Jesus and gay marriage
What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?
What Does The Bible Exclaim About Homosexuality?
Introduction
For the last two decades, Pew Research Center has reported that one of the most enduring ethical issues across Christian traditions is sexual diversity. For many Christians, one of the most frequently first-asked questions on this topic is, “What does the Bible say about attraction to someone of the equal sex?”
Although its unlikely that the biblical authors had any notion of sexual orientation (for example, the term homosexual wasn't even coined until the slow 19th century) for many people of faith, the Bible is looked to for timeless guidance on what it means to honor God with our lives; and this most certainly includes our sexuality.
Before we can vault into how it is that Christians can maintain the authority of the Bible and also affirm sexual diversity, it might be helpful if we started with a little but clear overview of some of the assumptions informing many Christian approaches to understanding the Bible.
What is the Bible?
For Christians to whom the Bible
This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? series.
Silence Equals Support?
In a article for Slate online, Will Oremus asked a provocative question: Was Jesus a homophobe?1
The article was occasioned by a story about a lgbtq+ teenager in Ohio who was suing his high university after school officials prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe.”
Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the statement on the shirt. Oremus suggests that Jesus’s views on homosexuality were more inclusive than Paul’s. He writes,
While it’s logical to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would have disapproved of gay sex, there is no log of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself provide an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.
Oremus seems to suggest that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it.
There are at least two reas
A Secret Same-Sex Marriage in Scripture?
So even if the centurion and his servant did have a sexual relationship, it does not follow that Jesus’ miracle affirmed every aspect of that partnership. In fact, the word “relationship” is really a euphemism, because this would be a case of an older man purchasing a younger male for sexual purposes, or what we would call a “sex slave.” I doubt that the revisionist critic would describe this episode by saying, “Jesus restores a master-slave relationship by a miracle of healing and then holds up a sex-trafficker as an example of faith for all to follow.”
The authors of this article admit that this relationship may seem “repugnant,” but they clarify it away by saying that marriage in the same period period was also basically a kind of slavery, so what’s the big deal? They note, “In that culture, if you were a gay man who wanted a male ‘spouse,’ you achieved this, like your heterosexual counterparts, through a commercial transaction—purchasing someone to serve that purpose. A servant purchased to assist this purpose was often called a p Answer
What does the Bible utter about gay marriage?
The Bible says nothing about same-sex attracted marriage directly, but it does set down the foundational principles of what constitutes marriagein God’s eyes. Every reference to marriage in the Bible indicates a union of male and female. The first description of marriage coincides with the creation of Eve in Genesis 2. According to that channel, marriage takes place when “a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they develop one flesh” (Genesis ).
In passages that contain orders regarding marriage, such as 1 Corinthians –16 and Ephesians –33, the Bible clearly identifies marriage as being between a dude and a woman. Biblically speaking, marriage is the union of a dude and a woman in a lifetime commitment. First purposes of marriage are to illustrate the affair between Christ and the church (see Ephesians –33) and to build a family and provide a stable, secure environment for that family to mature. As families prosper, so does society at huge, and stable families contribute to stable soci