End of Story?

Same-Sex Relationships and the Narratives of Evangelical Mission

Andrew Perriman

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532670190
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

This book is an exercise in a thoroughgoing narrative theology. The social and legal validation of same-sex relationships in the West over the last two decades has presented an immense challenge to the church insofar as it seeks to remain faithful to Scripture. But it is not an isolated ethical problem. It is just one element--albeit a very important one--in the much broader, long-term overhaul and reorientation of Western culture after the collapse of the Christian consensus. The forces of history that are driving this transformation, however, have also alerted us to the historical perspectives that constrained biblical thought.Andrew Perriman suggests that Paul's argument about same-sex behavior, perhaps more clearly than any other issue, highlights the narrative shape of the mission of the early church in the Greek world. By the same token, we must ask how that storyline has been refracted across the boundary of modernity, and how it now shapes the mission of the church as it adapts to its marginalized position in an aggressively secular world.

Chapter 1

The Story So Far

This book has been written primarily, and perhaps optimistically, with the evangelical missional church in mind, as it is confronted with the challenges of rampant secular modernity in Western societies. In an ideal world, “evangelical” would simply designate the church as it seeks faithfully to bear witness in all respects to the hopeful, transformative, and God-given power of the biblical narrative. It is unfortunate that, at a time of significant renewal in the field of New Testament studies, the word is barely serviceable in a work such as this because of its association, on the one hand, with a thin but heady salvationism distilled from the pulped mash of Scripture and, on the other, with controversial modes of social and political conservatism. I speak of the “power of the biblical narrative” rather than of the “gospel” (euangelion) because I think that the good news, as it was proclaimed first to Israel, then to the nations, and is now proclaimed today, always gains its relevance and force from the historical narrative that frames it. But we also have to call “evangelical” that self-conscious populist movement within the modern church that holds to the truthfulness of the Bible and the centrality of the cross in defiance of theological liberalism and progressivism.

By “missional” I mean the church as it endeavors to recover some forward momentum in its engagement with society following the broad collapse of the Western Christian worldview—or Christendom—over the last two hundred years. Again, this is not the standard definition, but it is in keeping, I think, with the dynamics of the biblical argument. On the one hand, I have restricted the scope of mission to the Western context—a civilization that used to be Christian but that is now mostly secular in its fundamental ethical and metaphysical commitments. On the other, I have extended the definition along a temporal axis to include both the narrative that accounts for the current state of affairs and plausible future projections. The story of the missional people of God did not stop when it got to Jesus, and it is still unfolding today. The “problem” of same-sex relationships was and is part of that story, and I will attempt to address it on that assumption, with two overarching questions in mind. First, how do we determine the “ends” of the story? I say “ends” because, however we imagine the final dénouement, there are multiple crises, climaxes, and cliffhangers along the way. Secondly, and conversely, how do the “ends” of the story determine the response of the church to the normalization of same-sex relationships in the modern era?

Naming the particular topic is also difficult. The history of the word “homosexual” has left it, too, with some unsavory associations (disease, perversion, criminality, “homophobia”).1 But it remains the obvious and probably necessary counterpart to “heterosexual.” The more or less neutral language of “same-sex” sexual relations, relationships, and marriage may be preferable, but the phrasing can be unwieldy, and some stylistic variation is required. In that case, Wesley Hill’s policy of not using “homosexual” as a noun in order to “send a subtle linguistic signal that being gay isn’t the most important thing about my or any other gay person’s identity” seems a good one.2 Our real subject is gay (male same-sex) and lesbian (female same-sex) relationships, not the wider spectrum of sexual identities referenced by the LGBT+ nomenclature. Bisexuality, no doubt, may be expressed in different ways but would appear to be by definition promiscuous, and the debate over transgenderism, though of enormous interest currently, is of a different kind and beyond the scope of this study. But the simple LGBT tag will serve as a convenient way of identifying the general social phenomenon.

