From soc.motss Wed Nov 6 23:08:13 1991 Path: andromeda.rutgers.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!wupost!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!bruce!monu0.cc.monash.edu.au!monu6!minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au!s883334 From: s883334@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au (James Alan Hall) Newsgroups: soc.motss Subject: Biblical arguments and homosexuality Message-ID: <1991Nov6.065033.15782@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au> Date: 6 Nov 91 06:50:33 GMT Organization: RMIT Computer Centre, Melbourne Australia. Lines: 879 The following is a document that goes through and analyses each quote from the bible that concerns homosexuality. It's rather long but worth the read. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Homosexuality and the Bible, An Interpretation by Walter Barnett About the author: A native of Texas Walter barnett graduated summa cum laude from Yale University, where he was president of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. He earned his Doctor of Jurisprudence at the University of Texas and his Master of Laws at Columbia University. He was also a Fullbright Scholar at the College of Europe in Belgium. After a brief period of law practive in Texas he served for four years on the staff of the Legal Adviser of the U.S department of State in Washington, and then taught for ten years in the law schools of the Universities of Miami, New Mexico and Texas and at Hastings College of Law at the University of California. He also worked for nearly two years as Program Interpreter for the Friends Committee on Legislation of California and is a member of the San Francisco Monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Since the beginning of 1979 he has been living with the Catholic Workers, first in Los Angeles and now in Redwood City, California. His interest in the subject of this pamphlet goes back to 1969 when he became involved in the struggle for civil rights of Gay people. This culminated in his first book, Sexual Freedom and the Constitution - An Inquiry into the Constitutionality of Repressive Sex Laws (University of new Mexico Press, 1973). He is also the author of Jesus - the Story of His Life (Nelson-Hall, Inc., 1976). He was moved to write this pamphlet as a result of the recent efforts of Anita Bryant in Florida and John Briggs in California to marshall Christian support for their campaigns against the rights of homosexuals. Request for permission to quote or to translate should be addressed to Pendle Hill Publications, Wallingford, PA 19086. USA. ISBN 0-87574-226-2 Most Christians are still uneasy about homosexuality. Even Gay Christians themselves often share this uneasiness, because we have all been brought up in the same Christian tradition. There are many causes for the uneasiness; but the one cause which seems most important in the minds of all is the conviction that the Bible condemns homosexuality, in itself and in all its manifestations. In recent years a slow change has begun to occur in Christian attitudes towards homosexuality and homosexual persons. Some Christians while maintaining the traditional attitude for themselves, have become prepared to admit that it is not necessary in secular society to punish homosexuals for behaviour which is permissible to heterosexuals. On this basis, most which is Christian churches have now made formal statements supporting the right of homosexual people ot protection against discrimination. Some Christians have gone further and acknowledge that the particular virulence with which some people have attached and condemned homosexual acts and homosexual persons is totally unjustified, if a caring person weighs the relative importance given to homosexual behavior in the Bible, and especially if he or she respects the attitudes appropriate for a Christian when dealing with fellow human beings. Some theologians and a number of Gay Christians, working from a growing understanding of the biblical texts, have come to the conclusion that the Bible does not exclude homosexual people form the Christian Fellowship, within bounds analogous to those applied to heterosexuals. The Bible does mention homosexual behavior in extremely negative terms in a handful of widely scattered verses, but modern research has turned up considerable evidence casting doubt on the traditional interpretation of these passages - an interpretation that has borne tragic consqeuences for homosexuals throughout almost the whole of Christian history. The purpose here is to examine this evidence, together with some of the light science has shed on the subject of psychosexual development, in the hope that it will lead to a more informed appraisal. The critical fact generally unknown to or overlooked by heterosexuals is that homosexuality is something quite distinct from homosexual behaviour and even from homosexual desires or lust. Homosexuality is an emotional and affectional orientation towards people of the same sex. It may or may not involve sexual acts, though of course it usually does. On the other hand, homosexual acts can be and are performed by both homosexuals AND hetersexuals, and homosexual desire or lust is probably experienced by most heterosexuals. (The most common instances of extensive homosexual behaviour by hetersexuals ofccur in those situations such as prisons where heterosexual partners are unavailable.) This is why those who possess this same-sex emotional orientation abjure the term homosexual and call themselves by their own slang word, Gay. The word homosexual for them overemphasizes the specifically sexual element in their feeligns. Because it was coined by the scientific community to label them, it also carries overtones of clinical pathology which they reject. Since 1974 the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association have both officially disavowed this implication of the label, but the Gay community continues to reject the word. So even in general usages "gay" is replacing "homosexual" just as "black" or "Afro-American" has replaced "Negro". Most people grow up to want and seek an intimate and loving relationship with a person of the opposite sex. Gay people on the other hand are those who have discovered that they want and seek such a relationship with a person of the same sex. Why and how this variant occurs is not now and probably never will be the subject of any pat explanation because it is the consequence of a wide range of factors, some of which are environmental and some possibly hereditary or physical. What is imporant, though, from the point of view of sin is that most Gay people have no conscious recollection of ever having chosen this orientation any more than the ordinary hetersexual ever consciously chose to want the opposite sex. It is simply a given in their emotional make-up, an integral part of the personality. And they sense that nothing on earth will ever change this, just as the ordinary heterosexual cannot imagine changing into a homosexual. Some people are truely bisexual; they find both sexes equally interesting and attractive. These however are few and far between. The orientation of the great majority is fixed and definite, towards either the opposite sex or their own. This is not to deny that many people engage in some experimentation on both sides of the fence before they know for sure which side is home, but it is a mistake to