What is Catalyst?
Four issues of Catalyst are mailed each academic year to some 5,000 UM theological students in more than 100 seminaries in the U.S.A.

AFTE
Catalyst is a project of A Foundation for Theological Education (AFTE).

What is the John Wesley Fellowship Program?
Each year AFTE awards up to five John Wesley Fellowships to assist gifted United Methodists in their doctoral studies at the finest universities.

Back Issues
Several back issues of Catalyst are now available on-line.

Subscriptions
Subscription is free for UM seminarians, and is available to all others for $5 per year.

THE HERMENEUTICS OF HOMOSEXUALITY: RECENT TRENDS

How did the shift occur in the discussion of homosexuality from one of morality to one of rights, and why have many Christians become increasingly tolerant of homosexual behavior? In the broadest terms, we might consider developments in Western and especially American culture. Begin with the affirmation that all people are created equal, and continue with the principle that the state should not rule in matters of personal conscience. Implication: the state should protect privacy. But then gradually remove the notion of a universal standard by which to evaluate behavior (the Judeo-Christian tradition), and people are left to evaluate their own behavior, which is all equally moral because it is all equally legal. The flip side of this is that it becomes immoral—and it could actually become illegal—to express intolerance, and the definition of intolerance could extend to any challenge of a legally protected behavior or opinion.

The confusion between what is legal and what is moral and the emergence of tolerance as the supreme virtue stand behind most of the important issues being debated today. But the problem of losing a balance between rights and obligations is not new. Plato predicted that democracy would crumble and pave the way to dictatorship because a foolish majority would turn liberty into license (Republic 562-65). Judges laments a period of chaos in which “all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judg 21:25) rather than “what is right in God’s eyes” (Exod 15:26). So the particulars change, but the underlying problem does not. Even within the church, human experience has become for many the canon by which Scripture is evaluated.

For those who are just catching up to revisionist attempts to recast the Bible as silent or even positive toward homosexuality, it may be a surprise to learn that increasing numbers of scholars— influenced by the sexual deconstruction of M. Foucault and by the feminist critique of biblical sexuality—freely acknowledge a biblical condemnation of homosexuality, but dismiss this condemnation on the ground that it is an arbitrary expression of an obsolete patriarchalism. Since, they maintain, power creates truth, new power structures will create new sexual mores based on mutuality.

Philosophical trends, however, do not make the evening news. What does make the news is the “nature or nurture” debate, which, sadly, has become a politicized media circus pitting Science against The Religious Right. What evidence there is for a biological component in homosexual orientation is quickly wrought into an argument for tolerance, since it is easy to effect a shift in the public mind between what one is ‘by nature” (female, black) and what one does (presumably) “by nature.” Even though most scientists remain unconvinced of the evidence, even though no ethicist worth the name considers biological causes any more relevant to homosexual behavior than to adultery or child molestation, even though many within the homosexual community itself snicker at the “we can’t help ourselves” argument—still the mass media persistently portrays, and the public increasingly adopts, a view that homosexuals do not do but are. If they are, and they experience oppression similar to that of minorities and women, then we must accept them—even celebrate them—as we do other victims.

Public trends toward tolerance aid the intellectual and political leaders of some mainline denominations in their efforts to influence the reluctant majority in the pews by means of lectures, guided discussions, and testimonies. The primary strategy is the appeal to experience, exposing doubters to homosexual people who are Christians. Since they have come to see through experience that their sexuality is something natural and therefore a gift of God, other believers can at the very least tolerate their presence in the church. To do otherwise, it is suggested, would be bigotry. It is of course only a few small steps from the avoidance of bigotry to the advocacy of ordination.

For most Christians, a shift toward tolerance of homosexual practice is impossible without setting aside, revising, or at least obscuring the seemingly clear import of several biblical texts. This challenge is taken up by a growing list of books which attempt to provide a revisionist hermeneutic. In order to avoid the repetition of a book-by-book summary, I offer a survey organized by arguments, parenthetically noting their most important proponents.

