Today’s author is Prince of Peace member, Carol Swanson.
A few weeks ago, I was visiting friends in Nevis, and we got to talking about books we were reading. I shared that I was reading Transforming: The Bible & Lives of Transgender Christians by Austen Hartke, and that I planned to share from it for a devotion for May 23. And then Tom asked me if I had ever heard the idea that the apostle Paul might have been gay, the thorn in his flesh that he refers to (2 Corinthians 12:7). I had heard a couple of ideas about the “thorn” (possibly recurring malaria?), but not that he was gay. Then he showed me a novel, A Wretched Man, written by a friend in his Park Rapids book club. Paul as a gay man. Could that be so? What might that mean for us, for our understanding as we read Paul’s letters?
Later, Tom went off to his weekly book club meeting while Shane and I visited. When Tom returned home, he had a signed copy of the book for me. The author is R. W. “Obie” Holmen, a Lutheran who was a former trial lawyer in St. Cloud and also went to St. John’s for post-graduate studies in theology and Christian history. The title of the book comes from Romans 7:21-25. I’ve started reading the novel and am finding it very engaging. I think I’ll order a copy for our PoP library.
I had noticed a short Q & A in the Notes at the back of the book which included a quote from John Shelby Spong, Episcopal Bishop and author I have read before and appreciate very much. With some googling, I also found a formal debate between Spong and White (a fundamentalist) titled “Is Homosexuality Compatible with Christianity?” followed by a Q & A (2006) on YouTube. When asked about Paul, John Shelby Spong replies:
Paul went through a cataclysmic experience, and in that conversion experience I think he came to the realization that God loved him just as he is, as we indeed sing “Just as I am without one plea.” That’s how God loved him. And he came out of that convinced, in what I think is a very revealing statement, that nothing could finally separate him from the love of God, not even he says ‘my own nakedness’ can separate me from the love of God. Now I don’t know that Paul was gay, and I have no sense that even if he were gay he ever acted it out. My sense is he lived bound by the law in such a way that it was killing him inside. But his conversion experience was a sense that whatever it is that God is, God loved him as he was, and so he breaks into this great epiphany of wonder that not height, not depth, not angels, not principalities, not things present, not things to come, nothing can separate me from the love of God. Now let me just finally say, I don’t know that Paul was gay. That’s a supposition. I’m personally convinced of it. I’ll ask him when I get to the kingdom of heaven. It will be a very revealing conversation. [See links at end of devotion.]
I ordered Spong’s book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991), where he explains his thinking. Two chapters are on Paul. Near the end of the second chapter he writes:
To me it is a beautiful idea that a homosexual male, scorned then as well as now, living with both the self-judgment and the social judgments that a fearful society has so often unknowingly pronounced upon the very being of some it its citizens, could nonetheless, not in spite of this but because of this, be the one who would define grace for Christian people. For two thousand years of Christian history this Pauline definition has been at the very core of the Christian experience. Grace was the love of God, an unconditional love, that loved Paul just as he was. A rigidly controlled gay male, I believe, taught the Christian church what the love of God means and what, therefore, Christ means as God’s agent. Finally, it was a gay male, tortured and rejected, who came to understand what resurrection means as God’s vindicating act. In the life and love of Jesus, who both expressed the love of God and bore in human history the life of God, the ultimate meaning of God had been established. Because of Paul, no longer can we see Jesus in any way other than as the fulness of God. (p 125-126)
Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians,
“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
And Austen Hartke responds:
“There are two ways to interpret what Paul says in Galatians 3:28 about our being one in Christ: either it means that we’re all whitewashed and homogenized and our differences are erased. …or it means that we’re called to find a way to make our different identities fit together, like the bright shards in assorted colors that make up the stained glass windows of a cathedral. Are we called to sameness, or are we called to oneness?” (Transforming, p 161)
Let us pray together: Loving God, thank you for friends, for books, for all the ways you use to expand our understanding of your deep unconditional love that makes us all one in you. Amen.
You can watch the seven-minute section where Spong argues for Paul’s homosexuality or the full three-hour debate.