The church and same-sex relationships: a case study in hermeneutical ecology.

"Sexual issues are tearing our churches apart today as never before," writes Walter Wink in an article entitled "Homosexuality and the Bible." He continues:

The issue of homosexuality threatens to fracture whole denominations, as the issue of slavery did a hundred and fifty years ago. We naturally turn to the Bible for guidance and find ourselves mired in interpretive quicksand. Is the Bible able to speak to our confusion on this issue? (1)

My experience as a pastor who has served three quite different congregations over the last quarter century and my present university congregation for more than a decade leads me to answer Wink's troubling question with a resounding "Yes!" Yes, the Bible speaks to us who gather week in and week out as church to hear God's Word and share the Supper. Moreover, it speaks in a way that has helped us as faith communities to hear a clarifying and unifying Word that is good news amid the larger church's "confusion on this issue."

This is due, in large part, to the "hermeneutical ecology" that is created by the presence in our congregation of fellow Christians who happen to be gay and lesbian. Their embodied experience of same-sex relationships, from friendships to committed partnerships, is a part of our common life in the same way as are our heterosexual relationships, from marriages to divorces, single friendships to dating and engaged couples. Homosexuality is not an "issue" that divides us but is one way of describing an aspect of the personhood of some of those among us that differentiates us and enriches our sense of diversity within the body of Christ. The presence of gay and lesbian fellow believers helps to sharpen the acuity of our listening for God's Word as we hear Jesus' imperative, "Whoever has ears to hear...." Rather than being "mired in interpretive quicksand" over this "issue" in which so much of the church feels "stuck," our community witnesses to the Truth that has set us free, a liberating Word that challenges all forms of enslavement to the powers that be. It is Scripture, interpreted through the lens of our week-in-and-week-out, shared experience as a Christian community, that continues to shape our theological anthropology by keeping us in Spirited conversation with God's living Word.

Choon-Leong Seow, Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary and editor of a collection of essays written by PTS faculty entitled Homosexuality and Christian Community, cites this text in support of his contention that "creation is not as orderly as one would like to believe." Particularly the wisdom tradition, he contends, while recognizing that God is the Creator of the universe,

also concedes that God's creation does include many irregularities and unevenness--anomalies that no human being can explain or change.... Wisdom's perspective is admittedly heterodox when judged by the viewpoints of the Torah and the Prophets. The entire corpus of wisdom books defies any attempt to systematize the Old Testament in terms of a definite center. There is not one perspective in the Bible, but many.

"The Bible," Seow concludes (coining a tongue-in-cheek neologism), "is heterotextual." (2)

Further, Seow argues, the wisdom tradition's is a "theology from below (starting with the plight of humanity)" and thereby provides a "necessary counterpoint to the dominant 'theology from above'" which is often accompanied by a "thus saith the Lord." This means, Seow asserts, that "Wisdom literature is thus a persistent reminder to us that we should not be too sure that we speak for God and too slow to admit that we stand with the rest of humanity before the mysteries of God and in the face of life's contradictions." (3)

This leads to the clear implication for Seow that in "wisdom literature we are instructed not to ignore nature, science, reason and experience." Quite the opposite, the biblical wisdom tradition, Seow claims, is itself "scriptural authority for human beings to make ethical decisions by paying attention to science and human experiences." "We must not say," he insists, "as we often hear in the debate about homosexuality, that 'experience has nothing to do with it' or that 'only scripture matters.' It is scriptural to take human observations and experiences seriously." (4)

Patrick Miller, an Old Testament scholar and Seow's colleague at Princeton Seminary, concurs and broadens his remarks beyond the perspective of the Hebrew wisdom tradition within Scripture when he observes that "the way of human discernment and reason's sensibility in the light of the complexities we encounter is not something foreign to scripture or disdained by scripture in favor of a simple reading of texts." Rather,

It is scripture itself that teaches us the importance of new knowledge, of the investigation of science, of the proven wisdom that comes from experience and is a part of our fear of the Lord. We tend to set the revelation of scripture condemning homosexual acts against our human desire to be open to the homosexual person and against our sense from experience that homosexuality is not finally reducible to the category of sin. ... But that tendency to trump experience with revelation comes up against scripture's own valuing of the wisdom of experience and its insistence that those who fear the Lord are to take account of what knowledge and wisdom teach us. (5)

