Next-Wave Ezine > church & culture

Why Silence is No Argument
By J. Alex Kirk

Perhaps no issue is (and will be) the greatest flash-point between culture and historically faithful Christianity than homosexuality. It has already displaced abortion as the most heated cultural battle… and we’ve only just begun.

Part of what makes the issue so loaded is that it is not just theory.

Most of us know people who are questioning their sexuality or have decided that they are gay. In thirteen years in campus ministry, I've worked with students who have left the faith as they've embraced their homosexuality, with students who have tried to remain in the faith while practicing homosexuality, and with students who have decided to bear the cross of fighting against their homosexual tendencies.

I have prayed and wept with these students and for them. And I have wrestled with the Lord and the scriptures over the issue as well.

This to say that it’s not theory for me either. I might be wrong, but I'm neither ignorant nor callous to the people who have to deal with this issue not as theory but as a daily experience.

But at some point, those of us who claim to follow Christ have to come to terms with what we think about the issue--and what the Bible says about it.

There’s a specific line of argument which runs something like this: Jesus doesn't say anything about homosexuality. His silence is telling—homosexuality wasn’t that big a deal to him. Paul (the one most vilified for taking "nice Jesus" and turning it all into "mean Christianity") adds the prohibition against homosexuality later - which, coupled with how he talks about women, probably says more about his personal issues than it does about God's will concerning homosexuality.

I have come across this argument in many different settings (most recently in an Amazon book review) and I’ve even heard that Bono has dropped the “Jesus never said anything about homosexuality” line during concerts.

This is called "an argument from silence." And while it sounds compelling on the surface, it falls apart rather easily. Jesus’ silence on the issue speaks volumes—but not on the side of those who want to legitimize it. Let me illustrate.

We just finished one of the most thorough-going and intense political campaigns anyone has ever witnessed. Obama spent over a year thoroughly denouncing all things George W. Bush and offering his own alternatives to anything that Bush did during his tenure: the war, taxes, housing, regulation and de-regulation, social security, health care, abortion… everything.

But throughout the campaign, there was one glaring and significant omission: the Dewey Decimal system. At no point during the entire presidential race where Obama talked about having to fix just about everything, did Obama ever argue that the Dewey Decimal system needed to be re-examined in light of eight years under GWB.

Apparently, that’s the one thing that Obama believes Bush didn’t screw up—at least, that’s the conclusion that most of us would come to.

And so we would find it strange if in the year 4012, a group calling itself “People for the Undoing of Dewey” would cite the Obama campaign’s silence as tacit endorsement for their cause. Obama wanted to change everything about the Bush years, surely he meant to include the Dewey Decimal system as well. This conclusion is actually the opposite of the proper conclusion: namely, that Dewey is operating just fine, thank you very much.

Jesus spent three years teaching in the Ancient Near-East where the issue of homosexuality was about as up for discussion as the Dewey Decimal system.

Over the course of three years, Jesus takes on almost every conceivable subject: money, sex, worship, politics, you name it. He challenges many if not most of the socio-political-religious systems and assumptions of his day. If he had wanted to change how marriage was to operate, he could have. It would have required a radical re-teaching about the nature of persons, image-bearing, and social and sexual laws from the scriptures. And if such a thing were true, that the fundamental Jewish understanding of what it means to be image-bearers as gendered beings was in need of an over-haul, I have high hopes that he would have done so.

Jesus doesn’t do this. And when he does talk about marriage, he is startlingly conventional about it:
"But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." (Mark 10:6-9, TNIV)

Jesus’ silence about the issue of homosexuality is anything but a tacit endorsement that the homosexual community would have it to be. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. Given how relentlessly Jesus takes on established conventions, his silence coupled with his statement grounding marriage in male and female is a ringing endorsement of Levitical law condemning the practice of homosexuality.

The argument for silence as an endorsement grows even weaker in light of the number of other things that Jesus is silent about: rape, incest, child molestation, spousal abuse, internet pornography. Few of us, I think, would take his silence as an endorsement of any of these practices.

Later, of course, Christianity engages the Roman world, where homosexuality is more widely practiced and less frowned upon. And so yes, Paul has to address it. And he does so in keeping with the scriptures and in keeping with Jesus’ description of what marriage and sexuality are designed for.

All of this, of course, does not end the conversation. Perhaps the entire Bible is hopelessly outdated, or perhaps in this instance, at least, it’s culturally conditioned or narrow-minded.

And none of this has anything to do with what kind of laws we should pass. Many Biblical commands make for terrible legislation: the first and greatest commandment, for example, makes for atrocious government.

But if we’re talking about what Jesus (and him in relation to the rest of the scriptures) does or doesn’t say about homosexuality, the answer is clear: Jesus’ silence doesn’t mean that he was setting the stage for an eventual acceptance of the practice.

Not any more than Obama’s silence about Dewey.

Alex Kirk is Team Leader for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at UNC-Chapel Hill. He blogs at www.piebaldlife.blogspot.com.