Anastasis has raced back from vacation to bring you this sa-weet little vid. Champ! Just one more way to enjoy God’s amazing creation…sitting in your office…hmmm, well, just don’t forget to get out and enjoy the real thing!!

My grandfather, a sinner saved by grace, completed his earthly journey today, crossed the River Jordan into the heavenly Canaan, and joined his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. A week ago he was in good health. He tripped, broke his hip, and after a few post-op complications, slipped the surly bonds of earth, called home by his Master. He will be dearly missed by his wife, his three sons, two daughters and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I had the privilege of spending a little time with him in ICU before he went home. With laboured breath, he commented that his body was worn out. When I pointed out that it was a good thing this earth is not our home, he replied with these words, among the last I ever heard him say, “We have no abiding city.” What a legacy to bequeath to one’s grandson! My opa had no abiding city here, but now he is a full citizen of that city where there is no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb! With his dentures and hearing-aids cast aside, Opa has now joined that heavenly host singing a new song:
Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honour and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created!
Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals,
for you were slain,
and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom
and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth!
I rejoice that Opa has gone to his eternal home, but am saddened by the prospect of life without him, especially for my oma, whose memory has trouble retaining things for more than 10 minutes. Opa’s translation into glory will be especially hard on her, seeing as she cannot take care of herself, and we are unsure of what the future holds for her. Please say a little prayer for her, that our Father would hold her in his tender care, and in his good time take her to be with himself. Also remember Opa’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, many of whom do not follow the faith of their father. Pray that God would use his death and the testimony he gave to melt their hearts and draw them to the Saviour so that one day they too may join Opa in that heavenly abode where we’ll never grow old.

At first I was thoroughly opposed to this whole Facebook phenomenon, especially since everyone seems to be hopelessly addicted to it. I once created an account with an old, old email address, just to check it out. Low and behold, it wasn’t very long before people were adding me as a friend (which I noticed when I logged in for the first time a few months later!), including an old friend from Mohawk who I hadn’t seen in years. Just recently another friend who I haven’t seen in a few years added me. Neither of them are Christians. I probably would never have seen them again, but now God has given me a wonderful opportunity to evangelize to them both!! So, while Facebook has the potential to suck up ridiculous amounts of time and produce a whole host of other negative effects, it can be used by God to reconnect us with people who need to hear the glorious news of Jesus Christ! So in short, I’m a reluctant convert to Facebook…

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

Romans 1: 21-27 is all about role-reversal. “Although they knew God, they did not honour him as God” (21). Instead, exchanging the “glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man” (23), and “truth about God for a lie” (25), they “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” and thus, “claiming to be wise, they became fools” (22). Notice the constant contrasts and role-reversals: immortal/mortal, truth/lie, creature/Creator, wise/fools. Now pay attention to the punishment which descends on them for such rebellious insubordination: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves… For this reason God gave them up to dishonourable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (24, 26-7). Another role-reversal, this time along male/female lines! The language of God “giving them up” is very important here. They want role-reversal? They get it! God gives them up to it. Their very role-reversing rebellion (creature/Creator) has become their role-reversing punishment (male/female), which, taken as a whole, is what? Yet another role-reversal (rebellion/punishment)! The genius of this passage is incredible!!
So what does this tell us about homosexuality? It is the pinnacle of rebellion. When God gave sinners up to their own devices, the end to which they arrived was homosexuality. Are homosexual sinners—(note that I do not say simply ‘homosexuals’. Homosexuality is merely the particular form their rebellion takes, not a part of their identity)—therefore to be treated any different from other sinners? Are they to be treated with revulsion rather than love? Absolutely not. They are to be loved just as much, if not MORE, than any other sinner. Nevertheless, their actions must never be glossed over as ‘who they are’. Their actions are the grossest manifestation of mankind’s rebellion against God. The male/female role-reversal is a vivid picture of the Creator/creature reversal.
Perhaps the supreme irony of the entire passage is that those who seek to usurp the role of Creator, in their sinful stupor, lose even the creative power—that is, the procreative power—they had as heterosexual creatures. Having set themselves up as homosexual creators, their sham is brutally exposed by their inability to do that which creators do—create! Claiming to be wise, they have become fools and their pathetic, impotent, foolishness is there for all to see. He who sits in the heavens laughs them to scorn.
What about identity in this passage? The only identifying designation is “fool”. Homosexual behaviour is merely the manifestation (and punishment) of this foolishness. Romans 1 does not conceive men and women as homosexuals, but rather as fools and rebels. Homosexuality is the product of their identity, not their identity itself. So perhaps ancient Greek sexual conceptions according to Foucault are nothing more than biblical conceptions? Perhaps in one final, ironic role-reversal, the vehemently anti-Christian Foucault, in his analysis of a monstrously depraved sexual ethic, has helped us to form a more scriptural conception of homosexuality as rebellion rather than identity.

hey everyone,

Lisa posted some thoughtful comments under Part 3, my response to which was way too big for the comments section, so I’m posting her comments and my response here.

