Over the past day or so I’ve been reading, in free moments here and there, this Commonweal exchange between Luke Timothy Johnson and Eve Tushnet. After finishing Johnson’s part I thought I would link to it under a subject something like “Interesting Dialog on Homosexuality.” But with all due respect to Mr. Johnson (a well-known biblical scholar) Ms. Tushnet’s contribution is the one to read. Mr. Johnson’s is pretty much the conventional Christian gay-rights rationale. Ms. Tushnet’s is emphatically not the conventional response. Eve (to revert to blogosphere informality) is herself a lesbian and a convert and addresses the question with a fresh wisdom and profundity unlike anything I've ever encountered on the subject. I could quote at length, and will perhaps have more specific comments later, but here’s a sample, picked mainly because those first two sentences resonate so much with me:
Experience is itself a kind of text, and texts need interpreters. How often have we thought that we understood our experiences, only to realize later that we had only the barest understanding of our own motives and impulses? We all know how flexible memory can be, how easy it is to give an overly gentle account of our own motivations, how hard it is to step outside our lifelong cultural training and see with the eyes of another time or place. To my mind, Johnson’s approach places far too much trust in personal experience. He views our experience as both more transparent and less fallible than it is. To take personal experience as our best and sturdiest guide seems like a good way to replicate all of our personal preferences and cultural blind spots. Scripture is weird and tangly and anything but obvious—but at least it wasn’t written by someone who shared all our desires, preferences, and cultural background. At least it wasn’t written by us. And so it’s necessary to turn at least as much skepticism on “the voice of experience” as Johnson turns on the voice of Scripture. It’s necessary to look at least as hard for alternative understandings of our experience as for alternative understandings of Scripture.
There’s a pattern in this exchange that I noticed over and over again on my way to the Church: that even if the case against the Church’s teaching seems superficially plausible, it’s the Church’s view—and often, but not always, the person arguing for the Church—that shows deeper and more poetic insight into human life. As the saying goes: This Is Not An Accident.
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