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Scripts We Live By: on Inheriting Canonical Texts

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Scripts We Live By: on Inheriting Canonical Texts Theology & Sexuality ISSN: 1355-8358 (Print) 1745-5170 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yths20 Scripts we live by: on inheriting canonical texts Charlotte Dalwood To cite this article: Charlotte Dalwood (2019) Scripts we live by: on inheriting canonical texts, Theology & Sexuality, 25:3, 165-187, DOI: 10.1080/13558358.2019.1658430 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13558358.2019.1658430 Published online: 27 Aug 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 45 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yths20 THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 2019, VOL. 25, NO. 3, 165–187 https://doi.org/10.1080/13558358.2019.1658430 Scripts we live by: on inheriting canonical texts Charlotte Dalwood Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS In this article, I theorize the interpretation of harmful canonical texts Evangelicalism; inheritance; with special reference to John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian the Institutes of the Christian Religion. As a result of the actions and rhetoric of some of its Religion; reparative reading; North American evangelical readers, the Institutes has come to canon; queer theory function as an intellectual foundation for certain expressions of modern homophobia. In conversation with Jacques Derrida on inheritance and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on reparativity, I thus consider how queer evangelicals (especially those who wish to continue identifying themselves as such) ought to engage both Calvin’s text, particularly, as well as, more generally, those other canonical texts that are sources of trauma. In so doing, I proffer a capacious view of interpretation as not only what one says but also how one lives. On 29 August 2017, a coalition of evangelical Christians affiliated with the “Council for Bib- lical Manhood and Womanhood” (CBMW) published the “Nashville Statement,” aseriesof fourteen affirmations and denials proffered “in the hope of serving Christ’s church and wit- nessing publicly to the good purposes of God for human sexuality revealed in Christian Scripture.”1 Sex is to be restricted to monogamous, heterosexual marriages, the Statement declared, for it is “sin” that “distorts sexual desires by directing them away from the marriage covenant and toward sexual immorality.”2 Although they censured heterosexual immorality as well, the Statement’s authors reserved the lion’s share of their condemnations for homo- sexual and transgender persons who refuse to adopt gender essentialist self-conceptions and submit to a life of voluntary chastity (or enforced heterosexuality). Article 10, which anath- ematizes Christian LGBTQ persons and their allies, is illustrative in this respect: WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness. WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.3 Unsurprisingly, the Statement’s release ignited a firestorm of controversy, with editorial- ists and Christian activists denouncing it in counter-polemics that variously compared the Statement to past Christian efforts to provide theological justifications for anti-Semitism, apartheid, and slavery.4 CONTACT Charlotte Dalwood [email protected] Yale Divinity School, 410-350 Canner St, New Haven, CT 06511, USA © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 166 C. DALWOOD The urgent tone of these responses attests the particular damage that the document’s homophobic rhetoric inflicted on those who found themselves objects of the censures therein yet nevertheless wished to continue identifying as evangelicals. And, to be sure, I am personally sympathetic to the project of expunging the Nashville Statement from Christian theological discourse by refuting the propositions therein. That concession aside, however, I hesitate to commend (or pursue) that undertaking without first consid- ering the questions of theological method that the aforesaid counter-polemics raise. Those questions include the two that motivate the present essay, namely, must queer evangelicals expurgate harmful, even violent, texts like the Nashville Statement in their entirety? And, if so, what are they then to do with that other literature on which those texts are based? Since attending to the latter query allows us to see the dangers of too-readily answering the former question in the affirmative, it is instructive to begin with a treatment of this second problem. In so doing, the Bible is, to my mind, the principal text that must needs be considered, not least because a quotation from Ps 100:3 frames the Nashville Statement and a litany of Scripture citations were included in a post-publication draft of the document. Indeed, it is striking that, while the Nashville Statement was presented as an articulation of fundamental scriptural teachings, one would be hard-pressed to find an evangelical critic who holds that, in order to defeat the Statement, Christian commu- nities must jettison the Bible itself. More typical is the strategy adopted by the framers of the “Christians United Statement” (issued a day after the publication of the Nashville Statement), who portrayed their acceptance of LGBTQ persons as a recovery of, rather than a departure from, key teachings in Scripture and the Christian tradition.5 As a cano- nical text par excellence, the Bible’s centrality within the evangelical imaginary undoubt- edly accounts for this reticence to throw it away tout court. But might other texts be suitable only for the flames? If one is committed to burning the Nashville Statement, it would not be too much of a stretch to think that one should likewise dispense with the writings of the Statement’s initial (and perhaps subsequent) signatories. For if these persons were able, given their per- sonal theological commitments, to subscribe publicly to the Nashville Statement, would this not suggest that their other contributions to the Christian theological archive are inimical to queer flourishing? Pursuing this line of reflection quickly leads one, of course, to the precipice of a trea- cherous slippery slop. Consider, for instance, J.I. Packer’s works, which would be strong candidates for incineration regardless of their author’s endorsement of the Nashville State- ment given Packer’s repeated insistence that the inclusion of LGBTQ persons within the church represents a deviation from Christian orthodoxy,6 a theological position that found concrete expression in 2008 when he disaffiliated himself from the Anglican Church of Canada in protest of an earlier decision by the Diocese of New Westminster to authorize the blessing of same-sex unions.7 Asked during an interview for The Gospel Coalition to enumerate the books that have had the greatest impact on his life, Packer put John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion at the “head of the list.”8 In this way, he established a bibliographic connection between his own writings (including the Nashville Statement) and those of the sixteenth-century reformer, marking the latter as a some- times-latent, but always-present, foundation for the former. That linkage is all the more striking because the historical Calvin would himself be nonplussed by the modern and postmodern debates over human sexuality in which Packer is involved.9 But if one THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 167 takes Packer’s appraisal of the Institutes at face value and identifies this text as a formative (perhaps even defining) influence on his thought, it is difficult to shake the feeling that the Institutes itself is in some way implicated in Packer’s homophobia. At the very least, Calvin’s text might well be charged with guilt by association, and, on that basis, rejected as incongruous with queer forms of Christian theology and practice. More precisely, by grounding his thought in Calvin’s own, Packer appropriates the Institutes as an intellectual foundation for contemporary theological arguments that dis- empower and otherwise marginalize queer persons within Packer’s evangelical commu- nity. Insofar as it lends itself to being handled thus, the Institutes serves as another reminder that the intellectual archive of Christian theological reflection in the West is hardly favorable (and, indeed, might well be openly hostile) to queer subjects. Rightly dis- tressed by Packer’s writings, queer evangelicals can, consequently, be forgiven for viewing Calvin’s text with suspicion, and regarding it as at least a potential source of harm given their subject positions qua queer. What, then, are such persons to do with the Institutes? To pose this question is to inquire into how it is that texts live on, continuing to speak and act even when their authors are long since dead. It is, further, to ask about the nature of Christian subjectivity, about how texts form readers even as readers form texts. In the present article, I take up these related lines of investigation with an eye towards sketching an interpretive practice suited to any text that – like the Bible, Calvin’s Institutes, and even the Nashville Statement – has purchase on the identities of Christian communities. As my earlier remarks suggest, I take it that much that is Christian is hostile to queer subjects and interests, the intellectual trajectory that links Packer and the Institutes not least.
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