Posts

Showing posts with the label gay & Bible

Since Jesus did not specifically address homosexuality, how can we be certain he considers it sinful behavior?

Image
Jesus never spoke directly about homosexuality but inferred its prohibition by referring to the law.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Jesus addressed a multitude of sins throughout the four Gospels . As evidenced in the Sermon on the Mount , he explicitly affirmed the continuation of the Old Testament moral law and its intensification in his kingdom. At the same time, there are many specific issues, both ancient and modern, for which there is no specific scriptural text explicitly revealing what Christ said during his earthly ministry. This does not mean we cannot know what Christ believed and taught. In answering a question about divorce, Jesus himself stated that God's plan from the beginning was that a man and a woman be united in marriage. Jesus affirmed the Genesis pattern of complementarity, and he honored the institution of marriage as the conjugal union of a man and a woman ( Mark 10:2-9). At every single point, Jesus ...

What does the Bible really say about Homosexuality?

Image
Español: Intercambio de anillos entre los novios (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The Bible says nothing specifically about the homosexual condition (despite the rather misleading RSV translation of 1 Cor. 6:9), but its condemnations of homosexual conduct are explicit. The scope of these strictures must, however, be carefully determined. Too often they have been used as tools of a homophobic polemic which has claimed too much. The exegesis of the Sodom and Gibeah stories (Gn. 19:1–25; Jdg. 19:13–20:48) is a good case in point. We must resist D. S. Bailey’s widely-quoted claim that the sin God punished on these occasions was a breach of hospitality etiquette without sexual overtones (it fails to explain adequately both the double usage of the word ‘know’ (yāḏa‘) and the reason behind the substitutionary offer of Lot’s daughters and the Levite’s concubine); but neither account amounts to a wholesale condemnation of all homosexual acts. On both occasions the sin condemned was attempted hom...