Theopedia

Homosexuality

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

— Leviticus 18:22

Definition

Homosexuality is sexual desire for, or a sexual act with, a person of the same sex. Scripture treats homosexual acts as sin throughout both Testaments, prohibiting sexual relations between two men or two women without exception for consent, commitment, or affection (Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Rom. 1:26-27; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; 1 Tim. 1:10). It is distinct from ordinary friendship or affection between people of the same sex, which Scripture nowhere condemns. Like every sin, it does not place a person beyond the reach of Christ’s redeeming and transforming grace (1 Cor. 6:11).

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to homosexuality by name. Its chapter on the law of God states that the law “written in the heart of man” continued after the fall to be “a perfect rule of righteousness,” and was delivered at Sinai “in ten commandments.”1 Its chapter on marriage confines lawful marriage to one man and one woman:

Marriage is to be between one man and one woman; neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband at the same time.2

Marriage exists, the same chapter continues, for “the mutual help of husband and wife,” “the increase of mankind,” and “the preventing of uncleanness.”3

The Westminster Larger Catechism, part of the wider confessional family whose Decalogue framework the 1689 shares, states directly what the 1689 leaves implicit. Among “the sins forbidden in the seventh commandment,” it names “adultery, fornication, rape, incest, sodomy, and all unnatural lusts.”4

Biblical Basis

Genesis 19

The men of Sodom surround Lot’s house and demand he hand over his two guests “that we may know them” (Gen. 19:5). Lot understands the demand as sexual: he offers his own daughters in the visitors’ place and calls the men’s intention “evil” (Gen. 19:7-8). Some interpreters have argued the Hebrew yada’ (“know”) more often means simple acquaintance than intercourse elsewhere in the Old Testament, but the word’s meaning in a given verse turns on its context, not a raw statistic across unrelated passages, and Lot’s own reaction settles the ambiguity in this one.5 Ezekiel later names Sodom’s sin as pride, “abundance of food,” and failure to “aid the poor and needy,” before adding that “they were haughty and did an abomination before me” (Ezek. 16:49-50), the same word Leviticus uses for male-male sex, so the reference need not exclude a sexual element even though it is not limited to one.

Jude is more direct, attributing Sodom and Gomorrah’s judgment to men who “indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire” (Jude 7), literally “different flesh.” Jewish interpreters had already read Sodom’s sin this way for centuries before Jude wrote, and read within that inherited tradition, Jude’s “different flesh” most naturally describes a desire for those of the same sex, rather than, as some revisionist readers propose, the Sodomites’ demand for sex with angels considered as a wholly different order of being.6 Taken by itself, Genesis 19 depicts an attempted homosexual rape rather than a consensual relationship, so it does not by itself settle the question of committed same-sex relationships; that weight falls on the texts that follow.

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.7

Leviticus 20:13 specifies that “both of them” are guilty and liable, which tells against reading either verse as directed only at rape or coercion, since a coerced partner would not share the guilt. Some interpreters treat these commands as no longer binding, on the grounds that many other Levitical laws (food, clothing) no longer apply to Christians, or as rooted in an assumption that the passive partner in male-male sex is degraded as though he were a woman, an assumption Scripture nowhere else endorses and which sits uneasily beside Genesis’s own affirmation that God made male and female alike in his image. The clearest test of whether a Levitical law remains binding is whether the New Testament repeats or repeals it: dietary law is repealed (Mark 7:19); the prohibition of homosexual acts is repeated.7

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (cf. 1 Timothy 1:8-11)

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Cor. 6:9-11).

Paul’s list pairs two Greek terms, malakoi and arsenokoitai. Malakos (“soft”) has a wide range of senses in Greek generally, but Richard Hays notes it functioned in Hellenistic Greek as “pejorative slang” for the passive partner in male homosexual activity, a usage Philo, a first-century Jewish contemporary of Paul, also employs.8 Arsenokoites, a compound of “male” and “bed,” has no attested use before Paul; the strongest explanation of its coinage is that it directly translates the Levitical phrase (Lev. 20:13 LXX: “arsenos koiten,” “lying with a male”), so that Paul’s use “unambiguously presupposes and reaffirms the holiness code’s condemnation of homosexual acts.”9 Revisionist interpreters, among them Dale Martin, argue the compound’s parts cannot fix its overall meaning and conclude “all appeals to ‘what the Bible says’ are ideological and problematic,” proposing instead that “all appeals, whether to the Bible or anything else, must submit to the test of love.”10 The word’s derivation from Leviticus, and its pairing with malakoi, tell against that reading. The passage also resists being read as a special category of sin set apart from the others in the list, or as a closed door: those “washed,” “sanctified,” and “justified” in verse 11 include, by Paul’s own account, some who had practiced exactly what verse 9 names.

