In this excerpt from his latest rebuttal video, Trent takes on the “gay revisionist theology” and its attempts to make the Bible say homosexual behavior isn’t sinful. In today’s episode, Trent addresses attempts to do this with passages in the books of Genesis and Leviticus.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Lights, camera, action. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. I’m really excited for today’s episode because it marks a turning point in the podcast history. We’ve done about 400 podcasts episodes so far, and the podcast also exists… well, the Counsel of Trent, I should say, also exists on YouTube. But on YouTube, I had only been doing rebuttal videos and I’ve really enjoyed doing them. I’ve been on a brief hiatus with the move and the new baby, but we’re back. I want to put out as many rebuttal videos as I can and I want to expand our podcasts episodes.
So I won’t just be doing rebuttal videos on YouTube, but all of the episodes of the podcast, I’m going to record on video as well. And not just a camera pointed at me, which is fun, but I’m going to include PowerPoint slides, media. I want to use this visual medium to its most effective level to share what we’re doing here on the podcast. So I’m just really excited about this. I want to thank by the way… for the past 400 episodes, we could not have done this without our patrons trenthornpodcast.com.
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Today, I’m going to be sharing with you a part of the newest rebuttal video that I’ve put up. I’m addressing the subject of gay Christianity, of Christians who claim that the Bible teaches that same-sex behavior, homosexual behavior, is not actually sinful. They’re also called LGBT or gay revisionist theologians. Today, I’m addressing a video that was posted about nine years ago by Matthew Vines. He’s part of the reformation project. He’s trying to get other conservative, evangelical Protestants to change their mind on the issue of homosexuality and come to believe the Bible does not condemn it as a sin.
His main argument is basically that the Bible condemns certain kinds of homosexual behavior, like rape between two men or pederastic exploitation between men and boys, that the Bible never condemns the kinds of sexual relationships you would find between two men and two women today. So his video… and it was posted about nine years ago. When he was 21 years old, he gave this talk. He does a good job actually in giving the presentation. It’s about an hour long online. I thought about addressing a more recent video he’s done, but it’s not nearly as popular and it’s quite technical.
And these are very typical arguments you’ll find when it comes to this issue. So if you want to hear me address the entire video, part one has gone up today and is on the Counsel of Trent YouTube page. So be sure to go to the Counsel of Trent on YouTube, click subscribe, and you can check out part one today where I address Matthew Vines’s kind of opening arguments and his take on the Old Testament. Next week, I’m going to release the second half of the rebuttal video where I confront Matthew Vines’s exegesis, his interpretation of the New Testament’s teachings on homosexual behavior.
So what I want to share with you in the podcast today is an excerpt from part one where Matthew Vines talks about the two… well, the three famous passages in the Old Testament that deal with homosexual behavior; Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the two passages in Leviticus that condemn sexual relations between two men. At this part of the rebuttal video, I’ve let Vines explain the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. A quick biblical history lesson if you forget, Lot was Abraham’s nephew. He lived in Sodom and Gomorrah and it was a pretty wicked place.
Then one day, two angels, disguised as human visitors, enter the city, Lot takes them in because he’s worried about them. Lot was also a judge at the city and he would judge these debaucherous evil people and they ended up being very resentful of Lot. So, all the men in the town go to Lot’s house and they want to rape the two men that have visited Lot, they don’t know that they’re angels. But then, the angels put out a blinding light. Well, actually, Lot offers his daughters to the mob instead. The angels put out a blinding light, everybody escapes, they flee Sodom and Gomorrah because God’s going to destroy the city for its wickedness, and the city is then destroyed.
Though Lot’s wife looks back at the city, even though she was told not to, and turns into a pillar of salt. All right. So here is Vines’s take on the story from his pro-LGBT stance, and then I’ll offer my commentary on the story.
Matthew Vines:
No one in the church or anywhere else is arguing for the acceptance of gang rape. That is vastly different from what we’re talking about. But the men of Sodom wanted to rape other men, so that must mean that they were gay, some will argue, and it was their same-sex desires and not just their threaten to rape that God was punishing. But gang rape of men by men was used as a common tactic of humiliation and aggression in warfare and other hostile contexts in ancient times, it had nothing to do with sexual orientation or attraction. The point was to shame and to conquer. That is the appropriate background for reading this passage in Genesis 19, which notably is contrasted with two accounts of generous welcome and hospitality, that of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 and Lot’s own display of hospitality in Genesis 19.
