Sexual Differences: A Cultural Convention?

More than orange juice flows from the Florida sunshine tree these days when Anita Bryant is around. Politics, lobbying, protest marches: she’s involved in all of these under the name of Save Our Children, Incorporated. Bryant asked Dade County, Florida, to repeal its ordinance guaranteeing the civil rights of homosexuals (i.e., banning discrimination against them in employment and housing). Such an ordinance, she claims, threatens our children, our homes, our way of life. Homosexuality is an abomination, declares Bryant. The voters of Dade County supported her; in June they repealed the ordinance.

Just what do Christians believe about homosexuality? What does the Bible say about it? Do we have answers for those who argue that Scripture speaks quietly about a gay life-style? Can it be argued that Paul condemns promiscuity, not homosexuality per se? After all, we are told, Jesus never mentioned homosexuality.

The Bible is frank about sexuality. We find no euphemisms or vague sentimentality there. In Genesis we learn that the human body is one of God’s good creations. Specifically, God shaped male (Hebrew, zakar) and female (Hebrew, neqevah). We find no mention of a third or fourth type of human sexual being. God created a biological difference out of which the other contours and polarities of maleness and femaleness emerge. He deliberately created male and female. This sexual difference is not an arbitrary or culturally conditioned convention, as some gay liberationists claim.

The fall affected every aspect of human life, including the sexual. Marriage is continually threatened by adultery (Gen. 12:17; 26:10), by incest (Gen. 19:36), by rape (Gen. 34:2), and by prostitution (Gen. 38:15 f.). The story of Sodom and Gomorrah vividly depicts homosexual lust linked with murderous hostility (Gen. 19:5 f.). These passages remind us of the fragility of sexual life in a perverse and often aggressive human society.

The Mosaic Law crystallized the creation order into precise, explicit forms. God’s commandments originate and terminate in the great indicative and imperative of biblical faith: “I am the LORD your God.… You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2, 3). God gives us his interpretation of the goal of human life, day by day, season by season, task by task, relationship by relationship. And his verdict upon homosexual activity is inescapably clear: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Lev. 18:22), and, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them” (Lev. 20:13). Homosexuality violates the basic sexual structure God created, and he rigorously condemns it. In the instructions about punishment we find no qualifications about motivation or contributing factors, such as we do with rape (Deut. 22:23–29) or killing (Deut. 19:4–13). The act of homosexual love-making (“to lie with,” Hebrew, shakar eth), like bestiality (Lev. 18:23), has no excuse.

But what about the New Covenant? Hasn’t the harshness of the Old Testament law been superseded by the law of Christ, the law of love? Christ stopped the stoning of the woman caught in the act of adultery (John 8:1–11). And he softened the Pharisees’ too rigorous application of the law. Didn’t he bring in an age of grace rather than law, tolerance rather than severity?

While there might be some validity to that view (though not as popularly understood), it is nonetheless true that Christ in many ways strengthened the force of the law. He showed how God’s judgment extended into the far recesses of our secret imaginations: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27, 28). Jesus never intended to dispense with the Mosaic Law (Matt. 5:17); he wanted rather to clarify and extend its radical demands for perfection.

Paul’s writings give us in detail God’s mind on a wide range of ethical issues. In Romans one Paul talks about homosexual desire and activity and denounces it as “shameful lust” (Rom. 1:26, NIV). He characterizes homosexuality as abandoning “natural relations,” that is, the normal and normative heterosexual responses and behavior. The phrase “natural relation” (Greek, fusike chresis) refers directly to God’s creation order, nature (Greek, fusis), here meaning the way he intends man and woman to relate sexually.

Today some people assert that what Paul castigates here is homosexual promiscuity, not homosexual activity per se, and that God can tolerate homosexual monogamy just as easily as he can commend heterosexual monogamy. Is this exegetical proposal valid?

Paul certainly had in mind the entire range of homosexual practice in Greco-Roman culture. He would have known how Greeks and Romans justified this aberration to themselves. Plato in the Symposium and other writers of the classic Attic period had commended certain kinds of homosexuality. Certainly Paul would have told the Romans if any homosexual behavior were approved. He does this with other ethical issues: he carefully distinguishes a proper from a false use of meat offered to idols, he contrasts worthy and insufficient grounds for divorce or separation, he explains the difference between a good and bad use of the law and between genuine exhortation and uncalled-for rebuking. How would it be possible for Paul, who knew of the philosophically justified homosexual practice of the time, not to distinguish that from the “unnatural relations” he speaks of in Romans 1:26 if he intended such a distinction? And Paul criticizes not only the act of homosexual love-making but the “sinful desires of their hearts” and the “lust” that “inflamed” them. Just to have a homosexual desire, then, is sinful. Further, is it likely that Paul would overthrow the entire weight of Old Testament teaching on this subject, which had Jesus’ indirect but nevertheless forceful backing?

Paul in First Corinthians 6:9 again condemns all homosexual activity without qualification: “Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals … will inherit the kingdom of God.” Two Greek words are translated here by the one English word “homosexuals”: malakio, probably meaning the passive “female” partner in a relationship (NIV says “male prostitute,” for which malakos was used, but this may be constricting its meaning a bit), and arsenokoitai, meaning the active “male” partner (though it may have a more general meaning). These words were applied to any and every continuous homosexual engagement by the Greek authors, whether a monogamously permanent or a promiscuous one. Paul used these terms knowing precisely what he meant and how he would be interpreted. The attempt to avoid the force of his unambiguous intention is a pathetic piece of modern rationalistic evasion.

The current debate over homosexuality is complicated by the voices of psychologists who are often in strident conflict. Although Freud saw homosexuality as a definite psychosis that could be cured, there is currently no consensus about either the abnormality or the possibility of a cure for exclusive homosexuals. Here are some voices in favor of updating Freud: “Opinion among British psychiatrists has moved away from the traditional view that homosexuality is a disorder” (R. E. Barr and S. V. Catts, “Psychiatric Opinion and Homosexuality,” Journal of Homosexuality, Winter, 1974/75, p. 213). “The authors of this book are not in favor of continuing to regard such behavior as psychopathological” (G. C. Davison and J. M. Neale, Abnormal Psychology, 1974, p. 239). On the other hand, among diehard Freudians and Skinnerian behaviorists, homosexuality continues to be considered a serious dysfunctional illness or behavior pattern.

Although there is strife, it seems evident that the dominant opinion (amplified by a militant gay movement) is the one expressed by the highly regarded Dr. Thomas Chalmers of Detroit, Michigan. He asserts, as a result of his clinical investigations:

1. Homosexuals are no more neurotic or psychotic than heterosexuals.

2. Homosexuality is not a mental illness.

3. The only real distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals is a non-voluntary sexual orientation resulting from a complex set of learning factors.

4. A lasting change of sexual orientation is improbable if not impossible.

5. The vast majority of males fall somewhere on a graded scale between homosexual and heterosexual and are therefore ambisexual in varying degrees of intensity.

Notice that Chalmers admits that homosexual behavior is learned. And what has been learned can, with God’s help, be unlearned.

Christian psychologist Ted R. Evans contested the approval granted homosexuality by the psychological establishment in an article for the Journal of Psychology and Theology (Spring, 1965) entitled “Homosexuality: Christian Ethics and Psychological Research.” Evans, a psychology fellow at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of UCLA, states what to most non-Christian psychologists must seem a gross absurdity: “Homosexual activity is in rebellion against God.” Evans cites research that in his opinion shows that there is no evidence whatever of any genetic or hormonal causes for homosexuality. Homosexuality, he says, is a “socially learned process” that can develop in a boy when the mother is frustrated and allies with the son against the father, the mother wanted a daughter, or the boy is rejected by girls in his peer group. Homosexual feelings cannot be condemned, he adds, though homosexual activity should be. Evans concluded that it is possible, however difficult, to change one’s predominant sexual response pattern.

Evans felt free to make the kind of moral judgment that Chalmers, under the influence of non-Christian presuppositions, is loathe to make. He concurs with Chalmers in denying organic origins for homosexual behavior. What seems to be at issue between them is the criterion of abnormality and the hope for a lasting change of behavior. It is no good for Chalmers to claim that homosexuals are no more neurotic or psychotic than heterosexuals, because it is precisely homosexual behavior that Evans, the Bible, and all of Christian tradition call abnormal, unnatural, and sinful. Nor does Chalmers’s skepticism about a cure threaten the case. Jay Adams and others give evidence of changed homosexuals.

Our society is going through a period of profound cultural unrest and open moral degeneration. The bill for homosexual rights introduced by Congressman Edward Koch (D-N. Y.) and the case of Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine are just two examples. Sadomasochistic and other pornographic literature infests our city streets. The propaganda for a homosexual life-style is part of this moral unrest.

The Christian Church must renew its dedication to uphold God’s high standards of purity, to feel compassion for men and women trapped by their own sins, and to go out into our society with a message of hope and salvation in Christ. Like Jesus did we should go where sinners are and there bring God’s judgment and healing grace. Homosexuals are not freaks or strange creatures in a world of straights. They are human beings, made in God’s image, people to whom God’s message comes in exactly the same way it comes to all of us. Homosexuals must not be left with a stern word of condemnation from a distant and repulsed body of people called the Church; instead they must be faced with a Church, with Christians, with a God who reaches out to bless even through condemnation.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

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