As Robert Jenson has observed in this matter, "God's creative intent" is not to be discovered "by examining the empirical situation." (6) But neither does our hearing of Scripture occur apart from our empirical location, knowledge, and life experience. As Christian ethicist Paul Jersild has written,

Protestant Christianity rightly affirms the primacy of the Bible, compelling its continuing conversation with it. This conversation requires a careful listening to Scripture, but that listening takes place with "ears"--or minds and hearts--that bring to bear the concerns and perspectives of the church's own cultural and social world. In this process, the moral issues of the time stimulate new perspectives in understanding what Scripture and tradition have to say in relation to these issues. (7)

In this matter of homosexual relationships, Jersild further believes, "the church is being challenged to recognize that its own experience in the present moment, in which a once alienated people are being restored, is a powerful reality that cannot be denied by laws out of the past that have consigned these people to perpetual judgment." This leads to the conclusion that "our experience today as Christians in the world gives the shape and form to the questions we ask of Scripture and therefore also to the kinds of answers we discern" (pp. 135, 137).

Interestingly, Richard Hays, a vigorous advocate for the church's traditional proscription of same-sex relationships, is found to argue in his widely influential The Moral Vision of the New Testament that "it is crucial to remember that experience must be treated as a hermeneutical lens for reading the New Testament" and then adds the important qualifier "rather than as an independent, counterbalancing authority." (8) This is the point that I insist upon as well: that experience, as well as science and other empirical realties, are not separate sources of authority within the church but that they contribute to the creation of the "hermeneutical lens," to use Hays' metaphor, through which Scripture is not only read, but--to mix metaphors--heard and interpreted.

Alluding to the struggle described in Acts 10 and 11 through which Peter and the early church changed their mind regarding the inclusion of Gentiles previously counted "unclean" on account of Scripture, Hays acknowledges that it was "the experience of uncircumcised Gentiles responding in faith to the gospel message [that] led the church back to a new reading of Scripture." But, he insists, "only because the new experience of Gentile converts proved hermeneutically illuminating of Scripture was the church, over time, able to accept the decision to embrace Gentiles within the fellowship of God's people." So too, Hays concludes, must a reading/hearing of Scripture amid a church inclusive of gay and lesbian persons be illuminative of God's original intent in Scripture (p. 399). It is to this effort that I now turn, engaging with my congregational members in a close reading and imaginative hearing of the Yahwist creation account as encountered in the second chapter of Genesis.

The ways in which members of the congregation of which I am a part and serve as pastor hear, understand, and respond to this particular piece of Scripture taken from the Yahwist's creation account was the subject of two "focus groups" that I convened early in 2001. The first group was composed of gay and lesbian members of Lord of Light Lutheran Church (including members' partners who were not church members but were invited to attend) and the second a group composed of non-gay and non-lesbian members (also including nonmember partners/spouses). Within these two groups there was a good diversity of males and females, partnered and single (including divorced and formerly partnered), and a variety of ages represented from late teens to early sixties, numbering twenty-six persons in all. Here I will simply report on contributions made during these two conversations. (A third joint gathering was later held.)

Participants were asked to read in advance the entire Yahwist creation story in Gen 2:4b-25 as well as, if time permitted, Mark 10:2-12, Jesus' pronouncement on divorce in which he cites both Genesis creation accounts. (This pairing of readings had occurred in our lectionary readings on the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost.) In preparation for the conversations I had asked participants to pay special attention to Genesis 2: 18a in its broader context and to reflect from their own experience on what Word they heard from God regarding the nature of our deepest human relationships.

Following a reading aloud of Gen 2:4b-25, spirited, wide-ranging conversations began, each of which was called to a halt after ninety minutes. It is impossible to generalize about the conversations, and no effort was made to determine consensus, but let me highlight a number of observations that participants made.

