Quotes from James V. Brownson

We do not interpret rightly any single passage of Scripture until we locate the text within this larger fabric of meaning in Scripture as a whole.

Should the moral logic that informs the condemnation of same-sex erotic activity in the "seven passages" apply categorically to all committed same-sex relationships today? The evidence suggests that there are no forms of moral logic underpinning these passages that clearly and unequivocally forbid all contemporary forms of committed same-sex intimate relationships.

So the question must be put in a more focused way: Is there anything inherent in the moral logic that shapes the Bible's discussion of one-flesh unions that not only assumes but also requires that such unions take place only between a male and a female?

There is something about the call to sacrificial love that finally removes any claim to superiority, any claim to priority in decision-making, any claim to special honor. The same vision finally led, in the nineteenth century, not only to the "humanization" of the slave trade but to the recognition that slavery itself was fundamentally incompatible with the worship of a God who "shows no partiality.

This means that the Genesis 2 account cannot be used to argue that heterosexual union in marriage reconstitutes the original, binary, or androgynous Ê¿adam. The creation of woman does not arise from the splitting of an original binary or sexually undifferentiated being. Sexual union is never portrayed in Scripture as the recovery of a primordial unity of the two genders.

In other words, the animals are not similar to the man — in the way that the woman will be. The animals are certainly different from the man, but that is not what the story is interested in. It is pursuing not differences but someone similar to the man, someone similar enough to be "his partner" (in contrast to the animals, who are not sufficiently similar), and someone strong enough to be his "helper.

But the church's struggle with slavery does illustrate forcefully how assumed understandings of Scripture, based on simple readings of the texts, have been overturned through a deeper engagement with the truth of God's Word, enlivened by the witness of human experience.

The primary movement in the text is not from unity to differentiation, but from the isolation of an individual to the deep blessing of shared kinship and community.

Those who want to insist that the Bible requires women never to exercise authority publicly over men are forced into some striking exegetical gymnastics to account for this direct evidence of women in leadership in the New Testament texts.

In short, the religious, purity, procreative, and honor-shame contexts that form the underlying moral logic of the Levitical prohibitions, understandable and coherent as they may be in their own context, simply do not apply to contemporary committed Christian gay and lesbian relationships.