The Pro-Love Agenda
Dylan Hendricks | Friday, July 8, 2011 Dylan's argument for the equal rights of homosexual people stands on the back of the greatest commandment, to love the Lord above all, and the neighbor as oneself. In a world of nuance and division, this message simplifies the terrain and encourages us to enlarge our concept of the human family. This is the second essay in our series on homosexuality -Editor.
I was asked to write a "liberal" response to the idea of homosexuality, a subject that is being debated here as well as many other places in our culture right now. I don't want to do that. I think these two teams have already done a very fine job of establishing their talking points and worldviews by this point, and all the movements, laws, websites and other armaments are firmly institutionalized to support either position. This culture war is already a war of attrition, each side hoping...I don't know, that the other side will be worn down enough that they'll relent and admit intellectual and theological defeat? Or that maybe the issue will just disappear, and all the detractors with it? I doubt most people even have a strategy for how this should all play out. They have strong emotions, and convictions, and that's enough to dig in and swing away - thoughtfully at times, crudely and aggressively at others. Either way, it'll likely fall to our children to settle this debate, mostly by not being interested in it. They'll have the robot uprising to think about after all, and gay rights will be lumped into the "issues my parents fought over" bucket, along with Facebook privacy concerns and lamentations over the death of paper books.
So this is all fairly condescending, as though I've transcended any of these very natural and predictable human behaviors. I haven't, and when pressed, I will most definitely pull out a typical "liberal" defense of gay rights and gay marriage. I have gay friends, and I have gay friends who are in love. I love them, and I support them in their pursuit of happiness. That's all there is to my position, and any defense more intellectual than that would be inauthentic. I'm pro-love.
With that out of the way, I do have some other intellectual thoughts I'd like to share. I'm a big fan of intellectual thought, generally, and increasingly interested in intellectual thought accompanied by an optimistic, embracing tone. In a world full of altogether too much information delivered at an unforgivingly relentless pace, I'm more than ever trying to hone in on that Swedenborgian sweet spot of wise words spoken with loving intention. To that end, I'd like to endorse a video from The Royal Society in England about "Empathic Civilization". It's worth a few minutes of your time, but you don't have to watch it to read on.
In this video, Jeremy Rifkin talks about our very natural and predictable human tendency to make teams and dig in our heels. We've always formed an Us that is in opposition to Them and then treated Them with trepidation and uncertainty, if not open hostility. Christian or Jew, black or white, gay or straight. There hasn't been a time or place where we didn't pick teams and fight over something. You might even say we're hard-wired to do this. And in this way, humans are inherently flawed, etc.
And yet - Rifkin goes on to talk about another human behavior that happens with equal predictability but gets much less airplay. It seems that "other"ing groups of people mostly happens when we don't know much about them, and when we don't have direct contact with them. Empathy plays a role in this. It's also just more difficult to Other somebody to their face than it is from across the valley.
You can chart this historically. Before language and society took hold, families and tribes formed the first dominant Us group. Any tribe on the next hill, their intentions uncertain, posed a potential threat. As communication and travel increased, and human society grew larger and more organized, the Us group had to grow with it, and moved slowly from tribal to religious identities. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and heathens were the biggest groups that we could recognize, summarize, contrast and compare. We fought wars and built empires based on these designations. But humans kept intermingling, and as economic markets increased in size, and the activity of trade encompassed multiple religions, the Us group grew again. The nation state emerged. Religion wasn't lost, but was subsumed into larger Us and Thems -- British, Chinese, American, Russian.
From this perspective, the noisiness of our world right now is a little more understandable. It feels in many ways like our culture is more divided than ever, that Us and Them has never been more prevalent. But we've also just finished exploding the remaining communication barriers that kept us apart, and only in the last generation has the world flirted with, then dived head-long into a fully globalized awareness of what's going on everywhere else on the planet. It's a confusing time for everybody. The economic and communication infrastructure has grown so fast, in fact, that we haven't remotely caught up with it on a psychological or cultural level. Multi-national corporations and global mass media have made national identity an increasingly complex situation, and have thrown into flux all the traditions and sacred cows that formed our pre-global cultures, religions and perspectives. And what do we have to hold onto? None of us grew up with a precedent for thinking of ourselves as anything more than American or Christian; global citizenship is still a very niche group, a Them to many established Us's. Will the Us group keep expanding, as it has always done, or is it now doomed to turn back in on itself, fracturing endlessly on however many cultural lines - gay vs. straight, black vs. white, Christian vs. Muslim?
