In a very sensible essay in Commonweal – http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1957 – Luke Timothy Johnson dwells on the contradiction between what Scripture says about homosexuality (for instance, Paul’s view that same-sex desire is a punishment for idolatry) and what one can learn from contemporary experience, not only in the human and biological sciences, but in the lives of one’s relatives and friends. He has received replies from two gay Catholics committed to celibacy and to the Church’s teaching on the illicitness of sexual acts between two people of the same sex.
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He claims that the crisis in Christian denominations over homosexuality is disproportionate, and that it distracts the Church from the countless other sexuality-related problems. ‘The relatively small set of same-sex unions gets singled out for moral condemnation, while the vast pandemic of sexual disorder goes ignored. In my view, this scapegoating of homosexuality has less to do with sex than with perceived threats to the authority of Scripture and the teaching authority of the church.’ He points out that ‘Christianity as actually practiced has never lived in precise accord with the Scriptures. War stands in tension with Jesus’ command of nonviolence, while divorce, even under another name (annulment), defies Jesus’ clear prohibition.’ The hard-line attitude to homosexuality was ‘probably held by many of us at some point until our lives and the lives of those we love made us begin to question them. So we can-and should-understand the mix of fear and anger that fuels the passionate defense of such positions. For those who hold them, something sacred is at stake. And something sacred is at stake. The authority of Scripture and of the church’s tradition is scarcely trivial. A real challenge confronts those of us who perceive God at work among all persons and in all covenanted and life-enhancing forms of sexual love.’
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‘We must state our grounds for standing in tension with the clear commands of Scripture, and include in those grounds some basis in Scripture itself. To avoid this task is to put ourselves in the very position that others insist we already occupy-that of liberal despisers of the tradition and of the church’s sacred writings.’ ‘We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality-namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God’s created order.’
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‘Many of us who stand for the full recognition of gay and lesbian persons within the Christian communion find ourselves in a position similar to that of the early abolitionists-and of the early advocates for women’s full and equal roles in church and society. We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position, yet place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts. To justify this trust, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6). And if the letter of Scripture cannot find room for the activity of the living God in the transformation of human lives, then trust and obedience must be paid to the living God rather than to the words of Scripture.
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‘For me this is no theoretical or academic position, but rather a passionate conviction. It is one many of us have come to through personal struggle, and for some, real suffering. In my case, I trusted that God was at work in the life of one of my four daughters, who struggled against bigotry to claim her sexual identity as a lesbian. I trusted God was at work in the life she shares with her partner-a long-lasting and fruitful marriage dedicated to the care of others, and one that has borne fruit in a wonderful little girl who is among my and my wife’s dear grandchildren. I also trusted the many stories of students and friends whose life witnessed to a deep faith in God but whose bodies moved sexually in ways different from the way my own did. And finally I began to appreciate the ways in which my own former attitudes and language had helped to create a world where family, friends, and students were treated cruelly.’
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‘The church cannot say “yes” to what the New Testament calls porneia (“sexual immorality”); but the church must say yes to the witness of lives that build the holiness of the church. The challenge, therefore, is to discern what constitutes the positive and negative in sexual behavior. A start would be to adapt Galatians 3:28 and state that “in Christ there is neither gay nor straight”- and on that basis, to begin to ask serious questions concerning the holiness of the church, applying the same criteria on both sides… If holiness among heterosexuals includes fidelity, chastity, modesty, and fruitfulness, we can ask whether and how the same elements are present in same-sex love…. Peter and Paul and James were open to the truth God wanted them to learn. They paid attention to human narratives-testimonies-that spoke of God at work among Gentiles in ways that not even Jewish believers in a crucified messiah could appreciate. The apostles had to be shown how the same Holy Spirit who had come upon them also came to those very unlike them, people whom they regarded as unclean by nature and evil in their practices. When shown the evidence of transformed lives, they saw and accepted what God was doing… I suggest, therefore, that the New Testament provides impressive support for our reliance on the experience of God in human lives - not in its commands, but in its narratives and in the very process by which it came into existence… The natural-law tradition is compatible with my argument that moral thinking should begin with what God discloses to us in creation… The Pharisees’ sin has come to be called “scotosis,” a deliberate and willful darkening of the mind that results from the refusal to acknowledge God’s presence and power at work in human stories. If the neglect of Scripture is a form of sin, John suggests, a blind adherence to Scripture when God is trying to show us the truth in human bodies is also a form of sin, and a far more grievous one.’
