Theology Today - Vol 52, No. 2 - July 1995 - ARTICLE

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Recent approaches to human sexuality from a theological perspective begin by granting fairly broad berth to what we know from human experience and, then, make an effort to relate this to what the Bible, in its variety and richness, has said. Thus, a somewhat dialectical relationship emerges between the Bible and modern experience, which is advantageous because modern experience is kept fully in view. But what would the issue of human sexuality look like viewed solely from the Bible's perspective of what it means to be male and female creatures? In order to address this question, I want, first, to explore what the Bible says about the human condition. I will take a fresh look at such central biblical themes as the human fall, Israel's election, and the destiny of the church over against the kingdoms of the world. Then, I will turn to the special case regarding human sexuality now confronting the church: homosexuality and homosexual behavior in specifically churchly contexts. In this way, I seek to privilege, as far as possible, an encounter with the word of God in Scripture over the more prevalent dialectical approach.

BEING HUMAN, BEING FALLEN, BEING ISRAEL

What does it mean to be human? In the modern world, we pose this question and try to answer it by considering human beings as a unique class over against all other living creatures. A theological or biblical perspective, then, restates the question as, What does it mean that this unique class of human creatures is made in the image of God? This is, of course, a very hard question to approach, requiring the cunning of the serpent and a wisdom devoid of the serpent's guile. Even so, to speak of "being human" from the perspective of divine image is not to answer a

Christopher R. Seitz is Professor of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School. He is author of Zion's Final Destiny (1 99 1) and Isaiah 1-39 (1993)

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question at all but to open a window onto many other questions the Bible only begins to address.

A more simple question, however, can be posed. Does the Bible really consider all human beings as belonging to the same essential and unique class? The answer is yes, and no, depending upon where one looks in the Bible's connected narrative about being human. Humanity is considered a distinct, unified species in Genesis 1-11, but, in these very same chapters, events transpire that permanently alter what it means to be human and what it means for human beings even to pose questions about their own humanity.

There is a longstanding debate about Genesis 3, revisited in recent days by James Barr, about whether human beings "fell" in such a way as to have permanently altered the human condition, sin and death being the consequences of that "fall." ¹ The debate is not a modern one nor even primarily a Christian one. A brief survey of the debate can be found in Terence Fretheim's fine review in Word and World, and I agree with him that not only does the New Testament assume such a fall, as traditionally understood, so, too, does the Old Testament. ² The possibility I am pursuing is a different one. The traditional view of the fall is a problem because it assumes a unitary view of human individuals as a class and

"The Old Testament should never become so comfortable that we lose the irony implied in reading it, as Christian outsiders who once did not know God."

ignores the election of Israel and her status over against the nations at large in God's dealing with humanity.

I want to begin not with the traditional concern, namely the effects of the fall on the individual but, instead, with the impact of the fall upon humanity as a class. As a consequence of the growth of sin among human beings and the limited effectiveness of measures like the flood, humanity loses its status as a unified class of creatures. Efforts to have "one language and the same words" (Gen. 11:1), the surest mark of humanity as a whole existing as a single group, collapse by divine will. The nations are scattered, and a special denominating within the national variety emerges, with Israel (or Israel-in-promise, made in pledge through Abraham and Sarah) as its focal point.

To underscore how fundamental a move this creating of Israel was, we need to consider three things. First, Israel is not marked off from other

¹ James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).
² Terence E. Fretheim, "Is Genesis 3 a Fall Story?", Word and World, 14 (1994), pp. 144-53. See also the fine essay of R. W. L. Moberly, "Did the Serpent Get it Right?", Joumal of Theological Studies, 39 (1988), pp. 1-27. Moberly reviews Barr's book in Journal of Theological Studies, 45 (1994), pp. 172-175.

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creatures physiologically. The most that can be said in this regard involves the later prescribed circumcision, but even that was a human act, divinely ordered, but humanly executed, and only extending to males. That women were full members of Israel, as Israel, is nowhere questioned, making this human setting off through circumcision symbolic of a larger divine intention (Gen. 17:1-14). So what constitutes this new denominating of humanity into Israel and the nations is the divine word alone, made in pledge alone, to Abraham. Israel becomes a reality by divine grace only.

