Scot McKnight in a series of thoughtful and engaging posts on homosexuality comes down with a rather curious position. First, I agree with his understanding of the nature of human being as so many broken and/or distorted images of God and that reconciliation with God leads to the restoration of that image through Jesus. This seems clear enough especially in the writings of Paul as through the Patristics and onward. Second, his understanding of the practice of Jesus as one whose understanding of humanity’s need for reconciliation and his act of reaching out to those who need such reconciliation the most by inviting them to his table offers an inclusive vision of Christian mission and practice. For as Paul says in Romans “Christ came for the ungodly” and “whle we were sinners Christ died for us”. Third, he is clear that the church ought not exclude anyone at all and practice the same radical inclusivity of Jesus in how the church understands its own reason for being. The boundaries that the church establishes in its purity system should be permeable and flexible to respond to the presence of God’s working through it in the same way that Jesus worked to reconcile the world to himself. Thus, there should be no arbitrary boundaries that the church establishes in order to maintain a specific set of propositions and dogmatic assertions which can run counter to the inclusive nature of the table of Jesus that demands nothing of us other than our pledge to seek a new way of living as we “pick up our cross and follow” Jesus. However, when McKnight looks to scripture regarding homosexuality he makes a curious move. Referencing and quoting all of the passages that deal directly or indirectly with same sex relations he makes a few assertions. First, the historical contexts of these various passages clearly has to do with sexual relations of a debased and violent nature and not of a situation that is monogamous and self-giving. This is, of course, an argument leveled against use of these passages as an injunction against homosexuality in general since they have nothing to do with what would be considered a loving relationship of mutual respect and support among persons of same gender. Second, he clarifies that Jesus said nothing of homosexuality, but was very clear about what constitutes a justified relationship between people and God - love your neighbor and love God and all other commandments fall under these two. Third, he argues that scripture clearly singles out same-sex relationships as that which is an example of something that runs counter to the order of God which we can quite reasonably infer from the scriptures was interpreted to be evident in marriages and relationships of those of different genders. To say that the writers and traditions of the Hebrew and New Testament scriptures did not understand marriage in this way seems to be a rather dishonest understanding of scripture, its sources, its historical import, and its social contexts. This notion of order runs straight up through Paul and it seems that same sex sexual relations is consistently used as something to offer an example of that which is in dis-order in contrast to the order of God that the law provides. That is to say, same-sex relations seem to be used as an example of how gentiles are distinct from Jews in terms of the law which ratifies the covenant of God with his people. Fourth, he argues that homosexuality is not necessarily a choice. He does not argue this in terms of biological determination (which continues to gain credibility in the scientific community - here is one example article worth a read) but in terms of those social and psychological processes that shape human behavior and knowledge that go largely unnoticed by us. Hence, one does not choose one’s gender identity in many cases. Then comes the curious move. First, even if our gender identities are not something that we necessarily choose, the way that we behave in terms of those identities are actions that we choose. We can either have sex with such and such person or not. Nothing in our gender preference determines that choice even if that choice is fundamentally conditioned from the start. Second, it is a theological and moral responsibility to be attentive to the order of God as revealed in scripture and to be faithful to that order. In other words, we cannot ignore those pieces of scripture and of God’s revelation and covenant that we not not believe are supportive of our current beliefs and positions on things. Why is this curious? McKnight does not draw out the probabilities here and leaves this in an almost irreconcilable tension for us to sort out. To this end what he has presented is not helpful. This seems to come off sounding far more of a bureaucratic pronouncement rather than constructive engagement. What he does well is cast the issues into sharper relief and dissect the tensions, but leaves the reader mired in the tensions that we already know are there.
- Do not be legalistic and understand scripture as constitutive of a compendium of judicial pronouncements, but observe the order that God has established.
- Invite sinners to the table of God and help them find reconciliation with God to allow God to repair the broken image of God in humankind through “embracing grace”, yet at the same time this order of God must be observed and followed in order for that image to be restored in practice.
For what good is a restored image of God by any means, even the resurrection, if one is unsure of how to live in that reconciliation? The order of God as McKnight uses in his hermeneutic is that very guide to make this reality tenable, but he does not quite go there and leaves his position perhaps intentionally ambiguous. But the logic is still there if we apply the test of the pragmatist to it. There is something missing in his discussion of a pragmatic sort. In the end one is not sure how to live what he is discussing here. If order is the primary issue with homosexuality - and here I am referring strictly to homosexual relationships that practice charity, humility, kindness, etc. to one another in mutual upbuilding; not the debased violent sort that provide the contexts of so many scripture passages - then how does one who is homosexual and in such a relationship maintain that order? If my relationship with someone of the same gender actually brings me closer into the mutual love in the being of God that is the perichoresis, am I to retain the order of God in terms of relationships for the purpose of child bearing and rearing between a man and a woman prior to this enriched sense of love? Or is the order of God the very essence of this kind of love that drives the direction of the law and love is what we ought to hold prior to the order of purity that the gender roles in scripture clearly imply? Finally, if this is but one aspect of the order of God’s covenant with humanity that we ought to uphold in response to God’s grace, what of other prescriptions of the law that function in the same ritualistic manner such as keeping Kosher, not working on the Sabbath which starts on Friday evening, observing the Passover, etc.? McKnight seems to have missed the corpus of Paul’s theology to the gentiles and its implications for how non-Jewish Christians ought to understand the relationship between the law, grace, faith, and the cross of Christ. What is the relationship between this understanding of “order” and the law? This at least demands discussion, but alas McKnight leaves us wanting. What McKnight does is double-speak. It seems to pander to both sides of the argument - be inclusive and invite all to the table without reservation, and yet uphold the order of God as revealed in the passages that deal with sex between those of the same gender. It is as unpragmatic as it is improbable. How do we welcome those who are fundamentally and consciously cutting against the grain of the order of God in an inclusive way - in the way of Jesus? The answer is that we need to rethink this order itself. If our own doctrinal and social boundaries ought not act as immutable boundaries to God, it seems that those boundaries through which the revelation of God was witnessed in scripture itself ought neither not be as immutable as McKnight seems to assume ought to be the case here. If the love of God as revealed in the Cross is to be the preeminent guide for Christian action and behavior, then it seems that it ought to dictate how we understand the order of God - even as witnessed in the whole of scripture. Perhaps the Cross is the very order of God revealed. But McKnight fails to take us to this level of reconciliation and leaves the order of God in terms of purity laws in irreconcilable tension with inclusive invitation to the very table of Jesus. Finally, the alternative is to see both the Cross and the Table of Jesus as mutually revelatory as, in Niebuhr’s formulation, the intelligible event that renders all other events intelligible. If we see these events as constitutive of the revelation of God’s love, then something happens to that order which McKnight assumes does it not? The Cross is what resolves the tension created between the law and God’s grace. But McKnight does not relate the Table to the Cross, and that is where his position fails since we cannot actually live it with integrity.
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March 4, 2008 at 7:40 pm
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