+ There was strong appreciation for the ironic and humorous elements of the Yahwist's account, especially the "trial and error" nature of God's parading the animals past the human one in quest of a suitable partner. In the g/l group someone commented how important pets are in the lives of some people. A genetics researcher mentioned how similar to an evolutionary understanding God's trial-and-error method sounds. This suggested to another that ours is a Creator God who is "a work in process" and not a fixed entity, as people in Scripture so often tried to confine God into being. God' sown willingness to say "not good" to what God has created tells us a good bit about God beyond all the omni-this and omni-that talk.

+ What does this say about God's own aloneness in the creation of the human one and God's own need or desire for companionship? Current trinitarian thinking about the nature of God dwells a great deal on God's personal interrelationships, how relationship is integral to God's own being. This may be a dimension of what the first creation account means by humanity's being created in the image of God. Interestingly, though, it is a relationship of three rather than two that is at the heart of God's being, which leads us to be aware that relationships are a larger matter than just the "intimate other."

+ It is striking that the word "partner" is used in our text, a word commonly used of g/l couples. The other word, "helper," struck some as a very utilitarian word even when understood in its Hebrew context and nonpatriarchal sense when referring to God as our "help and strength." One person also observed that Genesis 2, particularly in comparison with Genesis 1, presents a highly egocentric and anthropocentric view of creation.

+ Isn't it remarkable, after all the "and God saw that it was good" editorializing at the end of each day of creation, culminating in the "very good" following the creation of humankind in the first creation account, that we should find God declaring in 2: 18a the divine judgment of "not good" over something that God had molded from the dust of the earth (adamah) and into whose nostrils had breathed the "breath of life?" We haven't gotten to chapter 3 yet and the story of the first disobedience, and yet something, the human one's aloneness, is declared by God "not good." Doesn't this signal that this is the basic concern or intention of God in this account rather than the specific narration of the making of woman and the etiology of male-female "one-flesh" coupling? "It's quite a jump," one person observed, "from 'it is not good to be alone' to 'thou shalt take a female wife if you are a man."'

+ It is interesting that God would declare that it is "not good" for a human being to be part of a world in which there were not other humans, implying that adam was not yet fully human despite the rest of creation. Only secondarily does it mean partnering with another human being. A constant theme for gay/lesbian and heterosexual people alike is the desire for relationship. This text's overarching theme is that God does care for our deepest human needs; that which makes us human is our relationships. What makes us human is our sociality. We don't grow without one another. The more people we're exposed to the more diverse and creative we become. We'd be stunted without one another. A formerly Christian, now Buddhist, partner of one of our members observed that from a Buddhist perspective it would be "very weird" to be just an individual, sentient being.

+ One person commented that neither Genesis 1 nor 2 speaks to him because it is so primitive a story, so distant and remote in comparison to, for example, Jesus' story of the Prodigal Son, which we'd heard read that morning. It's a story handed down to explain something, but what authority does this old story have for us today? So many g/l people are anti-Christian. That is partly because of this text we read and how it's been used by the church.

+ Another (a classical archaeologist) commented that the church has lived through fifteen hundred years of monasticism and the assumption that we best develop a relationship with God in solitariness. Relationships were thought of as a crutch for people who weren't capable of being religious enough in the midst of everyday life. Also the need to experience aloneness was mentioned by one of our undergraduate students as a way of self-differentiating and becoming a "real person" not just "absorbed" into another as sometimes happens with young girl- or boy-friends who are overly dependent on another person for their sense of identity and self-esteem.

+ Friendship was acknowledged as an underappreciated form of relationship in our culture's fascination with the "intimate other" and the church's preoccupation with marriage as the paradigm of all relationships. One person wondered aloud whether friendships among heterosexuals were as important to them as his g/l friendships. One person responded that he doubted it and remarked how his own family didn't understand the depth of his long-distance friendships. Also remarked upon was the perceived difficulty of heterosexual men having friendships with women because of sexual attraction issues.

+ One commented how there is a sense in which g/l people are able to get close quickly because they understand so much of one another's experience. "You don't have to explain so much," someone said. But that can also be deceiving, another noted, since we've all known people of whom we can say, "yes, she's a lesbian, but she's such a jerk!" It was agreed that when a primary relationship (partnership or marriage) has ended, friends become even more important. This is probably true, we agreed, of single people generally.

