(Note from Rowland: some important considerations here from the field of social psychology etc. I’ve asked Paul if we can publish his follow-up article on this broad subject – which might contain some conclusions from the biblical material!).

By Paul Tyson

The Book of Judges informs us that Jephthah, the son of Gilead and a prostitute, was raised up by the Spirit of God to be a liberator for the children of Israel from the hand of the Ammonites. However, the Ephraimites, a powerful Israelite tribe from Joseph’s lineage, were not impressed with Jephthah’s mighty deeds. Indeed, they found Jephthah’s military exploits a threat to their own security. So a war between Gilead and Ephraim – both descendents of Israel – ensued. Jephthah was victorious over the Ephraimites, and slaughtered 42,000 of his routed relatives as they sought to escape back over the fords of the river Jordan to their own territory.

The Ephraimites spoke a slightly different dialect to the Gileadites, so it was easy for the Gileadites to identify whether those seeking to cross the fords were on their side or not, just by listening to how they spoke. Notably, the Ephraimite dialect did not have the sound ‘sh’. So the Gileadites simply positioned those seeking to cross the Jordan River into saying the word ‘shibboleth’, and if they couldn’t pronounce it ‘correctly’ they were killed on the spot.

Jephthah’s gifted and tragic life touches on a number of the powerful themes in the Book of Judges. In terms of the divine charge to Joshua to take the land from its native inhabitants by force, we see some of this promise fulfilled against the Ammonites in the military courage of Jephthah. However, infighting between the tribes of Israel equally illustrates the failure of the people of Israel to allow God to be their king. Men of power relied on their own resources in their determination to protect their own status and tribal independence, and this generated and entrenched deep seated animosities between different ‘factions’ within the people of Israel and perpetuated the unfulfilment of their destiny as one people under God.

Another theme illustrated in Jephthah’s life concerns the relation between the respectable and authorised centres of tribal life and the ill-reputed and marginalized peripheries. At a young age Jephthah was excluded from his kinsmen by the circumstances of his birth, yet, as a man uncommonly militarily gifted, his kinsmen in the extremity of their pending annihilation were forced to call on Jephthah for help, and thus Jephthah is able to re-position himself at the centre of his community. Issues of loyalty and brutal exclusion, of ‘us’ and ‘not genuinely of us’, are laced through every word of the biblical account of Jephthah’s life.

The notion of ‘a shibboleth’ unifies the themes of loyalty, brutality and marginality, as well as the theme of trust in men of power rather than God, as they appear in Judges 10:6 – 12:15. For ‘a shibboleth’ is a device which is used to determine whose side one is on, within the members of one’s own larger community. A shibboleth is about finding out who is really one of us, and who only seems to be one of us, but is in fact an enemy that must be extracted from our midst. And this ‘us’ verses ‘them’ identifier is fought out within the context of faithless power struggles between competing centres of power and authority within the people of God.

It is possible to argue that within Australian Evangelical circles, one’s stance on issues concerning sexuality and gender – women’s ordination, gay marriage/ministry, divorced deacons/pastors, the sexual promiscuity of youth etc – are our shibboleths. Any pronouncement one makes on these topics will typically identify you as being either ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive’, with, at times, only the slightest accent of meaning being all that is necessary to make your affiliations suspect, and hence identify you as ‘one of them’. Why you might be conservative or progressive (or neither) is really not that important – the burning question is: are you one of us or one of them?

One cannot, for example, get a job with the Uniting Church (at least in Brisbane) if you do not sign a pro-gay statement. And one’s job as a New Testament scholar – as Dr Keith Dyer found out – can come up for a very close review at a Baptist Seminary, if you explore the question of what a biblical understanding of homosexuality really is, and your findings do not obviously aligned with the “God hates the sin but loves the sinner” stance which is normative in ‘biblical’ Evangelical circles. Sex, and particularly homosexuality – is thus a powerfully polarising thing in the church; just look at the Anglicans. Typically one’s views about sexuality are treated as a shibboleth within the Evangelical community (as well as the broader secular community), and any discussion around this topic is almost always highly political and almost never an exercise in the frank and fearless collective pursuit of truth.

Let us try to understand something of why ‘sexual ethics’ is this powerful polarizing shibboleth to us Evangelicals. In order to try and avoid – at least initially – the inherently divisive nature of this discourse, let us take a somewhat aloof sociologically entry point into this question.

