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just out ▼ august 15, 1907 T 17
INTERVIEW
Reclaiming the word
ark Jordan is the author of The
Invention o f Sodomy in Christian
Theology. As the title suggests,
Jordan tackles a controversial and
The idea o f sodomy has been used to bar gays from Christianity ,
weighty task: He seeks to dis­
count the use of the term “sodomy” as a category
but one theologian says that's the church talking, not God
used to condemn gay and lesbian people by un­
▼
masking it as a late-in-coming invention.
As Jordan and I sat on the patio of a small
by Gip Plaster
coffee shop and discussed lesbian and gay Chris-
yourself, for example, how angry you are and how
Let’s talk a little about your new hook, The
much you are suffering. There is no point walking
Invention o f Sodomy in Christian Theology.
out Sunday after Sunday from your congregation
Tell me about it.
either crying or raging. You can’t worship. And it
In the process of writing the book I made a
may be, moreover, that certain denominations
historical discovery, which is that the category
cannot be reformed. God may mean for them to
“sodomy” appears very late in moral theology. 1
disappear.
tian theology, we managed to raise the eyebrows
think that I can pinpoint when and where it was
of at least one worker, who may have been sur­
coined as a theological term—around the year
prised to hear two gay men discussing Christian­
In general, Christians seem to have sort of
1050 by the religious reformer Peter Damian.
ity while he was taking out the trash.
strange—and inaccurate— ideas about what
the Bible says. Why is that?
And what application does your finding
Is it possible to be lesbian or gay and Chris­
The Bible has been preached that way, for one
have for our lives?
tian?
thing. A lot of effort has gone into producing bad
One conclusion is that “sodomy” is worthless
If by Christian you mean a real Christian, that
Biblical interpretations that reinforce prevailing
as a category for serious theology. It was glued
is, someone who responds to the revelation God
social prejudices about homosexuality. A hun­
together out of paradoxes, mi sreadi ngs and equi vo­
made in Jesus, then the answer is emphatically
dred and fifty years ago, similar efforts were
cations. That makes it even more peculiar that this
yes. There are dozens of definitions of “lesbian”
made to use the Bible to reinforce the interests of
particular theological category got written into
slaveholders.
or “gay,” and 10 times that many definitions of
English and American law as the main category
“Christian.” So the question will quickly come
uThe mainline
down—as often in theology—to a discussion of
who gets to set the definitions.
churches have
I think there is difference between asking,
“Can I be a Christian and gay?” and asking “Can
been killing us,
I be a Catholic and gay?” or “Can I be a Methodist
mangling us
and gay?”
M
Do you think we should reject the teachings
of the denominations in which we grew up?
At their best, denominations show us different
versions of Christian truth. But their emphases
may be important reminders of things we would
rather forget. Lesbian and gay Christians have
been tempted to live as if we didn’t need any of
those old patterns for our lives, because wejudged
that our denominations were wrong on the issue
of homosexuality. Now, though, we have to ask
ourselves, “How do we live outside the closet as
homosexual Christians? How is being a gay Chris­
tian different from being gay secular or gay Bud­
dhist?” The traditional wisdom of our denomina­
tions can be very helpful in taking up those
questions.
What do you think about groups like Met­
ropolitan Community Church, the mostly les­
bian and gay denomination founded by Troy
Perry in 1968?
Part of the genius of MCC is the genius of
peacekeeping—of not fighting over details of the
incarnation or what exactly happens to the bread
in the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper. I
don’t know how long that delicate peace can
continue.
Certain questions are hard for Christians to
avoid. For example, does the authority go to the
individual, to the majority of the community, to
certain officials in the community, to some doc­
trinal statement? Similar questions have divided
Christians for 2,000 years, and no group has
succeeded in postponing them for long. Of course,
I would prefer that we did keep peace in the
Christian household—not just for lesbian and gay
reasons, but for ecumenical reasons. Christian
quarreling is always ugly.
Are we doing Christianity more good by
staying in Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian
and other mainline churches, or do we do more
good by leaving them in favor of MCC and gay
denominational groups like Dignity in the
Catholic Church and the Methodist group
Affirmation?
That is the most urgent question. And it’s one
that a gay or lesbian Christian can only answer
individually, in prayer. Great spiritual discern­
ment is required in this prayer. You need to ask
Mark Jordan
But the larger issue here has to do with our
assumptions about what the Bible means and
what kind of answers it gives to moral questions.
One man asked me at a book signing whether I
had ever read Leviticus 18, where it says, roughly
speaking, that it is an abomination for a man to
“lie with a man as with a woman.” He assumed
that if I had ever read it, I would instantly know
better than to live as a homosexual. I answered
that I had not only read it, but had used my
faltering Hebrew to try to read it in the original. I
then added that it’s very hard to know how any
verse in Leviticus 18 applies to a modem Chris­
tian. The chapter is part of the holiness code that
imposed standards of purity or “cleanness” on
adult male Israelites. But by that point I had begun
to push against my questioner’s fundamental as­
sumptions, or fears.
Americans sometimes seem to act as if the
Bible were originally written in English.
If God had wanted the original Bible in En­
glish, God would have caused it to be written in
English. But God caused the Bible to be written in
Hebrew and a common street version of Greek. We
ought to remember and respect that divine choice.
and silencing
us for a long
time. We may
need 50 or 100
years away
■ from them, in
our own com­
munities, to
begin healing.
Of course, I'm
not sure how
smoothly they 'll
keep all those
congregations
running
without us."
under which we homosexuals were persecuted. I
want to show how illegitimate the category al­
ways has been.
Who will want to read your book?
Despite the fact that it has footnotes, I didn’t
intend the book mainly for an academic audi­
ence—though of course I wanted my scholarship
to be sound. I intended the book primarily for
those who are still being wounded by condemna­
tions of homosexuality as sodomy. I wanted to
say to them, "Look, there’s no reason to bleed.
The supposed arguments that are being wielded
against you are, in fact, theologically incoherent.”
Did writing the book change you spiritu­
ally?
It did and it does, in ways I don’t yet under­
stand. In the course of writing the book I’ve
become more and more radical in my consider­
ation of future alternatives. At the start, I posi­
tioned myself very deliberately as a dissenting
Catholic. Now I think that my position may be
something else, somewhere else. God may want
more prophetic and radical responses to the
churchly persecution of homosexuals. And my
future as a teacher or writer may be in specifically
gay and lesbian churches.
The mainline churches have been killing us,
mangling us and silencing us for a long time. We
may need 50 or 100 years away from them, in our
own communities, to begin healing. Of course.
I’m not sure how smoothly they’ll keep all those
congregations running without us.
Do you think the book will have an efTect on
your readers spiritually, too?
My hope has always been that the primary
effect would be to release some anger and bring
about some consolation: anger that the church has
distorted the tradition, consolation that thisdistor-
tion isn’t from God.
We’ve talked a little about overcoming what
some people think the Bible says about homo­
sexuality. Do you believe the Bible says things
that are supportive of gay and lesbian people?
There are no homosexuals in the Christian
Bible. But then there aren’t any heterosexuals,
either. “Homosexual” and “heterosexual” are cat­
egories invented barely 100years ago. They don’t
figure in the Bible any more than the categories
“American” or “Republican.” There are passages
in the Bible that speak about erotic relations
between some members of the same sex, but these
passages cannot be made into generalizations
about homosexuality. The hard issue is how you
get from these very old texts, written in and for
dead cultures, to your own life circumstances.
Then what?
Once you settle that question, you will dis­
cover many passages that speak to homosexuals.
Some of these are passages about same-sex love—
like David and Jonathan or Ruth and Naomi.
Others will be passages about less likely figures—
say, about eunuchs, a marginalized and badly
understood sexual minority. We should also re­
member that earlier versions of the Gospels may
have contained more explicitly homoerotic mate­
rial— for example, the story in the “secret Gospel
of Mark" about the young man who became Jesus’
special companion, of whom there remains only
the tantalizing mention in Mark 14:51-52.
Which parts of the Bible seem most sup­
portive to you?
The most supportive passages for me are those
about the sufferings required of God’s chosen
ones— of the Israelites in Egypt, of the prophets in
Israel, of Jesus and his followers. And doesn’t
Jesus talk directly to lesbian and gay Christians
when he says things like, “Blessed are you when
people revile you and persecute you and utter all
kinds of evil against you falsely on my account”
(Matthew 5:11)? That is the Bible saying some­
thing very supportive to homosexuals— very sup­
portive, but not very easy. You have to weigh
these words from the Lord against the disgust at
same-sex desire that Paul expresses in Romans 1
and elsewhere.
So how do we justify being gay and Chris­
tian? Do we simply ignore the parts of the Bible
that trouble us?
I don’t think we can ignore anything that’s in
the Bible, but I think the Bible is not one book. It’s
a whole library of books, spoken in a lot of
different voices with varying relevance to us in the
present. It’s crucial to remember—and now I’m
really talking like a Catholic—that the Bible is for
the sake of the Christian community, not the other
way around. The Bible is a privileged instrument
for God’s teaching humankind, but it is only an
instrument. The heart of Christianity is not a text;
it’s being in love for a living God. The Bible has
authority only so far as it ministers to that love.
The Invention of Sodomy in Christian
Theology by Mark Jordan. University o f
Chicago, 1997; $24.95 cloth.