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Tim Mackie Homosexuality and LGBTQ topics
What is Tim Mackie’s theology? What does Tim Mackie believe about the LGBTQ topic? Is the Bible meant to end conversations about ethics or start them? Dr. Timothy Mackie (The Bible Project) continues talking with Nate and Tim about the Bible and ethics. Conversation includes marriage, LGBTQ/homosexuality, and the church.
In this episode, we dive into a thought-provoking conversation with Tim Mackie from the Bible Project. Tim explores the complexities of biblical interpretation, focusing on how ancient texts inform modern ethical questions, particularly around sexuality and marriage. He breaks down the Bible’s design patterns and how these narratives compel us to rethink traditional approaches. From his unique perspective, Tim challenges us to see the Bible as more than a rulebook—it’s a living, breathing document that asks us to engage deeply with its stories.
Wrestling with the Ethics of Homosexuality in Scripture
Tim Mackie addresses a crucial and often controversial topic: homosexuality in the Bible. He reflects on how the Bible has been used to hurt marginalized communities and how we might reframe these conversations in light of the text’s complexity. As the conversation unfolds, we discuss the way cultural understandings of gender and sexuality have shifted, asking how scripture fits into these changes without resorting to rigid or harmful interpretations. This episode challenges listeners to consider the broader narrative of love, justice, and inclusion that runs through the Bible.
The Bible’s Complexity and Its Impact on Modern Faith
The episode brings forward one of Tim Mackie’s core insights: the Bible is designed to engage us in conversation, not to offer black-and-white answers. Whether it’s questions of marriage, sexuality, or human dignity, the Bible’s design pushes us to wrestle with difficult topics, encouraging deeper reflection rather than dogmatic answers. Tim’s approach invites listeners to rethink how they engage with scripture, particularly when grappling with issues that have a profound impact on real people today.
This is Part 2 of the conversation with Tim Mackie.
Listen to Part 1 with Tim Mackie here.
Transcription
Tim Mackie: One way I’ve, this is to use another Star Wars analogy, one way that I can now see my relationship to the Bible as it’s been developing, the more I sit with it and wrestle with it, it’s a lot like Luke Skywalker’s experience of Yoda the first time he meets him on planet Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. It’s all about Luke’s perceptions. Sorry, not just his perceptions, but his expectations of what he’s going to find. And so he’s going to look for a great Jedi master. He lands in a swamp, he finds a little silly green creature. Now of course the silly green creature is the great master, but because of Luke’s preconceived ideas about what a great master ought to look like, those expectations ironically blind him to the thing that’s sitting in front of him, and until he’s able to set aside his preconceived notion of what a Jedi master should be and just discover this unique Jedi master on its own terms, then all of a sudden a whole new world opens up. That’s the whole brilliance of that part of the story, is how wise Yoda is. Think of Yoda’s afterlife in all the movies! He’s almost like a god-figure in the stories, and to think that it all began with that silly green creature. And that’s totally my experience with the Bible. I didn’t have a lot of negative baggage from childhood with the Bible. It’s more just reading it in my early twenties and just being like, “What on earth?! This is crazy! What is this?!” But discovering, as I’m to let the texts themselves shape how they mean and what they mean, I am blown away every day. The sophistication of these authors and the profound things that they’re saying about human nature and about God’s work at work in the world. I don’t have language to talk about; it blows my categories. And so to me, especially, this design pattern for me has been a mega discovery, kind of re-tooling my whole paradigm for what the Bible is.
Nate: I was going to ask something else, but it kind of made me want to ask a question I was going to ask later. How do you personally engage with the Bible, do you engage with the Bible in a way that’s not your studying and breaking it down for the next Bible Project video? How does it influence your life? How do you—like, do you make decisions based on what the Bible says? This is common stuff that I think a lot of us have done, we make decisions based on what the Bible says because, if it’s the golden tablets from heaven, then this is God telling you what you’re supposed to do, but if it’s not that, then how do you personally engage with it?