Sociologists have discovered that no man is an island. Everyone’s personal identity is embedded within a specific community of people, a particular language, a defined set of beliefs and practises, and certain established relations of power and authority that the individual accepts but did not generate. To be an Evangelical Christian then is to live a certain way and to be a part of a community of fellow believers with whom we share a sociological ‘life form’. If the material conditions that sustain any given ‘life form’ disintegrate, and if the ‘doctrines’ and behavioural norms that define the characteristic beliefs, practises and world view assumptions of that community disintegrate, then so does the ‘life form’ of that distinctive way of being in the world. When the ‘life form’ of the community to which one belongs becomes tenuous, then one’s very identity as a member of such a community, and the credibility of the most basic truths integral to the vision of reality which one naturally believes as a member of a distinctive community, also become tenuous. Alas, the history of European colonisation illustrates this sociological reality all too clearly. People whose way of living in the world has been destroyed by contact with an overpowering foreign culture often experience the most profound dislocation not only from their own sense of identity and dignity once the structures and ‘normal’ operative features of their pre-colonial communities have been decimated, but they also frequently experience a profound alienation from a meaningful view of reality itself. The strange account of William Buckley’s life amongst the Aboriginals of what is now called Melbourne, Geelong and the Western District, gives us a very Anglicized view of the last period of the pre-European Aboriginal ‘life form’, which simply did not survive contact with the invading culture.

It is a contention of this paper that homosexuality is something of a shibboleth to us Evangelicals because our very life form is under threat since the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But unlike the Aboriginals of Southern Victoria, the threat to our way of being in the world does not come from some powerful invading culture, but actually come from our own culture, and arises from features of our own culture that we are very deeply committed to. This makes the ‘threat’ hard to identify, and makes us very suspicious of those within our own community who seem not to be on ‘our’ side on matters concerning sexual ethics. Thus, ‘sexuality’ is a field of doctrine and practise that we typically approach out of fear (conservatives) or in reaction to our fear (progressives) in relation to questions that concern our own identity. But to trace this fear and the fragility of our identity as Evangelicals to the 1960s is terribly inadequate. It goes a lot further back than that.

Barry Harvery is a professor of theology in the Honours College at Baylor, a Baptist university in Texas. His book Can These Bones Live? is a stunning exploration of ecclesiology within the big sweep of Western cultural history, touching lucidly on Evangelical Christianity’s place within that sweep.

One of the things that Dr Harvey notices is that we Evangelicals are very at home in the cultural environment characterised by the personal freedoms of modern individualism. Here, your moral and religious beliefs and your private practises and free associations are sacrosanct. Hence, we cherish our freedom of religious belief and association, and we cherish our right to govern our own private households according to our own religiously framed moral codes. But here’s the rub. Until quite recently our culture was broadly Christian. That is, if you had private religious beliefs that were Christian, and if you were ‘good’ by the moral standards expected by the Christian community, then you were a publically respectable person who was with the status quo in preserving the good order of society. With this position of social respectability often enough came power, responsibility, authority and wealth. However, the long de-Christianisation of Western European culture reached a demographic tipping point in the 1960s, and so Evangelical Christians experienced a corresponding marginalisation from status and power within our larger culture. We might still be persuaded of our respectability and our important ballasting role preserving the good order of society, but no-one else seems to find our distinctly Christian notions of good morals and correct social order either relevant or wanted in public contexts. Further, many of us – or at least many of our children – are no longer ‘good’ by the conservative moral standards that were central to Christian respectability only 40 years ago. This is particularly the case concerning sexual and gender norms, shared codes of modesty and propriety, Sabbath day piety, drinking, verbal hygiene, dancing, entertainment, frugality, money, consumption, self restraint, right worship and devotional discipline. Truth be said, the broader norms of non-Christian hedonistic consumer society have powerfully impacted us, and have eroded/transformed the distinctive features of traditional Evangelical piety, morality and worship within our own households in a dramatic and rapid manner. Some see this change as a new freedom from legalistic bondage and a new openness to progressive social agendas and moral norms; others see this change as a threat to our very survival as distinctive communities of biblical Christian faith. But however it is seen, there is profound change within the norms, beliefs and practises of our own community, and this level of change cannot fail to bring up for fundamental re-evaluate our understanding of what our own identity as Evangelicals should be characterised by.

As Dr Harvey notes, we Evangelicals are deeply committed to the freedoms of modern liberal individualism. And yet, when the freedoms of modern liberal individualism are applied to sexual and familial norms and belief commitments that are not situated within our community’s interpretation of the biblical narratives, and when those very freedoms undercut the believability and distinctive communal norms of ‘our’ way of life as lived out by our own children, then the sky sort of falls in on us and we cannot work out why.

