Bakery Run #13 – Perrymans, North Adelaide

Pie Buddy: Rosalie Dow

Topic: Marriage Equality

 This was definitely the most nervous I had ever felt before a bakery chat. I was talking to someone I’d never met, about a sensitive and divisive topic that I knew we would disagree on. But on the positive side, there was pie involved. And the pie turned out to be excellent – good size, good flavour, lots of meat, not too expensive. The range of flavours wasn’t huge (no steak and pepper unfortunately), but I certainly couldn’t complain about my beef mince pie. The caramel slice was also right on the money. The bakery isn’t huge, but it’s got all the bare essentials covered, and the outdoor seating area is a peaceful place to sit and eat while enjoying the peaceful surrounds of Tynte Street. I’d definitely come back! Rosalie, who works at the bakery (which her girlfriend runs) opted for a vegetarian pastie, and we got down to business.

I started off by recognising that we were coming from two very different perspectives, and that anything offensive that I said was completely unintentional. The goal of this chat was to have a productive conversation, not win an argument. We talked about how Rosalie came to support gay marriage from a Christian perspective. She had grown up in the Uniting Church, with parents who opposed gay marriage strongly. She was around 11 years old when gay ministers were officially allowed to be ordained in the Uniting Church. A lot of people left the church at this time. Rosalie recalled it as being an awful period, in which a lot of people were hurt.

“Did you have much of a view on that at the time?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Rosalie replied, “I remember thinking gay people were wrong, gay ministers shouldn’t be a thing. But then when I grew up I came to the understanding that a separation of church and state was the right thing – why would the church have any say over why people got married in a secular community? I felt that pretty strongly. And I knew a few gay people and got pretty upset when my church was awful to them. And then I realised I was gay and went through a bit of a roller coaster ride, thinking it was terrible, then thinking maybe it was okay, that I could just keep it under wraps and not act on it. I believe you can be a Christian and an active homosexual, which is a phrase that I dislike a lot, but I just thought it would never work for me, so I just said to God ‘I give it all up. Serving you is more important than doing this.’”

“What do you mean by active homosexual?” I asked. “Just the orientation?”

“Sometimes the church talks about how it’s ok to be gay and celibate, not acting on it,” said Rosalie. “Whereas an active homosexual is someone who is gay and looks to one day have a partner. Not necessarily sexually active. That’s how I understand it. I’ve been asked many times if I’m an active homosexual, so I hope I’ve been giving people the right answer!”

She continued. “I was pretty depressed. It’s pretty awful to give up on a family or any chance of a relationship and stuff like that. And then God showed me really clearly that I didn’t have to do that, that serving him and loving him wasn’t dependent on what I did with my sexuality.”

“How did he show you that?” I asked.

“Part of it was through other people, part of it was I just felt so strongly that it was ok for everyone else except me, and I was really struggling with the job I was at, and then they had some budget changes and couldn’t afford a youth pastor, and so they fired me. It was awful, but at the same time it just really strongly felt like an answer to prayer. I had been asking God to show me whether I should stay there, and I guess that was part of his answer.”

“Were you open about your sexuality at the time?”

“No, I was in the closet. I had told the minister, and I had told him that I wasn’t going to act on it, but it hadn’t gone down well. He still kept me on, but he stopped mentoring me pretty deliberately. It was made pretty clear to me after I was fired that I wasn’t welcome in youth ministry in that church.” Rosalie also commented on how she had been harassed for being too gay-friendly in her ministry, with people believing she was promoting homosexuality. All in all, it was a difficult environment to work in.

“I’ve got a clear bias,” Rosalie admitted. “I don’t know if I would have come to this opinion had I not been gay, I hope I would have, because I think it’s the right opinion.”

I was interested to see how God’s word had shaped her thinking. “In terms of thinking it through theologically, how did you go about that? Did you change your mind suddenly or was it gradual?”

“It was really gradual. I researched it a lot as a teenager, when I was thinking I might be gay. Lots of websites talked about how God hates gay people, but I just so strongly believe that God loves everybody, that I knew that was wrong.”

So much damage has been done over the years by people who have completely misunderstood God’s word, and the ‘God hates gays’ attitude is a prime example of this. Rosalie also recounted an incident where a group of street preachers had told her that ‘your parents must have abused you’. “What gives you the right to ask someone that?” she rightly reflected.

I thought it would be helpful to get a picture of each others’ theology before we got too in-depth. “What’s your view on scripture?” I asked.

