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A look at the biblical passages

Harold Jantz

Genesis 19:1-13 tells the story of angelic visitors who came to visit Lot in the city of Sodom. They wanted to sleep in the city square, but he insisted they come to his home, where he fed them and gave them a place to rest for the night. In the evening, however, the men of the city surrounded Lot’s home and called for the visitors, so they could “have sex with them.” Lot was appalled and offered his daughters instead, but the men of the city refused and would have broken in except that God brought a blindness upon them, and the men inside the house pulled Lot to safety. The next day, God brought judgement on Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed the cities with fire.

Sodom is referred to again at least 20 times in the Bible, from Deuteronomy 29:1-25 to Jude 5-7 and Revelation 11:8. A range of sins are attributed to Sodom, and it appears that “Sodom” came to be used as shorthand for a place representing extreme disregard for God’s Word. However, Sodom is also specifically connected to homosexual sin in Jude.

A similar story occurs in Judges 19:22-30, except in this case it’s a Levite who stays overnight in Gibeah, a city of Benjamin.

Then there are Levitical texts which have specific prohibitions against homosexual practice. Leviticus 18:22, for example, says: “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is an abomination.”

Jesus doesn’t refer directly to homosexuality. What Jesus does is speak very clearly about marriage (in Matthew 19, for example). As MB Bible scholar David Ewert puts it, Jesus “affirmed heterosexual marriage as God’s original and enduring will for men and women.”

The Apostle Paul, however, does speak about homosexuality. In Romans 1:18-27 he describes a progression through which people may pass. They reject the knowledge of God which has come to them through revelation, their minds become darkened, they create their own gods and worship them, and God gives them up to “shameful lusts,” in which “women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones” and men likewise “committed indecent acts with other men.” Because the passage is so clear in its condemnation, the efforts to argue away its thrust have, to say the least, stretched the limits of credulity.

A little further, in I Corinthians 6:9-11, Paul writes: “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” In I Timothy 1:9-10 he writes: “Law is made…for lawbreakers and rebels…for murderers, for adulterers and perverts, for slave traders and liars and perjurers – and for whatever else is contrary to the…glorious gospel of the blessed God.”

The words used in I Corinthians 6 appear to refer in the one case to male prostitution (where one takes a passive role) and in the other case (“homosexual offenders”) simply to males engaged in homosexual activity. The term “perverts” in 1 Timothy refers to homosexual activity.

It should be understood that all of the biblical passages that refer to homosexual behaviour have been reinterpreted by some scholars to say that what is being condemned is not homosexual practice but something else. So, for example, the sin of the men of Sodom was not the pursuit of homosexual partners but the sin of inhospitality, and the homosexual activity being sought was wrong only because it would not have been consensual. The same arguments have been made regarding the story of the men of Gibeah. The Levitical prohibitions are then taken to be laws of purity and property which have fallen away. Paul is said to be writing against homosexual sin which goes against nature, and if you are homosexual because of orientation, his words don’t apply.

Some, taking a revisionist approach, claim that in Romans 1 Paul is writing against homosexual activity where one man is cast into the role of a woman (that is, the verse forbids pedophilia, for example, where one is subservient to the other, and that it is this idolatrous power structure that is the sin). What these revisionists are saying is that homosexual activity isn’t prohibited if it’s between equals. In fact, other scholars maintain that this is a misunderstanding of the way pedophilia was practised in Greek culture. It was something cultivated in the upper classes where men took boys as sexual partners, not as though they were wives, but to culture and train them for their position as men and to bring them to the place where they would assume positions of influence. It had little or nothing to do with power structures, and still Paul condemned it.

It is significant that while virtually nothing is written in ancient literature about female homosexual activity, Paul in Romans 1 does. He treats both homosexuality and lesbianism the same and understands both to be wrong for the same reasons. It is important to note, as Thomas Schmidt does in the book Straight and Narrow, that Paul echoes the words of the creation account in Romans 1. He speaks of those who substitute images of the creation for the Creator and go “against nature” in committing unnatural acts with one another. Those who do so, he says, are both females and males, using not the usual Greek words for women and men, but the words used in Genesis, “female” and “male.” Paul is saying that we must look back toward the order that God established in creation to recognize where we’ve gone wrong.

Our conclusion echoes the words of the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, who wrote in the Church Times of London in 1996: “The entire biblical witness includes practiced homosexuality without exception among the kinds of behaviour which give particularly striking expression to humanity’s turning away from God.” One cannot read the Scriptures and grant them authority without coming to Pannenberg’s conclusion: Homosexual sexual activity of all sorts does not reflect the will of God and must be seen as sin.

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Last modified November 23, 1999.

© 1999 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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