A Fresh Perspective

Part 1 (Aug., State Journal) Today and in my next two articles I will be exploring the question: What should a modern day, Jesus inspired sexual ethic look like for Christians who aspire to follow Jesus? Jesus, of course, does not address this subject directly in the Gospels. But he does speak to it indirectly. By way of introduction we should first ask: Does the Bible as a whole teach a clear sexual ethic? It does not. The sexual mores condoned and practiced in the Old Testament Scriptures almost always favor patriarchal preferences and prejudices. Consider the following examples: (1) Polygamy (having many wives) and concubinage (a woman living with a man to whom she is not married) were regularly practiced and accepted as normative in the Old Testament without a single word of condemnation by a biblical writer. (2) Prostitution was considered quite natural and necessary in patriarchal biblical times as a safeguard for the virginity of brides and property rights o...

What would a modern day Jesus inspired sexual ethic look like? Did Jesus teach a sexual ethic?  I believe he did, though not explicitly. Biblical fundamentalists who like to claim that the Bible’s teaching is clear about any number of complex issues will find little in the Gospels to support a claim that Jesus is clear on all matters sexual in nature. Though Jesus does indeed have something to say. What Jesus does say, however, must be viewed within the broader perspective of that which constituted the critical core of all his teaching. When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment in the law, he responded, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”(Matt. 22:37-40). And lest we look for some wiggle room in the way we define ...

Prejudice disguises itself as holiness when passages such as Romans 1:26-27 are employed to clobber LGBTQ persons. The text reads as follows: “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” Here is the problem with turning Paul into an anti-gay proponent: Paul, along with most ancient moralists, would have regarded same sex relations as an expression of excessive or exploitive sexual behavior by heterosexuals. It is not likely that he would have had any understanding at all of same sex attraction as a sexual orientation set early in life. Paul’s knowing about sexual orientation is about as likely as his knowing of atoms and electrons as basic elements of our universe. He would have be...