This was my
contribution to an e-mail discussion on the N(ew)W(estminster)Net.
Far be it from me to chip in on an existing
dialogue, or to pretend to some kind of Olympian detachment. But it does strike
me that when two earnest Christians disagree on the subject of how the
canonical Scriptures are to be interpreted and applied,
there is almost certainly an underlying clash of theological assumptions. I
think that I can claim to be pretty objective in the homosexuality debate. I
have recently done and am publishing some pioneering work on the relevant
texts. This is grounded in forty years' immersion in the study of the ancient
world, and nearly as long an acquaintance with both Testaments in the original
text (or as near as we can get to it!). I started my investigation with an
attempt at an entirely open mind about What the Bible Says on this topic, and
worked as a philologist. I hope that what I say now will sound and be quite
independent of what I am sexually or erotically, whether I am
"liberal" or "conservative" in theology.
The discussion seems to be (a)
theological, i.e. about the relation of God's love to His justice and how we
proclaim and exemplify these, and (b) ethical, i.e. about the relation of (Judaeo-)Christian love to (Judaeo-)Christian law/rules. To save time I will lump these
two categories together. These are what I believe to be biblical positions (I
give no references because we all know them):-
(1) There
is no opposition between God's love and His justice. There is not really a
distinction even, for justice is simply love viewed from a particular angle.
The two Testaments are united on this point. Marcion got nowhere in the early
Church with the opposite opinion. Love includes God's doing justice to and for
us, and His expecting us to imitate Him out of gratitude for His
redeeming/liberating love. Love so understood, His for
us, ours for Him, and ours for one another, is the great all-inclusive (Judaeo-)Christian gospel truth,
and represents the whole of life and the whole duty of man.
(2) The
God of love defines what love is, as opposed to our using our idea of love to
delimit God in some way.
(3) We
are converted into a life of love, or we are not converted at all. There is no
holiness which is not loving. Persons and
relationships are bigger than anything else; they alone are eternal.
(4) While
God is all men's Father, as seen and experienced in the Life, Death and
Resurrection of Christ, I am not His child unless I respond to, and live
responsively in, His love.
(5) The
opposite of love is sin. All sin is primarily against God. There is sin which
is against God only. Because He is both God and a God Who loves people, to sin
against our fellow is both to dishonour and to
displease Him. Thus a loving God is "angry with sinners every day".
(6) There
is no opposition between love for brother/neighbour and obedience to the moral
law. The moral law comes to us from a loving God, and our obedience to it is an
aspect of love. Love "fulfils" not by abrogating, but by igniting and
motivating. The rules function rather like the jelly to the mould: certainly we
can't eat the mould, but without it we are unlikely to get any jelly.
(7) Both
a legalistic exaltation of the rules (usually for others) and an antinomian
contempt for them (usually in my own favour) are fundamentally sub-Christian.
(9) We
of the (Judaeo-)Christian
tradition have learned a universally-known and binding ethic in the matrix of
our faith. But everyone has it, and a sense of obligation to it, as part of
common grace. Our danger may sometimes be that we fall below, rather than rise
above, the world's best standards, whether in sex-ethics or elsewhere.
I find it absolutely fascinating that
all of this chimes with Articles VI, VII and XX.
That's perhaps about enough to be going
on with, except that I want to make two remarks and tack on a letter to the Anglican
Journal (whether it gets printed depends I suspect on whether they are
interested in moving the discussion on towards a livable resolution).
(a) Close
study of the language for righteousness, justice, justification, doing right
and for unrighteousness, sin, wronging one's fellow etc. shows that we are
looking at one complex of ideas. Greek cognates and derivatives with *dik* pervade the text e.g. of Rom. 1-3 and I Cor. 6.
A very good new book is Richard B.
Hays' The Moral Vision of the New Testament (Edinburgh 1996).
(b) I
am by no means convinced that modern homosexual relationships do not, as
ancient ones did, run the gamut from the lasting-and-loving kind to the
exploitative and hedonistic. For the ancient evidence (with a couple of minor
faults in his Greek) see a fine article by Mark Smith in JAAR 1996 64.2 pp.
223-56.
"TO THE ANGLICAN JOURNAL
Dear Editor,
As a biblical Hellenist and Hebraist, I
have to say that those who believe that the canonical scriptures contain
nothing about modern homosexual orientation and practice are going to have to
make and publish their own version of them, along the lines of the Jehovah's
Witnesses' New World Bible, for such a tendentious notion will never get past
the vast majority of qualified scholarly opinion. For full documentation of
this, I refer readers to my article entitled `Biblical Texts Relevant to
Homosexual Orientation and Practice' in the forthcoming special summer issue of
CHRISTIAN SCHOLAR'S REVIEW.
As for the suggestion that we have no
recorded Dominical teaching on these subjects, it is a falsehood based on a
failure to reckon with the wide scope of the Greek term *porneia* and the
*-porn-* root as it is used in the Bible. Our Lord has things to say about it
in Mt. 5, 15 and 19. There is incidentally an extra Greek-biblical reference
imported by the translator at Ezek.
As a theologian and simple believer, I
wait patiently as I have for thirty years for my church to start thinking
spiritually. We have God the Schoolmarm (Touch not, taste
not/keep-the-rules-or-else legalism), God the Grandfather (Come let us sin,/anything-goes antinomianism), but where is the Lord, the
Giver of Life (Against such there is no law/living-in-the-Spirit Christian
freedom)? If we had more of the real God we should see the back of the current
sterile clash between Left and Right in ethical discussion.
Dr. P.D.M. Turner."