Chapter 9 - Dispirited
by Christohper Seitz (2001)
Scripture as Rule of Faith and Recent Misuse of the
Council of Jerusalem: Text, Spirit, and Word to Culture
The decision reached by the council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 is a witness, within New Testament scripture, of how "the faith once delivered" was creatively guiding and constraining the early Christian community on a matter of great concern. For this reason, it has been taken as paradigmatic for the church's confrontation with another matter of great concern. I agree, and seek to show how this is so.
INTRODUCTION
In the same-sex blessing debate, two opposing positions have emerged. One is that the Bible condemns same-sex behaviors; the other is that it does not, because what we have today is not a behavior, but a state of nature, called in John Spong's koinonia statement a "morally neutral" state of nature. In the first position, it is granted that a specific sort of behavior is condemned by scripture, but this behavior entails a form of power abuse. Such behavior is distinguishable from a theoretically virtuous, monogamous (sic), blessable relationship, which contains the same physical acts but with appropriate "spiritual"-indeed, Christian-intentions of love. In the second case, appeal is made to a morally neutral condition, one that has no actual known appearance in late antiquity and is certainly absent within the cultures of a yet earlier period. As Foucault has pointed out, the nominal form "homosexual," as distinct from the behaviors associated with it, is a modern distinctive, emerging in nineteenth-century English jurisprudence.
In both cases, then, a behavior or a state is said to exist today that was not foreseen by scripture. Fresh moral judgment within the Christian church is therefore called for, and, if it is possible, this would ideally include appeal to a scripture that knows nothing of it.
In one popular recent treatment, Our Selves, Our Souls, and Bodies, this new frame of reference is presupposed.' Not content with saying we lack warrants from scripture or tradition for how to adjudicate same-sex behaviors, several contributors to the volume speak of "the Spirit's" endorsement of same-sex blessings. Appeals to tradition to defend homosexual conduct need not detain us here, as the burden of proof is enormous and requires convoluted-indeed, perverse-assessments of male relationships within the Trinity: an ironic late-modern deployment of gender marking, requiring literalism and radicalism in equal measure, both foreign to the Patristic and medieval worlds of Christian reflection on the Trinity.2
Scripture, by contrast, is said to provide analogies and exegetical resources for our late-modern confrontation with this cultural novum. The Spirit's illumination, active within the NT period, remains active now. Hence the three integers in the subtitle of this chapter: text, spirit, word to culture. Not content to argue from general moral theory, civil rights, or scientific evidence pro or con regarding predispositions (increasingly unreliable in moral argument), specifically Christian writers claim specifically Christian theological warrant and scriptural resources for a positive, spiritual evaluation of same-sex behavior or states of nature. One can see here a hope that such warrant might trump the ongoing scientific debate about genes, states, nature-nurture, and the moral ambiguities that result from conclusions given on these matters.
A thesis of this chapter is that a single source can be found for these late-modern arguments; that is, a popular, quasi-scholarly reading of Acts I $ has served wittingly or unwittingly to generate a whole school of thought in favor of a "Spirit endorsement" of same-sex behaviors. We could inquire here whether such a use of Acts 15 was inevitable, given the pressure to produce a "Christian" and "biblical" and "Spirit" endorsement for same-sex blessing. Stated counterfactually, if no scriptural warrant were needed to adjudicate the moral character of same-sex life, if one could have been content to appeal to a new word for a new day, unprecedented because of the unprecedented character of a new behavior in late-modern culture, then no analogy from scripture would have been required or sought. Rather, a real vision from God or the appearance in dramatic manifestation of glossolalia among same-sex practioners would have sufficed.
That is, not an analogy alone but a direct counterpart itself to Peter's vision or a similar form of Azuzu Street/Toronto/Brownsville spirit outpouring would have been in evidence across all general (Christian) expressions of same-sex life and behavior. Distinctions would then have emerged among those who engage in same-sex life and eroticism, in direct propportion to that which distinguished those gentile Christians upon whom the Spirit came down before and after baptism in the name of Jesus and those Gentiles who mocked Paul at Athens. To the best of my knowledge, no such manifestation has occurred. "Gay Pentecostals" evangelizing the bath-house-we would surely have seen the headlines by now. Same-sex practioners in late modernity have never argued for a spirit demarcation characteristic of late antiquity, as the gospel of Jesus Christ cut a massive swath through the Mediterranean basin and beyond, dividing what had been a gentile world into Christian and non-Christian, Jewish Christian and Jewish.
