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
accessed 17.3.10
Alli, W. (7.3.2010) A victory for religious freedom
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Cavanaugh, W.T. (2002) Faith Fires Back – A Conversation with
Stanley Hauerwas, in Duke Magazine, Vol.
88, No. 2 Jan-Feb 2002, published at:
accessed 1.4.10
Clements, R., (2005) Weaker
brothers, damnable heretics - and how to tell the difference
from:
accessed 17.3.10
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1.4.10
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Stuart, D. (3rd edn. 2003) How to Read the Bible for All its Worth, Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Zondervan
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