Ten years ago today, the Obergefell decision was handed down, making civil marriage legally available to same-sex couples nationwide. It just so happened that this decision arrived within a day or two of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church taking a vote on redefining the marriage canon of the church to include same-sex marriages. In addition, the appointed scripture readings for that Sunday included the story of David and Jonathan, a story about deep love between two men that has long been embraced by gay Christians. For me, these three things coinciding felt like a divine occurrence.

At the time, I was the rector at The Chapel of Saint Andrew in Boca Raton. The congregation was fairly politically diverse and so it felt right and proper to have a series of discussions on the changes that were happening in society and the Church. Those discussions prompted me to write a five-part series on the blog of The Chapel (now lost to ether of the internet…). I’ve long maintained that one can be a “traditionalist” Christian while also being open to things like same-sex marriage in the Church. So I saw these discussions as a catalyst for articulating a Biblical and theological (and ecclesiological) view of Christian marriage that is in continuity with the tradition but recognizes that God might be leading us to do “new things” as so often is the case in the scriptural tradition.

On this tenth anniversary of the decision, in the year 2025, renewed attacks on same-sex marriage have arisen. The Obergefell decision seems less secure. The Southern Baptists have reiterated their opposition to same-sex marriage, following a wider “spirit” of Christian hostility to the idea. And so, it seems appropriate to republish some of my series here. Others, back in 2015, found it helpful and so I hope you might as well.

What follows are the first two parts of my series: how we Episcopalians read the Bible and what the Bible itself actually says about same-sex marriage. I also include material from the last post of the series, made up of my own personal reflections. Keep in mind that these are being represented as they were written in 2015. My writing has probably improved in that time and some of my theology may have changed. Please be gracious.

—Fr. Charles+

THE BIBLE AND EPISCOPALIANS

In discussing same-sex marriage in/for The Church one is obligated to be aware of “what the Bible says.” The Bible (and a particular reading of it) dominates the conversation.

It is true that so-called “progressive” Episcopalians are put at something of a disadvantage on this topic because, as the so-called “conservative” Christians will quickly assert, the Bible is clear that homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. This is, for many, something that is non-negotiable.

One can point to the Bible and say “here’s what it says.”

I’m reminded of a former class-mate of mine in college who was an Evangelical Christian. She and I got into a discussion about the Bible and I made mention of “gray areas.”

“There are no gray areas in the Bible,” she stated without hesitation. “The Bible is black and white. There are only those parts of it that you disagree with that you want to interpret away.”

Her words are pretty consistent with what many of us hear in this conversation.

Before we get into the discussion of the Bible itself, I think it is important to talk first about how we read the Bible.

We are Anglican Christians. This means that we have a distinct way of being Christian. The past several decades have seen a shift away from denominational distinctiveness in favor of a loose commonality in an attempt at Christian unity. The result, however, has largely been to allow Evangelical Protestantism to dominate all non-Catholic ecclesiologies. This is a troubling trend.

Evangelical Protestantism tends to understand the Bible as a book that is to be taken literally, at face-value, a book containing everything we need to know about life. This is expressed in a bumper-sticker I’ve seen more than a few times: The B.I.B.L.E.—Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

A point that many Christians are quick to forget or not notice in the first place is that the Church has never had a universally recognized doctrine in regards to the Bible. Indeed, most (if not all) “doctrines” on the Bible are products of the late Protestant Reformation-era (at the earliest).

Martin Luther, the German Reformer, gave us the popularly known term “sola scriptura” which means “scripture alone.” It was this notion that created the context for a key component in Protestant Christianity: the Bible is the final and ultimate source of authority for the Church.

 Following Luther, John Calvin and, later, Ulrich Zwingli, provided their own spin on sola scriptura. Calvin, an unordained lawyer, believed that the Church, led by the scriptures, had an obligation to govern society. Zwingli, further, put this into practice and laid the groundwork for what is often called “the radical Reformation.” And the Radical Reformers are the ancestors for the Baptists and Evangelicals we see today.

Luther tended to believe that the Bible held primacy for the Church and that the Church is obligated to conform to what is written therein. If the Bible is silent on a matter, then the Church has the authority to do what it wants, so long as that action does not contradict something written in the Bible.

The radical Reformers, on the other hand, believed that the Bible held primacy for general society and that people are obligated to conform to what the Bible says—sometimes going so far as to declare the Bible prescriptive in the sense that one must do only what is written in the scriptures; if the Bible is silent on a matter, then that is to be taken as indication that the Bible does not endorse that matter.

The Reformation Era is the context in which Anglican Christianity came of age.

Unlike the rest of Europe, Henry VIII did not seek to reform the Church. Instead, he moved to take the Church in England out from under the political and ecclesial authority of the pope. This put Anglican Christians in a unique situation—as well as subject to a number of conflicts and controversies.

During Henry’s lifetime, the Church in England remained mostly identical with wider Catholic Christianity. It was under his son, the short-lived Edward I, when the European reforms began to affect the Church—under the leadership of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry’s reign. Upon Edward’s death, his sister Mary (the famous “Bloody Mary”) re-aligned the Church in England with Rome and had Thomas Cranmer executed. After her death, her sister Elizabeth I reversed the move to Rome and, with the help of the theologian Richard Hooker (among others), developed what has become known as “The Elizabethan Settlement.”

The Settlement sought to address the changes and challenges of Christianity on England. England was a realm filled with, by this point, Radical Reformers, Lutherans, and Catholic Christians. The work of the Elizabethan Settlement, in addressing these disparate Christian movements, has given us Anglicans a defining term: via media, “The Middle Way.”

Often mistakenly referred to as “the middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism,” The Settlement tends to find a way between Lutheran and Calvinist/Radical Reformation-ism. It gave us what is known as The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (found on pages 867-876 of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer). Among those are two Articles that speak directly of the Bible.

The key teaching on Anglican views of the Bible is found in Article VI of the Articles of Religion:

 Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.

This teaching is further reinforced in Article XX:

The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: and yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ, yet, as it ought not to decree any thing against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation.

So, to break this down, Anglican Christianity affirms that the Bible, primarily, contains what is necessary for salvation (this article is titled “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation”). The context here is that the Church cannot declare something NOT found in the Bible as being necessary for one’s salvation (this addresses a particular Reformation-era controversy surrounding Roman Catholic indulgences). However, if the Church does discern that something extra-biblical is necessary for salvation, then that thing must be “provable”—based in or in harmony with—by the Bible.

Further, the Church’s authority is limited by what is contained in the canon of Scripture. It cannot teach something that is “repugnant” or contrary to what is written in the Bible.

This teaches us that matters of salvation take primacy for us Anglicans in interpreting The Bible. The only “requirements” we have in regards to the Bible are in matters concerning our salvation (which includes the nature of sin, death, the divinity of Jesus, the nature of the sacraments, the bodily resurrection, etc.). We probe the scriptures in search of what saves us, helps us in our salvation life, and how to lead others to experience that salvation. We Anglicans, then, understand the Bible as a cross-oriented book—we read all of it in the shadow of the Cross.

The Bible, for Anglicans, then, is not Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. It’s not a rule book or life-manual. It contains the story of our salvation. It is a book about Jesus, revolving around Jesus. And we don’t read this sacred book dryly. We enact it, live it, dramatize it. The Book of Common Prayer is 80% scripture (more or less). We put our very lives in its pages, trying to align ourselves with the stories contained therein.

All of this is to say that the reading of the Bible that tends to dominate the discussions of same-sex marriage is a reading we Episcopalians do not endorse.

THE BIBLE AND SAME-SEXUALITY

 Please Note: This particular entry will be dealing with explicit statements on human sexuality and sexual practice.

Now that we have addressed how we Episcopalians read the Bible, the next logical step for us is to look at what the Bible itself says on the topic of “homosexuality.”

This will be divided into two sections: The Old Testament and The New Testament. The relevant passages themselves will be posted, followed by commentary.

Before we proceed, I hope you will notice the sparse amount of material here. The Bible doesn’t really say all that much on this topic. As you will see, much of even this is a degree of “reading in” to what is on the page.

What follows is everything the Bible has to say on the matter:

OLD TESTAMENT

The first place to start is with the famous story of “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Indeed, it is from this story that we get the term “sodomy”—which itself has served as the basis for an antiquated term for homosexual males: “sodomites.”

Genesis 19:1-11

The two messengers entered Sodom in the evening. Lot, who was sitting at the gate of Sodom, saw them, got up to greet them, and bowed low. He said, “Come to your servant’s house, spend the night, and wash your feet. Then you can get up early and go on your way.”

But they said, “No, we will spend the night in the town square.” He pleaded earnestly with them, so they went with him and entered his house. He made a big meal for them, even baking unleavened bread, and they ate.

Before they went to bed, the men of the city of Sodom—everyone from the youngest to the oldest—surrounded the house and called to Lot, “Where are the men who arrived tonight? Bring them out to us so that we may have sex with them.”

Lot went out toward the entrance, closed the door behind him, and said, “My brothers, don’t do such an evil thing. I’ve got two daughters who are virgins. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them whatever you wish. But don’t do anything to these men because they are now under the protection of my roof.”

They said, “Get out of the way!” And they continued, “Does this immigrant want to judge us? Now we will hurt you more than we will hurt them.” They pushed Lot back and came close to breaking down the door. The men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house with them and slammed the door. Then the messengers blinded the men near the entrance of the house, from the youngest to the oldest, so that they groped around trying to find the entrance. (see also Judges 19:16-24 for a nearly identical story)

So here is the classic story that forms the basis of much Christian thinking about homosexuality.

The “sin of Sodom and Gomorrah” is famous even within the pages of The Bible as an example of profound, unspeakable wretchedness committed before God. In the passages prior to this, Abraham (Lot’s uncle) is visited by God and told that the two cities are on the chopping block. Abraham is told that “their sin is very serious” and serves as the basis for their destruction. 

But this all raises the key question: what is the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?

That the men have sex with men (are “homosexual”) is often understood as the wickedness that causes God to burn with rage at the two cities. But what does the Bible itself say?

