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Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, by Andrew Sullivan (Alfred A. Knopf, 209 pp.; $22, hardcover); Straight and Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexual Debate, by Thomas E. Schmidt (InterVarsity, 240 pp.; $10.99, paper); Scripture and Homosexuality: Biblical Authority and the Church Today, by Marion L. Soards (Westminster John Knox, 84 pp.; $9.99, paper).

Twenty years ago, most homosexuals guarded their sexuality as a shameful secret. Today homosexuals march into the White House to see the President, who hopes to secure their votes in the next election. Homosexuals have emerged from the shadows not as perverts but as co-workers, family members, and political operatives. Unwilling any longer to remain hidden, they have framed their public appeal as a matter of civil rights. Homosexuals are ordinary people, they say, despised for an attribute as accidental as skin color. Should they not be free from prejudice? Should they not teach school, adopt children, fight as soldiers, become pastors like any other person? Isn't that the American way?

Christians who think hard about homosexuality—and surely we must—have found this hard to answer. To begin with, scholars have argued furiously about the Bible's message; many contend that it says nothing about modern homosexuality at all. Even if we agree about the Bible's prohibitions, we have the difficult task of applying its message in a way that meets a new situation. It is one thing to condemn homosexual behavior, another to offer pastoral care to those with fierce homosexual longings. And even if we know how to treat homosexuality in the church, we have further questions of how to apply the Bible's message in a pluralistic society.

First, what does the Bible say? Thankfully, as two of these books show, a degree of clarity has emerged after much vexed exegesis. Thomas Schmidt, who teaches New Testament at Westmont College, gives a persuasive, detailed, verse-by-verse response to revisionist critics. He shows that the biblical injunctions clearly apply to homosexuality as it is practiced today and not only to its forms in the ancient world.

Another New Testament professor, Marion Soards of Louisville Seminary, may be more helpful for the general reader. Soards writes to his own Presbyterian church's confused situation, but his brief, lucid overview of the biblical evidence will aid anyone seeking a pathway through conflicting claims.

Soards has a habit of putting matters into perspective with only a few sentences, and doing it convincingly. After reading his summation of John Boswell's work, for example, it would be difficult for anyone to quote Boswell as an unchallenged authority on the history of homosexuality and the church. Soards gives no detailed prescription for the church (neither does Schmidt), but he makes clear that both Old Testament and New consider homosexual behavior "outside the boundaries of God's intentions for humanity." From the beginning, God intended for sexual union to be experienced within marriage between man and woman.

It is not easy to apply such an answer today, however. Why such one-note absolutism? Why can't we simply live and let live—appreciating, as Andrew Sullivan poetically puts it, the wildflowers among our wheat?

As Schmidt sees it, these are questions born of individualism, while sexuality is a communal endeavor, with each of us bearing responsibility toward others for the way we live. Homosexual behavior undermines marriage, he says. Unlike the celibate person, who, though unmarried, testifies to the good of marriage, the active homosexual pursues sexual union according to his own private principles of individual self-fulfillment. Like adultery, homosexuality cannot be judged just by how it seems to the individuals involved. It must be considered in the broader context of what it does to the whole community's understanding of sex. Same-sex intimacy offers an alternative "good" that undermines a community's marriages, Schmidt contends.

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November 13 1995, Vol. 39, No. 13