I do think, actually, that most of us grew up with a precedent for global citizenship, with an Us that encompasses every other human on the planet. Jesus said many things, and every Christian-themed argument on controversial social issues has a supporting passage or two in its back pocket. But when pressed with complex, seemingly paradoxical matters, Jesus had a fairly simple answer.
And one of them, an expert in religious law, asked him a question to test him: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:35-40)
Of course, I say this is simple, and yet contained within it is enough ambiguous and interpretable language to support any kind of argument. Who is the neighbor? What is love? How is love communicated? There are plenty of Swedenborgian caveats and yes-buts here, but do me a favor and consider this passage for a second from the perspective of the growing Us. Love God, above all else. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments. For me, it's hard not to look at this passage and feel the Lord's pro-love agenda. Especially because the Lord *is* Love itself (Divine Love and Wisdom 4), we can even take the commandment to be “Love [love itself] with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. Love.
The Lord anticipated that this message was maybe a little too straightforward for some, and followed it with several warnings for those who would skew its meaning.
“But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher and you are all brothers." (23:8-9)
“But woe to you, experts in the law and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You keep locking people out of the kingdom of heaven! For you neither enter nor permit those trying to enter to go in." (23:13)
“Woe to you, experts in the law and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You give a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, yet you neglect what is more important in the law – justice, mercy, and faithfulness! You should have done these things without neglecting the others." (23:23)
I could now elaborate on these warnings to hammer my point, but for what? If I'm right, our children won't care about this issue because they'll have been in proximity to openly gay couples their entire lives, and their Us will already include this group. They'll have seen that gay relationships encompass the same range of love and lust as straight relationships, and manifest the same range of human emotions, yearnings, and spiritual desires. The conceptual conflicts that tie our hands will form the basis of their world view, and like every generation before them they will look at the world a little more broadly and openly than their parents did before them. If I'm wrong, it won't matter, because we'll just keep fighting.
This is just my experience.
My girlfriend and I are getting married soon. We got engaged a couple days ago as I write this. Talis is from Mexico, and I'm from Canada, but we met in America, and that's where we both live right now. I doubt many people would be able to peg our "true" national designations unless we told them. Talis looks Lebanese, and I look Irish. Talis was raised Catholic and I was raised New Church, but I've never met someone from any faith whose worldview and perception of God matches mine more specifically. Our diverse backgrounds put us in the increasingly common position of needing to co-create new identities for ourselves - our given ones just don't wholly capture our combined experiences, or totally reflect the world that brought us together. We relish the opportunity to discover meaning in the experiences we get to have that no society before us got to have.
We love each other, and we love God, and we want to be a team, standing together for our decidedly pro-love agenda. In addition to at least three countries' worth of family and friends, we're inviting our straight friends and our gay friends to our wedding, because we love them and they love us. This, for us, is all that it comes down to.
You're welcome to join Us.
Dylan Hendricks
Dylan lives in an underrated neighborhood of San Francisco, where he produces web videos and fervently ambitious notions about the future.Wondering about the inspiration for this article? Look up the New Church, which is based on the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Reader Comments (58)
I appreciate all the thoughtful comments here - my congratulations to Brian for creating a space where such reasonable discussions take place. No small accomplishment on these busy busy Internets.
I was thinking recently about what makes the difference between sites like youtube and wikipedia in terms of anonymous contributions. With the same barriers of entry (a username and password), the former is often like the online equivalent of a bathroom stall, while the latter is the most comprehensive accumulation of human knowledge ever attempted. And I've been thinking that maybe the difference is in the voice of the contributions. Wikipedia strives for a consistent, rational voice, one that only says things that are demonstrably true while using formal and socially neutral language. When editors and contributors are reviewing content on wikipedia, it's much easier to identify and then reject or modify passages that don't fit the voice, and over time this gives the body of work legitimacy and authority.
I was wondering if something similar could be done for wisdom - if we could try to crowd-source our viewpoints and opinions with the goal of finding the most wise voice, rather than just the most strictly true one. I realize this would be a highly subjective aim, but I think many people would agree on the wisest voice when they heard it - the one that approaches the issue from the broadest perspective, with the most equanimity, wonder, rational understanding, and loving appreciation for its subject. I'm not saying this encyclopedia would ever have to reach a firm consensus on issues, but perhaps it could help elevate our dialogue around things that, at the end of the day, we don't really understand very well.
