Say what?!

Tony Jones has responded to the sort of argu­ment I used in my pre­vi­ous reply to him and the response has me scratch­ing my head.  The core of Tony’s response is that first of all, every­thing is rel­a­tive (this isn’t sur­pris­ing). Sec­ond of all that the Bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive as such doesn’t mat­ter. It doesn’t mat­ter that the cre­ation nar­ra­tive only men­tioned the cre­ation of man and woman for each other. It also doesn’t mat­ter that Jesus affirmed this in the New Tes­ta­ment; the book of Matthew and the Ser­mon on the Mount and in other places. Tony Jones equated the lack of men­tion of bisex­u­als, homo­sex­u­als, her­maph­ro­dites etc., in Gen­e­sis and the say­ings of Jesus with the fact that Jesus cast demons named Legion out of a man instead of call­ing this man’s ‘prob­lem’ schiz­o­phre­nia. That there­fore, in the same way that a schiz­o­phrenic isn’t excluded from the king­dom of God sim­ply because Jesus called his schiz­o­phre­nia demonic, nei­ther are prac­tic­ing bisex­ual or homo­sex­u­als excluded because Gen­e­sis and Jesus don’t men­tion them (or so they say). The logic is that just because there are things not men­tioned in a cer­tain nar­ra­tive does not mean those things not men­tioned aren’t included in the king­dom of God (well, isn’t that why you take the entire account — all of Scrip­ture — into consideration?!).

Maybe that’s a bril­liant reply (I’m fairly sure it isn’t), how­ever, it doesn’t make sense to me at all. It would be ridicu­lous it we pre­sented the argu­ment in the fol­low­ing syllogism:

1. The Gen­e­sis cre­ation nar­ra­tive doesn’t men­tion homo­sex­u­als.
2. Jesus affirms the Gen­e­sis cre­ation nar­ra­tive and in doing so does not men­tion homo­sex­u­als.
3. Jesus cast demons out of a man but did not men­tion schiz­o­phre­nia.
4. Schiz­o­phren­ics can still be part of the king­dom of God.
5. There­fore, prac­tic­ing homo­sex­u­als aren’t excluded from the king­dom of God.

So it’s not much of a syl­lo­gism but it is Tony’s argu­ment in point form and it looks prop­erly poor.

In terms of the Gen­e­sis cre­ation nar­ra­tive as well as the teach­ing of Jesus, it’s not sim­ply the lack of men­tion of homo­sex­u­als and bisex­u­als, etc. It’s the explicit men­tion of why men and women were cre­ated. It is explic­itly stated that men and women were cre­ated to com­plete each other. It’s not as if the accounts are ambigu­ous; explicit approval of an act is in the very least implicit dis­ap­proval of any act which per­verts the approved act. Even if we were to accept the argu­ment from rel­a­tivism — that Scrip­ture is the prod­uct of a spe­cific cul­ture and is no longer applic­a­ble today — then I have to won­der why there is any attempt at all to enter into a bib­li­cal dia­logue if the first thing most will do is throw out the Bible as a prod­uct of cul­ture from another time.

I just don’t under­stand how the argu­ment could be pre­sented seri­ously with a straight face.

Related posts:

1. What does monogamy have to do with it?
2. Response to Tony Jones on Homosexuality
3. A lit­eral read­ing of Genesis?
4. Gen­e­sis 19:1–11
5. The Bible and Homo­sex­u­al­ity: Introduction