A Bold Defense of Liberty

I AM WRITING in enthusiastic support of the Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes and his defense of Christian liberty against those who would subject it again to bondage.

I am impressed, to be sure, by the conclusions which Gomes draws on the particular subject of homosexuality, but I am excited more by the broad program for Christian ethics which he seems to describe. I confess that before I had read Gomes's essay, at the same time so marvelously urbane and yet so devoutly pious, I should scarcely have believed that the freedom of the Christian was so compendiously broad.

THE FIRST precious liberty which Gomes reclaims from the hands of these new Puritans is the freedom of Christian ethics from the oppressive authority of the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers, documents perhaps useful once but now so little in season.

These authorities having been misused in the past, and alleged in the support of unjust causes, it is clear that their present application can only be fraught with danger, and liable to error. Gomes is therefore much to be praised for exposing those who have recently attempted to cloak their prejudices with these ragged garments.

But I find him still more to be commended for having freed the Christian moralist from the tiresome necessity of having some principle for distinguishing between a legitimate and an illegitimate use of Scripture.

It seems to me that anyone who still desires such a canon of judgment has ill-considered the magnitude of the freedom that Gomes has won us through its absence, whereby we are at liberty to estimate every inconvenient argument drawn from the Bible or the Fathers as false and deceitful. The Rev. Gomes has powerfully demonstrated the impossibility of thence deriving any moral precept, and thereby won us a perpetual liberty from their gloomy and awkward dictates.

Surely Professor Gomes's use of his position and authority to confront the prejudices of bibliolatry is long overdue; yet one might wish that he had gone somewhat farther in his campaign. Though the moral condemnation of homosexual acts is, to be sure, one of the precepts to be found in the dusty pages of the Bible, there are many others equally restrictive, which must also unjustly burden the consciences of many. The bibliolater's irrational prejudices against filial impiety, murder, adultery, larceny, lying, covetousness--all are equally notorious.

Thus, while I certainly approve of his argument so far as it goes, I cannot help wishing that Gomes might have made some public statement of his devotion to these other habits as well, since such a proclamation might have done much to ease many an unquiet conscience.

In the place of Scripture, Gomes says, we have the "continuing revelation of God," which he discovers to be a wonderfully malleable and useful thing indeed. More splendidly, Gomes seems at last to have liberated the Christian from Calvin's sticky rule, that the Holy Spirit speaking at different times must at least be consistency with himself. Truly, our bondage to the idol of consistency seems a formidable enemy to be overcome; but judging by his prodigious success thus far, I do not doubt but that Gomes is capable of the victory.

BUT THESE glorious liberties which Gomes has secured for us must seem positively inglorious in the light of the magnificent and absolute liberty which he secures for the Christian conscience.

Since (as he has taught us) we have no way of drawing any legitimate moral precept from the Bible or the Fathers, we discover all moral matters to be doubtful. And by the Rev. Baxter's precept we discover that, in all doubtful things, we are entitled to liberty. How pleasant a license is this doubt, and what a well-deserved sop for the distressed conscience!

As redeemed Christians, Gomes says, and sinners all, we thus find ourselves afforded the liberty to remain "just as we are," fallen and unregenerately otiose. Thanks to the new gospel which the Spirit has revealed to the Reverend Professor, we discover that the Christian is free of any obligation to moral improvements, whether--as a Catholic might say--as a means of gaining merit, or--as a Protestant--merely to the glory of God.

And so Gomes at last sets the Christian free to live by that principle which Paul was too timid to approve: "let us continue in sin, that grace may abound." A great victory, indeed, one long sought after, and one not unworthy so great a knight of Christ as Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals!

AT THIS POINT, one might have wished Gomes to have clarified his position somewhat; it would have been better if he had seemed to rely less on such awkward and incredible doctrines as the "fall," the "sacrifice of Christ," "Grace," or "the hope of glory," since there seems to be something inconsistent about a faith which so enthusiastically accepts the promises of God while so vigorously rejecting the authority of his moral precepts, whereas both seem to spring from the same source.

Someone less devoted to Gomes's system might imagine that at least as much bibliolatry is involved in embracing the former as the latter. But if self-consistency (as Gomes acutely suggests) is too much to expect of the Holy Spirit, surely we would be unreasonable to demand it too rigorously of Harvard's Plummer professor.

As a Christian of reformed and Protestant sensibilities myself, I am furthermore delighted to find that Gomes declares me to be emancipated from the moral burden of the Thomistic tradition.

Quite apart from my naive affection for Aristotelian ethics (shared with such other insufficiently Protestant men as Melanchton and Beza), I confess that in my former confusion, I had been somewhat struck by the theological ethics of Calvin and his successors; in that darkened state, I had been impressed more than I ought by more recent Protestant efforts to ground sexual ethics in the fact of the divine creation of the human race as male and female.

So I am delighted to find in the Reverend Gomes a man more reformed and Protestant than Karl Barth--to say nothing of Luther and Calvin; a man more Christian than Paul, Augustine or Aquinas; a man with more authority than all of these and the Scriptures put together; and I find myself confirmed in this high estimation out of the man's own mouth, as he liberates us from each of these tyrannies in its turn.

Had Gomes not revealed my own previous consideration of humility as a virtue to be nothing more but a prejudice cloaked in a pretended authority, I might have thought him to reveal here something of temerity; but liberated from these credulous preconceptions, I instead rejoice that what I now recognize as genuine Christian liberty has at last found a true apostle here at Harvard.

I AM GRATIFIED, therefore, that Gomes has at last affirmed in public that position which it has for a long time apparently pleased him to assume in private. The Reverend Peter J. Gomes has spoken, and I cannot but marvel at the new expansiveness of that liberty with which Christ has set us free.

The license which Gomes has secured for every Christian, the many onerous bonds of the new moral law whose hold on use he has broken, the ease at which his eloquent words must have placed many an uneasy conscience, surely have earned him a place among the great and wise of the Christian Church. Indeed, I doubt that the Christian soul has been at such liberty since the days of the Molinists, who so ably defended the same cause until they fell victim to a cruel and unjust intellectual mugging at the hands of a certain M. Pascal.

But it is greatly to be hoped that Gomes's achievement in Christian ethics will be of somewhat greater duration; and if, as I have said, it is only to be regretted that he did not go somewhat farther in his vindication of our liberty, he has at least shown us the way which we must follow.

But if in my newfound zeal for the teachings of the Reverend Professor Gomes, I have written anything here which seems to the more timid of The Crimson's readers to be contrary to Christian piety or good natural sense, I can only answer that I lay no claim to being a professor of Christian morals; and thus in matters pertaining to Christian ethics, I consider that I can do no better than to take up Gomes's opinions, and follow them with enthusiasm wherever they lead.

Thank God our Plummer Professor of Christian Morals has taken it upon himself to free us from all those restrictive moral constraints laid out in the dusty old pages of the Bible.

Christopher Brown '94 is a writer for Peninsula.