For Christians, the Bible is obviously important, but on homosexuality, responses differ. For traditionalists, it is a given that scripture “obviously” condemns all forms of same - sex activities, and that sodomy is “the sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance”. For an expanding pool of revisionist biblical scholars, this is a false reading of scripture, based on mistranslations or mistranslations of the original texts, and distorted by a heteronormative interpretive bias. Canon Derrek Sherwen Bailey first questioned the traditional readings back in the 1950′s, have challenged the traditional interpretations of the clobber texts, even labelling them as textual abuse, and more recently begun to promote affirmative, LGBT inclusive passages as an alternative.
But there’s another view, that even if it is true that the Bible really does condemn homosexuality, it could be simply wrong - just it has been wrong on slavery.
The argument is neatly put by Dan Savage, in his widely reported debate with Brian Brown, of the NOM:
The Bible, if it got something as easy and obvious as slavery wrong, what are the odds that it got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? I put those odds at about 100 percent. Pat Robertson was recently asked about this. He was asked, “If America was founded as a Christian nation why did we allow slavery?” And his answer was, “Like it or not, if you read the Bible, in the Old Testament slavery is permitted.” That’s a half-truth. In both testaments slavery is permitted and sanctioned. But then Robertson said something uncharacteristically profound: “We have moved in our conception of human beings until we realized that slavery was terribly wrong.” And so what he’s saying there is not just that we realized slavery is terribly wrong. Also, we realized the bible was wrong about slavery. I don’t think LGBT Americans are asking American Christians to do anything that you haven’t already done.
Move in your conception of the value of human beings.
Here’s the full debate, courtesy of YouTube:
Books:
Boswell, John: Christianity, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
Carden, Michael. Sodomy: The History of a Christian Biblical Myth .
Coulton, Nicholas, (ed) The Bible, The Church and Homosexuality
Countryman, L.William: Dirt, Greed, and Sex
Goss, Robert: Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible
Guest, Deryn, Mona West, Robert E. Goss, and Thomas Bohache, (eds). The Queer Bible Commentary
Helminiak, Daniel: What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality
Jennings, Theodore W. The man jesus loved
Jennings, Theodore W: Plato or Paul?: The Origins of Western Homophobia
Martin, Dale B. Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
Noort, Edward, and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar. Sodom’s Sin: Genesis 18-19 and its Interpretations Leiden: Brill.
Nyland, Ann. Study New Testament For Lesbians, Gays, Bi, And Transgender
Rogers, Jack Bartlett. Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church
Scroggs, Robin: New Testament and Homosexuality
Sharpe, Keith. The Gay Gospels: Good News for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered People
Stone, Ken, editor. Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible (Library Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies)
Stone, Ken: Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective
Vasey, M: Strangers and friends: A new exploration of homosexuality and the Bible
Wilson, Nancy L. Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus, and the Bible
Related articles
- “Blessed Are the Queer in Faith”: 60 Years Reassessing Scripture
- Through a Glass Queerly
- Reading Scripture With A Queer Eye
- “The Bible In Drag”: Introducing a Queer – centric Reading of Scripture
- The Religious Right, the Bible, and Slavery (religiondispatches.org)
- A faith-based explanation about why Christians could be wrong about God and gay marriage (thesunnews.typepad.com)
- Pat Robertson Discovers Cherry Picking (patheos.com)
- Re-Thinking Homosexuality: Introduction (rethinkingtheology.wordpress.com)
The Bible was not “wrong” on slavery, because the bible was not prescribing slavery - it was saying how to treat slaves if you own them. It is a fundamentally different understanding of the issue that how we understand it today, the European/African slavery started by anglo-saxon protestants is a very particular style of slavery that we now impose upon all other cultural understandings of “slavery” in a very similar sense as how “heteronormative bias” interprets bible passages on sexuality. besides, People today fail to recognize that it is only the protestant ideology that looks at the bible as an instruction manual where everything is some how relevant to christians. The passages on slavery are from the old testament and therefore are in NO WAY an endorsement for christian slavery.
Europe no longer had institutional slave systems by the medieval period because of the Church (which made the bible); only in protestant countries - where people believed the newly invented doctrine that anyone can just pick up a bible with no background in translation or contextual education and just divine its purpose and the will of God from it - was the bible used to support slavery. There is a reason why Catholic countries did not have slavery in the same sense that Protestant countries did, with the exception of a few Catholic colonies that the church had little real power to influence. I wrote a long paper on the difference between the way the Catholic/orthodox (aka ancient christianity/the people who made the bible) use the bible and the way modern (aka protestant and sectarian) groups use the bible for my Bible in the 21st Century course. My professor, with a doctorate in Biblical Scholarship from Harvard, called it the best undergraduate work he had ever seen with superb analytical ability. To call the bible “wrong” on the issue of slavery is to fail to fundamentally grasp the purpose of the bible, and, not to mention, impose the same kind of cultural-normative interpretational bias that is now being blamed for the “misinterpretation of passage on sexuality”. If someone thinks that, in writing this, I somehow support slavery, then they have just proven to that they lack the perspective to be able to adequately grasp what I am saying
From what I have seen, Dan Savage is a stereotypical, bitter, angry, intelligent but uneducated, and rude atheist queer of the type that made me concerned to be gay (because I thought being gay mean being like him). maybe he has changed, but I am skeptical. His only interest in all of this is to get christians to stop trying to block gay-rights, he has absolutely no interest in god or religion so he is (IMO) not someone who should be given a form by those who are interested in objectivity, god, and religion.
I am obviously in favor of looking back in time to find out if we have a distorted understanding of the text (that is what i will be doing at the graduate level for the next 2 years) but as soon as words like “heteronormative bias” are thrown in I am reminded of feminist-style revisions of reality and I become instantly opposed to the argument. Gays need to start being intellectually honest and admit that heterosexuality IS NORMATIVE - AND IT BETTER BE NORMATIVE IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES. What needs to change is not some invented ideology rejecting the reality of the standard (the most prevalent) form of sexuality, but rather we need to change how we interpret what not following the standard means - in other words, we need to admit the REALITY that heterosexuality is the 90% majority standard form of human sexuality but change the opinion that not following the standard is a problem. Our cultures have this obsessive need to give complete affirmation as totally “normal” to everything that we accept , because otherwise we have the impulse to condemn it. I refuse to accept that homosexuality is “normative”, because objective empirical observation proves otherwise. I affirm that homosexuality is not normative and I have absolutely no problem with not conforming to the norm. besides, all these gay-thinkers always talk about how “special” and “unique” homosexuals are and how they feel so “privilege to be gay” - well, most of that unique/specialness comes from the fact that they are NOT the normal/standard/most common form, and if you try to make homosexuality “normative” then you loose any sort of “difference” that gays have. I like being different, it makes me feel alive. If being different were not such a problem in this culture than I would absolutely love to be gay and different from the majority. We do not need to come up with a reality-distorting ideology to accept homosexuality, we need to stop viewing “different” as a bad thing. This is just another symptom of the absurd and neurotic distortion of the concept of human equality that western liberals have canonized. GAY IS DIFFERENT AND DIFFERENT IS NOT BAD. People are always talking about “diversity”, but in saying that “everything is normative and the same” then there is no diversity but rather distinct-less uniformity. In seeking to break down all lines and distinctions, we create not more diversity but more “same-ness”. For real diversity to thrive we need to have sharp distinctions between people and cultures, otherwise they end up blending together into a blob, uniform in its gray-ness and formlessness. We need to be proud to be different not seek to be viewed as the same, and we need to teach people that being different is ok rather than enforce conformity by try deny that anyone is different from anyone else. Gay is not normal; gay is different, and it is OK and GOOD to be different.
That is what I believe anyways. you may dissagree.
Instead of attacking the argument by way of a critique of Dan Savage, I prefer to focus on the merits of the case - which in any case was made not by him, but by Pat Robertson.
It is not true that Europe no longer has slave systems by the medieval period - it was certainly uncommon, but continued until the 18th/19th century. (See the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery#Pre-industrial_Europe). Europeans themselves were subject to be enslaved by the Muslims, and Europeans had no qualms at all in enslaving them.
It’s also not true that Biblical slavery applied only to the Old Testament: Paul certainly condoned it, in Colossians 3:22, Ephesians 5:21-6:5 and in Philemon.
It’s irrelevant to argue that slavery was “different” then - of course it was. Any human institution takes on different forms at different times, but that doesn’t make it necessarily benign (certainly not the view expressed by the slaves themselves, where we have their words).
You are correct though, in pointing out that the Bible is not to be used as an instruction manual. That’s precisely the point.
In headlining this piece with the question”Does it matter?”. I was not suggesting that it does not. I was simply posing a question.
Of course the Bible matters, on this, and everything else. The issue is, HOW does it matter? How are we to approach the texts, and make sense of them in modern conditions?
Just as the Bible was commenting on slavery in Biblical conditions, it was commenting on homosexuality in Biblical conditions. The world has moved on its assessment of slavery, and the world has moved on its assessment of homoerotic love.
I have a problem viewing the issue or slavery and homosexuality as examined by what’s in the Holy Bible.
However you try to disect it, you have to accept that
slavery was something that was put upon people and they had no choice in the long run. With the examining of how homosexuality is handled, we have to see that this is a matter that has nothing similar to slavery, as homosexuality is a personal acceptance of a sexual connection and behavior, and can’t be categorized the same as slavery.
This non-mixture demands a more complex treatment of these two subjects, and it very interesting, and I’m going to do more reading/research on the Holy Bible on them.
I agree that homosexuality and slavery are not the same - that’s not the point that Robertson was making. What is the issue, is that how we view the words of the bible on slavery has changed (just as we have changed in our view of usury, which was strongly condemned in both testaments).
Our interpretation of the Biblical words on sexuality can similarly change, in accordance with changing social conditions: loving, committed same - sex relationships between people of an innate homoerotic orientation are not the same as the acts which are (or appear to be) condemned in scripture. Views on the interpretation of the biblical evidence most certainly can change - and have done so, to a remarkable degree over the past half century.
It’s good that you plan to do more research on the Holy Bible on these issues: you could start here -
http://queeringthechurch.com/2012/02/21/blessed-are-the-queer-in-faith-60-years-reassessing-scripture/