Honored indeed

You're anticipating my response to exchanging posts with you, right? :) I do think that most objective observers of faith communities' sexuality debates agree that the matter comes down in the end to one's approach to the Bible. For example, I was reading a very thoughtful paper by a conservative scholar about a possible reference to pederasty by Paul— And here I must go off on a tangent in order to express my high amusement at the twists and turns in modern-day scholarship. Here's what I was reading: Liberal scholar: Paul's references to homosexuality are only references to pederasty, a degrading form of sexuality in which boys were forced to have sex against their will. Conservative scholar: Don't be silly; we have plenty of evidence that some boys in ancient times enjoyed pederastic relationships – just look at the boys' erections on these vases! Having settled that important point, the conservative scholar went on to point out that saying that Paul condemned all homosexuality doesn't settle the question of how the modern Church should react, for the very reasons you mention – because of disagreements between Christians on what type of guide the Bible is meant to be. I take the Quakerly view that the Bible isn't the Word of God, but rather the witness to the Word of God (and not the only one, as Galileo would say). But I think that in today's world the problem is often in convincing people to take the Bible seriously, rather than the other way around. We no longer have a tradition of taking secular literature seriously as a guide to life; the seriousness with which many Christians treat the Bible as a guide is the last gasp of what was once the standard response to all great literature. So (and I'm sure you agree with me here) I'd like to find the mean between bibliolatry and biblioclasm. Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page]