Does the Bible always tell us so? - Nashville, Tennessee - Sunday, 11/18/07 - Tennessean.com

Does the Bible always tell us so? - Nashville, Tennessee - Sunday, 11/18/07 - Tennessean.com

By BILL FRISKICS-WARRENStaff Writer
Scholars cast doubt on scriptural anti-gay bias
The Bible says that eating shrimp is an abomination and that working on the Sabbath is punishable by death. Not even the most devout Christian, though, thinks twice about ordering the shrimp scampi or checking their office e-mail from home on a Sunday afternoon.
Biblical literalists know that the customs and circumstances that gave rise to such injunctions were rooted in historical and cultural contexts very different from our own.

So why do so many Christians cling to the handful of Scriptures that cast aspersions on sexual relationships between people of the same gender? Why, when scholars tell us that these passages have nothing to do with sexual orientation as we've come to understand it, do some people continue to use Scripture as a club to judge and condemn?
"We have a long history of looking to the Bible to confirm our prejudices," said Daniel Karslake, director of For the Bible Tells Me So, a new documentary that explores these questions and looks at how this biblical heavy-handedness is tearing families, congregations and denominations apart.
Screening Nov. 19 at Regal Green Hills Cinema, Karslake's film focuses on how five Christian couples have struggled to reconcile their biblical faiths with the homosexuality of their children. Black and white, rural and urban, conservative and liberal, the families he profiles include those of former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and embattled Episcopal Bishop Eugene Robinson. Gephardt's daughter Chrissy is lesbian. Robinson is the openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire.
"I wanted to focus on straight, Christian parents of gay kids," he said. "The two things aren't mutually exclusive. You can be a faithful, godly person and still embrace your children for who they are."
The 'clobber passages'
The use of Scripture to justify discrimination began long before the current dispute about what the Bible does or doesn't say about homosexuality.
"Stronger texts in Scripture were used to justify slavery," said Ellen Armour, professor of theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School. "And in the case of same-sex sex, especially among men — and I think it's worth noting that that seems to be the focal point of the controversy — we're talking about just a few small verses."
Known as the "clobber passages," these six or seven Scriptures are commonly cited as evidence that God condemns homosexuality.
Probably the best known is Genesis 19:1-5, the text in which God sends a pair of angels in the guise of men to verify the cruel custom of gang-raping strangers practiced by males in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The passage is not about homosexuality as such but about the shameful treatment of visitors.
When Jesus rebukes Sodom and Gomorrah in Matthew 10:12-15 and Luke 10:8-12, he condemns them for inhospitality, not homosexuality.
Pronouncements decrying prostitution in the first books of Corinthians and Timothy likewise are not about sexual orientation but about the exploitation of underage males, a practice tantamount to what we now call human trafficking.
These Scriptures address ritual wrong as opposed to something innately immoral, said Dr. Laurence Keene, a Disciples of Christ minister interviewed in Karslake's film. Nowhere, in fact, does the Bible say anything, much less condemn, loving and committed partnerships between same-sex adults.
"Paul never contemplated the monogamous, long-term sexual relationships that take place among people today," explained Jack Rogers, former moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
"There is no analogue for our contemporary understanding of sexual identity in the Bible, neither for heterosexuals nor homosexuals," added Armour. "It's simply not there."
Perhaps no American denomination has had to confront issues of Scripture and social norms as starkly as Episcopalians after the split that occurred over Robinson's appointment.
Responding to how the church has dealt with ministering to homosexuals, Pamela Snare, the Canon to the Ordinary of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, cited a resolution from the Lambuth Conference of Anglican Bishops, held in 1998. The document states that, "the Conference, while rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture, calls on all our people to minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation." Snare characterized the resolution as an attempt "to be faithful to Scripture and to the fact that homosexuals are children of God."
A 'fear of otherness'
The phenomenon of biblical literalism is only a recent invention, and along with it, the practice of "prooftexting" whereby verses of Scripture are taken out of context and used to frame and defend certain fears and biases.
Unlike biblical exegesis, which involves the careful examination of Scripture in its historical context to understand what it means and how it might speak to us today, prooftexting manipulates what Christians believe to be God's word by allowing preconceived notions to color it. When done from the pulpit, it can amount to theological malpractice, depriving lay people of the chance to engage the Scriptures at a deeper, more informed level.
Armour is especially interested in what lies behind this misuse of Scripture. "What is it that's made sexuality the issue that (a) mobilizes certain portions of the Christian community to get out and vote and to get politically active in a way that nothing else apparently does and (b) becomes the line in the sand that's threatening to split denominations?"
Much of it, she suspects, has to do with the way that many people understand Christian identity. "In the United States at least, it seems to me that heterosexuality has been conflated with what it means to be Christian, and I would say that's a case of idolatry."
Lurking behind this idolatry is the fear of the other.
Gay men and lesbians in this way have become the latest in a long line of societal outcasts that extends from Jews to African-Americans all the way back to the lepers of Jesus' day.
"It's our dark underside in America," said Armour of this fear of otherness. "For all of our talk of 'Give us your tired, your poor, your hungry,' and of being the melting pot and being multicultural, we don't do it without an awful lot of scapegoating and an awful lot of requiring that you fit in by being just like us. This is simply the latest of it to pop up."
Love and justice
One peculiar form of theological harm is the distinction that some heterosexuals make between "loving the sinner and hating the sin."
"You can't hate such a complete part of me and still love me," Karslake said. "Straight people can't imagine not being straight, but they can't accept that the same thing could be true of gay people. They think that it's different with gay people, like it's somehow a choice."
Henry Blaze, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church in Nashville, tends to agree. "I don't think you can truly embrace the other and be able to recognize God in the other without seeking to understand them," he said.
The cruel irony, as For the Bible Tells Me So depicts, is that casting gay people out of church doesn't just alienate them from their own spirituality. It also robs straight people of faith of the chance to get to know and understand vast numbers of their Christian brothers and sisters.
All of which, Armour believes, points to the need for a new theology of sexuality, one steeped in the values of love and justice, not hatred and exclusion. "I think you can make a case for (love and justice) as a broad theological imperative, certainly in the Hebrew Scriptures and picked up again in many of the New Testament texts, and certainly picked up by Jesus," she said. "That was what his first sermon was all about. Sexual relationships should be judged not on legal grounds but on how they manifest justice and love."
Karslake's documentary represents a crucial step in this direction. After a gay teenager in Iowa saw a segment of what served as the de facto pilot for the project, he sent the filmmaker a note of thanks.
"Last week I bought the gun, yesterday I wrote the note, last night I happened to see your show on PBS," he wrote. "Just knowing that someday, somewhere, I might be able to go back into a church with my head held high, I dropped the gun in the river. My mom never has to know."