Response to Achtemeier’s column: ‘A long journey to a changed heart’
Commentary by Parker T. Williamson, The Layman, October 19, 2011
Read Achtemeier’s column ‘A long journey to a changed heart’
What former seminary Professor Mark Achtemeier has written constitutes a moving statement of affection for persons whom he identifies as “gay.” His kindness toward fellow human beings is laudable; his distortion of the Bible and abandonment of sound scholarship are not.
What is clear from Achtemeier’s column is that he changed his mind. He once believed same-gender attraction was an affliction whose practitioners needed therapy and pastoral care. He now believes it is a natural, God-given affection whose physical expression may be blessed by the church.
How did this change occur? Achtemeier tells us. His friendships with persons who are engaged in same-sex partnerships led him to adjust his opinion of their behavior. He did this, he says, by a “return to the Bible.”
Achtemeier did not return to the Bible; he rewrote it.
In Genesis, the Bible speaks of the complementary relationship that God created between man and woman. Achtemeier removed the text’s reference to the male/female union, replacing it with his own generic language to say that God created “human beings for intimate fellowship with a life partner.”
In his marriage redefinition, Achtemeier also failed to acknowledge the reference that Jesus Christ made to the Genesis account when Jesus blessed heterosexual marriage: “Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” This account of Jesus’ words is recorded in Matthew 19:4-6 and Mark 10:7, and it is quoted by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 5:31.
There is no question here but that Jesus is interpreting the God-given intimate relationship referred to in Genesis as a heterosexual union, not the generic union of any two humans that Achtemeier’s interpretation invents.
Achtemeier not only twists Scripture, he distorts history. He tells us that long-term, faithful, egalitarian partnerships “didn’t exist in the world of the Biblical writers.” But, homosexuality, including the practice of long-term same-sex unions, was widely known in the Greco-Roman world, a fact to which many credentialed historians will attest. The practice that Achtemeier defends is no novelty, but an ancient aberration.
One cannot help but be touched by Achtemeier’s affection for friends who identify themselves as “gay,” especially when one considers the sacrifice of Biblical and scholarly integrity that he has made on their behalf. Sadly, that sacrifice is no small thing, for rather than elevating a behavior that Scripture condemns, it has undermined the credibility of a respected church teacher.