A Reader Writes: If Karl Barth Was Addressing Fundamentalism in Europe, How Is It Possible to Say that Notions of Biblical Inerrancy Are Grounded in Defense of Slavery?

In response to my posting last week about Fred Clark's response to Emma Green on the connection between the Southern evangelical defense of slavery and the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, Larry Motuz writes, 

Sarah Morice-Brubaker on New Coptic Manuscript Discovery: Did Jesus Put a Ring on It?

In the lines I wish I'd written category, Sarah Morice-Brubaker writing about the discovery of a fourth-century Coptic papyrus fragment that may (or may not?) indicate Jesus was married:

The Gulf Disaster and the Search for Ethical Insight: Where Are Answers to Be Found?

I haven’t blogged yet about what’s happening in the Gulf because this story is painfully personal for me.  I still have not returned to New Orleans, following Katrina.  I do not know that I can do so—that I can see the aftereffects of the destruction of that city—and cope with what I see.  Photographs and videos have been enough to show me the horror.  Enough to let me know that I am still not prepared to see it first-hand.

New Orleans is, in key respects, my spiritual home.  I went to college there, found love there, nurtured soul there.  As I finished my graduate work in theology, providence returned me, fatefully, to teach at Xavier University, and the same providence found Steve a job in the same city the following year.  When we had entered graduate school, we had taken for granted that we would not likely find jobs in the same place when we graduated—that finishing our doctorates would mean the end of our life together. 

Living, Struggling, Believing in the Face of the Mystery of Being Gay

From a journal entry in March 1990:

How does one live in the face of mystery? Without seeking to control or manipulate . . . . This was the sin of Adam and Eve, in the view of neo-orthodox thinkers like Barth—they could not rest content with the sheer giftedness of the existence that had been handed to them; they wanted to penetrate behind this giftedness in order to wrest it to their own ends.

I feel lately as if I’m in the presence of a huge energy cell, as I keep struggling to integrate my identity as a gay person with my vocation as a believer and as a theology. On the one hand, the energy cell that emerges through this struggle charges me with new and deep recognitions, with an upwelling of hope and anguish. On the other hand, it burns and consumes and scars.

Part of the mystery of existence—a key to it—is to live in recognition of our sinfulness, as a prelude to opening our hands to all the undeserved gifts God sheds on us. For me, the narrow door—both mystery of evil and gift/grace—through which I must come to God is the door of my sexual orientation. My life will never be whole until I accept, celebrate, integrate that—and doing so seems to kill me, too, because the integrating and celebrating process brings me face to face with the evil that has long told gay persons that we should apologize for and hide ourselves, as God has made us. And that evil enters into our own psyche in a society saturated with homophobic messages.

The sinfulness I encounter in this struggle is not where the church keeps telling me to look for sin, inside myself and my gay human nature. It's in those who want me to understand my very nature, the nature God has given me, the source of my gifts, joy, and ability to love, as sinful. My sin is actually the temptation to hate myself because the church tells me who I am in my very nature is sinful.

Who will deliver us from the body of death? We need grace to walk through that door.

The Place of Gay Persons in God's Plan: The Biblical Question

The following journal entry is from August 1990. In this and several other journal entries I wrote at this period, I was attempting to step back from the theological questions about homosexuality and to look at them as objectively as I could, as a theologian (and a believer using his head). I was deliberately not reading many books on gay topics or theological or moral analysis of the question of homosexuality.

I had, of course, read any number of theological books about various topics in the years leading up to this journal entry, since I had just completed a master's and doctorate in theology. And I feel certain I am echoing the ideas of theologians I had read in what I say below.

But I'm trying not to do so directly. I wanted to make these theological claims my own, because it was my own life that was on the line, as I decided how to face being gay in a homophobic church.

In what follows, I wanted, insofar as possible (but recognizing that we never approach any such questions like this with total objectivity) to imagine that I was encountering these questions for the first time and thinking through how a reasonable believer should respond to them.

And so the following from August 1990, on the scriptures and homosexuality:

Those who argue that active, self-affirming homosexuality is reconcilable with a Christian ethic encounter a number of objections—from scripture, tradition, and natural law. In my view, the natural law objections deserve most attention because they are the most persuasive. The scriptural argument is often in the forefront of the cultural battle, and many churches continue to promote it, but obviously without having done much research or thinking about the very weak basis that the bible provides if we want to oppose homosexuality on moral grounds.

