Journal: Bulletin for Biblical Research
Volume: BBR 10:1 (NA 2000)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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BBR 10:1 (2000) p. 143

Book Reviews

Welcoming but Not Affirming: An Evangelical Response to Homosexuality. By Stanley J. Grenz. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1998. 210 pp. ISBN 0-664-25776-3.

Stan Grenz thinks that too many well-meaning Christians approach the problem of homosexuality from perspectives coyly camouflaged behind walls of rhetoric, regardless on which side of the homosexual debate one happens to stand. So concerned is he about this issue, he has put much of his academic theological work on hold in order to write an analysis of the issue that is at once compassionate and dispassionate: compassionate toward the people who wrestle with this issue—homosexuals and those of us who have been commanded by Christ to love them; and dispassionate toward the evidence—biblical, biological, anthropological, psychological, and theological. Today, books like this are necessary pastoral reading because the problem is persistent, the rhetoric is intense, and the information vacuum is great. Unashamedly evangelical, this book asks questions about what the Church’s attitudes toward homosexuality ought to be and limits itself to four lines of argument.

First, Grenz looks at the contemporary situation. Scientific analyses of homosexuality fall into two camps: “nature” and “nurture.” Grenz reminds us that even though Freud refrained from calling homosexuality a “sickness,” he nevertheless opened the door to a number of psychoanalytic approaches that vigorously do. Psychologist Elizabeth Moberly, for example, argues that since the sexual identities of very young children are ambisexual, the process of sexual maturation necessarily involves a number of developmental stages. She thinks that homosexuals are people whose sexual development has been arrested at one of these stages prematurely. For Moberly, homosexuality has nothing to do with “nature.” Homosexual longings are instead an attempt to make up for arrested growth in a person’s relationship to persons of the same sex, particularly toward parents of the same sex. C. A. Tripp argues that in societies where the male ideal of “hero” or “winner” is dominant, homosexuality becomes prevalent because so many young boys, already in the throes of adolescent sexual crisis, give up trying to achieve such “impossible ideals” of maleness. David Blankenhorn (Fatherless America [New York: Basic Books, 1995] 224-25), however, disagrees, arguing instead for a direct correlation between fatherlessness, the rise of androgyny generally, and homosexuality.

Proponents of the “nature” hypothesis reject the psychoanalytical explanations, proposing instead a number of explanations that focus either on genetic predisposition or hormonal dysfunction. Genetic theories are largely dependent on well-publicized b...

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