gtaylor@cornell.UUCP (Greg Taylor) (06/27/84)
I closed the last posting with a snappy little reference to Ken Arndt and the grounds of tolerance. Briefly put, Ken's most recent net.motss flamery comes down to something like this: There is a strong movement within the gay political-pac community to seek to identify the oppression of gays as a form of "generic oppression"..That is, to claim that gayness is just like being black or being female insofar as the exclusion of rights or freedom is concerned ( I went and heard the head of the big gay lobby in D.C. speck on this very issue. From her presentation, this is a somewhat new political tack to take, I gather. Anybody know? ) Arndt seems to be asking if such an equation can be defended on the SAME sort of moral grounds...that is, if tolerance IS linked to a system of belief, distinction becomes an important issue. This is why I was reminded of Ken's posting in talking to a Sunni scholar. Okay, back to Boswell and Rosen. Rich has hit on a very interesting point: Namely that Christians are pretty cavalier about claiming connection between the Old and New Testaments, and yet choosing to accept or reject parts of it as they wish. *I* sure don't send my wife out to her tent on the edge of the camp every lunar cycle, and am about as hesitant to loudly proclaim that the Christian faith goes hand in hand with Judaism as I am to proclaim that Evangelical Fundementalism is the First-century CHurch reborn (that's why I enjoy reading net.religion.jewish so much...there's an incredible sense of richness and history in even the most unusual discussions). A part of that is at the base of my curiousity about Boswell. I'd like to thank Rich for reminding me of exactly *what* it was that was gnawing away there. It seems to me that BOswell's whole argument about Homosexuality in the early church is buttressed on a less than obvious premise: that Homosexuality is mentioned in regard to the primarily Greco-Roman societal context, and that the Jewish elements in the early church are quite like the Orthodox Jew of today in condemning the behaviour. I certainly agree with Boswell that there's a strong amount of evidence for practicing Homosexuals in the church. The question, though, would be: can they be considered Orthodox (or totally acceptable..choose the working language that either satisfies you or allows for the most satisfying flame)? There's an equal body of literature from the early church that would suggest a female sub-Deity who presides over the passage from the world of spirit to the world of matter (cf the Gnostic Gospels)...do we then assume that the denunciations of Gnosticism as a heresy are a bit of revisionist oppression? It took the church quite awhile to get around to doing something about that....come to think of it, the whole Gnostic thing happened right in the middle of the collapse of the Roman Empire. I bet it was only a reaction to that. It would appear to me that Boswell has done something that Rich Rosen might appreciate: He's chucked out everything in the documents of the early church that doesn't implicitly or explicitly support practicing homosexuality as the remnant of a crusty batch of old Judaic poops cluttering up the cosmopolitan early church. It's an interesting approach, but I am not sure I buy it. It might be more interesting to discover what both BOswell and an orthodox (Christian, Jewish, Islamic) scholar would say about the combination or separation of love as committment, love as desire, and sex as drive in the various cultures of the Near East. Again, Ron has given a pretty good summation of BOswell (I have been skimming through the book, and using his notes to find my way: thanks Ron) Well, that's about all I wanted to say. I figured that since Rich had such a good topic for discussion on the net buried in his Jender article, I'd try to find a way to talk about it that would involve the potentially largest number of people. I would imagine that what follows may get a little messy, but what is the net for? A Caveat: I intended my little bit of "book report" to be seen a report/followup on Boswell AND a way to talk about being Judaic/Hellenic in the Christian tradition. My mailbox isn't fireproofed, and my gay-baiting membership has lapsed badly since my conversion.