Answers to an AP Reporter's Questions
about the Church's Debate of Homosexual Unions
By Robert A. J. Gagnon
Nov. 7, 2006
© 2006
Robert A. J. Gagnon
[For printing, I recommend the pdf version
here.]
[On
May 26, 2006, an AP reporter asked me some questions in connection
with a story about “how divisions over Scriptural authority and
homosexuality grew so wide within mainline denominations, why it's
so difficult (maybe impossible) to reconcile differing views, and
whether schism is inevitable.” The timing of the questions had to do
with the then upcoming national assemblies of the Episcopal Church
and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The reporter asked me the
following specific questions:
·
Did the debate
over homosexuality trigger divisions over Scriptural authority among
mainline Protestants or did those differences already exist when
discussion about ordaining gays started?
·
Why is it that
Protestants with different understandings about Scripture seemed to
peacefully co-exist at one time, but appear unable to do so now?
·
Why has this
debate gone on for so long?
·
Is there any
way to reconcile differing views over homosexuality and interpreting
Scripture?
I provided a
response. For whatever reason, no part of my response appears to
have made it to the light of day. So after a half year more, I have
decided to make my response public.]
Debate over
homosexual practice among mainline Protestants has both fueled and
ignited longstanding divisions over scriptural authority.
Divisions over scriptural authority antedate the debate over homosexual
practice. But debate over homosexual practice has provided a decisive
concrete test-case for deciding whether Scripture or self-interpreted
experience will function as the highest authority in matters of faith
and practice. Not since the period of the Reformation has there been a
frontal assault on an ethical standard so deeply embedded in the whole
witness of Scripture.
Mainline
denominations are being besieged by an inversion of levels of
interpretive authority. Historically the church has given Scripture
the highest position in deciding issues involving faith and practice,
followed by philosophic reason, scientific reason, and experience (no
experience is self-interpreting). Proponents of homosexual unions are
threatening to overturn that order so that experience is placed at the
top, followed inversely by scientific reason (though science does not
support affirmation of homosexual unions), philosophic reason, and,
last, Scripture.
The Bible’s
stance for a two-sex prerequisite for marriage and against homosexual
unions is pervasive, absolute (without exception), strong (a first-order
sexual offense), and countercultural.
It begins already
with the story of the creation of “male and female” as
complementary sexual counterparts in Genesis 1-2. Woman is presented as
coming from the “side” (a better translation than “rib”) of a human/man,
a beautiful picture of man and woman as each other’s sexual “other
half.”
In the Bible the
broad context for the issue of homosexual practice is that every
narrative, law, exhortation, proverb, and poetry that has anything to do
with human sexuality presupposes a male-female requirement for sexual
relations.
Leviticus
20:10-16 regards male-male intercourse as a first-order offense, along
with the adultery, bestiality, and the worst forms of incest. That
moral, and not merely ritual, impurity is in view is evident from the
fact that the impurity is not “contagious,” is not expunged merely by
ritual bathing, is limited to intentional acts, and is associated with
the term “abomination” in Lev 18:22 and 20:13.
The Sodom story
in Gen 19 (and the related story of the Levite at Gibeah) is not limited
in its indictment of homosexual practice to coercive forms any more than
a story about a rape of one’s father is limited in its indictment of
incest to coercive forms (as in the story of Ham’s act against his
father Noah in Genesis 9).
A series of texts in
the books from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings that speak in a derogatory manner
against the qedeshim, male cultic figures who serve as the
receptive partners in intercourse with other men, primarily have in view
their homoerotic activity.
As for the New
Testament, Jesus in Mark 10 predicated his own distinctive view
of marital monogamy and indissolubility—the limitation of sexual unions
to two and only two persons—on the ‘twoness’ of the sexes, or sexual
dimorphism, ordained by God at creation in Genesis 1-2.
Paul in Romans
1:24-27 described homosexual practice as an indecent dishonoring of
God’s creation of us as “male and female” and a classic instance of the
suppression of the truth about our sexual selves visible in material
creation. In 1 Corinthians 6:9 Paul lists “men who lie with a male”
alongside men who regularly and unrepentantly engage in incest,
adultery, and sex with prostitutes as among those who “shall not inherit
the kingdom of God.”
In short, there is no
getting around the fact that Scripture consistently treats
unrepentant homosexual activity as one of the most serious sexual
offenses to God’s will.
Some claim that
Scripture only condemns exploitative or coercive homosexual unions
(men who have sex with boys, slaves, or male prostitutes) but
there is no credible evidence supporting this view.
