Does Jesus see homosexual behaviour as
sinful?
Now and again I come across people saying or
writing that Jesus did not speak out against homosexuality and therefore must
have approved it.[1] He was loving and tolerant.
I saw one person state confidently on Twitter the other week
that she had a Masters in New Testament Studies and had studied all four Gospels
closely and nowhere does Jesus condemn homosexuality (or abortion for that
matter).
My sister posted an article in our
family WhatsApp showing how in Australia any church that says homosexual
activity is sinful are seen as ‘hardline’ – why can’t they be like other
churches that have moved with the times and see how outdated the church’s
teaching is?
The subtext: Why can’t they be more like Jesus? Why can’t the church
change with the times?
This argument that ‘Jesus never condemns homosexuality, therefore must
have condoned it’ frustrates me and fails on many levels.
First: The argument
fails on canonical grounds:
If you are going to critique Christianity then you have to do so on
historical Christianity’s terms not yours. And creating a dichotomy between
Jesus’ teaching and the rest of the Bible is to mistreat Jesus and the Bible.
Christians for two thousand years have believed the whole Bible is the
Word of God and has authority. Yes, we must read it within the three horizons
of its immediate context, covenantal context and canonical context. But we
can’t and we don’t (as Christians) elevate Jesus’ words over the rest of the
Bible, especially the rest of the New Testament.
We don’t create a mini canon within the wider canon
of Scripture. We’re not red-letter Christians who only believe Jesus’ words.
Paul and the disciples were writing as disciples and followers of Jesus. And
Paul clearly states sex between a man and a man, and between a woman and woman
is a sin (see Romans 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:10).[2] Therefore, to make Jesus and the Gospels the
sole arbiter of this debate is lazy and misguided.
Second: The
argument fails because of bad historical methodology:
It is a historical fallacy to make a positive argument from silence,
especially when the historical setting speaks negatively against this.
To say Jesus condoned homosexual practice because
he didn’t condemn it is not how historians study history. We don’t base our
arguments from silence, especially when we know what the wider culture believed
– to do so is simply to apply a faulty method of historical reasoning to your
historical argument.[3]
The end result: your argument is deeply flawed. In addition, too often
today we take our present-day ideals and try to impose them on different
historical cultures. You can’t read history like that and hope to be a good
historian.
Third: The argument
fails on historical grounds:
People fail to put Jesus in his historical context. He was a Jew living
in Palestine, living under the authority of the Torah. It would have been
inconceivable for a popular Jewish Rabbi to have condoned such practices,
especially one who said to enter the Kingdom of God you have to be more
righteous than the Pharisees (Matt 5:20).
That is not the kind of teaching that condones
homosexual behaviour. He likely didn’t discuss it directly because as a Jew
living in Jewish Palestine teaching Jewish people, the Law was clear on this
(see for example Leviticus 18:22; 20:13) and it was largely a non-issue. It
only later became an issue when the Gospel was preached to the Romans and
Greeks, where such practices were deemed acceptable in most cases.[4]
Fourth: The
argument fails on theological grounds:
Christians believe that Jesus is our sinless Saviour and lived a sinless
life (2 Cor. 5:21). We believe he obeyed and fulfilled the Mosaic Law as the
perfect Israelite (Rom. 8:3-4). He said himself he did not come to abolish the
Law and Prophets (i.e. the whole of the Old Testament) but to fulfil it as the
One it was pointing to (Matt 5:17).
If he had condoned homosexual behaviour, he could not have perfectly
kept the Torah, since the Torah clearly states homosexual practice is a sin
(Leviticus 18:22; 20:13). If you break the Torah, even one command, then you
are a sinner under God’s curse (Gal. 3:10).
In fact, Jesus himself said to the Pharisees, who
were looking for any reason to arrest him and kill him, “Who among you can convict me of sin?” (John 8:46 CSB).
All they could do in response was to call him names, but they couldn’t point
out in what way he was sinning, certainly not on moral grounds. There’s no
conceivable way the Pharisees would have allowed Jesus to get away with such
teaching. To them it was sinful and everything we know about the zeal of the
Pharisees for God’s Torah tells us they would have called him out on it.
Fifth: The argument
fails on Biblical grounds:
Despite the fact Jesus did not directly condemn homosexual practice, his
hearers would have understood he included it in his teaching on sexual sin.
For example, when Jesus says in Mark 7:21-23
(CSB): “For from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts,
sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, evil actions, deceit,
self-indulgence, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things
come from within and defile a person”, his hearers would have
understood homosexual practice to be implied from that list.
