Post Series
0: Intro
1: Narrative Question
2: Authority Question
3: God Question
4: Jesus Question
5: Gospel Question
Theological Foundation Recap
6: Church Question
7: Sex Question
8: Future Question
9: Pluralism Question
10: What-Do-We-Do-Now Question
11: Final Thoughts
The question Brian is trying to answer in this chapter is this: “Can we find a way to address human sexuality?” That’s the question of the chapter he has proposed. The real question floating through all of Brian’s rhetorical BS is this: “Is homosexual behavior normative in the Scriptures and part of the way God intended things to be at creation?”
This is an important chapter for me because I sit on the board of directors of a local LGBT/Christian bridging organization and have gay friends. I share this because what I am about to say in this post is not from an outsider who is disconnected from the issue, but one who has relationships with the community. Through my own relationships and pastoral experience I have come to approach the issue of homosexuality with a two-fold recognition: the Church must recognize both the reality and revelation; she must sit in the tension of the real life stories of those who have (and still are) waded through same-sex attraction for themselves and what God has revealed through the Holy Scriptures regarding His original intent for humanity.
In my experience, when that tension is broken, sides form at both polarities, resulting in disaster. Conservatives try and deny the reality of a whole community of stories and hold tightly to revelation. Liberals hold so tightly to reality that they neglect and outright reject what God has revealed to humanity through the Holy Scriptures regarding sexual practice and behavior in general, and homosexuality in particular. Brian falls into the later trap. While agree with his condemnation of how the more conservative Church has handled and treated the gay community—actually I would say that handling has been downright disastrous— Brian’s own position results in a disastrous handling of such an important contemporary issue.
For all of my effort at trying to take Brian and his work seriously, this chapter did it for me. Brian is one of those individuals who is able to say a whole heckofalot without saying anything at all or even addressing the real issue. He is at his best in this chapter. Instead of actually dealing with the Text, which explicitly condemns homosexual practice in several areas, he attempts to divert attention by constructing false, nonsensical arguments.
From the start he breaks out the Straw Man “fundasexuality.” Here Brian dismisses the genuine position that homosexual practice is not the way God intended things to be by reducing the conservative position to “a reactive, combative brand of religious fundamentalism that preoccupies itself with sexuality.” The term applies “to the organizing, angry, dominating fundamentalism that declares war on those who differ. Fundasexualityu is rooted not in faith, but in an orientation of fear. Its proponents fear new ideas, people who are different, criticism or rejection from their own community, and God’s violent wrath on them if they don’t fully conform to and enforce the teachings and interpretations of their popular teachers and other authority figures. It is a kind of heterophobia, the fear of people who are different.” (175)
So instead of actually dealing with the idea that homosexual practice is not the way God intended things to be, Brian over inflates the position of conservatives and reduces them to a gross caricature. Convenient but inexcusable.
Next, Brian breaks out his “Greco-Roman six-line narrative” false construct to attack the Platonic dualism of…wait for it…male and female! “Whatever we humans are, we aren’t simply metaphysical male or female souls riding around as passengers in male or female vehicles.” (176) What?! Whatever you think of the creation narrative in Genesis 1 and 2, it is clear God created the Human in male and female forms. These are not false human, societal constructs imposed on others. God created the Human in this way to reflect His own Image and Likeness, as male and female. To Brian, however, male and female are not timeless and perfect in essence, but instead can change and evolve over time.
At this point I am positively creeped out…but I move on. He next attacks the conservative reading of the Text by insisting episodes like the Copernicus/Galileo debate make such discussions on homosexuality null and void. If the Church got astronomy so wrong, then they can certainly get sexuality wrong, too. Just as we “were pressured to label the observation of retrograde motion as a deceptive appearance—not a reality,” so too has the Church pressured the world to label the experiences of gay people a deceptive appearance, “because the reality demanded by the dominant paradigm is that they are rebellious and dangerous sinners, a twisted abomination, a deceptive moral aberrance.” (177)
Again, Brian skirts the issue of whether homosexual practice is not the way God intended things to be. He continues this skirting even in addressing the violent God image. Apparently those of us who take God’s entire self-disclosure seriously “claim that God chooses one tribe and rejects or considers inferior other classes or types of people simply for being who they are—whether they’re Gentiles, Jews, women, nonwhites, non-Christians, or gays.” (178) What Brian does here is fascinating: 1) He falsely labels our view of God as overly exclusionary, which is simply ridiculous—God welcomes all people, but on His terms not ours; 2) He changes the category of homosexuality from a moral, ethical act of rebellion against God to an ontological category of being. No where, however, does the Holy Scripture treat those who practice homosexuality as an identity of being as Gentiles or women. The category “gay” to use Brian’s own language is an ethical violation, an act of moral rebellion. It is disobedience to the way God intended things to be.
