“The Biblical Understanding of Homosexuality” by Marion L. Soards, ReNews, February 1993. “The Family Man” by Kim A. Lawton, Christianity Today, November 9, 1992.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
ReNews is published by the ultraconservative Presbyterians For Renewal – and it stands against all homosexuality. So it is of more than passing interest that PFR’s enlisted Bible scholar (a New Testament professor at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary) begins by acknowledging: “The Bible says remarkably little about homosexuality. In fact, there is no biblical word for homosexual or for homosexuality”. Soards grants that all but one of the “biblical passages that are regularly invoked in debates about homosexuality prove upon examination to have little or nothing to do with the subject”. He ends by saying that “the biblical understanding of homosexual behavior … is at most a minor concern”.
He asserts: “The stories and references to Sodom and Gomorrah say nothing to our subject”. He admits: “Given the historical setting and purpose of the Holiness Code … and [the fact] that Christ is the end of the law, … it is impossible to declare the necessary relevance of [Lev 18:22; 20:13] for our world today”. He does not even mention Deut 23:17f. On the two obscure Greek words in I Corinthians 6:9, sometimes said to mean “homosexuals”, Soards admits: “These words have sorely vexed interpreters and translators”. At any rate, he says: “Paul is busy arguing against a concrete problem in the life of the church [lawsuits between Christians], not homosexuality itself. … The primary intention of these verses is not to teach about homosexuality”.
Having explained the inapplicability of all these texts, Soards turns to Romans 1:26f, saying that this is “the one statement in the New Testament that treats homosexuality in the context of a deliberate theological reflection”. But even here, Paul’s focus is not on same-sex acts as such but, as Soards says, his “real criticism is aimed at Gentile idolatry”.
Soards admits that the “graphically evident” same-sex illustration is merely “a sign” and “a symptom” of that idolatry that is the context.
Paul indeed had graphic examples in what Catherine Kroeger (in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society) says was “the deliberate sex reversal practiced in some of the cults [in which] males voluntarily castrated themselves and assumed women’s garments [and women] dressed in satyr pants equipped with the male organ”. Same-sex prostitution was practiced in the Temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, the city from which Paul wrote Romans. Says B. Z. Goldberg: Aphrodite “is both male and female – a bearded face with full maiden breasts. … They who come to worship her must hide their sex. … The greatest glory they can bring to Aphrodite … is to physically efface their sex” in erotic flagellations, same-sex orgies and castration rites. Given Paul’s theological focus on the idolatrous Creator/creature reversal in Romans 1, note of such ritual expression of the reversal was apt. Having rightly admitted that Paul “works from the beliefs and traditions of his own time” and that “neither Paul nor anyh other ancient person had a concept of ‘sexual orientation’,” – and therefore Paul could not have been addressing homosexuality as we understand it today – Soards nonetheless concludes that on the basis of what Paul said about these rites, we may say that any of today’s “homosexual activity is not consistent with the will of God”. Since, as Soards sees in I Corinthians 6, Paul “is busy arguing” something else and “not homosexuality itself” – and thus he drops the passage from the current debate – he violates his own hermeneutic when, recognizing that Paul’s “real criticism [in Rom 1] is aimed at Gentile idolatry” and not at “a symptom” of it, he nonetheless turns Paul’s argument, as such, antigay. He thinks that even “genuinely loving homosexual relationships” are “evidence of the blindness of humanity in bondage to sin” and insists that such love would not “impress Paul” (who, Soards says, didn’t even know there was such a thing as a homosexual orientation) and who wrote I Corinthians 13 and, after Jesus, said that love fulfills the law! Soards says: “God’s purpose for humanity as Paul and others knew … was for man and woman, male and female”. But Paul himself stated that there is no theological significance to the “male and female” pairing about which F. F. Bruce wrote: “Paul states the basic principle here, if restrictions on it are found elsewhere – they are to be understood in relation to Gal 3:28, and not vice versa.”
Soards ends by faulting the “church [that] is full of people, all too ready – like the false prophets of old – to say a sweet [progay] word to the ears of their hearers”. But given the admittedly flimsy biblical basis for this bitterly antigay word, one must ask whose ears would find Soard’s words sweet. Niebuhr said that false prophets are those who fail to include themselves under the judgment they preach. Paul went on in Romans 2 to be a true prophet, applying the judgment to us all.
Gary Bauer is “The Family Man” and head of the Rightwing Family Research Council. In this CT interview, he is asked: “What do you see as the key issues?” He replies: “Number one is, What is a family? … We believe a family is people related by blood, marriage, or adoption…heterosexual couples, and it should continue to be so limited”. That’s not what John Wesley said. In remembrance of words of Jesus [Matt 12:46-50] and recalling his visit to the household of a young, unmarried Mary Bosenquet who had invited the poor people and orphans of Laytonstone to live with her in her home at her expense, Wesley said that this was “the only perfect specimen of a Christian family” he’d ever seen.