Understanding Homosexuality in Biblical and Contemporary Times

Understanding Homosexualitin Biblical and Contemporar

Last semester, a lot of ink was spilled, statements made, and protests enacted over the perennial issue of Intervarsity’s (and by extensions SCF’s) stance on Christianity and LGBTQ issues. But in the furor over what the administration may or may not do and how the Christian community should organize itself, there has been little theological discussion. Reading over the quotes of SCF members in the Swarthmore Voices article, and commentary in campus publications, I was surprised at the vagueness of arguments on both sides: “you can context your way out of anything” on the non-affirming side, and little more than “Jesus never said anything about it” on the affirming side. These are obviously deficient—the Bible is inscrutable (and uninteresting) when read outside of its historical and moral context, and while Jesus never mentioned homosexuality explicitly, Paul certainly did, as did most every Church Father. In this article, I want to start a respectful, faithful conversation about this complex topic. The focus will be narrow: I have no desire to talk about campus politics, and I’ll be dealing only with the Biblical passages on homosexuality (the topic of transgender deserves to be discussed in a separate article by someone who knows more than me). This won’t settle the debate, of course: abstract arguments rarely do, and I’m speaking without any church authority or theological qualifications (I suppose student publications take what they can get). But I hope to

show a brief overview of the “affirming” stance by first dealing with the issue of Biblical interpretation, then what the Bible says about marriage, and finally with some of what are known as the “clobber verses:” the seven passages (out of roughly 31,000 verses!) that directly mention homosexuality.

A criticism often made of the affirming case is that it undermines Biblical authority by relativizing scripture. The accusation that liberals (on this issue) who emphasize reading Leviticus and Paul in light of their respective histories “context their way out of anything,” reducing specific Biblical claims to vague calls to justice and love, is actually not without some merit. I’m baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal church, and there can often be a tendency to gloss over or intellectualize parts of the Bible we find uncomfortable. And I actually think Mainliners are more guilty of this than those in other denominations. I can’t recall gay marriage being explored in anything more than a cursory way in my church; it was like the issue was so clear it didn’t merit any discussion. That was a mistake. Paul is not some backwards preacher to be left in the past, nor was he a passive supporter of cultural norms during his time. If Christians say the Bible is the Word of God, it requires serious thought and reflection, not just appropriation of the parts we like.

Of course, the opposite and equal sin is to hold the Bible over

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yy Times

by James Sutton

and against tradition, reason, and experience. That is a false choice. Sola Scriptura is actually self-refuting, given that the Bible did not descend in one piece from the heavens, but was written over thousands of years and not canonized until centuries after Christ, by church authorities using tradition, reason, and experience (and of course aided by the Holy Spirit). To assume the Bible should be read “out of context” (whatever that means), is wrong, and I don’t believe anyone who is serious can believe that consistently. It would be absurd

But the fact is, marriage in the Bible continually evolves.

to eliminate historical context from prohibitions on men wearing their hair long, on the complex interplay of Jesus’ teachings with contemporary morality, and the assumption that slavery is normal and tolerable found in the Bible. In fact, to really understand what God is saying to us in the Bible, we have to understand the moral logic behind claims made by the Old Testament writers and Paul. In his exhaustive survey of the Biblical passages dealing with homosexuality, Bible, Gender, Sexuality, Biblical scholar James Brownson discusses how the conversations the church is now having about LGBTQ Christians mirror previous encounters with social changes that conflicted with Biblical assumptions. Debates over slavery, over women in leadership, and even the decisions of Jewish Christians

in Acts to stop keeping kosher “caused people to go back to the biblical texts and read them with fresh eyes—looking more deeply and searching for different underlying values and forms of moral logic that they had not seen so clearly before.” 1 And these are not simply cases of human reason being used to “disprove” the Bible or obeying divine voices from the blue. The “leading of the Holy Spirit” spoken of in Acts means a complex process of prayer, history, wisdom, and experience interacting to form what we call “discernment.”The early Christian community chose to not only defy Old Testament law but also the urgings of Jesus, who commanded his followers to keep the old law 2 : the Christ present in his Church is not quite the same thing as the Jesus of history.

Those on the traditionalist side of the debate often claim that the Bible teaches marriage is between a man and a woman, or at least between men and women. But the fact is, marriage in the Bible continually evolves. While the first marriage between Adam and Eve may seem fairly normal to our modern ears, the rest of the Old Testament is filled with examples of polygamy, which was condemned in the New Testament and the early Church. But even the people described in the New Testament would have been entirely

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comfortable with many kinds of marriage that Christians today reject: significant age differences (including between children and adults), cousins marrying cousins, and marriages in which the wife has essentially no independence. The question, then, is to separate the moral logic (to use Brownson’s term) behind marriage from what is a cultural assumption in the Bible. It’s helpful to think about it in terms of background and foreground: some things (like polygamy and slavery) may be in the front of the Biblical “stage,” but the background (selfgiving love, compassion, fairness) is what really matters.

