“What Does Scripture Say? How Shall We Listen? The Bible and Homosexuality” by Victor Paul Furnish, Open Hands, Summer 1993. The Message – The New Testament in Contemporary English by Eugene H. Peterson (NavPress, 1993, 544 pp.).
by Dr. Ralph Blair
A favorite synonym for “gay” among fundamentalists is the word “abomination”, an English word for a term in the Hebrew book of Leviticus. But they otherwise largely neglect the book, subject to the “Leviticus syndrome” in which, as it’s described in a recent evangelical publication, “we find ourselves lost in a maze of laws and rituals that confuse, frustrate and, at times, quite frankly bore us”. But they aren’t bored citing Leviticus against homosexuals. And it isn’t uncommon to see Christians engaged in lawsuits against each other, even though the clear point of Paul’s whole argument in which they find one of their most popular verses allegedly against all homosexuals is that no Christian should sue another.
The Southern Methodist University Distinguished Professor of New Testament begins by observing that “Homosexuality is one of the few topics on which the Bible gets quoted even in public” – not just in churches, he notes, but in the secular press, at political conventions, and in courts of law. In fact, criminal law derives the word “sodomy” from the English Bible, though not from the Hebrew original. C. S. Lewis knew this whole phenomenon involved “much hypocrisy” and argued that “all the pother [against homosexuality] is neither Christian nor ethical”, for, he asked rhetorically, “how many of those who fulminate on the matter are in fact Christians?” As Furnish notes, “those who are unwilling to prooftext on other topics – for example, divorce and remarriage – may resort to prooftexting when it comes to homosexuality, usually as a way of supporting opinions they already hold.” He adds: “the Bible seems to be cited more than it’s studied, and more often exploited than allowed to speak its own word.”
What does the Bible say about homosexuality? According to Furnish: “Strictly speaking, nothing.” He points out that in spite of same-sex practices in the ancient world, “no ancient language, including Hebrew and Greek, had any specific words for ‘sexuality’, ‘heterosexuality’, or ‘homosexuality’.” He notes that the topic of the story of Sodom “is not even ‘sex’, let alone same-sex practices or ‘homosexuality’ in general”, but “the violation of the rights of strangers” and he cites Ezekiel’s commentary for confirmation. Furnish states that the “abomination” verse in Leviticus “is concerned with ritual – as distinct from moral … purity”. He explains that “something is ‘pure’ (or ‘clean’) as long as it remains an unblemished specimen of its kind, but it becomes ‘polluted’ (or ‘unclean’) when its physical integrity is in some way compromised” and he gives as examples this Holiness Code’s prohibitions against mixed fibers, cross-breeding, cross-planting, etc. – none of which is given any attention by evangelicals today. He notes Jesus’ and Paul’s rejection of all distinctions between “clean” and “unclean”.
With reference to Paul’s one sentence in Romans, used now against all homos4exuals, Furnish says that his term “’unnatural’ derives from Stoic thought” rather than being “distinctively Christian” and “in the context Paul is insisting that the whole of humankind stands in need of the grace of God”. A term Paul uses in I Corinthians and in I Timothy that fundamentalists say means all homosexuals is “a term that most likely refers to adolescent call-boys”, according to Furnish. He understands that the “silence of the Jesus traditions is important evidence that the first century church was not preoccupied with the matter of same-sex relationships”. With reference to the Genesis creation accounts, Furnish says they “are concerned mainly to describe how things have come to be as they are, not to prescribe how people ought to act”.
Furnish rightly rejects claims by some pro-gay/lesbian Christians that David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, Jesus and a “beloved disciple”, and Paul were homosexuals.
He ends by saying that, as the church recognizes “the grace of God working in and through the lives of homosexual persons who are brothers and sisters in Christ, it will be better able to listen for and to live by the word that Scripture really speaks”.
To help us hear this “word that Scripture really speaks”, Peterson provides a refreshing new rendering. A veteran Presbyterian pastor who now teaches at Vancouver’s Regent College, he is a sensitive evangelical whose purpose – “to convert the tone, the rhythm, the events, the ideas, into the way we actually think and speak” – is admirably achieved. Published by an evangelical press, with exegetical consultants from five major evangelical seminaries, The Message is endorsed by a galaxy of evangelicals. Christian novelist Madeleine L’Engle says it’s “so good it leaves me breathless” and does “even more” than J. B. Phillips did in the 1950s. To J. I. Packer it’s “accurate scholarship”, to Gordon D. Fee it’s “exegetically sensitive” and to Jack Hayford it’s “a devotional classic”.
Homosexual readers need not fear that they will be zapped with antigay mistranslations. Peterson renders thee phrase in Corinthians, “those who … abuse sex”, the term in Timothy, “riding roughshod over … sex”, and the Romans description, “they abused and defiled one another, women with women, men with men – all lust, no love”.