ENGENDERED DANGER AND ENDANGERED GENDER: THE CHURCH AND HOMOSEXUAL CLERGY – A CASE STUDY
Abstract
The issue of homosexuality is vexing the church throughout much of the world and seems to be most heated around the issue of clergy. Negative reactions to the prospect of the church endorsing homosexual clergy appear to suggest that such clergy pose a sort of ‘engendered danger’ to the very being of the church. Equally, these reactions give the impression that gay clerics are themselves something of an ‘endangered gender’. By taking as my starting point the situation in respect to the New Zealand Methodist Church, I propose to comment on the theme of danger / endangerment that is posed by the issue of clerical homosexuality, and to review a theological approach that might allow for the amelioration of danger and allow for the legitimate acceptance of homosexuality within the church.Authors retain copyright and grant the Journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this Journal.
This is an open access journal, and the authors and journal should be properly acknowledged, when works are cited.
Authors may use the publishers version for teaching purposes, in books, theses, dissertations, conferences and conference papers.
A copy of the authors’ publishers version may also be hosted on the following websites:
- Non-commercial personal webpage or blog.
- Institutional webpage.
- Authors Institutional Repository.
The following notice should accompany such a posting on the website: “This is an electronic version of an article published in Scriptura, Volume XXX, number XXX, pages XXX–XXX”, DOI. Authors should also supply a hyperlink to the original paper or indicate where the original paper (http://scriptura.journals.ac.za/pub) may be found.
Authors publishers version, affiliated with the Stellenbosch University will be automatically deposited in the University’s’ Institutional Repository SUNScholar.
Articles as a whole, may not be re-published with another journal.
The following license applies:
