DREADMUDDLE: Eve Tushnet And Luke Timothy Johnson In 'Commonweal' On Homosexuality & The Catholic Church

[UPDATE] New York Magazine considers research on a possible biological basis for homosexuality. DREADNOUGHT has, apparently anomalously, a clockwise hair whorl and little interest in interior design.

[UPDATE] Eggers on playing commando. That was us, boys.

[UPDATE] MA legislators (roll call) steal 'gay marriage' vote from citizens:

"It is obvious...that the voters of the Commonwealth would have voted in favor of the traditional definition of marriage. The pressure tactics were engineered to insure that the will of the people would not prevail."

:: Apparently, it isn't about Anal Sex ::

"Is the present crisis in Christian denominations over homosexuality really about sex? I don’t think so."

So begins Luke Timothy Johnson's contribution to a sort of debate in Commonweal this month. His interlocutor is Eve Tushnet and she has his number on many points. You would expect that, the topic is homosexuality and Tushnet is erudite and often virtuoso on all things lesbi-homo-auto-eroti-sexual. Check out her piece which runs below Johnson's, but the mistakes that undermine Johnson's essay are instructive and therefore merit closer examination.

:: Curiouser and Curiouser ::

The Church is not concerned with sex per se, Johnson claims, rather he appears to believe that she is obsessed with 'gay' sex in much the same manner that the GOP was said to be obsessed with 'gay marriage' during the 2004 election:

"Instead, the relatively small set of same-sex unions gets singled out for moral condemnation, while the vast pandemic of sexual disorder goes ignored. In my view, this scapegoating of homosexuality has less to do with sex than with perceived threats to the authority of Scripture and the teaching authority of the church."

This 'goes ignored' business cannot be right. Anyone with any experience of the Vatican's teachings on human sexuality knows that the Church speaks out frequently against adultery, divorce, pornography, masturbation and other failures at love. Indeed, John Paul the Great's seminal Theology of the Body - which may just turn out to be the Summa Theologiae of the next Christian Millennium - deals directly with human sexuality per se, treating primarily of male and female marital and sexual relations.

:: Tough Love ::

Indeed, the documents that so inflame the homoactivists are relatively thin on the ground and - if actually read - remarkably humane. The Catechism is firm about homogenital acts, but the teachings are on par with the prohibitions on masturbation and sodomy generally. These last are behaviours practised by heterosexual men many times more often than even the most promiscuous practitioners of male on male sodomy can manage.

:: A Hospital for Sinners ::

If the Church is hard on sodomites, then she is equally hard on most teenage boys and indeed challenges a whole army of fornicating straight men. This shows she is against the acts, not against the individuals who sometimes find themselves inclined towards the same. The Church is not anti-man, she is anti sodomy, masturbation, etc. Claiming otherwise demonstrates a posture of distrust on the part of the individual making the claim, it does not necessarily tell one anything definitive about the Catholic approach to same sex attraction.

:: The Creaking Wheel ::

Similarly, those documents that teach against 'gay marriage' do distill wider Catholic teaching on human sexuality, but not to scapegoat anyone, rather to offer timely moral and religious advice in specific contexts. The Vatican did not invent 'gay marriage' so as to have a reason to torment homoactivists, rather homoactivists agitated for something that the Church in her wisdom and love saw as anti-human. Johnson and others have the cart before the horse.

:: Neo-Paganism? ::

They also seem to have put off Christianity, with its fairly settled sources of authority - namely Scripture, Tradition and the teaching authority crystallised in the Magisterium which is exercised by the Popes and other Church leaders in keeping with the sensum fidei - for other, extra-Christian and sometimes radically Pagan moral and religious touchstones.

:: Who Says So? ::

The trouble with formulations like Johnson's - who "perceive[s] God at work among all persons and in all covenanted and life-enhancing forms of sexual love" - is that he is looking for authority in things and ideas, sources and meanings that are not obviously Christian and in some cases definitely Pagan.

:: No Greater Love ::

Since when did Jesus preach that we were to test love against whether or not it is 'life enhancing'? Indeed, many kinds of love including the supreme love-act performed by Christ on Calvary, are explicitly life-destroying. As Tushnet counters - "...if any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26) - Johnson's creed would sweep away the precious love of martyrs. Indeed, we are taught again and again that self-denial and mortification of the physical body will bring us closer to transcendence, prepare us for perfection. Yet Johnson and others seem to ignore these rich Christian ideas on suffering, abstinence, temperance, etc. in favour of something altogether more flabby.

