Jesus is the Word of God for us!

As Luther expressed, God's Word is given in many forms.  Not all of God's word for humanity is contained in the Bible, because Jesus is also the Word of God for us (John 1:1-14).

Jesus Christ is the focus of the Scriptures: John’s Gospel has several instructive comments about the place of the Scriptures and the person of Jesus:

5:39 "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. ⁴⁰ Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. ⁴¹ I do not accept glory from human beings. ⁴² But I know that you do not have the love of God in you. ⁴³ I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; if another comes in his own name, you will accept him. ⁴⁴ How can you believe when you accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God? ⁴⁵ Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope. ⁴⁶ If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. ⁴⁷ But if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?"

21:25 But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.^{20:30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31} But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

We are guided in our search by the Holy Spirit, and we can have confidence that we are not making a grave error, because we are seeking Christ in truth and in fidelity to his promises to us.

As LGBT people it is not our concern to explain away every possible "clobber passage" with perfect scholarship and reasoning. All we need to do is to claim our allegiance to the same Christ who justifies all people. Yes, it is useful to understand these clobber passages, because it helps to diffuse the explosive power they seem to hold over our own hearts and consciences. But there will always be other hateful people who will try to out-shout us with their dire warnings and hatred.

An LGBT Catechism must make room for questions our forebears in faith never asked. We are all seekers, now, in our own time, because we are living in a world so vastly changed that many of the assumptions and questions of human life have changed forever. We do not know what the world will be like tomorrow, but we can be certain of one thing: the world of tomorrow will never be like the world that existed in the era of Abraham, David, Jesus, Paul or Luther.

It has been a hammer used against doubt and honest faithful questioning to say that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, or to say that God is eternal, and that God’s truth is eternal. That all may be helpful and truthful. But the world constantly changes, and the truth of Jesus Christ must speak to a changing world, not to a static one. To suppose that Christians are forbidden to ask new questions, or that we are "doubters" because we frame the concerns and ideas of our generation differently than the Bible’s context is ridiculous. Remember that Jesus spoke honestly and compassionately with all who questioned him. Indeed, much of his ministry was spent in trying to show faithful people that the "timeless" views of previous generations were obsolete or no longer applicable.