That's a bit of a tangent, I realize, but I think it's relevant, because there are only a few points on this comment board that I take issue with, and they're all in the realm of things that I think would be edited out of the wisdom wikipedia. I'm sorry, Roger, but I don't think the Lord's loving wisdom would craft a sentence like "Unless you want, with Dylan, to write a sodomy-enabling, "pro-love" Gospel." That feels mean-spirited, spiteful, and fairly exaggerated. I don't mean to pick on you, but I do think that poisonous communication is a bigger threat to our society than sodomy. I've been guilty of it plenty of times myself, and I would also greatly appreciate someone to censor my statements from time to time.
On a (somewhat) lighter note, my experience with gay friends tells me that straight people are much more obsessed with the sodomy angle than the gay community itself is. It seems weird to me that we are so focused on the sex act itself, and that we then define the whole relationship around it, when we wouldn't ever dream of doing that with our straight friends.
Dylan,
Thanks for your response. Yes, I lack wisdom and love because I consider homosexuality to be a disease that needs to be cured in this world or the next before the patient can enter one of the heavens. Like many other diseases - malice, envy, propensity for slander and gossip, love of heterosexual adultery, pornography, dishonesty, laziness, violent fantasies, addiction to any object or person, lack of reverence for the Holy, unwillingness to share one's blessings, exaggerated or not enough self-worth, an excessive desire for control etc.
The tone of my note aside, but you do want to re-write the plain meaning of the Torah and the Gospel with regard to homosexuality, don't you? And you probably want to use the Swedenborgian concept of inner meanings to accomplish this re-structuring of classical Christian sexual morality which Swedenborg himself did not alter except for his allowance of "pellicacy" or non-marital male-female sexual relationships for simple release as opposed to for conquest, variety and other hellish goals. Swedenborg did not equate pellicacy with marital love.
And regarding my other email - you do want full legal equality for homosexual relationships with heterosexual ones, and the commensurate sanctification by religious authorities, don't you? Do those who oppose this objective, such as myself, fall in the pro-hate category, while your more tolerant view towards the restructuring of marriage takes the higher, "pro-love" ground?
Roger
Dylan,
Thank you for writing this thought-provoking article, and especially for having the courage to express your ideas.
I choose to extract something good from what you wrote. That is, the idea of creating a safe haven for our points of view.
I would definitely categorize a safe haven as- "pro-love".
I know that my 'tough love' stance can easily be misunderstand. When in the company of gays in my neighborhood, I never bring the subject of homosexuality up. It's different if they want to discuss it- then, I take care to accomodate what I know to that particular individual. Never would I quote do's and don'ts from scripture. Even Jesus mildly accomodated his words to fit those he instructed.
Lastly, I want Alanna, Normandy, Edmund, and Karl to know that I respected their knowledge of New Church ideas enough to engage them in a more difficult way. I'll also try harder to ......."Be as wise as a serpent, and harmless as a dove".
Roger, I'm going to sidestep your question for a second, but only because I think this line of argument doesn't go anywhere for either of us. Talking about this just at the level of civil laws only reflects our differing understandings of what it is that laws represent. In a certain sense, and this is the sense that I want to talk about them for a moment, civil laws are a fiction. They're not a real, substantial thing, but exist only abstractly in the minds of those who believe in them, and formally in the actions of those who are paid or otherwise motivated to enforce them in society. We created them because we realized at some point in human history that we needed to find a forum of consistent consensus on what was okay to do in the public sphere and what we didn't want to allow, what would make everything fall apart. Some of these laws have obvious, lasting value: don't murder, don't steal, generally don't do things that hurt other people's ability to live their lives. Some of these laws are revealed over time to be less valuable: enforcement of slavery, passive-aggressive immigration policy, etc. Some laws still need to be created, to reflect how society is fundamentally changing over time - laws that explicitly recognize the value and fragility of the natural environment, the rights of people who manufacture our goods, etc. My premise is that laws, generally, evolve over time, as our notions of society, and of Us, also evolve, and require new fictions.
