L.T. Johnson and Eve Tushnet debate homosexuality...

... in the pages of Commonweal (thanks to Ryan for the link). Johnson, who can be a very good and quite objective biblical scholar (I own several of his books and have benefited from them), openly admits that when it comes to issues involving sexuality, he isn't going to have much patience with Catholic teaching or Scripture or anything else that contradicts his opinion on the matter. In fact, he basically admits that if the Catholic Church were to change her teaching about homosexual acts and were to support "same sex" unions, it would do serious damage to Church authority:

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. A real challenge confronts those of us who perceive God at work among all persons and in all covenanted and life-enhancing forms of sexual love. That challenge is to take our tradition and the Scripture with at least as much seriousness as those who use the Bible as a buttress for rejecting forms of sexual love they fear or cannot understand.

The polemical smirk about "sexual love they fear or cannot understand" is typical of Johnson when it comes to his support of "same sex" unions, contraception, women's ordination, and related matters, as I observed in my 2004 review of his book, The Creed, in the pages of This Rock magazine:

When Johnson agrees with Church teaching, his writing is measured and his arguments are logical. But when Johnson parts ways with Church teaching, the tone becomes polemical and he shows little if any respect for the thinking and logic behind those teachings. For example, in speaking of gender-exclusive and gender-inclusive language, Johnson quotes radical feminist Mary Daly approvingly and writes:

"Within Christianity, gender-exclusive language about God has served to support ecclesiastical sexism and power structures that have been bad for women. Recent arguments from the Vatican that support the refusal to ordain women to the Roman Catholic priesthood because priests represent Christ, and Christ is male, only make the point by reducing it to the absurd. As Elizabeth Johnson has noted, sexism is truly revealed when even the theoretical possibility of God’s incarnation as a woman is rejected" (83).

This jab at Pope John II’s apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis raises a question much larger than the priesthood. If the teaching "that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone" that has been "preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church" (OS 4) is "absurd" in some way, then what other historical, consistent teaching of the Church might we consider "absurd" and in need of correction? The Church’s definition of marriage? Its condemnation of artificial contraceptives? Johnson says yes to those as well. But what about the Church’s teachings about Jesus and his divinity? Or the Trinity? Or the Resurrection? Cannot those beliefs also be considered absurd, outdated, and in need of change? Johnson vigorously resists these suggestions, not seeming to notice the inconsistency in doing so.

In addition, Johnson must know that there is more to the Church’s teaching about the priesthood than a glib appeal to Jesus being male, as if the Church has no interest in the deeper meaning of gender. Many fine Catholic theologians have delved into the depths of sexuality, gender, ecclesiology, and Christology and have explored the dynamic relationships between Christ and the Church, Christ and Mary, and man and woman. Many of these theologians are women, including Edith Stein, Gertrud von le Fort, Alice von Hildebrand, Monica Migliorino Miller, and Janet Smith. Unfortunately, Johnson ignores those contributions.

Discussing gender, Johnson writes, "It is a form of generational narcissism to change texts to suit one’s own needs" (85). Indeed, but what about changing doctrines and dogmas to suit one’s needs? Is it coincidental that Johnson’s views on sexuality strongly resemble the narcissistic views of his own generation, enamored as it is with radical feminism, pro-homosexuality, and disgust with the notion of celibacy?

And so, in the Commonweal piece, Johnson writes:

The task demands intellectual honesty. I have little patience with efforts to make Scripture say something other than what it says, through appeals to linguistic or cultural subtleties. 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. To avoid this task is to put ourselves in the very position that others insist we already occupy-that of liberal despisers of the tradition and of the church’s sacred writings, people who have no care for the shared symbols that define us as Christian. If we see ourselves as liberal, then we must be liberal in the name of the gospel, and not, as so often has been the case, liberal despite the gospel.

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.

