The sociocultural setting is key for making sense of references to homosexuality in the New Testament

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➔ ESPAÑOL

➔ CATALÀ

To make sense of the (few) refe­ren­ces to homo­sexua­lity in the New Testa­ment, it’s not enough to under­stand the lite­ral mean­ing of the origi­nal Greek. It’s also essen­tial to have a grasp of the socio­cultural setting to try to work out their real mean­ing. Let me explain why that’s so with an example:

When I was little (many years ago) and we went on holi­day, I remem­ber my parents tell­ing me: “If you get lost or any­thing happens to you, look for a police­man.” It was good advice at a time when British police patrol­led the streets on foot and offi­cers were easy to find at sum­mer resorts. And in the England of my child­hood the police gener­ally had a very good reputation.

But in some parts of the world, and for some seg­ments of the popu­la­tion, the best advice that parents can give their son or daugh­ter is: “If you see police­men coming, run away and hide.” Because unfor­tu­nately, in some coun­tries, the police can be very cor­rupt or racist, or be used by an author­i­ta­rian regime to repress and con­trol the general populace.

Photos by King’s Church International, Pawel Janiak and Maick Maciel on Unsplash.

Explained like that, it’s easy to under­stand that the state­ment “The police are very bad” can be as true as its oppo­site, “The police are very good”. The lite­ral or notio­nal mean­ing of the term “police” does not change, but the con­no­ta­tions attached to it can radi­cally change its real mean­ing for people. It all depends on the context.

But even though that’s so easy to com­pre­hend, and so reason­able, it draws the ire of cer­tain sections of the church when some pro­pose apply­ing the prin­ciple to Bible verses refer­ring to homo­sexuality.

So the most tra­di­tion­al­ist and dog­matic cling to the literal mean­ing of verses such as 1 Corin­thians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 (see my pre­vious post). And they do the same with the apostle Paul’s highly cri­tical com­ments on Greco-Roman homo­sexua­lity in Romans 1 (which I will dis­cuss in a future post). They’re un­willing to take into account that in that his­to­ri­cal setting homo­sexua­lity con­sisted almost exclu­sively of unequal, forced, abu­sive rela­tion­ships: pede­rasty or sex with male pros­ti­tutes or slaves, pro­vided by the exten­sive traf­fic in human beings that existed at the time.

Photo by rawpixel on Freepik.

In other words, it was reason­able for the apostle Paul, in his setting, to under­stand that “Homo­sexua­lity is very bad”. But it’s not so logical to affirm it in places like 21st cen­tury Spain, where two indi­vi­duals of the same sex can have a long-term peer rela­tion­ship, based on mutual love and com­mit­ment, and can create a home and a family. As I explain in my book, a cove­nantal rela­tion­ship of this nature, whether hetero- or homo­sexual, would seem object­ively to be a very good thing for the two people involved.

Photo by StockCake.

This is actually a very power­ful argu­ment. And you can’t refute it by saying that there are very bad mani­fest­a­tions of homo­sexua­lity: casual hook-ups, sex with sub­stance abuse (chemsex), sex addiction… Because all of that also occurs in hetero­sexual sex encounters.

Photo by Norbert Braun on Unsplash.

If you still struggle with the idea that, depend­ing on the social con­text, moral issues can be com­pletely turned on their head, here’s another example:

In the previous century, in Africa, some mis­sion­aries were scan­dal­ized to see that, in that location, Chris­tian women went with their breasts exposed. They wanted to insist that they cover them up, until local leaders explained that, in their setting, the only women with enough money to buy clothes to cover their breasts were pros­ti­tutes. There, decently dressed women went about bare-chested.

Photo by StockCake.

☝️ This example just goes to show that social factors can turn bad into good and good into bad; black into white and white into black. Could this also be the case with homo­sexuality? 😳 At the very least in settings where gay marriage is fully accepted by society at large? 🤔

It’s difficult to give a straight answer. Partly because the bib­lical and theo­lo­gical argu­ments for and against the legi­ti­macy of same-sex marriage are not limited to issues of social context. Which means I still have material for a good number of future posts. 😉

📌 If you would like to comment on this post (in the language of your choice), you can do so at the end of the Span­ish ver­sion, here.