Jennyandfriends: How do you know you’re right about homosexual expressions of love?

Deciding other people that they are not only wrong in their thinking but sinful in their behaviour can be a form of oppression if you hold all the power in a decision that affects their lives. Reaching that position requires great care.

Biblicism

The simplest Biblicist approach sees the Bible as infallible because it contains the very words of God. Biblicists tend to assume that the Bible not only contains but is intended by God as a set of rules that will provide an answer for every situation in human life. (Messer, 2006) For them Romans 1:14 -31 is a clear condemnation of all homosexual acts and relationships. (Alison, 2004)

Even among those who would be happy to see the Bible used as a kind of moral compass, some would feel uncomfortable with this. Fee and Stuart (2003), for example, offer two rules and a number of problems to show why we cannot always simply lift a sentence or even a paragraph from Paul’s epistles, and apply it as if it were written specifically to us yesterday.

Alison (2004) adds a further caution from the Roman Catholic perspective, which is from the teaching of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, 1993 :

‘Clearly to be rejected also is every attempt at actualization set in a direction contrary to evangelical justice and charity, such as, for example, the use of the Bible to justify racial segregation, anti-Semitism or sexism whether on the part of men or of women.’

Larson (2009) cites Hays as offering “five good ways to read the Bible:

1. As a story that it is primarily about God;

2. As a coherent narrative from Genesis to Revelation, requiring each portion of it to be read in light of the whole;

3. With awareness that specific texts can have multiple meanings;

4. In collaboration with others in contemporary Christian communities; and

5. A willingness to be surprised, challenged, and transformed.”

Hays’ position is here approaching that of virtue ethics, as we shall see. In recommending that we read collaboratively, he deprives us of what seems like an advantage – instant access to God’s word, and so an apparently ready answer, but also guards us against the error of misguided readings.

Alison’s own reading of Romans 1 is that it is a diagnosis of the human condition, with its punch line in Romans 2:1:

‘Therefore you have no excuse, O man, whoever you are, when you judge another; for in passing judgment upon him you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.’

On this basis, he argues that Romans 1 is not primarily about homosexuality at all.

Hays reaches a different conclusion, based both on New Testament scholarship and on conversations with a homosexual friend:

‘Both of us had serious misgivings about the mounting pressure for the church to recognize homosexuality as a legitimate Christian lifestyle. As a New Testament scholar, I was concerned about certain questionable exegetical and theological strategies of the gay apologists. As a homosexual Christian, Gary believed that their writings did justice neither to the biblical texts nor to his own sobering experience of the gay community that he had moved in and out of for 20 years.’ (Hays, 1996, p.380)

Hays recognises, however, a distinction between exegesis – which leads him to say that Scripture is entirely univocal in condemning homosexual acts - and hermeneutics, the application of Scripture to our present-day situation. Hermeneutics will necessarily take account of experience. He is aware of “Individuals who live in stable, loving homosexual relationships and claim to experience the grace – rather than the wrath - of God therein.” (Hays, 1996, p.398) However, “claims about divinely inspired experience that contradicts the witness of Scripture should be admitted to normative status only after sustained and agonising scrutiny by a consensus of the faithful.” (Hays, 1996, p.399 – author’s emphasis) We shall see that virtue ethicists seem to share this conclusion.

Clements (2005) appears to offer a clear way forward for Biblicist deontologists when he suggests that we need to distinguish between considerations that are primary, and worth standing firm about, and those that are of secondary importance, where we need simply to remember Paul’s advice about being considerate of the scruples of our “weaker brethren”. The three traditional rules he supports are:

In things essential - unity.

In things inessential - liberty.

In all things - charity.

Not all, however, would accept his paradigm, which is Paul’s view on permissible diet, (an inessential in Paul’s view) as applying to the issue of homosexuality. Alternatives might be the woman taken in adultery (“Go now and leave your life of sin.” John 8 11) or tax collectors and sinners (“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Mark 2:17) which would suggest a need for repentance and/or healing.

Virtue ethics

The starting point for virtue ethics is not with any authority, nor with any question about what actions are right or wrong, but rather with the question of what kind of person I should be. (Messer, 2006) Aquinas, for example, recognised the “cardinal” virtues of prudence, courage, justice and temperance, and the “theological virtues” of faith, hope and love. (Messer, 2006) Today’s proponents of virtue ethics are inspired to this approach by MacIntyre’s brilliantly argued thesis that his predecessors had been doomed to failure from the Enlightenment onwards. This was because the Enlightenment philosophers sought to free themselves from what they saw as the dead hand of authority based on tradition and religion, and tried to base their ethical arguments on reason alone. MacIntyre’s analysis of the tradition they had abandoned was that it formed an interlocking, self-consistent and rational system of thought with three main propositions:

· human nature is not as it was meant to be

· human beings need to attain to that state of being for which they were intended

· the purpose of ethical reasoning is to enable human beings to move towards the state which is their true end.

