Homosexuality and the
Bible
Preface
It seems to me that the place to begin is to distinguish
matters of people, made in the image of God (cf. James 3:9), from questions of
morality, truth, and ethics. Christians are to love their neighbors (e.g.,
Matt. 22:39; Romans 13:8-10; etc...). But they are also to love their enemies
(e.g., Matt. 5:43-48; Luke 10:29-37). That leaves no one that a Christian can
legitimately hate—at least not biblically. The groups that go around protesting
Billy Graham because he advocates loving gays, groups who usually hold signs
outside stadiums that say what God is going to do to [insert pejorative
reference to homosexuals], are thus out of
the will of God, at least as Jesus reveals it in the gospels. Any interpretation of Scripture someone might use to
justify hatred of individuals is unchristian.
As a “consultant” on this issue, therefore, I can
confidently say that Christians must love homosexuals. Indeed, Christians must
also love those who express hatred toward homosexuals! But they must denounce
and strongly reject the attitude and message of those who hide behind
Christianity as an excuse to hate humans created in the image of God.
Christians should pray for God to convict homosexual-haters and lead such
individuals to repentance, lest they ironically find themselves in hell fire
for being “murderers” (cf. Matt. 5:21-22).
There are also any number of
curious ideas you hear tossed about in relation to this subject. I would
suggest Christians should call these seriously into question before they
discuss biblical and Christian traditional matters. For example, it is
massively inappropriate to equate homosexuality with pederasty or child
molestation. As far as I can tell, equations like this one reflect a rather
massive lack of knowledge and awareness about homosexuality. You have to wonder
if a person who would espouse something like this idea had ever met anyone who
is a homosexual. There may be child molesters who prefer children of their own
sex, but this is a type of child molester, not a type of homosexual.
Secondly, in my life I have not known too many people who
are gay, but I think they would all either laugh or get very frustrated with
the idea that they somehow “chose” to be attracted to people of the same
gender. If anything, the more common story is one of a person who struggles
deeply with their attraction (in a more open climate today, this may be
changing; I don’t know). I hear such struggles are particularly strong when
such individuals grow up in Christian circles. You hear stories of people
wrestling for years with guilt for their attractions to the same sex. They
often go through long periods of repressing or denying such desires. Most give
into their desires eventually, at least that is my
impression.
If we were to speak of a choice, the choice seems more the
choice to act on such desires
rather than a choice to have
the desires in the first place. And there is the
choice of “coming out of the closet” or not. Of course, I’m sure there are
people we might call “experimenters,” who try homosexual sex to be edgy or cool
or to experiment (see Madonna). However, on
the whole it would seem as ridiculous to say most people choose to be attracted
to the same sex, as it would be to suggest that heterosexuals chose to be
attracted to the opposite sex. That is not to preclude the
possible existence of a pool of people who are more “in the middle” and could
under certain conditions be pushed one way or the other. These are not matters
of my expertise, but my amateur attempt to describe the situation.
Thirdly, I don’t know what combination of genetics and
environment might combine to make a person attracted to the same sex rather than the opposite sex (I am not a scientist, but I don’t
think I am saying anything debatable if I assume that the default result of
genetics is usually heterosexuality). I imagine that there is no single gene or
environmental factor but probably a combination of things that vary even from
one individual to another. However, as a consultant, I should remind us all
that even if a person were “born” with a predisposition to a particular
sexuality, this does not thereby automatically imply God’s sanction of it.
The current state of the world is not fair. Some people are
born to great advantage and others to extreme poverty and destitution. Where
they are born does not imply God’s favor or disfavor. And here let me make it
known that I am an Arminian consultant, not a
Calvinist-Reformed one. The view of God that sees Him predestining the fate and
fortunes of everything that happens in the world seems incoherent if it also
claims that God is love. It seems incomprehensible that God loves “the world”
if he has consigned the majority of it to destruction in such a way that it
could not have been otherwise.
Accordingly, we should not assume that because something
happens in the world, it is thereby God’s “first choice” for what should happen in
the world. We should not assume that God planned the tsunami or Katrina. We
should not assume that God designed Down’s Syndrome. I
will not say definitively that He never plans or designs such things. But it is
not at all clear to me that He does. For whatever reason, God seems to let a
good deal of the world proceed by the normal, operating rules of cause and
effect. He can and does intervene at times, but perhaps most of the time, He
doesn’t. He will set everything aright at the end of time.
