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# Six Texts, One Body, and the Temptation to Win
A gay friend of mine once told me he could predict, within about thirty seconds, whether a Christian quoting Leviticus was trying to understand him or defeat him. He was right almost every time. That is not a hermeneutical observation — it is a pastoral emergency.
I've been thinking about his comment for years. He wasn't telling me the texts didn't matter. He was telling me that the people quoting them often mattered less to the quoter than the quoting did. The Bible had become a flag rather than a word. What alarms me, as someone who holds what is usually called the traditional view on sexuality, is how often I recognise myself in his critique — or recognise the tribe I'd be tempted to play to if I started writing in a particular register.
So this is an attempt to do two things at once: to take the six passages seriously, because they deserve to be taken seriously, and to ask what it does to us when we hold a true thing in the wrong way. Augustine somewhere distinguishes between things to be used and things to be enjoyed. Truth, I think, can be loved or it can be wielded, and the difference matters enormously.
## What We're Actually Arguing About
There are at least three different conversations that get smashed into one whenever this subject comes up in a church or on a comment thread.
The first is exegetical: what do these six passages actually say, in their historical and canonical context, and what claim do they make on Christians today? The second is ecclesial: how should a local church order its life — its membership, its leadership, its pastoral practice — in light of what it believes the Bible teaches? The third is relational and political: how do we live in a society that has, in roughly two generations, moved from criminalising same-sex relationships to celebrating them as a basic human good, while many Christians have moved hardly at all?
These conversations are connected, of course. But they are not the same conversation, and the temptation in our moment is to collapse them into a single identity badge. You hold the traditional view, therefore you must be culturally combative. You hold the affirming view, therefore you must be theologically loose. The badge does the work; the texts become accessories.
The badge is the problem. The exegetical question is genuinely answerable, with care and humility. The relational question is genuinely difficult, and not made easier by pretending the exegesis is harder than it is, or by pretending it is simpler than it is.
## Genesis 1–2: The Architecture Before the Rules
You can't read the six prohibitive texts properly without first reading the two positive ones. This is where most internet arguments go wrong on both sides: they start with Leviticus, when they should start with Eden.
Genesis 1 and 2 establish something prior to any prohibition — a creational pattern of male and female, made in God's image together, called to fruitfulness, joined as "one flesh." "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (Gen. 1:27). The differentiation is not incidental. It is part of how the image of God is borne in the world.
Then Genesis 2 zooms in. The man is alone, and aloneness is the first thing in the Bible that is "not good." God doesn't solve the problem by creating another man, or by creating a community, or by giving Adam a more interesting job. He creates a woman, and the man's response is poetry: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (Gen. 2:23). The union that follows — leaving, cleaving, becoming one flesh — is the architecture Jesus himself appeals to when asked about marriage in Matthew 19.
Without this foundation, the six prohibitive texts float free of their meaning. They look arbitrary, like rules a deity invented in a bad mood. With this foundation, they look like guardrails around a positive vision — a vision of what human sexual union is for, what it images, and what it is not.
This is also why the traditional view cannot be reduced to "the Bible says no." It says yes to something first. The no is parasitic on the yes.
## Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19) and Its Smaller Sibling (Judges 19)
Genesis 19 is the text everyone thinks they know and almost no one reads. The men of Sodom surround Lot's house and demand that he hand over his male visitors "so that we can have sex with them" (Gen. 19:5). It is a horrifying scene — an attempted gang rape of strangers under the protection of hospitality.
Two mistakes get made here, and they're symmetrical. The traditionalist mistake is to read this as a straightforward condemnation of same-sex relationships generally, as if the sin of Sodom were homosexuality full stop. The revisionist mistake is to read this as having nothing to do with same-sex behaviour at all — only inhospitality and violence.
Both readings are too tidy. Ezekiel 16:49 famously says, "Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy." That is a striking text, worth sitting with — particularly for Christians whose moral imagination is exhausted by sexuality and untouched by economics. But Ezekiel 16:50 immediately adds: "They were haughty and did detestable things before me." Jude 7 picks up the thread and speaks of Sodom's "sexual immorality and perversion."
The honest reading is that Sodom's sin was a constellation: pride, cruelty, sexual violence, a settled refusal of hospitality and of God. Judges 19, the deeply disturbing parallel text where a Levite's concubine is gang-raped and dismembered, suggests that the writer of Judges saw an echo of Sodom in the worst behaviour Israel itself could produce. These are not proof texts. They are warning sirens.
