Excerpt from Daniel Helminiak, STL, PhD, PhD, LPC - Website from his book What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality
Chapter Nine
Summary and Conclusion
The literal approach to the Bible claims not to interpret the Bible but merely to take it for what it obviously says. The words of the Bible in modern translation are taken to mean what they mean to the reader today. On this basis the Bible is said to condemn homosexuality in a number of places.
But a historical-critical approach reads the Bible in its original historical and cultural context. This approach takes the Bible to mean, as best as can be determined, what its human authors intended to say in their own time and in their own way. Understood on its own terms, the Bible was not addressing our current questions about sexual ethics. The Bible does not condemn gay sex as we understand it today.
The sin of Sodom was inhospitality, not homosexuality. Jude condemns sex with angels, not sex between two men. Not a single Bible text indisputably refers to lesbian sex. The King James Bible's reference to "sodomites" in Deuteronomy and in 1 and 2 Kings is a mistranslation. From the Bible's positive teaching about heterosexuality, there follows no valid conclusion whatsoever about homosexuality. Biblical figures like Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, and Daniel may well have been involved in homogenital relationships. And Jesus himself said nothing at all about homosexuality, not even when face to face with a man in a gay relationship.
Only five texts in the Bible express an opinion about male-male sex: surely Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 and Romans 1:27 and perhaps 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 . All these texts are concerned with something other than homogenital activity itself, and these five texts boil down to only three different issues.
First, Leviticus forbids homogenitality as a violation of the ancient Jewish aversion to the "mixing of kinds," a confusion of the idealized roles of penetrating males and penetrated females. The concern about male-male sex is impurity, an offense against the Jewish religion, not violation of the inherent nature of sex. Second, the Letter to the Romans presupposes the teaching of the Jewish Law in Leviticus, and Romans mentions male-male sex as an instance of impurity. However, Romans mentions it precisely to make the point that purity issues have no importance in Christ. Finally, in the obscure term arsenokoitai , if taken to refer to male same-sex acts, 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy would condemn abuses associated with homogenital activity in the First Century: exploitation and lust.
So the Bible takes no direct stand on the morality of homogenital acts as such nor on the morality of gay and lesbian relationships as we conceive them today. Indeed, the Bible's longest treatment of the matter, in Romans, suggests that in themselves homogenital acts have no ethical significance whatsoever. However, understood in the context of the decadent first-century Roman Empire , 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy might suggest this lesson: abusive forms of male-male sex-and of male-female sex-must be avoided. Read more
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