Two book recommendations

If the recent comment boxes on this weblog are any indication, there is considerable interest in the controversial topic of homosexuality and its relationship to the Christian Faith. Of its nature, the topic cannot avoid being controversial in the contemporary social milieu, but one of the key questions concerning this topic that has surfaced not only among commentators on this blog but students in my classes writing term papers on this topic is this: What does the Bible have to say about homosexuality? As anyone knows who has read the comments of Fr. Joseph O'Leary or any of the dime-a-dozen Google-able defenses of gay/lesbian revisionist readings of biblical texts traditionally understood as proscribing homosexuality, the issue can very quickly seem to become quite murky indeed. Those who wish to find such revisionist readings need look no further than a Google search or Fr. O'Leary's (doubtless forthcoming) dissenting recommendations. However, for those who might wish to consider what the best lights of traditional biblical scholarship has yielded, I have the following recommendations.

The first is Robert A. J. Gagnon's The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Abingdon Press, 2002). Gagnon, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Pittsburg Theological Seminary, presents a meticulously detailed, substantial traditional reading of the relevant biblical passages, yielding an impressive defense of the traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of the Bible as unequivocally opposed to same-sex intercourse as sin. He deals with the classic Old Testament passages from the accounts of Sodom and Gomorah and the book of Leviticus, as well as the New Testament passages from Paul's epistles. But a chapter of exceptional interest is the one in which he treats "The Witness of Jesus." Revisionists often argue that Jesus is silent on the question of homosexuality. But Gagnon does a remarkable job not only of showing that an argument from silence is no argument at all, but in drawing out inferences from the things that Jesus explicitly does say about sexual behavor, as well as from the Jewish historical perspectives, to render a decisive conclusion about what Jesus' view of homosexual behavior would inevitably be.

The second is a debate between Robert Gagnon and Dan O. Via, Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2003). Dan Via argues in support of the view that Christians should accept and "sanctify" the sexual unions of practicing gays and lesbians, while Gagnon argues that the Bible unequivocally condemns homosexual practice as sin. While the participants may be short on subjective existential-phenomenological "heuristic" and hermeneutical "nuance" of the kind that some of our anti-traditionalist friends would enjoin, it will provide a more than an ample challenge for any dissenter who still takes seriously the conventional semiological framework of historical textual interpretation.

I highly recommend both volumes. The former is probably the best biblical-exegetical work available on the subject from a traditional Christian perspective. The latter ventures beyond that framework by offering a debate between this traditional perspective and the pro-homosexual argument from the perspective of a postmodern theological framework. Both volumes provide the broad base and exposure necessary for any further engegement of the issues in question.