Maybe it would help to clarify your pronoun.

I’m well aware that she does other things, and I’m sure he is too. He’s simply responding to one aspect of her work as it bears on this issue.

You offer a conveniently incomplete characterization of disgust:

“Disgust is a perfectly natural reaction to that which one viscerally realizes is unworthy of one’s humanity.”

I shouldn’t have to point out to you that the sorts of things towards which people react with disgust are highly contingent and culturally sensitive. The Egyptians of Joseph’s day were apparently disgusted by herdsmen–but herdsmen are hardly “unworthy of one’s humanity.” (Indeed, in Genesis we read that shepherds were an “abomination” to the Egyptians.)

I also shouldn’t have to point out to you that the visceral reaction of disgust is often a reaction we must resist–regardless of how “natural” it is. It may be perfectly natural to be disgusted by another person’s physical deformity or disease. Reacting with disgust towards the leper, however, is not exactly Christlike.

On Nussbaum, if anyone is interested in exploring any of her work, I suggest instead the much more valuable book The Fragility of Goodness, which doesn’t in every way line up with Christian thinking on the matters she discusses, but a good deal of what she says there is of a piece with the Christian doctrine of original sin (at least the Protestant doctrine in the way that Augustine originally used the term), the fallenness of the world in general, and total depravity in specific, both in its general effects on fallen humanity and in the specific ways that it still affects believers who are redeemed (which I think is in some ways similar to the common grace that still affects unbelievers despite their not being the immediate recipients of any salvific grace).

Steve Drake: Interesting question. Thought-inducing. Why would one take it any other way than was taken by the original reader trying to understand the author’s intent? Do the commands and didactic teaching of Scripture change over time and within a culture?

There’s a bit of a ‘Hmmm’ going in my head at the moment. Why would C. Ehrlich ask this question? What is the motivation behind this question? What are his views of Scripture? Lots of things to think about here, let me think on it.

Abomination or disgust, makes no difference.

if God is disgusted by something, it is sin.

Would God insist that I be disgusted by something that doesn’t disgust him?

I don’t see it.

At the end of the day, I think I’ll pass on Nussbaum’s book.

Disgust is a perfectly natural reaction to that which one viscerally realizes is unworthy of one’s humanity. So, ironically, contra Nussbaum, one who truly loves, truly cares for, truly wants to see made whole those who gravitate toward same-sex attraction is to elevate the humanity of the other. For to be truly human is to truly understand one’s intrinsic telos and to ask for the grace, patience, and discipline to adjust one’s desires to it. To not recognize this is to think of one’s self as less than human. Thus, Nussbaum, at the end of the day, just begs the question by assuming that our identity is located in our desires rather than in our nature, though flawed and misshapen as it often is.

Some seem to suggest that if something is called an “abomination,” this is supposed to indicate (unless the N.T. explicitly states otherwise) a wider scope of application, grounding the prohibition in something more universal or timeless. If, however, the concept of the abominable has anything to do with the idea of disgust (as the food restrictions might seem to indicate), the suggestion is dubious. On this topic, I’d recommend Martha Nussbaum’s From Disgust to Humanity (Oxford UP, 2010).