For weeks of posts now I’ve been wandering my way toward a Gospel defense of full gender equality and same-sex marriage. Jesus’ paradigm shift on reproductive success is a crucial first step. A Gospel orientation toward scripture more broadly is next, to overcome resistance from those who find hetero-normativity and patriarchy in the Bible to be authoritative. But I’m going to take a break from slow and steady and jump right into a story from the life of Jesus. I’m not sure this is argumentatively the best practice for making the case, but I’m open to the Spirit. The wind blows where it will and we do our best to ride the current.

The scripture for church last Sunday was Mark 10:1-12, which is not even about marriage or divorce directly, yet is often cited as evidence of Jesus’ opposition to same-sex marriage. The irony is that by citing it as such, those who weaponize this passage against same sex partners are identifying themselves with the Pharisees and not with Jesus.

The Pharisees weaponize the Bible in bad faith to harm their enemies and help themselves. It is their familiar playbook, and it has already proven successful in eliminating Wild John (the Baptizer). Wild John was beheaded by Herod’s wife for criticizing the divorce and remarriage that brought her to power. If Jesus says something similar (and why wouldn’t he? – Jesus and Wild John are cousins and co-conspirators in the Gospel) maybe Jesus will also be arrested and killed too? That seems to be the plan anyway.

So they find a verse in the law of Moses that prohibits a very specific kind of divorce-remarriage-divorce-remarriage. The prohibition seems originally intended to prevent abuse, greed, and fraud. But they repurpose it as permission for an exclusively male privilege of divorce. Already they’re twisting Mosaic law to benefit themselves: privileged male abusers in power.

In logical terms, the Pharisees commit a form of the fallacy of affirming the consequent. The law says “If P, then Q.” And the Pharisees twist that into “Therefore, P.”

It is also a form of the ‘naturalistic’ fallacy (unfortunately, a term that I think is actually pretty unhelpful) or a violation of Hume’s law that one can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.

In the Mosaic Law as written, “If P” is an ‘is’ clause. P is descriptive of something that people do, with no explicit moral evaluation. But ‘Q’ is a prescriptive prohibition of an immoral behavior that people ought not to do. Because the law of Moses is by definition a moral law, given by a morally authoritative lawgiver, this is not problematic. The Pharisees make it problematic by illegitimately (and in deliberate bad faith) treating the antecedent descriptive hypothetical ‘If P’ as also prescriptive, or if not prescriptive then at least permissive.

Permissive is not a logical term, so maybe we could say ‘possible’? But possibility is also non-moral, so ‘morally permissible’ is the conclusion they reach for.

It’s crucial to understand how the Pharisees are wielding scripture. I like the term ‘weaponizing’ because it is usually most accurate. But it also implies a level of intentional misuse that many evangelicals would deny they possess. So even though the Pharisees seem to be deliberately misusing scripture, let’s grant that’s not always the case with evangelical defenders of patriarchy and hetero-normativity.

What both the deliberate ‘weaponizer’ of scripture and the unaware ‘mis-wielder’ of scripture have in common is a misapplication of the ‘authority’ of scripture. The Pharisees pretend that, because a situation (“If P”) is described in scripture without explicit moral evaluation, then it is, by virtue of a kind of blanket ‘biblical’ authority, prescriptively permitted by default.

In general, this sounds like a liberal or ‘progressive’ principle of application which I tend to endorse. The logic is: if X is not prohibited, then X is permitted. More significantly, this is a legitimate Gospel principle that Jesus embodies and Paul explicitly acknowledges (four times!) in 1 Corinthians: “all things are permitted to me.” Of course, each time Paul affirms this, he also correctly observes that there are countervailing considerations: is it beneficial to me and to others? Is it liberating?

This is where Pharisees and conservative evangelicals fail from a Gospel perspective. Something is merely described in scripture, and on a legitimate liberal interpretive principle may then be reasonably treated as morally permissible. But then the countervailing considerations of benefit and liberty to self and others are (deliberately or not) ignored or rejected. By contrast, a Gospel perspective insists that love always gets the last word.

So here’s the argument in a nutshell. Scripture is full of patriarchy and hetero-normativity. Does that mean that hetero male privilege is morally permissible? Maybe. But it does not entail that hetero male privilege is morally permissible if it is harmful and restrictive. All evidence points to hetero male privilege as harmful and restrictive. Therefore, despite the prevalence of hetero male privilege in scripture, it is ultimately incompatible with the Gospel and therefore morally prohibited by Jesus for followers of Jesus.