This is an excerpt from a paper I wrote this semester. The paper was an attempt to offer a theological justification for the legitimacy of homosexual marriages/relationships. The excerpt that follows is from the beginning section of the paper in which I have to qualify what I consider to be legitimate and valid authorities from which we might be able to then engage theologically and ethically with the question of homosexuality. I really like this section, and consider it to be the best part of my paper. I hope ya'll enjoy it and engage with it so that we, as a community of reconciled believers, might be able to develop a solid understanding of homosexuality in light of the nature of God that is revealed to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. 

Authorities For Ethical and Theological Reflection

Before anything can be said about the moral position of homosexuality, I must first discuss the authorities upon which I shall base my argument and position. Ethical reflection requires us to make judgments about what types of things we recognize as having authority for any given situation. In the following section I shall present and explain the things that I hold to be authoritative, as well as critique and expressly reject other things as not having authority for this discussion.

The foundational authority upon which all Christians should base their thoughts, actions and intellectual reflections upon is the eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ, who is the norm for all ethical reflection. I hold Jesus and His nature as witnessed to in the Bible as the normative basis upon which we can judge, affirm, critique, engage and witness and this requires that we posit the normative Christ that we see in Scripture as being truly God’s fullest self-communication. Thus, the “ground and grammar” of theology is Jesus Christ and His nature revealed to us, for sure, through the biblical witness, but also not bound to the finite and fallible Scripture.

The norming norm that I advocate, that of Jesus Christ as witnessed to, but not bound by, Scripture, gives due diligence to the biblical witness but it does not allow the biblical witness to be interpreted in such a way that it contradicts the nature of God as revealed to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The nature of God that we see in Jesus Christ is one of love, of compassion, mercy and grace. In Jesus we see the love of God being revealed as radical and transformative action, and something that flips our modern understandings of love upside down. God’s love is that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. This is the heart of what God’s love is. We had originally cut ourselves off from the source of life, God Himself, and fractured our relationship with the Almighty, but God, in His grace and love, took on the fullness of our fallen humanity in the incarnation, lived and worked amongst those whom the culture said were sinners and worthless, flipped the teachings of His day upside down, and eventually graciously and willingly gave up His life for those whom by their own actions considered themselves to be enemies of God. Yet, the gates of hell could not contain the love and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ and death itself was decisively defeated by the love of God-in-Christ.

In Jesus we see the fullest revelation of a God who stands on the side of the oppressed and who struggles with, and on behalf of, those who are persecuted and exploited. In Christ we see God’s preferential option for the poor and oppressed. We also see a God who is more concerned with faithful disciples than with people acting good and believing the right things, as evidenced to us by Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees in Matt 23:26-8.

However, the question should rightly be asked, how can we know Jesus apart from the biblical witness? To this I would respond that we, by this I mean modern Christians in the West, cannot know Jesus apart from the biblical witness. However, I would then respond using the great theologian Karl Barth’s understanding of the three-fold Word of God.  Barth’s understanding of the three-fold Word of God goes something like this: Jesus Christ is the self-communication of God, the Word Incarnate (made flesh), the Bible is the Word Written, and the preaching of the Church is the Krygmatic Word. All three of these are rightly to be understood as the Word of God because a gracious act of God enables them to be so. However, the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, is the final and definitive Word through which the other two must be understood.[1] In the same way that we cannot say that a testimony is the same thing as that which it testifies to, so to can we not say that the Bible and the witness it gives us to Jesus is the same as Jesus Himself. Nevertheless, we can legitimately understand and know the nature and reality of the person of Jesus of Nazareth and the God who He reveals, through reading and studying Scripture. We simply have to remember that the God who loves in freedom is the master, not the servant of Scripture. Jesus Christ, as witnessed to, but not bound by Scripture, is the ultimate and final authority from which we are able to make ethical and moral claims.

Be that as it may, Scripture itself is also a valuable authority for engaging the issue of homosexuality and homosexual relationships. However, Scripture cannot have the final say in our ethical reflection because the witness of scripture on the issue of homosexuality is very sparse, and the contexts in which the various books of the Bible were written are drastically different from ours, and thus, there cannot be anything like a one-to-one correspondence between passages that mention homosexuality and the nature of homosexuality in today’s world.

