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While the Supreme Court deliberates the constitutionality of Congress’ “Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)” and California’s Proposition 8, it’s high time to reframe the religious argument that is so often brought to bear in the debate. Besides, let’s not be fooled. While the religious right is trying to reframe their argument in terms of family and procreation, we all know what they really mean. Religious fundamentalists and the politicians they support cast gay marriage as a violation of God’s law, insisting that our nation cannot be sustained in the face of this violation.
Leaders of more liberal religious movements that have
accepted marriage equality insist that God’s law is not stagnant, but evolves as
humans gain new understanding of the world and of God’s role in human affairs.
This more expansive view of the flexibility of religious law
and its connection to human knowledge and understanding is useful and important
as human moral values unfold and evolve. I would suggest, however, that this
vision does not go far enough in conceiving a new perspective on the nature of
religious scripture, the divine/human relationship and how that relationship
can inform a contemporary approach to moral and legal issues. I call this new
perspective Religious Humanism, which insists on the human dimension of
religion and recognizes religious scripture, including the Bible, as multivocal
expressions of the divine/human encounter.
When approaching the broader issue of sexuality from this
perspective, we must begin with the understanding not only that the Bible is not
the “Word of God,” but more significantly, that there is, existentially no such
thing as the Bible. What we call the Bible is, in fact, a collection of
books—indeed that’s what the word Bible means—each of which are themselves
composite works, perhaps emerging from an early oral tradition, written or
compiled over a period of roughly 1,000 years under varying historical, social,
political, economic and
religious/theological circumstances. As a result, what we really have is
not some univocal, monolithic work that we can simply turn to for answers to
our questions. It’s not a dictionary or an encyclopedia. It is, rather, a
polyphonous, multivocal work conveying the perspectives of various writers at
various times.
These various writings began to coalesce into what
Christians today would call the Old Testament and Jews would call the Tanakh or
the Hebrew Bible during the 6th – 5th centuries BCE. The
Kingdom of Judah had been invaded and conquered by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.
The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and a good portion of the citizens were
sent into exile in Babylonia. Fifty years later, in 536 BCE, the Persian King
Cyrus, having defeated the Babylonians, allowed exiled peoples, including the
Judeans—the Jews—to return to their homelands and rebuild their temples. It is
in this context of exile and eventual restoration that we need to examine the
seeds of the composition and compiling of the Hebrew Bible.
Probably due largely to Persian imperial politics, the
political development of this restored Judean community was kept under fairly
tight imperial control. There was no king of the newly restored Judea; it
became a Persian province ruled by a governor appointed by the Persian king.
Often this was a Jew, as exemplified by the biblical figure Nehemiah. Local
authority emanated from the Temple, rebuilt with the support of King Darius of
Persia, giving the priesthood a good deal of status and authority. It is these
priests who were responsible for compiling the various literary strands and
oral traditions that came to form what Jews call the Torah, or what is called
in English the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses. This is a crucial point to
bear in mind. The Torah, in its final compilation—more or less as we have it
today—is the product of the priests of the second Temple.
We should also bear in mind that the sparse verses referring
to male homosexuality in the Pentateuch derive from an earlier priestly work
perhaps going back to the first Temple, namely, the Book of Leviticus, with its
detailed instructions for the sacrificial program of the Temple and the rules
for ritual purity meant to protect the Temple from ritual contamination.
We get a glimpse of the mindset of these second Temple
priests in the biblical work ascribed to Ezra, a leader of that contingent,
identified in the book that bears his name as a priest and a scribe. In that
book, the author makes clear that the covenant community—the community that
could participate in the rebuilding of the Temple and in the communal life that
would center around that Temple—is restricted to what the book refers to as
“the returned exiles.” These are the descendants of the Judeans who had been
taken onto exile by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and who had returned to Judea
under Persian rule. In the biblical prophetic tradition, exile came to be
understood as God’s plan to punish the covenant people for their sins of
apostasy and idolatry. Exile would, in effect, cleanse and refine the community
thus allowing the purified community to return to its land. Only these returned
exiles had endured the punishment that would purify the community of the
pre-exilic sins, so only these returned exiles could be considered part of this
restored covenant community. Those who had remained in the land of Judea, who
had not gone into exile, who had not endured that punishment and had not been
cleansed of those sins could not participate. That, I would suggest is the
voice of the priests of the second Temple.
But there is another voice from the period—the voice of a
prophet whom scholars refer to as II Isaiah to distinguish him from the
earlier, pre-exilic prophet Isaiah. This prophet’s voice is heard in the latter
half of the Book of Isaiah, chapters 40-66. This prophetic voice insists that
all who are willing to enter into a covenant relationship with God are accepted
in God’s house, God’s Temple.
"To the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths,
who choose the things that please Me and hold fast My covenant, I will give, in
My house and within My walls, a monument and a name better than sons and
daughters… And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to Him,
to love the name of the Lord… these I will bring to My holy mountain, and make
them joyful in My house of prayer… for My house shall be called a house of
prayer for all peoples" (Isaiah 56:4-7).
So, can you comment on the selection of Leviticus 18:1-30 as the Mincha Yom Kippur reading? I know I've heard various historic reasons behind why we sure be chastened at that point in the day of fasting. Do you think we should switch to the alternate reading (I've never evn looked at what that is...)
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of sexual stuff here: incest, bestiality, sexuality and menstruation, homosexuality. Notice that it's tied to the idea of "purity," and that human sexual purity impugns the purity of the land such that the land will "vomit" out its inhabitants. After all, the natural world also operates on the principle of an ordered sexuality. The birds and the bees do it. The flowers and the trees do it. So the connection between human sexual purity and the purity of the land is a whole other story.
DeleteShould we change the liturgy? We could, but it sort of makes sense that while we're beginning to experience the pangs of hunger, we might contemplate some other human urges from which we're supposed to abstain during this day of spiritual reflection.
The Bible does not Condemn Homosexuality. I have proved this definitively on my SolaScripturaChristianLiberty blog. It was specific Pagan ritual Sex acts being addressed in Leviticus.
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