Strangers and Friends: A new exploration of homosexuality and the Bible by Michael Vasey (Hodder and Stoughton, 1995, 276 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Recognizing that he’s up against a conservative church’s “over-eager identification of [its] present understanding with God’s truth” and a tendency to value its own presuppositions “above the disturbing insight of the person on the edge” as well as up against the church’s selective memory of biblical and Christian history, Vasey presents a “grace-led approach” to the “complex and diverse world … of gay people.” That, he says, “implies a certain sort of penitent tolerance of some imperfection in what we call sexual matters. The question becomes not ‘Have you crossed the line?’ but ‘As one struggling sinner to another, are you making progress in your growth in grace?’” Noting that “the question ‘What does the Bible say?’ is never quite as simple as it looks,” Vasey asserts that “it is easy for a reader of scripture to be misled into thinking that the New Testament offers greater clarity on sexual behavior than is actually the case.” He asks: “exactly where is homosexuality to be found in scripture?” Warning that “careless exegesis costs lives,” Vasey examines the seven Bible verses that are popularly misused as “weapon[s] in a cultural war” against lesbians and gay men. As have other biblical scholars, he concludes that these texts don’t speak to issues of homosexuality as we know it today.
Lest some contemporary conservative American Christians dismiss his view as the weaseling of a “liberal”, it must be said that though he’s teaching at Britain’s University of Durham, Vasey’s conservative enough to attribute the pastoral epistles to Paul, show grateful indebtedness to other conservative Bible scholars, and admit that his “evangelical approach to the scriptures … will appear quaint” to some readers. His assessment of the Bible texts echoes that of Helmut Thielicke, his fellow evangelical European, who, in 1963, said that homosexuality “can be discussed at all only in the framework of that freedom which is given to us by the insight that even the New Testament does not provide us with an evident, normative dictum” on it. Thielicke went on to acknowledge that any question about homosexuality as now understood “must for purely historical reasons be alien to the New Testament” – something since endorsed by other evangelical Bible scholars and with which Vasey concurs, adding that even the concept of “‘sexuality’ is an historical construction” that isn’t found in the Bible. Beyond the “antigay” verses, however, Vasey discusses the relevance of the “missiological pragmatism” of I Corinthians 11, the “radicalization of ethnic and sexual identity” of Romans 14 and the “vulnerability before reconciliation” of II Corinthians.
Vasey identifies himself as an evangelical who takes seriously our “profound and destructive rebellion against God.” God’s “unmerited grace” in Jesus Christ, and the “untamed activity of the Holy Spirit” as well as God’s “speak[ing] through the Bible.” But he is saddened by the fact that evangelicalism is “one of the most hostile cultural forces experienced by gay people in the West.” He contrasts this with the fact that Jesus was accused of being the “ ‘friend of sinners’ … enjoying the company of those beyond the pale of the moral law or the standards of righteous society.” Vasey’s Jewish background (with family members lost at Auschwitz) makes him especially sensitive to needs of “a people for whom conventional expressions of the Christian faith have been, at the very least, dangerous.” He says that while antigay “ ‘conservative’ Christian documents always include an obligatory paragraph deploring the hostility and injustice experienced by gay people” – though they don’t always do that – these statements “lack credibility, partly because they include no analysis of the hostility and violence experienced by gay people, and partly because they never issue in any action that is likely to be effective in the public arena.”
Taking a lead from Jacques Ellul, he tries to understand “why modern society is so reluctant to extend the ordinary dignities of human life to gay people.” He suggests that evangelicalism is provoked by lesbian/gay rebellion against traditions that he, after Ellul, sees as society’s idols. One of these idols, so-called “family values”, is the “impos[ing] on scripture the domestic ideal of the nuclear family – a husband and wife with their children enjoying domestic bliss in protected isolation from wider society.” Not only is this a late model of a family, but, ironically, as Vasey says, “The emotion that we identify as ‘romantic love’ flourished and even gained its firs cultural and poetic form in European culture, within the single sex institutions of the Christian church.” Says Vasey: “The strangest feature of the contemporary alliance between evangelical Christians and so-called ‘family values’ is a lack of awareness that conflict between family and Christian faith has been a part of Christianity since4 the New Testament.” Another idol is the dominant “cultural exaltation of competition between males as the basis of economic and social well-being.” Vasey adds: “Those who find themselves the enemy of idols cannot be very far from the mysterious presence of the true and living God.” Well, yes. And as in this comment, Vasey sometimes needlessly overstates his case. At the very end, for example, he says “the biblical and traditional images of heaven are … almost camp …[and] have more in common with a Gay Pride event than … the leisurewear informality of evangelical Christian life.” At a few points he places too uncritical a confidence in “gay sensibility”. Though cautioning that he is not saying that “the accepted wisdom of popular gay culture is either uniform or always correct”, he nonetheless is a bit too willing to say that, as such – and notwithstanding the host5ility sustained and even internalized – “gay people themselves may be the best people to discern what patterns of behavior are healthy and supportive in the lives of gay people.” Is this the case in either the “gay ‘manuals’ … on anonymous and recreational sex” or in the “ex-gay” movement in which, Vasey says, “gay people are giving their own account of their experiences”? Besides, are non-gays always the best judges of their lives?
On the whole, however, Vasey’s is an excellent contribution to a better evangelical understanding of homosexualities – ancient and modern.