Lisa:

“well i have two thoughts so far…
all in all i’ve thought for a while now that our society is really turning back to the way the greeks viewed things. it is true that gay vs. straight is generally seen as dichotomous…. but bisexuality is also seen as a legit category and the idea that we are all a little bisexual is pretty popular. the top theories in psychology for sure right now are based on a continuum approach meaning that everyone has attractions to both genders (so you’d be somewhere a scale from 1 – i am only attracted to women, to 7 – i am only attracted to men). of course it takes a while before theories trickle down and become general societal attitudes but i think it’s on its way. men in general are pretty resistant to the idea – straight guys want everyone to know they’re straight but this doesn’t seem to be as true of women. i think a lot of women embrace the idea though especially if they have feminist tendencies. it seems like a big fad now for heterosexual girls to post photos of themselves and their girlfriends smooching on facebook…

secondly, how do greek women shed light on this matter? While the men were free to do whatever they wanted sexually, the same wasn’t true of women (well, there’s Sappho… but generally speaking lesbian acts were viewed negatively and satirized, i think). so for women, would a heterosexual orientation actually have been more a part of existential identity? or perhaps sexuality simply not a part of their identity at all, since women’s self-worth was tied up with other aspects of life?

sorry for being so long. i’m very interested in this topic and looking forward to seeing what you come up with in future posts :)”

My Response:

I’m sure you won’t take it ill of me if I restate that I am not an expert in any of this. With that said, here are my thoughts:

1. Yes, society is slowly turning toward the Greek conception. Nevertheless, while continuum theories come close to the Greek conception, they are very different from adding the category of bisexuality. This category that exists in our language/thought is very different from the Greeks’ absence of these types of categories. The continuum stuff has in large part broken free from these categories, but as you say, those ideas have not filtered down into society at large; certainly not conservative Christian society, but not even ‘homosexual’ society either. For instance, groups advocating the rights of ‘homosexuals’ often have GLBT somewhere in their names, which evidences that their self-identity is very categorized (although this line of argument could be pushed too far—they have to distinguish themselves somehow!)

2. I think the continuum theory in its most basic form is essentially right. Everybody is attracted to both sexes sexually, but to varying degrees. Many Christians of the past (and present) would probably deny this, categorizing homosexuality as a deviance that only the horribly degenerate suffer from. Of course, I am not seeking to minimize what I think is the horrible degeneracy of homosexual behaviour, but I do think that homosexuality should be dealt with honestly. Here’s an example to illustrate. I remember Al Mohler mentioning a story from his youth: As a young boy he came across the word ‘homosexual’, the meaning of which he did not know. He asked his grandfather (I think this was probably in the 1950s) what a homosexual was. The reply? “Boy! If I ever hear you say that word again, you won’t be able to sit down for month!” Not exactly the best response. In Mohler’s words, “I knew I was on to something!” Far more Christian men and women experience homoerotic desires than are willing to admit it. They probably feel that such an admission would place them in a whole different category from those who only suffer from ‘normal’ sexual desires. Of course the distinction between heterosexual desires (which have a legitimate outlet in marriage, and therefore, are not necessarily sinful) and homosexual desires (which have no legitimate outlet, and are by definition sinful) must be maintained. Our society is desperate to erase that distinction, and Christians are (hopefully) desperate to maintain it. Nevertheless, the way to combat homosexual sin in the lives of Christians is not to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

