In December, Michael Vasey's long-awaited book on homosexual morality was published to a storm of protest. Here Dr. David Wright of Edinburgh University reviews the issues and the book.
What Michael Vasey seeks is a 'reconciliation' between the church, especially the evangelical church, and gay people. This would involve on the church's side a full acceptance of the 'gay public identity' within its fold. Nothing is said about what it might entail for gay men and women. Vasey's ideal is that the church should ensure that relationships are conducted in a responsible, respectful and affirming environment and leave the details of sexual practice to be worked out by those involved, without outside interference.
Vasey writes as someone who knows the world of gaydom and the new discipline of gay studies like an insider. He presents a largely attractive and uncritical picture of the gay movement, which he believes is here to stay. He even claims that gay culture 'represents a form of resistance to the values and 'gods' that underlie the social disintegration of Western industrial society', and that its acceptance by the churches would help them to distance themselves from the idols of the modern world and to become forces of communal re-integration.
It is a breathtaking vision. Like any such work of advocacy, the argument cuts corners. Vasey wrongly assumes that all Christians with gay disposition subscribe to his plea for the churches' endorsement of the homosexual preference. He congratulates the gay community on the maturity of its response to the AIDS crisis (although one wonders whether this can be claimed for every aspect of the USA experience), but never qualifies his criticism of the hostility and 'idolatrous violence' of evangelical Christians towards gays by acknowledging (for example) that the first AIDS hospice in Europe was the initiative of evangelicals, and that a leading British AIDS charity is now an international ministry.
No debit side
So Vasey's picture of the church (which he regards as having sold out to 'the robust 'heterosexual' masculinity of the culture') and of gaydom is too monochrome. One gets no glimpse here of the medical and social debit side of the gay movement so tellingly charted by Tom Schmidt in Straight and Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexual Debate (IVP). Vasey's pro-gay stance makes it difficult for him to avoid assuming what he wants to prove, namely, the acceptability of genital homosexual relationships by the church. Hence he wastes space complaining that evangelical agencies will not advertise pro-gay causes, nor do the bishops of the Church of England come off any better on this score. It is almost as if he does not take seriously enough that orthodox Christian disapproval of same-sex sexuality is deeply grounded in well-considered biblical and theological conviction.
Biblical teaching
When Vasey comes to consider biblical teaching, he places heavy emphasis on its cultural conditioning - but only selectively. He believes that 'sexual acts derive their primary meaning from the social context in which they occur'. Not surprisingly, he finds no place to mention Ephesians 5, which sees a profound analogy between the one-flesh union of husband and wife, and the bonding of Christ and the church. So for Vasey the hostility to homosexual ways of life encountered in the Bible is essentially cultural - comparable to its 'relentlessly negative view of dogs'.
He works through 'the seven texts' as he isolates them. At Sodom in Genesis 19 'The attempted rape of the visitors is evidence not of sexual deviance, but of an arrogant and violent society' - which assumes a false choice; sexual violation was a commonplace of intrusive aggression in antiquity. The ban on two-male sexual intercourse in Leviticus (which for some reason Vasey takes as anal intercourse) is part of 'a complex symbolic system' which does not apply to Christians. It is regrettable that, in seeking to evaluate the possible relevance of this ban to Christian ethics, the author does not refer to Paul's use in 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1 of a Greek word (whose translation in the RSV as 'sodomites' Vasey criticises - and I would agree with him) based on these Leviticus verses as they appear in the Greek Septuagint Bible.
The homosexual practices condemned in Romans 1 have nothing to do with the gay way commended by Vasey. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that Paul might be ''more at home today in gay rather than non-gay society'. (This is not untypical of a risky speculative streak in the chapter on the Bible.) For Paul, 'nature' is 'an explicit construct of biology and culture...a real but culture-specific response to the order inherent in God's creation'. But neither Romans 1 nor the other Pauline references give any explicit indication of a culture-specific limitation, as though he had in mind only homosexual acts associated with slavery, social dominance and lustful pride and wrong only because of those associations. Paul uses either terminology echoing Leviticus or, in Romans 1 in a context where creation is a prominent motif, the argument from nature in which defiance of the natural use of our bodies is basic. He may well be condemning behaviours in the main associated with slavery, etc., but not doing so because of these associations, as though without them such behaviours were quite acceptable.
