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History, Homosexuality and God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
An adapted version of a paper given in Oxford at the 1986 conference of Friend. Friend is a national organisation dedicated to the counselling and befriending of homosexuals.
Historians are accustomed to listening to the debates of theologians, but the theologians they listen to are usually those of the past; and they do not normally join such debates. I do not propose to alter that. But one of the workmanlike tasks of historians (as it is of philosophers) is sometimes to put aside their own books and see to the task of making tools others use in their work, and if they are to be taken seriously in a wider college of learning they need sometimes to fulfil this obligation. Sometimes they need to pay the rent.
In a small way that is what I would like to do in this paper, and the audience I have primarily in mind is composed of those moral theologians and practical pastors who are troubled by the tension that exists between homosexuals and the Christian Church. Inevitably, though, what I have to say is not equally relevant to all Christian churches. I have less to say to those who are ready to construct their moral theology afresh, from the beginning. For good or bad they are free of the past. But for many Christians, in varying degrees, this is not a possible option, and it is fundamentally not a possible option for Catholics, for whom an appeal to scripture and tradition—a willingness to listen to the past—is unavoidable.
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- Copyright © 1986 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Perkins, William, The Workes of … Mr W. Perkins, Vol. 3 (Cambridge 1609) p. 532Google Scholar. All the quotations in this paper have been modernised according to the rules in H.R.E. (see note 13 below) p. 115.
2 Pagitt, Ephraim, Heresiography, London 1647, p. 139Google Scholar. I have discussed the connection between popery and attitudes to sodomy at greater length in H.R.E. pp. 13–32.
3 Quoted in Bingham, Caroline, ‘Seventeenth‐Century Attitudes Towards Deviant Sex’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 1 No. 3, p. 456Google Scholar.
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11 Boon, L.J., ‘Those Damned Sodomites: Public Images of Sodomy in the 18th Century Netherlands’, Among Man, Among Women: Sociological and Historical Recognition of Homosocial Arrangements, Supplement No. 1 pp. 19–22, University of Amsterdam 1983Google Scholar.
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13 This is brought out most clearly in the writings of Michel Foucault and Jeffrey Weeks. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, London 1979Google Scholar; the second volume of his History of Sexuality has been translated into English as The Use of Pleasure. Harmondsworth 1986, and is particularly relevant to the moral questions indirectly addressed in this article. Jeffrey Weeks's Sexuality, Chichester 1986, is an excellent introduction to his writings. A seminal work on homosexuality was Mary Mclntosh‘s 'The Homosexual Role’, reprinted in The Making of The Modern Homosexual, ed. Plummer, Kenneth, London 1981, pp. 30–49Google Scholar; my own Homosexuality in Renaissance England, London 1982Google Scholar, abbreviated above as H.R.E., shares the approach of these writers. Not all historians have accepted the culturally relative view of sexuality presented in this article, especially in the U.S.A. Its most intelligent (and readable) critic is John Boswell, whose Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Chicago 1980Google Scholar, is written from the standpoint of the sociobiology of E.O. Wilson.