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In the same issue of Commonweal Eve Tushnet writes: ‘We should seek to reconcile love of God and love of others whenever they appear to conflict. But we can’t simply assume that such a conflict never exists-or that, if a conflict seems to arise, God couldn’t possibly be asking us to sacrifice a human relationship…Homosexuality has become a cultural battleground for reasons that have very little to do with Catholic morality or scriptural prohibitions… Several recent studies have found that Americans are having a harder time making and keeping close personal relationships… And so we’re ready to cheer on any kind of personal connection at all, any love that lasts, since we see it much more rarely than we used to… The often vicious and violent anxiety about masculinity is one reason that the ways in which homosexuality is stigmatized in our culture look nothing like the ways we treat many other things Scripture calls vices… This isn’t how we treat the acts we really consider sinful. It’s how we treat scapegoats… If we seek to overcome any aspects of our culture that conflict with the gospel, I’m not sure why we would expect the gay liberation movement-slightly over a hundred years old, and largely Western in character-to be less culture-bound, and therefore a better guide to the countercultural aspects of the gospel, than the Catholic Church… How often have we thought that we understood our experiences, only to realize later that we had only the barest understanding of our own motives and impulses? …Johnson’s approach places far too much trust in personal experience. He views our experience as both more transparent and less fallible than it is…Scripture is weird and tangly and anything but obvious-but at least it wasn’t written by someone who shared all our desires, preferences, and cultural background… The only theological “school” or approach that has helped me understand at least parts of the church teaching on homosexuality is the theology of the body… In this approach, we look to Genesis, to the creation narratives, to discover who we truly are and how we could most perfectly relate to one another. Although marriage is the primary focus of the theology of the body, sexual difference is a recurring theme…Here, man is defined by his longing for woman, woman by her longing for man; this is the “nuptial meaning of the body.” The male becomes a man and the female a woman in their yearning for each other. Love of the other both creates and reconciles the sexes… But there are equally obvious problems with applying this Genesis model to homosexuality. I’ve never found that lesbian women were less womanly, or gay men less manly... Moreover, showing that homosexual relationships are imperfect, that they do not echo our life in Eden as well as heterosexual relationships can, might not be the same as showing that gay sex is always and everywhere wrong… The “theology of the body” approach doesn’t give any guidance on the questions currently most pressing to me: How can I express my love of women in ways consonant with church teaching; and how can I deepen my love of Christ through all the other loves in my life, including romantic love?... The coming-out story is a quintessentially American story. It is self-discovery in opposition to societal regulation. It is personal liberation-as American as “lighting out for the territory.” There are ways to tell the Christian story so that it corresponds very well to this story of self-discovery and liberation… But there are other ways of talking about Christian life-ways that focus on sacrifice, martyrdom, dying in Christ to live with him - which are perhaps less quintessentially American, and for that reason all the more necessary for us... [I think there is a false dualism here. Christian gays who have ‘come out’ in places like Nigeria or Russia have certainly not fled the Cross.] Johnson, like many writers who oppose the church’s prohibition against all homosexual acts, points to the real virtues exhibited by so many gay couples: loyalty, caretaking, and compassion…The question is whether that is enough. How could it not be? How could Christ require more?... The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants… We are tempted to believe that our love of God and our love of others won’t ever conflict. But there will be times when it does seem like God is asking us to choose. At the very least, God may require us to radically reshape our understanding of what love of another person should look like. God may ask you not to stop loving your partner but to express that love without sex… Johnson begins by saying that his position “stand[s] in tension with Scripture.” But he then seems to use human beloveds as a kind of walking Scripture in themselves, able to contradict and correct the merely paper canon… [Here Tushnet shows little understanding of Johnson’s hermeneutic; he points out that the canon is precisely not a set of paper regulations but depicts a dynamic process of spiritual discernment, of which the foremost exponents