Theology Today - Vol 36, No. 1 - April 1979 - THEOLOGICAL TABLE-TALK

58 - Human Sexuality

IN the last two decades, human sexuality has been a major subject of attention and debate in theology and the social sciences. We have experienced the situation-ethics discussion, the abortion question, the reaction to sex research, and now a reconsideration of homosexuality. All of this has engendered its fair share of fear, anger, confusion, and recrimination within the churches, as well as the inevitable committees, task forces, study documents, and recommendations for change in official ecclesiastical attitudes. Currently, the most debatable question is whether churches should ordain to their ministries person who identify themselves as avowed "unrepentant," or non-celibate homosexuals. That has become such a hot political issue that it is difficult for pastors and counselors to know to whom they should listen and what to believe.

Helmut Thielicke reminds us that the Bible has so little to say in a directly normative mode about sexual behavior that "we cannot simply quote, but must rather interpret." That means "raising the question whether and where in the biblical orders of creation and redemption there is a theological place where eros and the modern understanding of reality affected by it can be 'settled' . . ." (The Ethics of Sex, p. 298). What is it, in other words, that belongs to the essential kerygma of Christianity, and what is the coloration given that message by the cultural setting and personal predilections of the writer? What is "treasure" and what is "earthen vessel"?

The theological substratum on which we have rested most of our thinking is the notion of "orders of creation." So, Emil Brunner, Karl Barth, and Helmut Thielicke, for example, all begin their discussions of human sexuality with the assumption that, since gender differentiation belongs to the original "order of creation," the question of greatest ethical interest will always ask what kinds of attitudes and behavior are likely to upset that order. Thus Barth ends his one-page discussion of homosexuality (maybe the only thing he ever discussed in one page), saying "that as a man he can only be genuinely human with woman, or as a woman with man" (KD III/4, p. 166). And Brunner (The Divine

Richard P. Unsworth is Chaplain at Smith College. He is an alumnus of Princeton University, Yale Divinity School, and Harvard Divinity School, and he served on the United Presbyterian Church's special committee which issued a report on human sexuality in 1970.

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Imperative) roots his discussion of sexuality in this same category of "orders of creation."

Thielicke succeeds better than either Barth or Brunner in breaking loose from a theology of sexuality oppressively centered on marriage. Why "oppressively"? Because a theology of human sexuality which makes marriage its dominating or only norm simply leaves out the substantial majority of human beings, at least in contemporary western societies. So Thielicke notes that "in theological ethics, the problem of sex is one that is not to be treated only within the framework of marriage." Still, for Thielicke, the "orders" of marriage and family life remain the baseline against which most ethical questions in the realm of sex are measured.

The only break with an "orders of creation" approach in recent Protestant writing comes in Jacques Ellul's The Ethics of Freedom (Eerdmans, 1976). In the latter reaches of the book, he reflects on sex and family questions with devastatingly accurate criticisms, elusive constructs, germinal biblical insights, and irritating judgments. He dismisses the contraceptive pill, for instance, as a "triumph of egoism" (p. 484) and recommends continence instead. Yet, Ellul undertakes to make eschatology rather than orders of creation the point of departure for ethics. His criticism of the "orders" approach is two-fold: it is incompatible with Scripture (because it assumes no moral "break" since Eden-no fall, just a stumble), and it confines ethics to "conformity to a prior given" (p. 448), the elaboration of duties and structures instead of the experience of responsible freedom.

Roman Catholic theologians have also been at work on the ethics of human sexuality, with a few heartening efforts now in print. But the view of women that still predominates in Catholic theology on sex is not all that heartening. When the latest papal utterance about women can call for a renewal of woman's primary vocation of motherhood, you know we haven't come very far. (A feminist responded that it must then follow that the primary vocation of men is fatherhood, which means the pope has failed his vocation.) Nonetheless, there have been significant theological probings.

Father Phillip S. Keane's Sexual Morality: A Catholic Perspective (Paulist Press, 1977) is a rigorous attempt to forward some proposals for reconstructing Catholic sexual morality. He is ready to acknowledge that many official Catholic teachings on sexual matters have been inadequate, if not downright destructive, and he tackles such teachings energetically. For example, he insists that Christianity "will not achieve a fully adequate understanding of human sexuality until it achieves a more satisfactory theology of women" (p. 24). He also criticizes traditional Catholic teachings on masturbation, homosexuality, and birth control. But Keane's efforts all aim at a more effective

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re-interpretation of natural law rather than any new methodological departures.

What has not yet been written, as far as I know, is a fully developed ethics of human sexuality for which the biblical covenant, rather than orders of creation or natural law, is the methodological model.