conclude from this fact that all people are basically bisexual. It is equally a mistake to conclude that all people are basically heterosexual and a few are lured away into homosexuality by seduction. The truth rather seems to be that human sexuality is initially free-floating and unattached, that an emotional interest develops very early in life, and that this interest then comes increasingly to the fore as puberty and adolescence bring on explicitly sexual fantasies and behaviour. The reason therefore why Gay people seek out others of their own sex and engage in sexual behaviour with them is not that they are incapable of bridling their lusts or are perversely determined to disobey God but simply because the option open to the rest of humankind - a hetersoexual relationship and specifically marriage to a prtner of the opposite sex - is not open to them. Legally of course it is open, but emotionally it is not. it would for them be living a lie - a sin against their partner as well as themselves. Such a relationship does not perform for them the function it is meant to perform - to satisfy, to recreate, to replenish. Unlike the heterosexual they feel completed only by a person of the same sex. This is not to say that Gay people are incapable of heterosexual behaviour. Many can perform heterosexual coitus just as many heterosexual people are capable of engaging in homosexual acts. But if given the choice they will prefer a partner of the same sex, not out of mere perversity but because it is only a partner of the same sex who satisfies them emotionally. Now in order for anything to be a sin there must be a possibility of moral choice. Where there is no choice there can be no sin. So if one's sexual orientation is not a matter of choice, it cannot be a sin to be a homosexual. True, it may be admitted, but one does have the choice of committing or not homosexual acts. This boils down to saying that whether or not homosexuality - the orientation - is a sin, homosexual behaviour invariably is. The cruelty of this position is that it leaves only one option open to Gay people who take their relationship to God seriously - the option of total and complete life long celibacy. Because as already noted the option open to the rest of the world - heterosexual marriage - is immoral and unethical, yes sinful, for a Gay person. But the church would never dream of imposing such a burden on heterosexuals. Even the Roman Catholic Church which requires celibacy of its priests has always admitted this to be a special calling for those select few to whom God has given the ability to accept it; it is not for everyone. Heterosexual Christians should beware of doing like the Pharisees of old, laying down on the backs of other people a yoke they themselves would find impossible to bear. Actually the Bible appears unequivocally to condemn only three things: (1) homosexual rape; (2) the ritual homosexual prostitution that was part of the Canaanite fertility cult and at one time apprently taken over into Jewish practive as well; and (3) homosexual lust and behaviour of the part of heterosexuals. On the subject of homosexuality as an orientation, and on consensual behaviour by people who possess that orientation, it is wholly silent. The orientation as such was apprently unknown to or at least unrecognised by the Biblical authors. If we may assume that the Biblical authors were themselves all heterosexual this would not be at all suprising. For that matter it has only been since about 1890 that the science of psychology began to recognise homosexuality as a distinct entity. In the first place homoexuality and homosexual behaviour are never anywhere in the Bible mentioned either by Jesus Christ himself or any of the Old Testament prophets. If it really were a sin in God's sight surely he or they or both would have inveighed against it. This fact should be of cardinal important to the thinking of any person who purports to follow jesus. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18 and 19 has traditionally in Christianity been thought to demonstrate God's condemnation of homosexual behaviour. All this because the Hewbrew word meaning "to know" in Gensis 19:5 has been interpreted to mean "have sexual intercourse with." "They [the townsmen of Sodom] called to Lot, 'Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to use, that we may know them.' " In the story God informs Abraham that these two cities will be destroyed because of their great wickedness, but the wickedness is never specified. Abraham persuades God to spare the cities if even ten righteous men can be found in them. Two angels them come to Sodom to investigate and are given hospitality by Abraham's nephew Lot. All the townsmen both young and old surround the house and demand to "know" the two strangers, but Lot refuses to surrended them up and offers instead his two virgin daughters. When this offer is rejected, the angels pull Lot inside and shut the door, striking the townsmen blind so that they grope about in darkness. The angels then urge Lot and his household to flee the city to escape its destruction. Actually in the Bible this Hebrew word "to know" rarely means sexual intercourse. Apart from this story and the counterpart tale in Judges 19, it has that meaning in only about fifteen instances out of more than 900, and in all those few instances it denotes hetersoexual coitus 9as, for instance, in Genesis 19:8). Some scholars believe that here, because of the circumstances, it has only its usual meaning of "become aquainted with." Lot himself was a resident alien in Sodom, and for such a person to harbor two other foreigners within the city's gates could well rouse suspicion that they were spies looking for weaknesses in its defenses that a potential enemy could exploit. The townsmen therefore had a perfectly justifiable excuse for demanding that the two strangers show themselves so that their indentities and the purpose of their visit could be ascertained. Lot's reaction however indicates that there was some serious mischief afoot, and his offering the townsmen intercourse with his two virgin daughters to kepe them from doing anything to his guests does seem to support the notion that the mischief was specifically sexual. Even if the sexual interpretation is corect, the sin of Sodom does not necessarily lie in homosexuality or homosexual behaviour. Rather, this wicked thing that Lot enjoins the townsmen not to do is rape pure and simple, and gang rape at that. Rape is not a sin peculiar to homosexuality; it occurs far more often in a heterosexual ontext. Its sinfulness lies not in the context, whether heterosexual or homosexual, but in the victimisation of the nonconsenting partner. In our reading today of this story we overlook a little known fact - that the entire ancient Near East hospitality to sojourners and travellers was not seen to be, as with us, a merely a voluntary option but rather was a sacred religious duty. See Leviticus 19:33-34; Matthew 25:35, 38, and 43. Thus whatever the townsmen intended, any kind of mistreatment or indignity inflicted on Lot's guests would be a sin. It would violate the sacred obligation of hospitality. And indeed this latter is the sin or wrong Lot's own words indicate in verse 8 - "Don't do anything to these men, for you know they have come under the shelter of my roof." This interpretation is further buttressed by the fact that the story presents in such marked