The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  What is revealing about all this is that nowhere in the Old or New Testaments is the sin of Sodom, the cause of its sudden and terrible destruction, equated with homosexuals or with homosexuality. The attempted homosexual rape of the angels at Lot’s door, while vivid and distasteful, is hardly the subject of the story or the cause of the punishment, and no one in scripture suggests that it was. Homosexual rape is never to be condoned; it is indeed, like heterosexual rape, an abomination before God. This instance of attempted homosexual rape, however, does not invalidate all homosexuals or all homosexual activity. Jeffrey S. Siker makes an excellent point when he says in his article in Theology Today that “David’s sin of adultery with Bathsheba does not make all heterosexual expressions sinful!” In the matter of Genesis 19 and the “obvious” conclusion that God here enunciates in fire and brimstone his condemnation of homosexuals and homosexuality, there is less than meets the eye.

  The Law of Leviticus

  Leviticus 18:22 reads, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination,” and Leviticus 20:13 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.” The statements are clear, but the context and application are not. It is clear that this so-called Holiness Code is designed to provide a standard of moral behavior that will distinguish the Jews from the Canaanites, whose land they have been given by God. The price of the land, as it were, is a new standard of behavior. The Jews are not to worship the Canaanite god Molech, nor to adopt any of the practices of the people who do. The sentence to be carried out when this Holiness Code is violated is death. Children who curse their parents are to be put to death. The sentence for adultery for both parties is death. The punishment for incest is death. The punishment for bestiality is death. “You shall therefore keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and do them; that the land where I am bringing you to dwell may not vomit you out. And you shall not walk in the customs of the nation which I am casting out before you, for they did all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. But I have said to you, ‘You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey.’ ” (Leviticus 20:22–24)

  These rules are designed for a very particular purpose and in a very particular setting. Their purpose is nation building; their setting is the entry into a promised but very foreign land. These are fundamental laws for the formation of a frontier community. In addition to honoring one’s parents and keeping the Sabbath, showing appropriate hospitality and abstaining from idol worship, the people are forbidden to permit cattle inbreeding, or to sow fields with two kinds of seed, or to wear garments made of two different kinds of materials. Fruit trees may not be harvested until the fifth year, and the kosher laws must be kept. Round haircuts are forbidden, as are tattoos, and consultations with mediums and wizards. A man may not have sexual relations with his wife while she menstruates. These and many other actions are condemned because they defy purity and weaken the cultural identification of the children of Israel; and so great is the principle of ritual and ethnic purity that to violate it is in most cases to warrant the sentence of death.

  We can understand the context: cultural identity, protection, and procreation. In this context homosexual conduct is a risk to all three of these necessary frontier ambitions. We have, however, long since ceased to live as God’s frontier folk in the promised land. Not only is the cultural context markedly different, but so for Christians is the theological context. Indeed, to what extent can Christians be said to be bound by these rules of the Holiness Code when even Saint Paul, himself a Jew and an heir of this very code, says that the Gentiles, that is, the non-Jewish Christians, have the gift of the Holy Spirit without the necessity of the Law of Israel? In Acts 10:47, of these non-Jewish Christians, the Apostle Peter asks, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”

  For Jesus and Saint Paul, the ritual purity of which Leviticus speaks with such passionate detail is plainly irrelevant; they are both concerned with purity of heart. Boswell argues that a distinction is made between what is ritually impure and what is intrinsically wrong. Homosexuality in Leviticus is condemned as ritually impure, the key to this conclusion being the fact that the word abomination does not usually describe something intrinsically evil, such as rape or theft, but something that is ritually impure, like eating pork or engaging in intercourse during menstruation. An abomination is by definition what the Gentiles do, but that in and of itself is not necessarily evil or a violation of the Commandments. Thus homosexuality is an abomination in Leviticus not because it is inherently evil but because the Gentiles do it, and it is therefore ritually impure.

  When Christians ignore most of the Holiness Code and regard its precepts as irrelevant to a New Testament understanding of purity of heart, and yet cite the Levitical prohibitions against homosexuality as the basis of their own moral position on that subject, one is led to wonder what is behind the adoption of this prohibition and the casting away of the others. Once again the “clear meaning” of scripture in the matter of homosexuality seems more expedient than compelling.

  What Saint Paul Says and Means

  We turn now to the New Testament and the writings by and attributed to Paul, in Romans, I Corinthians, and I Timothy.

