With apologies for the length...I've given this book a short favorable review on other sites, and
promised a detailed review on my site. This is a review of an early review copy of a book that's scheduled to reach the stores on Tuesday:
If we study the Bible itself, as
distinct from the devotional literature produced by people who want
to avoid controversial topics and stick to the passages that "feel
good," we are going to find some things that always surprise the
people who have read only the devotional literature. The Bible is
very much "adult" literature; its purpose is not to make
anyone feel good (least of all "to make people feel good about
themselves") and it is extremely frank about what human society
is like when it's not been enlightened by Christ.
Some people can't bear this. They take
the squeamish approach to Bible scholarship that wails "But life
and God and Humanity can't be like that!
Surely we can't be expected to take the Bible seriously as a book of
guidance for our lives in the real world. It can't be true! It
mustn't be true! We haaaaff to be
allowed to understand the Bible as merely a
lot of ancient 'texts' handed
down from an ancient world where people hadn't evolved far enough to
be able to think, perceive, and understand as we do."
They try to sound a little more sophisticated than that, but yes,
their approach to the Bible really is
that of frightened children, approaching the Bible as if it were an
alarming object, throwing it into water and breaking it apart with
sticks, and then being surprised when handling the Bible as if it
were a bomb spoils the lovely present it really contains. Daniel
McClellan is one of those frightened little boys who say they want to
"study the Bible objectively, rejecting the doctrine of
inerrancy" and then inevitably pull their Bibles to pieces and
proclaim themselves more righteous and enlightened than God and all
His prophets. This makes it hard to reply to their frantic
self-assurances without beginning with "Child..."
Child.
That Christian tradition that you want to shock, or shake, or
revolutionize? That is the difference between our society and those
"primitive" societies you imagine to be so alien to us. We
have not physically "evolved" any significant differences
from an ancient Hebrew or Greek or Egyptian. More protein in our diet
may have made us taller than most Bible characters were. Ancestors'
DNA may have given us lighter or darker complexions. Neither of those
things mas made us better human beings. In the absence of our
Christian tradition we'd be just like
them...worshipping kings, trading slaves, choosing jobs and spouses
for children with an eye to retirement and living on their income,
not knowing any way to avoid AIDS without hating and persecuting men
suspected of ever having had anal sex, believing God had to be bound
to a body and, given some ancestor's artistic talent or lack of it, a
grotesque-looking body at that...We stopped doing those things,
developed the printing press to allow everyone to be able to afford a
Bible, acquired the ideal of lasting international peace, organized
schools to develop the equal
or superior job skills of women along with men, and learned how to
cure the diseases that made the ancient Romans' life expectancy half
of ours, because we became Christians.
Even though the early church made its mistakes, and ours makes its
mistakes today.
The
Bible always refers to God as a "He." Some wordplay is
going on there The Bible refers to God by one title, Baal,
"lord and master," that is definitely masculine and
singular.
But the Sacred Name ends in H, which suggests
a feminine singular form, and the other name used for God,
Elohim, is grammatically a
plural form. Although the Sacred Name was not pronounced in everyday
reading
the effect of reading the ancient scrolls must have been like reading
contemporary writers' fun with pronouns. "Elizabeth says that he
intends...The Joneses says that he will..."
God's
metaphoric person in the Creation story is plural.
Various aspects of God talk to one another like a committee of
Creators. "Let us make man in our image..." God is
certainly entitled to use the royal plural form if anyone ever was,
but once again the Bible writers were intentionally
reminding us that God, a transcendent Supreme Being, is not limited
to the number, much less the gender or color, of a mortal body. To
see God would not be like seeing
a person or persons. We are plainly told that when Moses asked for a
vision of God, he reported a vision of a Light that no man may look
upon and live. Moses was allowed to survive seeing only God's "hind
parts." But he did not describe the Cosmic Coattails and that
may well have been because what he saw was more like the tail of a
comet. He didn't even have to
describe his vision in words; his face reflected it.
God
has, nevertheless, female parts. This seems clearly not to have been
because God was believed to be female, but because female parts were
seen as the basis for the motherly love the Bible ascribes to God.