Tim Mackie: Well, it’s not simple. I actually don’t think the answer to that is simple. Which people from a very conservative background find infuriating, but often because it’s from a preconceived idea. If God wants to tell us what to do so that you can go to the good place after you die, then He would be very clear, and so here are the thirteen verses about sex, and here’s the rules about money. But of course the Bible, that model of approaching the Bible self-destructs on any common sense reading if you’re just consistent with it. It’s a world-forming kind of text, where it’s wrapping its arms around your whole life experience, giving you a narrative framework to give meaning to your own life and to history. You know, I actually try to avoid controversial topics, for the most part, but marriage is an interesting one! On page 1, some kind of ideal is being set there with a single man and a single woman and a covenant. And then you go on and watch throughout the rest of the stories where people violate that ideal, and their lives turn out horribly. I mean, horribly! So that’s an example, I think of how, as a reader of these texts, you know, think of growing up as a Jew in the Second Temple period. You’ve grown up on this literature, that’s shaping your imagination for what is good and what is not good; what will lead to a good life and what will not; what’s a life that honors God and His will and what’s a life that doesn’t. So I think the Bible works on us on more of a deep substructure level of our worldview concept as a whole. And so, for me, I can’t read the Bible without my notes out and my charts and a Hebrew dictionary. I can’t. I can’t engage the Bible in any other way now because I think I’m beginning to track with how it communicates and what these authors are trying to say, and if I had grown up as a native reader of these texts, I would just get it, but I’m not. I grew up skateboarding, not reading the Bible, so I’m coming late to the game. So I’m trying to acquire a more native skill set for how these texts mean. For me, it’s all one thing. As I think about how raise my kids, you know, I’ve got a 5 and a 7 year old, I think about this all the time. So I’m trying to think of how to invite them into the story in a way that I won’t have to help them unlearn a bunch of stuff later, but also in a way that really is helping guide their moral development. These stories are amazing; these stories have an amazing way of shaping humans on a real deep level, which is why the Bible exerts the force that it does still today in our culture.
Tim R: You know, most of us, if we lived some portion of our lives in protestant church-world, the idea of the Bible as the Word of God has significantly impacted our thinking in a lot of different ways, right? For me at least, and I think it’s probably pretty typical at least of western Christianity, some of what that meant—you go back to that Yoda example, what are our expectations?—that impacted and sort of carried into our minds particular expectations, and I think a lot of that had to do with divine commandments. Whether that was law or more like Christian ethics, or who’s in/who’s out, that sort of moral… I don’t know, I guess I’m stumbling over words for it, but that kind of… especially Old Testament, or even Paul’s letters, you know? We read Paul’s letters, we figure out what Paul thought was good and what Paul thought was bad, and that was law in the church, right? And then you use language like riddles. So what does it mean for you now, for the Bible to be the Word of God? And even that example you brought up of marriage. I know from our friendship, Tim, that you’re someone who cares about what science proves and what your neighbors are thinking and feeling, and what culture is expressing even outside the church, right? And in my lifetime at least, what science has shown about sexuality, gender, marriage, has changed dramatically from my parents’ and grandparents’ lives. How have you wrestled with what you’ve devoted your life to, this text we call the Word of God, and all the other messiness and complexity of human life?
Tim Mackie: Wow, that’s a great—there’s probably half a dozen wonderful questions bundled together there. Isn’t that always the case? To pick one to kind of work on, the Word of God question. My own location, my own social location and identity in engaging the Bible is actually important for how the story itself works. So I’m not Jewish, I’m not an Israelite. I’m a West Coast, 21st century American, my ancestry goes to the Scottish highlands. So how do I relate? The reason I’m reading the Hebrew Bible is, to put it the way one of my favorite Old Testament theologians puts it, a guy named Christopher Seitz, it’s because I got a library card by joining the messianic Jesus movement. And when I, it actually wasn’t from reading the Bible that I became a part of Jesus’ people. It’s because I heard stories about Him, and I heard His teachings and His life represented by friends and peers that were really compelling to me. And then I became compelled as I read the stories about Him. And I still remember this, one of the titles given to Jesus in one of the earliest accounts that’s in the New Testament, is He’s called the Word of God. He’s the Word! The Word of God is a person! And then as you read those stories about Jesus, it’s clear that His, the way Jesus thought and talked and viewed all of reality, and even His own identity, was all in relationship to the storyline of the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew scriptures. They shaped His whole sense of reality. And what He said was that the Hebrew Bible is a narrative that’s pointing to Himself and what He was saying and doing, to His life, death, and resurrection. For me, that’s always given somewhat of a framework, that the Word of God is the person of Jesus in His life, death, and resurrection. That living Word claimed that these written texts are making a set of claims about God and the world and humanity that all lead up to Himself. So that’s kind of been my way of putting it together. The Word of God is Jesus and the texts that He said point to him. They’re not a rulebook. There are rules within it, 613 actually, within the first three quarters. But those rules fit into a narrative context and the whole narrative is about how people really suck at following moral rules. In fact, they’re terrible. We will embrace our own self-destruction to the complete ignorance of common sense rules that have been written out for us in stone. The rules play a really important role in the book, but it’s not a rulebook. It’s an epic narrative pointing to a person who did something for us all that we can’t do for ourselves. So to me that’s how the Word of God thing fits together. And we could explore a lot more, but that’s kind of my short, not-so-short thing on the Word of God. So I’m happy to pick up another part of that question, but that’s at least that one part.
