The Bible Does Have Something to Say About Homosexuality

By: Dr. CarI Bridges

Many gay writers have promoted the idea that the Bible is silent or even approves of homosexual behavior. In this study, Dr. CarI Bridges reviews the key passages and arguments that support biblical interdiction against homosexuality.

Sources

Tom Horner, Homosexuality and the Judeo-Christian Tradition: An Annotated Bibliography, ATLA Bibliographical Series 5 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1981).
Robin Scroggs, in The New Testament and Homosexuality: Contextual Background for Contemporary Debate (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), pp. 62-65, 106-109, argues that these two words refer in a restricted sense to homosexual prostitutes (malahoi) and the men who use them (arsenokoitai). However, even if Paul does not refer to homosexual behavior generally in this passage, he certainly does so in Romans 1:26-27, which Scroggs appears to admit (116-117). P. Michael Ukleja, "Homosexuality in the New Testament," Bibliotheca Sacra 140/4 (October-December 1983): 350-358, argues for the more general meaning of the two words which we believe is correct. See also two articles by David E. Malick, "The Condemnation of Homosexuality in Romans 1:26-27, Bibliotheca Sacra 150/3 (July-September 1993): 327-340, and "The Condemnation of Homosexuality in 1 Corinthians 6:9," Bibliotheca Sacra 150/4 (October-December 1993), pp. 479-492.
Marva J. Dawn, Sexual Character: Beyond Technique to Intimacy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), in a useful "hermeneutical excursus" (pp. 96-98), deals with the question of how the present-day church should deal with the biblical passages on homosexuality.
Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1955); reprint, Hamden, CT: Archon, 1975. John R. W. Stott, in "Homosexual 'Marriage,"' Christianity Today 29/17 (November 22, 1985), p. 22, refers to Sherwin Bailey as "the first Christian theologian to re-evaluate the traditional understanding of the biblical prohibitions regarding homosexuality."
Stott, 23. See also Scroggs, p. 73, who although in general he concludes that Scripture does not forbid homosexual behavior today, still "believe[s] the traditional interpretation [of the Sodom account] to be correct."
Derek Kidner, "Additional Note on the sin of Sodom," in Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1967), pp. 136-137. See also Coleman, p.34.
John White, Eros Defiled: The Christian and Sexual Sin (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1977), p. 112, calls temporary homosexuality associated with prison life and similar circumstances "situational homosexuality." Eleanor Daniel, What the Bible Says About Sexual Identity (Joplin: College Press, 1981), pp. 161-162, prefers to call such people "contingent homosexuals."
For an argument that the Leviticus passages are normative for Christians as we believe, see P. Michael Ukleja, "Homosexuality and the Old Testament," Bibliotheca Sacra 140/3 (July-September 1983): 259-266, especially 264tf. on "The Relevance of the Law."
Kidner, p. 137.
Sherwin Bailey, pp. 172-173; author's emphasis. Freud used the terms "inversion" and "perversion" somewhat differently; see Peter Coleman, Christian Attitudes to Homosexuality (London: SPCK, 1980), p. 13.
An alert reader might notice that Paul uses a natural-law argument in favor of women keeping their hair long, and men cutting theirs, in 1 Cor. 11:14-15, and that we find an argument from creation, similar to a natural-law argument, for the silence of women in church in 1 Tim. 2:13-14. If we say that we are bound to condemn all homosexual behavior because Paul argued against it on the ground of natural law, are we also obligated to keep our hair short (or long, as the case may be) and keep women quiet in church on the same grounds? We believe these are different cases.
Paul condemns homosexual behavior as sin in Rom. 7:26-27. while he does not discuss variations in hairstyle or women's speaking in church on the same terms. We might say that for Paul, homosexual behavior was a moral matter, while hairstyle was a symbolic one - standing for a wife's submission for her husband (see 1 Cor. 11:5,7) - or a customary matter (see 1 Cor. 11:16), while the question of women speaking in church was a practical, not a moral, issue (see 1 Cor. 11:5, 14:33b-35). Paul's use of a natural-law argument in discussing a non-moral issue does not necessarily imply that he considered hairstyles or women's silence part of the moral order of creation.
Coleman, p. 91, calls that attempt to read Paul as only condemning homosexual acts by heterosexual people "an attempt to read the old texts with modern presuppositions."
See note 2.
Sherwin Bailey, p. 157.
Both Daniel, pp. 171-173, and Sherwin Bailey, pp. 56-57, agree that the evidence is weak. For an argument that David and Jonathan did have a homosexual relationship, see Tom Horner, Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), pp. 26-40.
Stott, p. 24, (author's emphasis).
Walter Trobisch, I Married You, in The Complete Works of Walter Trobisch: Answers about Loue, Sex, Self-Esteem and Personal Grouth (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1987), pp. 376-386.
Marva Dawn's near-poetic description of "sexual Shalom" (pp. 161-168) paints a compelling picture of God's design for sexuality as revealed in Scripture.
Here we must part company with Helmut Thielicke, who in his work The Ethics of Sex, trans. by John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1964) refers to homosexuality as a "borderline situation" (p. 199). Although he argues that the homosexual orientation is a perversion of the created order (pp. 282-283), he seems to leave the door open at least for the theoretical possibility that a given individual might live an ethically responsible life as a practicing homosexual (pp. 283-286). In practical terms, however, Thielicke admits that "Christian pastoral care will have to be concerned primarily with helping the person to sublimate his homosexual urge" (p. 287, Thielicke's emphasis).