contrast to the behaviour of the Sodomites the elaborate hospitality shown the angelic visitors by Abraham and Lot. Finally it is worth noting for future reference that sexual intercourse between humans and angels - two different orders of creation - would in itself have been wrong in the eyes of the Jews, who would remember that in Genesis 6:1-8 the disaster of the Great Flood comes hard on the heels of a charge that the "sons of God" (presumably angels) took to wife the daughters of men. The idea that the Sodom story is not an indictment of homosexuality is no new-fangled interpretation. Most later Jewish commentary on it both inside and outside of the Bible does not make out the sin of these cities to be homosexuality or homosexual behaviour. According to Isaiah 1:9 and ff. and 3:9, it was a lack of social justice; according to Ezekiel 16:46-52 it was disregard for the poor; and according to Jeremiah 23:14 it was general immorality. Though ancient Rabbinical literature - the Talmud and Midrashim - often refers to Sodom in connections with sins of pride, arrogance and inhospitality, it contains only one mention of anything homosexual, namely a midrash emphasising rape and robbery of strangers. ("The Sodomites made an agreement among themselves whenever a stranger visited them they should force him to sodomy and rob him of his money.") It is primarily among Philo of Alexandria and Joesphus, that we find the homosexual interpretation, and it is probably from Josephus that the interpretation eventually found its way into the Christian Church. In the New Testament two passages - II Peter 2:4-9 and Jude 6-7 - refer to Sodom and Gomorrah as examples of God's judgement on the wicked in such terms as apparently to adopt a sexual interpretation . The former refers to the townsmen of Sodom as licentious or "unprincipled in their lusts," and the latter says that ehy gave themselves to fornication and went after different flesh. Neither passage contributes anything more on the subject. But it is important to bear in mind that both authors may have been thinking not of homosexual intercourse but of intercourse between different orders of creation (humans and angels). Both authors refer to God having likewise judged the angels who sinned, and Peter refers to the story of the Flood. Consequently both were probably only reiterating the view found in some Jewish writings from the same general period, namely the Testament of Naphtali 2:4-5, and the Book of Jubilees 7:20-22, 16:5-6, and 20:5-6. The view found in these other writings is that the Sodomites were cursed for having changed the order of nature by runnin after angels just as the angels have been cursed at the flood for having gone a-whoring after the daughters of men. jesus himself mentions Sodom and Gomorrah but only to say that they will be judged less severely than the towns that rejected his disciples or refused to repent even after witnessing the works he performed (Matthew 10:14-15, and 11:20-24, Luke 10:10-12, and 17:28-29). None of these passages tells us his interpretation of the Sodom story, though the fact that he linked the name of Sodom with refusal to welcome his disciples may give us a hint. And the parallel to the Sodom story reported in Luke 9:51-56 in which James and John the sons of Zebedee beseech Jesus to call down from heaven destruction by fire on an inhospitable Samaritan town provides at least some confirmation that Jesus and his disciples held to the more prevalent view within Jewish tradition that the sin depicted in the Sodom story was inhospitable treatment of travellers rather than homosexuality or homosexual behaviour. The story in Judges 19 of the outrage at Gibeah is very similar to that of Sodom and Gomorrah, and some scholars consider the one derived from the other. Here again the Hebrew word "to know" is used (Judges 19:22) and the host's offer of two females as diversion implies that it is to be taken in a sexual sense. In this story, however, the male guest pushes his concubine out the door, and the townsmen of Gibeah "know" and abuse her all night long, as a result of which she dies. yet this story goes on to say explicitly (Judges 20:4-5) that the townsmen's intention was to kill the male guest. So the mischief that was afoot here was not merely sexual, even homosexual rape; it was murder. And it ended in a heterosexual gang rape that took the womans life. Even if the original intent of both the townsmen of Sodom and those of Gibeah was homosexual rape, obviously both stories are about heterosexual males who indulge in it as a sport. Otherwise the offer in both stories of females as a diversionary sexual object makes no sense. To extend such an offer to homosexual males would be pointless because it would hold no interest for them. In Deuteronomy 23:17-18, in I Kings 14:24, 15:12, and 22:46, in II Kings 23:7, and in Job 36:14, there are references to a kadesh (singular) or to kedeshim (plural), which literally mean "holy man" and "holy men". Some translations of the Bible render these terms by the English word sodomite(s). The passage in Deuteronomy forbids Israelite men to become such, and likewise forbids an Israelite woman to become a kedeshah - the same word for the femenine gender. Modern Bible Scholars believe these terms refer to priests and priestesses of the Canaanite fertility cult, and evidence outside the Bible supports the inference that both types of functionaries engage in sexual intercourse with male worshippers as part of the ritual. Indeed the Deuteronomy passage by poetic parallelism appears to equate kedeshah with the hebrew word for a female prostitute (zonah). The 38th chapter of Genesis and Hosea 4:12-14 also support this equation. Thus the better translation of kadeshikedeshim would be "male cult prostitute(s)." Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 enjoin the men of Israel not to "lie with a male as with a woman," for which the latter verse invokes the death penalty. It is state to be to'ebah. This Hebrew word, generally translated as abomination in English, is used in the Old Testament to refer to idolatry and to practices associated with idolatry. And in deed the whole context of these injunctions is a polemic against the Israelites imitating the defiling practices of the Canaanites whom they displaced in Palestine. Thus again, the prohibition is probably directed against the practice of ritual homosexual prostitution as found in the Canaanite fertility cult. In any event the intent cannot be to condemn all homosexuality and homosexual behaviour because there is no prohibition whatever in Leviticus against women having sexual relations with other women. This can hardly be explained as an oversight or on the basis that what women do is never of any consequence, because these chapters do contain explicit prohibitions against both male and female intercourse with an animal. So if homosexual behaviour is supposedly such an evil in God's sigh, why does Leviticus forbid it only to males and not to females ? Apart from the association of male homosexual acts with Canaanite idolatry, the answer probably lies mainly in a concern for the "seed" of life rather than a concern about homosexuality per se. The Hebrews like other ancient peoples had no accurate knowledge of conception. They did not know that women produce eggs which the man's sperm fertilizes, but apparently thought that the seed came solely from the man; when "sowed" in