The sickness at the highest levels of United Methodism is most lately demonstrated by this statement from an emeritus professor of theology at Perkins School of Theology:
The church should be concerned with being biblical in the deepest sense. What might that look like? The ranking of a few statements by Paul above all the persuasive and powerful texts related to God’s radical love through Jesus Christ can hardly qualify as serious biblical inquiry and authority. Paul and his generation had no knowledge or awareness of long-term consensual same-gender loving relationships so prevalent today.
At this late date in the study of the New Testament one would think that there would be other matters over which to argue when it comes to the differences between Jesus and Paul than the categories of their moral universe.
It is only a measure of contemporary decadence that a person who should know better would seek to divide them over an issue which would have been non-existent at the time, not just for Paul but for Jesus himself. No one can say with a straight face that Jesus and his generation knew of "long-term consensual same-gender loving relationships." The reason for this is that in Judaism they were stoned to death when they were found out, not unlike other malefactors.
Like the Christians, for example. Just ask Saul. He stood by holding the coats while Stephen was dispatched to the next world. I suppose it won't be long before some enterprising New Testament scholar tries to make a name for himself by claiming homosexuality was a chief tenet of Stephen's Hellenistic circle in Jerusalem. We already have one claiming there was advocacy for suicide in early Christianity, so why not Greek homosexuality, too?
No, the law of God is wise because it demands that evil be stamped out when it is discovered before the people can become inured to it. But, of course, inuring the people is the modus operandi of Fabian socialism.
The problem with the preachers of the radical love of Jesus is that to them, radical is measured on a meter whose needle only goes into the red zone when fellow Christians are outraged, not the world. What they intend is anarchism, not radicalism. It drinks from the same well as the revolution of the 1960s. A new order is not its object, merely overthrow of the existing order. These would give us license, not liberation.
These people don't know the first thing about radicalism, otherwise they'd be out of a job. The sorry truth about the church since the dawn of the twentieth century is the way it has made peace with the liberal Jesus of the nineteenth. Jesus is nothing more than a moralist who taught forgiveness and love, reigning interminably in heaven while ceaseless ages here below roll on and on and on, to be improved year upon year by the presence of God's holy people. This Jesus was a sitting duck for the Progressive Movement, the Social Gospel, liberation theology, the civil rights movement, and all the other forms of Marxism which now plague the world, and the United Methodist Church now in particular. Rick Santorum was more right than he knows.
If the church were "biblical in the deepest sense," the church as we know it wouldn't exist. The cost of discipleship rules that out, but, of course, recovering what that means is almost impossible for the church because it has been trimming and compromising Jesus since the beginning. Jesus asked his followers to turn their backs on their jobs, their money, and their wives and children because the form of this world was passing away in an instant. So urgent was his message of the kingdom and the coming judgment that there was no time even to bury the dead. The judgment would come even before the disciples had finished preaching in Israel.
Yes, judgment. And Jesus' vision of it is horrific. Many are called, but few are chosen. Homosexuals will make up only a small few of us who don't make it.
Radical.
