COMMENT The problem of Christian fundamentalists is that they read the Bible literally, and see their reading of the Bible as the highest authority that not only they, but everyone, regardless of their faiths, should follow submissively, without taking other points of view into consideration.

It is why, in 1856, a Baptist pastor in the United States, the Rev Thorton Stringfellow, said that Jesus recognised the institution of slavery as “one that was lawful among men, and regulated its relative duties... I affirm then, first, (and no man denies,) that Jesus Christ has not abolished slavery by a prohibitory command; and second, I affirm, he has introduced no new moral principle which can work its destruction...” We all know today that he was very wrong!

Christian fundamentalists claim that they are the only true Christians, but if we look at what they did to non-believers, women, and blacks in the past, or what they are doing to gay people today, their actions are anything but Christian.

If many Christians in the past could support slavery and oppose its abolishment because “the Bible said so”, are we surprised that there are Christians today who oppose homosexuals vehemently because they believe it is God’s will and justify heterosexism by appealing to the Bible?

Religious truth, not a scientific truth

We have heard many Christians say that being gay is wrong because “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” making off-handed allusions to biblical texts. To argue against homosexuality based on this infamous saying by Christian fundamentalists is highly problematic for two reasons.

First, in a secular society, many people do not believe in the creation story of the Bible; therefore it is neither just nor right to construct our social morality based on the Bible or any religious texts that condemn all homosexuals. Second, the creation story in the Bible has its theological significance, however it is not meant to be read literally as a historical fact. In other words, it is a religious truth, not a scientific truth.

Gareth Moore, who is a Catholic priest and a lecturer in theology and philosophy at Oxford, rightly points out that the creation story of Adam and Eve does not have the importance often attributed to it in the theological discussion of sex nor should it be used to oppose homosexuality.

As he argues, it does not “provide a universally applicable heterosexual blueprint for human sexuality,” and does not show “God expressing his will that we all be heterosexual”.

christians praying church attacks The logic is very simple; if homosexuality is wrong simply because “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” then by the same token, incest is right, because God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Eve plus another straight couple. Lacking two couples, Adam and Eve’s children could not have sexual intercourse with people outside of their family.

How many reasonable people would say that incest is right, justifying it by arguing that had God deemed incest wrong, God would have created at least two heterosexual couples instead of just Adam and Eve? Not even Christian fundamentalists would say this, and yet, they argue that for homosexuality to be right, God would have had to create Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve.

The more essential problem of Christian fundamentalists, however, is that they do not know or refuse to know that the creation story is a story of faith that should not be read literally as a historical fact or scientific truth. Adam and Eve were not real people created about 6,000 years ago according to the chronology of the Bible. The history of humanity and the universe is much longer than that.

Two creation stories

Any serious biblical scholar, and I mean scholar, not a regular Christian or pastor who has not studied the Bible deeply enough, would tell us that there are two creation stories in the Bible, not one. There are discrepancies between them because they are coming from different sources, namely the “Priestly” account and the “Yahwistic” account, which are called the “P” source and the “J” source, respectively.

The first creation story is in Genesis 1:1-2:3, and the second one is in Genesis 2:4-25. Christian fundamentalists perhaps do not read them carefully enough, and have mistaken them as the same story. But there are obvious discrepancies between them and they cannot be a single story.

christian faith 030108 cross For instance, in the first story, God created everything before Adam and Eve, but in the second story, Adam and Eve were created before plants, and after God created Adam and plants, God made animals. These two stories cannot be historical facts because they contradict each other. When there are discrepancies, either one of the stories is right, or both of them are wrong, but both cannot be right.

If this is not enough to prove that creation stories in the Bible are not meant to be read literally, let us look at the account of the great flood in the book of Genesis in the Bible. There is a contradiction in the number of animals of each kind that Noah took to the ark.

In Genesis 6:19-20, God says to Noah, “all of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind.” But in Genesis 7:2-3, God says, “you shall take with you of every clean animal by sevens... also the birds of the sky, by sevens, male and female.”

No one can make a movie based on the accounts in Genesis following every detail of these two narrations, because they contradict each other. The film maker would have to decide to take one and ignore the other, perhaps depending on the budget!

The Bible is not free of historical prejudice and biases.

As a Christian minister and theologian by training, I would thus say that the challenge to Christians today is to recognise the historicity of the Bible and to scrutinise its discourses in light of the spirit of the Bible, together with modern science and discoveries, so that our faith might serve as a trajectory to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to all forms of authority, and to provide a platform for theological rebellion that will bring forth right and loving relationships and do justice to everyone.

REV O YOUNG is an ordained Christian minister at MCC New York. He holds two masters degrees, in  sociology and theology. He lives in New York city and teaches sociology at St Peter’s College. He has published 20 books on sociology, theology and sexuality and is also a columnist for Sin Chew Daily . He is currently finishing his doctoral degrees in sociology and theology.