With a Sincere Heart, with Real Intent

In the early 1990s I was involved in an increasingly heated discussion within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America about homosexuality. I participated in a couple of dialog events where information and perspectives on homosexuality were presented that were participated in by liberals and conservatives -- across the theological spectrum within Lutheranism.

At one point I remember having a conversation with a conservative evangelical Lutheran pastor. What he told me, I felt, was very revealing. He believed that the "biblical" position on homosexuality was that it was a sin. If that position were shown to be wrong, then he would lose faith in his ability to get any truth from the Bible. He said, "If we can't count on the Bible, what do we have left?"

My gut reaction came from the spiritual wellsprings of my upbringing as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I said to him, "We have God, of course!" I thought, "Where do you think the Bible came from?"

Thanks to my Mormonism, my faith as a Christian didn't depend on a view of scripture as 100% inerrant. I believed in a God who could reveal (and had revealed) himself to me personally, and who could give (and had given) me direct answers to the most perplexing questions in my life, even (or especially) when the words in a book didn't seem to do that very well. As Joseph Smith put it, "for the teachers of religion... understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible."

Of course I've run into the same problem among Mormons. A lot of Mormons want to do the same thing for "living prophets" that a lot of Protestants have done for the Bible. "Living prophets" are not "inerrant" for the same reasons that the Bible is not inerrant. This gets us to the root or the heart of the problem -- whether you are a Mormon or a conservative Evangelical.

If what you want is some "never wrong" external source of authority, you will be disappointed (traumatically disappointed even!) time and time and time again. The search for Truth with a capital T requires more personal engagement than just believing that some interpretation of scripture or some doctrinal pronouncement is infallible. It requires us to engage in a personal quest that requires risk.

"What if I'm wrong?" is one of the most painful questions to emerge from this messy human experience we are all having. And lots of us try to avoid that question by believing (wishing?) that some external authority can take away from us all risk of being wrong. If THEY'RE right 100% of the time, then I can always be right by just following them 100%.

I actually have become profoundly convinced that that's not God's plan for us (another insight that comes from deep within the spiritual wellsprings of my faith as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). I absolutely believe that God intended for this experience to be challenging and messy and to demand of us the utmost personal risk in learning how to become like Him.

In other words, there's no way for us to avoid being wrong once in a while.

*****

From this I also learned something important about the painful conflicts many of us are experiencing around LGBTQ experience and the church.

It was painful for me to feel that my experience as a gay man was invalidated or not believed by other Christians. But when I had this conversation with this conservative evangelical pastor, I realized that for him this was not about me personally at all. It wasn't about LGBTQ people in general at all. It was about him trying to hold on to a particular type of moral and spiritual compass. It was about this big question of how do we know truth and how do we make our way through the world.

In other words, it was not that he was a bad person. Quite the opposite. He was a very, very good, admirable person, wrestling with big questions about truth and how to find it and how to live by it. And for that, I was able to forgive him for not "getting" it, for not seeing things exactly the way I see them, as I hope others will forgive me for not seeing things their way, and even for being wrong on important matters that affect them.

What I believe is that we all have a better chance of getting to that place of perfection and truth we're all striving for if we have patience, if we go about it with a lot of love and forgiveness, and if we seek truth "having faith" that we can find it, "with a sincere heart, with real intent," and with more humility than we've had in the past.