From Gaunilo's Island!:
A few years ago, I read an essay (the citation presently escapes me) by a NT scholar who argued quite cogently that the usual texts in the deutero/Pauline corpus that are typically cited to condemn homosexuality do, in fact, condemn homosexuality - they cannot be explained away. But in the last paragraph of the article, he* startled me with the comment that, for all that he had just proven, the weight of textual evidence said nothing about how those texts should be received - that just because Paul or his disciples had condemned homosexual acts, we were under no obligation to do so.
The debate over homosexuality is a misnomer, and is, in fact a debate over biblical authority. We should be clear about this, and this was in fact the subject of the earlier post. Albert Mohler assumes a divinely inspired text (presumably inerrant, althought that term is not in SBTS' statement of faith), and I do not. But even if I did, I would be faced with two significant problems: first, the thrust of the biblical text is highly ambiguous - witness the objections I earlier mentioned, viz. the problem of taking narrative as normative, the hermeneutical issues implicated in assessing the import of Hebrew Bible prohibitions, the seriously ethically compromised nature of much of the Hebrew Bible narrative; second, the half-hearted nature of the Bible's protest against homosexuality - it is a marginal theme at best in the minds of the biblical authors and editors.
I've polemicised often here against a manner of doing church that focuses around exclusion - that erects boundaries between the elect and reprobate, that founds itself by discursive practices that function to ostracize the other as sinful and rejected. Homosexuality is the great Other in contemporary Christianity - the alienated alterity against which a certain segment of the church can organize its mode of resistance to a perceived hostile culture, and that legitimates and furthers its rhetoric of besiegement (the 'threat' of homosexuality; the 'attack' on family values). It's also a useful foil against which the discourse of authority can organize its tactical logic (it is no mistake that the rhetoric of scriptural inerrancy centers on the notion of authority because, at the heart of this theological discourse is the logic of power and domination***) vis-a-vis the excluded minority.
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