In this episode Trent sits down with Pastor Brandan Robertson to discuss whether Bible-believing Christians should accept or reject homosexual behavior. In part two they discuss what the Bible says about homosexuality including passages in the Old Testament.
Trent: Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I just want to let you know this is part two of the three part interview I did with Brandan Robertson on the question, is homosexuality a sin? So be sure to listen to part two, and then the next episode will conclude our dialogue in part three.
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Brandan: And I still would point back to look throughout history of the oppression, suppression, and harm done to LGBT people throughout the history of Christianity. And I think-
Trent: Sure, and that’s why the catechism says in paragraph 2358, for example, that those who have same sex attraction should not be the victims of unjust discrimination.
Brandan: Sure.
Trent: So for example, in one of my books I tell a story about, it was like 30, 40 years ago, back when the AIDS crisis was first unfolding. And there was a religious house with nuns that was treating AIDS patients in Washington DC. And there were people who were protesting at the time, thinking like, what if we get AIDS? Why are you treating these people? Why would you do something like this in our community?
Brandan: Yeah.
Trent: And the religious sisters said, well these are human beings, made in the image and likeness of God. We are going to be there for them in their final hour. So for me, there’s one example, and I know there’s Christians who would disagree with that. And so I would say, in joining with someone like you, that they’re wrong. That someone who identifies as a gay or lesbian, who is suffering some kind of disease and needs medical treatment, or needs housing, or needs a basic necessity of life, that we have a duty to provide it just as Jesus challenged people in his time to provide. You know, the Samaritan who provided for his enemy the Judean. So I forget where I was going with this. But you see where I’m coming from.
Brandan: Totally. And just again, the point of that argument is hopefully to be more of a unifying point right at the beginning is to say, even though we might disagree about how the actual interpretation plays out, I think we can both agree that harm being done to LGBT people by the church doing unjust actions or being overtly harsh for no good reason is something that we should all stand against.
Trent: I firmly agree with you. Where I would put the line down is I would say that the teaching itself can’t be construed as being that which is the villainous force here, if it turns out to be true. So for example, I’ve gone to talks where I’ve done talks on, you know, so-called same sex marriage, LGBT plus issues, and people will say, you know, you offended me with your talk. What you said offended me. And so I said, okay, how could I share my message in a way that would not offend you? Just please, because if I used a word that was inappropriate, a slur, I’m happily delete that from my vocabulary. And then she said, well, you should just say that if two people love each other that’s all that matters.
Trent: I said, well, but that’s not my message. So how do I communicate my message without offending you? And she said, well, I guess you can’t. And I said, okay, so then it’s not really about me. It’s, we got to figure out if this teaching is true or not. So let’s go then, as Christians we look to the Bible you know, Protestants and Catholics, even among Protestants different views about the authority of the Bible. But we still go and look there.
Brandan: Totally.
Trent: And this will help. And then I almost wish we had Vines here. It’s almost just such a distinct view from yours, and maybe I will have him or someone else on, and it’ll be a very different conversation. Because people allow, even people who are, you know, Catholics who are listening to this, who have held with us now for 40 minutes or wherever, they say, well, look at the Bible, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s just obvious from the Bible. And let’s go to those passages. I’m going to briefly hopscotch over, I think it’s Genesis 19 about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Because they’re, that’s not the most helpful story for us to determine if sexual behavior between two men or two women is amoral.
Trent: My position would just be at the very least the element of homosexual activity in the story was meant to add another layer of depravity to it. So that’s the position that that I’ll take. It’s not one that’ll push us in either direction. But I think going forward for the Old Testament witness, the passages in Leviticus, Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus, I think it’s 20:13 are ones that get brought up a lot. In fact, what’s funny is I notice a lot of Christians will go to Leviticus first before they go to Romans, or First Corinthians nine through 10. So I’ll just read the first Levitical passage which is simple.
Trent: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it is an abomination.” And that’s part of the purity codes in Leviticus 18 dealing with incest and other grave sexual behaviors. Leviticus 20:13 repeats the same thing. “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall be put to death. Their blood is upon them.” Which of course makes reference to many other grave violations of Old Testament Levitical law that also carried with the death penalty.
Brandan: Right.
Trent: Your thoughts on these passages?
Brandan: Again, preface at the beginning, I don’t think these arguments are the most convincing arguments, but I’ll give you the arguments that I would still hold to.