  Paul’s most significant comments on what we call homosexuality occur in Romans 1:26–27. “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” The first thing to be remembered here is that Paul is not writing about homosexuality in Romans—neither about homosexuality as he would have understood it nor about homosexuality as we now understand it. He is writing about the fallen nature of humankind. It is this fallen nature, this “corrupted will” to use a favorite phrase of Saint Augustine, that has caused both Gentile and Jew to suppress the truth by their wickedness. They are able to know what is knowable about God: his invisible nature, his eternal power and deity. The creation itself bears witness to this. The nature, power, and goodness of God are not hidden. There is therefore no excuse for this ignorance of God. The people knew God but did not honor God. They were not grateful to God. They substituted their own minds and their own thinking in place of God. As Paul says in Romans 1:21, “They became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were clouded.” In other words, the creatures ignored the Creator, and they themselves became the objects of their own worship and veneration. They became worshipers of self, caught up in their own egos, and they gave to created things the glory and dignity that belong to the Creator. This is what he means when he says that in the fallen state of total self-absorption and self-deception, human beings, “claiming to be wise…became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.” This is the golden calf of the Old Testament all over again, the worship of the Canaanite and Babylonian fertility gods, and, in Greco-Roman civilization, the worship of worldly wisdom and philosophy.

  We become what we worship. It is this sophisticated psychological insight that Paul applies to those who worship a lie rather than the truth, who submit themselves to images rather than to the divine reality. Such people are disordered, that is, they have their priorities wrong; they have lost their perspective. God’s judgment is that they will reap the consequences of these lesser, inferior gods. This is what is meant at verses 24–25: “Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 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!” As a consequence of this, in the jargon of contemporary psychology, God let them
“bottom out.” As H. Darrell Lance points out in his 1989 article entitled “The Bible and Homosexuality,” in The American Baptist Quarterly, “As a result, God let his creatures follow their own corrupt ways.”

  These corrupt ways include intellectual self-deception and the sexual practices of the pagan world. These fallen ones are described as “filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” (Romans 1:29–31) This is the context in which Paul, at verses 26 and 27, discusses what we call homosexuality, and he never takes up that subject in Romans again, for it was merely one of the many consequences of the fallen state.

  When modern readers scrutinize Romans 1:26, with its discussion of “dishonorable passions,” “unnatural relations,” and “shameless acts,” conditioned as we are by the characterization of homosexual behavior prevalent among us since the late nineteenth century, which in the current cultural debate is described both loosely and pejoratively as the “gay lifestyle” and the “homosexual agenda,” we are tempted to give a content to those words and a profile, largely negative, to those behaviors, and are persuaded by our own infallible opinions that Saint Paul is “obviously” talking about the same thing as we are. The hard question we must persuade ourselves to ask is, is this so?

  In their discussions in a statement on “Issues in Human Sexuality,” members of the House of Bishops of the General Synod of the Church of England write: “Passions are more than emotions; they are emotions out of control. Dishonorable passions are a disordering of God’s purpose.” They go on to say, “Paul takes for granted an ordering of things in which the body and its sexual desires have their place and their proper honor; but the sexual acts of which he is now speaking dishonor the body.” Paul is speaking here of passions out of control, that become an end in and of themselves, that are in fact idolatrous. Dishonorable passions refer to the worship of sexual pleasure, an excess to be condemned with all other excesses.

  The “natural relations exchanged for unnatural” among women, at verse 26, and among men, at verse 27, who “likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another,” does not describe the conduct of homosexuals, but rather of heterosexual people who performed homosexual acts. As Boswell reminds us, the whole point of Romans 1 is a discussion of people who know what is right but who, because of their arrogant willfulness in their fallen state, choose to act contrary to that knowledge. In other words, “Paul did not discuss gay persons but only homosexual acts committed by heterosexual persons.” It is not clear that Saint Paul distinguished, as we must, between homosexual persons and heterosexual persons who behave like homosexuals, but what is clear is that what is “unnatural” is the one behaving after the manner of the other.

  We must further point out, as has nearly all contemporary scholarship on this point, that “nature,” as Paul here utilizes the concept, has nothing to do with a theory of Natural Law, which comes into the picture some centuries later, nor is he referring to the “order created in Genesis by God,” as H. Darrell Lance reminds us, “but to a common idea taken from pagan culture.” “Nature,” for Paul, is something more akin to “customary” or “characteristic”; it is not to be confused with that which is innate, inherent, or immutable. Among the Jews, homosexual behavior was not customary. It was in fact uncommon, “unnatural,” compared with the customs of the Greco-Roman world. As Boswell puts it, “For Paul, ‘nature’ was not a question of universal law or truth, but rather a matter of the character of some person or group of persons, a character which was largely ethnic and entirely human.” Nature is not, in the thinking of Paul, a moral force.