One has the impression that the scriptural argument had less force in the past than it does today. Today it is foremost in most people’s minds—a testimony to the power fundamentalism exerts in American culture, and thus, through American influence, globally.

As I believe John Boswell has shown, until the High Middle Ages, the purported scriptural injunctions against homosexuality counted not for a great deal in the church’s teaching regarding sexual morality. Scripture had simply never been used in a literalist fashion within the Christian tradition, up to that point.

The patristic tradition of exegesis was allegorical, and Origen’s famous method of reading the bible privileged non-literal interpretation. These hermeneutical approaches tended to preclude a crudely literalist reading of those texts that presumably outlawed homosexual activity.

The texts: the prohibition in the Leviticus holiness code of males lying with one another; the Sodom and Gomorrah story; and the Pauline texts—the castigation in Romans of the vices of the pagans, for which God destroyed them, and the inclusion of “homosexuality” among those grave sins which, in various of Paul’s parenetic passages, will keep one out of the kingdom of heaven.

Commentators usually deal with these texts one by one, seeking to divine their original intent or purpose, to decode them or even to translate them (for the Pauline texts present serious translation problems), and to place them in their context. Such careful exegesis is of course necessary, and appears to show that these texts are hardly so transparent as fundamentalists have taken them to be. But I think that a set of preliminary interpretive observations can be made about the whole group of “anti-homosexal” scriptures qua group.

The first such observation concerns the paucity of the texts. Clearly, if one can search the whole bible and find only a handful of texts—and those not patent at all—forbidding “homosexuality,” the issue is not for the scriptures anywhere near the crucial moral issue that modern moralists have made it out to be.

When one thinks of how much more extensive and persistent is the condemnation of the more conventional sexual vices—adultery, fornication—one realizes how much less the matter of “homosexuality” was at the forefront of biblical writers’ concern. (An obvious counter to this observation is that a culture that could hardly envisage the possibility of homosexual desire or behavior would of course not have dealt with the issue. But I’m not sure that that objection doesn’t actually speak on behalf of a cautious reading of the biblical injunctions against homosexuality.)

And when one compares the few biblical texts on homosexuality with the wealth of texts forbidding capitalistic business and banking practices, one wonders even more at our contemporary allocation of weight to the “homosexual” texts, and our elision of the others . . . .

Another general preliminary comment is, of course, that fundamentalist interpretation is hard to support, unless one simply decides a priori that the scriptures must be read literally. Catholicism does not so decide and has not, though in the current push to keep gays marginal and powerless in American society, certain Catholic clerical leaders and many Catholic laypeople are willing to make common cause with the fundamentalists (and to adopt their approach to the bible, whether consciously or not).

In my view, one of the neatest and most persuasive critiques of the fundamentalist approach is Barth’s. Barth points out that biblical literalism actually humanizes the scriptures in a way that robs them of their divine otherness and mystery. To say that we can clearly understand the bible (a linchpin of the fundamentalist argument) is to imply that it operates at our level, and not God’s. As Barth observes, in this way we wrap up the refractory and challenging message and put it on a shelf so that it won’t bother us: or, to change trope, we construct a manageable human bible that keeps us fairly comfortable with much around us. Literalists always choose a canon within the canon, and this canon not surprisingly usually mirrors the prejudices of the culture.

I’m not quite sure how to voice my final preliminary observation. The best way I can put the insight is to say that the purported anti-homosexual texts simply lack the “texture” of strong, unambiguous moral condemnations of homosexuality. Perhaps I’m really thinking of genre. When one looks at these texts from the standpoint of genre, what does one find? A holiness-code prescription; a quasi-historical narrative; a conventional diatribe against decadent morality; and parenetic lists. In order to collate these into a single moral teaching about homosexuality, one must wrest them from context and wrench them into a shape (and purpose) that it’s doubtful they were intended to have.

The Message and the Churches' Failure at Proclaiming It

I’ve talked in the last several postings about how (and why) the churches are losing people, when it comes to proclaiming the fundamental message of Christianity. As I’ve noted, to many of us, it seems increasingly imperative that we actively leave and/or oppose the churches, precisely if we want to retain some vital, meaningful contact with that message.

