The Sins of Scripture (14 page)

When people seeking to use these texts from Genesis to defend their homophobic prejudice realize that they have come up against solid opposition, they do an interesting two-step. This story, they say, does have some weaknesses, since it is found in the Hebrew scriptures which in many of their details have not been adopted by Christianity. But the New Testament, they say with hopeful enthusiasm,
does
condemn homosexuality. Look at the writings of Paul, they say. Did Paul not condemn homosexual behavior? Is Paul not proclaiming the “Word of God” to which Christians must listen? To the homophobia of Paul I turn next.

T
his is the most overt and, I might add, the strangest condemnation of homosexual acts in the New Testament. It is the only place in the Bible where there is a specific allusion to female homosexuality. It is a text frequently quoted to justify blatant homophobia. Yet its obvious meaning is simply ignored or dodged. Let me state that meaning boldly. Paul is asserting that homosexuality is the punishment given by God to those who fail to worship God properly! Homosexuality for Paul is not a sickness or the result of a choice which one has freely made; it is a punishment for the sin of not attending to the details and practices of proper worship. In other words, Paul is saying that God infects people with homosexual desire if they engage in improper worship or use improper images of God. It is both a startling and an ill-informed claim. Imagine what it must be like to live in fear that God will turn your sexual desire “from the natural use of a woman,” making the recipient burn with lust toward one of his own gender! If God could or would do that, would God be worthy of anyone’s worship? Would God not be an ogre, a demon or something worse? Could Paul really have believed such a thing? What in the world would be the experience of a human being like Paul that would cause him even to think in these strange explanatory terms? Is there any reason why anyone should believe that this convoluted and bizarre understanding of the tortured Pauline mind could ever be called the “Word of God”? Is it rational to think that these words would ever be used to condemn or to oppress those who awaken to the reality of their homosexual orientation?

The inability or the unwillingness to see this text for what it so overtly says is a powerful witness to the distorting lenses through which so many people read Holy Scripture.

Paul, as a rabbinical student who studied under Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), surely knew well the passages from Leviticus and Genesis to which I have previously referred. To be homosexual, or at least to act on one’s homosexuality, was according to his religion to come under the condemnation of the Torah. It was a serious offense. Death was the penalty prescribed by the law for those who did not repress their homosexual orientation. Paul also in all probability knew the books of the Maccabees, found in the Apocrypha, which were incredibly popular in his time of Jewish history. These books recounted battles in the second century BCE between Jewish guerrilla fighters, led by Judas, who was given the nickname “the Hammer” or in Aramaic “Maccabeas,” and the army of the Syrians. Paul would certainly have been aware of the injunction found in 4 Maccabees which suggested that if one were faithful and disciplined enough in the worship of God, all desires could be overcome (4 Macc. 2:2, 3:17).

Fortunately, we do not have to speculate on Paul’s meaning in the absence of other firsthand data, since we have other works of Paul that we can search for additional clues. In the epistles to the Galatians (1:13–17) and to the Philippians (3:5–6) Paul relates some of his autobiographical history—his passion for the law, his willingness to work on his studies with zeal and his advancement in holiness beyond all of his fellows. Paul was quite clearly a religious zealot, perhaps a religious fanatic. This kind of behavior that we call either zealotry or fanaticism is always compensatory, always in the service of something unresolved and more pressing, perhaps more threatening. Fanaticism in religion is normally employed in the suppression of something deep within the person that is deemed unacceptable—indeed, is of such magnitude that it might not be admitted even by that person.

