You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Serious talk about the Sacred Book. I'm Pete Ends.

And I'm Jared Bias.

Well, hello, Normal People. Thank you for hanging with us. Today our topic is the Bible and the

Gate Christian. We're talking with Matthew Vines, who's the founder and executive director of the

Reformation Project, which is a nonprofit dedicated to reforming church teaching on sexual orientation

and gender identity. Right. And he's also the author of a book that came out what maybe two,

three years ago, I think 2014, God and the Gate Christian, which is his very, I guess,

bridge building book on how to help people see, let's say, the complexities of biblical

interpretation when it comes to the issue of human sexuality. And I found this one reason I'm

very excited to have Matthew on the podcast is because this is an issue that I think a lot of

Christians keep coming back to because so many complex things intersect here. It's a philology,

that's a boring way of saying, just what words mean in Greek and Hebrew and what those words mean in

their ancient context and what are ancient assumptions and how does all that factor into

how we read the Bible and fell into the mix things like the function of the law in the Old Testament

for Christians today. Throw into the mix the history of interpretation of these texts, both,

you know, before the time of Christ and certainly in the church thereafter and how that has influenced

how many people understand some of these texts. It really is sort of a rolloquaster ride of

interpretation and theology and philology and it's almost like it's a topic where a lot of these

issues just come home to roost in a way that's also of such practical and personal importance to

many people. Yeah, and I think that's the important thing to also in this is one thing that's

interesting to me is it's so clouded in a lot of emotion maybe rightly so in personal relationships.

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