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Sodom in the Old Testament Is No Knock on Gays — and Other Queer Takes on the Bible



For centuries it was conventional wisdom that the Bible condemned homosexuality as sinful, and sanctified marriage between a man and a woman. But queer theologians have been chipping away at this assumption for decades, and todayโ€™s acceptance of gay marriage and queer sexuality is in some measure due to their efforts and their success in recasting the Bible as a queer-affirming text.ย ย 

Main Story: How Queer Theology Is Going Mainstream

In recent decades, progressive theologians have worked out elaborate arguments to demonstrate that what they term the classic โ€œtexts of terrorโ€ censuring homosexuality are misunderstood today because they would have meant something totally different to their original audiences.  

This critical approach to reassessing Biblical passages, known as โ€œqueeringโ€ โ€“ which stresses Jesusโ€™s role as an anti-colonialist revolutionary who surrounded himself by the sexually marginalized and others rejected by society โ€“ can even go even further to suggest that the apostle Paul and Jesusโ€™ disciples may have been gay, or that ancient Bible stories subvert the gender binary and validate queer identities.   

Queer theologians are not positing plausible alternatives to traditional interpretations of the Bible; in the spirit of German theologian Martin Luther and other revisionist scholars, they say they are recovering the original, true meanings of the sacred texts. 

โ€œThat is the correct way of reading the Scripture,โ€ said Cheri DiNovo, bisexual minister of Trinity-St.Paul’s United Church & Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts in Toronto, a congregation in the United Church of Canada, the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. โ€œAll that weโ€™re doing in all these liberation movements is recovering our biblical basis.โ€ 

DiNovo, who performed Canadaโ€™s first legal same-sex marriage in 2001 and authored the 2021 memoir, โ€œThe Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergyโ€™s Radically Honest Tale,โ€ said that the Bible sanctifies a broad spectrum of human love and family structure, from same-sex attraction to polyamory.  

DiNovo can be viewed on an online video queering various โ€œtexts of terrorโ€ and interpreting other stories that validate the queer experience. One of the common examples she cites is the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, which purportedly shows that the very first Christian convert was a gender-nonconforming person of color, and indicates that the church was a welcoming queer community at its inception.  

โ€œNow, how did the eunuch convince Philip to baptize them?โ€ DiNovo posits, referring to the first-century eunuch by a nonbinary pronoun. โ€œBy knowing their Bible and quoting Scripture at Philip. Lesson for all of us.โ€ 

In the words of queer theologian, author and minister Robert Shore-Goss, the queerness of the Bible is not a social construct or willful interpolation; it comes directly from the divine source.  

โ€œGod is more akin to queers, the sexual outlaws who break cultural codes of decency and sexual restrictedness,โ€ Shore-Goss wrote in 2021. โ€œGod is a โ€˜faggotโ€™, for God creatively pursues the conception of Jesus outside the bounds of vanilla religiosity.โ€ 

โ€œThe pervert Jesus lacks middle-class respectability, male and heterosexist constructions of authoritarian, patriarchal and heteronormative Christianities,โ€ Goss wrote. 

These arguments make no dent on conservative Christians, who see queer theology as a vain exercise in sophistry to twist sacred writings into saying the opposite of what was intended.

โ€œItโ€™s sowing doubt where there really should not be much doubt,โ€ said Bill Heming, a pastor at Parkway Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, Wash. โ€œIf thereโ€™s anything thatโ€™s crystal-clear in the Old Testament and the New Testament, itโ€™s sexual morality.โ€ 

Still, even some queer theologians privately acknowledge that the Bible is not open to gay sex. But the question remains: Are those ancient injunctions relevant today?  

Yale Divinity School theologian Linn Marie Tonstad, whose books include โ€œQueer Theology: Beyond Apologetics,โ€ declared in a 2020 podcast, โ€œThere are texts in the Bible that condemn a man lying with a man as with a woman. There is no ambiguity around that. There is no real argument to be had about whatโ€™s being talked about there.  

โ€œSo the question is, what does that mean, whatโ€™s the significance of a statement like that?โ€ 

Progressive theologians have dealt with such passages in several ways over many decades. Starting with prohibitions against homosexuality in the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus states that it is an abomination for a man to lie with another man as with a woman. One response from queer theologians is to argue that within the social context of the time, the laws in Leviticus apply only to Israelites and aliens residing in the land of Israel, so itโ€™s not a universal prohibition. Another approach is to class the ban on homosexuality with other bans, such as the prohibition on mixing meat with dairy, or wool with linen, which are not binding on Christians.  

โ€œMixing cotton and linen doesnโ€™t worry us, so why should lying with a man as if with a woman bother us?โ€ Tonstad wrote, summarizing the case.  

Next comes Paulโ€™s condemnation of lustful relations between men, which he describes as shameful and perverse in the New Testament Book of Romans. Queer theologians  interpret these narrowly, as prohibitions against temple prostitution, bans against pederasty, bans against humiliating enemy soldiers, or bans against raping slaves โ€“ essentially bans against sexually exploiting inequitable power dynamics — not bans on consensual same-sex relationships. The queer argument that comes up over and over is that gay relationships and gay identities as we understand them were not known in the first century, so Paulโ€™s prohibition canโ€™t apply. โ€œHe simply cannot be thinking about sex between gay men, since such a concept doesnโ€™t exist in his context,โ€ Tonstad writes.  

Queer theologians contend that what appear to be categorical bans must be read in the broader context of social history and thematic unity, which requires aligning supposed bans with Paulโ€™s good news to the Galatians: โ€œThere is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.โ€ 

โ€œMany queer apologists argue that the destruction, or transgression, of binaries is central to the Christian message,โ€ Tonstad wrote. โ€œHeterosexual/homosexual belongs to the list of binaries destroyed or transgressed by Christianity, the argument runs, following the Christian irrelevance of the distinction between male and female.โ€ 

No discussion of homosexuality in the Bible can omit mention of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities that God destroyed with fire and brimstone, traditionally understood as Godโ€™s dire warning against sexual perversion. But this interpretation is a Christian myth whose origins date back to the third century, according to โ€œThe Queer Bible Commentary,โ€ a 2006 book co-edited by Goss that spans more than 1,000 pages and queers every book in the Old Testament and New Testament.  

Somewhat anticlimactically, this well-known Bible story is reduced to a warning against being unwelcoming towards strangers โ€“ it never had anything to do with condemning homosexuality.  

โ€œSodom is used as an example to illustrate the fate of societies in which queer people are accorded full acceptance and equal rights,โ€ according to โ€œThe Queer Bible Commentary.โ€ โ€œIn contrast to this Christian myth, Jewish traditions concerning Sodom and Gomorrah highlighted the evils of hostility towards outsiders and unwillingness to share resources compounded with a cruelty towards the poor, as the sins for which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.โ€ 

Tonstad concedes that such textual arguments rarely convince anyone. Most of these arguments, she says in her 2018 book, are not โ€œtheologically rich, insightful, illuminating.โ€ The most compelling evidence that sways opinions is the personal experience of knowing queer family members or queer friends. 

โ€œThatโ€™s one reason I argue in this book that people donโ€™t change their mind on this issue for reasons,โ€ Tonstad said. โ€œThey change their mind on this issue and then they find reasons. Thatโ€™s how it works. And the reason the mind changes is often love, itโ€™s often a beloved person or yourself.โ€

email: [email protected] 

Twitter: @johnmurawski

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.