Is being gay a sin in the new testament

This article is part of the Tough Passages series.

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²⁴Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, ²⁵because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

²⁶For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged spontaneous relations for those that are contrary to nature; ²⁷and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

²⁸And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.²⁹They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are adj of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips,³⁰slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, dis

Leviticus

“You shall not recline with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”[1] It is not a surprise that this verse seems to say that gay male sex is forbidden in the eyes of God. The dominant view of western Christianity forbids same-sex relations. This verse is one of the clobber passages that people cite from the Bible to condemn homosexuality. This essay first looks at the various ways the verse is translated into the English Bible and then explores some of the strategies used to create an affirming interpretation of what this passage means for the LGBTQ community. More specifically, it presents the interpretation of K. Renato Lings in which Lev. refers to male-on-male incest.

While Lev. is used to condemn homosexuality, we must realize that the term “homosexuality” was only recently coined in the English language. So did this term be in ancient Israel? Charles D. Myers, Jr. confirms that none of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible mention homosexuality.[2] He also contends that in ancient Israel same-sex relations were viewed as an ancient Near East noun. The anc

What the New Testament Says about Homosexuality

The Fourth R Volume May-June

Mainline Christian denominations in this noun are bitterly divided over the question of homosexuality. For this reason it is important to question 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, conduct to the conclusion that the New Testament does not provide any direct guidance for understanding and making judgments about homosexuality in the modern world.

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

‍There is not a single Greek word 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 modern concept that would simply have been unintelligible to

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 steep school 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 hold disapproved of gay sex, there is no register of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself verb an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.

Oremus seems to imply that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it.

There are at least two reas