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The Queer Bible Commentary

Extended Information

Introduction

Disarming Biblically Based

Gay-Bashing

Ronald E. Long

The leader, the great man or woman, does not say, ‘The end justifies the means.’The great person says, ‘There is no end, and even though it may cost me (as it cost Saint Joan her life; as it may cost X, Y, or Z the election; as it may cost the actor the audition), I’m not going to give them want they want, if what they want is a lie.’ (David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife) Biblical tradition reflects the heritage of the prophetic revolution. It is with the prophets of Israel that the practice of faith comes to be associated with the pursuit of justice. ‘what doth the Lord require of thee,’ asks the prophet Micah, ‘but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?’ (6.8b). And more pointedly the prophet Amos, ‘let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream’ (5.24). One would thereafter expect that those who consider themselves among the faithful would be on the forefront of movements for social justice, especially since every Passover the Jew would remember what it would be like to be a slave in the household in Egypt,and the Christian would remember that his or her Lord was executed as an expendable historical no-account. Perhaps there was a time when the churchescould be counted on to be in the lead in the advancement of justice. The early Church, indeed, helped to bring about the eradication of the Roman practice of the exposure of infants and to lead the way in the establishment of foundling hospitals. In modern times, the Church has in contrast more often than not defended the status quo over against change. While voices of individuals like Wilberforce may have been in the forefront in challenging the practice of slavery and Henry Primatt and the Earl of Shaftesbury in defence of animal life over against human cruelty, the bulk of the faithful have as often as not defended the practices they have grown too comfortable with to challenge.

It might come as a surprise that the repository of the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ might from time to time change its mind on moral matters, but it has done so throughout history. Although some of us might doubt the moral wisdom involved, ‘usury’ – the biblical name for the charging of interest, a practice not only forbidden in scripture but seen as thoroughly un-Christian until the Reformation – became with the rise of capitalistic society so religiously innocuous that the long history of its proscription frequently passes unnoticed (Jones 2004). Slavery, on the other hand, was long seen as having scriptural warrant. It is only with modernity that slavery became universally recognized as both unscriptural and immoral.

Of course, to the extent Christian bodies take the Bible as the ‘Word of God’ – although in classical Christian theology, Jesus is the Word, and the Bible the ‘Word’ in but a secondary and derivative sense – each time the Church has changed its mind regarding specific moral prejudices (here I am using the term literally in the sense of ‘pre-judgement’) has required a revision and re-evaluation of its scriptural heritage. It has had to ask, ‘Does the Bible really say what we have always taken it to say?’ ‘What are the grounds for it saying what it does?’ and finally, ‘What authority does textual accuracy or biblical moral reasoning have for the Church in the matter at hand?’

In our own day, movements for the moral equivalence of homosexual and heterosexual love – that which I take to be the issue in GLBT rights and liberation– have caused faultlines to appear not only in society at large, but among, as well as within, denominations as well. The ‘traditionalist’ – even those who do not really care much about what the Bible might say one way or another on other matters – protests, ’The Bible says it is a sin.’ Only close critical attention to the biblical witness, its grounds and its authority can disabuse the traditionalist of his or her biblically based homophobic presumption. Contemporary rhetoric notwithstanding, the theme of homosexual sex is really not very prevalent. While some episodes or passages, like the story concerning the exposure of Noah’s nakedness to his son Ham (Gen. 9.18–29) and others, would need to be employed in framing a complete biblical picture of sex, the traditionalist who would hold that homosexuality is invariably sinful normally has recourse to three passages: a twice-repeated Levitical proscription (Lev. 18.22; 20.13); the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19), and the first chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. And it is these texts which are chiefly in need of revision and evaluation in the light of the moral status of homosexual love in our day.

Contrary to what contemporary rhetoric might lead one to believe, the subject of homosexual relations occurs very infrequently in scripture, in both the First and Second Testaments. The only explicit prohibition is contained in the Book of Leviticus. In the literal translations of Saul Olyan, Leviticus 18.22 runs: And with a male you shall not lie the lying down of a woman; it is to eba.

And Leviticus 20.13:

And as for the man who lies with a man the lying down of a woman, they

– the two of them – have a committed a to< eba; they shall certainly be put to

death; their blood is upon them. (1994 (1997): 398)

What is clear is that the author of these injunctions – indeed, they presumably derive from a single individual or a single school of thought – is concerned not with what today we call ‘homosexuality’, but rather with a certain kind of sexual act possible between men. Most commentators agree that what is forbidden here is anal intercourse, the penetration of one man by another. The act is forbidden, no matter whether the act is committed by a heterosexual who turns to a man for want of a woman, or by a ‘homosexual’. Two things are to be noted at the outset. First, the text is unconcerned with the issue of lesbian love and sex. Any viable interpretation will have to admit of an explanation for the exclusion. Second, as is frequently said, these passages are ‘act-centred’, indifferent to the issue of what we today refer to as the homosexual ‘condition’. Although widely noted, it is not always clear what the import of this very common observation means. Today, we live in a world where the quality of our relationships, in particular our sexually intimate relations, is very much the focus of our spiritual work and that from which we derive much of our spiritual satisfaction. To be homosexual is to find that one can find sexual and emotional intimacy primarily, generally exclusively, with members of one’s own sex. To deny the homosexual a sexual outlet is to deny him or her access to that from which, as a religious culture, we are bidden to find much of our spiritual significance. The Bible as a whole is not really interested in emotional satisfaction. It fixes its religious sights elsewhere. Clearly, then, we should not deny the homosexual access to that on which he or she is otherwise taught to focus unless the biblical rationale for resistance to homosexuality continues to be persuasive. The morally sensitive exegete needs to focus on what lies behind and motivates texts like that of Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13.

