Theological Task Force wades in ‘the issue’ – studies six writings on theology and homosexuality

Jack Haberer, the Houston pastor who led the discussion, pointed out at the beginning that the task force was conducting “an analytical exercise,” looking at the six articles to say, “Does what they say hold water. Is it valid? Is it legitimate? … Are they doing theology the way we believe theology ought to be done?”

In effect, the task force was taking the learnings from some of its earlier discussions — what the Reformed tradition teaches about how Scripture should be properly interpreted, for example — and putting those principles to work. They looked at how each author dealt with sinfulness, what each considered the role of the church to be, how they dealt with the themes of creation and redemption, nature and grace. It was also a way to gently crack the door — to start talking about homosexuality and ordination without letting the beast out to freely roam.

“None of them is perfect, none of them is wholly despicable,” Haberer said of the pieces chosen for analysis. (The other authors were Luke Timothy Johnson, a Catholic and former monk, now married, who teaches at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta; Thomas E. Schmidt, who was published by InterVarsity Press and has taught at Westmont College in California; Jeffrey S. Siker, who teaches theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles; and Helmut Thielicke, a late German theologian whom some task force members said is well-respected by evangelicals.) The question is “is it a good theological process,” Haberer said, not whether individual task force members agree with an author’s conclusions.

As a result, the discussion was both by intention narrowly focused, and also somewhat revealing. What some Presbyterians most want to know — what this task force will tell the PC(USA) to do about ordaining gays and lesbians — never made it to the batter’s box. But there were some glimpses of what could lie ahead.

Mike Loudon, a pastor from Florida, said the question of whether gays and lesbians have a choice about their sexual orientation — whether it’s predetermined by genetics or up to individual choice — is very much an issue for evangelicals. Loudon said of Gagnon: “He definitely does not believe the biological evidence is definitive, that homosexuality is a biological condition. I think that still is very much at the bottom of this whole argument.”

Is homosexuality genetic, determined at birth, something presumably God-given and God-created? Or is it a matter of choice — something that can change, and be repented of?

Several of the authors pulled from the opening chapters of Genesis in the Bible — some drawing the conclusion that the account of creation, the order that God established before the fall into sin, is God’s vision for what the world ought to be — including the creation of a man and a woman, intentionally made for each other, made to fit together in heterosexual marriage.

Scott Anderson, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, said the question of whether the description of creation in Genesis, where God created Adam and then Eve, telling them to cleave to each other and to be one flesh, is “normative for every human life” is a central argument in the debate. Because Genesis doesn’t mention homosexuality, “we cannot rule out that it is a possibility” as well, Anderson said.

What does it mean that something is or is not in the Bible, asked Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Seminary in New York. She pointed out that different authors sometimes used the same techniques of scriptural interpretation to reach different conclusions — applying essentially the same methods to come out in different places. And not all authors who reach the same conclusion, perhaps that homosexuality is sinful and outside God’s plan, give the same weight to particular passages in Scripture — to what Paul says about homosexuality in the first chapter of Romans, for example, which some view as more of an illustration and others as more definitive.

One writer the group discussed previously, who concluded that homosexuality is sinful, relied heavily on Romans, Wheeler said. But Schmidt dismisses the biblical prohibitions against homosexuality “with a wave of a hand,” she said — almost as lightly as do some who think gays and lesbians should be ordained — but then leans heavily on Genesis to establish what’s “normal.”

Not even all the authors who are convinced that homosexuality is sinful come at it simply by relying on what the Bible says — they turn to other reasons, perhaps an argument, said theologian Mark Achtemeier, that some of them may be skeptical about whether the proof-texts so frequently cited always hold up.

That’s not to say just throw out the biblical passages on homosexuality, however.

In comparing these writers, “the hard work of exegesis in community really stands out,” said John Wilkinson, a pastor from Rochester, N.Y. “You can’t ignore the Bible. We have to remember that.” If there’s concern about what particular passages mean, “I think we need to say more than these simply don’t apply.”

