The Sins of Scripture (12 page)

If this reconstruction could be sustained, would we not then have an ancient, nonsexist tradition to reclaim, one on which we could rebuild our sexual value system? The new values in that system, values of radical equality, would become the mark of the church of the future. In that church there would be no barrier erected against women, no attempt to define their worth as second-class citizens. That new church would adhere to the belief that in Christ “there is neither male nor female.”

As we work toward that radical equality, the victory for women that has come through the secular society and against the entrenched patriarchy of the church will find a new ally in the Jesus who destroyed power boundaries and power definitions. This Jesus, who related to the primary woman in his life with the power of equal dignity, appears to have called women into a new being, to have enabled them to experience a new humanity.

It is a shame that by denigrating the woman called Magdalene during Christian history, the church destroyed the healthiest female symbol in ancient Christianity. There is no evidence in the Bible to support the familiar claim that Magdalene was a prostitute. That charge was fabricated beginning in the second century of the Common Era, when Greek dualism portrayed flesh as evil. This flesh-and-blood woman at Jesus’ side was perceived by the dualists as a threat to his holiness. So the church set about trashing her reputation. Church leaders began to identify her with the woman taken in adultery in John’s gospel (8:1–11), though there is not a shred of evidence to support this identification. Just to be safe, they also identified her with that previously mentioned but still unnamed woman of the city in Luke’s gospel (7:36–50), though once again there is not a shred of evidence to support this identification. With her character in tatters, Mary Magdalene was left to play the role of the harlot in Christian history. In her place at Jesus’ side, the church installed the sexless, and therefore unthreatening, virgin mother, who was docile, dependent and passive. With the two major female figures in the Christ story relegated to the classical roles in male fantasy of virgin and whore, there was no viable female role model left in the Christian story.

It is interesting to note that when the rise of women in the secular West began to break into consciousness, women adopted a fictional role model, a comic strip character created by William Molton Marstan, the pseudonym for psychologist Charles Moulton, as their inspiration. This character was called Wonder Woman, and her adventures captured the imagination of girls and women from 1941, when the strip was born, into the 1960s. When Gloria Steinem launched
Ms.
magazine in 1971, the cover featured a picture of Wonder Woman, who by this time had become the patron saint of the feminist movement.

Wonder Woman’s secret was that she could do anything that men could do, and do it even better. She stood for strength, self-reliance, sisterhood and mutual support among women. Her body was an identifiable and well-proportioned female body. There was no mistaking her for either a man or a sexless figure. If history does not give us the defining models that we need when our perception of reality begins to change and the old models no longer work, then we create make-believe role models. I regard Wonder Woman as a necessary figure in the human story, since the one vibrant and whole woman in the Christian story, Magdalene, was obliterated by the keepers of the historic prejudices of patriarchy and misogyny, the hierarchy of the Christian church.

A new day is dawning in the lives of 50 percent of the human race. The church that was once the enemy of this new day, quoting and acting upon the basis of biblical texts born in patriarchy, could become both the ally of these oppressed ones and the place where a new humanity in which there is neither male nor female can finally be acted out. That is my vision. Magdalene is my role model. The church that adopts this vision will change radically. The church that does not adopt this vision will die! There is no other possibility! Now do you still want to waste your time arguing that the full inclusion of women in the power positions of church leadership violates scripture, overturns sacred tradition and threatens the unity of the church? That is the height of suicidal irrelevance for the Christian church.

I prefer to grasp the new day, to expose the “sins of the scriptures” and to claim the Jesus seen in the often hidden texts of the New Testament as the ally of a new humanity in every form. To follow that Jesus is to know that in Christ, humanity in all its fullness is what counts. Whether that humanity is male or female might determine biological functions, but it must never determine human worth or divine value.

THE TERRIBLE TEXTS

INTENSE, IRRATIONAL, THREATENING AND HYSTERICAL

I
t has all of the intensity of the final battle of Armageddon that is supposed to mark the end of the world. The opposing forces consider each other to be mortal enemies. There is no room for compromise between them, no middle ground, just mutually exclusive points of view. Threats and even violence are readily employed as the tactics of intimidation. Both sides appeal to God and claim that this fight is waged in the name of all that is deemed holy. The stakes are thought to be so high that many people on both sides assert that Christianity itself will die if the other side prevails.

What I am describing, however, is neither the end of the world nor the end of Christianity. It is rather a collision between a new consciousness based on new data and an old definition that has informed our cultural value system for at least two thousand years. Welcome to the church’s battle over homosexuality, which today is in its final stages and marks the life of every part of this faith system the world over.

