Breaking the Silence on Sexuality within the Orthodox Church

Some Comments on the Hopko Article

Below are a few comments on Fr Hopko’s article on homosexuality that was recently posted here. My comments are in boldface—if you can’t see the bold, go back and click on the document title itself, which should give you a version in which the bold shows up—it really can’t be read without the bold showing. This goes with apologies to Fr Hopko for the fact that these comments are on an article that’s now twenty years old, in case any of his views in it that I comment on have since been revised. Though I believe the criticisms remain apt because the article is still used as a reference by those who aim to shut down the gay dialogue.


Many gay men and lesbians claim that the Christian faith is the guiding rule of their lives. Some of them hold that their sexual orientation is given by God, that it is good, and that there is nothing wrong or sinful with their homosexual activities. These persons say that the Bible and Church Tradition do not condemn homosexual behaviour, but have been misinterpreted and misused, sometimes unknowingly and other times quite willfully, by prejudiced and hostile people who hate homosexuals. Those who believe in this way obviously want others to agree with them, and many are now working hard to have their views accepted, particularly by fellow Christians and Church leaders.

Father Hopko paints a simplistic picture of how a gay Christian might perceive him or herself and that I suspect reflects the view or experience of very few gay Orthodox Christians—it has little to do to with mine—and uses the false picture to create a convenient target. The implication is that any gay person who “claims” to be working out his salvation before God and with his brothers and sisters has somehow just chucked all the Church’s perceived teaching in the interest of getting laid, and who then goes through convoluted patterns of perverted reasoning to justify his behavior. There are people like that, but in my experience, they’re few and far between. Gay people who place a central value on sex usually just end up leaving Church rather than suffering being treated as evil or pathetic. Those of us who stay consider it worthwhile to endure the calumny, and we are mostly mid-process in understanding our sexuality and how it might fit, looking to the Bible, fathers, and so forth, and weighing it against our own experience. That doesn’t match his model.

Other homosexual Christians hold that their sexual orientation is not from God – except providentially, since the Lord’s plan inevitably involves human freedom and sin but derives from human fault. While some of these people are not willing or able to identify the specific reasons for their sexual feelings, though still affirming that they are not good and are not to be indulged; others with the help of what they believe to be sound biblical interpretation and accurate psychological analysis, identify the source of their sexual orientation in faults and failures in their family experiences, particularly in early childhood, and perhaps even before that, which contribute to their sexual makeup. These people hold that they are called by God to struggle against their homosexual tendencies as all people are called to struggle against the sinful passions which they find within themselves, while they work to heal the causes of their disorientation and disease. Those who hold this position look to their fellow Christians, especially their Church leaders, for support and assistance in their spiritual struggle.

I have to have great respect for those who for love of God by ascesis choose the celibate life for whatever reason. But I would really like to meet one of the people who have chosen celibacy in response to the church’s teaching that sexual activity is impossible for them. I suspect such people to be rare, and such a life to be exceedingly difficult (though I truly would like to meet one and hear about his or her experiences). I sense no support for such a life in parishes I’ve been in, unless that support comes secretly from the priest. It’s a place of extreme isolation. I’ve often heard it said that gays should be monastic, but then, monasticism hardly exists in our country, and it seems to me a wise person would do well to avoid a lot of the problem-riddled communities that do exist. The life you’re asserting the homosexual should lead is one of a difficulty so extreme that it would take a person of great strength to embrace it. Few people are so strong. They’d have to remain in church and bear all the horrible things that are said to them “in love” about their being depraved and prone to sin of the most abhorrent kind. Fr Hopko writes as though there is a community of support for such people from their communities and their church leaders. THERE IS NONE.

The Orthodox Position

Given the traditional Orthodox understanding of the Old and New Testament scriptures as expressed in the Church’s liturgical worship, sacramental rites, canonical regulations and lives and teachings of the saints, it is clear that the Orthodox Church identifies solidly with those Christians, homosexual and heterosexual, who consider homosexual orientation as a disorder and disease, and who therefore consider homosexual actions as sinful and destructive.

According to Orthodox Christian witness over the centuries, Biblical passages such as the following do not permit any other interpretation but that which is obvious:

If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination . . . (Leviticus 20:13)

For this reason (i.e. their refusal to acknowledge, thank and glorify God) God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameful acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error. (Romans 1:26-27)

Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral (or fornicators), nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals (or sodomites; literally those who have coitus, or who sleep, with men), nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-11)

Discussion of the above verses has happened so much elsewhere, that I won’t get into it here. (Maybe someone can supply links, particularly to John Boswell’s analysis of the term malakoi) But Fr Hopko surely knows that using “proof texts” per the Evangelical model isn’t the way we read scripture, and that using the Bible that way leaves one open to criticism re all the Bible’s admonitions that we now ignore or consider inapplicable to us for whatever reasons. Same thing is true of the canons. His point–well taken–is that in our Church homosexual activity has always been viewed as in every case sinful, but I find using the Bible to “prove” that to be fairly weak, as I do trying to scrounge around for proof texts that would “prove” homosexuality to be acceptable. His point is that the Church has never accepted the validity of homosexual relationships, and he’s right about that. The point is that we’re now challenging that view, based on our own experiences, as well as new kinds of knowledge gained from the modern discipline of psychology and so forth. If the Church’s teaching as he’s presenting it is true, it will stand up to that challenge, and those who’d run away from that challenge (or, I’d say, who try to belittle us who make the challenge by casting us as demonic or pathetic) do disservice to the Tradition and demonstrate their own lack of faith in it.