Trent: These are the other revisionist arguments.
Brandan: Right. And I think Leviticus is an interesting passage, it’s the one that I think probably has the strongest case that the author of Leviticus meant what he said when homosexuality is abomination, but I think what we need to understand is that the context that the author is talking about is not the same as what we’re talking about in modern day. In Leviticus, the cultures that surrounded the ancient Hebrew people, these were cultures that offered sexual sacrifices to gods and goddesses as a form of worship. The Bible talks about that pretty explicitly. And so the homosexual acts that God is calling the Hebrew people out of and away from is to distinguish them from those people, those false teachers, those false people that are worshiping false gods, and not to engage in these exploitive practices of a lot of the homosexual acts that were happening were between older men and younger boys.
Brandan: Things that we would call pedophilia today or pederasty. And so I think the author of Leviticus is condemning something based on his culture that looks nothing like what we’re talking about today. I think that’s the first argument there. Then the other one is kind of the broader Christian argument is that these passages are part of Levitical law, which almost no Christian still upholds because of Paul’s teachings. That grace has now pulled us away from the law and Paul and Peter debate it quite a bit about whether Christians should adhere to the ancient laws of the Hebrew Bible or whether we’re freed from doing that. And I think Paul wins the day with his arguments in the new Testament saying, no, you’re not required to be circumcised. You’re not required to follow dietary laws. These things are all passed away, and Leviticus passage falls in the midst of condemnations that are all part of that culturally defined Jewish purity law.
Trent: Let’s go… Well, I’ll address both of those revisionist points. So the first one being, I’ll agree with you that many sexual encounters between two men in the among the ancient Israelites, among those pagan cultures, and even the Greco Roman world would have been young men and boys, what we would call pederasty. Though not necessarily exclusively. That there was still a lot of evidence from ancient Mesopotamian records of adult men engaged in homosexual behavior with each other, especially if it is a superior in the social hierarchy and an inferior. And well I talk about that with patriarchy, but that would be something still involving adults. And that the passages in Leviticus, I think that they apply… I think you’ll probably see the strength of this. The author of Leviticus is enjoining all kinds of these relationships for everyone, both Jews and Gentiles. First, there’s no distinction about that this is merely dealing with cultic offerings.
Trent: Like the author Leviticus talks about child sacrifice to Molech, for example. He doesn’t talk about same-sex behavior as part of any particular fertility cult or anything like that. Second, the one for me that’s more stronger evidence that it had a universal scope was that this is a part of… It says in two verses later in verse 24, “Do not defile yourselves by any of these things. For by all of these the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves and the land became defiled so that I punished it’s iniquity and the land vomited out its inhabitants.” That the sin here is put next to beastiality. It’s put next to cases of incest.
Brandan: Right.
Trent: That the author of Leviticus sees this as something serious that Gentiles could be held accountable for. Whereas they would not be held accountable for violations of the kosher law. That it’s something he would see is that even they, it was so grave they were vomited out of land because they’re doing this. Well, I guess I’ll add one more thing and then you could comment on. I mean, you would agree that those who say, well this is part of Leviticus. Some Levitical law still carry over today. You know, the prohibitions on bestiality, on adult incest, on adultery. And then of course economic justice also carries over from Leviticus. So the question…
Trent: I always don’t like that response like, oh well that’s in Leviticus. Well, some of it still carries over. Now I didn’t mean to clobber you with a bunch of my response, but take as much as you want, we can go back and forth.
Brandan: Right. I just think just because Leviticus has some good things in it that we still would adhere to, I don’t think that means that Levitical law needs to be… I don’t think almost any Christian theologian would say a Levitical law carries over necessarily to apply to Christians today. Yeah. I think also putting it in the context of beastiality and the other things is a good point to say that this isn’t the same kind of behavior we’re talking about today. Beastiality wasn’t just something done in the ancient world for fun, it was done out of severe depravity, and it was done out of, more often than not, false religious worship and false religious cultic practices.
Brandan: And so when you see homosexuality grouped within that, and then I think, not to jump ahead, but I think Romans one also shows Paul’s thinking about this passage and puts homosexuality in a list of false worshiping of gods. He says, you’ve worshiped created things instead of the creator God, you worship images of reptiles, and then homosexual behavior emerges among other sorts of behavior. So I think if that’s how Paul’s interpreting Leviticus, and I think it is, then we can see that it all begins with this false worshiping of false gods. This is all in the context of idolatry.