Among church documents dealing with these issues, two are especially helpful. Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought (Paulist Press, 1977) is a committee document prepared for the Catholic Theological Society of America by Anthony Kosnik, chairperson, and four other authors. Other reviewers have acknowledged that it suffers from some of the perils of committee authorship, but it has merit both for the general reader and for someone looking for indicators of the direction of Catholic thought on sexual ethics. Its biblical section acknowledges the refusal of biblical writers to divinize sex, cites Jesus' egalitarian attitude toward women, and points out how social custom in the ancient world "militated against the original feminist impulse in Christianity" (p. 28). The chapter on the empirical sciences concludes that practices commonly labeled deviant have not been proven harmful or harmless, which "should give pause to one who might otherwise too facilely assume that human experience confirms his moral persuasion"(p. 77).

The book is heavily weighted toward "pastoral guidelines," some of which are responsive to dilemmas peculiarly Catholic; but many others are guidelines that will be found useful just because they take realistic account of the sexual situations of contemporary human beings and equally realistic account of the need for moral understanding.

Human Sexuality: A Preliminary Study (United Church Press, 1977) is a Protestant committee document, and also has some of the stylistic failings of multiple authorship. It is a compendious book, touching on biblical hermeneutics, sociological and medical research, theological ethics, and questions of public policy. A committee effort that tries to do that much and more in 232 pages of text is bound to give short shrift to some areas. Nonetheless, it is a teaching volume and brings under one cover materials to which most clergy and lay leaders would not have easy access. The chapter on "Psychosexual Development," for example, gives a resume of important research by John Money and Anke Ehrhardt at Johns Hopkins which makes much clearer to the lay reader how gender identity is established in early childhood.

There are other elements of this "preliminary" study (they don't say to what it is preliminary) that will broaden almost anyone's understanding of human sexuality and the Christian community's struggle for a more mature response to it. The short section on minority perspectives on sexuality is illuminating. And the chapter on public policy raises many important questions for a socially concerned church. The chapter directly concerned with ethics, on the other hand, is less satisfactory, perhaps reflecting a certain lack of clarity inevitably

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associated with the sea changes that are going on in this area of human experience. Jacques Ellul would say the fault is in the attempt to find intrinsic meaning in sexuality. "Meaning has to be invented," he says, "and it has to be such that all will accept it" (p. 464).

Isn't that just our problem at this juncture? We are both experiencing and inventing new meanings in our sexual dimensions, and it's not clear that all will accept them. Nowhere is that clearer than in the current spate of books about homosexuality. Many of them seem more devoted to firing the controversy than to seeking light on the subject. One has to sort through a lot of strident prose before finding a book that truly helps.

III

One of the most helpful treatments of homosexuality carries the title Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? (Harper and Row, 1978). Letha Scanzoni, a professional writer, and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, English professor and contributing editor of Faith at Work magazine, have collaborated to produce a sane, learned, and readable volume whose aim is simply a better understanding and a more adequate Christian ethical consideration of homosexuality. They achieve this admirably, perhaps chiefly because they have brought together biblical scholarship, practical theology, and the insights of social scientists.

The authors set out with the most fundamental of Christian ethical questions: "Who is my neighbor?" In answer, they go beyond the level of many writers in the religious community by posing to the heterosexual majority the challenge of moral growth. Using two narratives (Peter's struggle with dietary laws in Acts, chaps. 10-1 1, and Huck Finn's conflict over property laws in helping Jim escape from slavery), the authors pose the timeless problem that faces all religiously sincere persons, namely, how to discern between the divinely and the socially ordained. As antidote to the moralistic misuses of biblical authority that seem to abound in discussions of homosexuality, these writers recommend a healthy dose of self-examination to see where our fears and prejudices may be controlling our thought. "When we assume that the Bible is perfectly clear on a moral issue-so clear that only a fool or a dishonest person could possibly differ from our view of things-that over-confidence should alert us to the possibility that our egos are clouding our interpretations. Self-suspicion is especially in order when our view happens to coincide with the prevailing view, whether of a particular church or the secular society" (p. 20).

The authors proceed without overstatement, either in the sections which press for appreciation of the contribution to Christian life and understanding of some homosexual persons (Michelangelo, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden, etc.), or in sections which review the current debate in American Christendom over the status of homosexual persons. In the latter sections, it becomes clear that church people, lay and clerical, have often taken over and baptized the stereotyping and

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stigmatizing of homosexuals that has prevailed in the culture. The evidence presented is sobering and should do much to give any thoughtful Christian a more independent and biblically based standpoint for examining the issues now so much on the public and ecclesiastical dockets. Indeed, the chapter entitled "What does the Bible say?" is a balanced and thorough exegetical treatment of the relevant texts.