But the purpose of this chapter is to take the culture, scripture, spirit argument seriously long enough to show it to be false and misleading: a distortion in the spiritualistic, virtually New Age conclusions it reaches for Christians. The source of the argument for Acts 15 as foundational for decision making in the church is a book of the same title by LukeJohnson.3 Marilyn Adams is representative of a recent wave of same-sex blessings and approval when she says,
Happily but not surprisingly, the New Testament offers us a model for negotiating institutional crises in the power of the Spirit. In this paper I take my cue from Acts 10-15,the story of how the church dealt with the shocking surprise of Gentile conversions in her earliest years. (129)
Adams goes on to speak of the "taboo" of Jewish belief, which is challenged in Acts by "experience" (130), with the result of an "institution" learning "from the Spirit" and changing its "policies," because the "Spirit's taboo-toppling was the key to the spread of the gospel."4
To summarize, then, one could well inquire about visions or tongues in late-modern same-sex advocacy on the basis of Acts 1-15: visions from enlightened proponents, tongues, or other obvious "Spirit manifestation" among those engaging in the behavior. Failing this, we must ask how far the analogy can be stretched that credits to spirit and scripture the selfsame character and authority within the earliest Jewish Christian and gentile Church, attested in Acts, and in late-modern Western culture. Parenthetically, scripture is no anachronism within the narrative structure of Luke-Acts; indeed, by this is meant the scriptures of Israel, en route to the status "Old Testament," from which the New Testament finds its proper declension, these two testaments together constituting Christian scripture. Israel's scriptures, we shall see, are decisive for determining God's word regarding the life of his Son among those manifesting his spirit, inside and outside the household of Israel. Our conclusion will be that scripture offers a word to the church on same-sex behavior, in late antiquity and late modernity, whatever differences between these two contexts may be alleged, and that Acts 15 offers a fine example of how God's word to Israel and in Jesus his Son provided guidance and indeed divine judgment on the gentile mission and can today offer both on same-sex life and practice.
MAIN ARGUMENT
Two challenges must be met in this presentation. First, the argumentation of Luke Johnson must be set forth in as fair and economical a fashion as possible. Because his view is now fairly representative, he can be used only as a "for instance," and attention to his position is not intended as an attack on him alone. My own view is that the pressure to produce such a reading as he has produced is enormous, and so it would have emerged in due course anyway.
The second challenge is to tackle a bundle of interrelated topics in summary fashion, given the constraints of time. A full treatment cannot be attempted here.
The relevant topics are five:
The Holy Spirit in Luke-Acts
The structure of Acts, namely, is the counsel at Jersualem a pivotal episode, or does the dramatic movement of Acts suggest a different emphasis?
Gentile conversion: what does that mean?
The four prohibitions in Acts 15: where do they come from?
Biblicism and theological reading of Christian scripture (the Western text)
LUKE JOHNSON'S TREATMENT
In his book The Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck contrasts modes of religious discoursed One he terms "experiential-expressive," by which is meant that the words of scripture describe or thematize a prior religious feeling, truth, or disposition; scripture contains the accidents of a deeper and more universal substance. Modern post-Kantian appeal to religious experience is perhaps best exemplified by Schleiermacher and his disciples.