3. Social and mental environments either cultivate or dampen sexual desires of all kinds. While I am arguing that the continuum theory has a lot of truth in it, I am not arguing that we are all what would be traditionally called ‘bisexual’. The ‘gay’ population that we see around us wasn’t always there. Sure, there were always ‘homosexuals’ but they weren’t as visible, not only because the subject was taboo and their activities were abhorred, but because the environment was not conducive to cultivating homoerotic desires. These desires, if they were consciously felt, were repressed by most men and women. Today, repression of any desire, no matter how perverse, is seen as a terrible strangulation of self-expression and identity. Anyone who believes in the pervasive reality of sin obviously cannot hold to this view. Repression of sinful desires is a good thing (leaving aside the fact that there can be unhelpful and unhealthy types of repression). Nowadays, the legion of books, magazines, movies, etc. which gives expression to homosexual struggles and desires is not only ‘helping’ homosexuals deal with themselves, but is awakening homosexual desires in people at the heterosexual end of the spectrum. Potential homoerotic energy lives in us all. Whether or not that energy is realized in mental or physical sin largely depends on our environment. In that sense, the derision in which homosexual behaviour was held in the past centuries was very effective in creating an environment not conducive to cultivating those desires. On the other hand, the approach, insofar as it denied the desires rather than dealt with them, was a failure. Thus those individuals who had more intense struggles with homosexual sin were left totally alone and had to find a way to deal with or express those desires without any guidance from people of God who were busy pretending that none of them had similar desires (regardless of how intense or not they were). While this was wrong, our society’s celebration of those same desires is probably far worse.

4. Now onto the Greek women. First of all, I should clarify that Greek men weren’t allowed to do whatever they wanted sexually. The Greeks still had a concept of sexual misconduct, it just wasn’t defined in terms of gender. Greeks saw sex as something one did to another (as opposed to some thing one does with another, which I believe is the biblical conception). Therefore, sex and sexual misconduct was seen in terms of the active and passive sexual roles and there were all sorts of ways in which males could behave inappropriately in terms of active/passive behaviour.

5. Ancient Greek female sexuality is not well attested in our surviving sources, so it’s a lot harder to come up with general principles. In general, female sexuality was not nearly as complicated as male sexuality. Females were basically always the passive partners in sexual relationships (although some artwork does depict them in active roles (I won’t explain how)), and this fits well into the entire Greek concept of females and their role in society (which I don’t really want to get into now – its a huge topic). With regard to Sappho, it is interesting to note that while she was from the 6th? century BC, she was not seen as a symbol of homoeroticism until around the 1st century AD, either because here poetry was not seen as homoerotic until then, or because her homoeroticism was not worthy of note. It was not until the 19th century that the term ‘lesbian’ was used to denote female homosexual relationships (previous to that, it merely referred to somebody from Lesbos, the island on which Sappho lived).

The ancient Greeks on the other hand, according to Foucault, did not see sexual orientation as an existential part of one’s identity at all. A person was not a homosexual or a heterosexual, they were just a sexual. If a man usually restricted himself to heterosexual encounters that was his choice. A break from this pattern would entail no soul-searching or identity crisis. Similarly, if a man engaged in homosexual activity on odd days and heterosexual on even days, it said nothing about who he was, just about his particular sexual preferences. To our minds, conditioned as they are by our location in space and time, this may seem either bizarre or difficult to grasp. I don’t think it is. In fact, I think it may even be biblical. We would desperately want to classify the first man as a heterosexual, and since the second man does not fit neatly into either the homo- or the hetero- category, we would feel the need to create a new one for him, perhaps ‘transsexual’ or ‘bisexual’. The idea of leaving them uncategorized is totally foreign to us. Just think of how categorized you have yourself.
Perhaps a different example will make things clearer. Suppose that Joe is only attracted to blonde women. He has never seen a brunette that interested him in the slightest. After years of observing him sleeping exclusively with blondes, we might be tempted to classify Joe as a ‘blondosexual’. One night, he sleeps with a brunette. In the morning, will he struggle with whether this makes him a ‘brunettosexual’? Of course not. Why not? Because he never conceived of himself as a ‘blondosexual’. He may view the previous night’s events as unusual and a little unexpected, but he wouldn’t be having an identity crisis! So he slept with a brunette, that doesn’t change who he is! Likewise the Greek man did not conceive of himself as a homo- or hetero-sexual, nor did he struggle with his identity the morning after. So we see that the Noun-Verb-Adjective form of expression is as suitable to the Greek conception as it is unsuitable to ours.
The Greek conception has much to say to our contemporary debates about homosexuality. If men and women are neither gay nor straight, but only choose to engage in activities which are gay or straight, that would lay to rest the endless debates about whether children can be born gay. They can’t be born gay. But, (and here’s the radical new twist) they can’t be born straight either. One thing we do know—they are born sinners. Sin is a manifestation of our rebellion against God. Heterosexual sin is such a manifestation. What about homosexuality? It too is a manifestation of this same rebellion but in a different way. To explore the differences, let’s turn to the most extensive passage on homosexuality in the New Testament: Romans 1.

