Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts...

Ressourcement in the Era of Trump, Part One (Scripture)

Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Content warning: Discussions of sex.

This essay is the first in a planned three part series, in which I continue to try to make sense of living as a Christian in a time when a distressing number of my coreligionists have thrown their support behind a fascist regime that stands against everything I think is good and holy, aligning themselves with Pontius Pilate over against Jesus Christ.

Because my theological sensibilities and research interest lie within the twentieth-century ressourcement, I will draw upon the approach of ressourcement as I grapple with Trumpism. My interest in ressourcement began as a purely theological matter, but as I’ve written recently, there are distressing parallels between the political context during which the ressourcement movement flourished (the rise of European fascism) and our own day. My next major project will probe more fully those political connections. I hate having such relevant research interests. I wish I could just do boring theology!

But the Nazis are back and my heroes risked their lives to oppose Nazism. So I guess I’m stuck with an unwanted contemporary relevance.

Jean Daniélou’s essay, “Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse” is often regarded as a programmatic statement for ressourcement, marking out Scripture, the liturgy and the writings of the church fathers and mothers as especially focal for this theological mode of proceeding. There’s more to ressourcement than just Scripture, liturgy, and patristics, and I’m particularly interested in expanding its scope beyond these, but they remain a vital and classical constellation of commitments and sources.

The plan for this series is to devote one essay to each of these three. I begin today with Scripture.

Just last week, amid our daily Morning Prayer, I turned to my wife and said, half-jokingly: Do we believe in the Bible again?!

My remark was occasioned by the epistle reading, 2 Timothy 3:1–17, which I’ll quote in part:

You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times. ² For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. ³ They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control. They will be cruel and hate what is good. ⁴ They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. ⁵ They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly. Stay away from people like that! (New Living Translation)

This continued a trend of our readings for the Daily Office eerily paralleling the state of the world and our distress at the MAGA-fication of white American Christianity.

When we were Evangelicals, we consistently looked to Scripture as a source of authority and reliable guidance. Then the mask came off, we recognized how morally bankrupt (white American) Evangelicalism is, and how consistently the Bible’s witness is one of dubious moral character, passing on the misogynistic assumptions of its authors, propping up structures of oppression such as patriarchy and slavery, and so on. We’ve continued to engage with the Bible, often with frustration, but the last several months have brought us passages of Scripture that resonate with and incisively critique so much of the present moment.

“Do we believe in the Bible again?” was a joke, but only in part.

Drawing upon the Bible for one’s theology can be fraught, because while Scripture is given by divine inspiration and holds authority for the church, it is rife with ambiguities. It’s an artifact of so many different cultural and historical periods, many of which operate in considerable tension with our present moral sensibilities. This leads immediately to a conundrum: how do we handle this moral distance?

Appropriating Scripture Dialectically

The only responsible way to read Scripture is to do so dialectically, recognizing that there are wonderful things in the Bible and terrible things in the Bible, and that we ought to promote things that are wonderful and oppose things that are terrible. Obviously, that’s a little tricky. How do we avoid simply reinforcing our preconceived notions? When I find my views challenged by a passage of Scripture, how do I know if I’m wrong and need to change, or if the biblical writer was wrong and need to be repudiated?

I note at the outset that everyone reads and applies Scripture selectively. Even the most conservative, fundamentalist readers of Scripture are engaged in picking and choosing in their appropriation of biblical texts. This is necessary, because the Bible contains internal contradictions. It simply cannot be adopted, embraced, and imitated wholesale. Readers who do not recognize this are still picking and choosing, they just do so without intentionality and self-awareness, which means that they do so haphazardly and irresponsibly.

So the question becomes how we’ll interpret, with what criteria we’ll decide what to follow and what not to.

There’s some truly heinous shit in the Bible, but the life of Jesus shows that while, as a Christian, I still need to grapple with it, I am not bound to affirm or replicate it. I am inspired here by the Womanist hermeneutic expressed in the story of an enslaved woman, who was told about the biblical instruction that slaves should obey their masters. She replied by saying that if she ever learned to read, she’d just not read that part of the Bible.

Now, I actually think we ought to still be reading the whole thing, even the “bad parts,” and I’ll engage in some of that momentarily. This is what I mean about still having to grapple with it. However, I think that this woman’s basic instinct is entirely correct. She was able to recognize that an endorsement of slavery was simply and indefensibly wrong, and that the Bible is misused if it is used to hold people in oppression, rather than to promote their liberation and flourishing.

Returning to that moral distance between our assumptions and those encoded in the Bible, sometimes that distance is just a neutral matter of fact. Other times, it’s because we’re wrong and the Bible offers us a corrective. Still other times, as I’ve just noted, the Bible reproduces harmful and mistaken understandings of its authors and we disagree with it because our culture has progressed into a better knowledge of reality. It’s not always apparent which is the case, which means that we must be constantly engaged in discernment as we read both the Scriptures and our own moral lives. Being contradicted and challenged by biblical texts gives me the opportunity to examine myself and my assumptions.

