Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and
Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. Nashville:
Abingdon, 2001. 520 pages. $49.00.
Reviewed by Beth Johnson, Columbia Theological
Seminary
Let me be clear at the outset about my presuppositions. I believe it
unlikely that the church will welcome gay and lesbian Christians into
full membership in the church solely or even largely on the basis of
exegetical arguments. It has been my experience that people's minds are
changed when their hearts are changed, that altered perspectives do not
become intellectual until they are existential. The remarkable shift in
attitude we have witnessed in the North American church during the past
quarter-century has come not from books about the Bible or ethics but as
a result of relationships between gay and straight believers who have
borne witness to each other about the grace of God in their lives.
Robert Gagnon's The Bible and Homosexual Practice is a book
that will impress people who already agree with him and confirm to them
the rightness of their position; it is not likely to persuade people who
disagree with him to change their minds. That said, it is a book worth
knowing about.
Gagnon's is one of three volumes chosen by the United
Methodist Publishing House to stimulate conversation about homosexuality
in advance of the UMC's 2000 General Conference. The Loyal
Opposition: Struggling with the Church on Homosexuality, edited by
Tex Sample and Amy DeLong, and Where the Spirit Leads: The Evolving
Views of United Methodists on Homosexuality, by James Rutland Wood,
appeared that year, but neither is as large or complex a project as
Gagnon's, which is why his took over a year longer to produce. Instead
of figuring in the Methodist debate, then, Gagnon now contributes to the
Presbyterian conversation about Amendment A, an appropriate turn of
events since he is himself Presbyterian and serves on the faculty of
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. This is an impressive volume,
encyclopedic in its scope, detailed in its argumentation, and massive in
its documentation. It may well be, as its champions have claimed, that The
Bible and Homosexual Practice will become the standard academic
work against homosexuality. Kenneth Bailey refers to it and its title is
featured in the Presbyterian Coalition promotional video currently
making the rounds of presbyteries.
In his introduction Gagnon says he speaks at some
personal risk and only for the greater good of the church that is
jeopardized by the possibility that moral standards for Christians might
deteriorate to include any state but heterosexual marriage and celibacy.
The anxious tone of this introduction is revealing, I think. First,
Gagnon acknowledges that he writes from a minority stance both within
the guild of biblical scholars and among Presbyterian professors of
Bible. Second, he is aware that his position may not carry the day in
the church and this strikes him as nothing short of dire. A
"potentially irreversible change in the morality of mainline
denominations" is at stake. That urgency fuels the tone of every
paragraph.
The book contains four chapters that investigate
attitudes toward same-sex intercourse in ancient Israel, early Judaism,
and the early church, and a fifth chapter discusses what Gagnon calls
"the hermeneutical relevance" of the exegetical conclusions he
draws. There is much here that is familiar to those who know the
conversation and some that is new or at least newly revived. The bottom
line is that the Bible speaks unequivocally and unambiguously of
homosexual intercourse as sin. Gagnon treats the texts most commonly
invoked (Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; Romans 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1
Timothy 1:10), and argues, often quite cogently, that revisionist
attempts to redeem those passages are unsuccessful. Similarly, he places
on the same level of importance texts that are today frequently excluded
from the conversation, such as the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis
19:4-11) and its parallel, the Levite's concubine (Judges 19:22-25).
Both, he says, manifestly condemn not rape generally but homosexual rape
specifically, and so are properly relevant. Gagnon even includes texts
that seldom appear in the modern debate, notably the story of the sin of
Ham (Genesis 9:20-27). Although it is frequently noted that the New
Testament ascribes no comment on the matter to Jesus of Nazareth, Gagnon
determines what Jesus must have thought on the basis of his otherwise
conventional Jewish attitudes toward sexual ethics and "male-female
complementarity," a value that Gagnon finds ubiquitous in
antiquity. There is simply no ancient Israelite, Jewish, or Christian
writer who endorses any form of "homosexual practice."
There is much to commend the descriptive task Gagnon
undertakes. Although I disagree with his analysis of the malakos/arsenokoites
debate (1 Cor 6:9) and I am not persuaded that first-century moralists
cared as much about procreation as Gagnon does, I think he is probably
correct about his historical reading of many of the other texts he
investigates. What biblical writers said on this subject is not
all that difficult to discern and I too am skeptical about revisionist
exegesis. Ancient Jews and Christians were notably concerned to preserve
their understanding of sexual purity against the dangers of paganism.
What the Bible means, though, how it should function in our
life together, is a much more difficult question, and it is that
question that divides us. For Gagnon, the descriptive task--what the
Bible said in its original historical context--is sufficient to
determine what contemporary believers should do. He finds nothing in
individual or ecclesiastical life to "override the Bible's
authority" on this matter, and he is characteristically thorough in
rejecting arguments to the contrary. The historical task is for me the
beginning rather than the end of the theological task, and I think we
encounter the Bible's authority not in its static content but in its
dynamic power to shape and reshape us as the people of God in the world
for which Christ died.
Because this book is not only about the Bible, but
also about how the church interprets the Bible, it features arguments
drawn from psychology, sociology, and anthropology as well as the fields
of history and Bible. Gagnon notes, for example, that although the
biblical writers had no concept of sexual orientation, the current
debate is very much influenced by it. Although he speaks more often of
"urges" than of "orientation," he operates with a
quasi-Freudian theory about homoerotic orientation that is caused by
domineering mothers and absent fathers. Behind this scenario of people
warped by bad parenting is a kind of Manichean anthropology that sees
people (or at least male people) as both enslaved by insatiable lust and
possessing infinitely malleable free will, both "intractable"
impulses and "the possibility for change." I do not know the
psychological literature nearly so well as the biblical, but my
colleagues in pastoral theology have taught me to be wary of knowing
more than can be known about the mysteries of sexual attraction and to
take with some salt claims that orientation can be permanently altered.
Gagnon's book rests solidly on both these questionable assumptions.
The question for Gagnon boils down repeatedly to what
did or did not constitute sin in the eyes of our ancestors who produced
the Bible. The Bible is thus a rule book in which to find the boundaries
of acceptable behavior rather than a collection of what my colleague
Walter Brueggemann calls "truth-telling" texts, witnesses to
God in the midst of God's people. So long as these two profoundly
different perceptions of the Bible itself continue to divide us, we will
continue to read and interpret it differently.
