JD Crossan and the Newsweek story

As someone who thinks same-sex marriage is a good thing, I've noticed a number of posts lately on the Newsweek cover story about the Bible and same-sex marriage. On Faith has just asked a question prompted by that - Is there a religious and/or scriptural case for gay marriage? I noticed that JD Crossan, former priest, biblical scholar and professor emeritus in the religious studies department at DePaul University, had an answer, and though he has given his opinion other times about that subject ...

If being gay is as intrinsic for some people as being straight is for others--that is, both are God-given options--then gay unions, ordinations, and consecrations must be treated equally with straight ones. On homosexuality, many ancients judged sexual nature in terms of biology and organs but many moderns—myself included—judge sexual nature in terms of chemistry and hormones. In other words, Paul was wrong on hair and equally wrong on homosexuality. And, by the way, can you imagine how unnatural Paul would have considered a heart-transplant?

.... this time he writes that he feels there are more important issues than sex to discuss. Here's his answer -

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The Real Issue is Violence, Not Sex

In the Bible, humanity's inaugural problem is never about "sex and the city" but about "violence and the city."

And so the trap closes. Let us, by all means, debate what--if anything-- the Bible says about heterosexual as against homosexual marriage. And while we are doing that--be it from one side or the other--let us ignore what the Bible says about far, far, far more pressing problems. Does that distraction happen just by chance?

The priorities of the Bible are quite clear. When, after that magnificent parable of Genesis 2-3, humans first left the safe confines of the Garden, do you remember the first thing that happened outside of Paradise?

There is nothing about marriage mentioned in Genesis 4, nothing about either heterosexual or homosexual marriage. Nothing, in fact, even about sex, in any way shape or form. Genesis 4 is about fratricidal murder and escalatory violence.

First, the farmer Cain kills the herder Abel and so recorded history begins. It starts that ancient struggle known from the Sumerian plains of Neolithic Mesopotamia ("the cradle of civilization") to the musical strains of Rogers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma ("the farmer and the cowboy should be friends"). But even though Abel's blood cries out to God from the ground, Cain is not killed but marked by God "so that no one who came upon him would kill him" (4:15). God warns, however, that sevenfold vengeance will be taken--not by God but by his tribe--for anyone who murders Cain. And so begins that escalatory violence which has been our human drug-of-choice ever since.

Next, after the farmer slays the herder, he builds a city. "Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and Cain built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch" (4:17). So, for the Bible, humanity's inaugural problem is never about "sex and the city" but about "violence and the city."

Finally, as the chapter proceeds, we find a descendant of Cain named Lamech who boasts that he himself had personally escalated retaliatory vengeance by killing "a man for wounding me" and, "if Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold." That is quite a progress across a single chapter of 25 verses.

The validity of homosexual as well as heterosexual marriage will be generally accepted before most of our generation is gone form this earth. There are, of course, people biblically against it--just as there are people biblically against wine. But nobody tells us anything, if you will recall, about the sexual preferences of that couple during whose "wedding at Cana of Galilee" Jesus supplied an awful lot of wine (John 2:1).

So, then, let us debate about sex and marriage rather than war and violence. Let us concentrate on the bed-room rather than the war-room. Let us liberals get trapped--as always--on the right side of the wrong question. I write this in protest against that deviation from what fundamentally concerns the Bible, the biblical God, and Jesus, namely, that escalatory violence that by now threatens our world with destruction.

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