Our first reference to the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah comes just before the passage we read above: Genesis 18:20 says, “The cries of injustice from Sodom and Gomorrah are countless, and their sin is very serious! I will go down now to examine the cries of injustice that have reached me” (from the Common English Bible).

So, it is “the cries of injustice” that cause God to be angry. What is that injustice?

Later on, Ezekiel the prophet, speaking the Word of God, will say of Sodom and Gomorrah: “This is the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were proud, had plenty to eat, and enjoyed peace and prosperity; but she didn’t help the poor and the needy. They became haughty and did detestable practices in front of me, and I turned away from them as soon as I saw it” (Ezekiel 16:49-50 NRSV).

The “sin” listed here is failure to help the poor and needy in spite of wealth. They were arrogant (“haughty”). Yes, there’s a mention of “detestable” things that folks could use to fuel the “homosexuality” angle, but we’ll look at that in a moment.

Even Jesus, in the gospels (in a story recorded by Mark, Matthew, and Luke), speaks of the sin of Sodom. But He does so in terms of hospitality, telling the disciples He’s sent out that any city that does not welcome them will face a harsher sentence than what was experienced by Sodom and Gomorrah:

“If anyone refuses to welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet as you leave that house or city. I assure you that it will be more bearable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on Judgment Day than it will be for that city.” (Matthew 10:14-15 CEB)

And given that Jesus is our final authority in how we read the Bible, we are left with the realization that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is not “homosexuality” but inhospitality.

A little context here goes a long way:

Sodom and Gomorrah are first mentioned in Genesis 13, when Lot moves there. Even then they are mentioned as “very evil and sinful against the Lord.”

Next, they are depicted in Genesis 14 as having been conquered and ransacked by a coalition army comprised of soldiers from five kingdoms as part of a civil war. Abraham comes to their assistance to free Lot and winds up helping them achieve victory and a return of their wealth.

So Sodom and Gomorrah are a people who ought to know the importance of assisting people in need. But instead, they use their power to abuse people by raping them as a form of domination (much like is seen in some forms of prison culture today).

What clearly happens in Sodom and Gomorrah is not exemplary of two people of the same sex being in love with each other and desiring a life together before God. This isn’t even categorically “homosexuality.” This is rape. Men raping men rather than expressing peace and hospitality to them.

And that systemic culture of raping foreigners in their midst is the detestable act that God speaks of in the beginning. Which all of us would most certainly understand as profoundly evil.

So this is not a passage about “homosexual orientation” (meaning, a person romantically and physically attracted to a person of the same sex), but about an astounding culture of violence and domination.

We must remember that in the ancient world there didn’t exist Hyatt Hotels or Motel 6. When people travelled they needed to rely on the hospitality of strangers. Travel was already dangerous enough with thieves on the roads. This is why the Torah places an emphasis on welcoming the stranger, saying “remember that you were strangers in Egypt.” God is interested in God’s people creating a trustworthy society where travelers can sojourn without fear of exploitation or abuse.

This underscores the great evil of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here was a people who had experienced the violence of inhospitality themselves and who were given an opportunity to change, but wound up becoming more wicked than before.

Leviticus 18: 19-24

Here we have the go-to passage on homosexuality. This one serves as the clearest example of “the Bible says this is wrong.” I’ve put the passage in a bit of wider context to show how it plays in a larger category of sexual sins in The Torah:

‘Also you shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness during her menstrual impurity. You shall not have intercourse with your neighbor’s wife, to be defiled with her. You shall not give any of your offspring to offer them to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God; I am the Lord. You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination. Also you shall not have intercourse with any animal to be defiled with it, nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it; it is a perversion.

‘Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled. (see also Leviticus 20)

How are we to interpret this?

The first issue that any Christian using Leviticus for this discussion has to account for is what St. Paul writes in Ephesians 2: “[Jesus] canceled the detailed rules of the Law so that he could create one new person […]” (Ephesians 2:15). This means, as St. Paul writes elsewhere, that we are “no longer under the Law.” The Law forbids the eating of shellfish, the wearing of mixed fabrics. It also requires that parents stone to death overly disobedient children and that victims of rape marry their assailants. 

There are many things in the Law that Christians are quick to say “this no longer applies.” But on issues like homosexuality, they will point at the Law and say, “see?”

But that is a discussion for another time. For the purposes of debate, we will consider what the Law says here.

If we can learn anything from the rabbis it’s that every word of scripture counts.

So, to begin with, this law speaks only to men. Indeed, there is only one verse where lesbian activity is even discussed (see the New Testament section below). Which means that this law is not speaking of “homosexuality” in categorical terms. Rather it is condemning a practice that applies specifically to males—namely, that a man cannot “lie down” with another man as that man would “lie down” with a woman. 

The Hebrew word “shakab” means “to lie down” and has a wide range of connotations. It is frequently sexual, but not exclusively—in the Bible it most often refers to sleeping. Context clues us in to the fact that it is sexual (since this prohibition appears in a list of sexual sins). So, a man cannot have sex with another man as he would with a woman. That is the literal reading of this law (so far). Now we have to determine what “as he would with a woman” means. And this is where things get tricky.

For starters, it is impossible for a man to have sex with a man in the way he’d have sex with a woman because men, in general, do not have female genitalia. However, one can easily make the jump to see that, perhaps, the Law is talking about anal sex. A male using the male body as though it were a female’s body. This reads a bit euphemistically, but it seems sound.

This gives us two possible interpretations. The first should be clear: the Bible is forbidding male anal sex. This is the common take-away for many interpreters and the basis for anti-gay views in Christianity (and some parts of Judaism). However, this interpretation doesn’t seem to be as nuanced as the text. Because a woman also has an anus and the law says nothing about forbidding anal sex with a woman. So, it seems that there’s something else going on here. Further, anal sex is not an exclusive practice of male same-sex relationships (contrary to what much popular culture would indicate). So, even if this law is condemning a particular practice, that condemnation does not necessarily apply across the board to “homosexual orientation” and/or practice.

Now, the fact that the law specifies “as with a woman” suggests something emasculating. This is a major concern in the Torah. Indeed, a man who’s been rendered “infertile” is not allowed to come into the Lord’s presence (see Leviticus 21:17ff, Deuteronomy 23:1). The concern seems to be more about a man’s “maleness” than it does with sexual activity. To treat another man as though he was a woman, to emasculate him, is what is considered “abominable” (the Hebrew word which, incidentally, is also used in reference to non-kosher foods in Deuteronomy 14:3).

But there is another aspect to this that deserves further investigation:

In the ancient world it was believed that children came from men. Their semen was seen as a seed (which is why this is the word used in Hebrew) to be planted in the fertile “soil” of the woman’s womb. So the law is very concerned with how semen is used.

As was mentioned above, men were the primary “givers” in procreation, women only serving as the soil for the seed to take root in. Even past the invention of the microscope, people believed that a man’s semen contained a tiny, fully formed human. This speaks also to the Law’s prohibition on bestiality. In a world where people believed in half-human/half-animal beings (like satyrs), the concern was that an animal’s seed might impregnate a woman and create something inhuman.

So this Law is concerned with responsible use of one’s body for the purposes of procreation. We will talk about this further in the next part of this series (on marriage). So, if anything, this seems more in line with a condemnation of abortion than it does homosexuality in that the passage seems to concern itself with what one does with their bodily fluids considered to be very seed of a human life.

This aspect is also partially understood in the Torah’s cleansing rituals. If a man has a nocturnal emission, he is to ritually purify himself. Same if anyone touches blood. Both of these fluids are tied to life, the shedding of life. And the shedding of life always carries with it, in the Torah, a need to for purification.

Ultimately, however, the final verse provides the context we need: “Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled.” The giving of children over to Molech, male prostitution, bestiality, these are all examples of idolatrous practices. So the Law is interested here (and elsewhere) in providing the means for Jews to define themselves over and against the idolatrous peoples they are going to encounter and remove from the Promised Land.

Again, the concern here is not categorical “homosexual orientation.” It is, rather, the responsible use of the tools for life and the defining markers of cultural uniqueness.

NEW TESTAMENT

Now that we’ve looked at what the Old Testament has to say on the subject, we turn now to the New Testament.

The first passage for our consideration is another one that is commonly cited by opponents of same-sex marriage: 

Romans 1: 25-28 (CEB)

They traded God’s truth for a lie, and they worshipped and served the creation instead of the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

That’s why God abandoned them to degrading lust. Their females traded natural sexual relations for unnatural sexual relations. Also, in the same way, the males traded natural sexual relations with females, and burned with lust for each other. Males performed shameful actions with males, and they were paid back with the penalty they deserved for their mistake in their own bodies. Since they didn’t think it was worthwhile to acknowledge God, God abandoned them to a defective mind to do inappropriate things.

There’s a lot here to wade through.

Firstly, this passage is unique in all the Bible because it is the only place where female same-sexual practice is referenced. Secondly, Paul’s arguments hinge on the concepts of a few key words here: “natural,” “traded” (other translations say “exchanged”), and “lust.”

To begin, let’s look at “lust.” Lust is a clearly condemned sinful practice that happens among all sexual orientations. There’s nothing explicitly “homosexual” about lust. That these women and men are acting out of lust is clearly a sinful thing and lust is something that all Christians (whether “progressive” or “conservative”) will agree ought to be condemned.

So here, as we have seen in the Old Testament, what Paul is condemning is not mutual love but lust-based actions. And lust is always going to be selfish and wicked.

Indeed, this lust is of such potency that it causes women and men to make an exchange. They give up sexual desire for the opposite sex and turn it toward their respective sexes.

Many Christians will see this as a prescriptive statement about homosexual orientation, evidence that people “choose” to act according to their forbidden and sexual desires. However, reality does not fit in with this notion.

The experience of LGBTQ people, backed up by psychological science, tells us that they do not “choose” their sexual orientation any more than someone chooses their gender or their race. While the precise “causes” of same-sexuality (as well as bi- and asexuality) is still not known, researches are in agreement that it is something human beings are born into—it is something not of one’s choosing.

At the same time, this fact does not diminish Saint Paul’s condemnations. Because while he might not be condemning “homosexuality” as we understand it today, he is clearly still condemning a perversion. Because he is speaking of people making a choice to perform certain acts with their bodies, choices rooted in lust rather than love.

