MetaCatholic

Some of the more moderate (which may not be saying very much) discussions among Anglicans about sexuality can be found on the (characteristically liberal) Thinking Anglicans and the (characteristically evangelical) Fulcrum websites. But there, as elsewhere, and also in much of the official and semi-official publications devoted to the topic, the discussion, to my mind, is essentially focused on the trees rather than the wood.

Liberals (loaded term, and not necessarily a preferred self-designation) frequently accuse conservatives (ditto) of proof-texting. Conservatives accuse liberals of dismissing the texts, often on the basis of some theory of cultural-conditioning, and assuming the natural superiority of late Western culture as the lens through which the texts must be re-evaluated and interpreted. Both accusations have some supporting evidence in some cases.

It increasingly seems to me, however, that both miss the sheer size of the gulf between the worldview of the New Testament writers, and today’s worldview. Both sides of the argument therefore miss the provocative challenge of working out how to appropriate the New Testament, because both talk in terms of sexuality — a concept unknown to Paul et al.

Among other things, the conception of same-sex activity is embedded in a cultural complex that includes physiological and psychological constructions of masculinity and femininity, desire and reason, as well as hierarchical social conceptions of absolutely every relationship, including that between the sexes. (I know of no better book that exposes some of these questions than Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body.)

Some of these conceptions are not simply culturally alien to us, but from the knowledge we have acquired (which also carries its own social constructions) simply wrong. We do not assume women are imperfectly formed men. We do not locate desire, temper, emotion and health / illness alike in terms of bodily humours or a lack of balance of the basic elements. There is no return to this way of thinking, and yet it is heavily implicated in the worldview in which these texts were written and heard for the first time.

It seems to me that paying attention to the whole of the text, and reading it holistically against its cultural setting, is what we should always be trying to do with the scriptures; the more authority we ascribe to them, the more we should be trying to do so. If we do that, not only do I think the divisive questions we currently have around homosexuality will look different, but that we might find a number of other areas challenged as we work out how culturally to translate, interpret and appropriate these texts.

They contain rather less support for marriage as we conceive it today than is assumed, more support for continence (and a different conception of continence and desire). At the very least they suggest you can’t simply extol marriage and sex within it as God’s great blessing for the straight while excoriating sex for the gay. They are equally neither egalitarian nor complementarian in their view of the relationship between men and women. I pick those issues, because they are areas where conservatives set the text aside in favour of a modern interpretation as readily as liberals, not even knowing they’re doing it.

It’s highly unlikely in my view that exploring those issues would lead to a wholesale adoption by anyone of the ethics embedded within them. It may, however, lead to a probing examination and critique of many of the ideas and practices shared in common by our culture, and invite us to a more co-operative and detailed theological appropriation of strange texts in more creative ways.