God has rachamim, a
uterus and the rest of that body system, because rachamim
had the metaphoric meaning of compassion. God was also
shaddai, an interesting word
identifying top-heavy shapes
with strength in males or females; El Shaddai
invokes God's mighty arm and God's full breasts. God is even imagined
as a truly non-binary parent-figure, a "father" who "pities
his child," tries to nurse the infant Humanity, and can, because
He has breasts. Big, full,
lactating ones, ready when needed,
supported by His muscular arms...
God
does not, in Biblical phrasing, have any real suggestion of
male parts. The Father of
Humankind has been memorably painted as an old man with a long white
beard, but the Bible never mentions
God's beard. The metaphoric connotations of male parts were not seen
as proper to ascribe to God,
even though a male role that can connote the act of begetting, among
other things, was so seen.
McClellan
doesn't like that. If the ancient Middle East was raddled with sexism
(which it was), surely God was imagined to have male parts. McClellan
does not want to imagine that the Hebrew priesthood were, as they
continually affirm that they
were, actively trying to distinguish their Baal from
the other Semitic tribes' Baalim,
the Lords of This and That Place who were portrayed as brawling,
rutting, destructive males.
The
other Baalim demanded
child sacrifice, although Abraham seems by all accounts to have
pioneered the idea that God, or even the local gods, might be better
pleased by a symbolic sacrifice to "redeem" a child (or
even a valued animal) or by the individual's voluntary "sacrifice"
of service. History suggests that the complete ritual of communion
with the Baalim through
cannibalistic sacrifices of babies were, at least by the time people
began reading and writing, far more often attributed to that other,
nastier cult down the road than practiced by the cult for which
anyone was writing
hymns or making images. The
ritual to which the God of the Bible objected involved "making a
child pass through the fire." If the baby or whatever it was
dressed in caught fire, that was a sign that it must be barbecued. If
it didn't catch fire, the Baal to
which
it had been sacrificed wanted it to live in the human realm. In
practice, no doubt the priests of these primal-male gods were paid to
deliver the outcome the parents wanted for "passing a child
through the fire," and most of the babies were unharmed. In any
case the decision to keep and feed a child, or "expose" it
to potential
foster parents in a public place, or sacrifice it to the local male
god of fire, was seen as a father's prerogative--a male god doing
male things.
So the Bible writers, having found ways
to refer to the maleness of humans that were not considered too rude
to appear in the Bible, still refused to describe God in specifically
male terms, probably not because they saw God as a couple (as
McClellan's church does) so much as because they wanted to
distinguish God from those other tribes' male gods.
That's not good enough for McClellan,
though. He prefers to argue creatively, from resemblances between
ancient poems and images, that the ancient Hebrews must have "seen"
God as having male parts. The Bible itself doesn't say that, but if
you look for parallels between Hebrew and other tribes' images you
can certainly find evidence that some Semitic tribal gods were
positively ithyphallic. McClellan is obviously more comfortable with
the idea of God having that "shameful part" the Bible
specifically refuses to ascribe to Him, than with the idea of the
common people understanding "God...He" to imply that God
has male parts and the priests and prophets affirming that He behaved
more as if He had female ones.
This is the kind of petty error that
need offend nobody. Christians have traditionally affirmed that God
transcends all physical bodies. God chose to inspire the Hebrew poets
to celebrate His most "feminine" compassion and protective
love, but God also chose to
incarnate as a Son of Man. God is free from the obsessions of a male
body; God chose to reveal God's Self
to us as a man in control of his body--which is indeed a miraculous
thing. If ancient Israel had
to wait a long time for a revelation of God's masculine attributes,
nevertheless, when it came, Jesus was the fullest and truest
revelation of God they ever had.