Romans 1:26-27

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 (Rom. 1:26-27).

Paul’s larger argument in Romans 1:18-3:20 establishes the universal unrighteousness of Gentile and Jew alike; homosexual relations serve within that argument as illustration rather than as its point, so a reader who stops at verse 27 to condemn others without recognizing Paul’s larger indictment of common human sin has misread the passage.11 Within the illustration itself, “against nature” (para physin) is a technical phrase in ancient usage “reserved for same-sex erotic behavior,” not a general term for whatever a given culture happens to find unconventional.12 The passage is saturated with allusions to the creation account: Paul’s terms for “male” and “female” in verses 26-27 match the Greek Old Testament’s wording of Genesis 1:27, and his language of images resembling “man,” “birds,” and “four-footed animals” in verse 23 matches Genesis 1:26. Richard Hays draws out the implication:

The understanding of “nature” in this conventional language does not rest on empirical observation of what actually exists; instead, it appeals to a conception of what ought to be, of the world as designed by God… Those who indulge in sexual practices para physin are defying the Creator and demonstrating their own alienation from him.13

Some interpreters read Paul’s language of “passion” and being “consumed” as condemning excessive lust rather than committed relationships as such, but Paul condemns female no less than male same-sex relations, and ancient writers did not typically associate female homosexuality with excessive lust, so reading the passage as a critique of degree rather than kind does not fit either half of what Paul actually condemns.11

Historical Development

Ancient Jewish and early Christian interpretation

A homosexual reading of Sodom’s sin is not, as some modern scholarship has suggested, a comparatively recent imposition on the text. Jewish literature from the Second Temple period already reads Genesis 19 that way: Jubilees (typically dated to the second century BC) and the Testament of Benjamin (from around the same period) both attribute sexual sin to Sodom, and Philo of Alexandria, writing in the first century AD, names the Sodomites’ “unlawful forms of sex” explicitly, including “men hav[ing] intercourse with males.”14 Writing in that same century, Jude draws on this inherited tradition when he attributes Sodom’s judgment to “unnatural desire” (Jude 7).15 John Boswell, whose 1980 study argued against reading homosexuality into the Sodom narrative, held that “Sodom is used as a symbol of evil in dozens of places, but not in a single instance is the sin of the Sodomites specified as homosexuality.”16 The Second Temple and first-century evidence above tells directly against that claim: it was specified, centuries before the modern debate began.

The modern revisionist debate

The traditional reading held broad consensus among Christian interpreters until the mid-twentieth century, when Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s 1955 study argued that Genesis 19’s Hebrew vocabulary does not require a sexual reading.17 John Boswell’s 1980 Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality extended a revisionist argument to Romans 1, proposing that “against nature” there targets homosexual acts committed by otherwise heterosexual persons rather than homosexuality as such.17 James Brownson’s 2013 Bible, Gender, Sexuality mounted a more recent scholarly case along similar lines, engaging the creation accounts directly, and Matthew Vines’s 2014 God and the Gay Christian popularized the resulting revisionist case for a wide readership.17

Opposing Views

Revisionist, or “affirming,” interpreters hold that Scripture’s texts do not address the modern question of a committed, consensual same-sex relationship, either because the ancient world had no concept of a fixed sexual orientation, or because the texts in view target rape, prostitution, pederasty, or excessive lust rather than partnership as such. On Jude 7, Matthew Vines argues that “far from arguing that the men of Sodom pursued flesh too similar to their own,” as in a same-sex relationship, “Jude indicts them for pursuing flesh that was too different,” reading the “different flesh” as a reference to the visitors’ angelic nature rather than to their sex.6 On 1 Corinthians 6:9, Dale Martin argues neither malakoi nor arsenokoitai can be fixed to a single meaning by breaking the words into their component parts, and concludes that scriptural appeals generally “must submit to the test of love” rather than settle a question like this one.10 Some revisionist interpreters trace the prohibition in Leviticus to patriarchal assumptions about male honor rather than a timeless moral norm, or to a concern with cultic prostitution specifically rather than homosexual acts as such.7

Objections and Responses

Scripture’s condemnation targets rape, prostitution, or exploitation, not a loving, committed relationship. Leviticus 20:13 names both partners as guilty, which a reading limited to coercion cannot explain; Romans 1:26-27 condemns female as well as male same-sex acts, and ancient writers did not associate female homosexuality with the exploitation dynamics (pederasty, prostitution) sometimes proposed as the real target of the male-oriented texts; and 1 Corinthians 6:9 pairs malakoi and arsenokoitai in a way that implicates both the passive and active partner in a consensual act, not only an exploiting party.9