The Bible Does Not Condemn Homosexuality
Homosexuality is the desire for and the phenomenon of sexual behavior between members of the same sex. The words “desire” and “between” imply that the behavior involves mutual adult consent. The Bible undoubtedly affirms heterosexuality, but does it condemn homosexuality as we know it today? Some revisionists maintain that the handful of passages which supposedly condemn homosexuality actually refer to activities which modern homosexuals would also condemn (Furnish, Scroggs). Since I assume that most readers are generally familiar with these arguments, I will limit myself to summaries and the general direction which a critical engagement might take.

Genesis 19:1-8 and Judges 19:16-30, in the revisionist view, either involved a desire to “interrogate” rather than to “have sex with” (Bailey) or involved only male rape (Edwards, McNeill, Jung and Smith). The latter view is historically defensible, but the argument that either interpretation renders the passages and subsequent canonical references to them irrelevant is indefensible. By NT times, the sin of Sodom was generally understood as same-sex attraction.

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are quickly dismissed because of their context, the Holiness Code of Leviticus 17-26, which is rescinded by the gospel, and which in any case has in view male prostitution in association with idolatry (hence “abomination”), not homosexual behavior between consenting equals (Edwards, Goss). This dismissal is hardly possible in view of Paul’s use of arsenokoitai in 1 Cor 6:9-10 and 1 Tim 1:10, which is taken directly from the LXX text of Lev 20:13. This observation is crucial to establish the normativity for Christians of the Levitical proscriptions of same-sex acts, which are described without respect to the age or economic position of the partners. In both Testaments, the deviation is not from justice or purity (only) but from marriage, and the supporting rationale is not limited to a few proscriptive texts but is grounded in Genesis (which both Jesus and Paul cite) and the pervasive affirmation of heterosexual monogamy throughout Scripture.

Romans 1:26-27, the key text, is subject to several different kinds of smoke screens sent up by contemporary interpreters. Most commonly they set Paul’s writing in the context of his time, where the forms of same-sex intimacy were unjust: pederasty and prostitution (Furnish, Scroggs). But Paul’s language clearly implies mutual desire and attraction, and his unusual joint reference to male and female same-sex activity signals a deeper problem than the “Paul as culturally conditioned” or “Paul as sexist” schools want to see. Paul understands that confusion involving a person’s (sexual) identity emanates from humanity’s idolatrous rebellion against God. He has in view the creation narrative in Genesis, and the nitpicky discussions of his use of “natural” are anachronistic. For him, “natural” is not so much biological or phenomenological as theological— that is, God intended people to have sex in particular ways in certain contexts.

The Bible’s Condemnation of Homosexuality Should Be Qualified
Another revisionist approach acknowledges that Scripture prohibits same-sex intimacy and assumes the normativity of heterosexuality but attempts to modify this stance in light of larger themes in the Bible itself. We might characterize these attempts in relation to the biblical material by the words implication, expansion, and correction.

The implication approach suggests that we should set aside interests of ritual purity for the gospel values of love and liberation. In this view, the Levitical proscriptions are part of the Holiness Code from which the gospel sets Christians free (Boswell, Countryman). In Rom 1:26-27, Paul is careful to use the terminology of ritual impurity rather than immorality when he describes homosexuality (Boswell, Countryman) because he wants to expose the hypocrisy of legalists among his audience in the next chapter. His real message is in Rom 14:14: “nothing is unclean in itself.” The NT sows the seeds of liberation from all legalistic restrictions on human sexuality. Galatians 3:28 serves notice to the rule of law, the constraints of purity: “In Christ there is no longer [gay nor straight].” This approach cannot stand exegetical scrutiny: Paul uses the same language in a variety of contexts to denote sin, not only impurity.

The expansion of the biblical message allows for affirmation of homosexuality by removing human sexuality from illogical traditions connecting it to reproduction and male-female complementarity (Pronk, Jung and Smith). In this view, sex involves much more than procreation, sexual pleasure is not limited to coitus, and other differences between the sexes are artificial. Without these bases for prohibitions of same-sex acts, we must consider carefully the life-enhancing experience of many contemporary homosexuals (Guinan, Farley, Goss) and expand our traditional categories for loving relationships. New categories will stress the quality of relationship as the basis of sexuality (Edwards, McGuire, McNeill, Goss). The trouble with these categories is that they are no more than pale shadows of marriage, and they reflect a kind of neo-Gnosticism, where the physical body (and its procreative potential) has no real importance.