A good part of the book is taken up with an examination of the biblical material relating to same-sex sexual relations along with the first-century cultural background. This will not be merely a remapping of a well-trodden and very muddy exegetical field. The intention is to tell a credible story about this aspect of human sexuality—a story that begins with creation, then runs through Israel’s possession of the land and the clash of kingdoms anticipated in the New Testament, to the profound and unfinished reorientation of the world that we know as modernity, and on toward a final repair of the eternal rupture between God and his creation.

There is no “mission” in Scripture without some awareness of the controlling narrative context. For example, if the “mission” of the Jews in Babylon was to “seek the welfare of the city” (Jer 29:7) as we are sometimes told, the instruction presupposes the long narrative of exile, survival, flourishing, and return from exile. It is not a bare injunction to pursue social transformation. When Jesus sent out his disciples to proclaim the imminence of the kingdom of God, to heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons, their “mission” belonged to a Jewish story (“Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”) that reached back to the ancient precedent of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and forwards to the appearance of the Son of Man before they had gone through all the towns of Israel (Matt 10:5–23).3 I will suggest that missional engagement with the Western world today, whether we mean by that social action, or gospel proclamation, or constructive engagement with the LGBT community, is hampered greatly by the fact that we have very little sense of a guiding “prophetic” narrative. Evangelicals are adrift on the sea of history, somewhere between Pentecost and the second coming, with only an empty, flat, hazy horizon ahead of us. We need to get some historical bearings. So this is not, in the first place, an argument either for or against same-sex relationships as a matter of Christian ethics; it is an attempt to reframe the controversy narratively.

Before we start on the task, however, I want to attempt a brief overview of the background and context of the debate. In this chapter, I will outline the social developments that have culminated in the legalization of same-sex marriage in North America, much of South America, most of Western Europe, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. In chapter 2, we will look at how the evangelical world has been dealing with the issue, and ask what is at stake for churches, missions, and other organizations, for leaders and laypeople, as we pick our way nervously through the minefield of the LGBT controversy. The initial impetus for this book came from the deliberations of a church-planting mission trying to think these matters through in the secular Western context, and I think it may be helpful to register and foreground that perspective, albeit in a patchy and limited fashion, before we get to the biblical, historical, theological, and hermeneutical questions. Part of the reason for doing so is that I hope this book will be read by people who are more interested in the “narratives of evangelical mission” and have not been paying too much attention to the debate about same-sex relationships.

The Modern Understanding of Homosexuality

Nothing happens in a vacuum. There is a historical and social setting for the biblical texts that responsible interpreters must take into account, whatever the topic under investigation. But a missional hermeneutic must also reckon with the various contexts in which the Bible is read today: we read with an awareness of a long history of interpretation and application; we read under diverse and changing social, cultural, and intellectual conditions; and our reading is formed—for better or for worse—by personal experience and by the experience and circumstances of the communities of which we are part. The modern biblical-theological debate about same-sex relationships has come about because characteristically Western commitments—in essence, to scientific description, on the one hand, and to personal freedoms and rights, on the other—have brought about a fundamental change in social attitudes, driving a wedge between the present and the past.4 This is the given narrative setting for our engagement with the biblical texts.

As long as the church controlled the moral debate in the West, same-sex sexual activity was regarded as willful sin or moral perversion.5 The terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were introduced toward the end of the nineteenth century as the phenomenon came to be understood as a distinct psychological condition. Now it was possible to be a “homosexual” and not just happen on occasion to engage in sexual activity with a person of the same sex. It was something of a watershed. David Halperin quotes George Chauncey: “The differentiation of homosexual desire from ‘deviant’ gender behavior at the turn of the century reflects a major reconceptualization of the nature of human sexuality, its relation to gender, and its role in one’s social definition.”6 Craig Williams quotes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to similar effect:

What was new from the turn of the century was the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she w...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: The Story So Far
• Chapter 2: Recent Developments in the Evangelical-Missional World
• Chapter 3: Humanity, Homosexuality, and the Land
• Chapter 4: The Greek-Roman Cultural Background
• Chapter 5: Homosexuality and the Kingdom
• Chapter 6: Back to Nature
• Chapter 7: The Dead End of the Traditional Story
• Chapter 8: Progressive Narratives
• Chapter 9: The Art of Evangelical Storytelling
• Bibliography