Eugene, this is by far the most perplexing and difficult to interpret essay of yours I've read. I find myself in profound affinity with parts of it, and recoiling from others. So this will be a little stream-of-consciousness.
I very much share your revulsion over both the election and administration of Donald Trump, a revulsion which motivates and bookends your essay. I also think your broad point about the application of the pastoral and Pauline epistles to this present moment is excellent. It's related to a point I've been making for some years now that after decades of the fundamentalists warning us about the dangers of relativism, they all capitulated to the biggest moral relativist who ever campaigned for public office.
I also very much like your broad point about reading scripture dialectically. As a Christian Platonist, I'm a fan of reading everything dialectically! Nor am I an inerrantist or anything like that. There are mistakes and bad ideas within the scriptures. Though it is a very different thing to assert that Holy Spirit is *advocating* those elements, rather than merely leaving in scripture, as C. S. Lewis has said, "naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness" to display "the human qualities of the raw materials."
Which is why I find myself rather taken aback by your somewhat flippant and unsupported assertions that scripture is burgeoning with heinous shit and the like. That has not been my experience reading scripture devotionally. While I broadly agree with your re-construction of Romans 1, I don't think St. Paul is homophobic. Having a heteronormative worldview does not make one homophobic. These are importantly distinct categories. The former is the view that humans as a species reproduce heterosexually, just as we're also bipedal as a species. Neither heteronormativity nor bipedalnormativity imply that non-heterosexual relations or people missing a leg or having an extra leg are "bad" or "evil." In some fashion. St. Paul thinks that the Gentiles he has in mind were given over to their perverse desires, which probably means people who engaged in desires *because* those were contrary to nature, not out of a spirit of genuine love and affection. I had a pastor a few years back who said a modern equivalent of Paul's example would be someone today getting off by penetrating a partner with their foot. It's about finding sexual stimulation in the perverse, which every pornographer throughout human history as specialized in (consider the proliferation of incest role play in pornography today).
Therefore, I don't think anything Paul says is homophobic and I don't think anything in your argument implies that he is (although he is, like all of us, heteronormative, because even a species that has recreational sexual practices outside of reproduction is still under the norms of whatever sexual practices foster reproduction, which again does not mean sex reduces to reproduction, only that reproduction is an irreducible source of normativity for us). Despite your caveats, I still found many of your assertions about scripture in general and Paul in particular unnecessarily hasty.
Most often whenever I find something heinous or reprehensible in scripture, the problem lies more in my assumptions and misreading of the text than what Holy Spirit is actually trying to teach the Church from the scriptures.
Last point, I have found myself much less worried about heinous content in scripture and more worried by heinous content in theological publications. You mentioned finding inspiration from a Womanist theologian. A few years back I dived into some Womanist literature to see what the fuss was, and came across Wil Gafney's article on Ruth. If I was ever to identify a text for the Church's use of "dubious moral character" and advocating some "truly heinous shit," it would be that piece. When I ended her appalling argument for how to re-read Ruth "Womanistically," if I had thought there was a shred of truth in her argument, I'd have ceased to be a Christian immediately and called for the forced closure of all Christian churches and ministries as instruments of unfettered evil. It was the most irresponsible piece of theological and pastoral writing I've ever read.
Would I take the book of Ruth, which Gafney treats as "heinous shit" over the "heinous shit" of her biblical exegesis? Any day. I am much more confident that Holy Spirit has and will continue to speak through every page of the scriptures than I am that Holy Spirit is using every or even most pages churned out by theologians. So when I encounter scripture that puzzles or even discomforts me, I just remember that if it discomforts me, how much more will it serve as a discomfort to tyrants like Donald Trump. It's the discordance between scripture and our self-congratulatory estimation of our contemporary moral sensibilities that gives me the most hope.
For I remain convinced that the scriptures and its authors are far more subversive about the powers and the victory over them than we are without our pathetic elections and aging public bureaucracies. We've allowed the panacea of liberalism to beguile us for decades into believing that we can achieve a measure of justice on this earth without doing the much harder work imagined by scripture to transform society through serving one another as Christ first served us. I'll be writing in the months to come about how it is my conviction that a distinctly Christian politics -- one divorced from liberalism and quite antithetical to the nonsensical chauvinism of Christian nationalism -- is our best hope for a just society. And my source for a Christian politics is and remains the scriptures, but the scriptures read "under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have," as C. S. Lewis counseled against the fundamentalists.
