Today I read an excellent diary ("Has A Gay Man Really Filed A Lawsuit Against A Bible Publisher Over Offensive 'Homosexual' Language?")that dealt with the vice list in I Corinthians 6 that has often been used to "prove" that Paul condemned homosexuals as "sinners" and excluded them from the kingdom of God.
I set out to make a comment on that diary, but I decided that the comment would have been too long and that it might be more useful simply to cut and paste something I had written many years ago on the topic. A 16-year-old Christian kid had asked me whether the Bible taught that God hated him because he was gay. I responded with three rather lengthy letters that treated a variety of issues. The final letter included a section on I Cor 6, which argues in rather the same way that librarisingnsf did in the diary cited above.
So, here it is--for whatever it's worth.
Make no mistake: neither fornicators nor idolaters, neither adulterers, effeminates, nor men who sleep with other men, neither thieves, nor greedy people, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor people who take all they can get will inherit the kingdom of God. (I Cor. 6: 9-10)
Now, the first thing to note is that Paul’s letters include quite a few vice lists (lists of sins), and I think this is the only one that includes specific references to homosexuals. Even within this particular list we should note that the references to homosexuals are no more emphatic or pointed than his references to heterosexual fornication, drunkenness, and greed. So, we should note from the start that even though Paul had grown up with a strict Jewish repugnance for homosexuality and was living among Greeks who were considerably more tolerant of homosexual activities, Paul does not single out the issue for emphasis in his moral teachings. Many fundamentalist preachers assume that if Paul were to appear in San Francisco or some other well-known gay city, he would launch a campaign against homosexuals. In fact, such Greek cities as Ephesus and Corinth must have struck Paul as at least as permissive with regard to homosexuality as any contemporary American city, and yet he neither launched a public anti-gay campaign nor spoke strongly about homosexuality in letters to the Christians he was teaching.
We should also note that lists of sins always tell us far less than they may initially seem to. Many people read the list in I Cor. 6 and quickly conclude, “See, it’s always wrong for men to have sex with men. Paul teaches it right there.” In fact, lists of sins usually don’t teach. Instead, they appeal to what people already know. Teaching people that something they consider right is really wrong requires explanation and persuasion—not just a list. Go back and look at the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus teaches the people, and you will see that he explains that holding grudges, seeking retribution, and cultivating a reputation for religiosity are wrong. He gives brief, but powerful arguments that persuade people. He doesn’t just offer a list of bad things.
An item in a list doesn’t persuade. It merely pushes a button in the listener to obtain a predictable response. The list in I Cor. 6, for example, functions to remind the Christians at Corinth that their conversion was a sort of liberation from their previous lives, as is clear in the statement immediately after the list: “Such were some of you, but you have been washed clean, you have been dedicated to God, you have been justified through the name of the Lord Jesus and through the Spirit of our God” (I Cor. 6:11). The list works to help people remember how important their new way of life is by reminding them that they have been set free from modes of life that they already consider wrong. Paul himself is aware that he uses lists in this way. Note how he introduces a very similar vice list in Galatians 5: 19-21.
Anyone can see the behavior that belongs to the unspiritual nature: fornication, indecency, and debauchery; idolatry and sorcery; quarrels, a contentious temper, envy, fits of rage, selfish ambitions, dissensions, party intrigues, and jealousies; drinking bouts, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that no one who behaves like that will ever inherit the kingdom of God.
The words in the list are intended to flash like a slide show through the minds of his audience—rapid-fire images of things that anyone can see, that all of us know play to our unspiritual aspects rather than contributing to the development of the reign of God in our souls: idolatry; fighting, selfishness; out-of-control drinking, out-of-control sex.
These rapid-fire images, though, are not of themselves very morally instructive. Some vice lists, for example, contain references to murder. The word murder in the list causes a quick image to pop into our minds: some person killing another during a robbery or in an act of savagery. We know that such a thing is wrong and that if we want the kingdom of God to grow in us, we must (thank God) be delivered from such terrible actions. But the word murder doesn’t offer any clear detailed moral instruction. A Christian soldier, for example, will listen to the list and agree that murder is a sin even though (let us say) he has killed many people and is likely to kill many more in a coming battle. He considers himself not a murderer, but a child of God who is trying to live up to that calling to the best of his capacity. Some of us Christians would prefer to go to prison or be killed rather than to kill—even in war. But few Christian pacifists would condemn the Christian soldier by saying, “This list teaches very clearly that murder is wrong. Murder is the taking of another human life. Therefore, soldiers who claim to be Christians are frauds. They can never inherit the kingdom of God.”
Similarly, with greed and selfish ambition. Those words evoke images of things that are clearly wrong: people who do terrible wrongs to achieve self-serving ends. Neither of those terms, though, instructs us as to whether our own desires for economic stability and professional promotion are wrong. The Christian church does not tell its members that every desire for acquisition or promotion is wrong. Instead, we intuitively allow the words in the list to function as they ought to: They remind us that some desires for wealth and status are clearly wrong, and they challenge us to scrutinize our own wealth and ambitions so we won’t lock the reign of God out of those parts of our lives. Even after such serious self-examination many Christians decide that their considerable wealth does not constitute greed and their considerable ambition does not constitute selfish ambition. Whether those decisions are correct or not, other Christians usually recognize the difficulty of such choices. I, at least, am not inclined to issue a blanket condemnation of the greed of any Christian who amasses fifty million dollars, though I cannot imagine how I could do so myself without sinking into greed.