This, again, is not surprising to those who have read some of Johnson's other works. In my review of The Creed, I highlighted Johnson's proclivity toward stating that doctrines or beliefs that he rejects are divisive, hurtful, sectarian, irrational, and otherwise flawed, yet rarely makes an argument for his opinion. It is simply so because he says so:

Once again calling down a plague on many houses, Johnson chastises those "Christian groups" who "confuse the accidental with the essential" and "tend to make a single element of belief or morals the litmus test of membership and indeed of true Christianity. For some, it is the literal inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture; for others, baptism in the Spirit; for others, recognition of papal authority; for many, the condemnation of homosexuality and the canonization of the nuclear family" (298). In an ironic passage, Johnson states that those groups are "fundamentally sectarian, because they define themselves as much by what they oppose as what they affirm. They exemplify the classical definition of heresy as an elevation of one truth to the distortion of other rules" (299).

These are caricatures of the worldviews found among most Christians, Protestant or Catholic, who certainly emphasize specific beliefs but almost always within a complex framework of other beliefs. Again, these statements smack of rhetorical devices used to demonstrate how broadminded Johnson is in contrast to large numbers of Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and Catholics.

Johnson declares that "so individualistic has Christianity become in the United States, indeed, that one could argue that there is no church in America" (309). The solution, he explains, is "creedal Christianity," which is "a healthy alternative" to the extremes of fundamentalism and modernism. "In contrast to a commitment to history found in both opposing parties, creedal Christians insist on the superiority of myth to history. Yes, we must know history and know it well, to read Scripture responsibly. But the truths of which Scripture speaks can scarcely be contained within the framework of critical history" (308).

The "Johnson Denomination," as I call it, rests squarely on the authority of the scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, who is—when it comes to homosexuality (and several other matters)—judge, jury, and Magisterium. In the Commonweal piece, he uses the strained argument equating views about slavery to those about homosexuality, as those Christians universally supported slavery for 1850 years before finally being smacked down by those who saw through the frail arguments that slave-holders attempted to build upon passages of Scripture:

So how is it that now, in the early twenty-first century, the authority of the scriptural texts on slavery and the arguments made on their basis appear to all of us, without exception, as completely beside the point and deeply wrong?

In fact, opposition to slavery not only existed in the early years of Christianity, it eventually led, during the Middle Ages, to the near elimination of slavery. As Carl Sommer argues well in We Look for a Kingdom, "Christianity began in an empire in which a third of the people were enslaved, yet it brought into being a world in which almost everyone knows slavery is wrong." (Read interview with Sommer here.) Slavery re-emerged, tragically, during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, despite opposition from Popes and other Christian leaders. Johnson, however, pushes the comparison:

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.

It seems to me that two very different things are being wrongly conflated here. One reason that Christians eventually recognized that slavery—an unjust act relationship in which this man owned and controlled that man—was wrong was because Scripture itself provided the basis for recognizing the inherent dignity and value of every man, regardless of race, color, creed. Man, made in the image of God, should be able live the freedom to choose what is right and good. Laws and rights should apply equally to all men. This is quite different from saying that the choice to commit homosexual acts, adultery, and fornication is morally good. Those who are enslaved have no choice; those who commit the above-mentioned acts do have a choice. Which is why, of course, the Church makes a careful distinction between a homosexual tendency or inclination and homosexual acts (just as there is a difference between in inclination toward stealing, adultery, murder, etc., and the actual commitment of those acts). For more on this I recommend Dr. Mark Lowery's article, "Authentic Freedom and the Homosexual Person" (Catholic Dossier, March/April 2001).

There is much more that could be said (and perhaps will be, if time allows), but consider this passage, in which Johnson pits God, the divine Author of Scripture, against Scripture itself:

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.

There are many problems here, but I'll just note how strange it is that Johnson uses a text of Scripture (taken out of context, neccessarily) to argue that we should be able—when our experience tells us so—to ignore Scripture.  Ultimately, of course, the real issue here is not so much homosexuality, as important as that topic is, but authority—something that Eve Tushnet takes up in her response to Johnson. As Johnson makes clear in The Creed, his experience and opinions should be the final seat of authority. We might well wonder how this is different from those who say their "truth" frees them to do this or that with impunity? As I concluded in my review of The Creed:

Just as Luther believed that sola scriptura would cure the Church of corruption and false teachings, Johnson believes that adherence to the "Creed alone" will do the same. Just as Luther never imagined (at first) that anyone freed from Romanist influence could read the Bible differently from him, Johnson seems to believe that a renunciation of 1,700 years of Catholic accretions, mixed with a modern sensibility about issues of sexuality and authority, will restore the Church and return final authority to those to whom it belongs: the theologians interpreting the Creed.

