Loveday Alexander helpfully clarifies the difference it makes when we regard homosexual practice as social phenomenon (as we tend to do nowadays) compared with seeing it as a moral issue (as is the case in the Bible).

‘We don’t talk (as a church) of being ‘inclusive’ towards murderers (say), or of repenting of negative attitudes towards financial fraud. (We will of course want to stress that the church is there for sinners — but we don’t thereby condone the sin.) The language of inclusion is the language we use not of moral categories but of social or anthropological categories (race, gender, disability).’

I have doubts about where Alexander takes this (we ‘now know’ what the biblical writers did not know, namely that ‘our sexual identity is not about moral choice but about “orientation”‘.

So, he continues:

‘I don’t think we should underestimate the huge (and surprisingly  apid) cultural shift that is involved here. But I am convinced that it is not simply a cultural fad but a genuine shift in moral perception, based not only on the solid evidence of psychiatry and medical science, but on the day-to-day  experience of countless gay youngsters and their heterosexual parents and grandparents. It is a shift as momentous in its way as the shift in the 19th-century perception of the ethics of slavery (though that was a shift in the opposite direction, from social category to moral issue) — and as troubling in its challenge to centuries of biblical interpretation.’

To continue to see homosexual behaviour as ‘sin’ is (claims Alexander) becoming increasingly implausible:

‘For many…(both inside and outside the church), the Bible’s negative statements about women and gays belong with those ‘texts of terror’ which have been used over the centuries ‘to authorize appalling abuse, even murder, of women, Jews, slaves, colonized peoples, homosexuals’ – texts which come from ‘a culture whose ethical presuppositions and dispositions were inferior to the best of our own, a culture that was xenophobic, patriarchal, classist, and bloodthirsty.’  The pace of criticism seems if anything to have accelerated during the debate over gay marriage over the past couple of years, with many young people (under 40, that is) simply walking away from a church which they regard as ‘evil’ and a Bible that belongs to a world they don’t recognise, which speaks with the voices of prejudice and oppression.’ (The quote is from Davis and Hays)

Alexander then turns to the question of how we can honour the Bible while accepting that we cannot accept its assumptions about same-sex relations.  I find his discussion insightful in places, but ultimately unconvincing.

But, still, the basic distinction is a helpful one, whichever side of it we might places ourselves on.