Stacy Johnson throws down the gauntlet
and tosses verses he believes are biased
By James D. Berkley, The Layman, November 11, 2008
MINNEAPOLIS – Princeton Seminary professor Stacy Johnson was poised to take a stab at setting Biblical exegesis on its ear on the final morning of the Covenant Network Conference in Minneapolis.
The movement has been glaringly thin on theology, driven largely by social/political arguments, a measure of entitlement and personal narrative. Johnson gave evidence of undertaking a dual task: first, to give the movement some Biblical credibility, and second, although largely unspoken, to displace Robert Gagnon as the authoritative scholar on the Bible and homosexuality.
Johnson started out Saturday morning on a quest to slay individual passages that together have provided a withering biblical argument against same-sex sexual practice. The classic Leviticus passage about homosexuality being an abomination was first to experience Johnson’s assault. His assessment? The traditional interpretation of the passage’s plain meaning “trades on a masculine view of male dominance that degrades women and has no place in our society anymore.” He thought it ought to be thrown out with other outmoded rules, such as not wearing garments with mixed fibers.
Radicalized religion
“I want to underscore today that Biblical religion is even more radicalized than we realize,” Johnson declared grandly. Using the theme of his address two days earlier, Johnson reiterated that “‘our house is broke,’ and God is going to fix it, but God is going to fix it through us…. Each one of us is special to God, especially the one who has been rejected.”
That took Johnson into the work of the church. “God is calling us in Christ to be for and with each other,” Johnson decreed, and that includes “especially the widening of the covenant to include all of God’s children.”
Citing a purported societal swing in thinking, Johnson looks to transition away from “thirty years of conservative dominance.” The crowd naturally seemed to like that idea, but perhaps Johnson caught them up short with his next statement: “But what we should not do is hope that [conservative dominance] is replaced by a thirty-year period of liberal dominance. That would be a terrible mistake! It should be replaced by something we don’t yet know and that’s not yet clear. It’s up to us, but we need to move beyond the conservative-liberal divide that has run through our narrative for so long now.”
Johnson laid out the situation, placing rules and sincerity at opposite poles. “We’ve had a conservative position about rules,” he explained. “The question is, ‘Can I obey the rules?’ Or, with conservative dominance, it’s ‘Are you obeying the rules?’” On the other pole, “What liberals have done is ask, ‘Are you sincere? Is this relationship sincere?’”
Taking aim at 08-B
Johnson took a broad swing at a solution: Amendment 08-B that presbyteries are presently voting on. “Does Amendment B have theological integrity?” he asked. “I believe it does, because it combines the liberal’s emphasis on sincerity and the conservative’s emphasis on standards” when it speaks of “sincere effort to adhere to these standards.”
But beyond sincerity or rules, Johnson had a third way. “Our sexual ethic should be, ‘What does our life show forth? What does my life demonstrate, and what does it demonstrate about the gospel?’” He has an answer: “What our lives should demonstrate, by the grace of God, is that the God who is for us and with us in Christ invites us to be for and with one another.”
Johnson quoted from several places in Calvin’s commentaries on Scripture. “A violation against one’s neighbor is a violation against God’s own image,” Calvin wrote. In a commentary on Genesis 9:6-7, again Calvin wrote, “No one can be injurious to a brother or sister without wounding God.”
Johnson noted that “the idea that God can be wounded is startling.” He summed up the situation simply: “When people cry, God is crying with them.”
Johnson’s argument hinges on the apparent assumption that if a person existentially claims to be injured, the person therefore must actually be ontologically injured. In other words, if I should ever feel hurt, you have injured me, apart from your intent or the reality versus perception of what actually transpired.
Self-knowledge v. Word
A corollary is the implicit assumption that the person must know what is best for himself or herself. Someone’s feeling hurt seems to be what counts most, and thus scrambling around to fix that hurt would be the only appropriate response by others – no matter that God’s Word may say something contrary. One claim of feeling hurt apparently trumps all.
So “how then should we approach this issue today?” Johnson asked rhetorically.
“Everything depends on the lens through which we look,” he answered himself, “and almost no one has applied the lens that is most helpful.” Just as the Gnostics were convinced that they alone had received the gnosis – the special knowledge that allowed them to understand God – Johnson fervently believes that he, nearly alone, holds the answer to correct Biblical exegesis about sexuality. “That lens is the sexual ethos of submission and dominance that prevailed in the Roman Empire,” Johnson revealed.
