rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (05/30/84)
THE GAY CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE: An Historical Perspective [Summary of a talk given May 21, 1984 at the Church of the Covenant in Boston by John Boswell, author of the ground-breaking study CHRISTIAN- ITY, SOCIAL TOLERANCE & HOMOSEXUALITY (U. Chicago Press, 1980) and professor (at a tender 37 years of age) of history at Yale.] [All errors of logic or fact or stylistic inelegance are mine. Much of the summary's wording is taken verbatim from Boswell but not quoted to make reading easier. --- Ron Rizzo ] PART THREE There is nothing in the teachings of Christ as presented in the New Testament to support either the complete exclusion of women from power & authority in the church or the church's doctrine of basic inequality between the sexes. On the contrary, the emphasis on love as the sole or overriding criterion by which to morally evaluate all human relationships tends to promote egalitarianism and the discarding of most conventional social roles, including gender roles. Yet most church doctrine was adopted by majority vote, a method called "kataholon" (?, "of the whole", from which the word "catholic" comes), in a long series of councils that were convened over the centuries to settle theological disputes. The early church had female clergy (deacons), bishops were popularly elected, and women participated at councils and in other powerful church bodies. They probably comprised at least half of all church members as well. Nevertheless, using a succession of ma- jority votes, these very same "coed" councils systematically stripped women of all power & rights within the church. How could this possibly have happened? Boswell claims the early church adopted a secular ethical ideal, "virtus" (English "virtue" ultimately derives from it), as the standard underlying its conception of morality, even though virtus blatantly contradicts the ethical notions of the New Testament. Virtus defines the Good as manliness and proposes masculine traits as ethical criteria: strength, decisiveness, assertiveness, etc. It likewise denigrates qualities seen as "feminine" as undesirable & even immoral. It still has a profound effect on how Christians think about ethics. The result was the radical disenfranchisement within Christianity of half the human race and the establishment of misogyny as Christian doctrine. Given such a complete perversion of the faith and the institution, is eventual homophobia any surprise? The church has been characteristically indifferent, &, less often, hostile, even to heterosexuality, the majority sexual preference (Jerome, an early Father of the church, believed that a husband who displayed "too much" affection or concern for his wife had committed adultery). For a minority sexual preference, Christian indif- ference to eros meant homophobic sentiments within the church would not be suppressed when they occurred, & Christian hostility to eros could be decisive when the church absorbed secular bigotries (homophobia, misogyny) under the external pressure of social change, even though these were at odds with basic Christian values. The other two attitudes towards eros that Christianity has displayed are much less common but still significant: 3) Ambivalence, often misperceived as hostility or indifference (Boswell said little about this); and 4) A positive valuation of eros: this tradition has nearly escaped notice. It has parallels in other religions: in Judaism, the mysticism centering on the Zohar; in Islam, sufism. Boswell thinks gay people have been fundamentally responsible for this tradition in these three faiths. For example, there is "no hint of procreative intent in the New Testament's description of love". Love doesn't exclude passion. The words used for love in Koine, the Greek-derived lingua franca in which the NT is written, had also human and erotic connotations. Up to the 13th century, a number of gay lover/saint couples were widely venerated (and still are in the eastern church). (PART FOUR will conclude this "synopsis")