Does god actually hate gays

How Should Christians Respond to Queer Friends or Family Members?

Caleb Kaltenbach (M.A. ’07) is an alumnus of Biola’s Talbot School of Theology, lead pastor of a large church in Simi Valley, Calif., and a married father of two. He’s also an emerging voice in the discussion of how Christians should occupy the LGBT community. That’s because Kaltenbach has an insider perspective, having been raised by a dad and mom who divorced and independently came out of the closet as a homosexual man and a lesbian. Raised in the midst of LGBT parties and pride parades, Kaltenbach became a Christian and a pastor as a young grown-up. Today, he manages the tension of holding to the traditional biblical teaching on sexuality while loving his gay parents.

Kaltenbach’s distinct story is detailed in his new book Messy Grace: How a Pastor with Gay Parents Learned to Love Others Without Sacrificing Conviction and landed him on the front page of the New York Times in June. Biola Magazine reached out to him to talk about his book and his perspective on how Christians can surpass navigate the complexities of this

This article is part of the Tough Passages series.

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²⁴Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, ²⁵because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

²⁶For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged instinctive relations for those that are contrary to nature; ²⁷and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

²⁸And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.²⁹They were filled with all conduct of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are occupied of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips,³⁰slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, dis

Queer Theology: Does God Hate Gay People?

A class questions issues from hetero privilege to gaydar to LGBTQ racism

Class by class, lecture by lecture, question asked by question answered, an education is built. This is one of a series of visits to one class, on one morning, in search of those building blocks at BU.

Are stereotypes about gays—for example, that gay men talk, dress, or gesture differently than straight guys—bigoted blather? Or is there such a thing as reliable gaydar that helps people, including gays, to perceive others’ sexual orientation?

You might not expect openmindedness about stereotyping to appear up in a seminar called Lgbtq+ Theology, which studies questions about God and religion posed by gay, transsexual , bisexual, and gender-questioning people, many of whom, according to teacher Pamela Lightsey, ask, “Does God hate me?” because of widespread prejudice.

Lightsey herself, she says, is the only openly lesbian African American cleric in the United Methodist Church, and a fervent critic of stereotyping. But the School of Theology associate dean and clinical

What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?

What Does The Bible Speak About Homosexuality?

Introduction

For the last two decades, Pew Research Center has reported that one of the most enduring ethical issues across Christian traditions is sexual diversity. For many Christians, one of the most frequently first-asked questions on this topic is, “What does the Bible say about attraction to someone of the equal sex?”

Although its unlikely that the biblical authors had any notion of sexual orientation (for example, the term homosexual wasn't even coined until the belated 19th century) for many people of faith, the Bible is looked to for timeless guidance on what it means to honor God with our lives; and this most certainly includes our sexuality.

Before we can bounce into how it is that Christians can maintain the authority of the Bible and also affirm sexual diversity, it might be helpful if we started with a short but clear overview of some of the assumptions informing many Christian approaches to understanding the Bible.

What is the Bible?

For Christians to whom the Bible