On Law, Nature, and Homoerotic Acts

There is so much confusion about homosexual behavior within Lutheran circles, that I shall try again to explain what was once thought obvious by Christianity: Homoerotic behavior, like many other human behaviors, is sinful. That this is true ought not to be startling to Lutherans who know that human beings perpetually sin against God in thought, word and deed. Curiously, however, Lutherans have increasing difficulty confessing the sinfulness of such acts, and indeed, of many types of sexual behaviors and practices.

The Lutheran position on the rectitude of homosexual behavior should be straightforward. After all, the great theological tradition has always held that there is an order of creation. The order of creation is the direct artifact of God’s design; it instantiates God’s primary intentionality for existence as such. The Biblical tradition has affirmed that it is part of God’s primary intentionality that a man and woman should leave their parents and dwell in life-long relationships with each other. God is the author of creation so it bears an imprint of his “eternal law” that can be apprehended through conscience as “natural law.” The natural law tradition expresses what God has objectively ordered nature to be.

Under the conditions of existence, the order of creation has fallen into sin from which it cannot free itself. Things that are, are not what they ought to be. Accordingly, human beings by their own natures (fallen human natures) are not, and cannot be, what they are by nature, by that which has been ordered by God. Natural law expresses God’s universal objective ordering; natural human natures instantiate the particular subjective ordering of individuals after their own ends, ends that are not part of God’s primal intentionality.

Given that the Biblical record unambiguously places man and woman together in the paradisical state within the order of creation, the question becomes what can the redeemed church support and proclaim as consistent with this order of creation. Obviously, human beings naturally are not who they are to be by nature. As fallen human beings living the redeemed life, what ought they to think about nature and about their natural acts that are not natural?

There are two choices: One can say that the orders of creation must be adjusted or accommodated to what is naturally possible. Some individuals are obviously natured and nurtured not to desire sexual and romantic relationships with members of the other sex. This is obvious. Moreover, some individuals are obviously natured and nurtured not to be able easily to avoid sexual promiscuity, sexual objectification, masturbation, serial monogamy, premarital sexual activity, etc. This is obvious as well. One can thus say that that which is not attainable, must be not be regarded as sinful, or must be differently understood as sinful.

The other option, of course, is to follow the tradition and claim that what we are sexually not who we ought to be. This option identifies divorce as sin, and understands how humans can be divorced - - particularly in a society like ours. This option identifies the addictive masturbation, pornographic consumption, and sexual promiscuity (especially serial monogamy) as sinful, but still understands how humans could be engaged in these behaviors - - particularly in a society like ours. Finally, this option finally identifies homoerotic behavior as sinful, yet understands how humans can be engaged in these behaviors - - particularly in a society like ours.

The fundamental question is whether we want to regard homoerotic behavior as consistent with the order of creation or not. To my mind, groups like the WordAlone Network have never claimed that divorce is consistent with the order of creation. If they were to have said that, and claimed that homoerotic behavior was inconsistent with it, then the WordAlone Network would be guilty of unfairly picking a particular sin to scorn. Questions about sex and sexuality are driven by society. General cultural forces generate the question of the propriety of homoerotic behavior, and it is this question which confronts the churches now; it is this question that needs a response. I do not believe there are many at synodical and churchwide conventions who want to claim that divorce, masturbation, and sexual promiscuity ought to be blessed within a liturgical context. This point must be seen clearly.

Unfortunately, Lutherans have abandoned any effort to think ontologically about divine law. They squirm at words like 'eternal law' and any attempt to identify a teleologically-ordered creation with divine law. They want to talk about the law only in so far as it confronts us, thus confusing the experience of being curbed by the law with the ontological contour of the law itself. But acting merely in accordance with the law, or acting due to the law does not change the meaning or ontology of the law. The law is the universal objective will of God for His creation, an objective will that is almost wholly obscured under the conditions of existence, an objective will grounding the promulgation of particular divine laws.

The time has come for Lutherans to rescue the divine law from its security within the phenomenology of human existence, and make again the bold and risky claim that the divine law really is God's, and that human apprehension of that law does not that law make.

Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part IV

Reading DSSHS Critically

Maybe it is, in fact, unfair to read DSSHS closely and critically. After all, it is the work of 14 committee members from different walks of life, having different educational backgrounds, different theological convictions, and different views on the propriety of same-sex relationships. However, since the document purports to be important enough that the entire ELCA study it, I shall take it with the seriousness it invites.

DSSHS starts promisingly enough, quoting Jesus’ summary of the law: 1) Love God above all things, and 2) love the other person as oneself (Matt. 22:36-40). But then things disintegrate rather quickly. As every good Lutheran knows, no one can do that, i.e., love God above all things and love the neighbor as oneself. While this fundamental material content of the law is binding on all human beings, nobody can accomplish it. Human beings have a fundamental deficiency before the law.

Unfortunately, DSSHS evades our full realization of this fundamental human deficiency. It asks, “What does it mean for us as sexual creatures to love our neighbors as ourselves and thus fulfill God’s law of love in this time and society?” (13-15) The game is lost from the outset because the question is the wrong one. A person simply cannot “fulfill God’s law of love.” The ‘thus’ in the question suggests that one could fulfill this law of love if one “as a sexual creature” did love the neighbor as oneself. But who can do this? To suggest it is possible is already to confuse law and gospel.

This confusion of law and gospel is further exacerbated when, a few lines later, the ELCA is identified as “a community of moral deliberation.” The use of this definition from a 1991 ELCA social statement is unfortunate because it confuses what the church is. Clearly, we should not expect members of the ELCA to have special ethical/moral insight or any special tools for ethical/moral reflection. The church is, as Luther says, those who hear the voice of their shepherd (Schmalkald Articles). But those hearing this voice are concerned not primarily with the development of acumen in ethical and moral reflection, but rather with salvation. They want to hear the voice and follow the shepherd, not learn how to mount ethical arguments. The church is a community gathered about a salvific concern (gospel), not an ethical one (law).

Further confusion ensues when DSSHS states that it wants to “speak in ways that can address both religious and secular discussions” (35-6). On the basis of this, one would expect DSSHS to identify something universal in Christian and secular experience. Lutheran ethics has traditionally been able to accomplish this with its two kingdoms approach: God deals with us with two hands. With the gospel of His right hand, human beings live in the realm of grace and faith. However, with His left hand, humans dwell in the kingdom of law and reason. The genius of Lutheran ethics has always been that because the foundation of ethical reasoning is not grounded in the particularity of Christian soteriology, ethical reflection from a Lutheran perspective retains a universal character.

However, any hope that DSSHS shall proceed in this time-honored fashion is immediately crushed by this: “[This document] contains important introductory material designed to explain how Lutherans approach ethics in the light of God’s incarnation and our hope in God who justifies us in Christ” (45-7). The foundation for a Lutheran contribution to a secular ethical discussion has now been lost. How might one find something in these two discussions that is common when the putative foundation for these discussions is the reality of incarnation and justification only granted by one of the conversation partners? This incoherency is never addressed in DSSHS.

Another theological problem occurs when DSSHS makes this startling claim: “As Lutherans we understand ourselves . . . as simultaneously righteous (saved by God’s grace alone) and sinful (convicted by the law)” (165-66). While one might argue on the basis of the “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner, that ‘righteousness’ just is ‘being saved by God’s grace’, any putative identity between being sinful and being convicted by the law is wrongheaded. Being sinful and being convicted by the law are logically independent notions. One is clearly sinful from birth even if one has never been convicted by the law. To confuse the two is to mistake the reality of not conforming to the law with the experience of not so conforming.

DSSHS’s attempt to use Christian freedom somehow to “preserve and guide all churchly teaching” (164), is also problematic. How is it precisely that “freedom from the crushing burden of our unworthiness before the law” engenders “responsibility and humility in service to the neighbor (200)? While the document says that we are to serve others because of God’s “promises, compassion and mercy” (213), it does not show - - and indeed it cannot show - - how God’s promises, compassion and mercy fill in the contour of what we ought to do. The problem is logical: An ought cannot be derived from an is. We cannot derive that we ought to be compassionate because God is compassionate, though we can conclude that we are in fact compassionate because God is compassionate. DSSHS purports, however, to be an ethical document. Accordingly, it deals with what we ought to do. DSSHS clearly is concerned with what is sexually licit and what illicit.