Leviticus presupposes a kind of religiosity we might call ‘temple religion’. The dramatic setting is Israel in its wandering after the Exodus, prior to its coming into the ‘Promised Land’. But the text really reflects the interests of a settled society. The tent is really a stand-in for the temple, the encampment is an analogue for the territory of Israel, and the environs represent Gentile territory. If we can think of these as a superimposed set of concentric circles, then, according to the Hebrew scriptural scholar Jacob Milgrom, Israel – which is in close proximity to the dwelling of God – is called to reflect that proximity in being holier, which is to say ‘purer’, than the Gentile world (1991: 731 and passim). Israel is called to reflect a concern for purity that is not incumbent upon those living in outlying territory. ‘Purity’ is here being used in a very ancient sense. The modern reader tends to hear ‘purity’ as a matter of sexual propriety, and certainly not a matter of diet. Milgrom points out, however, that Israel’s restrictive diet is a consequence of Israel’s attempt to mirror the divine purity, arguing that the restrictive diet involves a ‘reverence for life’ that answers to the more decisive ‘reverence for life’ which is the nature of the divine (1991: 735). ‘Purity’ is thus equivalent to ‘reverence for life’ – something which is actualized most fully in the divine, relatively so in Israel, and much less decisively among the Gentiles. By extension, then, homosexual anal sex – because it is inherently non-procreative – fails to answer to the call to embody reverence for life (Milgrom 2000: 1567). Milgrom’s theory is the college- educated version of the widely held prejudice that homosexual sex is wrong because it fails to be procreative. However, if that were the focus of the biblical author(s), one has to wonder why the text focuses on homosexual anal sex, and not on anal sex in general. Second, one has to wonder why other forms of non-procreative sex, whether homosexual or heterosexual, are not found equally horrific. And, third, it is hard to see how every instance of sex introduction needs be potentially procreative in order to embody an ethic of reverence for life. In other cultures, as diverse as Rome and China, males at least were free to use their genitals as they wished, as long as they also did their reproductive family duty. Such a policy could only be seen to be ‘irreverent’ if sperm were somehow seen as a scarce natural resource, a view that is not otherwise evidenced in the biblical texts.

From a scholar’s perspective, Milgrom’s focus on the calling of Israel to be holy – like the God who dwells in the temple is holy – fails, it seems to me, to do adequate justice to the idea of to< eba (the ‘abominable’, as it is frequently translated). The Book of Leviticus generally sounds the theme that ‘abominations’ (or, more generally, ‘impurities’) threaten the nation. An abomination has the capacity so to nauseate the land that it ‘vomits’ the people forth. There is evidence that, when the Assyrians overran the northern kingdom, they deported at least some of the upper classes of the defeated population (Noth 1960: 261–2). Deportation to Babylon is a well-attested practice of the Babylonians, the successors to the Assyrians who would later defeat the Southern Kingdom of Judah. (Presumably deportation of the provincial leadership minimized the possibility of revolt.) The Book of Leviticus was written after these deportations, and reflects the fear of a new ‘exile’ for a re-established Hebrew nation. Indeed, much of it can be seen to be the charter for a post-exilic Israel by which it could avoid the possibility of another exile, another case of being ‘vomited forth’ from the land. But to put the matter exclusively this way is to fail to realize the way in which the God of Israel is implicated in any possible future exile. The temple is literally the ‘House of God’, a place where God dwells. As such, the temple is a kind of central power-generating plant, for the temple is the place from which God’s power radiates, invigorating the land and ensuring the well-being and political integrity of the people. The sickening of the land represents a compromise of the divine power, perhaps even a withdrawal of the divine energy. The presence of impurity, and particularly of that more serious kind of impurity labelled to eba, threatens to sicken the land by effectively short-circuiting the power of God, perhaps even causing God to withdraw his divine presence.

The note that impurity is somehow nauseating is helpful, for in anthropological consideration, the ‘impure’ is that within any given culture that strikes the people as somehow sickening, that which makes them respond with an ‘Ugh!’ Consider the reaction of the contemporary diner who has just been told that what they had eaten was not really chicken, but cat – or the reaction of the movie-going audience to the monkey-brains served as dessert in the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. L. William Countryman (1988:ch. 2), following Mary Douglas (1966), has offered an account of the logic by which male–male anal intercourse could be construed as a ‘sickening’ reality. Indeed, in this line of thinking, an ‘abomination’ results from categorical confusions (as when animals in the ‘pet’ category are mistakenly taken for ‘food’) or is itself somehow a monstrous deformity. That which is ‘pure’ is ‘true to type’. Here, something is set up as paradigmatic or (stereo-)typical. Monstrosities are things which either fail in a significant way to be true to type or otherwise combine elements belonging essentially to other types. If a fish like the sea-bass or the salmon is the paradigmatic sea creature, then lobsters and other crustaceans are monstrous formations to the extent they do not resemble the paradigmatic instance. If the cow is the paradigmatic land animal, then a creature like the lowly pig is ‘impure’ because in essential ways it fails to conform to the ideal of the ruminant. Such impure creatures are thus forbidden to the Israelite table, just as the blemished cow is inappropriate for the sacrificial table. If the cow is ideally of one hue, then the purity of God requires the purest of the pure, the unblemished sacrifice. Accordingly, if male–male anal intercourse is to be found impure, it must presuppose some norm for what is real sex. In this case, it involves a penis in a vagina. Any other kind of sex fails to conform to the standard: anal sex involves the use of the anus in a way appropriate to the vagina, and homosexual anal sex involves an inappropriate gender blending of roles. The result? Male–male intercourse is a monstrous deformation of the real thing. The underlying threat is that of cosmic disorder: monstrous formations threaten to undo the divine order and the world falls apart. But, once again, why is male–male homosexual anal intercourse singled out? Why not prohibit all anal sex, whether heterosexual or homosexual? Why not prohibit all non-vaginal sex?

Saul Olyan (1994) has attempted a mediating position, combining insights typical of Milgrom’s and Countryman’s approaches respectively. For him, the power of God is not threatened so much by disorder as it is by the explosive mixing of the things of life with the things of death. Anal sex involves an explosive mixture, the deposition of the fluid of life (seminal fluid) in the place of excrement. His theory would be particularly cogent if Leviticus had been written by priests who had come to know the Zoroastrian tradition in which the devilish Angra Mainyu (the enemy of the good god Ahura Mazdha) creates his powerful horde of demons through self-sodomy (Sproul 1979: 142). Yet once again, the issue becomes, why single out only homosexual anal sex? I suspect there is something deeper at stake here that comes to light when one considers also the story of Lot’s hospitality and the men of Sodom. But already, it must be clear that the Levitical horror of homosexual sex loses its force outside the context of what I have called temple religion.

