The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Yet the matter remains unsettled. In an article in Christianity Today, “Why Is This Important?” Stanton L. Jones4 gives three reasons. “First, the church’s historically high view of the authority of scripture is threatened by efforts at revising the church’s position on homosexuality.” His second reason is that if homosexuals are defined primarily by their sexual inclinations, this definition is contrary to the fundamental definition of Christian identity. The third and most critical reason, however, is this: “We can only change our position on homosexuality by changing our fundamental stance on biblical authority, by changing our core view of sexuality, and by changing the meaning and character of Christ’s call on our lives.”

  The first of Jones’s objections, that the authority of scripture is challenged by a revision of the church’s position on homosexuality, does not take account of the fact that the authority of scripture seems not to have been challenged by the revision of the church’s, position on women, Jews, and slavery. Nor does he appear to take into account the fact that, high view or not, the scripture has so little to say about homosexuality that it cannot be called upon to resolve the contemporary church’s debates about homosexuality or address itself to the modern complexity of human sexuality. It should also be noted that it is not homosexuals who define themselves by their sexual desires, but it is invariably the case that persons opposed to homosexuality define it and homosexuals exclusively in sexual terms. Finally, of course, what Jones sees as a “problem” is in fact the only intellectually and spiritually responsible way forward. We must change our position on homosexuality if that position is based upon a prejudicial and uninformed reading of scripture. Our fundamental stance on biblical authority ought by no means to be an absolute; that is a form of Protestant idolatry. Indeed, our core view of sexuality ought to change, and must, and the “meaning and character of Christ’s call on our lives” thus is not merely changed but enlarged to reflect a dynamic and inclusive gospel.

  What is at stake is not simply the authority of scripture, as conservative opponents to homosexual legitimization like to say, but the authority of the culture of interpretation by which these people read scripture in such a way as to lend legitimacy to their doctrinaire prejudices. Thus the battle for the Bible, of which homosexuality is the last front, is really the battle for the prevailing culture, of which the Bible itself is a mere trophy and icon. Such a cadre of cultural conservatives would rather defend their ideology in the name of the authority of scripture than concede that their self-serving reading of that scripture might just be wrong, and that both the Bible and the God who inspires it may be more gracious, just, and inclusive than they can presently afford to be.

  The biblical writers never contemplated a form of homosexuality in which loving, monogamous, and faithful persons sought to live out the implications of the gospel with as much fidelity to it as any heterosexual believer. All they knew of homosexuality was prostitution, pederasty, lasciviousness, and exploitation. These vices, as we know, are not unknown among heterosexuals, and to define contemporary homosexuals only in these terms is a cultural slander of the highest order, reflecting not so much prejudice, which it surely does, but what the Roman Catholic Church calls “invincible ignorance,” which all of the Christian piety and charity in the world can do little to conceal. The “problem,” of course, is not the Bible, it is the Christians who read it.

  Testimony in the Yard

  This is where I come in.

  A few years ago I found myself speaking at a rally in Harvard Yard, at the request of an organization of gay and lesbian undergraduates who had found themselves the objects of an attack against them on religious grounds by a conservative undergraduate periodical. The articles in the periodical, all written by undergraduates, most of whom were conservative Roman Catholics, argued that homosexuality was bad for the individual, bad for society, and should be condemned on religious and biblical grounds as well as on the empirical evidence of the unhappy lives of homosexuals. The purported purpose of this periodical was pastoral, no malice was intended, and while it was meant to be provocative and to attract attention, it was also meant to persuade, by the power of its arguments from Christian tradition and contemporary social analysis, that homosexuality was an unsound position and an unsafe and destructive lifestyle.

  In its efforts to attract attention and to provoke, the periodical was a roaring success, and the response was outrage on the part of the Harvard homosexual community. It should be pointed out that this community was a diverse and secular one, and that while many of its members were doubtless devout practitioners of a number of religious faiths, it would be less than accurate to call the community as a whole particularly visibly religious, and the rally itself was hardly a churchy affair. It was arranged to be located in the traditional gathering place for protest and demonstration in Harvard Yard, on the large platform that forms the south porch of The Memorial Church, the scene not only of hundreds of rallies over the years but of the annual Commencement exercises. When the Harvard community has something on its mind, it gathers on these steps to express it.

  In the days after publication of these articles and before the rally itself, the college community was ablaze with debate and controversy, and many felt that a line in college civility had been crossed. Rarely in the memory of many had one group of students taken to print to castigate its fellow students, and quickly the issue of homosexuality and religion fell second to questions of fairness, fair play, and civil discourse. At Harvard, where tolerance and diversity had long assumed the status of sacred cow and secular icon, the challenge to these virtues assumed in the minds of many a form of blasphemy. Some homosexual students said that they no longer felt safe from physical attack if they could be subjected in print to such an aggressive assault. What may have been genuine desire on the part of the young authors to present their strongly argued positions as a way of opening a vigorous debate on an issue of enormous moral significance had the effect of most polemics. Fears and anxieties were raised where few had been before, discourse was inhibited rather than stimulated, and the moral climate of the community was poisoned. What was meant to be robust debate was perceived to be theological thuggery, and the situation could not continue unaddressed.

