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HOMOSEXUALITY: REFLECTIONS ON THE CURRENT CONTROVERSY

Homosexuality is rarely out of the headlines. On both sides of the Atlantic the “outing” controversy has made the feathers fly, and not a year passes without one or more major denomination addressing the issue. In 1990 a Commission on Human Sexuality reported to the British Methodist Conference, while in the summer of 1991 it was the turn of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to attract the media’s attention with its Assembly’s resounding rejection of Holding Body and Soul Together. Passions run high. As one wag has mischievously commented, Christians seem divided between those who want to stone homosexual people and those who want to ordain them.

This high profile reflects the success of the gay and lesbian lobby. The pressures of its campaigns for gay rights are increasingly being felt among the churches. Their ultimate objective is the acceptance of homosexual behavior and relationships on equal terms with heterosexual. In theology and ethics, pastoral care and discipline, worship, membership and ministry, no distinction should be made between homosexuality and heterosexuality.

Unanswered Questions
If this goal were to be attained, it presumable would no longer matter that so many key questions remain unresolved. For example, what constitutes homosexual identity? Is it sufficient that a person wants to be known as, or claims to be, gay or lesbian? Is it dependent on the presence of a particular lifestyle or pattern of behavior? Is it permanent or temporary? Can it coexist with heterosexuality? In the case of so-called bisexuality, will the churches be expected to approve of individuals switching in and out of homosexual and heterosexual roles, or maintaining both at the same time?

These questions are not about causes, although they may in part be unanswerable without confronting deeper issues. They concern realities, or rather alleged realities. That many people behave homosexually is inescapable, but the relationship between such behavior and a homosexual identity that deserves to be taken seriously in ethical terms is another matter. Can it really be doubted that society’s—and, in some quarters, the churches’—increasing acceptance of the homosexual option encourages some people to behave homosexually and, at least in that sense, to become homosexual? In similar fashion a generation ago, in the age of “the new morality” (‘love and do what you like,” as Augustine—of all theologians!—was blatantly misrepresented as teaching), approval by a number of Christian leaders and writers of intercourse before and outside marriage had the effect of promoting extra-marital sexual misconduct.

Undermining Foundations
If the churches grant what the gay and lesbian lobby is demanding—full gay Christian and ecclesiastical rights—the result will be a revolution in Christianity of Copernican proportions. On this we must harbor no illusions. The Christian ideals of heterosexual marriage (and abstinence outside marriage) and of the family which is built on it could scarcely survive without grave damage. The issues at stake are quite fundamental for the integrity of the Christian religion.

Christianity’s almost unvarying disapproval of homosexual practice for two thousand years has been based not on a handful of disputed biblical texts, but on a central foundation of Christian doctrine—God’s creation of humanity as male and female, designed, even in their very anatomies, for a relationship of complementarity the one to the other. To that extent human nature is essentially heterosexual. A person’s nature as a creature of God can no more be homosexual than it can be, say, alcoholic or vegetarian or agoraphobic or homicidal or pacifist or racist. I doubt if a full-blooded acceptance of the homosexual option by Christian theology could be maintained without severe consequences for the doctrine of creation. This in turn could have quite frightening implications, for the equal dignity of every human being—young and aged, the genius and the mentally retarded, the beggar and the millionaire, black and white, persecuted and persecutor—has no surer foundation than the teaching that all are creatures of God, made in his image.

The specifically relevant biblical texts have been much discussed elsewhere (see D.F. Wright, “Homosexuality: The Relevance of the Bible,” EvQ 61 [4, 1989] 291-300). I wish to highlight one or two aspects which have gone unnoticed or not been given their due weight.

Romans 1
Romans 1:26-27 provide the clearest biblical reference to homosexual conduct. These verses have been subject to some fanciful revisionist exegesis. Paul is allegedly speaking only about heterosexuals who abandoned their individual heterosexual natures in order to indulge in homosexual practices which were, for them, unnatural. He is passing no comment, so this interpretation goes, on people of homosexual nature or orientation who live according to their nature. Fathering such a distinction on Paul is surely a gross anachronism, which results in a quite sophistic reading of the text. It also misses the background allusions to divine creation.

Or again what Paul is condemning, it is claimed, is homosexual disorder arising from idolatry, not behavior or a way of life adopted by the non-idolatrous masses. This exegesis not only fails to pay proper regard to Paul’s stress on the unnaturalness of the actions in question, but also turns the sequence of Paul’s thought on its head. He surely did not imply that everything idolaters did was wrong simply because they were idolaters. Rather it was the already known reprobate character of their unnatural sexual practices that showed what a dreadful thing idolatry was.

What hardly anyone has sufficiently weighed in Romans 1:26-27 is Paul’s setting male and female same-sex conduct on a par  with each other. The pairing may be instinctive for us, but it was very rare in antiquity, not least because female homosexuality is seldom mentioned. Paul is almost the first (preceded only by Plato and PsPhocylides) who links them together in a single condemnation. This immediately refutes those interpretations (such as R. Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality [Fortress, 1983], on which see D.F. Wright’s review in SJT 38 [1985] 118-129) which dismiss Paul’s teaching on the subject as mere convention, ‘preformed tradition” which Paul reproduced—unthinkingly? disinterestedly? automatically? Paul shows startling originality at this point.

The linkage means that Paul gives us here something akin to a generic condemnation of homosexual activity. His insight penetrates beyond particular expressions of same-sex behavior (such as male pederasty, the most common pattern in the Hellenistic world) to what it is that unites male and female homosexual misconduct. (There was no counterpart to pederasty on the female side.) Both forms were against nature, which in the context of Romans 1 means contrary to the design of the Creator. The passage turns out to have wider and clearer force than a number of recent writers have claimed.