Thanks for the engagement, Michael. I truly appreciate it. I don't really see any area of substantive disagreement in what you're saying and what I intended.
It seems that you've taken issue with my statement that Paul is homophobic. Fair enough. In most of the essay I stuck to "heteronormative." I grant that I probably should have maintained a tighter control of meaning, but that strikes me as a not-especially substantive point.
And then, re "heinous shit." As you note, there are lots of mistakes and bad ideas in the Bible, and we shouldn't assume that the Holy Spirit is endorsing those things. Maybe you'd prefer not calling some of these bad ideas "heinous shit," but the rape and expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, the killing of Jephthah's daughter, and so forth strike me as meeting that standard.
You wrote: "Most often whenever I find something heinous or reprehensible in scripture, the problem lies more in my assumptions and misreading of the text than what Holy Spirit is actually trying to teach the Church from the scriptures."
This is basically what I'm trying to say in the essay. Perhaps poorly, perhaps unclearly, perhaps ineffectively. I believe that God does indeed give and intend the Scriptures for our good, and that when we find something truly terrible in the Scriptures, we should not assume that this means God endorses the terrible thing or wants us to go and do likewise. The overall point of the essay was that even those parts of Scripture we might be tempted to dismiss as too "problematic" still speak to us and to our moment in really important ways.
I'm unfamiliar with Gafney's article on Ruth, so I have no comment on it.
But again, overall, the point of the article is that we shouldn't dismiss Scripture, that it continues to hold authority, and that there's much to learn even from the "bad" parts of it.
Eugene, no question we're pretty close in agreement. I've thoroughly enjoyed your essays over the past year, and I suspect both temperamentally and theologically we're pretty similar Episcopalians. Again, I found the broad message of this essay and your specific reading of Romans 1 to be excellent. I'll insist on less self-deprecation from you though, because while you occasionally write an academic idiom, you are an otherwise really careful and astute writer. At no point do I think you wrote poorly or ineffectively, here or anywhere else. If anything, I took you to be writing passionately; that is, you're pissed! And you should be. People are doing awful things in Christ's name through the coercive instruments of the U.S. government. Plenty of outrage in my own essays.
I am a parish lay leader who is constantly fighting an uphill battle in the Episcopal Church to get people to care about scripture in *any* sense, much less an authoritative one, and so I struggle with such strong reactions to elements in scripture because, well, because I have a really high Pneumatology. I do think the Holy Spirit guides the Church, the formation of Church doctrine, and the canonization and promulgation of the scriptures. Like any good Anglican, I think the Church, Church doctrine, and the scriptures are all fallible material entities chosen by God for sacramental use. But there is a big difference for me between saying they're fallible and saying they're mostly in err. If I thought the Church was mostly in err, or has mostly been a force for evil in history, or that the Bible was mostly a vehicle for patriarchal culture and chattel slavery, then I would renounce Christianity. It would mean that our beliefs about Christ sending the Holy Spirit to lead the Church in all truth was a false doctrine.
The Womanist texts that I have read, which have become very fashionable in the Episcopal Church over the past 8 years largely due to the popularity of Wilda Gafney and her women's lectionary, seem to me to be asserting those very things, that the Church has been mostly evil, that the Bible is mostly awful, and that Holy Spirit has mostly failed us, but if we just practice epistemic deference to an elite group of minority theologians, we can invent a new Church and a new Scriptures and scrap the last two thousand years of Church history and teaching. It's all very John Shelby Spong-esque.
I just wasn't initially sure where you stand in all of this, between invoking a Womanist theologian, asking whether "we believe the Bible again?", and conceding much in scripture as problematic. Again, I'm all for repenting of the errors of our tradition. We bewail our manifold sins and wickedness! But, when the dust settles, do we still hold to enough of a tradition and enough of the scriptures that someone reading your essay would conclude, "Eugene still believes that Holy Spirit is guiding this Church in all truth and that Christ is the head of this Church." As someone who still believes that and finds myself having fewer and fewer allies, I was mostly hoping I hadn't lost you too in reaction to the horrors of Trump's abuse and appropriation of evangelical Christianity in America.