Following this, Saint Paul is clearly claiming that what these women and men are doing is “unnatural.” But what exactly does Paul understand “natural” to mean?

This is particularly tricky because “nature” has been (and remains) a fluid concept. For many in the Ancient World, “nature” referred to something ordered. Today, we tend to view “nature” as being something wild, un-contained, somewhat disordered (or having its own order over and against human concepts of order which are often seen as means of containing and controlling).

Paul uses “nature” to describe something a couple of key places in his writing. In I Corinthians, he writes: “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him?” (I Corinthians 11:14a NRSV).

This reveals to us the differences between how we understand “nature” and how Paul understood it. Because, for us, long hair is “natural”—meaning, hair naturally grows, therefore long hair can only happen by virtue of hair doing what comes naturally. So, Paul’s concept of “natural” is an iffy concept for us today.

But Paul speaks of “nature” in another place in Romans: “If you [Gentiles] have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree” (Romans 11:24 NRSV).

So Saint Paul acknowledges that God does something “unnatural,” something “contrary to nature,” in bringing the Gentiles into the Promises of salvation.

And all of this really helps drive home Saint Paul’s larger point in Romans 1 and 2. You see, we’ve gotten far too caught up in the particulars of what Paul writes here that we’ve lost the big picture of what he’s trying to do. He’s not actually interested in condemning particular sins or people—indeed, Paul is quite wary of risking the creation of a new Law so much so that he often avoids precise language in instances where he does condemn particular behaviors.

Paul is, instead, building a crescendo in order to hit an arrogant church with a dose of humility.

Saint Paul is writing to a church made up of a mix of Jewish and Gentile Christians, at a time when Gentiles were relegated to second-class status in The Church. He opens his letter playing to the Jewish Christian elitism (and maybe even a degree of general Christian elitism shared by both Jews and Gentiles in The Church). The description we get in Romans 1:18-32 is something that clearly describes the Roman and Greek pagan aristocracy. He is hitting a number of Jewish beliefs about idolatry: that it willfully ignores the revelation of God of Israel and is the result of self-imposed spiritual blindness, even somewhat mocking the Greek philosophers (“claiming to be wise they became as fools”). In Jewish thought, idolatry is conceived of in terms of adultery and sexual immorality (largely due to the fact that many ancient religious practices involved temple prostitution) and that the worship of idols will lead people to debased sexual practices (this is indicated by the life of Solomon in I Kings 11, who turns to idols due to his love of “foreign women”).

So one can easily read this passage as Paul whipping his crowd up. It is important to keep in mind that Paul’s letters were meant to be listened to, not read on a page. They were written for his assistants to read to the churches, performed somewhat like a sermon.

Here’s Paul saying, essentially, “you all know how wicked those pagans are; how ugly and twisted their practices are.” And Paul’s audience is nodding along. They’re thinking “alright alright, Paul’s really giving it to those disgusting pagans! I like this guy!”

And this builds and builds and builds… until Paul drops a bomb in Romans 2:1—“So every single one of you who judge others is without any excuse. You condemn yourself when you judge another person because the one who is judging is doing the same things.”

So Paul’s using biases and generalizations to drive home a particular point: all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23). And God has demonstrated an enormous and scandalous grace in doing something contrary to nature by bringing in the Gentiles, a people seen as unclean and detestable by “the faithful.” 

So these first two chapters of Romans aren’t exactly about condemning same-sex love. They’re about reminding a self-righteous Church that they are as dependent on God’s grace as “those people” that they want to condemn.

Now the next two passages  will be discussed in tandem, because the issues in them are something they have in common:

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (NASB)

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

1 Timothy 1:8-10 (ESV)

Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.

Looking at these passages it seems things could not be any more clear. After all, the word “homosexual” shows up. It is obvious that the Bible condemns this as sin.

The things to look at here have to deal with translation, particularly the words “effeminate” and “homosexual.”

“Effeminate” is the English translation of the Greek word malakia which means “soft.” Interestingly, this word is sometimes omitted in English translations of the Bible, seemingly subsumed into the phrase “both participants in same-sex intercourse” (as in the otherwise excellent Common English Bible translation). 

Bishop Gene Robinson has argued that it refers to people being morally weak. The antonym of this word in Greek is karteria, which means “patient endurance.” So, rather than saying that someone who is “effeminate” will not enter into the Kingdom of God, it appears that Paul is referring to someone who is “soft-willed” rather than “enduring with patience.” To put this in concert with one of Jesus’ parables, this would be the seed that falls on rocky ground (see Matthew 13:20-21).

In regards to “homosexual,” many translations, use this word to translate the Greek word arsenokoites,which is the combination of “men” and “bed” (arsen referring to “male” or “man” and koites meaning “bed”—it’s where we get the word “coitus” used in English).

The first edition of the New International Version of the Bible (in 1973) was the first English translation to translate arsenokoites as “homosexual.” Prior translations, like the King James Bible, used phrases like “abusers of themselves with mankind” (in 1 Corinthians 6:9) and “them that defile themselves with mankind” (1 Timothy 1:10).

The problem with using the word “homosexual” to translate this term has to do with the fact that, like with what is read in Leviticus, arsenokoites, in its literal sense, refers specifically to males (whereas “homosexuality” is a gender-neutral term). Secondly, “homosexual” was a word that was invented (in German) in the late 1800s for use in a psychological dictionary when homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. So “homosexual” is already a loaded word referring to something that is likely quite different from what Saint Paul is talking about.

The other major problem with using “homosexual” here is that, from what we can gather, arsenokoites is a word Saint Paul invented. It shows up nowhere else other than the Greek New Testament (and, of course, ancient Greek Christian commentators quoting it). What, precisely, Paul was referring to here is lost to us. (It has since been pointed out to me that “arsenokoites” is a kind of combination word that uses the Greek terms from Leviticus 18 in the Greek translation of the Old Testament—the version of the Old Testament Saint Paul would have known and read. I’m adding this note here in order to be transparent. I’ve not done a lot of theological or scholarly reflection on this since learning about it, to be honest. —ed.)

One can easily make the case that it refers to male sex slavery/prostitution. Koites can also refer to a bed-chamber, suggesting perhaps one being a “kept man.” So the case could be made that Paul is condemning a practice of engaging in abusive and exploitative male same-sex relationships.

But we don’t actually know for sure.

***

Now that we’ve looked at all the Bible has to say on the matter, I want to reiterate a couple of key points:

—The Bible only ever explicitly condemns sexual acts between males (lesbian activity only really alluded to).

—What the Bible does condemn turns out to be somewhat vague, or at least not what we’ve popularly interpreted/translated it to mean.

—The term “homosexual” is a bad term to translate a vague Greek word.

—What the Bible condemns is something that does not look like mutually-shared, mutually offered same-sex relationships.

This last point is crucial. The Bible is clearly condemning something, and something wicked. What precisely that condemned thing is, is not completely clear.

Or is it?

How are we to know?

Jesus tells us that the Law is summed up in this statement: Love God with all your heart, mind, and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.

Elsewhere we are told that love is defined this way: Jesus gave Himself for us. (Romans 5:8; I John 4:10-16)

So this means that the Law, as Christians are to understand it, is to be read through a lens of love—a love defined by the actions of Jesus Christ.

This goes back to what we discussed in the beginning: Anglican Christians read the Bible primarily through Jesus, understanding scripture to be about our salvation more than anything else.

The former rector of The Chapel of Saint Andrew, The Rev. Steve Zimmerman, in his own essay on human sexuality in The Church (entitled Authority and Sex in the Church and written in 2000) writes of Anglican understandings of the Bible:

“[Martin Luther] expressed his view of scripture by saying, ‘The Bible is the manger, in which the Christ child is laid, in which there is also, much straw’ […] The Anglican view of the character of the Bible’s authority also comes closer to Luther’s, than to Calvin’s and the Reformed tradition [in that Anglicans] agreed with Luther that the Bible’s authority lies in its witness. Anglicans, however, emphasize scripture’s witness to Christ, not just to the gospel of justification by faith. Scripture bears witness therefore to a person, Jesus Christ, the living Lord, not a message.”

So what this means for us is that the conversation is primarily about this question: does the love of two men or two women look like the love Jesus Christ embodies?

In light of that, we can hold those kinds of same-sex relationships up to what is written in the Bible, in the passages above, and can clearly see that those relationships—rooted in Christ-like love—are not reflected there. Indeed, those kinds of same-sex relationships help further reveal the kinds of evil being condemned in scripture.

We’re not talking about relationships based on lust or exploitation or violence. We’re talking about relationships based on the mutual offering and receiving of love, in like manner to Jesus Christ. And now the question becomes: are those relationships compatible with Christian views on marriage?

AND IN THE END...

(NOTE: The third and fourth parts of the series looked at the history of marriage and then got into the weeds on the actual marriage canon itself. I’m not including that in this because it doesn’t seem as relevant to the current discussion. But if you disagree, let me know on Mastodon and I’ll happily post those! —ed.)

To conclude this series I felt it was helpful to offer my own personal thoughts on the matter (at least more so than I have throughout this series).

One of my friends, after the House of Deputies vote made the new resolution on marriage official, said “alright, now we need to teach this.” What he meant by that was that The Episcopal Church reaffirmed marriage (which itself is amazing and praiseworthy—we could have caved to the wider culture and made marriage completely arbitrary, but instead we reasserted it). Because we reaffirmed marriage, we need to start talking to people about why they get married.

This means saying that, as a Church, we believe that sexuality is reserved for the marriage relationship.

We can no longer just sort of turn a blind eye and act like anything goes. If we’re going to reaffirm and expand marriage, then that means we need to start having difficult conversations about the relationships among the people in our congregations.

Now, here’s the part where I’m going to come across as contradictory from what I just said above:

I think that we’ve largely gone about this the wrong way from the get-go. The same-sex marriage conversation, in The Church, has never been adequate. Indeed even the words of Immorten Joe (from Mad Max: Fury Road) come to mind: mediocre.

This is because we got caught up in sexuality.

In perhaps the most basic terms possible, the same-sex marriage discussion has really been about whether or not it’s okay that people act on the stirrings in their genitals.