Trent: But also these other false, these other pagan deities. So the argument to catch our listeners up to speed is that some revisionist will say Leviticus is condemning pagan sexuality, but not necessarily homosexuality per se. And so the idea here is that… You’re nodding a little bit like, okay, I’m willing to…
Brandan: I don’t like the word pagan. I know the Bible uses it, because it’s such a weird word, it’s [crosstalk 00:10:33].
Trent: Gentile.
Brandan: Even, I mean, I think Leviticus is condemning very specific behavior about various specific cultures that were surrounding this very small group of people.
Trent: Sure. We’ll call it Canaanite then.
Brandan: Sure.
Trent: But even in the Canaanite cultures, they’re deities, for example, routinely practiced incest. And so that was a justification for the Canaanites to engage in incest as well. Yet it wouldn’t follow therefore that we don’t have problems with incest today since people who engage in incest are not doing it to satisfy Baal, or something like that. That just because it may have been associated with that, for the Levitical author it was still a grave departure from the creation norm that God originally gave.
Brandan: But I think the important thing is that what I’m talking about, at least when we’re talking about these passages, is what the author meant in his time, not how we’re interpreting it today. I think the author in his context in his time had these things in mind, these false practices of cultures around him. And he’s writing to a group of people in the midst of that talking about that. And we might extrapolate it, and we might have even early Christian theologians taking this and applying it. But I’m saying if we get down to just the academic side of what is the cultural context of Leviticus-
Trent: But [inaudible 00:11:42] we do. You can have someone like William Loader, probably the one of the premier scholars today when it comes to homosexuality in the ancient world, would hold to the view that this author would have seen that even in non-cultic contexts that if you just had two Israelites sneaking off to, you know, Brokeback Sinai Mountain, whatever it might be. If they did that, that would fall… Sorry. Well you think about it, like where would these things happen? You have people who were just off on their own alone, that he would still condemn those kinds of behaviors.
Brandan: Yeah. And at the end of the day, I don’t think I would necessarily agree… Or disagree with that, because I think based on his cultural context, his time, the way ethics and morals were being understood in this time period. I think generally if you saw two men having sex in the ancient world during this time period it would have been condemned by the Hebrew people. Which is why I think, and I’ve said before, Leviticus is the weakest argument for revisionists to talk about, because I think we just have… I think the author meant what he said likely, and kind of thing.
Trent: Let’s then go on to, well there’s different kinds of passages and we’ll come back to this here. Because we can go talk about Paul, because I mean you have the passages in Leviticus, you have the passages in Paul. But also I think for me the more important ones are the passages in Genesis One and Two, and Matthew 19, when Jesus is talking about his ethic on divorce and remarriage. So maybe we’ll get to that third. Because we’ve got the… For me the do, the command provides an overarching paradigm for us to understand how sexuality, God gave it to us, versus where the don’ts are. Because there’s one argument I hear a lot, I saw it a little bit in your book. And I think it’s one of the weakest arguments, the revisionist view. And that is that homosexual behavior is not condemned often.
Trent: You know you have five condemnations that saying because it’s condemned infrequently, it was not a big deal. To me that argument doesn’t really carry any weight because you have some sins that are grievous that are rarely condemned, like child sacrifice. That would be a preeminent one right there, for example. That just because sometimes a sin does not have to be repeated because it just becomes obvious for people.
Brandan: Yeah. I think I would disagree with it in the same way you’re articulating it. I would disagree with that just because it’s not mentioned a lot, it’s not a sin. But I would say when we get to the New Testament and the arguments about Jesus and Paul and Peter, and the writers of the New Testament not speaking of it much, we do know homosexuality and homosexual behavior was much more prevalent in the Greco Roman world than it was in the ancient Hebrew world. That we do know N.T. Wright talks about this, that there were homosexual relationships in the first century, in the Greco Roman world that Paul would have known about, that Jesus would have known about. And the fact-
Trent: But not necessarily in first century Palestine. There’s a difference between Corinth, Rome and Ephesus, and being in Jerusalem and the context there. You’re not going to have people in Corinth rioting to get rid of blasphemous shields like they did in Jerusalem when Pontius Pilate put them up. So for me it makes sense that Paul explicitly talks about same-sex behavior and incest.
