CLGS

"Since the 1970s, the meaning of sex has changed radically; unfortunately, our churches have not come to grips with that fact." -Dale Martin

BERKELEY, CA. The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry began its annual John E. Boswell lecture series with typical daring yesterday, with a program on gay sex. Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University titled his lecture, "A Gay, Male, Christian, Sexual Ethic." More than 150 people attended the standing room only event held in Pacific School of Religion.s Badé Museum.

Martin, whose expertise is in New Testament and Christian origins, including attention to social and cultural history of the Greco-Roman world, began by outlining the historical impossibility of finding a coherent sexual ethic in Biblical and early Christian texts. He cited the patriarchal family code of the Hebrew Bible, which stressed families made up of male heads of household and their wives, concubines, and slaves, and New Testament and early Christian texts, which stressed asceticism and celibacy as conducive and even necessary to salvation, as among the mutually contradictory ethics found in Scripture and Christian tradition.

"Ancient sexuality was designed solely to protect the interest of the male head of the household," Martin said.

According to Martin, it was only with the rise of Puritan, humanist, and Reformation movements in the 17th Century that heterosexual monogamous marriage that Christians began to see marriage as equal in purity and holiness to celibacy. Concluding his historical survey, Martin suggested that the rise of feminism, which overturned centuries of sexual hierarchy based on gender, and the invention of reliable and available birth control, which disassociated sex with procreation, changed the meaning of sex in the same radical way as these previous historical movements. He compared the current era of social fluctuation of sexual norms to the early Christian era, when churches across the ancient world had to create a new sexual ethic based on the Gospel in the context of Roman and Jewish traditions.

"The ethics of sex depends on the meaning of sex," Martin said. "Since the 1970s, the meaning of sex has changed radically. Unfortunately, our churches have not come to grips with that fact."

Using this historical context as a backdrop, Martin suggested a paradigm for sexual ethics based on analogy, "abandoning a 'The Bible Says' approach." Taking the Christian imperative of love of neighbor and self as the primary ethical framework, Martin suggested Christians look at sex as analogous to other human activities, like friendship, eating, and play. Just as the amount of intimacy in a friendship, the amount of food one eats, or the rules of playing fair may change from situation to situation, Martin suggested the ethics of sex must also be situationally adjusted. Central to this idea is the understanding that sex may mean different things for different people, whether people consider themselves heterosexual, bisexual, gay, lesbian, male, female, or transgender. "Sex is good and ethical when appropriate to the relationship," Martin said.

The John E. Boswell lectureship was named in honor of the Yale historian and watershed figure in the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Christian church history. Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1993) argued with exhaustive historical evidence that the early Christian and medieval church was significantly more accepting of gay people than in modern times. He was the first major scholar to take on the prevailing assumption that the entire 2,000 year history of Christianity was uniformly negative toward same-sex relationships. The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry initiated the Boswell Lectures to encourage contemporary scholars in the mold of Boswell to continue groundbreaking study that advances the understanding of religion, sexuality and gender.