Throughout DSSHS one runs across ambiguous statements, of which the following is an example: “At heart, human beings are captive to sin - - needy, fearful, often misguided, and sometimes broken” (225-26). Here DSSHS seemingly suggests that sin just is being needy, fearful, misguided and broken? But this is surely problematic; for being needy, fearful, misguided and broken is not, strictly speaking, sin. For Lutherans, sin is primarily enmity with God. Sin is a relational property, not a non-relational one. The logic of ‘sin’ is this: ‘A instances the property S of sin if and only if A has dispositions, attitudes and actions not intended by God for A’. But DSSHS seems to suggest the following: ‘A instances S if A has some cluster of non-relational properties P.’ Apparently, properties P are also what is psychologically unhealthy for A. But this is entirely wrongheaded, for what is psychologically healthy or unhealthy for a person is logically independent of that person’s sin.

DSSHS makes some statements that cannot truly be intended by the drafters. Surely, the committee did not mean to say that “Lutheran sexual ethics cannot suggest that sexual longing or sexual expression is sinful intrinsically” (275-76). But why can it not do this? Are we not willing any longer to say that there are classes of sexual longings or expressions that are not intended by God for human beings to have and do? Is not a sexual longing or expression toward a child intrinsically sinful? Is it not also the case with a murderous heart? The confusion here is deep: Just because something may be “natural” for A to experience does not mean that God intends that what is “natural” for A to obtain. We must distinguish God’s natural law that A instance a set of dispositions B from the natural disposition A has not instance B. The sad fact is that humans now are not as they ought to be. Clearly, if, as Luther says, “human beings sin against God whether they eat or sleep,” then there is a large class of sexual longings and expressions with are intrinsically sinful.

As has previously been discussed, DSSHS states that “a Lutheran sexual ethic looks to the death and resurrection of Christ as the source for the values that guide it (325-26).” But the question is how does the death and resurrection of Christ guide sexual value formation? What is the specific connection?

Here, lamentably, there simply is deep ambiguity. One can say such things as that God was so merciful that He, in Christ, went to His death on the Cross. But precisely what does this imply for sexual human beings? Are we to conclude that since Christ did not condemn (or judge) us, we ought not condemn (or judge) our brother or sister? While this is right, it tells only half the story. In reality, we are both condemned by God for our sin, and forgiven in Christ for that same sin. What Lutheran ethics cannot do is leave out the law. It is because we are condemned and lost before God that God became incarnate and justified us. Lutheran sexual ethics must not forget the reality of God’s primordial intentionality for his creation, and the deficiency of His creation in actualizing that intentionality. Living out our freedom on account of Christ does not entail that we can change the identity conditions for “being lost.”

Finally, for a church defining itself as “a community of moral discernment,” the section entitled “Scripture and Moral Discernment” must come as a disappointment, for in this section we learn very little about how Scripture is to be used to discern what God would have us do sexually. The focal biblical quote in the section is clearly this: “Scripture teaches that God’s will for humankind and creation can be comprehended only through the foolishness of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ (405-07).” While this is, of course, true of God’s merciful will, Lutheran ethics simply cannot deny that God retains an original will for humans that “they be perfect as the Lord, thy God is perfect.”

The trouble here is very deep. It is as if the drafters of DSSHS have forgotten the ancient Marcionite heresy of denying the validity of the Old Testament and its teachings in favor of a single-minded concentration on the merciful salvific action of the saving God. For Marcion, Christ has come to rescue people from a situation created by a creator God who has made rather a mess of things. Accordingly, the old laws of the Old Testament have passed away and a new era has dawned. By steadfastly refusing to go to the OT and its law for determining the intentionality of God for human sexual being, DSSHS clearly flirts with the heresy of Marcionism.

