Wednesday, March 05, 2008

IS THE BOOK OF ROMANS OBSCURE?

Long considered to be the most thorough theological treatise in the Bible, Paul's epistle to the Romans has now been relegated to obscurity by Barack Obama. Speaking on the issue of homosexual marriage, the Democrat Presidential candidate said,
I will tell you that I don't believe in gay marriage, but I do think that people who are gay and lesbian should be treated with dignity and respect and that the state should not discriminate against them. So, I believe in civil unions that allow a same-sex couple to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other. I don't think it should be called marriage, but I think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized by the state. If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans.

Well, if we do push aside Paul's more obscure writings like Romans I wonder if Jesus had anything to say about marriage (er, 'unions', nudge, nudge, wink, wink). In the very same gospel as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus quotes Genesis in Matthew 19:4-5 and said,
"Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?" (emphasis added, nac)
In that passage Jesus affirms the intent of marriage and of sexual relations. They are to be within marriage and between a man and a wife. And since Jesus also said in the gospel of Matthew (15:19-20) that
"For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man..."
it seems that Mr. Obama will find that the thing he condones is condemned even in non-obscure books like Matthew.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Sen. Obama ignores Christ's plain teaching that "from the beginning" the natural ordering of the sexes was for men and women to join together in marriage and bear children. It is this ordering established by the Creation (and therefore inherent in our nature both spiritually and physically) that is the reason the Apostle Paul referenced men "leaving the natural use of the woman" to engage in homosexual acts.

Nature, both in the Creation and in the biological design of men and women, evidences that heterosexuality is inherent to humans and homosexuality is "against nature." But only someone as sophisticated as Sen. Obama would fail to understand that.

P.S. Think he'll lose votes among Gays for that comment?

Hatless in Hattiesburg said...

the obama giveth and the obama taketh away... :P