In Romans 1 Paul discerns the entail of idolatry - the abandonment of the Creator God for false gods among created things - behind indulgence in unnatural sex. Vasey challenges those who believe that Paul's condemnation embraces all forms of genital same-sex to demonstrate how today it is an outworking of idolatry. For him today's idols are 'the competitive market and the bourgeois family'. I reckon it takes an enormous leap of imagination to think that British society in the mid-1990s displays an idolatrously excessive reverence for the nuclear family! Which idolatry then? Try the idolatry of sex (which he refers to once), and the idolatry of the right of untrammelled expression of inclinations and desires. It is not as though the gay movement's roots lie in worship of the one and only God.
Vasey's treatment of arsenokoitai in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 has already been touched upon. He again cuts a corner in claiming that the Corinthian passage reflects a church 'more open to gay people' than many today - for he omits verse 11: 'That is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified...' As to the meaning of the term, he inclines, somewhat hesitantly, to accept its etymological origin in Leviticus, but wrongly reads me (in my demonstration of this case) as implying that it embraces also 'affectional preference'. But again for Vasey 'arsenokoitai can only be understood within the cultural assumptions of the time' - which makes one wonder how he can appeal to these verses as depicting a church commendably receptive of 'gay people'. He cannot have it both ways.
Major not minor
This is more than a minor debating point. If you thrust the Bible back into its original cultures, so that, as happens here, its culture-specific references cease to speak today, you cannot do this selectively. Even the case that Vasey makes for same-sex friendships on the basis of the ministry of Jesus is undermined, for as Vasey himself declares: 'This obvious feature of Jesus' life rests on two aspects of his culture, to which many modern people . . . have little access.' Why should an inaccessible culture provide a norm in the Gospels but not in the Pauline letters? Why should the friendship of David and Jonathan (which Vasey believes to be homoerotic) embody a model for the late 20th century when it is so culture-specific? 'It fits easily with the macho culture of David's circle which admired the qualities of the male hero and rejoiced in close relationships established within a band of warriors.'
The book's handling of the Bible is in this respect fairly typical of pro-gay revisionism: a range of passages apparently bearing explicitly on the issue, including Genesis 1 and 2, are disqualified or marginalised as culture-bound, while others are appealed to with an uncritical Bible-believing directness. If any of the Bible is culture-specific, all of it is. But culture-specificity is, for Christian faith, not an embarrassment, dooming Scripture to captivity beyond rescue, but the very heart and glory of the gospel: 'under Pontius Pilate,' once-for-all (eph' hapax), in Jerusalem, around AD30, on a Friday and the following sabbath and first day, through Jesus a Jew, God wrought the salvation of humankind. Or is all this meaningless today, because it is all so terribly culture-specific?
I warm to much of what Vasey has to say about friendship between persons of the same sex. Friendship badly needs to be recovered from the pan-sexualising of relationships which both heterosexual and homosexual emancipations have fostered. But in seeking support from the early medieval church, Vasey has gone badly astray by replying to the works of the late John Boswell. Perhaps Vasey wrote too soon after Same Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe was published to be aware of the rubbishing it has received at the hands of scholars in several disciplines. And Boswell's earlier Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, although truly a path-breaking work, has been shown by specialists in different fields to be far more fundamentally flawed than Vasey seems aware of. There is no evidence worth speaking of in the pre-Reformation era that the teaching mind of the church was in any doubt about the unacceptability of genital homosexuality. Even the 'Sodom myth' whose origins Vasey places in the 13th Century in reality goes back to intertestamental Judaism and was pervasive in early Christianity.
If, as Vasey believes, the gay movement is here to stay in the West, then what he calls Paul's 'missiological pragmatism' will become increasingly relevant to the churches, but for a reason Vasey cannot acknowledge. The first Christians also had to make their way in a world where homosexual behaviour enjoyed a high profile and some acceptance, and did so with remarkable success ('such were some of you, but you were washed . . .') without in any way condoning it.
Vasey talks about the church and gays as 'two movements' or 'two groups'- which may reflect a touch of immodesty on the gay side. The hope of overcoming the sense of alienation from the church felt by some gays will both be realised at the group level, but only person-by-person, as individuals are welcomed in the love of Christ for what God has made them and all of us - male and female in His image - and what Christ remakes them and all of us - new creations by His spirit. In real life, we are not all split into two water-tight categories of 'straight' and 'gay', as this book seems to assume. Sexual identity is not so simple and fixed a matter for many. All Christians have a responsibility to shift the focus away from sexuality as the defining feature of human beings.
Dr. David Wright
Dr. David Wright is senior lecturer in Ecclesiastical Studies, Faculty of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh and advisor to the Evangelical Alliance.
