Both Jae's claim about Eugene's actual beliefs about gay marriage and Steve's claim about "The Message" are refuted in the article I cite in my post. Please actually read this article before pontificating.
Seriously? Regis Nicholl is hardly a scholar and Crisis Magazine is hardly an academic journal. Essentially, Nicholl has written an opinion piece in a magazine deliberately directed toward laity and other non-scholars. There's nothing at all wrong with that - but what he wrote is hardly a "refutation" of my position. He has an opinion; I have an opinion. You prefer his opinion to mine. That's perfectly fine, but it's a reflection of your bias rather than any air-tight refutation of my position by Nicholl.
And, in any event, I'm curious what position I've taken that you feel he has refuted - especially since Nicholl and I aren't that far off in our views of The Message. I trust neither you nor Nicholl would take issue with my position that on what you might call the spectrum of biblical translation (ranging from dynamic to literal) The Message is a dynamic translation. If either of you take issue with that then there's just no basis for discussion since that would represent a complete lack of understanding of the process of biblical translation. I give you both more credit than that, so I'm assuming we agree that The Message is a dynamic translation.
There are a lot of issues with dynamic translations, which is why The Message really shouldn't be used as a primary preaching text or as a teaching text. It's useful as a supplement to open up fresh understandings of the text. To use a simple example of why I find The Message problematic, I'll refer to the opening words of Psalm 23. A literal translation is "The Lord is my shepherd." Peterson's dynamic translation is "God, my shepherd." Just two points to illustrate my problem with this: (a) the lack of a verb makes a less definitive statement about God. "The Lord is my shepherd" is a statement about the nature of God. "God, my shepherd" is simply a personal statement of my feelings about God. It's a weakened statement about God's nature. (b) For a dynamic translation, Peterson' insistence on retaining "shepherd" is problematic. Given his audience - basically the English speaking world (and even more specifically, given the use of idiom and slang, the American market) - "shepherd" lacks meaning. To the extent that we have shepherds today they are basically farmers who keep sheep. I've known a lot of them over the years - and I wouldn't equate them with biblical shepherds. It's just a different time and a different role. So the dynamic translation fails because it doesn't speak to the contemporary context. Were I translating Psalm 23 dynamically and for Peterson's audience, I'd probably render those opening words as "God is the one whom I follow," or "God is the one who cares for me" or maybe something more dramatic like "God is a trailblazer for me." All make basically the same point as the original text, but in understandable contextual language.
Anyway, your point of contention seems to be what Peterson does with passages that use words traditionally translated or understood as "homosexual." I don't disagree with either you or Nicholl that Peterson's translation has adopted a massively different interpretation than traditionally found. I would, however, argue that assuming a modern understanding of "homosexuality" from any of the three passages Nicholl cites as examples is itself a form of "dynamic" translation, since the modern context of "homosexuality" is far different from the context of the New Testament and the translation can't necessarily be made on a one to one basis. Peterson does seem to be moving in what I believe is the proper direction - the words of Romans, 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians (in Greek arsenokoites, malakos and porneia) are, indeed, references to sexual sin - but not necessarily homosexuality as we understand the word. Of course, many scholars today believe they actually reference either pederasty or prostitution (both of which often involved same gender sexual relations.) That's possible, since both are forms of exploitation of a vulnerable person (a practice which is, in my view, counter to the gospel, but which I concede is, in itself, my own contextual view and not necessarily the view of the society in which these practices were engaged in) but I'd personally take a more general interpretation. I believe that in the context in which they were written, these things were sexual sins in that they were references to male-male (and possibly female-female) sexual acts, and by definition in that culture such acts had to be defined as either adultery or fornication, since two people of the same gender could not be married. To put it simply, either one or both partners were married and fooling around with someone of the same gender on the side, or two unmarried people of the same gender were fooling around. Thus, any form of homosexual sex was unavoidably in that cultural context sexual sin.
It is, to me, at least an open question as to what Paul (or any author of the New Testament) would say about homosexuality today in an environment in which same gender marriage (thus involving covenant and commitment) was possible. They would not have even contemplated the possibility. I make no "argument from silence" (which is always an intellectually weak argument to begin with, in that it relieves us of the need to actually grapple with the text) - I simply note that I don't know what Paul's opinion of same gender marriage (and whether it would impact his view of the sinfulness of homosexual behaviour) would be.
So, my opinion is different than that of the opinion piece you cite. Neither of us "refutes" the other. Both of us express an opinion. If you agree with Nicholl that's fine. I will likely lose no sleep over that.
