On Homosexuality and the Bible
© 2020 Thomas C.
Sorenson. All rights reserved.
The text that follows is a very slightly
edited version of a portion of my book Liberating Christianity. The
issue of homosexuality is less of a hot button issue than it was when I wrote Liberating
Christianity in 2006. Still, prejudice against LGBTQ persists, and some
people still justify it by reference to the Bible. What I wrote may still be of
some use.
The primary
text that opponents of gay rights use to support their position that all
homosexual behavior is necessarily immoral in all contexts is Leviticus 18:22,
which reads: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an
abomination.” Less often cited except by extreme bigots like Fred Phelps is the
corollary passage, Leviticus 20:13, which reads: “If a man lies 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.” We cannot, and do not, deny that these
passages condemn as worthy of death sexual relations between two men. On their
face they do. The issue for us is not what the words of Leviticus are but
whether those words are the eternal and binding will and law of God, as those
who would continue the church’s legacy of hatred toward gay and lesbian people
contend.[i]
The answer
surely is that they are not. Perhaps the major reason that this condemnation of
all homosexual acts between men[ii]
is not binding on us is that the ancient world had no conception of
homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality. That
understanding is of very recent origin. Only in 1973, for example, did the
American Psychological Association remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders. People in ancient times simply
assumed that everyone was what we would call heterosexual. They did not even
have words for homosexual and heterosexual. Cultures do not produce words for
concepts they do not have. Leviticus 18:22 does not say “homosexuality” is an
abomination. It calls lying “with a male as with a woman” an abomination. The
assumption is that sexual relations between men and woman is the norm for
everyone. One reason Leviticus condemns male homosexual acts is that they were
considered unnatural, for everyone. We know better. We know that while same
gender sexual relations are not natural for the majority of people, for those
whom we call heterosexual, they are natural for some people. The Levitical
condemnation of male homosexual acts is grounded in and reflects an ancient
anthropological understanding. That understanding has changed. The modern
understanding of human sexuality has rendered Leviticus 18:22 irrelevant.
The text of
Leviticus itself reveals another reason Leviticus condemns same-gender male
sexual acts. Leviticus 18:22 is part of the Levitical holiness code, the same
holiness or purity code that Jesus so forcefully rejected.[iii]
One of the primary purposes of the holiness or purity code is to keep the
Hebrew people separate and different from the Canaanites, the people of the
land the Hebrews were to inhabit. Thus the code states: “You shall not do as
they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do
in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not follow their
statutes.”[iv]
Leviticus is a book written by and to a considerable extent for Jewish priests
after the return from Babylon in the late 6th century BCE. Their
concerns are not our concerns. Maintaining the identity of 6th
century Jews is not a concern of ours. Indeed, it is not a concern of at least
the more progressive of our Jewish brothers and sisters, many of whom have
views on homosexuality similar to the one expressed here.[v]
Leviticus deals with ancient concerns on the basis of ancient understandings. It
is not God’s law for us.
The frequent
use of Leviticus 18:22 by opponents of the equal rights and dignity of gay and
lesbian people raises another significant issue, the issue of the selective use
of Scripture. As we have said, Leviticus 18:22 is part of a much larger
holiness code. That code contains numerous prohibitions and requirements that
no one today (except perhaps the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel who want to
bring back animal sacrifice because it is commanded in the Bible) pays any
attention to. The Leviticus holiness code prohibits all contact with a woman
during her menstrual period.[vi]
It condones the purchase and ownership of slaves, provided only that they come
from neighboring nations.[vii]
It prohibits eating seafood that does not have scales and fins, i.e.,
shellfish.[viii]
It provides that no person with any physical defect may serve as priest.[ix]
It prohibits planting two different crops in the same field or wearing garments
of mixed fibers.[x] These
are but some of the prohibitions in the holiness code of Leviticus that even
the most vehement opponents of the rights of gay and lesbian people ignore. Indeed,
in my experience, most of them are not even aware of these other provisions of
Leviticus. I do not deny accepting some of the Bible as authentic and
authoritative and rejecting other parts as false. I have tried to explain my
basis for doing that in this book. The problem with those on the other side of
the gay rights issue is not that they read Scripture selectively. The problem
is that they deny doing so, or, in the case of many less sophisticated
Christians, are not even aware that they do so.[xi]
They therefore do not articulate the basis for their selection, something that
makes discussion with them all the more difficult. A great many Christians use
Leviticus 18:22 selectively to harm gay and lesbian people by denying their
full and equal God-given human dignity. Liberating Christianity in our context
requires that we expose the fallacy and even the hypocrisy in their use of the
Bible.
Some
unsophisticated Christians, who are unaware that the Christian tradition
condemned Marcionism as a heresy more than a millennium and a half ago,[xii]
counter any rejection of Leviticus by saying something like: “Well, it’s in the
Old Testament. So you can ignore it. But the New Testament says the same
thing.” In making this claim they are referring primarily to Romans 1:26-27. Opponents
of the equality of gay and lesbian people also use this verse to say that
because the new Testament affirms Leviticus 18:22 but not much of the rest of
the Levitical holiness code that one verse from the code remains valid while
the others do not. Upon examination, however, it turns out that Romans 1:26-27
does not support their position either.
