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Posted by on Sep 10, 2007

William Countryman – Homosexuality and the Bible

William Countryman – Homosexuality and the Bible

Scripture scholar William Countryman is part of a movement that threatens to split the Anglican Communion. Throughout its history, Christianity has held that homosexuality is an immoral act. Over the last 20 years, Papal pronouncements have referred to the sexuality of gays and lesbians as “disordered” and the act itself as “intrinsically” evil, while at the same time deploring acts of malice and violence toward homosexuals. The movement to give homosexuals full standing in the Episcopal Church has reached the point of severe strain with the confirmation of the election of the first openly gay bishop, the Rev. Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire in August 2003.

I had always wondered how Gay Liberation in Christianity was going to deal with St. Paul’s condemnation of it in his letter to the Romans, Chapter 1. (Jesus makes no reference to homosexuality in the Gospels.) When I came across Countryman’s Dirt, Greed, and Sex. I thought that it was probably the most provocative titled book by a scripture scholar that I had ever seen.

Countryman’s thesis is simple. Romans has been misread. According to Countryman, Paul was addressing a church (congregation) which he had not visited. The group in Rome was having what today we call a cross cultural conflict. Jewish Christians objected to unclean items and practices that were part of the culture of Gentile Christians. In the first part of Romans, Countryman says that Paul was playing up to the Jewish Christians and their moral sense of superiority in order to reprimand them later. The upshot is that the Jewish Christians are not supposed to require the same observance of ritual purity by the Gentile Christians.

However, Gentile Christians are to avoid certain acts such as meat sacrificed to idols in order not to trip up (scandalize) others in their faith. In fact, Paul doesn’t see division because of the Jewish ritual purity code as the big problem. The bigger divisive issue is greed.

Countryman’s book is a very carefully crafted and detailed piece of scholarship. My description of it in the previous paragraph is a great oversimplification. The key point though, is that is possible to see the scriptural basis against homosexuality in both the Old and New Testaments in a different light based on a careful study of the language and culture of the time.

This approach is giving many Christians more than heartburn. Anglicans in Africa whose culture opposes homosexuality make up a great part of the opposition. Interestingly, polygamy is socially acceptable among many African Christians. If one can take such a linguistic and cultural approach to scripture and even tradition, should the Episcopal Church accept polygamy?

The question was part of a April 24, 2005 podcast interview with Countryman at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. As a Roman Catholic, I have to confess some culture shock. The openness and frankness of the discussion, while refreshing, is very different from an environment in which the boundaries of belief and practice are more strictly defined. Even in everyday matters, Catholics – of a certain age – recall parents or teachers indicating that there was to be no more discussion when they heard in Latin or English “Roma locuta, causa finita.” “Rome has spoken, the matter is closed.”

This came up in the podcast regarding Anglican rejection of both Rome’s direct control of discussion by bishops and theologians and Geneva’s (read Calvin’s) objection to inquiry. “Rome cannot err. Geneva will not err.” Although dialog and collegiality among bishops may be a significant part of the culture of the Episcopal Church, what do you do when the other side doesn’t want to talk?

On the other hand what do you do when your personal experience tells you that there are good people out there who are involved – even in love with – a person of the same sex?

Stay tuned.

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Posted by on Aug 29, 2007

William Countryman – Homosexuality and the Bible

St. Augustine: The Once and Future Giant

 

St. Augustine of Hippo by Sandro Botticelli

August 28th. is the feast day of Aurelius Augustinus Bishop of Hippo.

St. Augustine (354 to 430) was one of my boyhood heroes. I read Louis de Wohl’s biography of the saint, The Restless Flame. As a German writer in the 1920’s and 1930’s, de Wohl was immensely successful as a writer of thrillers and he brought this sense of action to his religious historical novels written in English after World War II. I was introduced to Augustine as a man of great learning and action, a man who moved mountains and changed the course of oceans of thought and action.

Later, when I read his Confessions and the City of God in Latin, I met a more complex man, very much at odds with mid-twentieth century psychology. Yes, Augustine was a giant of Western thought, but he was also a major force for movements and institutions that had been blown apart with the end of the modern era when World War II left Christendom in smoke and ashes.

The alliance of empire and church, the oneness of truth that allowed for state violence to save those in rebellious error, the primacy of celibacy, and the utterly fallen nature of humans conceived in original sin are significant positions which post-modern thinkers judge to have been more harmful than helpful.

The development of history as a critical discipline in the 19th century blossomed in the 20th with the tools of science, linguistics, and anthropology. The political, human, and moral catastrophes of saturation bombing, genocide, and nuclear weapons have led to a profound soul searching about what brought us to this point. Needless to say, many of Augustine’s positions came under fire by revisionists.