Growing up in a fundamentalist Southern Baptist environment and then becoming an Anglican Christian in college (while attending an evangelical university), I’ve talked far too much about sex.

As a teenager the question was always some degree of “how far is too far?” Then it became “when is it really sex?” After which it was “is sex like being married to someone?” And finally “if I love them I can have sex with them, right? The intention was marriage so…”

Every person of my age and background has had these conversations. We went to youth camps where they were discussed. We were force-fed books that talked about this.

It was all, really, “I want to have sex, but I want to have sex correctly in the eyes of God.”

The way we’ve approached same-sexuality in the Church is no different from this. We’ve been asking, for thirty years or so—regardless of sexual orientation—“is the sex people want to have okay with God?”

And, so, for that entire time the Church has been obsessed with sex. Ironically we criticized TV shows for focusing too much on sex while never once acknowledging that we talked about it just as much and with as much focus.

Sexuality is a psychological term, the product of the 20th century. Perhaps the most famous writers on the subject are Freud, Kinsey, and Foucault. It is defined nowadays, more or less, as the brain-chemical process one experiences when they look at or interact with another person.

This notion of “sexuality” gave us the psychological concepts of “attraction” and “orientation.” Some people are attracted to members of a different sex (or, more archaically, “gender”), while others are attracted to members of the same sex. Still others found that they were attracted to both.

That attraction was defined under the umbrella term of “sexual orientation.” People attracted to members of the same sex or gender are homosexually oriented. The same logic follows for heterosexual orientation and bisexual orientation.

The problem with all of this is that human beings are in danger of being reduced to a process of brain chemistry. That the kind of person that I am is largely defined by what my brain does when I’m around a particular human being.

The result of all this talk of orientation and attraction is that it permitted a couple of key phenomena:

Firstly, one could distinguish between orientation and action. This is expressed in the Catholic Church’s teachings on same-sexuality, that acting upon one’s orientation is the sin but the orientation itself is not sinful.

Secondly, and following the above bifurcation, a focus on brain-chemistry-as-personhood-definer does not provide a satisfactory case for the acceptance of same-sex persons for the Church. Because one could easily argue (and have argued) that orientation might be the process of a chemical imbalance. Therefore, one’s sexual orientation might be akin to a handicap or a disease that needs to be cured or corrected. And from here we find ourselves in a circular argument destined to go no where.

Instead, how the Church ought to be talking about this is in terms of love. Case in point: David and Jonathan.

In the Bible is a story of same-sex love. Whether or not it was romantic or platonic is still a matter of (significant) debate. What is not up for grabs here is whether or not the story reflects two men sharing love for each other. This latter notion is made explicitly clear throughout the story, where we are told no less than four times over a number of chapters and in two books, that David and Jonathan share love for each other.

Many Christians get uncomfortable with this story because it’s been made a matter of sexual orientation. In short, we don’t know the sexual orientation of either David or Jonathan. All we know is what the story tells us. We can speculate, sure (which is what makes studying the Bible fun), but we can only walk away with what the story says.

And the story gives us love. And not only that, but the Bible endorses this story of love implicitly—by including it in the canon of scripture.

So the question for us Christians becomes: can we bless love between two men or two women?

And this is a much more honest field for discussion and thought and prayer. Because sex is a very small part of marriage. Sex and sexuality are only a small part of what makes us who we are, as people.

Are there Christian teachings and views on sex? Sure. But that’s not what is being asked when a couple comes to the Church seeking a blessing on their marriage. What IS being asked is a blessing on their love for each other and the life they want to share with each other.

If marriage was a matter of blessing sex, then every pre-marital counseling series needs to include an investigation into what kind of sex a couple is interested in and then it needs to be held up to what the Bible teaches. To be blunt, these conversations would need to address things like: Can BDSM be part of a Christian marriage? What about role-playing (is it effectively adultery since you’re pretending to be someone else)? Toys? Can one use toys? Any positions that might be problematic?

Is there a place for this? Yes. It’s for married couples to discern and pray and discuss. Because it is in marriage, for Christians, that sexuality finds its fullness. But Christian marriage is not simply a blessing of one’s sexuality. It is the blessing of a relationship. It is a celebration of love, putting that love in concert with the love expressed by Jesus toward the Church—incidentally, described as a wedding at the end of the book of Revelation, one that ostensibly involves multiple people of all genders marrying Jesus.

So, again, the question remains: can we, ought we, bless love between two men or two women?

Because we have canonized the story of David and Jonathan we’ve already given a resounding YES to this question.

Love utterly changes the conversation.

When we approach this topic through a lens of love, we begin to see a redefinition of our old interpretations of things. The old proof-texts get a new gloss. Leviticus 18, Romans 1, etc. maintain their traditional integrity because what they reflect is not love—and is, thus, truly sinful. Comparing their contents to the example of faithful same-sex love—David and Jonathan love—reveals their intent. The Bible will always condemn lust, abuse, perversion.

But Scripture always affirms love.

As one of the wedding readings for Episcopal Marriage liturgies says: “I am now taking this kinswoman of mine, not because of lust, but with sincerity” (Tobit 8:7).

We’ve always condemned blessing lust. We’ve never blessed lust. We recognize that lust has no part in Christian marriage or morals. Love reveals the evils of lust.

Leviticus 18, Romans 1, these are not speaking of David and Jonathan. They are speaking of lust. Of perversion.

No one is asking the Church to bless what’s discussed in Leviticus 18 or any of the other proof-texts. Instead, we are asked to bless love.

And so our task, as the Church, is to affirm what is already affirmed in Holy Scripture: love can be found between two people of the same sex. And that love is honorable and to be remembered and celebrated.

What’s cool, to me, in this, is that scripture is always true.

We aren’t required to do any crazy interpretive gymnastics with the Bible. What the Bible says remains true. What is condemned by Paul in Romans, I Corinthians, I Timothy remains condemned—we don’t say “well, Paul was wrong here and we now know better.” No, instead we get to better understand what it is that Paul is condemning.

When this is about love we can hold things up to the Bible and see what the Bible is saying. And we then get to affirm something new and profound while letting the Bible speak its truth evermore!

When two people come to the Church with their love, we bless it. We bless it and send them on their journey—supporting them with our prayers and the hope that God is working transformative things in their lives together.

It was never supposed to be about just sex.

It’s always been about love.

#Christianity #Jesus #Episcopal #Anglican #Marriage #LGBTQ #SSM #Bible #SameSexMarriage #Equality

---

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

I have a confession: I love earnest and even corny religious things. Saints candles, gaudy lenticular reproductions of DaVinci’s The Last Supper, vanilla-scented Virgin Mary statues for the car, the extremely goofy silicone Jesus I bought at a Christian bookstore recently…

Look, give me a Catholic anime mascot character and I. am. in.

Though this might have more to do with me being a weeb...

I love it all. It represents a kind of “true-believer” innocence that reminds me not to take my religion too seriously, too academically, too intellectually. Maybe it’s because I grew up hanging around churches and Christian bookstores, but the moment I see something like a full-color Saint Francis lawn statue or even a WWJD bracelet my heart gets “strangely warmed” like that Wesley brother who started Methodism.

This extends even to liturgy sometimes.

While I will avoid the cringe-inducing cheesiness of much Evangelical worship, or the “bless-their-hearts” attempts found among Roman Catholic “folk masses,” I am not immune to some Rich Mullins or even the Gaithers from time-to-time. And it’s not only music, but even the prayers that might make my Anglo-Catholic fellows wince that I sometimes find power in.

Which leads me to make another confession: I love Eucharistic Prayer C. In the Episcopal Church this is frequently derided as “the Star Wars Prayer” because of such celestial language as:

At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.

This Eucharistic prayer is right at home with the petition found in the Prayers of the People, bracketed as optional, which asks the Lord to have mercy on those who travel “through outer space” (alongside “those who travel on land, on water, or in the air”). It is also of a piece with the famous “Space Window” at the National Cathedral that features an actual moon rock among the stained glass.

While I do agree that the call-and-response nature of Prayer C is not great (and why I adapted an alternate version of Prayer C to incorporate the responses into what is known as the “anaphora” itself), it is maybe our most “penitential” Eucharistic prayer in the Episcopal Church, contains the most overt declaration our Eucharistic theology (“Risen Lord, be known to us in the breaking of the bread”), and does much to situate the Christian story in both Jewish and global history.

Many in the Episcopal Church do not like Prayer C and choose to omit the line about people traveling through outer space because they find the language of these things corny and embarrassing. But me? I find it earnest and reflective of where we were as a country and a Church when our most recent Book of Common Prayer was assembled.

See, the current Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church is known as the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It was a landmark development that changed the nature of the Episcopal Church when it was approved. This Prayer Book is most famous for centralizing the Eucharist as the principle act of worship across the Episcopal Church, as well as articulating a renewed theology of Baptism that expected public and active declarations of faith—as opposed to the private family affairs Baptism had been for centuries prior. The 1979 book was the result of a lengthy process that would be seen as a major victory for the so-called “High Church” and “Anglo-Catholic” elements of the Church while also putting the liturgical language of the Church into “contemporary” English. Despite its radical move toward a much more ancient and traditional sacramental theology, the 1979 book contains distinct notes of the hippy counter-culture that had influenced Western Christianity throughout the mid-to-late 20th Century. It was a Prayer Book that would play well in the grand gothic arches of our major cathedrals, while also being right at home in a wood-paneled parish hall.

The previous revision of the American Book of Common Prayer was in 1928. This means that, in addition to revising the Prayer Book to reflect the changes that had taken place within the Episcopal Church, the 1979 book also needed to be usable for at least 50 years (in case you’re wondering, the process toward a new Prayer Book revision is under way—initially for 2030, but we’re not sure if that is still the year, given the interruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and gestures around). So that meant that the church bodies responsible for the Book of Common Prayer had to imagine what things might be like over the subsequent half-century in the United States.

