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An Awful Rowing toward God
A Review of Some Recent Literature from the Church's Conversation on Homosexuality
By D. Cameron Murchison, Jr.

For some time now, North American churches have been preoccupied with the place of homosexual Christians within them. In the 1990s, several denominations have called upon their memberships to engage in respectful dialogue to discover more fully the will of God in the matter, while maintaining explicit prohibitions against the ordination of homosexuals who are not celibate. Anyone who has been seriously involved in :the conversation knows that it is an awkward and painful discussion for all participants and most especially for those who are the subject/object of the conversation. At its worst, the dialogue degenerates into fearful alienation. At its best, the conversation shows genuine potential for drawing all its partners closer to the abiding presence of God. This complex nature of the conversation is well named by Anne Sexton's phrase "the awful rowing toward God."

One measure of the earnestness with which the invitation to conversation has been heeded is the recent publication record. Though the importance of the subject to the personal lives of many makes the notation of ancillary benefits a distinctly secondary concern, it is remarkable how the scholarly attention of the church has been creatively and effectively engaged. Biblical scholars, theologians, ethicists, sociologists, and a variety of ;practical theologians bring their voices to bear in the six volumes under 'review here. Rarely, at least in recent memory, has the scholarly energy of the church been put in such a focused way into concerns troubling the mind and heart of the church.

There are several different (and equally useful) ways of analyzing this body of material. Ecclesiastically, it arises from three denominational contexts: Episcopalian, Methodist, and Presbyterian. Personally, it is

D. Cameron Murchison, Jr. has had pastorates in Knoxville, Richmond, and Blacksburg and seed on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. He is presently Professor of Ministry at Columbia Theological Seminary.

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authored by persons who are lesbian/gay and heterosexual (though in half the material the writers have little reason to indicate their own sexual orientation). Perspectivally, one volume is clearly a reaffirmation of the traditional identification of homosexuality as standing outside the Christian norm, with contributions in two other volumes echoing this point of view. The remainder of the material explores various kinds of alternatives to the traditional approach. Thematically, virtually all the books are concerned (at least implicitly) with a foundational Christian estimate of homosexuality in the framework of human sexuality more generally considered. Beyond that, most of the writers give some attention to the question of ordination, several deal with the matter of church membership, and two specifically discuss the blessing of same-sex unions. But perhaps the most interesting theme sounded in at least four of the volumes concerns the issue of Christian community in relation to the discussion of homosexuality and the church's "awful rowing" in these waters.

In terms of the theological sources called upon for the delineation of a Christian estimate of homosexuality, appeal is made throughout these works to some version or another (and some part or another) of the classic quadrilateral: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. But for the purpose of disclosing the nuances and distinctive contributions found in the material, it is most useful to restate these sources as: Scripture, tradition, knowledge, and experience. A discussion of how the various volumes draw on one or more of these sources is perhaps the surest way to glimpse some of their distinguishing characteristics.

SCRIPTURE

Three of the publications that derive from the context of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) bear the marks of a characteristic concern with Scripture. The most "ancient" volume among these six is Marion L. Soards's Scripture and Homosexuality: Biblical Authority and the Church Today (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995. 84 pp. $9.99). It represents a succinct yet comprehensive address to the question of exegeting and interpreting Scripture that the author intends as both faithful and compassionate. The primary strength of Soards's work is its careful attention to issues of biblical authority and interpretation, coupled to a survey of the principal interpretive alternatives that have been proposed heretofore for the most widely discussed texts. He fairly describes these alternatives even as he advocates construals of the texts leading to the conclusion that homosexuality is outside of God's creative intention, if not outside the reach of God's grace. Insofar as it is a volume that summarizes much of the conversation on biblical questions to the point of its publication, it does not seek to break new ground.

If Soards's book summarizes important parts of the conversation about the Bible and homosexuality to date, the other two books from the Presbyterian context seek to make new contributions to that conversation. Robert L. Brawley is the editor of Biblical Ethics and Homosexuality: Listening to Scripture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996. 162 pp.

