Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church Quotes

“genuine relationships are always the best place to start as we seek to integrate our ethical views in the daily life of ministry.”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“We are called to go beyond our imaginations, to be led by God’s Spirit into church practices that are as welcoming of outcasts as Jesus was during his earthly ministry and as implacable in the face of sin as Jesus was then. Conservative”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“Pastoral questions are properly answered at the level of individual lives, not at the level of generic themes. When”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“this “right to marry” argument has enormous contemporary cultural traction in the West, which requires explanation if it is indeed obviously worthless. I suspect that the felt force lies in another contemporary Western cultural assumption, that it is necessary to be sexually active to be a fulfilled, or even a properly adult, human being. We could no doubt trace the root of this assumption to Freud, but I trust it is evident once named, displayed repeatedly in our popular music, in the Hollywood assumption that the existence of a “40-Year-Old Virgin” is self-evidently hilarious, in our newspaper advice columns that prioritise sexual satisfaction as a personal need, and in countless other ways.18 The (Protestant) churches have visibly surrendered to this cultural assumption, making marriage an inevitable part of Christian maturity for much of the twentieth century. We looked askance at ministerial candidates who were not married and constructed church programmes on the basis that the only single people around were young adults preparing for marriage or widows.”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“Augustine suggests that in the mutual submission and self-surrender of marriage, and in the openness of the marriage relationship to children, with the demands of self-sacrificial love that the arrival of children bring, there is a discipling process. Our desires are reordered as we live out the marriage relationship (just as they are when we live out a celibate life) so that we are rendered fit for the kingdom—and marriage and celibacy alike are ways of life, thick clusters of practices, that tend to this reordering of our desires when lived seriously. In this sense marriage is properly named an “ascetic” practice.”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“Unlike the Old Testament, in which singleness was not a good, the New Testament—or, more properly, the coming of Christ—opens up, for the first time in redemptive history, the possibility of viewing marriage completely as a freely chosen vocation. It is not necessary in the way that it once was, and singleness is now an equally (or more!) honorable calling. But,”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“Reading Scripture as a coherent narrative rather seems to me to invite reflection on how all present human conditions, those of being “male” or “female” included, are in some radical and profound way “not the way they’re supposed to be.”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, [which] will “turn the necessity to glorious gain.”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“we cannot imagine existing in our culture without the haven of an erotic partnership because our capacity to belong together in more chaste ways is so limited.”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“Already in the Old Testament, God’s love for Israel had been compared to the marital bond (Isa 62:5; Jer 2–3; Ezek 16; Hos 1–3), but here that imagery becomes Christologically specific. It is the love of Christ for the church, a love that will culminate in an eschatological wedding feast (Rev 19:7, 9; cf. 21:2), that earthly couples image and in which they participate. The created good of marriage, marked by its openness to children and its faithful union, is taken up into Christian life and made to be an outward and visible sign of the love of God in Christ. In”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“describing singleness as “a rare calling,” which is neither a common position in Christian history (at best we may say that most Protestants in the West have recently begun to think like this) nor a plausible reading of the New Testament,”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“The Incarnate One is truly human as well as truly divine, and so properly spoken of as our friend and brother as well as our Lord and God.”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“for Christians, not every passage in the Bible is equally prescriptive or determinative for a Christian ethical life. Rather, the Old Testament must be read in light of the New, the Mosaic legislation must be read in light of its fulfillment in Christ (Rom 10:4), and so on. The point is simply that one must look for Scripture’s Christological center and read all of its various parts in light of that center. When”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“I do not accept that there has been a change in our understanding of marriage, just many and repeated changes in its cultural expressions. We need to distinguish, I suggest, between the theological reality of marriage and its ever-changing cultural trappings. We need to do this because the biblical texts make no sense if we do not. To”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church

“those who disagree with us are still making arguments from Scripture, from the wisdom of the tradition, from humble, prayerful struggles to follow Jesus faithfully—loving God and neighbor.”
― Preston Sprinkle, Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church