What the homosexual did was different, and hence the homosexual was different, and in a religious world that increasingly prized conformity in all things, but particularly in sexual matters, the difference branded the homosexual a threat to the moral order, the equivalent of a heretic in the church or a traitor to the state. This is the position when Saint Thomas Aquinas arrives, whose teaching formed a basis of moral philosophy for the treatment of homosexuality up to the present. Until fairly recent times, homosexuality was regarded first as sin, then as crime, and then as illness. These cultural identities all stem from what homosexuals do or cannot do sexually, and the source again is not the Bible but the moral assumptions of the Church Fathers with which they then read the Bible and interpreted it as part of the teaching tradition of the church.
What the Homosexual “Does”
Andrew Sullivan,6 the Roman Catholic and openly gay former editor of The New Republic, tells of an encounter with Patrick J. Buchanan on Crossfire, Buchanan’s television talk show. The subject was same-sex marriage, with Sullivan in favor of it and Buchanan opposed. Thundered Buchanan, “Andrew, it’s not what you are. It is what you do!” A good Roman Catholic knows that what homosexuals “do” is to have sex in which the possibility of procreation is excluded. Since the only purpose of sex is to procreate, when that is by definition not possible, the sexual activity is also by definition “unnatural” and proscribed by church teaching. Sullivan points out in his New Republic essay, however, that the Roman Catholic Church permits the marriage of infertile couples in church and allows them sex. Couples in which the wife is past child-bearing are also allowed to marry in church and to have sex although the procreation options are closed. By a miracle a childless couple could have a child, but as Sullivan points out, if we appeal to the miraculous, why are God’s miracles necessarily limited to heterosexual couples? If homosexuality is an objective disorder, then what is infertility? Sullivan’s argument is that the church has accommodated itself to nonprocreative sex in marriage. By what logic other than circular does it oppose homosexual nonprocreative sex in a marriage that also in every other way conforms to the church’s definition of the marriage state?
In his recently published essay “By Their Fruits” in Our Selves, Our Souls and Bodies, Boston College Professor of Theology Charles C. Hefling, Jr.,7 raises this timely discussion to a new level of clarity. Writing firmly within the tradition of Anglican moral theology, Hefling argues that to say that homosexual conduct is wrong because the Bible says it is “is not to answer but to dismiss the question.”
He puts the question in the way he thinks it should be asked: “Are there sound reasons for revising the traditional account of what the wrongness of homosexuality consists in? Is the idea that physical intimacy between men or between women can only be unnatural an idea that the best available understanding of the relevant facts will no longer support?” In other words, are we able to advance beyond the moral hypothesis of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas that the sole natural function of sex is procreation?
Beyond Procreation
The answer is yes. There is a widely shared consensus developed over time that “sex is good in more ways than one.” He cites the 1958 resolution of the Ninth Lambeth Conference, the decennial meeting of the bishops of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which on the subject of intercourse said, “Sexual intercourse is not by any means the only language of earthly love, but it is, in its full and right use, the most revealing…. It is a giving and receiving in the unity of two free spirits which is in itself good…. Therefore it is utterly wrong to say that…such intercourse ought not to be engaged in except with the willing intention of children.” The Roman Church teaches that the sexual act must have two core elements: the procreative, which means an openness to the possibility of new life, and the unitive, which means a commitment to faithfulness. The Lambeth ruling makes it clear that the procreative does not take precedence over the unitive, and in fact the unitive is an equally valid context in which the sexual act may take place. Fruitfulness in marriage, as Hefling argues, can be real without being visibly obvious. Or, as he neatly summarizes it, “Sex can be productive without being reproductive.” On this basis Hefling argues that “homosexual intercourse is not, in and of itself, the unnatural vice that tradition condemns.”
Sex Redeemed
Hefling has not devoted this careful and constructive analysis merely to the advocacy of what is called “gay marriage,” which is of course a civil affair and very much before the public in the congressional debates on the so-called Defense of Marriage Act. Hefling is suggesting that the church, his own Anglican Communion and by implication all other churches, advance the conversation to the point where the relevant question is what are the appropriate Christian expectations placed upon those permanent, monogamous, faithful, intimate relationships within which the sexual act takes place, whether the relationship be heterosexual or homosexual. “Have same-sex relationships the same potential for sacramental meaning and power” as heterosexual relationships? He believes they have because “they can, and do signify a natural good.” Sex thus understood is not only redeemed, it is also redemptive.
Part Three
The True and Lively Word
“Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all Bishops, Pastors, and Curates, that they may both by their life and doctrine set forth Thy true and lively word.”
