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Divided By The Sermon On The Mount, David A. Skeel Jr.

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This Essay, written for a festschrift for Bob Cochran, argues that the much-discussed friction between evangelical supporters of President Trump and evangelical critics is a symptom of a much deeper theological divide over the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus told his disciples to turn the other cheek when struck, love their neighbor as themselves, and pray that their debts will be forgiven as they forgive their debtors. Divergent interpretations of these teachings have given rise to competing evangelical visions of justice. One side of today’s divide—the religious right—can be traced directly back to the fundamentalist critics of the early …

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How Paul Became The Straight Word: Protestant Biblicism And The Twentieth-Century Invention Of Biblical Heteronormativity, Heather White

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This essay traces out how a seemingly ancient truth of antihomosexual condemnation came to be implanted in American Bibles and lodged—in particular—in the epistles of the apostle Paul. The Pauline texts of Romans and 1 Corinthians are the most frequently cited proof texts for biblical condemnation of homosexuality. The same-sex meanings of these passages are often not perceived as interpretations; they are imputed to the text and its historical context as the timeless, original meaning. Viewed historically, however, there are many things that are puzzlingly new about this plain biblical speech.

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