Gary came to New Haven in the summer of 1989 to say a proper
farewell. My best friend from undergraduate years at Yale, he was dying
of AIDS. While he was still able to travel, my family and I invited him to come visit us one more time.
During
the week he stayed with use, we went to films together, we drank wine
and laughed, we had long sober talks about politics and literature and
the gospel and sex and such. Above all, we listened to music.
As always, his aesthetic sense was fine and austere; as always he was
determined to face the truth, even in the shadow of death.
We prayed together often that week, and we talked theology. It became
clear that Gary had come not only to say goodbye but also to think
hard, before God, about the relation between his homosexuality and his
Christian faith. He was angry at the self-affirming gay Christian
groups, because he regarded his own condition as more complex and tragic
than their apologetic stance could acknowledge. He also worried that
the gay apologists encouraged homosexual believers to "draw their
identity from their sexuality" and thus to shift the ground of their
identity subtly and idolatrously away from God. For more than 20 years,
Gary had grappled with his homosexuality, experiencing it as a
compulsion and an affliction. Now, as he faced death, he wanted to talk
it all through again from the beginning, because he knew my love for him
and trusted me to speak without dissembling. For Gary, there was no
time to dance around the hard questions.
In particular, Gary wanted to discuss the biblical passages that deal
with homosexual acts. Among Gary's many gifts was his skill as a reader
of texts. After leaving Yale and helping to found a community-based
Christian theater group in Toronto, he had eventually completed a
master's degree in French literature. Though he was not trained as a
biblical exegete, he was a careful and sensitive interpreter. He had
read hopefully through the standard bibliography of the burgeoning
movement advocating the acceptance of homosexuality in the church. In
the end, he came away disappointed, believing that these authors,
despite their good intentions, had imposed a wishful interpretation on
the biblical passages. However much he wanted to believe that the Bible
did not condemn homosexuality, he would not violate his own stubborn
intellectual integrity by pretending to find their arguments persuasive.
The more we talked, the more we found our perspectives interlocking.
Both of us had serious misgivings about the mounting pressure for the
church to recognize homosexuality as a legitimate Christian lifestyle.
As a New Testament scholar, I was concerned about certain questionable
exegetical and theological strategies of the gay apologists. As a
homosexual Christian, Gary believed that their writings did justice
neither to the biblical texts nor to his own sobering experience of the
gay community that he had moved in and out of for 20 years.
Gary and I agreed that we should try to encourage a more nuanced
discourse. Tragically, Gary soon became too sick to carry out his
intention. His last letter to me was an effort to get some of his
thoughts on paper while he was still able to write. By May of 1990 he
was dead.
The Bible hardly ever discusses homosexual behavior. There are
perhaps half a dozen brief references to it in all of Scripture. In
terms of emphasis, it is a minor concern-in contrast, for example, to
economic injustice.
In I Corinthians 6, Paul, exasperated with the Corinthians, some of
whom apparently believe themselves to have entered a spiritually exalted
state in which the moral rules of their old existence no longer apply
to them (cf. I Cor. 4:8, 5:1-2, 8:1-9), confronts them with a blunt
rhetorical question: "Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit
the kingdom of God?" He then gives an illustrative list of the sorts of
persons he means: "fornicators, idolaters, adulterers,
malakoi, arsenokoitai,
thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers."
I have left the terms pertinent to the present issue untranslated, because their translation has been disputed. The word
malakoi
is not a technical term meaning "homosexuals" (no such term existed
either in Greek or in Hebrew), but it appears often in Hellenistic Greek
as pejorative slang to describe the "passive" partners-often young
boys-in homosexual activity. The word,
arsenokoitai., is not
found in any extant Greek text earlier than I Corinthians. Some scholars
have suggested that its meaning is uncertain, but Robin Scroggs has
shown that the word is a translation of the Hebrew
mishkav zakur
("lying with the male), derived directly from Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13
and used in rabbinic texts to refer to homosexual intercourse. The
Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) of Leviticus 20:13 reads, "Whoever lies
with a man as with a woman [
meta arsenos koiten gynaikos], they have both done an abomination." This is almost certainly the idiom from which the noun
arsenokoitai
was coined. Thus, Paul's use of the term presupposes and reaffirms the
holiness code's condemnation of homosexual acts. This is not a
controversial point in Paul's argument; the letter gives no evidence
that anyone at Corinth was arguing for the acceptance of same-sex erotic
activity. Paul simply assumes that his readers will share his
conviction that those who indulge in homosexual activity are
"wrongdoers" (
adikoi, literally "unrighteous"), along with other sorts of offenders in his list.