Genesis 19 recounts the behaviour of the menfolk of Sodom after Lot persuades two angelic visitors to the city to stay with him in his house for the night. Following in the narrative of Genesis immediately upon Abraham’s appeal to God not to behave unjustly in his dealings with the people of that city, the episode purportedly justifies God’s eventual destruction of Sodom and its twin city Gomorrah. But wherein lies the ‘sin’ of Sodom? During the night in which the visitors stay with Lot, the men of the town surround Lot’s house demanding that he produce the men staying with him that they might ‘know’ them. It is almost universally acknowledged that the word ‘know’ is being used here in the sense of ‘have sex with’, so that the men of Sodom are actually seeking to rape and gang bang the visitors. The issue is not whether homosexual sex might be involved, but what ‘meaning’ the sexual acts have in context. Whatever is going on, Lot finds the prospect of the gang bang of the visitors so horrifying a prospect that he offers them his virginal daughters instead. But it is not so clear that it is the homosexual nature of the sex that constitutes the sin here. Is Lot saying, ‘homosexual sex is so wrong, if you must have sex, at least have it with a woman instead even if it is with my daughters’? Or is he horrified that the visitors might be raped? Careful attention to his words leads in yet another direction. He protests, ‘do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof’ (v. 8). The issue which is forefront in Lot’s mind is the violation of his hospitality that the ‘abuse’ of these men would represent. Indeed, it is not until the Hellenistic period that the sin of Sodom begins to be identified as homosexual sex. This leaves us with the conclusion, in Gray Temple’s pointed words, that in Genesis, ‘the Sodomites were first and foremost inhospitable; they thought it good sport to humiliate foreign guests’ (2004: 58).

That humiliation of the stranger through sex is the theme of Genesis 19 becomes even more compelling when the episode is read together with the structurally parallel story in Judges 19.22ff. In this second story, a travelling Levite is taken under the roof of a local. When the men of the town demand the traveller, the master of the house offers instead his own daughter and/or the traveller’s own concubine. Perhaps the prospect of homosexual sex is what is foremost in his mind in making this offer. But the townsmen are apparently indifferent to whether they have sex with the travelling Levite or his concubine. They are not interested in homosexual sex per se. And the Levite himself seems to have found that abuse of his concubine was tantamount to an assault, if not on his person, then on his honour, for when they return home – in a move that cannot be other than horrifying for the modern mind – the Levite murders his concubine, cutting her body into numerous parts which he then distributes to the various tribes, presumably as a call to arms. For the modern sensibility, the concubine is the victim here. For the Levite, however, as for those who live in many traditional societies today, the assault on the woman is taken as an assault on his own person. For him, he has been humiliated in the person of his concubine.

The story in Judges highlights in an excruciatingly horrific way the fact that people in traditional cultures experience(d) their identities quite differently than does the modern Anglo-American. For us, we are primarily individuals who join groups – or are thought to have effectively joined a group as in the idea of the ‘social contract’. Thus, group membership is secondary to our primary identity. Traditional people tend to see themselves first and foremost as cells of an ‘extended’ social body, a body politic as it were. Sometimes it is the family or tribe or nation which comprises the relevant body (Countryman 1988: ch. 8; cf. Emerson 1996: 534–7, 551–4). In this story, the concubine is part of the extended body whose head is the Levite. What is done to her is really done to the whole of ‘his’ body.

Second, the very fact that sex can so easily become an instrument of degradation of the penetrated in both these stories gives indirect evidence for an ancient construction of sex. Sex was first and foremost about power. Sexual penetration was not so much about love or pleasure, but about the assertion of superiority. The penetrator who ‘tops’ a bottom of either sex is asserting his superiority over the penetrated social underling. And with this, we are very close to understanding why male–male intercourse was so troubling for the Hebraic tradition. If we went no further, we might conclude with Gray Temple that, in ancient Israel, ‘[s]ame-sex coupling with a peer or a superior robbed the victim of his prerogatives as a "man," rendering him unfit for further life, and it marked the perpetrator as a murderer, hence a danger to the social order’ (2004: 60). The interpretation, I believe, is inadequate since it really fails to show why the sexually humiliated man is unfit to live. The idea that sexual penetration is first and foremost an act of social topmanship derives, it seems to me, from warrior culture (Long 2004). Where war is a matter of penetrating enemy bodies and enemy lines, it is but a short step to viewing the erect phallus as a weapon. Thus, penetration by either weapon or phallus renders the penetrated a pathetic, if not dead, passive. And indeed, the rape of an enemy’s womenfolk or, more dramatically, of the enemy himself, an act which effectively unmans him, turning him into a subservient being, has long been the capstone which seals a victory in war (Tombs 2002). To go outside the ancient Near East for a moment, it is not insignificant that, according to Richard Trexler, ‘the Nahuatl word for a powerful warrior (tecuilónti) means "I make someone into a passive"’ (1995: 71). It is the ideology perpetuated in the vulgarisms of our day. ‘Fuck’, ‘screw’ and the British slang ‘shag’ are all, in the main, transitive verbs, implying that the sexual act is one in which someone does something to another. In the light of the identifi- cation of phallus and weapon, one can make full sense of the Hebraic horror of male–male anal intercourse. To penetrate a man of one’s own cohort, or to be complicitous in one’s own penetration, by a kind of magical congruence, threatens the body politic. If a cell (an individual) of the warrior band goes intobattle having been penetrated, the warrior band is going into battle already wounded. The penetrated male is a defective soldier whose existence threatens the impenetrability of the wider social body, endangering it by making it vulnerable to penetration by enemy instruments of war.