:: Academics Befuddled ::

Or, perhaps it is legal theory that has them swayed. Why does Johnson think 'covenanted sexuality' is better than other kinds of sexuality?

:: We've Heard it All Before ::

Such formulations rely, not on any Christian idea, but rather on positivism or other imported schools of thought. Christians do not treat a contract like a marriage just because it has been drawn up according to some prescribed form or contains some legally valid content. Rather, covenants in faith (in Judaism, Christianity and sometimes Islam) are sanctified and binding because of, in the case of a sacrament like matrimony, the agency of God's grace. What is good about covenants is what God gives us that enables us to give something of ourselves to each other.

:: Worthy of Praise ::

Good faith means then, in the basic sense, that what the parties do and that which they covenant is good enough to stand in the sight of God. To put it more pointedly, that what they have done does not besmirch the parties in the eyes of God: that they have not sinned. Jewish law had covenanting parties walk between a sacrificial offering, another way of showing that we give only what God has already given to us, and that we covenant only so that we can give back in latria according to His law.

:: Unworthy of Praise ::

'Gay marriages' which involve necessarily non-Christian or anti-Christian exhortations to sodomy or other homogenital acts are, by definition therefore, not worthy of such covenants in faith. They can never be marriages.

:: Washed Clean ::

Certain male on male unions know a mighty love indeed, but those who pretend that the weight of Christian teaching is not against homogenital acts are hardly credible, whether as historians, theologians or as exegetes. The facts, those ringing prohibitions, the unbroken and living teaching against sodomy and other homogenital acts is well established. Sure, Christians have never kept the Leviticus rules on shellfish or stoning, or those other elements of the halachic order that don't fit well beside the Law revealed in Christ as Love. However, those laws that align with Christ's kingship, we are bound to keep. It is good then that Johnson next calls for intellectual honesty:

"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."

:: Back in the Mud ::

But it is disappointing that he moves immediately back to heterodoxy and extra-Christian sources of authority.

"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."

To be clear, this is an argument from relativism used, tortuously, to buttress a universal claim. What's more, it invokes a new hierarchy of authority, one that is unknown in any living Christian community other than the most liberal, Protestant movements in America: call it sola experientia.

:: His Hermeneutics is Legion ::

It gets even wilder. Johnson then claims that:

"...the deepest truth revealed by Scripture itself-namely, that God does create the world anew at every moment, does call into being that which is not, and does raise the dead to new and greater forms of life..."

which is not what my Bible tells me in Genesis and John. Does this muddled gesturing towards profundity really rival the solid Catholic idea that Scripture is all about God's love for wretched man? This demonstrates neatly why the Church relies on those pillars of authority (Scripture, Tradition, Magisterium), because in their absence any man is Pope and all interpretations of Scripture, no matter how silly or damaging, are valid.

:: Wrong Train ::

Further, Johnson's analogy between those who defended slavery in the past and those who oppose 'gay marriage' now is, other than insulting, wrong on his own terms. There are exhortations against unjust slave-owning alongside teachings against the maltreatment of the weak, the poor, etc. in the Fathers. Similarly, the activities of the early Church in the Roman empire were, as Gospel-inspired movements and almost exclusively, oriented away from slave-owning. One of the main reasons the emperors were so intent on persecuting early Christians was because they saw that Christian teachings on human dignity would radically transform their slave-trading society. Thus, some Catholics might have owned slaves but no Catholic ever used Paul or Moses to justify slave ownership, certainly not with the approval of the wider Church.

:: Not My Bag ::

Further, Christians simply did not reject slavery primarily because they had first hand experience of the thing and somehow intuited from their experience that it was evil. If Johnson's version of history were true one would have expected that the American South, rather than the generally slave-free British and the abolitionist Yankees, would have led the anti-slavery crusades.

