It's Interesting What You Can Find Out When You Look

When I first started attending Believers Covenant Fellowship, I had to be right with the idea of GLBT equality in the Kingdom of God before I could join in covenant with the ministry. I asked questions of Apostle Dale, Pastor Brenda and others, and I also researched multiple viewpoints concerning the "clobber passages" from the bible so often used to condemn homosexuality.


I concluded that those clobber passages were misinterpreted and misrepresented and that the bible clearly did NOT condemn homosexuality. A student at the University of North Carolina recently went through a similar process as an assignment in one of her classes and wrote about it for the Washington Post "On Faith" section. Not surprising, she reached a similar conclusion to mine:

I wish I knew Greek and not just to keep the fraternities straight. My debate for Intro to New Testament class was entitled “Resolved: The New Testament Condemns Modern Practices of Homosexuality,” and I was assigned to the negative side with two other students. We hinged most of our argument on the fact that Paul and other New Testament writers did not know modern homosexuality as we know it.

We discussed how early Greco-Roman society had no concept of a defined “sexual orientation” and how in some areas it was socially acceptable for adult males with wives to have sexual encounters with young pubescent boys. Clearly different from our society, but arguing that Biblical rules don’t transcend time always brings in the scary question of where to draw the line. (“Love thy neighbor” seems pretty transcendent.) In that regard, we decided to focus our argument on a language we knew nothing about and years of translations and mistranslations even the best scholars can’t seem to sort out. Things got a little complicated.


The New Testament refers directly to homosexuality in three different places: Romans 1:26-27, 1 Timothy 1:10, and 1 Corinthians 6:9. Paul and the author of Timothy use various Greek words for the sinful and sexual acts they describe, especially this really sticky one “arsenokoitai” that does not appear in any literature that pre-dates the Pauline letters. “Arsenokoitai” has been translated into English as “sodomite” or “homosexual offender” but may be more ambiguous than Christians tend to think. Much of our research was based on John Boswell’s 1980 book Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. He believed the Romans passage was more a warning against acting outside one’s natural sexual inclination, and the 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians passages were actually speaking against prostitution.


With a few coherent points made here and there, my debate group and the other group monotonously went back and forth for fifty minutes, quibbling on a couple Greek words and certainly changing no one’s mind about homosexuality in a single class period. John Boswell was a devout Roman Catholic his entire life, and for me it was impossible to separate his interpretation of Scripture from his attempt to be true to both his faith and his sexual orientation. No two Christians have the exact same faith. We see in Scripture what we want to see—especially when we have thousands of translations to look at. I gave the opening statement and stated with conviction that the New Testament does not condemn modern practices homosexuality. I also wrote an essay for that same class that gave the full argument for why it did.


What’s a Christian to do? My youth in a slightly-liberal-leaning Episcopal congregation would lead me to answer, nothing. My church was in a heated discussion about whether same-sex couples should be allowed to have their picture together in the church directory, like all the other families. Our minister gave a sermon one Sunday, saying he’d decided what to do. He wasn’t putting any sinners’ pictures in the directory. He held it up. Every page was blank. Maybe translation isn’t the issue. After Romans 1:26, it wouldn’t hurt to keep reading to Romans 2:1.


To save you from looking it up, here are the Romans verses:


Romans 1:26-27 (NIV): 26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In 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.


Romans 2:1 (NIV): You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.


People have a really bad habit of forgetting that second scripture, don't they?