Answering the Affirming: A Biblical Response to LGBTQ+ Advocates in the Church
If invited to a gay “wedding,” would you go?
If so, how would you justify that decision? “Love is love,” “I go to be a witness,” “If I don’t it’ll destroy my relationship,” “I won’t go to the wedding, but I will show up for the reception.”
More and more Christians are using rationale like these to justify not only attending same-sex “weddings” but also to justify their support for the LGBTQ+ community and lifestyle more generally. “Open and affirming” is often the language that is used to describe these Christians. But how do “affirming” Christians justify their position of supporting the LGBTQ+ community?
The Ultimate Authority
For the Christian, Scripture is the ultimate authority in matters of life and faith. To be faithful in such matters requires us first to be biblical. As Christians, what give us the authority to speak to questions of sexual orientation and gender identity? Authority comes from God as revealed in the text of Scripture. You and I have a borrowed authority as speakers of God’s Word. As far as our teaching, understanding and communication accurately portray the text, we have authority. To any degree that deviates from the text, authority is lost.
So, what do the Scriptures say concerning homosexuality? What is the proper interpretation? Are the edicts, judgments and prohibitions against homosexuality no longer relevant today? Is the behavior associated with the term “homosexual” properly translated in our modern-day English Bibles? Do the prohibitions of homosexual orientation and marital union only apply to Christians? And how do we decide the answer to these questions?
The field of hermeneutics is concerned with the proper interpretation of Scripture. Hermeneutics provides us with a set of rules principles, correctives and tests to determine the correct meaning of a biblical text. While there is a lot to learn about hermeneutics, one well-known axiom is helpful here, “If the plain sense makes good sense, seek no other sense.”
Relevant Passages
A list of relevant passages of Scripture concerning the subject of homosexuality includes:
Genesis 1-3: Creation, Adam and Eve, The Fall
Genesis 19:4-11: Sodom and Gomorrah
Judges 19:22-25: Townsmen desire to rape the male visitors
Lev. 18:22 & 20:13: Sexual conduct laws prohibiting homosexual behavior
Romans 1:24-27: Specific prohibitions against homosexual behavior
1 Corinthians 6:9: Included in list of vices
1 Timothy 1:10: Included in list of vices
At face value, a plain sense reading of these selected texts would lead one to conclude that homosexual acts are sinful, reprobate, contrary to one’s own nature and, of greater concern, damning. Since a plain reading of the text leads one to the conclusion homosexuality is wrong, how does the “affirming” Christian arrive at their conclusion to support those in a LGBTQ+ lifestyle? Hermeneutical gymnastics and creative cultural reinterpretations.
Romans 1
In the remaining space we have, let’s examine one passage, Romans 1:24-27, which is the strongest prohibition against homosexuality of the texts addressing the subject. It leaves no wiggle room for mistranslation or reinterpretation of the cultural setting in Paul’s day:
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 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 themselves the due penalty for their error.
Since this is the clearest prohibition in Scripture against homosexuality let’s see how those attempting to hold their Christian faith and homosexual affirmation understand this passage.
Examining the Best Argument
When my children go through my library after I’m gone, they are going to think their daddy was a Muslim, Scientologist, new age, occult-practicing Mormon. The reason I have amassed such a variety of garbage is I desire to know the best arguments that set themselves up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:5). It is one thing to familiarize oneself with an opponent’s position, another thing entirely to know the source of their argument. I don’t want a feeble, anemic husk of a man to take down, I want the real flesh and blood monster. Too often straw men occupy the minds of would-be apologists who seek the victory over a weak opponent instead of engaging with reality.
It is in that vein that I present to you the works of Jack Rogers. Rogers was an influential Presbyterian minister, professor who taught at Fuller Theological Seminary and for our purposes, the author of “Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church.” I have read a considerable amount of gay-affirming, liberal and progressive authors on this subject and find his to be the most robust.
Affirming Argument 1: Idolatry, Not Sexuality
In Roger’s work he sidesteps the issue of homosexuality by interpreting the impetus of Paul’s indictment in Romans to be “about idolatry, and not sexuality per se” (Rogers, 73). He waters down the issue of sexuality in favor of a broad-brush stroke application of universal sin. The fact that he mentions sexuality, something foreign to the text of Scripture, begs the question in favor of his conclusion. Sexuality in the sense Rogers is using it, and the cultural milieu surrounding it, has a very different meaning that imports modern understandings of orientation, gender identity and expression into the text.
Homosexual acts are what the text is concerned with, not with idolatry in general. Their idolatry is what led them to the heinous sin, something that not only went against the nature of God, but against their very own nature. Rogers wrongly interprets the idolatry of verse 23, “and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles” to be the ultimate error and then attempts to lessen the result of homosexual behavior not as something abhorrent, but like every other sin, citing that no one is righteous, we are all sinners (73-74). For Rogers, the sin is idolatry, and the guilt is on us all.
