The Bible is part of an ongoing story of God moving towards his people, and human culture moving very, very gradually towards God in an ever-expanding consciousness. Since the very beginning God has been pulling us forward, showing us better and better ways to be human. We’ve come a long way and we’ve got an awfully long way to go, but each breakthrough in equality and justice is a step towards God.
Accepting gay people as equals is the next big step.
(See my previous posts I Think God Makes People Gay and I Think God Makes People Gay (Part 2) for why the Biblical argument against homosexuality doesn’t work.)
What are we so scared of?
I still sometimes doubt if I’m doing the right thing here. I suspect I’m not alone in that.
But what are we scared of? Do we really think that if we welcome, love and accept people in gay relationships, God will punish us? For what, being too inclusive, too loving?
If so, we need to seriously re-examine our view of God.
From what we know about Jesus, it seems to me that God is far more likely to be angry at those who exclude and alienate his beloved children because of their sexual orientation, than at those who find themselves experiencing same-sex attraction.
The standard is love
I know it can feel a bit like we’re lowering our standards. Like we’re letting go of our morals, changing the rules to make Christianity easier to swallow.
But it was never supposed to be about rules, that was the whole point.
We have the ultimate standard: love.
Real, life-changing, earth-shattering, hardcore, sacrificial, Jesus-love.
We stand against that which is harmful, damaging, unjust, unloving, inhumane – that which prevents people from living a full life in relationship with God and others. I can think of all sorts of things that fall into that category that are commonplace in churches. Homosexuality is not one of them.
A New Testament solution to the gay debate
It would be naive to expect everyone to come an agreement on this. If we try to force everyone to think the same, then we are missing the point (and we will fail).
In New Testament times, there were hugely controversial and divisive issues within the church that are perhaps comparable to the homosexuality debate today. There were an awful lot of Christians in the early church who argued that all believers should be circumcised, that they should avoid certain foods and that the Sabbath should be kept holy. Then there were other Christians (e.g. Paul) who strongly believed that Jesus had changed everything, and so these old laws no longer applied.
These issues were a HUGE deal at the time. The Jews had always done things this way (in Exodus 4, God nearly kills Moses for neglecting to circumcise his son!) so it is hardly surprising that people were not taking these new ideas lightly.
Paul’s response is very interesting. He doesn’t try to make everyone think the same as him, but instead suggests that everyone should be allowed to do whatever they feel is right before God:
Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.
One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God.
Romans 14:1-6 NIV (emphases added)
Is homosexuality a ‘disputable matter’ in the church today? Absolutely. So what should we do?
Stop judging people. It’s not our job. If someone genuinely believes that God is happy for them to be in a homosexual relationship, then leave them be. If someone believes God wants them to be celibate, then support them. It’s not our place to judge.
This means that by Paul’s logic, even if you believe that homosexuality is a sin, you should still allow people in gay relationships to engage fully in the life of the church, and to participate in the sacraments (Romans 15:7).
(Note: marriage is a sacrament.)
Clearly this cannot be applied to just anything – if someone is doing something that is harmful to them or others, then of course the right thing to do would be to challenge that behaviour. But homosexuality in the church today is most definitely a “disputable matter”: whether it is a “sin” or not is entirely a matter of opinion.
People on both sides of the debate, then, are called to stand down; to stop trying to enforce their opinions on others, and to strive instead for unity. The aim of the church is surely to be a loving community, bringing people into deeper relationship with God and with others. Everything else is of secondary importance.
The church has failed at this spectacularly. I have heard of very few gay people who have felt fully accepted and welcomed in church. The vast majority of the time they are judged, excluded, prevented from fully participating. In many, many cases this will have led to them feeling that if God exists at all, he doesn’t like them very much.
Seriously then…
After teaching his disciples to be like children and to welcome children in his name, Jesus says:
If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!
Matthew 18:6 NIV
I have most often heard passages like this used to support anti-gay arguments. People are terrified that if they condone homosexual behaviour and it turns out to be a sin, they will be subject to divine wrath and punishment.
But Jesus was always welcoming people, loving people, encouraging them into relationship with God despite their many shortcomings. He always leaned towards acceptance, unity and love, and stood fiercely against those who insisted that people needed to meet standards of purity.
So what if we interpreted this passage more like this?
If anyone causes one of my children (gay or straight) – those who want to follow me – to fall away from me, woe to that person! If you exclude them or prevent them from fully entering into life with me, woe to you!
Sobering stuff. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait to see what is worse than having a large millstone hung around my neck and being drowned in the depths of the sea.