Christians refer to the current state of the world as “fallen.”
That means that the official Christian position on the state of the world is
that it has a lot of aspects that are not the way God wants them ultimately to
be. Accordingly, although a person may
not “choose” to have a homosexual orientation, that
does not automatically solve the question of legitimacy from a Christian point
of view.
Finally, I mention with great caution the topic of
healing. If we conclude that
homosexuality is an inclination to a certain type of sin, then we legitimately
ask whether God might heal a person of such an inclination. This is a very difficult matter to
address. On the one hand, we do not want
to underestimate the power of God or advocate a lack of faith. Much of the church today does not expect
miracles on so many issues and is content to pray for coping mechanisms. Would we get more if we asked for more with
greater faith?
At the same time, I have never known anyone to pray for an
amputated leg to heal or for someone to be healed of Down’s
Syndrome. I only say such things
to get my ignorance out on the table—I don’t know how homosexuality works, and
my sense is that very few adults end up changing their “orientation.” Is it a lack of faith? Is it because it is something God rarely
changes? I don’t know.
And so, with such prolegomena out of the way, our next stop
will be the Old Testament.
Leviticus 18 and 20
The two classic OT texts on the issue of homosexuality are
Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13:
Lev. 18:22: “With a male you will not lie from the beds of a woman. It is an
abomination.”
Lev. 20:13: “A man who lies with a male from the beds of a woman, they both do an
abomination. Dying they will die. Their blood is upon them.”
These verses both appear in the “holiness codes” of
Leviticus. The first appears in a chapter we might dub, “everything you want to
know about how not to have sex”
(Leviticus 18). The second appears in a related chapter that extends the
discussion of “abominable behavior” to punishments.
1. Let us first identify what these verses are about and what they are not
about. First, it seems overwhelmingly clear that these passages have at least
some form of male homosexual sex in view. The idiom “from the beds of a woman”
seems a clear reference to sexual activity. No comment is made on female
homosexual activity.
2. However, let us also note that these verses have no concept of what we today
call a homosexual “orientation.” The idea of an orientation seems by all
accounts a rather modern conception (roots in 19th century diagnoses of
homosexuality as a medical condition and then expanded in the 20th century as a
psychological orientation). It is doubtful that any biblical author understood
homosexuality in any terms other than sexual activity.
When the Bible refers to matters homosexual, it is thinking about sex, not lust
toward the same sex (which Christians can address under the heading of lust in
general). We think of homosexuals as a psychological
type of person; they thought of homosexuals as people who had sex with people of the same gender.
The Bible thus has nothing directly to say about what we might call a “celibate homosexual.”
The biblical authors were not thinking of such a person in any of their
indictments of matters homosexual.
3. There is nothing in the context of these two passages to suggest that
homosexual rape or some similar act of violence is in view. Indeed, Lev. 20:13 implicates both men in the abomination and consigns them
both to death. Passages in Deuteronomy absolve a wife from guilt when some man
commits adultery with her 1) if she screams in town or 2) if she is in the
country on the presumption that she screamed and no one was there to hear her.
While these are different parts of the Pentateuch from the verses in question,
no clause of this sort appears here. In short, these verses most likely imply
consensual sex between two males.
Further, the context of both verses is very general rather
than situational. These passages are laying down sexual activities that are
categorically abominable according to the holiness code.
4. Let us now address arguments made against the relevance of these verses to
today by those who might yet consider the New Testament authoritative. The line
of argument usually runs something like the following: there are many other
verses in Leviticus that hardly any Christian applies to today. The chapter in
between these two verses, for example, forbids sowing a field with two
different kinds of seed or wearing a garment with two different kinds of thread
woven together (Lev. 19:19). Almost everyone wears polyester without a second
thought, so why are so many Christians fanatical about
homosexual sex, the argument goes.
Further, very few Christians today would put homosexuals to
death any more than they would stone a disobedient son (cf. Deut. 21:18-21). So almost all Christians already acknowledge implicitly that God
has “loosened” the rules on these things somewhat and that not all of these
laws are binding on Christians today. So Christians are inconsistent
when they focus on one of these rules when they are ignoring so many others,
the argument goes.
Here I should make a few comments. It seems that as historic
Christians, the Jewish Scriptures only become Christian Scriptures—the “Old”
Testament—in the light of the New Testament and the invisible and universal
church that flowed thereafter. The key question for the Christian appropriation
of the OT is thus, “How does the NT appropriate these laws and or commandments?”
Here the answer seems fairly clear. While writers like Paul
and Matthew do some serious shifting of the OT’s meaning and priority, they do
not shift any of the sexual prohibitions of the OT. As far as we can tell, Paul
did not change the binding character of any of the sexual prohibitions of
Leviticus 18. Indeed, it seems more likely than not that Leviticus 18 gives us
the basic content of what Paul meant when he referred to porneia, “sexual immorality.” These
observations seem to imply that any change in the Christian view of homosexual
sex requires a substantial and fundamental alteration of its view of
practically all sexual activity.
We conclude that while the idea of “homosexual orientation”
was not on the map of Leviticus, its text enjoins a strict prohibition on male,
homosexual sex.
I do not think this passage is very relevant to the topic at
hand, except that it likely presupposes the attitude of Leviticus 18 toward
homosexual acts. But I do not think that Genesis 19 portrays the men of
We can see the nature of
We stop here to mention the nature of ancient virtue in
relation to hospitality of this sort. To entertain strangers was universally
considered a sacred duty, as Hebrews 13:2 reflects. I know our knee-jerk
response to taking hospitality so seriously is usually one of “you have to be
joking.” Such values seem trivial to our modern cultural viewpoint.
Nevertheless, this reaction comes from a lack of awareness of ancient culture
as well as a lack of awareness of our own glasses.
The Greek story of Baucis and
Philemon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
is an excellent case in point, a story that reverberates in the story of Paul
and Barnabas in Acts 13. In this story, the gods Zeus and Hermes disguise
themselves as humans and go around among humanity (cf. Heb. 13:2 here also). An
elderly couple finally welcomes them in after wholesale rejection by the rest
of the region. After the gods have revealed themselves, they destroy everyone
in the region except the elderly couple, whom they reward. The reason is the
impious inhospitality of the region toward strangers.
So when Abraham runs out to welcome the three angels to his
house in Genesis 18, it is not because he recognizes them as angels. Indeed, in
accordance with custom he doesn’t even find out their business until after he
has fed them. In short, Genesis presents Abraham as a virtuous man, a man who
entertains strangers according to the sacred duties of hospitality to
strangers. We notice that this story occurs right before the story of
Back to the story of the Levite and
the concubine in Judges. We note that after the old man of the house refuses to allow them
access to the Levite, they give them his concubine, whom they rape to death.
Notice that this is not a homosexual activity. In short, the central sin of
these men in Judges is their abominable behavior toward strangers, and
strangers of their own people nonetheless. From our perspective, their violent
rape of the concubine is also a massive sin, although Judges does not highlight
this element of the story. These men
were not homosexuals, for they went on to rape the
concubine. They were rapists—violent, faithless men.
So when we return to
A careful reading of the
The gospels confirm these connotations to the story in
Matthew 10:15 and Luke 10:12. In both passages, Jesus tells his followers that
it will be worse for the cities that reject them than it will be for
So the
Romans 1
I jump to the New Testament into Romans 1, the main NT text
relating to this issue.
In Romans 1:18-3:20, Paul is building toward the conclusion
he reaches in chapter 3, variously captured in 3:9, 20, and 23. Paul concludes
that all human beings are “under sin” whether they would be Jew or Gentile.
In building toward this conclusion, Paul begins with some
general comments in Romans 1 with which his audience would readily agree. These
arguments seem particularly targeted at a person who might consider him or
herself a “Jew” and “boast in God” (2:17). “You know the will of God and
approve of things that are excellent revealed from the Law and have become
convinced that you are leader of the blind, a light of those in darkness...”
Whether Paul has in mind a person who is ethnically Jewish or simply a
conservative Gentile Christian is not important for our purposes (the answer is
not as clear as one might think). But the person Paul has in mind is someone
who thinks they might boast about their knowledge of the law.
To set up such a person, to catch him or her in hypocrisy,
Paul presents a number of sins in Romans 1:18-32 that such a person might
readily rail against. While Paul never mentions Gentiles explicitly in these
verses, he invokes the two most stereotypical Gentile sins: idolatry (1:23) and
sexual immorality, homosexual sex in particular. This is a sting operation—not
that Paul doesn’t believe these things are sinful—it is just they are not the point
that he is really working toward. His real purpose is to show that anyone who
might boast in their own righteousness stands just as condemned as anyone else,
just as subject to the wrath of God as anyone mentioned in Romans 1.
These facts lead us to our first observation. Before a
person comes to Christ, all sins have the same effect and are thus, for all
intents and purposes, the same. Some of you will know that I do not believe
that all sins are of the same consequence after
we come to Christ. But before we
are justified by faith, all sins may as well be equal: they all imply that we
lack the glory God intended for us (3:23). Similarly, we are all just as easily
and freely justified by the blood of Christ (3:24). For all intents and purposes, homosexual sex is no
different from any other sin when it comes to the time before we have faith in
Christ. When we come to Christ, this sin is forgiven just as
much as any lie we might have told or any stealing we might have done or any
hateful word we might have said.
Romans 1:18-32 itself presents a process of abandonment by
God with a resultant deterioration into darkness and shame. We might capture
the train of thought as follows:
First, the wrath of God is against all human ungodliness
(1:18). Paul plays out this general statement in the rest of the chapter. The
starting point for such ungodliness among most humans is as follows. While the
invisible things of God should be clear to everyone (his eternal power and
divinity), humanity has not glorified God or given Him thanks accordingly. They
have exchanged the truth of God for a lie (1:23). They worshiped idols and
images rather than the true God. This comment alone makes it clear that Paul
primarily has Gentiles rather than Jews in view in Romans 1.
Three “He delivered” sections follow. Paul implies that in
response to the Gentile’s failure to acknowledge God as God, in response to
human idolatry, God lets a process of deterioration take place. God abandons
the pagan world to several consequences:
1. Therefore, God delivered them
to the desires of their hearts. This involves dishonoring their bodies among
themselves (1:24) and worshiping the creature rather than the Creator (1:25).
It is possible that Paul then plays out these two comments in the rest of the
chapter. In other words, 1:24-25 seem a kind of general statement whose
particulars appear in the rest of the chapter.
2. So 1:26-27 play out the first comment: Gentiles dishonored their bodies
among themselves. 1:26 says God
delivered them to dishonorable passions. Paul then enumerates
female and male homosexual sex. 1:26 speaks of women exchanging the natural use
for that beside nature (para physin). 1:27
then speaks of males leaving the natural use of the female and burning toward
one another, “males among males doing the shameful.”
3. 1:28-32 then play out the second comment on “exchanging the truth of God for
a lie” from 1:25. God delivered them
(1:28) to a worthless mind. What follows is a list of vices that Paul considers
“worthy of death” (1:32).
OK, now that we have presented the basic thrust of this
chapter, what might it contribute to the matter of Christianity and
homosexuality?
First of all, it seems clear that Paul believes homosexual sex of
both the male and female kind to be shameful, dishonorable, and unnatural. Paul
is not speaking of same-sex rape or pederasty or violence. He is speaking of a
man doing with a man what a man “naturally” does with a woman. Paul’s language
here evokes images of Leviticus 18 and 20. We might also mention that this is
the only reference in the Bible to female homosexual sex.
Some have argued at this point that the connection between
idolatry and homosexual acts points to male temple prostitution as what Paul
has in mind. Their argument is thus that Paul is only condemning homosexual sex
associated with a pagan temple here and not something like a monogamous
homosexual relationship. This argument seems highly unlikely to me. For one, I’m
not sure how common male-male temple prostitution was in the ancient world, in
fact if it even existed at this time. I have serious doubts about how prevalent
such a practice was.
All the evidence at our disposal indicates that homosexual
sex was considered dishonorable in most of the Roman world even by pagans. A
former student of mind reminded me of a reference to the emperor
Nero’s preference for “young men” at his court (Tacitus)
and how the text looked down on him for it.
