#Literalism is my personal enemy! But especially with color words in A. Greek texts!

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

Transcript of discussion on 1 Timothy 1:9-10, a passage used against LGBTQ Christians

I was listening to episode 13 of a podcast called Lord Have Mercy, which is produced by Crystal Cheatham, one of the people creating the “Our Bible App.” I really liked the second half of the episode’s discussion around 1 Timothy 1:9-10 (a passage you can read at the beginning of the transcript below), which is a passage used against LGBTQA+ Christians because of the frequent translation of one of its Greek words as “homosexuals.” 

I personally find this a pretty easy passage to deconstruct simply by looking at it linguistically, which you can see at this post -- but this ep focuses on a contextual approach that is also beneficial. 

So yes, I typed out a transcript of the podcast below for those who can’t listen to it / prefer to read it! The part of the episode that I typed out begins around 39 minutes in (the first half deals with the topic of sexual shame, which is interesting too!).

For accessibility, I tried to break up paragraphs into readable pieces. Note that the transcript is not a perfect rendition of every word: I left out a good number of “um’s” as well as places where the two people (Crystal Cheatham and “Rev. Sex”) interrupt each other with simple agreement words and sounds. But the actual context of their conversation is preserved. 

For those who do not have the time / inclination to read the entire transcript, I put asterisks ***around the places that I felt were most important or powerful***. 

(I won’t say I personally agree with everything they say, especially their discussion of the “law” aspect of the Timothy verses, but read / listen and draw your own conclusions.)

The transcript is under a readmore; let me know if you are unable to access it! If you prefer to listen to the podcast, it’s from May 18, 2017, episode 13, “Sexual Shame with Ryan Johnstone” -- find it at this link, or on iPhone / iTunes. 

Lord Have Mercy Podcast

Episode 13: “Sexual Shame”

Questions for Rev. Sex starts at ~39 minutes in; that is where I start my transcript.

CC

It’s that time of the show again, where you listeners get to call in and ask questions to Rev. Sex.

***It’s 1 Timothy 1:9-10, and this is the New International Version. It reads:

“We also know that the law is not made for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine.” ***

I have so many questions when I read this because immediately I think, um, it says “we also know that the law is not made for the righteous” – so what’s the law? who is the righteous? who is this talking about?

RS

*** If this were being used to attack me, I would say, ‘Well that’s really interesting, let’s turn the page a couple more pages maybe to chapter 6,’ and so 1 Timothy, same book, chapter 6, five chapters later, starts with: “Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed. Those who have believing masters must not be disrespectful to them on the ground that they are members of the church; rather, they must serve them all the more since those who benefit from their service are believers and beloved.”

So, if we’re using a text that condemns homosexuality and yet not lifting up the enforcement and reinforcement of slavery just a few chapters later, then that’s a particular kind of inconsistency that I will not abide. So if we’re going to say ‘1 Timothy, it is our scripture it is our guide,’ then we are saying, ‘oh, we will condemn homosexuality and we will affirm slavery and we can just keep it moving’ – I don’t know any Christians who do that, so I am not willing to entertain an argument that says, ‘well yes, chapter 1 is absolutely right but chapter 6 we can just let that one slide.’ …For me consistency is one of the most important pieces of a theology that you’re going to use, especially if you’re using it to harm rather than uplift others. Um, so those are all different kinds of ways to come at the same thing. ***

CC

I’m still confused though, like what does it mean when it says ‘we also know that the law is not made for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels’? So the law isn’t made for people who are already good? It’s made for people who are bad?

RS

Well. That’s a great question, and I think that it depends on who the laws are made for, to be quite honest. When we live in a society where it wasn’t but a hundred years ago that it was illegal for two people of different races to get married, where we live in a society where it wasn’t but a couple years ago since it was legal for people of the same assigned sex to get married, when we live in a place where it used to be illegal for people of color to drink out of water fountains and where women didn’t have voting rights...

When we start talking about laws and what they were made for, I feel really, um, really hesitant because I want to start asking other questions about ‘whose law are you talking about?’ and what law in specific and who created those laws and whose image are those laws created because I have seen laws used much more to harm, um, and to maintain the status quo, and so if the status quo is white supremacy and segregation, um, or imperialism or colonization then my experience is yes, it’s about keeping people in line.

If we’re talking about sacred law, this is a reference back to Old Testament kind of law, I think it is very true that when we see in, uh, some of the, um, Hebrew Bible text where we have God mandating, you know, ‘Do not make idols’ that you can pretty much guarantee that was because people were worshiping idols and when you see all these commandments coming down, um, and assigned to God it’s because they are actively happening and so yes, if it’s about maintaining the status quo sure but my question is like okay but if the status quo includes women being property and children being able to be sold and bought, if it includes slaying your enemy and all of the living things and scorching the land like…there’s a little bit more that goes into that rather than just like, ‘The law was meant for those that break it,’ I think that depends on who’s in power and what they’re trying to do with that power.