Fine, answer many traditionalists. The moral logic of the Bible is still incompatible with gay marriage—marriage is presented as procreative and, importantly, complementary—that is, men and women were made for each other, and we don’t get to seperate our inner experience from our outer reality. This argument about complementarity mostly rests on the quotation “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” 3 The language the Bible uses to describe marriage is that of the “one flesh” bond. While some traditionalists interpret this as saying that marriage essentially makes human beings “complete,” uniting an original whole, Brownson notes this is incorrect. For example, a man “leaving his father and mother” to become “one flesh” with his wife, does not mean that a man strikes out on his own and establishes the bond of intimacy with his spouse. Men in the ancient Mediterranean would live on their parents’ property with their wives, first of all. The “one flesh” language points to an establishment of new kinship bond, which

is related to sexual intimacy but was not always the same thing. Additionally, the idea of humans only being “complete” when united with the opposite sex in marriage subordinates single people by asserting that the imago dei is somehow less expressed in them, an odd assumption given the facts that Jesus, Paul, and every nun and monk throughout history were celibate (well, ideally every monk and nun).

The argument from procreation is also flawed in light of the Bible and Church tradition. Brownson notes that the “entire discussion of ‘one flesh’ in Genesis (and indeed, throughout the Bible) takes place without even a hint of concern for procreation.” 1 Paul writes rather confusingly of marriage, relegating it to basically a fallback option, but then hesitantly saying the union might be compared to “Christ and his Church.” 4 Again, no mention whatsoever of procreation. It is worth noting that comparing the Church to the “Bride of Christ” does not exactly lend itself to gender complementarity, as well. Throughout the Bible, marriages that produce no children are regarded as valid, and even Roman Catholics allow marriage between infertile partners. While having children can be an example of the self-giving love embodied in the “one flesh” bond, it is not essential to it. And raising children is by no means the exclusive province of heterosexuals.

So how then might we think about marriage as Christians? What is the moral logic behind marriage and intimacy in the Bible? As an unmarried 19 year old, I think it’s best to defer to someone with more authority than myself. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in an essay entitled “The Body’s Grace,” put into

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words what I cannot really do justice to (I highly recommend reading it for yourself ). He says that love, sex, and marriage are about “how much we want our bodily selves to mean rather than what emotional needs we're meeting or what laws we're satisfying.” 5 And as Paul said, “Does this mean that we are using faith to undermine law? By no means: we are placing law itself on a firmer footing!” 5 For Williams, and for affirming Christians, intimacy is understood as grace, as a further expression of the divine love that delights in us and forms us. Williams: “We are led into the knowledge that our identity is being made in the relations of bodies, not by the private exercise of will or fantasy: we belong with and to each other, not to our "private" selves (as Paul said of mutual sexual commitment), and yet are not instruments for each other's gratification.” To belong with and to each other is risky, is often unsettling, and does not line up neatly with the individualism of our secular culture. But maybe it can be “like Christ and his Church.”

Now that I’ve cleared up some misconceptions about marriage in the Bible, the passage that most explicitly mentions homosexuality should be examined. I’ll put it here in full:

“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and

in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” 7

Here Paul is describing the behavior of Roman citizens in his (in)famous epistle. While there are other mentions of homosexuality in the New Testament, they appear in lists of other sins—this passage is the only one that expands upon it. In its larger context, this passage is one among a succession, which identifies the universality of human sin. Then, after stirring his readers to indignant heights, Paul points out their hypocrisy in Romans 2:1: “Therefore you have noexcuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” Rhetorically brilliant, but also puzzling. Given that Romans 1 is written to first get readers on Paul’s side by identifying behaviors they would regard as contemptible, how could they be “doing the same thing” as the Romans he condemns in the previous chapter?

The recipients of Paul’s epistle were not, in fact, engaging in the homosexual acts he condemns. But they were committing the sin of judgmentalism, and Paul equates it with the out-of-control lust of Romans 1. For Paul, excessive lust was a manifestation of the human desire to elevate oneself at the expense of others, to acquire honor by de-

For Paul, excessive lust was a manifestation of the human desire to elevate oneself at the expense of others, to acquire honor by degrading others.