You don't need to respond to all of this, I just wanted to get you a little more context to my "surprise" at your essay and the strength of my reaction. I find what we need today is help loving scripture, not assistance in tearing it down. I see now you're engaged in the former project, in your way. Your excellent response more than satisfied me, and I look forward to the next installments!
I've been trying to wrestle through precisely how to affirm that God continues to guide God's church into all truth amid all the empirical evidence to the contrary. I think that a robust theology of the supernatural order, of providence, and of human freedom can accomplish this.
I try to work some of it out at a more theoretical level in my recent Ruptured Bodies.
I think that the recent work of Anne Carpenter in Nothing Gained Is Eternal goes a long way towards working through this.
And, since I'm naming friends and their work, Jonathan Heaps's The Ambiguity of Being, provides the metaphysical framework for doing this work, I think.
I'd add as well that my primary window into womanist theology is the work of Shawn Copeland (though I've also learned from Delores Williams, whose conclusions I don't follow, but whose critiques I feel bound to take seriously; and Kelly Brown Douglas). It's hardly a univocal field of inquiry.
Wonderful recommendations Eugene, thanks! I've been meaning to say that I thought your Ruptured Bodies was a wonderful theological examination of contemporary issues using the full resources of the tradition and bringing them to bear. I really enjoyed reading it and am quite grateful for your curious and winsome scholarship.
Heaps' The Ambiguity of Being looks quite arresting! It's high on my reading list, though I'll have to figure out a way around the sticker price since it's not in my university library.
I appreciate the suggestion to look at M. Shawn Copeland's work -- I'll give Enfleshing Freedom a read. I've read a fair bit of Kelly Brown Douglas' work and found it hard going. A lot of the challenge for me Eugene comes from my own theological formation, which has included an extensive read through the work of Black women theologians writing in and from an African perspective. Emily Onyango, Esther Mombo, Loreen Maseno-Ouma, Mercy Oduyoye, to name a few. Their perspectives and assumptions stand in sharp relief from the American Womanist tradition, and often gets excluded from it or selectively read. It's created a trust issue for me, and I've had a tough time finding reliable voices to provide me a stronger footing.
Anyway, thanks for the very insightful exchange, and for the joy of learning and wrestling with you on your Substack.
I very much appreciate the kind words about Ruptured Bodies.
And, yes, I think it's very important to note the differences in Black women's experiences on the African continent versus North America. There are distinct contours to each history that means we cannot simply map the one onto the other.
Enjoyed your post -- and the clarity of the your point about Paul's *present* mindset informing a larger point of turning from God's wisdom and goodness. I'm picking nits here, and I may be misunderstanding one of your points. But I view the roughly 150 million American voters, not Trump, as siding with Pontius Pilate -- and Trump as Barrabas.
I'd agree that those who've elected Trump are the one's who've sided with Pilate. But so long as Trump with his imperial pretensions, aims to subjugate and crucify vulnerable peoples, he's more Pilate than Barrabas. Actually, his pardon of the treasonous January 6 insurrectionists parallels Barrabas pretty well.
You are a gift to the world. I'm so grateful you're doing this substack. Your theological mind has impacted my life greatly, and your writing continues to help me learn and grow.
Paul seems to mainly be fulminating against people who abandon heterosexual relations for homosexual ones. Technically, the lifelong homosexual is not covered by this.
He also seems to think this is a symptom of a deeper problem, not per se the(!) problem
This is my favorite sentence in your excellent essay. "Trump administration is targeting trans people. I regard the administration’s actions as vile and demonic." I say that because the ONLY explanation I can come up with for Trump's reelection is demonic intervention. And I don't even believe in demonic intervention.
It is so necessary to meet and talk to others from a familiar frame of reference and a common cultural understanding. Since there are an abundance of “Christian” oriented people in the US you demonstrate you are speaking on their terms and in their frame of reference. Otherwise it’s Tower of Babel speak. I admire your ability and dedication to finding common ground.
