“Vines took a two year hiatus from his studies at Harvard to explore the issue and concluded that neither God nor the Bible condemns homosexuality.”
Wow, 2 years. So, when the Christian Church and its thousands and thousands of theologians have studied this issue for 2,000 years, and concluded the opposite, we are to conclude that Vines got it right? The arrogance of the article is suffocating.
And by the way, this is an entirely different issue from slavery and racism, the former which the Christian Church by the authority of the Holy Scriptures only tolerated under certain circumstances, but was instrumental in overturning when it could so persuade the society of its time and the latter which the Church by the same authority called morally wrong from the beginning. Now, to be sure, there were and are those who called themselves Christians who don’t know these basic facts and would argue with what I just wrote. But that just puts them in the ranks of those who do not follow what the Scriptures plainly say.
The Bible calls adultery, that is, sin, anything of a sexual nature which is not kept within the bounds of marriage, which is itself defined as the bonding of one man and one woman (Genesis 2:18-25). Vines must have missed that in the course of those arduous two years.
I suspect his "two year hiatus" to explore this issue consisted of half an hour of thumbing through the Bible, a few hours of looking at pro-Sodomite websites, and then 1.99 years of smoking his bong pipe.