This is because of the word ‘sexual immoralities’ which is from the Greek word Porneia. The fact that Jesus speaks of ‘sexual immoralities’ and ‘adulteries’ shows us
Jesus is speaking of more than just unfaithfulness in marriage. He used it as a
term to convey all sexual sin outside of marriage.
As well as this broad meaning, historically the
earliest Christians saw it used particularly to speak out against prostitution
and homosexual practice in what was the first sexual revolution.[5]
Jesus was clear on what marriage is in Matthew 19
when quoting Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 when he said, ‘“Haven’t you read”, he replied, “that he who created them in the
beginning made them male and female, and he also said, ‘For this reason a man
will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will
become one flesh?’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what
God has joined together, let no one separate”’ (Matthew 19:4-6 CSB).
He clearly grounds marriage between male and female
and then says that the alternatives are: some people were born eunuchs, others
made eunuchs, and yet still others choose to live like eunuchs (i.e. not having
sex) for the sake of the kingdom of God (Matt 19:11-12). There are two choices
for Christians when it comes to sex, either sex within marriage between a male
or female (becoming one flesh), or celibacy. There’s no third way. As difficult
and as painful as this is for some and as much as we should seek to speak truth
in love, we cannot allow our feelings and experiences overrule the Bible and
create an alternative or modern solution within the church. For Jesus says: ‘what God has joined together, let no man separate’ –
these are apposite words for those who try to make Jesus fit their
pro-homosexual worldview.
[1] Some Christians don’t see a distinction
between homosexual behaviour and homosexual inclination or orientation – that
the whole person is sinful and needs to repent of his/her temptations and
inclinations. But I am persuaded of the fact that the Fall has broken us all sexually and so clearly homosexual inclination
is a result of the bigger picture of sin and yet choosing not to follow your
inclination is not sinful but faithful,
because it seeks to say no to temptation and sexual desire. The emphasis of
this article is on homosexual behaviour as
sinful and yet is encouraged to be seen as acceptable within the church. For
more on this read Sam Allberry’s Is God Anti-Gay? He
writes: ‘We should expect a number of Christians to experience forms of
same-sex attraction. We live in a fallen world…Being Christian makes us no less
likely to fall ill, face tragedy, or experience insecurity. It is not
un-Christian to experience same-sex attraction any more than it is un-Christian
to get sick. What marks us out as Christian is not that we never experience
such things, but how we respond to them when we do’, p. 41.
[2] 1 Timothy 1:10 also speaks against an argument
that goes like this – Christianity once believed slavery was okay and not
sinful and changed its mind on that, so why not homosexuality? Well, 1 Timothy
1:10 includes ‘practicing homosexuality’ with ‘slaver traders’ as unlawful and
sinful. What is more, Paul constantly undermines slavery at various times.
Whether it’s asking Philemon to accept his former slave Onesimus back not as a
slave but as a ‘dear brother’ (Philemon 1:15-16), or when Paul says ‘slave or
free’ we’re all one in Christ (Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11), Paul is radically changing
the way slaves are to be treated and recognised. Or when Paul says if you can
earn your freedom then do it (1 Cor. 7:21-23). Even though Paul doesn’t say
flee your masters but obey them (Eph. 6:5; Col. 3:22) and Peter says honour
them even when they are cruel (1 Peter 2:18), (which in itself was subversive
and revolutionary), this kind of subversion to slavery soon led later Christian
thinkers to see slavery and having slaves as utterly repulsive – which was a
revolutionary thought in the ancient world. For example, John Chrysostom
described slavery as ‘the fruit of covetousness, of degradation, of savagery…
the fruit of sin, [and] of [human] rebellion against … our true Father’. Homilies on Ephesians, Homily XXII. The point is, that
early Christian teaching on slavery saw it as sinful, not okay. And they
saw it as sinful because they saw it as sinful
in the Bible.
[3] We also know that the Gospels did not record
everything Jesus taught or did (John 20:30 and 21:25). Like all history, the
Gospels are edited. This should make us pause before categorically stating
Jesus must have condoned homosexual behaviour.
[4] See William Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality, pp. 83-91 and Kyle
Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality
in Late Antiquity, pp.35-37. Harper even discusses evidence of
same-sex marriages between men, and between women, dispelling the myth that the
Greco-Roman world did not have the categories of romantic homosexual love.
[5] See Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin.
Mwanga was a superstitious pagan king who originally was tolerant of Catholicism. However, his chief assistant, Katikiro, slowly convinced him that Christians were a threat to his rule. The premise was if these Christians would not bow to him, nor make sacrifices to their pagan god, nor pillage, massacre, nor make war, what would happen if his whole kingdom converted to Catholicism?