As I have already said, the fundamental problem of DSSHS is that it forgets that God deals with His creation with two hands: on the left hand is law and reason, and on the right hand is gospel and faith. Lutheran theology teaches that it is one God who manifests Himself to us in these two ways. DSSHS consistently errs on the side of identifying God with only his right hand. But God is not one-handed; He is, in fact, ambidextrous. To work out a Lutheran social ethics on sexuality demands that both hands of God are equally considered. There is, on the one hand, the divinely-intentioned order that must be implemented; there is, on the other hand, the divinely-intentioned mercy that is freely given when the intentioned and just order is not implemented. An ethics without God’s left hand is cannot be a Lutheran sexual ethics. Accordingly, DSSHS, though written by Lutherans, is not a Lutheran document.

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part III

DSSHS and Antinomianism

Classically, ‘antinomianism’ applies to any theological position that downgrades the authority or integrity of the law. If one were to say, like Luther’s contemporary Johann Agricola, that the law needs not to be proclaimed among Christians, then one clearly is flirting with antinomianism. The question is this: Is DSSHS antinomian?

To answer this question clearly, one must first get an operating definition of law. I like the following: x is a law if and only if x is promulgated by an authority, is binding upon a class, and is in principle enforceable. Lutheran thinking has classically started with the promulgation or giving of God’s law to creation. God is an authority that has a clear intent with respect to His creation, and this intent is accordingly binding upon it. Furthermore, this law is enforceable by God: violators - - all of us - - are worthy of ultimate punishment. For Luther and the classical Lutheran tradition, the ‘oughtness’ of things is grounded upon a transcendent ought-intentionality. Oughtness is built into the very nature of things because God loads ought into creation. Not only does is creation bound by the ought, God has a capacity to enforce this oughtness He loads into creation.

The classical Lutheran story does not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. The classical tradition realizes that the ‘ought’ of law can only be grounded in the transcendent ‘ought-intentionality’ of God. Sin, of course, interferes, and what ought to be is not. The Fall is profoundly understood as the nonconformity of ‘is’ to ‘ought’. All of creation is wayward. The natural law upon creation given by God is not followed. Human beings have turned away from God and what ought to be. While the being of Creation was designed to be in conformity with the divine ought, it is not now in conformity. All have fallen short of the glory of God.

The whole idea of redemption in classical Christian theology is that God arrives in His incarnation to justify, e.g., to make right, the nonconformity of creation’s ‘is’ to the divine ‘ought’. Justification, on the basis of Christ, occurs when God judges His wayward creation that is not what it ought to be to be, nonetheless, acceptable to Him, to the One who can only judge it as unacceptable. For Lutherans, there is a “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner. Christ’s gifts of conformity to the ought are given to human beings, and human deficiency in the face of the ought is given to Christ. The result is that human beings live and Christ dies in accordance with God’s justice that can only properly judge nonconformity with the ought as worthy of death.

The fundamental problem with DSSHS is that a statement of what ought to be cannot be derived from a description of what is. To try to derive a prescription of how to behave sexually from a description of what God has done for us is a category mistake.

The profound problem with DSSHS turns out to be the ancient problem of “what has God said?” The notion of an external law claiming that human beings ought to behave in such and such a way seems fundamentally out of touch with our times. While human beings have never liked oughts, it seems that our time has a special disdain for them. In vast portions of western popular culture, normative ethics simply does not play. People can make no sense out of “absolute” claims that humans ought to be different than they are. The very notion of an objective reality that human beings must somehow conform to is today anathema. It is, of course, the triumph of Nietzsche. The medieval transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty have been unmasked and seen to be mere projections of the human will-to-power.

Lutheran theology in the last 125 years has strongly been influenced by Nietzsche’s critique. Accordingly, there is little hope that an ELCA committee on sexuality could move beyond the dominance of the subject and return to the object, to a way of thinking that allows again for the possibility of a real ought. To return to the ought, to an honest appraisal of how God intends things to be, means that human action will likely be curbed in particular ways. If man and woman ought to remain celibate outside of marriage, then that is what they ought to do, no matter how difficult that may be. That they won’t so remain is addressed by incarnation and justification. This is how it works; this is how it has always worked. But, as evidenced by DSSHS, this is no longer how it works.

