I have seen several very good reviews of TORN: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate by Justin Lee. I could link to several different reviews (and I may link to more in the future) but I thought this was a good review because it is a personal review of a pastor that has been struggling through the issue because his brother has come out as gay.
After learning that my younger brother was gay, I was forced to think through my own understandings of homosexuality and my interpretation of scripture. What had once been abstract was now quite personal. Here I was, a pastor with an evangelical pedigree (even if I was on the progressive side of that movement), and though I opposed efforts to discriminate against gays in the broader society, that didn’t mean I supported the ordination of gays or gay marriage. There was, in my mind, a preponderance of evidence that ruled out such a reality. Not only did Scripture seem to rule out an active “œgay lifestyle,” but nature itself seemed to be an important impediment to full acceptance. I wasn’t convinced that this was anything but a choice, and a wrong one at that. With this perspective, how should I respond? To say the least, things got turned upside down by this revelation.