(Part 4) Top products from r/OpenChristian

There's an awful lot to unpack in your post. I'll try to hit the key points, but please let me know if I miss something. To be clear, I am speaking to you explicitly in my capacity as a member of the clergy, ordained and out of seminary over twenty years.

1. This is not a punishment for sex. Clearly he's a jerk, and not worthy of your time, affection or intimacy - but that doesn't mean that it was a mistake to be sexually intimate with someone you loved and trusted.
   
2. You did not make a "marital commitment" to him. There is no magical boundary of emotional or physical intimacy that - once crossed - goes from "romantic affection" to "sex and marriage." It's your body, and you get to decide what touching you or not touching you means.
   
3. Consensual sex does not damage or soil us as people. We aren't ruined or reduced in value by it. The question isn't, "Would a Christian man still want you?" The question is, "Why would you want a man who still has a medieval understanding of sexual intimacy?"
   
4. You are not broken. This hurts right now, in a way nearly all of us have experienced at one time or another. But the breaking you feel is the pain of growing, and growing stronger. You will learn from this, and - in every way - be a healthier person.
   
5. You don't need to know if, or what, you believe in God right now. Scripture, the Church, and the love of God are all here for you, in whatever way you can receive them, just as you are. We sing and talk about grace all the time in church, but somehow it's hardest to believe it is real when we need it the most. But I assure you, the same beautiful grace that made you want to open a Bible and study it, is still here. God loves you, and knows you, and sees you - and whatever shape your faith takes, God will still love and know you.
   
6. "Sin" is a very complicated concept, and never as clearly delineated as fundamentalists want it to be. Many people take advantage of Scripture to cram their own fear and biases into eternal commands that don't hold up to scrutiny or scholarship. There are countless mainline and progressive Christian books that can help you work out a sexual ethic that is faithful both to your values and to the tradition. Don't let this bad experience cause you to fall back into dangerous and damaging "purity culture."
   
7. This is the most important one. You are a good and worthy person. You deserve to be loved by someone who respects you enough to always be honest with you. Never settle for less.
   
   For your own reading, or others looking for an understanding of Christians sexual ethics that goes beyond fundamentalism, here are some resources:
   
   - Good Christian Sex - Bromleigh McCleneghan
   
   - Unprotected Texts - Jennifer Wright Knust
   
   - Shameless: A Sexual Reformation: - Nadia Bolz-Webber
   
   - Shameless: How I Lost My Virginity and Kept My Faith - Dani Frankhauser
   
   - Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics - Margaret Farley (this one leans toward the academic)
   
   - God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says - Michael Coogan
   
   and, for a wonderful critique of the devastating impact of "purity" culture...
   
   - Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation - Linda Kay Klein

I think that you need to protect yourself and your family, but consider this: If you can not be honest about yourself with them, what does that say about the relationship? They are poorer for not knowing your true self and giftedness, and you are unable to become the person that can express themselves most fully. Part of being human is being a partner in your own creation.

Not every congregation is in the same place, but perhaps you can help them along their path to Christ by having the faith to be open with them. I know you would be welcome in my congregation.

There are some books that may help both you and those you choose to share them with that I will mention here.

First, from the Presbyterian tradition is Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality, Revised and Expanded Edition: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church Paperback – April 14, 2009
by Jack Rogers .

Next, from the Mormon tradition is No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons around Our Gay Loved Ones Paperback – December 12, 2016 by Carol Lynn Pearson, an amazing woman, poet and artist I have the honor to know.

And finally, from my own tradition Touched by Grace: LGBT Stories in Community of Christ Paperback – February 1, 2012
by David Howard my late friend who I shared some San Francisco Pride celebrations with, and
Homosexual Saints: The Community of Christ Experience Paperback – January 21, 2008
by William D. Russell, my old friend and professor.

Some of these will be painful reading, but you will know that you are not alone and the end can be filled with joy.