The religious obligation to avoid impurity as defined above makes no real sense outside the ancient context of temple religion in the light of which impurity is understood to pose a real threat to the world order. At the same time, biblical sexual prohibitions which presuppose the ancient understanding of a relation between sex and war are effectively undermined to the extent such an association seems increasingly less compelling, indeed anachronistic. Indeed, we live in a time in which war is much more a matter of blowing people up or firing at people from extended distances than it is a matter of close combat in which soldiers stab one another. Increasingly, the act of penile penetration seems less and less like an act of martial attack. Second, in a world in which women – whose biology mandates their penetrability in procreative sex – become soldiers, the ancient fear that the sexual penetrability of a soldier makes an army or a people vulnerable to attack seems increasingly unpersuasive. Not only is the ancient equation between sex and war passing away. It seems to me that humanity only stands to gain when we finally sever the equation between the two. Theremay be a time for each under heaven. But we sell ourselves short when we pretend one is equivalent to the other, even as we deny ourselves in the bed when we don’t really allow ourselves to love lest we let down our defences. When the authority of a biblical proscription rests upon presuppositions that we no longer find desirable, then it becomes desirable to abandon those proscriptions – unless we can find other compelling reasons to sustain them.

The Christian Scriptures

The early Christian movement seems to have been already well on its way to leaving the religious obligation of Levitical purity behind. The Jesus of the Gospels, of course, asserts that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2.27) – and is regularly shown as taking less than seriously other concrete dictates of the Law. He apparently felt quite free not only to heal on the Sabbath, but to break bread with such ‘impure’, dirty people as prostitutes and tax collectors. Nor does he choose disciples from groups who would have been known for their observance. However, Jesus had been a Jew and, as Gentiles were invited into the Christian movement, the answer to the question whether Gentiles needed to become Jews first in order to be followers of Jesus the Jew did not seem to be a foregone conclusion. Indeed, Acts 11 records the momentous decision not to require circumcision of Gentile male converts, a move which effectively started the ball moving toward freeing the Christian from the religious obligation of Levitical purity. But again, the consequences of that decision would take some time to sink in, for the issue would raise its ugly head shortly thereafter in the issue of table fellowship with those who did not abide by Jewish dietary regulations. A common table had already become a staple in Christian worship, and Torah-observant Christians felt that, as part of their practice, they should refuse to break bread with those who did not abide by such in their eating habits. Paul, who had sided with Peter on the circumcision issue (Gal. 2.11–14), took a similar stance with regard to Jewish dietary regulations. In 1 Corinthians 8–10, he divides Christians into two camps: the ‘weak’ and the ‘strong’, who – for present purposes – we can gloss as the ‘weak-’ and ‘strong-stomached’. The ‘weak-stomached’ were the Torahobservant Christians who were nauseated by the idea of breaking bread with the ‘strong-stomached’ who might even eat food offered to idols! Paul decides that the strong are indeed in the right, but recommends a policy of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ In order to keep peace in the household of the Lord, the strong are minimally not to announce their dietary habits in the presence of the weak – and maybe even refrain from the offensive practices entirely, for the sake of the weak – while the weak are not to enquire about the same of the strong. Effectively – and this is the important point – Paul would seem to be relegating observation of purity regulations at least as far as diet is concerned, to a matter of personal preference, removing it from the sphere of the religiously obligatory. The Law is not binding on the Christian as Christian! Only those rules which could find a rationale other than being an offence against purity could rightly be required.

It is this controversy that is the background for Paul’s Letter to the Romans, for Paul is addressing a congregation in which there are both Torah-observant and non-Torah-observant Christians. The vocabulary, logic and rhetoric of the letter is notoriously difficult to interpret – and especially Romans 1.18–32, thepassage social conservatives love to point to in their attempt to affirm that the New Testament is firm in its proscription of homosexual sex.

Let me first pass over a full survey of the exegetical difficulties to present what I think Paul is actually saying. He begins with a diagnosis of Gentile culture and opines that, at some point in their history, Gentiles abandoned the native recognition of the power and authority of God for idols. For this reason, God ‘gives them up’ to both impurity and further sin. Indeed, the phrase ‘gives them up’ functions as a kind of organizing principle. Now it could imply that what God gives the Gentiles up to is punishment rather than sin, and as Gareth Moore points out, being in prison might be shameful, but it is clearly distinguishable from the criminal offence for which prison is the punishment (2003: 89). More likely, however, I think that Paul is saying that, because of their idolatry, God has already resigned them to a disgusting and damnable existence. But is same-sex behaviour something that will merit damnation? In verse 24 Paul characterizes the ‘dishonouring of their bodies’ – clearly a reference to Gentile homosexual practices – as shameful punishment for Gentile culture’s primordial idolatry, indeed an ‘impurity’ (akatharsían), but impurity in his thinking is not necessarily in itself sinful. He interrupts his thought to invoke blessing upon the name of God, then returns to his line of thinking, repeating the verbal phrase ‘gave them up’, but this time God gives them up to shameful passion (pathe atimias). Let me paraphrase. ‘Because of their primordial God-forgetfulness and idolatry, God gave the Gentiles up to impurity . . .indeed, the disgusting dishonouring of their bodies that we (!) recognize all about us. Blessed be God! Indeed, he gave them up to such filth . . . by letting them be overtaken by shameful passion.’ Note, Paul uses the singular pathe, passion. Now the modern reader might be tempted to think that a passion is shameful because of what is desired. But this would be to overlook the popular Stoicism that Paul is here drawing on. To be under the sway of passion – any passion whatsoever – is to be misled. In his or her passion, a person is being led to think that that which they desire is indeed important, whereas in Stoic doctrine, everything but virtue is only – to use the preferred phrasing of Nancy Sherman – an ‘indifferent’ (2005). What is desirable is a cool head, devoid of misleading passion. To be led around by passion – something that happens to us, something we undergo, rather than choose – is particularly shameful for a man. The male is called to be in control at all times. To the extent that modern gender stereotyping casts the male as more rational than the female, it echoes ancient assumptions. But in modernity, the male is thought more rational – except when sex is in the air. It is the male who is sexually impulsive and, in the back seat of a car, it is the female who is expected to have the presence of mind to be able to say ‘no’ to the insistent male. The ancients were more consistent. The male was to be in control, cool, calm, and collected – even when sexually aroused. Thus Paul is, in effect, accusing Gentile males of being oversexed, indeed embarrassingly and uncontrollably so. Perhaps, he is saying they are pathetic excuses for men, insufficiently zealous for their masculine dignity.

