33 - Homosexuals: Identity and Dignity

Homosexuals: Identity and Dignity
By Patrick Henry

What follows is excerpted from a sermon preached on July 6, 1975, in the Swarthmore Presbyterian Church, of which I am a lay member. I hope that something of the homiletic style filters through the journal format, since I think there are articles aplenty on this subject, and what we need is to hear more from the pulpit about it. The texts for the sermon were John 13:34-35 and 15:1-12, and Galatians 3:23-28.

DURING the spring semester of 1975, along with colleagues from several other departments, I participated in a student-run course at Swarthmore College on the subject of homosexuality. I was responsible for only one small segment of the study, the historical and contemporary attitudes of religion towards homosexuality. I was struck by the degree to which the students in the course, both the homosexuals and the heterosexuals-or, to use the more common terms, the gay ones and the straight ones-were convinced that what the churches do and say still has a major significance for our society and, in some instances, even for the students themselves.

One of the examination questions I asked was this: "What would have to happen to change attitudes so that official spokesmen for an organized church could make ungrudgingly a statement that appears in

Patrick Henry, who holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, is Associate Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa. During the year 1975-76 he is on leave as a Fellow of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John's Abbey and University, Collegeville, Minn., where he is completing a book on St. Theodore of Studios, a leading ninth-century Byzantine abbot.
The immediate context of this sermon was the action by the 187th General Assembly (1975) of the United Presbyterian Church, denying recognition to the Presbyterian Gay Caucus under Chapter 28 of the church's constitution. Several groups organized for particular purposes are related to the United Presbyterian Church under this section of the denomination's constitution, and the General Assembly's decision came after an extended debate. In 1970, the 182nd General Assembly had accepted for the denomination's study, but not approved, a report, "Sexuality and the Human Community," which urged reconsideration of homosexuality as sin. However, the Assembly was deeply divided over the issue, and in a last-minute action it also added a contradictory amendment that stipulated that "adultery, prostitution, fornication, and/or the practice of homosexuality" should still be considered sins.

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an article called 'The Homosexual and the Church': "There is no fundamental inconsistency between full Christianity and full practicing homosexuality"?"1 Most of the students realized that a lot would have to happen. The question had another part: "Do you think it is likely to happen?" Most of the students said "No," but a few said they thought there was an outside chance. During the semester I came to know fairly well some of the gay students to whom the church has meant a great deal, and who long for it to continue to mean a great deal to them. So, when I read in the summer issue of A.D. magazine that the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., had rejected a report of the Presbyterian Gay Caucus on the grounds that " 'the Scripture as understood in our Reformed tradition does not condone (the) sexual orientation and life-style' of homosexuals,"2 I realized that I must in conscience use the occasion of a guest appearance in the pulpit to act on my conviction that gay people in the church should no longer have to stand alone as advocates in their own cause.

A hymn that we sang just before the sermon expresses with force and in contemporary language something crucial about Christian identity, something declared by Jesus himself in the 13th chapter of John's Gospel:

We will work with each other,
We will work side by side,
And we'll guard each man's dignity
And save each man's pride,
And they'll know we a re Christians
By our love, by our love,
Yes, they'll know we are Christians
By our love.3

The challenge which this hymn, and the gospel on which it rests, presents to us is this: by maintaining the traditional ecclesiastical attitude towards homosexuality, we are failing to guard the dignity and save the pride of many of our brothers and sisters; by declaring that their identity as homosexuals is odious in the sight of God, we are tarnishing our own identity as Christians.

I

The challenge confronts us in many areas. First is biblical interpretation itself. There are no more than two dozen passages in the entire Bible that deal directly or even very indirectly with homosexuality. A very careful exegetical study of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis has raised serious doubts that the sin

1 Barbara B. Gittings, in Ralph W. Weltge, ed., The Same Sex: An Appraisal of Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969), p. 15 1.
2 A. D. (United Presbyterian edition), 4:7 and 8 (July-August 1975), p. 22.
3 Peter Scholtes, "We are One in the Spirit" (1966), No. 619 in The Worshipbook (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972).

