In his book Slaves, Women & Homosexuals William Webb wrestles with the hermeneutics involved in some of the thorniest issues of the past hundred and fifty years.
Slaves, Women, & Scripture
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the question might be summarized like this:
How can people who decry slavery as evil and affirm the equality of women claim, in any meaningful sense, to be subject to scripture?
The follow-up, then, is how this question relates to the issue of homosexuality.
Webb argues that on slavery and the role of women there is a “redemptive movement” from accepting the status quo toward transformation and equality of persons. This means that even though scripture does not with one voice affirm the equal participation of women in the church, or come out and condemn slavery, there are aspects of God’s redemptive work in the world that set each on a trajectory toward the positions commonly held today.
Moreover, on both issues we can find some sort of ambivalence and/or change in the unfolding biblical plot line.
This means that our rejection of slavery, for instance, is a biblical rejection despite the facts that scripture does not come out and condemn slavery as an institution, and that the New Testament even regulates the slave-master relationship.
Homosexuality?
Webb sees homosexuality differently. For homosexuality in particular there is no movement from OT to NT, or within the NT itself, toward a more accepting stance. In fact, there are a couple of places where the New Testament appears to be tightening the regulations pertaining to marriage and sex, thus moving in the opposite direction from a “redemptive movement” that softens an older biblical norm or expectation.
Thus, Webb is able to consistently differentiate between the ways in which we have left biblical assumptions about women and slaves behind, while maintaining a traditional position on homosexuality.
Pinpointing the Trajectory
Webb’s case against seeing homosexuality as plotted onto some redemptive trajectory is coherent. But I want to suggest that the differentiation he makes between homosexuality and the treatment of women is ultimately unsustainable. Indeed, all three of these issues are bound up in each other in the ancient world.
Ancient accounts of both the master/slave relationship and the husband/wife relationship are typically rendered in articulation of a “household code.” A household code is a way of governing the home, yes, but it is also a microcosm of society as a whole. The power dynamics reflected in the household codes are, on a smaller scale, the same power dynamics that are deployed to keep up a village, a city, a state.
More specifically, the household codes are depictions of and prescriptions for a patriarchal power system. Those who are more gifted with what is needful for rule (strength, wisdom, foresight, self-control), i.e. men, masters, and parents, are to exert their rule for the good of everyone. Those who are gifted with what is needful for implementing that rule (you know, the people who are soft, foolish, short-sighted, enslaved to their bodily passions), i.e. women and slaves, are to submit themselves for the good of everyone.
Why do biblical admonitions for women to subject themselves to their husbands almost always come where parents and children and slaves and masters are addressed? Their subjection is part of this far-reaching patriarchy.
Why do the biblical injunctions for women’s submission in 1 Timothy and 1 Peter come hard on the heels of instructions to be subservient to the king/governors? Because the household is but one small unit in a larger society that has to be maintained through this patriarchal hegemony.
This, then, is the nature of the redemptive trajectory that Webb sees: it is a diminishing of patriarchy as the ordering principle of society / the church.
Including Homosexuality in the Trajectory
This is why it is so important for us to understand that ancient condemnations of homosexuality were part and parcel with the larger patriarchal framework of society. (See the discussion from last week.) By and large, the reason that homosexual contact was despised by ancient moralists, when they saw a problem with it, was because it caused a man to surrender his rightful place in the social hierarchy.
Sex was supposed to be a way in which the social hierarchy was maintained. When a man is “treated like a woman,” this creates problems. Here’s what Philo says about a man who is penetrated by another man:
he is a disgrace to himself, and to his family, and to his country, and to the whole race of mankind. (Special Laws 3:38)
Notice how Philo moves out from the smallest unit to the whole society. He is assessing the sex-act within the whole hierarchical, patriarchal system that the household codes represent.
Once we get our minds around the fact that the ancients were opposed to homosexuality when it upset the patriarchal order, we are in a position to see that the redemptive trajectories Webb accurately pinpoints carry homosexuality forward as well. When the opposition to homosexuality is based on female inferiority and the upsetting of the social order through a man playing the woman’s part (e.g. when someone who participates in a sex-act is derided as a “softie” (1 Cor 6)), we are seeing an opposition that stands and falls with patriarchal hierarchy.
Does the New Testament show a “redemptive hermeneutic” toward homosexuality itself? No. But, does it show a redemptive hermeneutic toward the larger system of gender role-casting that serves as the basis for the biblical pronouncements? Yes.
So what I’m saying is, basically, if you think that slavery is evil and/or that women are equal to men, you are already on the trajectory that redeems the viability of homosexual practice within the Christian tradition.
Featured Image: Turin, Flickr Creative Commons