According to our sacred texts, the Lord also passed down laws, although He did so more often in the old testament than in the new, and many of those laws have been since revoked, because they applied only to the situation at hand in the time they were decreed. Many Swedenborgian scholars have likened the difference in God's tone between the testaments as the difference between how a parent interacts with a young child versus a teenager, and I'm sympathetic to this view. If a two-year old's going to burn himself on a stove, you say "No! Don't do that!" because that's the level of understanding that the child needs to survive at that point in their development. When they get a little older, it's not enough to just say "no," but becomes increasingly useful to explain to a child why they shouldn't do something. The stove is hot. Hot things burn you. As we mature into our own self-aware understanding of the world, strict reprimands are decreasingly effective or respectful, because they begin to violate our freedom. At some point it's much more useful to help someone understand how fire works, what makes it hot, what motivates the chemical reaction that burns you when you touch it, etc, because then they can not only understand why they shouldn't touch the stove, but can extrapolate that understanding to help them in many other situations. And this, I believe, is what the Lord wants for us, and it's one of the reasons I love the New Church teachings among Christian theology, because for the first time we're being told that it's important that we understand something before we believe it. As we grow up as a species, the Lord is less interested in just helping us survive, and more interested in empowering us to grow closer to Him, to voluntarily enter into union with Him. The requisite qualities of this union are love - being a receptacle and embodiment of love, and secondarily, communicating that love into wisdom. The Lord's laws, therefore, exist specifically to guide us on that path. And to the degree that civil laws weakly echo spiritual ones, they also exist to help guide society into an increasing state of union, harmony and useful activity. This is what I believe, and I don't think it reflects a rewrite of anything in the sacred texts. The Lord wants us to love, and He wants us to understand. This is both His greatest commandment and the explicit purpose of Swedenborg's writings, respectively.
With that said, I don't believe that the laws about specific physical homosexuality are as strict and straight-forward as you do, to the point where I would risk violating the greater laws, the laws about loving my neighbour as myself, or that I would even risk formally violating someone else's freedom to do something that really, at the end of the day, is none of my business. Civil laws both prescribe what we can and cannot do, and create a formal record of legitimacy. If something is illegal, it means that we're in the wrong when we do it. And that is psychologically crippling to people, because it attacks them at the level of self-worth. It is explicitly judgmental and alienating, and as such is really a form of oppression.
And if we're going to make laws that oppress people, especially people whose "crime":
a) exists in a fog of half-understanding (because no one really understands why people are gay, how that trait comes to be, or what it ultimately represents) and
b) doesn't actively prevent us from living our lives,
I don't believe that the weight of that decision should fall to the oppressors. That's happened too much throughout human history, and it's always wrong. On the other hand, legalizing gay marriage in a civil sense, to me, simply removes that element of formalized societal oppression. You're still free to disagree with what people do, and technically free to try and influence/deter/chance your kids all you want if they reveal to you that they're gay, but you're no longer free to oppress people you've never met.
This comment got super-long, but I just want to quickly address an obvious response to this, which is the other side of law creation, that it legitimizes an activity and makes it a somewhat formally accepted path in society. Anti-gay-marriage people obviously want to avoid this. But for me, again, I don't understand homosexuality, and neither do you. And I don't think that incidences of homosexuality in a population are tied to its legal status in the same way that say, abortions are, because they're clearly statistically not. As far as we know, right now, people are either gay or they're not, regardless of the legal or cultural climate. That is the experience of every gay person I've ever met, and I have to take them at their word. So if legitimacy doesn't deter the trait, why would we risk oppressing people just in case it might help the half-understood moral cause, which, again, we have no reason to believe that it would. That's what it comes down to for me, at the level of civil laws. For the same reasons, churches should be able to do whatever they want when it comes to their cultural sacraments.
Dylan,
While you choose to see the issue through the lens of cultural relativism- some of which I agree- the church, which is the Lord's kingdom on earth, has an obligation to reform individuals for the sake of salvation. Naturally, we have to take in account mankind's freedom- of which the Lord never violates. Herein lies our agreement.
Throughout Swedenborg's writings, he clearly details the 'Divine design' in God's creation, and the disorders that result from mankind's perversion of that design. Swedenborg states in "Conjugial Love" that the highest standard of love is the male-female relationship- on account of the exalted use of procreating a heaven from the human race. The greatest joys and blessednesses are bestowed on mankind by no other way than true marriage. It's also important for us to see it's opposites, which are greater, and lesser degrees of disorder that are spritually harmful. We are told that this harm to the soul can only be negated by sincere repentence and reformation. That's the duty of the Lord's church on earth! It must be able to judge evils for the sake of salvation.
Conjugial love is the standard we all must strive for regardless of our current spiritual states. There is no infirmity that the Lord's Divine Human cannot help us overcome.