The best scholars among
those who support homosexual unions recognize that the scriptural
prohibitions against homosexual practice are framed absolutely. In
Romans 1:26-27 Paul indicts both female and male homosexual practice and
female homosexual practice in the ancient world is not known for
coercion. Moreover, he refers in 1:27 to men “inflamed in their yearning
for one another,” which certainly doesn’t sound like a coercive
relationship. The fact that in Paul’s major indictments of homosexual
practice here and in 1 Cor 6:9 there are clear allusions to the creation
texts indicates that Paul would have opposed all sexual unions that did
not involve a male and female. The same is true of Paul’s nature
argument in Rom 1:26-27, which alludes to the embodied complementarity
of men and women as a clue to God’s intent for sexual relationships.
In addition, the
conception of caring homosexual unions was well known in the ancient
world. Had Christians wanted to distinguish between caring and
non-caring homosexual unions, they could easily have done so. That they
didn’t is further evidence that they were indicting all homosexual
unions. In fact, some Greek and Roman moralists already condemned all
homosexual acts, even those that were entered “willingly” and were
characterized by “tenderness” (see, for example, the speech of Daphnaeus
in Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love).
Early Jewish
interpretation of the Levitical prohibitions makes clear that “the
law recognizes only sexual intercourse that is according to nature, that
which is with a woman . . . abhors the intercourse of males with males”
(Josephus) and is inclusive of sex between men and men, not just men
with boys (so the rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin
54a).
Some claim that
modern knowledge of homosexual orientation makes obsolete Scripture’s
indictment of homosexual relations. Yet there is no reason for drawing
this conclusion. There were a number of theories in the Greco-Roman
world positing at least a partial congenital basis for some homosexual
attraction and some of those holding such theories still rejected
the homosexual behavior arising from such impulses. Paul viewed sin as
an innate impulse running through the members of the human body, passed
on by an ancestor, and never entirely within human control. Since all
behavior is at some level biologically caused, the moral acceptability
of a behavior cannot be deduced from biological causation. Again, some
of the top scholars among those supportive of homosexual unions
recognize that knowledge of a homosexual “orientation” would not have
changed Scripture’s indictment of homosexual unions.
As regards the use of
analogical reasoning, some appeal to changing Scripture’s
stance on slavery as an analogy for changing its stance on
homosexual practice. This is a bad analogy. There is no scriptural
mandate to enslave others; indeed, many texts in Scripture are critical
of the institution of slavery. But Scripture does have a very clear
mandate for a male-female prerequisite for sexual unions, from creation
on. From the standpoint of countercultural witness there is no
comparison: While Scripture moves in the direction of critiquing the
culturally accepted institution of slavery, it also moves in the
direction not of greater tolerance toward homosexual unions but of
greater rejection as compared to what prevailed in the surrounding
cultures.
Nor can homosexual
impulses be likened to ethnicity or gender, conditions that are
totally heritable, absolutely immutable, primarily non-behavioral, and
intrinsically benign.
Can there be
long-term reconciliation within the mainline denominations—an
agree-to-disagree approach—over issues such as the ordination of persons
engaged in serial, unrepentant homosexual practice and the blessing of
homosexual unions? My opinion is: Only if the standards of the church
against homosexual activity by officers of the church remain
enforceable.
The homosexuality
debate is ultimately a debate about ethics in general: whether innate,
biological urges or Jesus will be lord and master of our lives. Because
so much is at stake, I do not think that there is a compromise position
that will avert major church divisions. It is like asking whether the
mainline churches can agree to disagree on man-mother incest or
polyamorous practices or adultery.
Persons supporting
homosexual unions won’t give up on the issue because they wrongly regard
it as a “social justice” issue. They will not be content with a local
option, much less with demoting a national requirement to a nonessential
standard. Any accommodation made by a mainline denomination to ordaining
persons in homosexual unions will serve as a transitional stage to an
inevitable foisting of homosexual endorsement on the denomination as a
whole.
Abraham Lincoln in
1858 declared—borrowing from Jesus’ rebuttal of charges that he cast out
demons by Beelzebul (Mark 3:20-27)—that “a house divided against itself
cannot stand” and that, in time, the United States “will become all one
thing [i.e., all slave states], or all the other [all free states].”
This is similar to the current decision faced by each mainline
denomination on the homosexuality issue: They will operate either under
the motto that innate biological urges are Lord, and we their slaves, or
under the motto that Jesus is Lord even of such urges.