And what does being so oversexed lead them to do? First, they give up the ‘natural use’ of women for sex. The translation of chresis as ‘use’ is quite literal and accurate. In the ancient ideology at work here, reminiscent of that at work in Leviticus, the penetrator ‘uses’ his sexual subordinate. Pleasure is reserved for the sexual top. And Paul is echoing the ambient Jewish presumption that women (more particularly, vaginas) are the appropriate instruments of male pleasure. By contrast, the Gentile male is so typically oversexed that he seeks out other vehicles for his phallic satisfaction. Now Paul does claim the ‘use’ of women for sexual satisfaction is ‘natural’. But what does the word really mean? I submit that Paul is setting up penis-in-vagina as paradigmatic sex, in contrast with which the use of hand, mouth and particularly anus is revealed to be deformed or monstrous sex. But this is the logic behind impurity. Thus, calling something ‘unnatural’ is the college-educated form of calling something dirty, nauseatingly monstrous. (To be sure, Plato seems to be the first to call homosexual sex unnatural (Ward 1997: 264–9), and he is followed by the Stoics. Whether calling a kind of sex unnatural involves anything other than name-calling is an idea I will return to later in this chapter.) Here, however, it seems to me that by his use of ‘unnatural’ Paul is simply employing a circumlocution for ‘impure’. For Paul, the Gentile male is so oversexed that he finds himself drawn to ‘dirty’ (can we read ‘kinky’?) sex. That is to say, he develops the hots for his own kind, and proceeds to try to ‘do the dirty’ with them, with the consequence that males come to ‘suffer the penalty’ in their persons. Now some would argue that Paul is alluding to health consequences following from homosexual sex. I think Paul is thinking of something less elusive. When men seek each other out for sex, some men end up being mounted and penetrated. Because of the oversexed nature of the Gentile male, some Gentile males bear the consequences; they are unmanned, shamefully bottoming – or perhaps being forced to bottom – for their sexual tops.

Romans 1.26 is unique in the biblical literature in possibly speaking of lesbian sex. Literally, Paul writes ‘Their (Gentile) women exchange natural use’ – yes, he employs the word chresis – ’for that which is against nature.’ The phrasing invites a variety of different interpretations. (1) Perhaps Paul is saying, in their disgraceful passion, rather than to be ‘used’ by men, Gentile women seek to ‘use’ others – perhaps men, perhaps other women – for their own pleasure. (2) Perhaps Paul is claiming that they seek to be ‘used’ by men unnaturally, that is, seeking to please men in ways other than vaginal intercourse. (3) Wayne Dynes makes a plausible case that in mentioning the practices of Gentile women before speaking of the men, Paul is echoing the order of thought which he would have known from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, itself elaborating on 1 Enoch’s treatment of female intercourse with the ‘Watchers’ referring back in turn to the story in Genesis 6.1–4. In Dynes’s view, Romans 1.26–7 is to be read as dealing with ‘[m]an-crazy women, who are even willing to sleep with extraterrestrial beings’ as is known from Genesis 6 and ‘parallel man-crazy men, who wish to sleep with other members of their own sex’ as were the men of Sodom (Dynes 1998). I, for one, do not know what Paul had on his mind. Perhaps we can retain Paul’s ambiguity to gloss Romans 1.26 as saying that ‘sex-crazed Gentile women seek out kinky sex with strange partners’.

In verse 28, Paul resumes the use of the verbal phrase ‘gave them over’ – but this time – to what the NRSV translates as ‘a debased mind’. From the debased mind flow all sorts of things that are unambiguously sinful, but the sexual practices typical of Gentile culture are not mentioned in the list of such vices. Thus, Paul seems to reserve the word ‘impurity’ for Gentile sexual practices and ‘sin’ for a host of other things. It is tempting to think that Paul is here working with the distinction between taste and religious obligation that seems to underlie his discussion of diet and, by analogy, he construes the avoidance of ‘sexual’ impurity to be a matter of personal (or perhaps even corporate) taste and not religiously obligatory. But assumptions frequently prove errant, and Dale Martin (1995) has convincingly shown that even the Paul of 1 Corinthians had not abandoned working with a sense of morally significant bodily pollution.

Paul’s Letter to the Romans is rhetorically complex – even dizzyingly so. After sketching the decline of Gentile civilization in chapter 1, in verse 2.1, Paul directly addresses one who has presumably been nodding his or her head in heartfelt agreement with what Paul has been saying so far only to turn the tables, chiding him or her about judging others when they themselves are implicated in the same faults. There has been much controversy over the years as to just whom Paul might be addressing here. Stanley Stowers (1993 (1997): 103–4) has made what seems to me a very strong case for seeing Paul addressing not a ‘Jew’ or a Torah-observant Christian in the Roman congregation, but a Gentile who finds himself in concert with what had become a customary Jewish complaint about the lack of self-mastery (as evidenced in same-sex practices) and anti-social behaviour evident in Gentile culture. Indeed, I can imagine any number of slaves who might long for an order that freed them from a culture in which a master could expect to be sexually serviced by his servants – same-sexed or otherwise – as was the case in Rome (cf. Jewett 2000: 240)! Free males or young men destined to be adult Roman citizens were forbidden as sexual partners to the Roman. However, the Roman was quite free to use his male servants for sex. Paul would, I assume, be addressing slaves who were not comfortable about serving their masters in such capacities along with any number of otherwise disaffected Gentiles who shared the general Jewish distaste for Gentile culture along the lines Paul has been developing. But having drawn from such Gentiles nodding agreement, Paul turns the tables. ‘Who are you’, Paul says in 2.1, ‘to condemn your fellow Gentiles for their lack of self-mastery and sinful behaviour when you are caught up in the same perverse idolatrous lifestyle/mode of thinking and/or being led around by your passions like them?’ However, Paul is eager to argue that such a Gentile need not become a Jew, that is, a student of Torah, in order to achieve the escape that he or she seeks. That is available to him or her in and as the spirit of Christ. The logic of Paul’s argument throughout chapters 2 and 3, however, is notoriously complex, indeed convoluted. What he does say can be reconciled, I believe, only on the assumption of two things, (1) that everyone will be judged according to the Law, but (2) that the Law requires different things of Jew and Gentile (cf. Stowers 1994: 139). But we are still left with the question, does the Law thus forbid homosexual sex to the Gentile? Throughout chapter 1, Paul has been trading upon the sympathies of a Gentile reader who is critical of the sexual practices characteristic of his or her culture. I doubt that Paul has simply been playing to the audience; indeed, I think it highly unlikely that he is not in solidarity with his reader in this regard. While not including homosexual relations among the anti-social vices he lists as proceeding from a ‘debased mind’, Paul nevertheless speaks of homosexual relations among Gentile men as conduct unbecoming, expressive of nothing less than a shameful lack of (manly) self-possession. Now, in my single year as the lone Protestant student in Catholic military high school, Brother Lawrence, my 10th grade religion teacher, affirmed that ‘cursing’, while not sinful, was nevertheless unbecoming in a Catholic gentleman. ‘Cussing’ is indecorous, but not something for which one will be damned. However much I might like to be able to conclude otherwise, it seems to me that Paul, in contrast, is using the words ‘dishonourable’ and ‘shameful’ in a yet stronger way. In the light of his discussion in Romans 2, he is thinking of such things as being included among the faults for which God will judge the Gentile in the end, things distinguishable from the social vices but likewise things to be avoided, forbidden them by the Law.