Roger,
I've taken my time replying to your queries because I felt defensive and angry at the aggressive tone you assumed. If you're actually curious I'd be happy to share my opinions about the questions you asked me, but I'd appreciate being asked in a less confrontational manner.
For example, you said, "(1) Rites within the General Church and every other church in the land to solemnize buggery, as they do in the Swedenborgian Church of North America (Convention)?" Instead try ,"what's your opinion on gay marriage and what do you think the General Church's stance on it should be?"
Thanks,
Edmund
This is what Swedenborg has to say about same sex relations. It can be found in Conjugial Love, part 55, and is an accont of a memorable experience, in which angels are exploring the different kinds of relations, whether of man to man, woman to woman, and man to woman. Note that all three of these kinds of relations are lumped together here, and about an exploration of all of them, these exploratory angels say "we have not yet found any shared chaste sexual love, except among those endowed with constant potency by truly conjugial love, and these are in the highest heavens." A little further on, he writes as follows: "There is, they said, the love of two men for each other, and the love of two women for each other, and the love of a man for a woman and of a woman for a man. These three pairs of love are completely different. The love of two men is like the love of two intellects, for man was created and is by birth designed to become an intellect. The love of two women is like the love of two affections for man's intellect, for woman was created and is designed by birth to become the love of a man's intellect. These loves, those between two men or two women, do not sink far into the breast, but stay outside, making merely superficial contact and not leading to any inner union of the two."
The Bible should really be called the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, since the word 'covenant' infers the centrality of a conjunction. This is an incredibly complex word since there are clearly different degrees of conjunction. The highest union is that of Father and Son, and is called a union, whereas regeneration is a conjunction, not a union. Then there are also presences, which are not conjunctions but 'nearnesses'. Notice, therefore, that same sex relations are neither decried nor condemned but referred to as a conjunction of a certain kind of depth. Notice, therefore, how these angels find no real depth even among male and female relations. Yet the tone is never judgemental. The reason for this should be obvious. The pages of the Arcana are peppered with reference to why, and here is one typical example from AC4363:2:
People believe that goods and truths flow in immediately from heaven, and so without any intermediate agents in man; but in this they are much mistaken. The Lord leads everyone through the agency of his affections and in so doing bends him by means of a Providence working silently; for he leads people by means of their freedom. All freedom entails a person's affection or love. Consequently, every joining together of good and truth takes place in freedom and not in compulsion....
Should such passages as these not temper our own views?
Karl,
Swedenborg is not talking about sex between people of the same gender. His is talking about quality and depth of different types of man-woman, man-man and woman-woman relationships. For example, the Bible describes the non-sexual love between David and Jonathan or between Ruth and Naomi. The angels in the Arcana passage you mention are not exploring their sexuality, as you indicated.Frank, do you concur?
One of the sad outcomes of the prevalance of homosexuality is that deep friendships between people of the same gender are suspect and are difficult to cultivate or to express. That would require a return to a more innocent condition such as the one in heaven.
Roger
Karl,
I appreciate that you are offering specific references for us to consider, but, like Roger, in reading carefully through CL 55 I don't find any basis for making the assumption that the discussion of male-male and female-female love has anything to do with a sexualized love between the same sex. I have heard this argument before and frankly it strikes me as a very poor reading of the passage. However, I do think that this passage is relevant to the broad discussion, in teaching about the nature of men and women and also about the very confused and unchaste thinking most of us bring to the subject of marriage.
It is notable to me, that the majority of the spirits involved in the discussion in CL 55 could not conceive of a chaste love of the opposite sex that would allow a male to appreciate the beauty of a woman (not his wife) without thinking unchastely. This is a common heterosexual problem, but to my mind it is similar to the one that people dealing with same-sex attraction face. Can a man who experiences same-sex attraction conceive of a chaste (non sexual) relationship with the men he loves and admires in his life?
Brian
Karl,
Conjugial love 55 uses male-male friendships to clearly DISTINGUISH them!- from the "inmost" friendships contained in male-female conjugial love. Swedenborg clearly pronounced the male-male sexual act (SODOMY) as a "foul conjunction".
Swedenborg also recounts how the angels consider the abuse of man's seed- "heinous"- because, as he said, "A man's seed contains the rudiments of another human being". The word ABOMINATION is synonomous with HEINOUS, meaning- disgustful, loathing, and defilement.