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But whether or not Romans is talking about excessive lust in general or the Emperor specifically, it is miles removed from our modern knowledge of sexual orientation, which is generally innate and highly resistant to change.

grading others. In Romans, judgmentalism and excessive lust exist on the same spectrum. Homosexual acts are identified as men (whether this text refers to homosexual women is unclear) leaving “natural” sexual activity for “unnatural” to satisfy their unbounded desires. With what we know about views of homosexuality in Paul’s era, this is an entirely non-controversial claim. There was no concept of homosexual “orientation;” there were only men who were so lustful, so desirous of dominance that they slept with other men. And this did in fact happen. Many Biblical scholars view Romans as directly referencing the court of the Emperor Caligula,whose excesses might have included raping young boys and his sisters. In fact, Brownson notes the mention of the sinners receiving “their just reward” could easily be a reference to Caligula’s murder by being stabbed in the genitals.

But whether or not

Romans is talking about excessive lust in general or the Emperor specifically, it is miles removed from our modern knowledge of sexual orientation, which is generally innate and highly resistant to change. Modern gay couples who wish to enter a sanctified, covenantal marriage before God could hardly be accused of having “excessive” lust, given that their relationships would not display any of the self-seeking, intense, and deeply destructive behavior of the men in Romans. And moreover, queer men and women do not “leave behind” any kind of “natural” relations. That would imply being heterosexual in the first place. They are not. They simply

are how they are, members of the created universe and bearers of the imago dei in the same ways as straight people.

That is why almost every modern Christian who does not affirm same sex marriage is left in a very strange position: arguing for what Williams calls the “extraordinary idea that sexual orientation is an automatic pointer to the celibate life; almost as if celibacy before God is less costly, even less risky, for the homosexual than the heterosexual.” This view fundamentally distorts the time-honored tradition of celibate vocation in the Church, first of all. But more importantly for my purposes here, it draws a line between homosexual orientation and homosexual behavior that cannot be argued from Scripture. In the Bible, homosexual behavior is a manifestation of excessive lust; destructive inner desires causing sinful outward behavior. In the Gospels, Jesus lays out a similar moral code in his (intentionally hyperbolic) equation of anger towards a neighbor with murder. For a Christian, anger must be repented of as well as violence, and hopefully that process of continual repentance leads to a path away from anger. If this moral logic is applied consistently, a gay, celibate Christian who continues to experience her innate and persistent feelings of romantic love, attraction, and affection for members of the same sex must possess a disordered and sinful inner state that she must repent of. It is difficult even to say where the line can be drawn; certainly not just at sex. What about inadvertently falling in love, or simple attraction? What about admiring a beautiful person? What about basic friendship with a person of the same sex? Even the ontology of Christians who accept and practice this “welcoming but not affirming” approach is Biblically wrong: Paul is saying their “sinful desires” stem

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from a dangerously lustful and prideful interior state, not any kind of sexual orientation. Romans simply does not describe the experience of gay Christians today.

All of this does not necessarily mandate

the acceptance of queer

love in the Church.

There could plausibly

be

other

arguments

that gay marriage is

incompatible

with

Christianity;

most

prominently the Roman

Catholic belief in

procreative

marriage.

They just wouldn’t have very much to do with what Paul and the rest of the Bible actually say. And the fact of the matter is that the Church’s rejection of gay people has been one of its greatest sins—you don’t need to be affirming to recognize this point. The Church has caused people to live their lives in fear, without hope or understanding, condemning something that is at the core of their being. Every sham marriage, every child kicked out of the home, every AIDs sufferer left untreated like a modern-day leper should be mourned by the Church. And while the recent moderation of most conservative churches is certainly an improvement, mandating the vocation (a contradiction in terms) of celibacy to queer Christians results in outcomes that are hardly representative of the “good fruit” Christ promises: higher rates of depression, loss of faith, and suicide.

What is extraordinary to a straight person like myself is the simple truth there have always been gay Christians. Without any comfort from the Church, with a numbing lack of hope and understanding, gay people have somehow stayed in, time and time again, and are surely present in the

“great cloud of witnesses,” even if they were only ever told they were condemned during their lives. I think about Christians from my own tradition: the rector of my parish in the 1970s, who came out in a sermon to

Every sham marriage, every child kicked out of the home, every AIDs sufferer left untreated like a modern-day leper should be mourned by the Church.

his congregation, before there had been any glimmer of the Church beginning to change. The gay Christians who have been fellow parishioners, chaplains, andministers. And the great Anglican hymn “My Song is Love Unknown,” set to a “melody of ineffable tenderness” by the composer John Ireland, a repressed gay man in 1920s Britain who somehow managed to retain the hope of Christ’s saving love: My song is love unknown, My Saviour’s love to me; Love to the loveless shown, That they might lovely be. O who am I, That for my sake My Lord should take Frail flesh, and die? r

Endnotes 1. Brownson, James V. Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships. Eerdmans, 2013. 2. Matthew 5:18 3. Genesis 2:24 4. Ephesians 5:32 5. Williams, Rowan. “The Body's Grace.” Michael Harding Memorial Address. 1989. 6. Romans 3:31 7. Romans 1:24-27

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