a woman it would grow into a new being just as a seed from from plants will sprout and grow when sowed in the earth. They likewise did not know that matings between different species are sterile. Thus men must not expend their seed in other males where it would be unproductive, or in animals where it might result in a "confusion" such as a centaur. Women are forbidden to receive seed from an animal for the same reason, but because presumably they have no seed, what they do among themselves is inconsequential. Also, in the patriarchal society of the ancient Hebrews the status and dignity of the male was held to be inviolable, so much so that even the women of the house must be sacrificed to preserve if need be, as in the Sodom and Gibeah stories. In the ancient Near East it was not uncommon for the victors in war to rape vanquished kings or warriors as a mark of utter subjection and contempt. The Hebrews unlike the Greeks may thus have associated male homosexuality with disrespect and debasement of the male sex and viewed it as intolerable for that reason. Moreover, any society that exalts the male sex over the female may tend to associate male homosexuality with effiminacy. It therefore becomes tabooed to keep the dominant sex from being assimiliated to the status of women. Even if these Levitical injunctions are to be read as an absolute prohibition against males engaging in homosexual behaviour under any and all circumstances, it is worth asking why this should be deemed binding on Christians when so many other injunctions of the Pentateuch are not. For instance these same chapters of leviticus make punishable by banishment the sin of a man having intercourse with his wife during menstrual period (Leviticus 18:19 and 20:18). Leviticus also forbids the wearing of cloth made of two different kinds of fibers, say for instance cotton and polyester (Leviticus 19:19). And what about Exodus 22:18, requiring that witches be put to death? The only three remaining Biblical passages that conceivably touch on homosexual behaviour are found in I Corinthians 6:9, I Timothy 1:10, and Romans 1:18-32. In I Corinthians 6:9 Paul asks his readers, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God ?" He then proceeds to list certain catergories of people as examples of those who will not inherit the kingdom. In this list two of the Greek words, namely malakoi and arsenokoitai, have usually been rendered in English translation by a single term such as "homosexuals," "sodomites," "sexual perverts," pr "homosexual perverts." And in I Timothy 1:8-11 Paul says that the Law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, and he then proceeds to list specific examples. In this list again appears the Greek word arsenokoitai. Actually in neither case dow we know whom Paul meant by these terms, because he does not elaborate. There was no Greek word corresponding to the English word "homosexuals," because as a rule ancient Greeks who practiced homosexual intercourse were at the same time married and therefore heterosexually involved as well. Ancient Greek did have common words for such people who in homosexual itnercourse - for instance, paiderastes, palakos, kinaidos, arrenomanes, and paidophthoros. If Paul had really intended to refer to such people he would probably have used one of those terms, but he did not. Instead he used two terms that are not plain references to such people. The word malakoi is the plural of malakos which literally means "soft." In the moral context malakoi would therefore signify people who were "loose,", "dissolute," "morally weak," or "lacking in self control," and this is the sense accorded this word in the King James Version and in J. B. Phillips's and Edgar J. Goodspeed's translations. (The word "effeminate" in the King James Version did not mean to English-speaking people in 1600 what it means to us today.) Some have claimed that there is support in ancient Greek literature for applying this term to the passive partner in sexual intercourse between males - hence the Jerusalem Bible's translation "catamites." As already noted we have no way of knowing for sure which of these two possible meanings Paul intended, because he does not elaborate. What Paul meant by the term arsenokoitai is even more difficult to ascertain. It is a relatively rare and obscure word - a compound of koitai (literally, "those who engage in sexual intercourse") and arseno (literally, "male" or "masculine"). We do not know whether the prefix arseno refers to the subject or the object of the intercourse. If the subject, then the meaning is "males for sex," that is, male prostitutes. And this rendering ("male concubines") is the one given this word by the most scholarly ancient translator - St. Jerome - in his translation into Latin of the late 4th Century A.D. known as the Vulgate. If on the other hand arseno refers to the object of the intercourse, then the meaning is "those who have sexual intercourse with males." Modern lexicons refer to some usages in ancient Greek that support the meaning "the active partner in anal intercourse." Thus they conclude that Paul used malakoi and arsenokoitai to denote, respectively, the passive and active partners in homosexual anal intercourse (hence the Jerusalem Bible's rendering "catamites" and "sodomites"). But if this be the case it is odd that the early Greek fathers of the Church such as St. John Chrysostom did not so interpret these terms. They found no reference to homosexual behaviour in this passage of I Corinthians. Whatever Paul meant by these terms they are in no event either so clear or so all-inclusive as to encompass the entire class of people we describe today by the English word "homosexual" or the slang word "Gay." These two passages can therefore hardly supply a reliable basis for condemning all such people as sinners. Paul does speak definitely about homosexual behaviour in the first chapter of Romans. But here he is not primarily addressing himself to that subject but to the sin of idolatry and its consequences. He states that because men exchanged the glory of the immortal God for idols, they were delivered up by God in their lusts to unclean practices and disgraceful passions. "Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and the men gave up natural intercourse with women and burned with lust for one another. Men did shameful things with men, and thus received in their own persons the penalty for their perversity. They did not see fit to acknowledge God, so God delivered them up to their own depraved sense to do what is unseemly" (Romans 1:26-28). in the case of the men, the plain meaning is a reference to heterosexuals giving up intercourse with the opposite sex and turning in perverseness to homosexual lust and behaviour. The passage says nothing about people whose orientation is homosexual and who therefore are in no wise perverting their nature as they perceive it. (In this connection it bears noting tha tmost such people discover their orientation in childhood, before they know it has a name or that the adult world considers it to be a moral issue. And many of these were then and still are deeply religious. To hold that this passage in Romans was meant to include all such people is to give it a coverage that the thoughts, language, and context will not bear.) In the case of the women, this passage, which is the only one in the entire Bible that could conceivably refer to sexual relations