If you reach for Genesis 19 to settle the question of two faithful Christians of the same sex who want to share a life together, you are reaching for the wrong text. If you dismiss Genesis 19 as having no bearing on sexual ethics at all, you are not reading it.
## Leviticus 18 and 20: Why the Purity Codes Still Have a Claim on Us
"Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable" (Lev. 18:22). And again, with the death penalty attached, in Leviticus 20:13.
The standard objection is well known. Leviticus also forbids shellfish, mixed fabrics, and tattoos. If we eat prawns and wear cotton-polyester blends without guilt, why treat the sexual prohibitions as binding? It is a fair question and it deserves a real answer, not a dismissive one.
The traditional Christian distinction between ritual, civil, and moral law is not a neat slice through the text. The categories aren't airtight, and Leviticus itself doesn't label its laws that way. But the distinction isn't arbitrary either. It emerges from how the New Testament itself reads the Old. Mark 7 has Jesus declaring all foods clean; Acts 10 has Peter's vision; Hebrews argues at length that the sacrificial system has been fulfilled in Christ. The dietary and purity codes are repeatedly relativised by the apostles. The sexual ethic, by contrast, is not relaxed but if anything intensified, Jesus going behind adultery to lust, Paul taking Leviticus's prohibitions and carrying them straight into his letters to gentile churches who weren't even under the Mosaic code.
That last point matters. When Paul writes to Corinth and Rome, churches full of gentiles for whom shellfish was never an issue, he doesn't bring forward the food laws. He does bring forward the sexual ones. That is not a Christian innovation imposed on the text; it is how the New Testament itself sorts the material.
You can argue with this. People do. But the cheap version of the shellfish objection assumes Christians have never noticed the question, when in fact the church has been working on it for two thousand years.
## Romans 1: Paul's Hardest Paragraph and What He Was Actually Doing
Romans 1:26,27 is probably the single most cited passage in this debate. Paul describes those who exchange "natural relations for unnatural ones," men with men "committing shameful acts." For traditionalists it is the clearest New Testament text. For revisionists it is a description only of exploitative pagan practice, pederasty, temple prostitution, not of anything resembling modern committed same-sex partnership.
I want to make a different point. Read on. Read into chapter 2.
Paul's whole rhetorical strategy in Romans 1 is to build a vivid catalogue of gentile sin, idolatry, sexual disorder, greed, envy, gossip, arrogance, disobedience to parents, precisely so that his reader, presumably a self-respecting Jewish or Jewish-influenced believer, will be nodding vigorously by the end of the chapter. Then in 2:1 the trap snaps shut: "You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things."
This is one of the most surgical pieces of writing in the New Testament. Paul is not handing his readers a club. He is handing them a mirror and telling them to look at themselves before they swing it. To use Romans 1 as a weapon against gay people, with no awareness of Romans 2, is to do precisely what Paul is satirising. It is to walk straight into the snare he set.
This doesn't mean Romans 1 is saying nothing about same-sex behaviour. I think it plainly is. But it is saying it in a context that makes any triumphalist deployment of the verse self-refuting. If you read Romans 1 and feel superior, you have misread Romans 1.
## 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1: The Vice Lists and the Mistranslation Wars
These two passages contain Paul's vice lists, and they contain two Greek words that have generated enormous scholarly heat: *malakoi* (1 Cor. 6:9) and *arsenokoitai* (1 Cor. 6:9; 1 Tim. 1:10).
*Malakoi* literally means "soft" and was used in Greek literature for a range of things, including effeminacy, moral weakness, and, in some contexts, the passive partner in male same-sex acts. *Arsenokoitai* is a Pauline coinage, or close to one, a compound of "male" and "bed" that almost certainly draws on the Greek of Leviticus 18 and 20, where the same two words appear adjacent in the Septuagint.
Revisionist scholars argue that these terms are too ambiguous to support a blanket condemnation, that they may refer to specific exploitative practices common in the Greco-Roman world rather than to same-sex behaviour as such. Traditionalist scholars argue that *arsenokoitai* in particular is constructed from Leviticus and means what Leviticus meant.
