Rogers brings an approach that manages to be simultaneously conservative and traditional, and liberated—not to say liberal—to the question of sexuality in the Christian church. In the process, he makes convincing and fascinating critiques of much Christian theology that, while I do not have the expertise to assess them fully, feel correct, and make a lot of sense. And his conclusions are beautiful and, again, simply look and feel true.
Rogers has to deal with the text of the Bible. The Old Testament mentions homosexuality twice. At Leviticus 18:22 it says: “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.” It prescribes the penalty of banishment. Later, in Leviticus 20:13, the text uses substantially the same language, except this time it prescribes death for both partners.
Once we get over the fact that even the very same book of the Bible seems a little confused about the issue, the question is, do these prohibitions carry through? After all, the sections of Leviticus around them deal with prohibited degrees of consanguineous marriage, which the Gentile church has largely forgotten and derived from other sources, and against sacrificing babies to Moloch, which simply isn’t an issue. Moreover, the New Law of grace is fundamentally different in character.
The New Testament makes no such obvious prohibition. Jesus never mentions it. Paul makes two possible references. Romans 1:26-27 has a reference to men and women committing “unnatural acts” with one another as a characteristic of Gentiles without the Law. 1 Corinthians 6:9 also mentions “homosexual offenders,” although from the Greek word used—arsenokoitai—it is less clear, because this word was Greek sex slang in the first century, apparently. A similar word shows up meaning “homosexual” in Greek literature, but it is sufficiently different in spelling and usage to suggest a different shading of meaning.
As historians and theologians have documented, the Church has traditionally considered heterosexual marriage normative and homosexual love and marriage to be exceptional, although it has frequently been tolerated as an exception. This does not have to preclude changes in the doctrine, however; recall that Scripture is very much in favor of slavery, and yet at some point the Christian tradition turned against it, for reasons more traditional and humane than scriptural. Similarly, Protestant churches permit divorce for various reasons, despite the extremely clear New Testament injunction against it in any way, shape, or form. So there is ample precedent for fictive or revised readings of Scripture that emphasize the overall sense of the passages, without taking them out of context—noscitur a sociis, after all—rather than reading them legalistically and out of the context of the passages in which they are found. But regardless of how you look at the New Testament passages, taking them in isolation is both legalistic—which Paul condemns over and over again, and with none of the ambiguity we see here—and theologically vapid, both of which are not parts of how we “do” theology. What is Paul getting at?
1.
Rogers does not take on an easy task for himself. He lays out a hermeneutic of charity, and, using this hermeneutic, lays out sympathetic accounts of the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ positions on homosexual behavior and marriage. The ‘conservative’ account is concerned chiefly with holiness of body, which, to be sure, is an extremely important value. It is part of the way that God deals with us, and it should not be underestimated; moreover, the simplest sense of Scripture is that homosexuality is bad, therefore there should be no homosexuality. The ‘liberal’ acount seems mostly concerned with the language of rights. But the language of rights, for all its value in political and ethical philosophy, doesn’t really have much place in Christian theological discourse. He also assumes that homosexuality exists. This is to say, it is not made up, and it is not a “disease” that must be—or even can be—“cured.” It is not a “lifestyle choice”; people cannot simply choose not to be gay, with or without the help of twelve-step programs. It is a given fact with which we have to deal.
In order to create space in which to talk about homosexuality, Rogers needs to push back against Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, and needs to talk to mainline Protestants who are open to his arguments but expect him to make them and make them well before they will assent. In order to make these pushes, he presents Thomas Aquinas on the one hand, and Karl Barth on the other. This is perfectly proper, since it is hard to find a deeper or better statement of the characteristic natural law theology of the Roman Catholic church than Aquinas, or a deeper or better statement of Evangelical theology than Barth. Furthermore, Rogers is himself a scholar of both, having written a very smart dissertation on their interrelationships which was subsequently published as Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God.
