What does the Bible say about homosexuality?

Question 12017

Homosexual practice is the subject on which the church in the West is most frequently accused of cruelty, and it is the subject on which we most often deserve at least part of the accusation. Not because the biblical teaching is unclear, but because the manner of our teaching has too often been contemptuous, and contempt is not a fruit of the Spirit.

So I want to do two things here. I want to set out what Scripture actually says, text by text, including the revisionist readings and why I do not find them convincing. And I want to say how a church should treat the people this subject concerns, because both belong in the same article or neither is worth much.

Start with the design, not the prohibition

The right place to begin is not with a list of forbidden acts but with what God made. Genesis presents human sexuality as part of a creation that is called very good, and the account is specific: “male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27), followed by the one-flesh union of a man and his wife (Genesis 2:24).

Every subsequent prohibition in Scripture is an outworking of that design. Adultery, fornication, incest and homosexual practice are all defined as departures from the same pattern, which means the biblical position is not a collection of arbitrary rules but a single coherent picture with boundaries around it.

This matters for how we present it. If we lead with prohibition, we sound like people who dislike something. If we lead with design, we can explain why the boundary exists, and what it is protecting. Jesus Himself argued this way, going back to the beginning when questioned about marriage (Matthew 19:4-6).

Sodom, and what the prophets said it was about

The account of Sodom in Genesis 19 has given its name to a whole vocabulary, but it is not the strongest text on this subject and I would not build a case on it. The men of the city demand to “know” the visitors, and the Hebrew yada in that context clearly means sexual assault, but the situation is one of attempted gang rape rather than a description of ordinary relationships.

Revisionist writers point out that Ezekiel names Sodom’s sin as pride, excess of food, prosperous ease and neglect of the poor (Ezekiel 16:49), and they are right that this is what the text says. What they usually leave out is the next verse: “they were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it” (Ezekiel 16:50).

Jude adds that Sodom and the surrounding cities “indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire” (Jude 7). So the sexual dimension is not invented by later interpreters. It is in the biblical commentary on the event. It is simply not the whole of it, and honest teaching should say so.

Homosexual practice in the Levitical law

Leviticus is direct: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Leviticus 18:22), repeated with a penalty in Leviticus 20:13. The standard objection is that these sit among ritual laws about shellfish and mixed fabrics which no Christian keeps, so consistency requires setting them aside together.

That objection has more force than many preachers allow, and it should be answered rather than dismissed. The answer lies in what the surrounding chapter is doing. Leviticus 18 addresses the sexual practices of the Canaanites, and the list includes incest, adultery, child sacrifice and bestiality. Nobody argues that those are ceremonial.

The decisive point is that the New Testament reaffirms the sexual prohibitions while explicitly setting aside the food and purity laws (Mark 7:19; Acts 10:15). What carries forward is not decided by our preference but by apostolic teaching, and the apostles carried this forward without hesitation.

Romans 1 and the argument from creation

The fullest treatment is Romans 1:26-27, and its logic repays attention. Paul is describing humanity’s exchange of the Creator for created things, and he presents disordered sexuality as a consequence and a picture of that exchange rather than as an isolated offence.

His language is the language of nature and design: women exchanged “natural relations for those that are contrary to nature”, and men “gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another”. The word behind natural, phusikos, points to the created order rather than to cultural convention.

This is why Romans 1 is the text that cannot be neutralised by cultural arguments. Paul is not appealing to Jewish custom or to Roman respectability. He is appealing to creation, which is precisely the argument that survives a change of culture. Note too that he addresses female as well as male behaviour, which rules out the claim that only exploitative male practices are in view.

The vocabulary of 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy

Paul lists among those who will not inherit the kingdom the malakoi and the arsenokoitai (1 Corinthians 6:9), and repeats the second term in 1 Timothy 1:10. A great deal of argument has been expended on these words, and some of it is worth engaging.

The second term appears to be Paul’s own construction, built from the two words used in the Greek translation of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, arsen and koite, male and bed. That is not a coincidence. Paul is coining a term that points straight back to the Levitical prohibition, which tells us how he understood its continuing force.

The claim that these terms address only pederasty or temple prostitution runs into the problem that Greek had perfectly good words for both, and Paul did not use them. He used a word that describes the act itself, which is a strange choice if he intended to condemn only a particular abusive form of it.

The revisionist case, taken seriously

It is worth stating the revisionist position at its best rather than at its worst. It argues that the biblical writers knew nothing of committed, mutual, lifelong same-sex partnerships; that what they condemned was exploitation, excess and idolatry; and that the trajectory of Scripture towards inclusion should carry us further than the first-century texts did.

I have read the case carefully and I do not find it holds. The ancient world did know of committed same-sex relationships, and they are described in surviving literature. The prohibition in Romans 1 is grounded in creation rather than in exploitation. And a trajectory argument that arrives at a conclusion the text explicitly excludes is no longer interpretation but replacement.

What I would concede is that the revisionist case is frequently motivated by genuine pastoral distress rather than by a casual attitude to Scripture. People have watched friends and children suffer and have gone looking for a way out. Understanding that motive should change our tone even where it does not change our conclusion.

Homosexual practice, attraction and the difference between them

A distinction has to be made here that the church has often blurred, with painful results. Scripture addresses homosexual practice, the acts and the cultivated desire, rather than the experience of unchosen attraction. Temptation is not sin; Jesus was tempted and did not sin (Hebrews 4:15).

That distinction matters enormously to a Christian teenager who did not choose what he feels and has been told from the pulpit that people like him are an abomination. He hears a verdict on his existence rather than on his conduct, and a great many have left the church at exactly that point.

