The number or sermons that I remember from my undergraduate days – now over twenty years ago – can be counted on the fingers of one hand (with two or three fingers left over).  One of these sermons concerned homosexuality.  The suggestion that left a particular impression on me was that in reading into Paul’s letters a wholesale condemnation of homosexuality, the church may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.  Although I wouldn’t claim to be a perfect parent, I did manage to avoid throwing either of my babies out with their bathwater.  The point of the saying, it seems to me, isn’t just, “Whoops! I didn’t mean to throw that away!” but rather that in disposing of something dirty you accidentally lose something that is really rather precious.

I have pondered the issue of homosexuality on and off over the (many) intervening years.  I actually started writing this post well over a year ago.  In the course of all that pondering and writing, I have come to understand why homosexuality is such a divisive issue for Christians.  Reaching my conclusions has challenged me in all sorts of different ways, making me think much more deeply about what it means to be a Christian and, in particular, how I interpret scripture.  Indeed, what I thought I knew about homosexuality in scripture was one of the barriers that held me back from fully embracing the Bible, Paul’s letters in particular.  However, this was also one of the reasons that I eventually threw myself into studying the Bible in depth.  In the end, I had to know.  I shouldn’t have feared.  What I got from studying Paul – someone whose writings I’d always found severe, impenetrable and hard to love – was a profound sense of liberation.  A further surprise has been that I was unable to finish this article until I had not only looked to Paul but also looked forward to Revelation and back to Genesis.

In a previous post (Post-Truth Certainty) I wrote that “as human beings we crave certainty”.  There is nothing that provides certainty as much as a rule being handed down to us, whether we certainly agree with it or certainly disagree with it.  The power of this is multiplied if we see such a rule being handed down to us in a religious text.  Homosexuality is one of those issues where many people see this happening:  with the Bible unequivocally condemning homosexuality.  Some people use this perception to reject homosexuals; others use it to reject Christianity.  I understand only too well the attraction of such certainty, because I spent many years looking for such certain answers from outside.  Such an approach seemed to offer insurance against getting it wrong and being one of the people of whom Jeremiah said:

Jeremiah 6:14
“They’ve healed my people’s wound too easily, saying “Things are well, they’re well,” when they’re not well”.

However, I now believe that this approach merely enslaves ourselves to a concept of law that Jesus came to liberate us from: a liberation that is one of Paul’s favourite subjects.

Let me be quite clear at this point that I am not dismissing scripture.  It has a central role in my faith, as nicely described in one of the letters to Timothy:

2 Timothy 3:14-17
“But you, on the other hand, must stand firm in the things you learned and believed.  You know who it was you received them from, and how from childhood you have known the holy writings which have the power to make you wise for salvation through faith in King Jesus.  All scripture is breathed by God, and it is useful for teaching, for rebuke, for improvement, for training in righteousness, so that people who belong to God may be complete, fitted out and ready for every good work.”

I just don’t believe that the Bible is a rule book with which we can directly govern our lives.  God works in a much deeper way through scripture.  I recently became aware that in several places the Qu’ran refers to Christians as “people of the book”.  In one sense this description is quite an honour, recognising as it does the importance that Christians at the time must have attached to scripture.  Viewed from our present time, however, it appears somewhat incongruous, seeing as it is for Muslims that the ultimate revelation of God is a book:  The Qu’ran (believed by Muslims to be a perfect copy of a heavenly work).  For Christians, the ultimate revelation of God is not a book, but a person:  Jesus.  Of course, as primary source material, the whole Bible is vital for getting to know Jesus (including the Old Testament, which was the scriptures as far as New Testament writers were concerned).  However, the point of Jesus’ ministry was that through our relationship with him we come to know God in a deeper, more mysterious way that the prophet Jeremiah foresaw:

Jeremiah 31:33
“Because this is the covenant that I’ll seal with Israel’s household after those days (Yahweh’s declaration).  I’m putting my teaching inside them and I’ll write it on their mind; and I’ll be God for them and they’ll be a people for me.”

Returning to the subject of homosexuality, what does the New Testament say about it?  It is directly referred to in three places, as follows (in Tom Wright’s “For Everyone” translation):

Romans 1:26&27
“So God gave them up to shameful desires.  Even the women, you see, swapped natural sexual practice for unnatural; and the men, too, abandoned natural sexual relations with women, and were inflamed with their lust for one another.  Men performed shameless acts with men, and received in themselves the appropriate repayment for their mistaken ways.”

1 Corinthians 6:9&10
“Don’t you know that the unjust will not inherit God’s kingdom?  Don’t be deceived! Neither immoral people, not idolaters, nor adulterers, nor practising homosexuals of whichever sort, nor thieves, nor greedy people, nor drunkards, nor abusive talkers, nor robbers will inherit God’s kingdom.”

