Does the Bible actually condemn homosexuality, or have we mistranslated six verses into a culture war?

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  Jamie1mo ago

  I'm gay. I grew up evangelical. I memorized those six verses before I turned twelve because people kept throwing them at me like stones. I've now spent fifteen years studying them in the original languages, reading every serious scholar on both sides, praying until my knees bled metaphorically. I genuinely don't know the definitive answer. What I do know is that people who've never had skin in this game treat it like a fun debate topic and that is its own kind of cruelty.

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  Iris1mo ago

  i've been a christian for 40 years and im tired. tired of this being the only topic that gets this energy. tired of gay people being anyone's debate topic. tired of certainty from people who have never loved someone gay. tired of uncertainty being used as a weapon too. just tired.

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• A

  Alex1mo ago

  I was a pastor for 22 years and I preached the traditional view without question. Then my son came out. I'm not saying that changed my theology automatically — I don't believe parents should just flip their convictions because it got personal. But it did force me to actually dig instead of just repeat what I'd always said. I'm still working through it. I don't have a neat answer anymore and I'm not sure that's a failure.

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• O

  Omar1mo ago

  The word 'arsenokoitai' in 1 Corinthians 6:9 was literally coined by Paul. He built it directly from the Septuagint — arsen (male) + koite (bed) — pulling straight from Leviticus 18 and 20. If you want to argue Paul didn't mean men sleeping with men, you have to explain why he chose THOSE two Greek words from THOSE two passages. The 'it was about exploitation' reading requires you to ignore the actual etymology. I've read Boswell, I've read Brownson, and neither of them actually lands the argument.

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• MS

  Morgan S.1mo ago

  What I wish people understood is that for gay Christians there is no version of this debate that isn't about your actual life. You're sitting there listening to people throw around 'the text clearly means X' and what they're actually deciding is whether you can love who you love. The abstract theological confidence is a luxury that only works if you're straight.

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• MB

  Maya B.1mo ago

  If you genuinely believe the traditional view is right and that acting on same-sex attraction is sinful, I want to ask you honestly: what are you actually offering gay Christians in your church? Because 'be alone forever' is a serious thing to ask someone and if you're asking it you'd better have a robust theology of celibacy, genuine community, and real pastoral support. Most churches that preach the traditional view don't have any of that infrastructure and that's a massive failure.

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• Q

  Quinn1mo ago

  The honest answer that nobody wants to say out loud: the church has been inconsistent about sexual ethics across the board for decades. Divorce and remarriage is rampant in the pews with basically no church discipline. Premarital sex is treated as normal and expected. And then we want to draw the line specifically at this issue with sudden precision. The inconsistency undermines every confident 'the Bible is clear' take whether you're traditional or affirming.

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• RB

  Reese B.1mo ago

  I grew up in a church where the gay kids got the message loud and clear that they were unwelcome and several of them left faith entirely. Whatever you believe about the exegesis, if the way you're communicating it is driving people away from Jesus rather than toward Him, something is wrong. That's not a theological argument I know but it matters.

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• M

  Maya1mo ago

  y'all are out here debating six verses when the bible has hundreds about how to treat the poor and i don't see nearly this many churches splitting over whether to house the homeless

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  Theo1mo ago

  I'm a biblical languages professor at a seminary I won't name and I'll just say the actual textual evidence for the exploitation-only reading of arsenokoitai is genuinely thin. The word appears rarely in early Christian literature and every appearance suggests a meaning broader than just coercive or exploitative same-sex acts. I hold my view carefully and I'm not interested in a culture war but the linguistics don't support the revisionist reading as strongly as its proponents claim.

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  Jamie1mo ago

  hot take: the culture war framing in the OP is itself the problem. neither side of this is 'doing a culture war.' gay Christians who want affirmation are not culture warriors and traditional Christians who hold the historic view aren't culture warriors either. most of the actual people involved are just trying to faithfully follow Jesus and it is genuinely hard. can we lose the battle language for five seconds

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• RM

  Reese M.1mo ago

  Plain reading of scripture. Full stop. Romans 1 doesn't say anything about exploitation or temple prostitution. Paul describes a natural/unnatural exchange that applies to the act itself. The revisionist interpretation requires so many layers of 'well what he REALLY meant was' that it stops being exegesis and becomes ventriloquism.