between women, does not clearly bring homosexual intercourse within its purview. The statement that "their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural" does not necessarily refer to homosexual intercourse. It may just mean that the women exchanged coitus for hetersoexual fellatio or anal intercourse. We have no way of knowing what Paul considered to be "natural" or "unnatural" in the way of heterosexual behaviour. Only on the supposition that the statement about woman was intended by Paul as a shorthand parallel to the more explicit statement about men is sexual intercourse between women included. And even if it is included, the plain meaning of the passage is that the women exchanged one for the other (heterosexual for homosexual). It therefore says nothing about lesbians - those women who like the Greek poet Sappho see beauty and desirability only in other women and have always felt that way. It is worth noting that the adjectives Paul uses when he is speaking of these sexual consequences of idolatry are "unclean," "degrading," "disgraceful," "shameful," and "unseemly." It is only when he gets to the nonsexual consequences such as greed, envy, murder, deceit, gossip, slander, isolence, boastfulness, and mercilessness tha the uses the word "wickedness" and "evil." Which is some indication that in his mind een the sexual perversion he is describing is more properly classified as a disorder than as a sin. He likewise states that is is unnatural and dishonourable for a man to wear his hair long (I Corinthians 11:14), but few today would conclude therefrom that men who wear their hair long are sinning. Nor would Samson and other ancient Hebrew Nazirites. Finally, even if we take it for granted that Paul considered homosexuality and homosexual behaviour a sin, we cannot avoid asking whther this attitude of his is God's own or whether it may not be merely the result of the cultural conditioning of his time and place in history together with his own personal predilections and prejudices, like his attitude towards long hair on men. This question is especially needed because when dealing with the subject it is easy to forget that there are other attitudes of Paul which many Christians today are convinced did not come from God. let us look at Paul's view oof marriage first. Although he consistently denied that anyone who chooses to marry is thereby sinning, he says that those who choose not to marry do better; that marriage brings troubles, which he would spare his readers; and that it diverts attention from the business of the Lord to the pleasing of the spouse (I Corinthians 7:25-40. See also I Timothy 4:1-3, where the forbidding of marriage is called a demon-inspired doctrine.) In this he admits (verse 25) that he has no command from Jesus, but he still asserts he thinks he has the Spirit of God in these counsels. Though he says that sexual intercourse is the right and duty of both parties to a marriage (verses 3-5) he prefaces this with the remark that "it is good for a man not to touch a woman" but because of the temptation to immorality each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband 9verses 1-2). And he follows it in verses 8-9 with the counsel that the unmarried would do well to follow his own example in remaining single if they can do so without burning up with passion. Even allowing Paul's belief that the end of the world was imminent, these statements betray to the modern reader a real lack of appreciation of the enormous benefits and blessings if marriage. Few Christians today would agree with Paul that marriage is merely or even primarily an antidote to the temptation to fornicate, is a bag of troubles, or is a hindrance rather than a help in serving the Lord. And most would reverse his assertion about touching so that it would read instead, "It is good for a man to touch a woman and vice versa!" Paul often seems to equate sin with obediene to the body's desires. See Romans 6:12, 7:21-25, 8:13, and 13:14. He expressly inveighs against fornication or otherwise refers to it as a sin no less that seven times in his letters (I Corinthians 6:9, 12-20; I Corinthians 10:8; II Corinthians 12:21; I Thessalonians 4:2-8; Ephesians 5:3-5; Colossians 3:5-7; and I Timothy 1:10). Jesus on the other hand had very little say about sex. Matthew makes it appear that Jesus, like Paul, urged celibacy for those who could manage it. In Matthew 19:1-12, in response to his disciple's comment that it is better not to marry if in God's sight marriage is indissoluble, jesus is reported to have said that "not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it." But neither of the other synoptic gospels mentions this saying, though both recount Jesus's teachings about divorce of which Matthew makes it a part. See Mark 10:1-12, and Luke 16:!8. And Paul, who is plainly aware of Jesus's teaching on divorce (see I Corinthians 7:10-11), seems unaware that Jesus ever urged celibacy on anybody. See I Corinthians 7:25. For Hesus the word "sin" does not appear to have had, as it seems to have for us today, a primarily sexual connotation. He himself was accused of having been the product of fornication (see John 8:41), and he mentions fornication only once, including it along with adultery in a list or catalog of various sins to illustrate that what defiles a person are the things that proceed from the heart rather than those that enter the stomach (Matthew 15:19; Mark 7:21). Apart from this catalog, he touches upon the sin of adultery in only three contexts, and in all three his primary concern is not with adultery itself but with something else that he must have felt was much more important. In one, the Episode of the woman caught in adultery, he save sthe "sinner" from being stoned to death by reminding her accusers that they, being sinners too, have no right to judge her (John 8:2-11). In another his concern is with divorce. He undermines the entire practice of divorce by, in effectm forbiddign as adultery any remarriage of either party (Matthew 5:31-32, and 19:3-9; Mark 10:2-12; and Luke 16:18). In the third context his concern is with those who pride themselves on their own righteousness by pretending that sin lies solely in acts and behaviour rather than in the attitudes of the heart. He says in effect that the man who looks at another woman with heart full of lust is just as guilty of adultery as the one who goes to bed with her (Matthew 5:27-28). Christians sometimes seem to think and act as if sexuality were not one of God's most glorious gifts to us but a snare and a trap. They seldom stop to ask themselves how a good God could make us so sexual and sexual activity so pleasurable and then condemn us for enjoying it. Another are in which Paul's attitudes and emphases are rejected by many Christians today is that status of women. His assertations about women speak for themselves. In I Corinthians 11:3-15 he says that woman's head is her husband; that man is the image of God, whereas woman reflects the glory of man; and that man was not created for woman's sake, but woman was for the sake of man. Again elsewhere he adheres to the notion that marriage is a subordination of the woman to the man in all things rather than an equal partnership (Ephesians 5:22-23; Colossians 3:18-19; Titus 2:5). Finally, in I Corinthians 14:34-35 he says that women are to keep quiet in all the congregations, that they are not permitted to speak, and that