—THOMAS CRANMER,
The Book of Common Prayer, 1662
Chapter 9
The Bible and the Good Life
OVER the years of my ministry I have come to two conclusions about people and the Bible. The first is that people really do desire to be and to do good. They want to know what makes a good life, and they want such a good life for themselves and for those they love. The second is that people have an instinctive belief that the Bible is an important book and that it is significant in helping them learn about the good life, but that most of them do not know how to read the Bible, finding it a confusing mystery and not understanding what is in it or how to make sense and meaning of what is in it. Thus the good life remains an elusive goal and the Bible an unknown, even unknowable book. Is it wrong to expect the Bible to provide a key to the good life? Is that not using the Bible in a self-serving way? Am I stupid for not being able to figure out on my own what the Bible says and means? Do I have to be a fundamentalist or a biblical scholar to answer these questions? These two questions and their attendant anxieties consume the interests of many modern men and women, who are, in the words of Carl Jung, “in search of a soul.”
The Desire for the Good Life
In the autumn of 1995 I went to preach in one of New York City’s oldest and most historic churches, the First Presbyterian Church on lower Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. This was the church in which Harry Emerson Fosdick preached his famous 1923 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The liberal Fosdick, a Baptist by ordination, created such a fuss among the more conservative Presbyterians that he was forced out of the friendly and relatively liberal pulpit of the First Church by a less than friendly denomination. As a consequence, the Riverside Church was founded to provide an unfettered pulpit for his preaching. There are some who would suggest that the transformation of America’s traditional churches, from the main line to the sidelines, began with this confrontation. The First Church has a proud history, but until recently most churches with a proud history faced an uncertain future. The movement was away from these old establishments, the balance of power was shifting to the more conservative, evangelical, and nondenominational religious powerhouses in the suburbs of the South, the Heartland, and the Far West. For twenty-five years we have heard of the slow death of the once-thriving inner-city churches. They have been killed off by dead preaching, aging congregations, costly physical plants, the changing demographics of America, and unfavorable statistics.
By all measures then, the First Presbyterian Church should have been dead on its feet years ago. Surrounded as it is by a h
alf-dozen institutions of higher learning in one of New York’s trendiest and most secular neighborhoods, one might have expected to find a small and faithful congregation of the elderly, holdouts against an inevitable decline, huddled within these nineteenth-century Gothic walls much like the old praying women muttering their beads in the neglected darkness of Orthodox churches in the secular Soviet Russia of two generations ago. Yet the place was filled to the doors with a vibrant, varied, and energetic congregation. Many came from the suburbs into the city for services, and as many, if not more, were New Yorkers from nearby; even more were new Presbyterians and new Christians. I was delighted and surprised. On the Sunday in question nearly forty new members were received into the church, and this, I was told, happened three times a year. Most of these were young adults, and many were young parents. From the little biographical summaries the pastor made as each person came forward I learned something of who they were and why they were joining this church. Many had been brought up in church but had fallen away; others had never known a church, had discovered this one, and had decided to sign on. None, it seemed, was merely going through the motions; all were intentional and articulate about why they were there and what they wanted. What they wanted could be summed up in three words: The Good Life.
The Good Life to many now has a decidedly comfortable, consumerist, and secular ring to it. Following the gospel of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko, that “greed is good,” the good life means as much of this world’s goods as can be carried away and charged. He who dies with the most toys wins. We all know about the Greedy Eighties, that decade of rampant materialism in which our cultural values were defined by television’s Dynasty and Alexis Carrington, and Dallas and J. R. Ewing. Junk bonding was the national sport, and self-indulgence was a constitutional right. Excess was in, moderation was only for those who could not accelerate or excel. Luxury was both a goal and a reward, and Godiva chocolates turned one of the world’s most ordinary of confections into a pricey status symbol. Cityscapes exploded with steel and glass temples to the gods of commerce; banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses sprang up everywhere. Malls, the horizontal version of these monuments to the credit economy of things, killed off the pokey downtowns of Middle America, and became self-sustained suburban pleasure domes. The word was “development,” and the developers became the apostles of the new age of instant and trouble-free prosperity. This was as close to heaven as the Brie-and-bottled-water set wanted to get, and a New Yorker Thanksgiving cartoon of that era captured the mood: It showed one Pilgrim saying to another as the Mayflower was putting in to Plymouth Harbor, “Religious freedom is my immediate goal, but my long-range plan is to go into real estate.”