In Conjugial Love 79 - Swedenborg quotes I Corinthians 6:9 in which Paul lists "abusers of man with mankind" as an evil.
He also references the Prohibitive laws in Leviticus,
thus making it clear that the "foul conjunction" you defend- is spiritually harmful.
The word PERVERSION clearly defines homosexuality- as it defiles the exalted use of the male-female relationship in procreating a heaven from the human race. The male and female sexual organs CORRESPOND to heaven- which is why "Man shall not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is ABOMINATION".
Frank and Roger, I do think you have to admit a very specific form of selective reading of the old testament to justify all this talk of abominations. Not only are the Leviticus passages referred to later rescinded by the Lord, but I doubt either of you would even pretend to give credence to the many other laws listed in those same sections, even though they carry the same dire warnings.
Leviticus 18:19 forbids a husband from having sex with his wife during her menstrual period. Leviticus 19:19 forbids mixed breeding of various kinds of cattle, sowing various kinds of seeds in your field or wearing "a garment made from two kinds of material mixed together." Leviticus 19:27 demands that "you shall not round off the side-growth of your heads, nor harm the edges of your beard." The next verse forbids "tattoo marks on yourself."
Likewise, sodomy is never specifically referred to as a sex act in the bible. It refers to people who lived in a city called Sodom, who were perverse people for many reasons, mostly to do with their interior affections towards evil. Homosexuality doesn't explicitly enter into it, not until modern readings of these passages.
The best we can honestly say about this issue is that it's shaky theological ground. And other passages referenced carry no explicit condemnation, but merely implied ones. It is true that marriage between a male and female is held in the highest regard in the writings. But neither Swedenborg nor Jesus ever specifically refer to homosexuality in any way. And why not? Why wouldn't the Lord be clearer about this? Why did the Lord create people with a tendency towards homosexuality in the first place? We don't know. We just don't. There are is no explicit language around homosexuality that doesn't also prohibit the mixing of different fabrics in garments.
When we don't know for sure, wher does the Lord encourage us to extrapolate, interpret and condemn? And how often does He encourage us to be humble, to extend the benefit of the doubt, to focus on making ourselves better before judging others? To love our neighbour as ourselves, and Him above all else. People wanting to declare, in public, that they love each other and want to pledge spending the rest of their lives loving and honouring that other person...how is this the thing people are most concerned about? Especially when there are so many more explicitly terrible, evil things happening in the world to focus on. Things that really are evil, that little children would recognize as terrible, a perspective that the Lord encourages us to aspire to in very explicit language.
"Leviticus 18:19 forbids a husband from having sex with his wife during her menstrual period."
I grew up in a Catholic family of Middle Eastern origin and I married into the same ethnicity. My wife never let me have sex with her during her periods, nor did I want to . Whether this is a law or not, it is good advice.
"Leviticus 19:19 forbids mixed breeding of various kinds of cattle, sowing various kinds of seeds in your field or wearing "a garment made from two kinds of material mixed together."
Specifics aside, doesn't this point to the dangers of playing with nature, such as in genetically modified foods, and in gene splicing? Also, this law points to the dangers of "category mixing" and of letting things be in their proper place. Of course, it can be misinterpreted and misused.
"Leviticus 19:27 demands that you shall not round off the side-growth of your heads, nor harm the edges of your beard."
This is prohibition against Canaanite mourning rituals. The Israelites were mosty Canaanites with an infusion of Aramean blood from the Egyptianized Semites who were the founding families. Moral: Do not mourn deaths in excess.
"The next verse forbids "tattoo marks on yourself."
Perfectly good advice. What can you do with tattoos except mar God's creation?
Torah laws are classified into: (1) Dietary and Hygienic laws, such as the ones you have been quoting, (2) Judicial laws, such as the death penalty for doing work on the Sabbath, (3) Laws for worship rituals and feast days. (4) Ethical laws.
(1) Dietary and Hygienic laws apply to Orthodox Jews but not to Christians, but we can study their deeper meaning.
(2) Judicial laws are passe.
(3) Laws for worship rituals and feast days apply to Orthodox Jews but not to Christians, but we can study their deeper meaning.
(4) Ethical laws, such as those in the 10 commandments and those against sodomy, incest and bestiality apply to all for all time.
Roger
Dylan,
It's true that we must love the neighbor as our selves- and the Lord's Church on earth is the neighbor we should love in a higher degree.
