Titanic Post

Living in a homophobic county as I do, and seeing that most of the anti-gay rhetoric is based on statements from evangelical ministers’ interpretation of the New Testament, I was pleased to find the following piece by Dr. William Stacy Johnson, Princeton Theological Seminary’s Arthur M. Adams Associate Professor of Systematic Theology.

Printed in The Christian Century, January 15, 2008

SEX AND SLAVERY: William Stacy Johnson notes that there are three forms of homoeroticism:

Age-differentiated homosexuality, known as pederasty and common among the ancient Greeks, is when a younger person is expected to give sexual favors to his mentor as a rite of passage.

Status-defined homosexuality, in which a superior performs a sexual act with a passive inferior who is often stigmatized, was common among the ancient Romans.

Egalitarian homosexu­ality, in which the partners are in an equal and mutual relationship, is the pre­dominant form today.

Johnson points out that no biblical text addresses this third type of homosexuality and that the sec­ond type is the context for the three New Testament texts that deal with same-sex activity. If the New Testament is a protest document that offered an alternative to Roman dominance and exploitation, as scholars are increasingly concluding, could one of the implications be that egalitarian homosexual unions are not proscribed by the New Testament, espe­cially when its writers seem not to have known of this form of homosexuality? (Biblical Theology Bulletin, Winter).