Luke Johnson operates fully in the experiential-expressive mode. He dedicates his 1983 Decision Making in the Church to "the students at Yale Divinity School who taught me"-a dedication later explained as entailing the reading of these students' "by no means self-indulgent spiritual journals" (96), including those in which "committed, sincere and intelligent believers have discovered that their lifelong struggle against a homosexual orientation has been in effect a rejection of the way God has created them" (96). He then says, in 1983, that we need "a narrative of experience" (97). He says not all religious experiences are "encounters with the true God" (99). "We can, as individuals, mistake the movements of the Spirit" (99). Therefore, the way we know the Spirit to be at work is by its fruits. These fruits are described in the NT, and they include rejection of works of the flesh, above porneia, but we are not to suppose that these fruits are wrong because scripture says so but only because the church knows this as truer than "unreflected Scripture citations," which presumably state only by accident a truth that is truer because it is experientially substantive in the life of Christian faith, and only secondarily so in scriptural attestation.
Perhaps the best illustration of Johnson's experiential-expressive insistence is found in his curious reading of Acts 15:16-18. James says that the manifestation of the Holy Spirit agrees with the prophets' words, found in Israel's scriptures (cited is a LXX rendering of Amos 9:6-18, whose Hebrew rendering was likely known by the Jerusalem church).6 Johnson's take on this is: "He (James) does not say, 'This agrees with the prophets,' but, 'the prophets agree with this. '"Johnson here exemplifies-on the basis of a heretofore unrecognized syntax marker-the experiential-expressive instinct in its representative arc: scripture is not consulted for divine guidance but for correlation with what has bubbled up in the realm of experience in the community, in this instance, "agreeing with the prophets."
In the face of this, let us turn to the topics listed previously. Nothing I shall say here has not been covered in previous scholarship, though the times call out for a reconsideration of what has been said in the light of late-modern culture's challenges.
THE HOLY SPIRIT IN LUKE-ACTS
Johnson, Marilyn Adams, and others speak of a fresh word from the Spirit on the matter of same-sex life and practice, on the basis of Acts 15.
How does Luke-Acts describe the work of the Holy Spirit?
The Holy Spirit inspired the visions of pious Israelites, like Zechariah (1:67), to speak of Christ before the incarnation.
The Holy Spirit overshadows Mary, and Jesus is so conceived.
The Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in bodily form at his baptism by John.
The Holy Spirit works to embolden and comfort Jesus prior to his crucifixion and resurrection.
In Luke, the Holy Spirit is at work within the old Israel and within Jesus.
At the conclusion of Luke, the Holy Spirit is promised by Jesus for his disciples (24:49), though Jesus speaks only of "what my Father has promised" and of being "clothed with power from on high." The gap separating Luke's final statement and the manifestation of the Spirit in Acts is filled by a Johannine stipulation and clarification. What is promised from the Father is the Advocate (chapter 14), the Holy Spirit sent by the Father.
This Spirit comes on the conditions of obedience to God's commandments (14:15) and adds nothing to what original witnesses have heard from and beheld in the Son. The Advocate is recapitulator, teacher of judgment (16:8) and sin and righteousness (16:9-11). He is the Spirit of truth, according to John. He teaches nothing new and, because he is one with the Father and the Son, is about a revelation properly understood as confirmation of the apostolic testimony, beyond that immediate circle, in boldness and in truth. In Acts, this intervening depletion from John is confirmed. The Holy Spirit is boldness and power, is an endowment preceded by repentance and judgment, and is a recapitulation for those who witnessed the resurrection and a fresh attestation for those, such as Stephen, who know of Christ by means of the father's direct gift of the Spirit.
THE STRUCTURE OF LUKE-ACTS
According to Luke Johnson, Acts 15 is the key dramatic episode in the theological movement of Acts. For his argument to work best, a dramatic decision in the church regarding an unprecedented event would provide a useful analogy for the church's present confrontation with gay life.
Two forces are operative throughout these first fifteen chapters: the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the use of scripture to defend, support, and interpret what is happening by his dramatic hand. Cited are Ps. 69:25; 109:8; Joel 2:28-32; Ps. 16:8-11; 132:11; 16:10; 118:22; 2:1-2; Amos 5:25-27; Isa.66:1-2; 53:7-8; Ps. 89:20; I Sam. 13:14; Ps. 2:7; Isa. 55:3; Ps. 16:10; Isa. 49:6; and, in chapter 15, Amos 9:11-12. The density, range, and length of citations mark these chapters as concerned with scriptural accordance, and virtually no episode in the life of the church prior to Acts 15 goes without according comment and scriptural refraction.