It is this pick-and-choose, cafeteria-style approach to the Creed that robs Johnson’s work of credibility and cohesion. Filled with promise and moments of insight, The Creed finally erodes into a sad screed, betrayed by its attachment to contemporary fads and the momentary obsessions of a passing age.

Comments

[Celestial SeraphiMan]

"...attachment to contemporary fads and the momentary obsessions of a passing age"

I'll try to be much milder and more relevant this time in asking questions.

Sam Francis claimed that none of the Church Fathers condemned slavery and that abolition arose solely out of liberalism. Secular-humanist sites have jumped on that claim and further elaborated on it. Are they right or are they wrong?

Thank you in advance for taking the time to clarify. I'm not here to accuse you of anything. I'm here to sift through the polemics floating around and gain a clear grasp of the truth. I understand that reading 'blogs won't be enough to deeply understand the faith's history, yet such understanding has to start somewhere.

[Ryan Browning]

See the link below Celestial.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14036a.htm

[Celestial SeraphiMan]

I appreciate the link, Ryan.

[Deacon Harold]

Here is another link re: the Church and slavery. Of particular interest is the work of Dr. Jaime L. Balmes:

http://medicolegal.tripod.com/catholicsvslavery.htm

[Sandra Miesel]

Large scale slavery was replaced by serfdom in the Early Middle Ages for practical reasons, not because of abolitionist teachings or campaigns. Serfs were not legally equal to free men but could under some circumstances gain their freedom.

The Carolingian Empire had no qualms about selling pagan Slavs to the Muslims just as Muslims would later sell pagan Central Asians to medieval Italians. Domestic slavery existed in Tuscan cities before the Renaissance.

The Age of Exploration made large scale chattel slavery profitable by providing workers for colonies. The Portuguese were the pioneers here, with their African ventures in the 15th C.

Nobody was paying attention to papal statements when there was money to be made.

[joe]

The review at 'This Rock' is really helpful. Thanks.

[spaxx]

What has the "very good and quite objective biblical scholar" Johnson got to say about Romans (1: 26-27)?

Commenting on the Epistle to the Romans (1: 26-27), Saint John Chrysostom denounces homosexual acts as being contrary to nature and says that the pleasures of sodomy are an unpardonable offense to nature and are doubly destructive, since they threaten the species by deviating the sexual organs away from their primary procreative end and they sow disharmony between men and women, who no longer are inclined by physical desire to live together in peace.

Saint John Chrysostom employs most severe words for the vice of homosexuality being discussed here and makes this strong argument:

"All passions are dishonorable, for the soul is even more prejudiced and degraded by sin than is the body by disease; but the worst of all passions is lust between men…. The sins against nature are more difficult and less rewarding, since true pleasure is only the one according to nature. But when God abandons a man, everything is turned upside down! Therefore, not only are their passions [of the homosexuals] satanic, but their lives are diabolic…. So I say to you that these are even worse than murderers, and that it would be better to die than to live in such dishonor. A murderer only separates the soul from the body, whereas these destroy the soul inside the body….. There is nothing, absolutely nothing more mad or damaging than this perversity." (St. John Chrysostom, In Epistulam ad Romanos IV, in J. McNeill, op. cit., pp. 89-90)

Ephesians (5:12) calls homosexual acts passions of ignominy because they are not worthy of being named,

"For the things that are done by them in secret, it is a shame even to speak of."

If L.T. Johnson is really a very good and quite objective biblical scholar how comes he missed this? Me thinks he is most definitely picky and choosy.