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• M

  Morgan1mo ago

  This is the most important comment in the whole thread. The traditional view has a coherent theological case. The problem is 99% of churches that hold it have no idea what to actually do with gay Christians who are trying to live by it and that absence is itself a form of cruelty.

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• KR

  Kofi R.1mo ago

  you're also eating shrimp and wearing poly-cotton blends and nobody's calling that an abomination though so

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  Noah1mo ago

  I'm going to say something unpopular: I think both sides have been reading the text honestly and coming to different conclusions and THAT ITSELF should tell us something about how the church should handle this pastorally. When faithful, serious scholars who love Scripture disagree this sharply, maybe the answer isn't to make it a test of orthodoxy.

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  Drew1mo ago

  what gets me is how CERTAIN everyone is. on both sides. these are ancient texts from a culture we barely understand written in languages that no native speaker has used in over a thousand years. a little epistemic humility might be in order

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• Y

  Yuki1mo ago

  The 'Matthew Vines is just telling people what they want to hear' criticism cuts both ways. People telling gay Christians their orientation is disordered and they must be celibate forever or they're damned — that's also what a particular crowd wants to hear. Let's not pretend the traditional view is the courageously unpopular one in every context because in most evangelical churches it absolutely is not.

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  Nina1mo ago

  I've attended three different denominations that all came to three different conclusions on this with equally confident citations of scripture and I honestly at this point wonder if any of us actually let the text lead or if we all just arrive at the conclusion our community handed us and then find the verses to back it up

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  Taylor1mo ago

  Epistemic humility is not a get-out-of-clarity-free card. By that logic we should be uncertain about everything in Scripture. At some point the church has to be able to say 'this is what the text says' or we don't actually have a faith, we have a suggestion box.

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• Q

  Quinn1mo ago

  The Sodom story isn't even primarily about homosexuality and any honest reading of Ezekiel 16:49 confirms that — 'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.' The church latched onto the sexual reading and built a whole theology on it while ignoring what God himself said the sin was.

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  Morgan1mo ago

  The creation narrative matters here and almost no one talks about it enough. In Genesis 2 God creates a complementary pair — male and female — and calls it VERY good. Jesus himself in Matthew 19 grounds his whole teaching on marriage in that creation account. Whatever else you do with the six 'clobber verses,' you still have to answer what the design of human sexuality looks like according to the beginning of the story.

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  Feli1mo ago

  the theological arguments on both sides have been made so many times that honestly I don't think anyone is changing their mind in a Facebook comments section. what i come back to is: how am i called to treat the actual person in front of me right now. thats the question i can actually answer today

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• TB

  Taylor B.1mo ago

  The 'but Leviticus also bans shellfish' response is probably the most exhausted argument in this entire debate and it's been answered so many times. The New Testament reaffirms the sexual ethic. It does not reaffirm the kosher laws. These are categorically different types of commandments in the Mosaic code. If you're going to make the Leviticus argument please at least engage with why the food laws were abrogated and the sexual ones weren't according to the NT itself.

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  Casey1mo ago

  If you disagree with the traditional view I genuinely want to know: how do you read Romans 1:26-27 where Paul explicitly includes women exchanging natural relations for unnatural ones? That verse has no exploitation angle, no power-differential angle, no temple-prostitution angle. It's describing mutual exchange. If your reading can't account for that verse specifically, it's not a full reading.

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• R_

  Riley _x1mo ago

  The revisionist scholars aren't doing linguistics they're doing advocacy. And that's fine, advocacy exists, but let's not pretend it's neutral scholarship. When you read Boswell or Vines and then read the responses from scholars like Robert Gagnon, it becomes pretty apparent who's actually engaging the text and who's working backwards from a conclusion.

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• OS

  Omar S.1mo ago

  Nobody is saying truth is determined by pastoral outcomes. They're saying pastoral outcomes are one signal worth examining when you're in genuine interpretive uncertainty. If a reading of scripture consistently produces dehumanization, that's not proof the reading is wrong but it's a reason to look harder at the text. Wisdom 101.