Trent Horn:
So, Vines is right, that Genesis 19 does not contain an explicit condemnation of same-sex behavior, but the narrative describing the attempted male-on-male rape of the angelic visitors, it adds another layer of horror to the story. Let me give you an example. Just after Lot and his family fled from Sodom and Gomorrah, they go into the hill countries and Lot’s daughters get him drunk. They say, “There are no other men on the earth, let us go into our father so that we may have offspring.” The offspring end up becoming the ancestors of Israel’s enemies. So here, we have what is incestual rape, that Lot’s daughters get Lot drunk and then they have sexual relations with him.
Though honestly, I think that’s poetic justice in the story. Remember Lot tried to offer his daughters to the mob. If he was real here, he’d offer himself. So he offered the daughters to his mob to be raped, and then poetic justice, Lot gets raped by his daughters. It’s a messed up story. It’s just one of those messed up stories we see in the Old Testament, the darkness of human sin. But imagine if we had this story and I said, this story does not tell us anything about the morality of incest. Well, okay, it doesn’t say incest is wrong, but it clearly… because someone might say, “It doesn’t tell us anything about the morality of incest because Lot’s daughters raped their father.”
But if they had a loving relationship, maybe if… you might say, “Well, Trent, who’s going to defend incest, incest is always exploitative?” Well, there’s people who are related to one another through things like surrogacy, egg donation, sperm donation, there are adults like men who come to meet young women who turn out to be their half daughters, they are their daughters because they’re a sperm donor, and they still develop a romantic relationship with this person. So it’s not like the kind of grooming that would take place in an incestual household. Can we say, “Because does the Bible say those loving, committed, adult, non-exploitative ancestral relationships are wrong?”
Yes, it does say that, but you could use the same arguments from the revisionist theologians to argue for polyamory, to argue for incest, by trying to undercut everything the Bible teaches. So yeah, this story, after Sodom and Gomorrah where Lot’s daughters rape Lot, it’s not the strongest argument against incest, but it’s clearly a narrative that shows the story is much more horrible because it involves incest, much the same way the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah does not prove all homosexual behavior is wrong, but the story is much more horrible because it includes this grave, depraved detail of attempted male-on-male gang rape.
So it does comment on the depravity of relationships between two men or two women on same-sex relationships, though in an indirect way. But we’ll continue on. When we get to the other passages, we’ll have more meat to work with on what the Bible explicitly says on this subject.
Matthew Vines:
The actions of the men of Sodom are intended to underscore their cruel treatment of outsiders, not to somehow tell us that they were gay. And indeed, Sodom and Gomorrah are referred to 20 times throughout the subsequent books of the Bible, sometimes with detailed commentary on what their sins were, but homosexuality is never mentioned or connected to them. In Ezekiel 16 verse 49, the prophet quotes God as saying, “Now this was the sin of your sister, Sodom. She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They did not help the poor and needy.” So God himself, in Ezekiel, declares the sin of Sodom to be arrogance and apathy toward the poor.
Trent Horn:
Now, Vines has left out an important part of Ezekiel 16:49. He’s right, I mean, Sodom… any city is going to have more than one sin. Well, look at the Ragnar survey, those who support homosexual behavior, they also support cohabitation, pornography, polyamory, abortion. So those who accept this behavior, there’s going to be other sins as well. So in the Old Testament, it’s not surprising that Sodom also had pride, they didn’t help the poor, they were haughty.
But I also noticed that Ezekiel 16:50 says, “They did abominable things, they practiced toebah, which is the same way as we’ll see in Leviticus that homosexual behavior is described as a toebah. So there’s strong evidence that Ezekiel is referring to the sexual immorality that the people in Sodom and Gomorrah took part in as well as part of the judgment on them.
