In-Depth Articles

The gravest human right violation in our world today is slavery – and the most abhorrent form of slavery is sexual exploitation. If Australia is serious about eradicating modern day slavery and ending the exploitation of women in prostitution, it should adopt the Nordic model of removing criminal sanctions for all those who are bought and sold for sex, and support criminal sanctions for those who buy and sell others for sex.

While the Liberal Party is (marginally) more likely than the ALP to ensure religious freedom, their proposed concessions are limited only to institutional religion, with minimal concessions to those in the wedding industry. The assumptions underlying Senator Smith’s bill are riddled with false conceptions, fallacious elisions and inconsistencies. The bill fails to properly capture the meaning and scope of religion, whilst saying nothing at all about other (non-religious) forms of opposition to SSM.

Most Evangelical discussions of same-sex marriage ignore same-sex orientation, both in politics and in theology. But if we look at orientation and marriage together, we find it doesn't match the reasons for the Bible's moral condemnations of same-sex relations. This is surprising. It illuminates our difficulties with orientation and it fundamentally changes our arguments about nature and marriage. Reexamining these arguments suggests that we should view a same sex marriage of two same-sex oriented Evangelicals as a biblical marriage, and believe that God does too.

David Gushee, like many, has changed his mind on same-sex marriage through ‘transformative encounters’. But while he engages with the pastoral and theological issues with honesty and integrity, his conclusions are flawed because they are based on an insufficiently integrated reading of Scripture that misses the foundational nature of creational sexual difference.

We often define people and their human dignity according to their rational and relational assets and activity, or even their relational capacity. But our dignity does not reside in any human function, or even in our knowing God, but in being known by God.

Revelation is not about the end of the world, but the end of a covenant era – the Old Covenant. Once it is understood in its historical and ‘covenant’ context, it is rescued from the obscurity of the ‘fringe’ of biblical studies and allowed to shine as one of the most insightful, enlightening and practical books of the Bible.