Part of why I'm not a conservative evangelical
bellatoris, quoted from Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, adding emphasis:
“I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights no such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simlpy because the people they love are of the same sex—nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.
sds added, “Obama’s quick dismissal of Romans simply confirms what I’ve already observed about him—namely, that he has a low view of Scripture as informed by his mainline liberal denomination.”
Normally I’m impressed by sds’s thoughtful posts—though I often disagree with them. For one reason or another, this one bothered me. Sorry in advance, SDS and sympathizers, for any perceptible hostility in this post—but something that sentence struck a nerve. Perhaps it exemplifies why I’m not an evangelical—at least not a conservative evangelical.
In what manner does the passage in question indicate a “low view of Scripture”? It mentions two portions of scripture and suggests that one should be more defining of Christianity than the other. This is not a crazy suggestion. In fact, if you flip open a Bible, there’s a decent chance that the Sermon on the Mount, as something Jesus said, will be in brilliant red letters. There are a few parts of the Bible that have some tension with other parts of the Bible. If you don’t believe this, you haven’t read the Bible. This doesn’t mean that some parts should be discarded outright—but it does mean that there are some portions we might not base our public policy on (as sds already observed) without a whole lot of careful thought.
If you seriously claim to respect scripture about church history, you can’t condemn others as insincere when they put their informed reading of the scripture over your preferred reading. The Catholics, of course, give church history and authoritative interpretations a primacy that few Protestants do. That’s their thing—and if I wanted to do that, I’d up and become a Catholic. But if we’re going with sola scriptura, sola fide, you need to let people read the scripture. It is not dismissive of scripture to conclude that basing public policy on the inclusive sermon on the mount is more inline with what the church should be doing than basing policy on the one recorded sermon Jesus gave than on a passage primarily about idolotry that incidentally mentions homosexual sex along with gossip, slander, insolence, boastfulness, and the disobedience of parents.
Coincidentally, the passage wraps up in Romans 2:1 with, “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.” The passage goes on to talk about God’s kindness, tolerance and patience. But hey, if you want to read this passage and decide first that it’s one of the most important calls to action in the Bible and second, that the primary message of the passage is “NO HOMOS,” there’s nothing I can say to reach you.