By the late 70s, the United States had emerged from a major economic recession and the end of a deeply unpopular war. The opening of the decade had seen humans first set foot on the moon, the culmination of an almost miraculously speedy program that served as the greatest non-war governmental program in human history. After the ending of the Apollo program, NASA had placed a functioning space station in orbit with plans for a permanent and international one in the near-future. Then there was the advent of the Space Shuttle, a reusable space-faring vehicle that hinted at the promise of expanded and more affordable human space flight. This time period was known as “the Space Age.”

I was born around three years after the 1979 Prayer Book was published (though I was raised as a Baptist and so the Prayer Book would not become a part of my life for many years). I also grew up in Orlando, Florida. My childhood church included many members who worked for companies like Lockheed-Martin, building components for the space program. Practically every year in school we would take a field trip to Kennedy Space Center. Every Space Shuttle launch occasioned an interruption of our school schedule so we could all go outside, look to the East, and see that glowing vapor trail moving toward the heavens. I came to recognize the sound of sonic booms from the Shuttle’s re-entry on its way to land. Heck, my mother even dated a NASA engineer who worked on Atlantis’ engines and later built Endeavor (the replacement to the ill-fated Challenger, the destruction of which is among my earliest memories). This is all to say that “outer space” was part of the matrix of life.

I remember all those fanciful ideas, where we’d have commercial space flights that would allow us to travel around the globe quickly (while experiencing zero-G for part of the flight)—like the Pan-American space shuttle seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Thoughts of orbital hotels, or even lunar hotels. Trips to Mars or even the moons of Jupiter. It was an exciting time.

And it was this same exciting time that the liturgical scholars of the Episcopal Church were assembling the rites and words for God’s people, keeping an eye to the next fifty years. They too were dreaming and praying, imagining a world drastically changed by people traveling outside our atmosphere and seeing Earth among the stars with their own eyes—not just mediated through Time magazine covers or IMAX films at Kennedy Space Center.

In a sense, I like the language of these prayers for the nostalgia they bring, nostalgia for a world we never saw come to fruition. In those nearly fifty years space travel is still only available to a select few (which includes, of course, billionaires taking 11-minute jaunts into the heavens). There are no orbital hotels or lunar colonies. These prayers recall a different world once imagined—a world that some of us still dream about.

Even then, rockets still go up. People live on the International Space Station. So there are those who are traveling through outer space, even beyond the billionaire vanity trips.

A few years back, I was with family at Walt Disney World on vacation. We were at Animal Kingdom and it was night. I use the SkyGuide app on my phone from time to time, and I got an alert that the International Space Station would be traveling overhead in the next few minutes.

If you’ve never seen the ISS, it appears as the brightest light in the night sky (apart from the Moon, of course). It looks either like a moving star or an airplane with no blinking lights. Chances are that you’ve seen it but didn’t know what it was.

So I looked up and pointed it out to my father-in-law. A few other tourists saw what I was doing and asked. After a minute or so, a crowd of maybe 20 or more people had stopped to look up at the ISS flying overhead, all of them in awe. It was clogging up foot-traffic in the park and I was amazed that even among Disney’s multi-billion dollar attractions, people would turn their attention to a bright dot in the sky and marvel.

The Space Age was a time of hope. It still casts a shadow of hope on us. And these corny and embarrassing prayers capture that fact. People actually do travel in outer space and they do need our prayers—perhaps especially the billionaires.

There’s also the fact that maybe some day, we all will be able to truly appreciate “this fragile Earth, our island home,” floating as that pale blue dot among the “vast expanse of interstellar space,” and not only feel the awe of God Himself, but also how small and precious we are and thus how foolish we are to squander and hurt this wholly unique gift on which we live and move and have our being.

—

*The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Christianity #Episcopal #Church #Catholic #Jesus #Space #SpaceTravel #Science #SciFi #liturgy #worship #Retrofuturism #SpaceAge

People sometimes call me a techie. There was a time where this was true, and is something that I’m getting back into.

See, what I’ve come to realize about the phrase “techie” is that it often means “uses gadgets.” Using an iPad for preaching, or wearing an Apple Watch, knowing my way around social media or the features of my phone, these have garnered the techie designation, but, really, this is just me being a consumer who uses purchased products. Yes, they are “tech,” but my utilization of them was pretty much in accord with standard use. To use a microwave is a “techie” as using a tablet or phone in this case.

But being a proper “techie” is, to me, someone who navigates the concepts around their devices, who seeks to grasp an understanding of their innermost parts, to turn a biblical phrase. In that sense, I was a proper techie in my younger years, when I was learning computing from Mrs. Vincent, my math teacher. This extended into my late teens when I discovered 2600 magazine (which turned me on to the political dimensions of technology) and began to understand hardware integration and decided that I wanted to develop video games. So I convinced my mom that we needed a new PC and that me building one was an important educational opportunity. I acquired the parts (including an ASUS motherboard that I thought was legit but I’m pretty sure turned out to be stolen—I discovered this when I went to boot my machine for the first time and was greeted with an HP logo where there shouldn’t have been one; if not for Mrs. Vincent teaching me about BIOS and DOS, I would have been completely lost) and assembled my machine while watching Hackers, a machine that I would later try to learn C programming on (I wrote a calculator!), even if my ulterior motive was to have a gaming rig that could support the brand new VooDoo 2 graphics card so that EverQuest would play better. I even attempted to use chat rooms as a means to evangelize (which one pastor at the time said was not legit) and I even talked about the possibility of sticking a webcam in the church and streaming the sermon with a chat box underneath the stream (which people didn’t seem to understand then—now every church is doing this!) But my time as a techie began to fizzle out shortly after, the moment my grasp of BASIC vanished during a class at the local community college. After that, I just became a gadget-consumer.

I’ve since gotten back into my techie interests thanks in part to my dropping big-corporate social media in favor of the Fediverse, followed by the installation of Ubuntu Linux on an old mid-2011 Mac that has breathed considerable new life into that machine (as well as me). I’ve since started this blog, where I’ve actually learned a degree of coding through the use of MarkDown and CSS, and I’m now very much into the Free Open Source Software movement that is absolutely suppressed by the big corporations.

All of this is simply a prelude to say that, as a priest, I’ve begun reflecting theologically on technology and our (Christian) relationship to it. If being a proper techie is to seek to understand the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of technology, then it is inevitable that one will bump up against the theological aspects of technology as well.

God And The Machines

Popularly, the term technology is often applied to gizmos. Things with integrated circuits that utilize electricity. We often fail to remember that things like bread and windows and legal pads and gel pens and roads and chairs and cast iron skillets are all forms of technology. According to Wikipedia technology is “the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.” Technology is, more simply, the practical application of ideas (in addition to also being a term applying to the tools or results of that application). This definition is, to me, an interesting thing to consider in regards to humanity’s relationship with technology in the Bible.

The first piece of technology that humans make, according to the mythological account found in Genesis, is a form of rudimentary clothing. The story goes that Eve and Adam, the first people, were naked and unashamed. But the moment they decided to listen to a talking snake and his advice about whether or not to eat a piece of forbidden fruit, the couple become aware of their nakedness and get to work using fig leaves as means to cover up (there’s a very funny old English translation of the Bible called the “Breeches Bible” because it says that Eve and Adam used the fig leaves to make “breeches” for themselves—leafy britches!). This is technology. Eve and Adam had the conceptual knowledge—the idea—that they were naked and so went about making use of resources to apply that knowledge in a practical way. Then God, once He confronts them over their disobedience (which He figures out because they’re wearing the aforementioned britches), He introduces the technology of hide-based clothing, by killing two lambs and using their skins to cover Eve and Adam.

This story sets up the complicated relationship we have with technology. It is both borne out of our foibles and limitations, as well as being evidence perhaps of divine mercy. Both death and life are intertwined in the advent of human ingenuity.

At the same time, technology becomes a means of mediating God’s own self-revelation to humanity. God gives a law to His people through the use of the technology of writing, in which He also instructs them to build a box that symbolizes His presence among them, to be kept housed in a tent that is designed for portability. Later, that tent is upgraded to a building called a temple, itself situated amidst the technology known as a city, the language of which God also uses to refer to His own home/realm. Once we get to the beginning of the Common Era, we have Jesus (God incarnate) utilizing a whole range of technologies as a means to both communicate things about God, but also to serve as mediators of His presence and grace. The manger, the fishnet, bread, wine, a cross and a tomb are but a few of the technological examples put to use by God Incarnate to reveal His full plan to the world. And in the case of the bread and wine, these are said to become the body and blood of Jesus—and not in some notion of symbol or metaphor, no these are God-ordained technologies of grace, what we today call “sacraments.”

In a sense, these sacramental signs are a kind of machine, things that use power to perform a specific action. In this case, it is both the power of God and the power of the entire creation that is behind these technologies, mediating God’s grace and moving us toward the restoration of the world. As the Orthodox theologian Michael J. Oleska writes:

Eastern Christians believe in sacred materialism. God uses physical objects and visible elements to communicate with His People. The created universe is the means by which we enter into communion with Him. He chose food as the most perfect way to enter our lives. And what is the bread? Flour, yeast and water, baked to a certain temperature? No, it is much more, for to create bread, one needs the whole world. The earth must turn, the rain must fall, the soil must be fertile, the sun must shine, night must come, the wind blow. If all this is in harmony, and humans interact with it appropriately, tending the garden as God originally planned, bread can be baked, communion with God restored [...]

It is all Christ. He chose to make water into wine as his first miracle, but He is always doing that, every vineyard since time began [...] The Word made Flesh only does in His Incarnate Form what the Word, embodied in the whole creation, has always done. (from “The Alaskan Orthodox Mission and Cosmic Christianity,” The Chant of Life: Inculturation and the People of the Land p. 188)

We Are God’s Technology

I have to admit, the idea that technology is “applied conceptual knowledge” sounds a bit like what Saint John the Evangelist writes in his gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God [...] The Word became flesh and made his home among us.

The “Word” there is the English rendering of a Greek concept known as “Logos.” It’s a fairly difficult concept to translate directly into English, to be honest. The best I’ve come up with is that the “Logos” is akin to the “kernel” in a program like Linux, the core element around which everything else is built/based.