In stark contrast to the Scanzoni-Mollenkott volume is The Unhappy Gays, by Tim LaHaye (Tyndale House 1978). LaHaye's book is dotted with first-person pronouns, references to and recommendations for his own books, and detailed, salacious descriptions of sexual behavior; all in the name of telling us "what everyone should know about homosexuality." He amplifies every stereotype: that homosexuals are engaged in "an insatiable quest for the erotic" (p. 33), that they are the product of "smother mothers" and "absent fathers" and/or broken homes and permissive child-rearing (pp. 72-76), that "most homosexuals are the best liars you will ever meet" (p. 44), that homosexuals propagate by recruiting youngsters (p. 193), and that "the phrase 'a Christian homosexual' is really a contradiction in terms" (p. 111). He opines that homosexuality is learned and chosen behavior (p. 62), and admits only that there may be in some a certain temperamental predisposition toward same-sex preference. This opens the way for him to outline his anthropology based on the four temperaments: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholy, and Phlegmatic. ("A 60 percent Sanguine and 40 percent Phlegmatic is a 'SanPhleg' . . .").

LaHaye scolds at college administrators who "make no attempt to fire known homosexuals from their faculties" (p. 198) and at President Carter for not inviting Anita Bryant to the White House (p. 176). But one of the most ironic phrases in the book is his observation (p. 47) that "homosexual case studies reveal a heavy use of the personal pronoun. . . ." All in all, it is not a helpful book.

While LaHaye's book sounds strident and irresponsible, Jerry Kirk's book, The Homosexual Crisis in the Mainline Church (Nelson, 1978) cannot be dismissed as irresponsible. This is a frankly polemical book, aimed primarily but not exclusively at the question of the ordination of homosexual persons to Christian ministries. Kirk is a Presbyterian (UPUSA) pastor who has taken an active role in the struggle within his church over the question of the ordination of "avowed, practicing homosexuals." Believing that God has cured him of his anger over the majority recommendation of the General Assembly's Task Force on Homosexuality, he nonetheless presses his criticisms vigorously, even heatedly.

Kirk's book is a rather good case study of the problems addressed by Scanzoni and Mollenkott. He assumes that the Bible is perfectly clear on this moral issue, and that its clarity coincides with his opinion and the opinion of the vast majority of church people (pp. 61 and 32). His exegetical treatment of relevant texts (chapter 5) is done with attention

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to the biblical context but with none of the historical-cultural analysis that thorough exegesis requires. This is provided in a measure by Scanzoni and Mollencott, and more fully by Tom Horner's Jonathan Loved David (Westminster, 1978).

Kirk's position is that homosexuality is a spiritual sickness that can be cured. His book abounds with success stories about homosexuals who have been cured through his ministry and counseling. To his credit, he also regards homophobia as a sin to be cured in himself as well as in the church (chapter 11).

The directly polemical character of the book comes to the fore in its last chapters, which include instructions on how to lobby within the church against any slackening of opposition to the ordination of homosexual men and women, and suggestions about how to become a reconciling church. Here, of course, "reconciling" means "converting," since the openness of the church is to be for the sake of setting gays straight. The issue, as he sees it, "is not gay rights, but God's rights" (p. 37). It is not clear what is meant, theologically, by the phrase "God's rights." Unrelievedly sexist, his admonitions to pastors begin with "Brethren . . ." And unless he is telling a tale about a woman, his references to gay persons always assume that a male is being spoken of. "Brethren," he says (p. 43), "we have caved in to the culture." Jerry Kirk may have said more than he knew.

A far more satisfactory conservative statement than either Kirk's or LaHaye's is Greg L. Bahnsen's Homosexuality: a Biblical View (Baker, 1978). It is a book that could have been written in the eighteenth century, so classic is it in structure and argumentation. Laying the foundation of his argument in "the absolute authority of God's revealed, . . . inspired and infallible Word" (p. 14) in self-attesting Scripture, Bahnsen proceeds with his thesis that "individuals should disapprove of and oppose homosexuality as immoral. Churches should decline membership and office to unrepentant homosexuals. States should restrain homosexuality rather than making it a civil right" (p. 6).