Each side in this conflict seems to understand that both the future and the integrity of this faith system are at stake in this conflict. People who stand outside the Christian faith are amazed at the passion, the rhetoric and the hyperbole, but those engaged in the issue believe that all those emotions are justified in what is to them a life-and-death struggle. If gay and lesbian people are not welcomed and accepted just as they are, many Christians believe, then the Christian church becomes nothing more than a sectarian movement that has no future. If gay and lesbian people are welcomed and accepted just as they are, many Christians believe, then morality itself collapses and the system of authority that has marked the Christian past will collapse. What emerges from that collapse will be something quite different, indeed unrecognizable from anything that has been called Christian in the past. At the center of the debate is the claim historically made for the truth of the scriptures. The sins of scripture with its terrible texts strike yet again.

Examine first just how the threat posed by the acceptance of gay and lesbian people has changed the guidelines which usually mark church debate. Pope John Paul II, who still maintains the traditional Roman Catholic position that there is only one true church, and it is constituted by those who accept the authority of and remain in communion with the bishop of Rome, has begun to court the support of those parts of the non–Roman Catholic Christian world that share his point of view that homosexuality is unnatural and deviant behavior. He has sent messages of support to fragmentary groups within other ecclesiastical traditions, tacitly recognizing both their existence and their validity. He has lectured Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams openly and even rudely, as an angry schoolmaster might do, in an attempt to influence the direction of the worldwide Anglican communion at whose altars he still forbids Roman Catholics to worship. He has issued warnings to national and provincial or state governments not to move toward a new acceptance of homosexuality, maintaining his working definition that it is “an affliction” that needs to be cured, if possible, or endured without giving in, if cure is not possible. He has warned Roman Catholic legislators that they risk excommunication unless they stand firm on the official teaching of this church. One does not go to these lengths unless the issue is assumed to be a matter of life or death, or the threat posed by this new consciousness is deemed to be so dangerous that it might destroy all that he thinks is holy.

What makes this papal and Roman Catholic negativity so strange is that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church knows full well that its ordained ranks are liberally populated with gay persons. They know as a matter of fact that its priesthood has, for most of Christian history, either encouraged or required an unmarried status as a prerequisite for ordination. It has thus provided a safe haven in which gay men could escape the social pressure of marrying while being able to suggest by implication that they are motivated only by virtue and the sacrifice of answering a “higher calling.” They also recognize, even if they do not admit it, that one of the major reasons for the incredible shortage of priests in that church today is that gay people, living as they do in a far more open society, do not need the church for a cover as they once did. Anecdotal evidence is always dangerous, but I could not help finding it compelling when I talked to a man who told me he had given up his ambition to join the Roman Catholic priesthood because he was the only heterosexual student in his place of theological training!

When the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church condemns homosexuality with the vehement public rhetoric we have become accustomed to hearing from its leaders, one has to realize that there is some hysteria present. Their cover is not holding, and they are condemning what they know to be true about themselves. There is no health in such a tactic. Rather, fear is rampant, honesty is a casualty and integrity is missing in action.

This behavior is quite frankly an acknowledgment that anxiety at the threat of exposure is very near the surface. It is a tacit recognition that the power of the teaching magisterium can no longer hold back reality. It is the dawning awareness that the authority system that undergirds its doctrines, dogmas and ethical pronouncements is becoming something other than self-evident truth. A new consciousness is in fact challenging their presuppositions. It is no wonder that this church has become so defensive.

While the Bible has never been for Roman Catholics the same kind of “Maginot” or defense line that it has been for Protestants, it is nonetheless always lurking in the background. One certainly cannot trace the rise of creedal theology in the first six hundred years of Western Christian history without becoming aware that quotations from the scriptures, which were assumed to be vested with the power of divine revelation, were essential in the development of such doctrines as The Incarnation, The Atonement and The Holy Trinity. Only when one realizes that these are the foundations that are shaking underneath the battle about homosexuality do the strange reactions and visceral intensity exhibited by Catholic religious leaders, who are presumably rational people, become at least comprehensible.

While denial and repression are both visible and obvious in Roman Catholicism, there is no part of the Christian church that has escaped this kind of conflicted debate over homosexuality, and the resulting behavior is highly revelatory. In the Church of England, for example, in 2003 an openly gay man, Jeffrey John, was nominated and approved at each level in that church’s rather cumbersome decision-making process to serve as a bishop in the diocese of Oxford. This approval process included the imprimaturs of the appointing bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth II herself. Yet John was forced to step aside at the last minute when traditionalists mounted a campaign of incredible hostility that included the threat of violence and murder if this man were to become a bishop. This was not a debate on competence, for no one could doubt this man’s qualifications. He was a greatly admired New Testament scholar with an earned Oxford PhD. His position at the time of his selection was that of overseeing the training of candidates for the priesthood in a major diocese. That is hardly a position into which one is placed without impressive credentials. He had previously served as vicar of a parish church, as well as dean of Magdalene College, Oxford.
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The startling, duplicity-dripping message that the Church of England was proclaiming was that it was okay to be gay in a low-profile church position, but not in a high-profile position. That is hardly a stance that many will salute.

