Them That Call Evil Good and Good Evil

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, 

and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"

~ Isaiah 5:20

This well-known and well-used scripture has been floating around my head for the past several weeks in the wake of my daughter's blog post about reconciling what she knows to be true about the family that Mark and I have created with what the LDS Church has told her about same-sex relationships. It was a powerful post, and if you have not read it, I highly recommend it.

Her post was subsequently re-published on Feminist Mormon Housewives and on No More Strangers. I wrote a post in response, and it was also republished on No More Strangers.

The comments that my daughter received were generally very supportive. My post, however, received a number of negative, condemnatory comments. With respect to both posts, comments that were not entirely supportive tended to fall within the following categories:

• Church leaders are human and sometimes make mistakes.
• Church leaders should be forgiven when they make mistakes.
• If one does not forgive for an "offense," then the greater sin lies with she who has been hurt.
• My 19-year-old daughter should have "stood up" to her stake president - the man who had the power to deny her temple recommend immediately prior to her temple wedding.
• The Church is making "progress" and those who have been hurt by its shifting policies on homosexuality should be patient and forebearing.

There is much that could be said about these statements, such as:

• Why the constant need to defend leaders?
• Why the constant insistence on the point that the Church is perfect but the people in it are not?
• Why the need to bash those that have been hurt in order to defend leaders?

But I am not going to address these questions in this post.

I want to look at a larger issue. 

The scripture that I quoted above has often - many times - been used to condemn what are perceived as "wicked" practices and trends in society, as well as to defend Church doctrine, policies and practices. Those who have different views from the Church are perceived as calling evil good, of putting darkness for light and bitter for sweet. 

On the other hand, those who criticize certain doctrine, policies and practices of the Church are perceived as calling good evil, of calling that which is light, darkness, and of calling that which is sweet, bitter. 

These kinds of attitudes are deliberately fostered within the LDS Church (as well as in many other conservative Christian denominations) with respect to many issues and teachings. Mormons are taught to view themselves as both guardians of virtue and recipients of the mockery of the prideful world (e.g., in Lehi's Dream). This view tends to promote self-righteousness and a rigid, skewed and frankly uncharitable world view, justified by scriptures such as Isaiah 5:20.

But I'd like to turn this scripture around, looking at the Church's teachings about homosexuality and family. I'd like to suggest that it is the Church (through its doctrines, practices and policies that have in turn affected the attitudes of millions of Church members), that has called bigotry, judgment

For most of its history, in fact until just recently, the Church taught that those who experience feelings of attraction to members of their own sex were depraved, in grave danger of hellfire. Men and women, but primarily men, were (and are) labeled and judged based on a single (but very important) characteristic - their sexual orientation. 

Any other "redeeming" qualities of such persons that were/are "virtuous, lovely or of good report," were ignored. Such people were/are "evil," and it wouldn't do for them to be considered "good." They had to change from "evil" to "good." Any pronouncement that gays are just as good as other people (or just as bad), that homosexuality is not a moral issue, was calling evil, good; and any criticism leveled at the Church for its teachings on homosexuality was essentially calling good, evil.

The Church teaches and has always taught that "acting" on one's gay sexual orientation is a sin and bad. And this is not limited to actual sex. It applies to any other type of activity, feelings or gestures that, with respect to a heterosexual relationship, would be considered healthy, appropriate and in no way a violation of the law of chastity - but with respect to a same-sex relationship is wrong. In fact, there is no such thing as a same-sex "relationship" - at least nothing that could be considered "good." Mormon gays are expected to be not only celibate sexually, but celibate emotionally as well. 

And as to gay relationships, gay partnerships and gay marriage, the Church's stance was pretty well stated recently by Boyd Packer when he referred to same-sex marriages and partnerships as "Satan's counterfeit for marriage." Any claim that such relationships were anything but bad was calling evil good, and any criticism of the Church's stance in this regard is calling good evil.

But I think it is time to turn Isaiah around. The Church is calling something that is good, evil. It is labeling something that is full of light, darkness. It is claiming that something that is sweet, bitter. These sentiments were expressed by my daughter in her blog post:

"I watch my dad and Mark interact with each other, I see love, respect, kindness, loyalty, and dedication. I watch my dad and Mark interact with my siblings, and I see the same things. I see my little brother come over and sit on Mark's lap and Mark intently listen to what he has to say, whether it's about his lego set or his little sister that is bothering him. I hear him tell my six-year old sister that she looks so beautiful in her new outfit. I see the joy in his eyes when he sees the my siblings laugh and play. 

