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The New Testament scholar N. T. Wright (and his alter-ego\/more popular counterpart Tom Wright) have, apparently, not written that much on the contentious issues of homosexuality and Christian faith, particularly in terms of how they relate to each other. This, to my mind, represents more a lack of imagination on the part of the reader\/’researcher’, than on the published work (at both a popular and academic level) of one of the world’s most prolific Christian writers. He’s spoken on ‘Gay Marriage’ in 2014<\/a>, and wrote on one of the key texts (Romans 1:26-27) in a technical commentary<\/a>, as well as some helpful comments in his ‘for Everyone’ commentary:<\/p>\n “He [Paul] sees the practice of same-sex relations as a sign that the human world in general is out of joint.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/span>This out-of-jointness, he says, is the result of God allowing people to follow lust wherever it leads\u2014once they have lost their grip on God\u2019s truth and, like Adam and Eve in the garden, listened to th<\/span>e voice of the creature rather than the voice of God…<\/em>“<\/p>\n As early as 2002, in a paper shared at a conference in Oxford<\/a>, Wright wrote:<\/p>\n “It is, of course open to anyone to say, on the basis of my argument so far, that they regard the distinction between homosexual and heterosexual\u00a0behaviour\u00a0as one of those cultural\u00a0distinctives which are irrelevant in the gospel; that homosexual\u00a0behaviour\u00a0simply is part of some cultures today, and that the church must respect,\u00a0honour\u00a0and bless it. You will not be surprised to know that I do not share this view. I am not an expert on current debates, and defer to two splendid books: Richard Hays,\u00a0The Moral Vision of the New Testament, and Robert Gagnon,\u00a0The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. But I may perhaps, as a long-time specialist on the letter to the Romans, put in my small contribution.<\/em><\/p>\n Paul\u2019s denunciation of homosexual practice in Romans 1 is well known but not so well understood, particularly in relation to its place in the argument as a whole. It is too often dismissed as simply firing some Jewish-style thunderbolts against typical pagan targets; and it is regularly thought to be dealing only with the deliberate choice of heterosexual individuals to abandon normal usage and indulge in alternative passions. It is often said that Paul is describing something quite different from the phenomenon we know today, e.g. in large western cities.<\/em><\/p>\n This is misleading. First, Paul is not primarily talking about individuals at this point, but about the entire human race. He is expounding Genesis 1-3, and looking at the human race as whole, so here he is categorizing the large sweep of human history as a whole \u2013 not, of course, that any individuals escape this\u00a0judgement, as 3.19f makes clear. Second, the point of his highlighting of female and male turning away from natural usage to unnatural grows directly out of the text which is his subtext, here and often elsewhere: for in Genesis 1 it is of course male plus female that is created to bear God\u2019s image. The male-plus-female factor is not of course specific to humanity; the principle of \u2018male plus female\u2019 runs through a great deal of creation. But humans were created to bear God\u2019s image, and given a task, to be fruitful and multiply, to tend the garden and name the animals. The point of Romans 1 as a whole is that when humans refuse to worship or\u00a0honour\u00a0God, the God in whose image they are\u00a0made,\u00a0their humanness goes into self-destruct mode; and Paul clearly sees homosexual\u00a0behaviour\u00a0as ultimately a form of human deconstruction. He is not saying that everyone who discovers homosexual instincts has chosen to commit idolatry and has chosen homosexual\u00a0behaviour\u00a0as a part of that; rather, he is saying that in a world where men and women have refused to\u00a0honour\u00a0God this is the kind of thing you will find.<\/em>”<\/p>\n Not for nothing, then, is it actually rather\u00a0un<\/em>surprising to read Wright’s comments in his generous foreword to\u00a0A War of Loves<\/em><\/a> by David Bennett:<\/p>\n “This is a brave and wise book. The territory into which it leads us – in shockingly clear detail – is perhaps the most contested moral, social, and cultural issue of our times: the question of same-sex desire and practice… David’s account of his meeting with Jesus, and the transformation that this produced in his life, his mind, his body, his imagination, and his hopes, is alone worth double the price of this book… I was struck, in particular, by the way that before his meeting with Jesus, David positively\u00a0hated <\/strong>the Bible.<\/em><\/p>\n I greatly respect David’s insider viewpoint and will, I hope, continue to learn from him.<\/em><\/p>\n Above all, I respect and salute David’s resolute afirmation of\u00a0chastity<\/strong>: of sexual fidelity in heterosexual marriage and sexual abstinence outside it. C. S. Lewis once remarked that when Charles Williams was lecturing in Oxford, the undergraduates were shocked because, having long supposed that the old rules about chastity were outdated, they were confronted with an author, literary critic, and lecturere who knew his texts like\u00a0 the back of his hand and was able to bring them gloriously to life,\u00a0and who passionately believed in chastity<\/strong>… David Bennett’s compassionate intelligence, his forthright tell-it-like-it-is memoir, and his rich theological understanding mean that when he advocates chastity, as he does in this book, nobody will be able to dismiss him in the way they might dismiss elderly theologians like the present writer<\/em>”<\/p>\n I hope that I have done justice to some of the words of Wright on the way that Christians are invited to think about sexuality and spirituality. These are important issues, and what we say and who we listen to are vital parts of our following of Jesus together.<\/p>\n Bibliography\/for further reading<\/strong><\/p>\n Foreword in\u00a0A War of Loves<\/em><\/a>, David Bennett (Zondervan, 2018)<\/p>\n Times Editorial<\/a> (paid subscribers only, 2009)<\/p>\n Paper given in 2002 ‘Communion and Koinoni<\/a>a’ (Available in Print as ‘Pauline Perspectives<\/a>‘)<\/p>\n Andrew Wilson’s blog post<\/a> (2014)<\/p>\n Commentary on Romans, in the New Interpreters Bibl<\/a>e (Abingdon, 2002)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The New Testament scholar N. T. Wright (and his alter-ego\/more popular counterpart Tom Wright) have, apparently, not written that much on the contentious issues of homosexuality and Christian faith, particularly in terms of how they relate to each other. This, … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kt_blocks_editor_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1918"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1929,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918\/revisions\/1929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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