A Time to Embrace: Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law, and Politics by William Stacy Johnson
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Book Reviews of A Time to Embrace: Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law, and Politics
Book Review: A Time to Embrace
Summary: 3 Stars
While I have read other books making a case for Gay/Lesbian marriage, this was the first that really convinced me. Facing head on many if not all of the Scriptural passages used by opponents of homosexuality to condemn it, the author helps the reader see these passages in a new light amd argues from the whole thrust of the Bible that it should be acceptable and even blessed. He then goes on to point out the severe legal penalties same sex couples face when denied the right to marry and argues for allowing it. Book Review: A Time To Embrace
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the most scholarly and well researched book on the topic of same gender relationships that I have ever read.Book Review: Thoughtful, closely reasoned, Biblically supported exploration
Summary: 5 Stars
Stacy Johnson is a good man and a deep thinker; the church is indebted to him for this book. He avoids polemic on either side of his discussion of the issues of homosexuality in the church.
Stacy's first career was as an attorney, and his closely reasoned examination of the biblical imperatives surrounding these issues speaks to his capacitiy for logical and disciplined research and reasoning.
This book is a gift to all of us who would rather focus on what unites us in the church (Christ's sacrifice for us, the Biblical mandate to feed the hungry, comfort the grieving, bind up wounds and work for justice) than what divides us.
I puzzle over all those who think that this is the one, central issue on which our salvation hinges. Perhaps Stacy's voice can be one that helps the church move beyond these issues to the central call of the Gospel: To Love God with all that we are, and our neighbors as ourselves.
In the grace of God may it be so.
Book Review: THE best book yet on homosexuality
Summary: 5 Stars
From my vantage point, as a Ph.D. in Church History and on the farthest heterosexual side of Kinsey's spectrum, I regard Johnson's book as far and away the best book yet on the subject. As the sub-title says, he deals with homosexuality from the sides of religion, law, and politics--as a respected theologian on a top-notch theological seminary faculty and also with a degree in law.
He rightly gives most space to the opening section of religion, since here is, and always has been, where the most controversy has been. Respected biblical scholars have always said we must deal with puzzling passages in the context of the rest of the Bible--and yet, with that approach--have wound up on opposite conclusions. Where Johnson outshines all others is that he also studies the much-used biblical texts in the wider context of the cultural surroundings of the biblical authors--their Sitz im Leben. This is especially where he differs so critically from the widely-read work of Gagnon--and accordingly comes out on the opposite side.
The book's succeeding sections on law and politics are equally thoroughly handled, though at less length.
Granted, I had already moved, slowly through decades of study, to come out on Johnson's side of affirmation--although as a very hetero youth I hated the very thought of homosexuality, since I had been molested by a homosexual teacher. But as a church historian I have written a short treatise surveying twelve highly controversial issues through twenty centuries of church history in which the Christian church has changed its mind, showing that the trajectory indicates that homosexuality is the thirteenth big issue on which the Church is now in process of changing its mind. The wheels of church history change slowly--but they do change!
Johnson's book should add to and hasten this sorely-needed change.
Book Review: Thoughtful, well-supported and challenging!
Summary: 5 Stars
I teach at a Christian university which takes an official position that marriage is only between a man and a woman. All in our university community do not agree with that position, and debate continues.
This book fleshes out all the different positions that are taken within the Christian community. Johnson, as a Princeton Theological seminary professor, takes seriously the biblical passages cited against homosexual relationships and provides thoughtful exegesis of those passages, concluding that they cannot be used to oppose homosexual relationships.
Drawing upon his background as a lawyer, he then analyzes the legal basis for same-sex marriage, and ends with a thought-provoking discussion of what it means to live in a "welcoming democracy", drawing upon the work of political scientist Amy Guttman (president of the University of Pennsylvania) and Harvard philosophy professor, Dennis Thompson, who have written about deliberative democracy.
Christians who swear by Robert Gagnon's The Bible and Homosexual Practice should balance it with Johnson's book. Although Johnson's exegesis of the biblical passages is not necessarily new, the connection of it with a discussion of what it means to live in a democracy is unique.
The selected bibliography is extensive and the footnotes are extremely detailed.