Honestly, this image is probably the actual best representation of what “the Logos made his home among us” means. (from the Perry Bible Fellowship)

Basically, the idea is that God looked out at timeless time and decided that He wanted to create a universe where He would come to live, and so He built a universe around the “kernel” of Himself as human. So when Genesis says that humanity is made “in God’s image,” we Christians are saying that we are built to look like what Jesus (that is, God-in-flesh) is. Yes, I understand that this does not make sense when we think of time linearly—but there’s really nothing that says time is linear; plus we Christians affirm that God does not exist within time as we comprehend it.

Anyway, Saint John speaks of this notion as “Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being.” The “Word” (Logos) is the anchor around which everything exists. One of the Episcopal Church’s Eucharistic prayers puts it as “In your infinite love you made us for yourself.” In other words, we are made by God to do what God intends us to do.

Which means we are God’s technology.

This might sound weird at first. Especially if we still associate technology with machines or gadgets. But when we recall that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (as the Psalmist declares) we realize that our “being made” is a confession that to be created means that we fall into the realm of technology. Saint Paul articulates this when he writes that we are “God’s building.” This is overt technological language, applied to us as created beings. We, and the whole universe, are an application of God’s conceptual knowledge—indeed THE conceptual knowledge—reproducible and with particular intention.

And what is that intention? To love God.

I know that sounds selfish on God’s part. Is God so insecure that He felt the need to create an entire universe so that it could foster sapient life on (perhaps) a single planet with the express purpose of giving Him worship and adoration? When we think of God as lacking in love, then yes it does sound like He’s insecure. But when we consider that God is a complete and perfect Being lacking in nothing, then it changes the idea of why God created.

God did not need to create, not in the sense of an obligation (as in filling a lack). Instead God chose to create as an outgrowth of His ever-flowing love. Love demands an object. And if, as Jesus tells us, God is Love, then the only logical conclusion we can reach is that the universe was created to be an object of that Love, borne as a consequence of an eternally radiating love emanating from a complete Being who has love to spare. And if that Being is the originator of all that is, then the love poured into us finds its most worthwhile expression when directed back at the One who graced us with everything that is—out of His love.

But notice what Jesus says about how we apply that love ourselves. He doesn’t tell us to do what all of the other religious practices of His time were doing, which was to direct love at God/the gods in order to win their favor, as though God needed this love. No, Jesus tells us that our love of God is demonstrated best when we love our neighbor—which Jesus defines as everyone and anyone. We are to mediate God’s love among ourselves and in so doing it is directed toward God, who is the One most worthy of receiving love. This is what He designed us to do.

This post is long enough without getting into the programming bug we know as sin (I’ll take that up in a later post). Instead I’ll leave us here to ponder what it all means that we are God’s technology of love, given the gift of technology ourselves that can serve as a mediating factor for receiving God’s love in order to spread it around—by which we show God how much we love Him in return.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Theology #Technology #Linux #Computers #Philosophy #Christianity #Bible #Church #Jesus

What is a Christian?

This seems like it should be a simple question. “Christian” means “little Christ” or even “like-Christ.” So, anyone who attempts to be like Christ is a Christian, yeah? I mean, I’ve had this stated to me outright more than a few times over the years whenever I try to challenge one’s definition of Christianity.

But this is incorrect, even from a biblical standpoint. Because while, yes, the Bible does note that there’s a moment where these followers of Jesus’ disciples are called “Christian,” there is a broader bit of context to consider.

The people who would one day become known as “Christians” were originally called people of “the Way.” “Christian” was a later term applied to them, by the people of Antioch (with plenty of folks out there postulating that this might have been intended as an insult). So they were branded with this name, which they later embraced. But it was not the term that they first applied to themselves—nor was it a term Jesus gave them, at least not in a direct sort of way.

This is all to say that, in order to understand what it means to be “Christian,” we first have to consider what it meant to be people of “the Way.”

For starters, what was “the Way?” Perhaps the most concise answer to this question is provided by Jesus Himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one gets to the Father, except through me.” Now, the term “way” was already a loaded term for Jesus. As a Jew, He would’ve been taught that the Torah was “the way” to God. Following the commandments given by Moses and expanded by scribes and religious teachers continues to be the means by which Jews understand their life and relationship to God. Keeping these things puts them on the path (or, “way”) to God.

Regardless of what one might think about the theological claims about Jesus, He was very clearly a religious reformer/revolutionary. In the gospels, we see Him taking umbrage with the labyrinthine interpretations of the Law that were foisted upon every day people; we see Him opposed to a predatory financial system rooted in the Temple’s religious customs; we even see Him willing to buck deeply held notions around women and non-Jews. Jesus is very interested in expressing a different way of not only being Jewish, but also a different way for non-Jews to have a relationship with the God of Judaism (who was believed and proclaimed as THE God). Jesus lays out—in two sermons, acts of healing, and various parables—an alternative way of living, an actual practice, which He Himself embodies. And so when we get to that famous line in John’s gospel about Him being “the way” what He’s effectively saying is: “go where I go, live a life like mine, and you will see God, you will achieve what the Torah is all about.”

But Jesus’ followers came to see Him as more than an ethicist or reformer. Beyond those dimensions, indeed the soil from which those dimensions sprout, His followers see Him as God, living in human flesh. Which means there emerges a theological dimension to both understanding and following Jesus. And this is the thing that Christians spend their first 300 years or so hammering out, resulting in the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinoplian Creeds.

Today, it’s easy for us to look at those theological arguments and wonder what the big deal was all about. But try and consider things from the perspective of the ancients. They were trying to understand precisely who it was they were following and why they should follow Him at all. Because if He’s fully God as well as man, or a simply a human endowed with spiritual power, or even a sort of demigod, there are ramifications to what it means to follow Him.

The kernel of these ideas were held by those first people, articulated as “the Way.” So, this movement later rebranded as Christian carries with it pre-existing theological baggage that continues once the new name for the movement takes hold. It’s not simply a movement of people trying to live an ethical life akin to the one Jesus did. It’s a group of people who do this while also worshipping Jesus as God. Which means that “Christian” is a term that carries particular meanings rooted in both a way of life and a way of worship.

Theology requires a grammar. The conventional term for this grammar is “doctrine.” Misused, “doctrine” is about lines in the sand that separate degrees of faithfulness and rightness before God. But the correct view of doctrine is that it provides the boundaries for what makes a particular theology or religion definably itself. Further, those doctrines inform practices meant to embody what that theology or religion has to say or mean for its adherents.

Dance is a helpful example. There is a clear grammar to dance—whether hula, or ballet, or modern, etc. But once that grammar begins to be stripped away we begin to see something other than dance: perhaps floor gymnastics, or a form of martial arts. This is not to say that dance cannot innovate. It simply means that we have to either review the grammar of dance, or delineate when something ceases to be dance because it has strayed into a space where it uses a different grammar.

Consider the phenomenon of the modern smartphone. Many of us continue to refer to the device as a “phone” but it is completely unrecognizable from the device that Alexander Graham Bell first invented. Now, the “phone” portion of the device is a piece of software and part of what is actually a small personal computer. There is a clear line of recognizability from the wall-mounted telephone of yesteryear and the cellular telephone (today referred to as a feature phone). But the modern smartphone is built more from the design language (that is, “grammar”) of the personal MP3 player than it is the telephone.

Christianity is like this. The doctrines of the faith are what make it definable, following a trajectory of development where we can see certain commonalities in both belief and practice. At the same time, we have also seen a certain degree of disruption (to use the term in its tech-industry, startup sense), largely in the form of the Protestant Reformation, that has affected this notion and has lead us to a place where we have multiple things calling themselves “Christian” while only a few can be accurately identified by that term.

Which leads me, finally, to answer my initial question: what is a Christian?

A Christian is a person who follows Jesus as He has been understood by the Church. By this I mean that Christians believe in Jesus as He is articulated in the Creeds (particularly the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds), and both worship and follow Him in the particular ways defined by the heritage of the Church. Christianity is practiced, not simply “believed.” It is the result of the out-working of what it means to follow Jesus and who Jesus is, placed amidst a trajectory (tradition) of continual out-working. Christianity carries continuity—of both practice and belief.

This is not to say that Christianity is something frozen in time. Rather, it is to suggest that innovations within Christianity (say, the ordaining of women to the priesthood, or same-sex marriage) have to carry continuity with what came before, either through a form of historic recovery (in the case of women’s ordination) or integration into that continuous stream (in the case of same-sex marriage).

The Creeds, as a source of Christian grammar, offer flexibility. They are “what” statements, not “how” statements. This means that there is wiggle-room in how these things are understood. However, there is not wiggle room in regards to the “What” being stated about Christian belief. For instance, we can differ on what it means when we say that we “believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting” (Saint Augustine of Hippo to Pierre Tielhard de Chardin offers a pretty solid range), but if we say that there is no resurrection of the dead and/or life everlasting then we have broken the boundaries of Christian grammar and are now speaking a different theological language. Similarly, the moment we elevate the Bible to a place traditionally occupied by Jesus, seeing it (and not Him) as the “authoritative Word of God,” we’ve also crossed a key boundary of Christian grammar and are now speaking a different religious language (the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is probably the most notable instance of this, and held as the standard statement on “Biblical inerrancy” throughout much of Evangelicalism—interestingly, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 seems to have amended its wording to better reflect that Jesus is the main revelation and the Bible is merely a testament to that fact; so not all Evangelical denominations are created equal here, it seems).

Additionally, there is a continuity of Christian practice that constitutes this grammar: gathered together as people who have been baptized, to share in bread and wine, informed by the reading and expounding of the scriptures and the singing of hymns and psalms, all assembled in an ordered fashion. And from this gathering emerges a way of life, an ethic, itself reflective of a particular grammar of action.

So, to be “Christian” is to be a particular thing. This is why Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons cannot rightly claim the name “Christian.” Yes, they profess Jesus. But their understanding of who Jesus is resides outside the grammar defined by the Creeds (which, by the way, are themselves a kind of summary of what the Bible is all about), by rejecting His divinity. They might be cousins to the Christian faith, but they are cousins removed (akin to the relationship between Muslims and Jews—both claim the same God, but they each have a unique grammar in regards to that God). “Christianity” loses coherence when we fail to assert these facts—which has led us to where we are today, with neo-fascists espousing abhorrent ideas and calling them “Christian.”)

