Although Orthodoxy in Dialogue normally declines to publish anonymous articles, we make an occasional exception on the subject of sexuality and gender when an author feels the need to protect himself or herself from the kind of hatred that is far too often directed at us from ecclesiastical and ecclesial sources.
The climate of fear in which we live cannot be blamed solely on the Evangelical invasion of the Orthodox Church over the past 30+ years, although this has certainly played a substantial part in giving rise to a culture entirely foreign to the spirit of Orthodox Christianity. Father Thomas Hopko—in articles that still appear on the OCA website, and especially in his Christian Faith and Same Sex Attraction: Eastern Orthodox Reflections (2006)—was the first to call for the excommunication of Orthodox Christians for merely asking the questions and proposing the answers on sexuality and gender for which Orthodoxy in Dialogue has become the Orthodox Church’s principal voice.
The importance of the present article lies in its giving expression to a reality often overlooked by all sides in the Church’s debates on sexuality and gender: Christians who positively embrace their identity somewhere along the LGBTQ spectrum, some of whom have formed or seek to form a committed same-sex couple, and yet feel called to lifelong sexual abstinence. Orthodoxy in Dialogue addressed this issue more than two years ago in Gregg Webb’s Sexual Minorities in the Orthodox Church: Towards a Better Conversation. The present article restores these Christians to their rightful place in our ecclesial consciousness and discourse.
We can vouch that the “American LGBTQ Christian” who authored this article is well known to us.
Let me begin by saying I appreciated Father Aaron Warwick’s opening a discussion in his Pastoring LGBTQ Individuals in the Orthodox Church. His article represents a beginning of a conversation, and certainly shouldn’t be taken as the only word to be said on the subject.
Father Warwick seemingly constructs the conversation about LGBTQ individuals relative to the curbing of lusts. He can scarcely be faulted for this approach. After all, Saint Paul takes a similar approach when he writes to the Corinthians:
Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is well for a man not to touch a woman.” But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. This I say by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind. Read More
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