Matthew Vines:
In Matthew 10 and Luke 10, Jesus associates the sin of Sodom with inhospitable treatment of his disciples. Of all the 20 references to Sodom and Gomorrah throughout the rest of scripture, only one connects their sins to sexual transgressions in general.
Trent Horn:
So this is a really misleading statement on Vines’s part when he says, well, only one passage out of the dozens in the New Testament that talks about Sodom and Gomorrah mention sexual immorality, but the other passages don’t describe why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. Jesus references Sodom and Gomorrah in the synoptic gospels merely to show that the judgment that will await the unrepentant cities in Galilee and Judea, those that fail to repent, they will suffer a fate worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. He’s saying, “You’re going to wish you had been in Sodom and Gomorrah, then you’ll see what will happen if you fail to repent.” This is a continual theme we see in the New Testament.
You go to the end of Hebrews chapter 10, where the author of Hebrew says that in the old covenant, when you disobey the old covenant, the punishment was physical death. In the new covenant, it’s worse, it’s spiritual death. It’s unending damnation. That is what Jesus is talking about, or he’s talking about the suddenness of it. So like in Luke 17 when he mentioned sodomy, he says, “Likewise, as it was in the days of Lot, they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and brimstone rained from heaven and it destroyed them all. So will it be on the day when the son of man is revealed?” So he’s comparing the destruction, the suddenness, the need to repent.
He’s not making a comment on why Sodom was judged. But we also have other examples from beyond Jude, which as you’ll see here Vine tries to explain a way I would say desperately. But Peter talks about this, he says, “If by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, He condemned them to extinction and made them an example to those who were to be ungodly.” So Peter’s talking about how God will rescue his people from harm. He said, “If He rescued righteous Lot greatly distressed by the licentiousness of the wicked, by the licentiousness, sexual immorality of the wicked, for by what that righteous man saw and heard as he lived among them, he was vexed in his righteous soul day after day with their lawless deeds, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial.”
But this is like Jude as we see when Vines continues. He’ll say, “Well, it’s sexual immorality. It could be lots of things, it doesn’t necessarily mean same-sex behavior.” Well, now he’s raising the bar so high it’ll be almost impossible to clear it. As I said before, Sodom and Gomorrah is not the best biblical evidence against the morality of same-sex relations. The best is Genesis, Matthew 19, and other passages that affirm life-giving nature of sexual love. And Jesus is teaching on that, especially when you compare Jesus’s teaching on divorce. I mean, Matthew Vines is trying to say, “Look, it’s wrong to have a teaching that prevents someone from having happiness and fulfillment by getting married.”
What do you do with Jesus’s teaching in Mark 10 where he says a person who is divorced and remarried commits adultery. Jesus prohibited that if you’re divorced, even if someone commits the crime of divorce against you and leaves you as an abandoned spouse, he says that does not give you the right to commit adultery by remarrying if you still have a valid marriage and you’ve only been civilly divorced. So Vines’s argument against so-called homosexual behavior, it would just completely decimate Jesus’s teaching on divorce and the other teachings on sexual morality as well. In fact, Brandon Robertson to his credit in the dialogue that I had with him… Let me bring up the picture of that here.
When he and I were talking about this issue, he admitted the Catholic church is more consistent on sexual morality than many Protestants, because many Protestants think there’s nothing wrong with divorce. If someone’s divorced and they don’t want to be lonely, they should be able to get married. And what Jesus said, well, he couldn’t have meant these kinds of couples. So yeah, I side with people like Matthew Vines, that if your church says, “We don’t want this guy to be alone forever, we should let him get remarried, even if Jesus said that’s wrong, well, yeah, if you allow that, then you need to open the door…” I mean, you don’t need to, but it totally opens the door for same-sex relationships, all kinds of relationships. So, people who have opposite sex attractions, they do need to get their house in order first.
Matthew Vines:
The New Testament book of Jude verse seven states that Sodom and Gomorrah “gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.” But there are many forms of sexual immorality and perversion. Even if Jude seven is taken as specifically referring to the threatened gang rape from Genesis 19:5, that still has nothing to do with the kinds of relationships that we’re talking about. It’s now widely conceited by scholars on both sides of this debate that Sodom and Gomorrah do not offer biblical evidence to support the belief that homosexuality is a sin.
