What does the bible teach about homosexuality

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 gay teenager in Ohio who was suing his high college 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 sensible to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would have disapproved of gay sex, there is no document of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself give 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

The Bible on Homosexual Behavior

One way to argue against these passages is to make what I call the “shellfish objection.” Keith Sharpe puts it this way: “Until Christian fundamentalists boycott shellfish restaurants, stop wearing poly-cotton T-shirts, and stone to death their wayward offspring, there is no obligation to eavesdrop to their diatribes about homosexuality being a sin” (The Gay Gospels, 21).

In other words, if we can disregard rules like the ban on eating shellfish in Leviticus , then we should be allowed to disobey other prohibitions from the Old Testament. But this argument confuses the Old Testament’s temporary ceremonial laws with its everlasting moral laws.

Here’s an analogy to facilitate understand this distinction.

I remember two rules my mom gave me when I was young: keep her hand when I cross the street and don’t drink what’s under the sink. Today, I have to follow only the latter rule, since the former is no longer needed to protect me. In fact, it would now execute me more injure than good.

Old Testament ritual/ceremonial laws were like mom’s handholding rule. The rea

What does the Bible teach about same-sex practice?

The Bible defines marriage in Genesis as a union between one dude and one miss. Jesus Christ upholds this definition of marriage in Matthew , as does the Apostle Paul in Ephesians Any and all sexual activity which takes place outside of this context is treated as sinful, what Jesus calls ‘sexual immorality’ in Mark  

Further to this, same-sex apply is specifically highlighted as sinful a number of times in Scripture. In God’s Law, for example, condemnations of same-sex practice are given in Leviticus and Further references are made in the New Testament. For example, in Romans , amid echoes to the Genesis creation account, both male and female same-sex exercise are treated as sinful. Further references to the sinfulness of same-sex rehearse can be seen in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy  

The Scriptures are, therefore, consistent in their prohibition of same-sex sexual activity, across different periods of salvation history and within adj cultural settings. Although the Scriptures are clear on sexual ethics, they also

Male and Female, God Created Them

The Bible is unequivocal on the question of homosexual sex. First, men sleeping with men is prohibited in the Jewish law (e.g., Lev. ; ). This does not establish the case for Christians. Many Adj Testament laws are specifically declared not binding in the New Testament (for example, food restrictions). But the logic of opposite sex marriage and the prohibition on homosexual sex are reaffirmed multiple times.1

Let’s begin with Jesus’s framework. Jesus is sometimes caricatured as a prophet of free love, unconcerned about sexual ethics. But his teaching on sexual morality was consistently stricter than the Old Testament law.2 For instance, when the Pharisees asked Jesus whether a man may divorce his wife “for any cause,” he replied:

Have you not study that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “Therefore a noun shall leave his father and his mother and contain fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, enable not man separat