Contemporary anti-gay interpreters, eager to counter any suggestion that Paul condoned removing homosexual ‘practice’ from the class of sins, have sought to reinforce their case by drawing on the lists of vices that Paul includes in 1 Corinthians 6.9 and 1 Timothy 1.10. Not only is vocabulary problematic in this regard, but the move, I believe, proves counterproductive, ultimately working to undermine Paul’s authority on homosexual sex. Among the vicious persons that Paul names are in Greek arsenokoitai and malakoi. Robert Gagnon sees the word arsenokoitai as a Pauline neologism, attempting to capture in a single word the Levitical heritage, translating it as ‘bedders of males, those [men] who take [other] males to bed’, ‘men who sleep or lie with males’ (Gagnon 2001: 312). However, following the lead of Gray Temple (2004: 77), we can well ask how likely it is that Paul would take such care to find a word that exactly translates a Levitical notion when in Romans his indictment of Gentile sexual practices does not seem to depend upon the letter of the Law? James Miller argues that the term would have been heard as referring to at least one partner (probably the ‘active’ partner) in a pederastic relation so typical of the times (1997: 863). For his part, Dale Martin observes that, in 1 Corinthians, the term appears on the cusp of vices relating to sex and those relating to economic exploitation, suggesting that the term might perhaps refer to those who use their position or their money to exploit others, principally sexually (1996: 123). Thus, the word could cover the gamut from clients or ‘johns’ of prostitutes to masters who ‘use’ their slaves for their sexual pleasure. But, perhaps, we should join Martin himself in his all too uncommon gesture of humility in admitting ignorance, owning up to the fact that the exact meaning of the word is as of yet beyond our abilities to decipher with any certainty. The term malakos seems to be less problematic. Literally, the word means ‘a soft male’, that is, an effeminate male. But effeminacy could be predicated of a Roman male on any number of grounds. Perhaps he was effeminate in demeanour, in which case effeminacy could characterize both homosexually and heterosexually inclined men. Perhaps he was effeminate in the sense of his willingness to be bedded by other men. Or perhaps – and, in Roman perspective, this was apparently the decisive issue – he was effeminate in his inability to control himself. In Roman understanding, as we have already noted, a failure of self-control was a significant compromise of a man’s masculinity. By such standards, a womanizer would have been the very model of the ‘effeminate male’, while the self-controlled ‘practising homosexual’ could be a paragon of masculinity. Gagnon may be close to the mark when he suggests that the word should be taken as lying ‘somewhere in between "only prostituting passive homosexuals" and "effeminate heterosexual and homosexual males"’ (2001:308). Significant is his failure to entertain that the usage of the word might thus roughly correspond to that of the contemporary English word ‘sissy’, signifying an effeminacy of which penetrability may function as but a symbol. At this point, however, the modern interpreter cannot but become wary of endorsing Paul tout court, for who among us would want to make effeminacy in demeanour a sin – any more than we would want to reinforce Paul’s ban on long hair for men or his insistence on covering the hair of women? We are thus led to what I think is the best strategy for dealing with Paul in the context of contemporary debates over the morality of homosexual sex. The Christian interpreter is all too predisposed to want to find Paul both right and authoritative. However, rather than to seek a basis in Paul whereby he can be seen to allow virtuous same-sex activity, I think it is the better part of wisdom to allow that Paul might have felt same-sex sex should be avoided even by the righteous Gentile and show, on the basis of what he does say, why Paul’s reasoning fails. Some years ago, Gary Comstock bade the gay and lesbian community to prove itself a ‘friend’ of religion. He argued that, while friends may support one another, it is the good friend who also chides his or her friend for failing to live up to all that they can be (Comstock 1993: 11, 48). Let me then follow his lead and seek whether there might not be additional grounds upon which one can mount a friendly challenge to, and finally abandon, any putative Pauline homophobia.

Let us begin with the notion of the ‘natural’. First of all, it goes without saying that Paul’s understanding of sex as a matter of a ‘top’ using a bottom for his pleasure is hopelessly dated and ethically challenged. Importantly, such a construction condemns the bottom – no matter the sex – to passivity, (ab)use, not to mention a form of sex in which his or her claims to pleasure can be ignored. In modernity, sex ideally involves a contract between equals for mutual pleasure. In contrast, the ancient view is simply ethically deficient and any view dependent upon it compromised. Likewise ethically deficient is a view that sex must conform to a pattern consistent with the use that nature makes of sex. That nature uses vaginal sex for reproduction is too obvious for words. However, not even in nature is reproduction the sole use to which nature puts sex. For example, among the bonobos, a species very close to the human, nature seems to have ‘used’ sex principally to bond the group socially, and only indirectly for reproduction. The same might very well be said for the human. Besides, to insist that sexual expression be restricted to vaginal intercourse is to condemn unreasonably a large portion of humankind who find that mouth and hand are likewise the instruments of love, whether homosexual or heterosexual, to an ethical hell. From a theological point of view, all too often proponents of natural law – especially those who see nature as embodying ‘intelligent design’ – make the mistake of identifying a law of nature with the will of God 1. Nature cannot be the model for ethical human living. We should neither model ourselves after the piranha, nor the chimpanzees who occasionally go berserk, killing and cannibalizing one of their own kind. Trying to pin down a relevant notion of naturalness, the evangelical John Richardson has stated that ‘You can use a screwdriver to open a paint tin but that is not the natural use of a screwdriver’ (quoted in Bates 2004: 45). Admittedly, opening a tin of paint is not the purpose for which the screwdriver has been designed. But that hardly makes the use of it to open a can of paint immoral. Indeed, if I used a screwdriver to pry open a space so that a friend could extricate the finger that has gotten caught between the window frame and the air conditioner he was installing, I would have to say the ‘unnatural’ use of the screwdriver was here ethically admirable. Quite simply, the ethical lies in how we use nature, not in our blind subservience to it. And a tradition that looks for the resurrectionof the body, a body exempt from the natural conditions that lead to disease, decay and death, should simply know that!