Homosexual acts are born from an ardent frenzy; they are disgustingly foul; those who become addicted to them are seldom freed from that vice; they are as contagious as disease, passing quickly from one person to another. (St. Albert the Great, In Evangelium Lucae XVII, 29, in J. McNeill, op. cit., p. 95)

A religious mystic of the 14th century, St Catherine of Siena, relays words of Our Lord Jesus Christ about the vice against nature, which contaminated part of the clergy in her time even more forcefully. Referring to sacred ministers, He says:

"They not only fail from resisting this frailty of fallen human nature, but do even worse as they commit the cursed sin against nature. Like the blind and stupid, having dimmed the light of their understanding, they do not recognize the disease and misery in which they find themselves. For this not only causes Me nausea, but displeases even the demons themselves, whom these miserable creatures have chosen as their lords. For Me, this sin against nature is so abominable that, for it alone, five cities were submersed, by virtue of the judgment of My Divine Justice, which could no longer bear them. It is disagreeable to the demons, not because evil displeases them and they find pleasure in good, but because their nature is angelic and thus is repulsed upon seeing such an enormous sin being committed. It is true that it is the demon who hits the sinner with the poisoned arrow of lust, but when a man carries out such a sinful act, the demon leaves." (St. Catherine of Siena, El diálogo, in Obras de Santa Catarina de Siena (Madrid: BAC, 1991), p. 292)

Saint Bernardine of Siena, a preacher of the fifteenth century, makes an accurate psychological analysis of the consequences of the homosexual vice. The illustrious Franciscan writes:

"No sin has greater power over the soul than the one of cursed sodomy, which was always detested by all those who lived according to God….. Such passion for undue forms borders on madness. This vice disturbs the intellect, breaks an elevated and generous state of soul, drags great thoughts to petty ones, makes [men] pusillanimous and irascible, obstinate and hardened, servilely soft and incapable of anything. Furthermore, the will, being agitated by the insatiable drive for pleasure, no longer follows reason, but furor…. Someone who lived practicing the vice of sodomy will suffer more pains in Hell than any one else, because this is the worst sin that there is." (St. Bernardine of Siena, Predica XXXIX, in Le prediche volgari (Milan: Rizzoli, 1936), pp. 869ff., 915, in F. Bernadei, op. cit., pp. 11f)

Now, we know why gays never seem to want out. Satan has a strangle hold on them; his hellish shackles simply cannot be loosened by natural means.

[Carl Olson]

If L.T. Johnson is really a very good and quite objective biblical scholar how comes he missed this? Me thinks he is most definitely picky and choosy.

Actually, Johnson admits in the Commonweal piece that Scripture condemns homosexual acts: "We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position..." Which is why I stand by my praise for his biblical scholarship. Not that I agree with everything he writes about Scripture, but for my money, his commentaries on Luke and Acts of the Apostles are among of the best. But as I noted in my piece for This Rock, Johnson seems to, well, lose it ("it" being logic, commonsense, intellectual integrity, etc.) when it comes to matters sexual.

Now, we know why gays never seem to want out. Satan has a strangle hold on them; his hellish shackles simply cannot be loosened by natural means.

Many who have chosen and are caught up in the homosexual lifestyle do want out. I think we could say that there are all sorts of sin—pornography, lying, gossip, etc.—that puts a stranglehold on people, and not everyone wants to stop commiting those sins. Or, if they do, they find it very hard to do so. Such is the human condition. We need to guard against making homosexuality some sort of "super bad sin" that allows us to put homosexuals into a category that the rest of us would never stoop to. Doing so leads to pride, and I would argue that pride can be just as damning as any sexual sin, the capital sins being "pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth or acedia" (CCC 1866).

[Celestial SeraphiMan]

Carl, thank you very much for your thoughtful comment. Pride is indeed one of the capital sins.

Spaxx, let me take you to task for the way in which you use those quotes.

"...For Me, this sin against nature is so abominable that, for it alone, five cities were submersed, by virtue of the judgment of My Divine Justice, which could no longer bear them. It is disagreeable to the demons, not because evil displeases them and they find pleasure in good, but because their nature is angelic and thus is repulsed upon seeing such an enormous sin being committed. It is true that it is the demon who hits the sinner with the poisoned arrow of lust, but when a man carries out such a sinful act, the demon leaves."

"Furthermore, the will, being agitated by the insatiable drive for pleasure, no longer follows reason, but furor…. Someone who lived practicing the vice of sodomy will suffer more pains in Hell than any one else, because this is the worst sin that there is."

Does this mean that genocide is perfectly natural? Why don't you use such language towards genocide? Do committers of genocide get light punishments in Hell? Wouldn't demons revel in any grave evil? Do we have to agree with every single literal word spoken by saints? Are you exploiting saints' words to single out a certain group, much like Fred Phelps? Please be careful not to slip and fall into the Fred Phelps crowd.