I recommended this over on /r/Chrsitianity the other day, but I think it's more universally appropriate for this crowd. If you're interested in something non-traditional, I would whole-heartedly recommend Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. It's a fiction that imagines Jesus left Israel during the years we don't have many stories about to go find the wise men that found him when he was young, and try to figure out what the heck it means to be the son of God. It shows him interacting with other religious traditions, and learning about God through them. It's a fun read, and enjoys imagining various Bible stories in ways that match the original text, but not what we assume about them.

It is fiction, and doesn't make any claims to truth, but it's thought-provoking. I highly recommend it to any Christian who can stand to not take the religion too seriously.

Such a good point. There is so much in the Bible that is problematic. If we just decide to excise everything we dislike, what we have remaining is no longer the Bible — but something of our own creation, disconnected from tradition and the witness of the church immemorial. It’s like a Jefferson Bible of sorts.

I just watched (trans guy) Austen Hartke’s video on the book of Judges. The last few minutes talk about a horrendous sexual assault that occurs. His suggestion (from Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror) is that the terrible stuff in the Bible can help us navigate the terrible stuff in our own time. The Bible reflects the human experience — with all of its flaws, shortfalls and terrors — and we impoverish ourselves if we don’t confront them. Yes, this takes a hermeneutic where we don’t accept everything at face value, where we have to wrestle with the text. That’s tough for a lot of people. A lot of people need something perfect and certain to put their trust in, which unfortunately(?) the Bible doesn’t provide — only God does, right?

Like you said, there is so much theological richness in Paul. He’s a very complicated figure, and throwing out the good with the bad is harmful for our theological imagination. I honestly think Paul is more “feminist” than we realize. The Pastorals and the 1 Cor. interpolation were probably not written by him. He had women in leadership in most all of his congregations. I already mentioned the Gal. “no male and female in Christ.” His reversals, like you mentioned — “the strong are weak/the weak are strong” — were gendered statements in a world where strength was associated with masculinity and weakness was associated with femininity. He likens his vocation as apostle to that of a mother (see Beverly Gaventa’s Our Mother Saint Paul ). These are great resources. (That’s not to say he wasn’t a misogynist; he obviously was.)

> What I'm thinking of is more a case of having a base translation that you think is pretty good for right now, and then updating it one verse at a time with something more like a text replacement.

Yep. This is usually how translators work. The NIV went though and replaced instances of the word "thong" with "sandal" when "thong" took on its modern "underwear" meaning.

But this doesn't always work out as perfectly as you would hope. Say you want to replace "bread" with "tortilla" in a culture where corn tortillas are the staple food. What do you do with the Exodus story? God told them to make unleavened...tortillas? But tortillas are already unleavened. Ok, so that's an exception. We have to leave "bread" there, maybe with a note explaining what bread and leavening meant to the Israelites. But then we have to check all the instances of "bread" to see if they mean "staple food" "specific type of bread" "metaphorical image" or whatever else. And there are books (and software - check out Logos) with this sort of information that translators use (lexicons, concordances, grammatical analyses), but there is still disagreement over what sense a word has in a particular passage. So there will still be a human decision somewhere down the line as to what "bread" in a specific passage means. And that I think is where we can't rely on the sort of program which does replacements of concepts. There are too many concepts to make this feasible. See Hoffman's book And God Said for another view of some of this.

Another problem would be that replacing single words or even phrases would create a very clunky translation. The original translation might be in one style, but the people who filled out the form might use a different dialect or vocabulary. That MadLibs-style result would be at least as jarring as a footnote. The Bible is indeed a text composed by many human authors, but a single passage usually has one person making it cohesive. This is more of a trivial problem, not affecting the core meaning, but it will affect how the resulting product is read, which can very easily affect the meaning people take from it. See how the style of Donald Trump's speech completely changes when he has a British accent. The words are still the same, but the style completely changes how I feel about those words. And accent is something even beyond what we're talking about here.