But our next two verses from Leviticus, “Do not lie with a man as one does with a woman, it is an abomination,” continue to be commonly cited to uphold that belief. And they certainly can be claimed to be of greater relevance to this issue than the matter of gang rape, so they deserve our careful study and attention to back out for a moment and provide some context. Leviticus is the third book of the Bible. We have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Beginning in Exodus and continuing through to Deuteronomy, God delivers the law to the Israelites, which contains 613 rules in total.
The book of Leviticus deals primarily with ceremonial issues related to appropriate worship practices at the tabernacle, the various offerings and how to make them, clean versus unclean foods, diseases and bodily discharges, sexual taboos, and rules for the priests. Chapter 18 of Leviticus contains a list of sexual prohibitions and chapter 20 follows this up with a list of punishments.
Trent Horn:
Notice how Vines is conflating the temporary ritual purity laws of the Old Testament, like the prohibitions on eating unclean animals or mixing different seeds in the same plot of land. Those were meant to be temporary provisions to keep the people of God separated from their pagan neighbors. But the Old Testament also contained plenty of moral laws that were enduring for God’s people forever. So this is pretty common among pro-LGBT revisionist theologians. They’ll say, “Oh, well, Leviticus says homosexuality is wrong,” but remember Leviticus has all these other rules in it we don’t follow.
Yet these same advocates, when other issues come up that they support will cite freely from the Old Testament. I’ll give you an example. I often see this verse cited when issues about immigration come up. “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you and you shall love him as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord, your God.” Now, obviously this is true. Some advocates though will say this verse means Christians must support some particular kind of immigration policy or that Christians must support open borders, immigration policy.
And here would be appropriate to say, no, immigration and regions and migration in the ancient near East, 3,000 years ago, 3,500 years ago was far different than what we were dealing with in today’s geopolitical climate. I’m not going to get into a digression about immigration. My point is, these advocates will cite from the Old Testament, regardless of context, when it fits their narrative, but when we bring up the issue of homosexuality, suddenly all these qualifications come in and try to throw away the Old Testament as if it’s only ritual purity laws, which is not. And there’s strong evidence that the injunctions against homosexual behavior belong to the enduring moral code of the law. They’re not mere ritual purity requirements.
Matthew Vines:
In these chapters, male same-sex intercourse is prohibited, and the punishment for violators is death. These specific verses are Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, they read, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.” And 20:13 goes on to say, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination, they shall surely be put to death. Their blood is upon them.” Well, there we have it. For many, the biblical debate is now over. It’s surprising that so many people continue to believe that these verses in Leviticus somehow form the heart of the theological debate about homosexuality.
They are in fact of secondary significance to the later passage by Paul in Romans 1. And the reason for that isn’t that their meaning is unclear, but that their context within the Old Testament law makes them inapplicable to Christians. Much of the New Testament deals with the issue of the place of the old law in the emerging Christian Church. As Gentiles were being included for the very first time in what was formerly an exclusively Jewish faith, there arose ferocious debates and divisions among the early Jewish Christians about whether Gentile converts should have to follow the law with its more than 600 rules.
In Acts chapter 15, we read how this debate was resolved. In the year 49 AD, early church leaders gathered at became to be called the Council of Jerusalem and they decided that the old law would not be binding on Gentile believers.
Trent Horn:
The point of the Council of Jerusalem that’s described in Acts 15 is that Gentiles do not have to become Jews to enter into the new covenant. That’s why things like circumcision weren’t required. But Vines is being too broad when he says that the old law did not apply to Gentiles, because some of it did. No, they did not have to go through the old markers of the covenant, like circumcision, for example, but the Gentile converts were still expected to maintain elements of the old covenant and the old laws that are part of that enduring moral law.
That’s why in Acts 15, James says in verses 19 through 20, “Therefore, my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the pollution of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood.” Now, the latter part is more disciplinary, it was softened later. We even see that in the writings of St. Paul. But clearly, the Old Testament injunctions on idolatry and on unchastity or sexual immorality still applied even to the Gentile believers, and that would have included the Old Testament’s prohibitions on homosexual behavior.