Brandan: Sure.
Trent: And that Jesus doesn’t talk about either of those things as they weren’t as big a problem in the immediate context in Jerusalem and Galilee.
Brandan: I concur, I’ll grant you that argument.
Trent: Okay.
Brandan: Yeah.
Trent: But I do believe that Jesus was addressing… Well, you know, we’ll get to Jesus. Paul, we’ll be right there with you, because we’re moving forward. And I think that it’s important, a lot of people only talk about this, they just go to Leviticus and then they go to Romans and Corinthians. For me, this is the important area here that when Jesus was asked to weigh in on a dispute about sexual morality, he was asked to weigh in.
Trent: The thing that was debated was the issue of divorce and the issue of remarriage, two different things. Whether it was lawful to divorce your wife. Could you do it? You know, there was the great dispute between the rabbinical houses of Hillel and Shammai. Well, only for adultery. Well actually you could do it if she burns your dinner, you know? And so then Jesus takes a view even beyond them. He says, you cannot divorce your spouse. Remarriage makes them an adulterer except in cases of unchastity, and that’s a whole different trail for us to go down. But I noticed in your book you talked about, well let’s go to the Gospel of Mark because it’s very reliable to know what Jesus said. And there in Mark 10 there’s no exception clause, the tradition about divorce that’s preserved is just…
Trent: Well I mean, let’s bring it up. Because I think that weighs in on the ethics that we use. So Mark chapter 10 he says, whoever divorces… Mark 10, 11 through 12, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” And, you know-
Brandan: Period.
Trent: Period. And he grounds that before when he’s asked about divorce, you know, Moses allowed it. Yeah. That was for your hardness of hearts. There is a trajectory in scripture, you know, far from you. Moving away from that, that the ideal… And St. Thomas Aquinas said that his argument for why the concession was allowed in the Old Testament was to prevent wife murder. That was his argument. Why did God allow divorce in the Old Testament? Well, it’s because God in his wisdom foresaw that people had such hard hearts. If they couldn’t divorce their wives, they would just end up murdering them.
Trent: Because in order to be convicted of murder, you need two or three witnesses. And you’re often alone with your spouse. And you just push them over a cliff and you marry your concubine or whatever. But Jesus says, “It’s not from the beginning. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother, be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. They are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” So for me then we have, if we looked, and you believe Jesus is fully divine, we can trust the ethics we receive from Jesus. He takes a very firm view on sexual ethics that restricts it to monogamous marriage between a man and woman. So how do we get a wider sexual ethics from someone like Jesus when he seems pretty clear?
Brandan: I think the weakness of that argument is just, again, extrapolating out of this a full sexual ethic. I would agree that the ethic Jesus is articulating here, and one that I would preach at my church is that covenant relationship is the core of what Jesus is getting at. When you commit your life to another person in marriage, that is a binding contract before God and before man. And that you should honor that contract. And so I would likewise lean against and caution people against divorce, nine times out of 10.
Brandan: Now we can get into grace and how Paul uses grace ethically later, and that’s where I would apply grace if there were divorced folks in my congregation. I’m not going to bar them from communion or anything like that. But I think that-
Trent: Well I wouldn’t, for me, I would not. As someone who is divorced in the Catholic Church can receive communion if, well one, if they’ve been divorced against their will, it’s not their fault. Two, if they have committed the sin of divorce and abandoned their family, you can repent of that. For me, the problem is if someone, Jesus says that those who continue and remarriage after divorce of a valid marriage, they continue in adultery. And well, I mean the Bible seems pretty clear that adultery is a sin. Yet for you yourself saying you’re open to polyamory, it sounds like you’re saying adultery’s okay if you have their permission.
Brandan: I don’t think polyamory… First of all, I want to be very clear. I don’t want to be pigeonholed as the polyamory pastor, this whole thing publicly came about because-
Trent: Well, I mean it’s in your book.
Brandan: Right. And the reason it’s in the book is because it came about, I did one… We didn’t ask anything serious at our church where people could submit questions. One thrupple submitted a question and said, we’ve-
Trent: A group of three people.
