But according to the traditional interpretation of
Scripture, as a Christian, I am uniquely excluded from that possibility
for love, for companionship, and for family. But unlike someone who
senses a calling from God to celibacy, or unlike a straight person who
just can’t find the right partner, I don’t sense a special calling to
celibacy, and I may well find someone I grow to love and would like to
spend the rest of my life with.
But if that were to happen, following
the traditional interpretation, if I were to fall in love with someone,
and if those feelings were reciprocated, my only choice would be to walk
away, to break my heart, and retreat into isolation, alone. And this
wouldn’t be just a one-time heartbreak. It would continue throughout my
entire life. Whenever I came to know someone whose company I really
enjoyed, I would always fear that I might come to like them too much,
that I might come to love them.
And within the traditional
interpretation of Scripture, falling in love is one of the worst things
that could happen to a gay person. Because you will necessarily be
heartbroken, you will have to run away, and that will happen every
single time that you come to care about someone else too much. So while
you watch your friends fall in love, get married, and start families,
you will always be left out. You will never share in those joys yourself
– of a spouse and of children of your own. You will always be alone.
Well, that’s certainly sad, some might say, and I’m
sorry for that. But you cannot elevate your experience over the
authority of Scripture in order to be happy. Christianity isn’t about
you being happy. It’s not about your personal fulfillment. Sacrifice and
suffering were integral to the life of Christ, and as Christians, we’re
called to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses, and to follow Him.
This is true. But it assumes that there’s no doubt about the correctness
of the traditional interpretation of Scripture on this subject, which
I’m about to explore. And already, two major problems have presented
themselves with that interpretation.
The first problem is this: In
Matthew 7, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns against false
teachers, and he offers a principle that can be used to test good
teaching from bad teaching. By their fruit, you will recognize them, he
says. Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A
good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.
Good teachings, according to Jesus, have good consequences.
That
doesn’t mean that following Christian teaching will or should be easy,
and in fact, many of Jesus’s commands are not easy at all – turning the
other cheek, loving your enemies, laying down your life for your
friends. But those are all profound acts of love that both reflect God’s
love for us and that powerfully affirm the dignity and worth of human
life and of human beings.
Good teachings, even when they are very
difficult, are not destructive to human dignity. They don’t lead to
emotional and spiritual devastation, and to the loss of self-esteem and
self-worth. But those have been the consequences for gay people of the
traditional teaching on homosexuality. It has not borne good fruit in
their lives, and it’s caused them incalculable pain and suffering. If
we’re taking Jesus seriously that bad fruit cannot come from a good
tree, then that should cause us to question whether the traditional
teaching is correct.
The second problem that has already presented
itself with the traditional interpretation comes from the opening
chapters of Genesis, from the account of the creation of Adam and Eve.
This story is often cited to argue against the blessing of same-sex
unions: in the beginning, God created a man and a woman, and two men or
two women would be a deviation from that design. But this biblical story
deserves closer attention. In the first two chapters of Genesis, God
creates the heavens and the earth, plants, animals, man, and everything
in the earth.
And He declares everything in creation to be either good
or very good – except for one thing. In Genesis 2:18, God says, “It is
not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for
him.” And yes, the suitable helper or partner that God makes for Adam is
Eve, a woman. And a woman is a suitable partner for the vast majority
of men – for straight men. But for gay men, that isn’t the case. For
them, a woman is not a suitable partner.
And in all of the ways that a
woman is a suitable partner for straight men—for gay men, it’s another
gay man who is a suitable partner. And the same is true for lesbian
women. For them, it is another lesbian woman who is a suitable partner.
But the necessary consequence of the traditional teaching on
homosexuality is that, even though gay people have suitable partners,
they must reject them, and they must live alone for their whole lives,
without a spouse or a family of their own.
We are now declaring good the
very first thing in Scripture that God declared not good: for the man
to be forced to be alone. And the fruit that this teaching has borne has
been deeply wounding and destructive.
This is a major problem. By holding to the
traditional interpretation, we are now contradicting the Bible’s own
teachings: the Bible teaches that it is not good for the man to be
forced to be alone, and yet now, we are teaching that it is. Scripture
says that good teachings will bear good fruit, but now, the reverse is
occurring, and we say it’s not a problem.
