God's gay agenda

 This is the next wave: an Evangelical pastor who is partnered with someone of her own gender making a case as a somewhat Pentecostal Evangelical not only for acceptance of gay people in covenanted partnerships within the church and the ordained ministry of the church, but more than that: for a special purpose for gay people within God's purposes.

This book looks at the so-called 'clobber' texts and does so in a way that will commend itself to those who do theology as Evangelicals. These texts are successfully 'disposed' of in the sense that it is shown that for the most part, what they are about is either inhospitality or idolatrous religion.

it is often said that Jesus never said anything about what we call homosexuality, Sandra Turnbull challenges that. One of the 'new' things this book does is to look at the word 'eunuch' firstly in Jesus' teaching and to make the case that part of the semantic field of the term in the gospel and in the history and culture around it, is to refer to those who are constitutionally unable to make a heterosexual marriage even though they may be genitally intact -notably what we call homosexuality. This makes it considerably more plausible to see a potential affirmation by Jesus of 'gay' people, including couples and also in the early church.

I was very skeptical about this but I'm, if not convinced, at least now considering this. Sometimes I think that Sandra overstates her case and once or twice I think the argument looks a bit contradictory, but I think that the main direction of the argument is not unduly affected by those.

It will be very interesting to see Evangelicals in the Charismatic and Pentecostal traditions wrestle with this book.
God's Gay Agenda