are the Prophets and Paul.] But our human experience, including our erotic experience, cannot be a replacement for the divine revelation preserved by the church… [This presupposes a very static, indeed frozen, conception of divine revelation, one contradicted by the many changes in offical Catholic moral teaching over the centuries.] I am unimpressed with the attempts to resolve the conflict by negating the teaching. And so I have to seek ways to make that teaching more intelligible. I hope this essay has suggested some ways already. Strengthen your families (and your friendships). Accept your children, loving and welcoming them, even, and perhaps especially, when you can’t approve of all of their beliefs or choices…Don’t set homosexuality apart, a specially and un-Scripturally stigmatized and identity-shaping category… [Alas, Scripture does stigmatize homosexuality, in Leviticus and in Romans 1.] [In the Catholic Church] there is a rich theology of friendship, helping me to express my love of women both sacrificially and chastely. There’s honor for both celibacy and married life, and resources for living fruitfully in either of these states. We have Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, we have saints who are possibly even crazier than I am, we have the Anima Christi and Thomas à Kempis’s rewriting of the Song of Songs as a hymn to the crucified Christ.’
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John Heard ( http://johnheard.blogspot.com ) objects: ‘Anyone with any experience of the Vatican’s teachings on human sexuality knows that the Church speaks out frequently against adultery, divorce, pornography, masturbation and other failures at love. [In fact, the Church allows many exceptions on divorce, such as the Pauline and Petrine privileges, not to mention annulments.] Indeed, John Paul the Great’s seminal Theology of the Body – which may just turn out to be the Summa Theologiae of the next Christian millennium – deals primarily with human sexuality per se… [This remark shows a very constricted view of theology, in line with Heard’s tendency to make the teaching on homosexuality an articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae and the touchstone of orthodoxy, rather than a fairly secondary prescription.] If the Church is hard on sodomites, then she is equally hard on most teenage boys and challenges a whole army of fornicating straight men. This shows that she is against the acts, not against the individuals… The Vatican did not invent “gay marriage” so as to have a reason to torment homoactivists, rather homoactivists agitated for something that the Church in her wisdom and love saw as anti-human. [It is true that the unexpected success of the gay marriage movement has drawn intense reactions from the official Church; but there was already an intense to the first stirrings of gay liberation, in Persona Humana 1975 and Homosexualitatis Problema 1986, the latter of which teaches that the homosexual orientation is as such intrinsically disordered -- surely a formula for gay self-hatred?] Johnson and others have the cart before the horse. They also seem to have put off Christianity – with its fairly settled sources of authority – namely Scripture, Tradition and the teaching authority crystallised in the Magisterium which is exercised by the Popes and other Church leaders in keeping with the sensus fidei – for other, extra-Christian and sometimes radically Pagan moral and religious touchstones… Self-denial and mortification of the physical body will bring us closer to transcendence, prepare us for perfection. Yet Johnson and others seem to ignore these rich Christian ideas on suffering, abstinence, temperance, etc., in favour of something altogether more flabby… [Johnson did not ignore them, and as a former monk he should know more about them than Heard.] Why does Johnson think “covenanted sexuality” is better than other kinds of sexuality?... [Because the Bible tells him so!] What is good about Covenants is what God gives us that enables us to give something of ourselves to each other. [Here Heard seems to answer his own question in a way that corresponds to what Johnson says about his daughter and her covenanted partner.] “Gay marriages” which involve necessarily non-Christian or anti-Christian exhortation to sodomy or other homogenital acts are, by definition therefore, not worthy of such covenants in faith. They can never be marriages… [This begs the question, and the ‘therefore’ is a non sequitur.] It gets even wilder. Johnson then claims that “the deepest truth revealed by Scripture itself-namely, that God does create the world anew at every moment, does call into being that which is not, and does raise the dead to new and greater forms of life,” which is not what my Bible tells me… [Johnson clearly knows the Bible better than Heard; see Romans 4.17.] Does this muddled gesturing towards profundity really rival the solid Catholic idea that Scripture is all about God’s love for wretched man?... [Heard, in his usual provocative style, goes on to unload reams of abuse on