Having read enough of this literature, I want to say two honest things. First, the lexical questions are real and the certainty with which some preachers handle these verses is not justified by the underlying philology. Second, the cumulative case across six passages is not easily dissolved by lexical uncertainty in two of them. Remove Romans 1 and Corinthians and Timothy and you still have a coherent biblical witness in Genesis 19 and Leviticus alone. The arguments against the traditional view have to do work on every passage simultaneously, and the work gets harder the more passages you face.
That said, and this is where I want to push my own tribe, genuine scholarly dispute should produce humility, not bluster. A pastor who hasn't read Robert Gagnon or William Loader or Richard Hays should probably be quieter than a pastor who has. The texts deserve more than confidence.
## The Weaponisation Problem: When Orthodoxy Becomes a Weapon
Here is the part I find hardest to write, because it implicates me.
It is entirely possible to hold a correct view of these texts and to hold it in a way that does spiritual damage. The Pharisees, after all, had remarkably good Bibles. What they lacked was not information.
The weaponisation of orthodoxy happens in specific, identifiable ways. It happens when correct doctrine functions as a marker of tribal belonging, when saying the right thing about sexuality is what gets you into the in-group, and the in-group's approval matters more to you than the actual gay person in the pew. It happens online, where the structure of the medium rewards point-scoring and punishes nuance, and where a clip of a pastor saying the hard true thing accumulates retweets while the slow pastoral work that pastor may or may not also be doing is invisible. It happens in pulpits where the rhetorical heat on this issue is wildly disproportionate to the rhetorical heat on greed, gossip, divorce among believers, or the treatment of the poor, all of which the same Bible addresses with the same seriousness.
Augustine, in *De Doctrina Christiana*, distinguishes between things to be used (*uti*) and things to be enjoyed (*frui*). God alone is to be enjoyed; everything else is to be used in the service of love for God and neighbour. Truth, on this account, is to be used, used to love. When we begin to enjoy truth as an end in itself, especially when "enjoying it" means deploying it to feel correct and to make others feel wrong, we have inverted the order. We have started loving the wrong object.
Nietzsche, who saw Christian moral psychology with terrifying clarity even as he hated it, called this *ressentiment*, the moral weakness that masquerades as moral strength, the wounded ego dressed in the borrowed clothes of righteousness. The danger for the contemporary Western church on this question is not, I suspect, that we will abandon the texts. It is that we will hold them in a way Nietzsche could diagnose at fifty paces and Jesus would not recognise.
The test is simple, even if the application isn't. Does your handling of these passages, in conversation, in preaching, in your own internal narration of yourself, leave you more capable or less capable of loving the actual gay people God will put in front of you this year? If less, something has gone wrong, regardless of how technically correct your exegesis is.
## What Costly Love Actually Requires in a Divided Church
So what now? It would be cheap to end with critique. Let me try, instead, to say what I think the traditional view, held faithfully, actually requires.
It requires churches in which gay people are genuinely known, by name, over years, in their actual lives, not as a category to be either celebrated or contested. It requires friendships in which the question of sexuality is neither the first thing addressed nor permanently avoided: friendships robust enough to bear the conversation when it comes, and patient enough not to force it before it does. Most of my gay friends, Christian and not, can tell instantly whether they are being befriended or recruited. The friendship has to be real.
It requires, for those Christians who are themselves same-sex attracted and committed to a traditional sexual ethic, and there are many, and they have written some of the most important books on this subject, a church that does not treat celibacy as a strange and lonely vocation but as a genuine Christian path with a long and honourable history. Jesus was celibate. Paul was celibate. The early church treated celibacy as a high calling, not a consolation prize. Western evangelicalism has often functioned as if marriage were the only adult Christian state, and that quiet idolatry has done enormous damage to people whose lives don't fit the script.
It requires a willingness to be wrong about specifics while right about substance, to apologise when we have used the texts as cudgels, to listen when gay friends tell us how a particular sermon landed, to distinguish between the offence of the gospel and the offence of our own personalities.
It requires, finally, holding the line on Micah 6:8, "to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God", in that order, with all three, refusing the false choice between justice and mercy that culture warriors of every kind would press on us.
The six texts are clear enough to take seriously. They are also complex enough to require humility. And the body of Christ is wide enough, wider than our tribes, wider than our timelines, wider than our self-regard, to hold a serious sexual ethic and a serious love for the people that ethic implicates.
The temptation, always, is to win. The calling is to love. They are not the same thing, and we should stop pretending they are.
"Walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us" (Eph. 5:2).