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A book not to be embraced: A critical appraisal of Stacy Johnson's A Time to Embrace
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2009
Extract
I wish that I could commend William Stacy Johnson's book, A Time to Embrace, as a rigorous and fair assessment of Christianity and homosexuality from a homosexualist perspective. Unfortunately, Johnson so regularly violates scholarly standards for honesty and accuracy in representing secondary literature, conceals from readers the most important counter-arguments to his position and shows gaps in logic, that I cannot embrace A Time to Embrace. Given space constraints, it is impossible to give a systematic presentation of the book's errors in fact or argumentation. I refer readers to my website for material that could not fit here and for a rejoinder to Johnson's response (http://robgagnon.net/ArticlesOnline.htm).
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References
1 A Time to Embrace: Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law, and Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). A pedantic observation is that Johnson's book has the worst compiled ‘Index of Names’ I have seen in any scholarly work.
2 By ‘homosexualist’ I mean an ideology which espouses the legitimacy of one or more forms of homosexual practice. I characterise the anti-homosexualist position as the complementarity position.
3 Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 114.
4 Brooten, Bernadette J., Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 253 n. 106, 244, 257, 361.
5 This includes the facts that: (1) the ‘likewise also’ of Rom. 1:27 parallels ‘the natural use of the female’ in 1:27 with ‘the natural use [i.e. of the male]’ in 1:26; (2) lesbian intercourse is the form of female intercourse most commonly labelled ‘contrary to nature’ in antiquity; (3) male homosexual practice is far more often paired with female homosexual practice than any other female behaviour; (4) lesbian intercourse is elsewhere used in a manner similar to Rom. 1:26, i.e. as a clinching argument against male homosexual practice; (5) it would be historically absurd to assume that Paul would take a different stance on lesbianism than that which prevailed nearly universally among men in the ancient world; and (6) lesbianism is the dominant interpretation of Rom. 1:26 in the patristic period.
6 Ibid., pp. 149, 156–9; Gagnon, , ‘Does the Bible Regard Same-Sex Intercourse as Intrinsically Sinful?’ in Saltzman, R. E. (ed.), Christian Sexuality: Normative and Pastoral Principles (Minneapolis: Kirk House, 2003), pp. 106–55Google Scholar (online notes at http://robgagnon.net/articles/homoPowellRespNotes.pdf), here pp. 141–6. See also the comment by classicist Thomas K. Hubbard: ‘Homosexuality in [the early imperial age of Rome] may have ceased to be merely another practice of personal pleasure and began to be viewed as an essential and central category of personal identity, exclusive of and antithetical to heterosexual orientation’ (Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. 386).
7 New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003.
8 Harrison, Verna E. F., ‘Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology’, JTS 41 (1990), pp. 441–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coakley, Sarah, ‘The Eschatological Body’, Modern Theology 16 (2000), pp. 61–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2001 (520 pp.). Johnson ignores completely my treatment of the ancient Near Eastern background; the Sodom story and related texts such as the story of Ham and Noah, the story of the Levite at Gibeah, the Deuteronomic and Deuteronomistic references to the qedeshim (cult figures that engaged in receptive male–male intercourse), and the back references to Sodom in Ezekiel, Jude and 2 Peter; the witness of early Judaism; the witness of Jesus; and the witness of Paul in 1 Cor. 6:9 and 1 Tim 1:10. He omits most of my main arguments as regards the creation texts, the Levitical prohibitions and Rom. 1:24–7; the few arguments that he addresses he tends to distort or truncate (see below). He skips over nearly all of my 145-page chapter on ‘The Hermeneutical Relevance of the Biblical Witness’.
10 Theology Today 63 (2006), pp. 388, 390, 392 (hereafter: Review). Theology Today published this distorted piece five years after my book came out.
11 Bible and Homosexual Practice, p. 139; cf. pp. 459–60 and often.
12 Sourcebook, p. 444. See further: Bible and Homosexual Practice, pp. 257–9, 364–84; with new material, along with quotations from Craig Williams and William Schoedel, in my ‘A Comprehensive and Critical Review Essay of Homosexuality, Science, and the “Plain Sense” of Scripture, Part 2’, HBT 25 (2003), pp. 179–275, here 249–56 (also online: http://www.robgagnon.net/articles/homoBalchHBTReview2.pdf).
13 Cf. Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), p. 46 with online ‘Notes’, 2–3 (http://www.robgagnon.net/2Views/HomoViaRespNotesRev.pdf); ‘Why the Disagreement over the Biblical Witness on Homosexual Practice? A Response to Myers and Scanzoni, What God Has Joined Together?’, Reformed Review 59 (2005), pp. 81–2, 93–4 (online: http://www.westernsem.edu/files/westernsem/gagnon_autm05_0.pdf).
14 Contrast Johnson's claim with what I have to say in Bible and Homosexual Practice, pp. 414, 347–61.
15 The Bible and Homosexual Practice, pp. 350–60.
16 My translation. Philo's qualifying comment, ‘differing from them only in age’, underscores that the age differential was a mitigating, not exacerbating, factor in condemning the bond. A sexual bond between two age-equal adult men would be more problematic, not less so, because adult males have outgrown the ‘softness’ of immature adolescence.
17 Ibid., The Bible and Homosexual Practice, p. 354.
18 Johnson might retort that these are not good examples because they do not illustrate a marriage between two masculine men. Yet Johnson's own support for the GLBT cause shows no particular alarm over very effeminate behaviour by males.
19 Sifra on Lev. 18:3; Genesis Rabbah 26.6; Leviticus Rabbah 23.9; b. Hullin 92b. Cf. Brooten, Love Between Women, p. 65.
20 Sourcebook, p. 383 (my emphasis).
21 Instone-Brewer, David, Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 61–3Google Scholar.
22 Similarly, Paul cites Gen. 2:24c (‘the two shall become one flesh’) in close proximity to his indictment of ‘men who lie with males’ in 1 Cor. 6:9 (cf. 6:16). Although the immediate point is to show the ‘one body’ defiling character of immoral sexual intercourse, Paul could not have missed the relevance of Gen. 2:24a–b (‘a man shall . . . become joined to his woman’) for his rejection of male homosexual intercourse in 1 Cor. 6:9, especially given his appeal to Gen. 1:27 and 2:21–2 later in the same letter as a basis for retaining traditional markers of sexual differentiation (11:7–12).
23 See my ‘Old Testament and Homosexuality: A Critical Review of the Case Made by Phyllis Bird’, ZAW 117 (2005), pp. 367–94, esp. pp. 387–9.
24 Cf. Heinz-Josef Fabry in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament 12:402; Walton, John H., Genesis, NIVAC (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), p. 177Google Scholar.
25 Cf. Loader, William, Sexuality and the Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 188–92, 198Google Scholar.
26 Ibid., pp. 199–207.
27 Ibid., p. 201; cf. pp. 193, 207, 214, 243.
28 Ibid., pp. 196–7.
29 See my discussion of kinship terminology for this relationship in The Bible and Homosexual Practice, pp. 146–54.
30 See esp. his table 6 on p. 108.
31 What Christians Think about Homosexuality: Six Representative Viewpoints (North Richland Hills, TX: Bibal Press, 1999). Johnson buries in an endnote (p. 262 n. 3) that Holben's typology was one of three which ‘informed’ his own approach, but does not tell readers what Holben's scheme looks like.