Biblical Ethics and Homosexuality: Listening to Scripture edited by Robert L. Brawley (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996, 162 pp.) “Where God Makes a Way” by Alice Ogden Bellis, The Other Side, March – April 1995.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
As part of a continuing sexuality study in the Presbyterian Church (USA), twenty-four Bible scholars met in Chicago in 1995. Biblical Ethics and Homosexuality is one of the fruits of those meetings. Six of the book’s nine contributors teach at Presbyterian seminaries. Of the Others, Dale B. Martin teaches at Duke, Jeffrey S. Siker teaches at Loyola Marymount, and Sarah J. Milcher is a doctoral candidate at Emory.
In doing hristian ethics, editor Brawley appeals for humility under God as “over against modern individualism,” and both “easy permissiveness” and “being judgmental about others.” Whether “as two or three gathered together in the name of Jesus” or as the Presbyterian General Assembly, Brawley calls for a community testing of the contending spirits.
This book is worth having if for nothing but Martin’s discussion of the misuse of arsenokoites and malakos in the current debate. In his view, this misuse of two terms in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence has been “driven more by ideological interests in marginalizing gay and lesbian people than by the general strictures of historical criticism”. He gives a brilliantly argued and well-documented analysis of both terms, observing the historical function of the former as referencing economic exploitation and the wide range of feminine-negative usages of the latter. He shows that it is erroneous to read into either term an unquestioned homosexual meaning.
Herman C. Waetjen discusses same-sex sexual relations in antiquity and concludes, as do leading historians, that “none of the texts of the Bible’s two testaments that deal with sexual deviance can or should be related to what today is being called ‘homosexuality’”. Siker, writing “as one who used to believe otherwise,” agrees that this is so true that “we should stop talking about what the Bible has to say regarding ‘homosexuality’”. He sees the early church’s inclusion of Gentiles as a model for inclusion of homosexuals today and suggests that those who disagree should remember Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares.
Choon-Leong Seow takes a gay-friendly view on the basis of the Bible’s wisdom literature, saying that “the perspective of wisdom is a needed corrective to the “theology from above”, even though he finds that Paul’s anti-“homosexuality” in Romans 1 was not “received from on high” but was the view of many pagans in the Greco-Roman world.
But Ulrich Mauser argues that “God’s good creation” disallows all homosexuality because, in Rom 1:26f, Paul uses terms for men and women that “derive from the storehouse of creation terminology in Gen 1:27, in which the one human species (anthropos) is said to exist in the form of the union of two (arsen kai thely)”. These terms do derive from biblical creation narrative, but although Mauser admits that the only other Pauline instance of these terms is in Gal 3:28, he fails to acknowledge the apostle’s telling the Galatians that there is now no theological significance to creation’s heterosexual pairing as such, to this very same arsen kai thely: “in Christ there is no male and female”. Mauser also fails to see that Paul’s Romans illustration of pagan idolatry alludes to their same-sex religious practices. Mauser insists that all homosexuality is a “denial that the human being is good as God’s creature in the polarity of being male and female”. But homosexuality, no less than heterosexuality, does affirm this difference between male and female. Indeed, this difference constitutes both heterosexuality and homosexuality.
While Presbyterians and other church groups debate homosexuality, they’d do well to listen to Martin’s caution: “Neither a simple reading of ‘what the Bible says’ nor a professional historical-critical reconstruction of the ancient meaning of the texts will provide a prescription for contemporary Christian ethics. Indeed, the naïve attempts by conservative Christians, well-meaning though they may be, to derive their ethics from a ‘simple’ reading of the Bible have meant merely that they impute to the Bible their own destructive ideologies.” Siker gives examples in the shameful history of so-called biblical support for sexism and racism. Says Martin: “In the end, all appeals, whether to the Bible or anything else, must submit to the test of love.” Given all the misery caused by cruel ecclesiastical powers, one hopes so.
Bellis, an Old Testament professor at Howard University, says she’s “made a 180-degree turn in my understanding of the Bible [and homosexuality]. I have concluded that a positive attitude toward homosexual marriage and ordination of gay men and lesbians for the Christian ministry is not only consistent with Scripture but mandated by it.” Taking more seriously the fact that “the biblical authors employed far greater freedom in interpreting their traditions than is generally recognized” and noting how Bible interpretation on other issues has changed in the wake of cultural and scientific development, she realizes what many others fail to admit: “the treasure of God’s Word comes to us in an earthen vessel.”
George MacDonald, a Christian writer now well-received in evangelical circles, but, a century ago, the target of conservative Christian heresy-hunters, wrote: “The antidote to party-spirit is church history, and when the antidote itself has made you miserably ill, the cure is the gospel … the story and words of Jesus.”