Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Author:Rosaria Champagne Butterfield [Butterfield, Rosaria Champagne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown & Covenant Publications
Published: 2015-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

5

Self-Representation

What Does It Mean to Be gay?

What the Word gay Means

The word gay shifted from its historical sixteenth-century meaning of merry, bright, festive, and joyous, to a precise portraiture of male effeminacy in the eighteenth century, to a new kind of person in the nineteenth century, to a term affirming the inherent goodness of homosexuality in the twentieth century.

We associate the word gay with its twenty-first century dictionary meaning: a homosexual. Importantly, the term gay became associated with homosexuality at the same time that it became associated with homosexual liberation (freedom of oppression and stigma for being gay). The term was a contested one. Gay-detractors used it pejoratively, and gay-affirmers claimed it back. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces word etymologies and meanings as they change over time, culture, and use. The OED shows how both the term gay and its political advocacy and affirmation of gay rights came into existence simultaneously.1

Later in the twentieth century, after the concept of homosexuality was rightly removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973, the phrase “gay is good” became associated with the term, a maxim intended to shift social focus away from illness and pathology to the asserted necessity of sexual orientation as a human-defining and distinguishing term, one that heralds a new wave of diversity.

Homosexual practice is not the consequence of mental illness. That is not how the Bible records things. God declares homosexual practice a sin from which we must repent. But the concept of sexual orientation blurs the relationship between personhood and sexual practice (desired or actual). Christians are called “saints” in the Bible. We who bear Christ’s spilled blood are a royal priesthood. Any category of personhood that reduces a saint to a sum total of his or her fallen sexual behavior is not a friend of Christ.

The word gay has a power and history that Christians who claim it as self-representation need to reckon with. When Christians embrace the moniker gay, we enter into the worldview that declares political advocacy, sexual affirmation, and the overriding philosophy that homosexual practice is good. This is in contrast with the biblical norms of fidelity within marriage and chastity outside of marriage. We can use words and words can use us. The meaning and interpretation of words in context of grammar and syntax transcend our good intentions.

Therefore, to the best of our ability to discern this, God’s intent must trump ours when defining a word’s semantic range. As Christian brothers and sisters, we affirm Christ in us and working through us by grace alone, not our patterns of temptations, special interests, or even our physical conditions. Our life in the flesh matters, but it is not the most important thing. We agree with Paul that our preference is to be “absent from the body and to be home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). The blood that ties us together and to our Savior and Friend trumps all.

Words, though, are unstable creatures. We need revised dictionaries each year because new words enter into the culture, and because words do change over time.

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