I'm struck by a breathtaking disconnect on the part of those biblical scholars who insist that "the biblical view" of homosexuality should determine policy (concerning ordination and marriage ceremonies in churches; concerning a range of civil rights in society as well) in our own day.
A lot of the ground here is well trodden. Responsible historians know that the ancient world didn't perceive sexuality or "sexual orientation" the way we do; that means that any contemporary English translation of the Bible that renders Greek terms with the 19th-century neologism "homosexuality" is an exercise in daring anachronism. There are a number of excellent resources here, perhaps most accessible being L. William Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex (2nd ed. 2008). P. Deryn Guest lays out what's at stake in "Battling for the Bible: Academy, Church, and the Gay Agenda," Theology and Sexuality 15 (2001) 66-93.
I am particularly puzzled by two interpretive moves by "the opposition." (Both these moves are discussed by Guest, cited above.) One is exemplified by Alister McGrath in an essay in Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (a collection of essays edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, 1995), where he writes:
To allow our ideas and values to become controlled by anything or anyone other than the self-revelation of God in Scripture is to adopt an ideology rather than a theology; it is to become controlled by ideas and values whose origins lie outside the Christian tradition--and potentially to become enslaved to them. (72)
It's certainly an attractive claim--who wouldn't want to be able to claim to speak for God almighty, in contrast to one's poor benighted opponents who represent "mere" human thought? The problem, of course, is that the claim itself is an irreducibly ideological move: "I speak for God almighty because I intuit the very self-revelation of God in Scripture--and you don't." I side with those biblical scholars who recognize that all of the writings that we call scripture are thoroughly human creations; and all of the ways any of us employ to appeal to those writings to accomplish specific ends in our own situations are, irreducibly, our own choices for which we alone are responsible.
To some, I've just identified myself as a "postmodernist" or "deconstructionist," and the methodological battle lines are quickly drawn.
But wait a minute. Everyone, I mean everyone, realizes that the Bible is a human cultural product at least some of the time in at least some places. Nobody advocates slavery as the will of God, even though the Bible has nothing to say against slavery as such (it only--at best--puts a kinder, gentler face on slaveholding). This brings me to the second mind-boggling inconsistency, to which Guest draws attention (with particular focus on an essay, in the same collection, by Karl Donfried). Donfried concedes that the Bible "cannot be used as a legalistic text book that describes and prescribes all Christian action"--related, for example, to slaveholding--but then insists that "it is, however, a foundational source of moral teaching and contains certain parameters of behavior, the performance of which places one outside the community," that is, outside the church (p. 27).
Note the contrast: the Bible is foundational for "moral teaching"--just not for the kinds of behavior that might include slaveholding. Here "moral" seems to be confined to an intimate "zone" of bodily sexuality; slaveholding (for one instance) is part of a different zone that we might label "public" or "social."
At this our hermeneutical spidey sense should be tingling intensely. It's not just that any such categorical distinction between "private" and "public" (or intimate and social, or personal and political) is profoundly anachronistic. (After all, as Jennifer Glancy forcefully reminds us in Slavery in Early Christianity, the sexual abuse of slaves was an integral part of Roman slaveholding.) It's also completely artificial--for the ancient world and for our own--which means that the distinction tells us more about the ideological goals of its advocates than about the real world they're claiming to describe.
So here's my question. Why is it so important for some biblical scholars to insist that some parts of the Bible--those having to do with sexuality (and, in their view, condemning "homosexuality")--are eternally valid and should determine our views, behaviors, and policies today--even while acknowledging that other parts of the Bible are time- and culture-bound and, in effect, obsolete?
For some observers, the answer must have something to do with deep-seated antagonism to homosexuals on the part of those scholars. That sounds like an ad hominem attack--but of course the orchestrated campaign to erase gay and lesbian people from public view is nothing else than a massive ad hominem attack; the theological industry built around "explaining" the pathological and sinful origins of homosexuality, nothing less than systematic slander. It's hard for me to work up a lot of sympathy for those poor biblical scholars who stand accused of hating gays just because they've devoted considerable professional effort to . . . opposing gays.
But there's more going on here, I think. For some more traditionally minded Christians, and especially--poignantly--painfully--for those who have built professional careers as biblical scholars, it's really, really threatening to see the idea of "the Bible's authority" eroding hour by hour. If we're worried about those polar bears being stranded on rapidly melting ice floes floating south from the Arctic, how much should we fret about fellow Christians who find the biblical ground beneath their feet shrinking even more rapidly?
Maybe the battle is fueled, on one side, by a hefty dose of antipathy for gay and lesbian people. But maybe the battle is also carried on by people who are mostly anxious that "their" Bible is under attack; "their" faith--by which I mean the thought structure by which they've learned to make sense of their place in the world--is threatening to disintegrate. For these people, the "gay agenda" is simply the last stand in a decades-long theological culture war.
That doesn't mean, of course, that the battle is any less personal just because the injury to gay men and lesbian women is a sort of "collateral damage." There's a profound selfishness--what else should we call it but sin?--in an attitude that says, "I must defend my Bible, my church, my God against you people, whatever the emotional cost to you." It's no less hatred just because the hostility is impersonal.
My point is that the argument isn't just about homosexuality; it's also about the difficulty some Christians have moving beyond a traditional understanding of biblical authority--one that (if they think about it) they've already discarded in other, large swaths of their lives. Those of us who hold particular responsibilities as leaders, clergy, and teachers do the churches no service when we perpetuate traditionalist language about biblical authority. (That's why I found the "Reflections" document from the most recent Lambeth conference so profoundly troubling.) We can't straddle the fence--claiming to be "welcoming" and "hospitable" to gays and lesbians as if we're inviting them into "our" gay-friendly, "affirming" churches, all the while perpetuating traditional reverence for the Bible.
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