The “true end” was defined by culture and, in Christendom, by the Church. It was exemplified in stories which illustrated what good character was. Thus Hauerwas stresses the importance of Biblical stories as part of the cultural context in which ethical thought can make sense, and denies that ethical reasoning can make sense if divorced from its proper context. He argues that if we seek to reach agreement internationally or cross-culturally, we need to be explicit about where our ethical values are coming from, rather than assuming that any culturally neutral ethic based solely on reason is possible.

The “Enlightenment project” failed, according to MacIntyre, because the logically necessary third strand of the classical ethical argumentation, the idea of a proper telos or end purpose for human beings, was rejected. This left philosophers with what purported to be reasoned argument, but in fact was or became simply “emotivism”, as they vainly sought to support by reason alone those conclusions, inherited from the older tradition, that they still believed to be true.

Virtue ethicists suggest that we can best cultivate a virtuous character in the context of a community. For Hauerwas, that community is the worshipping church (Hauerwas and Wells, 2006). In “The Peaceable Kingdom” (2003) he has written about the church as “A Community of Virtues”, particularly stressing peace, patience and hope:

‘ The church must learn time and time again, that its task is not to make the world the kingdom, but to be faithful to the kingdom by showing to the world what it means to be a community of peace. Thus we are required to be patient and never lose hope (…) in God and God’s faithful caring for the world. (Hauerwas, 2003, pp103-104)

It is therefore not surprising that he would seek to locate any discussion about homosexuality within a community’s self-understanding. Olasky (2007) reports him responding to an interview question about homosexuality by saying:

I do not think that the issue of homosexuality can be determined by any one verse of Scripture. Rather it has to do with how a community understands the significance of having children. Christians believe that marriage is the normative practice necessary for being able to welcome children into the world. That's where you have to begin to think about homosexuality.

This seems to refer to a debate within his own church, as illustrated by “Duke” magazine’s January-February issue of 2002. In a transcribed and edited conversation, Hauerwas begins:

The problem with debates about homosexuality is they have been devoid of any linguistic discipline that might give you some indication what is at stake. Methodism, for example, is more concerned with being inclusive than being the church. (…). Even worse, the inclusive church is captured by romantic notions of marriage. Combine inclusivity and romanticism and you have no reason to deny marriage between gay people.

The ambivalence of this response continues to its end:

For gay Christians who I know and love, I wish we as Christians could come up with some way to help them, like we need to help one another, to avoid the sexual wilderness in which we live. That’s a worthy task. I probably sound like a conservative on these matters, not because I’ve got some deep animosity toward gay people, but because I don’t know how to go forward given the current marriage practices of our culture.

This is consistent with his position that ethical reasoning - or even better, ethical behaviour – needs to take place within the church community. If the church community’s practice and thinking about sexual relationships are disordered – and Hauerwas seems to say that they are – then its ethical reasoning cannot hope to be anything but confused and confusing.

Hursthouse (1995), addresses the criticism that virtue ethics may never be able to give us an answer to our ethical queries. Her argument is that we may indeed sometimes face “tragic” problems (where only undesirable choices are available), but that if we have developed a good character by our practice of virtue ethics, we shall behave with more grace and integrity than someone who has not done so.

Others, however, have sought to show how an issue can be resolved. Johnson (2007) in America and Jones (2010) in

England

have argued for acceptance of a diversity of ethical convictions about human sexuality, and for continuing engagement between holders of different views. The “Changing Attitude” blog particularly welcomed the fact that the Bishop had arrived at this position after accepting a challenge to listen more carefully to what lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people had to say. This is certainly modelling peacefulness in a way that Hauerwas would have to approve, but MacIntyre might well object that it abandons any claim for ethical statements to be either true or false.

Bibliography

Alison, J. (2004) A Catholic Reading of Romans 1

from http://www.courage.org.uk/articles/Romans1.shtml

accessed 17.3.10

Alli, W. (7.3.2010) A victory for religious freedom

from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/7385701/Lord-Alli-A-victory-for-religious-freedom.html

accessed 18.3.10

Cavanaugh, W.T. (2002) Faith Fires Back – A Conversation with Stanley Hauerwas, in Duke Magazine, Vol. 88, No. 2 Jan-Feb 2002, published at:

http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/dukemag/issues/010202/faith.html

accessed 1.4.10

Clements, R., (2005) Weaker brothers, damnable heretics - and how to tell the difference

from: