LUCERNE, Switzerland (ChurchMilitant.com) – A homosexual priest from Lucerne, a city renowned as the capital of Catholic Switzerland, claims to have reimagined the Holy Scriptures to create the world’s first “Queer Bible.”
Fr. Meinrad Furrer conducting a lesbian blessing
Launching Die Queerbibel at the Lucerne Pride Festival on Saturday, Fr. Meinrad Furrer, an LGBT activist, presented a sample of his heterodox text by offering a “queer” rewriting of the Joseph story in the book of Genesis.
Rewriting Scripture
“We rewrite certain texts in the Bible. You can see the original text but also what we add from a queer point of view,” explains Fr. Furrer, parish priest of St. Peter’s Chapel — the oldest church in Lucerne.
Furrer argues that the “coat of many colors” (Gen 37:3) given to Joseph by his father, Jacob, is a “floor-length, decorated sleeve dress.”
The priest claims that the word for such a skirt or dress is the same word used to describe the garment worn by a princess in the period of King David, as recorded in the second book of Samuel.
“So was Joseph wearing the garment of a princess? Did Joseph feel more like a Josephine? And was his [gender] identity the reason why he was later sold to Egypt by his brothers?” Fr. Furrer asks.
“The Bible contains texts that can be read in a very queer-friendly manner, such as the story of Joseph and the dress,” the priest claims. “Many such debates take place on social media in a queer-feminist bubble. We want to take the texts that are there and publish them.”
“We want to encourage queer people to gain positive access to the realities of their lives from a biblical point of view,” Fr. Furrer observes, stressing he is not writing a new Bible. “But you can interpret the biblical texts in such a way that they inspire queer people.”
The 58-year-old openly gay pastor says that the 2003 Lucerne Pride Festival version is only the first edition: “We’re currently collecting texts on social media and noticing which ones we still want to write ourselves.”
“Later, the texts will also be available online. There will be no final product, very deliberately. We want it to continue,” Furrer remarks.
In a Sunday sermon, the priest tells the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, explaining how “nothing stands in the way of his baptism,” even though he is “a person whose [gender] identity clearly deviates from heteronormativity.”
Fr. Meinrad Furrer on a rainbow bench in Switzerland
Dr. Matthias Ederer, professor of Old Testament exegesis at the University of Lucerne, supports Fr. Furrer’s project, insisting that “there is no one who ‘owns’ the Bible and who could determine how one may deal with it.”
“In biblical studies, we are looking for an honest dialogue between the Bible and modern questions ‘on an equal footing.’ This includes reading the Bible from a current perspective and discovering new perspectives,” Ederer explains.
“However, it is just as important to make transparent where biblical and modern thinking do not go together. And to explain how we can deal with it,” he adds.
Bible Condemns Homosexuality
In contrast to Furrer, queer scholars of the Bible, even those who are actively homosexual, have reached an academic consensus in recent years that the Bible unequivocally prohibits and condemns homosexuality.
The well-known liberal scholar Dan O. Via agrees with illustrious conservative scholar Dr. Robert Gagnon. “Professor Gagnon and I are in substantial agreement that the biblical texts that deal specifically with homosexual practice condemn it unconditionally,” he writes.
Louis Crompton, a self-identified homosexual, pioneer of gay studies and emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska, debunks the often-repeated spiel that the anti-gay biblical texts are not about committed, loving, faithful monogamous relationships with persons of the same sex.
“Nowhere does Paul or any other Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of same-sex relations under any circumstance,” Crompton writes.
Furrer with Protestant pastors at a “pride service”
Lesbian professor Bernadette Brooten of Brandeis University categorically states, “I see Paul as condemning all forms of homoeroticism as the unnatural acts of people who had turned away from God.”
Professor Martti Nissinen from the University of Helsinki, who is the author of one of the best academic books on the Bible and homosexuality from a pro-gay perspective, agrees that “nothing would have made Paul approve homoerotic behavior.”
Gay professor Pim Pronk at the Free University in Amsterdam is emphatic: “Wherever homosexual intercourse is mentioned in Scripture, it is condemned. … The New Testament adds no arguments to those of the Old. Rejection is a foregone conclusion.”
Several local Catholics expressed outrage after Fr. Furrer held an ecumenical “pride service” at St. Peter’s Church on Sunday afternoon, asking participants to turn their backs to the Blessed Sacrament and face the rear of the church festooned with a rainbow flag.
Furrer, who has become notorious for blessing same-sex couples on a rainbow bench in Zurich’s Platzspitz park, says that the seating was deliberately changed in order “to be able to see things from a different perspective” because “that’s how the Savior has our backs.”
The service included a musical performance of excerpts from Considering Matthew Shepard, a modern oratorio composed by conductor Craig Hella Johnson, which commemorates and reacts to the brutal murder of a young gay man in the United States.
During a seven-minute interlude, the congregation could move freely in the chapel to light a candle, formulate a request, leaf through the Queer Bible or be individually blessed by the clergy present.