Not suprisingly, Acts 15, too, is about adjudicating a matter confronting the church on the basis of scripture. But Johnson's pivotal episode notion requires Acts 15 to be the beginning of a new day: from here on out, gentile converts are not required to become Jews in order to become Christians. An unprecedented occurrence-Gentiles accepting an unprecedented LORD and Messiah without becoming Jews-is taken to be analogous to the church's confrontation with a new behavior today, even one reckoned to be religiously virtuous. Lying behind the pivotal decision is, however, a long process:
The decision is not made all at once. It is not made by the entire church from the beginning. It is not made on the basis of a priori principles and practices. Even the Scripture and the words of Jesus are reread. . . . The experience of diverse people and the narrative of those experiences . . .provide the primary theological data.7
The pivotal character of Acts 15 is its bringing to a head all the prior experiences with their raw value as primary theological data. No wonder, then, that Amos 9 is said to agree with these experiences. Once experience is granted priority, it is only a vestigial notion of scriptural authority to say that the scriptures are in any way determinative in the "decision-making process." Ironically, it is an odd sort of literalism cum proof text mentality that would suggest the church was searching around in its scriptural legacy to see if it could find something to agree with what was going on. The density, scope, and range of citations suggest otherwise. As in I Corinthians IS, the scriptures are God's word to Israel, which, in the light of the eschatological event of the resurrection of Israel's Messiah, are used to direct the church's new life and mission-and that includes a life and mission beyond carnal Israel and Torah observance of old. Here the narrative flow of Acts 1-15 is fully consistent with and, indeed, illustrative of Luke 24:27, "Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, [Jesus] interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures." Where Jesus leaves off, the Holy Spirit takes over in Acts. This finds expression in the narrative citation of Israel's scriptures to interpret the Holy Spirit's bold work in the church post-Pentecost, with a new territorial horizon.
In order to properly assess how and if Acts 15 is pivotal, we must now turn to our third topic.
GENTILE CONVERSION
What exactly does this phrase mean? Not content with the radical notion that the nations can become Christians through the work of the Holy Spirit independent of circumcision, Johnson goes yet further: "[Peter] says that Jewish believers will be saved by the grace of the Lord ]esus, just as the Gentiles (15:11). The implication of this reversal is that Peter has come to learn from his experience of God's work among the Gentiles the basis for his own salvation. . . . Can it be that Peter and the Jewish Christians needed the conversion of Cornelius more than Cornelius did!"8
Johnson obviously means here to be rhetorically provocative, and allowance should be made for that and for the truth about the gospel's power his statement captures. Granting that, one still sees clearly that Peter's Christian life and authority as apostle turn in some measure on his capacity to properly interpret the raw theological data of experience: in this case, urging his decision to set aside food laws, whose necessary adherence is a derivative of circumcision and proselytization for Gentiles, in order to have fellowship within the household of Israel. His vision and its wondrous conjunction with a delegation from Cornelius, narrated with superb (one is tempted to say, scriptural-namely, Old Testament-narrative) power, conspire in the providence of God to place Peter in the midst of a gentile assembly, in the house of Cornelius, where, preaching the word of God concerning Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit comes down upon his uncircumcised listeners. His Jewish Christian associates ("circumcised believers") are astounded that tongues are manifested among those uncircumcised, but their acknowledged, selfsame reception of the Holy Spirit levels the playing field. Water is brought, and they are baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. In the narrative flow of Acts 1-15, what does it mean exactly to call Cornelius "the first Gentile convert"? To answer this question is to revisit Johnson's notion of Acts 15 as pivotal. Of course, the so-called gentile mission does not begin after Acts 15, nor does it even begin with Cornelius. Because of the persecution in Jerusalem and because of the geographical implications of the gospel and the Pentecost event, an expansion into the table of nations (Genesis 10) occurs almost instantaneously. Stated differently, the movement of the nations to Jerusalem at Pentecost is the inverse of the gospel's movement into the nations shortly thereafter. The prophecy of Joel used to interpret the Pentecost event had, however, spoken of "all flesh" as the target of the Holy Spirit's claim (Acts 2:17-21). "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved"-so Israel's scriptures insist.