I’ve framed this discussion in terms of Easter, the season of the liturgical year in which churches remember what is central to the gospel proclamation: the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is that central message, I want to suggest, that is simply obscured and lost sight of in much of Christianity—in particular, in how the churches live from day to day, a lived proclamation which is the most significant proclamation possible of the gospel message. When the message is not lived in an accessible and clear way, it cannot be credibly preached in other, verbal ways, nor can it be appropriated by those whom the church addresses through its proclamation of the gospel.

To a great extent, the churches are not reaching many of us with their preaching because that preaching (and the life of the church underlying it) is removed from our everyday experience. The church’s preaching is superimposed on our lives, as if it is extrinsic and foreign to our lives.

This is never so apparent as in the Easter season, when the central, core proclamation of Christianity—the death and resurrection of Jesus—appears as some esoteric event dropping in from the supernatural world, as the church preaches about and liturgically reenacts the passion and resurrection of Christ annually. Little attempt is made to do what is fundamentally necessary if we are to understand the significance of Jesus’s death: that is, to relate that death to other deaths in the world, and, in particular, to the deaths of the countless others who, like Jesus, are crucified throughout history (and in the world today) by the powerful of the earth.

Jesus’s death is treated in much Christian preaching and iconography as an exotic, otherworldly event, unlike and unrelated to any other death in the world. And yet the whole meaning of this death revolves around the significant ways in which the death of Jesus is like—is akin to, echoes and provides meaning for—the deaths of other victims of the powerful.

And to an even greater extent, the resurrection is presented, in much of the church’s preaching and worship, as some alien intrusion into this world, almost like the landing of a space-ship from another galaxy. The death and resurrection of Jesus are mythologized in Christian piety and proclamation, removed from their context in the life of the historical Jesus, made into miraculous events with no connection at all to the life of the man who proclaimed the arrival of the reign of God in history, or to that central message of the reign of God. The resurrection is, in much contemporary Christian preaching, even divorced from the death of Jesus, without which this event of astonishing reversal of injustice and oppression makes no sense at all.

Paul Tillich once noted that what is entirely alien cannot be appropriated by believers. If the Word of God is as utterly alien to this world as some believers appear to think, if it only stands against this world and its vocabularies and experiences, then we cannot understand or appropriate it. We can take into our own understanding and act on only what connects in a meaningful way to the structures of our human minds and hearts.

And as Karl Barth himself once noted, ironically, the emphasis on the otherness of God’s Word in much neo-orthodox theology actually ends up making the divine captive to the human in many Christian traditions. Barth noted this, in particular, as he critiqued a literalist, fundamentalist reading of the scripture, which imagines that God’s Word is spoken in the biblical text in a way that completely shatters the presuppositions of this world, but is at the same time completely clear and controllable.

As Barth noted, those who think that they can lock the entire meaning of that totally other Word up in a collection of verses actually rob the Word of the very force they believe they are preserving, by making the text true in a literal sense. Fundamentalism imagines that it owns the Word of God—something that evacuates the Word of God (and God!) of the transformative significance that defenders of the literal Word of God imagine they preserve more faithfully than any other believers.

The grand irony of much contemporary Christian life is that those who most loudly proclaim that they are faithfully preserving the traditional, otherworldly Word of God are those who are most actively undermining the force of that Word for many of us, by reducing it to the magical, extrinsic, and very controllable grab-bag of "truths" that defenders of orthodoxy seem always to carry about with them. A grab-bag of "truths" and instant answers carried about by people whose own lives seem to be little affected by those truths and answers, in any other than the most superficial extrinsic sense . . . .

To many of us, this disparity between the message proclaimed and the one lived indicates that the core teachings of Christianity are not making their way into the minds and hearts of those who are catechized. Those with instant answers most ready at their fingertips, those the least troubled by searching questions about how their answers connect to the lived experience they are supposed to illuminate, these chief defenders of Christian "truth" in the world today: these are becoming a strong counter-sign to the Christian message, and churches that permit themselves to be captive to such messengers are losing the battle to proclaim that message to the world.