It is a stretch to say this first post is from Turkey. Literally, as I begin, we are over Turkey in a holding pattern waiting for a storm to subside so we can land at the Ankara airport.
.
But my head
has been partly in Turkey for months as I have been reading, praying, and
thinking in preparation for this time of sabbatical study. I have been learning
a bit about the first century Jewish Turk, Paul the Apostle to the gentiles. I
have been reading the views of Schweitzer, Sanders, Wright, and a brilliant
young classicist Sara Ruden. I have learned a lot. But there is one key point
on which I am not satisfied that any of them have explained Paul well. They are
all better scholars than I could ever hope to be (though this is a question of
law and I may be a better lawyer). I want this point to be clear because it is
crucial to our understanding of Christianity and that clarification would go a
long way to resolving some of the heated controversies in today’s Church,
particularly issues of LGBTQ inclusion.
We all know
Paul had a huge dust up with James, Peter, and eventually even Barnabas over
his radical inclusion of gentiles -- radical in that he maintained that gentiles could become Christians
without first becoming Jews. The way the scholars describe the issue is, in
fairness to them, the way Paul spoke of it: did gentile Christians have to
subscribe to “the law of Moses”? Paul said “No” while the others said, in
greater or lesser degrees, “Yes.”
But here’s
the problem: Paul says gentiles are free from the Law of Moses but then goes on
to emphatically forbid a whole laundry list of infractions, some famously
concerning sex. Paul is pretty adamant about keeping clear of idolatry and
mistreating other people – but he is radically inclusive when it comes to such
things as circumcision and kosher eating. How do we make sense of this seeming
inconsistency?
“The Law of
Moses” is a comprehensive umbrella term for – not 10 but – 613 written
commandments scattered through the Hebrew Scriptures, plus centuries of oral
traditions interpreting those laws (comparable to judicial decisions
interpreting the Constitution and statutes in the Anglo-American legal system).
But those laws are not all alike. They fall into 3 categories:
1. Moral laws – regulate how we treat
each other. The book of Deuteronomy and other books from the same group of
writers (the D source) are full of moral laws. Do not lie, cheat, steal.
Forgive debts. Pay the laborers fairly and promptly. Extend hospitality to
aliens. Leave the gleanings of your crop for the poor. Judaism practically
invented the whole notion of religion infused with morality. Not that other
religions may not have had a moral qualm here and there, but morality was not
high on the concern list for ancient deities before YHWH appeared to Moses with
a moral concern – the oppression of Israel by Egypt. Until then the primitive
gods were more interested in getting their sacrifices. Transgression of a moral
law was called “sin.”
2. Ritual purity regulations – define
the cultural standard of yuckiness. You must not eat this, touch that, or
associate with people who do. All cultures have such standards. But they vary
widely from culture to culture. Sex is a great subject on which we can distinguish
between ritual purity and morality because in our culture the word “morality”
has gotten wrongly associated with sex. In the Jewish Law, adultery was a moral
offense against the family.[i]
It can hurt people. Having sex during menstruation, on the other hand, did not
hurt anyone. But it was prohibited as a ritual purity violation because their
culture thought of it as “unclean.” Transgression of a ritual purity regulation
is not a sin. (I am not the one who said that. It’s the Bible.) Ritual purity
violations are not sins. They are “abominations.”
It’s a bad-sounding word but it does not mean a super bad sin. As the Bible
uses “abomination,” it is not a sin at all. It is merely something that
essentially smells bad according to a particular culture’s sensibility.
3. Cultic requirements – prescribe acts
of worship, particularly sacrifice, that honor the deity. Ancient religious
texts, like the early Vedas, are quite thorough in telling us how we are
required to pay ritual homage to our gods or God. The Hebrew Scriptures go into
great detail about how to furnish the Temple and how to perform the many
required sacrifices.
All these
things together make up the Law of Moses. But the Jewish attitude toward the
Law had been evolving through the centuries as one might say Judaism matured
from a narrow tribal cult into a great World Religion. Remember that, from the
get go, Judaism was cutting edge in giving morality a big role in religion. But
at first Judaism was still a primitive tribal religion worshiping a primitive
tribal god, just one who had an unusual interest in justice, mercy, and
integrity.
[At this point, just past midnight, we have
landed in Istanbul and are refueling in order to take another run at Ankara.]
Over time,
Judaism saw its God as larger and larger, culminating in monotheism. The God
they worshiped was not theirs alone but the God of all people, including those
who did not share their distinctive cultural taboos. By the time of the
prophets, we hear YHWH disavowing or at least downgrading the whole cult
sacrifice system.