Arsenokoitai
In 1 Cor6:9 and 1 Tim 1:10 appears the Greek noun arsenokoitai, which a review of the English versions shows to have caused translators some difficulty, although all agree that it denotes male homosexual agents of some kind. (The argument in the influential book by J. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality [Chicago, 1980], that it refers to male prostitutes who may have serviced males or females, is based on absurd linguistic analysis, as I have shown in “Homosexuals or Prostitutes? The Meaning of Arsenokoitai(1 Cor. 6:9,1 Tim. 1:10),” Vigiliae Christianae 38 [19841125-153. For the book’s serious inadequacies on early Christianity see my critique, “Early Christian Attitudes to Homosexuality,” Studia Patristica 18:2, ed. E.A. Livingstone [Kalamazoo, 1989] 329-334.)

Most interpreters argue that the word denotes the active or aggressive (adult) partner in pederastic intercourse. What hardly any have asked is why Paul did not use any of the numerous words or phrases current in Hellenistic Greek to denote pederasty if this is what he had specifically in mind. Instead he (and the author of 1 Timothy—the term is a significant Pauline element in the letter) chose a word that speaks generically of males, not more precisely of boys or youths, that was certainly very rare (if Paul did not coin it himself) and that was clearly constructed from the Greek of the Septuagint of Lev 18:22 and 20:13. The latter condemns hos an koimthe meta arsenos koiten gunaikos, and the former almost identically uses the two roots of arsenokoitai consecutively in the same order. (For further details see my Vigiliae Christianae article cited above.)

The failure of most scholars to discern the Septuagint basis of this Greek noun has often accompanied a claim that the Levitical prohibition of male homosexual intercourse had no influence on primitive Christianity. Boswell argues this, but the evidence refutes him, as I have shown in the studies already referred to. In particular the Pauline term is not one plucked from some conventional vice-list, but seems deliberately to catch up the Levitical ban. And there is no possibility that this ban was directed solely against an exploitative pederasty.

But if I thus contend that these Pauline texts, when examined closely in their historical context, prove much more eloquent and productive than is frequently assumed, my earlier point is worth repeating: a biblical rejection of the homosexual option by no means rests solely on these and similar texts. It flows from a much broader and deeper reservoir of biblical doctrine.

Some Causes of Weakness
To ascertain why churches have been finding the question a difficult one to resolve one would need to look in different directions. On the one hand account would have to be taken of modern theology’s weak doctrine of creation, and even weaker doctrine of the fall and original sin. On the widest canvas the prevalence of homosexuality, whether orientation or practice, cannot be understood except as an aspect of the fallenness of humankind in which we are all entangled.

On another front we live in a culture obsessed with sexuality of all kinds. One could be forgiven for concluding that the anthropology of the West in the late twentieth century views human beings as fundamentally constituted by their sexuality. When this is coupled with a prevalent ethos that deplores above all repression and inhibition (words which it prefers to “self-discipline” and “restraint”) and applauds above all freedom of self-expression and untrammeled individual rights (to be oneself, to do what comes naturally, etc.), even well-meaning Christians fail to realize what a poisoned atmosphere they are breathing.

A sense of guilt at society’s crude prejudice and persecution of homosexual individuals—not only in Nazi Germany— has understandably fostered a sympathetic change of mind and heart. This has been encouraged by gay and lesbian groups, and in Britain at least, is taking place in the context of serious church decline and a rapid transition to a pluralistic and secularized culture. A widespread loss of Christian nerve is evident, and many Christian leaders apparently have less stomach for the unpopularity and even ridicule that the advocacy of traditional Christian sexual ethics encounters.

In this as in other areas the Christian past is regarded as a source of embarrassment more often than of encouragement and guidance. The result is an absence of historical perspective. Attitudes and policies are being adopted which would not only have been unthinkable in earlier centuries but might well, if adopted then, have crippled or prevented the very development of Christianity. The sexual and marital ethics of the early church may well have been excessively influenced by asceticism, but had they reflected today’s easy-going, accommodating, “love-is-everything” Christian life-styles, Christianity would have had no clear alternative to offer the Graeco-Roman world.

No Floating Sexuality
Several of these factors have conspired together to persuade Christians to accept the status quo as the starting point for a consideration of the homosexual option. Not only do we seem fearful to confront a sexually disordered society with the summons to repentance and renewal, but we appear to have bought the common assumption that sexuality is a non-specific, indeterminate reality. Both the British Methodist report and Holding Body and Soul Together exemplify this abysmal structural fault. They begin with a general sexuality which is the gift of God, before they proceed to consider different expressions of sexuality prevalent in the contemporary scene and attempt to decide which might be acceptable. The Bible, and two thousand years of Christian theology, know no such floating or variable sexuality. They begin with heterosexuality, with man and woman created for each other, possessing sexual natures determined by and for that complementary relationship. Social realities and unquestioned social assumptions must not be allowed to play a prescriptive role in Christian ethics. I would regard the uncritical acceptance of the notion of a basic common sexuality not defined by reference to the other gender as the most worrying feature of present-day Christian reflection. We need to recover the roots of Christian sexual ethics expansively set forth in Scripture.

By D.F. Wright, Dean, Faculty of Divinity, University of Edinburgh.

Recommended Reading
D.J. Atkinson, Homosexuals in the Christian Fellowship (Latimer House, 131Banbury Road, Oxford, 1979).

R.F. Lovelace, Homosexuality and the Church (Revell, 1978).

D.L. Fans, Trojan Horse. The Homosexual Ideology and the Christian Church (Welch, 1989).

M. Green, D. Holloway, and D. Watson, The Church and Homosexuality (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980).

V.P. Furnish, The Moral Teaching of Paul (Abingdon, 1979).

P. Coleman, Christian Attitudes to Homosexuality (SPCK, 1980).