Because Paul uses Gentile homosexual sex as evidence of Gentile lack of self-mastery and self-control, I think he is assuming that, were it not for their excessive sex drive, Gentile indulgence in homosexual practice might very well cease. He presumes that homosexual sex is the result and symptom of slavery to an overpowering sex drive. Here he is on shaky ground indeed. On what basis can he rule out the possibility of same-sex sex which is not an indicator of failure in self-mastery, but proceeds from the love of a self-possessed person? Pointed are the words of the gay scholar Dale Martin:

The burden of proof over the last twenty years has shifted. There are too

many of us who are not sick, or inverted, or perverted, or even, ‘effeminate,’

but who just have a knack for falling in love with people of our own sex . . .

The burden of proof is now not on us, but rather on those who insist that we

would be better off going back into the closet. (1996: 130–1)

Given that lack of self-control could very well be understood as a Stoic way of speaking of the pathological, the contemporary person who would analogously hold that same-sex desire is ‘sick’ really has the entire contemporary therapeutic establishment allied against him or her. And perhaps even more pointedly, it would seem to me that both heterosexual love and homosexual love have the same capacity for, as well as the possibility of inhibiting, what Catholics call ‘unitivity’ and, as thinkers from Plato to André Guindon have observed, both have the capacity for their respective forms of ‘procreativity’ (Guindon 1986). As such, they deserve to be recognized to be morally equivalent and on a par2 – even if Plato, it must be remembered, held the ‘brain- children’ of homosexual romance to be more noble than what was for him mere biological issue! It follows that it is both fitting and incumbent upon a religious tradition that grew out of horror at the injustice of the murder of its founder on the cross, with the apparent consent of both secular and religious authorities, to be supportive of the needs of the minority over against even the religious establishment. Indeed, it seems to me that, in view of our contemporary recognition of the spiritual importance of interpersonal ‘unitivity’, such a tradition should rather err on the side of supporting those whose sexual impulses lead them to form relationships with members of their own sex, rather than to seek to thwart them by law or exclusion from the rites of religion. Paul, in his best moments, recognizes that love for the other seeks their good, that we echo Christ when we adapt ourselves to their needs. And, as Dan O. Via asks, ‘Would this not have to mean seeking abundant bodily life for the homosexual since the homosexual orientation is the destiny he/she has been given?’ (Via and Gagnon 2001: 36).

Beyond that, and perhaps this is the decisive issue, Paul’s understanding of sexual desire is not only dated, but more importantly, theologically deficient. Whatever sympathies we might have for the Stoic analysis of emotion which he seems to reflect – and I confess I admire the Stoic attempt to affirm human agency even in the midst of terrible suffering, something that we who labor under the shadow of HIV cannot lose sight of – nevertheless, the suggestion that sexual desire is somehow something to be got over neglects what is perhaps one of the most spiritually significant impulses that a human being might have. Indeed, in the hands of Paul, sexual desire is reduced to nothing more than an itch which demands to be scratched. Sexual desire is a demand for pleasure that, in his view, is best left unaddressed, if at all possible. ‘Better to marry than to burn,’ he says in the well-known injunction (1 Cor. 7.9), as if sexual desire is a kind of steam in a pressure cooker that, at least for some, needs an escape valve. Such a view totally overlooks the interpersonal significance that sexual desire actually has. At the same time, and in deference to Paul – who in this at least seems to get things right – the ‘purpose’ of sex is taken to be pleasure rather than procreation! Relative to Paul’s construal of desire, however, I can do no better than to quote the words of the Second Testament scholar and theologian L. William Countryman:

Flawed as all human eros, it is still the best thing in our makeup, the brightest

treasure that God has placed there. And it is by this that God calls us

home.

For love has the power to triumph even over our own abuse of it. It keeps

coming back. It keeps sneaking up on us. It keeps breaking us open and

showing us new worlds outside the carapaces we have formed around ourselves.

It shows us one another and it shows us God. (2005: 56)

And lest it be thought that he is speaking of eros in a non-sexual sense, this:

We shortchange the sexual expression of eros if we think of it simply as the satisfaction of physical desire. It is much more than that. The desire is rooted as much in the soul and spirit as in the body. And it is supremely satisfied when it enables a genuinely transcendent union with the beloved, a union that belongs as much to soul and spirit as body. (2005: 39–40)

Finally, and perhaps strikingly, even as we must admit Paul’s own seeming indifference to the actual words and example of Jesus, still in the words of the Jesus of the Gospel of John, ‘A servant is not greater than his master’ (15.20). Now, it is true that the Jesus of the Gospels nowhere makes any explicit statement about homosexuality in general, nor even the specific homosexual ‘practices’ that might have been commonly recognized in his day. And it is almost always inadmissible to infer anything from silence. In particular, we go wrong to assume that because Jesus is nowhere shown contradicting the biblical heritage that he therefore endorsed it. Indeed, if there is any evidence, it arguably supports the claim Jesus was more accepting of contemporary homosexual practices than was the tradition out of which he came, not to mention the tradition St Paul himself seems to perpetuate despite himself. Theodore Jennings has to my mind convincingly argued that the burden of the evidence points to the idea that there was at least one man with whom Jesus was homoerotically, if not homosexually involved, the man reflected in the title of his refreshingly written book The Man Jesus Loved (2003). I have yet to see his argument effectively countered.