Second, Israel, as over against humanity in general, does not possess a different or distinctive moral capacity. Whatever happened to the divine image in Adam extends in equal measure both to Israel and to the other nations. God's special people do not live longer, jump higher, or fail to disappoint just as profoundly; the opposite may well be true. What marks them out is that God will speak to them in a special and persistent way, or to individuals among them who will pass on what they know even when the tongue sticks or Tarshish seems like a safe place to hide from the potent words of the one God. "Has any people ever heard the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have heard, and lived? ... To you it was shown, that you might know that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him" (Deut. 4:33,35). It is important to note that God may on occasion speak to the non-Israelite, but these are exceptions that prove the rule. And when the Assyrian Rabshakeh asks, "Is it without the Lord that I have come out against this land to destroy it?" (Isa. 36:10), while we hear in his words the same message of divine judgment spoken to Isaiah (Isa. 10:5), we know not how he heard it and come to learn that his very speaking of it is blasphemy of an order deserving death.

The third consideration involves the most difficult aspect of Israel's specialness. Even when the Bible makes general statements about humanity in toto-for example, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them?" (Ps. 8:4)-we never know for sure whether or not the special voice that speaks these words regards itself as part of humanity in general, that is, as reflecting on a sort of natural revelation accessible to all. Nor arc we sure what the significance of such natural or universal knowing of God might be measured against Israel's own knowing. Israel can speak about humanity in general, itself included, but would Israel accept this wisdom from the mouth of humanity in general, with itself included as only one unprivileged part among others? It is one thing for Philo to describe the Torah from Sinai as an expression of the divine universal will; it is less clear that Philo would regard as legitimate the claims of the nations to know the one God, Israel's Lord of Hosts, under the cover of their own laws, religious customs, and mores. It is important to remember that statements about humanity in general, such as Genesis 1-11, the wisdom of the Queen of Sheba, King Lemuel, or even Balaam's ass, are modified either by appeals to the fear of the Lord as Israel's named God or by the simple virtue of being found not floating free of context but rooted within Israel's own scriptural testimony. When the Rabshakeh

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says what is true, that God has sent Assyria on a mission of judgment, it is true not because he says it but only because we know God to have said it on Isaiah's testimony and can, therefore, measure its truthfulness. The flip side of this is that non-Israelites may intuit what Israelites know but are afraid to tell, so the sailors and Jonah, but they never know something that Israel must intuit in respect of the one divine will. Just ask any of Daniel's blowhard adversaries; Daniel may have appeared to be in real danger, but only for a time. Kings come to acknowledge his God's truth, or they die condemned.

In sum, when more universal ways of knowing are registered in the Old Testament, these are still rooted in Israel's own special record of revelation and judged as comprehensible only within that context. This record of revelation is shared by no one else. It is this record that marks off Israel as God's elect, alone in a position to judge the truth claims of others in respect of God. The final note of Psalm 147 is not an isolated one: "He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and ordinances to Israel. He has not dealt thus with any other nation; they do not know his ordinances, Praise the Lord." The Old Testament should never become so comfortable that we lose the irony implied in reading it, as Christian outsiders who once did not know God. With the psalmist, we rejoice that we did not know what Israel alone knew and then say " Alleluja" because we have now been invited to share what they first experienced.

Thus, the Old Testament considers humanity in two categories: one fallen and outside God's special relationship with Israel, the other fallen but marked with the potential for knowing the will of God, a knowledge that sadly cannot preclude disobedience. So, with the special relationship comes also special judgment: "You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities" (Amos 3:2). The nations may even inadvertently do God's will and show Israel's status to be perversely a judgment on her: "You are not sent ... to many peoples of obscure speech and difficult language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely if I sent you to them," God says to Ezekiel, "they would listen to you" (Ezek. 3:5-6). But God retains a special bond with his own judged Israel that weighs more in the scale than the inadvertent doing of the will of God by those outside God's covenant. If it were not for Israel's testimony to her own hardheartedness, we would not even know that God would illustrate that hardheartedness by allowing the other nations potentially to do good.