During and especially toward the end of each session, several people felt sufficiently secure to witness to their own experiences as members of a congregation that has been intentionally welcoming to gay and lesbian persons since the "coming out" of a valued member just over twenty-five years ago. That well-remembered event precipitated the beginning of an intentional study process on the "issue" of homosexuality that culminated in the congregation's commitment to the inclusion of sexual minority people as a sign of its hospitality (literally, in Greek, "love of the stranger") as a community of faith rooted in the gospel.

+ A long-time member of the congregation testified as to how easy it is to get into "we-they" thinking whereas "my personal experience in this congregation is that the people I sit next to in worship are people just like me who are struggling with faith issues and with God. They come to this church with the same human frailties that I do. We are no different but are all in the same need of grace. So how can anyone justify excluding them?" We are all saints and sinners, she concluded, and it is our common need that brings us together.

+ Even if we see homosexuality as a sin, an undergraduate member observed, that's not the point of the Bible. One sin isn't worse than another, but the issue of acceptance has priority. A nonmember spouse added, "Weren't Gertrude Stein's dying words, 'What was the question?"' We can't be so self-assured that we exclude others.

+ Another person observed that people in other churches haven't had as much experience of homosexual people as we do in our congregation. We say, "I love you and you love me and God loves us." So how can others say they're right when they haven't had our experience? So much of what we talk about is not what God's will is but what makes us feel ok, resulting in a confusion of faith with religion. Black-and-white thinking is so widespread in religious circles.

+ Q: Which side is the great divide over homosexuality coming from? A: From the literalists, not from us who are accepting. This is not really an issue for our congregation anymore--we may have other problems, but not this. Other things are more important. The church could get over this pretty quickly. The "other side" is taking their stance on the Bible in a way that raises questions about their whole understanding and use of the Bible.

+ The larger church seems to focus on the sex people have--or imagines they're having! But there's no sex going on on Sunday mornings but relationships. We want the rest of the church to experience the quality of life, the good news we experience because of our acceptance of others.

+ I came out long before I joined the church, commented an undergraduate. People don't understand it. It "flips people out." On campus it's much easier to be accepted as a lesbian than as a Christian. It seems strange and confusing to others--especially to my parents who aren't Christians. "So how did you become a Christian?" becomes a big question. I came to my own relationship with God and then found a welcoming community to become a part of.

+ I didn't realize that the church and homosexuality were incompatible until somebody told me. I began to look at Scripture much differently, no longer literally. Scripture became richer. Coming out really enriched my spiritual life.

+ A word about bisexuality needs to be spoken. We go through "stuff' on the way to discovering our sexuality. It's not always a straight-ahead kind of journey. The church doesn't give people enough room to figure this all out, to discover who they are. Some of us have to go outside the "official duality" to discover this. To be so either-or isn't satisfactory.

+ If I had this ok relationship with God before I discovered my sexuality, why should my faith change as I've discovered more about myself? I see no disjunction between being a Christian and being a lesbian. I was created in the image of God, too. That's the best answer to the question of why we hang in there with the church as g/l people.

Charles Baxter's novel The Feast of Love, a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award, is a marvelously interwoven narrative consisting of a motley cast of characters telling their own personal stories of loving and not-so-loving relationships (broadly inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream). The novel itself arises Out of a 2:00 A.M. conversation on an Ann Arbor park bench that occurs between a couple of insomniacs--the author, called "Charlie," and his friend and the novel's protagonist, "Bradley." "Listen, Charlie," Bradley says to his writer-friend, who is having a tough time getting his new novel started, "I've got an idea. It'll solve all your problems and it'll solve mine. Why don't you let me talk. I'll send you people, you know, actual people, for a change, like for instance human beings who genuinely exist, and you listen to them for awhile. Everybody's, got a story, and we'll just start telling you the stories we have."

