Hermeneutics of Homosexuality

Hermeneutics of Homosexuality:
The Good News for Lesbian Women and Gay Men
Prepared By Reverend Marilyn A. Riedel
Updated by Maracon on December 1, 2005

Preface

February 18, 2001: This statement is dedicated to and in prayerful response to my faith-filled spiritual brother, a theological student in Baia Mare City, Transylvania, Romania, who is studying for the Armenian Catholic priesthood, and to his envisioning a unique and special calling, not only through his web site, but to speak the truth of God's prophetic word to all cultural, ethnic, and despised and persecuted sexual minorities and to witness in ministry to the Christian churches and its sisters and brothers who would be healed from the sin of bigotry and hatred identified in their homophobia, and finally to extend Christ's reconciling love and welcome to those anathematized as prodigal daughters and sons.

The Proverbial Sodom and Gomorrah Story in Genesis
Based On John McNeill's
The Church And The Homosexual

     The proverbial condemnation of homosexual acts or practices is found in the Sodom and Gomorrah story in Genesis 19:4-11. Churches taught and people universally believed in their excellent authority that homosexual practices had brought a terrible divine vengeance upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. That repeating of these "offenses against nature" had provoked similar instances of divine wrath in the form of earthquakes, floods, famines, outbreaks of pestilence, etc. It was also assumed, therefore, that both church and state must discipline and restrain through penalties and laws these acts to ward off God's wrath. And the assumption was taken for granted the sin for which the cities were destroyed was because of habitual "perverse homosexual practices among men."
     How much of this tradition is truly founded in scripture? What was the meaning of the encounter of the angels and Lot with the angry men of Sodom as the J or "J(Y)ahwist" author of Genesis 19 writes? What were the grounds, if any, for the persistent belief that the men of the city were addicted to male homosexual practices and were punished for it?
     Specifically, In Father John McNeill's book, The Church and the Homosexual, (pp. 42-49) he points out that D. S. Bailey the demand of the Sodomites made to Lot: Bring them out unto us, that we may know (Hebrew, yadha "to know") them, can mean either sexual coitus; or to get acquainted with, introduce, welcome, or socialize with. This latter sense of acquaintenship is used 943 times, according to the Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament, and is used only 10 times including a derivative form (Judges 19:22) to denote heterosexual coitus!
     Moreover, the Old Testament word normally used for both homosexual coitus and bestiality is shakhabh.
     To continue, Bailey says this passage could also be interpreted that Lot, a resident alien (ger) in Sodom, may have exceeded his rights by receiving and entertaining the two foreigners/angels, who might be hostile, and whose authorization had not been determined nor examined. Hence the demand to get acquainted with them.
     But what was the sinfulness of Sodom and Gomorrah? They were called wicked and grievously sinful cities but no specific grievance is actually described! Only outside of the text of the writer, and on a priori grounds such as ones willfulness to read a solely or predominantly sexual characterization into the passage (eisegesis) versus exegesis, or interpretation within the meaning of the biblical text, itself, is not and cannot be supported.
    There is no evidence here or in any other parts of the Old Testament that show homosexual behavior was rampant in these cities of Sodom and Gomorrah!
    Such a scurrilous pretext is dishonest and a slander to prove and impute homosexual behavior as unconditionally
condemned by God; and by implication a condemnation of an entirely different, modern discovery of a person's inherent and unlearned biological giveness as homosexual orientation.
     Lot's willingness to sacrifice his daughters to the heterosexual abuse and intercourse (yadha) by the hostile crowd in verse 7 is both shocking, and a desperate, spur of the moment attempt to appease and derail the angry men. Here the double meaning of yadah as both carnal and social is used as an ambiguous play on words to allow there may have or could have been sexual mistreatment of strangers, by extension, to Lot's daughters.
     Taken as a whole, the entire Biblical commentary seems to support the main sin to be inhospitality to strangers and stiff-necked pride of the Sodom and Gomorrah citizenry. For example, the J(Y)ahwist writer indicates in the previous verses of Genesis 18: 1-4, how angelic strangers came to Abraham's tent and how hospitable his reception was of them for food and shelter (Genesis 19: 1-3).
      A most significant interpretation of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is Jesus the Christ who calls for judgment upon the cities who are inhospitable to the reception of his disciples! "I tell you, on that day [when the Kingdom of God is at hand] Sodom will fare better than that town!" (Luke 10: 10-13)
     No where in the Old Testament is Sodom referred to as a symbol of utter destruction identified with the sin being
homosexual behavior!
      Among many examples, Ezekiel 16: 49-50 reads: "Behold, this was the sin of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters lived in pride, plenty, and thoughtless ease; they supported not the poor and needy; they grew haughty, and committed abomination before me; so I swept them away, as you have seen." Isaiah stresses lack of justice, Jeremiah cites moral and ethical laxity. Even the Deuterocanonical books, like Wisdom (19: 13-14) identify sin as pride and inhospitality:" "...whereas the men of Sodom received not the strangers when they came among them; the Egyptians made slaves of the guests who were their benefactors." In Ecclesiastics (16: 0) the sin is pride. Later New Testament books of 2 Peter and Jude, find the sin as "transgression of orders" between human and angelic beings.
     Wherever these homosexual practices have been traditionally condemned in the Old or New Testament, no mention is made of the Sodom story, which if that were the case, Sodom would have been definitely mentioned!
     So why is there any mention of sex with men at all? Two main factors are presented by John McKenzie; 1. the idea of "the absolute dignity of the male sex" because of the Jewish hostility to homosexual practices. And by Peter Ellis in The Yahwist: The Bible's First Theologian, who suggests that 2. the writer is attacking as idolatry the Canaanite nature worship directed to the fertility gods, where sacred prostitutes of men and women were part of the climax to obtain a special relationship with the god or goddess so that rain and fertility would return to the land. This polemic against Canaanite idolatry is thus directed against the five Canaanite cities which are also wiped off the face of the earth, and not because of homosexual acts.
        McNeill states, "If the interpretation of the true sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is correct, then we are dealing here with one of the supremely ironic paradoxes of history. For thousands of years in the Christian West the homosexual has been the victim of inhospitable treatment. Condemned by the church, s/he has been the victim of persecution, torture, and even death. In the name of a mistaken understanding of the crime of Sodom and Gomorrah, the true crime of Sodom and Gomorrah has been and continues to be repeated every day." (p.50)
     Of course, there are other passages in the Old and New Testament which seem to condemn homosexual practices and these will be dealt with in the next email. ---Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel

Homosexuality
Nature, Natural and Greater than Natural
Saint Paul and Romans 1:26-7

     March 6, 2001: Greetings to you Brother George in Christ's Spirit! I pray this may be as helpful to you as it was educational and inspirational for me!
     I plan to make a more detailed study of the New Testament as a whole but for now, I will try to describe the difference between homosexual acts and the orientation or situation and condition of being lesbian women and gay men that are entirely different contexts and categories. Paul did not know about any "homosexuals" as such, as there was no word or "category" like that to describe such a living style or condition of committed (married) relationships! So there were no such relationships in the New Testament that Paul wrote of. Saint Paul and the author of the Hebrew laws written for the Israelites in Leviticus knew about heterosexual men or women who committed or engaged in promiscuous heterosexual or homosexual acts with other men or women, as in male or female temple prostitutes and thus considered as idol worship by patrons paying for the sexual services! That kind of behavior was considered an "abomination" and unclean as well as forbidden because it was seen as harlotry, idol worship, and "whoring after other gods. "Although it is good biblical practice to let the Bible itself critique itself so that one can get the "big picture" of the Old Testament to gain a better understanding of the context of what the author, Paul, means or says in the translation, and what the translator of the Bible or the reader means by using the term "against nature," as to homosexual acts, I will summarize it for you.
     In Romans 26, the translation of "against nature" or natural law is first used by the philosopher Plato to describe the homosexual activity as "unrelated to birth" or "non procreative," and not "unnatural" as if there was a contravention of some overriding moral or physical law. In The Republic, Plato was the first to use natural in the other sense of being human-made or "constructed" as opposed to being naturally "born" or "to grow." Therefore, to the Athenians of his day, the term "against nature" would mean something entirely different in its associations than in the minds of us later readers.
     What has happened to the original sense and first use of the term from 2000 years of usage? Obscuration--years of repetition in stock phrases and by the accretion of associations inculcated by social taboos, patristic (early church
writers or "Fathers") and Reformation theology, Freudian psychology, and personal misgivings.
     Of course the concept of "natural law" was not fully developed until more than a millennium after Paul's death. He thought "nature" was not a question of universal law or truth but, rather, a matter of the character of some person or group of persons, character which was largely ethnic and entirely human: Jews are Jews "by nature," just as Gentiles are Gentiles "by nature." "Nature" is not a moral force for Paul: humankind may be evil or good "by nature," depending on their own disposition. Paul uses "nature" in the possessive, that is not in the abstract "nature" but as someone's nature. Paul is therefore writing about the personal nature of the pagans in question.
    "For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise, also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet."
     Some say that Paul was writing here against the Roman orgiastic heterosexual (or even homosexual) pagan rites
in honor of false gods.
    But this is an inadequate interpretation because Paul was not describing cold blooded, dispassionate acts in a ritual or ceremony. He says clearly the parties involved: "burned in their lust one toward another." Sexual desire is the motive for the behavior. The passage does not stigmatize sexual behavior of any sort but condemns the Gentiles for their general infidelity to monotheism which they rejected (vv. 19-23). Their homosexual behavior is a mundane analogy of this theological sin. Once this point is made, the subject of homosexuality is dropped and the major argument resumes (vv 28ff.)
     The main persons Paul condemns are not homosexual: what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by
apparently heterosexual persons! Romans 1, in fact, stigmatizes persons who have rejected their calling, gotten off
the true path they were once on. The whole argument is based on the fact that if persons who are naturally inclined to the opposite sex are "naturally" inclined to monotheism. The sin of the Romans was not that they lacked what Paul considered proper inclinations but that they had them: they held the truth, but "in unrighteousness" (v. 18). Because "they did not see fit to retain Him in their knowledge" (v. 28 ). To repeat, Paul did not discuss gay persons but only homosexual acts committed by heterosexual persons.
     One last point: the term "against" [nature] in the Greek is here a translation of para. Yet the usage of para connotes "more than," "in excess of" or "beyond" nature. For example, God is also depicted as acting "against nature" by grafting on and saving the Gentiles, meaning behavior that is unexpected, unusual, or different, "beyond nature," but not "immoral" (Romans 11:24).
     Paul believed the Gentiles rejected their true natures like they rejected God, so that their sexual appetites went beyond what was "natural" for them and approved for the Jews. He was not talking about mere homoerotic attraction or practice of particular persons who were inclined gay, but heterosexual men and women who abandoned the "natural use" to homosexual activities.
     This report is based on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press 1980) by John Boswell, pp 106-113.