RECENT controversies over sexuality and gender identity have been made all the more frustrating and tedious by having to hear the same arguments on both sides repeated over and over again.
In this respect, James Alison, an international theologian and Roman Catholic priest, who also identifies as a gay man, offers a contribution that gives us a potentially different and, therefore, welcome way in. He seeks to show how matters LGBTQ+ are not “load-bearing walls” of the Christian narrative, in either its Catholic or Protestant form, and that, therefore, a different view of such matters is possible and, indeed, as he would see it, necessary.
In the first of the book’s three sections — well worth reading for its stand-alone content, independently of LGBTQ+ issues — Alison draws on his theological mentor René Girard to offer an exploration of the biblical understanding of sacrifice. Rather, he argues, than something necessary to appease an angry God, sacrifice is “a largely tragic human necessity”. Its structure enables human beings to live with one another in an uneasy peace through the process of selecting scapegoats to bear the weight of collective guilt and anger.
In contrast, in the biblical account, the High Priest in the Atonement and Enthronement liturgies of the temple symbolically offers himself up in sacrifice to renew creation. And, supremely, as the culmination of this trajectory, Jesus, depicted in the Revelation of St John as “the lamb standing as one slain”, himself steps into the place of the sacrificial victim. The work of Christ is thus to undo the entire sacrificial system from within and initiates a new order of “redemption without revenge”, which then, through the working of the Holy Spirit, spreads into the message and mission of the Church.
In the second section of the book, Alison seeks to draw more explicit connections between these insights and questions of sexuality and gender identity. The impetus of the sacrificial system is to seek frightened short cuts to goodness and knowledge through the creation of scapegoats. Instead, he advocates a Christ-like path that frees us from the need to turn LGBTQ+ people into sacrificial victims. Accordingly, in Alison’s view, “truthfulness” is no longer to be handed down from on high, but “learned relationally, sideways”.
In the final section, “Some Fun with the ‘Clobber Texts’”, Alison offers some detailed exegesis of biblical texts that are often adduced by conservative commentators. These, he argues, are unable to bear the interpretative load that often rests on them.
As the foregoing will indicate, rather than issue a head-on challenge to conservative thinking, Alison invites his readers to think about these issues in an analogical way: to make dexterous sideways leaps between the sacrificial system, as he explores it in the Bible, and the experience of LGBTQ+ people in modern society. Some will find Alison a sure guide to making such leaps, but others will inevitably continue to find them challenging. Still others will question the conclusions to which sideways learning has led him: for example, that an apparently lesbian friend has all along been a heterosexual male.
This said, all could benefit from Alison’s long study of the theme of sacrifice and the potentially new vistas that it opens on such contested questions.
The Very Revd Dr Edward Dowler is the Dean of Chichester.
You Can If You Want To: Navigating Christian faith, conscience and matters LGBTQ+
James Alison
Bloomsbury £17.99
(978-1-3994-2299-4)
Church Times Bookshop £16.19