Zondervan’s New ‘Upside Down Bible’ Has Baaaaad Commentary on Immigration, Homosexuality
Zondervan recently released a new study Bible called “The Upside-Down Kingdom,” (UDKB), edited by Preston Sprinkle, and it is a nasty piece of subversive work.
Sprinkle is the co-founder of Revoice, President of the Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender, and host of Theology in the Raw podcast. No stranger to perverse and novel theology, he’s known for platforming a Roman Catholic lesbian who praised an X-rated BDSM film, and championing “gay Christian” or “trans Christian” identities, declaring that these designations ought to be celebrated and fully embraced by the church, promoting personal pronouns, arguing that annihilationism and universalism as legitimate, orthodox Christian positions, and suggesting that it’s “good parenting” to let teenage LGBTQ children date people of the same sex.
His newest project, the UDKB, opens up with an introduction from him quoting progressive ‘Sojourners’ founder Jim Wallis in the first sentence before explaining that “biblically rooted Christian faith should determine how we think about all areas of life: economics, immigration, the death penalty, abortion, war, violence, power, justice, sexuality, and what it means to follow the Creator’s design for human flourishing.” He adds that “This bible edition was written to “capture the specific counter-culture vision of God’s reign on earth” and to “unleash this counter-cultural, politically subversive, upside-down nature of the Christian faith.”
It seems there is something theologically subversive about it as well.
In the notes on Sexuality and Gender from Romans 1, the commentary reads, “Paul does not condemn same-sex attraction but same-sex sexual behavior. (…) It’s the act, not the attraction, that’s in focus here.” A brief replacement of the word ‘same-sex’ with ‘pedophilic,’ which is another type of attraction, shows how quickly this argument falters and fails.
The book of Matthew predictably has commentary on immigration and migration. These notes were written by Juan Martinez, a pastor, and professor who spent nearly four years as the communications assistant at the progressive site Red Letter Christians while also getting his Master of Divinity at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2020. He writes in the margins of Matthew 2:
“During the days of Joseph, the Hebrew people had to flee to Egypt. They fled from their God-given land because of an environmental and food-security crisis. Like Mary and Joseph, these migrants also feared for their lives….The evangelist Matthew is reminding us how the Messiah identifies himself with the experience of forced displacement. Jesus and his family were impacted by the same struggles that often accompany displacement: detachment, vulnerability, discrimination and nostalgia.
Nowadays, both the sacred family and the people of Israel would likely be identified as asylum seekers and refugees.”
He adds in Matthew 5:
It is right for families to have food and security. It is right for children to have enough resources to flour ish. It is right for parents to have the opportunity to nurture and take care of their children in safe environments. It is right for humans to migrate, looking for better conditions that are unavailable to them in their homelands.
If we believe that, then supporting and advocating for the migrant community is also the right thing to do. Jesus invites his disciples to consider the way of justice and righteousness as an essential part of their commitment to follow him.”
In an interview with Sprinkle, when asked about open borders, Martinez dodges the direct question while at the same time basically making a case for it:
So we need to inhabit the system, we need to be part of the system in a sense that we function within the system, but we are navigating the system in a subversive way, in a way that resists the tendencies of the system to destroy, to kill, to steal.
So it’s a subversive submission in the sense that we acknowledge the laws, that we participate in a society with laws, and we want that structure to be function within a society, and at the same time recognize that many times laws and policies do not reflect the kingdom of God. So when that happens, how do we manage to be Christians?
And there are more examples in the New Testament in which disciples said ‘it is better for us to obey God than the system or the laws of the system.’
When they found out that some expressions of that system were not aligned with what God has said about humanity, what God has said about our human dignity, our brothers and sisters, and again when they found out that some of part of the systems are aligned with the world and not with the kingdom, then I think we need to navigate the system in a subversive way.
It’s still navigating the laws, it’s still navigating the policies, but subverting the ways in with the system is not reflecting how God want us to to be.
About Author
Literally letting Satan speak through the commentary: “Yea, hath God said?”
As bad as that is, the NIV topped the problems in that NIV with John Mark Comer’s Lectio NIV Bible.