In I Corinthians 6:11, Paul asserts that the sinful behaviors
catalogued in the vice list were formerly practiced by some of the
Corinthians. Now, however, since Paul's correspondents have been
transferred into the sphere of Christ's lordship, they ought to have
left these practices behind: "This is what some of you used to be. But
you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of
the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God." The remainder of
the chapter, then (I Cor. 6:12-20), counsels the Corinthians to glorify
God in their bodies, because they belong now to God and no longer to
themselves.
The I Timothy passage includes
arsenokoitai in a list of
"the lawless and disobedient" whose behavior is specified in a vice list
that includes everything from lying to slave-trading to murdering one's
parent, under the rubric of actions "contrary to the sound teaching
that conforms to the glorious gospel."
One other possibly relevant passage is the apostolic decree of Acts
15:28-29, which rules that Gentile converts to the new Christian
movement must observe a list of minimal purity prohibitions in order to
have fellowship with the predominantly Jewish early church.
If, as seems likely, these stipulations are based on the purity
regulations of Leviticus 17: 1-18:30, then they might well include all
the sexual transgressions enumerated in Leviticus 18:6-30, including
homosexual intercourse. This suggestion about the Old Testament
background for Acts 15:28-29 is probable, but not certain.
The
most crucial text for Christian ethic concerning homosexuality remains
Romans 1, because this is the only passage in the New Testament that
explains the condemnation of homosexual behavior in an explicitly
theological context. The substance of Paul's exposition begins with a
programmatic declaration in 1:16-17: the gospel is "the power of God for
salvation to everyone who has
faith,
to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of
God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, `The one who
is righteous will live by faith.'" The gospel is not merely a moral or
philosophical teaching that hearers may accept or reject as they choose;
it is rather the eschatological instrument which God is working out in
the world.
Paul is undertaking in his own way to "justify the ways of God to men" by proclaiming that the righteousness of God (
dikaiosyne theou)
is now definitively manifest in the gospel. As a demonstration of his
righteousness, God has "put forward" Jesus Christ, precisely in order
"to prove at the present time that he himself (i.e. God) is righteous"
(Rom. 3:25-26). For Paul, the gospel that proclaims God's justice is
also a power, "the power of God for salvation" reaching out graciously
to deliver humanity from bondage to sin and death.
The genius of Paul's analysis lies in his refusal to posit a catalog
of sins as the cause of human alienation from God. Instead, he delves to
the root: all other depravities follow from the radical rebellion of
the creature against the Creator (1:24-31). In order to make his
accusation stick, Paul has to claim that these human beings are actually
in rebellion against God, not merely ignorant of him. The way in which
the argument is framed here is crucial: ignorance is the consequence of
humanity's primal rebellion. Because human beings did not acknowledge
God, "they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds
were darkened." The passage is not merely a polemical denunciation of
selected
pagan
vices; it is a diagnosis of the human condition. The diseased behavior
detailed in verses 24-31 is symptomatic of the one sickness of humanity
as a whole. Because they have turned away from God, "all, both Jews and
Greeks, are under the power of sin." The aim of Romans 1 is not to teach
a code of sexual ethics; nor is the passage a warning of God's judgment
against those who are guilty of particular sins. Rather, Paul is
offering a diagnosis of the disordered human condition: he adduces the
fact of widespread homosexual behavior as evidence that human beings are
indeed in rebellion against their creator. Homosexuality, then, is not a
provocation of "the wrath of God" (Rom. 1:18); rather, it is a
consequence of God's decision to "give up" rebellious creatures to
follow their own futile thinking and desires.