> However this kind of thing usually doesn't happen on controversial verses

But...they are controversial exactly because there is disagreement about the core truth of the passage. I think this is where you are going to run into the most problems with this project. If there was a definitive core truth of a passage, we wouldn't still be arguing about it 50, 100, 1000 years later. Yes, we can decide to pick the more progressive interpretation. And yes, I think that people should have access to the progressive/liberal interpretation in the surface text, rather than in a footnote. But the Bible is not a collection of core truths. It's a text written in a context by specific people, and interpreted through millennia by people. The disagreements over the text are as much a part of the the interpretation of the text as the words themselves. That's why the Jews have Talmud. That's why we have subreddits. To struggle with the text. To discover nuances people 200 years ago couldn't have imagined, but are perfectly relevant to today.

I just finished 'Queering Christ: beyond JESUS ACTED UP' by Robert Goss. It attempts to construct a queer theology. It is mostly focused on gay men, mostly since that's where the author falls, but it does a decent job extending it to Trans/Non-Binary people. The book also has great resources for follow up reads on these topics.

Also check out Indecent Theology by Marcella Althaus-Reid; I haven't finished reading this one yet.

One I haven't even started yet is 'Omnigender' by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. This is specifically a trans-religious approach.

Hope these help :)

*edit: added links.

All spectacular books, if I could add one to the list.

Sex + Faith: Talking with Your Child from Birth to Adolescence by Kate Ott. It's a great resource for parents who want to help form a healthy understanding of sexuality for their children as it relates to faith.

Honestly, I've found it more helpful to critique literalism and fundamentalist hermeneutics, rather than trying to justify something by "putting things in context." as /u/JesterWales pointed out, if the early church even had something commensurable to our modern ideas of "homosexuality" they would certainly be very homophobic.

However, I don't wanna discourage you from learning things. I just don't think you're going to learn much if you're looking for a specific hermeneutic outcome (i.e. the Bible is pro-LGBT or whatever).

That said, there's a lot of scholarship out there on this. Dale Martin, Bernadette Brooten were both mentioned elsewhere in this thread. But I think you'd also benefit from reading Luke Timothy Johnson's commentary on Romans and Richard B. Hays' Moral Vision of the New Testament (especially chapter 16).

That is a perfectly normal reaction. A lot of times there are physical, biological, or practical issues in our lives that can hamper our ability to pray and connect with God. Unlike periods of spiritual desolation (which are typically addressed by simply sticking with your Rule and waiting it out) the underlying issues typically need to be addressed. It sounds like you are doing that and I commend you on continuing!

Gerald May might be someone you want to look into more. He was a psychiatrist and spiritual director. I know he talks about depression in Care of Mind/Care of Spirit and in Dark Night of the Soul (where he points out the dark night is not the same thing as depression!)

These don't primarily address that in an instructive/prescriptive way like the Didache, but

The Gospel of Mary

The Acts of Paul and Thecla

and

The Thunder: Perfect Mind

are apocryphal writings that all feature women (or femininity, I guess) pretty prominently. I read them from here, though I think there are also translations available online.

We are very clearly allowed to eat animals; no one (well, not many people) would contest that. But I think the Bible clearly shows that animals are God's, not ours - and being allowed to eat them is not the same thing as being allowed to torture them, and that's the crux of the issue for a modern day person contemplating the modern meat industry. Animals were treated much differently, and far better, in Bible times than they are in our factory farms, feedlots, and slaughter houses. Volumes have been written on the subject; I strongly recommend Dominion by Matthew Scully if you want to read a good, measured argument for how we should treat animals.

The book mentioned in the article is free as an eBook on Amazon. It’s a real solid read, especially for the price of free.

Pentecostal Theology by Wolfgang Vondey. Reclaiming my Pentecostal roots and engaging with the emerging intellectual tradition arising from the movement.

http://www.amazon.com/Interpretation-New-Testament-17-Volumes/dp/0664221297/ref=cm_lmf_tit_19

Here is a pretty progressive set my old testament professor did work in this commentary and we use it a lot

These might be good for your list,

Homophobia and the Politics of Biblical Translation from the Jottings blog.

Sex and the Single Savior by Dale B. Martin.

Torah Queeries and the book

The Queer Bible Commentary

I will list more. Gotta go catch a train.

https://www.amazon.com/Changes-That-Heal-Henry-Cloud/dp/0310606314