Touching the Past, or Reading as If It Matters Now

Abstract

Touching the Past, or Reading as If It Matters Now Tyler Schwaller (bio) There are certain works that have so transformed my ways of thinking that I sometimes forget what it was like to think otherwise. Dr. Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women is one of those texts. As I teach in both academic and ecclesial settings about the Bible and sexuality, I draw regularly upon the materials and insights of Dr. Brooten's work and of course cite her appropriately. However, the content has become so familiar to me that I sometimes forget the sheer scope of the book's impact. This opportunity to spend substantial time again with the text has illuminated for me that Love Between Women is not only an important work that I cite for evidence, but also one that I cannot and do not think apart from, as Dr. Brooten's arguments have so fundamentally shaped the ways I think about sex, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world and its implications for contemporary discourses and debates. It is truly an honor to be able to reflect on the impact of this transformative work. I will admit that it made me somewhat anxious to present as part of this retrospective special section, as I have felt a tension between the manner in which I think I am supposed to speak "as a scholar" and what I really want to say, which is perhaps more confessional. But even as Dr. Brooten's Love Between Women has certainly sharpened my scholarly sensibilities, its influence has been deeper and farther-reaching for me. So, I would like to share in terms of my experiences with the text, which begin with the personal and extend beyond academe to workshops I have taught on the Bible and sexuality with church groups. These workshops have taken place primarily in United Methodist contexts.1 Further, I have drawn [End Page 177] upon Dr. Brooten's work while engaging in ecclesial juridical settings convened to enforce the United Methodist Church's anti-queer policies. This leads me to reflect in two directions: first, toward celebration and gratitude for Love Between Women and second, toward ethics of interpretation, scholarship, pedagogy, and sex. I initially encountered Love Between Women soon after coming out as gay, as I was still thinking through my relationship to the church and to the Bible. I experienced the commentary on Rom 1:18–32 especially as freeing.2 Without being able to name at the time what felt deficient, I had been left unsatisfied by mainstream progressive interpretive strategies aimed at affirming same-sex desire and relationships. I was familiar with two primary approaches, sometimes working in tandem: claiming that homosexuality is a modern category, thereby presuming biblical texts have nothing to say on the topic as we know it, and/or contending that ancient condemnation of same-sex desire is really a critique of pederasty (as if that were the only same-sex relationality known in the ancient world). These possibilities for claiming that modern queer relationality was unknown to biblical writers and so freed from scriptural scrutiny was first introduced to me in the published debate between Dan Via and Robert Gagnon, which I purchased and read in secret in high school.3 Such line of thinking was reinforced when I encountered Foucault in college and learned his claim that homosexuality emerged as a discrete concept only in the modern period. While I appreciated the call to think contextually, not generalizing categories of desire across time and space, I was unsatisfied by the notion that the best defense for queer love today would be the impossibility of its imagination in the past. What felt so freeing about reading the commentary in Love Between Women was to let go of the intellectual gymnastics and simply name things as they are: Paul does not like same-sex desire, full stop. But Paul draws upon contemporaneous thought to make an argument fundamentally rooted in the assumption of women's subordination.4 Recognizing that I could not support the underlying logic and so did not feel beholden to the argument, I acknowledged for myself the need to look elsewhere, to consider...