it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. This attitude is repeated in I Timothy 2:11-15: "A woman must be a learner, listening quietly and with due submission. I do not permit a woman to be a teacher, nor must a woman domineer over man; she should be quiet. For Adam was cteated first, and Eve afterward; and it was not Adam who was deceived; it was the woman who, yielding to deception, fell into sin. yet she will be saved through motherhood. . . ." Paul expresses no inkling of the enormous evil of human slavery. Instead of urging Christian masters to free their slaves, he only counseled them to reat their slaves fairly and the slaves to obey willingly and not to seek their freedom (Colossians 3:22-4:1; Ephesians 6:5-9; I Timothy 6:1-2; Titus 2:9-10; and Philemon). Yet there is perhaps no Christian alive today who does not believe human slavery to be absolutely and fundamentally opposed to the will of God at all times and in all places. A last example is Paul's attitude to civil authority. He tells Christians to submit to the authority of the staae, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. So that whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed and will incur judgement. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad (Romans 13:1-7). See also Titus 3:1. All this rings hollow to people who in the 20th Century saw Hitler and his Third Reich inflict the Holocaust on millions of hapless Jews, Gays, Gypsies and others and the Second World War on countless millions more of innocent victims. jesus on the other hand was under no such illusions about the power of the state. He realised that political power is in the Devil's keeping (Matthew 4:8-10; Luke 4:5-8). To some people all analysis of the Biblical texts relative to homosexual behaviour is pointless. For them it is plain as day that God made people male and female, and for good reason. In the oldest account of creation - the Yahwist - the purpose is said to be companionship; God creates woman to be a helper fit for man (Gensis 2:18-25). In the later Priestly account (Genesis 1:26-28), the purpose of reproduction is emphasised. In any event, so the argument goes, God intended each sex for God's plan for the creation and ipso facto sinful. This is a point of view that must be faced, but before doing so it is necessary at least to show that the Biblical passages that touch explicitly upon homosexual behaviour do not, except by special prejudicial interpretation, condemn either homosexuality or consensual sexual behaviour between Gay people. What then of the view that God made male and female for each other ? As someone crudely put it, if God had intended homosexuality to be normal we would have had Adam and Bruce instead of Adam and Eve. This misses the whole point. The point is not to deny that God had a plan in making people into males and females. The point is that it does not follow from this that homosexuality is a sin. God may very well have intended the male-female relationship to be the general plan without at the same time meaning to condemn as sin every variation from that plan found in nature. Nature as it actually exists is full of variations from the apparent overall design. Some people are midgets. Some are albinos. Some are sterile. Some have peculiar allergies that the rest do not have. Some are left handed. It used to be commonplace before the advent of modern science to attribute all usch extraordinary conditions to sin, as in the gospel story of the man born blind (John 9:1-2). In the sexual sphere itself one has only to read a scientific treatise like John Money's and Anke Ehrhardt's Man and Woman, Boy and Girl to discover that there are quite a few people in this world who are neither male nor female but somewhere in between. Yet surely these intersexes are not condemned to choose between celibacy and sin merely because they do not fit into the male-female dichotomy. Some such anomalies occur because of unusual genetic combinations that arise in nature like an XXY or an XO sex chromosone rather than the usual XX (female) or XY (male). Others occur because of hormonal imbalances during the period of gestation. Robert Stoller's Sex and Gender depicts yet another variation in psychosexual development - transsexualism. The transsexual is a person who physically is a normal male or normal female but who through an unusual early childhood environment develops the self-image or identity of the opposite sex. Once this gender identity becomes fixed, usually about the age language is aquired, it is well nigh irreversible. If these people are then compelled by society or by the medical profession's devotion to "natural law" to live as the sex their physical make-up dictates, they suffer untold and unending anguish. Thank God human compassion is now leading many doctors to throw all their preconceived notions of what is natural to the winds and change the body to fit the mind! The point is that homosexuality, like hermaphroditism and transsexualism, is and always will be a minority variation in sexual development, physical and emotional. So far as we can ascertain, none of these variations is unique to our own culture or to our day and age; rather, they are universal. They occur not because of sin or the fallen condition of humanity but simply because nature is not uniform. Moreover, sexual orientation like gender identity is a component of personality universally acquired in the process of growing up. Once so acquired, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to alter, because nobody can go back and re-live that growing-up process differently. What has occurred is similar to the phenomenon of "imprinting" that we observe in birds and animals. So to assert that homosexuality is normal means only that it is a variation universally found in nature, like left-handedness. Unfortunately many people confuse the word "normal" with the word "normative"; they interpret the asssertion to mean that everybody should be Gay, that homosexuality is competing with heterosexuality for everyone's allegiance, which is nonsense. The norms of conduct found in the Bible are addressed to the generality of humankind. Its failure to address the specific situation and problems of many minorities does not mean that those minorities are excluded from God's Kingdom unless and until they somehow conform. This is obvious in the case of left-handedness or albinism. Nobody pretends that these minorities are abhorred by God simply because they run counter to the general pattern and the Bible does not recognise their existence. But what of the minority who are sexually sterile ? They certainly disobey the commandment of Genesis 1:28 to be fruitful and multiply and there is plenty of evidence that in Biblical times this was taken as cause for reproach. See, for example Luke 1:25. Today, largely because science has taught us that sterility just happens and because in an overpopulated world we no longer see much need for procreation, the judgement of Christians is more compassionate. We do not consider sterility a sin nor do we condemn sterile people to a life of celibacy. And the judgement should be the same in the case of homosexuals. And perhaps would be, if homosexual behaviour and desire were confined to the catergory "homosexuals." The fact that it is not so confined accounts for what little the Bible has to say on the subject and likewise muddies people's perceptions considerably, to