“I don’t believe the NIV, ESV or whatever is the literal words of God, because the English translations are all different, and the Bible wasn’t originally written in English anyway. I believe that there are differences in translation, which need to be taken into account. I think any so-called biblical proof that involves taking one or two verses and using them out of context has the potential to be misused.”

“Does that play a role in how you look at some passages that relate to this?”

“Yeah, that and how things have been translated over the years.” Rosalie then explained that only eight passages in the New Testament mention homosexuality, and some of these use Greek words that we don’t know how to translate. Her research led her to believe that these homosexual references often referred to different things like paedophilia.

“So you’d say the Bible we have isn’t God’s word?” I asked.

“I’d say it pretty much is, overall it is, but each individual verse might not be. I don’t see it as being infallible. God has given us intelligence, and we’re called to use that intelligence to read these things.”

“Would you say the original Scripture is infallible?”

“Even that I’m not sure of. I find it problematic to believe that God can literally force someone’s hand to write specific words, because then why isn’t God making it rain manna in Africa right now?”

“You could say that for any sort of suffering,” I replied. “Personally I’d say the Bible is God’s word and it is infallible.” I then decided to see what she thought about Jesus. Like me, she agreed that he was the Son of God, divine, and that he was resurrected. “Do you believe there is no way to God but through him?” I asked.

“I don’t believe a person necessarily has to know Jesus to experience salvation. I’d say I have more of a universalist view. What about babies? What about people who have never heard of Jesus or the Bible? How could God sit there and judge whether someone should be excused because they had been abused, for example? There can’t be a weighing up, based on whether they had believed the right things. That would make God a bit sadistic. I believe Jesus provided salvation, and his death was the only thing that could bring about salvation, but I don’t think a personal belief in Jesus is required for salvation.”

Certainly while we agreed on many points, there were certainly some key differences in our views. Rosalie certainly had a much more liberal theology than I did. It was helpful to establish our differing perspectives early on.

Rosalie grew up in an evangelical family, and recognised her sexuality as being a factor in becoming more liberal in her views. “But I think I would have anyway though. My dad always told me to read with my brain on, so I’ve never accepted anything at face value. I research everything. And I don’t hold on to any belief but that Jesus loves me.” The book Love Wins by Rob Bell also had a big impact in shaping Rosalie’s views.

I put forward my view on marriage equality. “The way I look at it, God made man and woman right from the start, he established that partnership right from the beginning, and you see him follow it through and show how the husband and wife is a foreshadowing of Christ and the Church. There aren’t a lot of references to homosexuality throughout the Bible, but the few that are there seem to condemn it. There only seems to be a prescription for male and female relationships. That’s always the view I’ve held. What would you see there that you’d disagree with? It’s a very simplistic overview I realise.”

“It’s interesting how you talk about the husband and wife foreshadowing Christ and the church,” Rosalie replied. “That’s my dad’s view, and I’d never heard it before he’d said it, and now you’re the second person I’ve heard mention it. I don’t know why the male-female element is important in that. The church is an entity -  it isn’t male or female. To me, a same-sex couple could be just as much a foreshadowing. I haven’t put a lot of thought into that particular view. It’s very different to the moralistic arguments I normally hear, like ‘the Bible says not to do it, so don’t’. It’s probably one of the only arguments I’ve heard recently that does make me think a bit about it.”

“Ok, that would be my main view,” I replied. I also brought up Jesus’ reference to God bringing together men and women, as well as Paul talking about roles of the husband and wife, and how they represent Christ and the church. “I’d see marriage as being a sacred covenant representing the ultimate marriage that is to come.”

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)

“Haven’t you read,” [Jesus] replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6)

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. (Ephesians 5:21-25)

“Yeah, although I would hope that in any marriage there’d be love and respect,” Rosalie replied. She then raised the point about people who don’t identify as male or female. Certainly not everything is black and white when it comes to human sexuality. We also agreed that there are plenty of loving homosexual relationships, and lots of terrible heterosexual marriages.

“When it comes down to it,” said Rosalie, “I don’t find a lot of objection to it in the Bible.” Once again she discussed how the original Greek text refers to vague sexual immorality or some specific social wrong, like paedophilia. “So morally I don’t see the Bible saying it’s wrong.”

“So you feel that someone who read the Scriptures in their original language wouldn’t come to the conclusion that gay marriage was against God’s will?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t know if they’d come out concluding that it was for God’s will either,” she replied. “When the Bible was written, they didn’t have healthy homosexual relationships to think about. It wouldn’t have crossed Paul’s mind. He was a product of his culture as much as he was a great man of God. Maybe if Paul was around now it just wouldn’t be an issue.” However, we both agreed that it was impossible to read exactly into what Paul would think if he were alive today.