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  Liam1mo ago

  The 'it was about pagan temple prostitution' argument is the one that requires the most special pleading. Romans 1 has absolutely zero reference to temple prostitutes. Paul is describing something he sees as arising from suppression of the knowledge of God in a broad cultural sense, not a specific cultic practice. The temple prostitution reading was largely discredited in scholarship decades ago but it keeps getting resurrected in popular level apologetics because it sounds plausible.

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• A2

  Alex 211mo ago

  The 'follow the money' argument works in both directions — conservative seminaries also have enormous institutional pressure to maintain traditional positions. The social pressure argument cancels itself out pretty fast.

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• DT

  Diego T.1mo ago

  The Sodom-wasn't-about-sex argument is the one that always gets trotted out and it always ignores Jude 1:7 which explicitly says Sodom went after 'strange flesh.' Ezekiel's reference to their sins doesn't mean sex wasn't also condemned. A city can have multiple sins. This isn't complicated.

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  Feli1mo ago

  truth is not determined by whether people find it welcoming. if that were the standard we'd soften everything hard in scripture. the gospel itself is offensive to the natural mind according to paul. i'm not saying be unkind but the 'it hurt people so maybe we got the interpretation wrong' logic is deeply problematic

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• R

  Reese1mo ago

  Two wrongs and all that. 'The church was inconsistent about divorce' doesn't actually address whether the current question is handled correctly. It just adds a second inconsistency to the pile. The answer to the church failing on divorce is to take divorce more seriously, not to lower the bar everywhere else.

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  Kofi1mo ago

  I want someone to explain to me how 'men shall not lie with men as with women' in Leviticus is about exploitation specifically. The text just... doesn't say that. You have to import that meaning entirely. I'm not saying be cruel to gay people. I'm saying the text is clear and we need to own what it says even when it's hard.

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• JK

  Jamie K.1mo ago

  my grandmother would say: the Bible says what it says and if you don't like it take it up with God. She wasn't cruel about it either. She just had a very straightforward faith that I genuinely miss in this era of everyone performing their theological nuance on the internet

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• MS

  Marco S.1mo ago

  ^ This. And the response is usually to dismiss the person as a culture warrior or to question their motives rather than engage the actual linguistic evidence. The conversation never actually gets to the text.

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  Yuki1mo ago

  The creation argument assumes the creation narrative is primarily about establishing a sexual template rather than about covenant, image-bearing, and human community. Read it in its ancient Near Eastern context and the point is not 'this is the only valid pairing' — it's demonstrating God's creative order against the backdrop of surrounding creation myths. You're importing a 21st century marriage debate into a text that wasn't answering that question.

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  Reese1mo ago

  The church has disagreed about plenty of things that ARE tests of orthodoxy. Disagreement among scholars doesn't automatically create a gray area — at some point you have to say the weight of evidence lands somewhere. Otherwise every contested doctrine becomes optional.

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• M9

  Marco 921mo ago

  That's a genuinely moving point and I don't want to be dismissive of it. And also — the personal stakes don't determine the exegesis. We don't get to decide what Scripture says based on how hard the answer is. That's true for every uncomfortable biblical teaching, not just this one. I'm sorry it's hard. That doesn't change my reading of the text.

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  Morgan1mo ago

  Gagnon is not the last word on this and presenting him like he is is exactly the problem with this conversation lol. He's a scholar, yes. He's also a man with an obvious axe to grind. Scholars disagree. That's kind of the whole point of scholarship.

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  Elena1mo ago

  That kind of cynicism is the most corrosive thing in this conversation. Yes, people are influenced by community. That's true of every belief humans hold. It doesn't mean honest inquiry is impossible or that no conclusion is better supported than another. Your observation about human psychology is correct and completely irrelevant to the actual exegetical question.

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• A

  Avery1mo ago

  Anyone who thinks the revisionist reading is just 'scholarship' needs to follow the money and the social pressure in academia. Publishing a traditional view on this in most secular universities would be career-limiting. The 'consensus of scholars' framing ignores the enormous sociological pressure on scholars to reach particular conclusions. I'm not saying the traditional scholars are infallible but the revisionist consensus is not a neutral data point.

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