Bible Verses

It takes more than citing text to prove a case.

Note: Quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (1989) used as the Biblical text in The Lutheran Study Bible (2009).

When we disagree over questions of sexuality, arguments will vary dependent upon the uses of approach and evidence. Christians eventually get around to quoting Bible verses at one another, sometimes quite vociferously. Often these texts arrive announced without their context. Arguments of this nature take place even at the most public levels in office, denominational assembly, house presses, and other media.

About three years ago, the Minnesota Senate Judiciary Committee considered proposed language for a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between one man and one woman. One speaker for the amendment, clergy of a denomination more fundamentalist than most Lutherans, referenced the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. She claimed that God destroyed these cities because of their practice of homosexuality. We often hear this one. In fact, the word sodomy has become a term for anal intercourse or anal rape.

The full story in its context appears in Genesis 18.16-19.38. Three men, visiting as messengers from God, have told Abraham that his wife will bear a son. They prepare to go toward Sodom and God reveals to Abraham the general outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and “how very grave their sin” (Gen 18.20). Abraham pleads for the righteous to be spared, but none can be found.

The visitors come to Sodom, and Lot, Abraham’s nephew, resident there invites them into his house. The men of the city surround Lot’s house and ask that the men be brought out so they can rape them. Genesis 19.5 uses the usual euphemism “know them,” but Lot recognizes their intent and offers his two daughters instead. The men threaten Lot who must escape from them back into his house.

The visitors reveal to Lot that they have been sent to destroy the city, which they are about to do. They caution Lot to gather his family and leave. Lot includes his prospective son’s-in-law, but they think he is jesting and refuse to go. Fire destroys the cities as Lot’s family escapes only to live in a cave. Subsequently, Lot’s daughters, bereft of husbands, get their father drunk in order to have intercourse with him and produce offspring.

This is the story, routinely botched in the telling, to condemn and distance all homosexuals as wicked and beyond human association as long as they continue in their perverted fixation.

While the Sodom incident may appear, however mistakenly, as the argument from the sinful character of homosexuality, the argument after general human nature comes from the Apostle Paul in his taut theological treatise, the letter to the Romans. In Romans 1 after the salutation, prayer of thanksgiving, and announcement of the power of the Gospel, Paul launches into the universal state of human ungodliness and wickedness (Rom. 1.18-32) followed by the righteous judgment of God (Rom. 2.1-16) by which “God shows no partiality” (Rom. 2.11).

A part of this section on the guilt of humankind is verses 26-27 which out of all human sin gets fastened exclusively on homosexuals.

“For this reason[i] God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”

What is Paul doing in this passage and what does he mean? Robin Scroggs in The New Testament and Homosexuality: contextual background for contemporary debate (1983) reaches the New Testament (chapter 7) after first establishing the Judaic, Greco-Roman, and Hellenistic origins of the same subject. In the case of the texts in Romans, Paul makes a major and obvious overarching theological argument: God’s justice and mercy are revealed from the perspective of the Christ event. Paul is not concerned with individual vices as he is with universal sin, and he repeats the attitude of Jews and Hellenists concerning homosexual acts as part of that catalog. Even so, Paul relates the acts of men with men and women with women to idolatry; that is, the turning away from God that ushers in other calamities of the fall.

What Paul or any Biblical writer may have known of what we now term homosexuality is uncertain. He definitely does not see homosexual acts as pertaining to anyone by nature. However, his example points to heterosexuals acting in contrary defiance of their own nature and thereby offensive to God.

Of all the scattered pronouncements in the Bible, taken to condemn homosexuality, the unequivocal ones are in Leviticus.

Lev. 18.22: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.
Lev. 20.13: If a man lies with a man as with a woman, both have committed an abomination; they shall both be put to death; their blood is upon them.

The meaning is clear: those wishing to base their beliefs on the witness of the Old Testament must be completely consistent and demand the death penalty for everyone who performs homosexual acts. Of course, for Christians Old Testament texts have to be weighed against the New. In addition, for Lutherans, a hermeneutic applies as illustrated previously.

An examination of all the other verses on matters of diet, dress, nakedness, sexual behavior, and marriage that prevailed in Old Testament days may also illuminate our thinking. They had equal standing in the Leviticus codes, but we ignore many of them today at our convenience. See Walter Wink, “Homosexuality and the Bible,” Homosexuality and the Christian Faith (1999) pages 33-49 for his catalog of these items.

[i] Just prior, Romans 1.25 states, “ ...because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.”