Terry Lane, a Melbourne religious and political affairs commentator, recently wrote a brief article about the biblical attitude to homosexuals (’Better to run away than burn in hell’, Melbourne Sunday Age, 2 Jul. 2006).

Lane began by quoting Paul’s letter to the Romans:

God gave them up to dishonourable passions. (Er. God made them do it? - T.L.) Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another … [T]hose who do such things deserve to die …

Having observed that ‘[t]here’s not much wiggle room there’, Lane proceeds to quote from I Corinthians:

Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

To digress for a moment, it’s quite clear that most Australian Religious Right leaders fall squarely into the category of ‘revilers’ (i.e. abusive critics) - see, for example, last week’s blog; and therefore that they should expect to be treated by their god in exactly the same way as the homosexuals they revile.

Returning to Terry Lane’s piece, he proceeds to make the point that the current argument about ‘the Christian view of homosexuality’:

… goes right to the heart of Christianity - just how authoritative and definitive is the Bible?

Lane develops this general concept further:

The Bible is ambiguous on the real moral issues such as war, economic injustice and slavery. Warmongers and pacifists can find supporting verses to back up their prejudices. Even slave owners could take comfort from the injunction to slaves to obey their masters.

As Lane says, laissez-faire capitalism and the subordination of women can also both be justified by recourse to a literal interpretation of the Bible - or parts of the Bible.

All this was too much for Canon Dick Pidgeon of Bairnsdale, Vic. Lane had fallen into ‘the trap of fundamentalist Christians’ when he based his conclusions on ‘isolated passages taken out of context, with no regard to their social, ethical background’:

There are many homosexuals living in gentle, loving relationships who would resent greatly being lumped among those St Paul condemns as ‘given up to dishonourable passions’. After all, Paul equally condemned heterosexual lust.

After giving a couple of similar examples, Pidgeon concludes with this admonition:

Terry, we welcome your stimulating critique of the Christian faith, but please honour us with the intelligence not to rely on a few so-called proof texts, instead of viewing Christ’s teaching as a whole. (Sunday Age, 9 Jul. 2006)

Now, in terms of the war between Christian fundamentalism and Christian liberalism, I am instinctively more sympathetic towards the latter position - in other words, I’m something of a ‘Pidgeon-fancier’. (They’re there if you look for ‘em, folks!) However, the point must be made that given the claims of historic Christianity, the liberal position is not inherently the stronger competitor. Making allowances for social and cultural differences between widely-separated eras and civilisations has a lot going for it, but it’s always going to smack of pragmatism. And it’s never going to land a killer blow against the fundamentalist position, at least not in our lifetimes.

The essential problem is that no-one knows what Jesus really taught. Pidgeon wants Lane to ‘view Christ’s teaching as a whole’, but why should Lane or anyone else do so when the various parts of the ‘teaching’ simply cannot be read as a consistent unit? ‘Ambiguity’ is the key word here. And I leave aside for now the question of whether Christ was one person, many people, or as I suspect, a mythical construct all the strands of which are now impossible to trace.

A long time ago I read a story about a boy who trapped a boastful magician. The wizard swore that he could successfully perform any impossible feat, to which the boy replied, ‘Make two plus two equal five’. When Christians tell me that you can reconcile ‘homosexuals deserve to die’ with ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, I always think of that story.

Filed in: Biblical criticism, Sexuality