When it comes down to it…
For many people, the problem is that they just don’t like the idea of it. The thought of the “act” itself repulses them.
Well if that’s the case for you, you’re probably not gay.
If you don’t like it, don’t do it. Just don’t assume everyone should be like you.
Buckle up, we’re about to get serious.
If we are happy to allow people who are divorced and remarried to participate fully in the church, but exclude people in gay relationships, then our actions are based on prejudice. They have to be. Why else would we accept one and not the other? Whether we are aware of it or not, an underlying prejudice is colouring our interpretation of the Bible. Just as people genuinely believed that certain races were inferior and used the Bible to defend their position, if we prevent people in monogamous homosexual relationships from fully participating in church, we are using the Bible to prop up our own deep-seated prejudices. Prejudices that need to be seen for what they are and gouged out.
(I’m ashamed to say I am not completely over my prejudices, but I’m working on it. I can see now that’s what they are – ugly stains in my worldview that I’ve picked up along the way and that I am in the process of scrubbing off.)
Image via Pixabay
Emma Higgs 
Amen 😊
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I disagree as to homosexuality being a disputable matter. I think Paul was referring more to the foods we eat, traditions, and festivals. I think we need to be clear where God is clear and also not try to come up with answers where there aren’t any.
I think you can disagree with a gay person saying that they believe God is ok with homosexuality. It’s pretty clear he isn’t.
That’s like saying God is ok with sin.
That’s not “judging” someone. It’s loving them enough to tell them the truth.
On the other hand we should never come off as if we are better than anyone leat we also fall.
We should love and accept people like Jesus does, without conditions. We should be kind and gracious yet full of truth.
We don’t have to compromise to love people.
His kindness is what leads us to repentance also. Not condemnation.
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(1Co 7:27) Have you been bound to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Have you been released from a wife? Do not seek a wife.
(1Co 7:28) But even if you should marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin should marry, she has not sinned. But such will have trouble in the flesh, and I would spare you.
This is just one of many verses that talk about divorce and remarriage. It is a very clear message that divorce is wrong but remarriage is not a sin. The problem is that we all want to find something in the Bible that justifies the way we feel. But our feelings are not always justifiable.
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Of course we should be accepting of Gay people. That is true but not the first step in the right direction nor the answer to the challenges we face as followers of Christ. Here’s why: if you individually or as a congregation of supposed believers in Christ pick and choose from scripture what you are willing to believe is true about the will of God then the same standard must be valid for all matters of faith. In other words, if you decide what to believe in scripture as right and worthy, and what to reject as unworthy of belief, there is for you no standard of truth beyond yourself or your congregation. That clearly make you rather than God the revealer of truth. Or, if you think that God is revealing new truth through you or your congregation then everyone and everything is equally the revealer of truth–hence if all is true then nothing is truly true because there are inherently contradictions out there. And we are inevitably all on our own in this world and there probably isn’t a world to come because there really is no knowable truth.
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PS: there are alternative perspectives on every argument you pose; none of them is incapable of being view from a positively affirmative basis in relation to scriptural tradition. Piling up arguments that appear to cast doubt on the validity of the biblical teaching on marriage may encourage those weak in understanding of the Bible but appear superficial and insignificant to those committed to God’s revelation through his word.
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The argument that we cannot pick and choose from scripture, but must accept and follow every single thing the Bible says, is a major fallacy of conservative Christians.
The fact of the matter is that no group of Christians and no individual Christian follows every single commandment in the Bible. Every group of Christians, even the most conservative and fundamentalist, picks and chooses which commandments in the Bible it will follow and which it will not. There are whole chapters of commandments in Leviticus that no Christian group follows.
Those who say that we can’t pick and choose, but must follow everything in the Bible, are ignoring the fact that they themselves pick and choose, following some commandments of the Bible and not following others.
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Major category mistake here. We, at least most of us debating the issues here, are Christians, which means we are subjects of King Jesus, adopted sons and daughters of the King, members of the people of God under the New Covenant. As such, we are not bound in any absolute or direct sense by the commandments given to the Jews under the Torah of the Old Covenant, but are only obligated to obey the teaching of Jesus, the one who made known the parameters of the New Law of Love, and who was himself the embodiment of the New Covenant way. So, believing and following the teaching of the one who picked and chose for us is not just a conservative Christian thing, it is THE Christian way.
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Hi RWWILSON147,
Having criteria for how to pick and choose which commandments of the Bible to follow and which not to follow is still picking and choosing.
Your criteria seems to be that if Jesus taught it, then we must obey it, but if he didn’t, then it’s not necessary for us to obey it.