"Mark and Dad are good parents. Obviously my dad has always been my dad, and I've always loved him for it, but it's been amazing to me to see Mark come into our lives and be another loving parent to me and my siblings. 

"There is a peaceful spirit I feel when I am at dad and Mark's house. It is calm, simple, and beautiful. I don't feel like there is anything amiss, or missing, though of course I always miss both my parents and all of my family members whenever we are not all together. 

"I guess I am saying all of this as a back drop to my feelings I want to express in this post. 

"I've been taught at church to think that what I experience at my dad's house is "wrong." That it isn't natural, right, healthy, or good.

"Well I've come to the point when I just KNOW that is not true. I believe it, I feel it, I know it."

Thankfully, more and more people are realizing that not only the LDS Church, but many other conservative Christian denominations, pundits and political groups are under Isaiah's condemnation. They are realizing that what they had taught to regard as evil is nothing of the sort; that their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers are not the people that others would portray them to be; that these people's relationships are based on love, commitment and dignity - not depraved sexuality as they had been taught.

And when they see love for what it truly is, when they give themselves permission to act on the love they have for their gay family members, they in turn are blessed with that same love and are enabled to better view the world as a place of goodness, sweetness and light, rather than a vale of evil, bitterness and darkness.

The Abomination Thing

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

Leviticus 18:22

“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; 

they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.”

Leviticus 20:13

This post, previously published in the spring of 2011 on my former blog, describes the insights of Daniel Helminiak (discussed in the previous two posts) into and conclusions regarding the foregoing passages from Leviticus, viewed in the light of a historical-critical approach to their interpretation.  

The Holiness Code

These two passages appear in what scholars refer to as “The Holiness Code” – a list of laws and punishments that spelled out requirements for Israel to remain ‘holy’ in God’s sight. As Professor Helminiak explains in his book, “to remain separate from the Gentiles was to be ‘holy’ – set apart, different, chosen, special, consecrated … Differences or specialness is the core meaning of holiness in the ancient Hebrew understanding.  So, a main concern of The Holiness Code was to keep Israel different from the Gentiles … Homogenital sex is forbidden because it is associated with Gentile identity.  It departs from the Jewish understanding of how things should be.”

“The prohibition of male-male sex,” continued Helminiak, “occurs only in The Holiness Code of Leviticus and nowhere else.  But other prohibitions in The Holiness Code [such as adultery, incest and bestiality] recur in other places in the Bible … The implication is that the only reason for forbidding male-male sex is concern about uncleanness and ‘holiness.’  The argument in Leviticus is religious [i.e., ritualistic], not ethical or moral.  That is to say, no thought is given to whether the sex in itself is right or wrong.  The intent is to keep Jewish identity strong.  The concern is purity.”

  

To better explain what he means when he draws a distinction between religious laws vs. ethical/moral laws, Helminiak uses the example of the prohibition on eating meat in the Catholic Church.  There used to be a church law that forbade Catholics from eating meat on Fridays.  That church law was considered so serious that violation was a mortal (i.e., extremely serious) sin, supposedly punishable by hell.  Yet no one believed that eating meat was something wrong in itself.  The offense was against a religious responsibility. 

This example parallels, in Helminiak’s view, the prohibition of male-male sex in Leviticus.  “Not sex,” he writes, “but violation of Judaism is what was prohibited … [and] the fact that two men shared a sexual experience was really not a problem.  The only problem was when one man penetrated another.  Among the early Israelites, to engage specifically in male-male intercourse was to mix the roles of man and woman.  Such ‘mixing of the kinds’ was an abomination; it was impure … Though the Hebrew Testament certainly did forbid penetrative male-male sex, its reasons for forbidding it have no bearing on today’s discussion of homosexuality.”

And what was behind this Hebrew aversion to penetrative male-male sex?  “Women [was] to be penetrated,” writes Helminiak, “and man is to penetrate.  The very Hebrew word for woman, naqeba, means ‘orifice bearer’ – as if there were no orifices in the male body.  The fundamental image of a woman was someone who was there to serve the man in sexual intercourse.  So for a man to sexually penetrate another man in anal intercourse was to mix and confuse the standards of maleness and femaleness.  It was to use a male in the function of a female.  It was precisely this mixing of kinds, this confusion of accepted gender roles, that Leviticus 18:22 forbade – but not other kinds of male-male sex.  In the ancient Hebrew mind, penetrative sex with another man disrupted the ideal order of things and thus was unclean, taboo, forbidden; it was an abomination.”