Brandan: Yes, we’ve been in a committed relationship for a number of years, if we go to your church what do you say to us? And I said, we believe we call you to the same sexual ethics as everybody else. That in your committed relationship, you need to be committed to each other. You need to live out the same sexual ethics we call everyone to and be faithful to each other. And you’re welcome here. Because I think it’s a really hard case to make, and I would argue this really strongly that the number of people in relationships is, in the Bible fluctuates. You see people having different sorts of relationships. Polygamy is certainly blessed throughout scripture.
Trent: Well, I wouldn’t say that it’s blessed, it’s something that’s recorded throughout the Old Testament. The closest you can come is that when David is rebuked for his shenanigans with Bathsheba, God speaking through Nathan the prophet says, I gave you the whole kingdom, I gave you everything in Israel, I gave you all of the Kings, all these wives. I give you all this stuff. And yet you still had to help yourself to Bathsheba.
Trent: But otherwise when you look at the Old Testament, I would further that trajectory element you’re talking about, that the trajectory is moving away from it, that that’s another… Just like divorce in the Old Testament, that there we have a toleration for the hardness of hearts for our common practice. And I would say that in Mark 10 and Matthew 19 when Jesus closes the loophole on divorce and remarriage, some of the rabbis had allowed, he did the same with polygamy.
Brandan: And I agree. So in my patriarchy argument, I think polygamy is sinful and wrong because it’s usually an exploitive relationship of one man over many women. People misunderstand what polyamory is. And again, I don’t want to be pegged as this is not-
Trent: We can talk about it. Because for me, if someone’s right on sexual ethics, even if it seems absurd to me, I’m willing to listen because there was a time when Catholic sexual ethics seemed absurd to me.
Brandan: Sure.
Trent: But I was willing to listen and hear it out and I changed my mind. So you’re right that you have polyamory is romantic and sexual attraction with more than one person at the same time.
Brandan: Usually in the context of a committed relationship. So this isn’t a-
Trent: Well, there’s a lot of people who say they’re in open relationships.
Brandan: But that’s not polyamory, that’s different. So there are open relationships, there’s polyamory, they’re swinging relationships.
Trent: Then we’ll [inaudible 00:21:38], there’s non-monogamy.
Brandan: But I wouldn’t even say that, other than mono meaning one. Polyamorous would be pologamy. Most people that I’ve met, for instance, Reverend Rochelle Brown, who just was the former moderator of Metropolitan Community Churches, has been in a relationship with her two wives for, I think, a decade. They have kids together and they’re living together. It’s a committed relationship. This isn’t a sexually deviant thing where they’re going out and having sex with whoever they want to do. They’re committed in a relationship.
Trent: But here’s interesting, so you’ve got a standard, and I think, and don’t worry, Paul, we’ll get to you here soon. We’ll, you’ll make an appearance here because of first Corinthians chapter five. You agree that as Christians it’s possible to fall into sexual sin.
Brandan: Sure.
Trent: But then we have to figure out, where do our standards for sexual sin come from? And it seems like you’re returning to just one standard, which is sexual behavior is okay within a committed relationship.
Brandan: I think commitment is the highest part of sexual ethics, but you’re not going to like where I’m going to go with how I deal with sexual ethics, because I do center around Paul’s Romans 14 argument that there are lots of these ethics. That there are lots of ethical principles that I don’t think are universal, I think our individual ethics. I think we have standards that inform how this looks individually. So we center around a group of values, but the way those values are lived out look differently in each context and person’s life.
Brandan: So the way we do sexual ethics is to say, commitment is key, covenant is key.
Trent: Why is it? Why does… Because for example, like with food and drink, like I don’t have to have a committed relationship with those I choose to buy food from or eat with. I can eat what I want, where I want, when I want. Why does sex require commitment for it to be Holy? Whereas you can’t have things like open relationships, or sex can’t be casual for Christians. What’s the warrant for that?
Brandan: Well, I wouldn’t say that sex can’t necessarily be casual for Christians. But I would say-
Trent: Well wait. No, you can’t un-ring the bell right there. Because I know your book also talks about that-
Brandan: Premarital sex is not simple.
Trent: Yeah. So then there, what kind of… Then tell me, how do I determine if a sexual behavior is sinful or not?
Brandan: Again, I think this is an [inaudible 00:24:01]… In my theological view, I think theology is given to us to help us be healthy and whole people, not to not offend God. And so I think this is where I’ve shifted in my view from what I had as a traditional evangelical theology.