Ancient
Second, Paul considers such desires the consequence of the Gentiles’
failure to acknowledge God properly. Because the Gentiles do not acknowledged
God as God, God has abandoned them to these desires. It is probably significant
to note a slight strangeness to this train of thought, for Paul makes it sound
like the entire pagan world, as a consequence of their idolatry, ends up
engaged in homosexual sex. The reason this is significant to note is because it
reveals that Paul is not thinking of the small segment of the human population
that we today would classify as homosexual. His argument is about the whole world, and the failure of the whole
pagan world to acknowledge God as God has lead, for
one thing, to sexual shame.
One difficult interpretive issue comes from Paul’s comment
that such people were working the shameful “and receiving the punishment among
themselves that was necessary because of their error” (1:27). What punishment
did Paul have in mind? Many turn at this point to something like AIDS or
venereal diseases as the punishment “in themselves.” But no mention is made of
physical consequences. Such a line of thought fits suspiciously with the way we
in a medically, scientifically oriented culture think—it seems anachronistic.
Given Paul’s honor-shame world, I think the most likely
answer is that the action itself is so shameful that it is its own punishment.
In other words, might we dynamically translate the statement something like the
following: “men with men working the shameful and thus receiving among
themselves the punishment of disgrace necessary given their error.” I am not
100% certain of this interpretation, but it seems the one most likely given the
way Paul’s world thought.
Third, it is not clear that Paul considers homosexual sin here
worse than the viceful individuals he mentions later
in the chapter. Indeed, it is those with vices in 1:29-31 that Paul speaks of
as worthy of death—people like slanderers. There is nothing in the chapter to
lead us to conclude that Paul meant to emphasize the homosexual sinners of
1:26-27 as worse than the others in the chapter. Indeed, if Paul were giving a
downward spiral—and I don’t necessarily think he is—then the sinners at the end
of the chapter would be worse than those in the middle.
To summarize: Paul considers homosexual sex of all kinds not only
as sinful, shameful, and unnatural, but he sees it as a consequence of a
failure to acknowledge God as God. However, Paul is not writing about a
specific group of people like homosexuals—a modern category—he is making a
universal argument about Gentiles as a whole and homosexual sex as the kind of
thing that results among pagans who do not believe in God. Sexual sins of this
sort are common to all
non-believers in general, not just a particular group with a certain
orientation, because Gentiles are pagan and idolatrous. Finally, Paul gives us
no indication that he considered homosexual sex as more sinful or a greater
object of God’s wrath than the other sinners at the end of the chapter.
The Rest of the New
Testament
There are two final references to homosexual sex in the New
Testament:
1 Corinthians 6:9-11: “Do you not know that he unrighteous will not inherit the
Let us first explore the 1 Corinthians 6 passage. The two
references of greatest interest to us are the terms I have translated as “male
prostitutes” (malakoi)
and “those who have homosexual sex” (arsenokoitai).
The word malakos basically means “soft,” and there is
legitimately room for some discussion of what Paul specifically has in mind.
Given its apparent connection with arsenokoites, the word that
follows, it seems to have some connection to homosexual sex. Unfortunately,
there are no other biblical passages that might shed light on its precise
meaning for Paul. There are two occurrences in the Septuagint and two in the
gospels, but they simply mean “soft.”
All in all, the explanation I have found most persuasive is
that it is a reference to the “passive” partner in homosexual sex as a
particular type of person. It thus has a sense of effeminacy in the sense of
regularly taking the “female’s role” in sex. Although we might think of other
contexts for such a person, a “male prostitute” surely comes close.
The word arsenokoites is
intriguing. Its appearance here and in 1 Timothy 1:10 is the first known use of
the word in all surviving Greek literature, leading some to believe that Paul
himself coined the term. I personally think this unlikely. The argument I find
most persuasive is that this verse is actually composed from the Leviticus 18
passage. In Greek, Leviticus 18:22 reads:
“And with a male (arsen) you
will not lie a woman-like bed (koite).”
