The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Supporters of Smith were many as the letters pages in Southern Baptist periodicals reveal. A typical one is this from Richard Edwards, then pastor of Carroll Memorial Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina: “I am in agreement with him because he is in agreement with the Bible.” Another on the same page writes, “If they are criticizing him for his doctrine, they are taking a stand against all the New Testament teaches.”

  Smith never denied his remarks. It would have been very difficult to do so as they were recorded on tape from which transcripts were made and sent to Jewish leaders within days of his statement. It is not clear from his many subsequent explanations of what he meant that he ever knew why or how he had given offense. After simmering a decade and a half, the controversy was reopened by the Southern Baptists in the summer of 1996, when at their annual meeting they reaffirmed their mission to convert the Jews. This time the controversy was carried on the editorial pages of The New York Times, where Leonard Garment in an Op-Ed piece on June 27, 1996, argued that Martin Luther prepared the way for modern Christian anti-Semitism and the Holocaust by the writing of his infamous pamphlet “The Jews and Their Lies.” As Paul Zahl and Timothy George point out in their letter to the Times of June 28, 1996, Luther’s attitude toward Judaism was religious, not ethnic, and born out of a conviction as old as Christianity itself. Alas, the subtleties of that distinction are lost upon modern anti-Semites, who are only too happy to add Christian theologians to the Christian Bible in support of their pernicious prejudice. As John T. Townsend in his essay “The New Testament, the Early Church, and Anti-Semitism” notes, “It has become customary to distinguish between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. The first is supposed to denote hostility to Jews on religious grounds, and the second denotes that the hostility has a racial aspect. In practice, however, racial hostility was generally present to some extent from the time that the Church became predominantly gentile.” (From Ancient Israel to Modem Judaism: Intellect in Quest of Understanding: Essays in Honor of Marvin Fox, ed. Jacob Neusner et al. [Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1989], pp. 149–170.)

  2. Ronald Reagan’s remarks are reported in a story by Steven K. Weisman in The New York Times of October 10, 1980.

  3. Explorations: Rethinking Relationships Among Jews and Christians, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1992. James Charlesworth is professor of New Testament Language and literature at Princeton Seminary, and is the editor of Explorations, published by the American Interfaith Institute, Philadelphia.

  4. Robert Kyser is professor of New Testament and homiletics at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and is the author of “The Gospel of John and Anti-Jewish Polemic” in Explorations.

  5. It is fair to say that the academy is well ahead of the church in taking on the stressful subject of the Christian Bible, anti-Jewish polemic, and anti-Semitism. As Luke T. Johnson points out in his essay “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic” (Journal of Biblical Literature 108/3 [1989], pp. 419–441), “The scurrilous language used about Jews in the earliest Christian writings is a hurdle neither Jew nor Christian can easily surmount. It is a source of shame [finally] to Christians, and a well-grounded source of fear to Jews.” (p. 419) Sidney G. Hill’s Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul’s Theology (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1993) begins with an account of the Bailey Smith affair (p. ix). The purpose of his book “is to gain a new, critical understanding of Paul after Auschwitz.” (p. xi) The issue of Christian anti-Semitism among fundamentalists and evangelicals is addressed by David A. Rausch in Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and Anti-Semitism (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993). Krister Stendahl in his article on “Anti-Semitism” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993) regards anti-Semitism as “the most persistent heresy of Christian theology and practice” and recommends that first it be recognized and unmasked, and that in order to combat it, Christians must continue the work begun in the Second Vatican Council: “a vigilant audit of Christian preaching, teaching, Bible study, and liturgy as to what perpetuates and engenders contempt for Jews and Judaism. In such a task dialogue with Jews is indispensable.” (p. 34)

  The Evangelical Church in Canada has joined its American counterpart in disassociating the Lutheran Church from the anti-Semitic writings of its founder. The statement passed in the spring of 1996 noted, “We who bear his name and heritage must acknowledge with pain the anti-Judaic diatribes contained in Luther’s later writings.” Luther was annoyed that Jews declined to be converted, and in his later years he called them “disgusting vermin” and “thieves and brigands.” The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran body in the United States, adopted a similar resolution in 1994.

  Chapter 7: The Bible and Women

  1. Professor Mary Daly has given her own account of her visit to The Memorial Church in the “Women’s Issue” of The New Yorker of February 26 and March 4, 1996. She and I endured an awkward conversation of about ten minutes just before the service, and as she departed in some organized haste before it concluded, I never spoke to her again that day, nor have I since. Thus I was most interested in her views of the occasion; her recollections are not significantly different from my own.

  2. The wickedly delicious concept of “textual harassment” was coined by Mary Jacobus and first appeared, I believe, in her article “Is There a Woman in This Text?” in The New Literary History, 1982.

  3. Dianne Bergant, “Women in the Bible: Friends or Foes?,” Theology Digest 40 (1993), pp. 103–112. Bergant cautions against the unthinking use of exemplary women in the Bible and would not necessarily approve of the use I make of Lydia, Phoebe, and Priscilla. “Just because women seem to be portrayed as self-directed and competent is no gurantee that such was the point intended by the author. In fact, they may be reinforcing patriarchial or Kyiarchal structures.” (p. 106) I take her point, but mine is that the presence of these women in the Pauline text is an affirmation by Paul of a colleagueship with them that indeed transcends a purely patriarchal reading. Lydia, Phoebe, and Priscilla were included at the beginning of the gospel work and by no means should be “read out” or their presence diminished.