Johnson, apparently completely unable to understand the rich final paragraphs of Johnson’s essay.] No Catholic ever used Paul or Moses to justify slave ownership, certainly not with the approval of the wider Church. [Alas, even Paul’s ‘I am sending you back your slave’ in Philemon was so invoked; and the Holy Office declared as late as 1866 that slavery was compatible with natural law.] … When has the Paraclete relied on Scripture-rejection to buttress orthodoxy and lead a new springtime?... [Jesus and Paul ‘fulfil’ rather than ‘abolish’ the law, but as is well known their hostile critics could only see Scripture-rejection in what they were doing.] Johnson reveals that he is not actually same sex attracted. This means that he writes… from outside the kind of experience that he asserts as the vouchsafe [sic] of his novel idea of orthodoxy. He is not in possession of the experience that would make him the prophet he posits. [In fact, Johnson refers to the experience of his daughter and of other relatives and friends. By this logic, only a slave could have become an abolitionist. Heard may be saying that experience is not the warrant of prophecy, for he mentioned that the abolitionists did not come from the deep South of the US but from the far north. But surely Johnson has then exactly the kind of experience that best equips a prophet -- empathetic identification with victims of injustice?]
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It seems to me that Tushnet and Heard have failed to respond to the basic perception of Johnson. Significantly neither of them refers to the personal experiences he invoked. He is not setting up the authority of experience as a summary court of judgment over Scripture, but pleads for a mature interaction between Scripture and experience, such as we see enacted within the pages of Scripture itself. He points out that experience shows Scripture to be wrong on certain points, such as the etiology of homosexuality. In the same way, Scriptural attitudes to slavery or genocide have been corrected in light of experience. In each case one could dismiss the findings of the court of experience as merely modern trendiness, yet the truths that experience brought to light turned out not to be so easily dismissed. This is not relativism but its opposite.
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He also points out that Scripture is a dynamic, self-correcting text, and that if we read Scripture integrally we are freed to follow the Spirit that gives life even if it brings us into contradiction with the surface letter. That is, far from subjecting the authority of Scipture to modern experience, he uses modern experience as a catalyst for recovering the truly liberating authority of Scripture.
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A question raised by some bloggers – http://jintoku.blogspot.com/2007/06/revelation-and-experience.html (an excellent statement from Tobias Haller) and
http://chris.tessone.net/2007/06/19/johnson-and-tushnet-on-experience – is whether Johnson is conceding too much in claiming that development in our thinking on homosexuality puts us in contradiction with Scripture. After all, if one said ‘Many of my best friends are Cretans, and they are the most honest people I know’, one would not really be contradicting Scripture, even though on the literal plane it says ‘“Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons”. This testimony is true’ (Titus 1.12-13). Of course any writer will reflect notions circulating in his milieu, as Paul does in his conventional vice-lists, which have nothing to do with a calm and considered reflection on same-sex loving relations.
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Nor is the Bible perfectly consistent; David’s love for Jonathan and Jonathan’s for David is glorified in the epic of 1-2 Samuel; no male-female relationship in these books comes near it. If Romans 1 is taken as portraying same-sex desire as intrinsically disordered (as in various Vatican documents since 1975), then it is hard to see how Scripture is not contradicting itself on this point. As our culture recuperates from the long night of homophobic dominance, suddenly texts whose meaning and authority seemed as plain as day recede into deserved obscurity, just like texts justifying genocide, slavery or treatment of women as chattels. Meanwhile, other texts come to the fore with new clarity, texts that speak with deep appreciation of the freedom and non-discrimination that the Gospel represents. Ironically, as one commentator in the above blogs notes, Jews are currently far better at drawing such humane wisdom from their Scriptures than Christians. Indeed fundamentalist Christians have done much to make Scripture hateful by highlighting a tiny handful of texts selected as slogans of homophobic propaganda. Our own Church has cast a deep shadow on the reception of Romans by highlighting so insistently the confused obiter dicta of Romans 1, which no doubt owe more to the rhetorical schools of the time than to observation of human nature.