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: Part II

DSSHS and the Divine “As If”

As others have pointed out, the term ‘Trinity’ occurs but once in the document, and there the three distinctive persons are not named. This is perhaps indicative of a deeper presupposition in the document: In discussing sin and law the document proceeds “as if” God were to exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and “as if” God had a definite set of attitudes towards the world. I say this “as if” pointedly because there is ample evidence in the document to suggest committee members actually reject the idea that that God has a primal intentionality towards His creation. Instead of viewing God as an individual divine being having a particular intention towards His creation (e.g., it is His Will that human beings do x under conditions y), God is understood as somehow having a general nature that human beings must “fill in.” The result of this “filling in” is that God’s “intentionality” towards x is asserted on the basis of the previous commitment of the drafters towards x.

In DSSHS, the nature of God and his relationship to His creation is understood on the basis of His graceful and merciful incarnational sojourn and justificatory activity. Given this general nature of the divine, what specific intentions would and could this God have for His people? Surely He would bring life out of death, make new the old, and do the unexpected (like rising from the dead). Since He dwells with us in our humanness in the incarnation, he accordingly dwells with us in our weakness and our weak wills. He is alongside of us in all of our sexual choices and foibles, never abandoning us. God loves us even in our weakness, so we are to love others in their weakness. God’s love for us clearly trumps his Judgment upon us. But outside of this, what more can be said about God?

Here it becomes more difficult. While Love and mercy are very good things, and while God’s gift of them to us maybe does suggest that we should be honest, sincere, and not jealous and envious in our relationships, love and mercy are not capable of providing a foundation for institutions such as marriage - - at least a foundation that can speak of marriage qua marriage. If love and mercy constitute the divine intention towards us, then it would seem that there is no greater reason to prefer married love to lesbian love. If God came and manifested love and mercy, should we not manifest love and mercy? And if we do, what reasons are there to do that within the context of heterosexual married love over homosexual, unmarried, committed love? It seems that it is a stretch to say that heterosexual love is more facilely derivable from the incarnation and justification than homosexual love.

The problem is that DSSHS does not avail itself of traditional Lutheran resources of natural law and orders of creation. By looking only at the incarnation for clues to God’s intention, readers of DSSHS seem to ignore what the Old Testament (and much of the New Testament) say about God’s rather distinctive intentionality for human life - - including human sexual life. It is obvious that DSSHS does not suppose that God has a general revelation for all human beings apart from the Christ event, and that the Bible has much to say about the specifics of God’s primal intentionality towards His creation. In fact, the fundamental question is not even asked in the document: Is homoerotic behavior in itself sinful? Is such behavior consistent with the Will of God, or does it run counter to His will? While it would seem to many Christians that one of these two alternatives must obtain, DSSHS seems to presuppose a third option: It is neither consistent with or inconsistent with that Will, and perhaps, to think it is, is itself profoundly wrongheaded. But to assume this is to assume that God is not the kind of being that has a definite will on these matters. Accordingly, the intentionality of God, while it might be an interesting theological construct, is not itself a real event or state.

The ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: Part I

Over the next few days I shall publish here my response to the ELCA Sexuality Statement. Below is Part I:

Since the time of David Hume (1711-76), philosophers have been struggling with the question of whether “ought” can be inferred from “is.” Famously, Hume held that it “seems altogether inconceivable how this new relation [ought] can be a deduction of others [is] which are entirely different from it.[i] Accordingly, propositions of how the world is simply cannot entail statements of how it ought to be.

Against this, naturalists of all stripes, including Hume’s contemporary Jeremy Bentham (1748 -1832) hold that how things are do entail how they ought to be. Famously, Bentham’s Principle of Utility “approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” [ii] Reflecting on the nature of this approval, classical utilitarianism argues that one ought to do that act which augments the happiness of those whose interest is in question. Evolutionary ethical theory thus permits a move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. If human beings are instilled by the evolutionary process with a moral sense, then the fact of this sense does entail what they ought to do.

