Snippet: Ignorance or Willfully Ignoring?

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from an article by Russell Moore in Christianity Today, “Don’t Pretend the Ugandan Homosexuality Law Is Christian.” He’s commenting on a new set of laws in Uganda that, in Moore’s description, “would not only outlaw homosexuality but also mandate conversion-therapy-type ‘rehabilitation’ for gay people who are arrested and require a kind of surveillance culture in which citizens are criminally liable for not turning in people they know to be gay. But most chilling of all, the law would impose the death penalty on categories deemed to be ‘aggravated homosexuality.’” Here’s the snippet:

“Not everything that’s a sin is a crime. To equate all sin with crime, without the authority to do so, is itself a sin against God—to take the name of the Lord our God in vain. If the historic Christian vision of marriage and family is true and good and beautiful, as I believe it is, then we demonstrate that truth, goodness, and beauty to our unbelieving neighbors through our witness—not by threatening to kill them.”

Moore backs this up biblically. It’s another masterclass in biblical interpretation (see previous blog post).

He also notes that there are a lot of other sexual sins for which the death penalty applies in Leviticus that those advocating for these Ugandan laws ignore. For those who identify as Christian and feel compelled to defend this law and these lawmakers, I wonder if it’s out of biblical ignorance or simply willfully ignoring the biblical facts.

These laws have to be read in their context within redemptive history. As Moore notes, “Misinterpreting this [by failing to take redemptive history into consideration] is the equivalent of concluding that one should sacrifice a lamb on the church Communion table during a sermon series on Leviticus.”

For a great presentation on how to read Levitical laws in the context of redemptive history, see Tim Keller’s “Old Testament Law and The Charge of Inconsistency.”

Photo by Daniel Sandvik on Unsplash