No one is judging others when we seperate- the sin of homosexuality- from individuals who are caught up in it.
You ask- "why did the Lord create people with homosexual tendencies"? My answer is- for the same reason he created people with tenedencies to theft, murder, adultery, lasciviouness, etc.,... so the "born this way" excuse can also apply to other biological (hereditary) tendencies.
Why was the Lord born with homosexual tendencies, as well as every other hereditary inclination? So he could overcome them for the sake of our eternal salvation!
The Church must teach us not to make excuses, but to shun evils as sins against the Lord. The three-fold Word clearly shows us what sins should be shunned.
While I do think homosexuality is innate, and wrong, I don't think it's worse than anything else. And I don't think people who engage in it in ways that are consistent with their best interpretation of CL are going to hell, etc. These points have been amply covered by others.
But what worries me is the rather fluid definitions of monogamy in the homosexual community, especially between gay men. Monogamy is a central tenet of CL, but several studies suggest that even in "committed" relationships, monogamy is not always defined as a sexual and deeply emotional connection with only one person for life.
I realize this ideal is not always achieved in heterosexual relationships either, but it is a generally accepted ideal, at least at the time of marriage. However, several surveys and studies have shown that this may not always been the accepted ideal in gay male relationships (it seems to be more so in female-female relationships). This isn't exactly surprising, since CL teaches that conjugial love comes from wife to husband, so in a male-male relationship, one might ask "Where is the love?"
Thoughts?
Dylan, I really appreciate what you wrote, and I'm hopeful that change is as inevitable as you think.
I want to suggest two ideas that shouldn't be absent from a conversation like this.
First, none of us has a perfect understanding of doctrine, and each of us could be wrong about our interpretation. There are many Swedenborgians who believe themselves to be in integrity with doctrine when they take a LGBT-allied stance.
Second, I really don't think that the Lord promotes a conditional love approach. "I love you, but...; I accept you, if..." Have you ever disagreed deeply with someone very close to you, and continued to love them with the same level of intensity, and the same respect? I haven't. There is always going to be a wedge between you. Some would say that the wedge is your disagreement, but I think it's the judgement. If you choose to loosen your hold on a minor and blurry religious principle, for the sake of love and breaking down the barriers between people, then I think that the Lord is going be cool with that.
Kristin,
1. I love your first idea that all of our understandings are limited and flawed. check.
2. I think it is true that there are people who identify both as Swedenborgian and LGBT allied.
3. I think there are many places in the Writings which affirm that God's love for us in unconditional, constant and fervent.
But I don't know why this must imply that judgment is a bad thing to be looked down on. There are many many things which separate us from a full experience of the Lord's love and regeneration is a process of identifying those things (with judgment) and rejecting them. "...God is not in space and is therefore omnipresent and that Divinity is everywhere the same, but that there is an apparent variation of divinity in angels and in us because of our differences in receptivity." (DLW 147).
It seems to me that all the distinctions between various heavens and between various hells and between heaven and hell are described as disagreements in loves and not as arbitrary judgments.
I observe that my generation loves acceptance and loves to focus on a type of humility about the limits of each of our perspectives... I applaud that. But I just don't understand the penchant for failing to make distinctions. Everything I observe in life is held together by distinctions.
I would agree that there is no reason to condemn the practice of homosexuality if you don't see that taught in the Word. And there is never any excuse to treat people who are practicing homosexuality badly, cruelly or with contempt. But if you are someone who sees the Word to teach that homosexuality is wrong, then it does create a barrier or wedge or distinction between you and people who live that life style. That is how life works. I don't like ping-pong, and you love to play it 7 hrs every day of the week. Guess what, we won't have a lot of time to spend together.
I reject the idea that being against the practice of homosexuality necessarily has anything to do with a lack of love. And also the idea that being for the practice of homosexuality necessarily is an expression of love.
God is always "cool" with us, because He loves us completely. The question is the degree to which we accept his love. It seems to me that it is a greater acceptance of his love when we try to live and think according to our best sense of what is right (conscience) whether that be pro or against the practice of homosexuality.
And personally, I think it is a conscience more in line with the teachings of the Word, to be against the practice of homosexuality... but that is my conscience.
Brian
Brian, your retorts are deserved and appreciated :-)
I was using judgment to mean the effort to regenerate someone else, not ourselves. For me, it comes to this:
If I took any approach other than, "Your journey is your own; it's between you and God," I don't think I could be genuinely loving toward my neighbor. My tendencies to control, and to favor my own understanding over others, would always get in the way.
