“When We Interpret Scripture Differently” by Roberta Hestenes. reNEWS, October 1996.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed admits that while “invok[ing] Scripture … the white evangelical church was not only on the sidelines but on the wrong side of the most central struggle for social justice in this century.” Says Reed, a historian: “Liberals have been correct throughout history on issues of social justice while we have been neglectful or derelict.” For example, Christianity Today, the major evangelical magazine, used to editorialize against integration and attacked Dr. King’s 1963 March on Washington as a “mob spectacle.” These who were wrong then, together with their successors, now justify antigay prejudice with Scripture. It hasn’t always been this way. Evangelicals in 18th century England fought against the slave trade and 19th century American evangelicals fought for abolition and women’s rights, even while the era’s foremost Presbyterian theologian, Charles Hodge, didn’t view slaveholding as sin and opposed abolitionism. Hestenes grants that the Bible’s “frequently been misread and misused throughout the centuries, often with very negative results,” but as head of the Ordination and Human Sexuality Committee in the Presbyterian Church (USA), she keeps up the oppressive tradition by her arguments against the ordination of homosexuals in this publication of Presbyterians For Renewal.
On the so-called antigay Bible verses, she insists: “there is a widespread consensus throughout history on [their] meaning.” There is not. Some have been taken very differently in even intra-biblical commentary, not all have been applied to same-sex matters in history, and verses have been used in earlier antihomosexual efforts that aren’t used today. Even if one could document Hestenes’ claim, doesn’t she herself stand against a long pre-Reformation tradition and against other Presbyterian and Reformed traditions that would still bar her from being a clergywoman? (She’s left the presidency of Eastern College to be senior pastor of a Presbyterian church.)
She’s correct in saying, firstly, that a text’s meaning must be read “within its surrounding and larger context.” But in gender and sex, there is no more fundamentally “larger context” than Paul’s principle that “in Christ” the Genesis-phrased “male and female” is no longer theologically significant. As evangelical Bible scholar F. F. Bruce puts it: “Paul states the basic principle here; if restrictions on it are found elsewhere … they are to be understood in relation to Gal 3:28, and not vice versa.” Philip Melancthon, Luther’s closest friend and the Reformer whose 500th birthday we celebrate this year, applied Christ’s “larger context” of human necessity to matters of sexual celibacy and abstinence: “even Christ dispenses with the divine law in case of necessity. … How much more is it permissible to violate human traditions if the necessity of life demands it!” He cites Paul’s “condemn[ing] the laws which unduly burden the body.” And surely the “larger context” of general revelation in social and natural science recalls the terribly cruel and costly mistakes the church made in, for example, astronomy and psychology. If great conservative Presbyterians of the last century, such as B. B. Warfield and even Hodge, can have held that the biblical writers were “dependent for their information upon sources and methods in themselves fallible, [and] their personal knowledge and judgment were in many matters hesitating and defective or even wrong,” can’t Hestenes allow that the ancient writers had no way to address today’s gay issues? Historians recognize that that old world had no idea of what we mean now by homosexual orientation. Calvin Seminary Old Testament professor Marten Woudstra said “there is nothing in the Old Testament that corresponds to homosexuality as we understand it today” and evangelical theologian Helmut Thielicke wrote that “homosexuality … can be discussed at all only in the framework of that freedom which is given to us by the insight that even the New Testament does not provide us with an evident, normative dictum” on it, since “for purely historical reasons” our questions of homosexuality are “alien to the New Testament.” And there is, of course, the “larger context” of Christ’s law of love, his call to seek the welfare of others, and his “Golden Rule” that is the sum of all law and prophets: to seek for others what we seek for ourselves.
Secondly, Hestenes says that “clearer texts provide guidance in helping to interpret unclear or problematic texts.” Yes. And aren’t the many texts calling for love for others clearer than the two obscure Pauline terms that antigay preachers say mean all homosexuals today? A Bible prof admits in Jerry Falwe11’s monthly that “these words are difficult to translate” and another antigay evangelical agrees they’re “difficult,” adding that “subsequent authors are reluctant to use [one], especially when describing homosexual activity.”
Finally, she argues that if we were ever to drop the antigay position, “The whole church would have to decide” the matter. Fuggetaboutit! Since when has “the whole church” decided anything? “The whole church” didn’t vote to be antigay! A Presbyterian Bible scholar reminds us: “the differences that exist among the [New Testament] books … and even within the several writings of the same author, are … reflections of theological pluralism within the primitive Christian community.” [Bruce Metzger] Says another: “the apostles did not all preach the same message and disagreed strongly on several important points.” [James D. G. Dunn] According to Wheaton College’s Mark No11: “Christianity does not possess a single, sharply defined cultural essence. Rather, it appears in different forms (sometimes, very different forms) in different centuries in different places … you will find resources in Christianity for you and your specific cultural situation that those from far away never dreamed possible.”
What damage is now being done by what Reed calls the typically “neglectful and derelict” conservatives! Reformed scholar George Marsden notes that “the weight of the New Testament … shifts to the principle of flexibility, especially the flexibility of not giving needless offense to a large portion of the culture to whom we are supposed to witness. Hence the Bible’s own principles invite adjustment to cultural circumstances on matters that do not threaten the heart of the gospel.” Ordination of homosexuals does not threaten the heart of the gospel, but the refusal to ordain homosexuals stabs the very heart of their humanity.