McClellan
goes on to uncover just a few things that are in the Old Testament
that the Sunday School books rarely want to touch. The sacrifice of
Isaac was, according to some extrabiblical traditions that deserve at
least as much inclusion as the Babylonian traditions
get, a ceremony first enacted with Ishmael. Preaching to people who
thought God wanted child sacrifices, who thought Abraham and Sarah
didn't have a baby of their own because they hadn't sacrificed a
baby, Abraham announced that he was going to sacrifice his son and
then reported a last-minute revelation that God wanted him to be
willing to sacrifice his son,
but that God had caused a suitable animal to be nearby and wanted the
animal sacrificed instead. Subsequently human sacrifice was
absolutely forbidden to the ancient Israelites except when their war
chief Jephthah, in a profoundly unsatisfactory story, vowed to
sacrifice "the first thing that came out at the gate" to
meet him when he returned from battle. No doubt he expected this to
be an animal. Dogs were not yet domesticated as pets. Neither were
chickens, nor, apparently, horses. Jephthah might have had a pet cat,
though so far as we know only
the richest Egyptians did, or
expected to be greeted by a pet goat or sheep. Anyway he was met by a
daughter who, on hearing of his vow, consented to be sacrificed. Some
prefer to imagine that she was married to a priest and spent her life
cleaning the altar where animals were sacrificed, but the Bible says
that Jephthah promised a burnt offering and that he did with his
daughter "according
to his vow." So, does the Bible say that God ever wants human
sacrifices? McClellan thinks it does. Or, because the Bible begins
with people at a level of social degradation so low that they were
"sacrificing" babies instead of practicing birth control,
the Bible can be no more enlightened than its audience and people
like McClellan are free to judge the Bible,
rather than letting it judge them, when they want to disagree with it
on points of more contemporary relevance, like fairness in business
and faithfulness in marriage.
Does
the Bible affirm slavery? It does. Slavery was global and provided
easily understood metaphors for the life a living person could claim
to "offer as a sacrifice" to God. McClellan thinks women
could not run up debts sufficient to be enslaved in their own right,
despite Hosea's vivid description of how Gomer did that. Children
could be sold as slaves to pay their parents' debts.
McClellan chooses lasciviously to fixate on the image of daughters
sold as sex slaves,
though in the ancient world
"women's work" had not been mechanized or professionalized,
and female slaves were more often used for domestic chores. Every
housewife probably wanted "maidens"; the perfect wife in
Proverbs 31 sold enough handwoven fabric to be able to buy all the
"maidens" she needed, with her own money; ordinary women
probably had to beg their husbands, and, as reported about student
laborers from other Muslim countries in the modern Arab countries, no
doubt there were husbands who felt entitled to get some personal use
out of their wives' "maidens." But officially, and no doubt
normally, most daughters sold as slaves were sold to help busy
mothers with the house and garden work.
Does
the Bible
encourage parents to spank children? It does. McClellan feels that
spanking is "abuse." He has not asked people who were
spanked, as children, whether they experienced
spanking as more "abusive" than, e.g., being put in foster
care. I remember, as a child,
feeling positively grateful for a shove that knocked me flat on the
ground instead of letting me run right into a venomous snake,
accepting slaps or bumps that kept me from bumping into worse things
than a loving hand (like a hot stove). I remember spankings that were
more intentional than that as a particularly ineffective way to teach
me anything. Spanking is not abusive, unless it's escalated to a
level of violence no sane person shows to a child--broken bones,
flowing blood. Spanking does
fail to accomplish what a normal
adult wants to accomplish by correcting a child--teaching the child
what it ought to have done, instead of what it did. But if I,
personally, could go back and order my parents, "Under no
circumstances are you allowed to do that to that child," I'd
waste no time on any mere spanking, but warn them to stop moving us
around the country all the time. I remember the uprootings as
traumatic; not the spankings.