:: Just Wrong ::

Thus, on the issue of sodomy and 'gay marriage' the opposite of Johnson's analogy is the case. Christians spoke out against the sexual profligacy of the Pagan world, and unless one swallows Boswell's academically compromised line, clerics never blessed 'gay marriages', certainly not as the sodomy-centric unions understood by modern homoactivists. It is hard to imagine how writers on these matters can continue to pedal such a warped, homoactivism-inflected view of history and still make a claim to 'intellectual honesty'.

:: Who is Like God? ::

Then there are more importations:

"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."

Since when did the living God inspire any such reform* within the Church? When has the Paraclete relied on Scripture-rejection to buttress orthodoxy and lead a new springtime?

It is in these particularly bald statements that Johnson finally shows his hand. The 'gay marriage' movement is not, as he claims, one from death to life, from misery to new forms of love. Rather, it preaches a move away from God as He is known to Christians, to a god who sounds suspiciously like whoever has the microphone or the lectern:

"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."

:: The Gospel According to L.T. Johnson ::

See that? To discern the 'living God' in that sentence one must, apparently, consider that Luke Timothy Johnson on 'gay marriage' might be a prophet on par with St Paul:

"In this interpretive struggle, brave witnesses like Paul refused to force their experience of God in Christ into the frame of their previous understanding of Scripture. Instead, they followed the witness of the experience of God in Christ among them, and in light of that experience began to reread and reinterpret all of their Scripture as prophecy that disclosed Christ in ways they had not perceived before-and could not have perceived before."

Johnson seems unaware of the fact that St Paul had power to write authoritatively because it was given to him by Christ via his experience of and obedience to Christ's teaching. He wrote by Christ, for Christ - Paul was for the most part out of the picture, irrelevant. So it is with the Popes and the other bishops who teach against 'gay marriage' and homogenital acts. They faithfully serve the truth without egocentrism. Hubristic appeals to personal experience operate as though any man's ideas were worth more than God's revealed wisdom or the lessons of practical reason. Johnson - despite earnest attempts, his comments on his family life are touching - is a long way from that kind of authentic, specifically Christian witness.

:: Not One of Us! One of Us! One of Us! ::

The rest of the essay, built on such bizarre foundations, continues in the same muddled vein until it peters out - at least for a same sex attracted reader like DREADNOUGHT - around the time Johnson reveals that he is not actually same sex attracted. This means that he writes not only from heterodoxy as generally understood, but also from outside the kind of experience he asserts is the key to his novel idea of orthodoxy. He is not in possession of the experience that would make him the prophet he posits.

:: Homo Homo? ::

He is also apparently not afflicted like DREADNOUGHT and other same sex attracted men and women with "bodies...[that]... move...sexually in ways different" from the rest of humanity. Does Johnson think men like me have erections that point inward? Does he imagine lesbians close their legs when they seek sexual stimulation or search for the clitoris on the bridge of a lover's nose? We are getting into silly waters indeed when we write as though inclinations to homogenital acts are evidence of some new species of homo sapiens.

:: This One is Not For Us ::

Rather than seriously considering the Vatican's pronouncements on human sexuality, 'gay marriage' and family - Johnson first offers a pseudo-Marxist diagnosis: the Church is a rigid power-structure and the main issue is not human flourishing, sanctity or obedience, it is simply a concern to see Church power controlled, maintained and - if possible - extended. He then seems to understand that he is outside orthodoxy on many points, but cannot resist looking for and recommending a secular and perhaps Pagan compass for guidance in faith and morals. As such, his piece is a telling example of what Catholicism would look like if it were a bastard religion that worshipped a new god known (or more likely unknown) most often via personal experience. In short, it is the same Christianity-lite and near neo-Pagansim we've been fed by sixties-era liberals for decades.

:: The Upshot ::

Such a limp theology, this relativist creed, cannot compare with the sometimes hard, but always honest love found in the Catholic teaching on human sexuality. Perhaps that's why same sex attracted men and women like DREADNOUGHT and Eve Tushnet listen past liberal prognosticators to the prophets of eternity.

:: Resources ::

- The Fathers of the Church;

- Read Tushnet's piece. She is convinced (and convincingly) that God is the deity known in the Catholic faith and is "...unimpressed with the attempts to resolve the conflict [over homosexuality] by negating the teaching [against homogenital acts]."

- *Encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge on true reform:

"20. Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world."

- The Vatican's deeply scholarly survey of same sex attraction; and

- John Paul the Great's Theology of the Body.