Leaving the argument about Jesus’ own sexuality aside, however, the story of the centurion and his ‘boy’ in Matthew 8.5–13 (cf. Luke 7.1–19) may provide an even stronger case for abandoning any alleged unavoidable Pauline identification of homosexual intercourse with sin. The centurion comes to Jesus complaining that his pais is ill. Now, the usual translations imply that this pais was but one of the centurion’s slaves or servants. But, in that case, we would expect the generic Greek word for slave or servant, doulos. Instead, we find the Greek word meaning ‘boy’, the force of which suggests rather a slave who is a sexual favourite (Horner 1978: 122; Jennings 2003: 132–4; Mader 1980), an idea for which ‘toy boy’ might not be a wholly inappropriate contemporary rendering. It was quite accepted within Roman society for even married masters to use their young male slaves as sex partners. It was the ‘use’ of male citizens or youthful males who were destined to be part of the adult citizenry that was forbidden to the Roman, not males in general. While some such master–slave sexual relations might have been the kind in which masters simply ‘used’ a slave for sexual release, we do know from the example of Hadrian and Antinous that romantic emotional involvement did characterize some such relationships, in the light of which a translation of pais by ‘boyfriend’ seems justified, perhaps even preferable. (Indeed, although the Lucan parallel employs the word doulos of the ailing young man, rather than pais, there it is coupled with the adjective entimos (‘dear’ or ‘valued’), a word that can connote emotional cherishing.) Additionally, just as today, we speak of a night out with the boys, the word ‘boy’ does not necessarily imply anything about the age of the ‘boy’ (cf. Boswell 1980: 81). What is really noteworthy about the whole incident is that Jesus doesn’t bat an eyelash, but is quite content to heal from a distance the centurion’s entimos pais, something he might hardly have been expected to do if he had any reservations about the moral legitimacy of the relationship. The textual base is admittedly thin, but it may in fact be suf- ficient to show that, in contradistinction to those who would argue from the silence of Jesus that he concurred with tradition, the preponderance of the evidence we do have supports instead Jesus’ break with his tradition on the subject of homosexual sex.

Beyond that, the text has it that Jesus was ‘amazed’ and confesses, ‘Truly, I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith’ (v. 10, NRSV). How about that? Strikingly, if there is any merit to the interpretation, it is one who is arguably involved in a homosexual romance and liaison of some sort who embodies an exemplary faith, a faith in comparison with which that of the pious Torah sensitive Jew comes up short! What is this faith that Jesus in Matthew seems to admire so? I think Jennings hits the nail on the head:

the centurion . . . wanted, he yearned, for healing and wholeness for his

beloved. And he would do anything, risk everything, to get it . . . He knows

that religious Jews revile the whole idea of pederasty, having no understanding

of, or sympathy for, the kind of love he knows; yet he goes out into

the street to find a Jewish healer and, risking rejection and ridicule, asks for

help for the boyfriend he loves. (2003: 142–3)

Further,

the important aspect of the story is the concern that draws one to take risks,

to become vulnerable in hope, to reach out in yearning for well-being, to

refuse to give disease . . . the last word, to suppose that divine power is not

on the side of calamity but on the side of wholeness: Jesus calls this outlook

faith. (2003: 143)

Faith lies not in accommodating the self to regnant standards of respectability, whether their source be religion or society, but the daringness to act out of love and an irrepressible hope. In his better moments, even Paul knows this and, if pressed, would probably own up to that being what he really means when he speaks of Gentiles’ conformance with the Law in their hearts. Of course, he is not here to press. However, the modern moral progressive, whose programme must inevitably involve distinguishing what is essential and salvageable in the faith from that which is purely historically determined and accidental, must press on. And just imagine! In the New Testament, it is arguably to a ‘fag’ that we are all – whatever our sexuality – bidden to look to recognize what faith is all about.

I want to conclude with a caveat. While the homosexual person who is convinced of his or her own moral integrity before God might – and indeed should – argue with those who would use the Bible and the tradition to discredit him or her in the interest of truth, they should take care not to get caught up in self-apology. To be ‘gay’ is to recognize that range of persons with whom one can be significantly intimate and to refuse complicity in a social practice that would treat one’s love as somehow less significant than that of a heterosexual. It is that very recognition that can ground a sense of vocation which can sustain the moral fibre it takes to bear the tiresomeness of so much so-called ‘dialogue’. Sexuality is so much a part of who we are that those of us who ‘come out’ feel we have to own up to it in the public arena. For that very reason, it may be the role of GLBT persons, indeed their God-given task, to point the way for society – and for the Church – into a fuller recognition of the significance of sex and sexual desire in human life. That is an onerous task indeed, but not at all one that is insignificant for the future good of all humankind. And I rest confident that, one day, future religiosity, should it not have rendered itself obsolete by moral obtuseness, will find itself no more upset by homosexual sex than it currently is by interest on loans (‘usury’), and no less encumbered by anti-homosexual religious propaganda than by religiously based arguments for slavery. Was it not the Jesus of the Gospel of John who promised his followers that a Spirit would come who would lead them into all truth (16.13), even if – we might add – it was a Spirit that took them far beyond what Jesus, a man limited like all men, could have imagined or perhaps even appreciated?

1 The works of the Orthodox theologian David Hart (2003: 128–9, 386; 2005) are particularly

helpful in this regard, as are the works of the Oxford theologian Andrew

Linzey (1993 (1995): 76–92; 1998: 25–32).

2 Indeed, the degree to which the Religious Right is driven to draw on spurious ‘science’

in a desperate attempt to show that homosexual sex is injurious to one or the other

parties involved indicates the poverty of ethical argument to the contrary!

The Contributors

Christopher King completed his doctorate in early Christian studies at the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis, Origen on the Song of Songs as the Spirit of Scripture: The Bridegroom’s Perfect Marriage-Song, was published by Oxford University Press in 2005.

The Revd Justin Tanis was for many years Director of Clergy and Leadership Development of the Universal Fellowship of the Metropolitan Community Churches. Revd Tanis received an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School and a DMin from San Francisco Theological Seminary. He is the author of Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith. He is active in the Leather Community and is Program Manager for the National Center for Transgender Equality, Washington DC. Dr Tanis is working on a leather spirituality anthology.

ISBN:  9780334040217