After the stoning of Stephen, the expansion begins. Philip goes to Samaria (8:5). The word is received. Peter and John are dispatched, they pray that the Holy Spirit might come upon those baptized, they lay hands on them, and the Spirit comes down. They preach throughout Samaria.
An Ethiopian eunuch is baptized by Philip on the wilderness road to Gaza. In one fell swoop, Isaiah 56 is filled to overflowing as a foreigner and eunuch, who has become joined to Israel, is brought by baptism into the fellowship of Jesus' death and new life. That he is reading Isaiah and returning from worship in Jerusalem suggests he is no ordinary gentilic pagan. To ask if he is circumcised might be the question the narrative means to beg.
After the conversion of Saul, our narrator informs us that "the church throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and was built up" (9:31).
Joppa, Lydda, Caesarea, and Antioch, and synagogue preaching, become the rule and not the excepdon. Peter finds accommodation in the region where he raised Tabitha, with a tanner. Here he has his vision. A tanner works with hides and so is by definition a threat to Jewish food restrictions. The narrator does not explain or interpret this. Before his vision, we are only told that Peter "became hungry and wanted something to eat" (10:10). "While it was being prepared," the narrator states, "he fell into a trance." Food taken to be unclean, Peter is commanded to kill and eat. Meanwhile, Cornelius is praying to God, holy angels are visiting him, and he is a God-fearer and alrnsgiver, respected by "the whole Jewish nation." Different from the Ethiopian but like him in his devotion to the one God of Israel, it cannot be supposed that Cornelius is a typical Gentile in the sense that you and I once were, before we became Christians.
Peter is forced to defend his actions in not requiring circumcision of the baptized in Acts 11. It has been argued in another place that "circumcised believers" need not only refer to Jewish Christians. It must suffice here to merely lodge the suggestion that circumcision, required of full proselytes to Judaism, may have been required of, or thought suitable for, non-Jews baptized into the name of Jesus and receiving the Holy Spirit. We have no good way to determine if all "circumcised believers" were therefore of the household of Israel. What Acts 11 does report is that such believers accepted Peter's explanation and indeed praised God (11:18). The circumcised believers conclude, in a phrase unhelpful for Johnson's experiential logic, "Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life" (v 18).
There is one further thing to note in this important chapter. Peter has a vision. He uses it to defend his actions at Caesarea, in the house of Cornelius where the Holy Spirit came down as he preached. The vision explains his decision to associate with these Gentiles, but without the delegation and the angelic word to a devout God-fearer, Cornelius, Peter would not have had complete and specific marching orders.
But note what he says to the "circumcised believers" about the moment he decided to baptize those who received the Holy Spirit. "I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, 'John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit'" (Acts 10:16). He then reasons, "If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?"
It is the thesis of this chapter that here the narrator gives intentional expression to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as it is found in John 16:13-15: "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears. . . . All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that [the Spirit of truth] will take what is mine and declare it to you. " Acts 11:16 provides attestation that the Holy Spirit, fully at work in Peter, has brought to mind what was the Lord's own word (Acts 1:5), which was itself verified by the Father as the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism (Luke 3:22). We need look no further for a doctrine of the Holy Spirit than here. One might well ask if a vision without this accompanying word of the Lord, without scriptural attestation from the prophets ("All the prophets testify about him," Acts 10:43), and without a providential conjunction in the person of Cornelius, "well spoken of by the whole Jewish nation," could be a misleading and demonic vision, given by a spirit hostile to the Spirit of truth. The conjunction of scripture, remembered word of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is essential if experiential data are to mean anything. Acts knows full well of false and misleading spirits and deceitful appeals to experience or prophetic endowment (Acts 5:1-6; 8:9-24; 12:20-23: 13:4-12).