Unlike
Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:25-27 is a very complex passage. In the first chapter
of Romans Paul contends that even pagans who have not had the Jewish law to
guide them are accountable for sin because “what can be known about God is
plain to them, because God has shown it to them.”[xiii]
God’s “eternal power and divine nature” have always been revealed “through the
things he has made.”[xiv]
Paul’s argument is essentially one from natural law, in which the truth about
God is evident to all who will seek it. Yet the pagans did not seek and
discover the truth about God in God’s works of creation. Instead, they
descended into idolatry: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they
exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human
being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.”[xv]
Because of
their idolatry, which they could have avoided though they were without the law,
God inflicted punishment upon the pagans. Because they “worshiped and served
the creature rather than the Creator…God gave them up to degrading passions.”[xvi]
Those degrading passions included homosexual acts. In a passage that includes
the only reference to lesbian sexual acts in the entire Bible Paul wrote:
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.[xvii]
The first thing to
note about this passage is that homosexuality is not itself the sin that Paul
is condemning. He is condemning idolatry. Homosexual behavior is the penalty,
not itself the sin. Beyond that, the reason that Paul considers homosexual
behavior to be a punishment is that it is unnatural. Paul assumed that both
female and male homosexual relations were unnatural for the people who engaged
in them. We know, however, that it is not true for men and women with a
naturally occurring homosexual orientation. For them heterosexual relations are
unnatural and homosexual ones are natural.
Like everyone else in the ancient world, Paul had no such
understanding. The only male homosexual behavior with which he was familiar was
probably the Greek practice of pederasty, in which an older man took a young
man or even a boy essentially as a sex slave. If that practice is your only
image of homosexual behavior, of course you condemn it. Paul simply had no
awareness of natural homosexuality. He had never experienced the kind of
loving, mutual, committed, and faithful same gender unions with which we are,
or if we’ll just look can be, familiar today. Like Leviticus 18:22, Romans
1:26-27 is not an expression of the immutable will of God. It is an expression
of an ancient cultural understanding leading to what we call prejudice.
We have insisted in this work that the Bible becomes true
myth for us, that is, it truly connects us with God and God with us, when we
hold it up to the mirror of our own experience of God to see whether or not a particular
Bible passage agrees with and confirms or contradicts that experience. Because
all truth is grounded in perception and experience, including even Biblical
truth, we can and indeed must trust our own experience of God, even when the
Bible seems to contradict it. The passages we have examined here, and the very
few others that mention homosexual acts, contradict my experience of
homosexuality. They contradict the experiences of a great many people today,
both straight and gay. For me, as a heterosexual man, homosexuality is
unnatural. For my many gay and lesbian friends it is natural. It is an
intrinsic, God-given part of who they are in exactly the same way that my
heterosexuality is for me. The use of the Bible to condemn these children of God
simply for being who they are is an abuse of our tradition’s holy book. It will
not stand. Because it is such a major obstacle to faith in our context today,
liberated and liberating Christianity must and will overcome it.
[i] I am of course well aware that Christians who condemn
homosexuality as inherently sinful generally deny that they hate homosexual
people, or perhaps better, people who have engaged in homosexual behavior
(since these Christians generally deny that homosexuality is a natural and
inherent personal characteristic for some people). Having given the matter much
thought, I have concluded that these denials of hatred are unconvincing. The
Christians who make them may not feel the emotion hatred toward homosexual
people. The fact remains, however, that they condemn and reject an intimate and
intrinsic part of these persons’ humanity. In doing that they necessarily
condemn and reject the people themselves, since our sexuality cannot be
separated from the rest of our being. If condemning and rejecting a person is
not hatred, I do not know what is.
[ii] The author of Leviticus apparently did not care
enough about women even to condemn their homosexual acts as he did the
homosexual acts of men. Or perhaps he really did not consider lesbian acts to
be the abomination that he thought sexual acts between men were. Either way,
Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 can be used to condemn lesbian acts only by analogy. They
don’t mention them.
[iii] The term holiness code means the same thing as purity
code. It comes from the frequent admonitions in Leviticus that the people are
to be holy. Leviticus 19:2, for example, reads: “Speak to all the congregation
of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”
[iv] Leviticus 18:3.
[v] The only Jewish wedding I have ever attended was a
“wedding” of two women in a Reformed Jewish synagogue.
[vi] Leviticus 15:19-24.
[vii] Leviticus 25:44.
[viii] Leviticus 11:10.
[ix] Leviticus 21:16-21.
[x] Leviticus 19:19.
[xi] After my church had received considerable local
publicity for being Open and Affirming, a woman whom I do not know called me up
and asked me how I could claim to be a Christian pastor if I teach things
contrary to Scripture. During that conversation I asked her if she ever wore
clothes made of mixed fibers, a cotton wool blend for example. She said yes,
she supposed that she did. I told her that Leviticus prohibits that too. She
said incredulously: “It does?” I assured her that it does. She was surprised,
but I will give her her due. She at least tried to be consistent. She said: “Well
than I suppose we shouldn’t do it.”
[xii] Marcion held that Christ had superseded the Law and
that Hebrew Scripture was therefore no longer Scripture for Christians. The
Church held otherwise. The Hebrew Bible is also part of the Christian Bible. We
cannot dispose of things in it simply by saying that it is the “Old Testament”
and therefore not applicable to us.
[xiii] Romans 1:19.
[xiv] Romans 1:20.
[xv] Romans 1:22-23.
[xvi] Romans 1:25-26.
[xvii] Romans 1:26b-27.
No comments:
Post a Comment