Not to condemn: Jesus and the Nashville Statement

Jesus never let a person's morality or immorality get in the way of making friends with him.

When a prostitute made a big scene of showering him with kisses, he castigated the people who judged her for her sinfulness. When he met the Samaritan woman at well, he stirred up scandal by getting into a conversation with her. In both those cases, he acknowledged their lifestyles, but that was never the point of the conversation; it was more like an aside.

It's like acknowledging that your son has boogers in his hair, but hey, he made it downstairs in time to catch the bus, and that's what matters right now. To the woman caught in adultery in John 8 he does say, "Go now and sin no more," but that's after he's already set her free. "Has no one stayed to condemn you? Then neither do I condemn you." His whole message to her is liberation and freedom,and has been from the moment the priests brought her out and humiliated her just to see if they could trip Jesus up.

Jesus' tone is entirely different from that of the Nashville Statement. Jesus was willing to risk people saying he was soft on adultery -- and they did! The oldest MSS of John's gospel don't include that story, because it was so shocking -- just because he wanted this unnamed woman to know that she was free.

When he says "Go and sin no more," that's a final declaration of freedom, that she can leave, that she can have a fresh start and none of these men are going to hound her. The Nashville Statement is so set on drawing a line in the sand that it's willing to alienate people in the name of "tough love," to bar from fellowship people who disagree. It's so determined to be right, that it 's OK with alienating the outcasts whom Christ came for.

Church history often isn't as unwavering as we think it is. Many Christians today will claim that the church has always been opposed to abortion, for instance, because the Bible teaches that life begins at conception. The Bible actually says nothing about conception, it calls for inducing an abortion when the mother is suspected of adultery (caveat: rabbis generally agree that it wouldn't have worked, which suggests it was God's way of telling jealous husbands to calm down), and in fact the evangelical church largely welcomed Roe v. Wade at the time.

In the same way, the church's stand on homosexuality historically is not definably the same as we now perceive it. For starters, there is no koine word for "homosexual," in part because our notion of sexual orientation has been informed and shaped by science , so we understand that people;s sexual attractions fall along on a spectrum.

The New Testament has a few places where it refers to same-sex sexual relations, but it uses different terms, which suggests that it's referring to specific behaviors. These phrases have been translated as "homosexual offenders" and "abusers of the flesh" at various times in church history, and as "effeminate men" in others.

Church leaders at times throughout church history have written in praise of love between men in ways that would make the Nashville Statement signatories uncomfortable, at a minimum.