Trent: But we could offend God though with things that we do, like if we mistreat ourselves or act in irrational ways. Like that would offend him.
Brandan: But I think that God gives us laws so that we can be healthy, we can be Holy, and we can be whole. That’s what God is pushing us towards. So when we talk about sexual ethics, when I talk about relationships, I’m saying commitment is the key to relationships. I’m not going to put a flag in the sand on either side of this. And people have tried to nail me down and I don’t think you can because I hold, again this Romans 14 ethical bend. Which says, Romans 14 essentially says, “What is sin for one person may not be sin for another. So let us not judge anyone.” And-
Trent: Well, let’s go to that, because I would say that that’s not what Romans 14 says. Here Paul is talking about judgment particularly in aspects of food and drink. That the two biggest things that were dividing Christians in the early church was whether… The question is, to become a good Christian, do you have to be a good Jew? Do you have to… And so when you look at the-
Brandan: [crosstalk 00:25:15] Levitical laws.
Trent: Right. Well what it means to be a good Jew. So you have people, and that’s why I appreciate the new perspective on Paul arguments from people like N.T. Wright, E. P. Sanders, James Dunn. And some of them have said their view on Paul is actually pretty similar to the Catholic view, which is that Paul was concerned about people saying that you have to belong to the Jewish people as part of a badge of honor, a national identity before you could become a Christian. Which means being circumcised, and which means upholding the dietary laws. So that basically no Gentile could become a Christian. You’d have to be a Jew first, which would severely inhibit the universal gathering of all people in the body of Christ if everyone had to become a Jew.
Trent: He says, “As for the man who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not for disputes over opinions. One believes he may eat anything while the weak man eats only vegetables. Let not him who eats despise him, who abstains. Let not him who abstains pass judgment on him who eats, for God has welcomed him. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls and he will be upheld for the master is able to make him stand.” So I would agree that Paul is saying… And in Colossians he also says, you want to have festivals, new moons, Passover, fine. You want to retain some of your Jewish holidays, fine. You don’t want to, that’s okay. But he also makes clear in other passages, like when the Corinthians were saying, all things are lawful to me. And you know, they’re slaves to their bellies, that he makes it clear that that food and sex are very, very different.
Trent: Like in the case of First Corinthians chapter five he expels someone from the community for engaging in a committed relationship with, was probably his stepmother. We don’t know if the father was alive or not at that time, but he-
Brandan: I question the committed relationship part there.
Trent: Well, why?
Brandan: I don’t think Paul says that it’s a committed relationship. I think this [crosstalk 00:27:02] guy’s having sex with his stepmother and that’s a sinful action.
Trent: Why is it a sinful action? I think I would go to a simple biological argument to say having sex with another… Stepmother here is where I’m going to fall off here.
Brandan: But that’s a problem because when we look at it, it doesn’t say it’s his mother, it says it’s his father’s wife in First Corinthians five.
Trent: So I think that part is ambiguous. But I do think, again, there is a standard. I think Genesis gives us a standard of two people, two people coming together in covenant committed relationship. I think that’s what we’re calling people to when they enter into covenant relationship. This guy having sex with his father’s wife, from what I can understand, that doesn’t sound to me, and I have not done study on that particular passage, so that doesn’t sound like a committed relationship between two equals in a relationship.
Brandan: But it sounds like, to me, that what you’re… And I’ve seen this before when I read arguments and I peruse… I was perusing, I think it was Perez Hilton actually. He’s a self identified gay blogger, not Paris Hilton, ladies and gentlemen, Perez Hilton, self identified gay blogger. You know, I widely peruse the blogosphere to see what the haps are, as my father-in-law would say, “What are the haps?” And he was sharing a story about adult incest. And people were like, just the comments, like it’s gross, it’s disgusting. But I noticed there were a few commenters who said, hey, wait a minute guys. Isn’t this the same thing people tell us all the time?
Trent: Sure.
Brandan: And so it just seems like when you hear about this case, you’re operating from that similar gut instinct that the traditionalists argue when they hear about same sex intercourse.
Trent: I disagree there, I don’t think it’s just a dis… It’s not the ick argument as I would call it, which I think is obviously I think you think it’s probably a weak argument. Just because you’re not attracted to something doesn’t mean that it’s right or wrong.