To which Charlie responds, "What do you think I am, an anthropologist?" (9)

Theological anthropology necessarily involves the "field work" of inviting actual people to tell their stories, not just any stories but their personal stories of love and human relationships as experienced and interpreted in the light of Scripture's master story. Moreover, theological anthropology is more than a mere collection of individuals' stories; it is the communal interweaving of individual narratives told and shared and reflected upon as response to the Word in the gathered koinonia we call "church." As Luke Johnson has put it, "If in fact theology has to do not alone with ideas but with faith in the living God, pastoral or practical theology is the research arm of theology." (10) Or, I would add, "theological anthropology." As David Bartlett put it in another context, we need "studies that help us think about how people understand texts in their relationship to communities, not just in relationship to the individual scholar..." (11)

Old Testament scholar Patrick Miller insists that

the present interpretive activity of the church be a communal one, that our efforts to think about this issue afresh and in reference to what has been thought already be a corporate engagement and not simply a matter of individual proposals for reading texts, although we may start at that point. Our interpretation happens in community, and what the community experiences in faith is more significant than the experience of any individual. What we say and do together is more to be attended to than idiosyncratic readings of texts by one or a few individuals.... This means listening to a broad range of interpretive judgments in the church, including its gay and lesbian members. (12)

Not all scholars share this view. Christopher Seitz, a biblical scholar who argues against relaxing the church's traditional proscription against same-sex behavior, doubts that attempts within the church to "stay in dialogue" regarding this issue will be productive. "I may be wrong," he admits, but nonetheless asserts that "what I see is a hardening of resolve on both sides and greater conviction that one's own side is right after all." (13) While personally I am not ready to give up on dialogue, I find compelling Seitz's recommendation that at the present impasse at which the church finds itself on this issue,

it is better for us to witness to the truth and to clarify how it is we come to it, than to assume that what is confused are our sources of authority and that with just one more historical-critical work we will succeed in eliminating the confusion and persuading the other side.... In the meantime both sides are obliged to testify to the truth and clarify how they have come to it, without any assumption that a consensus will emerge this side of the judgment of God. (14)

Without conceding to his fatalistic judgment that "we must frankly admit that we [the church] are in schism," he is certainly right that it is God who "will judge the appeal to his word being made by both sides." (15) In fact, it is Seitz's we-they, us-them view of the church's current preoccupation with homosexuality, as noted in our focus group conversation, that seems more a unilateral declaration that the church is in schism by the defenders of the traditional position than a genuine effort to "testify to the truth" of their position in conversation with those very persons who embody the issue, namely, lesbian and gay members of the church.

Jersild views our present situation more positively as "a genuine learning moment for the church" that may well become "a time of significant growth and maturation." (16) This also is the overwhelming feeling among members of our congregation, several of whom have attended regional church forums on homosexuality led by guest theologians, gatherings that have attracted capacity crowds for Bible study and discussion such as our synod has never before experienced. Can it be a bad thing when Christians of widely varying views on the matter of homosexuality come together to worship and pray, study Scripture, and be in conversation with one another? I can testify to how important it has been in these gatherings to have gay and lesbian Christians (including members of my own congregation) present to add to the conversation with Scripture their own voices of faith, voices many from other congregations have not had opportunity to engage with in the formation of their own attitudes and opinions about this "issue."

Jersild further notes that it is the known presence of gays and lesbians as "fellow member(s) of the household of faith" that is "fundamentally changing the nature of this debate." No longer is the gay or lesbian person "simply 'the other,' one who is kept at a safe distance as a kind of leper whom it is easy to reject.... Whether living as singles or in partnership, Christian homosexual persons have emerged as fellow believers, witnesses to God's grace, and co-workers in the kingdom," living testimonies that "God is at work in the world, and that changes marked by greater understanding, and by the recovery of a people once repudiated and lost to the church, bear the signs of God's presence." (17)

Thomas Long, formerly Professor of Preaching and Worship at Princeton Seminary and now at Emory University, believes that "Despite countless statements and pronouncements, the larger church is probably not prepared to render a finished judgment on the matter of homosexuality." Indeed, he raises the question as to the possibility of ever coming to such a "fixed" view and argues instead that:

The larger and worthy doctrinal goal of discerning Christian truth, believed everywhere and by all, must be nuanced by the inescapably local and congregational character of Christianity. On the horizon is the cathedral of God's truth, and we are all making pilgrimage toward it. For the time being, though, along the pilgrim path, the biblical mandate for the congregations of Galatia or Grand Rapids may not be what is biblical for the congregation of Corinth or at Jennings, Missouri. (18)

