argument then is that people who are in some way congenitally incapable of realizing these values should receive a kind of exemption.
This sort of discussion is inherently demeaning to the people it seeks to benefit, pleading for understanding and tolerance while leaving untouched the prevailing values and arrangements. Persons who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or “queer” increasingly find it no longer worthwhile to engage in this inherently degrading discussion.
Rereading the Bible
The current study departs from what has been the norm of discussion. This book takes the position that the homophobic and heterocentric position of the church (and of Western society generally) is a distortion of the Bible. I propose, as a corollary, that a gay affirmative reading of the Bible will actually respect the integrity of these texts and make their message both more clear and more persuasive.
This study is not a plea for acceptance or toleration of gay people, but it does suggest that the exclusion of persons on the basis of sexual orientation or same-sex practices brings with it a fundamental distortion of the Bible generally and of the traditions concerning Jesus in particular.
Now this case can be made only by rereading the biblical materials. The issue is not just a matter of the five isolated verses that presumably disqualify persons who engage in same-sex erotic behavior. It is a question of rereading the biblical witness much more broadly and appropriating the Bible for a gay-positive perspective.
This kind of a rereading of the Bible is related to the sort of rereading that has gone on in a variety of liberationist contexts. In the modern period, such a rereading has been necessary for a number of reasons. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, for example, a rereading was initiated to undermine the self-evidence of institutions of slavery. The Bible does not seem to abolish slavery. Indeed the apologists for chattel slavery could and did appeal both to “Mosaic” legislation and to the New Testament’s apparent acceptance of institutions of slavery in order to legitimate the renewed practice of slavery in Protestant North America. The struggle, then, against slavery also was a struggle for the appropriate way of reading the Bible. That is, the question was one of hermeneutics.
This same hermeneutical issue or set of issues came into play in the struggle concerning segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. In each case the issue had to do with the presence of biblical texts in both Testaments that were (mis)appropriated to legitimate white racism. But the issue was also in this case broader since it was a question of applying biblical principles (as opposed to proof texts) to questions of theological and ethical debate.
This struggle is by no means over. The work of Cain Hope Felder in developing an Afrocentric reading of the Bible is of considerable importance, as is the work of Itumeleng Mosala, and others in South Africa, for recapturing the Bible from white supremacist ideology.
A second illustration of the way in which a particular issue opens the way to a broader hermeneutical discussion has to do with a feminist reading of the Bible. Interestingly rereading the Bible from a feminist perspective began in the same context as the abolitionist and antiracist rereading of the Bible. The production of the “Woman’s Bible” was the first rereading of the Bible from a liberationist (and revisionist) perspective.
The feminist rereading of the Bible continues today, and has growing relevance to a reappropriation of biblical texts, particularly in the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Here we have moved beyond the question of accepting women in leadership positions in society and the church to an interrogation of the biblical worldview and to the meaning of the gospel as a whole. To be sure, many people (like Mary Daly) conclude that the biblical materials are hopelessly sexist and so should be abandoned. Others (like Rosemary Ruether), without discounting the patriarchal bias of the biblical authors, nevertheless find support in important aspects of this tradition for a rigorous critique of sexism and patriarchy in the world and in society.
One of the most urgent rereadings of the Bible in the twentieth century was in response to the horrors of the Holocaust prompted by the belated realization among Christian exegetes that traditional readings of the Bible have fostered anti-Semitism and actually contributed to and prepared the ground for the genocidal policies of Hitler. Here it has been a matter of reconsidering the apparently self-evident ways the New Testament was read and the way in which cherished doctrinal formulations were developed and interpreted. Even the name given by Christians to the sacred writings of Israel—the Old Testament—betrays a bias that is conducive to the emergence of anti-Judaism. The reconsideration of Jesus as a Jew (and of Paul as well) together with critical reflection on the ways texts seem to make the Jewish people generally responsible for the execution of Jesus (actually carried out, of course, by the Roman empire and thus by the Gentiles) has been immensely fruitful for producing fresh insight into the emergence of the Jesus movement as well as into the dangers of a traditional and ideologically distorted (mis)reading of the New Testament.
A further rereading of the Bible that has become widely influential is that undertaken from the standpoint of the struggle of the poor and oppressed to attain liberation and life. This hermeneutical strategy is most often associated with Latin American liberation theology, although it in fact embraces black liberation in the United States and Africa and has influenced the quite different context of Asian theology.
Now this liberationist rereading has shown itself to be of enduring importance, for it has not simply argued that we should be nice to poor people but that the welfare of the poor and marginalized is the test of our relationship to the God of both Testaments.
Indeed, in all the cases we have referred to, the proposed rereading of the Bible claims to provide decisive clarification of the meaning of the witness to the action, will, and goal of the divine in the world.
In all of these cases, a reading of the Bible is at stake that contests traditional readings. These traditional readings have so succeeded in substituting themselves for the text that they purport to “interpret” that new readings have often been regarded as “unbiblical.” But in all cases, the rereading has resulted in greater clarity about the meaning of faithfulness to the God who is attested by Scripture.
I maintain that similar gains can be hoped for from a “gay-affirmative” or counterhomophobic rereading of the Bible. The gains I have in mind are not simply an acceptance of previously proscribed behavior but a greater clarity about the meaning of biblical texts and hence a greater clarity about the meaningfulness of biblical traditions for contemporary attitudes toward same-sex desire and practice.
Now I must add a caveat. I do not suppose that the hermeneutical enterprise that I am suggesting should displace the other hermeneutical strategies I have just listed. Rather I regard this approach as a collaborative enterprise. As Latin American theologians say, the search is for “integral liberation.” A liberation of some at the expense of others cannot be liberation within the horizon of the new creation promised and already begun in Jesus.
At the “end of the rainbow” of the hermeneutical work that we begin here is an appropriation of the Bible that is not afraid of the body or of the erotic. Thus, the aim of a gay-positive reading of the Bible is as well to offer a liberating word to all persons, including “straights,” concerning the place of the erotic in our lives. The consideration of the question of homosexuality in the churches a quarter century ago began in the context of the sexual revolution that asked whether traditional antierotic views associated with Christianity were to be regarded as binding upon us in the present. That question has been sidetracked by the focus on the question of homosexuality. A reexamination of homoeroticism in biblical narratives may also make possible a reconsideration of the place of the erotic in the life and thought of those who understand themselves