Jesus Himself makes this clear. While there are no explicit passages condemning this conduct by Jesus, implicit references do exist. In Mark 7:21-23 Jesus explains that whatever defiles a person comes from their heart, and then lists sexual immoralities (in the greek PORNEIA), adulteries, licentiousness, etc…No first century Jew could have spoken of PORNEIA without having in mind the list of forbidden sexual offenses of Lev. 18 and 20, including incest, bestiality, AND homosexual practice. Furthermore, Jesus appealed frequently to Male-Female complementarity for marriage and sexual union. In Mark 10 when talking about divorce he appeals to the Torah, to Gen 1:27 and 2:24. In Mark’s view Jesus accepted the model for marriage and sexual union presented in Gen 1-2, understanding that it was ordained by God from the beginning of Creation. He shows no awareness of any other marital or sexual pattern ordained by God or part of creation.
Brian insists differently, claiming that “Jesus’ treatment of the marginalized and stigmatized requires us to question the conventional approach. We have many examples of Jesus crossing boundaries to include outcasts and sinners and not a single example of Jesus crossing his arms and refusing to do so.” (179) While this is true to some extent, the ministry of Jesus to be that of both love AND righteousness. While Jesus’ love for the marginalized moved him to go seek the lost and poor and blind, he also insisted on internal transformation with the intent of bring them to a higher ethical standard. Especially regarding incidents of sexual conduct recorded in the Gospels, Jesus accepts in love while truthfully confronting the sinner to change by sinning no more.
Brian ends this chapter with two Red Herrings: he attempts to divert attention from our beginning question—”Is homosexual behavior normative in the Scriptures and part of the way God intended things to be at creation?”—through the Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion in Acts 8 and the sexually sinful practices of heterosexuals.
First, Brian attempts to claim the Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion episode changes the paradigm regarding homosexuality, ushering in a new acceptance of the “sexually other.” “The sign of the Kingdom of God that began with Jesus—a place at the table for outcasts and outsiders—continues in the era of the Acts of the Apostles. The poor are accepted, and the sick. Samaritans are accepted, and Gentiles, including Africans, and here, even the ‘sexually other,’ those considered ‘defective’ who will never have a place in traditional religion or in the traditional culture based on ‘traditional family.'” (183)
The problem here is that Brian attempts to simply re-categorize homosexual behavior as a state of being. The revelation we have from God in the Text, however, consistently marks it as ethically morally rebellious behavior that violates God’s original creative intent. Here Brian is simply wrong at the categorical sense, but even worse in the biblical. Here he twists the meaning of Scripture to serve his agenda of normalizing homosexual practice, holding so tightly to the reality of homosexuality and flagrantly disregarding the revelation of God.
Brian ends the chapter by diverting attention to the question he refuses to answer—”Is homosexual behavior normative in the Scriptures and part of the way God intended things to be at creation?”—to heterosexual behavior. “What we have called traditional marriage—one virgin man and one virgin woman coming together and remaining sole sexual partners for life—isn’t working as it’s supposed to for heterosexuals.” (186) Brian points to premarital sex as the norm for Christians and non-Christians, divorce rates inside and outside the Church, contraceptives, internet pornography, cultural images of bodily perfection, catholic priest abuse scandals, and evangelical abstinence pledge violations as evidence “sexually unrestrained hedonism” among heterosexuals. (187-189)
While I completely agree with the sexual problems our culture faces in general, Brian spends nearly 5 pages addressing issues which have nothing to do with the chapters main premise that insists “we must pursue a practical, down-to-earth theology and an honest, fully embodied spirituality that speaks truthfully and openly about our sexuality, in all its straight and gay complexity.” (189) For Brian, being gay is the reality, regardless of the revelation of God which says otherwise. According to the Holy Scripture, gay practice is just that, ethical moral behavior that violates God’s creation. This is the clear case in Romans 1, which actually links homosexual behavior to idolatry and condemns it as a violation of God’s creation. God does not lift up homosexual practice as another alternative to heterosexual union. God insists that it is disobedient, rebellious practice that is far outside the way He intended things to be at creation.
We began with this question at the beginning, one which we’ve carried through this chapter: “Is homosexual behavior normative in the Scriptures and part of the way God intended things to be at creation?” A better question might be this: If the event of rebellion (aka The Fall) had not occurred would homosexuality be part of our reality? From God’s divine self-disclosure there is no way you can answer that in the positive. Now because Brian believes that the Fall is actually an evolution, he would answer yes. But for those who hold to the historic Christian understanding of God’s Story—Creation, Rebellion, Rescue, Re-creation—there is no way one can see male-male and female-female sexual relations in the creation narrative.
In the end, Brian says “a new kind of Christianity must move beyond this impasse and begin to construct not just a more humane sexual ethic in particular, but a more honest and robust Christian anthropology in general.” (190) No, the Church must reorient Herself around Christ who is rescuing us from our moral rebellion and restoring us to the way we were originally intended to be at the beginning of creation, regardless of the issue. Brian is attempting to construct human sexual ethics and anthropology outside the creative intent of the Creator. May we instead take serious the ministry of reconciliation we’ve been given by God Himself, who is making His appeal to the world to be reconciled to Himself, including every manner in which our sexuality violates God’s original intent.
