Being Faithful to Scripture in God’s Creation: Taking a Second Look at Christian Homosexuality

If you have ever brought up the topic of homosexuality with a group of Christians, you might know the feeling that someone says, “The Bible says that homosexuality is a sin,” and then everybody nods and discussion ends. The lack of specificity in a label statement such as this belies a real lack of engagement with the issue of the acceptability of homosexuality among Christians. What does the Bible actually say about homosexuality? The answer to this question is important. In a prominent nationwide survey of un-churched young people, non-Christians (and nonpracticing Christians) associated Christian with anti-homosexual more than any other descriptive label. Ninety-one percent of them agreed with the statement “Christians are anti-homosexual.”

I understand that this is a politicized issue, and that this issue stirs up deep emotions. I am treading on contested ground by positing that homosexuality is not necessarily sinful, nor against God’s will. Most people think that orthodox Christians are unfailingly negative and militaristic toward homosexuality. However, most of the Christians that I know at Brown are not described by this statement. Many of us have gay friends. And, in fact, most of us do not condemn our friends’ sexuality to their faces. Is this a mere lack of courage, or is something else at work? How do we understand our commitment to them, and what does our Gospel have to say to them?

Scripture is not meant to speak to a vacuum, but rather to speak to our real-life experiences and desires. And when Scripture and life come together, we cannot help but that our experiences color, as well, our reading of the Bible. As hard as we try, a “pure” reading of the text is not possible. For instance, I once had an intense dream which forced me to consider the claims of Pentecostals with regards to the Bible for the first time. With this in mind, I acknowledge that my experiences of faithful, gay Christians have informed my viewpoint on homosexuality. I have known quite a few committed Christians who have come out as homosexuals, including some who live in committed, long-term relationships with their partners. Gary and Jim, who play organ and sing in my home church’s choir and who offered their house to my aunt for her wedding, have been together for thirty years. They were married last year in California, but Proposition 8 since annulled their wedding. Many of us have experiences of gay people here at Brown, as well, which may color our experiences in any number of ways. Few of us, however, know gay Christians, and our association with an entirely heterosexual church also informs our views of what a church should look like and how it should deal with gay people.

Our understanding of Scripture is informed by our experiences, and it should also be informed by the experiences of the author and the original audience of Biblical texts. We interpret Scripture in the light of the Gospel, in the light of the New Testament writers’ understandings of Jesus. Any Christian who has engaged in the reading of difficult passages of Scripture knows that sometimes this overarching idea – that God created a good world, that human beings have screwed it up, and that God sent Jesus into the world to reconcile Himself to us and to each other, to create a new heaven and new earth where all flourish and have intimate connection with God —needs to be applied to difficult passages of Scripture in order to make sense of them. Cultural context is also extremely important in understanding the true meaning of stories, letters and the Bible as a whole.

Scripture lacks a lot of statements about homosexuality. At most, eight passages deal with the topic (whereas 2,000 deal with poverty, for instance). Discussion centers, however, around three passages: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the law given in Leviticus, and Romans 1. Sodom and Gomorrah, describes two representatives of the Lord (who are implied to be very close to God himself) who meet Abraham and then travel to stay with Lot in Sodom. The men of the town demand that the men be brought out of Lot’s house so that they can rape them, and for that God destroys the town. The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah are inhospitality and attempting to rape an angel of God, not homosexuality.

Leviticus 20:13 says, “You shall not lie with man as with woman; it is an abomination.” This law must be interpreted in light of the purpose of the entire Jewish law, to distinguish the nation of Israel from other peoples. In fact, the word “abomination” implies not the same thing it does to us today, but rather something which makes the Israelites ritually unclean, such as violating kosher laws or having unwanted sexual discharges. Ritual purity was the way in which Jews were separated from other nations. Jesus’ fulfilling the law and universalizing the gospel makes these considerations obsolete for gentile Christians.

Romans 1 is the most difficult passage of the bunch. In it, Paul is making a polemic against idolatry in order

to emphasize the importance of the fact that Jesus’ salvation comes by faith, since no one has avoided idolatry and earned salvation for themselves. Writing from Corinth, the home of prostitutes, he denounces those idolaters he sees around him and says that because of their idolatry, “God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.”! Anti-homosexuality scholars contend that this passage demonstrates the Biblical basis for a natural order of heterosexuality. People commonly express this by saying, “The parts don’t fit.” Paul does describe the idolaters’ acts as unnatural. However, he also uses “unnatural” (physis, physical nature, not ktisis, or created nature) to describe men with long hair, for instance. While this was unconventional, it was certainly not against nature, or genetics, for men to grow long hair. In fact, Paul’s reason for believing that their acts were unnatural may have been the lack of male gender dominance in their sexuality, not the fact that they were same-sex relations. While Peter converted individuals to Christianity, Paul worked within the existing societal structure of male-headed households to spread the gospel. While Paul in some ways was a radical feminist for his time, he also spoke in ways that resonated with the culture (“For the husband is the head of his wife as Christ is head of the church”). Households were generally converted according to the will of the father, as everything else done in society would have been done. Homosexuality, which does not make a picture of male authority, was in this way entirely unconventional and probably looked down upon by ancient Christians as a practice of social rejects and freaks. Thus Paul laments the unconventionality of these homosexual relations, the way in which it made them seem like sinners, rather than denouncing the act itself. If men and women are not the only physical partners for each other, anti-homosexuality scholars often contend that they are necessary metaphysical partners for each other, that they form the perfect team for life. However, this position is against Paul’s, who believes that men and women should be single if they are able to do so.

Unconventional sexuality is both a punishment for and a result of idolatry in this passage. He describes this group of sexual deviants as “full of every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; …they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy”. 9 Does this description accurately describe our gay friends today? What about the gay people that we know who are not idolaters of this type? Today’s cultural landscape of some level of tolerance for homosexuals means that more “normal” people feel safe in coming out. Paul may not be speaking about the same people that we are speaking about. In another way, however, Paul is speaking to everyone. He uses this passage to tell everyone, including the Christian congregation, that they are sinners as well and need to be reminded of his main point – that Jesus saves all by faith, not by our own perfection. Thus, this passage either does not describe today’s homosexuals, or it describes them only to the extent to which it describes everyone.

Multiple readings of this passage are possible, but the one that makes the most sense with my experiences, with Paul’s point in the passage and the overall salvific message of the Bible, and in the context of the first century, is the one that does not condemn homosexuality outright. The prudent course is to drop our opposition to it. Attempts at curing homosexuality, such as ex-gay treatments, are rarely successful at preventing gay behavior, and never successful at stopping gay attraction. Also, I know that when I tell people that I support gay marriage, they are more willing to dialogue with me about the crux of Christianity as well. But this is not only the practical path, but the right one. God has created us and our sexuality good, and this statement applies to gay people as well as straight ones. Coming out as a gay person is an incredibly challenging process of discovering and asserting one’s identity; it is hard enough without Christians denouncing them. Wouldn’t it be better if, instead, during this process of self-discovery gay people knew that God loved them, created them to be who they know themselves to be, and were offered God’s healing grace just the way that straight people are?