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By Root 1431 0

so that the troops can be rallied, funds can be raised, internal questions and divisions can be suppressed, and boundaries can be maintained. If the “devil” is the majority, then the group in question identifies itself as a persecuted, divinely favored minority. If the group in question is a majority, it seeks a minority group on which to project its anxieties and anger. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people are an ideal choice for this kind of fundasexualist scapegoating. Gay people appear to make up between 3 and 10 percent of every society (although they are, in many parts of the world, still in hiding), just big enough but not too big to be scapegoated effectively. But more is going on in current controversies over sexuality than simple scapegoating. Our preoccupation with sexuality is a symptom, I believe, of our growing discomfort with conventional answers to the six questions we have already considered in this book.

1. The Greco-Roman narrative, in which we have framed the Bible, consistently fails to explain homosexuality for at least two reasons. First, the narrative assumes an inherent dualism in the universe—a bipolar world of matter/spirit, physics/metaphysics, natural/supernatural, and male/female. This dualism portrays the human being as a ghost in a machine—a spirit or soul that indwells a physical body much the way a driver indwells a car. If the car goes into a ditch, it’s the driver’s fault; similarly, if a person has sex with a person of the wrong gender, it’s the soul’s fault.

But this view is under assault from all sides. Medicine points to chemical imbalances, congenital defects, and degenerative diseases that impair various functions we associate with the soul—reasoning, making moral choices, remembering, and so on. Psychology, psychiatry, neurobiology, evolutionary biology, and related fields similarly blur the old distinctions between personality and chemistry or soul and body. As they do so, these fields of study additionally undermine the Platonic dualisms in which maleness and femaleness are two absolute, eternal categories of being into which all people fit. In light of additional biological complications like intersexuality (the presence of some combination of male and female sex organs) and Klinefelter’s syndrome (a genetic condition in which an individual has XXY chromosomes, rather than typical male, XY, or female, XX, chromosomes), it becomes clear that whatever we human beings are, we aren’t simply metaphysical male or female souls riding around as passengers in male or female body-vehicles. This realization is creating a far-reaching revolution in Christian anthropology.2

Second, in the perpetual high-noon sunlight of Platonic philosophy, words like “male,” “female,” and “marriage” have timeless, perfect essences. No change or blurring in these essences can possibly occur, since they exist on the transcendent, absolute, and eternal plane of ideal forms. Our job as fallen people stuck down here in the cave of illusion is to understand and conform to those unchanging, transcendent, absolute definitions as rigidly and faithfully as possible. True, faithful Bible readers struggle to reconcile this view with certain stubborn facts, such as the fact that marriage in the Bible was not always between one man and one woman, but rather evolved through stages in which polygyny was not only permitted, but in some cases required.3 But even so, the Platonic view has successfully rendered those facts strangely invisible, as if they weren’t even there.

But now, as we move outside the Greco-Roman worldview, we are able to ask the same kind of uncomfortable questions about absolutist Platonic dualism that Jesus raised regarding the Jewish Law. Just as he asked, “Was the Sabbath made for humankind, or humankind for the Sabbath?” we can ask whether humans were made to fit into an absolute, unchanging institution called marriage, or whether marriage was created to help humans—perhaps including gay humans?—live wisely and well in this world.4

2. Regarding the constitutional reading of the Bible,