1 Timothy 1:9-11
“We recognise that the law is not laid down for people who are in the right, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinners, the unholy and worldly, for people who kill their father or mother, for murderers, fornicators, practising homosexuals, slave traders, liars, perjurers, and those who practise any other behaviour contrary to healthy teaching, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of God the blessed one that was entrusted to me.”

Reading these verses, it is easy to understand why some people conclude that any expression of homosexuality is contrary to the will of God and is therefore morally unacceptable.  However, I have found that reading these verses has raised some pressing questions in my mind, not the least of which is:  “Why?”

Firstly, I’m going to consider the verses from 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy together, because of their similarity:  they are both lists of immoral behaviour.  (There is a another example of such a list in Galatians 5:19-21, but that one doesn’t mention homosexuality.)  In these verses, Paul isn’t providing a detailed exposition on these behaviours, but using them as examples of people who will not inherit God’s Kingdom (in 1 Corinthians) and of people who are not in the right (in 1 Timothy).  Amongst the items in these lists, it is only the inclusion of homosexuality that troubles my conscience.  Consciences are important, God given, tools that (providing we have nourished them with scripture) we should not ignore:

1 Timothy 1:18&19
“I am giving you this command, Timothy my child, in accordance with the prophecies which were made about you before, so that, as they said, you may fight the glorious battle, holding on to faith and a good conscience.  Some have rejected conscience, and their faith has been shipwrecked.”

When my conscience is troubled, I want to understand why.  After all, through wisdom and knowledge, guided as always by love, we should be able to tell the difference between right and wrong:

Philippians 1:9-11
“And this is what I’m praying: that your love may overflow still more and more, in knowledge and in all astute wisdom.  Then you will be able to tell the difference between good and evil, and be sincere and faultless on the day of the Messiah, filled to overflowing with the fruit of right living, fruit that comes through King Jesus to God’s glory and praise.”

Within the Anglican framework of scripture, tradition and reason, it is incumbent on us all to use our reason to support or challenge the traditions we have inherited for the interpretation of scripture.  Using my reason to follow each of the behaviours in the lists from 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy to their logical conclusion, I very quickly reach a point where they will clearly inflict pain or damage on people and therefore also on the one in whose image all people are made:  God.  The exception is homosexuality.  When I consider homosexuality in such a way, my reason cannot reach such a point.  I have tried to see the evil consequences of two people of the same sex committing to living together faithfully in the service of God.  I can’t find any.  At this point, the obvious question to ask is whether what I have in mind when I consider homosexuality is actually what Paul had in mind when he wrote his lists.

A few years ago I read a fascinating book about the history of marriage.  This clearly illustrated how much the idea and understanding of marriage has changed over the centuries and yet how all these different understandings are comfortably described by the single word marriage.  The same could be true for homosexuality, with the added complication that I only read scripture in translation, not its original language.  The world we know now is, of course, very different in many ways to the Greco-Roman world that Paul knew.  In the Greek world, homosexuality was often part of the older teacher / younger student path of learning, with the older man expected to desire the younger while the younger man was not expected to enjoy his purely passive sexual role.  In the Roman world, men were expected to be highly sexually active, including with male slaves.  It was, however, frowned upon for Roman men to assume a passive sexual role:  that was for the slaves.  In both of these models there is a clear lack of mutuality and an equally clear imbalance of power.  If I was to apply modern terminology to describe them I would probably choose “sexual abuse” or “rape” and have no problem in including them in the lists in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy.  But was this what Paul was referring to?

Some authors (including Tom Wright – my trusted guide through the New Testament) argue that, whilst all the above is true, there were also mutual, meaningful relationships between members of the same sex in the ancient world, that Paul would have known about them and that by not differentiating he therefore condemns all homosexual behaviour.  However, I don’t see how we can be sure about what Paul would or would not have known about.  One way in which people try and determine this is to consider the precise meaning of the Greek words that Paul uses (malakoi & arsenokoita in 1 Corinthians and arsenokoita alone in 1 Timothy).  Tom Wright, in 1 Corinthians for Everyone writes:  “The terms Paul uses here include two words which have been much debated, but which, experts have now established, clearly refer to the practice of male homosexuality.  The two terms refer respectively to the passive or submissive partner and the active or aggressive one, and Paul places both roles in his list of unacceptable behaviour.”  It seems to me, however, that the use of different terms for different roles in a sexual act is very much indicative of the abusive Greek and Roman behaviours outlined above with their clearly delineated roles.  Furthermore, I wouldn’t begin to characterise heterosexual relationships in their entirety by reference to a single sexual act that a couple might choose to engage in.  Whilst interesting and informative, I’m not sure that this avenue can answer the question “what exactly was Paul referring to?” with any degree of certainty.  I’m reminded of the following words:

2 Timothy 2:14
“Remind them about these things; and warn them, in God’s presence, not to quarrel about words.  This doesn’t do any good; instead, it threatens to ruin people who listen to it.”