Sexual behavior figures prominently in Christian vice lists. The slide show flashes images of orgies and debauchery: the behaviors of people who are enslaved to their own hormonal desires, who abandon all concern for what is right, who neither know nor care the names of the people they have sex with. Anyone who desires to be “spiritual” knows that such a slavery to hormones works counter to godlike aspirations. Such slavery is, as Paul says, “death.” We don’t want to become slaves of our sexual desires. Similarly, if fornication suggests (as the name—porneia—likely implied to most Greeks) “habituation to sex with prostitutes (pornai),” virtually all Christians would agree that fornication is the sort of thing we must be freed from if the reign of God is to become a reality in us. But the mere word fornication doesn’t clearly instruct us as to whether some activity in our lives is wrong or not. Faithful Christians have long wondered exactly what constitutes fornication. Can an engaged couple be guilty of fornication? And if so, where does it begin? French kissing? Awareness of one another’s bodies through the clothing? Groping under the clothing? Some further step in the sequence? I think there are many different opinions on such matters. Most of us Christians have been less than fully successful in our personal struggles with heterosexual passion, just as we have been less than fully successful in our struggles with greed and ambition, and so most of us hold our views on these topics with a certain degree of humility and are hesitant to launch into blanket denunciations of fornicators and greedy people.
And that brings us to the two references to homosexuals that Paul uses in the list of vices in I Cor. 6: effeminates (malakoi, literally soft men) and men who sleep with other men (arsenokoitai). Like the other words in the list, these words must have been intended to evoke a slide show of obviously ungodly activity in the minds of Paul’s audience—things that are certainly not proper goals for people who want to live under the reign of God. I think the word effeminates, soft people probably calls to mind men who want to be sexually dominated by other men, the sort of men who cannot pursue their own sense of right and wrong, men who want to be treated as tools to other men’s pleasure. We can have compassion for people like that, but we all know intuitively that this is not a condition that Christians should aspire to. Instead, we should want to be set free from it. People under the reign of God will become strong, not so soft or needy that they will do anything to win someone else’s approval or to satisfy their own desires for pleasure. And how about arsenokoitai, men who sleep with other men? What clearly wrong image did that word suggest to Paul’s audience? My guess is that it suggested the sort of men who frequent public toilets looking for quick anonymous gratification; men whose sexual compulsion drives them to engage in any activity, no matter how depraved or humiliating, in order to satisfy their desires. Anyone who longs for God to control his life recognizes the destructiveness of such compulsions and longs to be free of them.
But this slide show of what is bad and weak in human experience, these reminders of things we properly long to be set free from, don’t instruct us beyond what we already know. The kid whose hormones and psychological background have put him near the effeminate end of the continuum cannot learn from the mere word effeminate what is right or wrong. Is it wrong for him to have a high voice or incipient breasts? Is it wrong for him to love flowers and hate football? Does Paul’s condemnation of “softies” mean that God wants him to learn to talk in a low voice and repair diesel engines? Is that what Paul means when he says that the malakoi, the soft guys cannot enter the reign of God?
And what about the kid who has loved God and Jesus for as long as he can remember, who would die rather than give up his faith, who does his best to love his neighbors, who would love nothing better than to marry the girl across the street, have three kids, and live the perfect Christian life—but for whatever reason can feel no genuine desire for girls, and falls in love only with boys? What if he and another Christian boy much like him fall in love and want to share their lives as faithful Christians? What if these two boys are willing to struggle with their passions in the same way that faithful heterosexual couples do? They are not slaves to their passions anymore than anyone else. They do not build their lives around pleasure, but around their faith and their love of God and people. Does the word arsenokoitai declare people such as this evil? In other words, does Paul use the word arsenokoitai to declare that the contact of male skin on male skin is inherently evil in a way that the contact of male skin on female skin is not? If so, it seems to be the only word in the list that is so unambiguously literal. The fact is that the term “guys who sleep with guys” does not explain itself. It is just a word in a list of bad things. Paul did not intend to tell people exactly the circumstances that make it wrong for men to sleep together, but rather to draw on his readers’ convictions that some kinds of men who sleep together are engaged in a bad way of life.
Just as the Christian stock trader who knows that greed is bad must ultimately work out the details of his own life with God because the word greedy doesn’t tell him whether greed begins at a hundred thousand dollars or a hundred million dollars, so also the Christian boy who finds other boys beautiful must ultimately work out the details of his own life with God because the word arsenokoitai doesn’t tell him whether male flesh touching male flesh is inherently evil. The word greedy in the vice list should remind the Christian stock trader that there is such a thing as wanting too much, that greed works counter to the spirit of God, and that he should remember that he wants to be free of greed. So also, words like malakoi and arsenokoitai in the list should remind homosexual Christians that sexual attraction to other guys can lead them into degraded and slavish behaviors, and they should remember that they want to be set free from such weaknesses. I think, though, that the presence of greedy in this list does not give poorer Christians the right to issue blanket condemnations of wealthy people. And similarly, the presence of the words malakoi and arsenokoitai in the list do not give heterosexual Christians the right to issue blanket condemnations of sexual contact between males.