Thank you, Captain Obvious

I recently had a blog post on Theolog, Christian Century's blog, that was a shorter version of my post on 10/25. One thing I learned through the comments I received (and they came from a variety of people and opinions) is that a lot of people think that it is obvious that (in this example) homosexuality is wrong, or, conversely, that it is obvious that homosexuality is fine. What happens is that you get arguments over full inclusion, ordination and marriage rights among people whose basic assumptions about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality itself are sharply at odds.

On many issues, though not on the question of homosexuality, I am often one of those people who presumes that certain tenets of the faith are self-evident. A lot of this comes about because I have grown up in the church and am—in some cases, but not all—more familiar with the scriptural and/or theological arguments surrounding an issue than your average person. Once I got to college, I started learning that this tendency towards the obvious is not always helpful. Suddenly I was around intelligent Christians who thought that certain things about faith were perfectly obvious—things about which I thought in polar opposite terms, which I, too, thought were obvious.

One of my friends supports the death penalty from a Christian perspective and claims that its use preserves the right to life. Just hearing this makes my head spin because it seems like such a blatant internal contradiction. However, my friend thinks his reasoning is perfectly sound, and when I counter his point, it's not as if it's the first time he's thought about it from a different perspective—he's heard similar views before, he's thought about it before. I will maintain that his argument is inconsistent, but if I am not careful about how I approach the argument, I shut off all further debate, which seems to me to be ultimately unhelpful.

What this calls for, I think, is a certain level of intellectual generosity—something, I admit, I'm not very good at practicing. Especially on the issue of homosexuality, plenty of people have thought long and hard about it and crafted scripturally based arguments that end up being utterly divergent in many cases. One does not have to relinquish one's own position in order to seek to understand another point of view, and one does not have to agree with the other person, but as Christians I believe it is important that even—and especially—when we hold to seeming extremes of interpretation, we cannot do so without allowing space for the other side to articulate its points, even if we think their ideas ludicrous.

The heart of the Gospel is not that we need to prove ourselves right in opposition to all those who are wrong. I am by no means calling for a wishy-washy universality or relativity of belief (heaven forbid); I am not saying that some things are not ultimately right, because some things are. The Trinity, Christ's death and resurrection, Christ's divinity and humanity—these things, and other dogma outlined in the Nicene Creed, are non-negotiable. However, where it concerns the adiaphora of the Christian faith, we must be able to understand, if not necessarily embrace, other points of view—or risk the fragmentation of Christ's body, the Church.