In 1903, G.E. Moore (1873-1958) launched a classic argument against any kind of ethical naturalism. In his “open question argument” he points out that a statement like Bentham’s ‘pleasure is good’ cannot mean that pleasure is identical to good, for if that were so, then ‘pleasure is good’ would entail ‘pleasure is pleasure’. [iii] But clearly it remains an “open question” whether or not ‘pleasure is good’, but not that 'pleasure is pleasure'. Thus, anyone asserting that pleasure is good must be “saying something more” about pleasure than that it is pleasure, and this “more” must presupposes a non-natural property of goodness. To say ‘x is good’ or ‘S ought to do y’ is to say something that is in principle irreducible to mere descriptions of natural and social facts. Accordingly, ‘ought’ is of another order than ‘is’.

While philosophers since Moore’s time have been divided over the validity of the open question argument, there is no mistaking that a very powerful tradition of twentieth century philosophical argument followed Hume in denying that ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’. After all, even if beneficent values were somehow evolutionarily loaded into human nature, it would still not entail that one ought to act in accordance with those values. For a number of reasons, I am convinced that Hume is essentially right, and that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’.

So why do I raise this old controversy in this discussion of the ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality (DSSHS)? It is my contention that unknown to the committee members of the ELCA Task Force on Human Sexuality, their work actually presupposes the minority position in this philosophical debate: DSSHS assumes that descriptive statements about God’s incarnation in Christ and His justification of sinful human beings can entail a prescriptive statement about how one ought to behave sexually. By attempting to ground sexual ethics in the Second Article, DSSHS not only is unorthodox, but incoherent. It not only does not hold together rhetorically, it cannot do so logically. By analyzing what God has done for us in Christ, we cannot logically derive how we ought to act as Christians. As paradoxical as this might sound, to claim that we can do so is to confuse Law and Gospel. While from a description of what God has done for us in Christ, we can infer something of what we do in fact do as Christians, we cannot infer what we ought to do as Christians. To claim otherwise is to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; it is to ground the Law in the Gospel; it is to strike out in a way that Lutherans simply cannot do.

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[i] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.

[ii] Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter 1.

[iii] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica.

The "Sexuality Issue"

Members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) are confused these days about sexuality. They want to figure out if engaging in homoerotic behavior is consonant with assuming the predigtamt (preaching office) within a congregation. They also are contemplating whether pastors should be blessing same sex relationships.

The problem with talking about this issue is that few care about the arguments actually used to determine the positions adopted. People just want to know who is for and who is against it; they don't want to know why. Thus, it is with some trepidation that I offer the following analysis of the sexuality issue. Those that read this blog will know now that I am against it. I offer this analysis, however, not as an interesting psychological fact about me (e.g., that I am against it), but rather as a justification for being against it. I believe that one's justification for holding something true is much more than a fact about the speaker. It is a public argument offered in logical space, an argument that, in principle, gives others grounds for being against it. While what I say is not terribly original, the succinctness in how I have said it may well be. I offer this argument to people of reason who might want to consider these grounds in arriving at their own well-informed position:

Every human being has two mothers, the one from whose womb they emerged, and the language (mother tongue) they learned early in life, that language through and by which they structured and understood their world. The naming and predicative machinery of the mother tongue determines in large part the objects, kinds of objects, and qualities of objects one can encounter. The "immediacy" of human experience is mediated by that language by and through which it is had.

Clearly, human beings possess genetic characteristics that strongly affect their dispositions to behave. There is general agreement that early experience (and thus language) greatly influences these dispositional characteristics. However, later experience and reflection within a language also strongly influence dispositional development. The mother language in which one lives “breaks” and “orders” the world for the speaker; its conceptual machinery forms the a priori basis for the possibility of particular objects, and for general categories of objects. Consequently, one cannot be a person of a particular psychological type without first being able to conceive and order the world as a place where such types are possible. Property determination is logically prior to property instantiation.

