Quote from New Testament calls same-sex relationships ‘shameful’
Police are investigating a lawmaker in Finland for posting Bible verses on Facebook.
Päivi Räsänen, a member of parliament, was expressing criticism of the national church’s support for the LGBT agenda when she posted Romans 1:24-27.
“How can the church’s doctrinal foundation, the Bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of pride?” she wrote.
The Scripture she posted was: “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator–who is forever praised. Amen.
“Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.”
The British multi-media group Premier reported Räsänen’s criticism of the official Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for its support of the Helsinki LGBT Pride events in June.
ELCF, with some 3.8 million members, has declined at a rate of 1 to 2 percentage points annually.
Finnish police have begun investigating the claims of incitement against sexual and gender minorities.
Räsänen previously was in the news for her conservative views on abortion, euthanasia and marriage.
“I am not concerned on my part,” she tweeted Aug. 13, “as I trust this will not move on to the prosecutor. However, I am concerned if quoting the Bible is considered even ‘slightly’ illegal. I hope this won’t lead to self-censorship among Christians.”
She is a member of the Christian Democrats party in Finland, a minority group that holds five of the 200 seats in parliament.
The Christian Institute in the United Kingdom noted Finland legalized same-sex marriage in 2014, but the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland still officially teaches marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
“Almost 8,000 members left the church when a previous archbishop commended the same-sex marriage bill as it was passed,” the report said.
Evangelical Focus reported the ELCF, as the national church, “plays an active role in the public sphere and has the right to collect church tax from its membership that is largely secularized but contains an active minority of conservative ‘revival movements.’”
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