AS JUSTIFICATION for Barbadian churches’ refusal to sanction homosexuality and same-sex marriage, Reverend Winston Jones says: “To ask the church to change the standards of acceptance and allow something that it has recorded in its rule book, is to categorically denounce the very premise upon which it was previously built.”
The fact is that the Christian rule book has been evolving for millenia.
For example, it is no exaggeration to say that official church leaders, clergymen, and ordinary believers have started out on the wrong side of almost every major global human rights issue of the past 200 years, only to change their tune, invariably after decades of resistance.
Colonialism, slavery, racism against Blacks, the denial of women’s rights, and child labour, to name a handful, were all initially sanctioned by the church and embraced by most pious, God-fearing people in the West, before public opinion went the other way.
Often, these people would quote biblical chapter and verse in support of views that would make most of us cringe today – chapters and verses which Christendom now happily ignores or interprets differently.
So it seems that what Rev. Jones calls the “God-breathed, infallible, Word of God” needs the occasional clarification, usually when it appears to disagree with what most people have come to believe is right and just. It wouldn’t surprise me if, eventually, some biblical clarifications on gay rights were to arise.
– MARK BOYCE