John J. O’Donnell, in Augustine: A New Biography, presents Augustine as a man of his time, with more warts and wrinkles than a halo. The dreaded heresies Augustine defeated, Donatism and Pelagianism, come in for a revisionist appraisal of their good points. David Hunter, in his review of O’Donnell’s book in America magazine, takes the author to task.

“This Augustine will surprise many readers. The following section headings, although taken from a single chapter, characterize the tone that prevails throughout the whole book: “Augustine the Self-Promoter,” “Augustine the Social Climber,” “Augustine the Troublemaker.” O’Donnell’s Augustine never seems to have outgrown his youthful aggressions and ambitions: “When writing about his first book in the Confessions, he reproached himself for his worldly ambition, even as, with the Confessions, he was carrying out an ecclesiastical version of the same social climbing.” O’Donnell duly documents Augustine’s later associations with powerful Roman generals as evidence of his subject’s lifelong attraction to power.”

O’Donnell has tremendous crediblity as the author of a three volume commentary on the Confessions of St. Augustine. However, his critics excoriate his portrayal of Augustine as less than saintly.

St. Augustine will rise again after this bout of historical criticism because the positive aspects of his legacy, his passionate devotion to Christ, his attempts to build a theology on scripture, the constitution of the human being as being body and soul, and the power of love, will, and memory will all come to the fore once again. From time to time St. Augustine may suffer from our ambivalence, but he is the pivotal ancestor that believers and non-believers in the post-modern world cannot deny.

Take a look at O’Donnell’s profile on the Georgetown University website and select some of the reviews. It’s an eye opener.

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Posted by on Aug 13, 2007

Edith Stein – A Woman For All Seasons

August 9 is the feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was not only a Carmelite nun who went to her death at Auschwitz but also one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century, Edith Stein.

The broad outlines of her life are well known. The cherished youngest child of a Jewish family, the brilliant atheist student of Edmund Husserl converts to the Catholic faith after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. She tries unsuccessfully to get an audience with the Pope in order to encourage him to issue an encyclical denouncing anti-Semitism. Edith Stein joins the Carmelites and becomes Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross as the Third Reich begins its restrictions on German Jews. Her order tries to protect her by moving her to the Netherlands. She is once again in danger after that fall of the country to Germany. The Dutch bishops issue a statement denouncing Nazi anti-Semitism. In response the Nazis round up Catholic Jews including Edith Stein and send them to Auschwitz where she was gassed to death within a week of arrival.

Edith Stein resonates deeply within the major human questions facing faith and society today. Her life and work dealt with the foundations of human self-awareness, the ability to know, and empathy. Relations between Christians and Jews, the identity of Jewish Christians, the response of the Catholic Church to the holocaust were personal issues for Edith Stein and are major social and religious challenges today.

At the turn of the century, while Freud was trying to understand neurosis in women, Edith Stein was among a vanguard of scholars interested in the nature of human understanding and consciousness. Today we would say that she was interested in neuroscience and psychiatry. Psychology was still a sub-discipline of philosophy. This focus on the nature of experience and awareness is called the study of phenomenology. One of her major contributions was the notion that we become aware of ourselves by experiencing the awareness and feelings of others. This is, of course, a great oversimplification. However, she rescued the ego from an encapsulated shell and posited that our sense of identity and awareness is the product of the experience of the other. The “I” is not something I create but is created in the process of interaction based on feeling what the other feels, knows, and senses.

The term in German is broader than our sense of empathy. It is an experience of oneness or solidarity, we might say. This solidarity with her Jewish identity did not leave Edith Stein and it was her wish that her baptism would not spare her from the fate of her fellow Jews. Her courage derived from a faith in the cross and hope in the resurrection for all people even those who put her and her family to death. The realization of the self in selfless service – from philosophy to a life that might have been called tragic if it had not been suffused with so much meaning.

If you have an interest in philosophy, I recommend Marianne Sawicki, Ph.D.’s Personal Connections: The Phenomenology of Edith Stein.

American Catholic has an easy to read summary St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

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Posted by on Jul 25, 2007

Welcome to Theologika – A Space for All Things Theological

 

“… Every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.”

– Matthew 13: 52.


Welcome to Theologika, a storeroom – or treasure in some translations – of all things theological, the new as well as the old.

Theologika tries to bridge the gap between the general public and experts in theology, philosophy, religious studies, and the social and behavioral sciences by providing a public meeting place for “scribes instructed in the kingdom of heaven” to meet with people of good will – believers or not.

Theologika is meant to be a haven from the sound and fury in our lives and on the internet regarding questions of Christian belief and lifestyle. It is a place of thoughtful and prayerful retreat to learn calmly what trusted thought leaders have had to say from the earliest days of Christianity to the present.

Our goal is to help you find the best information from trusted authorities across the centuries and the globe. The focus of the site is Catholic and catholic. The upper case “C” refers to the Roman Catholic tradition and the lower case “c” refers to the broadest universal dimensions of the Christian movement and its interaction with all human institutions and learning.

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