Does this mean that none of the commandments of the Old Testament are still binding unless Jesus reaffirmed them? Do you think we can just ignore the entire Old Testament unless there is a specific commandment in the Gospels to reaffirm any particular thing it says? And if so, how is the Old Testament even Scripture, if we can simply ignore most of it?
And what about Paul? Paul is not Jesus. Is everything Paul taught binding on us, or only if Jesus also said it in the Gospels? What about what the rest of the Apostles say in the Acts and the Epistles? Are we not required to obey what they teach if Jesus didn’t teach it in the Gospels?
Also, does your church teach that we must fully obey the following commandments of Jesus? Do you fully follow them yourself?
Make no mistake about it, you do pick and choose which commandments in the Bible to follow—even the commandments of Jesus Christ himself—and so does whatever church you belong to.
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About “lowering our standards,” the irony is that in pressing for equal marriage rights, gays and lesbians are also asking for a way for their relationships to be held to the same standards as heterosexual relationships.
How is it “lowering our standards” to apply the same standards to homosexuals as we do to heterosexuals?
In accepting same-sex marriage, we’re not “lowering our standards.” We’re applying whatever standards we may have for marriage, whether high or low, to a new group of people.
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I totally understand your affirmation of equality for all in our secular society. I get that and actually pretty much agree–I’ll bet you didn’t expect that. Equality under the non-religious rules of un-Christian government makes perfect sense. The differences come in whether one is willing to consider those who disagree with the idea that God affirms all sexual relationships as equal as being morally equal. Agreeing with revealed norms for human behavior, ie., those of New Testament revelation in conformity with apostolic teaching, which should be considered equivalent to the will of God (which you apparently don’t), would at least put those standards above those who believe that God created everyone to be whatever they think they are.
Not sure you all can follow the ethical reasoning here, but if designating a “new group of people” as morally equivalent to some other group of people is a valid argument, then “open marriage” people should be considered morally equivalent to heterosexual monogamous people, and “promiscuous philanderers” should be thought of as the way God created them to be and therefore morally marvelous. In fact, since I’m a married heterosexual male that may be inclined to seek sexual relations outside of my marriage I should think you would want me to affirm my natural inclinations and bring as many women into marriage with my wife and I as I can, right? I pray every reasonable believer in Christ can see the fallacy of this line of reasoning, and recognize it for what it is, a deviation from the standards God has given to those who knew him best and were closest to Jesus as the revealers of His will.
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Hi Richard,
Yes, I can see the deviation from the standards God has given in your slippery slope argument. And if we allow women and blacks full freedom and respect under the law, pretty soon we’ll have to allow thieves and murderers full freedom and respect under the law, and civil order will break down.
Nonsense.
Granting gay people access to faithful, monogamous marriage provides a slippery slope to exactly nowhere. It doesn’t allow for polygamy or adultery or anything else. It says that gay people must follow the same moral standards that we apply to heterosexual people.
No Christian who believes that homosexuals should be allowed to marry believes that “God affirms all sexual relationships as equal.” Saying so is just lazy thinking, and an unwillingness to face the real issues.
And thinking that the New Testament opposes gay marriage as we understand it today is also lazy thinking, and an ignorance of what homosexual relationships were in apostolic times. They were not relationships between two equal men (or two equal women) as gay marriage is understood legally and socially today. Rather, they were for the most part relationships between high-status middle aged or older men and low-status teenage boys or young adult men. In some ancient cultures that allowed such homosexual relationships there were actually laws prohibiting homosexual relationships between men of equal status. Reading the Bible outside of its cultural context results in all kinds of wrong conclusions about what it teaches. I’m afraid you have fallen prey to that error.
All of this and much more is covered in detail in my article, Homosexuality, the Bible, and Christianity
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Jesus didn’t have to mention homosexuality because he fully affirmed Old Covenant sexual ethics (Matt. 5:18… “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished”; Matt 19:4-6). That even the apostles didn’t need to mention it specifically because they followed the Old Covenant sexual morals is evident from the the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15. If you think somehow that Jews in general, or Jesus and the apostles in particular, didn’t oppose homosexual behavior, I’ll think you need to better than using a “history denying,” reality distorting suggestion that an argument from silence proves your point. This is just about the weakest argument any LGBTQI+++ inclusionist and affirmationist can make.
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Hi Richard,
This makes even less sense than your previous comments. You are essentially saying that Jesus affirmed that we must obey every law in the entire Old Testament. Since I assume you don’t sacrifice cows, or stone wayward children, this argument holds no water at all. Really, it’s just grasping at straws to attempt to support an unsupportable statement. The fact of the matter is that Jesus said nothing at all about homosexuality.