(44:20)

CC

Yeah I don’t know, this verse is very suspect…I also hate that they…I mean, we’ve established that ‘homosexual’ is something that was invented and probably not in the original text, right?

And I hate that those who, um, decided to throw in homosexuality threw it in along with, like, murderers and slave traders and liars and perjurers and it’s like, that right there is why in, um, school, like university policy books they’ll say that it’s bad – I mean like they throw in homosexual right along with all the other horrible things that you could be, like a pedophile, you know? and it’s just like, when, where do you get off saying that you know, just because you don’t agree with being gay somehow it’s along the same lines as being, like, a criminal.

RS

Right, no, I mean even what is a criminal, right? because “criminal” changes dramatically over time. What is criminalized behavior in some places is seen as totally acceptable in others. So if we’re going back, like, for example when we’re talking about fornicators it’s like, well, if we equated having sex – as a culture, not talking just about the law – if we equated sex outside of marriage – which includes things like having sex with someone who’s not your spouse, cheating on people, those kinds of things – with homosexuality, those are not, uh, those are not punishable in the same ways. I’ve never yet heard of someone losing their job because they had sex outside of marriage –

CC

or they divorced their wife--

RS

[agreeing tone] --or they divorced their wife. So I think that, you know…it’s about that consistent application of belief, and I do believe that there are some very devoted Christians who believe that having sex or being married to someone of the same sex is equated with adultery, and they live very consistently those values across the board, but if we’re talking about law, and biblical law in particular... we get back to this question of biblical marriage.

*** Because, you know, for some folks who say, ‘it is our call to be celibate if we are gay and Christian,’ which I do not believe – but there’s a wide-spread, well, I think it’s faith…but I do think there is something that is very important about recognizing the ways that “biblical marriage” – I hear that so often from the religious right, around like “we support biblical marriage,” biblical marriage, biblical marriage – and the truth of the matter is that there are multiple, multiple formulations of biblical marriage. ***

So for example you have Levirate marriage, which is the time when, if a man dies without having a son, a child to like continue the name on

CC

His brother has to step in!

RS

Then his brother has to step in and marry his wife, even if she’s his second or third or sixteenth wife, and has to sleep with her

CC

and make a baby!

RS

and make a baby, and when she has that baby the baby takes the name of her dead husband rather than the person who literally fathered it, and it’s a kind of stop-gap measure to make sure that the lines are continued in their appropriate patriarchal [Avery’s note: I’d say more correctly patrilineal] structure.

But we don’t talk about that as part of biblical marriage; we don’t talk about….we have the beloved of God, David, who has so many wives, and Solomon who has so many wives and so many concubines (read slave, read harem)…you know, we have some of our founding fathers, right – we have Sarah and Abraham, who are trying to make a baby and that doesn’t happen and then we have Hagar who comes along as Sarah’s slave, as her handmaid, whom Abraham impregnates at Sarah’s request, and Hagar isn’t one of the people we mention as one of our foremothers because then God comes back and supposedly makes sure that Sarah has the actual legitimate heir. But those are two wives, and so there is this concubine slash slave-master kind of marriage and relationship that happens and it’s absolutely biblical.

We have multiple marriages like Jacob, who marries both sisters, right? Rachel and Leah.

***So there’s a lot, there’s a lot in terms of what is quote-on-quote “biblical marriage.” So to lift up this idea that it is forever, since Adam and Eve, been one man and one woman, I’m like, okay, so there were just Adam and Eve? then what about the next generation? Who did their children sleep with to procreate? Did God, like, magically impregnate the daughters of Adam and Eve to have, like – what do you do with that? There’s a consistency of logic that must be followed if you’re gonna proclaim the biblical marriage: you have to at least be consistent across the board, and then support multiple spouses of a person or, um, a levirate kind of marriage…it’s a lot. ***

CC

Okay, so, you poke a lot of holes in this, um, verse, that people usually use to just hit gay people over the head with, and so, if the rest of the Bible confirms that, you know, this Timothy verse doesn’t quite hold water, then what are we to understand or believe about this verse? Like what the hell is it talking about? if it’s not saying…if it is so easily contradicted by other parts of the Bible?...

RS

*** Oh beloved, I think there’s something….it’s actually really simple but it’s really hard to do, which is – this idea that we have to hold on to every single verse in the Bible as equally important and equally powerful is a really harmful one. It gets us really wrapped up in the wrong…

CC

It’s a really hard thing to do, too!

RS

Yeah! It’s wrapped up in the hard…in like, the wrong questions right?

So like for me when I’m thinking about the Bible, it’s important to understand some history about the Bible around, you know, it isn’t until a good forty, fifty years after Jesus died that any of the books that say “Jesus said” get actually written down, in a time when there were no podcasts, there were no video recorders, there were no, like, smart phones, you know? where scribes was what somebody wrote on paper who happened to be around – we have Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, nobody there had like, pen and paper recording Jesus’ prayer.