The point that I would take from this is that if the whole of this moral dilemma hangs on the interpretation of one or two words, it is far too much of a burden for mere words to be expected to bear.  There is, for me, sufficient doubt for us to need to look for answers elsewhere, as authors on both sides of the argument do.

This is an appropriate point to move on to the passage from Romans.  As with the other two passages, Paul isn’t writing about homosexuality as his main theme.  At this early stage of the letter we are at the beginning of a long, complex argument for which Paul wants to establish as a starting point the broken state of humanity resulting from its rejection of God.  In the eyes of many readers, the ultimate sign of this brokenness that Paul chooses to use is the existence of homosexuality.  However, looking at the language of these verses, I don’t see a description of homosexuality as I understand it.  I wouldn’t describe a loving homosexual couple as being “inflamed with their lust for one another” and more than I would describe a loving heterosexual couple in that way.  It is the language of uncontrollable sexual appetite.  There’s plenty of that in the world and it causes plenty of damage to the world, but it doesn’t describe two men in a loving, committed relationship.  Furthermore, how are we to understand “swapping natural sexual practice for unnatural” or “abandoning natural sexual relations” in the context of people who have only ever been attracted to other people of the same sex?  Whilst some people question whether homosexuality is a state into which people can be born, I have heard, seen and read enough testimony from homosexual people to be convinced that it is.

The discussion above is, however, something of a digression.  The passage from Romans 1 is not an argument about personal morality (in the way that the passages from 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy are).  It does not argue that individual people engage in the homosexual activities described (however we understand them) because of their individual disobedience to God.  It argues that the existence of these behaviours in their deviation from the created order of Genesis 1-2 results from the disobedience of the whole of the human race.  Therefore, even if we accept the Paul is talking about all expressions of homosexuality, since his argument works at the population level, not at the personal level, using it to justify any conclusions we might wish to draw about personal morality and choices would be to miss the point entirely.  To shed further light on this, we need to reflect on creation.

There are, of course, two accounts of creation in Genesis.  In the first account, human beings are created on day six as the final act of creation:

Genesis 1:27-30
So God created human beings in his image.  He created them in the image of God.  He created them male and female.  God blessed them, and said to them, “Be fruitful, be numerous, fill the earth and master it, hold sway over the fish in the sea, the birds in the heavens, and every creature that moves on the earth.”  And God said, “Now.  I give you all the plants that bear seed that are on the face of all the earth and every tree with fruit that bears seed.  These will be your food.  To all the creatures of the earth, to all the birds in the heavens, and to all the things that move on the earth that have living breath in them, I give all the green plants as food”.  So it came to be.

In the second account (Genesis 2), God starts by making a single human being and then placing that human being in a garden called Eden “to serve it and look after it”.  God then gives the human being permission to eat from any tree in the garden apart from one.  God decides that the human being should not be alone and so sets about creating a helper.  Having created a load of animals without finding a suitable helper, God then creates a woman from one of the human being’s ribs (at which point the term man enters the text) and the human being declares:  “Well!  This one is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh!  This one will be called ‘Woman’, because from a man this one was taken.”  There then follows what sounds like something of an editorial comment:  “Hence a man leaves his father and his mother and sticks to his woman and they become one flesh.”

What, then, can we glean about God’s original created order from these stories?  Firstly, in both accounts human beings are allotted a plant-based diet.  Eating meat is a later concession by God.  It is possible, therefore, to view vegetarian people as modelling God’s original created order and the eating of meat as a deviation from that created order and as such a sign of humanity’s disobedience to God.  This doesn’t mean that I feel the need to condemn other meat eaters (including myself) as immoral.  Secondly, it would appear that the pairing up of male and female was indeed part of God’s original created order.  In the first account, male and female are created together and told to be fruitful and multiply; in the second account the female is specially created as a helper for the male.  It is possible, therefore, to view heterosexual people as modelling God’s original created order and homosexuality as a deviation from that created order and as such a sign of humanity’s disobedience to God.  This doesn’t mean that I feel the need to condemn homosexual people as immoral any more than I do people who remain single or couples who are unable to be fruitful and multiply.