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Sorry, I am absolutely NOT saying (did I say that? really?) that Jesus said we have to obey every law in the Old Testament. I shouldn’t have to say this since it is a bit too obvious, but you are strawmanning the debate.
What Jesus said indirectly, through his Spirit lead empowerment of the apostles’ teaching and authority, was that gentile believers were required to refrain from sexual immorality, which included for all those who accepted the teaching of Torah, same gendered sex. If you don’t believe in apostolic authority or the authority of God in New Testament teaching then you wouldn’t agree with this, but if you do then you should accept what it says.
What Jesus explicitly said about human sexuality is that God desired those relations to be as they were “from the beginning” between a man and a woman. The “as it was in the beginning” for Jesus was how it was then and was to be for his followers “until all things were accomplished.” Period.
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Hi Richard,
All of this is well and good. But you are in fact picking and choosing which Old Testament rules you wish Jesus to be endorsing, and which you wish him not to be endorsing. This is indeed a complex subject. But the simple fact remains that Jesus said nothing at all about homosexuality. So any claims that Jesus condemned homosexuality are simply false.
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Ah, what I thought was to be my Response to Lee’s other response ended up under this comment. A bit hard to follow exactly where one’s respondes are being posted.
As for the “slippery slope” argument you make Lee, it is a _non-sequitur_ or pure straw man argument; I didn’t bring up any suggestion that what we rightly consider distortions and misapplications of biblical teaching are in any sense equivalent to the prohibitions of homosexual behaviors in either the Old or the New Covenant teachings. Nonsense right back at ya.
Second point: we can’t apply the “same moral standards that we apply to heterosexual people” to “gay people” people because those biblical moral standards can’t be applied to both groups or individual–there is no moral equivalence from a scriptural basis.
Third, I appreciate your effort, and those of others, to make the case for homosexual relations being different than they were in New Testament authorship times. I just find it very difficult, ney impossible, to imagine that the apostolic and other New Testament authors would agree with you. They believed all same gender sexual relations were prohibited by God. You can imagine that some would be permissible. The problem is that imagining something is true just isn’t enough to make it true. The reality of the situation is that people today think they know things that no one else in Church history ever knew, that today we have a new revelation of what acceptable sexual relations can be. You and those who affirm same gender marriage are speaking and acting as prophets and apostles of God, as authorized to bring new revelation. I reject that because I haven’t seen any reason to think that God has sent prophets to bring new teaching and new ethical standards for His people. You claim that homosexual relationship are today different from what they were then, but can’t demonstrate that any same gender sex was acceptable to New Testament teachers authorized by Jesus, so your argument is absolutely an argument from an imagined silence, not even a legitimate silence. Reading the scriptures in light of your re-imagined historical context by denying what you want to deny perhaps isn’t lazy thinking, but is way too imaginatively creative to be realistically historical. As you rightly said: “reading the Bible outside of its cultural context results in all kinds of wrong conclusions about what it teaches” and that is precisely what you are doing. You are reading the scriptures as though your cultural context tells you more about human sexual reality than biblical revelation does–and unquestionably out of context.
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Hi Richard,
And this comment is actually rather funny, because you’re simply accusing me of doing everything you’re doing. I didn’t make a slippery slope argument. You did. And you are clearly ignoring the cultural context, probably because you are unaware of it, and think that the cultures of Bible times were pretty much the same as Western culture today. That is a ludicrous idea.
I would suggest studying the history of marriage and gender relations before making such obviously uninformed statements. Until you do, it’s hardly even worth responding to your comments because they are based almost entirely on ignorance.
As for the Apostolic writers not agreeing with me, they couldn’t write about something they knew nothing about. Would you expect the Apostolic authors to have an opinion on the ethics of cloning humans? Of course not. Such a thing didn’t exist in their day. Similarly, homosexual relationships between people of equal status in society effectively didn’t exist in their day. That’s just not what homosexual relationships were. In fact, there weren’t even heterosexual marriages between two equal people, because women were considered inherently subordinate to men. So marriage itself as it is now thought of in the West simply didn’t exist in biblical times. It was a whole different relationship, even though it went by the same name.
Once again, if you’re unaware of these things, there is no way you can rightly read and interpret the Bible’s statements even about heterosexual marriage, let alone its statements about homosexual sex.
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Well, this is getting a bit tedious. I did NOT say that you were engaged in a “slippery slope” argument. Did I? Really? Read what I actually said.
Also, what I actually said was that our cultural contexts are different and that you are imposing your cultural context on an interpretation of the scriptures in regard to homosexual relations.