Lastly, let me be clear about another point: saying that someone is not “Christian” is not the same thing as saying that they are headed for damnation. Jesus saying “no one gets to the Father apart from me” is, in my faithful estimation, Him saying that He’s the one who decides the ultimate fate of human souls in the afterlife. I tend to believe that, in time, everyone is welcomed into the always-open gates of the New Jerusalem. But, ultimately, Jesus is the one who saves. Not me. Not any particular institution. Rather, the Church is the place that gives us the language for what it means to be saved, to live into what Jesus has already done. Christianity is, as far as I’m concerned, this profoundly beautiful thing that allows us to live with the freedom that comes with being saved by Jesus. It gives us the language by which we can live thankfully in the light that we no longer feel we have to save ourselves, making it all up as we go along.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Christianity #Church #Jesus #History #Politics #Bible #religion #theology

A very stupid thing I made a few years back

I’m writing this on “Fat Tuesday,” the day before Ash Wednesday. I have numerous bulletins to make, as well as preparing the ashes, but the brain God gifted me with needs the dopamine produced by posting this entry before it can get to work on those other things. Plus, I’m trying to develop a discipline of writing, which means I really ought to be doing this right?

Anyway, Lent begins tomorrow. It marks 40 days of fasting and spiritual discipline for the majority of Christians around the world (Evangelicals not included—they don’t really observe Lent), kicked off for Western Christians by the observance of Ash Wednesday. This is a day where we go to church and have ashes smeared on our heads (or sprinkled on them) as a reminder of two things: we sin and we die. It is meant to get us in touch with the frailty of our humanity as a way to underscore the magnanimity of what Jesus did in re-orienting our humanity through His life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

But I look at things in much of the world right now and I’m not so sure we need the ashes to remind us of these facts. Ukraine and Gaza (as well as the under-reported turmoil of what is happening throughout Africa, particularly in the Congo region) are stark reminders of the ubiquity of death. And the current state of things in the United States is perhaps the clearest reminder to us that sin is far from gone in the world—and also demonstrating to us how sin and death inform each other. Furthermore, Lent itself is a season of voluntary austerity and deprivation. Lent, in a way, assumes a degree of “affluence” as the “norm” and “deprivation” as the outlier. Given the direction of the economy, Lent feels less like a thing we Christians choose to enter into for a time and more the general reality in which we are moving.

So, why bother? I mean, can we even afford to do Lent this year? Since much will likely be taken away as this administration goes on, wouldn’t we be better off using the time we have as a sort of extended Mardi Gras and treat ourselves until we can’t? Shouldn’t we take the advice of the wise Preacher in Ecclesiastes and “eat drink and be merry” since everything around is “a puff of smoke” and “chasing the wind?”*

Well, this more or less assumes the Western Christian view of Lent. Eastern Christianity (think Greek or Coptic) has a different mindset. For Eastern Christians (whose theology is arguably more reflective of ancient Christianity), Lent is about balance. See, in Eastern Christian practice, one fasts for about half the year and feasts for the rest. This serves as a kind of balance for the earth and our bodies, similar to the YinYang thinking of East Asia or the Ku/Hina thinking of ancient Hawai’i. And this can have notable economic repercussions in Christian societies.

There’s an old tale that gets repeated (one that I’ve been known to parrot myself) that says that fish was deemed appropriate for Lent due to the lobbying of fishmongers. Apparently there is no evidence to support this story. But this does not negate the fact that fasting can carry implications for resisting the “principalities and powers” of our current economic reality. The food industry, for instance, wants to dominate our kitchens and push the kinds of foods they want us to eat. They want us to lean into excess. In his 2016 documentary series Cooked, food author Michael Pollan notes that the sort of foods pushed on us are foods that, if we were to cook them ourselves, would be excessively time-consuming. Think about French fries, for instance. We view them as basically “filler.” But consider what it takes to make French fries: growing potatoes, peeling them, slicing them, blanching them, then frying them. Think about all the little prepackaged cakes or tubs of ice cream in our freezers. Their delectability is largely informed by the difficulty that comes in making these things ourselves. But that labor is outsourced and now these things are largely treated as staples in the Western diet and not the exceptional items they’re really supposed to be.

And the food industry is making bank on that fact.

Pollan’s documentary further notes that the food industry sold us on these things by hammering us with messages that reinforce how stressful our lives are, thus pressuring us into buying their products as a means to relieve some degree of stress. Capitalism selling us their solutions to the problems they created. And the messages are only getting stronger and stronger. The stress and chaos of this administration in the United States is very good for business (and probably why so many CEO-types have gone hard for Trump in the first place).

So, fasting becomes a form of refusal, a form of resistance. It also becomes self-empowering in a way because it can help us remember that we can make choices free of corporate and political pressures.

Saint Paul asserts that while we are at war, our war “is not against blood and flesh”. Which means that we don’t fight this war in the same way we might fight others. The Chinese theologian Watchman Nee notes that Saint Paul’s instructions in this passage are rooted in a defensive stance and not a march into battle. Which means, quite literally, that our war against the spiritual forces that assail us is waged as resistance.

So, food can become a tool in that resistance. Refusing to eat certain foods becomes an act of resistance against the very forces that capitalize on our stress and fear.

But the fasting of Lent is not only a curbing of the foods we eat. It’s also the giving up of certain activities. There’s been much press about the various economic blackouts people are participating in right now. What if we made every Wednesday and Friday (the traditional days of general fasting for ancient Christianity) in Lent a “buy nothing” day? And alongside that maybe consider using any money we save from our refusals and give it to various people (software engineers, journalists) that could really use the money?

Yes, we are facing a reality of involuntary austerity. But Lent is more than just a time of tightening the belt for some vague spiritual benefit. It is about a life of balance. It is a tool in a war of resistance against the very power of Satan itself, manifested in the economic pressures foisted upon us by billionaires addicted to wealth and gaining it at our expense.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Lent #Christianity #spirituality #religion #Church #Jesus #Episcopal #politics #economy

We are in the midst of a wave of what is now known as enshittification, which is a term coined by Canadian author Cory Doctorow on his blog, Pluaralistic. It’s a phrase that has taken parts of the internet by storm, a perfect word to describe how seemingly everything has gotten worse. (Apologies to anyone who is bothered by a priest using the word “shit,” by the way. I get that some Christians are offended by swearing, but Saint Paul pretty much uses the word “shit” in Philippians 3:8 when he considers his life before Christ as skybala, so make of that what you will.)

“Enshittification” is marked by four things, according to Doctorow:

first, [platforms] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Notice that those four markers are not exclusive to technology, where the term “platform” could be used for just about any institution.

Including the Church.

Just think back to the 15th and 16th Centuries. The Church had been good. It managed to change the direction of the Roman Empire and even managed to preserve elements of culture and society after the fall of that empire. It was nimble and adaptive to the needs of people in the agrarian days of the early Medieval period and managed to counterbalance the worst impulses of kings and lords (for the most part) because kings and lords were seen as subservient to the lordship of Christ Jesus and His Church, which wielded the power of excommunication as a way to keep things in check. But then, kings and lords wanted more from the Church, an institution they were largely funding. Further, many of the bishops had been welcomed into the halls of wealth and power and now saw themselves largely in political terms rather than spiritual. So the laity began to be exploited through practices like the selling of indulgences (used to fund wars and, later, the construction of Saint Peter’s at the Vatican). Then, the bishops began to exploit the lords and kings to get what they wanted (just consider the story of Henry IV traveling in the snow to get the pope to reverse an excommunication). Then, we get the Reformation Era (which gave birth to my branch of the Church, known as Anglicanism).

Now, we see the same things happening in regards to Protestant Christianity, particularly the Evangelical side of things. Pro Publica is running an article about one of the several Evangelical pastors that are leveraging their spiritual influence in the service of political power. And the question is why? Why would any organization that calls itself Christian engage in this sort of thing?

Why would the Church ever return, like “a dog to its vomit,” to the well of enshittification?

It’s because Christians seem to forget what their religion is all about, largely because Christianity is a pretty inconvenient thing. We want to change the world, we rightly recognize that Jesus calls us to change the world. But the lure of doing such things quickly and conveniently is very very strong. Which I feel like we’ve heard something similar before...

Oh. Right.

I’m beginning to think more and more that “inconvenience” is a Christian virtue, a thing we need to embrace, cultivate, and value (I’ve plans to write more on this in the future). When we consider that the ancient rabbinical interpretation of the Fall was the result of the serpent telling Eve and Adam that they could short-cut their way to god-like-ness that the Holy One was moving them toward by eating that piece of fruit, we see that “convenience” or “expedience” becomes a very alluring temptation. Further, in a prophecy about Jesus found in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom (frequently called The Wisdom of Solomon) we read:

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. (Wisdom 2:12-15, NRSV)

So, even the Bible itself acknowledges that the ways of Jesus are inconvenient, while also exposing the short-comings and even wickedness that come from a life of convenience. And those things result in Jesus being crucified. Which is all to say that convenience is powerful and can come with a dark side if we’re not attentive to it.

Christians, as with anyone else, are sinners. We know this, we confess this, we (are supposed to) try and overcome this. But, nevertheless, we live in a sinful world and it is very hard to successfully resist every day. (But this is why we also believe in grace—which is another topic for another time!) The allure of a short-cut to what we think we want is too strong. And so we make a concession here, another there, and then in time we have Rube-Goldberg-machined our way into abandoning our faith and/or calling a heresy or idolatry “Christian.”

Christians have an uneasy relationship with the so-called “separation of church and state.” Our faith demands that we be public and call on the public to repent and follow Jesus. This fact was not lost on some of our most ancient thinkers, most notable being Saint Augustine of Hippo, the great sage of Western (scholastic) Christianity. His mountainous masterpiece, The City of God, deals with the questions of Christians in political leadership. What he effectively argues is that Christians are baptized into a world affected by sin and so all things we humans develop are going to be marked by that fact in some way. But because we confess that sin and confess that Jesus has freed us from sin having lasting, defining power over us, we are able to see past the marks of sin and into a new way of being. So Augustine argues that the Church must make use of the systems of this world, but in such a way to move past the sin-defined flaws of those systems. Judicial punishment, for instance, is supposed to be understood by Christians as a tool that leads to people being restored into the community and not a means of punishment for the sake of punishment. Augustine understood that the guilt of the knowledge of the sin itself is more punishment than the law could ever apply, and so mechanisms of “punishment” are only to help an offender realize the sinfulness of their actions, so that they could come to a place of confession—which is the catalyst for repentance and restoration to the community.