Matthew Vines:
The most culturally distinctive aspects of the old law were the Israelites’ complex dietary code for keeping culture and the practice of male circumcision. But after the Council of Jerusalem’s ruling, even those central parts of Israelite identity and culture no longer applied to Christians. Although it’s a common argument today, there’s no reason to think that these two verses from the old law in Leviticus would somehow have remained applicable to Christians, even when other much more central parts of the law did not. In Galatians 6, Paul goes so far as to say that in Christ, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything.
He speaks of the old law as “a yoke of slavery” that he warns Christians not to be burdened by. In Colossians 2, Paul writes that through Christ, God “forgave” us all our sins having canceled the written code with its regulations that was against us and that stood opposed to us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross.
Trent Horn:
Vines is right that Paul did not want the Gentiles to be placed under the yoke of the mosaic law and the idea that they just had to become Jews before they could become Christians. He didn’t want that. That’s a consistent theme in Romans and Galatians. But to say that Paul did not have concern for applying the old covenant law, especially sexual purity, is just a complete misreading of Saint Paul. It’s an absolute, complete misreading. When you look at the writings of Saint Paul, it’s very clear he desired to employ the enduring moral precepts of the Old Testament, especially related to sexual purity, in the new covenant age.
That’s just abundantly clear. You go look at 1 Corinthians chapter five, you have a case of consensual incest between a man and his stepmother, and Paul says, “Not even the pagans do this kind of stuff, but you guys should know because it’s prohibited in Leviticus 18 through 20.” What’s also prohibited there? Same-sex relations. We see homosexuality in 1 Corinthians six, which we’ll talk about shortly, as well as the injunction against prostitution. We see his concern about obeying these prescripts of the law of maintaining purity in Galatians chapter five. If you are led by the spirit, you are not under the law, gay were not under the law.
But because we’re led by the spirit, we are led under a new law, so to speak. Paul says the works of the flesh are plain, immorality, impurity, licentiousness. We’re led by the spirit. We may not be under the law, but in the spirit, we follow the law of Christ and all of the purity requirements that it entails. Then in Colossians, he says that we are to be blameless. The goal of us being under the new covenant is to be presented to the father pure and blameless, unless you shift in faith and abandon the faith.
Matthew Vines:
In the gospels, Jesus describes himself as the fulfillment of the law. And in Romans 10 verse four, Paul writes, “Christ is the end of the law.” Hebrews eight verse 13 states that the old covenant is now “obsolete” because Christ is the basis of the new covenant freeing Christians from the system of the old law, most of which was specific to the ancient Israelites, to their community, and their unique worship practices. Christians have always regarded the book of Leviticus in particular as being inapplicable to them in light of Christ’s fulfillment of the law.
Trent Horn:
Sure, the cereal offerings, the votive offerings, the rules in Leviticus related to animal sacrifice do not apply to Christians because Christians have one sacrifice represented to the Father, which is Christ sacrifice on Calvary. But that doesn’t mean you can just write off the whole book of Leviticus. If anything, the one book in the Old Testament, in the Torah, I should say the pentatonic, the first five books of scripture, that I would say apply the most to Christians is Leviticus, or at least the very part of the holiness code we’re talking about, Leviticus 18 through 20, which has ritual purity laws, but also moral laws that exist to this very day.
Here’s one of the most famous, Leviticus 19 verses 17 through 19, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbor lest you bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” The golden rule, when Jesus quoted the golden rule, nothing he just came up with. I mean, he came up with it, he’s God, but it wasn’t foreign to the people he was speaking with. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” that’s straight from Leviticus. Jesus expanded the concept of neighbor to be any person, not just a member of your tribe, not just a member of God’s chosen people, not just a fellow Jew, but a Gentile as well.
So these enduring moral laws, some of them are very deeply rooted in Leviticus. The golden rule is one of them. The injunctions on incest, sexual morality, and homosexuality are others from the same section of Leviticus.
