Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships
February 1, 2013
In Brownson's (The Promise of Baptism) remarkably thorough, patient, and learned treatment of the knotty questions that surround Christian stances toward same-sex relationships, he reviews traditionalist and revisionist approaches, and addresses the issue through the categories of patriarchy, procreation, celibacy, lust, purity, honor and shame, and nature. He concludes that a careful understanding of the moral logic that underlies Biblical texts does not consistently support homophobic conclusions. VERDICT While Brownson's treatment may be too scholarly for some readers, his writing and thinking are deliberate and clear, and may supply a crucial tool for discussion based neither on impulse nor unexamined cultural tradition.
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from February 15, 2013
In an outstanding presentation of academic scholarship to general readers, Brownson, a New Testament professor, does indeed, as the subtitle avers, reframe biblical debate about same-sex relationships. In the first of four parts, he states his intent to reinvigorate the imagination of the church . . . so that we discover the scriptures' wisdom in the presence of new questions and points out the shortcomings of both traditional and revisionist positions on the Bible and homosexuality. The second part educes the broad forms of moral logic patriarchy, the one flesh' bond of marriage, procreation, and celibacy with which the Bible addresses sexuality; the third assesses the boundaries scripture imposes on sexual practices. The last part summarily returns to the heart of the matterthe biblical passages concerned with same-sex relations (e.g., Sodom and Gomorrah, Paul denouncing men who lie with other men)and analyzes what serious textual scholarship has revealed about those passages ever since gay civil rights activism emerged in the 1950s. Out of rigorous inspection, then, Brownson establishes that what the Bible condemns is same-sex abuse, and that the moral logic that applies to abuse doesn't speak to the committed, loving, consecrated same-sex relationships we see today. Demanding focused but not labored reading, this strikes to the heart of the Bible-versus-homosexuality fracas.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)