  4. Arthur Rowe’s article, “Hermeneutics and ‘Hard Passages’ in the NT on the Role of Women in the Church: Issues from Recent Literature,” appeared in The Epworth Review 18 (1991), pp. 82–88.

  5. Malcolm O. Tolbert’s article, “Searching the Scriptures,” appears in The New Has Come: Emerging Roles Among Southern Baptist Women, ed. Anne Thomas Neil and Virginia Garrett Neely (Washington, D.C.: Southern Baptist Alliance, 1989), pp. 29–39.

  Chapter 8: The Bible and Homosexuality

  1. John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) received extraordinarily mixed reviews, and the opinion on this ambitious and precedent-shattering work is not settled even after fifteen years. It was hailed in the popular press, a remarkable thing in itself that a 424-page book of highly specialized medieval scholarship, densely documented in several languages and filled with demanding intellectual risks, should capture the general imagination, and on so controversial a topic as homosexuality. It was the first serious book to use the term “gay” as a precisely defined catagory as opposed to an in-group’s jargon. This alone was enough to offend many in the scholarly establishment. The scholarly reviews fell into three categories: (1) rave appreciation of a stupendous intellectual achievement; (2) an appreciative “yes, but,” judgment on the part of those who had some concerns about the intellectual leaps in a book that embraced nearly all of the major fields of humane inquiry, including theology, patristics, biblical studies, literary criticism, sociology, anthropology, and history; and (3) outright hostility, largely on the part of those who claimed one of these fields as their own particular specialty. Of these latter, perhaps Glenn W. Olsen’s review article in Communio (Summer, 1981), “The Gay Middle A
ges: A Response to Professor Boswell,” and J. Robert Wright’s “Boswell on Homosexuality: A Case Undemonstrated,” in the Anglican Theological Review (ATR/LXV:1), represent the extremes in peer disapprobation. Each in his own case seems upset that Boswell didn’t write the book they would have written, that his “special pleading” does not take into account their own particular concerns—in Olsen’s case, the neglect of “natural law” for which he charges Boswell with “cultural Protestantism,” and in Wright’s case, the fact that Boswell’s views do not square with the weight of received opinion. Wright is most anxious that Boswell’s views, particularly on scripture, do nothing to cause the Episcopal Church to reconsider its opposition to homosexuality on scriptural grounds, a position reaffirmed in the General Convention of that church in 1979, just a year before Boswell’s book burst upon the scene. These negative judgments do not conclude that Boswell is “wrong,” but prefer the protective coloration of what is known as the Scotch verdict, from the judicial proceedings in the courts of Scotland which permit a verdict of not proven.

  Boswell’s thesis is simply that hostility toward homosexuals and homosexuality does not find its roots either in the scriptural texts usually offered in evidence or in the early church, where a certain degree of tolerance obtained. The intolerance for homosexuals took the form we now recognize as the received tradition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when toleration of any deviation from the order of Church and State was at an all-time low: Jews, heretics, and homosexuals all found themselves at new and high risk. The theologian architect of this new level of intolerance, according to Boswell, was Saint Thomas Aquinas. From that time onward, Christianity has been bad news for homosexuals, to the point that Boswell could write, “It is unlikely that at any time in Western history have gay people been the victims of more widespread and vehement intolerance than during the first half of the twentieth century.” (p. 23) His exoneration of the Bible and the early church in the condemnation of homosexuality of course depends upon a radical, some would say inventive, reading of the texts and contexts, and this is of course the most exciting part of the scholarship, and the part that is also the most controversial. Some of the most adamant negative criticism came from those who objected to Boswell, whose field was not biblical studies, presuming to venture readings of texts at such great variation with received readings by the experts and the convictions of the faithful based on such readings. J. Robert Wright cites fourteen biblical commentaries from 1909 to 1982, “readily available on the library shelves,” and notes that Boswell’s readings are not confirmed by any of them. For most people that would be reason enough to take what Boswell has to say quite seriously, but for Wright, this discontinuity with orthodox scholarship proves that Boswell is not orthodox, and that is reason enough for not taking him seriously.

  Not all subsequent scholarship, and there has been a great deal of it on the topic of the Bible and homosexuality since 1980, agrees with everything Boswell had to say. I myself am not entirely sanguine with placing the full burden of Christian hostility to homosexuality on the shoulders of Saint Thomas and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As Reay Tannahill’s Sex in History, published in 1982, two years after Boswell, demonstrates, there seems to be enough overt hostility in the patristic period and its interpretation of scripture to share some of the responsibility. It is also interesting to note that Tannahill does not cite Boswell in either her extensive notes or her bibliography. What is clear is that the rereading that Boswell began of what Phyllis Tribble once called the Terrible Texts has been carried on along many of the lines he himself laid down. Victor Paul Furnish’s The Moral Teaching of Paul: Selected Issues (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1985), H. Darrell Lance’s “The Bible and Homosexuality” (American Baptist Quarterly 8, 1989), and Jeffrey S. Siker’s “How to Decide? Homosexual Christians, the Bible, and Gentile Inclusion” (Theology Today, July 1994) are significant contributions in this rereading. Few responsible discussions on the Bible and homosexuality in 1995 would content themselves with a received tradition of exegesis that responds neither to the questions Boswell’s readings raise, nor to the developments in the allied fields of interpretation, moral theology, or the ongoing developments in the fields of human sexuality and literary theory.