One further thing to note is that arguments against homosexuality that point backwards to creation often make far more of the difference between male and female than I can see in Genesis 1-2.  Such arguments are often based on a perceived fundamental difference between men and women that is seen to be enshrined in creation.  As Tom Wright notes in Romans for Everyone, “Males and females are very different…”  Heterosexual relationships are then viewed as unions of difference, contrasted with homosexual relationships viewed as unions of same.  In the first account of creation, male and female are created together and then jointly blessed and commissioned to be fruitful and master the earth.  There is no indication of them being given different roles to perform.  Although in the second account the woman is created to be a helper for the man this does not imply subservience, since God is often described in the Bible as our helper.  When the man first sees the woman the thing he remarks upon is the similarity between them, not the difference (“bone from my bone, flesh from my flesh”).  Therefore, when thinking about God’s original created order, equality of the sexes seems to be the order of the day (apart from the different reproductive roles).  The view of the sexes as binary opposites is, I believe, incredibly damaging, but that is another topic for another day.

Until recently, however, in thinking about the specific issue of same-sex marriage I used similar arguments in considering whether there should be some equal but different classification for same-sex couples.  The argument I was favouring went something like this.  Since men and women are different, a relationship between a man and a woman is different to a relationship between two members of the same sex, not least in the possibility of procreation.  Therefore, whilst I had become certain that a relationship between two people of the same sex should be treated as being equal to heterosexual marriage, I wondered whether the attempt to make them the same was one of those occasions when fairness was being confused with equality.  Pondering on this, whilst driving home from work one day, I was suddenly struck by the following verses from Paul:

Galatians 3:27&28
“You see, every one of you who has been baptised into the Messiah has put on the Messiah.  There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no ‘male and female’; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus.”

These are very familiar verses, speaking of healing the major divisions in the societies that Paul would have known.  Slavery was a fact of life in the ancient world.  The division between Jewish Christians and Greek (Gentile) Christians was something that Paul wrote at great length about, trying to heal.  It was the full force of the third part of this that struck me on that drive home.  If in the Messiah – in the age to come – there is no male and female the solid foundation of my argument above crumbles to dust.  The possibility of procreation remains as an undeniable difference, but what about beyond that?  There is surely far more to a marriage than procreation, but Genesis sheds little light on this (as it sheds little light on marriage at all, at least as we understand it today).  To understand this further we need to turn around and look in the opposite direction.

As a Christian I not only look back at creation to understand the way things are, but also try and look forward into the age to come to try to understand the way things will be.  It is time, therefore, to return to those signs of humanity’s waywardness and turn them around so that they point forward into the age to come, rather than backward towards creation.  Thinking first about diet, I can well imagine that in the age to come (after the renewal of creation, when heaven and earth are joined and finally God’s kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven) that, in our resurrected bodies, we will be quite content to eat plants (if food is even required for our new bodies) and live in harmony with the animals.  When it comes to diet, therefore, it is possible to view vegetarian people as a sign that points both back to creation and forward to the age to come.  But what of sexuality?  We’ve seen that, arguably, heterosexuality is a sign that points back to creation, but does it point forward to the age to come?  In one of those rare concrete views into the age to come, Jesus tells us that marriage will not survive:

Luke 20:34-36
“The children of this age”, replied Jesus, “marry and are given in marriage.  But those who are counted worthy of a place in the age to come, and of the resurrection of the dead, don’t marry, and they are not given in marriage.  This is because they can no longer die; they are the equivalent of angels.  They are children of God, since they are children of the resurrection.”

On first consideration, this seems rather disappointing:  I rather like being married to my wife.  However, if we look deeper into marriage (beyond its function as a stable base for procreation and a safe space for the expression of sexuality) it is about love.  Brought together by sexual attraction, held together by covenant vows made before family, friends and God, growing together through emotional love, the intimacy of marriage provides a space for that emotional love to evolve into that deeper love that Paul writes so eloquently about in 1 Corinthians 13:  the love that is the one thing that will survive into the age to come.  At least, that’s how it seems to me.  Although, as I noted earlier in relation to creation, at one level we are all similar regardless of sex, at another level we are all uniquely created and so are all different.  In this age, it is enough of a challenge to achieve the intimacy of marriage with one similar-but-different person.  However, if we do achieve this then the love that then evolves can spill out to nourish our other relationships.  This process is not dependent on having biologically differing reproductive roles.  In the age to come, there will be neither male nor female because in our eternal resurrection bodies there will be no need to reproduce.  In the age to come, I believe we won’t need to marry because we will achieve that beautiful loving intimacy that we strive for in our earthly marriages in all our relationships, in which sex will have no relevance because it won’t then exist.  So, whilst heterosexuality points us back towards creation, same-sex marriages give us a glimpse into the age to come.  Such glimpses, coming as they do like puzzling reflections in a mirror or as though through a darkened glass, are something really rather precious indeed.