A friend, an Episcopal priest and biblical studies colleague, has sent out an e-mail invitation to recommend some summer reading for the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Most Rev. Rowan Williams spends a lot of his time these days expressing grave concern over the Episcopal Church, especially now that we have decided, in its General Convention, to resume living out our faith. The Archbishop has now called for "painstaking faithful exegesis" of the Bible on the question of homosexuality. My friend's not-so-subtle point is that there is already a wealth of reading material available should the good Archbishop decide to take a weekend off and read it.
As it happens, some of the best scholarship on "the Bible and homosexuality" comes from biblical scholars who are also Episcopalians and Anglicans--many of them priests and many of them teaching in Episcopal seminaries. (Not that holding such credentials is a prerequisite for "painstaking faithful exegesis": with William Stringfellow I rest my case.) Here are just a few recommendations, with annotation.
Fundamental: in 2006 Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold commissioned a response to the Windsor Report's invitation (par. 135) for the U.S. church to offer a theological rationale, in effect to explain what we thought we were doing when we consecrated the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. The result is an articulate and eloquent statement of Episcopal theology at the dawn of the 21st century. To Set Our Hope on Christ (2006) is available for reading online or downloading as a PDF. Click here.
That document nevertheless is flawed, in my opinion, by something like a failure of nerve at one crucial point. After carefully and thoughtfully explaining why Episcopalians don't just pick up a Bible and ask it a question, the authors imply at one point that that's just what they did--they "asked God" what to think about homosexuality and opened their Bibles to get the answer. I thought that part of the response was its weakest point, and explained why in my column for The Witness online: to read it, click here.
William Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex: New Testament Sexual Ethics and Their Implications for Today, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), is the best book in print for understanding New Testament sexual ethics in their first-century cultural context. That title isn't just titillation: Countryman discusses the cultural norms surrounding purity and impurity ("dirt") and the patriarchal valuation of women as property ("greed") rife in the New Testament world. The book is available from Fortress Press or (of course) amazon.
In 2008 the bishops gathered at Lambeth issued a "Reflections" document (to read it, click here) concerning their approach to the Bible during their conference. Though the document protests that it's not to be taken as any sort of official statement, it's phrased with the excruciating care normally reserved for such statements, and at the 2008 meeting of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars I was invited to take part in a panel responding to the statement as if it were at least worthy of a serious reading. I offer my thoughts on "The Bible at Lambeth" here.
Finally: Romans 1:24-27 gets inordinate attention in all discussions of "the Bible and homosexuality," and almost always is read as Paul's theological diagnosis of the homosexual "condition." I think that reading is fundamentally wrong. I've discussed the passage in two books (Liberating Paul [1994; 2006], pp. 192-94, and The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire [2008], 75-83), and in summary form in this 2003 column on "The Apostle Paul and sexuality" at The Witness online (click here).
What do other scholars think about that argument? One attempt at rebuttal, from Robert A. Gagnon, is here (to which I will respond in another post). Since the publication of The Arrogance of Nations, I've heard from other scholars (okay, a total of three so far) who find the argument "completely convincing": "it convinced our whole graduate seminar on Romans"; "it blew my socks off." That argument was the hook for the brief mention of my book in Lisa Miller's cover story on gay marriage, "Our Mutual Joy," in Newsweek, Dec. 15, 2008. But of course being mentioned in Newsweek only guarantees that I'll be vilified by a wider circle of conservative Christians--not that I'm right.
Grace and peace,
Fr. Neil