In this regard, I am reminded from a scene from the documentary, Trembling Before G-d, which explored homosexuality among orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities.  In the scene, Steve Greenberg, who is reportedly the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi in the United States, describes visiting with a revered rabbi in Jerusalem and asking him about homosexuality.  The rabbi pointed out that male-male penetrative sex is forbidden by the Torah.  Greenberg replied that there are other ways to express homosexual love, which the revered rabbi admitted he had never considered.

The Word "Abomination"

And now, about that word “abomination.”  In referring to Leviticus 20:25-26, Helminiak explains that “abominable” is just another word for “unclean.”  “An abomination,” he writes, “is a violation of the purity rules that governed Israelite society and kept the Israelites different from other peoples … We do not fully understand the ancient Jewish worldview …  The reasons for the purity laws of Leviticus are lost in history and in layer upon layer of editing … Whatever the rationale was behind the ancient Hebrew purity laws, such thinking certainly has nothing to do with ethics as we understand it.”   

Helminiak also points out that the Hebrew term toevah used in Leviticus, which is commonly translated as abomination, could also be translated as “uncleanness” or “impurity” or “dirtiness” or “taboo”.  The significance of the use of this word becomes clearer when one realizes that another Hebrew term zimah  could have been used, if that was what the authors intended.  Zimah means, not what is objectionable for religious or cultural reasons, but what is wrong in itself.  It means an injustice, a sin.  “Clearly, then,” writes Helminiak, “Leviticus does not say that for man to lie with is a “sin.”  Rather, it is a ritual violation, an uncleanness.

Further textual support is found in the Greek Septuagint, which usually translates the Hebrew word toevah with the Greek word bdelygma, which means a ritual offense.  In some places, it is translated as akatharsia, which means uncleanness.  But, as with the original Hebrew, other Greek words were available, such as anomia, meaning a violation of law or wrong or a sin; or poneria, an evil practice; or asebia, meaning ungodliness.  “These words, “writes Helminiak, could have been used to translate toevah.  In fact, in some cases they were.  In nine places in chapter 16 of Ezekial – where the prophet outright defines the sin of Sodom [see last week’s post on the Sin of Sodom] – toevah is translated as anomia, and the offenses in question are not just ritual impurity but real wrongs, like idolatry, child sacrifice, adultery and basic wickedness.  Anomia also translates toevah in Ezekial 18:12, 13 and 24, where the discussion is about individual moral responsibility.  In Proverbs 26:25, referring to a deceitful and wicked person, poneria is used to translate toevah.  And in Ezekial 14:6, in reference to idolatry, the Greek word asebia is used to translate toevah.”

Concluding Comments

In the last post in this series, I mentioned a book, Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality, by Rev. Rack Rogers, Professor of Theology Emeritus at San Francisco Theological Seminary and former Moderator (President) of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA).  In his book, Professor Rogers sums up his comments on these two verses from Leviticus thusly (at pp. 69-70):

“Jesus was concerned with purity of heart.  In Matthew 15 he said to a crowd, ‘Listen and understand:  it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles’ (Matthew 15:10-11).  Later he explained to his disciples:  ‘What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.  For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.  These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile” (Matthew 15:18-20).

“When we see Jesus as the fulfillment of the law, we understand that our challenge is not meticulously to maintain culturally conditioned laws, but rather, with Jesus, to love God and love our neighbor.  When these texts in Leviticus are taken out of their historical and cultural context and applied to faithful, God-worshipping Christians who are homosexual, it does violence to them.  They are being condemned for failing to conform to an ancient culturally conditioned code that is not applicable to them or their circumstances.  Even Louisville Presbyterian Seminary New Testament professor Marion Soards, who opposes homosexuality on other grounds, agrees that ‘it is impossible to declare the necessary relevance of these verses for our world today.’”

What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality: Sodom

I published a series of posts on my former blog a year ago last spring about what the Bible really has to say about homosexuality.  As a follow-on to yesterday's post about Prayers for Bobby, I am going to re-publish those posts over the course of the next couple of weeks.

