Christianity and Homophobia (3)
What’s the Bible got to do with it? Originally posted on Facebook in August 2011
Some Christians would like to approach this issue, or any issue, on the basis of ‘this is what the Bible says’. In fact the Bible doesn’t ‘say’ anything, it is a book (or a collection of books) rather than an oration, unlike the Qur’an it is not all at the level of the direct Word of God — ‘thus says the Lord’. It is also not a self-conscious entity — it cannot speak about itself — because it has been compiled, edited, collected. We cannot, or should not, select single texts without knowing the whole, we need to understand how it fits together and how, whether and why it is ‘saying’ to us, and to whom it is addressed.
One of the key verses on this subject is, of course, Leviticus 18.22. Before I quote the verse, first ask yourself — have I read the whole of Leviticus (and if not, why not? Please go and do it now). It may well be that those who quote 18.22 have read it, but it must be said that Leviticus is hardly the most popular book in the Bible and, in my experience, not that many Christians have read that much of the Hebrew Scriptures.
‘You must not lie with a man as with a woman: that is an abomination’
See also this expanded verse: ‘If a man has intercourse with a man as with a woman, both commit an abomination. They must be put to death; their blood be on their own heads’ (20.13)
This verse is within the ‘Holiness Code’ of Leviticus 17 to 26. The ‘Code’ is one of the sections of Leviticus, which is addressed to the whole of the Hebrew covenantal community. This is important when engaging with the text. The Mosaic covenantal community was marked out as holy, segregated, through various constraints, some of them worship ritual, including sacrifice, others through personal conduct and relationship legislation. This needs to be thought through carefully, we should be clear about how we adopt its rulings.
Questions:
- why are verses 6 to 18 addressed to men?
- how does ‘abomination’ work for Christians, it is a cultic word (related to ritual purity)?
- why is there no mention of female homosexuality?
The commands in chapter 18 are all to do with sexual relationships, the attitude of some Christians to these suggests that they take anything to do with sexuality as still being binding. Let’s look at chapter 19:
- keep the Sabbath (v.3)
- do Christian farmers consider the need to leave some of the harvest for those who wish to glean the remnants? Also do Christian farmers allow the poor to glean their fields (v.9,10)? Let me know and I’ll pay a visit at harvest time.
- do Christians pay their staff at the end of each day (v.13)?
- note the equal opportunities provisions for the deaf and the blind (v.14)
- do Christians avoid mixing animals, seeds and fabrics? (v.19)
- it is OK for a man to have sexual relations with a slave to whom he is not married (v.20)
- should Christians avoid eating the fruit of newly-planted trees (v.23–25)?
- do Christians avoid meat with blood in it (v.26)? This is shechita (kosher), or halal.
- do Christians grow their facial hair (v.27)?
- do Christians have an exemplary attitude towards foreigners (v.33,34)? The foreigner should ‘be treated as a native born among you’, so Christians should not be among those who say ‘go back where you came from’ (which I have heard from the pulpit!).
Now chapter 20:
- death penalty for cursing parents (v.9)
- death penalty for adultery (v.10)
- death penalty for various prohibited sexual relations (v.11–16) — but not for incest (v.17)!
I think this indicates that we should be very careful before taking any verse as setting a standard for Christians. In fact this was explored by the early church in Acts 15 and, in my experience, this is widely unacknowledged as a source for Christian practice/constraints, even by conservative Christians. The rulings in Acts 15 (v.23–29) are in response to this statement, ‘Those Gentiles must be circumcised and told to keep the law of Moses’ (15.5). This is what the early church ruled for Gentile Christians as ‘essential’:
- abstaining from meat offered to idols
- from blood (i.e. eating meat that had not been drained of blood)
- from anything that has been strangled (i.e. not slaughtered in a kosher manner by having its throat slit)
- fornication (general sexual immorality)
There is no mention, beyond these specifics, of ‘abomination’. Abomination and some kind of religious ‘normality’ was critical to the covenantal legislation, it was not always humane or fair or merciful (though we know little about whether its provisions were enacted, another of the limitations of Scripture). We must also ask about the capital penalties, in the case of the most famous adulterer in the Bible — King David — he does not suffer the death penalty, contrary to Leviticus, it is his infant son who dies instead (the Bible elsewhere highlights what is wrong with this …). The only time in the Bible where the provisions of the law are presented for a judgement it is in an unreliable passage with a mischievous (i.e. insufficient evidence/guilty parties being presented) conviction where Jesus, reportedly, rules against any death penalty.
Abomination
The concept of ‘abomination’ seems critical for an understanding of what was wrong with the same sex practice described in Leviticus 18. It appeared to be a dire threat to gender and sex roles (it is worth noting that many Biblical characters perpetrate many (or even most!) of the illicit sex acts which are forbidden in the Torah), creating a problem for the holiness of the community (another moot point). In fact, it could perhaps be seen as xenophobic propaganda (‘don’t copy the practices of the former inhabitants of the land’) with a certain amount of denial in it, with which we will be familiar — ‘Oh no, that doesn’t happen in our community, it’s unnatural’ (when of course it does!). We could also note that the Torah does in other places deny what is natural (those with deformed sex organs cannot be members of the priesthood) and allows what is unnatural — masters taking sexual property rights over slave girls (as above).
‘Abomination’ is not a word that we associate with Jesus, in fact Jesus associated with the outcasts, ‘sinners’ (I am convinced that we should not use this word without quotation marks), women (it was a man’s world in many respects), tax collectors. An unclean woman, with a haemorrhage, touched him and he sought her out to share God’s love with her. He challenged all the notions of no-go areas, separation, ritual uncleanness and abomination. If Jesus was around today, on the earth, he would be associating with hoodies, single parents, LGBTs, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, minority religious believers. He would be condemned by the homophobic for associating with gay people.
So as followers of Christ, I argue, we can have nothing to do with any notion of ‘abomination’, ‘uncleanness’, ‘unnatural’. Christ made no judgement of what people were, what they looked like on the outside, you will remember that he criticised some for looking spick and span on the outside but ‘full of dead men’s bones on the inside’. He was interested in what was in women’s and men’s hearts and so should we be, we will certainly not find out if we are homophobic, we will not find out in society or in the church while our hateful attitudes persist. We can have nothing to do with the cultic legislation which was not given to us or for us. If we do persist then we need to start offering much more than quoting isolated verses from Leviticus and begin to explain why we think Leviticus, rather than the inclusive outlook of Jesus and his message, should be shaping our outlook.
#Homophobia #JesusRediscovered