I'm a bit lost on how "non-procreative straight sex run[s] afoul of [Paul's] logic in Romans 1" and on how his words against same sex behavior makes him a sinner (or a "homophobe"). If you are correct, how do we decide which parts, in following Scripture, make us sinners and which parts make us obedient? I did read your whole article, yes, and I almost understand your point (I'm not as educated as you are, so it's a struggle for that reason), but I'm still a bit lost. Either way, I will not agree with you that Christians should affirm same sex behavior any more than I will agree they should affirm adultery among heterosexuals, gossip, selfishness, and greed, etc., but I would still like to better understand your basis. What do you do with non-Pauline passages on homosexuality? Why would Paul or any other follower of God at any place in Scripture, be against sex for leisure/pleasure? <--(Or is that not what you're saying?) How do we know which passages are cultural and which are not?
I hasten to say that I don't think Paul is being sinful in this passage from Romans. I think he's mistaken in his evaluation of sexuality, but I also think that his assumptions are what are running in the background, rather than the point he's trying to make. I should also note that I was less careful than I should have been. "Heteronormative" is a fair label for Paul, "homophobic" may not be.
His point is that turning away from God leads to futility (that sin is its own punishment, in other words). Because of what he assumes about how sex works, his comments about same-sex sexual activity is a ready-to-hand illustration, rather than the the actual point he's trying to make.
As far as other passages in Scripture that touch upon sex between people of the same gender, my handling of them is very similar to my approach other to Paul. I recognize the assumptions they would have held about the way things are, but also believe that our understandings of sex and gender have developed since then, meaning that we're talking about different things. That is not to say that these authors would agree with me if they were living today, just that it would be a different conversation and that we cannot know what they would say.
And, yes, your assumptions that heterosexual sex that cannot result in procreation are normal and good a very different understanding of sexuality than what the New Testament authors are working with. It's something that most of us would take for granted, but it's also *very* recent.
As for what's cultural....all of it is. There's no escaping culture or context, for us or for ancient authors. I have no ready made list here. It's really a matter of discernment. And that's the scary thing about facing these realities: there is no escaping from discernment, even if you decide that what's written in the Bible just maps onto our lives today with no adjustments, that's still a *decision*. that you've made. We're all engaged in this. I want to encourage us to do it intentionally, knowingly, deliberately, carefully, and with a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.
Eugene, this is by far the most perplexing and difficult to interpret essay of yours I've read. I find myself in profound affinity with parts of it, and recoiling from others. So this will be a little stream-of-consciousness.
I very much share your revulsion over both the election and administration of Donald Trump, a revulsion which motivates and bookends your essay. I also think your broad point about the application of the pastoral and Pauline epistles to this present moment is excellent. It's related to a point I've been making for some years now that after decades of the fundamentalists warning us about the dangers of relativism, they all capitulated to the biggest moral relativist who ever campaigned for public office.
I also very much like your broad point about reading scripture dialectically. As a Christian Platonist, I'm a fan of reading everything dialectically! Nor am I an inerrantist or anything like that. There are mistakes and bad ideas within the scriptures. Though it is a very different thing to assert that Holy Spirit is *advocating* those elements, rather than merely leaving in scripture, as C. S. Lewis has said, "naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness" to display "the human qualities of the raw materials."
Which is why I find myself rather taken aback by your somewhat flippant and unsupported assertions that scripture is burgeoning with heinous shit and the like. That has not been my experience reading scripture devotionally. While I broadly agree with your re-construction of Romans 1, I don't think St. Paul is homophobic. Having a heteronormative worldview does not make one homophobic. These are importantly distinct categories. The former is the view that humans as a species reproduce heterosexually, just as we're also bipedal as a species. Neither heteronormativity nor bipedalnormativity imply that non-heterosexual relations or people missing a leg or having an extra leg are "bad" or "evil." In some fashion. St. Paul thinks that the Gentiles he has in mind were given over to their perverse desires, which probably means people who engaged in desires *because* those were contrary to nature, not out of a spirit of genuine love and affection. I had a pastor a few years back who said a modern equivalent of Paul's example would be someone today getting off by penetrating a partner with their foot. It's about finding sexual stimulation in the perverse, which every pornographer throughout human history as specialized in (consider the proliferation of incest role play in pornography today).
Therefore, I don't think anything Paul says is homophobic and I don't think anything in your argument implies that he is (although he is, like all of us, heteronormative, because even a species that has recreational sexual practices outside of reproduction is still under the norms of whatever sexual practices foster reproduction, which again does not mean sex reduces to reproduction, only that reproduction is an irreducible source of normativity for us). Despite your caveats, I still found many of your assertions about scripture in general and Paul in particular unnecessarily hasty.
