Some Thoughts on Same-Sex Practice from Scripture

One of the issues roiling mainline Christianity in the United States is same-sex practice: should it be condemned, tolerated, celebrated? Should those who participate in such practice be disciplined, tolerated, ordained to leadership office? Even my own denomination, the Reformed Church in America (RCA), after disciplining a prominent minister and seminary president for performing a same-sex “wedding” ceremony, voted to conduct a three-year study of the issue.

I wish to offer a few thoughts on same-sex practice from my engagement with Scripture. Traditionally the Bible has been regarded as authoritative by Christianity; even today most mainline denominations have some sort of statement recognizing Biblical authority. So, some thoughts on same-sex practice. (I am refraining from using the terms “homosexual” and “lesbian” because the Bible does not operate from modern psychological assumptions; rather than speaking of homosexuality, it speaks of same-sex sex.) All biblical quotations are from the NRSV translation.
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Some conservative Christians begin their statement of opposition by quoting from Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lie with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.” This verse reiterates and establishes the punishment for the action prohibited in Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Notice that nothing is mentioned regarding consensual or nonconsensual sex, nor about age and/or power differences. The practice itself is condemned absolutely. Those Christians who defend or tolerate same-sex practice usually respond by pointing out that no Christian group, no matter how conservative, follows the entire Old Testament Law. True enough. I want, as a beginning, to look to the New Testament to see if an Old Testament command is continued. And I find that indeed just as same-sex practice placed one outside the covenant community in the Old Testament, so also same-sex practice places one outside the New Testament covenant community. For example, in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11a Paul wrote “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be.” Other New Testament Scriptures make the same point, for example 1 Timothy 1:10: “. . . fornicators, sodomites, slave traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching . . .”.

The term “sodomite” comes, of course, from the Old Testament story of Sodom told in Genesis 19. In that story two angels in the form of men have been sent by God to see if Sodom is indeed as wicked as reported. Staying the night in the house of Lot (nephew of Abraham), their sojourn is interrupted: “But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.’” (Verses 4-5) The crowd turns down Lot’s offer of his two virgin daughters instead, and attempts to force their way into the house. The household is saved by the angels who blinded or dazzled the eyes of the crowd. At dawn the following morning the city and its neighbors are destroyed by a rain of “sulfur and fire.” Several years ago I heard a preacher on the radio state that if God did not punish the United States for condoning homosexuality, God would have to dig up Sodom and apologize to it. Those Christians who defend or tolerate same-sex practice make the point that the crowd was attempting a gang-rape; therefore the sin of Sodom really was violence and injustice, not consensual adult sex between men. There is a point here, but the New Testament will not allow us to set aside the same-sex nature of the attempted assault. Jude 7 declares “Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which, in the same manner as they, indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.”

The most powerful Old Testament Scriptures contradicting same-sex practice, I think, are the creation narratives of Genesis 1 & 2. In Genesis 1:27-28: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over . . .” God created humans as male and female. Indeed, some have asserted that it is in this complimentary duality of human male and female that the image of God resides.. In Genesis 2:15, 21-25: “Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ . . . So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.’ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Again, God created humans as man and woman having complimentary differences and built-in mutual attraction and need for one another. In these passages the creation of the human species as male and female is linked clearly to procreation, an activity between the opposite sexes, not same-sex sex. In my experience, those Christians who defend or tolerate same-sex practice, attempt to set-aside the heterosexual implications of these verses by stating that not all men or women marry or engage in sex and are not less human for that; not all male-female sex leads to procreation; and, tying sex to procreation means opposing contraception—positions not taken by conservative Christians. However, it does seem to me that since same-sex sex is inherently nonprocreative, it is in a different class than barrenness or contraception. And, to borrow from C.S. Lewis, to say that humans can perceive color is not a statement absolutely invalidated by pointing out someone who is colorblind. Sometimes liberal Christians attempt to ignore these passages by dismissing them as mere myths, forgetting that myths are intended to tell truths, and that since these stories are in Scripture they cannot be dismisses as mere myths. Finally, Jesus himself referred to the account in Genesis 2 when explaining marriage and divorce in Matthew 19:3-9 and parallels. It seems to me that the Genesis stories portray humanity as created heterosexually male and female.

