I think this analysis depends substantially on seeing the Holiness Laws as being (or as containing) potentially inexplicable divine fiats that God imposes upon people for God's own (perhaps) inscrutable reasons. The only question for us as Christians, then, is which of these fiats remained so important to God that they had to be obeyed even within Christianity, where salvation through Law was rejected.

While I recognize that God has a majesty, a numinous viewpoint, that might lead to some inexplicable moral fiats, I don't see anything like that in the Bible. Other than the occasional command to genocide inclusive of children, which I question the divine origin of, what I see there is all understandable in human terms. God made the Sabbath for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath. The fact is that, in working with people, God works in a microcosm where the factors that are important to people are the factors that are important to him - because his only known imperative is love. I don't believe he craves flattery or obeisance and I don't believe this is what worship, praise, prayer and meditation are about. I believe we connect to God so that God may enable us, through grace, in his love. As you can see, I don't even do him the obsequy of capitalizing his pronoun - but this is not a failure to recognize his overarching complexity or creative sovereignty. It is just an avoidance of inappropriate, medieval royal fawning.

I'm very grateful to Cat for starting this discussion. There is no one I respect more, and if you haven't read his most recent devotional in this week's service at cjat.org, go there right now - it is a jaw-dropper (God's Princes).

I've answered his Leviticus/Romans post in more detail at the link below. As I've told him, my answer is something of a draft, but its fundamental basis is understanding the inner motivations of the holiness laws, even the ones that seem inexplicable. They are not arbitrary fiats, and Christianity is not burdened with an arbitrary selection of them. We eschew immorality for reasons that are readily explained, but none of these considerations applies to loving same-sex relationships.

Some of the explanation may seem a little light, because I've been working these themes a lot in other cjat contributions and was keeping the redundancy down a bit.









• ( http link ) Lev 18 and Romans 1 - an answer
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