“The Use of Scripture within the Christian Ethical Debate Concerning Same-Sex Oriented Persons” by Gerald T. Sheppard, Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 40, 1 and 2, 1985.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
If stranded on a desert island, which reading material would you prefer: Pilgrim’s Progress or the Book of Leviticus? This is a question the conservative scholar W. T. Conner used to ask Southern Baptist students during his nearly 40 years of teaching at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth. When the students would prove his point by replying that in all honesty they’d prefer Bunyan’s classic, Conner would explain: “There are some things that are more biblical than the Bible itself”. Conner stood in the Protestant tradition that began with Luther himself when the Reformer spoke of the Epistle of James as a letter of straw and continues in today’s Dispensationalism. And Dallas Seminary professor Robert Lightner, in the Fundamentalist Journal, says “some things [in the Bible] are more important than other things. … Differences regarding Christian lifestyle are often stressed out of proportion to the ‘weightier matters’ … Too much [fighting] concerns petty differences over which there is no uniform agreement”. But observation of different relevancies within the Bible (as well as between canonical and non-canonical material) has been obscured lately by the “Battlers for the Bible” who try to restrict the historical perspective of evangelicals today to rigidly narrow categories of “the new inerrancy”. In such an atmosphere of suspicion and hostility, the hermeneutic of this former Fuller Seminary biblical scholar and Pentecostal minister can appear to some readers to be more “liberal” than it is. But Sheppard’s approach is not incompatible with what evangelical theologian Clark Pinnock calls “the normal orthodox method … respect[ing] the divine authority even of a situationally limited Word, and … ask[ing] what it may signify, if anything, for us”. (Italics mine.) Sheppard takes a “canon-contextual” approach, saying: “The Bible is that partially coherent sentence which interpreters, in the hope of attaining the tr4easure to which it bears witness, must complete”. Thus, what he views as “homophobic statements” of Bible “authors/redactors” rather than of “the Word of God” should, he argues, “never be identified with a ‘biblical theology’, but viewed as only preparation for theological exegesis.”
Most conservatives no longer use the Bible to support slavery and segregation. This is not because the Bible no longer contains the passages marshaled in the 1850s and the 1950s but because the Bible was used then as a weapon to justify “Christian” positions coming from a social milieu outside the Bible and that milieu has changed. With this history lesson in mind, we approach Sheppard’s attempt to pay due honor to both the authority of scripture and the “other elements [that] must”, as he states, “interplay with scripture to inform Christian ethical discourse”, for there are those today who are trying to use the Bible against homosexual neighbors just as they themselves and their great grandparents did against neighbors of color. As an Old Testament scholar with an evangelical heart, Sheppard is struggling to live biblically, justly and mercifully, among all his neighbors. He well notes that hermeneutical confusion results in ironies of excessively conservative calls for abnormal celibacy and even hypocrisy as well as excessively liberal calls for an almost “anything goes” ethic.
His effort is constrained by its being a part of a journal issue dedicated to liberal ethicist Roger Shinn. Sheppard builds on Shinn’s 1969 article on homosexuality, “attempting to push it forward [while] remaining faithful to [Shinn’s] basic insight”. Sheppard excuses what is wrong-headed about Shinn’s position by saying that “the moral and political climate was different at that time”. Unfortunately, not even the liberal atmosphere of Union Seminary in 1969 permitted Shinn’s “basic insight” to be as refreshingly fruitful as the even earlier and more evangelical insight of Helmut Thielicke, to whom Sheppard makes no reference. Sheppard goes on to respond to more recent studies by John Boswell, Robin Scroggs, George Edwards and others who, though he thinks that they are brilliant in some respects, have concluded “more radically” than he thinks the texts warrant. There is no question that, on the one hand, writers such as Noel Garde and Tom Horner have gone much too far in suggesting a “gay” relationship between David and Jonathan, a “lesbian” relationship between Ruth and Naomi, and even a “gay” relationship between Jesus and John. But, on the other hand, it should not be so easily assumed that the Bible contains “homophobic statements” if, as Thielicke, Marten Woudstra, Herman van de Spijker and other biblical scholars explicate, the Bible – for purely historical reasons – does not even address the homosexuality we debate today. A subject must be addressed in a text if a value judgment on it is to be found in that text. Even Sheppard’s own intelligent recognition of many “homosexualities” should permit him to avoid reading the ancient Levitical text as pertaining to all “same-gender sexual activity in general”, as he does aver.
In the end, though, with his “academic arguments … collected and ordered”, Sheppard stands in the biblical tradition, submitting that “the context of Christian scripture summons us to something more than just historical exegesis”. While insisting that “our answers [should be] fostered and informed by social scientific evidence”, he argues that they “cannot be resolved by such information. We must acknowledge the claims of the normative biblical expression upon us” but still we “dare not identify uncritically that to which the scripture bears witness with the mere letter of the biblical expression itself”. He says: “We must hear from the ones we have oppressed”. And he has indeed listened to gay people – with Teen Challenge, in seminary and at EC summer conferences. And he has heard the pain and seen the love. He concludes: “The fundamental issue at stake [is] the Gospel of Jesus Christ [and] the demands of the Gospel in terms of love and justice”.