The Logic of Love

Generally speaking I think of Red Pen Logic with Mr. B as a reliable resource, but he occasionally gets it wrong, & this is one of them.

By way of reply…

So what we’re saying here is that if we stand with LGBTQ people because we recognize them as an oppressed minority whom the Christian community has failed, we are guilty of sin ourselves.   That’s called Situational Ethics, Tim, & it is anathema.  

The Bible instructs us to paraclete people including sinners.   Matthew 5:43–48 (ESV): You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. 

Why were those words written?  They were written because the majority of the Sanhedrin, along with the Zealots & Romans were all at war with each other, & a great many of them were using religion as a shield to license their bigotry.  

Matthew 5:41 is clear about this.  If the Roman soldier (who is equivalent to the Oppressor & the Oppressed) requests or otherwise demands that you carry his load a stadia (bake the cake, stand up his Civil Rights, stop looking for more ways to use your religion as an excuse to continue to fail him), then you are to walk the stadia (paraclete him), & do an act.  In other words, you are to replicate & restore just like the Mosaic Law requires instead of cloaking your refusal to obey Mt. 5:41 in love. 

Your concept of love turns on Situational Ethics.  In SE, David Baker is told that if he bakes the cake or lends his moral &/or political support to Peter & Perry then he is guilty of invidious collaboration with the Enemy based not on his own motives but rather on the identity of his clients/associates/friends & the meaning of the cake or some other external factors.  That is how SE operates through & through. 

In SE every decision is unique, requiring a unique response.  The most loving thing to do is measured by the identity of the clients/associates & external factors like the perceived consequences of one’s actions.  

The execution of this scheme requires a PR campaign that gets people to make moral decisions on the basis that God condemns & commends based not on our personal internal motivations, rather based on these externals, when the Bible repeatedly teaches otherwise.  I Sam. 16 says God judges the heart not by appearances. Jeremiah 17 says God tests the heart & mind; Matt. 5 teaches adultery is a matter of intent not target; James 1 is clear that we form & follow our own desires into condemnation & death. 

Contrary to Tim, we have a duty to paraclete LGBTQ people & replicate & restore because of the way Christians have corporately failed & oppressed them - and because we have a special duty to work to end the constant state of war between us & them. 

Love doesn’t rejoice in evil - but it also protects, hopes, & perseveres.  Because love rejoices in the Truth, genuine love does not judge people sinners regardless of their motives based on the target(s) of their love.  Rather, it judges based on the degree of love for God & neighbor they exercised.   If homosexual behavior is wrong regardless of the degree of love between people, then that means the two tables of the Law are not summarized by love for God & neighbor.  

All the other commandments hang on those 2 principles, which describe our inner thoughts & desires.  How then is it that people are judged based on the identity of the targets of their love or other externals factors?

The idea that gays are in sin regardless of motive turns on the idea that the word “natural” refers to human anatomy & physiology.  

“The physical body as male and female has inherent moral meaning that Christians are obligated to respect. The very structures of our sexually dimorphic anatomy correspond to the other and that it’s intentionally designed that way. In other words, the way God made us is no accident and homosexuality, like other sexual sin, distorts it.”

On this view the human body serves as the epistemic warrant for sexual ethics.  That’s not at all true.  This is the Is-Ought Fallacy writ large.

What is this the teleological intent of the created order?  To serve as an epistemic warrant on par with God Himself or instead of God?  Absolutely not!   Rom.1:20 says its intent is to testify to God’s image & authority.  Only God’s image & authority supply a non-arbitrary epistemic warrant for sexual ethics.

“Natural use” in 1:26 - 27 refers to the natural teleology of the created order in Romans 1:20 not the human body itself as a moral warrant.  The human body fails the test of necessity relative to its ability to serve as an epistemic warrant.  

Only God Himself - who is His Word - is truly not arbitrary.  If the human body warrants sexual ethics, then that means God says that the creation is His temple & testament only to license us to use our own image & authority for worship & sexual ethics a few sentences later.  

The Bible models sound reasoning principles for us.  Romans tells us that the pagans used their own image & attributes as the epistemic warrant for worship & sexual ethics - which is the unnatural use of our image & authority.  

A large part of the reason Christians & LGBTQ people are at odds has its roots in both sides using their image & attributes to underwrite their sexual ethics & their polemics.   When a gay man appeals to his genetics to underwrite his ethics, Greg Koukl at STR calls that the Is-Ought Fallacy, but then he turns around & deploys the same logic by interpreting “natural” as heteronormative based on human anatomy & physiology.  

We need to recognize this & repent. We also ought to stop the trend of using the law in the US as a means to carve out special exemptions for ourselves that result in us looking for special exemptions for ourselves relative to Matthew 5:41 - 48.  When that happens, we agree with the Zealots, Sanhedrin, & Romans the same way we agree with the thought processes of the pagans who reasoned that Gpd has a body just like Francesca Stavrakopoulou in the modern era.  

If you interpret “natural” to mean “heterosexual” or “heteronormative” then you wind up with the UNNATURAL moral use of the Created Order as the epistemic warrant for human sexual ethics.  

Four to five epistemic, logical, & exegetical fallacies underwrite the traditional view in this issue : Is-Ought, Vicious Circularity, Overspecification, & Category Error. 

https://thepropheticpresbyterian.blogspot.com/2024/03/favorite-fallacies-homosexuality.html

How exactly has the Christian Community accrued the need to replicate & restore - regardless of whether or not homosexuality is a sin regardless of motive?  