Does
the Bible
tell women, or men for that matter, how much skin
to cover up? McClellan ignores the evidence that displays of male
legs, or flashes of anything
above them, were indeed considered shameful in ancient Israel. (Steps
were to be built for the tabernacle so as to conceal any view of what
might be under priests' robes, and Michal scolded David for dancing
joyfully in his ephod rather
than restraining his jubilance to a level at which he could dance in
his long, heavy, royal robes.) He considers references to women's
immodesty and suggests that displays of skin might have been less
frowned upon than displays of conspicuous consumption, especially
jewelry and face pant. Bible writers also denounced expensive
furniture. The emphasis was never so much on immodesty as calling
attention to oneself in a sexual sense, since the Bible writers seem
to have observed that what arouses one person's lust generally
arouses another's disgust. It was on the immodesty of buying and
wearing expensive things for a vain display of one's own wealth while
others lacked wealth. McClellan defends women who've been scolded for
wearing short skirts or inadequate bras in church, but seems not to
understand what made things like owning "changeable suits of
apparel" or "sewing cushions on armchairs" so bad. It
was not that the clothes or cushions themselves were immoral. It was
that these people's neighbors were hungry.
Only
recently has human society been tempted to
display ever closer approaches to nakedness. In most of human
history, bare arms or legs, bare heads or feet, even bare hands
in cities during plagues, were
seen as indicators of extreme poverty,
not so much as sexual invitations, except perhaps in the sense that a
person who couldn't afford adequate covering for the whole body would
probably be delighted to trade sexual favors for the boots or long
skirt the person obviously needed--if such a ragged, probably dirty,
person could have found a buyer, which was unlikely to have been the
case. The temptation for
rich, vain women was not to wear "mini" skirts, which would
have been seen as evidence that someone was too poor to buy a longer
skirt, but to wear skirts with long "trans" that swept the
floor. Leonardo's and Michelangelo's rich men wallowed in sleeves big
enough to have been skirts.
Into the early twentieth century women who could afford it layered on
anywhere from three to thirty full-length skirts at one time. Poor
people probably had some sort of tunics to wear but were seen as
"naked," having been humiliated by "naking" (nu
and desnudo and
other European equivalents are also past-participial forms), deprived
of the layers of long robes everyone was thought to need. It's not
surprising, nor is it a pro-woman or pro-sex statement, that Bible
writers had more compassion for people who simply lacked fabric than
they had for people who dressed themselves and their homes
extravagantly. Israel was a small, poor nation and even the kings
were warned not to indulge themselves in acquiring fine horses.
McClellan's
examinations of Hebrew words
that are not usually studied in Sunday School books is a Bible
maven's delight. What he does with them often stops at the point of
mere trendiness without developing into the kind of real, radical
Christianity that chooses to invest in communities rather than in
"wardrobe engineering." In no case is this more obvious
than in the case he saves for last--his hasty and incomplete
examination of what the Bible teaches about homosexuality.
Briefly,
the Bible writers were aware of different behaviors that fall into
the category of homosexuality. They're not supportive of any of those
behaviors. In fact, although the Bible is in favor of having children
and it was not the Bible writers who taught that people should try
not to enjoy the process, the Bible does not teach that it's
important that anyone express per sexuality. The Bible is about
spirituality and the spiritual life has generally been agreed to
benefit from self-discipline, reclaiming control of our physical
appetites. The Bible is not opposed to anyone eating well. (Whatever
else they may lack, farmers
eat well.) The Bible also consistently favors the practice of fasting
on at least one day in the week, with the specific purpose of giving
food to those who need it. And it also favors sexual self-discipline,
although married couples are advised not to take long vows of sexual
abstinence without their partners' consent. The
Bible writers were not aware of a later monastic tradition in which
men attracted to homosexuality would become celibate monks and would
be among the early church's best writers and teachers. They could not
be expected to encourage that type of spiritual-over-sexual
expression, as modern Christians can.
