No,
Mr. President, It Wasn’t
April
2, 2021
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
I like former
president Jimmy Carter a lot. He is easily our greatest former president. I
fully support the equal rights and dignity of LGBTQ+ people and have for
decades. Nonetheless there is something that keeps popping up on my Facebook
feed about President Carter and homosexuality that simply isn’t correct. It is
a statement attributed to former president Carter that reads;
Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well
before Christ was born, and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all
of his teachings about multiple things—he never said that gay people should be
condemned.
There is much in this statement
that is true. Jesus indeed never said a word about homosexuality. He never said
that gay people should be condemned. Those things are true and important. One
thing President Carter says, however, is not correct. He says that
homosexuality was well known in the ancient world. No, Mr. President, it wasn’t.
President Carter is just wrong about that.
To understand how
that statement is wrong we need to make a crucial distinction. It is the
distinction between same gender sexual acts and homosexuality as a naturally
occurring variety of human sexuality. The ancient world knew about homosexual
acts. Leviticus would not have condemned them if it didn’t. See Leviticus
18:22. Sexual acts between men were relatively common among the ancient Greeks,
something the author of Leviticus may or may not have known. The ancient world
certainly knew that sometimes men perform sexual acts with other men.
It didn’t,
however, know about homosexuality. By that I mean that it had no understanding
that a person being homosexual is a natural type of human sexuality for some
men and for some women. That understanding is a modern phenomenon. The word
homosexuality wasn’t even coined until the nineteenth century.[1]
Of course Jesus didn’t say anything about homosexuality. It never occurred to
anyone in his world that sexual orientation toward a person of the same gender
could be natural for some people.
We see that the
world of the Bible considered only sexual acts between women and men to be
natural in the only passage in the Bible that mentions sexual acts between two
women. At Romans 1:18-23 Paul condemns the Gentiles for idolatry. He says that
they could and should have known of the one true God because God is revealed in
everything God has made. Yet instead of knowing and worshipping the one true
God the Gentiles “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling
a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” Romans 1:23.
They “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature
rather than the Creator….” Romans 1:25.
Paul then
discusses what he considers to be the punishment God inflicted on the Gentiles
for their idolatry. He writes:
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 persons the due penalty for their error. Romans 1:26-27.
I’m not sure what he means by “the
due penalty for their error,” but notice Paul’s use of the words natural and
unnatural. He clearly believed that only what we call heterosexual relations
were natural for everyone. We know that isn’t true. The ancient world didn’t.
So former
president Carter is correct that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality.
More importantly he never said anything about sexual acts between people of the
same gender. We can assume, I think that, he knew that such acts occurred. Even
though the ancient world didn’t have the concept, there surely were homosexual
people in Jesus’ time and place. Yet Jesus said not one word about such sexual
acts. We can safely assume that either he didn’t think them immoral or at least
that he didn’t consider them worth talking about. President Carter is wrong
about the ancient world knowing homosexuality. He is absolutely correct that
Jesus never condemned same gender sexual acts or the people who engaged in
them. We who confess him to be our Lord and Savior must never condemn them
either.
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