Underlying all Evangelical political positions on gay marriage is the assumption that the Bible gives an unequivocal moral condemnation of all forms of homosexuality. My task of the next few weeks is to examine systematically all of the passages in the Bible that are commonly said to refer to homosexuality to find out exactly what they say and don’t say. Since evangelical positions are always rooted in Scripture, this is certainly a worthwhile venture. The passages in question are Genesis 2, Genesis 19, two verses from the Old Testament law, two verses from the Epistles, and of course Romans 1.
Many Christians feel that a sufficient condemnation of homosexuality already exists in Genesis 2, where God creates only two genders (“she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” 2:23), and then ordains marriage by saying that “they shall become one flesh” (2:24). The idea that this passage delivers a knock-out blow to homosexuality and gay marriage is deep-rooted. In the eighties (which aside from my birth was a rather forgettable decade), conservative Christians were fond of the witty saying, “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Likewise, only two days before the referendum on the definition of marriage in 2004, my pastor suddenly deviated from his current series of sermons to talk about the “one man, one woman” marriage principle from Genesis 2. Although it was never said, the implicit message was sufficiently clear: “Genesis 2 condems homosexulaity and same-gendered marriage, and so you should too!”
The thinking here is that since God created only two genders and ordained marriage to be between one man and one woman, and since any deviation from God’s plan is sin, homosexuality is sin. But is it true that any deviation from God’s plan is sin? It certainly is a widely held belief, even among great Christians. For example, the disciples encountered a blind man in John 9 and asked Jesus who messed up to make this man blind: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus responded to their question by rejecting their implication altogether (as he often did) that blindness was a punishment for something.
Blindness is certainly a deviation from God’s original purpose of seeing (what else are the eyes there for?), and homosexuality is also a deviation from God’s original purpose for gender (as a brief anatomical investigation will make clear). But no one thinks anymore (as the disciples did) that blindness is the result of a moral failure. What is true is that blindness is not God’s ideal for the eyes. Similarly, the only thing implied by Genesis 2 is that homosexuality is not God’s ideal for sexuality, but as the example of blindness makes clear, this does not yet make it sin. And so we must answer the Christians that joke about Adam and Steve by saying that just because God did not originally create “Adam and Steve”, this is not yet a moral condemnation of homosexuality. Rather, we will have to wait for other passages to deliver such a condemnation. Do they?
