Not That Kind of Homosexuality? Despite revisionist attempts....

Full Title: Not That Kind of Homosexuality? Despite revisionist attempts, the Bible has nothing good to say about homosexual practice.

That may sound like a harsh conclusion, but it’s not all that controversial. Even the gay Dutch scholar Pim Pronk has concluded that “wherever homosexual intercourse is mentioned in Scripture, it is condemned. With reference to it the New Testament adds no new arguments to those of the Old. Rejection is a foregone conclusion; the assessment of it nowhere constitutes a problem.”[1] There is simply no positive case to be made from the Bible for homoerotic behavior.

Revisionist arguments in favor of same-sex unions do not rest on gay affirming exegetical conclusions as much as they try to show that traditional interpretations of Scripture are unwarranted. That is to say, the only way revisionist arguments make sense is if they can show that there is an impassable distance between the world of the Bible and our world.

Of all the arguments in favor of same-sex behavior, the cultural distance argument is the most foundational and the most common (at least among those for whom biblical authority is still important). Although the Mosaic Law and Paul’s letter to the Romans and the vice lists of the New Testament speak uniformly against same-sex behavior, these texts (it is said) were addressing a different kind of same-sex behavior. The ancient world had no concept of sexual orientation, no understanding of egalitarian, loving, committed, monogamous, covenantal same-sex unions.

The issue was not gender (whether the lovers were male or female), but gender roles (whether a man was overly feminized and acting like a woman).

The issue was not consensual same-sex intercourse, but gang rape, power imbalances, and systemic oppression.

The revisionist case can take many forms, but central to most of them is the “not that kind of homosexuality!” argument. We can safely set aside the scriptural prohibitions against homosexual behavior because we are comparing apples and oranges: we are talking in our day about committed, consensual, lifelong partnerships, something the biblical authors in their day knew nothing about.

Despite its superficial plausibility, there are at least two major problems with this line of thinking.

For starters, the cultural distance argument is an argument from silence. The Bible nowhere limits its rejection of homosexuality to exploitative or pederastic (man-boy) forms of same-sex intimacy. Leviticus forbids a male lying with a male as with a woman (Lev. 18:22; 20:13). The text says nothing about temple prostitution, effeminate men, or sexual domination. The prohibition is against men doing with men what ought to be done with women. Similarly, the same-sex sin condemned in Romans 1 is not simply out of control passion or the insatiable male libido that desires men in addition to women. According to Paul, the fundamental problem with homosexual behavior is that men and women exchange sexual intercourse with the opposite sex for unnatural relations with persons of the same sex (Rom. 1:26-27; cf. 22, 25). If the biblical authors meant to frown upon only certain kinds of homosexual arrangements, they wouldn’t have condemned the same-sex act itself in such absolute terms.

Because the Bible never limits its rejection of homosexual behavior to pederasty or exploitation, those wanting to affirm homosexual behavior can only make an argument from silence. That’s why you will often read in the revisionist literature that the biblical author was only thinking of man-boy love or that an exploitative relationship would have been assumed in the minds of the original audience. The logic usually goes like this: There were many bad example of homosexual behavior in the ancient world. For example, here are ancient sources describing pederasty, master-slave encounters, and wild promiscuity. Therefore, when the Bible condemns same-sex intimacy, it had these bad examples in mind.

This reasoning can look impressive, especially when it comes at you with a half dozen quotations from ancient sources that most readers are not familiar with. But the last step in the syllogism is an assumption more than an argument. How can we be sure Paul had these bad examples in mind? If he did, why didn’t he use the Greek word for pederasty? Why didn’t he warn masters against forcing themselves upon slaves? Why does the Bible talk about men lying with men and the exchange of what is natural for unnatural if it wasn’t thinking about the created order and only had in mind predatory sex and promiscuous liaisons? If the biblical authors expected us to know what they really had in mind—and no one figured this out for two millennia—it appears that they came up with a remarkably ineffective way of getting their point across.

The second reason the distance argument fails is because it is an argument against the evidence. The line of reasoning traced above would be more compelling if it could be demonstrated that the only kinds of homosexuality known in the ancient world were based on pederasty, victimization, and exploitation. On the face of it, it’s strange that progressive voices would want us to reach this conclusion. For it would mean that committed, consensual, lifelong partnerships were completely unknown and untried in the ancient world. It seems demeaning to suggest that until very recently in the history of the world there were no examples of warm, loving, committed homosexual relationships. This is probably why Matthew Vines in using the cultural distance argument to make a biblical case for same-sex relationships admits, “This isn’t to say no one [in the Greco-Roman world] pursued only same-sex relationships, or that no same-sex unions were marked by long-term commitment and love.”[2] But of course, once we recognize that the type of same-sex unions progressives want to bless today were in fact present in the ancient world, it’s only special pleading which makes us think the biblical prohibitions couldn’t be talking about those kinds of relationships.

I’m not a scholar of the ancient world, neither are most of the authors writing on the revisionist side. As a pastor I can read Greek, but I’m no expert in Plato, Plutarch, or Aristides. Most people reading this are not scholars either. Thankfully, almost all of the important ancient texts on homosexuality are readily available. It doesn’t make for fun reading (especially if you think homosexual behavior is wrong), but anyone can explore the primary sources in Homosexuality In Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. This 558 page book is edited by the non-Christian classics professor Thomas K Hubbard. What you’ll find in the sourcebook is not surprising given the diversity and complexity of the ancient world: Homosexual behavior was not reducible to any single pattern and moral judgment did not fall into neat categories. There was no more consensus about homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome than we see today.[3]

From a Christian point of view, there are plenty of examples of “bad” homosexuality in the ancient world, but there is also plenty of evidence to prove that homosexual activity was not restricted to man-boy pairs. Some homosexual lovers swore continued attraction well into their loved one’s adulthood, and some gay lovers were lifelong companions.[4] By the first century AD, the Roman was increasingly divided on the issue of homosexuality. As public displays of same-sex indulgence grew, so did the moral condemnation of homosexual behavior.[5] Every kind of homosexual relationship was known in the first century, from lesbianism, to origiastic behavior, to gender-bending “marriage”, to lifelong same-sex companionship. Hubbard’s summary of early imperial Rome is important:

The coincidence of such severity on the part of moralistic writers with the flagrant and open display of every form of homosexual behavior by Nero and other practitioners indicates a culture in which attitude about this issue increasingly defined one’s ideological and moral position. In other words, homosexuality in this era may have ceased to be merely another practice of personal pleasure and began to be viewed as an essential and central category of personal identity, exclusive of and antithetical to heterosexual orientation.

If in the ancient world not only had a category for committed same-sex relationships but also some understanding of homosexual orientation (to use our phrase), there is no reason to think the New Testament’s prohibitions against same-sex behavior were only thinking of pederasty and exploitation.

Hubbard is not the only scholar to see the full range of homosexual expression in the ancient world. William Loader, who has written eight significant books on sexuality in Judaism and early Christianity and is himself a strong proponent of same-sex marriage, points to examples of same-sex adult partnerships in the ancient world.[6] Even more telling, Loader sees evidence for nascent ideas about orientation in the Greco-Roman era:

It is very possible that Paul knew of views which claimed some people had what we would call a homosexual orientation, though we cannot know for sure and certainly should not read our modern theories back into his world. If he did, it is more likely that, like other Jews, he would have rejected them out of hand, as does Philo after reporting Aristophanes’ bizarre aetiology [i.e., the study of causation] of human sexuality.[7]

Loader’s statement about Aristophanes is a reference to Plato’s Symposium (c. 385-370 B.C.), a series of speeches on Love (Eros) given by famous men at a drinking party in 416 B.C.. At this party we meet Pausanias who was a lover of the host Agathon, both grown men. Pausanias applauds the naturalness and longevity of same-sex love. In the fourth speech we meet the comic poet Aristophanes who proposes a convoluted theory, including notions of genetic causation, about why some men and women are attracted to persons of the same sex. Even if the speech is meant to be satire, it only works as satire by playing off the positive view of homosexual practice common in antiquity.[8]

To suggest that only certain kinds of homosexual practice (the bad kinds) were known in the ancient world is a claim that flies in the face of many Greek texts. Here, for example, is N.T. Wright’s informed conclusion:

As a classicist, I have to say that when I read Plato’s Symposium, or when I read the accounts from the early Roman empire of the practice of homosexuality, then it seems to me they knew just as much about it as we do. In particular, a point which is often missed, they knew a great deal about what people today would regard as longer-term, reasonably stable relations between two people of the same gender. This is not a modern invention, it’s already there in Plato. The idea that in Paul’s today it was always a matter of exploitation of younger men by older men or whatever … of course there was plenty of that then, as there is today, but it was by no means the only thing. They knew about the whole range of options there.[9]

And then there is this paragraph from the late Louis Crompton, a gay man and pioneer in queer studies, in his massive book Homosexuality and Civilization:

