c. 1998 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ The Rev. Peter J. Gomes was a veteran Harvard divinity professor but a neophyte to talk radio last year when he sat down before an open microphone in Chicago.

The hour was meandering quietly, so the radio host “decided to juice up the callers out there,” Gomes recalled. “She came back from a break and said, `He’s black. He’s Republican. He’s gay. Is he going to hell?”’

The switchboard lit up with callers eager to respond.

“Having survived that three hours _ the longest three hours since Good Friday, in my opinion _ I feel I can survive any question put to me,” the author of “The Good Book: Reading the Bible With Mind and Heart” (William Morrow & Co., $25), said during a recent appearance here.

Gomes has surprised his publisher, who had an initial print run of 20,000 copies, by selling more than 250,000 books. He himself said he has been surprised by an American hunger for meaning and community.

“Reactions have been quite remarkable,” Gomes said. “It’s not that the book is that great. It’s that the need is that great.

“My travels have told me over the last year that the culture is crying out for some basis of spiritual and cultural unity. We’ve spent so much of our time looking for the dividing lines, and we’ve discovered we pay a very high price for that.”

Gomes has spent most of his 55 years confounding American cultural dividing lines: a Baptist born in Boston, a black Republican who helped with the inaugural prayers for both Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and a gay man who holds a professorship in Christian morals.

The last bit became public in 1991 almost by accident, when Gomes responded spontaneously to some campus gay bashing by coming out. He acquired his 15 minutes of fame and a segment on “60 Minutes,” but no interest in becoming, as he puts it, “the Barney Frank of the pulpit.”

True to form, it was an abuse of the Scriptures in an anti-gay tirade that roused Gomes’ ire. “I acted not as an outraged homosexual, but as an outraged Christian,” he said.

His book dissects classical misuses of the Scriptures in those arguments that have supported temperance, slavery, segregation and the subjugation of women. Gomes declared that “within our lifetimes,” the biblical castigations of homosexuals will be recognized as just as archaic as those arguments made on behalf of slaveholders.

Asked by a high school student how he dismisses St. Paul’s writing against homosexuality, Gomes suggested the apostle’s understanding was limited to his place and time.

“I wouldn’t trust the Apostle Paul’s views on sexuality any more than I would trust him to predict the weather,” the professor said. “Clearly, the Apostle Paul had what we would call a very rigorous and clear dedication to the then Jewish principle that sexuality was solely to reproduce and sustain the race. That understanding is really out of kilter with the vast majority of medical, psychological and theological understanding.”

A conservative man, Gomes would be the last to throw out the teachings of Paul. He simply argues that every reading of the Bible requires discernment between universal principles and culturally bound artifacts. Unlike some of the great families of the Bible, he pointed out, few contemporary people cotton much to polygamy.

These difficulties do not make the Bible a fossil, Gomes said.

“The first thing we have to remember is the Bible is not one book,” he said. “It is 66 books written by at least 66 different authors over thousands of years.

“It is a library of conviction put together by various people at various times that remains an imperishable part of our Christian heritage. Our heritage is rich and confused because it represents the highs and the lows of the human struggle to understand God and what he expects of us.”

Gomes argued the Bible contains a beginning point for the way out of the cultural divisiveness in which America is mired.

“We must look for the things that make for peace,” he said. “As a Christian, one must take very, very seriously the example of Jesus and the summary of the law: that you love your God with your whole heart, your whole soul and your whole mind and love your neighbor as yourself.”

DEA END LONG