This post is the first of several that will consider a little book written by Daniel A. Helminiak entitled What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality (Tajique, NM: Alamo Press, 2000).  Helminiak is a former Catholic priest and scholar who has ministered to gays and studied theology and gay issues for over 30 years. Though only 133 pages long, the book has a lot crammed into it, and I recommend it to any gay Mormon or Christian.  

Helminiak grew up in a devout Polish Catholic community in Pittsburgh and entered seminary at age seventeen.  He was ordained in Rome, where he earned a Vatican license to teach theology; he later earned a PhD in Systematic Theology at Andover Newton Theological School and Boston College.  Helminiak came out in 1976 and served for many years as chaplain to Dignity USA, a LGBT Catholic support network.  In the 1980’s, after teaching in a seminary for four years, disillusioned with the institutional church and unable to reconcile his integrity with Vatican expectations, Helminiak enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a PhD in Human Development.  He is now a full professor in the humanistic and transpersonal Department of Psychology at the University of West Georgia.

Background

Helminiak begins his book by presenting a short lesson on the history of how the church has dealt with homosexuality.  “A millennium ago,” he begins, “Western society was rather indifferent to homosexuality and even supportive of it.  A gay subculture thrived.  Clerics and nuns wrote love letters and poetry to one another … Students at the newly founded Christian universities regularly debated the pros and cons of straight versus gay love. And no law codes in Europe (except in Visigoth Spain) included prohibitions on homosexual acts.”

By 1200, however, things had changed:  “Order and uniformity became the rule of the day,” Helminiak writes, “and volumes and volumes of law codes were promulgated.  For the first time in Christian history, Jews and Muslims were persecuted, the poor were regarded as a menace and … ‘heretics’ were put to death.  At the same time, homosexuals began to face violent and open opposition.  Thus began a millennium of Christian condemnation of homosexuality.”

Fast-forwarding to our time, Helminiak points out that “many of those who are homosexual have been raised to believe in the Bible, and they have been told that it condemns homosexuality … It looks as if homosexual people have to give up their religion or else – which seems impossible – give up their sexuality.”

He continues:

“That is no small matter.  Scientific study, along with psychology, has been underway for barely a century.  But it is already clear that sexuality goes to the core of a person.  Sexuality means much more than physical arousal and orgasm.  Attached to a person’s sexuality is the capacity to feel affection, to delight in someone else, to get emotionally close to another person, to be passionately committed to him or her ... To have to be afraid to feel sexual is to restrain that noblest of human possibilities, love.  It is to short-circuit human spontaneity in a whole array of expressions – creativity, motivation, passion, commitment, heroic achievement.  It is to be afraid of part of one’s own deepest self.”

Interpreting the Bible

There is no question but that the Bible has things to say about homosexuality.  Several passages have been used like gigantic clubs which many “Christians” have used to beat up on homosexuals.  Helminiak acknowledges that these passages exist, but challenges the interpretations that are commonly ascribed to these verses.

To preface his comments on these various passages of scripture, Helminiak devotes an entire chapter of his book to describing the two most common approaches to interpretation of the Bible:  a literal reading and an historical-critical reading.  The literal reading claims to take the text simply for what it says, whereas the other approach aims to discover that the text meant to the people who originally wrote it.  In other words, Helminiak explains, “to say what a biblical text teaches us today, you first have to understand the text in its original situation and then apply the meaning to the present situation.”

To illustrate a point that words don’t always mean what they say, he uses the example of the phrase “out in left field.”  To someone centuries in the future who runs across this expression in a text, unless that person understood the game of baseball and how the expression came into common usage, he wouldn’t have a clue as to what the term meant in the context in which it was being used.

As an illustration of this principle applied to Biblical texts, Helminiak uses the example of Jesus’ saying that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.  On its face, this statement implies that no rich person can get to heaven, because it is impossible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.  On the other hand, scholars have pointed out that in Jerusalem there was a very low and narrow gate through the city wall called “the eye of the needle.”  When a caravan entered through that gate, the camels had to be unloaded, led through the gate crouching down and then reloaded inside the city wall.  With this understanding, we can surmise that what Jesus meant by this saying is that the rich might first have to “unload” their material concerns in order to get into heaven.

