“A Common Thread of Opposition to Homosexuality Runs Through the Bible” by David A. Seamands and “Understanding Homosexuality in the bible’s Cultural Particularity” by Victor Paul Furnish, Circuit Rider, December 1991 / January 1992.
“Can Homosexuals Change? Many leading psychiatrists and researchers say yes” by Sy Rogers and Alan Medinger, Good News, September / October 1991.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Last August, after three years of study, the 27-member United Methodist Committee to Study Homosexuality issued its report. With four members dissenting, the main conclusion was this: “The present state of knowledge and insight in the biblical, theological, ethical, biological, psychological, and sociological fields does not provide a satisfactory basis upon which the church can responsibly maintain the condemnation of all homosexual practice.” The 8.8-million member denomination, in General conference in May, will be responding to this realistic understanding.
Circuit Rider is “a professional journal for the applied practice of Christian ministry … sent free to all United Methodist clergy”. This recent issue features seven articles on homosexuality, from which we will look at the two on the Bible. Both authors were on the committee, though Seamands was one of the four who dissented from the majority’s more compassionate position.
Seamands is a professor emeritus of the conservative Asbury Seminary and with his wife, pioneered the Marriage Enrichment movement. His banal reading of Bible verses to condemn homosexuality is anachronistic, He erroneously assumes that the Bible address the homosexuality facing United Methodists today. As Calvin Seminary biblical scholar Marten Woudstra noted, there is nothing in the Bible on homosexuality as we see it today and as Evangelical theologian Helmut Thielicke said, such homosexuality “must for purely historical reasons be alien” to the Bible. Seamands fails utterly to appreciate the perils of reading contemporary homosexualities back into ancient texts, a serious disregard of basic biblical hermeneutics and specific warnings by historians of sex and sexuality (e.g., Halperin, Winkler, Zeitlin, Padgug, Sergent, Furnish, Soards, et. al.). Tragically, his ineptness with these texts is malefic in pastoral ministry, his own specialty at Asbury Seminary. His fundamental, theologically prescriptive misuse of the modern idea of heterosexuality – itself a cognitive construction even more recent than the 100-year-old “homosexuality” – fails to grasp Paul’s profound insight that there is now, in Christ, absolutely no theological significance to the “male and [kai!] female” pair. Says Pauline scholar F. F. Bruce: “Paul states the basic principle here; if restrictions on it are found elsewhere … they are to be understood in relation to Galatians 3:28, and not vice versa.”
[In July, 2005, Seamands publicly apologized for “sexual misconduct with an adult female occurring over a number of years”.]
In contrast to Seamands’ saying that even “lifelong and loving” homosexual partnership is no biblical option – whatever happened to love that fulfills law and against which there is no law? – Furnish’s article is a hymn to God’s grace. At over a dozen points in his two pages of clearly reasoned theology and exegesis, this Southern Methodist University New Testament scholar speaks of God’s grace. Seamands never mentions it.
Furnish shows that in “the most extended biblical reference to same-sex activity – Romans 1 – it “is not as such the topic … the apostle’s point is that ‘all have sinned’. … He is not thinking of particular ‘sins’.” Says Furnish: “The biblical references and allusions to same-sex acts reflect the cultural, religious, and situational particularities of the various times and places in and for which they were formulated”. Seamands uses the very same principle of interpretation in issues of slavery and the place of women, but for reasons reflecting his bias, refuses to apply it to sex. He insists on but one biblical model of sex (monogamous heterosexual marriage) though with reference to slavery and women’s issues, he says “specific moral directives vary according to the sociological and cultural context of the times”. But how can he overlook the Bible’s several models of sexual morality? And is he not aware that in the last century, Methodists split North and South because his conservative forebears insisted that the Bible supported their system of slavery? Doesn’t he know that his conservative cohorts in other denominations still use a wooden reading of the Bible to keep women out of pulpits? Evidently even conservatives can read the Bible differently.
Good News is an antigay Methodist caucus organ. Rogers and Mediger claim to be “ex-gays”. Here, they purport to cite “many leading psychiatrists and researchers [who] say yes” to the question: “Can Homosexuals Change?” Whom do they cite to support this? Strange as it may seem, they cite a board member of a progay counseling service, a psychiatrist who refers gay people to that progay service, another whose son is a gay activist, another who says “Homosexuality is a natural form of sexual expression”, called the American Psychiatric Association’s declassification of homosexuality as a disorder “the biggest step in the right direction”, and, a man who, at a gay activist rally, urged his audience to come out of the closet and fight society’s homophobia. They cite another who admits he offers no “cure” for homosexuality and another who says “it is no more possible to change a homosexual orientation into a heterosexual one than it is – take special note! – to change a heterosexual orientation into a homosexual one”, adding that sexual orientation, like native language, “cannot be dislodged from the brain once it has become fixated there from childhood onward”. Good News readers are told none of this “bad news”. Neither do Rogers and Medinger admit that one of their other experts – and they refer to only two more – recommends “herbal teas and mineral waters” as well as “daily exercise” to change homosexual orientation!