Your assumptions about my not having studied these matters is an unfounded put down.
Again, claiming that somehow same gendered relations as we experience them today can’t have been prohibited presumes that our cultural context is the determinative factor in how we can interpret whether biblical teaching applies to us today. That is not interpreting the scriptures in light of its cultural context but superimposing your cultural context on the scriptures. The arguments you are making about homosexual relationships as they are experienced today not being anything like what was known in biblical times has been shown to be untrue–there were in fact same gender marriages between equals in Roman culture. Again, if biblical prohibitions included any and every same gender sexual behavior (which Jews and the Church have always believed until our generation!) one can reasonably conclude that some special kind of relationship we construct today couldn’t possible have been acceptable to them. That is a non-starter as arguments go.
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Hi Richard,
In ancient Roman society, as in other ancient societies, same-sex relations between men of equal status was frowned upon. When it happened, it was considered an aberration, and those engaging in it were considered to be disgraced.
In ancient society generally, sex was seen as a dominant, virile person penetrating a submissive, less-virile or non-virile person. A man was considered masculine, not based on whether he had sex with a woman or with a man, but by whether he was the dominant, penetrating person in any sexual act. For a man to be penetrated was to mark him as less manly, and as of lower status.
Every society has its “aberrants.” So yes, there were cases of socially equal men engaging in sex with one another. But it was considered aberrant and wrong. And it was rare.
The Wikipedia page on Homosexuality in ancient Rome covers all of this reasonably well.
Greek culture allowed for younger men to be penetrated by older men without losing status. But in Greek culture, too the penetrating person was considered to be of higher status, and the penetrated one of lower status. So although the particular expression of homoerotic relations may have been somewhat different in Greek culture than in Roman culture, the general principle that sex was an act between two unequal people still held.
So yes, homosexual relations in the ancient world were culturally very different from same-sex marriage in the West today, which is seen socially and legally as a relationship between two equal partners, in which who penetrates whom is not an issue.
By the same token, heterosexual marriage today is a very different relationship legally and socially in the West today than it was in the Biblical world, where it was seen as a relationship between two people who were inherently unequal.
In other words, the same-sex sexual relations that the Bible addresses simply aren’t the same as today’s same-sex marriage because effectively, same-sex relationships between men of equal status did not exist, or if it did, it was considered scandalous.
This is all covered in the article I linked for you earlier. You are wrong because you are not taking seriously the cultural differences between the societies of ancient Bible times and today’s culture. You are attempting to apply statements made in the Bible to types of relationships that were largely unknown in ancient cultures because they went contrary to the broad-based ancient cultural view that sex and marriage were inherently unequal relationships.
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Thank you for your thoughtful comments on homosexuality Emma. I think I’m with you on most (if not all) of your points, although my congregation would not agree with either of us. I do think that faith is a very personal matter, and that we all have a responsibility to have a personal relationship with the Lord, and that we are directly accountable to Him upon our judgment day. I believe we have a responsibility to examine the Bible directly and understand it for ourselves, and bring that understanding to bear on our lives.
I do disagree though about how Jesus loved everyone – YES, he loved everyone, but he did want the “sinners” to follow him, repent and change their ways. So while, my minister will say that he loves everyone, he would like gay Christians to repent and not practice their homosexuality.
While we are all directly responsible to the Lord for our beliefs and how we treat our neighbours, I do find it difficult to be in a congregation where people speak in such an unchristian manner about gay people – especially when I forsee that my son is/will be gay as a grown up. However, I do think that homophobia is still rife in our society, whether people are Christian or not – as you say, many people simply can’t understand it and are repulsed by it.
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Anonymous,
I appreciate your affirmation of our responsibility to examine the Bible and expect to be held accountable to God on the day of judgement. I’m a bit confused, however, and think you may be too, about how following Jesus in opposition to homosexual behavior should be considered unchristian. Having a gay friend, neighbor, or son, doesn’t change biblical teaching, unless we love people more than God. And being opposed to LGBTQ++ behavior doesn’t make someone “homophobic.” If, on the other hand, being “theophobic” is equivalent to “fearing the Lord,” then call me THEOPHOBIC; homophobic just isn’t accurate or appropriate for me. I’m pretty sure I’ll be better off fearing God rather than fearing people who consider me homophobic.
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And I’m a bit confused as to where you think Jesus spoke in opposition to homosexual behavior. The fact of the matter is that Jesus did not say one word about homosexuality anywhere in the Gospels. That in itself should give pause to conservative Christians who make such a big deal about the evils of homosexuality. If it were really as evil as such Christians believe, don’t you think Jesus would have said so?
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