the extent that many refuse even to admit there is such a catergory. They see in every practitioner of homosexual acts only a willfully perverted heterosexual. It would be far more in keeping with the spirit of jesus to open our eyes to the diversity in the world around us and rejoice in it rather than decry it. Sure God does not condemn anybody merely fore being different from the majority. God takes each of us as we are and, in the framework of who and what we are, then calls each of us to renounce evil and live a life full of goodness and love. And it is just as possible for a person to be Gay or transsexual or an intersex and to follow in this pathway of Jesus Christ as for the ordinary male or female heterosexual. None is required to give up sex in order to qualify, though any one can choose voluntarily to do so. The lack of specific Biblical norms addressed to the homosexual minority does not mean that Gay Christians, unlike heterosexual Christians, are free from all ethical constraints on their sexual behaviour. What those constraints are in view of the absence of the institution of marriage is a whole issue in itself. The purpose here is only to reappraise the traditional view that homosexual genital acts are always and for all people everywhere a sin. Some have argued that although Jesus was silent on the subject of homosexuality and homosexual behaviour he nevertheless implicitly condemned it. They point to his teaching that God from the beginning made people male and female and for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and two shall become one flesh (Matthew 19:3-9; Mark 10:2-9). This, they say, together with his disapproval of fornication and adultery, confines sex to the relationship between husband and wife thus outlawing homosexuality. But this is building a very important case - condemnation of homosexuality - on a very slim reed. In the one teaching all Jesus was doing was quoting the Genesis accounts of creation as proof texts for his assertion that marriage is indissoluble. And in both it and the others he is actually talking only about heterosexual relationships. To use them as evidence of another intent - to disapprove homosexuality - is stretching a point too far, because it is quite possible for any person, including jesus, to hold to these teachings of his about hetersexual relationships and still be convinced that homosexual acts are not a sin for homosexuals. In fact Jesus plainly states that heterosexual pairing is not an integral part of the spiritual order. In response to a riddle of the Sadducees designed to show up the foolishness of belief in the resurrection, he says flatly that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage. And if his answer was intended to be responsive to the circumstances posed in the question, it also means that marriages contracted in this life do not carry over into the life hereafter (Matthew 22:23-33; Mark 12:18-27; Luke 20:27-40). The Sadducees' riddle points up a significant contrast between Judaism and Christianity. There was a strong emphasis in Judaism on immortality through procreation. A man lives on after death through his children, grandchildren, and other descendants. Thus in Deuteronomy 25:5-10 the law of Levirate marriage to which their riddle refers prescribed that if a man died childless his brother must take the dead man's wife as his own and produce a son for him to bear his name, so that the dead man's name would not be blotted out of Israel. Jesus's answer to the riddle as Luke reports it shows that even in his mind the institution of marriage exists because of human mortality, so that with the absence of death the need for it will disappear (Luke 20:36). Barrenness was viewed as such a curse that any male whose testicles had been crushed or whose penis cut off was excluded from the assembly of the Lord (Deuteronomy 23:1). Yet Isaiah prophesised, "thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who . . hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters . . . an everlasting name which shall not be cut off" (Isaiah 56:4-5). With the coming of Jesus Christ personal immortality through the resurrection replaced immortality through procreation, and Isaiah's prophecy was fulfilled as God's Spirit reached out through Philip to bring the Ethiopian eunuch into the kingdom (Acts 8:26-40). The last verse of Isaiah's prophecy reads, "Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather yet others to him besides those alrady gathered" (Isaiah 56:8). Is it not possible that today God's spirit is reaching out again in fulfillment of the prophecy, this time to gather into the kingdom another outcast - the homosexual - who like the eunuch was previously excluded for sexual reasons ? The two are in fact close kin. For both, sexual intercourse is inherently nonprocreative, and eunuchs in the ancient world were widely associated with homosexual activity. Implicit in all the discussion so far is the assumption that sin and evil are synonymous, that evil is what is hurtful to others or to oneself, and that therefore nothing is a sin which hurts nobody. Consensual homosexual acts between Gay people are therefore not sinful because they hurt no one. The basis for these premises is Jesus's own assertion that the Law and the Prophets can be summed up in one command - always treat others as you would like them to treat you (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31). On the subject of Jesus one other matter deserves attention. There is no evidence whatever in the New Testament that Jesus had a sexual relationship with anybody, male or female. But it is incontestable that he experienced deep love for a member of the same sex. The whole Gospel of John purports to emobdy the recollections of an eye witness who is referred to only as "the disciple jesus loved" (John 21:20-24). Church tradition has inferred that this disciple was John the son of Zebedee, but the gospel itself makes no such identification. Whoever he was, he was a man, and the clear implication is that he was especially beloved by Jesus, because the same gospel states that Jesus also loved his other disciples very much, for instance Martha and mary and Lazarus (John 11:5) and those present at the Last Supper (John 13:34, and 15:9, 12-13). Other indications in the Gospel of John bear this out. At the Last Supper this disciple is lying close beside Jesus, and when Jesus announces that one of the disciples will betray him Simon Peter, instead of querying Jesus himself, signals to this disciple to ask Jesus who is meant. It is stated then that this disciple leaned back against Jesus's chest and asked "Lord, who is it ?" and Jesus vouchsafed the asnwer only to him (John 13:21-30) The incident makes clear that an emotional relationship existed between Jesus and the disciple closer than that which existed between him and any other, including Peter. On the cross Jesus sees his mother standing nearby together with other women and this disciple he loved. He tells his mother that the disciple is her son, and the disciple that she is his mother, almost as if to say that this man now stands in his stead. And the gospel states that from that time onward the disciple took her into his care (John 19:25-27). That Jesus should entrust his mother to the care of this disciple is particularly noteworthy when it is remembered that he had brothers and sisters, any one of whom to our minds would seem a