“Homosexuality & the Church: Scripture & Experience” by Luke Timothy Johnson, Commonweal, June 15, 2007.
“Is Homosexuality Compatible with Christianity?” by Scott Pruett, Lifeway.com, 2007.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Luke Timothy Johnson is a world-renowned biblical scholar and Emory University professor of New Testament and Christian origins. He’s probably the leading critic of the media-hyped Jesus Seminar and its supercilious posturing and pronouncements.
So his essay in this Roman Catholic “review of religion, politics and culture” should not be misread as giving short shrift to scripture when, instead of recasting a few Bible verses “through appeals to linguistic or cultural subtleties”, he reasons that we must “reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good.” In so doing, he believes “we must be liberal in the name of the gospel, and not, as so often has been the case, liberal despite the gospel.”
Considering that “the vast pandemic of [hetero]sexual disorder goes ignored”, Johnson sees the disproportionate ecclesiastical conniptions over homosexuality as “scapegoating” prompted by “perceived threats to the authority of Scripture and the teaching authority of the church.” He reminds readers that “Christianity as actually practiced has never lived in precise accord with the Scriptures”, alluding to war, divorce and biblically prescribed execution for psychics and adulterers as examples of this.
Still, he grants: “we can – and should – understand the mix of fear and anger that fuels the passionate defense” of antigay positions, for “something sacred is at stake.” But we must “place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts. To justify this trust, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills.”
He writes of one of his four daughters “who struggled against bigotry to claim her sexual identity as a lesbian. I trusted God was at work in the life she shares with her partner – a long-lasting and fruitful marriage dedicated to the care of others, and one that has borne fruit in a wonderful little girl who is among my and my wife’s dear grandchildren.” He regrets that his “own former attitudes and language had helped to create a world where family, friends, and students were treated cruelly.”
By “experience,” Johnson does not mean “every idiosyncratic or impulsive expression of human desire. … The church cannot say ‘yes’ to what the New Testament calls porneia (‘sexual immorality’); but the church must say yes to the witness of lives that build the holiness of the church.” Here he recalls the experience of the early church as reported in the book of Acts: “In short, we would not have the New Testament as Scripture if the first believers had not been willing to obey the living God disclosed in their own bodies more than the precedents provided by the writings – writings they also, by the way, considered holy and inspired by God.” He notes that it was the church’s continuing experience with the injustice of slavery, not Bible verses on slavery, that influenced the abolitionist reforms.
Johnson critiques the misuses of “natural law”, observing that they often involve merely “culturally constructed” phenomena, they are often “far removed from the analysis of actual human existence”, and they often fail to see Paul’s insistence that “the ‘new creation’ brought about by the Resurrection of Jesus has real implications for our understanding of the body and sexuality. He argues from Jesus’ Sabbath-day healing of the man born blind, noting that “the man’s experience and testimony stand against the authorities’ insistence that God can only act within the framework of righteousness as defined by traditional piety.”
Johnson’s approach should prove helpful to those who cannot revise their take on a few proof-texts but, like him, might move to more thoroughgoing scriptural truth in a wholeheartedly well-informed hermeneutic. He concludes: “If it is risky to trust ourselves to the evidence of God at work in transformed lives even when it challenges the clear statements of Scripture, it is a far greater risk to allow the words of Scripture to blind us to the presence and power of the living God.”
Scott Pruett, “a systems engineer by day, amateur Christian apologist by night”, says homosexuality is compatible with Christianity only if one takes a “Jesus Seminar” approach. But this overlooks the conclusions of Johnson, the devastating critic of the Jesus Seminar. Pruett claims: “If you probe at pro-homosexual groups you will soon discover that this one breach in the dam has turned into a huge flood of heresy. … In every ministry I have investigated where acceptance of homosexuality exists, theological liberalism is indeed right behind it.”
Though this may be true in some cases, he fails to consider the ministry of Evangelicals Concerned – now in our fourth decade. EC’s family has included the author whose books, according to the editors of Christianity Today, “shaped Evangelicals” more than any others’ of the past half-century. She and three other EC conference keynoters are on that CT list of fifty authors. Yet he says only “liberals” and “New Age gurus” affirm same-sex relationship. EC has been encouraged by evangelical leaders such as the president of the Evangelical Theological Society and chair of the NIV Old Testament translation committee, the founding president of Covenant College and Seminary, a professor for whom Fuller Seminary posthumously endowed a chair of ethics, other outstanding professors at colleges such as Anderson, Calvin, Hope and Messiah, the director of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies and Dove Award-winning artists and bestselling authors for Zondervan, Word and InterVarsity Press. (These institutional affiliations are for identification only; the institutions do not endorse EC.) And doesn’t Pruett know any everyday gay and lesbian Christians whose cherishing of each other “in sickness and health” matches the most faithful of heterosexual marriages?
Sadder than his stalling out on scriptures used as sledgehammers is his slighting of scripture’s “royal law” of love. Living in spousal intimacy with someone fitting his sexual orientation, he condemns to lifelong loneliness all who long for such intimacy with someone fitting their sexual orientation.