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