Breaking down the dividing wall: ending the silence about sexuality - Homosexuality: Some Elements for an Ecumenical Discussion

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan, 1998 by Melanie A. May

If we view this Roman political and religious heritage with regard to our life in the churches today, yet another sort of tension becomes clear. On one hand, we continue to live with the rhetoric of this paradigm of authority. authority established by past precedent and exercised externally. On the other hand, we in the West live with a paradigm of authority seated internally in individuals. Carter Heyward clarifies how these tensive paradigms co-exist:

A doctrine of internal authority has free rein among us today -- provided

that we locate and accept our own interests as compatible with those

of white, ostensibly heterosexual, affluent Christian males. Upon

others -- marginalized people, sexual deviants and political dissidents,

for example -- external authority characteristically is brought to bear

in forms of force and punishment."

We are at the end of the era in which either option in this set-up is life-giving. Hannah Arendt puts the spirit of such times as these precisely to the point:

The end of a tradition does not necessarily mean that traditional concepts

have lost their power over the minds of men. On the contrary, it sometimes

seems that this power of well-worn notions and categories becomes more

tyrannical as the tradition loses its living force and as the memory of its

beginning recedes; it may even reveal its full coercive force only

after its end has come and men no longer even rebel against it.(19)

No wonder we target those who deviate. No wonder "we are famished for demons, as if our very sanity depends on a kind of moral cannibalism".(20)

I am convinced that as long as our understanding of authority assumes the primary of past precedent, we will be prisoners of the past. With regard to the churches' call to conversation about human sexuality, specifically homosexuality, we will be bound to have still deeper debates over the same texts and traditions. No matter how variously we interpret these texts and traditions, we will each do so to establish our own interests.

"By what authority?" This New Testament question resounds into our own time. How might we understand authority anew? How might our exercise of authority free us rather than bind us to a past we re-create in our own image?

Here I am helped again by Hannah Arendt, who notes that the Latin root of the word "authority" is "to augment".(21) Genuine authority is, in the words of Letty Russell, "an authority of freedom that uses people's need for solidarity and care to empower them through a relationship of mutuality".(22) Genuine authority is exercised concretely, is connected to particular persons and places. Genuine authority thereby helps lives actually lived not only to be sustained but to flourish.

How then will we offer our experience, both personal and ecclesial, in ways that uphold and do not deny one another? A life-giving response to this question begins as we bind our understanding of what is authoritative more to one another than to the texts of scripture and tradition. This is not to say the texts of scripture and tradition are no longer authoritative. To the contrary. These texts keep us connected to the great cloud of witnesses without whom our life and identity as Christians cannot be sustained. But our life and identity as Christians will flourish only as we bring to these texts our actual communities and our concrete ways of bearing witness to the Good News in our world today. Our life and identity as Christians will flourish as we are face-to-face with one another around a common table open to what emerges as we bring into conversation our lives as churches, the texts of scripture and tradition, and the burning issues of our day.