The Bible, the Church, and Homosexuality

             

 

I asked a Catholic website for the passages in the Bible on which the Church bases its teaching.

“For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (Rom. 1:26–27).

 

“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9–10).

 

“Now we know that the law is good, if any one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine” (1 Tim. 1:8–10).

 

“Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire” (Jude 7).

 

All these are from St. Paul except the last one, which is traditionally from Jude, brother to James, perhaps the brother of Jesus. It seems the teachings of the Old Testament have been left intact, both in word and in spirit – the advent of Jesus changed nothing about the way St. Paul and Jude understand homosexuality. So you can read in the Encyclopedia Britannica about the letter of Jude:

 

The letter appeals to Christians to “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (1:3) and to be on their guard against people “who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (1:4). The author struggles forcefully against heretics who deny God and Christ and attempts to strengthen his readers in their fight against such heresy that leads to wickedness and disorder. Libertinism is a characteristic of such heresy, and he warns that the punishment of the heretics will be similar to that which befell the unfaithful in the Old Testament patriarchal times [emphasis mine].

 

I also think it was not disputed that St. Paul was active in establishing the early Christian church, as his letters are deeply concerned with distinguishing true believers from false, true beliefs from heresies. Who is a Christian? Who is not a Christian? Inevitably in such a project something like ‘the law’ comes into play, though in modified form: for example, Paul did not take over all the rituals and punishments of the Old Testament. But the underlying idea of distinguishing between the righteous whom God loves from the unrighteous who shall be punished – even if now in the afterlife – does come (I think) through St. Paul into Christianity. In any case, I personally feel a change of spirit from the agape love of Jesus to the somewhat pharisaical puritanism of St. Paul. Be that as it may.

 

     In the Old Testament, Leviticus 18:22 we read in the King James translation:

 

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

 

Other translations replace abomination with ‘disgusting’, ‘repulsive,’ or ‘abhorrent.’ The context is important, which we can gather from the following passage, Leviticus 18:23:

 

Nor shall you mate with any animal, to defile yourself with it. Nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it. It is perversion.

 

Leviticus spells out the consequences as well (20:13):

 

If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.

 

Sins that were punishable by death include homicide, striking one's parents, kidnapping, cursing one's parents, taking God’s name in vein, blasphemy, witchcraft and divination, bestiality, worshiping other gods, violating the Sabbath, child sacrifice, adultery, incest, and male homosexual intercourse (there is comically no biblical legal punishment for lesbians).

      Of course, the first mention of this theme in the Old Testament was in Genesis 19, when the “men of Sodom” demanded that Lot, son of Abraham, deliver the two guests, both men, actually angels who had taken on human male form, to be homosexually raped. Lot offers them his daughters instead.

 

Now the two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground. And he said, “Here now, my lords, please turn in to your servant’s house and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you may rise early and go on your way.” And they said, “No, but we will spend the night in the open square.” But he insisted strongly; so they turned in to him and entered his house. Then he made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate. Now before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both old and young, all the people from every quarter, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot and said to him, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them carnally.” So Lot went out to them through the doorway, shut the door behind him, and said, “Please, my brethren, do not do so wickedly! See now, I have two daughters who have not known a man; please, let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you wish; only do nothing to these men, since this is the reason they have come under the shadow of my roof.”

Yes, that’s the text. I don’t know what to think of that. There does seem to be a distinction between homosexual and heterosexual rape, with the latter – perhaps being more ‘natural’ – the lesser evil. (Did God destroy Sodom because of homosexuality or rape?)

       Of course, I don’t know and interpretation is involved, but the homosexual acts in play here seem to be pornographic, perverted, and violent acts, explicitly placed in the context of other such acts. Orgies. Swinger clubs. Sado-masochism. That sort of thing comes to mind. Yes, I can see that such things do not exactly express the love of one’s soul, the souls of others, the Creation, or a loving Creator. I can see that such descriptions of a person’s sexual practices as a biographer of the philosopher (or sorts) Michel Foucault

 

Miller is nevertheless gruesomely particular in his descriptions of the sadomasochistic underworld that Foucault frequented, a world that featured, among other attractions, “gagging, piercing, cutting, electric-shocking, stretching on racks, imprisoning, branding. . . .” “Depending on the club,” he dutifully reports, “one could savor the illusion of bondage—or experience the most directly physical sorts of self-chosen ‘torture.’” Foucault threw himself into this scene with an enthusiasm that astonished his friends, quickly acquiring an array of leather clothes and, “for play,” a variety of clamps, handcuffs, hoods, gags, whips, paddles, and other “sex toys.”

 

represent desecrations of nature, the human form, and sexuality from a Christian perspective. I can see why the Church doesn’t want to make a saint of Foucault. Indeed, the Foucault analogues living in the culture of the Old Testament – the men of Sodom – would have been stoned to death on command of the priests speaking for God. And if St. Paul had his way, the Foucaults of the world would all end up in Hell, or rather, if he has understood the mind of God, like the other categories of people who offended God and nature – the witches, the murders, the adulterers. See Dante’s Inferno for a translation of this desire into imaginative literature. The adulterers, perverts, and witches break God’s rules. The desecrate the Creation. The acts they do are inherently “disordered” – not ordered to their true purpose and reality – as the Catechism puts it. In Old Testament terms, God cannot dwell among us unless we purify the community from such pollutants. In Christian terms, Christ cannot dwell in our hearts while we are in the grip of such compulsions.