It is a very, um, oral tradition that is meant to invoke deep connection and creative engagement with something that is bigger than we can know and understand.

And so when we start drilling into “what is this exact word and what does that exact word mean?” rather than taking the scripture and saying, like, “what are my morals and my ethics around who God is? Is God a God of love? Is God a God of relationality, a God of life, a God of abundance? Is what we get from this book a God that is trying to judge us or is what we get from this book a God who is trying like hell to save us from all kinds of terrible possibilities?”

And when we get to that it gives a lens or a measuring stick, a rubric if you will, to be like, how do I take this verse? …Where does it fit in the lens of me looking for access to the Divine, access to life, access to hope and abundance and being the world needs, my authenticity, my helping others? – does this help or harm that, does it fit into that mold or not? ***

[Avery’s note: for more on this concept of reading the Bible contextually, focusing on some passages over others, see Austen Hartke’s YouTube vid “Are You Taking the Bible Seriously?”]

And I think that’s what Christians do when they throw out verses about slavery – we have now come to a place in our collective understanding where we understand that one human having ownership of another human’s body against their will is absolutely wrong no matter what the Bible says, right? so we can look at that and say our ethics and morals do not hold that, and we can let it go! and move on to the next thing. We don’t spend every Sunday or every Wednesday grappling deeply with what the fuck do we do with this Bible that says slavery is [right] – so why do we spend so much intensity and so much of our lives devoted to what do we do with where the Bible says that homosexuality is _fill in the blank_ “wrong” or “an abomination”?

CC

I mean it took us a really long time to figure out that slavery was wrong, and it’s taking us a really long time to figure out that homosexuality is not wrong.

[Avery’s note: Not sure I agree with CC here; I think it’s cutting slaveowners too much slack to pretend they “didn’t know” slavery was wrong. I’m going to make a (USA-centric) post at some point with things I learned in Black Church Studies, including how slaveowners and their supporters in many ways popularized the literalist way of reading the Bible to further their own agendas.]

And like what I’m hearing from this conversation is that, you know, in order to move forward as a, uh, as a collective society, it’s three parts of coming together.

One is the Bible, one is God, and the other is us – like, we…but it’s also us one by one, you know? One by one we have to figure it out and then we have to come together in groups and we say yes, this is what we believe; and then those groups get larger and larger and they find other groups and then finally it’s just a pretty well known fact that, you know, this one thing that we have all figured out with our hearts and with God and the Bible is true.

RS

Yeah!

CC

And I don’t know, I guess that’s why conversations like this are important, conversations like the ones we have at GCN are important, I know a lot of people say that it’s not right that GCN has Side A and Side B conversations, but you know, we’re all on a journey, we’re all trying to get there and it would be ridiculous for me to say no, you have to be where I am because I have this, this and this. It’s like we really do have to let everyone else just like…get there.

RS

Well, and we have to do our best to share what we know.

CC

Exactly. Challenge each other.

RS

*** Yeah! And for me, if there was one thing that is clear, it’s that God is connective of life. That God is perpetually and persistently, doggedly, after life and life abundant for all of creation. ***

CC

Amen!

RS

And if that is our rubric, then we are called to in accordance with that, right? And how does that fit? and that is the lens, that is the ethic that I read through the Bible. And there are things that I say “absolutely not,” and then things that I say “oh my gosh that was so life-giving, and yes to that.” …

CC

I think it’s a lot more power than I ever thought about.

RS

Yeah! I was gonna say the Methodists – I’m not Methodist and when I was younger I thought they were going to hell as a Southern Baptist [joking voice] – the Methodists have some really interesting stuff and one of the things that they taught me is this thing called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. John Wesley was one of the forefathers…

*** and it’s this idea that there are four ways to understanding revelation, our God, and God’s experience.

And one is Scripture. And it is really important and it is always gonna be relevant and important to Christians and therefore we absolutely have to grapple with it.

The second one is tradition, and the Church, and what we learn through the beginning when Christians were underground, illicit group of people who were often criminalized because of their belief and their refusal to acquiesce to Roman Empire, um.

The other two get left behind and I think they’re super important for us as Christians to lift back up and one of those is reason, which is what comes out for me around consistency – it is unreasonable to take chapter 1 but not take chapter 6.

And the last one is experience, and that if God is alive and God is still speaking, then God is alive and speaking through our lives and our experiences, and those are valid understandings and revelations to understand our relationality to God.

And so that is the last one in which I feel we understand testimonies, as evangelicals, to be important – and yet we seem to be able to dismiss them whenever they are not in alignment with what our own lived experience. And I think that happens over and over again with LGBTQ people, so I just want to encourage folks that your testimony matters, your lived experience matters, your authenticity absolutely is critical and matters – and there are more than one way, it’s not just scripture, there are actually many ways to understand the revelation of the Divine, because it’s all around us! *** ...

CC

Amen!

RS Yay!

[Theme music plays as episode ends]