“Against nature” in Romans 1 means only “against custom,” not against God’s design. The phrase is a technical term in ancient usage reserved specifically for same-sex acts, not a general label for whatever a culture finds unconventional, and Paul’s own surrounding language draws directly on the Genesis creation account rather than on contemporary Greco-Roman social expectation.12

The biblical writers knew nothing of a fixed sexual orientation, only of isolated acts, so the texts cannot speak to orientation as understood today. Paul’s language in Romans 1 of being “consumed with passion” already describes something like a durable disposition, not a single act; the newer development is treating that disposition as the core of a person’s identity, not the existence of a lasting attraction as such.18

A same-sex orientation resistant to change cannot be sinful, since it was not chosen. A widely cited claim that reorientation therapy essentially never works overstates the case: a longitudinal study tracking people over six to seven years found 45 percent reporting positive change (including reduced intensity of attraction or an increased capacity for celibacy), 40 percent no change, and the remainder mixed or negative results.19 The comparison with ordinary struggles against besetting sin is instructive: no one treats the persistence of lust or a settled temptation toward another sin as proof that resisting it is pointless, or that continence in the face of it is unjust to require.

A Christian may identify as “gay” the same way they might identify as an athlete or a teacher. If the label affirms that being gay and being a Christian are equally fundamental, that combination is a contradiction; if it means only acknowledging continuing same-sex attraction as part of one’s experience while treating it as subordinate to a primary identity in Christ, the language is more understandable but risks confusing observers who will reasonably hear it as affirming what it does not intend. Paul’s own words to a formerly unrepentant Corinth remain the standard: “such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11).20

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677; subscribed 1689), 19.2. ↩

  2. Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, 25.1. ↩

  3. Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, 25.2. ↩

  4. The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 139. ↩

  5. Ken Magnuson, “9. Homosexuality, Sexual Identity, and Gender,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020), s.v. “Genesis 19”: “The meaning of a word is determined by its usage in a given context, not merely by statistics.” ↩

  6. Magnuson, s.v. “Genesis 19,” quoting Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships (New York: Convergent, 2014): “Far from arguing that the men of Sodom pursued flesh too similar to their own, Jude indicts them for pursuing flesh that was too different.” ↩ ↩2

  7. Magnuson, s.v. “Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13”: “The clearest way to judge whether a Levitical law is in force today is whether it is repeated or repealed in the New Testament.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Magnuson, s.v. “1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (cf. 1 Timothy 1:8-11).” ↩

  9. Magnuson, s.v. “1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (cf. 1 Timothy 1:8-11),” quoting Robin Scroggs on arsenokoites. ↩ ↩2

  10. Magnuson, s.v. “1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (cf. 1 Timothy 1:8-11),” quoting Dale Martin. ↩ ↩2

  11. Magnuson, s.v. “Romans 1:18-32”: “to entice his readers first to feel revulsion and indignation against ‘those sinful pagans’ and then to recognize themselves as standing before God under the same judgment.” ↩ ↩2

  12. Magnuson, s.v. “Romans 1:18-32,” on the meaning of para physin. ↩ ↩2

  13. Magnuson, s.v. “Romans 1:18-32,” quoting Richard B. Hays. ↩

  14. Melvin L. Otey, “The Ancient Pedigree of Homosexuality as the Sin of Sodom,” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 32-43, here 33 (Jubilees, Testament of Benjamin), and 39-40, quoting Philo of Alexandria, On the Life of Abraham 135. ↩

  15. Otey, “Ancient Pedigree,” 39-40. ↩

  16. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 94, quoted in Otey, “Ancient Pedigree,” 40. ↩

  17. Magnuson, citing Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1955); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); James V. Brownson, Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013); and Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian (New York: Convergent, 2014). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  18. Magnuson, s.v. “Sexual Desire and Identity”: “It is true that the discussion of homosexual orientation is relatively new. That does not mean that the ancients knew nothing of a fixed erotic attraction to persons of the same sex.” ↩

  19. Magnuson, s.v. “Sexual Desire and Identity,” citing a longitudinal study by Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse: “Forty-five percent reported positive change, while 40 percent reported no change, and others reported negative change or uncertain change.” ↩

  20. Magnuson, s.v. “Can a Christian Identify as Gay?”: “it can be confusing to others, communicating something that is not intended, since many people would take it to mean that being gay is part of the person’s core identity.” ↩