In her recent CNN Belief Blog post “The Bible’s surprisingly mixed messages on sexuality,” Jennifer Wright Knust claims that Christians can’t appeal to the Bible to justify opposition to homosexual practice because the Bible provides no clear witness on the subject and is too flawed to serve as a moral guide.
As a scholar who has written books and articles on the Bible and homosexual practice, I can say that the reality is the opposite of her claim. It’s shocking that in her editorial and even her book, “Unprotected Texts,” Knust ignores a mountain of evidence against her positions.
It raises a serious question: does the Left read significant works that disagree with pro-gay interpretations of Scripture and choose to simply ignore them?
Ms. Kunst and her allies do not read, not do they want to read, scholarly works that disagree with their “interpretations” of Scripture. In this they follow the trail-blazing path of one once-called “the greatest theologian of the Episcopal Church”, the former bishop of Newark, one John Spong, who developed the fine art of referencing all sorts of dramatic assertions about human sexuality, Christ, the Church, and heaven knows what else with footnotes that were either irrelevant or worse, citations of his own works. Thus he could assert with absolute seriousness that because earthworms were found to be “bisexual”, all human beings were born bisexual. People still tell me that they think he is a brilliant thinker. I tell them to check his footnotes.
So-called scholars who believe and teach that you can uncover Truth by just studying the naked written word divorced from Tradition frequently come to idiotic conclusions. That is because, without Tradition, a “scholar” can use language like the Cheshire Cat used it in Alice In Wonderland. Make it mean anything he wants it to mean.
Professor Gagnon has put an appendix containing additional material related to the Knust article on his website [url=http://www.robgagnon.net/ArticlesOnline.htm]here[/url].
From the article I mentioned in number 3 above:
[blockquote] The editors of the Belief Blog limited my word count to roughly the size of Knust’s editorial. This limitation was excruciating given the number of dumb arguments that Knust made and the array of counterarguments at my disposal for answering each of these. So I limited myself there to treating her two key contentions, her androgyne argument and her slavery analogy, and put here my response to the rest of her claims.
I’m sure Prof. Knust is a nice person in other contexts but it is inexcusable to be so uninformed (and even condescendingly abrasive) about a subject on which she claims to be an expert.[/blockquote]
There is no affirmation of SSB/SSM/SS-anything in the Bible. There is however plenty of condemnation for that type of behavior to be found.
I will be interested to see what (if anything) Jennifer Knust offers as a rebuttal to this. While I don’t quite agree with everything Gagnon asserts in his lengthy rebuttal, he completely and systematically annihilates Knust’s argument. I almost felt sorry for her in a way, as it was like watching Muhammed Ali in his prime whoop up on inferior opponents.
Given the case that her arguments are so much nonsense, why are they so successful? Or is it simply that the Left really only listens to itself on the grounds that it alone has a handle on the truth. It appears that they actually believe that an Agenda and the Truth are the same thing. Or is it that a great many people have reached her conclusions separately merely by sampling their own wishes and have laid them on the gospel in the belief that their wishes are so powerful that they MUST wrest the gospel into congruence. That is, has narcissism become an argument from authority? Larry
Itching ears….
Thanks to all concerned for the accurate Gagnon smackdown!!
Knust’s originating opinion piece (masquerading as substantive argument) is, to me, an example of the immense cost of the Internet. More than ever, there now exists a platform for people to disseminate false information in “print,” with little or no accountability to fact in a welter of polarized, politicized “news” web sites. The accumulation of assaults on the boundary between truth and opinion is to make real scholarship seem hopelessly fussy and “un-inclusive” (good as Gagnon’s work is). While I certainly use the Internet, I continue to grow in my sense that it will ultimately be the main tool by which wisdom is repressed through information.
I was gratified to see him use the many substantive arguments sounding in true anthropology rather than the more localized moral proof-texts used by the inexperienced. The latter arguments are completely unpersuasive to antinomialists who, as Knust demonstrates, invariably use them to construct and destroy strawmen.
Ah, #10, you have hit the bullseye on a matter of the utmost importance. A nice entry and insightful. Would that the rest of the internet world paid attention top the wretched adage that if enough people tell a lie often enough, it will come to be believed. Larry