So whadya guys think of my new banner? It’s from Nick and I’s trip to NYC, which is good because I didn’t actually take the picture from the first banner, and I felt kind of bad about stealing it–unattributed–from some poor, starving (but very skilled) photographer :)

ps. If you ever want to see the Statue of Liberty without having to pay (being poor students and all) just take a ride on the Staton Island ferry which sails right past the statue, and then get back on and sail back to Manhattan (and get a nice view of that skyline too), all for FREE!

We will examine our own conceptions of sexuality first, before we move on to those of the Greeks. The language we employ says a lot more about our mental universe than we think, but interestingly enough, our language with regard to sexual orientation does not accurately reflect our conceptions. I’m not sure how this ambiguity developed (perhaps the topic of some future post?), but I hope to help clear some of the fog. Consider the language we employ when talking about persons and their sexual orientation: “Bob is gay.” “John is straight.” “Mary is a lesbian.” The first two statements are structured: Noun (Bob/John) + Verb (is) + Adjective (gay/straight). The third statement is similar but with two nouns: Noun (Mary) + Verb (is) + Indefinite Article (a) + Noun (lesbian). Most of us probably use these types of statements without ever pausing to think about their grammar.

Let’s look at another example of these sentence structures: “Bob is warm.” “John is angry.” “Mary is a fool.” The first two (using adjectives) describe temporary states. The statement that Bob is warm tells us nothing about his identity. But when we say that Mary is a fool, we are making a statement about Mary’s identity, about who Mary is. “Mary is a fool” tells me something about Mary’s identity in way that “John is angry” does not. John may be angry one day, calm the next. Mary is a fool, no matter what day it is.
Now back to our original examples. The statements “Bob is gay” and “Bob is warm” are identical grammatically, but very different conceptually. When someone says that Bob is gay, they are not talking about the current state he happens to be in (eg. warm/cool), they are talking about his identity. Likewise, the average Bob perceives his gayness as having to do with his identity. When he turns down a girl’s proposed date this coming Friday with, “Sorry, I’m gay,” the message he gives and she gets is profoundly different from that which would be given and gotten if he said, “Sorry, I’m busy.” Though the statements are grammatically identical, both the speaker and the hearer instinctively (even if not consciously) know that the first refers to who he is and the second refers to him only in relation to this coming Friday. Perhaps the point becomes clearer if we imagine that she should reply in the following manner: “Okay, what about next Friday?” Such a reply would be entirely logical in response to: “Sorry, I’m busy,” which says nothing about him or her, but only refers to one particular Friday night. On the other hand, such a response to: “Sorry, I’m gay,” would probably result in some confusion. “If I’m gay, I’m gay! This Friday, and next Friday, and every Friday after that!” “Sorry, I’m gay,” doesn’t refer to Friday at all, it refers to him. It refers to him in a way that excludes her from any of his Fridays. It refers to who he is. All this is to say that our conception of sexual orientation has everything to do with identity. Although we, in reference to sexuality, use Noun-Verb-Adjective statements and Noun-Verb-Noun statements without differentiation, the second form of expression is much closer to our actual conception.
Should any doubt remain concerning what I have said so far, consider the following contemporary scenario: One night a normally straight young man has gay sex with another man. In the morning, when he rises do you think his thoughts will be something like: “Well, I’ve always been completely heterosexual in thought and action. Last night I was suddenly attracted to another man and ended up in bed with him. Oh well.”? Not likely. A far more believable thought process would be this: “I can’t believe that happened. Does this mean I’m gay?” The number of novels, movies and television shows that revolve around this very struggle are a testament to its reality. It is a question of identity. In our culture, sexual orientation has everything to do with who we are existentially. It is much deeper than other aspects of our perceived identities. A person’s job could be legitimately construed as part of their identity, but not existentially. Nobody wakes up the morning after a career-change wondering, “Does this make me a banker?” Of course it does! The fact that nobody struggles with this shows that however much we perceive our occupations as being part of identity, we see them as changeable parts in way in which we do not see our sexualities. Nobody is a banker existentially.