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Moral theologian Paul Surlis addresses the question of the Bible with his customary incisiveness in The Furrow, April 2007:
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'Benedict should also listen to gay, lesbian and transgender Catholics who presumably are around 6 percent of all Catholics, as they are o the general population. He should reflect on their affirmation that sexual orientation is a discovery not a choice, an insight unknown to biblical writers two and three thousand years ago who assumed that all persons were heterosexual and only the perverse opted for homosexual relationships. This insight alone invalidates the shaky biblical structures condemning homosexuality which have much to do with taboos against non-procreative sexuality when infant mortality was high and a beleaguered Israel needed soldiers and workers for its very survival. And Benedict would be asked to ponder the fact that slavery is endorsed and even mandated far more strenuously than homosexuality is condemned in the Bible. Yet, today slavery is regarded as intrinsically evil and is everywhere condemned even if practised in places. But if such a turnaround of biblical teaching can occur in the area of slavery why may we not witness a reversal of centuries of misguided condemnations of homosexuality which is increasingly recognized as neither disordered nor sinful when consensually embraced in equal relationships?'
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Another blog (http://markshea.blogspot.com) raves about Eve Tushnet’s saintly wisdom, but for some in the excited combox discussion Eve falls short of full orthodoxy: ‘Is she a little soft on the inclination itself? Is it perhaps that if the longing of male for female and otherwise builds us into the sexual person we are meant to be, then no matter how one tries, one will never grow into a full human person until that longing for the opposite sex (chaste as it may be and often should be) is present? No matter how chaste we are, how fortified with stoicism, that longing for the same sex will not bring us to full humnaity. If so, the Church, in saying that SSA is a disorder, is also saying that we must become “ordered”.’
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I note that this particular site, though espousing worthy views on the Bush Administration’s attitudes to torture and war, greets a virulently homophobic article (focusing on anal warts) by Bush’s nominee for US Surgeon General as follows: ‘Doctor notes (literally) bleedin’ obvious, is shouted down by Usual Suspects’ (in the category, ‘Gay Blackshorts on the March’). The combox commentators developed this with relish: ‘Advocates of homosexual acts love to keep us in mind of the sitcoms where gays are funny with their banter about stylish clothing, Judy Garland, etc. Who would be mean to such adorable people? Start describing the reality: glory holes, men emerging from bathroom stalls, and the actual act itself, and watch them squirm because they know the truth destroys their position.’
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The Bush nominee’s piece was rapturously received on the weblog of Ignatius Press, the publishers of Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, under the heading ‘Cavemen were better plumbers than the Kinsey-ites’ (http://insightscoop.typepad.com).
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Among the family traits that define the neocath community, one of the most widely distributed is strident anti-gay rhetoric. Catholic teaching has increasingly become identified with the strident right wing in the US culture wars. This in itself is a reason to take another look at this teaching and to try to establish a broader and saner platform for talking about human sexuality.
Hi Joseph,
Great post - as usual!
Peace,
Michael
Posted by: Michael J. Bayly | June 19, 2007 at 02:23 AM
Great post -- I had not read Heard's piece, and I'm glad I read it along with your annotations and comments. :-)
Fundamentalist attitudes toward the Bible have poisoned the whole Christian landscape. I had my eyes opened to this during a panel with other clergy on issues of sexual health at a university in our area. Several of the questions (and all the questions that dealt with Scripture) were along the lines of, "Can you give me some Bible verses that say X is okay?" Many of the students were Roman Catholics or mainline Protestants. I tried to engage them by defusing some of the clobber passages used on the issues and then shifting to talking about the Bible as something we have to live with day to day and let it form our lives as a whole, but that seemed to be far outside what they expected. I'm not sure many of the students had any idea what I was getting at -- which speaks to very bad catechesis in mainstream churches even outside evangelicalism.
Posted by: Fr Chris | June 20, 2007 at 02:10 PM
Cool...I now have a new term for myself: NeoCath!
Posted by: carlos | July 19, 2007 at 10:19 PM