Why the Metropolitan Community Church and other - reinterpret the sin of homosexuality
THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY felt an explosion quite unlike that which shook Sodom, an eruption of reinterpretation of Scripture regarding gay and lesbian sexuality. To varying degrees, these studies have found the traditional view of key texts wrongheaded and in error. The old interpretations were replaced by three approaches:
1. References to homosexuality do not occur in passages where they traditionally have been seen (Gen. 19:1–8; Judg. 19:16–30; Ezek. 16:44–50; 1 Cor. 6:9–11; 1 Tim. 1:8–10; 2 Peter 2:6–8; and Jude 6–8). Identification of homosexuality in these passages is improper interpretation of Scripture.
2. Homosexuality is in the context of certain passages, but these texts concern Israel’s special ritual or sacred relationship to God (e.g., Levit. 18:22; 20:13). They are irrelevant to the Christian.
3. Whatever references to homosexuality are in Scripture may be deemed outdated and irrelevant. They concern a form of homosexuality unlike the modern practice and have nothing to contribute to contemporary discussion (e.g., Rom. 1:26–27).
There are variants to the third approach. One disassociates moral norms from theological revelation and asserts that the total modern community must decide what is moral and immoral, what God’s will is for us. Another variation that appeals to liberation theologians makes freedom in love the chief criterion for deciding the morality of homosexuality. Such reasoning reads the Bible through modern philosophies. Of course, many studies adopt two or all three approaches to the biblical texts.
A study of the biblical witness about homosexuality is timely and holds acute ramifications for people in the Judeo-Christian tradition that reach into all aspects of modern living. The homosexual lifestyle has penetrated virtually every facet of contemporary society.
Organizations exist for the expressed purpose of affirming homosexuality as a legitimate Christian lifestyle, including an entire church denomination, the Metropolitan Community Church. The “gay rights” movement demands that society remove all civil restrictions on homosexual activity so that homosexuals have access to all jobs, housing, and public service in government. Their “sexual orientation” should not be a barrier to any opportunity.
The gay community designs federal and state legislation and promotes judicial decisions as avenues for advancing its goal to include homosexual activity under civil rights protection. Churches wrestle with such matters as the acceptance of homosexuals into the church and even the ordination of gays and lesbians. The gay community has gone so far as to confront society with a redefinition of marriage that would recognize two homosexuals living together as man and wife, with rights to adopt children.
The book that led the way for this new interpretation of the Scriptures was D. Sherwin Bailey’s Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition. More recently, John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality won a 1981 American Book Award for History. Boswell’s treatment of Scripture and history to the fourteenth century was hailed as “a groundbreaking work,” a “revolutionary study,” “one of the most extensive treatments” of homosexuality, “an astonishing work of scholarship.”
It was said to open “a new area of historical inquiry.” Indeed, he succeeded “in making one think the unthinkable.”1 Robin Scroggs, L. William Countryman, George Edwards, John McNeill, Pim Pronk, Martti Nissinen, and other reinterpreters have followed Bailey and Boswell.
Boswell’s work continues to have a significant impact among homosexuals and others, within and without Christendom. The gay movement champions his work because it believes that it will change the attitudes of heterosexuals and persuade them to accept homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle. It does this by removing the biblical sanctions against homosexuality. Boswell and others are, I believe, so far-reaching and assertive in their revised interpretations of the biblical passages that they have crossed the line from objectivity to activism and are not only revisionist but also prohomosexual.
The approach of liberation theology is distinctive. George Edwards adds this dimension to the interpretation of Scripture. Where Paul and other writers of Scripture might condemn homosexuality, the theology of gay/lesbian liberation must “correct” them. There can be no such condemnation because soteriology is liberation. Liberation is based on love, whether gay and lesbian or heterosexual.2 So Edwards finds Scripture irrelevant and uses liberation theology to “correct” it.
