Newsweek Misreads the Bible

On the front page of Newsweek for this week, Lisa Miller writes that the Bible does not, in fact, stand for marriage just between a man and a woman.  Her whole article is skewed so that even Jesus Himself is not a proponent of marriage. (She apparently has not read Matthew 19:4-5.)  She mistakenly quotes scripture and says that Jesus was single and encouraged “indifference to earthly attachments, especially family.”  She argues that “Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married – and a number of excellent reasons why they should.”  In an overwhelming demonstration of her drastic misunderstanding about the Bible, she asks, “Why should we regard (the Bible’s) condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?”  She even suggests that Biblical figures David and Jonathan were homosexual!  Ms. Miller’s article demonstrates the media’s incredible bias and the lengths to which some will go to justify homosexual marriage.  It is important that we all speak up for truth in response. We encourage you to be active in the internet world by blogging, leaving comments on these stories, and posting links to these things with your own summaries of why you respectfully disagree!

 

CLICK HERE to read the full article. 

 

What do you think?

 

Here’s what other national leaders are saying:

 

Dr. Al Mohler wrote this on his blog (CLICK HERE to read his entire entry):

 

“Miller’s broadside attack on the biblical teachings on marriage goes to the heart of what will appear as her argument for same-sex marriage.  She argues that, in the Old Testament, “examples of what social conservatives call ‘the traditional family’ are scarcely to be found.”  This is true, of course, if what you mean by ‘traditional family’ is the picture of America in the 1950s.  The Old Testament notion of the family starts with the idea that the family is the carrier of covenant promises, and this family is defined, from the onset, as a transgenerational extended family of kin and kindred.”

 

He also rebuffs her suggestion that Paul did not intend to condemn homosexuality as we know it:

 

“Miller dismisses the Levitical condemnations of homosexuality as useless because ‘our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions.’  But she saves her most creative dismissal for the Apostle Paul.  Paul, she concedes, ‘was tough on homosexuality.’  Nevertheless, she takes encouragement from the fact that ‘progressive scholars’ have found a way to re-interpret the Pauline passages to refer only to homosexual violence and promiscuity.

In this light she cites author Neil Elliott and his book, The Arrogance of Nations.  Elliott, like other ‘progressive scholars,’ suggests that the modern notion of sexual orientation is simply missing from the biblical worldview, and thus the biblical authors are not really talking about what we know as homosexuality at all.  ‘Paul is not talking about what we call homosexuality at all,’ as Miller quotes Elliott.

Of course, no honest reader of the biblical text will share this simplistic and backward conclusion.  Furthermore, to accept this argument is to assume that the Christian church has misunderstood the Bible from its very birth — and that we are now dependent upon contemporary ‘progressive scholars’ to tell us what Christians throughout the centuries have missed.”

Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and and others were interviewed by Politico in regard to the Newsweek article (CLICK HERE for Politico’s article).  Land said,

“Quoting chapter and verse, Land argued that the Bible lays out a very clear prescription for opposite-sex marriage, starting with the passage in Genesis where God pairs Adam and Eve and proceeding through Ephesians, in the New Testament, when the apostle Paul compares the relationship between husband and wife to the relationship between Jesus and the Church.

“‘How can you address the subject of marriage from a religious perspective and utterly ignore the two foundational texts that deal with marriage: Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5?’ Land asked. ‘If a student turned a paper in to me on a religious argument for or against gay marriage and neglected to reference the two foundational texts, I would give them a pretty poor grade based on that alone.’”