In congregational life, he observes,

the "oracular" model of scripture is replaced by a conversational one.... Preaching teaching, praying, deliberating, praising, and sharing life around the coffeepot are all forms of the continuing congregational conversation, and scripture is a voice in the colloquy. Scripture is an important, authoritative, and normative voice--a "loud" voice, so to speak--but in congregational context it exerts its power conversationally and not unilaterally. (19)

Part of what this means, he continues, "is that congregations employ a broad and sophisticated hermeneutic that relates the whole and the part--the whole of congregational life to the part of a given text of scripture." Remarkably, he observes,

This bears similarity to canonical approaches to biblical interpretation in which the textual part is often seen as part of a larger whole as manifested by the canon. Thus a text can be heard in its own right, as a voice in the chorus, but its force is modified (and sometimes mitigated) by the overarching canonical harmonies.... In congregations, however, the textual part is related not just to the canonical whole, but to the whole of congregational life... in the preaching in the sanctuary and the laughter in the churchyard, in the hymns and in the prayers and in the reading of the lessons, in the touch of a hand at hospital bedside and in the words of comfort at the communion table, in the phone calls from members and in the printed reports of denominational deliberations--in every place in that congregation's life where the voice of scripture is invited to join the confusing welter of conversation about the even more tangled business of being Christian in the midst of the human condition--it is the convict ion of the church that the spirit of God speaks.

"Of course, this can be merely sentiment," Long admits, "but it can also be baptismal discernment." (20)

We hear God's story of the creation of the earthling and the divine declaration of "not good" regarding the earthling's aloneness in conversation with our own and others' yet unfinished human stories. A congregation is like a "complex, ongoing, and multifaceted conversation," Long suggests, invoking John McClure's phrase, that is "talking itself into becoming a Christian community." (21)

Martha Stortz explicates this hermeneutical ecology of the faith community further as she explains,

There are intersecting circles of Scripture, church tradition, experience, culture, and so forth. The community needs to take seriously the witness of each of these and somehow come to a point where it can say, "It seems right to the Holy Spirit and to us." All these pieces are present and shape one another. I find that people appeal to experience as if it were raw. But experience is always already shaped, for example, by Lutheran and biblical understandings. There's enormous reflexivity between the way I read Scripture and the way Scripture "reads" me. This happens in the context of community. (22)

Paul Lehmann makes an important contribution to this matter from beyond the grave in his final, posthumously published work in which he reflects on the Genesis creation accounts. As Miller observes carefully, Lehmann' s comments "are indicative of the fact that what the text says does not yet tell us what it teaches; that happens only when the text is perceived from some angle of vision. For Lehmann, as it should be for us all, that angle was the gospel, which is, in his now-familiar formulation, what God was and is doing to make and to keep human life human." (23) Lehmann' s "angle" on the Genesis account is worth citing at length, paying special attention to his crucial distinction between a "limiting" and a "foundational" instance.

[A] divine ordination is not a limiting instance, but a foundational one. As a limiting instance, the divine ordination to sexual otherness and reciprocity is put forward as the normative mode of sexuality, in relation to which variants are excluded as deviants from the heterosexual norm. As a foundational instance, the divine ordination to sexual otherness and reciprocity becomes the liberating instance in relation to which divergent possibilities may be pursued and assessed. As a limiting instance, heterosexuality necessarily excludes homosexuality from the divine purpose of and for human fulfillment. As a foundational instance of otherness in differentiation and commitment, inequality and heterogeneity, reciprocity and fidelity, heterosexuality becomes the liberating occasion and sign of human fulfillment in relation to which homosexuality may also be affirmed. Just as in Scripture and tradition, a central and indispensable correlation between monotheism and monogamy has been discerned and affirmed, yet wi thout requiring the instantaneous and intransigent rejection of concubinage, polyandry or polygamy, or even interracial and/or interfaith marriage as a test case of the obedience of faith, so the foundational and liberating instance of heterosexuality as a parable of human fulfillment does not require an intransigent rejection of homosexuality as a test case of the obedience of faith. (24)

In light of Lehmann's distinction, Gen 2:18a can be seen to be an example of God's foundational and thereby liberating rather than limiting intent for humanity (negatively stated): It is not good for the human one to be alone. This declaration, not procreation, not sexual complementarity, not "plumbing," (25) not the institution of marriage, not the "heterosexual order of creation," (26) not whatever other etiologies may be found in the second creation account, however important they may be, sounds most loudly and clearly within our congregational hearing and conversation as God's original and foundational but not limiting intent from which all the rest follows. It is this Word of God that makes most sense of our collectively shared stories and that speaks to us the good and liberating news that relationship--that not being alone--marks the beginning of our being truly human and, in Lehmann' s words, is what "keeps us human."

