Can my identity in Christ coexist with my homosexual being?
Dialogue with Gabriele Bertin, candidate for the Pastoral Ministry of the Valdese Church and deputy secretary FGEI, with Paolo, volunteer of Evangelical Project
Many of us will surely have listened to the testimony of Alessandro, a young Sicilian boy of the Word of Grace Church (PDG) of Palermo. The testimonies often represent the tool used both by us Christians LGBT to try to understand more about our situation, and from our relatives and friends to try to question us our being.
Alessandro opens his testimony by stating that he had an absent father and who sought the paternal figure in a man to love; He adds that when he was a child he loved playing with games more often used by girls and seeing "female" cartoons.
The same theme is taken up and supported by many churches including the sabooth Ministry: For this reason we have decided to deepen the relationship between homosexuality - family dynamics - childhood games in another article, which we have already published and that i invite you to read.
Listening to testimonies such as that of Alexander, questions came to us, which we decided to ask Gabriele Bertin, candidate for the pastoral ministry, entrusted to the Valdese church of Palermo and deputy secretary FGEI (Evangelical Youth Federation in Italy). Today we will deepen the appearance "identity", that we are often put in order to have lost, out of the influence of friends, of the company or even Satan.
Can the identity of homosexuals be considered an identity of smuggling passed off from Satan? And identifying itself as homosexuals unequivocally mean being away from God?
In my personal experience I do not think that a homo -affective identity can be defined as deviated or passed off by Satan. The main node, I think, is made up of the way in which the biblical text is read and interpreted, and consequently what is the image of God that extrapolated veins.
In the "historical Protestants" churches "from which I come, a way of reading the text is applied through a historical-critical exegesis. To put it in simple words it is understood that the biblical text is the child of its production context and therefore of a company and author or more different authors far from us over time. This approach, therefore, intends to relocate the words that are reported in the Bible to their context, underlining how difficult it is to be able to literally interpret them nowadays since the company, the relational models of reference and also the churches themselves.
This does not want to eliminate the spiritual value of Sacred Scripture in any way, simply to grasp its historical value of a document drawn up in different timing and in different social and political contexts. From this, therefore, I think that an image of God also defines himself: no longer a God placed in antagonism in Satan, but a God present and belonging to the good and evil of the world and in history.
For this reason I do not think that we can speak of deceptions or lies, as much as more than different identity paths, each of which accompanied, blessed and protected by the paternal and maternal gaze of God. For this reason, I believe not only that it is possible to live from happy homosexuals and welcomed before God, but I think it is a duty of the churches to announce an engaging God and hugs every person, regardless of sex, genre, breed and sexual orientation.
Being fragile creatures, imperfect with respect to the absolute perfection of God concerns every human being welcomed by grace in its specific existential condition. Homosexuality is not a choice but a condition that has always been existing in human nature, every single identity is made up of a thousand facets: sexual orientation is not necessarily the most important of them.
Having said that, Satan is never mentioned in the verses concerning the condemnation of the relationships between people of the same sex. In the Bible these are interpreted as one act of violence against the other exercised by those who make its power undergo through physical submission. This is what the Bible condemns: the overpowering of the weakest, together with other similar situations: e.g. The lack of protection of the orphan and the widow and the failure to welcome the foreigner (themes infinitely more present!). It is completely missing, in the biblical dictation, what we mean by homosexual relationship: an exchange of mutual love between two people who estimate and recognize themselves in a design relationship in which one takes care of the other.
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