Critical statements about the evaluation of homosexuality in the Bible have earned the Jesuit priest Ansgar Wucherpfennig the criticism of the Vatican. But what biblical passages are we talking about specifically? An analysis by theologian Thomas Soding.
Interviewer: What can be found in the Bible about homosexuality at all??
Professor Thomas Soding (Theologian at the Ruhr University Bochum): Very little. The little that is found in the Bible about homosexuality – more in the Old Testament than in the New – is also very concise and brief. It's quite controversial, it's disparaging, it's a far cry from the culture of debate we hope to have in the twenty-first century.
Interviewer: Is there a difference between the Old and the New Testament concerning the evaluation of homosexuality??
Soding: The New Testament is there 100 percent dependent on the Old Testament. In the Old Testament there are negative evaluations of homosexuality. In the New Testament, the subject is not discussed at all. This is a bit surprising, because the New Testament breaks into the world of the Greeks and the Romans. And one knows from ancient cultural history that there homosexuality – incidentally also pederasty etc. – have been evaluated differently, namely more openly, than in the Jewish context. But the apostle Paul, who, so to speak, made the sharpest and actually the only statements in the New Testament, has a very strong all-biblical, Old Testament background.
Interviewer: In an interview two years ago, Father Wucherpfennig said that misleadingly worded passages in the Bible were the reason for the Catholic Church's negative attitude toward homosexuals. As an example, he cited the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans. What does Paul write?
Soding: Paul has a certain theme that he wants to clarify: where the orientation to God has slipped, human relations are also reversed. There the insight of what is good and bad, right and wrong is reversed. Paul makes this clear in various key words, which are listed in so-called vice catalogs. These are ancient stereotypes that are passed on. And one of many is then just what – at least according to prevailing opinion – is mostly associated with homosexuality. It is essential to relate this to the cultural and social conditions of this time. This has nothing to do with a Christopher Street Day atmosphere of today. But in many cases these were also violent relationships, because slaves were sexually exploited – slave women, too, by the way.
There is not actually a confrontation with this ie, as we would expect today under psychological conditions, but it is, so to speak, the transmission of a certain stereotype. And the problem is, if from such ancient self-evident facts now all at once highly normative statements are made in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Then something happens that is problematic and that threatens to fall behind the differentiation in the current debate, which, thank God, has also become established in the Catholic Magisterium in recent years and decades. The Catholic Magisterium is not as undifferentiated as it often portrays itself, for example now in the scandalization of the positions of Ansgar Wucherpfennig.
Interviewer: How must we today basically evaluate biblical statements that come across as somewhat unwieldy to the way of life of today?
Soding: First: Don't just read the Bible. The Bible itself always says that you can open your eyes to the signs of the times. The Bible must be viewed in a differentiated way. It would be the last thing in the world if we as Catholic theologians were to argue biblically all of a sudden.
Admittedly, under the historical conditions of its time, the Bible also draws attention to something that I now have the impression is perhaps in danger of slipping away somewhat. namely that there are indeed different forms of human sexuality, which then have to do with the culture of life in different ways.
I say: "Marriage for all" would have been very difficult for Paul to imagine. But the apostle Paul – this intellectual type – would have been the last to avoid a discourse with psychology and sociology about the development of human sexuality. We are allowed to go far beyond the Bible itself. I would expect the same from the Catholic Church. That is long overdue.
Interviewer: What do you think will happen in this special case?
Soding: I hope that the logic of reason will be relied upon. Ansgar Wucherpfennig is simply not an outsider or a radical insider. But he is a highly recognized colleague who deals with this topic in a very differentiated way. And he represents 90 percent of the opinion of the Catholic New Testament scholars.
This is one of the typical examples where theological research enters into a relationship of tension with a prevailing doctrine. I very much hope that it will now be seen that even the Magisterium has something to learn – not least after the document of the International Theological Commission on the role of theology in the doctrinal structure of the Catholic Church. That is what I am counting on. This must be so.
And I also think and hope that in the long run we can come up with a constructive solution. We cannot, on the one hand, talk in the present situation about the need to rethink the subject of sexuality openly in the Catholic Church, and then the first thing that goes through the press is the refusal of nihil obstat for Ansgar Wucherpfennig.
The interview was conducted by Dagmar Peters.