There have been a handful of verses that have been held up as proof-texts to help legitimize the Church’s position on homosexuality throughout the Church’s history. I shall briefly try to show why these verves are irrelevant to the current discussion. The first of these is the story of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:1-29. The “sin of Sodom and Gomorrah” has come down though the tradition as being homosexuality, although this is completely unsubstantiated by the Bible as well as by other scholarly works. The sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was rather the sin of not being hospitable to the poor.[2] Next people attempt to use the Levitical laws concerning the admonition against homosexuality, although the Levitical laws are no longer something that holds authority over us as gentile Christians.[3] Also on the validity-chopping block are the traditional verses from the New Testament that have been classically cited to condemn homosexuality. These verses have recently come into question because of issues of translation.  In the 1 Corinthians 6:9 ‘sin-list,’ the traditional translation, of which I am using the New King James version to highlight, includes the terms “homosexuals” and “sodomites.” Recent scholarship has shown these terms to be inaccurate translations of the Greek words malakoi and arsenokoitai, which both have no clear scholarly consensus concerning their meanings. The same concept holds true for 1 Timothy 1:10, in which the term arsenkoitai is included in another sin-list; in this case it has also been inappropriately translated as “homosexuals.” While the meaning of these terms is an on-going debate within the scholarly world, it is sufficient for the purposes of this paper to simply say that based upon the lack of knowledge we have concerning the appropriate rendering of malakoi and arsenkoitai, we cannot turn to these verses to give warrant to our ethical reflection. [4]

Thus, I find myself forced to reject the traditionalist view of the complete literalness of the Bible and consequently, the particular passages which have been used to condemn homosexuality in the Church’s tradition. Thus we have to say that in Scripture we are able to find helpful ideas and concepts that point us in the right direction for ethical reflection but never have the final word in that reflection.

I reject the use of what some consider to be Church tradition as an authority from which we might speak about homosexuality. I reject this for two different reasons. The first reason is that tradition itself, far from being a unitary and unanimous voice, is made up of multiple voices and many different “channels” of tradition, many of which disagree quite strongly on very fundamental and important issues. Thus to treat “tradition” as though it were a singular construction would be a great mistake. The second reason I reject the use of tradition as an authority is because it doesn’t have a very good record of being faithful to the Gospel in its encounters with things that are outside of its narrow view of orthodoxy. By this I mean simply that the Church has a poor record of upholding the Gospel of Christ when it confronts and challenges the status quo. We see this in the Church’s “baptizing” of the powers that be during the reign of Constantine in 312 CE. We see this again in the Church’s legitimization of slavery in the 14^th to 21^st centuries, and yet again in the Church’s position on the inferiority of Africans to Europeans (and later Americans) during the same time periods. Still yet we see the traditions poor record in the Church’s rejection of inter-racial marriages and its “baptizing” of racist and xenophobic ideologies. The Church doesn’t have a very good record of understanding and engaging with those who are other than it in a way that’s faithful to God’s self-communication in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Consequently, why should we assume that the traditions of the Church, which could historically considered to be a great defender of the status quo, will be able to provide us with faithful grounds from which we could reject homosexuality? The trajectory of the history of the Church shows a continual cycle of the tradition lagging behind the progressive understanding of God that comes from being faithfully engaged in the praxis and life of the Church, which continually challenges and provokes a new and more faithful understanding of the Triune God. Thus, I am forced to reject the use of tradition as an authority from which the Church can speak about homosexuality.

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[1] This section concerning the theology of Karl Barth is indebted to ch. 1 of Karl Barth’s Evangelical Theology, ch. II.I of Eberhard Busch’s The Great Passion and Volume 1, book 1 of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (CD I/1, 120-121).

[2] See Ezekiel 16:49

[3] See Acts 15, which is the biblical record of the so-called Jerusalem Council, in which the Apostles decided that Gentile believers did not have to abide by Mosaic Law.

[4] This section of the paper is deeply indebted to an essay written by biblical scholar Richard B. Hays. Richard B. Hays, “Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies: The Witness of Scripture Concerning Homosexuality,” (ed. Jeffrey S. Siker; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), 5-7.