You can easily see how Jews might have referred to the
content of this verse by the shorthand arseno-koites. An arsenokoites
is thus someone who lies with a man as a man lies with a woman. By the way, I
notice that one word that appears over and over in the Greek of Leviticus 18 is
aschemosyne (“shamefulness” or some such,
translating the Hebrew word “nakedness”). This is the very same word that
Romans 1 says men with men were “working.” Romans 1 thus
evokes images of Leviticus 18 in its discussion of male-male sex. Thus
one cannot simply reject Leviticus because it appears in the OT—Paul clearly
implies that its teaching on this subject continues into the new covenant. One
can of course disagree with Paul also, but it is not simply a matter of
Leviticus.
It thus seems likely that, in some way, Paul condemns the
behavior of those who might either be prone to submit themselves to the passive
role in homosexual sex (male prostitutes?) or who are prone to take the active
role in homosexual sex (NIV: “homosexual offenders”).
Again, let us try to be as precise as possible about what
Paul might be thinking. I believe that Paul is referring to activities, not to
characteristics a person might have apart from having sex. For example, I don’t
think for one minute that malakos
simply refers to some man who is effeminate. I insist that Paul means someone
who is taking the “female” role in sex.
Second, I don’t think getting drunk once got you on this
list as a drunkard. I don’t think that committing adultery once and then truly
repenting got you on this list as an adulterer (I say this without minimizing
the serious sinfulness of committing adultery even one time). I really believe
that Paul is speaking of people who habitually got drunk or habitually had
homosexual sex. Again, I do not thereby mean that a single instance of greed is
not a sin. But I think Paul is targeting repeat offenders in this list. You can
repent for one sin, but in my theology, you have to wonder how repentant a
person truly is when a person continues to do the same sin repeatedly.
And here let me remind you all that I am an Arminian and do not believe the Bible teaches unconditional
salvation. Paul is speaking to Christians at
Here let us critique the idea that homosexuality is a “double
sin.” I have heard some suggest that homosexuality is twice as bad as adultery
because it violates two rules at once: 1) sex outside of marriage and 2)
same-sex sex. On the one hand, I
acknowledge that I do not think that post-justification sins are all the same
in terms of their consequences—I do think there are bigger and lesser sins
post-conversion in terms of the damage they do to our relationship with God. As
I mentioned above, before we
come to Christ all sins may as well be the same. But I view sin after faith in
quasi-relational terms. So not every “sin” against my wife damages my
relationship with her to the same degree. All “sins” against my wife damage my
relationship with her, but not all sins damage it to the same extent.
Let’s say I forget our anniversary. I have done her wrong, I have “sinned” against her. I didn’t intentionally
forget, so I don’t think she would divorce me. Of course repentance is in
order. On the other hand, if I were to have an affair (intentionally seems the
only option here), our marriage might have difficulty
surviving without a lot of grace from God.
In the same way, some sins damage our relationship with
Christ more severely than others. If I neglect to pray or worship Him for a
couple weeks because I am pre-occupied, I am prepared to call that a sin (I don’t
wish to go down a rabbit trail of psychoanalysis of intentionality here). But I
think the damage can be repaired (in me, not in God) quickly. But if I curse
Christ and burn the Scriptures because an emperor is threatening to behead me,
perhaps the relationship would be severed immediately with Christ (and at some
point I may find myself unable to repent, cf. Heb. 12:17).
So I accept that it is possible that homosexual sex might be
more or less damaging to one’s relationship with God than other sins. But I consider this a matter for us to
wrestle with quite seriously—and one to which I have no authoritative
answer. Why would homosexual sin be more
severe than adultery if the individuals involved are not married?
1. Because of motive?
No doubt some engage in homosexual sex with a defiant attitude toward
God. But this is not true of all
homosexuals by any means.
2. Because of character?
No doubt some embrace a lifestyle of defiance toward God in their
homosexuality. Others wrestle with
homosexuality for years before they conclude they can’t wrestle with it
anymore. They live out their lives in a
kind of detached relationship to the church, sometimes attending with a part of
their lives they don’t know how to integrate with Christianity. They sin regularly according to 1 Corinthians
6:9, but they do not do so in defiance of God.