I have no pleasure in the blood of
bulls and lambs and goats . . .
Stop bringing your meaningless
offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths, and
convocations –
I cannot bear your worthless assemblies
. . ..
Yet on the day of your fasting you
do as you please
You exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and
strife.
And in striking each other with
wicked fists . . ..
Is not this the fast I have chosen:
To loose the chains of injustice
And untie the cords of the yoke.
To set the oppressed free and break
every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with
the hungry
And to provide the poor wanderer
with shelter –
When you see the naked to clothe
them
And not to turn away from your own
flesh and blood?
Isaiah 1
Go to Bethel and sin.
Go to Gilgal and sin yet more.
Bring your sacrifices every morning
And your tithes every three years .
. . . .
Boast about them for that is what you
love to do,
Declares
the Lord . . ..
But let justice roll down like the
waters
And righteousness like an ever-flowing
stream.
Amos 4, 5
For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,
Acknowledgement of God, not burnt offerings.
Hosea 6
Third
Isaiah will quote God as saying; “My Temple shall be a house of prayer for all
people.” Isaiah 56. All people? The prophet directly says the eunuch who had always been
banned from the Temple for being unclean/ mutilated will be welcome. What about
the non-Jews? What about the ritually unclean? A new spirit of inclusion was
emerging hundreds of years before Jesus.
The course
toward inclusion was not steady and it was not without controversy. After
Babylon destroyed the Temple and took the leaders of Judah into exile for 40
years, faithful practice of the Temple Cult became impossible. So some Jewish
leaders doubled down extra hard on ritual purity to compensate and keep Jews
separate, uncontaminated. When they returned to Judah and began to restore
their society, Ezra and Nehemiah ordered the people to be stricter than ever.
The non-Jewish wives were to be divorced and deported along with their mixed
race children. Top scholars believe the book of Ruth, valorizing the Moabite
grandmother of King David, was written in protest against the narrow chauvinism
of Ezra and Nehemiah.
So for
centuries, there had been a movement in Judaism toward universality and
inclusion that transcended the cultural taboos that divided God’s children into
rival and often-warring camps.
Then along
came Jesus, descended from the Moabite woman Ruth, born out of wedlock perhaps in Judah, but spending his early
childhood in Egypt, then growing to adulthood in “Galilee of the Gentiles” (where ritual
purity could be sketchy). He healed the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman
and the son of the Roman Centurion, violated ritual purity several times most
dramatically by drinking from the cup of the Samaritan woman at the well while
telling her the time would come when all
people would worship God neither on the Samaritan holy mountain nor in the
Jerusalem Temple but rather “in spirit and in truth.” Jesus, told the story of
the Good Samaritan who proved more righteous than the Jewish clergy, After the
resurrection, he commanded his disciples to go “unto all nations” baptizing them in the name of the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Spirit.
This Jesus,
who was crucified after a ritual assault on the Temple cult (while quoting Isaiah 56 to challenge the Temple's exclusiveness -- Matthew 21) was decidedly in
line with the prophets who exalted Jewish morality above ritual purity and cult
sacrifice. His actions and teachings were all about an inclusion that
transcended Jewish taboos and cult practices. As the centuries went by, a
decidedly universalist Jewish morality came to trump the narrow exclusive
tenets that had defined the religion in its beginning.
[Here we landed in Ankara, cleared
customs, found our agent not surprisingly absent, got a cab which took us a
long long way to the Neva Palas Hotel, where the polite young cabbie banged on
the door to get them to open for us, and we had a short but good night’s sleep
with our windows open to the sounds of Ankara’s colorful nightlife. And now it
is morning of our first day on the ground in Turkey.]
Conservative
Bible scholar N. T. Wright is emphatic that Paul was a good Jew and that his message
was faithful to that of Jesus. I agree. I just want to emphasize that Jesus and
Paul after him were on a particular side of a particular ongoing Jewish
argument. It was about inclusion and the elevation of morality (kindness,
decency, fairness, compassion) over ritual purity and religious ceremony. Paul
would not conscience any narrow insistence on Jewish ritual purity regulations
or Temple sacrifice being made a pre-requisite for receiving the grace of God
in Jesus. He would not make admission to the Temple a first step to membership
in the Church. He had no use for such things as circumcision and dietary
restrictions; but the moral law Paul defended with a purple passion.