Tim R: Yeah, maybe do pick up the other piece. So on the example of marriage in our lifetime and the conversation, and how much it’s changed, and the different voices that have contributed, different experiences and perspectives that severely break away from traditional interpretations, the traditional church rule. How does your sense of Jesus as the Word, these texts as the Word, these complexities, all of that, how do you work through these conversations?
Tim Mackie: Well maybe one would be when, a great example is the meaning of marriage. When Jesus—this is interesting, and I remember this struck me many years ago as significant—when Jesus is approached and asked about loopholes in marriage law and re: divorce law, the place where Jesus didn’t was to the laws of the Torah. Where He goes is pages 1 and 2 of Genesis, which describe a divine ideal, a divine and human ideal for when the human family is functioning as the ideal community, as God’s image and co-rulers in the world, it looks like that. That’s clearly how Jesus conceives of that ideal. And so His response to people He’s talking to is actually really radical. He goes back to that divine ideal described on pages 1 & 2, and He just says, “That’s how we roll in the Jesus movement.” It’s one man, one woman, lifetime covenant. Why? Well, in Genesis 1, it’s all about the theological meaning of gender and of covenant. So in Genesis 1, you have the one God who wants to create images of God’s self, and those images are one species that are made up of two others. And when those two others make a covenant with each other, when the two—you have one humanity that’s two gendered others that become one again through covenant. And in that covenant of love, new life is generated. And this whole package deal is said to be a theological symbol, or image is the Hebrew word, for God. Who or what is God? Well, one way to think about it is, one and many who are one resulting in love and the emergence of new life and love shared with others. That’s really profound, I think. That’s a really profound narrative claim about humanity and God, and I think Jesus tuned into that and that’s why He cared about that, so that’s why He cites that passage, I think when he’s talking about marriage and divorce in His own day. It’s exactly that new creation marriage ethic that you see the apostles working out after that. That’s where I’ll leave it, and say, for me that’s what it means to look at the story as giving ethical guidance, is this whole story is about the world as you and I know it, beautiful and shot through with transcendence and beauty and glory; it’s also really horrific and terrible in the ways that we hurt each other and the ways that the world hurts us, and that it’s all, we’re living in a shadow version of what creation could be and is meant to be. What the Jesus movement is, as far as all the language He put around it, the Kingdom of God, is it’s sort of a new creation bursting into the present. Which means that it shatters all of our concepts of identity and gender and family and reconfigures them, pointing to the new creation. When it comes to marriage and sexuality, for me that’s the framework to engage it in. You’re going to feel like I’m punting, maybe. And maybe I am. I feel like that conversation’s so important, and it’s not at all at the forefront of my thinking. And there’s a lot that I want to read and think about on that topic that there’s just not enough hours in a day right now. I feel like there’s really great people having that front edge conversation, however, and it’s how does that biblical narrative vision align with our experience of sexuality and gender, and how do these two interface before the dawn of the new creation? I feel like there’s probably a lot of conversations on that topic that maybe are just starting to happen. Because what usually happens is, the Bible is a divine rulebook dropped from heaven, here’s a verse taken out of context, and then whether intentionally or not, I end up using it as a weapon to reaffirm some kind of cultural or socioeconomic boundary line between me and them. That’s usually how the Bible plays in these conversations, and I think Jesus would be really disappointed in His followers about that. So for me it’s about how does the narrative work, what are the claims of the narrative, and how does that engage the best of what we know about gender and biology today? I think that’s where the conversation could be had. Sorry I’m so long-winded.
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Nate: In a similar vein, speaking of the Bible as a weapon, this book that we love and have spent many, many years studying and appreciating and using in our lives has a troubled history of being used as a weapon against a lot of people. I’m just curious how you’ve wrestled with that, attaching your life and career to this book and to its history. How have processed that, how have you wrestled with that?
