Sunday, July 09, 2006

Oliver O'Donovan on the "Gay Experience"

I know some of you are familiar with Oliver O'Donovan, especially those of you who were able to hear him speak in Winnipeg at St. Margaret's a while back, where he preached this sermon and lectured on topics similar to what he wrote in this book.

If you are not familiar with the Rev. Dr. O'Donovan, let me commend him highly. I imagine some of you may bristle at his evangelical assumptions and conclusions. However, to my mind, he is a theologian always able to say something interesting. And with the debates about human sexuality being so stuck and stale, something interesting about human sexuality is very welcome.

So if you're able to take some time and slog through the first of O'Donovan's "Web Sermons" over at fulcrum, it is worth the time. (He may be interesting, but he is learned - his prose is characteristically dense in this piece.) What piqued me was the following, at the end of his short summary of liberalism in Christianity:

" . . . There were some very good stories of emancipation to be told, testimonies to the liberating implications of the Gospel and the pastoral involvement of the church, the enormously influential struggle for civil rights in the USA, for instance, and the Latin American base ecclesial communities that gave new energy to Catholic witness in the face of poverty and economic injustice. These threw a lifeline to a floundering liberal imagination, offering a matrix by which the present could be presented as standing in perpetual judgment on the past, allowing the Western hegemonic tradition of modernity to re-brand its anti-conservative appeal . . . In grasping the lifeline, however, Western liberalism paid its price. From that point on, it became identified with one kind of moral cause to the exclusion of others. It became a church-party proper, a specific agenda to pit against other agendas.

. . . The gay cause is grist for the liberal mill while it is in militant mode, for the mill processes victim-classes in want of a fair deal. But Proudhon's "Justice, nothing but justice!" is as restrictive on one front as it is empowering on the other. It allows not the slightest observation on the aesthetic or emotional timbre of gay existence. To demand justice is to make this class like every other class, for justice is thought's weapon against arbitrariness. But when gay experience starts attracting interest and interrogation in its own right and for its own sake, its usefulness to the liberal project is at an end. For that raises questions that were supposed to have been settled long ago; it draws attention to the fragmentation of the modern moral world, and therefore to its insufficiency as a measure to judge the performance of the church.

Gays also pose existential questions. They interest themselves in the riddle of gay existence. Anexetastos bios abiôtos, said Socrates; the life that is unexamined is intolerable to live. And much of the gay Angst is to do with the difficulty of raising questions in public that seem overwhelmingly pressing when they directly concern oneself. The pastoral challenge that the gay phenomenon presents to the church, then, is not primarily emancipatory, but hermeneutic. And that is the supreme justification for a conciliar process that will take up the experience of homosexual Christians as its leading question. How is this form of feeling to be understood? What are the patterns of life with which it may appropriately clothe itself? As far as I can tell, it is deeply in the interest of gay Christians, men and women, that their experience - by which is meant not merely sexual experience, not merely emotional experience, and not merely the narrative of experience, but the whole storehouse of what they have felt and thought about their lives, should become a matter of wider reflection, reflected on by those who are called to live this experience, by those who are called to accompany them in their living, by all who share their understanding of living as something they owe an account of to God."

This is refreshing to me. Evangelical Anglican Oliver O'Donovan is saying that the floundering Liberal paradigm, through it's attraction to oppressed classes to which it can come to the rescue, has prevented the full expression of the experience of being gay. O'Donovan even calls for that fuller experience to be expressed and heard, and he wants to hear it.

I'll admit to being in very new territory. I'm not sure at all what "gay consciousness," "gay existence," or "gay experience" really is, though I have learned, on a social scale, to think in simple terms of "opressed classes." (The personal scale is very different and probably a little more complete.) I've lived in Berkeley for four years, at a liberal seminary, and I'm newly curious.

What would it mean to think of this experience as "hermeneutic"? What new conversations might happen if we thought this way? What new learning might take place?

To those more familiar with what O'Donovan is referring to, is he making any sense?

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4 Comments:

Blogger Marshall Scott said...

Well, for once this sounds like an Evangelical rationale to support the "Listening Process." As so many of the noisiest (and least harmonious) voices out there these days seem to want to discount at best or avoid at worst any listening to the lives of Gay and Lesbian Christians, this is perhaps worth broadcasting.

Monday, July 10, 2006 12:00:00 PM  
Blogger Eric V. Jeuland said...

One analogy:
First things first: Until we undermine the massive homophobia which is killing people, we’ll have very little theologically to say to our oppressed brothers and sisters.
Sometimes in Emergency Medicine the docs must fix the bullet wound to the heart before they operate on the brain tumor, even if the tumor will eventually kill as well. Sometimes the urgent is worth doing before the important-but-not-yet-lethal.

More detailed (but less verbose than drdanfee)
Oliver O’Donovan is right as far as he goes, but he does not go far enough. In fact his blindness to one obvious conclusion pretty much invalidates all of his care and patience.
He makes the point that Liberalism as a project sells gays short by seeing them only as ‘a group needing to be saved from tradition.’ His strongest point is that this in turn sells the Gospel short because liberators seem content only to liberate, not to seek a more nuanced view of God-human relations, and a bigger God. If humans are *only* oppressed, God is *only* liberator, and not friend, or ground of being, or Love, much less mysterious Trinity.
However, ‘Gay liberation’ is not just a tool of Liberalism-as-death-of-all-Tradition, but a specific fruit yielded from liberalism-as-corrective-to-bad-tradition. It is precisely listening to gay experience in the past hundred years that has led to the gay-liberation movement. It’s just a movement, not The Gospel—but still a movement with a point.
As an evangelical speaking these questions, he’s wondering if the liberal liberators are using the oppressed to make themselves look good. However, he hasn’t yet dealt with and acknowledged the fact that gays were oppressed in the first place by everyone—and there was no movement at all against the injustice.

He’s right that regardless of the justice issue, the church will have to deal with the humanity of gays, not just their status as oppressed-and-in-need. And once that starts, the traditional themes of gift, obedience, transformation, imago dei, etc. will return. But he’s wrong if he assumes we can begin that existential conversation and edification while our brothers and sisters are still in the mouth of the lion—homophobia.
Once homophobia is well on its way toward eradication, the specific (‘specific’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘narrow’, it may simply be a sign of ‘deliberateness with regard to an important, fixable task’) liberalism inherent in the Gospel, Christ, and Trinity will be less stringent about gay rights, and those traditional, evangelical, theological conversations will be unimpeded and once again central. Thanks be to God.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 5:30:00 PM  
Blogger Eric V. Jeuland said...

and one more thought about Oliver O'Donovan and Gay experience... how much queer/lgbt theory has the church really read and studied?

I've barely taken the time and I'm far better than most these days, having gone to left-loving college and seminary.

We really haven't really started the listening process at all, have we?

AND ISN'T THAT THE LIBERALS'/GAYS' VERY POINT?

Judge not lest ye be judged

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 5:37:00 PM  
Blogger Tony Hunt said...

Wow,

All of you but Marshall are incredibly arrogant and rude concerning O'Donovan. He has in fact written and conversed extensively with homosexuals and the issues before the Communion.

Perhaps rather than reading a snippet on a blog post you should go get his book "Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion" before you continue to lambast the man.

http://www.amazon.com/Church-Crisis-Controversy-Anglican-Communion/dp/1556358970/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241201641&sr=1-8

Friday, May 01, 2009 11:15:00 AM  

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