Answering Malcomb Parry on Leviticus

Several months ago a columnist for the Vancouver Sun who specializes in writing about what's happening around town, usually with the monied set, wrote a short column criticizing some people's religious objections to homosexuality. A friend of mine sent me a copy of the column with an invitation to comment. I thought I would reprint the column and my comments in this blog.

Malcolm Parry's Writes

There's been some religious fuss recently about homosexuality, the widespread human condition referred to as an "abomination" in The Bible's Leviticus 18:22. But, as a correspondent advised me, many other biblically forbidden matters arouse no such ire from the pulpit.

For instance, Leviticus (11:10) also defined shellfish eating as an abomination, and (15:19) forbids contact with menstruating women. Lev 19:27 also says thou shalt not trim hair around your temples nor "tatoo any marks upon you." The latter is surely more widespread - and certainly easier to spot - than homosexuality.

Lev 11:6-8's proscription about touching the skin of a dead pig seems not to have impeded Notre Dame University's prowess on the football field, my correspondent notes. and, notwithstanding the commands in Lev 19:19, he says his uncle still plants two different crops in the same field and his aunt wears garments made of two different kinds of thread.

Picayune, you say? Well, Lev 25:44 says its ok to own male and female slaves, so long as you buy them from neighbouring nations. No problem-o, either, if you want to sell your daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7). But never on the Sabbath, right? That would be work. And Exodus 35:2 says the penalty for that is death. [malcolmparry@shaw.ca (604) 929-8456.]

My response to my friend is reproduced below. This response is not to Mr. Parry, with whom I have no interest in debating, but to a friend who is searching for meaning in her life.

Nancy,

I know it has been a long time since you sent me that message from Malcolm Parry regarding Leviticus and homosexuality. Please be reassured that I took no offence at all and the reason I have taken so long to reply is just due to my desire to respond completely and the inertia of daily life interfering. So now, finally, I have some spare time and the 'spirit' is moving me to put some thoughts down and send them along.

I should start off by saying that Leviticus was one of the books in the bible that I often quoted when arguing against Christianity when I was doing that with my sister Beth on all those long walks we took in Mt. Lehman back in the mid 90s. She was very patient. I don't remember her coming up with any counter arguments at the time, but then, Beth is not a debater. Eventually God had to confront me Himself and point out the whole thing about context, or perspective to use another word. Many of the questions and arguments about the bible boil down to that.

What I mean by context is that every truth exists within an environment. Most truths are not universal, they exist in a context. For instance, within our context, the death of a child is a bad thing. We mourn it and wonder why God allows innocent children to die in train wrecks. But in God’s context this life is a fleeting visit to a physical world by an eternal soul. The dead child is not gone, he or she is back with God. So we should not make the mistake of judging God based on our experience or our instincts about what is fair or unfair. Actually, we should probably not make the mistake of judging God at all. After all, He made the whole universe, us and everything we can observe with our senses and probably a lot more. It makes even less sense than for a baby to judge his parents.

What we can and should judge or have opinions about is what the truth of the matter is. God gave us brains and senses and expects us to use them. There is nothing wrong with having questions. But who should we put those questions to, if not God? How can we put questions to God without faith? On the quest for answers to the really big questions you have to start somewhere. You have to have faith in something to begin. You can put your faith in science and limit your answers to those that science can provide or you can put your faith in God and have a chance at answers to questions that science can’t really deal with. I personally don’t think there is any conflict between science and God. After all, science is really just an investigation into the workings of God’s creation.

There is an important reason why we live in this context, why our lives are temporary and we have the free will to behave as we see fit and believe or disbelieve what we want. I don’t know what that reason is, but I am sure that it exists and is essential to what God is doing with mankind. Do we have free will so that we can be judged on the basis of what we do with it? Is there some kind of evolution of the soul going on? Why did God put Satan in the world to lead us astray? Is it to stress us (like sharpening a knife on a grinding stone), so that we will be motivated to adapt and change? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I don’t stop questioning. The biggest change that ever happened in my life was when I decided to accept God in spite of my questions. That was where the journey began for me.

On the question of Leviticus, consider that the long list of rules outlined in this document were directed at the Jewish people, a people that God had singled out as a starting place for his work with men. He wanted the Jewish people to be set apart from the rest of mankind and not to mingle with them or become corrupted by other religious or social practices. Many of the rules listed here are dietary requirements and many of these make quite a bit of sense based on our current scientific knowledge. Not touching dead animals, for instance, might lead to healthier lives in an antibiotic free ancient world. The proscription against eating shellfish also makes some sense today since shellfish tend to absorb and concentrate toxins. What about the rule against contact with menstruating women? You know that during menstruation, the cervix is partly open and the uterus is more vulnerable to infection. Maybe there is sense in it.

The really important thing though is not the importance of all the arcane rules listed in Leviticus and other places in the old testament. The really important thing is that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ and allowed himself to be tortured and killed in order to redeem us from our sins. Jesus showed us, by His example and His teachings how we should live our lives. He gives us, through our faith in Him, the ability to approach God in spite of our sins.

Jesus expressed special contempt for the Pharisees, a particularly strict sect within the Jewish faith. He said that their insistence on keeping all of a very long list of commandments in a literal and rigid fashion was actually keeping people away from the love of God. When asked what the really important commandments were that we should keep, He said:

Mark 12:29-31‘The most important one’, answered Jesus, ‘is this: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The Second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.

Now I know that some of your neighbors are homosexual. And I know that you and Mike both follow the second part of this commandment with conviction. So I understand your wanting to stick up for these people who, from no fault of their own, simply prefer to have sexual relations with partners of like gender. I don’t disagree with this, and I too try to love all my neighbors whatever their sins. After all, I am not without sin, and I love myself anyway. The only place where we might disagree is that I believe that homosexual behavior is against the will of God and therefore, sinful.

The big question for me is how do we keep the first part of this commandment. How can we love God without having a relationship with Him? How can we have a relationship when God is spirit and we are flesh? I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I think I know where to begin. Just as every living thing begins as a seed (embryo) , so a relationship with God begins with a grain of faith. If that grain is allowed to flourish, it will grow and mature over time and a real relationship will develop in which love will arise as a natural thing. Remember too, we are more than flesh. We are also spirit. Our minds arise out of a relationship between that spirit and our flesh (neurons, synapses, etc). Without spirit there would be no consciousness.
If you are interested in knowing God, start with a grain of faith and then pray and read the bible with an open and questioning mind and then bring your questions to God in prayer. You are already doing everything else.

Please keep in mind that I am not intending to preach to you about what you should do or how you should behave. I do not consider that I occupy any higher moral ground than you. I am only sharing some of the experience and insight that I have gained in the past ten years or so. Consider this…. If God is real and He created us, and He wants a real relationship of love with us, what could be more important than that?

Jim