In short, Saint Augustine argues that the Church make use of governmental systems in order to persuade people of what they ought to do, rather than coerce them. In effect, this subverts the systems of government, sinful as they are, in the aims of hopefully working them out of a job.

But, as we all know, persuasion is inconvenient. It takes time. Think of how hard it is to convince people to leave Facebook or Instagram in favor of the far superior experience of decentralized social media like Mastodon and Pixelfed. Wouldn’t it be easier, more convenient, to just force people to leave?

Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just vote the right people into office and get them to make people behave the way we think they should?

Such a view is deeply heretical, from a Christian perspective, because it attempts to supplant the work of God and put it into the hands of us people. Like the Marvel villain, The High Evolutionary, we convince ourselves that we can do it all faster and better because God is not behaving the way we think He ought.

The only way out of the cycle of enshittification is to properly repent and then continue to resist the lure of convenience.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

header image by J Dean, via unsplash.com. The image of the Temptation of Christ is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain

#christianity #church #enshittification #technology #culture #politics

I’m probably going to be “that guy” to some of you. That guy who discovers something new to him and then integrates it into his personality and won’t shut up about it until something else comes along to take it’s place. I’ve been that guy kind of all my life, to be honest (ask my friends). My current “that guy” thing is the Linux distribution (I restrained myself from saying “distro”) known as Ubuntu and it has, in a small way, changed my life.

So here’s the deal. I’ve been an Apple guy since at least 2006, after an obsession with Sony products (and the building of a PC just after high school). My first ever Apple product was an iPod, the one with the touch wheel. I was so enamored with the design (as I was with the late-90s clear Macs) that I decided to finally purchase a Mac computer for myself. After my beloved Sony Vaio laptop was stolen from my apartment in college, I went almost a year without a computer (living fearfully and carefully with my entire life on a thumb drive that traveled with me everywhere—this was well before cloud storage). With money bequeathed to me from my grandmother after her funeral, I purchased that ubiquitous white plastic Apple iMac laptop that everyone had (except for the kids who had the black pro model). And I used it all through the rest of college and my seminary education. It was chipped and scratched by the time I got a good deal on a 27-inch iMac with an Intel processor, thanks to a friend who worked at the Apple Store. This was during my first year of marriage, before kids and when my wife had a very well-paying accounting job for a major firm (while I worked as the lowest-paid priest in my diocese). In addition to that, I was fully integrated into the Apple ecosystem: iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches. I read Steve Jobs’ biography (which still sits on my shelf and I pick up to read on occasion even nowadays). I was maybe “that guy” about Apple for a time.

What I love(d) about Apple is the seriousness they took with regards to design. They aimed to make beautiful products. And not only were they beautiful, they simply worked.

I hate Windows. I pretty much hate everything Microsoft. But I really hate Windows. I especially hated that Windows lied to me. Like when I went to delete software, just sending it to the recycle bin was not enough. You had to track down stuff in the registry after running an uninstaller, just to make sure it was all gone. What blew my mind with my first Mac was that deleting software was as simple as moving it to “trash.” Then emptying that trash. Then there was the refinement. Pages offered crisp-looking documents with a range of beautiful fonts. The icons for minimizing and closing windows in MacOS looked like candied jewels. The physical hardware of the machines were minimalist works of art. No company aside from Braun or Dyson seemed to be focused on the connection between function and form quite like Apple. And that philosophy carried over into the software side as well. Jobs was correct in recognizing that personal computing was only going to take off if things were designed with an eye toward intuition. He hung around with guys like Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates, guys who viewed computers in a vein similar to HAM radios. But Jobs knew that he’d have to remove personal computers from the realm of hobbyists and offer a product that seemed “finished” if people were going to shell out loads of money in order to use that product. And the proof is right in front of us: the Macintosh played an instrumental role in the adoption of personal computers and Apple sits as the most valuable company in the world.

Reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs reveals something many many people have noted: Apple struggles without Steve Jobs. When Apple fired Jobs, they floundered as a company and got too spread-out, offering products that no one seemed interested in purchasing. Jobs’ return brought with it the foundation of success that the company rides today, but looking at Apple these days and you can see that they’ve not really been able to overcome Jobs’ death (compounded by the losing of Jony Ive from the design side of things as well). Jobs’ philosophy of ensuring that these consumer products simply “work” has morphed instead into an approach of spoon-feeding applications and gradually locking people into the Apple ecosystem, seemingly more to keep them from leaving than any real benefit to remaining.

Take my beloved Pages, for instance. Every time I’ve updated that program (which has gradually become more and more like a mobile app than a proper word processor) I’ve lost fonts that I used and certain settings are gone or buried for reasons that don’t make a whole lot of sense to anyone but the engineers at Apple. Then there’s the planned obsolescence. Which, I get. Maintaining old hardware and software requires people and thus incurs costs on diminishing returns and all of that. But Apple continues to have their hardware and software locked up, which results in these beautiful products becoming seen as disposable, discardable, and furthering an ugly and environmentally catastrophic sense of consumerism.

Jobs seemed to hold the view that a computer should not insist upon itself. The computer, for him, is a tool toward a different end, not an end in itself. Increasingly, Apple feels like they’re making products for the sake of the product, and making changes to those products that feel insistent and not like the catalyst for liberation that Jobs envisioned in his dad’s garage all those years ago.

Which brings me, finally, to Ubuntu.

So that mid-2011 Mac I spoke about? I still have it and use it as my “home” computer. When I was called to be the priest of Saint Mary’s in Honolulu, the private school I had been chaplain to gave Saint Mary’s two refurbished Macs as a gift. Both of them the same year and model of my home computer. That was in March of 2020. One of the machines I appropriated for use as my office computer (because I didn’t have one at the church when I arrived). Shortly after the move, I started noticing that my home machine was running slow. I had a ton of stuff on there, so it wasn’t that unexpected. Then the office machine started chugging and I kept getting notices that my OS was no longer able to receive security updates, etc. It was becoming clear that I needed to buy a new computer—or two.

My parish is not big. I do not make a ton of money. So the idea of asking the parish to purchase me a new computer felt selfish. I was not about to keep apologizing to folks about the leaky roof while logging onto a brand new iMac (I really liked the mint green one). Plus there was the added element of what I’d said above about Apple, that the newer Macs were harder to repair and treated as more “disposable” (they glued the motherboard to the screen!). Conventional wisdom (that I picked up when I was working at EB Games in 2000 and part of the “PC Master Race”) was that a Windows machine should last about five years and a Mac between seven and ten, depending on use-level. These machines were hitting fourteen years of age, so old that I could not AirDrop from my iOS devices on them. So, it was time.

Then, Trump happened. Again. And suddenly all the big tech stuff changed in my eyes. Beating big tech felt like both a Christian responsibility and a patriotic need. I thought back to the early chapters of Steve Jobs’ biography and how he articulated the role tech can play in personal liberation. So I decided that I needed to learn Linux. I actually checked out Linux For Dummies from the library. In the course of my reading I learned that not only does Linux run really great on older Macs, but Ubuntu in particular.

This all means that I found myself in a position to try something new, something that would maybe inject new life into my computers—as well as me and my relationship with technology. I dug out an old external drive and got to work on creating a bootable USB drive for experimenting with Ubuntu on Mac. It was a bit more complicated than I expected. One computer basically forgot that it was able to access a WiFi network and so I had to create the drive on a separate same model Mac. I couldn’t use Etcher to get things going (the Mac was too old), so I had to learn to use the Terminal on Mac (which I’ve ever only used extremely sparingly; reminded me of DOS back in the day, which helped when I built my own PC, or when I had to do stuff with BIOS). I had two machines going, plus my iPad for instructions. I felt like I was hacking the Gibson. Once I got the bootable drive set up, I plugged it into the relevant machine, restarted it in order to boot from the drive, and was blown away at how refined and pretty Ubuntu looked—while feeling a deep sense of satisfaction that I got it to work at all. I fell in love almost immediately and so I wiped the memory of the machine and installed Ubuntu as the operating system, running it like it was a fresh computer.

I’m writing this on that machine, using LibreOffice. I love it so much that I get excited to come to work just to use this computer.

Running Ubuntu on this Mac has had an immense impact on my relationship with computers in just the few weeks I’ve had it. Not only does it feel like I’m using a completely brand new computer, it feels rebellious, like I’m in some sort of special club. When I check out apps online and I see that it has Linux support, I feel like I’m part of an inside joke that only cool people get.

Linux feels rebellious to me. I’m sure there are folks who run servers that do not feel this way. But for someone that lives among the normies, to whom it’s either Windows or MacOS, Android or iPhone, this feels counter-cultural. And it feels empowering, like I get to decide when my technology is out of date. I mean, I’m writing this on a nearly fifteen year old machine (which still looks beautiful), using a twenty-five year old Pro Keyboard (the one with the midnight blue clear plastic buttons—the peak of personal computing design—I got it for like ten bucks at a thrift store). There’s plenty of life left in these things and they do not deserve to be relegated to trash heaps. Indeed, the aesthetic beauty of these products is enduring and Linux ensures that they are still functionally useful.

There’s also a spiritual dimension to this as well. In not letting a mega-corporation or three make my technology decisions for me, I am asserting my own self-worth. I am also experiencing a sort of revival, what Saint Paul refers to as the transforming of one’s mind, in opposition to being “conformed to the ways of this world.” The tools and the knowledge to use them is out there. It just takes a little time and effort to acquire it. It doesn’t need to be doled out to me from on high. Rather, it’s all around us and among us, even within us. And this fact is utterly liberating to know.

It’s weird to say, I guess, but this little operating system has had a huge impact on me. Linux changes lives.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#linux #christianity #spirituality #technology #computers #ubuntu #resistance