Nevertheless, I suspect from language in footnotes that Rogers knows he is going to attract few people even to read his book from churches with a traditional of hierarchical authoritarianism, Biblical fundamentalism, or both. Thus, although he focuses his attention on serious Roman Catholic and Presbyterian thinkers, his audience is clearly more community- and Spirit-oriented churches.
2.
Romans 1:20ff. is an extremely strong passage, but it should get our theological doubts going because it chiefly relies on a “gross-out” argument about Gentiles, and explains that “[a]lthough they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death!” Rom. 1:32. How, precisely, do Gentiles without the law know this, except that the Judaizing party at Rome has been pressing it on them? The first sentence of chapter 2 makes the sting: “[y]ou therefore have no excuse!” Following on, Paul makes clear that when he wrote this passage, he was playing into the prejudices of the Judaizing party at Rome, only so that he could hammer them on the other side with virtues like patience and repentance.
Reading Romans 1:20ff. as a condemnation of them is a gross misreading; it is a condemnation of us. The fact is that there are virtually no Christian converts—certainly in the Episcopal Church—who were originally Jews. We thus have a regretable tendency to forget that as Gentiles, we are the ones Paul is making fun of here; we are the ones who are grossing out the Jews. We are the Gentiles who are condemned. But more to the point, it is a caricature, meant to play on the prejudices of the Judaizing party, to show (a) how the Old Law convicts us, and (b) how the New Law sanctifies and justifies us. It may in fact have little if anything to do with Paul’s actual views, but instead have quite a lot to do with the views of the Judaizing party at Rome.
Furthermore, as Rogers points out, Romans 1:27 in the New Revised Standard Version (“NRSV”) uses the term “unnatural relations.” This is a poor translation, and exposes the NRSV for the liberties it takes with the text to compromise with certain doctrinal positions. Similarly, Latin Vulgate Bible, which Thomas was using, was translated by St. Jerome, a notorious prude, and it shows: Jerome's Latin says contra naturam, “against nature,” or "unnatural." But St. Paul’s original Koine Greek read para phusin, which would more properly be translated into Latin as super naturam, “above and beyond nature.” “Against nature” or “unnatural,” in Greek, would have been epi phusin, which Paul chose not to use. This gives us an insight that can be used to fully explain Paul’s concept of what was going on in Leviticus.
In Leviticus, as mentioned above, the prohibition on homosexual sex comes between prohibitions on consanguineous sex and sacrificing babies to Moloch. Both of these can be taken as examples of lust. But if this lust is unnatural—epi phusin—why would it have to be proscribed? After all, human beings are animals, with physical bodies that lust as a matter of “nature.” What is genuinely unnatural, at least in our fallen world, does not have to be prohibited.
One possible way to understand these passages is to say that our spirits are not lustful, but our bodies are. But this seems to take nature as evil; this is Gnosticism. There has to be a better way to understand it. Both Athanasius and Thomas make the move here by saying that we are each one undifferentiated human being, both flesh and spirit, that God wants to save both body and soul, but that nature is fallen; thus death enters into the world. After all, in the Kingdom of Heaven, nature itself will be transformed such that the lion will lay down with the lamb.
This makes it far more difficult for us to make the reasonable—on its face, anyway—inference that homosexuality is “unnatural” because it cannot issue in children. Moreover, in making this type of argument we tend to turn to Aristotle as our paradigmatic authority on “nature,” which seems a little odd when natural science has advanced a bit since then. In another way, certain Orthodox and Anglican ecclesiastics have pointed out a grave shortcomings in the Roman Catholic account of marriage as being primarily about procreation, and the Evangelical Protestant assumption that it is about sublimation and control of lust. To the credit of both persuasions, they also see it as being secondarily about unification of the partners, but even so, it encourages an instrumental view of the other that is ultimately unsacramental and ungraced in character.
The point here is, that the move from nature as it is, to nature as it should be, and inferring homosexuality’s place in the Kingdom of God from that analysis, requires eschatological leaps that the text might not warrant.
