Episode 43: Pretty and Witty
Not Necessarily the Good News
Path of thought: Headline: “Catholic leader whose organization voted to deny Biden communion caught using gay dating app”
Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, the general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had lead the charge to deny President Biden communion for his abortion stance and I started interested in the hypocrisy angle so common in GOP politicians and clergy. However, when I went to research the story, I was faced with a couple of articles from the WSJ, one of which referred to “conservative Catholic publication, The Pillar.”
Read that article and two things stood out - the repeated phrase “According to commercially available records of app signal data obtained by The Pillar” and a lengthy section of the article written, supposedly in relation to Burrill’s position in cracking down on child abuse in the church but clearly just written to conflate homosexuality with pedophilia.
The More You Know
What informed Paul’s negative opinions of homosexuality as a legitimate way to express love? We know that he was a conservative who wanted to anchor the new faith in Old Testament tradition. There are several verses in the Old Testament about the, “sin,” of homosexuality. For instance:
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
Leviticus 20:13
Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination.
Leviticus 18:22
Add to this nearly identical stories in both Genesis 19: 1-11 and Judges 19: 16-24 involving roving gangs of homosexual rapists who prey on men travelling from city to city. In both cases the travelling men are sheltered by, “righteous,” elders who offer their virgin daughters to the lustful mob in an attempt to placate their needs. In one case the mob is stopped by angels. In the other the rapists accept the travelling man’s offered concubine and rape her to death.
The endless cycle of kings that follow the book of Judges take turns indulging and preventing idol worship, and encouraging or punishing the male and female prostitutes that were a part of those rites.
This explains why Paul, in the book of Romans, concludes that idol worship is the cause of homosexuality, and describes this as part of his construct on the origin of sin:
Why did Paul add these condemnations when Jesus and the rest of the disciples did not? Paul seems to have felt that it was his job to place the new Christianity in the context of the old religion. Try to make it acceptable to people coming from Judaism. The irony is that Paul’s evangelism eventually spread outside of Jewish communities and into gentile groups.
Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Sprong has written on the idea that Paul himself was a homosexual man, and that his struggle with his own urges were the basis for his writings excluding them from salvation in the new religion. Bishop Sprong’s writings were inspired by theologians like Arthur Darby Nock, who visited the idea of Saint Paul as a struggling gay man.
There is no actual evidence to support the idea that Saint Paul was gay. It is a concept that we must acknowledge in discussing him, but there is not biblical or extra biblical historical source that supports the theory. Others scholars have felt keenly the contradiction we brought up last week; that the same man who wrote such powerful passages about the love of God could not be the same man who wrote hurtful passages condemning sexual choices that are out of people’s control. The idea here is that these passages were added later by translators and some early churchmen. That could be the case, but there is no proving it, at least not with the documents we have on hand. Finding a very old manuscript without the anti-homosexual additions would be the only way to prove it.
In the end we can accept what we have: a stridently anti-gay Paul, who for his own reasons, has excluded same sex love from acceptable expression, even insisting that God has set up this rejection. Of course, as we learned last time, this is the same man who insisted that some people were, “vessels of wrath,” created by God to demonstrate his redemptive, or punishing power.
If we accept all scripture is infallible, then we have to accept this as part of our faith. The prejudice is not only justified, but endorsed by God. If we say that the scripture is only right when divinely inspired, how do we make the distinction between inspired and uninspired?
Maybe there is another way to look at it. Maybe, as Christians, we use the words of Jesus as a meter, and measure all of the stories as consistent with the spirit of Christ’s teaching. If we look at the scriptures through a Christ powered lens, we can see where an apostle’s personal opinions or struggles made it into the work.