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The Gnostic LGBTQ+
My lesbian friend told me that on Saturday there was to be a Gay pride parade on King Street between Foggy Pine bookstore and the Jones house. Reading about it in the local news feed, I didn’t agree with the narratives proclaimed on the Jones house steps, but I don’t begrudge them for staging the event. All people of religious convictions should take their best shot at winning their fellow traveler.
To sink one’s heart in the LGBTQ+ way of thinking you have to embrace Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a departure from Christianity that captured the cultural imagination at the end of the Apostolic age. John, the last of the Apostles, warned against this coming trend when he spoke about not denying that Christ “as coming in the flesh” (2 John 1:7) and arguing in his epistle that doing righteous deeds in the body does indeed matter (1 John 3:7).
Gnosticism, on the other hand, thought the body as irrelevant and bad. The God of the Old Testament was stupid at best and evil at worst creating a yuck-filled body with its guts and blood and vile liquids and excrement. Jesus transcended the body as a spiritual being to allow us to break past the limitations of matter and push into a mysteriously discerned knowledge or “gnosis”.
Through the years, as the Gay narriative ebbed and flowed from the pre-AIDS 1970s of militant “you can’t tell us what to do with our body, you sexual Fascists” to the post-AIDS “we were born this way” to the new-millinaial “love-wins fluidity” there is always the same common thread: I have my physical biology over there that may be wired up to a certain gender but my sexual orientation, my true overriding gender, is over here mysteriously discerned through my own private gnosis. Like the Gnostics, the transcending spiritual knowledge of sexual identity transcends the lesser body/matter gender of biology.
Historical Christians, at least those who trace back to the faith once delivered to the Saints and preserved through the ages, never bought into Gnosticism from the beginning. They never traded in the late coming gospels of Mary or Thomas. Against pagan cultures and newly emerging heresies, Christians tended to see humans as a harmonious being. The body and the spirit work together in union, not against itself. The disharmony we find within ourselves is not because we were built with contrary, conflicting parts but because our fallen nature and sin disfigure the image of God wired in us. Redemption seeks to restore this image making us whole and unified rather than pitting our higher spiritual self against our lower physical body.
But in our little town, the Gay Pride band plays on. Gay and Lesbian friends should march to the tune of their beliefs, rehashed and resurrected Gnosticism and all. They have a right to express their religious view. And so do we.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Some are. Perhaps they will wear themselves out and knock it off eventually.
I don’t think that’s how this works, but I hope you’re right.
Unfortunately, I don’t think so either, but my gay friends haven’t tried to get me to “affirm their lifestyles” yet.
To which I would respond “Are we including the moral turpitude of rooting for the White Sox? Because there are certain lines that shall not be crossed!“
If they’re “married” they have. It’s all about public affirmation.
I don’t run around affirming the marriages of heterosexuals either. They don’t insist that I do, for that matter.
If I remember rightly, he was the first to create a Biblical canon, saying “This is what’s included.” Before that, there was all sorts of stuff floating around. (And as the old saying goes, the cream floats to the top but so does the…) In reaction to Marcion, the church fathers finally got together to decide what was in and what was out. Obviously, they included much more than Marcion had.
He was, perhaps, the first to create a list of the New Testament canon.
The canon was first created when G-d inspired the apostolic writings.
Marcion could never answer the question “so why is practically everyone in the Gospels a Jew?”
Except for some of those that wrote them.
That makes it worse?
I stand corrected. My wording was loose.
I’m not sure I’d want to hear about anybody’s nice, normal life when my 13 year old is about to get a chemo treatment, but I’ve never been in that situation… Oh, WC! That would not be a great moment to feel required to politely nod and smile. I’m sorry!
Plus, as my late lamented first husband pointed out, the difference between “eccentric” and “nuts” can simply be money. There wasn’t a whole lot of daylight glimpse-able between my eccentric bird-hoarding relation and the crazy lady down the road who lived in a dilapidated trailer with forty two cats. And the distinction may not be the degree of dysfunction, but the vulnerability of the eccentric. “Mental Illness” has been (and continues to be, in some places) a category into which troublesome women, non-conforming relatives, political opponents and other difficult persons were placed for the convenience of the “well.” So there’s hesitation.
