Recently, I’ve explored the issues of homosexuality. I reviewed The Complete Christian Guide to Understanding Homosexuality edited by Joe Dallas and Nancy Heche (Harvest House) and Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill (Zondervan). Both books demonstrate concern and awareness of the plight of people struggling with same-sex attractions yet still aiming to be committed to the Christian call for sexual chastity.

Yes, I do believe Christianity calls us to live a life devoted to holiness and that does mean no sex outside of heterosexual marriage. We are to live in light of God’s created intent for this world: one man, one woman together in mutual love and submission for life, as husband and wife. But this is a fallen world and we all battle sinful urges which compel us to violate God’s standards for a holy life. Innately, and biologically even, we are driven toward pride, dishonesty, sinful strife, jealousy, and yes we are drawn to fantasize sinfully over objectified people of either gender. Some struggle one way, others another, but just because we were born as sinners and have a bent toward sinning, doesn’t mean we are not called to “abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.”

I wanted to point out a significant book review which brought up something I hadn’t truly considered before when it comes to this controversial topic. Dr. Peter Jones of Westminster Seminary, California, reviews a new book by Jenell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are (IVP, 2011). His review is worth the long read as it covers where we are in evangelical Christianity today on this issue. One of the points in his review is “the worldview implications of sexuality”. Without further ado, I want to excerpt a good portion from his review here for your benefit. Please do read the whole review, however.

Such thinking not only ignores biblical morals but also denies biblical cosmology. Homosexuality and other forms of sexual blending have deep religious significance within pagan cults. Paris mentions the berdache, the he/she that appears in over one hundred tribes as a “two-spirit” man or woman who functions in the opposite gender, but she claims we know little about them, except that they perform spiritual rituals (67). She also mentions ethnic groups in Siberia, Borneo and the Philippines that “grant religious roles for those of ambiguous sexual biology or those of same sex attraction” (67-8). Never once does she inquire as to what those religious roles might be, nor the spirituality there practiced.

The End of Sexuality fails to recognize that homosexuals have functioned consistently, from the mists of time and all over the globe, as occultic shamans in all kinds of pagan religions. Mircea Eliade, a world-renowned authority on world religions, and one of the architects of the new spirituality, demonstrates that through time and space a commonplace figure in the pagan cultus is an emasculated priest. This common religious universal, or archetype, is identified with a particular kind of spirituality. We see the myth of a bisexual or androgynous god in ancient Mesopotamian and Indo-European nature religions, as well as in the myths of Australian Aborigines, African tribes, South American Indians and Pacific islanders, all still surviving today. In all these religions, observes Eliade, “ritual androgynisation” is a “symbolic restoration of Chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.” Homosexual androgyny, the joining of male and female in the same person, functions in these countless traditional religions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum…symboliz[ing]…perfection…[and] ultimate being.”

Homosexuality is not limited here to morals or the lack thereof. It is employed as the attempt to define the very nature of the cosmos as inherently divine. It is for this reason that the Old Testament denounces homosexuality in such strong terms, since it is a sign of pagan religion. Paris’s dismissal of Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality as “the five or six passages” fails to see the injunctions as part of a major polemic against anti-creational paganism. The context of the much-cited prohibition against homosexuality states, “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan” (Lev 18:3; see Lev 20:23). Leviticus presents sexual activity between two men as an example of the pagan religion of the Canaanites, which the people of Yahweh should avoid. In other words, it is the religion (implicit in the act, in its rejection of God the Creator), more than the morals, which is in view.

Certainly, not all homosexuals see these religious connotations, nor have they come to homosexuality for religious reasons. Nevertheless many contemporary homosexuals see this deep connection. It is what J. Michael Clark, professor at Emory University and Georgian State University, and a gay spokesman, understood about the berdache. Clark, once a Christian, could not find an adequate place for his sexuality in biblical faith, and turned to Native American animism for an acceptable spiritual model. He found in the berdache, this androgynous American Indian shaman, born as a male but choosing to live as a female, “a desirable gay spiritual model,” because the berdache achieves “the reunion of the cosmic, sexual and moral polarities,” that is, the classic pagan “joining of the opposites.” …

Other notable contemporary homosexuals understand their sexuality in occultic religious terms. Professor Emily Culpepper, an Ex-Southern Baptist and now a lesbian pagan witch, sees gays and lesbians, in her words, as “shamans for a future age.” She reserves a spiritual role for homosexuals, for a shaman is “…a charged, potent, awe-inspiring, and even fear-inspiring person who takes true risks by crossing over into other worlds.”

A contemporary gay theorist, Toby Johnson, inspired by the modern-day popularizer of pagan mythology, Joseph Campbell, believes that present-day gay consciousness represents a new religious paradigm, for:

• it undermines the authority and legitimacy of the institutions of traditional religion;
• it helps to see the world with a harmonious, non-dualistic vision;
• in its ecstatic pangs of longing inspired by same-sex beauty, it experiences reverberations and recollections of humanity’s common mystical oneness with Gaia; and
• it helps humanity to get over dualistic, polarized (male-dominant) thinking, and thus save the world in awareness of common planetary identity.

With the place of homosexuality firmly established as an essential component of cultic and religious nature worship, it was inevitable that a Jungian, June Singer, would give the ultimate expression of the deeply religious importance of homosexuality. She said already in 1977, “the archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to …the primordial cosmic unity, that is, it is the sacrament of monism, functioning to erase distinction…[this understanding of sexuality was] nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition…and a patriarchal God-image.”

Clearly, Singer’s non-binary definition of sex does not fit “a Christian understanding” of creation (34). How powerfully, in its pagan self-understanding, it opposes what Paris also opposes, a “rigid sexual dimorphism” (32). Paris says that “viewing sex on a spectrum…male and female…positioned on the same line, not in two separate categories…makes a credible space for intersex people,” but, alas, such a view also makes an enormous space for occultic spirituality–once the connection of sex with spirituality is made (33).

The theological implications of this opposition to sexual binary categories are enormous. Such naiveté plays into the hands of the non-binary, or non-dual spirituality, which, in its Hindu form, is taking over much of the Western mind and soul. Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West, calls this a spiritual “revival,” based on the Hindu term Advaita, meaning “not two.” The spiritual synthesis, to which progressives believe we are advancing, will be “non-dual,” non-binary. Goldberg declares that Advaita and “non-dual…oneness, unity around non-separation” are “the generic term[s] increasingly used to describe the present and coming spirituality in America””meaning that God and the world are not two.”

I apologize for the lengthy quote, but I wanted Dr. Jones’ case to be established here. This spiritual aspect of homosexuality needs to be understood as evangelicals grapple with the increasing prominence of this issue today. The “otherness” of the Bible’s teaching on this issue should make sense given this wholistic viewpoint. It really is a different spirit and a different religious perspective that fights against the Created order presented in Scripture.

For more on this check out my review of Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill particularly. There I explain how I see Christianity impacting those who have homosexual tendencies.

[HT: Sharper Iron Filings]