Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Ethics in the New Testament and their Implications for Today by L. William Countryman (Fortress, 1988, 290 pp.) 20 Hot Potatoes Christians are Afraid to Touch by Tony Campolo (Word, 1988, 235 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Countryman, an Episcopal priest and professor of New Testament, places his study of sex in the context of biblical assumptions on purity and prosperity (dirt and greed). In discussing the power and unity of cultural purity or wholeness in ancient and first-century Judaism, he explains that to be clean, each individual must be only of its own unmixed kind and without blemish. Thus we have the Levitical curiosity that defined the partly leprous as “unclean” (mixed) and the totally leprous as “clean” (unmixed). Cross-dressing, for example, mixed two kinds in one. Countryman points out that, in Torah, “All sexual and quasi-sexual emissions defile”. He cautions that modern Bible readers who are ignorant of such assumptions can easily miss the point of some Bible passages. He then explains the revolutionary redefinition of purity in Christianity. He also points out that modern readers who are unfamiliar with other old biblical assumptions of sexual property rights in the male-owned families of ancient Israel will likewise misinterpret Bible passages. He explains how these old arrangements and perspectives were overturned by Jesus, who “was not friendly toward the family as an institution”. Jesus’ followers were rather to see each other as family and Paul taught that they belonged to Christ instead of to their families. Christian sex ethics flow from such revisioning. With reference to the two obscure terms in I Corinthians 6, allegedly meaning homosexuals, Countryman notes that the live meanings of words cannot be learned by simple extrapolation from components and that, “it would be unwise to imagine that we can know clearly or definitively what the terms meant to Paul”. The author’s textually faithful interpretation of Romans 1 differs from the traditionally conservative one in that he emphasizes Paul’s understanding that God surrendered Gentile culture to the unlceanness, not to the sin , of homosexual acts as a result of the root sin of idolatry. He shows that Paul’s choice of words recalls the purity code itself rather than the Apostle’s own rich vocabulary of sin. He states well the case for Paul’s basic use of Romans 1 as a “rhetorical trap” to be spring on his Jewish Christian critic in Romans 2. He concludes that the Romans text “makes rhetorical sense only on the presupposition that [Paul] kept, in the realm of sex as well as that of food, a consistent distinction between impurity and sin”. How, he asks, could Paul have appealed to the Gentile Christians in Rome if his illustration of their culture’s homosexuality at the very beginning of the letter was to mean that they were “uniquely sinful” as Gentiles? Countryman reminds us, too, that Paul goes on to say later in the letter that now “nothing is unclean in and of itself”.
The very necessity for this book is an indictment of Christians. We have so failed at proclaiming God’s grace and peace, so failed to call each other to grateful lives of justice and mercy, so firmed up an “us v them” mentality, that people get sidetracked by the worldly self-righteousness and homophobia that passes for much of Christianity today.
Homosexuality is such a “hot potato” that Campolo’s chapter on it is the only one the Eastern College sociologist bolsters with a bibliography – two pages of good academic sources. He also takes pains – within ten pages – to repeatedly assure his readers: “I do think that homosexual behavior is contrary to the will of God”, that “personally I hold to a belief that homosexual behavior is wrong, regardless of what motivates it”, that “I am not saying that homosexuals should engage in homosexual sex”, that “I am not asking that Christian people … ignore their conviction that homosexual acts are sin”. But what he is trying to do with all the other “hot potatoes” (e.g., women preachers, hunting, TV evangelism, Israel, etc.) and what his conference ministry is all about is to vigorously urge Christians to radically change their firmly held convictions. On homosexuality he asks only that they “reach out and show kindness and affection toward their homosexual neighbors” while still insisting, with him, that all homosexual acts are sinful.
Campolo rejects “ex-gay” claims and thus admires the “brave saints who endure lives of sexual frustration” in neglecting their homosexual needs. He admits that “more and more research suggests that in a great number of cases, if not in an overwhelming majority, homosexual orientation is inborn”. Though not a biblical scholar, he does admit that “among some of the most respected biblical scholars”, his own interpretation of the Bible on homosexuality is refuted. He admits that “there may be some validity” to their arguments. He offers a strange solution to homosexual loneliness that is theoretically novel but practically naïve: Homosexuals may live together in “lifelong commitment of mutual obligation which does not necessitate sexual intercourse”. While many homosexuals are already in such celibate roommate arrangements for economic and friendship purposes, Campolo’s idea no more fully addresses their romantic loneliness and sexual intimacy needs than such arrangements between heterosexuals address theirs. He should know that many – maybe most – homosexual and heterosexual relationships that begin with genital sex turn dysfunctionally celibate over time. This does not mean, however, that sexual needs are not therein being met psychosexually and sociolsexually. Also, if the two were romantically attracted to each other, it is unreasonable to think they would not express their feelings genitally, at least in the “honeymoon” phase. And if they were not romantically attracted to each other, it is unreasonable to think that they would be engage genitally, except in a superficial way.
The lengths to which Campolo goes to try to love his neighbors, even at the risk of evangelicals’ ire, is matched unfortunately by the lengths to which he goes to mandate homosexuals’ avoidance of any and all genital nerve ending stimulation. Such absolutizing of genitals is neither biblical nor healthy, whether done by pornographers to magnify genital sex into everything or done by preachers to minimize genital sex into nothing.