More to the point, I think transgenderism is a better fit for the thesis of the OP than homosexuality. Indeed, to affirm that there can be such a thing as a “man trapped in a woman’s body” is to propose a radical duality, a self or soul independent of the body that, presumably, merely houses it.
When Pete Buttigieg says “God made me this way,” that indicates a belief that body and soul are inseparable; he is, always was and always will be a homosexual man in the same way and for the same reason that I am a heterosexual woman.
I don’t know about Mayor Pete’s friends and relatives, but when one of my various loved ones has come out as gay, the experience for this beholder has been that of puzzle-pieces finally falling into place. The beholder (me, in this case) knew nothing about what sort of sexual activities he or she had gotten up to (still don’t and don’t want to, lalalalalala). Instead, the “ahah” was a recognition of a complete body+ mind inseparable self.
One can separate Bipolar Disorder from my loved one. She and I can easily ( indeed, eagerly!) imagine her without the illness. She would be (will be, please God?) whole and complete without bipolar, and is fractured by it. From my perspective, at least, this is true for my gender-dysphoric loved ones. Both they and I want a “cure” that allows them to be okay in their own bodies, whole and complete.
The “trans-movement” is, I think, deeply, spiritually at odds with what drove both feminism and gay rights. The book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” summed it up in the title. Being a woman was inextricable from dwelling in a woman’s body, enduring or enjoying the anatomical, physiological, form and function of the female as distinct from that of the male. Chapter by chapter, the actual or potential experiences of the body are understood as soul-shaping . It is woman-qua-woman who menstruates, get pregnant, gives birth, has abortions, endures actual or threatened rape or domestic violence, goes through menopause, and anticipates/dreads/remembers these. Male doctors are, in some sense, the villains of the book, insensitive to because not sharing in the experience of a woman.
Well, or the demands they make aren’t all that different from the demands we (that is, straight people) make on them.
Thank God! (And yes, I mean that literally.)
The back-in-the-beginning editorial decision-making is such a huge part of why the Bible is what it is (and sacred!).
Marcion’s version wasn’t crazy on the face of it. “Why have four Gospels? Why include the now-superceded Jewish scriptures?” These are real questions that still provoke animated discussion.
I think it makes sense to think of our Bible and the Marcion Bible as two competing books on the same subject published at the same time, each sponsored by a Christian leader of one of the various sects according to each one’s Christology. Among other questions the Book should answer either explicitly or implicitly (via its “embodiment’ in text): Was Christ/Christianity a whole new thing, a complete and radical break from anything and everything that went before? Or was He/it a continuance/fulfillment/expansion of an existing, good thing?
Our Bible won. Thank God. (Still literal).
Now-superceded Old Testament? When or where was that ever a live question?
When Marcion had a head to think it?
Among heretics, then.
That was her point, yes.
Nobody has, which is why the post is word salad drivel. (Although two cheers for what looks like its tolerant conclusion.)
LGBTQ+ and Feminist Christians are all equally ignorant and dismissive of the epistles, while elevating the un-examined Gospels at the exclusion of all else.
Rejection of the epistles and the OT appears to go hand in hand.
You read the scenario perfectly. This was very shortly after Obergefell and my first reaction was stunned silence while politely nodding and smiling. This doc is obviously a very bright, capable, and caring woman — she sees kids with cancer all day. She also happens to be physically darling, which always makes me suspect she was sexually abused as a youngster and that’s how she ended up preferring women to men. Who could blame her?
It was after she left the room I became angry at the presumption that her patients’ families would all be on board with hearing about her “marital” arrangements. Now I have to explain our beliefs to a thirteen year old with a brain tumor while she’s receiving chemo?? Are you kidding me????
After I calmed down, I came to pity her. Here she is, this incredible creation of God, and she’ll never have her own children by a husband. It’s tragic. An affliction, not unlike my kid’s NF Type 1 and the brain tumor she lives with every day. God doesn’t make people with these problems (Mayor Pete’s sentiment). He allows it for a greater good we can scarce comprehend.