The Disproof Text

     Ms. Debra Haffner of the Religious Institute for Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing is angry with me for calling her "Miss Hospitality" in my previous post.  I do see that there's some vinegar in the title.  It seemed better than Miss Sodomy, Miss Apostasy, Miss Heresy, and Miss Interpretation, but I agree, I had dipped my pen in gall.  Or, these days, my ten fingers.  I am sorry for that gall.

     I wish she'd feel the same scrupulosity about appearing to call everybody who disagrees with her on the lawfulness of sodomy a "fundamentalist."  Now that is not just an acid nickname, intended to insult.  It's a slander -- given the way that word is commonly used.  Or maybe it doesn't mean anything at all.  If it's supposed to signify a "Biblical literalist," then we need to know what kind of literalism is being practiced.  It must be an awfully broadminded and flexible literalism that can include the Pope of Rome, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the president of the Southern Baptist Convention.  It must be a warmly tolerant attention to the words of Scripture that can unite Luther and Leo X, after all these years.  Oh, anybody can pretend to unite around nothing: we can all agree that the Scripture is to be tossed into the fire, and then go forth to toss one another into the fire, about global warming or Iraq or the price of gasoline.  But to unite around something -- that commands attention.

     Yet I think I rather like that insulting name, "fundamentalist."  It suggests -- whatever the insulter may intend -- a thinker, someone who does not wish to reside in the mushy middle of sentiment.  That is, a fundamentalist is somebody who pays attention to foundations: he wants to know whether the floor beneath him has girders and posts and concrete anchors.  He wants to know whether, when the wolf comes howling -- and the wolf does follow a well-noted lupine schedule -- his house will remain standing.  The Christian householder, confronted with the question of whether it would be a good thing to drill a large hole in his floor, should be forgiven if he asks first what the cornerstone thinks about it.  We come from various communions, and our houses look a bit different -- some are Italianate with fancy tiles on the roof, and some are as spare as a lone steeple in Kansas -- but we look to the Word of God, and the historical teachings of our churches, and, without depending too heavily upon it, the natural reason God endowed us with.  These are our fundamentals, and we are flatfooted enough to believe that they do not contradict themselves, or one another.

     Now it won't do to say, "We use the Scriptures too, we respect the Scriptures, we love the Scriptures, but we interpret them in a truer and fuller way."  It won't do, because interpretation is the last thing that's going on.  If I say to my wife, "I am examining your body in the hope of finding blemishes," she is well within her rights to slap me in the face.  And that's what is going on -- an unseemly hunt for supposed blemishes, not so that one may interpret them correctly, but so that one may discount them, and refrain from interpreting them at all.  So, for instance, we hunt down a little mole called "Deutero-Paul," not so that we may synthesize the theology of the old genius named Paul with the newly recognized genius named Paul, but so that we may subordinate Paul the Second to Paul the First, ignoring what Paul the Second has to say when it seems to jar with what Paul the First has to say.  The process does not even require an actual second person: sometimes Paul the First just isn't himself, as when in 1 Corinthians he tartly advises the women to keep their peace in the assembly.  Then a putative Not Paul Really can be subordinated to Genuine Paul, also not to spur interpretation, but to remove the need for it.

     I've seen the same dynamic at work in the leftist Catholic argument to justify abortion.  Thomas Aquinas, it's said, believed that the human embryo was "ensouled" at some moment during gestation.  His belief was based on the biological knowledge of his time.  Therefore, you see, abortion up till that moment of ensoulment (and we don't know when that is, so we'll kindly not press the matter) should be considered licit.  Of course, the people who argue this way don't care a flip about Thomas Aquinas.  They will not cite his theological arguments to show that abortion is always evil, period.  They will certainly not cite his arguments to show that sodomy and fornication are also evil.  One little bit of Thomas -- an apparent blemish -- is used to discredit the Church's teaching.  Here we have the remarkable instance of modernist critics trusting the medieval biology of a theologian.  I prefer to trust his theology, thank you.

     Ms. Haffner notes that some of the rabbis in the Midrash said that the sin of Sodom was inhospitality -- their cruelty and greed.  But, meaning no disrespect -- woman, what is that to me?  Some of the rabbis also say that Jesus was a rabble rouser who got himself into trouble.  I don't have to believe that.  They also say, following the Torah, that fornication is an evil.  Not "sex without commitment" or "sex without Love" (pronounced "luhv," the force that makes the world and people's heads go round), but simply "sex without marriage."  Ms. Haffner doesn't care to believe that.

     So the Midrash is neither here nor there.  It can add nothing to Ms. Haffner's argument.  Same thing for Ezekiel, who expatiated upon Sodom's sins (actually, who applied the example of Sodom to his own people), and who did not name sodomy, unless he included it under "abomination," or unless he figured that nobody needed to be advised about that one.  Consider, had a prophet said of Hitler, "he was cruel, he aspired to godhood, he lied, he committed abominations," would we then conclude that his gas chambers were somehow excused?  Such non-interpreters don't believe that Ezekiel always knew what he was talking about, any more than they believe that the writer of Genesis (whom they are glad to see divided into J, E, D, and P, so that P can take a back seat to J, E, and D) knew what he was talking about.  You use Ezekiel, whom you don't trust, to disprove JED, whom you don't trust.  And you do so to arrive at the opinion of the one you do trust: Mr. Passing Fad.