Israel proves incapable of pleasing God, and those outside her circle do so only by indirection. So, neither acts finally in a manner that can bring about the fellowship and sustained righteousness intended in creation. We are left with redoubled efforts on the part of Israel to be the people of God, fully and completely, and promises from God that signal such efforts will never be enough, even when pursued with a pure heart. For God's designs began and ended with a will that the scattered nations would be blessed through Israel's own witness and that these two great divisions of humanity would be joined, as in Genesis 1, to worship as one people on

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Mt. Zion: "In days to come, the mountain of the Lord's house will become the highest of the mountains. . . all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, Come, let us go up that ... he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths" (Isa. 2:2,3). ³

Understood in this way, the "fall" of humanity as depicted in Genesis 1-11 is not simply an interior psychological, spiritual, or moral state of the individual human being, repaired in some manner by God's act in Jesus Christ, an act we confess and live by even as sin continues to invade our best daily efforts. It is this and more. The fall of humanity also has a

³ Incidentally, when Gentiles are included as full participants in the promises of God, through Jesus Christ, this radical move-which is a sticking point to be sure, as the opening chapters of Acts bear witness-is grounded in promises of old, made to God's own special people Israel. To depict as analogous the inclusion in the modern Christian church of men and women engaged in homosexual conduct is simply wrong (see Jeffrey Siker, "How to Decide? Homosexual Christians, the Bible, and Gentile Inclusion," Theology Today, 51 (1994), pp. 219-234; see also Luke Timothy Johnson's earlier essay in Commonweal (January 1994). Equally wrong would be to say that unmarried "heterosexuals" ought to be free to engage in sexual activity because that is their most compelling natural tendency. That is, though this had once been forbidden in an Israel without the love of Christ, now, in Christ, it is to be permitted. The analogy breaks down by simple virtue of the plain sense of Scripture. The New Testament does not break ranks with the teaching of the Old Testament on this matter. If anything, it makes yet more stringent the Old Testament's plain sense, as a text like Mark 10:2-12 makes clear. This is also why in the history of the church, until now, the only proper context for sexual expression has been the union of one man and one woman in the covenant of marriage.

An understanding of the council of Jerusalem as a "fresh reinterpretation" of Israel's ethic points to a deeper problem of how to render properly the Old Testament as Christian Scripture. The Old Testament does not function for the Christian church merely as religio-historical background for the New. It retains its own proper voice, not in simple historical, but in complex theological relationship with the witness of the New. Siker seems to sense that his evolutionary understanding might be open to charges of the Jews having a separate, less inclusive, ethic in respect of sexual conduct. Though he tries to cover himself on this front ("not In any way suggesting a supercessionist view of Christianity " p. 230) it is hard to see what his options are, having reduced the plain sense of the Old Testament to an ancient teaching in need of repair by a new word from the spirit-filled community.

Also questionable, and somewhat troubling on the same score, is his depiction of the earliest (Jewish) Christian community: "The earliest post-resurrection vision of Christianity did not conceive that Gentiles would become part of the Christian movement as Gentiles, namely apart from essentially first converting to Judaism" (p. 229). The problem again stems from an historicist approach lacking sufficient subtlety: One freezes a moment in time behind the present witness of the New Testament writings and invests it with the authority of "early" or "original," only then to regard it as impoverished from the standpoint of a modern cause. How can an issue still seeking resolution (an understanding of the church's relationship to emerging Judaism, guided by a scriptural legacy they both shared and sought illumination from) be both representational and normative, but also flawed, when the debate had yet to issue into a developed understanding one might call representational of the canonical New Testament in its totality, which does not state that Gentiles must "convert" to Judaism in order to be Christians?

The point is that this totality has everything to do with proper healing of the Old, not correction or spirit-filled illumination ad extra. (I leave it to New Testament scholars to debate on historical grounds Siker's depiction of "the earliest post-resurrection vision of Christianity," though we are still left with the same question of the probative character of such reconstructions, detached from their canonical context.) That the early community in Acts 10 had difficulty with Gentile inclusion may testify to human hardheartedness, but not an inadequacy inherited from "Judaism" or the Old Testament, now to be updated by an altogether new word. Paul quite naturally uses Isaiah 49:6 to defend his turning to the Gentiles, as Gentiles, only several chapters later (Acts 13:44-52). Examples such as this are too numerous to record.

