In the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) those who disagree with the church’s traditional reading of Scripture — that homosexual practice is sin — or who want to change the church’s ordination standards, are sometimes not clear about where they are standing to make these criticisms.
Eric Mount (see page 12) attempts to clarify why he favors changing ordination standards by using (in his own words) a sort of “Wesleyan quadrilateral,” emphasizing — in addition to the authority of Scripture — tradition, reason, and experience. Another church leader and scholar, the Anglican bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, affirms the importance of this debate, and makes similar comments1 to those of Dr. Mount, but he seems more inclined to support the Church’s traditional position. Wright says: “I’ve often said in my diocese, I believe in the authority of Scripture. I believe in the appropriate sub-authority of tradition — that is respecting the wisdom of the church as it has wrestled with this using Scripture over the years. I believe passionately in the importance of reason.”
Unfortunately, I believe that unlike N.T. Wright, Professor Mount and those who favor changing the church’s ordination standards are departing from the clear meaning of Scripture. I also believe they are not really being guided by tradition and reason. Finally, as I shall show, even the range of human experience they are willing to consider is circumscribed and limited.
Scripture
In arguing for the retention of the church’s theology and standards relating to human sexuality, I want to begin by looking at their Scriptural basis, doing so in dialogue with N.T. Wright. Wright talks about the beginnings of the argument he might make in the current sexuality debate. “If I were mounting the case, I would want to establish step by step something about creation, something about differentiation within creation, about the lights in the sky versus the land and the sea, then about different kinds of creatures — God’s differentiated creation — which nevertheless is designed to work together, ultimately heaven and earth and male and female, and that doesn’t seem to be just a sort of accidental genetic quirk, that humans are like that. And indeed that the grand narrative of Scripture goes right through to a conclusion which is the marriage of heaven and earth and the bride of Christ and Christ the bridegroom.” Then echoing Michael Polanyi, Wright adds: “And of course some people would say, ‘So the Scripture is an ancient and basically homophobic text, learn to distance yourself from it,’ and I would then want to say, ‘which bit of moral high ground do you stand on from which to pass that judgment on this text?’ ”
In Scripture, when asked about marriage and divorce, Jesus made clear that lifelong marriage between a man and a woman is God’s norm for sexuality in creation (Matt. 19:4-6; see also Mark 10:7-9). These passages, echoing Gen. 1:27 and 2:24, show that God makes male and female to relate complementarily to each other and God’s plan for a man and woman is to join together in a lifelong union. (See also Book of Confessions 9.47). Paul echoes this statement of God’s plan at Eph. 5:31-32. He says that the creation of male and female as complementary partners is not only God’s plan for creation but also a primary metaphor for the redemptive union between Christ and the church.
We should note that Jesus’ discussion of marriage is foundational for Paul’s inclusion of homosexual practice in those sexual behaviors he assures us God has prohibited. Paul’s need, unlike Jesus, is to be specific about God’s displeasure with malakoi and arsenokoitai (literally those who practice coitus between men, 1 Cor. 6:9) because same gender sex was common in the pagan world Paul was called to reach but forbidden (and apparently rare if not absent) in the Israel of Jesus’ day.
So, in Rom. 1:25 Paul gives us some theological background. He states that as a result of sin, humanity exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator. This resulted (Rom. 1:26) in women exchanging natural (fusikeen) relations for those against nature and (Rom. 1:27) in men abandoning natural relations with women in favor of burning in lust, men for men (arsenes en arsenes). The strange modern idea that the word translated “natural” in Rom. 1:26-27 must suddenly now in the twenty-first century be interpreted by us in a psychological way (homosexual practice feels “natural” to those who engage in it, so it can’t be “against nature”) rather than as a theological statement (such practice goes against God’s created plan for nature) misses (or actually makes) the point that Paul has just made in Rom. 1:25 — that human beings exchanged a theo-centric (God-centered) view of the world for an anthropocentric (human centered) one. As for the related idea cited by some interpreters of Scripture that people in Paul’s age had no knowledge of genuine same-gender sexual attraction that was not a form of mastery or domination, listen to what N.T. Wright has to say:
“But one thing I do know as an ancient historian is that there is nothing in contemporary understanding and experience of homosexual condition and behavior that was unknown in the first century. The idea that in the first century it was all about masters having odd relationships with slaves, or older men with younger men, yeah sure that happened, but read Plato’s Symposium — they have permanent faithful stable male-male partnerships, lifelong stuff, Achilles and Petropolis in Homer, all sorts of things. Paul in Corinth will not have been unaware, in a world where private life only is for the very rich and the very aristocratic (everyone else does what they do pretty much in public) — Paul will have known the full range of stuff. So that the idea that, oh well, in the first century they didn’t know (what) we know with our scientific knowledge — that is a little bit of Enlightenment arrogance —“we now know that there is this thing called homosexual condition, or whatever.” That is simply to frame the debate … not to settle it. …” 2
Tradition
This is a very short section. It is short because, while Eric Mount says that his position in favor of changing the church’s ordination standards is based on tradition and reason as well as experience, there is nothing at all substantial in Christian tradition or in the history of Biblical interpretation prior to the last thirty or forty years that has ever called for the legitimization of same sex relationships or the ordination of sexually active homosexual persons. Tradition speaks a “no” to the legitimization of homosexual practice that is every bit as clear as the “no” of Scripture.