Most often whenever I find something heinous or reprehensible in scripture, the problem lies more in my assumptions and misreading of the text than what Holy Spirit is actually trying to teach the Church from the scriptures.
Last point, I have found myself much less worried about heinous content in scripture and more worried by heinous content in theological publications. You mentioned finding inspiration from a Womanist theologian. A few years back I dived into some Womanist literature to see what the fuss was, and came across Wil Gafney's article on Ruth. If I was ever to identify a text for the Church's use of "dubious moral character" and advocating some "truly heinous shit," it would be that piece. When I ended her appalling argument for how to re-read Ruth "Womanistically," if I had thought there was a shred of truth in her argument, I'd have ceased to be a Christian immediately and called for the forced closure of all Christian churches and ministries as instruments of unfettered evil. It was the most irresponsible piece of theological and pastoral writing I've ever read.
Would I take the book of Ruth, which Gafney treats as "heinous shit" over the "heinous shit" of her biblical exegesis? Any day. I am much more confident that Holy Spirit has and will continue to speak through every page of the scriptures than I am that Holy Spirit is using every or even most pages churned out by theologians. So when I encounter scripture that puzzles or even discomforts me, I just remember that if it discomforts me, how much more will it serve as a discomfort to tyrants like Donald Trump. It's the discordance between scripture and our self-congratulatory estimation of our contemporary moral sensibilities that gives me the most hope.
For I remain convinced that the scriptures and its authors are far more subversive about the powers and the victory over them than we are without our pathetic elections and aging public bureaucracies. We've allowed the panacea of liberalism to beguile us for decades into believing that we can achieve a measure of justice on this earth without doing the much harder work imagined by scripture to transform society through serving one another as Christ first served us. I'll be writing in the months to come about how it is my conviction that a distinctly Christian politics -- one divorced from liberalism and quite antithetical to the nonsensical chauvinism of Christian nationalism -- is our best hope for a just society. And my source for a Christian politics is and remains the scriptures, but the scriptures read "under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have," as C. S. Lewis counseled against the fundamentalists.
Thanks for the engagement, Michael. I truly appreciate it. I don't really see any area of substantive disagreement in what you're saying and what I intended.
It seems that you've taken issue with my statement that Paul is homophobic. Fair enough. In most of the essay I stuck to "heteronormative." I grant that I probably should have maintained a tighter control of meaning, but that strikes me as a not-especially substantive point.
And then, re "heinous shit." As you note, there are lots of mistakes and bad ideas in the Bible, and we shouldn't assume that the Holy Spirit is endorsing those things. Maybe you'd prefer not calling some of these bad ideas "heinous shit," but the rape and expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, the killing of Jephthah's daughter, and so forth strike me as meeting that standard.
You wrote: "Most often whenever I find something heinous or reprehensible in scripture, the problem lies more in my assumptions and misreading of the text than what Holy Spirit is actually trying to teach the Church from the scriptures."
This is basically what I'm trying to say in the essay. Perhaps poorly, perhaps unclearly, perhaps ineffectively. I believe that God does indeed give and intend the Scriptures for our good, and that when we find something truly terrible in the Scriptures, we should not assume that this means God endorses the terrible thing or wants us to go and do likewise. The overall point of the essay was that even those parts of Scripture we might be tempted to dismiss as too "problematic" still speak to us and to our moment in really important ways.
I'm unfamiliar with Gafney's article on Ruth, so I have no comment on it.
But again, overall, the point of the article is that we shouldn't dismiss Scripture, that it continues to hold authority, and that there's much to learn even from the "bad" parts of it.
Eugene, no question we're pretty close in agreement. I've thoroughly enjoyed your essays over the past year, and I suspect both temperamentally and theologically we're pretty similar Episcopalians. Again, I found the broad message of this essay and your specific reading of Romans 1 to be excellent. I'll insist on less self-deprecation from you though, because while you occasionally write an academic idiom, you are an otherwise really careful and astute writer. At no point do I think you wrote poorly or ineffectively, here or anywhere else. If anything, I took you to be writing passionately; that is, you're pissed! And you should be. People are doing awful things in Christ's name through the coercive instruments of the U.S. government. Plenty of outrage in my own essays.