Unwilled Sins

According to the Orthodox Church not all sins are willful and voluntary, and not all acts of sin are the conscious fault of those who do them; at least not at first. In a word, sin is not always something for which the sinner himself or herself is necessarily culpable in a complete and conscious way. There are sins of ignorance and passion, sins which “work in our members,” as St. Paul says, even against our rational and conscious wills. (See Romans 6-8) These are the sins referred to in the Church’s prayers when the faithful beg God for forgiveness and pardon of sins which are not only conscious, but unconscious; not only voluntary, but involuntary.

There are sins which are involuntary, unwilled, unchosen; sins which overcome people and force them by irrational impulses and compulsions, by weaknesses of the flesh, emotional drives and misguided desires into actions which they themselves do not want, and often despise and abhor – even when they are engaging in them. These are known traditionally as the sins of passion. The fact that these sins are not freely chosen do not make them any less sinful. To sin means to miss the mark, to be off the track, to deviate, to defile, to transgress . . . whether or not the act is consciously willed and purposefully enacted; and whether or not the offender personally is freely and fully at fault.

I see repentance to be what the Christian life is all about, the constant turning back to God and my fellow person, becoming conscious of the ways I turn away from God and brother, and being grateful for being made able to see that, for it is indeed a gift of grace. My life in Christ can be characterized as a very slow process of repentance, of coming around to see things clearly in various ways, as God breaks through my own ignorance and willfulness. There are certainly voluntary and involuntary sins, and there’s no essential difference in that, whatever they are, they move me in a direction other than God’s and my fellow human being’s. But repentance can only be honest, and one has to be careful about acknowledging sins someone else tells you you’re doing if you’re not conscious of them yourself.

Language such as “the offender” being “freely and fully at fault” has no place in any theology of repentance I can accept, and I reject Fr Hopko’s use of such language to describe the eternal process of returning to God. I am being as honest as I can be before God at this point in saying that I can’t take my sexuality to be inherently sinful (not to say there can’t be horribly sinful expressions of it), nor can I take the relationship I have with my partner to be inherently sinful based on my experience of it, and my experience of it has to be held against any of Fr Hopko’s talk of deviation or defilement.

Redeemed Sinners

According to Orthodox Church Tradition, Christians are redeemed sinners. They are human beings who have been saved from sickness and sin, delivered from the devil and death by God’s grace through faith in Jesus by the Holy Spirit’s power: “and such were some of you.” (1 Cor. 6:10) They are baptized into Christ and sealed with the Spirit in order to live God’s life in the Church. They witness to their faith by regular participation in liturgical worship and eucharistic communion, accompanied by continual confession, repentance and the steadfast struggle against every form of sin, voluntary and involuntary, which attempts to destroy their lives in this world and in the age to come.

The homosexual Christian is called to a particularly rigorous battle. His or her struggle is an especially ferocious one. It is not made any easier by the mindless, truly demonic hatred of those who despise and ridicule those who carry this painful and burdensome cross; nor by the mindless, equally demonic affirmation of homosexual activity by its misguided advocates and enablers.

Why is the “demonic hatred” of those who despite and ridicule those of us who “carry this cross” most often given a pass (when we “misguided advocates and enablers” aren’t)? I make Fr Trenham want to vomit. I’ve heard no Orthodox churchman dispute his or any of the other perversions of Christian love that get spouted toward homosexuals, which makes Fr Hopko’s words ring empty. I challenge him to read the discussion on this Facebook page. I doubt it would change his mind much, but I believe it would cause him to reconsider calling us mindless and demonic. We’re at least not mindless.

 

Like all temptations, passions and sins, including those deeply, and oftentimes seemingly indelibly embedded in our nature by our sorrowful inheritance, homosexual orientation can be cured and homosexual actions can cease.

To Fr Hopko or anyone claiming that the homosexual orientation is “curable,” I say: introduce me to one person to whom this has happened. The idea that you’ve heard about it happening, or that “reparative therapy” programs claim some sort of success rate doesn’t matter to me. Introduce me to a real person whose sexual orientation was toward members of his or her own sex and whose sexual desires are now toward the opposite sex. I will believe that such a person exists when I meet him or her. I’ve not seen a “cure” program that was anything but duplicitious. They basically train the gay person in ascesis of battling against homosexual desires and not acting on them. Another of their tactics is to simply assert that, because homosexuality is a disorder, everyone is heterosexual anyway, so turning someone straight is as simple as empowering to say they’re straight. Presto! But they change no one, and their claim that they do is a lie. This is an area where I suspect Fr Hopko’s view may have changed somewhat, since so many others in our church have now come to understand that sexual orientation is immutable.