The
Bible writers do not, in fact, say anything against love and loyalty
between same-sex friends. The etiquette of these things was different
then. Second in moral weight to a blood oath was an oath sworn on a
friend's reproductive parts, so when Abraham wanted to impress the
vice-president of the Abraham Corporation, Eliezer, with the weight
he put on a task
he said "Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh,
and swear..." Hugging
and kissing, when same-sex friends met and parted, was normal. We are
not told whether Abraham and Eliezer, or Ruth and Naomi, or David and
Jonathan, would have felt that sexualizing their love was a
consummation or a betrayal, but we
know that Middle Eastern culture has traditionally treated all
expressions of same-sex love as if they were wholesome and sex-free
and that, for that reason, the culture has tolerated many such
expressions that were anything but sex-free. The Hebrews were less
outspoken about it than, e.g., the Greeks--Greek history records the
names of male couples. The Bible writers don't pry. They give us a
good example of taking individual people as we find them, asking no
impertinent questions, and recognizing in a general way that some
homosexual behaviors are worse than others,
The
Hebrew scriptures recognize a man's "lying with mankind as with
womankind" as "abomination." If the Hebrews had a name
for that kind of man, it would have been "dog," which was
what the Hebrews called the priests in some homosexual cults. The
Greeks called the active partner in an anal sex act arsenokoitai,
literally "male-bedder." They had other words for other
expressions of homosexuality. Arsenokoitai was
seen as an abomination sometimes even by Greeks, as it included
homosexual rape, sometimes
used as an initiation (as in Sodom) or punishment rather than an
expression of carnal pleasure. The Greeks recognized that sometimes
arsenokoitai and the
malakoi, passive
participants in anal sex, were "lovers" (which was not
necessarily seen as an abomination) and sometimes they were abusers
and victims. The pious Hebrews at least acted as if no man could
possibly enjoy being sodomized. A man who wanted
to do that, probably
even if he wanted to do it with his wife, was abominable.
On the
other hand no Hebrew text says anything against touching or kissing
anyone. Lesbian
relationships, not recognized as likely to be abusive, receive light
disparagement as desperate women's reaction to abusive or neglectful
men. The Hebrew writers seem to have avoided committing themselves to
any opinion about foreign kings and warlords who openly "loved"
other men, or exchanging intimate caresses with them. It is extremely
unlikely that they didn't know what Alexander (whom they admired) was
said to do. Probably they gave him a pass because he was foreign, and
they were just grateful that he did not attack their religious
practices.
But why were other
homosexual acts ignored, or considered ridiculous or pathetic, while
anal penetration is an abomination? McClellan ignores, perhaps from
fear, a thing about the Old Testament that is deeply creepy to those
who don't believe anyone could accurately prophesy events beyond the
person's own time. The ancient Hebrews' taboos about ritual purity
were not merely part of a cultural tradition. They are not very
similar to any of the cultural traditions surrounding them. While we
know that other contemporary cultures had laws of ritual purity, those
laws do not cohere...as a manual of how to avoid AIDS.
It is
hard to doubt that Moses and those who preserved his Five Books were
familiar with a disease that either was AIDS,
or functioned exactly like it. It was described as
"all-these-diseases." It was spread primarily by contact
with infected human or animal blood, also by contact with other body
fluids. Except for victims of violent assault, people could avoid it
by voluntary behavior. Developing this disease could be seen as
punishment for having violated a relatively simple, easy to obey, set
of rules about avoiding contact with other people's bodily fluids.
The taboos about which fluids
to avoid most assiduously, and how, are precisely the
kind we need
to live with people who have AIDS today. Technology makes it easier
to avoid exchanging fluids in some ways but the same types of contact
still need to be avoided.
In view
of this evidence it's irresponsible to suggest, as McClellan does,
that anal sex was an "abomination" only because it was seen
as foreign. Anal sex was and still is an abomination because, whether
it is intentionally chosen as a way to cause pain and bleeding and
make people feel humiliated, or seen as the ultimate
consummation of a passion that wants to do everything a couple can
possibly do together, either way it is the primary means of
transmission of AIDS. Homosexual couples may be guilty, in Bible
terms, of "adultery" (cheating on marriage vows) or
"fornication" (premarital sex) or only "impurity"
or "unseemliness," if they indulge in other kinds of sex
acts, but they don't have to
be guilty of the
"abomination" of anal sex--violating the rules for
operating a human body, spreading AIDS. Only
the active participants in anal sex were to be "cut off from
(their) people," an undefined phrase that sounds as if its
literal meaning was "sent out into the desert, alone, where if
they were less favored by God than Ishmael was they wouldn't last a
week."