Let me share just one example (albeit harsh to contemporary ears) from our tradition. In this year of the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, we might note that in his commentaries on the Scriptures, he feels very strongly about, and speaks quite negatively against, homosexual behavior, but also he refers to it only by circumlocution. In his commentary on I Cor. 6:9, Calvin is reluctant to directly translate arsenokoitai as males relating to each other sexually. Instead, he refers to arsenekoite as “ that monstrous pollution” … “which was but too prevalent in Greece.” He also calls it “the most abominable of all,” but he does not name it. Calvin makes similar comments about Jude 7 and Rom. 1:27. In short, just as there are no positive affirmations of same gender sexuality in Scripture, so there are no significant positive affirmations of it during the first nineteen hundred and seventy years of our tradition.
Reason
Mount shows us that Martin Luther had a high esteem for reason as well as for Scripture. What he does not really do is make a reasoned argument for changing our standards, though he does tell us about secular organizations (like the American Psychiatric Association) and how they say homosexual practice is acceptable. Mount claims “reason” as part of his quadrilateral that can justify same gender sex. However, throughout 98% of the history of the church, “reason” has not led to these novel conclusions, and in most of the worldwide church today, reason still does not lead to these conclusions. So what is reason?
If reason is seen as something incredibly elastic and changeable (in other words if “reason” is overwhelmingly influenced by culture and experience) then “reason” might lead to these new conclusions about human sexuality. But if reason is seen as not being completely dictated by our culture, then we must ask what sort of “reason” it is that leads a small (and declining) portion of the worldwide church to come to conclusions in its interpretation of Scripture 1) that no other generation of Christians anywhere else in the world ever came to; and 2) that the overwhelming majority of the worldwide church still rejects. The answer is that the sort of “reason” that leads to these conclusions is overwhelmingly influenced by (if not captive to) its culture!
In his book, The New Faces of Christianity — Believing the Bible in the Global South, Phillip Jenkins writes: “As North American churches have discussed issues of gender and sexuality, debates have been largely fueled by the changing mores of the mainstream secular society. Pressures to change traditional church teachings has not come from new textual discoveries by biblical scholars, nor by new insights from academic theologians, but from observing and accommodating to the changing secular environment.” He continues, “Against this background, we can understand the puzzlement of African and Asian church leaders when Americans and Europeans argue that the church and its process of Bible interpretation should keep in tune with secular values. In their experience such conformity is a recipe for ruin” (p. 56).
N.T. Wright gives us another example of the questionable reasoning some people in the church use to argue for the ordination of practicing homosexuals: “When people say we believe in the inclusion of all the baptized in every level of the church’s ministry … yes, but baptism doesn’t mean that everything in your character, personality … God now accepts and wants to affirm as is.”
Experience
It has been said that American culture makes a god out of human experience, as in, “Whatever anyone experiences must be true and cannot be questioned.” Yet there is a central paradox of American culture, one group’s experience to which we don’t really listen: the thousands of Christians whose reported experience is that God either freed them from homosexual temptations or else enabled them to overcome and successfully resist these feelings.
Ever since seminary, I have been impressed by Karl Barth’s concept that the Word of God shapes our experience. My professor, Paul Lehman, who was a student of Barth’s, coined the term “theonomos conscience” by which he meant that God’s Word (law, or “nomos”) shapes both the human conscience and human experience. Surely in the church of Jesus Christ (in the light of Scripture, tradition, and reason) the experience of those who believe themselves to have been set free from homosexuality must rank on at least an equal level with the experience of those who report irresistible and immutable homosexual urges.
Conclusion: Scripture, tradition, and reason all support our current standards. Experience may be a wash. Score: 3-0 for retention.
1Originally linked on www.presbyweb.com. The audio of the interview has been available at https://jeffwrightjr.wordpress.com/2009/06/ 06/nt-wright-church-homosexuality/.
2Ibid.
Winfield Casey Jones is pastor of First Church, Pearland, Texas.