[Celestial SeraphiMan]

What I would like to add is this: please don't lump every single committer of any certain sin into a certain group. Who are we to judge subjective guilt? Moreover, why wouldn't modern psychology be an aid in understanding people's thoughts and feelings instead of relying soley on old-fashioned moralizing? I'm sorry if I seem "politically correct", but I'm expressing my thoughts as best as I can.

[Celestial SeraphiMan]

One more thing...are those "words of Our Lord Jesus Christ" approved by the Church as actual private revelation? I honestly doubt that our Lord Himself would deinigrate certain people as "miserable creatures" who consciously choose demons as their lords? Wouldn't He try to reach out to those people as He reached out to prostitutes and tax collectors?

[Celestial SeraphiMan]

I'll try to make this the last post in this thread.

First of all, I don't think that I'll go beyond the Catechism which simply describes homosexual activities as objectively grave acts. Nothing more, nothing less. That position is already caricatured as Neo-Nazi bigotry--please don't give ammunition to anti-Christian activists!

Second of all, even if sodomy was the main aggravating factor in the desctruction of the cities, weren't there other vices as well?

[Cristina A. Montes]

CS: Please try to distinguish the Church's judgment on the TENDENCY to commit homosexual acts and HOMOSEXUAL ACTS THEMSELVES.

Also, granted that homosexual tendencies have psychological/sociological/genetic/hormonal/whatever roots, these factors (except, perhaps, in a few instances which I am not aware of) do not obliterate the persons free will. If a person is not deprived of free will, he can still be morally responsible for his actions even if he's being influenced by a clinical condition. His condition may mitigate his responsibility to the extent that his condition diminishes his free will (if it's to the extent that he is deprived of either full knowledge or full consent it would make him guilty of a venial rather than a mortal sin), but he is still responsible to the extent that his free will has not been totally obliterated.

This idea actually affirms the dignity of persons with homosexual tendencies rather than downgrades it. It asserts that they CAN transcend their tendencies.

[Celestial SeraphiMan]

Actually, that's exactly what I'm trying to distinguish, Christina. I may have misspoken.

[Paul Cat]

LTJ will be teaching a class at Notre Dame this summer on Romans. I don't know how he is going to do it see that he fudges on a number of points that are in Romans.

[Raving Papist]

Luke Timothy Johnson has lectured several series for The Teaching Company. I would be very curious if anyone has them and, if so, what the courses are like.

I own 19 course series already from the Teaching Company.

(He says, waiting for Ed Peters to chime in.)

[Joseph O'Leary]

Eve Tushnet is hardly a match for Luke Johnson in a quarrel about the authority and dynamics of Scripture. See my discussion of both of them at josephsoleary.typepad.com

[Joseph O'Leary]

Of course is it very homophobic to refer to the homosexual orientation as a "clinical condition" -- a view rejected by the vast majority of psychologists and also a view not countenanced by the Catholic Church. Whatever moral point one is trying to make is undercut by the espousal of such views. Indeed, the efforts of pastors to speak any word of ethical challenge to gay and lesbian faithful are constantly undercut by the Sodom-and-Gomorrah fixation which seems to be as far as many people can get. False psychology and false biblical hermeneutics have been the greatest boon to gay liberationists, who thrive on the wilful ignorance of their opponents.

[Mark Brumley]

Joseph O'Leary, if I understand you correctly, then I think I can say that I concur that those who seek to support the Church's view of human sexuality can sometimes unwittingly undercut their efforts by the way they handle biblical texts, including the Sodom and Gomorrah passages.

However, I don't think we agree about the issue of homophobia, which I take on the analogy of other phobias to be the irrational fear of homosexuality, and the view that homosexuality is a "clinical condition".

Why is it, in your view, homophobic--very homophobic or just plain homophobic--to refer to the homosexual orientation as a "clinical condition"? And in what way is the view that homosexual orientation is a clinical condition "not countenaced by the Catholic Church"?

It would be helpful to have clarification on these points.

[Rick]

Anyone ever wonder if Fr. O'Leary thinks all heterosexuals are "homophobic" based on sexual orientation?