I am a parish lay leader who is constantly fighting an uphill battle in the Episcopal Church to get people to care about scripture in *any* sense, much less an authoritative one, and so I struggle with such strong reactions to elements in scripture because, well, because I have a really high Pneumatology. I do think the Holy Spirit guides the Church, the formation of Church doctrine, and the canonization and promulgation of the scriptures. Like any good Anglican, I think the Church, Church doctrine, and the scriptures are all fallible material entities chosen by God for sacramental use. But there is a big difference for me between saying they're fallible and saying they're mostly in err. If I thought the Church was mostly in err, or has mostly been a force for evil in history, or that the Bible was mostly a vehicle for patriarchal culture and chattel slavery, then I would renounce Christianity. It would mean that our beliefs about Christ sending the Holy Spirit to lead the Church in all truth was a false doctrine.
The Womanist texts that I have read, which have become very fashionable in the Episcopal Church over the past 8 years largely due to the popularity of Wilda Gafney and her women's lectionary, seem to me to be asserting those very things, that the Church has been mostly evil, that the Bible is mostly awful, and that Holy Spirit has mostly failed us, but if we just practice epistemic deference to an elite group of minority theologians, we can invent a new Church and a new Scriptures and scrap the last two thousand years of Church history and teaching. It's all very John Shelby Spong-esque.
I just wasn't initially sure where you stand in all of this, between invoking a Womanist theologian, asking whether "we believe the Bible again?", and conceding much in scripture as problematic. Again, I'm all for repenting of the errors of our tradition. We bewail our manifold sins and wickedness! But, when the dust settles, do we still hold to enough of a tradition and enough of the scriptures that someone reading your essay would conclude, "Eugene still believes that Holy Spirit is guiding this Church in all truth and that Christ is the head of this Church." As someone who still believes that and finds myself having fewer and fewer allies, I was mostly hoping I hadn't lost you too in reaction to the horrors of Trump's abuse and appropriation of evangelical Christianity in America.
You don't need to respond to all of this, I just wanted to get you a little more context to my "surprise" at your essay and the strength of my reaction. I find what we need today is help loving scripture, not assistance in tearing it down. I see now you're engaged in the former project, in your way. Your excellent response more than satisfied me, and I look forward to the next installments!
Thanks for this, once more, Michael.
I've been trying to wrestle through precisely how to affirm that God continues to guide God's church into all truth amid all the empirical evidence to the contrary. I think that a robust theology of the supernatural order, of providence, and of human freedom can accomplish this.
I try to work some of it out at a more theoretical level in my recent Ruptured Bodies.
I think that the recent work of Anne Carpenter in Nothing Gained Is Eternal goes a long way towards working through this.
And, since I'm naming friends and their work, Jonathan Heaps's The Ambiguity of Being, provides the metaphysical framework for doing this work, I think.
I'd add as well that my primary window into womanist theology is the work of Shawn Copeland (though I've also learned from Delores Williams, whose conclusions I don't follow, but whose critiques I feel bound to take seriously; and Kelly Brown Douglas). It's hardly a univocal field of inquiry.
Wonderful recommendations Eugene, thanks! I've been meaning to say that I thought your Ruptured Bodies was a wonderful theological examination of contemporary issues using the full resources of the tradition and bringing them to bear. I really enjoyed reading it and am quite grateful for your curious and winsome scholarship.
Heaps' The Ambiguity of Being looks quite arresting! It's high on my reading list, though I'll have to figure out a way around the sticker price since it's not in my university library.
I appreciate the suggestion to look at M. Shawn Copeland's work -- I'll give Enfleshing Freedom a read. I've read a fair bit of Kelly Brown Douglas' work and found it hard going. A lot of the challenge for me Eugene comes from my own theological formation, which has included an extensive read through the work of Black women theologians writing in and from an African perspective. Emily Onyango, Esther Mombo, Loreen Maseno-Ouma, Mercy Oduyoye, to name a few. Their perspectives and assumptions stand in sharp relief from the American Womanist tradition, and often gets excluded from it or selectively read. It's created a trust issue for me, and I've had a tough time finding reliable voices to provide me a stronger footing.
Anyway, thanks for the very insightful exchange, and for the joy of learning and wrestling with you on your Substack.
I very much appreciate the kind words about Ruptured Bodies.