Affirming Argument 2: Natural vs. Unnatural
Having seemingly resolved the issue of homosexual acts in favor of idolatry and universal guilt, Rogers moves to explain away the terms “natural” and “unnatural.” This is necessary because if the acts of homosexuality are unnatural, that is against the intended design and purpose of God in human beings, then his cause is lost. Rogers does this by comparing the use of unnatural or “contrary to nature” in Romans 1:26 with Romans 11:24 where God is depicted as unnaturally grafting in the gentile branch into an olive tree of God’s people.
It’s an ingenious approach that Rogers used here. He selected the same Greek term to depict unnatural or contrary to nature, in the same book, but in the second instance it is God performing the unnatural act. His conclusion? “Paul is not talking in Romans 1:26-27 about a violation of the order of creation…Paul is merely accepting the conventional view of people and how they ought to behave in first-century Hellenistic-Jewish culture” (74). So, natural for Paul is not the created order in male-female relationships but how everyone was behaving in the first century. Rogers has inappropriately contextualized the interpretation of the passage which moves the meaning from being grounded in the nature and order of creation, something concrete and unchangeable, to being grounded in culture, something changing.
The reason this is so important is that things grounded in the nature of God and his creation with regards to morals are unchanging and therefore, prescriptive for all times, cultures and languages. However, things grounded in culture, that is the social norms of the first-century Hellenistic-Jewish culture, are descriptive and non-binding on our morals and Christian practice today. As soon as Rogers can reinterpret “natural,” everything is up for grabs. From this first mistake he goes on a diatribe against the men-centered culture of the first century, reinterpreting and explaining away, often in completely contradictory terms, the prohibition, judgment and consequences of homosexual behavior.
Answering Argument 1
The Apostle Paul grounds his argument against idolatry and same sex relationships in Genesis as part of God’s created, ordered and purposed plan for humanity. There are intertextual echoes in the NT authors when they quote from the Old Testament. In Romans 1:23, 26, and 27 we see a grounding in Genesis:
- God’s likeness and image in humans.
- Genesis speaks about the created order and animals.
- Male and female included in both.
When Paul is speaking about men and women, he has in mind the created order from Genesis. The point of this echo is that idolatry and same sex intercourse constitute a frontal assault on the work of the Creator in nature. The sin of same sex intercourse is idolatrous on a horizontal level as idolatry by worshiping false images is on the vertical level. This is analogous to the complementarity features of men and women. Something that is obvious is blatantly opposed and rejected, substituting an unnatural relationship. Eve came from Adam’s side, complementary to him and vice versa. The two shall become one comes from the fact that they were one, woman came from man. Two parts of humanity created in the image of God. Not any one man or woman possesses the entirety of the fullness of God’s image.
Answering Argument 2
Is grafting according to Romans 11 contrary to nature in opposing convention? There are many ways to do things contrary to nature but not all contraries are bad or immoral. Contrary to nature can be bad but it also may not have a moral application. Thus, to use a good or amoral application of contrary to nature (Rom. 11) to redefine an immoral use of contrary to nature (Rom. 1) is not just the fallacy of weak analogy but a false analogy for the text of Romans 1:27 clearly condemns unnatural relations as “shameless” and acts deserving of “penalty” for their “error.”
Romans 1 is Clear and Decisive
In the Romans 1 passage, it is obvious that human bodies are being dishonored. If Romans 1 is the strongest argument against Rogers and his ilk, then Rogers must instruct his readers on the entirety of Romans 1, especially verse 27. But he does an incomplete job at best. Rogers only focuses on the women claiming that the text is not about women having sex, but subverting the natural and accepted role of the masculine in their world. This ends up being ambiguous, especially if you divorce it from the context of verse 27, “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 themselves the due penalty for their error.” Rogers is being dishonest for he doesn’t connect what the women are doing with what the men are doing when the passage itself connects them explicitly. His silence is telling and dishonest.
If one desires to affirm same sex marriage, orientation or behavior one does so against Scripture, the inherent nature of the person they claim to be supporting and are themselves committing idolatry – for to believe God condones, creates and takes up the cause of the homosexual is to serve the god of culture and not the God of the Bible, the God of reality, the one who created them male and female in the image of God.
Truth, Not Niceness, is Our Calling
As with pronoun hospitality, or pronoun politeness, our culture wants us to play pretend with those confused with their gender and sexuality. It is seen as a good thing to affirm someone’s gender dysphoria because they are already unstable, and we need not make them feel more stressed. Those who have towed the cultural line by affirming LGBTQ+ identities and behaviors are actually practicing cunning and sin. We will not be judged by how nicely we treated our neighbors but how truly.
If we engage in the lies that our culture has proffered, we make repentance near impossible for them and impractical for ourselves. Trans women aren’t women and gay marriage isn’t marriage. Tell the truth! If your church has not taken a stand against sin, not the made-up sin of the social justice warriors, but actual sins as laid out in the Bible, then you need to call them on it. Do not think that a relationship established on a lie will benefit the reception of the gospel. The truth people need to hear is the fact that they are sinners. But telling people they are sinners is offensive you might say. I think Jesus might retort back, “A greater sin is people believing they have the good news without the reason that makes it good!”
Rev. Jack Mumford, “Answering the Affirming: A Biblical Response to LGBTQ+ Advocates in the Church,” The Advent Christian Witness, Fall 2023.