Scot McKnight on Natural law and LGBT persons in the Church

An old book review which may be relevant again

This is a re-post of a review I wrote back in 2015. I am re-publishing it here for two reasons: 1) I have noticed that Dr. McKnight’s work and his take specifically on LGBTQIA+ people seems to be back in the news and I thought it would be worthwhile to re-post my own reasons for disagreeing with him on the subject, and 2) I reference it in another piece and as the blog on which it was originally published is now defunct, this seemed the best way to keep that citation relevant.

In his recent book A Fellowship of Differents, Dr. Scot McKnight seems to be committing himself to an ethical and exegetical position which, while increasingly common among evangelical leaders today, is decidedly problematic. Specifically, Dr. McKnight builds a doctrine of sexuality, which he specifically applies to Lesbian and Gay people, on Paul’s use of the terms “natural” and “unnatural” in the Bible.

Let me say at the outset that A Fellowship of Differents is a worthwhile book in general. In it, Dr. McKnight urges the Body of Christ towards a greater degree of the unity and love that Jesus prayed for us in His high priestly prayer in John 17. I sincerely hope that many Christians will benefit from Dr. McKnight’s work in this and other books. 

Scot McKnight’s treatment of LGBT questions

Unfortunately, Dr. McKnight’s treatment of the current Church debate over Lesbian and Gay Christians (Dr. McKnight declines to comment on the current alienation of bisexual and transgender folk) leaves much to be desired. Ken Wilson has already discussed many of the book’s Chapter 12 failings in this post, but I was particularly struck by Dr. McKnights reliance on “natural” and “unnatural”, not because I found it unusual, but because I am beginning to believe that his treatment of these philosophically and theologically loaded terms is representative of an uncomfortable trend in evangelical protestant circles.

In Chapter 12 of the book, Dr. McKnight first, and somewhat surprisingly, concedes “What I am saying, then, is that those whom Paul had in mind–let’s call them the Typical Roman Male–were not so much compelled by same-sex attraction as by sexual indulgence. The Typical Roman Male is not the same as the person who has always experienced same-sex attraction, and today we are talking far more often about the latter than the former”. So he agrees with the cultural/historical position held by many who would celebrate same-sex marriages within the church. However, Dr. McKnight will not go the whole way and cites Paul’s use of the word “unnatural” in Romans 1 as the justification for his conclusion that all same-sex relations (gay sex) must be unnatural. His position is probably most succinctly summed up at the end of his section entitled “Paul’s Teachings” where he states:

“One can argue that Paul’s concern was not what is being discussed today–the appropriateness or inappropriateness of same-sex, faithful unions and marriages…Yet even if that was not his central focus, his words in Romans 1 about “unnatural” apply to all same-sex sexual relations”

Is natural law theory really what Protestants want to use?

The first problem here is that, in basing his claim that Romans 1 applies to same-sex couples on the term “unnatrual”, Dr. McKnight commits himself to a definition of “natural” which would not have worked in the 1st century Roman world. McKnight’s claim is that “By speaking of ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural,’ Paul refers to God’s created order, including anatomical design.” Phusis, the greek word which is translated as “nature,” is certainly a complex word. But the idea that “Paul’s language here about what is ‘natural’ is as wide as it can get: he sees all same-sex sexual relations as outside the divine, created order and inconsistent with life ‘in Christ’” is entirely unjustified. In fact, Dr. McKnight’s only attempt to justify it is a citation of the stoic philosopher Seneca who uses the Latin term natura in defense of a criticism of Roman citizens taking the passive role in same-sex sex because they are “unnatural” in that the male citizens are imitating slaves and women.  Beyond that wildly dubious justification, Dr. McKnight seems to be relying on bluster and assertion rather than any careful philology.

In fact, in his book Studies in Words, C.S. Lewis provides philological and etymological evidence that, to contemporary Greek and Roman readers, the term phusis referred to a thing developing without interference. Phusis is something like the way we currently think of a landscape which has developed without human intervention as “natural” while a landscape which has been shaped by human effort and machines might be called “unnatural.” By classical Greek and Roman standards a person “born straight” who engaged in gay sex due to licentious hyper-sexuality would certainly have been seen as “unnatural” but a person with exclusively homosexual attractions would have been acting a profoundly “natural” way in engaging in gay sex. Put another way, the opposite of Greek and Roman “natural” is “artificial” not “unusual”. Dr. McKnight’s assertion only works if he applies a modern, English definition of the word “natural” to the classical Greek word phusis but such an application is patently anachronistic.

It is possible though, that Dr. McKnight’s understanding of unnatural in Romans 1 is informed by the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, a 13th century philosopher, theologian and a doctor of the Roman Catholic church as it has been developed by Roman Catholic theologians over the centuries. Like Dr. McKnight, St. Thomas objected to gay sex on the grounds that it was “unnatural”. The Roman Catholic application of what is called natural law theory to questions of sex, requires that all moral sex acts must be done in love, and must be “generative” that is, they must be open to procreation in principle. As a result, Roman Catholics have generally condemned contraception, which attempts to make sex non “generative”, as well as all non penis-vagina sex, even between married heterosexual couples. All of these non-generative sex acts are seen as contrary to the “natural” purpose of sex, and Roman Catholic theology consistently (if quite harmfully in my opinion) prohibits them.

So natural law theory is a philosophical and ethical position and nearly all versions of it (there are a few exceptions) do see gay sex as unnatural. In fact, in natural law theory, unnatural is functionally a synonym for “evil” or “sinful”. But until the current culture war over LGBT persons and the church, Protestants, and particularly evangelical Protestants, generally rejected natural law theory; and they especially rejected its application to sexual ethics. And now that they have started to use it, I find their cherry picked application of it decidedly distasteful. I would suggest that if protestants want to use natural law theory to defend a non-inclusive reading of the Bible they have an obligation to either also condemn all forms of contraception and non-generative, heterosexual sex, or to explain how they are able to selectively apply the ethic. Until they do, whatever their intentions, it will appear that they are allowing a cultural homophobic prejudice to inform their reading of the Bible.