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LTJ on Authority

Posted: Tuesday Oct 27th | Author: JohnO | Filed under: Anthropology, Contemporary Church | View Comments

This is one of the better articles that I have read on the issue of Authority as it pertains to the issue of homosexuality. Thank you Luke Timothy Johnson for writing it. It quickly cuts through the red tape and puts the issue that few people seem to actually be discussing.

So we can—and should—understand the mix of fear and anger that fuels the passionate defense of such positions. For those who hold them, something sacred is at stake. And something sacred is at stake. The authority of Scripture and of the church’s tradition is scarcely trivial.

LTJ writes from the perspective that homosexual unions should be an allowed practice within Christianity. And he knows what that entails.

The exegetical situation is straightforward: we know what the text says. But what are we to do with what the text says? We must state our grounds for standing in tension with the clear commands of Scripture, and include in those grounds some basis in Scripture itself…

I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality—namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God’s created order.

Of course, anyone coming from a Protestant tradition (mind you that LTJ does as well), will have an issue with this approach, he defends it:

The answer is that over time the human experience of slavery and its horror came home to the popular conscience—through personal testimony and direct personal contact, through fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, of course, through a great Civil War in which ghastly numbers of people gave their lives so that slaves could be seen not as property but as persons. As persons, they could be treated by the same law of love that governed relations among all Christians, and could therefore eventually also realize full civil rights within society. And once that experience of their full humanity and the evil of their bondage reached a stage of critical consciousness, this nation could neither turn back to the practice of slavery nor ever read the Bible in the same way again.

Many of us who stand for the full recognition of gay and lesbian persons within the Christian communion find ourselves in a position similar to that of the early abolitionists—and of the early advocates for women’s full and equal roles in church and society. We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position, yet place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts. To justify this trust, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6). And if the letter of Scripture cannot find room for the activity of the living God in the transformation of human lives, then trust and obedience must be paid to the living God rather than to the words of Scripture.

His key to ‘experience’ is precisely something one needs to be aware of: the transformation of a human life. After all that is what the gospel is all about, a transformation. There was no Scriptural reason for either the ordination of woman, or the removal of slavery. Yet, both Scripture and transformative experiences, were used to justify both advances.

By “experience” we do not mean every idiosyncratic or impulsive expression of human desire. We refer rather to those profound stories of bondage and freedom, longing and love, shared by thousands of persons over many centuries and across many cultures, that help define them as human. The church cannot say “yes” to what the New Testament calls porneia (“sexual immorality”); but the church must say yes to the witness of lives that build the holiness of the church.

Before I get called for blasphemy and out-and-out revisionism let LTJ remind us of something:

Such discernment is difficult, but it is necessary. I believe there is the deepest sort of consonance between such an approach to God’s revelation and the witness of the New Testament. Indeed, the New Testament compositions owe their existence to the struggle to resolve the cognitive dissonance between a set of sacred texts that appeared to exclude a crucified messiah as God’s chosen one (“cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree,” Deuteronomy 21:23) and the powerful experience of Jesus’ new and exalted life as Lord through the Holy Spirit—an experience that empowered the first believers.

If you study the NT you have to realize this very basic fact. The Christian faith was developed in contradiction to many Jewish claims. And it was done against a Jewish canon, by Jews. Why? Besides being the largest question of Christian origins, the answer includes “because they believed it to be true”. No element of precedent could be found, no plain meaning of Scripture to grasp at, only the re-reading of their cherished texts in light of their experience got them on their way.

In short, we would not have the New Testament as Scripture if the first believers had not been willing to obey the living God disclosed in their own bodies more than the precedents provided by the writings—writings they also, by the way, considered holy and inspired by God.

I encourage everyone to read LTJ’s article. It is worth the time. Having said all this, the matter is still far from settled. This line of argumentation allows the debate to take place. This validates that the debate is open, and needs to be heard. What is lacking, and something I’ve never seen yet, is an actual theology of homosexuality that is life giving. The love of another can transform how one feels about oneself. But is that the extent of it?