Does it say anything in the bible about being gay

What does the Bible say about homosexuality?

Answer



In some people’s minds, being homosexual is as much outside one’s control as the color of your skin and your height. On the other hand, the Bible clearly and consistently declares that homosexual activity is a sin (Genesis –13; Leviticus ; ; Romans –27; 1 Corinthians ; 1 Timothy ). God created marriage and sexual relationships to be between one man and one woman: “At the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’” (Matthew –5). Anything outside of God’s intent and design is sin. The Bible teaches that Christians are to live for God, deny themselves, pick up their cross, and follow Him (Matthew ), including with their sexuality. This disconnect between what the Bible says and what some people feel leads to much controversy, debate, and even hostility.


When examining what the Bible says about homosexuality, it is important to distinguish between homosexual behaviorand hom

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 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 reasonable 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 offer 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 listen 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 Aged Testament’s temporary ceremonial laws with its permanent moral laws.

Here’s an analogy to help understand this distinction.

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

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

What the New Testament Says about Homosexuality

The Fourth R Volume May-June

Mainline Christian denominations in this country are bitterly divided over the question of homosexuality. For this reason it is essential to ask what light, if any, the New Testament sheds on this controversial issue. Most people apparently assume that the New Testament expresses strong opposition to homosexuality, but this simply is not the case. The six propositions that follow, considered cumulatively, lead to the conclusion that the New Testament does not provide any direct guidance for understanding and making judgments about homosexuality in the contemporary world.

Proposition 1: Strictly speaking, the New Testament says nothing at all about homosexuality.

‍There is not a single Greek synonyms or phrase in the entire New Testament that should be translated into English as “homosexual” or “homosexuality.” In fact, the very notion of “homosexuality”—like that of “heterosexuality,” “bisexuality,” and even “sexual orientation”—is essentially a new concept that would simply contain been unintelligible to