To summarize: No, Cornelius is not the first Gentile to be converted. The terms used are oversimplified and potentially misleading. They are representative of a form of Christian theological amnesia regarding the various ways in which synagogue and, indeed, temple worship had included the non-Jew, both in late antiquity as a reality and in the scriptures of Israel as a divine word to Israel regarding the nations. They are typical because the problems confronting Christianity changed once Judaism was birthed as an ongoing, differentiated, scripturally derived phenomenon, an extension of but also a new form of the various Judaisms existing at the time of Jesus of Nazareth and the church of Acts 1-15.
It would therefore be a form of biblicism to adopt the plain sense of Acts as immediately probative for the Christianity that emerged over time, as its Jewish roots, in messiah, scriptural word, worship, and table fellowship took distinctive form, in the vis-a-vis brought about by God's eschatological act in Jesus.
The charge of biblicism is oblique in the case of Johnson's process reading, because he is a complex combination of literalistic reader deriving loose analogies above and apart from the letter. We will investigate in our final section how another form of biblicism might emerge, with a different conclusion than Johnson's about the force of Acts 15 for Christian decision making, but one also theologically and hermeneutically unsatisfactory.
THE FOUR PROHIBITIONS OF ACTS 15:
WHERE DO THEY COME FROM?
Right away, let me signal my indebtedness to Richard Bauckham and commend his painstaking analysis of this topic in "James and the Gentiles (Acts 15:13-21)."9 Read him as a correction on my own summary here and, for the purposes of this chapter, as a supplement with close exegetical concerns. In this chapter, I want to push beyond these to attend to theology and hermeneutics as well, which will be the subject of my final section of this chapter.
By now, it should be clear that the so-called Council of Jerusalem does not invent without prior missionary realities a doctrine regarding gentile Christians. Various non-Jewish Christian communities are thriving, under the threefold pressure of scripture, preached and remembered word concerning Jesus, and the bold manifestation of the Holy Spirit. What happens is that a certain segment of Jewish Christianity objects to the willingness to dispense with circumcision for those who are Christians; indeed, final salvation is held to be connected with this key initiatory rite (15:1). It could be that the objection has to do not with failure to become Jewish in some full sense (there is no mention of food laws, e.g.) but failure to observe the restrictions set forth in God's covenant with Noah and all flesh, long before Sinai. (Galatians, as is well known, goes a different way; here we are interested in the narrative logic of Acts itself, in which Peter is credited with the first Gentile mission [Acts 15:7, compare 8:14; 10:34ff.]).
Peter, Barnabas, and Paul all rehearse before the assembly what had been true for some time: the Holy Spirit's cleansing the hearts (15:9) of non-Jewish Christians, neither preceded by nor followed up with circumcision, in the manner of God's covenant with Noah. This is important because it is commonly held that the rabbis regarded Noahic restrictions to be applied to the righteous among the nations; they might apply here as well-quite apart from the question of 'becoming Jewish."
Bauckham has shown that lying behind what looks like an ad hoc appeal to scripture (of the sort Johnson literalistically assumes) in Acts 15:16-18, there is a legacy of exegetical practice that explains why here, among all other possible texts-one thinks immediately of Isaiah-Amos 9:11-12 was selected for divine guidance. "The dwelling of David" had become a phrase pointing to the church and its apostolic pillars. "The Gentiles over whom my name is called," based on a sophisticated scriptural (OT) intertextuality, has become a direct reference to Christian baptism, apart from any previous rites of proselytization-including those from the scriptures of Genesis dealing with the nations. An eschatological promise, for a time beyond the days of Noah, has now come to pass. And yet this promise claims great antiquity, "Thus says the LORD, who has been making these things known from long ago" (Acts 15:17-18).
In so doing, however, Moses is not set aside. Far from it. "For in every city," James concludes, "for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him, for he has been read aloud every sabbath in the synagogues"-not just to Jews, but to proselytes. This concluding remark is meant to ground the prior four prohibitions, against porneia, meat undrained of blood, idolatry, and blood itself (an obvious Noahic detail), laid upon Christians uncircumcised in the flesh. That these are not Noahic restrictions has been pointed out; their location, in the order given and in specificity, is Leviticus 17-18, part of the "Moses proclaimed in every city." The prohibitions apply not to the sojourner as a general category (as Bauckham shows) but to the sojourner in the midst of Israel.