  It was to this situation that I, and a number of other members of the faculty and administration, were invited to speak. I accepted the invitation both because I recognized the precariousness of the situation and because I believed I had something to say that would not necessarily be said by my secular colleagues on the platform. I fully appreciated the fact that I was not asked to speak because of any radical credentials that I may have had: I had none and was not thought to have any. After all, I was the man who had prayed for Ronald Reagan at his second inaugual and preached for George Bush at his first. Some knew I was a Republican, and others knew I had been consistently on the “wrong” side of the divestment issue in the debates on South Africa. I was opposed to divestment. I knew that I was invited to speak as a representative of the establishment and, together with certain of my colleagues, was expected to lend a patina of respectability to an occasion that otherwise might be easily written off as homosexual hysteria. I also knew that no one wanted me to be “religious.” Religion, in fact, was part of the problem here and not part of the solution, or so it was thought by my secular friends.

  I knew all that, and yet I also knew that the only ground on which I could stand in this particular instance was religious ground, and so rather than a pious elegiac on civility, or an exercise in political outrage, I determined that I would make my best effort to represent my understanding of the Bible and the Christian faith as it applied to the heart of the present discontents. As the university’s pastor and preacher, as a Christian, and as a homosexual, I decided to reclaim by proclaiming a vision of the gospel that was inclusive rather than exclusive, and to do so as a Christian who was more than the sum of the parts of which I was made. I did so. I did so because I wanted all and sundry, but partic
ularly these young homosexuals and their polemic antagonists, to see that there was more than one way to read the Bible and to understand the imperatives of the Christian faith. Certainly I wanted to contribute to the cooling down of local passions, but admittedly I also wanted to win minds and hearts, or at least to awaken them, to a view of the Christian faith which in dispute valued charity and humility over mean-spiritedness and arrogance. I thought of Edwin Markham’s poem about the circle:

  He drew a circle that shut me out—

  Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

  But Love and I had the wit to win:

  We drew a circle that took him in.

  I warned of the dangers of Christian absolutism, with the appropriate references to the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials, and I dismissed the easy references to scripture and the rather glib social analysis as unworthy of thinking or charitable Christian debate. I gave my speech, and naively thought that my disclosure of my own homosexuality would serve to substantiate the Christian message of reconciliation in diversity and equality in Christ. I, however, rather than my message, became the subject of attention.

  The ensuing tempest drove me to an ever more intense study of both the relevant passages of scripture and the theories of interpretation, hermeneutics, as we call it in the trade, by which they are to be explained and understood. Despite some student calls for my resignation or dismissal, and threatening noises from clergy in my increasingly edgy denomination of American Baptist, I nevertheless found this experience to be one of the most formative and rewarding of my ministry. I prayed a lot, and was prayed for, and the support of friends who were secular and could not understand the problem, and of religious friends who did, and did not, and of strangers who heard not me but what I had said, served to sustain me in the difficult times. I got much mail, most of it a pleasure to receive. All that was not a delight to read, however, had to do with the Bible. Many of my critics, chiefly from within the religious community, asked if I read the same Bible they did, and if I did, how then could I possibly reconcile my position with that of scripture? When arguments failed, anathemas were hurled and damnations promised. The whole incident confirmed what had long been my suspicion. Fear was at the heart of homophobia, as it was at the heart of racism, and as with racism, religion—particularly the Protestant evangelical kind that had nourished me—was the moral fig leaf that covered naked prejudice. I further concluded that more rather than less attention must be given to how we read the scriptures, what we bring to the text, what we find in the text, and what we take from the text. This transaction has brought me to the present moment, and I am grateful for that.

  It Seems to Be All About Sex

  It is all well and good to discuss what the Bible says or doesn’t say about homosexuality, and it has been the purpose of this chapter to do just that. But when it comes down to cases, homosexuality is not about the Bible or texts. It is all about sex, and that is what tends to make it rather difficult to talk about in polite society, particularly in the religiously saturated culture of the United States that is still squeamish about the subject of sex. This squeamishness doesn’t deny the hedonistic basis of much of our popular culture; entertainment and advertising, perhaps our two chief “art forms,” are suffused with sex. Calvin Klein makes a sexual statement with every promotion of his underwear. The soap operas glide on a film of sexual frisson, and the substance, if we can call it that, of television situation comedies and nightclub stand-up comics is laced with sexual innuendo, and often with considerably more than innuendo.