“I’d look at it as redefining something that God’s created,” I said. “I’m not qualified to talk about all the scientific reasons that get thrown around for why gay marriage is wrong. Those would be secondary arguments for me. I wouldn’t rest my argument on those. I think what’s in the Bible that should some first.”

Rosalie recommended the book Being Gay, being Christian, You can be both, by Dr Stewart Edser, who is gay. “It talks a lot about the science of being gay, both biologically and psychologically, then goes into the theology of it, he looks at all the passages that deal with homosexuality. And a lot of the relationships in the Bible aren’t just one man and one woman.”

“I don’t necessarily think any of those are prescriptive though,” I replied, considering that when Solomon, David and Jacob took multiple wives, bad things seemed to come of it.

“There is an overarching male and female theme, but there’s also a theme of breaking norms,” Rosalie pointed out, using the example of Paul’s letters, which allowed rights for women that were unheard of in the culture of the time.

I wanted to see if the argument could be supported, rather than just defended. “Would you say there are passages that endorse your argument, rather than just not not supporting it?”

“No,” Rosalie replied, “but I also haven’t found a verse in the bible that supports my use of a mobile phone. With the verse about unnatural relations, I think that’s very clear. If I was to marry a man, that would be unnatural for me, and people would be hurt.”

“The Romans 1 passage?” I asked. “That was talking about women giving up their natural relations and going for other women.” Personally I believe, in light of the following verse (verse 27), that the ‘natural relations’ referred to in verse 26 of that passage is the pre-fall man/woman relations that God established, not a particular individual’s sexuality.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. (Romans 1:26-27)

Rosalie felt that the poor treatment of homosexual people by the church was also a serious issue. “In terms of how queer people have been treated by the church, I think the Bible does say a lot about that. Even coming from the perspective that it’s sinful to be gay, people guilty of sins that the Bible says a lot more about aren’t mistreated in the same way. It’s clearly not biblical.”

“It hurts to see the church hurt people both inside and outside,” I replied. We agreed that such mistreatment was not how the church was meant to be. Discipline and exhortation are required, but not at the expense of being loving. Rosalie brought up some mental health statistics, showing that suicide attempts are much higher in gay teenagers, and the rate increases even higher for those involved with church. We agreed that there is a need to lovingly look at what God is saying when approaching a sensitive issue like this. Hatred of the gay community by Christians is unbiblical.

Two passages that Rosalie brings up are the woman caught in adultery (John 8:2-11), and the instruction to take the log out of your own eye before removing the speck in your neighbour’s (Matthew 7:3-5). We’re called to focus on our own sins before we rebuke others for theirs. She also points out that there are both explicit forms of homophobia (e.g. hateful banners) and more subtle forms (e.g. people refusing to acknowledge a gay couple as ‘girlfriends’, instead referring to them constantly as ‘friends’). She believes the subtle forms are the more damaging.

In my personal view, homosexual orientation isn’t sinful of itself. Like being easily angered, it presents a temptation to be sinful. It’s only when that temptation is acted on that the person is acting in an ungodly way. From a Christian perspective, it’s important to distinguish between homosexual orientation and homosexual behaviour.

Ultimately, Rosalie believes that gay people often feel unwelcome in churches. “Gay people don’t all want to be going to liberal churches. There are things that need to be addressed if we want to see gay people in evangelical churches. We’d love to be accepted as part of the wider church. It’s scary visiting a church.” She recalls the heartbreaking experience of having been kicked out of three Christian organisations. “I’m stubborn. Lots of people just leave the church.”

This is a sensitive, personal issue, which I believe should always be handled carefully. But no Christian topic should be discussed without a willingness to be faithful to God’s word. And my personal reading of God’s word leaves me convinced that gay marriage is against God’s will. That may seem unloving - and it is certainly becoming a less popular view in secular society – but I think that the acceptability of gay marriage in God’s sight is something that has to be read into the Bible – it can’t be read out of the Bible. As Christians, we have a responsibility to love others and handle God’s word correctly, and this should shape the way we look at this issue. It’s not enough just to say “The Bible says gay marriage isn’t allowed”. We need to examine God’s word, and actually be able to give a reason for why we believe that. And we need to be loving in how we explain this to others. 

Rosalie also made an important point about the treatment of homosexuals by the church. As God’s chosen people, Christians are called to love God and love their neighbour. Twisting God’s word to justify behaviour that he does not appear to approve of does neither of those things. Being welcoming to people who need Jesus as much as we do – that is love. It would be great if gay people were made to feel welcome in church without compromising God’s will for us.