Homosexuality and the Church by Richard Lovelace (Fleming H. Revell, 1978, 158 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Church historian Richard Lovelace fails to comprehend and resolve his basic error: interpreting a natural and morally neutral phenomenon, homosexuality, to be, in all cases, unnatural and, if expressed, sinful. Rather woodenly citing pittances from Barth, Brunner and even Albert Ellis, Lovelace loses sight, in effect, of the biblical bases of justification and sanctification. He betrays a lack of knowledge of scientific literature (e.g., misusing terms such as “acting out” and confusing a science-based decision of the American Psychiatric Association with a commercial magazine’s non-scientific poll of its readers).
Quick to say that he is heterosexual, he tries to discredit opposing arguments by reporting that opponents are gay or are licentious heterosexuals and he neglects to warn against those homosexuals who, through reaction formation, agree with him. Besides, can bias about homosexuality not reside in a heterosexual as well as a homosexual? He falsely claims that though “most Christians speak of conviction of sin and reliance on Christ, … gay believers often speak of a ‘realization of innocence’” (a term I have never heard in circles of “gay believers”) and that though the heterosexual Chrsitian sees self as righteous and a sinner, the gay believer sees self as simply righteous. Again, this is descriptively untrue. He pretends ignorance of the actively gay evangelicals who have been and are spiritual giants, preferring to cast them aside as antinomian. He attacks “situation ethics” as a theological culprit, overlooking that everyone is a situationist, including himself, for his easy dismissal of some Levitical laws over against those he retains leaves basic hermeneutical questions unanswered.
The day has passed when a few doubtful Bible verses used in later tradition to put down gay people can be paraded without at least noting questions raised by more careful and contextual reading of Scripture. Lovelace takes his turn. An example of his straining is his handling of Romans 1:26, 27. He writes against the interpretation that what Paul had in mind were heterosexuals who were going contrary to their nature. Lovelace sees here God’s abandoning people to “the helpless tendency … toward sexual inversion”. Does “helpless” mean involuntary? But then Lovelace contradicts his own intent by concluding that Paul indeed had in mind “male aristocrats” who could thumb their noses at the natural order and “use women as chattel and child rearers, but reserve their most refined erotic passion for other males.” Lovelace argues against reading phusican as meaning “custom”, as Paul’s uses it elsewhere, and insists it means “nature” as in biology. Confronted with the news that homosexual behavior is biologically common throughout nature, he turns around and retreats behind the excuse that “an appeal to nature proves nothing in a fallen world”.
But perhaps his most pathetic argumentation is his uncritical absolutizing of his take on the Reformation tradition. Surely the continuing breeze of God’s Holy Spirit was not exhausted in Luther and Calvin, two to whom he is in particular debt, but is available to the ever-reforming Reformation. Being heir to the “magisterial Reformers”, as he claims to be, he follows them in misusing the Bible to refute contemporary gains in scientific insight made under God’s Common Grace. In their day it was about the sun; today it’s about homosexuality. Is Lovelace the Puritan so revolted by homosexuality that Lovelace the church historian forgets that it was Luther who argued: “This fool [Copernicus] will turn the art of astronomy upside down. … The Scripture shows and tells another lesson, where Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth” and that it was Calvin who said: “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus about that of the Holy Spirit?” About another persecuted minority, was it not Luther who wanted to rid his country of the Jews and who advised that they be deprived of “all their cash and jewels and silver and gold” and “that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed”? Can Lovelace not see John Knox’s thumbscrews as silent testimony today, not to fidelity to his Lord but to the excesses of an arrogant theoretical rigidity, thoroughly culture-bound? It is a very dangerous thing to link indiscriminately to church fathers who, themselves, were captive to a sinful parochialism. In his preoccupation with preserving all parts of the older Reformation, Lovelace resists reform that is needed, if for no other reason than that we must all learn to love each other more realistically.
If one demands more of one’s neighbor than one demands of oneself, does he love that neighbor as he loves self or does he love less? Lovelace demands much from his gay neighbors, as he admits. They are to contrive celibacy (but isn’t that a gift?) or submit to sexual reorientation through “ex-gay” ministrations (but do these produce what he claims they do?).
If gay evangelicals still affirm their homosexuality, he urges them to join the Unitarians, for their continued presence in Lovelace’s church “could cause catastrophic loss in giving and church membership” which would threaten “the economic base of clergy and administrators”. He says he also asks “a great deal” from churches: Give up homophobia (hardly a comparable sacrifice – especially if they merely trade theirs for his brand of homophobia). I am not convinced that Lovelace has purged his own irrational fears of homosexuality, no matter how well intentioned or how hard he has tried to do so.
Seemingly on the side of gay people’s “legitimate concerns for freedom in our society”, he negates support of gay rights with a tasteless plea for the civil rights of homophobes and even rationalizes (laughingly):“Gay people will see that the church is not promoting a vendetta against them but is simply preserving its own civil rights.”
After preaching doom and promising miracle cures, he has the insolence to cite Matthew 7:21-23 as though Jesus was referring to gay Christians. This seems inexplicable for, as Lovelace acknowledges, he was converted from atheism through the Christian witness of homosexuals. And some of the homosexuals from his Christian past and present are active in EC ministry.