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concrete, corporate, external reality: the cleavage between "Israel become Judaism" and the church as the "New Israel," and the cleavage between both of these entities and the vast realm of humanity at large. Of these two great cleavages, the individual spiritual dimension is but a manifestation. Genesis 1-11 speaks not only of a fall through disobedience that leads to perplexed existence and death, but also of a scattering of humanity that gives rise to the promise that through God's special relationship with Israel the nations will be finally blessed. So the "fall" has both an individual and a corporate dimension. The emergence of the church as the visible Body of Christ on earth has not permanently altered the fall as a corporate reality, but sadly, if providentially, exacerbated it (Romans 11:13-36), sharpening a line between Judaism and the church that threatens in the modern period to overshadow the line between the church and the world. ⁴

THE HUMAN CONDITION

Before turning to the difficult question now facing the church regarding homosexuality, let me draw together several conclusions about the human condition based upon this overview from Scripture:

(1) We cannot truly know God or ourselves by appeal to our essential nature, our emotions, or our sexual urges.

(2)� What we know of God we learn through the witness of others: Israel, the prophets and apostles, and the generations of Christians who have been faithful in passing on to us what they learned from these same privileged witnesses.

(3) The testimony of these witnesses is enshrined in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

(4) In those scriptures, we learn that humanity is fallen and, therefore, unable to set itself in right relationship to God. In the example of Israel, we see God trying with most special purpose. The plan was good but the partners failed. As a result, the plan was not thrown out, or declared to be in error. In accordance with its true intention, it was filled full by the holy sacrifice of Christ and, then, opened up for all, not just Israel, by the work of the Holy Spirit.

(5) Because humanity has been given only a foretaste of God's righteous fellowship, in the witness of Israel and in the person of Christ, we still participate in the fall of Adam: sinners but treated by God as justified. The ongoing power of sin has an individual but also a corporate attestation: the estrangement of Israel from the church.

(6)� Because of our corrupted state, we will err in the way we use Scripture and hear its plain sense according to the testimony of the Spirit. Satan did not tempt Jesus willy-nilly, but quoted Scripture at him, the same Scripture to -which Jesus then appealed for rebuttal (Matt. 4:5-7). Interpreters who justified slavery by appeal to Scripture were found to be

⁴ One would need to think long and hard about what a pink triangle worn by "gay" people, Christians and non-Christians alike, for example, may signify to post-Holocaust Jews.

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condemned by Scripture. The fault was not the Spirit's testimony through Scripture but the corrupt and self-serving human heart. The very fact that interpreters err in their best and worst efforts to hear Scripture's word is itself a testimony to the power of sin among those who reckon themselves Christians.

(7) There is no other separate avenue by which God makes the divine will known to Israel and to the church except by Scripture, which means positively that Scripture is sufficient to guide the church, and negatively that nothing taught apart from Scripture is to be enforced by the church and made binding on the Christian conscience (for example, the theological assertion, above and beyond a civil rights claim, that homosexual activity is congruent with the will of God).

(8) In the sexuality debate or any other like it, we are taught by Scripture that appeals to states of nature or human experience as revelatory of the purposes of God in Christ demonstrate nothing, in spite of their extraordinarily strong hold at present. Paul can even insist our bodies are not our own but are, instead, temples of the Holy Spirit to be used for one purpose only: the glorification of God in word and deed.

(9) That this may now sound like religious utopianism is only a sign of how much the church has merged its anthropology fully and congenially

"We are taught by Scripture that appeals to states of nature or human experience as revelatory of the purposes of God in Christ demonstrate nothing."

with that of the kingdoms of this world. Their purpose and destiny were set in distinction first to that of Israel, and then to that of the church regarding what it meant to be human in this life in preparation for the life to come. In 1 Corinthians, Paul can even sit loose to the general claims for sexual license he observes beyond the church or Israel, "For what have I to do with judging those outside?" "God will judge those outside" (1 Cor. 5:12-13). Any discussion of the human condition in the modern sexuality debate must come to terms with the separation of Israel from the nations and the separation of the church from the world. Different standards obtain because God's plan of redemption begun in Israel has been extended to the church. These standards cannot be comprehended by taking soundings on the naked human condition, a condition fraught with ambiguity and selfish distortion, but can be determined only by appeal to Scripture through the power of the Holy Spirit in the corporate life of the church.

