The Gay Closet as a Place of Sin

My colleague Advocatus Diaboli sent me a link some days ago to a post at Jesus in Love, about a new book ("Dark Knowledge", by Kenneth Low) which argues that Jesus was homosexual and sexually active, but closeted - and that was the reason for his trial and execution. AD asked me for my opinion. Before getting to my response, I share some key extracts from Kittredge's post:

“Dark Knowledge” by Kenneth Low uses rational arguments to disprove much of the conventional wisdom about Christ. According to Low, Jesus was not heterosexual, not celibate, and not happy with his own identity.

Low presents evidence that Jesus must have been homosexual because he was an unmarried man who surrounded himself with men, including John, his beloved male disciple and sexual partner.

-Jesus in Love

 

Kittredge quotes from Low directly:

In His childhood, Jesus Christ came into His awareness of being the Son of God. His magical authority and other attributes were given to Him as His birthright. As He came into sexual awareness, He discovered Himself to be a homosexual. His awareness of being the Son of God precluded any possibility of denying His sexuality out of some external concern and He began to be sexually active. He was evidently discovered to be a homosexual by people in His hometown and He must have been sharply rebuked and ostracized. He left Galilee and wandered on an endless soulful sojourn seeking a reconciliation of His divinity with His homosexuality. (p. 276)

-Jesus in Love

Toby Johnson, the author of Gay Spirituality and Gay Perspective and a former editor of the "White Crane" journal of gay spirituality, has also written about Dark Knowledge. He summarizes the thesis proposed by Dark Knowledge:

When Low considers Jesus as homosexual, it is as secretive, shamed and closeted, what a homosexual would have thought of himself in an intensely and threateningly homophobic and misogynistic society. His townsfolk would have ignored his teachings because they knew too much about him. He’d have been an embarrassment to his family. The Apostles would have been reluctant to admit they knew him if this fact came out. In this reading of the story, Jesus’s homosexuality isn’t an item of pride, but rather the source of a spiritual crisis that forces him to develop an interpretation of virtue and goodness that isn’t just conformity with Jewish Law, since he himself can’t conform.

(In his review, Johnson praises the originality of the presentation and the  manner  in which Low re-imagines the life of Christ. He concludes by noting that he is sceptical of Low's conclusion, but finds the book stimulating, and a good read nevertheless).

Put Christ Back Into Christianity: The Body of Christ

Absolutely fundamental to the Christian religion is the belief that God, as the second person of the Trinity, took on human form and became man. Jesus Christ, whose incarnation we celebrate at this time, was fully divine - and also fully human.

I want to stress here that word "incarnation", not just the nativity, so familiar from Christmas cards and Nativity plays. Yes, like all other humans he began life as an infant - but he lived and ministered as a man, a real man, fully human, with all that entails. We celebrate the incarnation explicitly at Christmas, but also constantly in the life of the Church, and especially in the Mass. At the consecration, we hear the words, "This is my body", and on receiving communion, "Body of Christ", to which we reply, "Amen". But like so much in tradition, this response has shifted subtly over the millenia.The original response carried rather more punch.

In the early church, when the presbyter administered the holy communion to the faithful, saying "Corpus Christi", the body of Christ, the response was not "Amen", as we now have it, but "I am". Do you see how radical that is? You -I- we- are the body of God, in our humanity.

-Fr Bernard Lynch, in From Queer to Eternity

Put Christ Back Into Christianity: Robert Goss' Queer Theology Renewing Christianity

In her account of the historical development of gay and lesbian/ queer theology, Elisabeth Stuart says that the weakness of both the gay liberationist and the feminist/lesbian approaches is that by working from the basis of real life experience of gays and lesbians, they are not easily accessible by others who do not share than experience. They also, she says, have in practice placed so much emphasis on ethics and relationships that questions of the divine seem to fade into the background: their work barely qualifies as “theology” at all.

This is not an accusation that one could make against Robert Goss, a former Jesuit turned AIDS activist. In his writing, he places God, and in particular the person of Jesus Christ, firmly at the centre of his work. In marked contrast with both the earlier gay and lesbian theologians and the orthodox Catholic theologians of the Vatican, Goss’ theology is built on Christology.

This Christmas, Let Us Put Christ Back Into Christianity

At this time of year, we are accustomed to numerous pleas to "Put Christ back into Christmas". These are entirely appropriate. The commercial binge and festive eating and drinking have nothing to do with the religious celebration of the Nativity. To the extent that secular jollity has crowded out the story of Christ, we do indeed need to put Christ back into Christmas. (However, I do not deplore the secular celebrations alongside - in the  northern winter, they are a welcome antidote to the cold and dark, and were a part of the established seasonal calendar long before the religious festival commandeered some of their features).

There is also a more important aspect of putting Christ back into Christmas: reinstating the place of Christ the man, not just the infant Jesus. Celebrate the incarnation, not just the nativity. As we do so, let us recall the full implications of Christ's humanity, and of his words and actions as we have them in the Gospels, not as they have been distorted, sanitized and abused by centuries of theological and popular overlay to support human agendas.

For this last week of Advent, I want to explore Christmas as a time to reflect on the Incarnation, and it's implications.  I will be looking at the remarkable absence of Christ's words or example in the CDF teaching on sexuality, and on homosexuality in particular. In contrast, I will consider Robert Goss's emphasis on Christology as a turning point in the development of gay and lesbian theology towards queer theology, and the Christological models of sin and grace proposed by Patrick Chen. I will reflect on the unavoidable fact of Christ's real, physical male body. Together with Rev Cindi Love, I will ask "Would Christ Discriminate"?

Finally, I will conclude with an appeal to bring Christ back into Christianity at the most basic, personal level - by developing a strong personal relationship, growing in spirituality, by "Taking a Chance on God."

The first instalment, on the near exclusion of Christ from the CDF writing on human sexuality, I hope to publish later today. The rest, and possibly more, will follow at intervals during the week.

Coming out as Grace: Patrick Chen, on the "Out Christ"

In the second instalment of his long essay on Christology, sin and grace at "Jesus in Love Blog", the theologian Patrick Chen discusses Christ's incarnation as God "coming out" to the world. This is an idea I first came across in Chris Glaser's "Coming out As Sacrament", and which Chen takes as his starting point:

The Out Christ arises out of the reality that God reveals Godself most fully in the person of Jesus Christ.  In other words, God “comes out of the closet” in the person of Jesus Christ; it is only through the incarnation, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that we understand the true nature of God (for example, God’s solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed).  Indeed, the notion of the Out Christ as the revelation of God is supported by Jesus Christ’s description in the Fourth Gospel as the logos or Word of God. 

Chris Glaser, the gay theologian and Metropolitan Community Church minister, has written about the Out Christ in his book Coming Out as Sacrament.  In that book, Glaser describes Jesus Christ as nothing less than God’s very own coming out to humanity:  “The story of the New Testament is that God comes out of the closet of heaven and out of the religious system of time to reveal Godself in the person of Jesus the Christ.”

“Sermon on the Mount” (from Ecce Homo) by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin