Homosexuality

This is perhaps the most controversial section of this entire theses and one of the most important issues facing the church of the 21st Century. It's a subject that the majority of western Christians believe is an open and shut case. They would say: 'Homosexuality is a sin. The Bible clearly condemns it, the Church throughout history has condemned it, the very facts of biology demonstrate that it's an aberration at best and our own emotional response to it is usually revulsion.'

So how on earth could any serious minded Christian ever endorse homosexuality (and in this I am including lesbianism) as a legitimate Christian lifestyle?

Only by changing your belief paradigm.

Changing one's world view

I once saw a short play on television that made a strong impression on me. It was set in a doctor's surgery and the doctor wheeled in a patient who was restrained by being tied to the wheelchair, apparently to avoid his becoming violent. The patient was clearly delusional and was shouting to the doctor that they were in a spaceship together and that the doctor and he were both astronauts. The doctor tried to help him and then began to wheel him to the waiting room.

At this the patient became extremely agitated and said that the waiting room was, in fact, a disposal hatch and that if he were taken there he would die. He said that the doctor was suffering a delusional space sickness and that if he took one of the blue and white pills that were in his top left hand drawer he would begin to recover.

Well, perhaps you can guess what happened. The doctor took him screaming outside and then sat at his desk and eventually looked in his drawer and found a packet of blue and white pills. He took one after much hesitation and following a dizzy spell found himself in a space capsule - alone!

He had had no doubt that he was right. Everything around him confirmed his perceptions. He had been convinced that he was experiencing reality but in fact it was a delusion. It caused him to eject his fellow spaceman.

Our perception of homosexuality is like this.

We have been ejecting our fellow believers from the bosom of the Church believing we are doing God's will. What has been their fate? They have been indoctrinated with confusion, guilt and self loathing. They have sought cures and miracles in vain. They have emasculated themselves, taken to drugs and excess and committed suicide in vast numbers. We have caused them to become spiritually shipwrecked.

"Surely not!" you cry. The Church couldn't be wrong on such an important point.

Oh no?

Could the Church be wrong?

Do you think it's impossible for the majority of Christians to be wrong about a significant doctrine? Well, if you have read what I have already written you will realise that not only can they be but for most of the last 2000 years they have been in general disagreement over many doctrines. For example:

§ Whether or not Gentiles can be saved.

§ Which day to observe as a Sabbath.

§ Whether observing days is important or not.

§ Dietary laws.

§ Capital punishment.

§ Racial equality.

§ Slavery.

§ Forms of baptism.

§ Church government.

§ The place of women in the church

§ Healing

Are you willing to change your paradigm?

I can point you in the right direction if you have an open mind. If you don't, what I am writing will seem like foolishness. If I just quoted you the scriptures that apparently condemn homosexuality and tried to say "well these really don't mean what they seem to clearly say" you would reject my arguments.

But if we look at the Bible itself, and you allow me to show you that we have been using it in the wrong way all along, then you will begin to see God's truth in a different light.

I will need to give you examples where it is clear that we cannot interpret them in the way that most Christians do. Then we will begin to understand how we must interpret them in order to correctly understand the spirit of what God wants us to receive from his holy Word. Then when we apply these principles in a consistent way across all scripture, including these that refer to homosexuality, we will see them in a new light.

This could be a difficult exercise and not one for the faint hearted. It is scary to question one's fundamental assumptions. You can begin to feel disoriented and fearful; not only for your own sake but for fear of what others will think of you if you embrace such different ideas.

Objections to accepting homosexuality

To most Christian readers, the thought of God accepting practicing homosexuals into the church body is repulsive, mentally and emotionally. I think the basic objections come under these headings:

1. It's true that God says that he made man male and female. Physically their bodies are designed to "fit" together in sexual union and this is how we reproduce. Accepting that this is a norm, however, doesn't address the question of those that God has made that don't fit the profile.

Homosexuality occurs naturally in the animal kingdom at every level. It also occurs naturally among humans of every race and society and has done throughout history, despite the fact that many societies have tried to deny it.

Homosexuality is not a single condition that is always caused by the same things. Sometimes the cause is primarily genetic, sometimes environmental and sometimes a mixture of each.
Furthermore, there are some people born "intersex". They have sexual organs of both sexes and usually find it very difficult to relate to a strongly heterosexual society that treats sexual deviations as taboo. They are often persecuted, frightened, guilty and lonely individuals. If their nuclear family is able to bring them up, accepting them for what they are, (i.e. neither male nor female) and refuses to hide them away as if they were freaks, then they have a chance of developing happily. However, it is rare if they love them just as they are - intersex individuals that God has made and Jesus died for. Usually the family is highly distraught, feel guilty, believes that God is punishing them for their sins (if they are Christians) and follow medical advice by trying to make their beautiful offspring into either a male of female through a mixture of surgery, medication and counselling.

Poor, sad, ignorant us! Because of our prejudices and fears and ignorance we cause our loved ones to suffer. We don't mean to harm them. We love them and want the best for them. Religious dogma doesn't help. It confirms us in our mental chains. "God made them male and female" the minister tells us.

But in these cases he didn't. What do we do? If someone has a beautiful baby boy or girl we are happy to credit God with such a creation. We count their fingers and toes and marvel at the intricate beauty of the baby's form. But if they have a deformity we start to look for someone or something to blame. The implication is that God's perfect will was thwarted somehow. The truth is that we live in a fallen creation and nothing in the physical world is perfect. The creation is subject to decay.

Okay so the male and female bits fit together. Does that mean that the only sexual consummation that is allowed is where the organs "fit"? What about heterosexual, husband and wife intercourse that doesn't involve vaginal penetration? Is that a perversion too? This gets us onto shaky ground. What is natural? I know some denominations that prescribe approved sexual positions. Are birth control devices natural?

Must sexual activity produce offspring to make them legitimate in God's eyes? I have looked in vain through the early chapters of Genesis to see references to producing children as a reason that God made marriage.

2. It might seem that many scriptures clearly condemn homosexuality, but in fact they don't. The truth is that the Bible has very little to say about homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle.

It is tragic how "sodomy" has come into the vernacular from the Biblical stories about the city of Sodom. The sin of the men of Sodom was not homosexuality as the Bible makes very clear itself.

"Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me… You (Jerusalem) have done more detestable things than they."

3. It is assumed that because most Christians agree that it's sinful, then it must be because they couldn't all be wrong. But the fact is that most Christians have been wrong about quite a lot of things - and homosexuality is just one more.

When it comes down to it, you have to look at Scripture for yourself and decide what it says. If you are looking for verses that confirm to you that the Bible condemns homosexuality, then you will find them if you simply read them in many of today's translations and without careful examination. They were translated by men who almost universally believed homosexuality to be a sin! On the other hand, if you delve deeper and listen to careful exegesis of these verses with an explanation of the social and historical context and the original Hebrew and Greek, you will see a totally different picture emerging. (You probably won't be looking into it unless you or someone you love is gay).

4. For many people the most powerful motive for condemning homosexuality is the fact that they find it repulsive, which just shows them how wrong it obviously is.

This is almost impossible to argue against. The more anyone does, the more you become convinced that they are the agent of the devil.

Try looking at it from another angle. When I first became a Christian I joined a fundamentalist Church that believed we should obey every word of Scripture from the Old as well as the New Testament. This wasn't possible, of course, because they contradict each other, but we tried. One of the teachings was that we shouldn't eat pork because Leviticus 11 prohibits it. So we didn't. Moreover, many members of that Church will tell you how repulsive even the smell of bacon frying was to them.

When we came out of that Church, my wife found that it took years before she could eat pork products without feeling squeamish.

Emotional conditioning is hard to break

I, myself, was conditioned by my religious indoctrination to think of gays as "unclean" and was repulsed by them. Even when I had intellectually proven to myself that God makes some people gay, that he loves them the way they are and that he doesn't condemn homosexual sex ( but rather selfish love and unfaithfulness and lack of personal commitment) I still found that it took a long time before I could react positively to gay men and women.

I didn't change the way I thought because of the way I felt. I came to understand the truth and now my emotions have followed. I see gay and lesbian men and women as precious brothers and sisters and delight in their contribution to society and the Church in particular.

So what can I say? Unless you are hungry to know the truth it's easier to stay in the accepted, popular, comfortable illusion. After all, it took us slavers in the United States and Britain a long time to think of black people as having souls like "real human beings".

Even today, most evangelical Christians believe that God condemns homosexuality and that the Bible forbids it. This is completely untrue. The Bible doesn't condemn homosexuality at all. It has been translated by largely homophobic scholars who have changed the original Hebrew and Greek to make it appear to be against homosexuality at first glance. However, true scholarship and understanding of the context of the "anti gay" verses reveal an amazingly different viewpoint. Are you open minded enough to at least look at the evidence? It's extremely difficult to do this because our emotional programming over sexually taboo subjects is incredibly powerful.

The truth is that God makes quite a lot of us either lesbians or gays. He loves them no less than straight people. Similarly, (despite the teachings of those who insist that healing is in the atonement and that God's will is always to heal) God makes a lot of sick and deformed people. He loves them just as much as those who are physically and mentally sound. He isn't trying desperately to heal them now and their imperfections don't thwart his purposes for a single one of us.

In fact, his power is made complete in our weaknesses. We are all flawed in many ways.

The Scriptures on Homosexuality

Romans 1

This is the main section of Scripture that is used to show that the Bible teaches the sinfulness of homosexuality. It is the plainest statement on the subject. It is in the New Testament, which gives it added weight for some who realise that there are many doctrinal statements in the Old Testament that we have almost universally accepted are no longer valid for Christians today.

So let's look at it and see what it actually says. If we can see that this doesn't condemn homosexuality we will have discredited the main witness for the prosecution.

"The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him. but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look

like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator-who is for ever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

Furthermore, since they did not think it worth while to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.

They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents;They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them."

Romans 1:18-32

Let us now prayerfully look at what this letter to the church at Rome was all about.

First of all, Paul was writing to a first century church that was a mixture of Jews and Gentiles. In this part of the letter he is addressing Gentile idolatry. Later on in his letter he goes on to say to the Jewish believers that they are no better because they had the law, but at this stage he is building his argument and he is talking about Gentile worship of false gods.

He writes that they are without excuse because God can clearly be seen in creation. He says that they willingly rejected that knowledge and turned instead to idols. Because of this perverse rejection of him, God gave them over to sexual perversions, typified by the change from heterosexual sex to homosexual sex along with other base sins.

Understanding the way that people thought at that time is important to help us understand why Paul wrote what he did. For the Jews, homosexuality was seen as a Gentile perversion and one which was either associated with idolatrous activities or pederasty (where an older male took a younger male sex partner).

Paul, like other writers at the time, knew nothing of "homosexual people" but only homosexual acts. To him, anyone who engaged in homosexual activity was perverting their natural sexual appetites. That's why he says they "Abandoned natural relations". He is, therefore, describing people who changed their natural heterosexual activity to unnatural - for them personally as well as "by the nature of things, which Paul accepted as a given. It was the changing of the natural sexuality to the unnatural (like the changing of the worship of the true God to the false) that was anathema to Paul.

The fact is that today we understand homosexuality better and realise that for some, homosexuality is their "natural" inclination and not something they have chosen in any way. Some few religious people still resist this truth but it is out of ignorance and/or a refusal or inability to examine the evidence objectively.

This therefore is the scenario he depicts:

So, far from being a blanket condemnation of homosexuality it is in a specific context condemning the behaviour of Gentiles who have turned to worshipping false gods and to perversions of their natural behaviour.

Does this describe your gay Christian friends? Of course not.

If you were to have been able to travel back in time and to ask Paul what he thought about two men who were naturally homosexual and who were living in a permanent, loving, faithful relationship together, what reaction do you think you would have got?

First of all, the concept would have been alien to his way of thinking. He would probably have trouble accepting that you were describing a reality. Because of his culture and personal understanding he would almost certainly find the concept objectionable. He might well doubt whether they were truly Christian, because of his own preconceived notions but would be honest enough to say that such were not the object of his criticisms in Romans 1.

In Paul's mind the only men who engaged in homosexual activity were heterosexual men who were perverting their own sexual drives by, for example:

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And it was, for Paul, clearly shameful and depraved. He wrote with the limitations of his own cultural understanding.

He also insisted on the covering and silencing of women in church, remember. He said that men should not have their heads covered because they are the image and glory of God. He said that women should cover their head because they are not. I personally believe that is fundamentally wrong. Women are as much the image and glory of God as men.