The correction of the biblical message allows for affirmation of homosexuality by applying the scriptural message of liberation to the troubling passages themselves. Oppressed people, including homosexuals, see their own Exodus experience when they read the biblical stories that offer deliverance to social outcasts. This experience allows them to correct unjust (and therefore unChristian) elements in the Bible or in traditional interpretations of the Bible. It is the children of Israel suffering in Exodus, rather than those who control and exclude in Leviticus or Romans, who provide the pattern for Christian discipleship (Comstock). To act as a disciple of Jesus, to live out the implications of the gospel, is to work for liberation (Goss). Biblical liberation, however, does not release the individual from moral responsibility, and the hermeneutics of liberation appears to be quite self-serving when it moves from economics to sexuality. Are not pedophiles even more oppressed?

The feminist variation of the liberation approach begins with the recognition that biblical sexuality is patriarchal, rooted not in human biology but in human culture. If the Bible is not to continue as a tool for oppression, only its non-sexist parts and non-oppressive biblical interpretation can have the theological authority of revelation (Williams). More specifically, we must set aside the patriarchal Pauline assumption of sexual asymmetry or active-passive roles and redefine sexuality in terms of equality and justice. But sex is never “symmetrical,” nor does biblical sexuality necessarily involve injustice. Paul’s approach accords privilege to neither dominance nor sameness but instead to mutual ownership, which should involve an erotic celebration of differences along the lines of the Song of Solomon.

Conclusion
Space allows only an outline of revisionist positions and a few suggestions for response at the close of each paragraph above. In addition to those suggestions, I recommend the bibliography below and further thinking along these lines:

(1) Do not limit discussion to the five or six debatable prescriptive texts, but formulate a theology of marriage based on Genesis and its use by Jesus and Paul.

(2) Explore the full medical implications of homosexual activity—by no means limited to HIV. This is crucial, and it is left out of almost every moral discussion.

(3) Appreciate the irrelevance of the nature-nurture debate. Remember that biological causation is not moral justification, and consider the possibility that child molestation, or male promiscuity in general, is “biologically determined.”

(4)  Always convey the biblical proscription of homosexual behavior in the context of your own fallenness in the area of sexuality. Homosexuals are numerically insignificant among those, including you and me, who need God’s grace in this age of confused sexuality.

By Thomas E. Schmidt, Ph.D., Westmont College.

Important Revisionist Literature:
S. Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (Green, 1955).

J. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Yale University, 1980).

G.D. Comstock, Gay Theology without Apology (Pilgrim, 1993).

L.W. Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex (Fortress, 1988).

G.A. Edwards, Gay/Lesbian Liberation: A Biblical Perspective (Pilgrim, 1984).

MA. Farley, “An Ethic for Same-Sex Relations,” in R. Nugent, ed., A Challenge to Love (Crossroad, 1983) 93-106.

M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (Vintage, 1980).

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

R. Goss, Jesus Acted Up (Harper, 1993).

P.B. Jung and R.F. Smith, Heterosexism: An Ethical Challenge (SUNY, 1993).

J.J. McNeill, The Church and the Homosexual (4th ed.; Boston, 1993).

P. Pronk, Against Nature? (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1993).

R. Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality (Fortress, 1983).

R. Williams, Just as I Am: A Practical Guide to Being Out, Proud and Christian (Crown, 1992).

Responses to Revisionist Arguments:
J.P. Hanigan, Homosexuality: The Test Case for Christian Ethics (Paulist, 1988).

R.B. Hays, "Relations Natural and Unnatural: A Response to John Boswell's Exegesis of Romans 1," JRE 14 (1986) 186-95.

D. Novak, "Before Revelation: The Rabbis, Paul, and Karl Barth," JR 71 (1, 1991) 50-66.

O. O'Donavan, "Transsexualism and Christian Marriage, " JRE 11 (1, 1983) 135-62.

T.E. Schmidt, Straight and narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexuality Debate (InterVarsity, 1995).

D.F. Wright, "Homosexuality: The Relevance of the Bible," EvQ 61 (4, 1989) 291-300.

idem, "Homosexuals or Prostitutes? The Meaning of arsenokoitai (1 Cor 6:9, 1 Tim. 1:10), Vigiliae Christianae 38 (1984) 125-53.