The believer who experiences same-sex attraction and does not act on it is not living in sin. He is living in obedience, frequently at considerable cost, and he deserves the respect the church readily gives to other forms of costly faithfulness rather than a suspicion that never quite lifts.

What the church asks, and whether it is fair

What Scripture asks of the believer with exclusively same-sex attraction is celibacy, and we should not pretend that this is a small thing. It is a lifetime without the companionship most people assume as their birthright, in a church culture that frequently treats marriage as the normal Christian condition.

If we ask that, we owe something in return. Paul’s vision of the church is a family with real obligations (1 Timothy 5:1-2), and the early church took in people who had no household. A congregation that demands celibacy while offering nothing but a seat in a service has asked for the sacrifice and withheld the support.

Jesus spoke about those who have renounced houses and family for the kingdom receiving “a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters” (Mark 10:29-30). That promise is meant to be kept through the local church. Where it is not kept, we should not be surprised that the demand feels intolerable.

Change, and the damage done by promising too much

Some believers do experience change in the direction of their attractions over time, and others do not, and the church has caused real harm by promising the first outcome as though it were guaranteed. Programmes that treated heterosexual marriage as the measure of successful sanctification left many people convinced that God had failed them or that they had failed Him.

Paul’s “and such were some of you” (1 Corinthians 6:11) is a statement about washing, sanctification and justification rather than about the reordering of desire. Sanctification touches everything, and it does not promise the removal of every particular struggle in this life.

What is promised is grace sufficient for the struggle (2 Corinthians 12:9) and a completed work at the last (Philippians 1:6). That is an honest hope, and I would rather offer an honest hope than an inflated one that collapses.

Truth and hospitality together

A church can be entirely orthodox and entirely inhospitable, and many are. Jesus was known as a friend of sinners, an accusation He never bothered to deny (Luke 7:34). It is worth asking whether anyone would think of levelling it at us.

Hospitality does not require affirmation. It requires welcome, ordinary friendship, invitations to lunch, and a congregation where a person can attend for two years without being reduced to a single topic. Telling somebody that God approves of what God calls sin is not love; but neither is treating them as an issue to be managed.

And a word about our own house. The church has tolerated heterosexual sin, divorce, pornography and greed among its members while treating this one matter as uniquely disqualifying. That inconsistency is noticed, it is fair comment, and it undermines our credibility more effectively than any external argument.

Jesus said nothing about it, so does silence settle anything?

The argument from silence is heard constantly, and it is worth answering properly. Jesus is not recorded as addressing homosexual practice directly. He is also not recorded as addressing incest, bestiality or domestic violence, and nobody concludes that He was relaxed about them.

What He did address was the definition of marriage, and He addressed it by quoting Genesis and treating the male and female pattern as the standard from which every departure is measured (Matthew 19:4-6). He also used the word porneia, sexual immorality, which in Jewish usage covered the whole range of prohibited sexual behaviour set out in Leviticus (Mark 7:21).

There is a further problem with the argument. It assumes a gap between Jesus and Paul that the New Testament does not permit. The apostles wrote under the authority of the risen Jesus, and treating their teaching as an unfortunate addition to His is a move that reshapes far more than this one question.

How this changed so quickly, and what it asks of us

The shift in Western opinion on this has been the fastest change in moral consensus in modern history, and it did not happen through argument alone. It happened through story, through personal acquaintance, and through a powerful appeal to authenticity and love, and it is naive to think that a church can respond adequately with proof texts.

Believers now hold a position that is not simply unpopular but widely regarded as harmful, and that is a genuinely new situation for the church in this country. Peter wrote to Christians in something similar, telling them to keep their conduct honourable “so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:12).

That is the strategy Scripture gives us. Not indignation about lost cultural ground, and not capitulation, but conduct so evidently loving that the accusation becomes harder to sustain. It is slower than winning arguments and it is the only approach with a New Testament pedigree.

It also requires us to know what we are defending. A believer who can quote Romans 1 but cannot explain why the biblical view of the body and the person is good news for human beings has half the case. The point is not that homosexual practice is forbidden. The point is that God designed something, and that His design is for our flourishing rather than against it.

So, now what?

The biblical teaching on homosexual practice is consistent from Genesis to the Epistles, and it is grounded in the design of creation rather than in cultural prejudice. It falls under the same heading as every other sexual expression outside the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, and it is not treated as a worse category of sin than the ones respectable Christians commit.

What that means in practice is a church that says clearly what Scripture says and then behaves like a family towards everyone who walks in. If you experience same-sex attraction and are trying to follow Jesus, you are not a second-class believer, and you should be able to find brothers and sisters who will walk with you for the long haul. If your church could not offer that today, that is the thing to fix first. Related reading: the question of same-sex marriage, what sexual purity involves and whether it is biblical to love the sinner and hate the sin.

“And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

1 Corinthians 6:11 (ESV)

For Further Study

For a fuller treatment of the biblical anthropology underlying this question, Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology and Anthony Hoekema’s Created in God’s Image both work carefully through the doctrine of humanity in the image of God. On the dispensational handling of law and its application to the believer, Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology set out the framework I have assumed here regarding the Mosaic covenant. J. Dwight Pentecost’s work on the Christian life is useful on sanctification and the believer’s ongoing struggle with indwelling sin, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum is worth consulting on the Jewish background to the Levitical holiness code. Readers wanting the exegetical detail on the Greek terms should work through the lexical entries directly rather than relying on summaries, since this is one area where secondhand claims circulate widely and are frequently inaccurate.