Some interpreters, seeking to mitigate Paul’s harshness, have read the passage [in Romans 1] as condemning not homosexuals generally but only heterosexual men and women who experimented with homosexuality. According to this interpretation, Paul’s words were not directed at “bona fide” homosexuals in committed relationships. But such a reading, however well-intentioned, seems strained and unhistorical. Nowhere does Paul or any other Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of same-sex relations under any circumstances. The idea that homosexuals might be redeemed by mutual devotion would have been wholly foreign to Paul or any Jew or early Christian.[10]

I know it is poor form to pile up block quotes from other authors, but in this case it proves a point. Scholars all of different stripes have said the same thing: the cultural distance argument will not work. There is nothing in the biblical text to suggest Paul or Moses or anyone else meant to limit the Scriptural condemnation of homosexual behavior. Likewise, there is no good reason to think from the thousands of homosexuality-related texts found in the Greco-Roman period that the blanket rejection of homosexual behavior found in the Bible can be redeemed by postulating an impassable cultural distance between our world and the ancient world. There is simply no positive case for homosexual practice in the Bible and no historical background that will allow us to set aside what has been the plain reading of Scripture for twenty centuries. The only way to think the Bible is talking about every other kind of homosexuality except the kind our culture wants to affirm is to be less than honest with the texts or less than honest with ourselves.

[1] Pim Pronk, Against Nature? Types of Moral Argumentation Regarding Homosexuality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993) ,279.

[2] Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships (New York: Convergent Books, 2014), 104.

[3] Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7-8.

[6] William Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans: 2012), 84.

[8] See Robert Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 350-54.

[9] John L. Allen Jr., “Interview with Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright of Durham, England,” National Catholic Reporter, May 21, 2004, http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/wright.htm (accessed November 11, 2014).

[10] Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 114.

Natural laws learned over thousands of years were mocked, ridiculed, overturned, and even outlawed. Toward the end, homosexual drill sergeants prowled the barracks grooming receptive teenage recruits. Hey, we were told, it’s their business, and who are you to judge them? Later, they could get married in the post-interfaith worship center by a military spiritual advisor (“chapels” and “chaplains” having been purged from the lexicon for favoring the Christian faiths) and then move on to adopting children.

And finally, the last old-guard bunker to fall: the Boy Scouts, completing the cycle of government-approved sodomite corruption. For a century the Scouts were morally straight? According to whose definition of straight? So why shouldn’t adult homosexual Scout leaders share tents with teenagers in our brave new world? Don’t be a homophobe, we were told. Each child can make his or her own free choice about their gender identity, but now with helpful adult mentors to guide them along the formerly forbidden paths.

If it feels good, do it. Or have it done to you. Or even do it unto the little children. Tommy wants to become Tomasina before heading to kindergarten? Her brave new mommy agrees? A government-provided surgeon will perform the “gender reassignment” operation. And if kindergarten isn’t soon enough to put the kids on the unrepressed road to gender identification, then start them on Heather Has Two Mommies and Prince and Prince cartoon books in the government-subsidized day care centers.

Smiling experts assured us that we were merely throwing off the shackles of our repressed sexualities. Dissent is hate, and hate is not tolerated around here, mister, so shut up and get with the program. Well, I couldn’t get with the program, so I quit my public high school job. As a world history teacher, moving from a public school to a Christian academy (at less pay and fewer benefits) gave me a couple more years of insulation from the social wreckage cascading down.

I kept looking up for the big asteroid, but we didn’t need God to smite us from outer space. In the end, we smote ourselves with our hubris, believing that we were replacing God’s wisdom with our own. The proud decadence and in-your-face cultural perversions didn’t cause the Rupture, but they were surely flashing red signs warning that the end was near.

Click the pic to the full-text Free Republic thread.

While I believe homosexuality to be unnatural, government should have no say in the matter.

I just saw a film about a fellow named Turing. He, perhaps more than any other human being, was responsible for defeating the Nazis and saving England from certain defeat. For his trouble, he was essentially murdered by the British government for committing homosexual acts.

We don’t trust government for anything else, so why have them be involved in situations like these.

There needs to be an addendum to the Bible, a separate book, that clarifies its prohibitions. Basically a clear explanation of what is prohibited and why.

1) Homosexuality, sodomy, other perversions and prostitution.

2) Abortion and other child sacrifice.

3) War, lawful killing and unlawful murder, to include euthanasia.

4) Mutilation and spiritual harm to oneself and others, in body and spirit.

5) An explanation of the covenants, and who they apply to. And especially what laws, statutes and judgments still apply, and those that no longer apply to Christians.