At this point, we should note in passing that Johnson, for all his utilization of the letter of Acts 15 on which to ground his process hermeneutic, passes up the chance to have one of these restrictions-unrelated to dietary matters- continuing in its binding character, thereby deploying a common Christian distinction between moral and ritual law as this would emerge in time, under the influence of a two-testament presentation. The one obvious perduring category, "sexual immorality" (porneia), cannot be expected to comprehend something like "homosexual orientation" in late modernity, though exactly why, except by virtue of process logic with massive philosophical ramifications, is unclear. Exactly at the moment when a process was at work of discerning how Moses might apply to Gentiles in Christ, Johnson excludes the discernment where it most obviously applies.
Johnson concludes that the dietary restrictions were, in essence, functionally derived by James, so that Christians and Jews could have table fellowship (including the Lord's Supper). The role of Leviticus 17-18 and the laws for the sojourner, noted by many commentators, is not even mentioned by Johnson in his treatment.
BIBLICISM AND THEOLOGICAL
READING OF CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE
In the Western text of Acts, we see already a change in the four prohibitions. The situation of James, the Lord's brother, and those for whom Israel's scriptures were sola scriptura, will in time come to an end. A New Testament will emerge and stand alongside the Old, deriving its genre as scripture and its authority as written word from the Old Testament and the claims of 2 Timothy 3:15. "All scripture" will come in time, naturally enough, to mean both New and Old Testament, while for James and his fellow apostolic leaders, there is one Spirit, one Lord, one baptism, and one scripture, whose word, in Christ, commands gentile Christians not to be circumcised but to be as the sojourner in Israel's midst-a grand image. In Christ Jesus, by claim of the Holy Spirit, Gentiles once without God in the world are brought into fellowship with the people of his promise, as God's blessing promised in Abraham's seed is fulfilled in his Son. Being in Israel's midst means hearing God's word to Israel, under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Cornelius threw himself at Peter's feet, and so, too, the early church threw itself before God's word, having, like Cornelius, been brought near in Christ.
The late-modern, virtually all-gentile Christian church does not stand beside James and Cornelius. Here Luke Johnson is right, but not by the logic of his process-experience model. If we are looking for a dynamic by which to comprehend the movement out of the providential moment of that first generation, we have one tailor-made in the way the four prohibitions changed under the pressure of tragic separation from the emerging Judaism.
Murder, idolatry, porneia, and doing to neighbor as self become the prohibitions or rule of Christian life, as one scripture gives way to two testaments, and new theological forces emerge from new exegetical parameters. There is no process by which, given these new parameters, we can draw a line from prohibitions against porneia to blessing same-sex relationships, any more than the Christian community has the freedom to endorse idolatry or murder. That has been the consistent teaching of the church, East and West, because it is the word of the Lord, the word of scripture, and the word of the Holy Spirit, one with the Father and the Son.
When the Jewish-Christian matrix is replaced Judaism is birthed alongside a unique Christian development: retention of the scriptures of Israel as God's word to Gentiles in Christ and the formation of what would come to be called the New Testament. The relationship between these two is not developmental, in some simple chronological sense, but involves the subject matter: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Lord of Israel and the heavens and the earth. James and the early Christian community knew that in Christ we were seeing the first-fruits of a final consummation. Far from driving it away from the scriptures of Israel, Jesus provided the clue to their interpretation and gave simple access to those once far off. Israel was something of a loner in antiquity on the matter oiporneia, and her failures in this regard-in religious expression no less than in carnal expression-testily to the holiness of God, not of his people. The early church never regarded this as an "example of pre-modern ignorance" but, in Christ, as a glimpse at life eternal, a mirror of the fidelity and holy obedience among of the persons of the Trinity themselves.
It is time to shift the discussion away from scripture's plain word to pastoral care. In that sense, appeal to experience is right: as indicating where God's Holy Spirit and Word are to judge, heal, inspire, and renew, for those of us brought near by his sacrifice for our sakes.
