I’ve been listening quietly to the range of responses on this topic since my initial email about the “nuptial metaphor” a few weeks ago. It is perhaps time to say a little more.

In reading Job, the visiting preacher at South Yarra last night reminded us that our life’s task was not to find the right answers to OUR questions, but rather to hear the questions God puts to us. For it is in answering GOD’s questions that we shall find out who we really are.

I therefore resonate with what Jason has written about the priority of grace. I would add, however, that grace is not only about feeling that one is accepted by God, important as that is. Theologically, it is also about the freedom of God to work in God’s own ways: to treat those who are nothing in the eyes of the (religious) world as though they were really something (1 Cor 1.26-31) It is, as Eberhard Jungel has eloquently written, about the surplus of divine possibility over necessity or inevitability. God calls those who we would call sinners, “saints,” and those we would call “unworthy” worthy – and this with supreme indifference to every myth or ethic of human making, whether religious in origin or not.

In that context, I would agree with those of you who said that each of us gets different answers on the question of homosexuality because we approach the issue with different “world views”. “World views” can also be called “myths” or even “ethico-political narratives”. If we ask questions in certain ways, we get certain kinds of answers. If we ask questions in other ways, then we get different sets of answers. Certain mythological worldviews ask questions in different ways than do others. Part of what I was trying to say with my earlier contributions about hermeneutics was simply this: that the answers we get to our questions have largely to do with both the questions we ask and the way we ask them. This means, of course, that even were Scripture entirely free of human fallibility (which it is not: that would be to gnosticise the text), it still behoves us to interpret Scripture as human beings always already entagled in mythlogical worlds.

Theologically, grace means that God is ultimately free from our mythological entanglements. God will not found, back up, or guarantee anything that we feel is necessary to make our lives meaningful. God retains the right to fracture, interrupt, or “other” whatever set of answers we currently rest upon. Even if that set of answers has apparently been derived from Scripture.

That is why I continue to argue for a Christian ethics that is open to its other: God. And that is the case whether we believe homosexuality to be a sin or not. Jacques Derrida, in a profound reflection upon the story of Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac, has written that what the Law requires of us all is ethically impossible: to disobey one commandment in order to fulfill another. (In the context of the debate on homosexuality, one is often forced to choose love for one set of neighbours over love for another set of neighbours). But (thank Christ!) acceptance by God, as we learn from Paul, is not ultimately dependent upon whether we obey the commandments in their totality. Acceptance by God is founded in God’s nature as love, that love revealed in the Easter mystery of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. In Christ, God is able to perform for us, precisely as a human being, what we are simply unable to perform for ourselves.

So whether one believes, on the basis of Scripture and experience, that homosexuality is a sin; or whether one believes, on the basis of Scripture and experience, that it is not, we are all accepted and purposed by God on the basis of grace, and grace alone. I may be wrong in believing that homosexual love is as capable of manifesting the trinitarian love of God as heterosexual love. Or I may be right. Who can tell save God alone? Afterall, who can say what the good is, save God alone (Mark 10.18)? What is important is that when God asks me who I am, and how I pretend to his love, that I answer only that I have died with Christ, and now live with God only as one whose life and future is hidden with Christ in God (Gal 2.20; Col 3.3, 4).

If God offers us such grace – grace completely independent or what we know, understand, or purpose – surely we are called to offer that grace to one another, in the power of Christ and for his sake.

Garry Deverell _ _ _ Pastor South Yarra Community Baptist Church