(10) It is precisely the capacity to distinguish between a person's self and his or her behaviors that marks off the Judeo-Christian heritage. All have sinned and fallen short, and precisely here Christ confronts the individual with the transforming power of the cross. One cannot therefore appeal to an innate condition as positively establishing the moral

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justification for behavior, especially in the area of human sexuality. Antidiscrimination toward those who have designated themselves "gay" is compelled by Christ, but not because a state of nature tells individuals who they are. Instead, Scripture reveals that all have fallen short by nature. Only that recognition can clear room for the individual to accept Christ's offering, which in turn frees the individual to love truly, mindful of his sacrifice on OUT behalf, for the first time.

Note, then, a painful irony confronting the present church. By insisting in the case of homosexuality that states of nature and behavior are inseparable, those most in a position to have compassion in the name of Christ are cut off, namely those who believe Christ does not love us as we are apart from a surrender of the appeal to our own individual will and human nature in order to conform to Christ's. A teachable spirit in respect of Scripture's plain sense has always been a hallmark of such a person, claimed by Christ and yearning to become most fully human precisely as the demands of the Old Adam fall away before the hope of glory prepared for the New.

POSTSCRIPT: HUMAN SEXUALITY IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

When Augustine said God did not hold him responsible for his dreams, he was not willfully repressing what frightened him or choosing to remain ignorant of his essential self. No one was more interested in critical self-examination than was Augustine. But in Christ, Augustine was able to sit as loose to these rumblings of the unconscious self as was the Apostle Paul in confronting sexual license in the kingdoms of the world, "For what have I to do with judging those outside?" (1 Cor. 5:12). He had learned what Freud later discovered, that is, that fantasy and reality are not simply determinative one of the other but, instead, reveal the essentially chaotic character, the tohuwevohu ("chaos and void") of human desiring left to run its own course. Freud referred to this in many instances with the blunt term "polymorphous perversity." In an effort to maximize heterosexual opportunity (an American obsession), many seek to grant this holdover from infantile sexuality an unhealthy permanence. Yet others in the homosexual community are now ironically attempting to resolve its complex character by an act of "coming out," claiming that erotic attraction to the same sex is the "outed" and essential state but that to the opposite sex "repellent." Bisexuality in its various forms must go its own way here, though common cause with the gay community remains strangely unproblematic.

For any individual, regardless of sexual proclivity, to embrace the vagueries of sexual desiring is to claim a nature God does not intend for us, as Scripture has insisted, often as a lone voice. On the other hand, to make sharp distinctions among human beings, implied in the terms, "homosexuals" and "heterosexuals," is to underestimate how permanently self-referential and self-absorbed is the nature we do have, dooming efforts to "come out" to our best or essential sexual self (efforts which lead instead to moralism or hedonism or the wretched combination of

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them both). ⁵ Both moralism and sexual liberationism represent a failure to come to terms with the essentially untrustworthy character (or one might say, more positively, the essentially penultimate character) of appeal to human urgings as such, whose most tragic consequences is our ongoing enslavement to them. For this and other reasons, Christians have described the life of faith as a journey, not a falling back into our essential self but a leaning ahead into the promises of God for us, requiring discipline and self-control so that the promises of God not be squandered.

In what I have said thus far about the "mixed messages" our erotic urges send us, it could be claimed that there is nothing more "natural" or "essential" about homosexual or heterosexual or even bisexual attractions and attachments. But this is a rather disembodied way of viewing the matter. The one ineluctable fact of human nature, of being human - persisting through the "fall," the scattering of the nations, the election of Israel, the destiny of the church-is that we are created male and female. More than this, the opening chapters of Genesis insist that maleness and femaleness is what sexual longing is fundamentally about. It is the predicate that makes sense of and grounds erotic attachment as such: "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife,

"To speak of being born 'gay' or 'straight' as an essential state of nature, whatever that means, is misleading and confusing. We are born 'male' and 'female.'"

and they become one flesh" (Gen. 2:24). "Becoming one flesh" is the typically embodied biblical language for sexual coupling. Nowhere is it used of anything but the coupling of a man and a woman. What happens after the "fall" is that desire of man for woman and woman for man still leads to "one flesh" coupling, but now with complication (see Gen. 3:16) instead of the original "and the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed" (Gen. 2:25). Perhaps human beings as originally created would naturally have grown old and died; that is what time is all about. But now they grasp the full reality of death because it is announced by God to them, with the consequence that their mortality is fully comprehended as meaning the end of time for themselves as man and as woman.

