robert gagnon

Reading Gagnon: Tony’s Wrap-Up

April 9, 2012 By Tony Jones 49 Comments

Last week, Scot Miller blogged about Robert Gagnon’s book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, which many readers of this blog are sure will convince Scot and me that we’re wrong about the gays. Here’s my summary of Scot’s posts. -TJ

Day One: Hermeneutics Is King

Scot made the Gadamerian move of proclaiming his prejudices up front. In other words, how one reads the Bible vis-á-vis homosexual practice has everything to do with hermeneutics, and hermeneutics has everything to do, according to Gadamer, with what prejudgements one brings to the task. Scot claims his, which is a great benefit to readers. Gagnon, alas, does not. Here’s Scot’s first prejudice:

First: Fidelity to the biblical message is important to me. I am a Christian, and how I understand God and salvation and sin and grace have been mediated to me through the Bible. I am interested in the Bible as a participant, not as a detached observer.

Day Two: Let’s Claim Some More Prejudices

In fact, Scot thinks that hermeneutical prejudices are so important — and I agree with him — that he spent another post explicating his. They are:

Second: I am aware that the Bible can be misread in dangerous ways.

Third: I am better trained as a philosopher than I am a biblical scholar.

If you don’t see what’s coming, it’s this: Scot claims his prejudices, Gagnon does not. Thus, readers can read Scot’s posts with these in mind, and they can judge his conclusions with this knowledge. Gagnon’s entire posture in his tome is one of absolute certainty — he writes as though he is capable of complete objectivity. He objectively looks at the evidence in the Bible, and objectively determines that homosexual practice is definitively rejected.

But, of course, Gagnon is not objective. As Scot makes clear in his later posts, Gagnon’s blindness to his own prejudices is the fatal flaw in his book. He bends all evidence — even scientific evidence — to his pre-determined conclusions.

Day Three: Gagnon Is Not an Inerrantist

Scot expresses appreciation for Gagnon’s biblical hermeneutic. Gagnon doesn’t, for instance, think that the Pentateuch was written by Moses. He acknowledges deutero-Pauline authorship of some epistles. In the end, Scot has a beneficent conclusion:

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Filed Under: bible, glbt, theology Tagged With: robert gagnon 49 Comments

Reading Gagnon: Morality and Sin [Scot]

April 7, 2012 By Scot Miller 53 Comments

This week, Scot Miller is blogging about Robert Gagnon’s book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, which many readers of this blog are sure will convince Scot and me that we’re wrong about the gays. -TJ

I should probably quit while I’m ahead, but I would like to offer a final post on Gagon’s book before I shut up.

Again, thanks to Rev. Joseph Hedden, Jr., pastor of Emmanuel Reformed Church of the United Church of Christ in Export, PA, for letting me borrow his copy of Gagnon’s book. I’ll return your copy in the mail next week!

Am I absolutely certain that same-sex intercourse is not a sin when the Bible apparently says it’s a sin? Why shouldn’t I defer to the “clear” statements and commands in the Bible? Who am I to judge God’s word?

I’m not absolutely certain about moral matters in general, since moral reasoning is not like reasoning in mathematics or logic. (About the only absolute moral principles I can think of are very specific, like, “Rape is wrong.”) While I’m convinced that some moral principles and values are objective, the moral conclusions we reach are never certain, and require ongoing reflection and re-examination. So while I’m no moral skeptic, I think it’s important that we have good reasons for our moral judgments.

At a minimum, I think that good moral reasons are determined within the community of moral agents who have to live together. Moral people may disagree between themselves, but we can all provide reasons for why we act morally as we do.

Then we need to ask whether our reasons are really good or not, whether they can stand up or not. As Paul said in 1 Thess. 5:20-21, “Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good.”

So while I could be mistaken, I’m highly confident that the biological sex of the participants is irrelevant to the question of whether intercourse is morally good or bad. Heterosexual intercourse is neither inherently good nor bad, and the same is true for same-sex intercourse. Intercourse may be sinful when someone uses deception or coercion or violence, but it’s hard to see how the biology the participants is relevant.
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Filed Under: bible, books Tagged With: bible, homosexuality, interpretation, morality, robert gagnon, sin 53 Comments

Reading Gagnon: What Went Wrong [Scot]

April 6, 2012 By Scot Miller 62 Comments

I have really tried to be charitable to Gagnon’s book in my blog posts. Maybe I’ve been too charitable, since Gagnon doesn’t just “overstate” the conclusions in his biblical exegesis. He relentless forces all of the evidence into arguments that seem intended to annihilate even the possibility of an alternative interpretation.