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of Sodom was originally understood to be homosexuality.⁴ The prohibition of homosexual intercourse in Leviticus 18 is part of a catalogue that includes the prohibition of intercourse with a menstruating woman-if you are going to call one of the prohibitions a binding revelation of the divine will, then you must treat the other in the same way. In I Corinthians 6 Paul lists types of persons who will not inherit the kingdom of God: "neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God." Paul also says, however, eight chapters later in the same letter (14:35), that "it is shameful for a woman to speak in church." If we qualify his authority there as, thank God, we do, then we are free to qualify his authority elsewhere. There is a basic inconsistency in a General Assembly that in one action refuses the appeal of a young minister who takes his stand on the scriptural hindrances to full participation of women in the church and that in another action insists on the most stringent interpretation of scriptural statements on homosexuality.⁵ Roger Shinn of Union Theological Seminary has put the matter squarely: "Certainly there is no automatic process by which a believer can lift out of biblical or historical tradition a moral commandment to meet a contemporary perplexity."⁶

The explicit biblical statements on homosexuality are simply not a substantial basis for a moral judgment. Even Paul's linking of homosexuality to idolatry in Romans I can be accounted for by the fact that most of the homosexual practices in Paul's world were found among the Greeks, and Paul considered idolatry to be the foundation of their way of life, so it followed that homosexuality was the direct result of idolatry. In formal terms, this kind of argument is not different from that of a seventeenth-century Lutheran professor of church and criminal law who said that the inevitable consequences of homosexuality were "earthquakes, famine, pestilence, Saracens, floods, and very fat, voracious fieldmice. "⁷

II

In his remarks in Romans, Paul calls homosexuality "unnatural," and it is the concept of "nature" and "the natural" that brings us to the second area in which the challenge to guard each person's dignity and save each person's pride confronts us: the area of Christian ethics. Many people would argue that even if in the first area, that of biblical interpretation, there is no unequivocal rejection of homosexuality, in the area of ethics there is. Christian ethics is of course closely tied to biblical interpretation, but here the issue concerns something much

⁴ Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955), esp. ch. 1.
⁵ On the case of Walter W. Kenyon see A.D., 4:7 and 8, pp. 33-35.
⁶ Homosexuality: Christian Conviction and Inquiry," ch. 4 of The Same Sex, p. 47.
⁷ Benedict Carpzov, quoted by Helmut Thielicke, The Ethics of Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 276.

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more general than explicit statements on homosexuality: it concerns the whole biblical concept of what is natural and what sex is for. This subject is a vast one, and all we can do here is point to a few aspects of it.

First, virtually all Protestant churches have rejected the notion that the only thing God created sex for was procreation. I doubt that the General Assembly would have said that the "life style" of married couples who choose not to have children is "not condoned" by "the Scripture as understood in our Reformed tradition," and yet the first man and woman were commanded to "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28). Sex as a profound expression of love and mutuality is something most of us, I think, accept gratefully as a good part of God's good world; it is a marvel and a mystery and a grace that babies can come from ecstasy, but the ecstasy does not require babies to justify it. Indeed, in a world where population is running wild, we question the morality of calling birth control immoral. Human fruitfulness and multiplication is rapidly becoming a curse, not a blessing.

Second, Christian ethics must be prepared to modify in certain major respects its notion of what is "natural" in light of modern findings. Much Christian moral teaching on homosexuality assumes that attraction to a person of the same sex is unnatural, a sickness, something to be avoided or, if contracted, cured. Karl Barth, the most powerful voice in Protestant theology in this century, began from this premise, and declared with characteristic assurance: "The decisive word of Christian ethics must consist in a warning against entering upon the whole way of life which can only end in the tragedy of concrete homosexuality."⁸ This "decisive word of Christian ethics" is irrelevant, and worse than irrelevant, if, as much modern psychology and the experience of many gay men and women has shown, homosexuality is not an aberration or an "abnormality," but is rather the structure of an individual's identity. The fundamental declaration of gay liberation is that gay is good, and if Christian ethics sticks to old ways and keeps repeating in the face of gay identity and dignity and pride that gay is not good, that the only Christian thing for a gay person to do is to undertake to be transformed into a straight person, then the "decisive word of Christian ethics" will sound hollow and will properly go unheeded.

Third, we need to evaluate the commitment of Christian ethics as we know it to the ideal of the nuclear family. The "decline of the family" is

⁸ Church Dogmatics, III/4 (Edinburgh: Clark, 1961), p. 166, The entire long paragraph from which this sentence comes is an unremitting broadside against homosexuality. It demonstrates, I think, the danger inherent in Barth's way of doing dogmatics, that theology can run roughshod over humanity. Thielicke, p. 272, quotes the sentence, and questions Barth's understanding of the situation.

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of course one of the most common themes among observers of our society; but recent statistics have shown that despite all the confident predictions of two or three decades ago that by this time marriage would be a thing of the past, applications for marriage licenses are as numerous as ever. The nuclear family has extraordinary staying power. It has made it through countless generations and a dizzying variety of social and cultural situations. The nuclear family makes a lot of sense, and it will not disappear. But for many people the nuclear family does not make sense, and it seems to me that Christianity, which had at its origins an astonishing capacity to break through social convention and established "order," would be true to itself if it began to assess positively a wide range of life expressions.⁹

III

The challenge to guard each person's dignity and save each person's pride confronts us in the area of biblical interpretation and in the area of Christian ethics. It confronts us finally in the area of the church itself.