So, even if I did believe that Scripture prohibits homosexuality (and as I've said, I find it a grey area), I would still conclude that loving my neighbor is more important than upholding a distinction about the rightness or wrongness of someone's love and happiness.
Kristin,
(I hope you are ok with me going back and forth with you on this). I could frame your second paragraph, I love it. I think people of our generation are champions of this key set of ideas which you express. I think it needs to be expressed just fully as you have said it, such that "My tendencies to control... would ALWAYS get in the way."
This is very cool to me. Without knowing this, deeply, and regularly being reminded of it, we do more harm than good. Or the good we do is coincidental to our efforts. Its the Lord's mercy ALONE that keeps any of us out of hell (AC 868), so presuming to do His work, or presuming that we have taken care of our own salvation by our brilliant efforts are both toxic ideas.
All that said, I feel (with tremendous fervor) the necessity to oppose the idea that love is in contradiction to distinction.
I should remaining quiet, when I have a self-righteous, self-assure, arrogantly held opinion about how another is living or thinking is to my credit. But when asked for my thinking on a subject, it is LOVING to offer it (with as much humility as I can). There are all sorts of harmful things in our world and there are appropriate settings and methods for offering them. I think that the classic example in addiction of enabling vs loving, applies across the board. There is no reason to expect that "loving" looks soft, pleasant, agreeable, or affirmative of all actions and thinking of another. What I would look for from all love is that it all be affirmative of the person, and not have any traces of assumed superiority or desire/attempt to control.
I'm guess we agree on most of that, and our difference then lies in the fact that we feel different degrees of confidence in each of our current understandings of the teachings of religion on the subject of the practice of homosexuality.
Brian
Brian, you said: "when asked for my thinking on a subject, it is LOVING to offer it (with as much humility as I can)". I think this awesome, and you're right.
I once met with a young woman who was curious about New Way Church, and had a million questions about our religion. She asked me how the New Church is about homosexuality. It made me squirm a little. But I told her that I believe in gendered souls, and eternal marriage between a spiritually-male and a spiritually-female. As to our approach to homosexuality on earth, all I can say is that it's confusing, but that love is Swedenborg's number one rule, and that I'm not prepared to judge anyone or try to change them. I blushed a bit, lest even this be viewed as homophobic. But she told me it wasn't, and that she liked the way I put it. Much later, incidentally, I found out that she's a lesbian. I was happy to have passed the pop quiz, so to speak.
So if I'm very, very honest (here in front of all these people on the internet), I do think that doctrine seems to value heterosexual marriage above same-sex. But, I'm not willing to bring that distinction into my life and the way I treat people, because I think it jeopardizes my ability to be humble and loving. I'd miss the forest for the trees. Just because something isn't the highest ideal, who's to say that it isn't beautiful and full of God's presence?
Dylan,
Thanks for writing this article. It is all very well, and perhaps useful, to divide into our teams of "pro-gay" and "anti-gay" and bat (or, perhaps throttle) the ball of argument back and forth. What I have difficulty with is the whole post-game party: What the heck am I suppose to do about it all?
I don't believe that homosexuality is the correct way to conduct our natural lives on earth. However, I believe in a hierarchy of Love and Wisdom. "Love Wins," as Rob Bell would say, but as argued in previous comments, that Love should be tempered by Wisdom. Maybe I'm misquoting Swedenborg, and please forgive me if I do, but I recall that Wisdom (or truth, if you will) also has a hierarchy. If "lower" truths are put above "higher" truths, we create disorder.
I believe the truth that "homosexuality is disorderly" is lower than the truth "love and serve the neighbor." I'm not saying this to excuse homosexuality. I don't think people should give up and say "but everybody else thinks it is right" instead of following what they believe to be the correct moral code. But I do want to advocate this perspective:
a) Everyone has issues, both natural and spiritual, that they need to deal with.
b) Viewing people as their sexual acts alone is not loving the neighbor. Neither is viewing thieves as just stealing machines. Or murderers as killing machines. Or whatever people decide to do that is against the Lord's order as "that person who does [blank]."
c) Every single person on earth to be viewed as creations of God, and to be given the same respect I hope they will offer me.
At the end of the day, when the "pro-gay" and "anti-gay" match is over, and whether or not my stance has shifted, I choose to love and serve the neighbor.
Thanks again,
Molly