3.
The Roman Catholic Church admits the existence of homosexual persons—something most Evangelical churches do not do—and gives a fairly sophisticated natural law account of why homosexuals may not marry, and must be celibate. This account relies at points on some arguments that seem to confuse “fallen” nature and “redeemed” nature a confusion with which Roman Catholic theology in general is shot through. Moreover, it is a confusion that a close reading of Paul, as we just saw, dispels; for what Paul is saying is not that homosexuality is against nature, but is merely more than natural. It’s a quantitative problem, not a qualitative one.
Regardless of its derivation, the argument’s conclusion is that every individual sex act must, in order to be licit, tend both toward (a) the unification of the partners; and (b) be “open” to the procreation of children. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, do we need to assume that therefore a woman who has had a hysterectomy, for example, simply may not marry? Or her marriage, if she is in one, can be annulled? Or must be sexless? Or possibly this is a limitation on the power of God: since Sarah became pregnant long past childbearing years, it is possible for opposite-sex couples to become pregnant at any time, but for gay couples, well, it’s just a little too miraculous. This argument might work for a Catholic, but it should make any Protestant very nervous.
Another way of looking at it that the Roman Catholic Church uses but is also commonly found in Protestant churches (including in Barth) is the doctrine of complementarity. This view, common among the Church Fathers, builds on Genesis 1:27 and 1:28 to say that God’s creating humanity “male and female” and asking them to “be fruitful and multiply” implies complementary roles in society. This is obviously a view we need to be careful with, since can tend toward a retrograde and ultimately unbiblical view of women as defective men. This is not the place for a full exegesis, but we should recall that there is no male or female in Christ, and Paul addresses the women Euodia and Syntyche as clergy in Philippians 4:2-3.
The best way of getting around this is to see reproduction as a communal good. Otherwise, there would be a problem with those who are called to a life of monasticism or even just singleness, because every single person would be called to marry and be fruitful and multiply, even if he or she felt a clear call from God to singleness. Moreover, as Rogers notes, we should note that this language of Genesis doesn’t really tell us much about what happened in Eden, the place where there really was a redeemed nature. In fact, as soon as Adam and Eve get together, they get into mischief. The only thing we know about what is right for them is that it is not good for a man to be alone.
Yet another way of looking at procreation as a communal good, and involving the Trinity in the picture, is to see the Trinity for what it is: a triune God who is entirely self-sufficient with itself. God created the world not because he wanted to create companionship, but as a free act of will. This must be the case, because the Trinity is complete as the interaction of God the Father, Jesus the Word/Creator and, in a gender-bending move, the Mother because “through him all things were created,” and the community provided by the witness of the Holy Spirit. A Trinity that was compelled to create would not be God.
The human marriage covenant can be seen as a type of this Trinitarian union: the Book of Common Prayer prescribes that in addition to the pair to be wed, there also be a priest to officiate and at least two witnesses, who will swear to help uphold the marriage. Thus, like the Trinity, there is a three-part Father-Son-Holy Spirit/Husband-Wife-Community typology going on here. Any coherent pneumatology has to hold that the Holy Spirit is not the Creator—that is the Father—nor is it the hypostasis through which creation occurred—that is the Son—but the celebrator of the love of the Father and the Son, and the sanctifier of creation.
Barth also presents textual problems. Although Barth published two complete commentaries on Romans in his own lifetime, he never addressed the homosexuality issue in his comments on Romans 1, and in fact seems almost unaware the issue exists. Barth’s overall treatment of homosexuality takes up a tiny part of his vast Church Dogmatics—a mere few pages—and is far from thorough. Thus, commenting on his thought, Rogers make the analogy between Barth’s doctrine of Israel and his doctrine of homosexuality. Barth winds up in his work holding that the Jew is an imperfect form of the Christian. This creates a problem, because Barth also needs to work with the text of Romans, where we find out that the Christian is an imperfect form of the Jew, Jewish only by adoption. Barth famously says, “because the election of God is real, there is such a thing as love and marriage.” Thus, Rogers makes Barth say: If Gentile Christians really are engrafted into the tree of life as adopted children of God, then the salvation of the community requires its recognition of marriage equality. Even more than Rogers’ treatment of natural law, this is truly a theological tour de force that must be read to be believed.