I rehearse this familiar chain of events because we need to ask, Why does being a man or being a woman not cleanly trump any complex package of human desires, leading naturally and always to the "becoming one flesh" of men and women? Why does embodied sexual differentiation

⁵ Which is why, of course, until very recently no one "came out" to their heterosexuality and why some homosexually active men and women argue passionately against "gay marriage" as a servile imitation of the abuses of "heterosexism."

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not simply exclude desire for the same sex in the condition of being human? I hesitate to conjecture too deeply here since, as Hans Frei reminded us, the Bible's preferred mode of communication is realistic narrative, not rationalistic explanation of a sort open to direct human consent and intelligibility. Nevertheless, in the narrative line of these important stories about being sexual human creatures, a prominent feature stands out.

Part of the package of the "fall" is the full reality of death that now intrudes on the human condition as a frightening and potentially paralyzing reality (Gen. 3:19). To be a man is not to be a woman, and to be a woman is not to be a man. ⁶ It is, instead, to accept our finite and particular mortality in God's creation, and, with the acceptance of our particular otherness, comes the full consciousness of our individual death as an inevitability. To be a man and to be a woman is to stand before the only possibility the Bible recognizes for becoming one flesh, but the way marking that path is guarded by its own kind of flaming sword: acceptance of our bodily state, that of being a man or being a woman, and with it, the inevitability of the deterioration of that body culminating in death. So the somber marriage declaration "till death do us part." The mixed-message world of infantile sexual longing of course knows nothing of death, but only of self and of desire. That is its ongoing attraction. But to know oneself as a man over against a woman, or a woman over against a man, is to know who we are bodily, and who we are not, a recognition that is not infantile, but adult precisely in its acknowledgement of death.

To confront the other sexually, and not the same, is to comprehend this bodily otherness in a way for which homosexual acts have absolutely no analogy. Here stands the only possibility of becoming one flesh, which is what the reality of being a man and being a woman was originally about, for its own sake and in order to overcome individual isolation and restlessness and lack of purpose (Gen. 2:18-24). For the complex package of human longing, a legacy of the fall, to be trumped, there must be a recognition of our own bodily state as men and as women, and with that comes the acceptance of our mortality.

But let the Christian be of good cheer and prayerful hope. The address of the gospel has confronted our fallen human nature in a way more profound and more permanent than the gracious clothing of the first couple by God as they prepared to enter a brave new world (Gen. 3:21). The overcoming of death's claim by Christ does not eradicate the bodily reality of men and women who, knowing each other as different also know themselves as mortal; rather, it gives us boldness to become who we were created to be: men and women, with the potential to become one flesh and, thereby, to create life. What was once commanded of humanity, "Be fruitful and multiply," is now shown in Christ to have the capacity to imitate God's love for creation and Christ's love for the church. Celibacy is not the recognition that "one flesh" coupling is impossible or not

⁶ Separate words are spoken to Adam and Eve in the judgment of Genesis 3:16-19.

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preferable, but a renunciation of such coupling in order to dedicate one's life individually to an imitation of the love of Christ for the world, God willing.

In light of this, to speak of being born "gay" or "straight" as an essential state of nature, whatever that means, is misleading and confusing. We are born "male" and "female." Acceptance of our bodily identity is frustrated above all by the power of death. The fact that complex sexual urges crowd in on us is a legacy of the fall, for positive developmental reasons as well as more negative ones involving the fear of death and the acceptance of our individual bodily identity and mortality. But it is this fear that Christ has come to conquer and has conquered, now offering the possibility that the marriage of man and woman, with the potential for creating life and manifesting love and purpose, might even mirror the love of God himself. In the realm of human sexuality, this is what it means for Christians to confess that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.