Brandan: Right.
Trent: However, I do think that there are standards that all humans have had at all times, and incest has generally been condemned across human history. Rape of children has been generally condemned across human history.
Brandan: Sure. And I think the question here is, and most people would agree that intergenerational incest, a father praying on his minor children, for example, there’s a severe power imbalance. You know, that sex with children in general obviously is wrong. Though I would ask the the deeper question why it’s wrong. And the reason I would say why is because children, those prior to puberty, because obviously in the ancient world people who are 13, 14 were entering into marriage. You were entering even as young men, you’re entering into adulthood before he reached the age of 18 because you had to, to survive. And that those were considered valid lawful moral marriages.
Trent: Totally.
Brandan: But prior to puberty, when you have someone who’s like child brides, like nine, seven, six, you have human beings who are not ordered towards the procreative end of marriage yet. They have not simply developed properly to reach that particular end. So that’s a clear sign they’re not suitable marriage partners. But then for me, that feeds us back into that kind of Genesis creation narrative. The same as when you say, well it’s clear the Bible gives us that it’s two people. Well I would say, well why is it two? You know, well male, female would explain that. I mean then that would also seem to undercut your figurings on polyamory too.
Trent: So here’s the thing, my problem with the Genesis argument is, I think Catholics are great at this and I get the appeal of this, but a lot of this is symbolic, and we put too much stock in the symbolism to translate into literal reality. So I don’t think Genesis one and two is literal history, I think it’s a poetic musing about how the world was created.
Brandan: I use the term epic poetry.
Trent: Great.
Brandan: But I do believe there are specific literal trues that are communicated.
Trent: And I think we would probably disagree. Like I don’t think Adam and Eve were historical people. I don’t think that’s how the world works. I think science tells us that’s not how the world began and how humans emerged on planet Earth. But I think there’s a truth trying to be communicated through Genesis one and two. And when we take it literally, or we infuse it with literal meaning, or take the symbols that are being communicated and the stories that are being communicated and make that law for all people at all times, I think we do a great injustice both to what the text was trying to do. And we’re imposing-
Brandan: Well, what do you think Jesus was trying to do with it in Matthew 19? He appeals to it and then he prohibits remarriage after divorce.
Trent: Right. So I think, again, so Jesus is talking to a specific person in a specific context, talking about marriage between a man and a woman. That was a question posed to him.
Brandan: Right.
Trent: So he’s answering that question. But I think what we should do, how I interpret scripture, how I teach scripture, is I’m looking at these individual statements that have been made in particular contexts and stories and saying, what is the principal being communicated here? And using that principle for our modern teaching as Christians. And so the principal I see there is covenant commitment. Jesus is saying the problem here with divorce is that you’ve made a commitment with God and people and now you’re breaking that commitment. And so I condemn that. And I think he’s answering that question that way using the context that the male and female that are being brought in that particular story.
Brandan: Well, but it seems to be a particular kind of covenant commitment. Like the language of one flesh is not used when it comes to things like adoption, which occurs frequently in the Old Testament-
Trent: And the New Testament it kind of is.
Brandan: Where the term one flesh?
Trent: I would say, I mean it’s spiritual adoption into Christ. Paul talks a lot about us becoming one body, one flesh.
Brandan: Well, he doesn’t say that we become one flesh with Christ. He talks about that we are one body and that we’re all united under the grace of God. But that term that they become one flesh seems it’s very specific of a kind of bond that for me that that’s not poetic. That what it means to be one flesh, to be unified, a union only exists when two incomplete parts come together, ordered towards something beyond them as a whole.
Trent: So you believe that a man is incomplete without a woman.
Brandan: He is incomplete when it comes to the goal of marriage and procreation. Yes, because for example, all my reproductive systems are fully actualized in my own body except for one, and that would be the reproductive system. It does not meet its end it’s naturally designed for without another person. But I can eat by myself, I can breathe by myself, but I can’t reproduce by myself. So I do believe there is an incompleteness there in that sense.
Brandan: Thank you so much for listening. We’re going to wrap up this discussion in part three in the next episode of The Council of Trent podcast, so stay tuned for the dramatic conclusion of our dialogue between myself and Brandan Robertson on the question, is homosexuality or homosexual behavior sinful?
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