  The paradox of our culture is that while we are hardly averse to sex and its all too prominent place in our public consciousness, we are still awkward in talking about it. Perhaps this is not surprising in a sophisticated civilization that persists in all sorts of childish euphemisms for body parts and functions and refers to what other cultures call simply the toilet as the “rest room.” This reticence in speech is explained by many as a result of modesty. In honest discussions about homosexuality, however, this reticence gets in the way. When we ask just what is wrong with homosexuality, we are forced to ask what for many is the far more difficult question, what is the purpose or function of sex?

  Taking its cues from much of its inherited Jewish morality of sex, the early Christian church had little doubt that the chief function of sex was to procreate. When the Hebrew Bible commanded that humankind be fruitful and multiply, as is recorded in Genesis 1:28, the Hebrew writer meant that from the posterity of Adam would come the Messiah. Fecundity was not simply to replicate the race, but to provide the means for the Messiah to enter into the world. Every male child was in fact a potential Messiah, as King Herod, in Matthew’s gospel, knew only too well. Thus, for the Jews, any sexual activity that interfered with the possible birth of the Messiah was forbidden. The wasting of seed through nonprocreative sex was destructive not only to the survival of the race but to the redemption of the race through the Messiah. Masturbation, coitus interruptus, and, understandably, sex without the possibility of issue, that is, homosexual activity, was proscribed.

  Not only did the early Christians have this moral inheritance as a part of their identity, they also had the negative examples of pagan sexual practices, which to them upheld private pleasure and satisfaction, together with aspects of exploitation and degradation, at the expense of the best interests of society. For Paul and his contemporaries, the end of the world would soon be at hand, and for them the Messiah had come in the form of Jesus Christ. Paul, interestingly enough, does not endorse the procreative aspects of sex, and in fact seems to prefer celibacy as the higher vocation. For those for whom the call of celibacy was too high, he issued his famous edict that it was “better to marry than to burn”—not in hell but with desire for the satisfactions of sex. In I Corinthians 7 he discusses the conjugal relations that ought to obtain between Christian husbands and wives. Nowhere does he mention that the sole purpose of such conjugality is the procreation of children. That emphasis would come later with the Church Fathers, who, seeing that the end of the world was not yet at hand and that the church needed to be replenished, grudgingly gave the mandate of sex for procreation. They were grudging in that they, like Paul, held celibacy to be a higher vocation than marriage. And as such Church Fathers as Jerome, Augustine, Origen, and Tertullian all knew either by experience, as was certainly the case with Augustine, or by keen observation, the pagan pleasures of sex, which they themselves had renounced upon their conversion to Christianity, they wished to separate “Christian sex” from “pagan sex” by imposing a strictly moral purpose on it.

  Augustine and the Invention of Shame

  To minimize carnal pleasure, Augustine and his colleagues endowed the act of intercourse with the burden of shame. Lust was the sinful desire that could only be mitigated by purposeful, procreative, and unpleasurable sex. The very organs of sex, the genitals, were called by Augustine pudena, from the Latin pudere, “to be ashamed.” Thus the genitals were instruments of shame because what they facilitated was itself a shameful, disgusting, but necessary act. Augustine reconstructs, “resitualizes,” as modern biblical critics would call it, the Eden story and transforms it from a story of creation and disobedience to a tale of the discovery of sexual shame, making sex, and not disobedience, the original sin by which all of the subsequent race was tainted at birth. It is in this way that he reads Psalm 51:5, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” As Reay Tannahill points out in her eminently readable Sex in History, for Augustine and the moral theology he was developing, “The body was no more than a flawed vessel for the mind and spirit, and it was now up to the Church to propagate Christian morality in these terms.”5

  He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, if the austere Augustine may be credited with wild dreams. Celibacy became the badge of moral authority. Marriage was a concession to human weakness and the need for companionship, children, and sex. And sex within marriage was tolerated not for pleasure but f
or the morally worthy purpose of producing more Christians—but even children were described as a “bitter pleasure,” of which the pangs of childbirth were both sign and punishment. Somewhere in the twelfth or thirteenth century, marriage was made a sacrament, which meant that like all sacraments it could not be dissolved. Jesus’ judgment on divorce, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11–12), confirms Paul’s textually older prohibition on divorce in I Corinthians 7:10–15. According to Tannahill, “One marriage…should supply enough companionship for any man; second marriages were adultery, third fornication, and fourth nothing short of ‘swinish.’ ”

  Given these strictures and the intrinsic sense of sin attached to sex, it is no wonder that sexual activity outside of marriage that gave only pleasure or sensation because it was incapable of performing its moral duty of producing issue was held in deep revulsion. The Bible, we may say, was utilized to reinforce this position, but as we have seen, the Bible was evidence for the prohibitions rather than the basis for them. Homosexuality was thus by definition, together with masturbation and other forms of nonprocreative sexual activity, deviant, and the degree to which these deviations gave pleasure only compounded the sin of lust.