more likely candidate. Indeed, these brothers together with his mother apparently were part of the believing community in Jerusalem after the Ascension (Acts 1:14), and one of them - James - later became its president and remained so until his martyrdom about 62 A.D. This disciple Jesus loved is the first to reach the empty tomb upon Mary Magdelene's report and the first to believe in the Resurrection (John 20:1-10). He is also the first to recognise the risen Jesus in the appearance at the Sea of Galilee (John 21:1-7). Indeed it came to be believed that Jesus had wanted this disciple to live on until he came again and had therefore in effect predicted that this disciple would not die, so that the resulting misapprehension had to be laid to rest by a careful explanation of the incident that gave rise to it (John 21:20-23, All this presumably because the disciple had in fact died by the time the Gospel of John was published.) All this is said not to argue, as some have done, that Jesus was himself homosexual. We do not know enough either to affirm or deny such a statement with certainty. But this we can say : he is universal - not the exclusive property of any group. Rather, the purpose is to make two much more important points. The first is that anybody who, like him, has openly and deeply loved another person of the same sex, cannot possibly lack sympathy for and understanding and acceptance of homosexuals. He would be bound to know and comprehend their plight. Any among them then who seeks a true friend can be sure of finding one in the greatest friend of all - Jesus Christ. The second point is that he calls us all to a life of love - love blocked or bounded by no barriers of any kind, whether of nation, race, religion, social status, or sex. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28). We are commanded even to love our enemies. In the light of this gospel of Jesus Christ - the supreme Prophet of Love, the Messiah who demonstrated that God IS love - how can we, any of us, shut ourselves off from loving others of the same sex through fear of being branded homosexual ? For many people in our culture do precisely that, especially men. In this as in everything else, Jesus points the way through the example of his own life to the ideal humanity towards which we are all called. He plainly loved people of the same sex as well as people of the opposite sex. Gender was no barrier for him. It should not be the same for us either. And if for some people loving others of the same sex carries a sexual component, there should be no cause for reproach. It is just a consequence of the God-given diversity of humankind. In any case, it is no exaggeration to say that the persecution of Gay people that has been characteristic of Western culture almost since the time of Constantine must be laid directly at the door of the Christian Church, and that this evil record of malevolence and bigotry is hardly compatible with the life and teaching of the one that Church claims as Lord and Saviour. He was a friend to those who were despised by all the nice decent people of his day, namely the prostitutes and tax collectors. The gospels say that this was because it is the sick (sinners) who need a physician (Jesus), but it seems also likely that he consorted with them because he preferred their company to that of people like the lawyers and Pharisees who reduced the righteousness God requires to a little rule book of "Do this" and "Don't dare do that!", thus consigning to obvlivion goodness and love and honesty and justice and mercy and generosity and kindness. It was for Pharisaism and legalism that Jesus reserved his righteous indignation. According to him justice and loving kindness are the "test" fruits of the Spirit of God, not propriety and conformity. So stop and think about it. What on earth do goodness and love and honesty and justice and mercy and generosity and kindness have to do with whether or not a person prefers the opposite sex or his or her own ? Few heterosexuals who do not have a Gay friend or relative have any comprehension of what it is like to grow up Gay in America. Imagine how it would feel to be constantly despised and jeered at by your peers and told by both church and society that your desire for love is sick and a sin and a crime. With such pervasive stigme to face, most Gay people end up hiding their orientation for years. They absorb the hurt and the pain rather than be honest and risk exposure. Many do their best to turn themselves into heterosexuals, even going to the extreme of marrying a person of the opposite sex and having children, only to discover that the experience changed them not one whit and succeeded only in spoiling other people's lives as well as their own. Many have spent countless hours and dollars in fruitless efforts to change themselves through psychotherapy. The assertion that all these people are deliberately bucking the current and choosing to be Gay is just not credible. If the Church of Jesus Christ were really seeking to follow his leading it would see that its traditional stance on homosexuality has caused and is still causing far more evil and suffering for homosexuals than they through their supposed sinning have ever caused, and would stop hurting them and set out instead to relieve their suffering and right their wrongs. Since 1969 more and more Gay people in America have stopped lying and come out of the closet and taken up the struggle to obtain legal safeguards for the basic human rights denied them for two thousand years - the right to life, to liberty, to love and enjoy each other to employment, to housing, and so on. The Church is faced with a choice. Either it will seek to make amends for the evil it has done them in the past or it will continue to encourage those who would hound and persecute them in the name of God. This is exactly what the Church's traditional stance on the sin question does. It supplies the persecutors with precisely the fuel they need for their fires, because nothing strengthens prejudice so much as having some way to ascribe it to God. It also forces Gay Christians to lie and hide in order to remain within the Church. Heterosexual Christians, who are and certainly will always remain by far the great majority in the Church, need to ponder whether on this question of sin the two-by-four may not be in their own eye and a speck of sawdust in the eye of their homosexual brothers and sisters. If they must insist that homosexual genital acts are a sin for themselves, let them do so. They have some Biblical warrant for that. But who are they to judge homosexual acts to be a sin for homosexuals - people whose emotional make-up and whose inner struggles they know nothing about ? Leave the judging to God. God's own Spirit within each of us is capable of doing whatever convicting of sin needs to be done. As long as heterosexual Christians keep on asserting that they know all there is to know about God's will in this matter, they will only succeed in accomplishing two things for sure - fanning the flames of persecution and driving more and more people away from Jesus Christ. -- - James Alan Hall s883334@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au - Mithrandir mith@arda.pub.uu.oz.au Thence to Briton shall return, If right prophetic rolls I learn, Borne on victory's spreading plume, His ancient sceptre to resume, His knightly table to restore, And brave the tournaments of yore.