Helminiak uses the historical-critical approach to interpret what the Bible has to say about homosexuality.  I will get into specifics in subsequent posts, but as general statements, Helminiak posits that the modern concept of adult homosexual relationships would not have been familiar to the writers of the Bible.  “Specifically,” he points out, “in biblical times there was no elaborated understanding of homosexuality as a sexual orientation … There was only a general awareness of same-sex contacts or same-sex acts.”  Therefore, in order to understand what passages of the Bible concerning homosexuality really mean as applied to modern society, one must understand and appreciate what the mindset was of the writers of such passages.

The Sin of Sodom

Helminiak dates the current widely-held interpretation of the story of Sodom to about the 12th century, which coincided with a major shift in attitude within the church toward homosexuality (discussed in my previous post).  From that point in time, writes Helminiak, “the very word ‘sodomite’ was taken to refer to someone who engages in anal sex, and the sin of Sodom was taken to be male homogential acts (i.e., same-sex sexual acts).”

However, argues Helminiak, in the many biblical references to the sin of Sodom, there is no concern whatsoever about homogenitality, but there is concern about hardheartedness and abuse.  The sins of Sodom, says Helminiak, were abuse and offense against strangers, insult to the traveler, and inhospitality to the needy.  “When male-male rape becomes part of the story,” he explains, “the additional offense was sexual abuse – gross insult and humiliation [by forcing anal sex on the men] in Lot’s time and our own.  The whole story and its culture make clear that the author was not concerned about sex in itself, and it was irrelevant whether the sex was hereto- or homosexual.”

In his discussion, Helminiak points out that in the ancient world, homosexual rape was a traditional way for victors to accentuate the subjection of captive enemies and foes.  In that culture, the most humiliating experience for a man was to be treated like a woman, and raping a man was the most violent such treatment.  As Dale Martin, a professor of religion at Duke University, wrote, “To be penetrated was to be inferior because women were inferior.”

Jack Rogers, Professor of Theology Emeritus at San Francisco Theological Seminary and former Moderator (President) of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), has also written a book (Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality) about homosexuality and the Bible, which I hope to write about in future posts.  With respect to the Biblical account of the strangers in Sodom, Rogers wrote:

“Some writers believe that the statement by the men of Sodom, ‘Bring them out to us, so that we may know them’ (Gen. 19:5), has a homosexual connotation.  That is not necessarily the case.  The Hebrew word ‘yada’, meaning ‘to know,’ appears almost 1,000 times in the Hebrew Scriptures.  It is used to refer to sexual intercourse only ten or eleven times.  In each case the reference is to heterosexual intercourse.  Therefore we should be cautious in attributing any homosexual connotation to it” [pp.189-190n3].

Other passages in the Bible point out that the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality.  Ezekial 16:48-49 states:  “As surely as I live, says the Sovereign Lord, Sodom and her daughters were never as wicked as you and your daughters.  Sodom’s sins were pride, gluttony, and laziness, while the poor and needy suffered outside her door.” [New Living Translation]  According to the 19th chapter of Wisdom (the Wisdom of Solomon, which is included in the Catholic bible, but not the King James and other versions), the sin of Sodom was a “bitter hatred of strangers” and “making slaves of guests who were benefactors.”

Jesus himself makes reference to Sodom, but the context is not “sodomy” but rejection of God’s messengers.  In Matthew 10:5-15, Jesus sends out his apostles with the admonition that if they are not received, they should shake off the dust from their feet as they leave a town, saying it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than that town.  This, again, points to the sin of Sodom being the sin of inhospitality.

Despite these clear references to the real sin of Sodom, people continue to cite the story of Sodom to condemn gay and lesbian people, which, Helminiak points out, leads to a bitter irony:

“There is a sad irony about the story of Sodom when understood in its own historical setting.  People oppose and abuse homosexual men and women for being different, odd, strange or, as they say, ‘queer.’  Lesbian women and gay men are just not allowed to fit in.  They are made to be outsiders, foreigners in our society.  They are disowned by their families, separated from their children, fired from their jobs, evicted from apartments and neighborhoods, insulted by public figures, denounced from the pulpit, vilified on religious radio and TV, and then beaten in the schools and killed on the streets and in the backwoods of our nation.  All this is done in the name of religion and supposed Judeo-Christian morality.  Such wickedness is the very sin of which the people of Sodom were guilty.  Such cruelty is what the Bible truly condemns over and over again.  So those who oppress homosexuals … may themselves be the real ‘sodomites,’ as the Bible understands it.”