One of the marks of fanaticism is a tendency to erupt in rage whenever some of the protective layers in the fanatic’s security system are challenged or exposed. We need only to recall Paul’s days as a persecutor of the Christians, which both he (Gal. 1:13) and the book of Acts (Acts 9:1ff.) relate. He describes himself as violently trying to exterminate the Christian movement (Gal. 1:13). Luke says Paul sought authority from the high priest to arrest the Christians in Damascus and to bring them bound to Jerusalem for imprisonment (Acts 9:2). Luke even portrays him as participating in their executions (Acts 7:58, 8:1). I do not think we can be certain of the historicity of these details found in the book of Acts, but they are certainly consistent with everything else we know about Paul and about religious fanatics in general. Religious fanatics are deeply controlling people. The very nature of fanaticism is revealed in the inability on the part of the fanatic to deal with diversity or pluralism. Fanatics make constant attempts to silence their critics, to excommunicate them, sometimes to burn them at the stake. They are enraged when challenged. They are people who are clearly busy suppressing something inside themselves with which they feel they cannot cope. They attach themselves to the authority of religious rules and systems that become unbendable and self-defining. They see anyone who is against their security-producing rules as being against God. It is a typical pattern: fanatical rhetoric is indeed the same generation after generation.

The most rigid priest I have ever known personally lived this pattern out totally—and yet, I might add, he did it rather beautifully. He was the kind of priest who would never think of appearing in public without the proper uniform of a jet-black suit and clerical collar. He followed a rigid discipline of daily worship, including obligatory rites of matins and evening prayer. He celebrated or attended the Eucharist—he called it the Mass—each day of his life. He was deeply disturbed by changes in the liturgy and in the practices of the church. The idea that the liturgy might be modernized was anathema to him. The possibility that women might ever become priests was inconceivable to him, for in his mind it required that the church be willing to sacrifice everything that was holy.

When the bishop would come to the church served by this priest for the annual confirmation visit, it would create in this priest an anxiety level that was all but unmanageable. For weeks in advance he would choreograph that liturgy to make sure that the bishop did not violate his customs and rules and thereby suggest to the members of this congregation that this priest’s patterns were not eternally binding on the faithful. This priest’s anxiety clearly spilled over into the congregation, many of whom were attracted to that church out of deep needs for the security of certainty that this priest offered. The members of his church had bought into the rigidity of worship that this church offered and they felt a sense of comfort in their ability to master the magic of the details of their typical liturgy so that God would be pleased and, not coincidentally, so that God would bless them.

Ultimately, all of these control needs proved too much to be sustained, even for this priest, and he finally endured what was later called a nervous breakdown. He literally fell apart and for a period of time was absolutely out of control, unable to function in any area of his life. It was a classic meltdown of defenses. The dark specter of depression began to consume him as the unacceptable parts of his identity entered his consciousness. During this critical moment in his life, both suicide and a psychotic break that might have rendered him a mental patient for life were distinct possibilities.

Instead, like Paul as Luke describes him on the road to Damascus, this man saw a bright light and heard a heavenly voice call him by name and he allowed his deeply debilitating fear of what he thought of as a loathsome and unacceptable homosexuality to be set aside. He experienced, as Paul seems also to have done, a love that embraced him just as he was, an acceptance that swept over that part of his sexual identity that he had been certain was unacceptable. He discovered the courage to be himself, a self that was not rejectable either eternally or today. That was when the healing process began. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, that priest started to live anew. To use the language of evangelical Christianity, he was “born again.” He came to terms with his homosexual reality. He began to allow his heart and soul to accept what his mind and emotions had long been telling him he was, and he laid down both his rigidity and his fear. As he was restored to health, a person came into his life that he allowed himself to love. In time they became partners and lived with each other in life-giving faithfulness until age finally separated them with death. I learned much from this man.

“Paul is just like I was before I became honest with myself,” he said to me. “He was rigid about all the rules, violent when challenged, a persecutor of those who suggested that the law with which Paul had bound himself was not itself ultimate, and that perhaps even that which was judged to be so totally unacceptable could be loved by the God who had made him.” Under the tutelage of this priest I began to look again at Paul. It was for me a life-changing experience.

In Romans Paul described his inner struggle: “I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members” (7:23). Paul’s experience was that he followed one law with his mind, another with his body. This sin that he feels “dwells in my members” caused him to proclaim that “nothing good dwells within me, that is my flesh.” He went on to say, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” He concludes this interior lament by saying, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” It was a plaintive cry reflecting a longstanding memory. That plea ultimately fades into an acclamation when he asserts that he has been given victory over the affliction. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord,” he says (Rom. 7:18–19, 24–25). Paul culminates this section by stating that he is now persuaded that nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (8:39), not even our “nakedness,” he adds in a revealing choice of words in verse 35. It is a remarkable portrait of a remarkable man. Perhaps what is even more unusual is that the words of Paul are still quoted today to condemn the homosexuality that Paul surely knew was his own hidden secret.

