The homosexuality debate in church and society is an uneasy and often destructive conversation not entered into lightly. I write in response to the Introduction to and launch address for Five Uneasy Pieces(FUP) by the distinguished Michael Kirby earlier this month at Eureka Street TV.
On one occasion I enjoyed Judge Kirby’s engaging conversation at dinner at New College at the University of NSW. However this is a more difficult conversation where unfortunately he speaks with a more polemical tone.
I also write as co-editor of Sexegesis: An Evangelical Response to Five Uneasy Pieces on Homosexuality. This is a collection of writings by Australasian Anglican scholars in response to FUP’s invitation to conversation about Scripture and sexuality.
Sexegesis is literally exegesis or reading out from texts on (homo)sex. We argue that the Five Uneasy Pieces (FUP) advocating a revisionist reading of the Bible on homosexuality, do not – apart from Meg Warner and Alan Cadwallader’s pieces – really do exegesis.
Instead they generally jump quickly to wider hermeneutical or interpretive issues that relativise the relationship of Scripture and tradition to other authorities. These include science or (selective) experience (of practising gays, not celibate gays), or contemporary ethical and cultural standards like inclusivity, not the historical and global catholicity of the church across time and space.
We don’t ignore these authorities, but first emphasise the text on sex, in context. As sociologist Peter Berger once said: ‘Whereas Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, today we betray him with a hermeneutic’.
Both sides thus need to beware: ‘Conservatives’ if they slip from opposing homosexual acts to opposing homosexual people, lacking grace; The ‘liberals’ for frankly writing, as Michael Kirby admits, ‘very easy pieces’. Well before Malcolm Fraser, Jesus said (Christian) ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’. Kirby, and the FUP authors, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, are cheapening grace.
Here the rhetoric of the homosexuality debate seriously clouds the issue and raises the temperature. Gay activist and academic Denis Altman notes that making homosexuality into an identity, not an activity issue, was a stroke of political genius. It meant that anyone who opposes homosexual practice appears to be opposing homosexual people or homophobic or hateful, as Kirby’s rhetoric, GetUp’s, Sunrise’s and the Greens’ claim, making reasoned debate impossible.
Only in a society practising sexual idolatry as the basis of identity could such confusion arise. As the gay sexologist Foucault said: ‘Sexuality has replaced the soul’. The over-heated rhetoric of denying people their humanity because of inability to fully express their sexuality insults millions of celibates.
Kirby also claims that the Church teaches divine dislike or even hatred of those whom ‘God made gay’. Apart from the bigoted and bizarre Westboro Baptist, I know of no mainline church holding this gospel of hatred (though many gays have been sadly hurt by Christians).
Judge Kirby pre-emptively pronounces the verdict on the gay gene issue, when the jury is still out, and claims it makes God to blame, in a kind of hyper-Calvinist genetic predestination to torment. Yet thinkers from a range of disciplines, gender and political persuasions such as UK gay activist Peter Tatchell, sociologist Frank Furedi, geneticist Francis Collins, and bisexual Camille Paglia agree that ‘Predisposition and determination are two different things’ as bisexuality and people switching sexuality in mid-life show. John D’Emilio, US gay activist and academic, says on ‘the convenient truth’ of the ‘born gay’ theory of Kirby and others that the scientific evidence for it ‘is thin as a reed’. That doesn’t mean that homosexual orientation is simply chosen, though.
Kirby claims that the source of the churches’ ‘terrible pickle over human sexuality’ is ‘the age old problem of the text. And the human disinclination in the face of new knowledge, to adjust to the necessities of new thinking’. This almost automatic rejection of the old or traditional contradicts Kirby’s support of the monarchy, or Anglican liturgy, or much law. It denies what Chesterton calls ‘the democracy of the dead’. The vast and panoramic past has a right to vote, against the dictatorial parochialism and diminished perspective of the present.
Kirby and FUP use contemporary context to manipulate ancient text like a nose of wax in Madam Tussaud’s. Just because a revisionist interpretation like FUP’s is available doesn’t mean it’s convincing. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s outdated or we wouldn’t still use wheels. Kirby and co. confuse time and truth categories.
They also cite the common furphy about Jesus never speaking against homosexuality. In a Jewish context he didn’t have to, but upheld God’s positive purpose in Genesis of one man one wife for life, or celibacy (Mt 19:1-12). Paul (Rom. 1: 20ff) in a Gentile context of common homosexual practice of all sorts, including long-term committed relationships, upholds Jesus’ and Genesis’ view of our sexual ecology, equality and complementarity.
Law, Gospel and Epistle agree. It is not a case of five uneasy, separate pieces or texts, but a strong bridge spanning beginning to end of Scripture. We agree with Kirby that this overall context of Scripture is one offering love, forgiveness, and reconciliation bridging all, gay and straight.
Rev’d Dr Gordon Preece is Director of Ethos: Evangelical Alliance Centre for Christianity and Society. This article is based on Gordon's introduction to Sexegesis. A longer version is here.