Yet we must take such “repeat offense” very seriously given
1 Corinthians 6:9. These verses imply
that repeat offenders will not inherit the
3. Is homosexuality a sin because of an act that has
negative consequences? God prohibits
some acts because they have negative consequences on individuals or social
structures. I am not qualified to say
what negative implications homosexuality might have on a social structure. I have heard doctors speak of physical
problems that sometimes result from male homosexual practice. Then there are of course various sexually
transmitted diseases. But on the whole,
it is not clear what immediate negative consequences consensual homosexual
relationships have on individuals and societies. This may again be my ignorance.
4. Because of an act that God has declared unclean in
itself? All in all, this domain seems
the one that best explains why God has prohibited homosexual sex. Prohibitions in this category do not need
explanations—they are simply what God has decreed. Uzzah dies when he
touches the ark because he is an unclean individual touching the holy. His motives or character do not matter.
So by these criteria is homosexual sex a worse sin than, for
example adultery? It depends primarily on
how one weights the final consideration above.
In motive or consequence it could well be less damaging to one’s
relationship to God than an adulterous affair or habitual lying or greed. But it is hard to know how the last category
harms our relationship to God on this issue, and 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 imply
disbarment from the
So let’s return to the “double sin” perspective, the idea
that we have two sins at once because a person is 1) having sex outside
marriage and 2) having it in a homosexual way.
With regard to the sin of
It is a small distinction but nevertheless one that I think
has consequences for this discussion. Paul believed that you should only have
sex within marriage because all other venues of having sex defiled you. Pop
Christian thought today believes that all other venues of having sex defile you
because you should only have sex within marriage. If this distinction is
correct, then homosexual sex is a single act of defilement, not a double
defilement. The intensity of sinfulness
depends only on the degree of “uncleanness” it represents in God’s eyes.
My comment on 1 Timothy will be brief:
1 Timothy 1:8-11: “Now we know that the Law is good if someone uses it lawfully, since we
know this fact: the Law is not in place for the righteous but for law-breakers
and the unruly, the godless and sinners, the unholy and profane, father and
mother-killers, murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice homosexual
sex, slave traders, liars, perjurors, and if there is
something else that is opposed to sound teaching according to the glorious
gospel of the blessed God, a gospel with which I have been entrusted.”
This is a peculiar way of putting things for Paul, for he
basically equates the Law with the 10 commandments in the specific sins he
mentions. Other letters in the Pauline corpus speak of the Law in relation to
boundary markers like circumcision and holy day observance. In any case, in
relation to the 10 commandments arsenokoites appears either in association with
adultery or perhaps covetousness. I’m not sure that this passage adds much new
to our discussion, although one might argue that this list is more severe than
the one in 1 Corinthians and thus that homosexual sin is more severe in degree
than some other sins (but note that lying is on this
list as well).
Summary: Paul considers homosexual sex to be sinful and indeed, if
one does not repent and if it persists, it can disbar one from the kingdom. But
it is not clear that Paul considers it a worse sin than adultery, perhaps even
than persistent greed or lying.
Wrapping Things Up
In the last several posts I have tried to run through the
biblical witness on the topic of homosexual sex as best I could. Here is an
attempt to place that witness into a flow.
I would say that there are at least two primary reasons why
things are prohibited in Leviticus and the other codes of the Pentateuch. One
set of reasons has to do with holiness, purity, and impurity. The other relates
to social consequences. In my opinion, sexuality is a particularly powerful
intersection of these two domains, one of the reasons why the New Testament
does not seem to alter its stance very much on sexual purity issues.
The lines of purity and impurity change on many issues
between the OT and the emergent NT church. For example, Mark says that Jesus
declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19). Paul says in Romans 14:14 that no food is
unclean in itself but if you think it is unclean, then it is unclean. I suspect
originally, many of the reasons for the purity rules had to do with setting
boundaries between
But Paul changes none of the lines of clean and unclean when
it comes to sexuality. Homosexual sex, sex with a prostitute,
sex with one’s step mother, these things meant defilement to him.
