In the Mail: The New Testament and Homosexuality by Robin Scroggs
Many thanks to Augsburg Fortress Publishers for sending a review copy of The New Testament and Homosexuality (publisher link) by Robin Scroggs, who is Edward Robinson Professor of Biblical Studies Emeritus at Union Theological Seminary in New York. This one goes back quite a few years, published in 1983. If you google “Robin Scroggs”, you will find all sorts of folks in the homosexuality debate using his book for various purposes. Scott Bartchy has required the text for his seminar this fall, “Spirituality and Sexuality in the Early Christian Movement” and I am intrigued. Here’s an excerpt from the preface:
For better or worse, I decided that somebody needed somehow to provide resources that would give both clarity and honesty: clarity about the real issues with which the Bible dealt, and honesty about how the Bible could or could not appropriately inform the debate [regarding homosexuality]. . . .
Perhaps this “personal confession” will signal my own interests and involvement with the topic. I am not a homosexual. Nor do I write this book as an advocate either for or against the ecclesiastical rights of homosexuals. I confess to a confusion about the merits of psychological arguments concerning homosexual inclinations, a confusion I know I share with many people. I just do not know whether homosexuality is or can be normal or whether it can be as fulfilling to the human person as heterosexuality.
At the same time I confess equally that I see no way of reading the Christian gospel except that it is one which totally accepts in love all persons, regardless of inadequacies or moral failings. And I have seen too many tragic rejections of homosexual persons in the name of Christian righteousness or even love. I thus offer these pages in the hope that, in addition to bringing clarity and honesty to issues of the relevance of the Bible, it may bring as well a little more light and a little less heat to the discussion, a little more acceptance of all persons on the “other side,” and maybe even an awareness that in Christ there is really no “other side” at all.
Ultimately, however, my purpose in writing is to make it as clear as possible what are the issues in the use of the Bible in Christian debates about the acceptance of homosexuals. Just what is a proper use of the Bible, especially the New Testament, in these discussions?
I don’t know if it’s possible for anyone to really bring “a little less heat” to this discussion, but I’m interested to see what Scroggs has to say nonetheless!
In the Mail: Peter Brown's The Body and Society
Another thank you is due. I extend my enormous gratitude to Columbia University Press for sending to me the twentieth anniversary edition of Peter Brown’s work on marriage and sexual practices in early Christianity, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (or see the book at CUP’s website). Here is the back cover blurb:
First published in 1988, Peter Brown’s The Body and Society was a groundbreaking study of the marriage and sexual practices of early Christians in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Brown focuses on the practice of permanent sexual renunciation–continence, celibacy, and lifelong virginity–in Christian circles from the first to the fifth centuries A.D. and traces early Christians’ preoccupations with sexuality and the body in the work of the period’s great writers.
The Body and Society questions how theological views on sexuality and the human body both mirrored and shaped relationships between men and women, Roman aristocracy and slaves, and the married and the celibate. Brown discusses Tertullian, Valentinus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Constantine, the Desert Fathers, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, among others, and considers asceticism and society in the Eastern Empire, martyrdom and prophecy, gnostic spiritual guidance, promiscuity among the men and women of the church, monks and marriage in Egypt, the ascetic life of women in fourth-century Jerusalem, and the body and society in the early Middle Ages. In his new introduction, Brown reflects on his work’s reception in the scholarly community.
Brown’s book is a required text for Scott Bartchy’s seminar this fall, “Spirituality and Sexuality in the Early Christian Movement.” I have requested other textbooks for the fall so that I can assess the books’ value not only in and of themselves but also for their usefulness in these kinds of courses. More thanks may be coming . . .
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Elsewhere . . .- Blog titles beginning with "A" to "Z" on your reader Mark Goodacre
- Of making many books there is no end Chris Brady
- Free Online: The Liddell-Scott Jones Lexicon S and C
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? II agathos
- Steven J. Friesen and the Identity of Satan’s Throne in Pergamum alan
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? agathos
- Bloomsbury buys Continuum Mark Goodacre
- Imperial America Peter J. Leithart
- C.F.D. Moule on the Birth of the New Testament d. miller
- Responding to Kostenberger (with comparisons to Marshall) Jeremiah
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