6) Heterodoxy, Heresy, Paganism and false religions, and anti-religious philosophies, who created them and why, and why they should be discarded as repugnant. Likely the largest part of the book. Reference should be made to good secular scholarship as well, when carried out with religious morality and ethics.

There is simply no positive case to be made from the Bible for homoerotic behavior. Revisionist arguments in favor of same-sex unions do not rest on gay affirming exegetical conclusions as much as they try to show that traditional interpretations of Scripture are unwarranted. That is to say, the only way revisionist arguments make sense is if they can show that there is an impassable distance between the world of the Bible and our world.
Of all the arguments in favor of same-sex behavior, the cultural distance argument is the most foundational and the most common (at least among those for whom biblical authority is still important). Although the Mosaic Law and Paul’s letter to the Romans and the vice lists of the New Testament speak uniformly against same-sex behavior, these texts (it is said) were addressing a different kind of same-sex behavior. The ancient world had no concept of sexual orientation, no understanding of egalitarian, loving, committed, monogamous, covenantal same-sex unions....

....The revisionist case can take many forms, but central to most of them is the “not that kind of homosexuality!” argument. We can safely set aside the scriptural prohibitions against homosexual behavior because we are comparing apples and oranges: we are talking in our day about committed, consensual, lifelong partnerships, something the biblical authors in their day knew nothing about.

On that note, we learned on the thread I’m a senior GOP spokesman, and I’m gay. Let me get married that in the state of Georgia, roughly 2% of the state population are homosexual, and three-quarters of that group do not live with their sexual partners. Of the remaining one-quarter of the 2% homosexual population that live with their partners, half have no intention or desire to make a covenantal commitment to their sexual partner, even if same-sex marriage were legalized.

In other words, the revisionist case of "egalitarian, loving, committed, monogamous, covenantal same-sex unions" is only applicable to one-eighth of the practicing homosexual population, if Georgia serves as a reliable example.

While I believe homosexuality to be unnatural, government should have no say in the matter....Turing... perhaps more than any other human being, was responsible for defeating the Nazis and saving England from certain defeat.... he was essentially murdered by the British government for committing homosexual acts. We don’t trust government for anything else, so why have them be involved in situations like these.

I think the problem for conservatives today is that government is using all its powers to establish homosexuality as a government-approved behavior, to label any conscientious objection to homosexuality as a punishable offense, and to affirmatively encourage in schoolchildren positive attitudes towards homosexual behaviors, while downplaying or forbidding the discussion of any negative consequences. This is certainly not neutrality.

Therefore Christians and Jews need to arm themselves with the truth concerning the many arguments trotted out. This article is specific and precise in rejecting the distortions of scripture employed by advocates of affirmative homosexuality, many of whom seek to display these arguments in media to undermine popular opinion, in the churches to subvert sound doctrine, and before the high courts of the land to overturn the will of the people.

GOD gave men the words He wanted to use to write each book of the Bible as the Bible is God’s word breathed. Answers to all questions are there, just not in the detail that we want them since we’re so smart now! He kept it simple for a reason and that was so we who try to prove Him wrong by our great mind(s) are made to look foolish at some point.

In my life when I have tried to justify my words or actions, even before Bible Study, somewhere deep inside my heart and mind, I KNEW right from wrong and that I was choosing wrong for my joy, not His! What a mess I would be without knowing the triune God! I thank my parents and grandparents for giving me GOD more than any gift they gave me!

what punishable offenses are you referring to?

Christian bakers being fined and shut down because they aren't comfortable doing a cake for a gay wedding.

Christian photographers fined for not wanting to photograph a gay wedding.

Christian couples being fined for not wanting to allow gay couples in their home, which is also a bed and breakfast.

A Christian couple being fined for not wanting to host a gay wedding at the wedding venue on their farm, which is also their home.

A Methodist church in Rehoboth, Delaware sued and fined for not wanting to host a lesbian wedding at a gazebo they rent out for weddings in a state that had not legalized gay marriage.

A tech CEO being fired when he was discovered to have sent a check in support of a traditional marriage referendum years ago, even though he treated gay employees equitably in the intervening years.

A Christian florist facing fines for not wanting to provide flowers for a gay wedding.

A married couple of ordained Christian pastors threatened with shutdown because they do not want to perform gay weddings in their wedding chapel, which is their sole livelihood.

A long-established, privately-owned wedding trolley-tour business in Annapolis Maryland that had to shut down when compelled by the state to host gay wedding parties.

Christian graduate students in couseling being pushed out of their doctorate programs and denied graduation after years of work because they wanted to refer openly gay patients to another counselor who did not have conscientious objections to encouraging gay behavior.

Shall I go on?

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