It is more difficult for me to be charitable with his fifth chapter, however. In this last chapter — about one-third of his book — Gagnon attempts to refute as many arguments as he can think of which attempt to “override the Bible’s authority” by appealing to “general theological principles or contemporary scientific knowledge and experience” (p. 37).

While the first four chapters of Gagnon’s book could be read as an important contribution to biblical scholarship on homosexuality and sexual ethics, I’m afraid that the last chapter reads more like partisan talking points that can be used to attack and dismiss interpretations which differ with Gagnon’s particular interpretation of the Bible. Instead of seriously engaging the theological and modern scientific challenges to the Bible’s apparent position on homosexual practice, Gagnon’s mind is clearly made up, and he will come up with any argument he can, good or bad, to defend what he already thinks.
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Filed Under: books Tagged With: analogy, Hans-Georg Gadamer, homosexuality, interpretation, robert gagnon, slavery 62 Comments

Reading Gagnon: Overstated Arguments [Scot]

April 5, 2012 By Scot Miller 34 Comments

I think that Gagnon’s conclusions about the biblical texts are basically correct. It seems pretty clear that the Hebrew Bible regards male same-sex intercourse as a sin, though it is silent about lesbian practices. Gagnon tries to argue that lesbian practices are implicitly regarded as sin, too (pp. 142-46), but this part of his argument isn’t very convincing, especially since the texts he had discussed in the earlier part of the book speak more directly of the sin being found in the “unnatural” penetration of a man by another man’s penis, which has nothing to do with lesbian practices.

But if the Hebrew Bible is silent about lesbian practice, Paul isn’t. Romans 1:26 explicitly condemns “women [who] exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural.” Of course, Paul explicitly argues in 1 Cor. 11:14-15 that “nature” also teaches that long hair on a man is degrading, but it is a woman’s glory.

Gagnon assures us on pp. 373-380 that Paul really meant “nature” in a moral sense in Romans (i.e., homosexual practice violates the natural law), while he really meant “nature” in a descriptive sense in 1 Corinthians (i.e., we can see that in nature women tend to have long hair while men typically go bald). Gagnon admits that Paul’s argument about hair length in 1 Cor. 11:14-15 isn’t really “credible” (p. 377), unlike the simple and obvious moral argument in Romans that two men (or two women) don’t naturally fit together like a man and a woman do.

While I agree with Gagnon that Paul is confusing a cultural bias with “nature” in 1 Corinthians, why can’t Paul be confused in the same way in Romans? Gagnon certainly offers a plausible argument why they should be read differently, but I’m not sure his evidence is as overwhelmingly convincing as he thinks.

So my complaint about Gagnon’s argument in the first four chapters isn’t that the conclusions are mistaken, but that he tends to overstates the strength of his conclusions. Let me offer four more examples of what I mean.
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Filed Under: books, christianity in america, glbt Tagged With: homosexuality, robert gagnon 34 Comments

Reading Gagnon: Here We Go [Scot]

April 4, 2012 By Scot Miller 11 Comments

Robert A. J. Gagnon, Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, has impressive academic credentials: a B.A. from Dartmouth, M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity, and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. But I have seen few scholarly works written by one author that is as impressive as his massive work, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (2001). (All page references are to this book.)

And by impressive work, I mean the entire book is 520 pages long — and it would have been longer, if the extensive discursive footnotes had not been printed smaller font. The list of abbreviations used in the book for ancient texts, journal titles, and major reference works is eleven pages long. The twenty-five page index listing his references to 472 different contemporary authors (by my count) and to numerous ancient texts. I was surprised that the book lacks a bibliography, but it probably would have added at least 30 more pages to the length of the book.

Robert Gagnon

Given the magnitude of the book, it is obvious that Gagnon is more than a little concerned with the growing tolerance for homosexual practice both in society and in the church. Acceptance of homosexual practice is not only a threat to “intellectual integrity [and] free speech,” but also threatens to make “a potentially irreversible change in the morality of mainline denominations … in this vital area of sexual ethics” (p. 35).

