Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? by Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (Harper & Row, 1978, 176 pp.)
Healing for the Homosexual by Betty Schonauer, et. al. (Presbyterian Charismatic Communion, 1978, 64 pp.)
“Sex and Homosexuality: A Pastoral Statement” by Bennett J. Sims, Christianity Today, February 24, 1978.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Scanzoni and Mollenkott pose two urgent questions facing a Christian today: “Do I care about the need of homosexuals who are without Chrtist and who cannot respond to an invitation based on the condition that they must either become heterosexual or live celibate forever after?” “Do I care about the need of hidden homosexual Christians whose self-acceptance is impeded by the well-meaning remarks of those who have not taken the trouble to understand the homosexual condition?” Rather than clobbering people with the Bible, these two Bible-believers show that they have taken the time, effort and love required to respond to hurting lives with responsibility. They have done their homework in the Bible and the behavioral sciences. Scanzoni’s close, though unofficial, association with researchers at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, allows her to keep up with the latest scientific study of sex. Mollenkott, a professor of English, provides important illustrations through her study of homosexual Christians such as W. H. Auden and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In discussing the dilemma between obeying God or society, a touching parallel is drawn from Huckleberry Finn’s deciding to risk violation of what he had been taught was “the sacredness of private property (even if that property happens to be a human being)” and “helping his friend, Jim, escape from slavery”. Huck’s “socially conditioned conscience” condemns him but he takes the consequences, even if it means going to hell! The authors cite appropriate words from John 15:13 and I John 3:20. These passages are much of what this book – and the debate over homosexuality – is really all about – much more so than are the frequently cited “proof texts” against “homosexuality” that Scanzoni and Mollenkott manage masterfully. These two women have proven to be Christians who really do care.
Everything right in the Scanzoni and Mollenkott book is wrong in the PCC booklet. Instead of scholarship there is misinformation and tired “proof texting”. Contrary to the claim promised in the title, there are sad tales of the hardly-“healed”, presumably PCC’s best evidence for “healing”. Typical of the confusion that riddles the booklet: “He has not changed his sexual preference, and we have not altered our belief that his behavior is a sin in God’s eyes [but] God has given me the faith to believe that David will be healed – eventually … by His supernatural power and grace”. Little wonder that the authors urge patience; they warn there will be backsliding as the homosexual fights the homosexuality day after day.
The editor of Christianity Today calls Episcopal Bishop Sims’ statement “compassionate” and “unassailable”. Their hearts may be in the right place but their heads are not. Not surprisingly, the bishop displays ignorance of the etiological and treatment literature on homosexuality, the scientific basis for the American Psychiatric Association’s nomenclature revision on mental disorders in general and homosexuality in particular, genetics, and the vast individual differences in the psychosocial dynamics between some men and others and between some women and others. More surprisingly, Sims speeds over several Bible quotes oblivious to the fact that, as Helmut Thielicke has cautioned, questions of homosexuality today “must for purely historical reasons be alien to the New Testament”, and too, to the Old. While Sims acknowledges that Christian homosexuals do manifest the fruit of the Spirit, he implies that they do so while abstaining from homosexual acts. Apparently he does not know the fine Christians in covenant homosexual unions who also manifest the fruit of the Spirit. He urges healing which he admits might not work and celibacy that he fails to note is a gift of God.
[In the summer, 1998, issue of EC’s RECORD, it will be noted that Bishop Sims changed his mind on the matter. In an essay, “How to be True to the Bible and Say ‘Yes’ to Same-Sex Unions”, he advocates church support for same-sex unions because, as he puts it, it “is a plain matter of justice” to do so.]