If the Christian community paracleted the LGBTQ community more, Disney, Target and Bud Light & whoever else probably wouldn’t be as strident with respect to what they are doing.   We should ask ourselves why, in the age in which gay people can legally marry, it is still legal in some states to discriminate against people with respect to sexual orientation with respect to employment, housing, and public accommodation. 

We should remember that Christians have a checkered history with respect to these issues.  In the 80’s, Tom, Carol, Ted, and Alice were swinging while Jerry Falwell pointed fingers at gay men with respect to HIV/AIDS.   In the 90’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was controversial while Christians were openly lying about the efficacy of latex condoms and instituting purity culture and abstinence only sex education programs that excluded gay people from discussions except to send the message that that sort of behavior kills and is otherwise unacceptable. 

In the 2000’s the BSA decided to allow openly gay students into its ranks.  Christians in the churches, while saying that gays need Jesus and that the BSA chapters they sponsored were part of their outreach ministries, cut ties with the BSA and decided to do their own thing in order to exclude gays, thus sending the message “No Jesus for you!” to gays.   That happened concurrently with the standing in line at Chick Fil’A to oppose the gay agenda.   Did anyone who bought Combo 1 for Christ buy one for their gay friend?  

About a decade ago in ATL, a group of local mean girls banded together and falsely accused the ATL Eagle of allowing drug sales on premises and turning their speakers onto the neighborhood illegally.   A paddy wagon appeared on a week night and violated the rights of staff & patrons alike in a raid of the bar that turned up no evidence whatsoever of the Women’s Temperance Union’s allegations. 

In NC, when the GOP took over the General Assembly, they decided not to honor a gentlemen’s agreement between the GA & LGBT lobbyists in which they had agreed that in exchange for continued funding of NC ADAP, they would do their best to keep the marriage issue out of NC.   After saber rattling by some Republican legislators who wanted to severely curtail or end ADAP, the LGBTQ community retaliated, and that act went all the way to SCOTUS, and now gay marriage is legal.   In NC, Conservative ideologues helped build the monster they feared.  

TN is targeting drag queens in the public square and censuring African-American legislators in the State House for being agitators while cutting the Nashville Metro area government in half for brazenly political reasons - and all of this while their legislature is reliving another cycle of sexual harassment by one or more legislators.  

In FL passed a law refusing to allow matters touching on these issues into an American or British literature class for high school juniors and seniors unless reading material that touches on these issues is mandatory.  In addition, if an employer uses Matthew 5:41 as the basis for a continuing education module that touches on race relations and an employee feels guilty, that is now an actionable offense, regardless of whether or not CRT is involved.   

In NC Mark Robinson is engaged in a high profile project that endorses keeping gender & sexuality issues out of particular class rooms.  He thinks of himself as a man qualified to be NC Governor while seeming oblivious to the fact that NC’s law doesn’t specify LGBTQ issues, it uses non-specific language (which is analogous to color blind language) that, if taken to its logical end would keep Dick & Jane books out of the schools - after all, they are obviously cisgender kids in a traditional family unit.  

In CO, the Denver baker is still working to obviate his duty to obey the laws of God & man.  In CO, religious liberty does not extend to the use of religion in a manner that is a detriment to the peace & good order of the State of CO, &/or as a means to engage in acts of licentiousness, nor may it serve as a means to dispense with public oaths. 

A business permit is rightly construed as a species of an oath.  When you obtain a business license, you are agreeing to abide by the laws governing the civil rights of your customers and employees.  He desires to obtain relief from this form of oath by way appealing to his religion.

According to God, a business owner does not have a religious right to do as he/she/they desire.  You can’t deny service to your enemies, even if your enemy is a Roman soldier.   That was true in Exodus too: If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall bring it back to him. 5If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall rescue it with him.  

However, as soon as you point out that this applies to LGBTQ people, these people cry foul.   They say that refusing to bake the cake, to take just 

one example, is a matter of religious liberty.  

The idea that baking the cake is an act that somehow infringes upon the religious liberty of the baker is driven by the axiom that doing so is an invidious act of collaboration with Evangelicals’ sociopolitical/cultural enemies.  Matthew 5:41 addresses that position by commanding that the baker serve the couple by baking the cake.

Does gay marriage itself or the use of a website/page relative to a gay couple’s wedding constitute a practice inconsistent with the good order, peace, or safety of the state?  No, it does not.  The fact that gay marriage and requiring businesses to comply with the law upsets some people is not the definition of a threat to good order, peace, and safety.   Threats are the product of their ignorance &/or moral compass of dutiful culture warriors not the law. 

However, the refusal of service to gay people is symptomatic of the oppression of gays in CO society, which, over time, does negatively affect the good order, peace, and security of CO.  Religious freedom does not extend to activities that are part of a web of deceitful and immoral practices that underwrite threats to the peace and safety of CO’s citizens or good order, insofar as they objectively oppress one or more targeted populations.  Requiring someone to comply with Mt. 5:41 is not the definition of unjust oppression.  

We live in the age of dutiful culture warriors whose first impulse with respect to Target and now Chick Fil-A and the production staff of Chosen is to take up arms instead of repenting for their role in continuing the cycle of mutual oppression.  Their response is to point fingers and take up arms instead of paracleting their enemies.

Matthew 5:41 was written as a confutation of the Sanhedrin and Zealots who were the dutiful culture warriors of their day.  The Sanhedrin was teaching the people that loving your neighbor was a cover for hating your enemies.  The Zealots acted accordingly.    The Romans responded accordingly.  If we find agreement with them, we are wrong.