What distresses me particularly is that I see the academy being truer than the church to the challenge of the Christian gospel. Gay people on college campuses are accepted with respect and openness; their identity is affirmed, their dignity guarded, their pride saved. The academy affirms allegiance to truth, and it has room for gay people without insisting that they should be, or at least should want to be, something else. The church is where the virtues of faith, hope, and love are supposed to live, and yet the church objected to the Presbyterian Gay Caucus report on the grounds that one of the purposes of the Caucus is " 'to facilitate . . . consideration by judicatories of support for legislation' removing legal disabilities from homosexuals," and this purpose "went beyond the terms of reference" of the church's constitution."¹⁰ According to the A.D. report, one of the most liberal voices at the Assembly admonished the commissioners: "We are not asked to approve theologically or morally of homosexuality. We are only asked to listen."¹¹ What I am suggesting is that the church, that is, we, approve homosexuality both theologically and morally. Let me make clear why I suggest that.

The first reason is a thoroughly practical one. As more and more young people through their experiences in college come to appreciate and value their gay friends, they are going to find the church's effective

⁹ See the challenging and open-minded report on "The Family Today" in A.D., 4:5 (May 1975), pp. 19-34.
¹⁰ A.D., 4:7 and 8, p. 23. 1 understand how commissioners might have in good faith voted against the Gay Caucus report on sound constitutional grounds. It does seem to me, however, that the General Assembly failed to deal with the main issue, and the appeal to Scripture and tradition by the Assembly Committee on Minutes and Reports went far beyond the constitutional question.
¹¹ Ibid. (Fortner moderator, Robert C. Lamar).

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exclusion of gay people more and more offensive. The church is in serious difficulty already, with the increasing tendency of young people not to return to the church after their years in college, and I predict that failure on the part of the church to be positive about gay people will in the future tend to turn away ever larger numbers of straight people.

The second reason is one based more directly on experience. As I said, I have come to know some gay people fairly well, and it is simply unthinkable to me to exclude them from full fellowship in the church-and full fellowship means welcome without judgment-indeed, it means getting beyond the point of even thinking in terms of "welcoming." It is a serious indictment of the church that there has to be a Gay "Caucus" at all. The church is the church, where dividing walls of hostility are broken down, where we are all one in the body of Christ, where it is Christ himself who welcomes all of us equally, and we do not decide shall we or shall we not welcome this one or that one. Just as the division of the church of Jesus Christ into hundreds of denominations is a tragedy, so is the felt need of a whole group of Christians within the various denominations to form caucuses, and of some to form separate gay churches. I understand that caucuses are necessary-otherwise the cries for liberation would be stifled. But it is to our shame that we have not led the way. Even more, it is to our great loss, for by including fully in the church only a small number of life expressions, we have cut ourselves off from the richness of human experience and religious insight that comes from a wide range of spiritual gifts. It seems to me that things are mixed up when it is in my work as a professor in the academy, and not in my active membership in the church, that I come to appreciate the identity, the dignity, and the proper pride of gay people.

Finally, the third reason I suggest we approve homosexuality both theologically and morally is that I think such approval is theologically and morally sound-and not simply on the grounds that we are all sinners and should not pass judgment.¹² In one of the most revolutionary insights anywhere in the Bible, Paul expresses in the third chapter of Galatians what happens in baptism. "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

There is neither Jew nor Greek-that is, national and racial distinctions are not the marks of Christian identity. There is neither slave nor free-that is, social and economic distinctions are not the marks of

¹² Thielicke, whose chapter on "The Problem of Homosexuality" is thoughtful and generally sympathetic, nonetheless wants to subsume homosexuality under the general heading of the Fall (cf. The Ethics of Sex, pp. 283-84).

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Christian identity. There is neither male nor female-that is, sexual distinctions and orientations are not the marks of Christian identity.

Paul was perfectly well aware that in the interim state before the full realization of God's kingdom distinctions of all kinds would persist. But he is telling the Galatians that they must not be content with the old distinctions. For centuries Christians have identified each other not with a question: "Are you a Jew or a Greek? slave or free? male or female? straight or gay?"; but with a declaration: "The Lord is risen!" to which the response is a reaffirmation, "He is risen indeed!" The church is the outpost of the world transformed in the world as it is. For the church to declare homosexuality an offence against God is for the church to look back, to use "the old leaven, the leaven of malice" (I Corinthians 5:8).

The gospel looks to the future. For the present it commands us to guard each person's dignity and save each person's pride, and to work with each other and to work side by side-and they'll know we are Christians by our love. That, when all is said and done, is the only way anybody, including ourselves, can know we are Christians.