Modern people, for a start, find much of the biblical narratives concerning sexuality – and violence – primitive, repressive and repulsive. The very narrative fibre of the Old Testament is framed by a violent Bronze Age, patriarchal, tribal world view that seems – more often than not – primitive, foreign, repressive and immoral to us. Israel has two wives, and also has children through the maid servants of his wives, and thus the twelve sons of Israel are delivered into the world via one man and four women, and the daughters of these unions are not mentioned. These sons act in the normal manner of tribal elites, fighting amongst each other for power, visiting prostitutes and taking for wife whom they desire. Moving further along the biblical narrative, the account of Jephthah being ostracised from his community because he was the child of a prostitute, and this warrior then slaughtering 42,000 of his tribal relatives and an unspecified number of Ammorites in a genocidal holy war is, again, no easy matter for us modern people to understand, let alone admire. No modern Evangelical is going to claim that excluding people from church because of the circumstances of their conception is ‘biblical’ or that this account of attempted genocide and tribal fratricide was unproblematically ordained by God simply because the writer of the first part of the Book of Judges is totally at home in the Bronze Age world where genocide and fratricide are both ‘normal’, morally permissible, and – when done by the right people under the right motivation – sanctioned by God and required by right worship.

So as modern people committed to our own personal freedoms, we ‘spiritualize’ a lot of the biblical narrative in order to sanitize it and make it align with our modern moral, gender/sexuality, political, economic and religious sensibilities. Thus, even when we Evangelicals think of ourselves as committed Biblicists, we are still modern people who do not really take the bible literally, and who cannot consistently deny personal liberty to those who do not conform to what we see as our own distinctive set of community norms. Further, broader non-Christian cultural and sexual norms are increasingly assumed as valid within our own community – at least in practise – anyway. We seem to be experiencing the erosion, and/or the radical transformation of our Evangelical life form, and the degree to which we ourselves are driving this erosion/transformation, adds powerfully to the resulting complexity and anxiety concerning what we believe an Evangelical life form actually is and should be.

The above should make it clear that there is a lot more going on when Evangelicals try and formulate any doctrinal and communal behavioural norms in matters sexual than may at first meet the eye. In fact, the central complexities of our doctrinal and community understandings of sexuality often do not gain any air play at all as the anxieties over our own identity as biblical Christians in the modern world take over – on both conservative and progressive ‘sides’. Long hard explorations into what our relationship to modern individualism is, to what the biblical narrative actually says and means concerning sexuality, to what it might mean for us to be marginal to the dominant norms of our larger society, and to what attitude we should have towards the marginal of our own community – this sort of theological and culturally reflective labour is often simply displaced by the anxious and accusative heat of shibboleth driven and faithless infighting.

What, then, is a Christian approach for us Evangelicals to take regarding the Bible and homosexuality? For a large range of reasons – not the least because of our own identity insecurity as Evangelicals in a post-Christian era – this is no easy question to answer. Straight forwardly ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive’ approaches to sexuality are likely to be little more than a reflection of Evangelical identity insecurities embedded either in Victorian or contemporary cultural assumptions about sexual identity and biblical interpretation. To avoid this trap we need a deeper and more critically discerning engagement with the way in which both of those cultural landscapes shape our approach to interpreting the Scriptures.

The great 18th century scholar of Biblical interpretation Johann Hamann warned Biblical scholars (alas, unheeded) against treating the Bible either as a doctrinal text book whose inner meanings can be unlocked with reductive logical and scientific rigor, as much as he warned against abandoning the mystery and offence of Scripture in order to make the Christian way palatable to the tastes of our own time and place. Hamann put it like this:

Neither the dogmatic soundness of orthodox Pharisees, nor the poetic licence of free-thinking Sadducees will renew the sending of the Spirit who drove the holy men of GOD to speak and to write.

If we must polarise all debate about homosexuality into a power contest between legalistic Pharisees and liberal Sadducees, we do not do the Spirit of God or His Scriptures justice. Further, following the message of the Book of Judges, factional power plays premised on different stances over this question illustrate that God is not our king and we are equating the preservation of a model of status and authority (be it conservative or progressive) in which we have security and power with the will of God. Thus, in faithless self assured zeal we will exclude, separate and denounce the members of our own ecclesial family whom we have identified as ‘not of us’ because of the shibboleth of homosexuality. This is an immature and faithless way that we must avoid if we are to look adequately at the complexities of the issue, and to submit faithfully to the Lordship of Christ.

December 2009

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