(McClellan
avoids any mention of
Ishmael or the sons of Keturah. And yes, the traditional penalty for
rape being genocide, which means that Judaism does not require
Israel to leave one Palestinian man alive, is in the Bible; if the
Bible writers saw rape more as a violation of a man's, or more likely
of a family's, rights rather than of a woman's, or child's or
animal's, own rights, as McClellan observes, no, the analogy between
rape and murder in the Torah did not mean the moral weights were
identical--rape was worse. Palestinians did not traditionally trace
their descent to Ishmael. But the position of this web site, whose
writer is neither a Jew nor an Arab but has cousins who are both, is
that Jews and Christians need to read more carefully what the Bible
says about Isaac's relationships with his brothers.
Abraham separated the sons of Keturah from Isaac and Ishmael but the
Bible clearly shows that their descendants respected one another,
too, as cousins.)
How far
should Christians go toward correcting the homophobic hysteria of the
mid-twentieth century? Do we really need even to try to give the
young an idea of how silly it
was? The young don't remember the hysteria and have nothing to
correct. Those old enough to remember the hysteria are aware of the
extent to which our own culture's view of homosexuality flipflopped
because (1) the vast majority of homosexuals are rich White
men and (2) in the 1980s some of them threw what may or may not have
been AIDS-infected blood, as an act of terrorism, at people who
opposed any part of their agenda, which of course was most vehemently
expressed as Extreme Leftist. This
writer is proud to say that I was more, not less, pro-gay or at least
pro-fairness-to-homosexual-individuals before the
blood-throwing terrorism, which I still think deserved life
imprisonment and no concessions. Most of the concessions should have
been made without the terrorism.
While
aware of the general principle that majority groups generally do more
wrong to minority groups than vice versa, I think Christians should
not flipflop. Some Christians
were homophobic because they really
were afraid that
homosexuals would be much worse than the majority of them ever were,
could have been, or wanted to
be. Some were more
sympathetic to homosexuals because we were
aware that homosexuality is a biological reaction to harmful, crowded
living conditions. We can
overcome the fears, which came from misinformation. We must
practice good will toward
individual people--homosexuals, and homophobics if we still know any
of those. We should take a more radical approach to the problem of
crowded living conditions, because nature has
worse things in store for
species, like ours, in which the appearance of sterility and
non-procreative sexual orientations can't correct the crowded
conditions fast enough. The problem is not that Adam and Steve had
some sort of wedding. The
reason for legalizing same-sex marriage was to perpetuate
discrimination against the half of every married couple who becomes
the widow, but that's a separate problem.
We can enjoy having Adam and Steve in the neighborhood--admit it,
they are fun to
know--and still recognize that children need more space in which to
grow up free from biological conditions that are worse than Adam's
and Steve's.
Personally,
I became sterile right about the time society said women of my social
class were supposed to start thinking about marriage.
(Girls whose parents hadn't gone to college were supposed to start
thinking about it a good ten years before girls like me did--and no,
my hormones never got that message; I just had enough sense to
pretend they had.) I know an
increase in sterility, especially through conditions like polycystic
ovarian syndrome, is one biological reaction to crowded living
conditions. Since the most "hurtful" things
Christians have ever said about my sterility was that it might be a
source of emotional pain (it's not) or I might want to pray that it
be changed (I never did), I see no reason why they'd feel any need to
express more opprobrium toward people who react to crowded living
conditions in another way. We
never should have feared homosexuality so much as to treat it as a
dangerous mental illness in et per se
or bar homosexuals from employment. That said, we don't need to give
the blood throwers an inch.
Homosexual relationships that do no one else any harm,
and should be perfectly acceptable to secular society,
still fall short of what Christians have to offer the world.
I
believe no church is
obligated to marry same-sex couples or appoint them to teaching or
pastoral positions. We must still affirm the value of sexual
self-discipline and the value of celibacy, whatever
temptations a person attempting celibacy may feel. We support and
celebrate parenthood; we let the joy of sex celebrate itself.
Hormones need no additional
social support.
So I'm
unimpressed by McClellan's hasty skips over the reality of AIDS,
apparently in biblical times as in our time, into a wordy peroration
about how equally valid all sexual feelings are. No, nobody chooses
their hormonal reactions; certainly I resented the way mine popped up
at an inconvenient time and then faded away when
society said I
had a right to enjoy them,
and I didn't like most of the boys to whom I felt attracted, either.