  The “shameless acts” of which Paul speaks may well refer to the assumption that homosexual acts, whether experienced by heterosexuals or homosexuals, always involved lust and avarice, an act of will, and an unavoidable degree of exploitation where the stronger took advantage of the weaker. In these same-sex relationships the passive partner, the female role, was taken advantage of by the active partner, the male role; and in the most disagreeable form of homosexual activity known to Paul and his contemporaries, pederasty, the adult male exploited for sexual purposes the younger male.

  The homosexuality Paul would have known and to which he makes reference in his letters, particularly to the Romans, has to do with pederasty and male prostitution, and he particularly condemns those heterosexual men and women who assume homosexual practices. What is patently unknown to Paul is the concept of a homosexual nature, that is, using Paul’s sense of the word “nature,” something that is beyond choice, that is not necessarily characterized by lust, avarice, idolatry, or exploitation, and that aspires to a life under the jurisdiction of the Holy Spirit. All Paul knew of homosexuality was the debauched pagan expression of it. He cannot be condemned for that ignorance, but neither should his ignorance be an excuse for our own. To base the church’s principled objections to homosexuality and homosexuals on the basis of Paul’s imperfect knowledge is itself unprincipled, and indeed quite beside all of the heroic points that Paul intends to make in Romans 1.

  In I Corinthians 6:9, the reference to homosexuals among the list of those who will not inherit the kingdom of God actually has as its context in Chapter 5 a startling case of heterosexual immorality, and of a kind not even found among the pagans: “For a man is living with his father’s wife.” (I Corinthians 5:1) Paul is so horrified by this that he demands that the man be expelled from the community, and it is this violation of the accepted standard of Christian behavior that leads Paul into another discussion about how Christians ought to live, and how they ought to put their old lives behind them. This passage is not about homosexuality; there is no reason to believe that the Corinthian church was troubled on that topic. We must remind ourselves that when Paul speaks of what we call homosexuality, he is speaking again of what can be called the “Gentile sin,” whose characteristics are those of which we have already spoken: willful, lustful, exploitive, avaricious, self-deceiving, self-absorbed, and thus idolatrous. Of course someone who fits this profile is unfit for the kingdom of heaven. Victor Paul Furnish reminds us that in these examples of wickedness, such as I Corinthians 6:9–10, the vices listed are “understood by Paul to be symptomatic of sin, not as its roots and essence.” In other words, because one is sinful one behaves in these ways. In I Timothy 1:10, “sodomites” are to be found on the list of the lawless and the disobedient for whom the law is laid down. “Sodomite,” as we now know, refers almost exclusively to a male prostitute, and is not a Pauline synonym for “homosexual,” as we understand that term.

  The Silent Text and Doctrinaire Prejudice

  In his study Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, John Boswell concluded his chapter on the New Testament texts having to do with homosexuality with these words:

  The New Testament takes no demonstrable position on homosexuality. To suggest that Paul’s references to excesses of sexual indulgence involving homosexual behavior are indicative of a general position in opposition to same-sex eroticism is as unfounded as arguing that his condemnation of drunkenness implies opposition to the drinking of wine.

  Jeffrey S. Siker, in the July 1994 issue of Theology Today, concludes his study of the biblical texts with these words:

  Thus the Bible has relatively little to say that directly informs us about how to address the issue of homosexual Christians today. The Bible certainly does not positively condone homosexuality as a legitimate expression of human sexuality, but neither does it expressly exclude loving monogamous homosexual adult Christian relationships from being within the realm of God’s intentions for humanity.

  Victor Paul Furnish, in the conclusion of his chapter on homosexuality in his 1979 book, The Moral Teaching of Paul, writes:

  Since Paul offered no direct teaching to his own churches on
the subject of homosexual conduct, his letters certainly cannot yield any specific answers to the questions being faced in the modern church…. It is a mistake to invoke Paul’s name in support of any specific position in these matters.

  As early as in 1964, German theologian Helmut Thielicke, in the volume of his Theological Ethics dealing with sex and homosexuality, after a thoroughgoing discussion of all of the relevant biblical passages, wrote, “There is not the slightest excuse for maligning the constitutional homosexual morally or theologically.” He went on to observe, however, that the continuing willingness to do so on the part of the Christian churches has nothing to do with the biblical texts, and very much to do with what he calls “doctrinaire prejudices.”

  Doctrinaire prejudices, which at the same time distort the theological problem presented by homosexuality, manifest themselves also in the fact that the value-judgment, “homosexuality is sinful,” is not isolated from an objective assessment of the phenomenon but is rather projected into it, and the result is that one arrives at an a priori defamation of those who are afflicted with this anomaly.