Perhaps the best and final objection to the complementarity doctrine stated too strongly and typologically is that it makes Jesus himself a “defective” human, because he never married nor procreated. The doctrine of complementarity is useful in practical pastoral counseling, perhaps, to a point, but it is too easily and too often overstated as a doctrinal theme.
4.
Just for fun, let’s do a thought-experiment with the Book of Ruth. It’s a very short book, but it’s hard to see what the point is; is it historical? Prophetic? Where does it “fit”? Because it’s such a difficult book, it barely appears in the Revised Common Lectionary, but it is an extremely important book, and Ruth appears as one of the few women in the genealogy of Jesus.
We are all familiar with Chapter 1, where Naomi’s husband dies, and her sons marry Ruth and Orpah. Her sons then die, and Naomi orders Ruth and Orpah to go back to their families. But Ruth refuses, saying, “[w]here you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” Ruth 1:16-17. In form and content, this is in essence a marriage vow. What’s more, it historically comes after the Law, not before it. A Christianized Jew, in sneering at the Gentiles as he read Paul's Romans 1, would also be sneering (1) at his own holy book and (2) at Christ himself. It’s a powerful and convicting problem!
After some adventures, Ruth and Naomi attempt to get their kinsman Boaz to impregnate Ruth through subterfuge when he’s drunk, and so that he’d be blacked out and no one else would know. Ruth 3:3-6. Moreover, the text seems equivocal—Naomi explains her rationale that Ruth should have someone to look after her, but Boaz would have no duty to marry a servant girl, although he would have a duty to support the child. Is it a permissible reading here that Ruth and Naomi wanted a child to bring up in their family unit?
It certainly seems so, when we move to Ruth 4:16-17. Naomi brings up Ruth’s and Boaz’s child Obed, and the women say “Naomi has a son.” It’s hard to get over the basic idea here that Ruth and Naomi have formed a family unit, and that Ruth is (most likely) just one of Boaz’s multiple wives. He serves his function, and Naomi and Ruth serve theirs.
Ultimately, the doctrine that marriage has two uses is impoverished. Perhaps in some “natural” sense, it exists only for the satiation of lust and the continuation of the species. But those of us who are part of the Body of Christ aim a bit higher than that. The Kingdom of Heaven, after all, is like a wedding feast; to the oddly single-gender wedding of Father and Son.
Our desire for God, his desire for us, and fundamentally the sexual desire for one another in marriage (properly understood), are all erotic in nature. Telling a person with homosexual desires that those desires are inherently sinful, disregards his humanness, and his resemblance to God; telling him that he may not fulfill his erotic feelings in a marriage denies him the sanctification in the Trinity into the Kingdom of God.
But it also says something about us. If the community of believers is unwilling to participate in the sanctification of a couple, then it is also unwilling to participate in the sanctification of itself. And thus we become nothing more than the caricatures Paul lays out in Romans 1, if we say “no” to God’s invitation to participate in the Trinity and in the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit; but we can also say “yes”; this is part of what it means to be in the image of God.
5.
So, would I recommend this book? Maybe. It is extremely hard, as this review might imply. It took me weeks to read it, and it took me weeks to write this review in an attempt to do it justice. On the other hand, I’m not sure that it is possible to really understand the conservative theological argument for marriage equality unless you read this bool. Therefore, I would recommend reading it, but only if you’re willing also to put in some time and effort in understanding Aquinas, Barth, and to some degree Rowan Williams, whom Rogers quotes constantly. If you’re not willing, then just read Williams’ short article, “The Body’s Grace.”