He is convinced we need to view Scriptural interpretation “through the lens of Roman arrogance and sexual violence.” It ought to color just about everything we read in the New Testament. “In those days, the Jews were an occupied people,” he explained. “Every page of the New Testament presupposes this. It is the lens through which the New Testament was written.”
According to Johnson, the problem is that “without the lens, you cannot read these texts in all their radical meaning. For instance, when Caesar conquered you, he would announce euangelion [Greek for ‘good news’].” It was like saying, “I have good news for you: I have arrived and you are conquered!” But “the New Testament talks about a very different good news,” Johnson noted. Yet even so, the word for “evangelism” needs to be seen as a radicalized word.
“In the Roman world if you were a slave, you were by definition a sex slave,” Johnson emphasized. “Tens of thousands of Jews were carried off as slaves. Don’t you think that would be a lens” they would use to understand Scripture? “There was a particular sexual ethos that prevailed among the Romans: A free-born male citizen was expected to have his way sexually with others, and the male citizen was expected to be in a superior position,” be it with a female or male victim. As a Roman male citizen, “you were expected to pleasure yourself, but if it was with men, only male prostitutes or slaves.”
Exclusionary argument
Driving home his point, Johnson went on the offensive against the sexual morality the church has observed since the beginning. “The predominant exclusionary argument has no way to distinguish ethically between a Roman soldier pleasuring himself with his boy-slave, and two women raising a child,” Johnson asserted. “The ethics of not being able to make a distinction there is problematic. Why do we let them get away with this exegetically bankrupt argument?”
Claiming that “the Roman lens takes care of the exegesis,” Johnson argued that “the only question left is Paul’s letter to the Romans. Do we take the lens off when we read Romans?” Johnson thinks not, claiming that “Paul does not reference specific individuals, but makes a generalization about Gentile sexuality.” The
Romans 1 passage receives Johnson’s dismissal as a “diagnosis of the human condition. It’s not about individual cases.”
Johnson goes so far as to accuse the Apostle Paul of “using a sexist slur as a rhetorical ploy to hook in his audience…. What he does is utterly sexist, [saying] sex is what men do to women.” Johnson has to admit that Paul “does say to abstain from sexual transgression,” but Johnson qualifies it by insisting that the passage is “not about committed relationships.”
“Thus, what do we do?” asked Johnson. “Everything depends on the frame through which we look.” Johnson used the example of Galatians 3:28. “We are told that in Christ there is no longer male and female,” he emphasized. “This is a Christological reversal of the male and female of Genesis 1:27. In our day we have understood this as doing away with gender hierarchy. But the text does not just say there is ‘neither male nor female.’ It says there is no longer male and female. It takes aim at the reality of gender differentiation altogether!”
‘Blessings’ are better
Johnson gave various examples of how to frame morality with this new understanding. “Take pastoral care as our organizing frame,” he ventured. “Blessing exclusive lesbian and gay couples is much better than telling lesbian and gay people that there is something essentially wrong with them. God said in Genesis 2:18 that ‘it is not good for the human to be alone.’ I would argue the suitable companion for the gay person is one whose sexual preference mirrors his own.”
Or frame the question from the analogy of Scripture itself, Johnson suggested. “For Leviticus, rather than getting tripped up on its culture-bound rules, consider the reason behind these rules: to enable human life to be set apart and consecrated to God…. For these reasons religious communities can bless covenantal love [of same-sex partners]. Only a noncovenantal reading of Scripture could see a blessing as not good.”
Johnson wheeled back to his reason for speaking as he closed his address. “Therefore [Amendment] 08-B is right,” he proclaimed, “not just for gays but for us all. It is a way to help us complete the covenant as we seek to live out faithfully this audacious mission of God.” That was the positive way to say it. In answering a question from the audience, Johnson turned negative, showing his disdain for historic Christian sexual morality. “Frankly, we need to make our case,” he pled, “because what has been perpetuated is untrue.”
An ingenuous prayer offered by a young-adult participant perhaps summarized best the implicit cry of the Covenant Network community as a whole and serves as a fitting conclusion: “God, please help us to know that we are all honored in all we do.”