In the American Episcopal Church, a Florida bishop wrote an open letter to the presiding bishop of his own church demanding that he step down from his position, since his pro-homosexual stand was, in the opinion of this Florida prelate, “outside the boundaries of Christian practice.”
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But it was the presiding bishop’s position and not that of the offended Floridian that was supported by the highest-ranking decision-making body of the Episcopal Church. This suggests that the Florida bishop now sees the majority of his own church as violating the Christian faith so deeply that it is fatally flawed and can no longer claim to be Christian. Tacit excommunication is what this letter was about. That presents a very new idea. The defeated minority is now calling the majority schismatic!

In American Methodism’s national conference, a body in which the traditional position is still in the majority, those who called for changes to enable the full acceptance of gay people were not just defeated in the assembly vote; they were arrested and jailed when they demonstrated against the winning majority.

Splinter bodies have sprung up in the various Christian denominations, claiming that all who do not agree with them are both faithless and no longer Christians. Vigilante groups within these several traditions go so far as to articulate their venom at the funerals of homosexual persons who have been killed in prejudice-driven hate crimes. One side views these victims as martyrs, while the other will actually say that their murders are the express will of God.

Some third world bishops, especially in Africa, feel so deeply about this issue that they are willing to sacrifice their sources of economic support rather than align themselves as part of a church that supports this “condition” they believe to be evil. But even in Africa the debate rages. The world-renowned Desmond Tutu, who prior to his retirement was both the Anglican Archbishop of Capetown in South Africa and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has offered unflinching and even breathtaking support for the cause of full inclusion of homosexual persons in the body of Christ. It is quite difficult for African Christians of any stripe to maintain that this gentle and saintly man has stepped outside the boundaries of the Christian faith.

Astonishingly judgmental and hostile statements are made in this conflict by those who are publicly identified as Christians—statements that so deeply violate the Christian call to love that their witness becomes destructive. One American television evangelist suggested that homosexuals were behind the violence that marked the rule of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Perhaps he did not know that Hitler also killed homosexuals along with six million Jews. This man went on to say that homosexuals ought to be quarantined and isolated from society lest they infect the masses. In an interesting revelation of his blatant anti-Semitism, this same public evangelist said that “the acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of Gentile Christianity,” and he warned his listeners that the agenda of the gay community is “to take your children and grandchildren and turn them into homosexuals.” Since these are his convictions, he urges the government of this nation to discriminate against homosexuals on the same basis that we “discriminate against kidnappers, murderers, and thieves,” lest the homosexual agenda “destroy all Christians.”
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Others in the world of American television and radio evangelism are no less robust in their negativity. Regularly they claim the authority to speak for God and justify their hatred of homosexual people on the basis of what they perceive to be God’s hatred of homosexuality. The validating authority that maintains this evangelical furor for these people is found in the sacred texts of the Bible. The “Word of God” is clear, they say. The word of hate is in the Book!

Yet one fascinating fact needs to be recognized. This vehement rhetoric reveals quite overtly the frightening but real assessment that even with God and the Bible presumably on their side, they are still losing this fight! If one has identified both God and God’s Word with a cause that is losing, then everything that person holds sacred is about to collapse. These people live, they believe, at the end of an era—perhaps even at the end of their world, which they mistakenly identify with
the
world. Their winning enemies are not just the secular humanists who long ago left the church; they are also fellow Christians. How can this be? The martyr complex rises. The paranoia increases. The sense of despair sets in. Their special hatred is reserved for those who claim to be themselves believers and yet who reject what they are sure is the “clear teaching of scripture” in regard to the evil of homosexuality.

When a Christian community elects an unashamed and openly gay man to be a bishop and consecrates him publicly to that role and office, then it is clear that the old definitions of what it means to be homosexual are no longer holding. That is what happened in the Episcopal Church in 2003.
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Just as certain is the realization that the “clear teaching of the Word of God” has, as traditionalists understand it, been set aside. This means one of two things: either the teaching of the Bible is not as clear as its advocates have always claimed or the Bible is not the “Word of God” in any literal sense. It might even suggest that
both
are the case.

What is that clear teaching, and where is it found in the Bible? That is the subject to which this study of the homophobic texts of the Bible must now turn. One discovers first how few these texts really are and second how convoluted is the reasoning that has attempted to use the Bible as the enforcer of cultural prejudices.

To set aside the Bible’s supposedly “clear teaching” about the evils of homosexuality—a teaching that is contained in no more than nine references found in sixty-six books, written over a period of about twelve hundred years—has proved to be far more difficult than other conflicts that have marked Christian history. Does that not suggest that something more than a proper reading of the Bible is at stake?

But since the defenders of the traditional condemnation of homosexuality depend so vehemently on this “clear teaching” from the “Word of God,” I must enter their battlefield and confront these condemning texts. It is a way of removing from those staunch defenders the righteousness of their claims that the Bible supports their prejudice. That, quite frankly, is not a very difficult thing to do, as I hope to demonstrate in successive chapters in which I will examine in detail the texts found on the opening page of this section. I will begin with Leviticus, not because it is first, but because it is the most frequently cited.