With God all things are possible. When homosexual Christians are willing to struggle, and when they receive patient, compassionate and authentically loving assistance from their families and friends – each of whom is struggling with his or her own temptations and sins; for no one is without this struggle in one form or another, and no one is without sin but God – the Lord guarantees victory in ways known to Himself. The victory, however, belongs only to the courageous souls who acknowledge their condition, face their resentments, express their angers, confess their sins, forgive their offenders (who always include their parents and members of their households), and reach out for help with the genuine desire to be healed. Jesus himself promises that the saintly heroes who “persevere to the end” along this “hard way which leads to life” will surely “be saved.” (Matt. 7:13; 24:13)

” . . . the Lord guarantees victory in ways known to Himself”

We’re in complete agreement about the above paragraph, other than in our serious disagreement in identifying where the sin is to be found. The result of this disagreement may be that gay people are excluded from the Church and her sacraments, since I sense little openness to discussion, but we’ll see…

I’m grateful to Fr Hopko for his willingness to engage this difficult subject, and to do so for many years. My hope and prayer is that we are all let to the Truth together. May those of us who are wrong have that revealed to us, and may we be granted the joy of repentance. And may those who are correct rejoice along with the repentant, since there’s no essential difference between any of us, really.

Now on to the bibliography:

Bibliography on Sexuality

Recommended: Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic. (Ignorethe Amazon reviews. They are not accurate.)

The principal ideas of the author of this work, Elizabeth Moberly, were once the “party line” of Fr Hopko and others, but I now understand her idea that homosexuality can be “cured” if the homosexual develops friendships with persons of the same sex has been rejected by the St Vladimir’s crowd, and I wonder if Fr Hopko has dissociated himself from her as well. It does seem that the party line understanding has changed to accept the fact that homosexuality is an immutable characteristic. It’s said that Dr Al Rossi, at a conference in the last few years was practically begging pastors and counselors to understand that homosexuality can’t be changed and not to try to make gay people straight. Not sure if Fr Thomas or the editor of this article is the one saying the Amazon reviews are “inaccurate.” If they’re critical of the misinformation Dr Moberly presents as fact, that can’t be called inaccurate.

Barnhouse, Ruth Tiffany, Homosexuality: A Symbolic Confusion. The Seabury Press, New York, 1977.

Dr Barnhouse, like Dr Moberly above, and Leanne Payne below, has failed to produce a single success story of someone whose sexuality has been changed (the latter two have presented some anonymous supposedly true stories with no real person to back them up. Moberly has presented absolutely nothing). Incredibly, all three women were taken as authorities on the matter seemingly because they’d published books on it. None of them had a single success story to present.

Clark, Stephen B. Men and Women in Christ, An Examination of theRoles of Men and Women in Light of Scripture and the Social Sciences, Servant Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1980, 753 pp.

Gelpi, Donald J., S.J., THE DIVINE MOTHER, A TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, University Press of America, New York, 1984, 245 pp.

Groeschel, Benedict J. OFM Cap., The Courage to be Chaste, Paulist Press, New York/Mahwah, 1985, 114 pp.

Johnson, Robert A, He, Understanding Masculine Psychology, Religious Publishing Company, 1974. Harper& Row, New York, 1977,89 pp.

Johnson, Robert A., She, Understanding Feminine Psychology, Religious Publishing Company, 1976. Harper& Row, New York, 1977, 77 pp.

How Robert Johnson’s understanding of masculine and feminine archetypes according to the ideas of C. G. Jung relates to homosexuality is a real head-scratcher. Unless Fr Hopko believes that if gay people understood the deep symbolism of male and female that would cure us. I happen to have read Jung and his colleagues pretty extensively. It didn’t work.

Moberly, Elizabeth R., Psychogenesis, The Early Development ofGenger Identity, Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, London, Boston Melbourne and Henley, 1983, 111 pp.

Oddie, William, What Will Happen to God? Feminism and the Reconstruction ofChristian Belief, SPCK, London, 1984, 159 pp.

Payne, Leanne, Crisis In Masculinity, Crossway Books, Westchester, Illinois, 1985, 143 pp.

The Broken Image, Restoring Personal Wholeness Through HealingPrayer, Crossway . . . 1981, 187 pp.

The Healing of the Homosexual, Crossway. . . 1985, 48 pp.

Quay, Paul J., S.J., Ph.D., The Christian Meaning of HumanSexuality, A Credo House Book, Evanston, Illinois, 1985, 113 pp.

Stern, Karl, The Flight From Woman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1965.

Trible, Phyllis, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1978, 206 pp.

Vanier, Jean, Man and Woman He Made Them, Foreword by Henri J. Nouwen, Paulist Press, Mahwah/New York, 1985, 177 pp.

Vanier’s view of male and female seem to be presented here, along with Robert Johnson, as a way of asserting the goodness of man and woman, masculine and feminine, I suspect as a way of accusing gays of rejecting those principles. Our sexual orientation has nothing to do with denying male and female or the goodness of that created dichotomy. Interesting to note that the author of the foreword, Henri Nouwen of blessed memory, was an openly gay man, celibate in faithfulness to his calling as a Catholic priest, but who affirmed the same-sex relationships of his many gay friends and spiritual children.

 

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