And, yes, I think it's very important to note the differences in Black women's experiences on the African continent versus North America. There are distinct contours to each history that means we cannot simply map the one onto the other.
Enjoyed your post -- and the clarity of the your point about Paul's *present* mindset informing a larger point of turning from God's wisdom and goodness. I'm picking nits here, and I may be misunderstanding one of your points. But I view the roughly 150 million American voters, not Trump, as siding with Pontius Pilate -- and Trump as Barrabas.
I'd agree that those who've elected Trump are the one's who've sided with Pilate. But so long as Trump with his imperial pretensions, aims to subjugate and crucify vulnerable peoples, he's more Pilate than Barrabas. Actually, his pardon of the treasonous January 6 insurrectionists parallels Barrabas pretty well.
You are a gift to the world. I'm so grateful you're doing this substack. Your theological mind has impacted my life greatly, and your writing continues to help me learn and grow.
I'm very grateful for your words. Thanks for reading and engaging!
Paul seems to mainly be fulminating against people who abandon heterosexual relations for homosexual ones. Technically, the lifelong homosexual is not covered by this.
He also seems to think this is a symptom of a deeper problem, not per se the(!) problem
This is my favorite sentence in your excellent essay. "Trump administration is targeting trans people. I regard the administration’s actions as vile and demonic." I say that because the ONLY explanation I can come up with for Trump's reelection is demonic intervention. And I don't even believe in demonic intervention.
TDS is real
I suspect you tweaked some noses amongst
https://substack.com/@poetpastor/note/p-161203914?r=5gejob&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
It is so necessary to meet and talk to others from a familiar frame of reference and a common cultural understanding. Since there are an abundance of “Christian” oriented people in the US you demonstrate you are speaking on their terms and in their frame of reference. Otherwise it’s Tower of Babel speak. I admire your ability and dedication to finding common ground.
Michael,
I'm a bit lost on how "non-procreative straight sex run[s] afoul of [Paul's] logic in Romans 1" and on how his words against same sex behavior makes him a sinner (or a "homophobe"). If you are correct, how do we decide which parts, in following Scripture, make us sinners and which parts make us obedient? I did read your whole article, yes, and I almost understand your point (I'm not as educated as you are, so it's a struggle for that reason), but I'm still a bit lost. Either way, I will not agree with you that Christians should affirm same sex behavior any more than I will agree they should affirm adultery among heterosexuals, gossip, selfishness, and greed, etc., but I would still like to better understand your basis. What do you do with non-Pauline passages on homosexuality? Why would Paul or any other follower of God at any place in Scripture, be against sex for leisure/pleasure? <--(Or is that not what you're saying?) How do we know which passages are cultural and which are not?
Thank you!
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.
I hasten to say that I don't think Paul is being sinful in this passage from Romans. I think he's mistaken in his evaluation of sexuality, but I also think that his assumptions are what are running in the background, rather than the point he's trying to make. I should also note that I was less careful than I should have been. "Heteronormative" is a fair label for Paul, "homophobic" may not be.
His point is that turning away from God leads to futility (that sin is its own punishment, in other words). Because of what he assumes about how sex works, his comments about same-sex sexual activity is a ready-to-hand illustration, rather than the the actual point he's trying to make.
As far as other passages in Scripture that touch upon sex between people of the same gender, my handling of them is very similar to my approach other to Paul. I recognize the assumptions they would have held about the way things are, but also believe that our understandings of sex and gender have developed since then, meaning that we're talking about different things. That is not to say that these authors would agree with me if they were living today, just that it would be a different conversation and that we cannot know what they would say.
And, yes, your assumptions that heterosexual sex that cannot result in procreation are normal and good a very different understanding of sexuality than what the New Testament authors are working with. It's something that most of us would take for granted, but it's also *very* recent.
As for what's cultural....all of it is. There's no escaping culture or context, for us or for ancient authors. I have no ready made list here. It's really a matter of discernment. And that's the scary thing about facing these realities: there is no escaping from discernment, even if you decide that what's written in the Bible just maps onto our lives today with no adjustments, that's still a *decision*. that you've made. We're all engaged in this. I want to encourage us to do it intentionally, knowingly, deliberately, carefully, and with a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.
So sorry... not sure why I thought Michael F. wrote the piece. Thanks, Eugene.