I have argued a number of things here, which I will now
summarize:
1. It is the unanimous position of all Scripture—at least insofar as the topic
is discussed—that homosexual sex is sinful and defiling. 1 Corinthians 6:9 says
that “homosexuals”—in the sense of those who habitually practice same-sex—will
not inherit the
2. The biblical authors do not directly address matters of “orientation.” Their
comments have to do with those who might habitually and constantly engage in
homosexual acts, not those who have desires on which they never act. Modern “homosexuals”
and ancient “homosexuals” are groups that overlap but that
are not exactly the same. For example, ancient homosexuals were likely
married and had children, even though they favored their own gender sexually.
3. Since Paul believes all sins imply a destiny of death for all, homosexual
sex has the same consequence as any other sin before coming to Christ.
4. Even after a person comes to
Christ, it is not clear that homosexual sex is ultimately more displeasing to God than other sins
like adultery, greed, or lying. The Bible considers it a sin, but it is a
matter for serious wrestling as to whether it is really the “sin of all sins”
as it is so often treated. The Bible
bids us take all sin seriously, but it is possible that much of Christianity
has it out of focus in terms of its intensity of sinfulness.
At this point a more knowledgeable soul would speak of the
attitude of the Christians of the ages on this topic. I do not have this
knowledge. However, informal discussion with Dr. Chris Bounds suggests that my
hunch is correct: throughout the centuries the overwhelming majority of
Christians have never looked favorably on homosexual sex. That is not to say
that post-Victorian English and American Christianity today may emphasize the
sinfulness of sexual sins more
than other Christians in other times and places. I have a hunch that this
latter statement is true, but lack the expertise either to confirm or deny it.
It seems unusual to be able to speak of such a continuous
and common position on an issue within Christianity. I believe that there is
such a thing as development in understanding within Christianity—we can discern
it on a number of subjects as we move from the OT to the church of the creeds
(e.g., the afterlife, the essence of God and His anointed one). But there seems to be little if any movement within Christianity on
the the matter of homosexual sex.
It seems to me the implications would be quite remarkable if
the church were to reverse its position on this issue. It might call into
question any host of near unanimous positions throughout the centuries. At the
very least, I think it would require Christians to overhaul and rethink
Christian views of sexuality across the board as it relates to purity and
defilement.
I do not wish to dismiss the struggle of many within
Christendom who sincerely wrestle with these issues. I know some genuinely find
their experiences and sense of the character of God and Christ incompatible
with the consensus of Scripture and the church on this matter. They would argue
for a change in viewpoint because of developments in the modern understanding
of sexuality and the body. They might argue that more fundamental principles of
Christianity play themselves out differently given these understandings. It
seems to me that the implications of such an argument would be staggering across
the board for historic Christianity, demanding a fundamental revision. Would
what was left even still be Christian?
Then there are others who call themselves Christians who
dismiss any authority of Scripture or the church without struggle, indeed speak
of Scripture and tradition with disdain. Many of these have gladly stepped out
of the flow of historic Christianity. They have rejected in part or whole the
historic foundations of the “apostles and prophets,” which I might somewhat
loosely connect to Scripture and tradition. We might call them “sociological
Christians” because their bodies belong to social groups that call themselves
Christian. Indeed, they probably do connect themselves in some way to some
element of Christian history or tradition. What a word means is how it’s used,
and no one can stop such individuals from using the word “Christian” of themselves.
But it is clear at the same time that this use of the word “Christian”
is out of continuity with the use of the word in the last 1900 centuries. Such
individuals have thus invented a new use of the word that contradicts the way
the word has been used for almost two millennia—and that on the most
fundamental level. In that sense they’re really part of a religious off-shoot
of Christianity. And since they hate so much about Christianity in its
historical essence, we have to wonder why they continue to call themselves “Christian”
at all? Why continue the linguistic tradition, the signifier, when you have
abandoned the substance or the signified?
There’s no shame in saying you can no longer call yourself a
Christian because you have come to disagree with its historic tenets. And I don’t
think that there is shame for those who believe themselves to be a prophetic
movement within the church. There are some who respect Scripture and the church
but believe that God is leading the church to a position they believe is more
Christ-like. I respect these individuals deeply. To me the shame is in those
who pretend like they are Christians when in fact they are haters of
Christianity. The shame is on those who act as if they are the true and
enlightened Christians because they disdain everything that has come before
them.
My very human and very fallible thoughts... May God lead His church into truth despite our failings!