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From: hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick)
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: modern Christianity's lack of responses to Boswell
Message-ID: <529@topaz.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 6-Feb-85 05:39:49 EST
Article-I.D.: topaz.529
Posted: Wed Feb  6 05:39:49 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 7-Feb-85 03:31:26 EST
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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Thanks to Ron Rizzo's reposting of Boswell's exegeses, I am now in a
position to give at least some response to Steve Dyer's recent challenge.
(He asked why no one from the mainstream of Christianity had responded to
Boswell's critiques of the Christian opposition to homosexuality.)  I am
going to take a somewhat indirect path to giving an answer to him.  This is
primarily because I don't see the issue about homosexuality in the Church in
the same terms as the discussion so far on the net.  Most of the discussion
has taken it for granted that what the Bible says goes, and homosexuals who
want to be considered Christians have to show that the Bible never condemns
homosexuality.  Certainly as I Christian, I consider the Bible as
authoritative.  But I am afraid that is somewhat of an oversimplification.
I suspect that the homosexual issue is going to proceed along roughly the
same trajectory as the issue of giving women leadership roles within the
Church.  Since that is further along, we may be able to learn something from
the experience.

There have been a number of books written discussing Biblical attitudes
towards women.  But I think when it finally came down to it, the critical
argument was not over the attitude towards women in the Bible so much as the
way the 20th Century should use the Bible.  Basically, those churches that
now ordain women are pretty much those churches that make relatively
flexible (liberal? - I am looking for a neutral term here and not finding
it) use of Scripture.  They (and I) believe that the Bible is a document
written by human beings who were witnesses to God's actions in history.  As
such, it shows both divine actions and human reporting.  If Jesus or Paul
had as part of their revelation that we should remove rights from women or
gays, then I'd have a real problem.  But where Paul seems to just be
repeating an attitude from around him, and where it has no organic
connection with the Christian message itself, many of us are prepared to say
that it is not necessarily binding today.  (We would have more trouble doing
this with Jesus, but fortunately Jesus himself was extremely accepting of
everybody.) It's not that we devalue what the Bible has to say on the
subject.  It's just that we would prefer to apply what the author is
actually saying (love for all mankind, acceptance of our fellow sinners)
rather than becoming overly concerned about some place where his early
training may happen to have shown through for a moment.  The more
conservative approach is that *everything* that the Biblical authors said
was inspired, and that there are no places where anything shows through by
accident.  Anything that they said even in passing is important.  It is this
process of deciding how to apply the Bible to current questions (refered to
by theologians as "hermeneutics") that is really at issue between
conservatives and liberals, not any debate over whether Paul did or did not
imply that homosexuality is wrong.

[In case it is not clear to some of you, this issue about how literally to
apply Scripture is *the* issue between liberals and conservatives.  It
underlies evolution, the role of women, and the role of homosexuals.  It
is almost the only issue of genuine theological importance dividing
Christians today.  Almost everyone, from Southern Baptists and Missouri
Synod Lutherans, up to Anglicans and Catholics, agree on the traditional
doctrines: the Trinity, the Incarnation (that Christ was both God and
Man), the Atonement (that Christ's death and resurrection saved us), etc.
The major battleground is the groundrules for using the Bible.]

I believe that to the extent that homosexuals are accepted in the Church, it
is going to be through this process of examining our hermeneutics.  I think
it is hopeless to try to convince everybody that the OT in general and Paul
in particular didn't have negative attitudes towards homosexuality.  (I'll
have a bit more to say about that below.)  About a month ago I had the
somewhat dubious honor of being present in a debate on whether the New
Brunswick Presbytery (of the Presbyterian Church (USA)) should adopt a
policy prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual
orientation, applied to jobs with the Presbytery itself (*NOT* all of the
churches within it -- just the Presbytery staff).  We heard some of the same
arguments that have been appearing on this list (though in somewhat more
enlightened forms).  We heard a particularly impressive statement from a
homosexual Presbyterian begging the church to live up to its ideals.  But I
found one interchange particularly interesting.  Someone asked the Taskforce
on Homosexuality what he should say to his congregation when they pointed to
all of these passages in the Bible and asked him how the Church could
possibly be taking the stand that it is.  The response was not a discussion
of the Greek words, trying to show that they didn't refer to homosexuality.
Rather it was said that he was going to have to discuss the meaning and
nature of Biblical authority, and the way that we apply the Bible to current
issues.

[By the way, let me not leave the wrong impression.  This battle is not yet
over in the Presbyterian Church (USA).  The denomination has recommended
that all of its parts adopt policies of non-discrimination in hiring.  It is
also conducting an internal campaign against "homophobia".  But there is
still a ruling from the General Assembly that homosexuals should not be
ordained.  I believe that this ruling is inconsistent with the direction in
which the church as a whole is moving, and expect to see it overturned
within a few years.  Apparently several Presbyteries consider it merely
advisory, and are ordaining homosexuals anyway.  But the ruling is there,
and there are still plenty of individual churches and other parts of the
denomination do not want homosexual pastors or other leaders, at least not
those who have "come out of the closet."]

Now, for the exegeses.  I find his discussions about word meanings very
interesting.  But I am more concerned with what use we are to make of all of
this scholarship.  Many of the people who quote it seem to believe that he
has in effect "explained away" all of the passages about homosexuality.
That is, that the burden of his exegesis is that the authors didn't really
think that homosexuality was intrinsically wrong.  Without reading Boswell
himself, I can't be sure whether that is the conclusion that he himself
drew.  But it doesn't seem to me to be the right way to use his material.
The question is not one of the attitudes of the Biblical authors.  It seems
clear to me that the author of Leviticus and Paul both believed that
homosexuality is wrong.  But the crucial issue in today's debate isn't about
that.  It is about hermeneutics: how do we apply the Bible to problems
today?   I argued above that one task of the Church today is to decide which
parts of Paul's letters are his actual Christian witness, and which are just
his cultural background.  If you agree with that, then I think Boswell's
analysis of Rom. 1:26-27 is helpful.  It seems to show that Paul is not
actually preaching against homosexuality.  Rather he just refers to it in
passing while he is talking about something else entirely.  He simply takes
it for granted that everyone is heterosexual, and so becoming homosexual is
unnatural for them.  If you are trying to separate Paul's message from his
cultural assumptions, then it sure looks like an opposition to homosexuality
is a cultural assumption.  But I do not believe that you can take the
analysis further and say that Paul did not consider homosexuality to be
wrong.  Although he never says it explicitly, I think there is a clear
assumption that everyone is by nature heterosexual, and that any
homosexuality is a perversion.

As this message is already long enough, I am not going to comment in detail
on the Lev. passages.  As Boswell himself notes, Christians' use of the
OT is a complicated issue.  By the very nature of the case, we have to
decide which of the rules there are still binding on Christians.  I am
afraid that nothing I saw (at least in the summary on the net) really 
helps me in that decision.