Within oue native language there are certain communal narratives that operate to grant meaning, identity, and purpose. Some of the statements within these narratives are constative; they claim that something obtains. Further reflection and experiment can falsify or provisionally countenance the truth of these statements. However, all such statements presuppose the particularity of the conceptual equipment historically transmitted by language. The “metanarrative” of the providence of God is one in which there are putatively factual statements making claims of truth. Given our conceptual grid, statements about God can be either true or false.

In their pre-linguistic state, the behavior of human beings, like all animals, is understandable as satisfying a complex set of stimulus-response conditionals. Some humans, due to genetic and early imprinting conditions, respond to greater or lesser degrees to same-sex sexual stimulation. However, humans always need narratives in order to have meaning and identity. We humans are creatures of time in ways different from the rest of the animal world. We humans know the passing of time, and thus understand what is against the backdrop of what is not. We shall not always be, and this deep sense of not always being sends us hunting after meaning, purpose and identity.

In the late nineteenth century a narrative began to develop about homosexuality that was amplified, adjusted, and codified throughout the twentieth century, such that in the last days of the twentieth-century, people could talk confidently about the state of “being homosexual” versus “acting in homosexual ways,” and about “discovering” this homosexuality. The narrative supposed homosexuality to be a general disposition, not unlike fragility. Just as fragile things are fragile even when they don’t always break, so too, it was thought that homosexuals are homosexual even when they do not act in homosexual ways. The messiness of history was pretty much forgotten in the chase to get clear on this issue. For instance, ancient Greek culture countenanced and sometimes encouraged homosexucal behavior seemingly without regard to genetic dispositions and without having the category of "the homosexual'.

As the century developed, the myth took a new twist. The disposition of homosexuality was understood to be a primary identity of the person, and thus civil rights were brought into play. Just as minorities and women must be protected by the law, so too must homosexual people. The disanalogy between the two was not noticed. After all, homosexuality is, prima facie, nothing at all like skin color, or gender. There are no “natural boundaries” to it. What was overlooked is that doing a similar exploration and thematization of the psychological character of people could issue in the same type of narratives for different psychological features - - if there were interest to do such. For instance, one might well have isolated the dispositions to steal of certain people, made that an identity issue, and then make the possession of that disposition a natural rights issue. One could have done it with dispositions toward shyness, dispositions toward sexual promiscuity, dispositions toward niggardliness, dispositions towards prolixity, etc. That one would never do so displays the difference in meaning of these various dispositions. It is difficult to see how possessing the disposition of prolixity can grant existential identity, meaning, and destiny.

Given the socially constructed “identity” of the homosexual, the interpretive framework of that identity was used to interpret the multivariagatedness of human experience into certain patterns of sexual response, such that experience itself - -antifoundational because of language and narrative - - was misused as a foundational source for theological reflection. Thus contemporary pseudo-intellectuals could declare that “some people are just made that way” and that “the Bible does not know anything about the homosexual.” The biblical text was thus read by those occupying a hermeneutical horizon openly antipodal to the hermeneutical cradle from which the text emerged. This antithetical horizon could only judge the “immediacy of human experience” - - anything but immediate as I have argued - - as something trumping the mediated historical horizon of an alien text.

If we could see the problem clearly, we could see that the "sexuality issue" has emerged from our contemporary mythology. The “discovery of my homosexuality” is an Enlightenment-inspired myth that fills life with identity, meaning and purpose; it is a myth grounded in the fundamentality of "my experience." Theologically, of course, the problem goes back to the primitive, “did God really say that?” Are there dispositions that are not my dispositions that ought to be my dispositions? Does this question make sense for us apart from obvious utilitarian concerns? Theologically, one might claim that Luther is right. We are either ridden by God or Satan. Understanding that, however, takes a depth that most no longer have.

Perhaps the primary sin of our times is that we have sold our birthright as beings of reason. We have forgotten that reason is involved in every activity of faith. Perhaps what makes the faith of our day so underdeveloped is that our reason is so underdeveloped. There is considerable irony in this. But what is better for the Evil One than to have beings who are asleep at the wheel while they “entertain themselves to death?"