“The Bible and Homosexuality,”

by Rev. Christopher Fazel

Delivered as a special presentation

at a session scheduled by the

“Open and Affirming Task Force”

-- September, 2008

When I was deciding how to title this presentation, I asked myself, “Shall I name it, “The Bible on Homosexuality?”  And I said, “No, I can’t name it that, because my central premise is that the Bible does not address homosexuality as we know it today.”  And so I named it, “The Bible and Homosexuality.”  Because, even though it is my premise that the Bible does not address homosexuality as we understand it, there are many today who take the opposite view.  Their view is that the Bible vehemently condemns homosexuality, and they point to a few verses in our Bible to support their view.  I shall now read to you the verses that are used primarily to attack homosexuality as “condemned by God.”

1.         Leviticus 18:22:

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

2.         Leviticus 20: 13:

“If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death.”

3.         Deuteronomy 23:17

“None of the daughters of Israel shall be a temple prostitute; none of the sons of Israel shall be a temple prostitute.”

4.         Paul’s letter to the Romans 1:18-32 (And here I read more of the text than is usually quoted, because later it will help me make a vital observation.):

 “18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; 21 for though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools; 23 and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

24 “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.  26  For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, 27 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.   28 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. 29 They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters,* insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 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.  2:1 Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”

5.         Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 6:9-10

“9 Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, 10 thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God”          

6.         1 Timothy 1:8-11

“8 Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately. 9 This means understanding that the law is laid down not for the innocent but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers, 10fornicators, sodomites, slave-traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching 11 that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.”

            So, now you’ve heard them.

Now, as I have digested the question concerning the Bible and homosexuality, through research and reflection, I perceive three lines of argument against interpreting these passages as weapons of condemnation against homosexuality as we know it today. 

One line of argument, I would call “the cherry picking argument.”  That is used primarily against the Leviticus and Deuteronomy passages.  That argument says, “Why are you cherry picking these passages when you totally ignore all the other passages that are right next to it?”  For example, one could argue, “Within a page of Leviticus 18, we read of prohibitions of mixing grain in your garden or wearing garments of mixed fabrics, or cutting the hair in the temple area of your head, and eight chapters earlier in Leviticus – in the food section – the eating of shellfish – shrimp, oysters and clams – is also declared an abomination.  But my favorite example of this argument is what follows Deuteronomy 23: 17.  The very next paragraph prohibits charging interest on loans to other Israelites.  And since Paul declares all Christians to be the adopted heirs of Abraham, that means that all of Christendom is prohibited from lending at interest.  No one is talking about that!  It is argued that people of a certain conviction and point of view cherry pick these few verses to build their case, while ignoring other verses within the same sections that to most ears and judgment seem ludicrous, or at least would so if one’s head bothered to think about it.

I think these arguments are sound, but they don’t get us to the heart of the matter.  However, they lead us to and accompany a deeper and better argument in my opinion, one that I call the “Contextual Argument.”

This argument says that one needs to see these statements in their proper context.  For example, it is universally accepted that the dominant religion in Canaan in the days when the Israelites entered the land was fertility worship.  And primary components of the fertility worship were ritualistic orgy and human sacrifice.  All of these passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy include specific references to the practices of the dominant fertility religions, which ritualistically inflamed the sexual and violent passions of the body and soul, which led to orgy and human sacrifice.  These practices bear no resemblance to the simple domestic homosexual relationships we see evidenced today.  As one middle-aged gay man responded when asked what he and his partner did in bed, he said, “We’ve been together for thirty years.  What we do mostly in bed is sleep.”

The contextual argument argues that the issue for whoever wrote these passages was really the worship of the physical appetites – and that such a worship resulted in sexual practices that were  anonymous,  impersonal, ritualistic, indiscriminant and at times violent.  You can see a PG-13 version of such worship in the movie “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

I believe that most people involved in this debate would agree that such an inflammation of the physical appetites debases the human spirit.  But those who use these verses as bullets in their attack on modern homosexuality make two big mistakes.  First --  they accuse all homosexual relationships of being of this character, which patently isn’t true.  And, they deny their own version of inflamed passions and appetites – both sexual and non-sexual, because the appetites of the body and soul are not just sexual.  They include appetites for money, power and dominance.

 Jesus talks very little about sexual issues and nothing at all about homosexuality.  But he talks a lot about greed, lust for power and religious arrogance.  And that takes us to Paul and to my favorite argument against the use of Biblical verses to attack modern homosexuality.  I call that argument the “Center of Gravity” argument. 

Now, the Corinthian passage, which is from Paul, and the First Timothy passage (which is much later than Paul, though written in his name) -- are both lists of evil doing.   And if you understand the meaning of the words in the original Greek, it is clear that in both lists the words concerning sexual ethics are addressing the product of inflamed passions leading to anonymous, prostitutional, religious and commercial sex.  Here are some of the Greek words in these lists that address sexual ethics:

Malakoi -- referring to soft, seductive boy prostitutes;  arsenokoitai--  referring to the men who use them.  The list also includes pornoi -- meaning prostitutes and those who use them, and methusoi -- or drunkards.

But the lists also include loidoroi, which means those who revile and rail at others.  The same word is used to describe what the religiously arrogant did to the blind man when he acknowledged Jesus as his healer.

So, there are two points to make concerning these lists of sins.  First, the sexual sins are sins of physical appetites inflamed by religious institutional and secular prositiutional sex industries.  Now, we deal with these issues today, but none of this has anything to do with mature, committed, faithful, domestic relationships between two men or two women.  The development of such covenanted relationships was not likely on the list makers’s radar screen.

The other point to make is that there are many sins included in these lists that have nothing to do with sexuality, but have a lot to do with religious arrogance, greed and the condemnation and plundering of others. 

And that observation takes us finally to the primary Pauline passage in this debate – Romans 1, and its center of gravity.

Now when you read Romans carefully from the beginning, you can see that Paul is writing to the Roman Christians whom he has never met.  Nevertheless, by the middle of the first chapter, it is clear that Paul is addressing a heated conflict within that church.  And that conflict is all about righteousness.  “Who is righteous?”  And Paul does a brilliant job of addressing this conflict.  He traces both sides of this conflict back to their common origin.  He says that way back, when humanity turned away from gratefully glorifying God, we began to worship instead the appetites and drives of the creaturely world.  This turning away resulted in a degradation of body and mind that followed two paths of degeneration. 

One path was the inflammation of “degrading passions” of sexual appetite.   That description covers two verses and ends with words that I would paraphrase as, “And they’ve already paid for that in themselves.” 

But then, he goes back and traces a second opposing line of degeneration that he calls a “debased mind.”  And these are its characteristics:  covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, slander, arrogance and boastfulness.  Paul’s description of this pole is twice as long as the other, and ends with four primary descriptors:  “as un e’ tous.” “As un the’ tous”, “as tor’ gous,” “ an e lea’ mo nas.”  -- “thuggish, treacherous, hard hearted, and ruthless.”

            And in case there is any doubt about where Paul is going, he then says at the beginning of chapter two, “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you the judge, are doing the very same things.”   Why “the same things”?  Because self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement are the two poles that form within the fallen spirit.  The Bible takes a stand against both poles – both self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement.  But by far, its greatest concern is the rise of greedy, arrogant, ruthless self-righteousness.

            We have many problems in our land today.  But none of them has anything to do with mature, covenanted, domestic relationships between two men or two women.  That is to say, our problems have nothing to do with them other than those relationships are currently the target of a thuggish, belligerent spirit of self-righteousness that is fed by both greed and a lust for power.

That is the real danger in our world today, just as it was in the days of Jesus, and of Paul.