Very briefly, I am committed to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as that criterion. I further interpret this narrative through the lens of the church’s creeds (thus, I affirm that Christ is not just a really good dude, but the eternal Word of God, now incarnate as a human being, having taken flesh from his Blessed Mother, Mary). This doesn’t resolve all the ambiguities, of course, but it’s a pretty good starting point, I think. In Jesus we see God taking God’s stand alongside the poor and downtrodden and against the rich and powerful, and doing so even to the point of death. His is a power that operates by self-giving love, and not be coercive force.

Dialectically Appropriating a Problematic Text

All that to say, it’s been a somewhat surprising realization just how accurately the Scriptures describe many of the dynamics that we’re facing right now. Examples could be multiplied, but I’m going to focus on a passage that at first blush might seem highly problematic from the standpoint of contemporary moral sensibilities. Consider this passage from the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans:

¹⁸ For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth. ¹⁹ For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse, ²¹ for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened. ²² Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves. ²⁵ They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

²⁶ For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, ²⁷ and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

²⁸ And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done. ²⁹ They were filled with every kind of injustice, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, ³¹ foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

These verses are well known and frequently appealed to for their condemnation of sexual contact between people of the same gender. And I want to acknowledge that all sort of harm has been done by people appealing to these verses for those reasons. That’s some of the heinous shit that I repudiate with all my heart. It is good and holy work to affirm LGBTQ folks, their identities, their lives, their loves, their rights to be themselves, and to oppose the forces that make life harder for them. This is all the more important to assert in this time when the Trump administration is targeting trans people. I regard the administration’s actions as vile and demonic.

However, I still think that these words from Paul have something to offer us. And that we benefit from engaging with them dialectically.

Paul is Homophobic, But That’s Beside the Point

Careful readers will note that Paul’s statements about gay and lesbian sexuality is not a conclusion for which he argues, but rather an example that he provides in the service of his larger argument. In other words, Paul is operating with assumptions about sex and sexuality and then proceeding from those assumptions to make a different point.

As a first century Jew, living at a time before there was any category of sexual orientation, Paul’s horizons are heteronormative. He just takes it for granted that sex is for the propagation of the species, which means that it’s a matter of penises in vaginas and that at a statistically regular interval, it’s going to result in babies. On such assumptions, for genitals to be doing stuff that does not and cannot result in baby making is an exercise in futility. It doesn’t even propagate the species! (This, of course, also implicates heterosexual couplings that are non-procreative, whether because they involve contraception or where ejaculation happens anywhere but within the vagina. I raise this point because quite a few Christian groups who would condemn gay sex endorse non-procreative straight sex, even though both run afoul of the apostle’s logic in Romans 1.)

Paul is obviously aware that some men have sex with other men and some women have sex with other women. But, again, in his time there was no category for sexual orientation. When men had sex with other men, it was not a matter of mutual regard and equality. It was a constructed along lines of social dominance. The superior male penetrated his inferior, but it would be shameful for him to be penetrated in turn. (This of course, carries all sorts of misogynistic connotations, for what it conveys about a person being penetrated.) And often enough, male on male sex was pederasty: a man having sex with a boy. So when that’s the sample set that Paul has for sex between people of the same gender, I’m not sure we could reasonably expect him to have his heteronormative assumptions overturned.

We, though, live in a world where we understand such things as sexual orientation, a world in which gay couples care for each other and use sex to deepen their bonds, rather than to assert dominance or to subjugate each other. I don’t assume that Paul would affirm gay sexuality if he lived today and shared our assumptions. I just insist that he was thinking and talking about something very different in his own day.

Anyway, all that to say that the heteronormativity of this passage is not the point of the passage, but rather an expression of something its author already assumed, and which he saw as illustrating the actual point he is arguing: that rebellion against God’s order carries its own punishment.

Thus, he understands what he sees as the futility of gay sex as a ready-made example of this larger point. Fail to honor God and now all of a sudden you’re not even propagating the species! Refuse to affirm the truth, and now your mind is darkened. In this passage, God is not inflicting punishments upon anyone. Instead, God is just allowing them to follow the destructive path that they’ve chosen.

We Have Sown, Now We Reap

And we find ourselves in a very similar situation now in our national political life. Voting for Donald Trump was a foolish and wicked act that 77,302,580 Americans committed. And now we bear the punishment of electing him. That punishment is that he’s in charge now. Chaos has been unleashed and lives are being upended. The prices of consumer goods has shot up and it looks like it will only continue doing so. Vital services including special education for kids with disabilities, are being suspended and defunded. Civil servants, including those whose job it is to make sure drinking water is safe, or that public lands are maintained are losing their jobs. Measles is making a comeback, and will soon be followed by other preventible diseases, because now we have anti-vaxxers in charge of Health and Human Services. Air travel is getting increasingly dangerous as the FAA is gutted. The “deep state” is being installed as the oligarch in chief, Elon Musk enriches himself at the expense of the American people. Communities are being destabilized as immigration round ups occur.

Of course, living in a society means that all these bad things hurt all of us and not just the people who voted Trump into office, but it is indeed beginning to hurt them too, and will continue to do so. We’re in this mess because we—as a society—have done this to ourselves. The punishment for the sin of electing Donald Trump is that now Donald Trump is in charge and we’ll have to deal with all the harm that unleashes.

Turns out Romans 1:18–31 is true after all, just not in the way that homophobic fundamentalists assumed it was.