      You know what does not come into my mind reading these passages? The image of two human beings loving one another and living responsibly according to the vow of marriage. A loving caress for one person to another, yes of the same sex does not come to mind. Nor do the many kindnesses that any married couple do for one another come to mind. Nor does the pain that married people cause each other through their all-too-human failings. Nor do the broken hearts of lovers when they are abandoned – homosexual or not. The grief one feels upon the death of a lover and a friend. I could go on. None of this can I connect with the Sodomites or with Foucault.

        And yet Leviticus 18:22 seems to see all homosexual attraction as by definition something akin to having sex with an animal, as something utterly de-humanized, depraved, perverted. There is no conceptual space for love, commitment, friendship, union inside of a homosexual attraction. I am not sure about this, and I don’t see how anyone else could be either. In any case: either the passages in the Bible see as sinful only certain forms of homosexual sex, as it also does certain forms of heterosexual sex; or all homosexual acts are by definition “disordered” no matter what the subjective attitude of the people involved. And if the latter, then I say: it suffers from an all-too-human failure of moral imagination, a failure still prevalent in our times – the inability even to imagine a loving relationship between two human beings of the same sex. In either case, the Bible passages offer no basis for the Church to find all homosexual love as such “disordered.” [Reading Plato’s Phaedrus might have helped the early Christians.]

 

     Did Jesus not change all this? It is true: Jesus did not make what was evil – murder, adultery – good; he did not make sins like lust or pride into virtues. But recall the woman caught in adultery. She broke the law. The punishment was clear: she was to be stoned to death (Leviticus 20:10-12). The Pharisees about to do this wanted to test Jesus, to see if he was willing to violate the law. Now I’m talking about Jesus Christ, who for Christians shared the consciousness of God the Creator, was one with the Creator. And he did not carry out the law the priests of Leviticus ascribed to God. You know the story from John 8:

 

Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?” This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear. So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”

 

    I promise you I have heard (on YouTube) sermons given by Catholic priests on topics like Wokism and homosexual marriage not physically, but with their minds and words throwing stones, as did St. Paul, who was a Pharisee before his conversion according to tradition: it seems his conversion was not complete, which is only human. Again, throwing stones not only at the men of Sodom, Michel Foucault, the sex addicts visiting your local swinger club or porn website, but at my niece, who has lived lovingly and responsibly in marriage for many years, and who is a loving and responsible, indeed virtuous woman.

       Jesus didn’t even stone the adulteress and presumable would not stone Foucault. Why? Because Jesus knew our hearts. Even I, who don’t know much, know that any soul caught in the grip of perversions is suffering, has been damaged by other people or nature. For Jesus love transcended condemnation. He removed absolutely condemnation from human beings, and put it completely in the hands of God. It is none of our business to condemn another to stoning or Hell. We are only commanded to love and forgive. We know what violates love. It is pretty easy to see that Foucault’s sado-masochistic orgies had little to do with love. But we are only tasked to doing that which Foucault’s good demands – loving him, treating him like a human being even if he didn’t always act like one. Had I been his friend, I would have tried to help him see his sex compulsions in the light of love, though as my light shines rather weakly, this might have been presumption. Be that as it may:  compassion and not condemnation is the right response to the Foucaults of the world, according to Jesus, which is to say, according to God. The will to divide the world into the righteous and the unrighteous has its source in resentment, not love. This will is what God tried to correct. The second any of us cast the first stone, we have violated our reality and cut ourselves off from our roots in God. Or as Wendell Berry put it in a little poem:

 

Dante

 

If you imagine

others are there,

you are there yourself.

    

       My point is that my niece and thousands like her should not be see in the light of the men or Sodom or a Michel Foucault at all. The Bible just sees homosexual acts in this light. Perhaps the people of that time had experienced nothing else. Perhaps they were incapable of imagining nothing else, though Plato certainly was.

  

     The same website that made the passages available also shared this:

 

Yes, interpretation is important. If interpretation were left up to us as individuals, we could make the Bible say whatever we want it to say, and our sinful natures could gravitate toward interpretations that serve our passions. That is why, ultimately, the Church reserves the right to interpret Scripture to herself. “For all of that has been said about the way of interpreting Scripture is subject finally to the judgment of the Church, which carries out the divine commission and ministry of guarding and interpreting the word of God” (Dei Verbum 12).

 

  Well, where does that leave me? Either I must submit to Church authority and equate my niece’s marriage with the men of Sodom wanting to rape two angels, with men having sex with sheep, with an inherently “disordered” – read perverted, unnatural, pornographic – sexual practice, in opposition to my reason, my heart, and my conscience, to all the better angels of my nature; or I am on the Church’s shitlist. Either I can remain attached to the Bible as sacred scripture authoritatively interpreted by the priesthood and understand those passages as distinguishing loving from pathological sex; or if a Church gives me no choice and tells me I have to see all homosexuality in the light of the men of Sodom, then I must reject that as simply an error, one with profoundly negative consequences. No, I don’t enjoy being a damned Luther. I don’t like criticizing the Church. I hate it. I only do it when absolutely forced (which is often). So far I don’t see that I have an option when it comes to homosexual marriage.  No exit. Do I feel that cuts me off from God? No. I don’t even feel it cuts me off from the invisible Church. I know it seems arrogant and I hate that, but I fear this Church teaching cuts the theologians who hold it.    

    You can see how this frankly immoral teaching on homosexuality is undermining the life of the Church. You can see how tying Christianity down to ancient texts and their interpretation – or bowing down to a monopoly on interpretation – is not the right foundation for a Church or a religion.