Bahnsen's book is a good fundamentalist statement. His knowledge of the biblical text is prodigious; his scriptural foot-noting reminds one of Calvin's Institutes; his conclusions are straighforwardly stated; his logic is consistent with his presuppositions. Furthermore, he studiously tries to avoid stentorian appeals to his readers' fears. He admonishes them to avoid "an unholy sympathy � and an unholy hatred for the homosexual" (p. 134). It doesn't always work out so neatly, of course. For example, he says "the Gospel leaves no room for a loathing fear of the homosexual" (p. 129), having said earlier that "God calls such people dogs�. Accordingly, the child of God must be repulsed and outraged at this vile behavior" (p. 92).

Anyone looking for a generally fair-minded, carefully written,

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conservative scriptural treatment of the current issues surrounding homosexuality will find it here. It should be useful to Bahnsen's opponents as well as to his allies. His lengthy but unannotated bibliography is also an asset, including writings on all sides of the questions.

At polar opposites in exegetical method and conclusions about what the Bible really says-and doesn't say-about homosexuality is Tom Horner's Jonathan Loved David (Westminster, 1978). He sets his sights more broadly on "homosexuality in biblical times" and begins, therefore, with an especially valuable chapter on the Middle Eastern background. Horner has drawn on an impressive array of historical and theological resources in developing both this chapter and the book as a whole. The seventeen pages of footnotes and seven pages of annotated bibliography are every bit as valuable and readable as the chapters that precede them.

The thrust of his argument is that the Bible reflects as well as addresses the cultures in which it was written. Since that writing occurs over the period of a millennium and across several distinct cultural strands, Horner asks that we look carefully at the variety of biblical responses to homosexuality. Noting that the words "homosexuality," "heterosexuality," and "bi-sexuality" never occur in Scripture, he seeks to defuse these questions of some of their volatile qualities by examining thoroughly the whole social and historical context in which sexuality is discussed in Scripture. He even presents a chapter on "Jesus and Sexuality," a topic that is bound to tangle with the high dudgeon of the sexual moralist. He handles the evidence carefully and refutes speculations about the sexual dimension of Jesus' relationships with women or with men. "What is conclusive," he writes, "is that it is impossible to conceive of Jesus as displaying hostility toward anyone because of his or her sexual preferences-especially the kind of hostility that some of his followers have displayed toward others throughout history on account of their homosexuality" (p. 121).

Horner's stance, that Jesus expressed no particular interest in sexual preference per se, only in the alienating consequences of lustful sexual attitudes and abusive sexual behavior, is one that would seem to accord with the majority opinion in the psychiatric community today. The American Psychiatric Association's decision to eliminate homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders is now reflected in the drafting of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition). Among its psychosexual disorders, the current draft mentions only the experience of homosexuality in which the individual desires to acquire or increase heterosexual arousal and is specifically distressed by a sustained pattern of homosexual arousal. The predisposition to this conflict is laid to "those negative societal attitudes towards homosexuality which have been internalized." It would not be unreasonable to conclude from this that the church may be a major

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cause of pathology among homosexual people-more their oppressor than their balm.

Psychiatric and psychological studies of homosexuality are much more numerous now than a dozen years ago; so numerous, in fact, that a working pastor cannot reasonably be expected to keep abreast of them. A good review of the studies appears in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (Vol. 39, No. 7, July, 1978) by Hart, Roback, et al. It is especially helpful because it deals with studies of non-patient homosexuals, whereas much of our impression of homosexuality as psychic disease arises from the fact that, until about twenty years ago, it was only the troubled persons seeing doctors or counselors who provided the data base. This review "concludes that findings to date have not demonstrated that the homosexual individual is any less psychologically adjusted than his heterosexual counterpart."

The most extensive of the recent studies, of course, is Homosexualities, by Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Weinberg (Simon and Schuster, 1978), a study undertaken by the Institute for Sex Research of Indiana University, the famous Kinsey Institute. A critical review of this important volume will appear in the next issue of THEOLOGY TODAY; the only point to make here is to note the researchers' conviction that homosexuality cannot reasonably be classed as a mental illness. True, all sorts of pathological feelings and behaviors are to be found among homosexual, as among heterosexual, persons. In some cases the incidence will be higher among homosexuals, but the reasons have more to do with social hostility than with sexual preference. The book is so arranged, incidentally, that one can readily cull the conclusions that are to be drawn from the data. Nearly half the book is devoted to tabular presentations of the statistical data for the study.

The dust hasn't yet settled on the turbulent questions being asked about human sexuality within the Christian community, nor can we expect that it will in the near future. It remains an area of major attitude changes in the church, and one whose implications are far-reaching. Already in some of the books mentioned here, it is clear that ethical, exegetical, and theological methods are up for re-examination in the light of new questions about human sexuality. So, one can hope, are many aspects of the common life in the body of Christ, for issues of justice and human dignity are at stake here-as every pastor knows.