UPDATE: Fixed a couple of typos and clarifying text to avoid giving the impression I was critical of the confessed Protestant faith.

Recently, I was taken to task about the morality of homosexuality and how the Bible “clearly” teaches it’s practice is a sin.  Frankly, I never believed that and having other priorities chose not to bother examining the issue other than cataloguing some verses.  Other things are important to me in my faith journey.  But given all the proud bigotry surrounding so-called “gay marriage” and the civil rights of LGBT persons I’m seeing, I decided to give it a look see.

What the Word Is Not: A Golden Calf

As a Catholic, I come from a faith tradition that recognizes human tradition (sometimes to a fault) in the organic relationship it has with reading the Word of God in the Bible.  Proper interpretation is known by its adherence to apostolic tradition, that is the tradition of understanding God as Jesus’ apostles do.  My Protestant brethren do not necessarily see this very well.  I have heard them quote Jesus as he quoted the prophet Isaiah in Matthew 15:9 or Mark 7:7 in criticism of my church: “In vain do they worship [God], teaching as doctrines human precepts.” (Of course, they neglect to read the previous two verses which speak of hypocrites who don’t love God and who only give lip service to him, but that’s another story.)  For my Protestant brethren, it’s the Word and only the Word and the Word says so!

There isn’t problem a problem with Sola Scriptura per se but often in my experience I see my brothers and sisters conflating the Word with their interpretations of the Bible and implicitly ignoring this fact, compounding that error.  What you hear is, “I believe in the Bible” or equivalently “I believe in the Word” (which strictly speaking is not true if there is an interpretation with which they disagree).  At that point they have forged a golden calf.  Belief becomes bibliolatry.  Simply reading the Bible is an act of interpretation inseparable from us and contains all our biases.  This is why I am deeply skeptical of any person who with any certainty claims to speak with God’s voice.  I am not speaking here of confessing one’s faith only problematic utterances that omit implicitly or explicitly the important caveat: “This I believe.”  

It takes discipline to give more than lip service to the notion that the Word is beyond our understanding and that we have but a dim view in God in the Bible.  We see through a mirror darkly.  It’s hard work to believe in something ardently and yet always open to change.  We instead want the quick fix, the emotional comfort that certainty through blind faith entails.  I am not immune to this.  So when we read the author of 2 Timothy writing in St. Paul’s name:

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

Amen.  We can read into the verse that Scripture is all we need and get lazy about it.  We forget historical context is important.  What we are not often taught is that, at the time 2 Timothy was written, scripture consisted only of the Old Testament, the Septuagint as a matter of fact!  The Gospels had not been written yet, but were little more than disjointed oral stories and traditions about Jesus.  This verse is often used to make the classic appeal that the whole Bible refers to itself as the Word of God with no realization that in context, it did not.  If you ask the average Christian about this, they probably have no idea.  Theologians do.  Catholic priests do.  Seminarians do.  But rarely the folks in the pew do.  It’s problems like this that make talking about the Bible and its contents with my fellow Christians so difficult.  And this is just one tradition that goes unnoticed, invisible.

If I bring stuff like this up, I’m often met with all kinds of resistance, anger, name calling, etc.  My faith is questioned.  My love of Jesus is called into doubt.  My allegiance to Satan is implied.  Yet, all I’ve done is read the Bible as it is, in the context in which it was written.  People are invested in their traditions, they are loathe to give them up.  And that is a very human thing.  Again, I am not immune to this.  So I understand that it’s much easier to malign me or claim I’m in the thrall of all manner of delusions than to admit one’s cherished beliefs might be mistaken.

I say all this to say that things are not nearly as ironclad as is often asserted in the Bible.  God and his Word always seem to elude being boxed in.

What the Word Is: God’s Biography

So what the hell is the Bible?  For me, the Bible is to quote my Church, “the Word of God written in the words of men.”  It’s one of the central ways of getting to know God in the intimate, personal way Jesus said. A way that connoted the deep intimacy of sexual intercourse.  So, I cherish my Bibles, all of them.  They are sacred.  Not in some magical or superstitious way but in holiness, that is “set apart.”

And the Word is written in the words of men who were full human beings limited in time and space with personal beliefs, biases and understandings that are evident in the text.  That’s why the sky is a dome and the earth flat in Genesis.  This was the “scientific” understanding of its authors.

So when I go to Bible study, I have these facts in mind.  I’m looking for God to teach and correct and such but with the clear-eyed view that the Word is distorted by the words, by me.  Just as any biography can only scratch the surface of a person’s life and who they are/were or just as no words could ever fully describe my love for my wife and son, words as symbols fall short of reality.  And most importantly, symbols are not the reality.  This does not mean that symbols are less than reality.  Just as my Christian brothers are one with Christ as his body and represent him in this world, we are not Christ.  So too do I see the Bible and the Word.  It is deep intimate connection, not identity.  So I am very, very careful to separate the timeless from the time bound, the transcendent from the mundane, and frankly, the good from bad.

Homosexuality: “Clearly” a Sin

So let’s get back to “the gays.”  I want to be illustrative rather than exhaustive for the sake of brevity, but my main point can be applied to other parts of the Bible.  My point being that people who claim what the Bible “clearly says” is not so clear on further inspection.  Room for interpretation abounds.

First let me quote from the Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 6:9 in New Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition:

Do you know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived!  Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers–none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

and the New American Bible:

Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

(I love the word choice “practicing homosexuals” vs. sodomites. My church is PC.  LOL)  Sounds cut and dry doesn’t it?  I mean a sodomite is a sodomite.  But remember context.  This was a letter written in the Roman empire where man-on-man sex was deeply taboo because patriarchal as the Roman’s were, they couldn’t stomach a man penetrating another in coitus.  Men should penetrate lesser forms of human being, i.e. women and boys, since the penetrator is considered dominant.  Further, this fact is implicit in the footnotes for this verse in the New American Bible:

1Co 6:9(b) The Greek word translated as boy prostitutes may refer to catamites, i.e. boys or young men who were kept for purposes of prostitution, a practice not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world. In Greek mythology this was the function of Ganymede, the “cupbearer of the gods,” whose Latin name was Catamitus.  The term translated Sodomotes [This was rendered "practicing homosexuals" in the updated text but apparently the footnote was missed in my edition.]  refers to adult males who indulged in homosexual practices with such boys. See similar condemnations of such practices in Romans 1:26-27; 1 Tim 1:10. [emphasis mine]

So we have important qualifying information about the biblical text.  Paul is literally saying that NAMBLA-esque pagan gay temple sex and those who engage in it are wrong and will not be part of God’s kingdom.  It is we  today who interpret and expand that to include, say, two men raising a family in a domestic partnership seeking to get married.

The Bible Reports: You Decide

And that is why I stand up for my LBGT brothers and sisters.  I believe such interpretation is wrong not because of bad exegesis (frankly it’s not) but because of the bigotry and hatred it engenders and gives joy to.  My Master teaches, “You shall know a tree by it’s fruit.”  The fruit ain’t good.  Because God is love and marriage is a public expression of love, to quote this verse to malign such between LGBT persons is proof enough for me that the interpretation is problematic at best, evil at worst.  We are supplanting our bigotry for the Word.  Not good.  Not good at all.