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$16.99), the outgrowth of a conference of twenty-four scholars who convened in 1995 in response to the Presbyterian Church's call for study and dialogue on homosexuality. The result is a volume that fruitfully explores, the methodological issue of how the Bible is employed in Christian ethics and seriously investigates a variety of biblical texts and themes with significant bearing on the question. These texts and themes range from same-sex relations in antiquity to the Old Testament's Holiness Code and its theology/institution/metaphor of marriage, to some of the New Testament's specialized vocabulary (especially sarx, arsenokoites, and malakos) and its parable of the wheat. Though the articles are sometimes highly specialized (and thus lack broad, popular appeal), they do contribute significant bits and pieces to the effort to discern Scripture's guidance to the church in this matter.

Choon-Leong Seow is the editor of Homosexuality and Christian Community (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996. 159 pp. $14.99). The interesting context of this volume is an ongoing conversation within a particular theological institution (Princeton Theological Seminary). Organized around three questions, concerning what the Scriptures say, how the Scriptures inform theological understanding, and how the church lives faithfully, the essays bring concerned and able faculty members into lively (though not contentious) dialogue with each other and, thus, with the wider church. Though concerned throughout with the Bible's bearing on the question, the volume pursues that bearing not only in the scholarly study of Scripture but also in its presence in the preaching, worship, pastoral life, and ongoing ethical reflection of the church. Not only in Thomas Gillespie's article on "The Pastoral Dilemma," but also in Choon-Leong Seow's stress on the Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament and Patrick Miller's discussion of the rule of faith and love in using Scripture, there is a concern for persons deeply affected in this matter by the church's talking and deciding. James Kay's article on the role of preaching in bringing the church to discernment challenges preachers to believe that the church is not best served by avoiding explicit address of homosexuality in sermons. And Nancy Duff models the difficult task of ongoing moral discussion in the wake of certitude about the perspective one holds.

TRADITION

Of course, Presbyterians are by no means the only ones engaged in this "awful I rowing toward God." The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church has also called for continuing dialogue, and one of the results of that call is the volume edited by Charles Hefling entitled Ourselves, Our Souls and Bodies: Sexuality and the Household of God (Boston: Cowley, 1996. 213 pp. $12.95). Though misleading to characterize the book globally as. focusing on the source of theology denoted by "tradition," the editor is himself a theologian with a demonstrated concern for how the history of the church's reflection informs and guides its present perceptions. Indeed, he mounts "a traditionalist argument" in his own essay, which discusses how change takes place within the tradition. His example

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is the case of usury, and his argument is that the church changed its attitude about charging interest on money loaned as an economic sin not because it ignored Scripture or tradition (which were clear in their denunciations of the practice) but because its very understanding of money changed. This opens onto an exploration of the question of whether knowledge and experience now suggest alternative understandings of homosexuality in an analogous fashion.

The Episcopal rootage of the volume is also evident in its sense of spirituality as being both context and content in the conversation. L. William Countryman poses the question of how the church deals with difficult topics toward the end of genuine spiritual discernment. He concludes that spiritual discourse on any important topic requires that health of spirit denoted by characteristics such as centeredness, faith, generosity of spirit, a sense of oneself, discipline, integrity and honesty, hospitality, compassion, vulnerability, and growth in faith, hope, and love. He goes on to give concreteness to these characteristics in the examples of spiritual discernment found in Dietrich Bonhoeffer and in the Christian community of Acts 15. This concern is reiterated in various ways throughout the volume, but nowhere more forcefully than in the section dealing with "Sexuality and the Soul." Among the articles there, Peter Hawkins' "Counter, Original, Spare, Strange" represents a vulnerable and honest sharing of the experience of a Christian who is also gay.

The other noteworthy characteristic of the volume is its origin not only from within the scholarly domain but also from within the life of congregations. This is indicated most clearly in the articles collected in the sections named "The Christian Household" and "The Body of Christ." In the former, there is a discussion of the relationship between Christian marriage and homosexual monogamy, as well as pastoral discussion of how Christian parents love and nurture a gay child and of how the church teaches its children regarding sexuality. In the latter, there is an exploration of how actual communities of faith have addressed and dealt with the presence of homosexual members.

Our Selves, Our Souls and Bodies is clearly a volume that comes quite thoroughly from people of the church who believe that the traditional posture of Christians concerning homosexuality needs revision. But even those who find themselves at a different place may find the traditional, spiritual, and congregational elements of the book more than a little instructive.

EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE

The other two books are not only about lesbians and gays in the church, they are by lesbians and gays in the church. Indeed, the premise both embody is that the ongoing conversation in the church needs desperately to be by and not only about homosexuals. It is an easy but imprecise assumption that they both therefore represent a focus on experience as a source of theology. The more precise account is that while both represent

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experience as a source in theology, one also represents a particular form of knowledge as well.

Marilyn Bennett Alexander and James Preston are the Methodist authors of We Were Baptized Too: Claiming God's Grace for Lesbians and Gays (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996. 139 pp. $16.99). This book is best described as an account of the experience of lesbian and gay church member s understood in the light of a theology of baptism. It is also an appeal to the church at large to own up to its repudiation of the baptism it practices and to summon courage for practicing the baptism it has repudiated. In highly personal essays and "interludes" that draw on a chorus of gay and lesbian voices, the book describes the baptismal hope of particular Christians juxtaposed against their ecclesiastical experiences of being silenced and made into strangers. Extending the sacramental focus to include the Lord's supper, the book appeals to the memories embedded in both sacraments as evocative of a commitment to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

As Desmond Tutu observes in his foreword to the book, it turns out to be a cri de coeur from persons "we have first accepted as baptized fellow Christians" but whom we have also made to "doubt that they are the children of God." While many in the church will want to object that the offense's taken by these Christians were not the offenses intended by the church; the raw and painful fact is that their wounded cry is the result. And if more rigorous theological analysis of baptism and the Lord's supper needs to be undertaken in the church's ongoing consideration of homosexuality, we have these writers to thank for making clear an obvious oversight-even carelessness-when it comes to the relevance of the sacraments to the issue at hand.

One of the obvious limitations of intensely personal accounts is that one may easily wonder about how far such experiences may be generalized. When it comes to using experience as a source for theology, it is commonly assumed that particular experiences may be especially misleading. That is why the translation of particular experiences into a more general body of knowledge is especially important in Gary David Comstock's Unrepentant, Self-Affirming, Practicing: Lesbian/Bisexual/Gay People within Organized Religion (New York: Continuum, 1996. 329 pp. $29.95). Working as a social scientist, Comstock advocates a shift from studying homosexuality as an "!abstract category of sexual behavior to the study of the experiences, social 'interactions, and involvement of gay people within religious bodies." Comstock's book is such a study, moving from a review of experiential writing by lesbian and gay people in organized religion (of the type by Alexander and Preston just discussed) to systematic observation and analysis of such experiences. He investigates existing empirical studies and pursue s original research of the same sort. The result is a significant body of knowledge (rather than only particular experiences) about lesbian and gay people in organized religion.

The analysis employs categories now quite familiar to persons concerned with denominational life in North America. Its conclusions regard-

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ing "Belonging., Switching, Leaving, and Shopping" present information of which the church surely needs to be aware as it continues its rowing toward God. Especially noteworthy are the contrasting conclusions that (1) there is a noticeably greater tendency toward nonaffiliation among gay and lesbian people than in the general population and (2) some lesbian and gay members have been able to find welcoming church homes within the most hostile denominations. Of equal importance are the findings about "Service, Participating, Leadership, and Advocacy" that suggest that when they do participate, gay and lesbian members undertake duties, leadership, and responsibilities at higher rates of involvement than do nongay members. And perhaps most consequential in multiple directions is the likelihood suggested by the chapter on "Seminary, Ordination, Ministry, and Employment" that "Most gay clergy and lay employees find and hold on to the full range of traditional positions within organized religion by being completely closeted, by being out selectively to various trusted individuals, by camouflaging their orientation and relationships, and/or by compartmentalizing their social, affectional, and professional lives." Exactly how the church should use this knowledge in its quest for more profound theological understanding of its life and mission is not completely obvious. But it is a remarkable contribution to the quest that such knowledge is becoming available. No longer does the church have merely to wonder or speculate about how lesbians and gays experience the church.

These six volumes offer a wide variety of contributions to a church that continues its awful rowing toward God. Surely there are many perspectives not included in these books that have a claim on the church's attention as well. But in their mutual reproof, correction, and affirmation of one another, these volumes do a good service to the church. Taken together, they suggest that while we are nowhere near the end of the conversation, we are learning important things-not least about the meaning of Christian community.