Gagnon is writing to offer a comprehensive, exhaustive, and definitive account of the biblical and theological message that homosexual practice is a sin. It should be the “go-to” book for anyone interested in defending the sin of homosexual practice against those who would “reinterpret” scripture or offer theological justifications for tolerance of LGBTQ practices.

Throughout the book, Gagnon is careful to distinguish between homosexual orientation and homosexual practice. According to him, the Bible has little interest in sexual urges as such, but with what one does with those urges (p. 38). This distinction permits him to show compassion and love toward the person with same-sex attraction or orientation (since having homosexual attraction is not a sin), while strongly condemning those who act on that attraction (since engaging in homosexual practice is a sin; see pp. 35-36, 489-93).

As the subtitle of the book suggests, Gagnon intends to establish that the biblical texts unequivocally regard same-sex intercourse as a sin, and he wants to refute all theological arguments and interpretations that would override the unequivocal authority of the Bible on this matter (p. 37).

This post will focus on Gagnon’s discussion of the biblical evidence.
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Filed Under: bible, books, christianity in america, glbt Tagged With: homosexuality, robert gagnon 11 Comments

Reading Gagnon: Getting Ready [Scot]

April 2, 2012 By Scot Miller 22 Comments

To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of Robert A. J. Gagnon until I read a comment on Tony’s blog giving credit to Gagnon for presenting “overwhelming evidence of the Bible’s unequivocal opposition to homosexual behavior.”

I have since discovered that Tony’s commentator is not alone in his praise of Gagnon. In fact, so many people seem to appeal to Gagnon in defense of the traditional notion that homosexual practice is a sin that Tony thought that someone should address Gagnon’s magnum opus, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (2001).

Since regular readers of Tony’s blog know that Tony has many books to read on his desk and his bedside and his easy chair, he asked me to review Gagnon’s book.

First of all, Tony and I would like to thank Rev. Joseph Hedden, Jr., pastor of Emmanuel Reformed Church of the United Church of Christ in Export, PA, for letting me borrow his copy of Gagnon’s book. Pastor Hedden is a gentleman and a scholar and a generous soul for lending me a book which he purchased for $39. (I took very good care of the book, Joseph, and I promise to return it as soon as I’m finished blogging about it.) Please check out Pastor Hedden’s blog at hills-church.org.

Before I launch into my review of Gagnon (I hope to post five more times about the book), I think it’s important for me to disclose how I am approaching Gagnon’s book.

In his classic work, Truth and Method (2nd rev. ed), Hans Georg-Gadamer argues that understanding requires developing an awareness of one’s biases, that “all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice” because prejudice is inescapable (Truth and Method, p. 270).

Each of us begins in a particular place at a particular time with particular assumptions. It is part of the human condition that we already bring these fore-understandings and anticipatory judgments to every act of interpretation.

So having a prejudice isn’t necessarily bad; indeed, Gadamer rejects the idea that prejudice something necessarily negative, for one can have good prejudices, like the prejudice to be open to the meaning of a text.

The problem is when one is unaware of one’s prejudices and substitutes one’s own prejudice for understanding the object of interpretation. So it is always important to be aware of one’s situation in approaching the text. (If you’re interested, Andrew Crome of the University of Manchester has a helpful discussion of Gadamer and Prejudice in Interpretation.)

I would like to disclose three of my prejudices I brought to my reading of Gagnon. Since this post is already too long, I’ll offer the first of my prejudices in this post, and two other prejudices in my next post.

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Filed Under: bible, books, glbt, philosophy, theology Tagged With: Hans-Georg Gadamer, homosexuality, prejudice, robert gagnon 22 Comments

Who Wants to Donate their Gagnon Book to the Cause?

March 1, 2012 By Tony Jones 16 Comments

So, everytime I blog about gay in the church, or about same sex marriage — like I did this week — someone brings up the book by Robert Gagnon. It seems that, for a lot of people, his book is the final word on homosexuality and biblical Christianity.

But the fracking book is $25, even on the Kindle!!! (C’mon, Abingdon, get with the program — no book should be that much on a Kindle.)

So, I’m wondering if anyone has a copy of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics by Robert Gagnon that they’d like to donate. Scot, my erstwhile guest blogger, has graciously offered to read the 500-page tome and see if it changes his mind. He’ll blog about the book here, and all of you Gagnon-defenders can have at him.

If you’re willing to donate yours, contact me here.

Why am I not reading the book?

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Filed Under: theology Tagged With: robert gagnon 16 Comments