Something here is off;
something is out of place. And it’s because of these problems and these
contradictions that more and more Christians have been going back to
Scripture and re-examining the 6 verses that have formed the basis for
an absolute condemnation of same-sex relationships. Can we go back, can
we take a closer look at these verses, and see what we can learn from
further study of them?
What are these 6 verses? There are three in the Old
Testament and three in the New Testament, so I’ll go in order of their
appearance in Scripture. In the Old Testament, we have the story of the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 as well as two
prohibitions in Leviticus 18 and 20. And in the New Testament, we have a
passage by Paul in Romans 1, as well as two Greek terms in 1
Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1.
To begin, let’s look at Genesis 19, the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Genesis 18, God and two angels come in the
form of men to visit Abraham and Sarah at their tent alongside the Dead
Sea. Abraham and Sarah do not yet realize who they are, but they show
them lavish hospitality nonetheless.
Halfway through the chapter, God –
now beginning to be recognized by Abraham – tells him “[t]he outcry
against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I
will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that
has reached me.” Abraham’s nephew, Lot, and Lot’s family, live in
Sodom, and so Abraham bargains with God, and gets Him to agree not to
destroy the city if He finds even 10 righteous people there.
At the start of the next chapter, in Genesis 19,
the two angels arrive in Sodom, still in the form of men. Lot invites
them to spend the night in his home, and he prepares a meal for them.
But beginning in verse 4, we read the following: “Before they had gone
to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and
old—surrounded the house.
They called to Lot, “Where are the men who
came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with
them.” Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him and
said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two
daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you,
and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these
men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”
But the men keep threatening, so the angels strike
them with blindness. Lot and his family then flee from the city, and God
destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone. The destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah was not originally thought to have anything to do
with sexuality at all, even if there is a sexual component to the
passage we just read.
But starting in the Middle Ages, it began to be
widely believed that the sin of Sodom, the reason that Sodom was
destroyed, was homosexuality in particular. This later interpretation
held sway for centuries, giving rise to the English term “sodomy,” which
technically refers to any form of non-procreative sexual behavior, but
at various points in history, has referred primarily to male same-sex
relations.
But this is no longer the prevailing interpretation of this
passage, and simply because later societies associated it with
homosexuality doesn’t mean that’s that what the Bible itself teaches. In
the passage, the men of Sodom threaten to gang rape Lot’s angel
visitors, who have come in the form of men, and so this behavior would
at least ostensibly be same-sex.
But that is the only connection that
can be drawn between this passage and homosexuality in general, and
there is a world of difference between violent and coercive practices
like gang rape and consensual, monogamous, and loving relationships.
No
one in the church or anywhere else is arguing for the acceptance of gang
rape; that is vastly different from what we’re talking about.
But the men of Sodom wanted to rape other men, so
that must mean that they were gay, some will argue. And it was their
same-sex desires, and not just their threatened rape, that God was
punishing. But gang rape of men by men was used as a common tactic of
humiliation and aggression in warfare and other hostile contexts in
ancient times. It had nothing to do with sexual orientation or
attraction; the point was to shame and to conquer.
That is the
appropriate background for reading this passage in Genesis 19, which,
notably, is contrasted with two accounts of generous welcome and
hospitality – that of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 and Lot’s own
display of hospitality in Genesis 19. The actions of the men of Sodom
are intended to underscore their cruel treatment of outsiders, not to
somehow tell us that they were gay.
And indeed, Sodom and Gomorrah are referred to 20
times throughout the subsequent books of the Bible, sometimes with
detailed commentary on what their sins were, but homosexuality is never
mentioned or connected to them. In Ezekiel 16:49, the prophet quotes God
as saying, “’Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her
daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the
poor and needy.” So God Himself in Ezekiel declares the sin of Sodom to
be arrogance and apathy toward the poor.
In Matthew 10 and Luke 10,
Jesus associates the sin of Sodom with inhospitable treatment of his
disciples. Of all the 20 references to Sodom and Gomorrah throughout the
rest of Scripture, only one connects their sins to sexual
transgressions in general. The New Testament book of Jude, verse 7,
states that Sodom and Gomorrah “gave themselves up to sexual immorality
and perversion.”
But there are many forms of sexual immorality and
perversion, and even if Jude 7 is taken as specifically referring to the
threatened gang rape from Genesis 19:5, that still has nothing to do
with the kinds of relationships that we’re talking about.
-Matthew Vines
to be continued...
J-Bo
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