Some authors drew their arguments from interpreting particular passages from Scripture, some by drawing theological analogies — if Gentiles could be accepted into the fellowship in the early church, what about homosexuals now? — and some by making arguments about natural law or drawn from the observable social condition (research about promiscuity among homosexual men, for example). Some referred in detail to what theology professor Frances Taylor Gench described as plumbing — how the male parts and female parts of the body fit together, making an argument about God’s intention for heterosexual marriage based as much on anatomy, or what Wheeler called “natural theology,” or “what any sensible person can see,” as anything else.

Schmidt made the argument that homosexuality undermines the family and heterosexual marriage — a case that Loudon said really resonates with some evangelicals. Loudon said a “conspiratorial fear” drives some of this debate in the church, a sense that homosexuality is “dangerous for marriage. That’s what’s of great concern in society.”

Some authors also raised pastoral concerns: even if the church determines that homosexuality is a sin, how can it minister to gays and lesbians? What does it say about God’s plan for them? Should the church think of homosexuality as somehow “a talent that is to be invested,” as Thielicke wrote, part of God’s created order, or as a sinful inclination from which people should repent?

Sullivan, for example, argues that if his church says gay orientation is a given, is naturally occurring, then the church needs to give a theological accounting of what’s involved in that. Not to discuss that at all, Achtemeier said, is to say “there are corners of the creation that just aren’t going to be revealed.”

Gagnon, on the other hand, argues that homosexuality “is not an inevitable product of one’s birth but rather is largely shaped” by factors in the family and the culture.

Wheeler said that Gagnon’s article has “a whale of an introduction,” drawing on the Old School Calvinistic view that “God does things that aren’t reasonable, that’s just the way it is. That may seem like a tragedy to you, but that’s the will of God.”

Joe Coalter, a professor and director of library and information technology services at Louisville Seminary, responded that Gagnon acknowledged that being gay or lesbian “was difficult. And there are other conditions that are difficult . . . The Bible doesn’t explain why things are there, it says what is there.” And “it gives you knowledge about God’s relationship to you.” (As Wheeler then put it: “Jesus is answer enough, even if you don’t understand it.”)

And Lonnie Oliver, a pastor from Georgia, said he liked how Gagnon “brought Jesus into the article, how he used Jesus to interpret Scripture.”

Jenny Stoner, the task force’s co-moderator, said she found the tone of some articles — particularly Gagnon’s — to be “really abrasive” (it was originally presented to “a very partisan crowd” at the Coalition meeting, Loudon said) and others more inviting. That may have implications for the task force’s own work, Stoner said — in deciding not just what to say, but the tone for how it should be said.

Achtemeier referred to Gagnon’s approach as “scorched earth,” although others said a highly partisan style isn’t uncommon in academic writing. And Loudon said Gagnon represents his constituencies well — those who believe “there is a gay agenda and it goes against traditional values,” who contend “the traditions are under attack, and this is a war.”

Anderson, who is gay, said, “I feel completely caricatured by this article, and unfairly so . . . It does not in any way describe what life is like as a gay person,” and he finds it troubling that Gagnon, while he refers to science, only cites scientific findings that support his case and ignores what Anderson described as “a huge body of science” that does not.

There also was discussion about personal experience — about the revelatory work of the Holy Spirit, and about what role the testimonies of gay and lesbian people that God is at work in their lives should play in the church’s discussions.

Andrew Sullivan, in his interview, spoke of what he called the “intellectually incoherent” position of the Catholic church saying, “we love gay people, but you can’t be gay.” And he said “I felt, through the experience of loving someone or being allowed to love someone, an enormous sense of the presence of God, for the first time in my life.”

That led to an extended discussion of sin, and the need to repent; and of how Reformed theology allows for continuing revelation through the Holy Spirit, but how that experience of revelation must always be tested by what is found in Scripture.

Before he became a Presbyterian, Haberer spent a lot of time in Pentecostal churches — where visions and speaking in tongues were daily occurrences, but which were always checked, he said, to see if they corresponded with what’s in the Bible. People need to be cautious, Haberer said, “about one vision trumping the Torah” — assuming that just because someone has experienced it, it’s necessarily true.