Paul assumes this interpretation in Romans 1:18-32. The passage is so crucial to the current debate that I quote it in spite of its length. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature . . . have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God . . . 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 . . . 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 person the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. . . . They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.” While Paul is here specifically addressing non-Jews (he condemns his fellow Jews later), he is in effect telling his own story of the Fall of humanity. Humans denied what might be known about God in creation and turned to idols, false religion. This turn away from God has had as a consequence a fall away from true humanity; people are not what they were created to be as seen in all sorts of things, especially same-sex sex, a disordering of creation. Paul is not here trying to give a history of each individual person (clear in his later consignment of all humans into the category of sinner through Adam), but rather a history of the human race that may be seen in Greco-Roman society. Unequivocally Paul regards same-sex sex as a manifestation of the sinfulness of the fallen human race. Those Christians who defend or tolerate same-sex sex argue that Paul is not talking about people who have a natural same-sex inclination, but those who have a natural heterosexual orientation but turn to same-sex practice. This argument imports modern psychological categories back into Paul’s thought, and, ignores the nature of Paul’s examination of human history. For Paul, same-sex practice is an example of the human creation fallen into disorder.

This insight helps to counter a common argument by those wanting to justify same-sex practice for Christians. I have heard the statement made several times “God just made me (them) homosexual. It’s not a choice. Since God created me (them) with a desire for the same sex, that is what I (they) should practice.” Such an assertion ignores the metanarrative of the Bible (the overarching plot), one facet of which Paul is explaining in Romans 1. The overarching plot (metanarrative) is Creation, Fall, Redemption, Salvation. Between Creation and present existence lies the Fall away from God and our created humanness, the Original Sin that set humanity, and the world, on a destructive path. We don’t say of a baby, “God created her with a cleft palate, so let’s celebrate the way God made her and affirm her in her birth condition." I have a genetic disposition to depression and anxiety: rather than affirming this as my birthright, I take medication and try to engage in a healthy lifestyle. My point, to be redundant, is that the Bible’s metanarrative does not permit us to take the way we were born as God’s affirming creation of our personhood. We are born into a fallen world as a member of a fallen race and that fallenness manifests itself in various disorders.

There are no Scriptures to line up on the other side of the issue; passages that affirm same-sex practice. It also is not valid, I think, to compare same-sex practice to slavery. By that I mean, some argue that we must use the Gospel as a critique on other Scriptures. For example, for centuries most of the Church defended slavery, citing its regulation in the Old Testament and New Testament, and the ownership of slaves by people like Abraham. Those Christians who defend or tolerate same-sex sex often argue that just like it took the Church a long time to realize that slavery was incompatible with Christ’s gospel, so now we should realize that “discrimination” in the church against those who engage in same-sex sex is incompatible with Christ’s gospel—‘come unto me all you that labor and are heavy laden’ is for gays and lesbians as well as straights. However, the comparison is false: nowhere in Scripture does slavery receive grounding in the very order of creation: there is nothing resembling “slave and free he created them” to correspond to “male and female he created them.” Furthermore, regulation of something is not the same as endorsement of it, a fact Jesus made abundantly clear when he stated that God did not intend divorce but tolerated and regulated it because of human sin. And, nowhere does the New Testament exclude slaves from the covenant community. Regarding the gospel invitation, Jesus did not say come as you are and stay as you are: to the woman taken in adultery he said, “neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”

People with same-sex desires and even those who have practiced same-sex sex, I think, are to be welcomed into the church, just like drunkards, adulterers, and greedy yuppies. But, once in the church the rules of the house apply. Do not live a life of greed; do not commit adultery; do not get drunk; and do not engage in same-sex sex. For some this will be difficult. Indeed. An AA group meets in our church fellowship hall two nights a week. The desire may remain. But, the Bible is clear that such desire is not to be acted upon.