[soc.religion.christian] More reflections on the homosexuality "debate"

mls@sfsup.att.com (Mike Siemon) (07/08/90)

One more bit of reflection on my "position" in the debate, derived from
email correspondence the last time this went round.  There is some amount
of "argumentation" for my stance in this, but what I am trying to get at
is the PROBLEM that faces ONE puzzled person (me) attempting along with
other confused and equally puzzled people to discern God's will *for me*.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

	One problem of "advocating" anything on the net is that one *will*
seem 1-dimensional in doing so.  This is almost inevitable, since it is
necessary to focus an issue very tightly to address it in an essay that
will not be more than a half-dozen screens of text.  I am sure that I come
across as a more intransigent crusader than I feel in my own self.  The
points I mean to raise are important to me, but the full texture of my life
is mostly invisible there.

	With regard to Paul and his comments about homosexuality, I must
note that:

    -	I assume he had a negative response to all forms of homosexuality
	that he had encountered or heard of,

    -	if asked by one of his congregations for an "authoritative" ruling
	he would likely have forbade all kinds of homosexual activity -- as
	he also insisted on women being "decorous" and veiling their hair,
	and men not having long hair, and ... <whatever>.  He would also, I
	suspect (and hope) have been honest enough to say that such a rule
	derived from *him* and his own opinion, and not from the Lord.

Gay men, quite generally, regard Paul as an "enemy" -- and from a limited
perspective (theirs and his) this is the "obvious" position.  As a gay man
with a theology derived from and modeled on Paul, I am the one with the
hard row to hoe.

	What is important to me, in my postings on this subject, is to point
out how *little* Paul has actually said about the matter.  What I am mostly
contesting on the net is the commonplace conservative notion that there is
a clear and direct outlawing of homosexuality; because there *isn't* any such
thing.  

    1.	the 1 Corinthians passage with its use of _arsenokoitai_ *cannot* be
	read as "legislation" against homosexuality, just because the *rest*
	of the terms in the passage are vague terms refering to abuses ..
	[I omit the paragraph or so of further belaboring this point, as not
	to my current purposes]

	My reaction to 1 Corinthians is: Paul clearly found *something* he
	wanted to condemn in *some* form of homosexual activity.  I may not
	find myself in complete agreement with the contexts he objected to;
	or I might -- there is simply not enough information.  There *are*
	a number of standard forms of homosexual abuse in the Roman world
	that *I* would condemn as breaking the law of love.  And I really do
	think that the forms most objectionable TO ME were likely the ones
	most notoriously well-known to Paul.  I seriously doubt that he ever
	encountered, among his congregations, *any* examples of the sort of
	committed love that I take as paradigmatic of gay relationships. So
	it becomes problematic just *how* I am to take his negative reaction.

    2.	The Romans 1 passage makes it fairly clear that Paul has a schematic
	idea of "unnatural" sex as somehow correlated with a rejection of the
	sovereignty of God.  It is very obscure why he thinks this.  It may
	well be that he has adopted the notion that appeared a century or so
	before his time that the "crime" of Sodom was unnatural sex.   I am
	*not* going to dispute that this was early adopted by the Church as
	*its* understanding.  It is, I think, sophistical, to try to avoid
	the obvious association made in this matter by the Church from at
	least 200 A.D. on; but it is (I think) equally obvious that *Jesus*
	made no such association -- his one reference to Sodom is in the
	context of the "great commission" and the crime in that context is
	inhospitable reception of the disciples: precisely what is seen by
	most of the OT tradition as the crime of Sodom with respect to the
	angels.

	Again, I am willing to understand anyone who takes Romans 1 as a sort
	of generic "homosexuality is a sign of our fallen estate" worldview.
	The context is a mythic explanation of the world, not a scientific
	one.  But Paul, despite heroic efforts, retains some of the Pharisaic
	sense that "purity is good, impurity is bad" that Jesus really and
	truly dispensed with -- without in any way claiming that impurity is
	good in itself.  The vast majority of gay men go through a phase in
	which we would *like* the world to be simple, and everyone to be nice
	little heterosexual girls and boys and live happily ever after.  But
	the world we inhabit -- made by our own tragic choices of the fruit
	of that fatal tree -- is not that simple.  And it is the *whole* of
	the world that Jesus intends to *heal* [I'd like to revert to Scots
	here and use "hale" for both terms, where English has diverged :-)]

    3.	This leads to my final point.  Neither the 1 Corinthians passage nor
	the Romans one should be seen as "legislation."  That is really the
	whole content of my argument about them.  They *do* define Paul's
	ideas about homosexuality, insofar as we have *any* sense of these --
	but in just that context they are incredibly vague and uninformative.
	And I am not going to pretend that Paul *favors* homosexuality, when
	he quite clearly does not.  As I have said, I don't know whether I'd
	win an arugment with him on this one -- probably not, since he is a
	better theologian and rhetorician than I am.  At most, I might get
	him to understand and actually come to grips with the issue as it is
	presented to me in my life -- he most definitely does NOT deal with
	it anywhere in his actual work.

	There is no "law" -- no general and abstract "rule" in either of the
	passages that are always quoted against homosexuality.  That is what
	my case has been from the beginning.  People who read these passages
	as "laws" are people who will see "laws" favoring their own prejudice
	in anything at all.  In general, I am a "libertine" just because I
	find it mind-boggling that people *want* to read any random opinion
	as if it provided a law.  They are so eager to avoid thinking for
	themselves, for coming to grips with the demands that God makes on us.
	The one place where Paul really *does* give a rule is the one I keep
	pointing to -- in Romans 13, where he repeats Jesus' insistence that
	all human law derives from the love of the neighbor.  This is a law
	that gives me no simple algorithm, no formula to "know" that such-
	and-such an act is "good" and some other act "bad."

I really can't help it if the early Church started loathing sex in all its
forms.  I think this was pathological of them, though explicable in a group
that truly expected the world to end around them and felt that they had to
be "pure" to deserve salvation when the world changed.  Yet that is *not*
the message I get from Jesus -- however stringent he was about our human
incapacity to meet the actual divine standard.  The Son of Man came eating
and drinking -- and thereby boggling the minds of those who found these to
be suspect activities, hedged about with prohibitions.
-- 
Michael L. Siemon		The Son of Man has come eating and drinking;
...!att!sfsup!mls		and you say "Behold, a glutton and a drunkard,
m.siemon@ATT.COM		a friend of tax collectors and sinners."  And
standard disclaimer		yet, Wisdom is justified by all her children.

bjstaff@uunet.uu.net (07/16/90)

Greetings:

In addition to Romans 1:27 and 1 Corinthians 6:9, there are two Old Testament
passages which seem to speak directly to the subject.  Perhaps Paul was
familiar with these passages?

	"Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable."
		- Leviticus 18:22

	"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have
	 done what is detestable.  They must be put to death; their blood will
	 be on their own heads."
		- Leviticus 20:13

Brad Staff
...uunet!zds-ux!bjstaff