Still more recently, another approach espouses a distinction between purity and morality. Countryman believes that homosexuality violates only the Old Testament “purity rule”; it does not violate any moral principle. Since Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament abrogated all purity rules, homosexuality is acceptable.3 Whether this approach can sustain a distinction between rules and principles, it challenges the traditional understanding of homosexuality.
Following Countryman, it is important, then, to discover what moral principle, if any, affects our understanding of homosexuality as acceptable or unacceptable behavior. I will argue that the nature of God as both loving and holy provides the anchor for just such a moral principle that excludes homosexual behavior.
Pim Pronk defends homosexuality from the perspective of moral argumentation.4 It is within the “whole human community,” not the narrow confines of revelation or theology, that a moral determination about sexual morality must be made.
Theology and revelation cannot limit God’s will for another day and time. Exegesis of the Bible can affirm that its writers regarded homosexuality as sin, but does this judgment remain normative? A new context must determine how much weight to give to the Bible’s statements. Theology is not the epistemological source of the knowledge of good and evil but exists only to affirm that morality is the will of God. The what of morality is supplied by moral education, critical thinking, and rational argumentation. The whole human community in deliberation decides what constitutes good and evil. Moral positions are part of general revelation and are antecedent to the appeal to special revelation.
Pronk’s method broadly covers all moral argumentation and has far-reaching consequences—nowhere greater than in the matter of homosexual ethics. Other approaches involve a discussion of the exegesis of texts on homosexuality and their interpretation and application. This approach asserts that “there is every reason to remove the homosexuality issue permanently from the church’s agendas as a moral and religious, i.e., as a scientific, problem.” If this view is correct, then the Bible’s statements on homosexuality are truly irrelevant. Is this a valid approach?
Finally, Martti Nissinen revises Scripture’s view of homosexuality from the standpoint of worldview. He combines features of the thinking of Boswell, Countryman, Edwards, Pronk, and others. In effect, his view subjects the biblical worldview to that of modern times. If the contemporary worldview regards homosexuality differently than does the Bible, then the modern attitudes deserve to prevail.
For example, Nissinen asserts that biblical writers were people of their times, with limited knowledge. Modern “changes in worldview” force us “to diverge from the clear word of the Bible.” The “specific moral commands are norms born from the needs of the time and place.” For Nissinen, love is “the central hermeneutical principle when applying biblical commands”; such an approach means “careful examination of both the Bible and the prevailing reality in which we live with neighbors of flesh and blood.”5
Clearly, Nissinen regards contemporary culture, not the Bible, to be determinative in ethics. His approach, based as it is in worldview, is potentially the most far-reaching of the revisionist interpretations of the Bible’s statements on homosexuality.
Although each of these approaches has certain distinctives, there are common principles of interpretation and theological presuppositions. All of the various approaches incorporate one or more of the three views or approaches to Scripture discussed above. These approaches to Scripture’s teaching regarding homosexuality have confused and distressed both Christians and non-Christians. It is possible to find our way to the truth if we follow a careful, deliberate, and respectful process of interpretation.
We can and must interpret Scripture correctly if we are to apply it rightly within and without the church.
If religion has a direct effect on morality, and morality, in turn, has a direct effect on law or legislation,6 then the new interpretations of Scripture have serious consequences for society, and we must answer them. Religious grounds derived from Scripture have influenced sexual behavior in the West more fully than has any other influence. Christians cannot abandon the implications that their theology has for public morality and legislation. They must speak to the legitimacy of homosexuality and its effects on morality and law within and without the church.
This chapter presents the Old Testament witness to Sodom, critiquing prohomosexual or revisionist interpretations. Subsequent chapters will take up other literature of the Jews, including the LXX and New Testament, as well as the ancient literature and law codes of the Greeks and Romans. While some attention must be given to literature from after the time of the New Testament, in-depth treatments of references to homosexuality in the church fathers and the later writings are already available.7
De Young, J. B. (2000). Homosexuality: Contemporary Claims Examined in Light of the Bible and Other Ancient Literature and Law (pp. 25–29). Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications.
