Conservative Anglicans are launching a new book to coincide with the homosexuality debate at this week’s General Synod of the Church of England.
God, Gays and the Church will feature ex-gay testimonies, along with contributions by biblical scholar Robert Gagnon and the increasingly discredited Dr Joseph Nicolosi of NARTH. Chapter titles include “Post-Gay: The Transforming Power of God,” “Post-Lesbian: My Testimony” and “Same Sex Attraction. Is it innate and immutable?”.
The launch comes the week after the Bishop of Liverpool, the Church of England’s leading evangelical, broke ranks with conservatives by drawing attention to same-sex relationships in the Bible and calling for a more open debate on homosexuality.
I see also that one of the contributors is the redoubtable Revd Peter Ould.
Will God, Gays and the Church say anything of significance that hasn’t been said countless times already? If not, then it is a book whose time has come and gone – a futile expenditure of ink and paper to flog a dead horse.
Sounder knowledge and understanding of homosexuality, together with the development of more decent and equitable attitudes in both church and society to gay and lesbian people, have left the proponents of this way of thinking somewhat high and dry, belated and stranded by the inexorable tide of enlightenment.
You would think with all the testimonies on commercials nowadays people would understand that they aren’t worth the paper they were written on. I suppose those testimonies will convince the already convinced but not change many other minds.
Gagnon is the central scholar of the Anglican right-wing; I am glad to see some pro-gay scholars taking his work on and exposing its flaws and oversights. There needs to be more of that. NARTH is a bit of a joke.
Still I am willing to bet that a copy of this will be given to every bishop prior to Lambeth in a last-ditch effort to sway opinion; my sense is that most bishops are sick of the whole row and want to move on to other things.
Just a minor correction:
Although the Anglican right wing have certainly grasped with alacrity at his work, Gagnon himself is – unless he has recently changed denomination – an ordained Presbyterian elder. See his web-site at:
https://www.robgagnon.net/
Let’s just say that Gagnon is the central scholar of those who are anti-gay activists.
I do not have the background to dispute the esteemed Dr. Gagnon. However, I find his willingness to leap through hoops and twist into contortions to find a way to condemn homosexuality to be a challenge to his credibility.
For example: some scholars claim that the story in Matthew 8:5-13 of the Roman Centurion who had a sick servant whom he cared for greatly and who was healed by Jesus to be an example of a same-sex relationship. They point to the culture of the time and state that original readers would have understood the context of the Roman’s pais as being his male concubine and clearly one which was much treasured and loved.
Gagnon has an easy solution:
The Roman Certurion was not Roman but instead a Jew. And he wasn’t a centurion but an employee of Herod. And the pais was not a servant but his son.
The whole thing was just recorded incorrectly, see? It was Luke who made a mistake when writing the story.
I do not claim that the Centurion story was a same-sex love relationship. While this seems possible, I just don’t have the knowledge base to make that determination.
But I do know that it is more than a little ironic that those who claim the inerrancy of Scripture also quote Gagnon. I guess the Bible in only inerrant when it says what you want it to say.
Perhaps even more concerning about Dr. Gagnon is his very unorthodox view of creation. Gagnon adheres to the notion of Complemenarity, that Adam was both male and female before he was split into two persons by God.
That is not only a bizzare twist on the Creation story, it originates with Greek mythology and not out of Christian text or teaching.
https://www.gaychristian101.com/Complementarity.html
Have you really read through his arguments thoroughly? From the build up and frequent use by others, I thought they might be quite scholarly. He is indeed thorough, some would say verbose even, but much of it was tired and, from my perspective, flawed by misplaced dogma.
In short, I’m sure you would do just fine dealing with Gagnon’s assertions, and then some.
Sorry. I meant that he is the central scholar cited by the Anglican right-wing. All paths seem to lead back to him eventually in the Anglican Sexuality smackdown. There seems to be a real asymmetry between the number of different scholars in many different denominations coming to a pro-gay position vs. Gagnon speaking for the Calvinist-evangelical right.
Anyway, there is a priest in NYC that has offered some critiques of Gagnon’s work on his blog: https://jintoku.blogspot.com/ You’ll have to scroll through his posts to find them, but they shoot some pretty interesting holes in Gagnon’s assumptions.
@Timothy K
Actually, Adam’s hermaphroditic status comes from the Babylonian Talmud, predating Greek thought. It describes the first human has exactly fully female and fully male with all the primary sexual characteristics and even two faces, one male and one female. It sure does sound like the Greek version, just as many myths contain the same core elements across time and space, eg great flood, virgin birth, dying god, etc. (See Joseph Campbell)
While it appear heterosexist at first, I don’t think it is. What it means is that hermaphroditic Adam was really autosexual which is the prototypical human. Every human thus has the capacity for attraction to the male portion of Adam or the female portion – or both.
It’s also very transgender friendly as it conveys the very first person as transgender. Gender is thus two sides of the same essence rather than an andro-centric view where even regular females are really males in essence.
This makes the David and Jonathan discussion of the other thread practically stuffy and traditional by comparison.