Yes, all sexual reactions are more likely to lead people into Real
Trouble than to lead them into True Love. Yes, society needs to err
on the side of encouraging everyone to ask their bodies hard
questions--give'm the third degree!--and "keep the body under"
while considering, as calmly as possible, whether a person over age
thirty has demonstrated the ability to be a good wife or husband, or
whether it's possible to have any idea about a person under age
thirty.
We need more support
for celibacy, for late marriages or none, and for having one child or
none. We don't need to single out unexpected sexual reactions for
special doubt and distrust (as in "I love my child, I want per
to be happy, and
homosexual relationships have such a tendency not to last"); we
need to doubt and distrust all hormone reactions alike. All
physical attractions have that tendency not to last.
We need to take the Christian position that people can and should
"keep the body under," that sex hormones are not a valid
excuse for any decision. I say this in sympathy with young people who
don't want to ruin their lives by heeding their hormones--or those
unhelpful, unchristian people who say things like "Why
aren't you married yet? Why
don't you date my brother-in-law, who has nothing in common with you
except being single, but at your age that should be
enough..." Christians have
no biblical basis for condemning sex, but even less have we a
biblical basis for joining forces with the Evil Principle in making
it harder for young people to practice self-control.
And
if I'd been writing this book I would not have reserved the
celebration of self-control for the context of homosexuality. Society
still tends to force celibacy
on many homosexuals. It doesn't make life easy for them, but it does
make celibacy easier,
to grow up in a town where the only people who want to know that you
think you might be "gay" are repulsive,
older, lonely people who want
to exploit you in emotionally abusive relationships, only you feel no
interest in them. Nor, as an alternative, to go to a big city, out
yourself, and be sucked into the gruesome "gay" lifestyle
of promiscuity for a few years and loneliness afterward. Meanwhile
the people who need celibacy most are the ones who are still tempted
to have multiple babies. People who grow up sterile but otherwise
healthy really have the easiest part, and should probably feel shy
about affirming celibacy when both heterosexual and homosexual youth
have so much harder times. Yet celibacy must be affirmed--and yes,
the Bible does say so.
Thunderously. Not only Paul but Jesus Himself
was celibate. Paul was an old
man when he wrote his books, and may have achieved the peace of
postsexuality. Did I say peace? I meant bliss. But Jesus, even if
scholars now think He was born in the year 4 BCE, had
no more than forty years in this world, trampling those hormones
underfoot every day
McClellan
seems not to want to endorse that an affirmation of Christian
marriage is in the Bible. Perhaps he's read too much of the work of
those Messianic Jews who love Yeshua,
good for them, but hate Paul.
In his frantic flipflopping McClellan
ignores passages like "A bishop must be sober, the husband of
one wife.,.." Ancient
Rome, where Paul was a citizen, had its overcrowded living conditions
and polluted water too. That may have been why the
early church was advised to reserve positions of authority for
Christians who knew something about leading a godly family life--not
for celibate men, as Catholicism
fell into the error of teaching. Even though Paul was a celibate man
and had every reason to want to save some exalted position for
celibate men, he was led to reserve that one for "the husband of
one wife." Even though I am a Christian feminist and have every
reason to want to celebrate the wisdom and authority of Christian
women, I feel led to
reserve special respect for men who succeed in being "the
husband of one wife" and the father of Christian offspring. It's
hard to be sure that men really have done that while they're alive,
or at least while they can stand up and preach a sermon, but it's
splendid when they have. I
would have expected McClellan to have something to say about that. He
doesn't. He's too busy grovelling to the homosexual lobby.
McClellan
has done a lot of research to write quite an interesting book. If he
had stuck to what the Bible really does say, rather than vaporing off
on what it might be understood to say because some similar "ancient text"
says something different and we don't know that
the Bible text was written specifically to refute the foreign one (or vice versa), he
would have written a better book. As it is, his book is well
written and entertaining, but some parts
of it are just plain wrong.