Now this
leads us inexorably in 2015, with our pending church canon and Supreme Court
case on gay marriage, to consider what Paul had to say about homoerotic
behavior. We start with remembering what the Law of Moses has to say on the
subject. It isn’t much. There is nothing
whatsoever in the Torah about lesbian acts. For gay men, only one homoerotic
act is labeled a ritual purity violation. Cross-dressing and one male
homoerotic act are the only prohibitions at all relating to homosexuality [ii]in
the Law of Moses and they are clearly ritual purity violations – not moral
sins.
So what did
Paul have to say about homosexuality? Short answer regarding lesbians: Paul
said the same as Jesus and the Law of Moses before him: nothing.[iii]
But what about gay men? If we take away the various texts that are
mistranslated – some retranslated only since the 1970s to apply to
homosexuality -- we have only the oft-cited passage from Romans 1. Did Paul who
otherwise stripped away ritual purity laws left and right to clear the path to
salvation for gentiles save this one ritual purity law based on only two verses
of Hebrew Scripture?
There are
two persuasive answers. Each has had numerous proponents among credible
Biblical scholars, but I will focus on one spokesperson for each view. They
would be Sara Ruden in Paul Among The
People and Paul Helmeniak in What The
Bible Really Says About Homosexuality.
Ruden
places Paul in the social context of classical civilization. His time knew
nothing of mature committed gay relationships. Frankly neither committed
straight nor gay relationships as we have them today existed in that era. Homosexuality
was a matter of dominance and cruelty; usually practiced against children,
particularly slave children. Ruden interprets Paul’s criticism of homosexuality
as a moral issue, not because it was same gender sexuality but because it was a
sexualized expression of the domination system, the principalities and powers
of the present age, which the Kingdom of God would overturn. The last thing the
people Paul criticized would have wanted would have been gay marriage. In fact,
gay marriage would be precisely the kind of committed loving relationship that
Paul extolled in 1 Corinthians 13. It would replace the cruelty and domination
of 1st century homosexuality with the moral values of God’s Kingdom.
Helmeniak
focuses on Paul’s language and the precise pastoral context of the Roman
congregation rather than the broader social context. The congregation in Rome
was locked in conflict between the gentiles and the Jews. At one point, Emperor
Claudius had exiled them from the city because of their rancorous quarreling.
Paul writes Romans in sections, addressing the Jews first, then the Gentiles.
He parrots back what they say about each other, generally saying, “yes, yes,
that’s how they are” Then with significantly greater theological eloquence he tells
them to “get over it.”
In his
treatment of gentile homosexuality, he agrees with the Jews that the gentiles
have behaved paraphysis – “unnaturally”
– but then at Chapter 11 he pulls out the zinger. Now God has behaved paraphysis – “unnaturally” – by grafting
the gentile branch into the vine of Israel. If you think two people of the same
sex being partnered is unnatural, that ain’t nothing compared to putting Jews
and gentiles in the same Church.
I find both
Ruden’s and Hemeniak’s arguments persuasive. They both have a valuable moral
force. If we are trying to get at what Paul was really on about, either could
be right. I give the nod to Hemeniak for this reason: Paul takes on not just
homosexuality but a variety of behaviors in this same passage. He explicitly
calls other behaviors sins, but he speaks of homosexuality in the conventional
Jewish terminology of a ritual purity violation. I believe if Paul were
addressing the violence, oppression, and degradation of masters exploiting
their slave boys, he would have spoken of sin. Here he is concerned with the
“unnatural” ritual purity violation only to eventually say God has taken all
such distinctions off the table in order to save us all.
There is a
trajectory in our faith. We have moved a long way past a bloodthirsty tribal
god who wanted our cattle burned on his altar. We have instead a God who is
actually worthy of our worship because our God is a Love that manifests as
justice, mercy, and nurturing relationship, a God with the capacity for delight
and forgiveness. Paul’s letters about the place of the Law in our faith,
properly understood, lead to a faith that connects us instead of divides us. It
is a faith that fits the Church’s mission to “unite all people to God and each
other in Christ.”
[i]
Actually the definition of adultery Paul was working with doesn’t match the
definition that got Hester Prynne her scarlet letter, but that’s another
subject. Suffice it to say the issue for Paul was moral because it concerns how
people treat each other. It’s ethical, not ritual.
[ii] I
know cross-dressing is not really about homosexuality; it is a thing unto
itself. But I am trying to cover all bases here in fairness to the other side.
[iii]
The Romans passage on women behaving “unnaturally” has been recognized from the
earliest days of Biblical interpretation to today to be about sex acts other
than lesbianism.
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