Yes, I am convinced that Paul of Tarsus was a gay man, deeply repressed, self-loathing, rigid in denial, bound by the law that he hoped could keep this thing, that he judged to be so unacceptable, totally under control, a control so profound that even Paul did not have to face this fact about himself. But repression kills. It kills the repressed one and sometimes the defensive anger found in the repressed one also kills those who challenge, threaten or live out the thing that this repressed person so deeply fears.

Much of the persecution of gay and lesbian people both within the church and in the broader society has been carried out by self-rejecting, deeply closeted homosexual people. Frequently homophobic but homosexual clergy and bishops, together with their most loyal lay followers, have wrapped their externalized rage, their rejecting and sometimes killing fury, inside the security of some authoritative system. They quote either a hierarchy that claims infallibility or a sacred source from scripture that people have said is inerrant. That is how fanaticism works. That is certainly what is revealed in the Pauline tirade recorded in Romans 1—a frightened gay man condemning other gay people so that he can keep his own homosexuality inside the rigid discipline of his faith.

Paul sought throughout his pre-conversion life to worship properly, and thereby to banish his own unacceptable desires. His words have been used to do great harm to great numbers of people. The “Word of God” he uttered has become a weapon of oppression. This was and is a sinister, inaccurate and incompetent way to use the writings of Paul, but that has been the fate of this first chapter of Romans. I now seek to expose it for what it has always been with the hope that, weakened and revealed, it will no longer claim new victims in every age. It will be a “terrible text” or a sin of scripture no longer.

There are other places in the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline corpus that have also been used to hurt homosexual people. In 1 Corinthians 5:10 and 6:9 Paul uses the word
malekos,
which means “soft” or “lacking in self-control,” and the word
arsenokoitis,
which means “a male lying” and is frequently used to refer to male prostitutes. The normal translation of these words has been “sexual perverts,” by which most people mean homosexuals. There is much debate in New Testament circles as to whether this translation is accurate. If Paul is referring to male prostitutes or even to abusive homosexual relationships, then a word of condemnation might well be in order. For that condemnation to be extended to include faithful, loving, nonexploitive gay and lesbian partnerships would be to stretch the text to the breaking point in service to one’s own prejudice.

There are three other frequently quoted New Testament texts used to buttress the “clear teaching of the Bible” against homosexuality. One of these, 1 Timothy 1:10, is sometimes attributed to Paul, but almost every New Testament scholar in the world acknowledges that Paul was not the author of 1 Timothy. In that epistle once again the word
arsenokoitis
is used. It is rendered “sodomites” in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and “them that defile themselves with mankind” in the King James Version. Let me say that I regard any sex that is predatory or forced to be evil, whether it is homosexual or heterosexual. But to have that kind of behavior used to define all homosexual relationships makes as much sense to me as using the word “rape” to define all heterosexual relationships.

Finally, there are two texts, one in the epistle of Jude (1:7) and the other in 2 Peter (2:6), that are frequently used by Bible quoters seeking to justify biblical negativity toward homosexuality. These two references are related to each other. The verse in 2 Peter appears to be dependent on Jude. Both are related to the Sodom and Gomorrah story and both are designed to show how God will destroy those who do not believe (Jude) or those who teach heresy (2 Peter). As sources to be quoted to condemn homosexuality, they are simply not worthy of further comment.

That is all there is in the “clear teaching of the Bible” in regard to the condemning of homosexuality. No lawyer could win a court case with such flimsy evidence, but people have been exposed, tortured and killed in obedience to the understanding supposedly gleaned from the sacred scriptures that God hates homosexuality and, by implication, homosexuals (unless they repent of their evil being). This, in turn, has justified the religious hatred of homosexuality and created the cataclysmic battle that tears churches apart as the new consciousness of today collides with the old and dying definitions of the past. There is no doubt about how this debate will come out: the new consciousness will not be defeated.