Taking Paul’s Lead: Christians navigating LGBTQ+ and the modern sexual ethic
We live in a time of a sort of second sexual revolution in America, and in the broader West and modern democratic nations. The church in America is feeling the pressure of it all, and we even have witnessed (sadly, with some irony due to their historic name name) the United Methodist Church splitting and breaking apart over the issue of affirming same-sex marriage and ordaining LGBTQ clergy.
Knowing that entire volumes of books could be written to address this issue and some of its complexities (which there are), there is something to be learned from the Apostle Paul in terms of how he arrives at a basic and foundational conviction concerning the design of sexual actions outside of monogamous, heterosexual marriage – God’s design of the human sexual experience is in a life-long covenant of marriage between one man and one woman (more on this later). This brief post, of course, will not answer all questions. But it only seeks to help provide a glimpse into what appears to be Paul’s own hermeneutic for this issue.
When we read the Bible and attempt to apply it to our lives today, at any basic level of that kind of use of the text is called hermeneutics. Simply stated, hermeneutics is the practice of interpreting the Scriptures in light of its original audience, of God who inspired the text, and bridging the gap to whatever cultural or historical context the reader finds themselves in.
Paul lived in one of the peak periods of the Roman Empire. There were sexual customs in place that were accepted by the broader society, but were far and away from God’s design for sexuality revealed in the Scriptures (then, of course, the scriptures were only the Hebrew bible).
From men being married to women but having recreational sex with both their female and male slaves, from public sex parties and temple prostitution and more – Paul’s Roman world may have had differences in how it plays out today, but nevertheless, both his and ours did not hold all sexual activity to be within monogamous, heterosexual marriage as the final ideal.
So like Paul, as followers of Jesus, we see one sexual ethic shared in Scripture and another in society. Also like Paul, people who did not share a sexual ethic based on Scripture becomes followers of Jesus, they experience the joy of conversion and want to live in God’s eternal life now.
How did he address this in his day?
Even though homosexuality isn’t referenced often in Scripture, we can see Paul’s approach to this answer in the New Testament.
Paul looked backward at the Hebrew Scriptures (what we called the Old Testament) and spoke its truth into the new Christians around him.
Here’s an example:
Romans 1:26–27
[26] For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; [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.
The entirety of Romans 1 in context is borrowing vocaublary from Genesis 1, evoking “creation” (Romans 1:20), “images” (Romans 1:23) and considering male/male and female/female sexual relations as unnatural, certainly as many commentators agree, is an allusion to Genesis 1:26-27 which states the natural way. The “due penalty” probably is some sort of reference to the punishment of the sexual chaos in Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18-19).
Two basic principles arise from this:
- Paul looked far back for his authority in Scripture at Genesis (and others in the Torah). The first editions of these books would have been at least 1,000+ years before him. Some editing around 400-500-ish years after their early editions took place, bringing Genesis and the Torah to the form we know it today. Nevertheless, the Hebrew Scriptures for him were not “modern” texts. It would be like us today looking back to stories like Beowulf or the writings of Decartes – writings as far removed as Genesis was from Paul for answers for modern problems today. But since Genesis and Torah were Scripture, he spoke those ancient truths to new followers of Jesus and to the culture around him as if they had a timeless authority. This timeless authority trumped his surrounding cultural norms.
- We should treat Scripture and its teachings of sexual ethics in the same way that Paul did when he address the sexual ethic of his day.
In short, let Scripture be Scripture. This of course is an perhaps oversimplified and too simply stated, as there are other nuances and complexities to this conversation that go into properly interpreting Scripture on this topic (for example – the word “homosexual” would have been very foreign to Paul, and it seems to have only entered the western vocabulary in 1800s Germany – so how would have Paul thought about same-sex relations? Secondly, more than likely, “bi-sexual” relationships dominated the Greeks and Roman far more than purely homosexual, as Eva Cantarella argues. Much more could be stated, but these nuances do affect our interpretation and application to modern contexts).
In the end, we do not speak such truth without grace (John 1:17). It also does not mean that exile any from attending our churches who want to explore who Jesus is and identify as LGBTQ. Christians listening, loving, learning, all in the context of relationship is the best way in which people who attend our churches are to be exposed to Jesus and his truths.
In the end, Scripture remains our authority as it has been for thousands of years for the Christian Church, just as it seemed to be for the Apostle Paul.