  The relationship among the Bible, sexuality, and the church as it has an impact upon the moral case for or against homosexuality is now one of the most contentious topics in the modern history of the church. Boswell did not begin that discussion. D. S. Bailey’s Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, which appeared in 1955 and contributed to the decriminalization of homosexuality in England in 1967, and Helmut Thielicke’s Theological Ethics, which appeared in 1964, make short shrift of the biblical case against homosexuality. Boswell, however, so defined the questions, albeit not all can agree with the answers that he proposes, that it is difficult to continue to appeal to the “plain sense of scripture” on the matter of homosexuality, although many persist in doing so. One of the better, but to me unconvincing, examples of this latter effort is Professor Marion L. Soards’s Scripture and Homosexuality: Biblical Authority and the Church Today (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster, 1995), which attempts to stave off revisionist exegesis of the texts on homosexuality not so much because Soards is opposed to homosexuality but because he wishes to defend the reformed tradition’s high view of scripture and its authority in the Presbyterian Church. Even that Communion, which for the past twenty years has wrestled with the matter of sexuality with the zeal it once reserved for the doctrine of predestination, concluded that on the basis of scripture, homosexuality itself was not a bar to ordination, although it required that homosexuals must be celibate, or non-practicing, if they were to be considered for the ordained offices of that church. As John J. McNeil, author of The Church and the Homosexual (Boston: Beacon, 1975), itself in its way a “Boswell before Boswell,” once said, “You can be a dog, as long as you don’t bark.”

  2. Jeffrey S. Siker, “How to Decide? Homosexual Christians, the Bible, and Gentile Inclusion,” in Theology Today, Vol. 52, No. 2, July 1994, p. 226. See also his “Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster, John Knox, 1994).

  3. Daniel A. Helminiak, What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality (San Francisco: Alamo Square Press, 1994,) pp. 100–102. In addition to his view that “Genesis is not a lesson on sexual orientation. Nothing in those two chapters [Genesis 1 and 2] suggests that heterosexuality, in contrast to homosexuality, was a concern in the author’s mind” (p. 101), Helminiak says that the popular “Adam-and-Eve-not-Adam-and-Steve” argument depends on a logical fallacy, what is called the ad ignorantiam argument, an argument “by appeal to the unknown, argument based on assumptions about what was not said. The argument runs like this: Since the Bible does not actively support homosexuality, it must be that the Bible condemns it. But this conclusion does not logically follow. What would follow is simply that we do not know the biblical mind on the subject.” (pp. 101, 102)

  4. Stanton L. Jones, “The Loving Opposition” in Christianity Today, July 19, 1993, pp. 19–25. Jones was chair of the psychology department at Wheaton College. His is a pastoral approach to the question of homosexuality and he urges Christian compassion from his largely evangelical readership. His chief concern, however, is neither pastoral nor necessarily moral, but the preservation of the doctrine of the authority of scripture. “There are only two ways one can neutralize the biblical witness against homosexual behavior: by gross misinterpretation or by moving away from a high view of scripture.” (p. 20)

  Many conservative scholars by the late 1980s conceded that a liberal consensus had been formed in favor of a revisionist view of the texts traditionally associated with the church’s teaching on homosexuality and decided that it must be challenged. An example of this reconsideration of the revisionist view of which Boswell was the chief instigator is David F. Wright’s “Homosexuality: The Relevance of the Bible,” in the Evangelical Quarterly 61 (198
9), pp. 291–300. An earlier and very significant critique of the Boswell view of Romans 1 is by Duke University Professor Richard B. Hays, “Relations Natural and Unnatural: A Response to John Boswell’s Exegesis of Romans 1,” in the Journal of Religious Ethics 14 (1986), pp. 184–215.

  A broader response to the cultural consequences of this now well developed scholarly consensus is that of the so-called Ramsey Colloquium, sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Public Life. Its article “Morality and Homosexuality,” which first appeared in the journal First Things, was reprinted in The Wall Street Journal of February 24, 1994. Aligning themselves with the “public anxiety about homosexuality,” which they regard as “a matter of legitimate and urgent public concern,” the members are eager to defend the heterosexual norms and the institution of marriage against what they regard as the cultural assault of an apparently successful homosexual civil rights movement. While they identify themselves as Christian and Jewish scholars of religion, they write as concerned citizens who “share the uneasiness of most Americans with the proposals advanced by the gay and lesbian movement,” and seek “to articulate some of the reasons for the largely intuitive and pre-articulate anxiety of most Americans regarding homosexuality.” It is a near concession that the liberal consensus is winning the cultural war.