I have never been a fan of the word “homophobic.” I have generally found it to be unhelpful in the homosexuality conversation because it is often used in a condescending and/or unnecessarily aggravating manner.
I have not liked the word because it seems to eclipse the possibility that someone might think something is wrong without being afraid of it.
I did not like the word because I was not afraid of gay people or the idea of gay sex when I was a traditionalist.
It is a word that gets deployed to play a rhetorical function that often does not fit. And I still think that those are good reasons to curtail its usage. But…
I have realized also that there are certain scenarios where fear is precisely the right word. And most of those scenarios have to do, not with how we respond to persons so much as how we see our institutions.
I did have a homophobia, and it went something like this: The Bible clearly teaches that homosexuality is wrong, a church that does not accept this teaching has lost its biblical and theological moorings, I am therefore afraid of what has happened to the gospel or what would happen to the gospel in that environment.
It is the fear of losing a certain kind of Christian identity. It is the fear of losing an amount of theological control over what the gospel is. It is the fear of having the Bible taken away from us as a standard that calls us to account and directs our faith and practice.
This is the reality of homophobia that perpetuates the status quo as much as anything else. Like “inerrancy” in a previous generation, this has become the marker of a holistic way of imagining the identity of the church as circumscribed by faithful biblical teaching.
There may be some good reasons for this. The sexuality conversation is showing us how the Bible is deeply embedded in a culture whose gender norms, especially as expressed in patriarchy, are inconsistent with our own culture’s and with what we see as a truer depiction of our identity in Christ.
What will we do with the Biblical portraits of gender and sexuality once we realize that we reject the frame over which the Bible has stretched certain canvasses?
What will happen as people start to realize that we never simply “do what the Bible says,” but are always negotiating between what the Bible says, what we know to be true and right, what we know of God in Christ, what our society has instilled in us about the equal dignity of all people, hundreds of Bible verses we would never seek to apply, and dozens of Bible passages reread in light of later moments in the story or our convictions about Christ?
When I was having a come to Jesus meeting with a couple of my senior colleagues two years ago, one of them pressed me on this. How can I both say that the Bible speaks with one voice against same-sex practice and claim that there is a biblical way to affirm same-sex relationships? What can the notion of “biblical” even mean in such a context?
It means that we have embraced the dangerous road of, as Karl Barth put it, not merely saying what the apostles and prophets said, but saying what we must say on the basis of what the apostles and prophets said.
It means not only saying what they said, but learning to play the parts they played, learning to live into the roles they modeled. It means, in other words, doing what they did. Listening and speaking in order to understand how the trajectory of the biblical story, the faithful trajectory and not a dead-end, are embodied in a later moment as directed by the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ.
This is a different way of being biblical.
And peering at that dangerous, uncontrolled and uncontrollable road from the safety of our walled-off convictions is terrifying.
That is the homophobia I see: the terror that affirming means giving up the Bible, and that we might have to reimagine our identity and practice in ways that we cannot foresee or control.