Tim Mackie: Yeah I do wrestle with it, a lot. A word picture has come into my mind more than once recently. You know, you could say something similar about the history of the axe, you know? “What a wonderful tool! What a great gift to humanity! And also what a horrific thing.” If I were to know all the horrific things that have been done with axes in human history, I would probably not want to touch an axe ever again. But at the same time, if I live in a forest… I think there’s something like that happening here. Obviously the Bible’s a much more sophisticated kind of thing than an axe and the ways that it gets misused are usually a lot more complicated. You can misuse something as complicated as the Bible even with good intentions and not know that you’re doing it, whereas it’s a little bit harder to do that with an axe, maybe. So yes, I’m not saying this is a good response on my part, but being in the thick of local church pastoral ministry for seven years, I was just kind of forced to be in those type of situations and conversations, just being in people’s lives, on the hot topics and trying to help connect people to the wisdom of the Bible and making sure I wasn’t consciously or unconsciously hurting anybody. Being in a more academic or research role, at least for this season right now, has actually, I’ve experienced as a kind of relief, because I’m not being asked to talk about those things right now, and it’s kind of a gift to have a season where it’s like, “Whew!” I’m going to try and bracket that troubled history of the Bible’s abuse, and just take a season. For me right now, I experience it like what I think that decade of Paul the apostle going off-radar to Arabia for a while, and just reading and soaking and reconfiguring. That’s kind of the season I’m in right now, is I’m trying to tune out of the most pressing, urgent questions of our day, because what I find is they distort my ability to hear the Bible on its own terms. And once I’m able to do that for a season and then come back to the pressing questions, I have a whole different way of thinking and talking about it. So that’s my way of relating to it right now, actually, is to tune out from the controversies for a season and just try and sit and learn all over again. And probably, in God’s grace, He’ll probably lead me back into the fray in some way. I don’t actually want to contribute. Because I don’t think the controversies really help us understand the Bible. I think they just help us get more angry at each other and use the Bible as a weapon in the process. What I’m saying is I don’t know. I have a complicated relationship to the use and abuse of the Bible. But I think we all do, don’t we, in our own ways?
Nate: I’m just curious if you feel a responsibility, I guess, with the knowledge that you do have? What I’m getting at is, there are a lot of people being hurt even right now by the ways that Bible is being used. I’m just curious. I feel like if I had the knowledge that you have and the years of biblical research that you have, and you have the ability to almost give evidence or support to those people that are being hurt. I just wonder if you ever just personally if you ever wrestle with that. I know there is, I’ve felt that too, not being a pastor right now, being out of having that responsibility, having to have a position on everything, or a stance on something to teach from, but then I also… I’m just curious.
Tim Mackie: Yeah, um… One thing I’ve learned about, at least in my experience in protestant church communities, and there’s so many factors I don’t even know all the factors going on, but when people take head-on approaches to offering a different point of view about theology, it almost always fails. Almost always. There’s social and religious reasons where, as communities and people we’re so invested in “my current way” of making sense of the world that when that’s threatened directly? Because it’s not just about a theological position, it’s about the stability of the universe, and so what I have found, and through the Bible Project that’s my vehicle for doing it, is just instead of saying, “Here’s what’s wrong,” just show a way that is a little more faithful to what’s right, and build it out as a comprehensive paradigm of a way of engaging. And what I find is, if you have people who care about the Bible, just start reading the Bible in a way that’s more faithful to how it’s meant to be read, and if people have genuine motives and really care and want to learn, they’ll get it. Your mind will be blown, and just like me, you’re slowly converted through the beauty of what these texts are trying to say. And all of a sudden, the things I cared about three years ago, I don’t care about as much anymore. It changes the questions that you ask. So that’s my strategy. It’s the same kind of goal, to help reconfigure people’s paradigms through the Bible, but I just, I’m convinced that the head-on approach, and three views, and, “Your view’s wrong for this reason and my view’s right,” that doesn’t convince anybody. All people do is walk away from those more reaffirmed in what they already wanted to be convinced of in the first place. There are exceptions to that, but I think that’s generally true. So I’m not interested in that kind of sparring. I would rather just show what’s awesome and point people to what’s beautiful and good. That’s at least where I’m going right now.
Nate: Totally. I think there’s even brain science on that, to show that trying to convince someone by attack or debate or whatever doesn’t work, people just leave more entrenched. I guess I was more thinking, if you could show this verse that’s not even the right way to use that or something, instead of saying, even on the LGBTQ issue, “Stop hurting people in this way because that’s not even what these verses—” or, we need to start the conversation somewhere else, not just with, “Here’s what the Bible says on this.”
Tim Mackie: You know, another part of is, and maybe this is my way of insulating myself from hot topics, is at least for the mission of the Bible Project…