But some authors argued that understandings of what Scripture means have changed over time. Johnson, for example, raises the question of whether the same-sex behavior that’s forbidden in the ancient world is “incompatible with covenant faithfulness, which is what stands the heart of a marriage,” Achtemeier said. But Johnson also writes that “the harder question, of course, is whether the church can recognize the possibility of homosexual committed and covenantal love” and to consider whether that is part of God’s plan or not.

Johnson, writing from the Catholic tradition, has in some ways “the highest view of Scripture,” Wheeler said. Because as Johnson sees it, the “Scripture has got legs, it does things to people, it forms faith,” and he writes of “what theological understandings it will create in you if you let it do that.” Protestants tend to think of “the Bible versus the New York Times,” as Wheeler put it — but Johnson “cuts through that with a much more dynamic, living view of Scripture, something that goes out and grabs you.”

Johnson also is concerned with holiness, Wheeler said, with how Scripture makes people live holy lives, and “he stands over against bending Scripture to what we want or need,” or, alternately, “it sitting there dead saying the same thing to us over time.” And he describes how the Holy Spirit works through the experiences people have to bring them to read the Bible in a different way — tying them together, “not the Spirit and experience trumping Scripture,” Achtemeier said.

But Coalter responded that, “I’m of very mixed minds on this one. I do think there’s a power to Scripture and I do think it does lead us deeper.” But if the Bible doesn’t speak with a single voice — Johnson suggested Scripture has multiple and sometimes contradictory voices, although the choice to pick one rather than another must be explained and defended — then “why read it?” Why not just turn to other classical religious texts?

And “we’re not invited just to listen to the Spirit, because there are all kinds of spirits,” Coalter said. “Trying to decipher which is the Holy Spirit and which is just a spirit is really hard to do.”

Sometimes, he acknowledged, the plain meaning of a passage of Scripture isn’t clear — some may even say that’s true of the passages regarding homosexuality, Coalter said. But he doesn’t want to give the Bible “so many legs” that it can mean whatever someone decides it should.

Coalter described it as a vulnerability of the Reformed tradition, the idea that there’s a living Bible that’s always somewhat malleable, that the Holy Spirit is always revealing.

“We don’t have a reliable leg to stand on,” Achtemeier said. “It’s both the glory and the terror of the Reformed tradition that we are so utterly dependent on God . . . If God doesn’t show up to do what God does, we’re just sitting around with a bunch of our theories that don’t amount to much of anything.”

That’s one reason the Reformed tradition is so vulnerable to schism, Achtemeier said — there isn’t a group of bishops to fall back on, a certain way “to nail things down.”

Near the end, the discussion looped back to an earlier question: is homosexuality genetically determined, or is it a sin from which one should repent?

To some extent, this is a pastoral question, Achtmeier said, of what the church should say to those who are gay and lesbian. “Do we say the gospel has nothing to do with a whole category of people” who are in this position thru no fault of their own? Or that God who came to seek and save the lost ones came to seek and save them too?

Loudon responded that God does come to seek and save the lost, “and all of us, every single one of us, is lost,” and that all people need to repent of that and to say, “I’m wrong, I’m wrong and I’m lost without Christ.”

But if one is being asked to repent of a “sin” that one does not consider to be sinful, “what is one being called to repent of?” asked Vicky Curtiss, a pastor from Iowa. Or, as Achtemeier put it, “What is one able to repent of?”

But isn’t all sin like that, Coalter answered back. “Isn’t all sin something we’re entrapped in and can’t see your way out of” and that “you may not even see it as a sin?”

And isn’t that kind of discussion exactly representative of the theological divisions in the denomination, Loudon asked — a sign that , in the PC(USA), “We come from two different streams of thought” on these issues.

But in reading these writers, Wheeler said, she’s seen more than two streams, “more like a tapestry,” and a lot of complicated theology. Yet in the politics, it gets reduced down, Achtemeier said, and “one hears a lot of talk about those two streams being Christian and non-Christian,” about one being interested in the Bible and the other not, one caring about justice and the other disregarding it.