The Bible is the church's book whose peculiar authority is experienced most persuasively, compellingly, and winsomely within the life of the gathered worshiping community. The insights of biblical scholars and theologians working indidivually and collectively do not displace the ecclesial authority we experience within our local, living, worshiping communities that gather regularly to hear the Word and share the supper and then disperse for the sake of ministry in daily life. Our local congregations are not the whole church, but they are fully church as they confess themselves to be participants in the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church." Our local ecclesial communities are not an ideal and abstract church but are a real and embodied gathering of saints/sinners who know and care for one another and the mission of the gospel into which they have been baptized. Here God's Word speaks to the lives and within the hearts of its hearers and is heard and bears fruit--or it does not. In this sense the congrega tion constitutes the primary "hermeneutical ecology" to which this essay has tried to pay attention.

The preceding is far from all that needs to be said about this conflicted matter in the life of the church we call homosexuality. It is, I would argue, that area of the church's contemporary life most reflective of a theological anthropology gone awry. A place from which we might begin afresh, I believe, is with Yahweh's original "not good," with the Creator's definitive dissatisfaction not with humanity itself but with the result of the human one's being alone. This as the originating Word of our conversation with Scripture regarding the basis for our theological anthropology is one that at the very least calls into question all church rulemaking that would seek to isolate people from meaningful, committed, and mutually fulfilling human relationship. It is a Word that at least one community of Christians finds to be a liberating and not limiting text that by the inspiration of the Spirit has the power to make and keep making us--but not only us--church.

(1.) Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions for the Churches, ed. Walter Wink (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 33.

(2.) Choon-Leong Seow, "A Heterotextual Perspective," Homosexuality and Christian Community (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 23.

(3.) Seow, 24.

(4.) Seow, 22.

(5.) Patrick Miller, "What The Scriptures Principally Teach," in Homosexuality and Christian Community, ed. Choon-Leong Seow (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 60.

(6.) Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 2 (New York: Oxford, 1999), 93.

(7.) Paul Jersild, Spirit Ethics: Scripture and the Moral Life (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 60.

(8.) Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 399.

(9.) Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000), 16.

(10.) Luke Johnson, Scripture and Discernment: Decision Making in the Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 40-44.

(11.) David Bartlett, Between the Bible and the Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 159.

(12.) Miller, "What The Scriptures Principally Teach," 58.

(13.) Christopher Seitz, "Sexuality and Scripture's Plain Sense: The Christian Community and the Law of God," in Homosexuality, Science and the 'Plain Sense' of Scripture, ed. David L. Balch (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 181.

(14.) Seitz, "Sexuality and Scripture's Plain Sense," 181.

(15.) Seitz, 181.

(16.) Jersild, Spirit Ethics, 134.

(17.) Jersild, 134-35.

(18.) Thomas Long, "Living With The Bible," in Homosexuality and Christian Community, ed. Choon-Leong Seow (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 70.

(19.) Long, "Living With The Bible," 72.

(20.) Long, 73, 72.

(21.) Long, 72.

(22.) Martha Stortz, "A Table Talk on Lutheran Ethics," in The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, ed. Karen Bloomquist and John Stumme (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 165.

(23.) Miller, "What The Scriptures Principally Teach," 57; emphasis added.

(24.) Paul Lehmann, The Decalogue and a Human Future: The Meaning of the Commandments for Making and Keeping Human Life Human (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 174, cited in Miller, "What The Scriptures Principally Teach," 57-58.

(25.) Jenson, Systematic Theology, 89.

(26.) See Christian Scharen, Married in the Sight of God: Theology, Ethics and Church Debates Over Homosexuality (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 55-92.