The Cafeteria Plan of Bible Study

Bob Doud of Glendale wrote in to the Los Angeles Times about the printed opinions on the PCUSA's recent move.

I applaud the decision of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. to allow openly gay and lesbian members to become ordained ministers.

Again, this is not what happened, because that was already going on. What the PCUSA decided to do was to let ministers engage in fornication, whether homosexual or heterosexual, openly and unrepentantly.

I am heartened at the ability of people devoted to the Bible to be able to find in it the deeper meaning of biblical love, justice and dignity. They did this against the grain of less important but more explicit and time-conditioned condemnations of homosexuality in the Bible.

They show that our understanding of the Bible grows through time and experience under divine influence.

So Bob apparently thinks God would put together the entire Bible, which from the first book to the last teaches that for all people, sex is something to be reserved for marriage and that marriage unites the sexes, then God would preserve that Bible through persecution and over thousands of years, and then God would later want us to figure out that we are now supposed to ignore that teaching.

I wonder what other "more explicit" teachings of the Bible "God" will lead us to abandon in the future. Love thy neighbor? Love your wife as Christ loves the Church?