The Harvard undergraduates I knew in those days, when asked what they wanted out of life, would say that they wanted “the good life,” or “a good life,” and by that most of them meant, like their college generation across the country, and perhaps the world, economic security, marital happiness, and a license to pursue the pleasures of this world. “I’m not greedy,” one once said to me. “I just want all I can get, legally, of course.” Many of these have now learned the truth of the sad aphorism “Be careful what you pray for, for you just might get it.” Since no one aspires to be lower class, and our democratic and anti-elitist principles deny the existence of an upper class, everybody in America of whom account is taken is middle class. Political parties and their partisans are devoted to the interests of this middle class, and the values and virtues of this class are taken to be normative, worthy of emulation and preservation. Affirmative action and high taxes “hurt the middle class”; high interest rates and government regulations “hurt the middle class”; and in fact, if Newt Gingrich and most of the Republican candidates for high office are to be believed, government itself is lethal to the health of the middle class.
It does not take a degree in sociology to know that this vast entity known as the middle class is unhappy, and woefully so. Elsewhere we have discussed some of the reasons for this discontent, and they are familiar to us all, but one of these discontents, not often discussed, is a discontent not with the failures of our system but with the unsatisfying nature of our system’s success. In the Needy Nineties, over and over again I have heard from people who by the standards of the day have made it, or are making it, the plaintive and at times resentful question, “Is this all there is? Isn’t there more to life than this?” This is not a question of greed but of need, an acknowledgment that what has been sold as the good life is not all it was cracked up to be.
Some years ago I gave the commencement address at a very posh girls’ day school in Manhattan. Many of the brightest and the best of the girls went on to Radcliffe and to other elite colleges, and soon thereafter would make their way into the expanding stratosphere of the establishment once reserved for their brothers. They were able, aggressive, and entitled young women on the threshold of conquering the world, and I rejoiced in their achievement, was happy to celebrate with them, and wished them well. I took as my text on that bright sunny morning in midtown that wonderful passage from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6, where he asks, “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” Neither for Jesus nor for me was this a hostile question, and he goes on to invite his listeners, as I did, to “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet their heavenly father provides for them. Are you not of more worth than these?” It is one of the most lyrical passages in all of literature, one well suited to the overachieving anxieties of prep school. It concludes with the sound advice, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.” Jesus knew his audience, and I thought that I knew mine, and I think the girls liked it, or at least they told me so.
All were not pleased, however, and at the reception the father of one of the girls came up to me with fire in his eyes and ice in his voice, and told me that what I had said was a lot of nonsense. I replied that I hadn’t said it, but that Jesus had. “It’s still nonsense,” he said, not easily dissuaded by an appeal to scripture. “It was anxiety that got my daughter into this school, it was anxiety that kept her here, it was anxiety that got her into Yale, it will be anxiety that will keep her there, and it will be anxiety that will get her a good job. You are selling nonsense.”
He was one unsatisfied customer, and I recognized the type, for I have watched Harvard parents drive their children not only to college but to distraction with their anxiety that they get the credentials for the good life. If the parents are wealthy they want their kids to learn practical skills to manage and to keep the wealth intact; if the parents are poor they want their kids to get the practical skills to move up the economic and social escalator, both for the kids and, vicariously, for themselves; and if the parents are from the middle class, they want their kids to be responsible and to get the practical skills, and so forth. Few parents tell their children to smell the roses or consider the lilies or become a poet or a potter or a painter, and when the child, wonder of wonders, discovers his or her muse and wants to take Music or Fine Arts or a seminar on Hindu religion instead of “something useful, like economics,” they are anxious because of their parents’ anxieties. College, to some students, and, alas, to most parents, is the very expensive ticket to the good life.
It is a pity, but it is also a truth that for many it is only when the good life turns sour or proves inadequate that it is seen to be not good enough. If Wordsworth were still taught and known as our grandparents knew him, we could say,
The world is too much with us: late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours.
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The poem may be less known than of old, but the truth is even less so, and I think we have reached that point where so many thousands of able, disappointed, and questing people are prepared to exchange the good life for the life that
is good. That is what brought so many of those people to the First Presbyterian Church in New York City. That search is what is beginning to fill up the waste places of America’s churches across the continent.
Some sociologists of this phenomenon describe the yuppie return to religion as the result of parenting, that these young people are seeking spiritual security for their children in the same way that they want them to have straight teeth, the best day care, and early violin lessons. This spirituality is just one more consumer objective to be satisfied. The consumer mentality is hard to break, and there is the very real ecclesiastical version of comparison shopping: looking for the church with the best parking, the most congenial day-care programs, the best choir, and the most user-friendly preaching. What is wrong with this? Why shouldn’t we rejoice that people take the same care in seeking out spiritual guidance as they do in looking for a dentist or a podiatrist for the family dog? Who are we to dismiss disillusion with what this world offers as the good life as an inadequate reason for seeking out the life that is good, and for those things that make for life rather than just for a living?
The Good Book Page 20