Matthew Vines:
So while it is true that Leviticus prohibits male same-sex relations, it also prohibits a vast array of other behaviors, activities, and foods that Christians have never regarded as being prohibited for them. For example, chapter 11 of Leviticus forbids the eating of pork, shrimp and lobster, which the church does not consider it to be a sin. Chapter 19 forbids planting two kinds of seed in the same field, wearing clothing woven of two types of material, and cutting the hair at the sides of one’s head. Christians have never regarded any of these things to be sinful behaviors, because Christ’s death on the cross liberated Christians from what Paul called the yoke of slavery.
We are not subject to the old law, but the old law does contain some rules that Christians have continued to observe, the 10 commandments for example. So some argue that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, the prohibitions of male same-sex relations should be an exception to the rule and that they should continue to have force for Christians today. There are three main arguments that are made for this position. The first is the verses’ immediate context. Leviticus 18 and 20 also prohibit adultery, incest, and bestiality, all of which continue to be regarded as sinful, and so homosexuality should be as well.
But just three verses away from the prohibition of male same-sex relations, in chapter 18 verse 19, sexual relations during a woman’s menstrual period are also prohibited. And this too is called an abomination at the chapters close. But this is not regarded as sinful behavior by Christians. Rather, it’s seen as a limited matter of ceremonial cleanliness for the ancient Israelites.
Trent Horn:
The problem with this kind of reasoning is that even in this section of the holiness code, the prohibition on having relations with a menstruating woman is not given capital punishment, but the other infractions such as bestiality, adultery, homosexual behavior, it is sanctioned by capital punishment. That doesn’t mean that we mete out capital punishment for these crimes today, but even at that time, the ritual purity element concerned with sex with a menstruating woman, which is something that for Israelites could have happened even accidentally, it could have happened as something you didn’t realize, you kind of stumbled into it.
You don’t stumble into same-sex relationships. So it’s treated differently in the code. And just to take this one element and say, “Well, all of this were just custom and ritual, disciplines for the Jews,” that’s absolutely not true. The serious, grave acts in Leviticus 18 were also standards that were held for other non-Jews. Leviticus 18:24 through 25 says, “Do not defile yourselves by any of these things, for by all these, the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves; and the land became defiled, so that I punish its inequity and the land vomited out its inhabitants. So this is clear that this was a moral standard that was expected beyond Jewish ritual purity law.
It was something that all people were held to. And we have ancient Mesopotamian records from things like the Almanac of Incantations and other sources that describe various punishments for same-sex behavior. What’s interesting, in the old Mesopotamian law codes, same-sex behavior was punished if someone from a lower class engaged in same-sex relations with someone from a higher class. So it was seen as a way to commit violence against another person. Whereas the Bible treats it very differently, not as a weapon to be used, but to recognize that two people who engage in this act can be held to be equally culpable for their actions for distorting God’s gift of sexuality.
So, Vines will bring up the death penalty part in a little bit. But it’s very clear, just citing the prohibition against menstruating women does nothing to remove the gravity of these other serious crimes here in the holiness code. I mean, honestly, I feel like you could take the same revisionist theology and you can go back to Leviticus and you can make a case for incest. Well, look at all the injunctions against incest in Leviticus 18. All these injunctions, yeah, they’re there, but you know what it also says, “Don’t have sex with a menstruating woman,” therefore, the incest laws, they don’t apply. You can see the folly of trying to argue this way instead of reading the text in its context and just seeing what it clearly says.
Matthew Vines:
And all of the other categories of prohibitions in these chapters on adultery, incest, and bestiality are repeated multiple times throughout the rest of the Old Testament, both within the law and outside of it; in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Ezekiel. But the prohibitions on male same-sex relations only appear in Leviticus among many dozens of other prohibitions that Christians have never viewed as being applicable to them.
Trent Horn:
I’ll also add this argument about, well, it’s only found here in Leviticus, it’s not repeated, it’s an arbitrary argument. It’s arbitrary. How often does a moral rule in the Bible have to be repeated before it gains force? We only find the golden rule in the book of Leviticus, does that mean it’s just not really that important, because it’s only in Leviticus? We find negative versions of the rule in Tobit and Sirach, but just because… people will do this with rules that they don’t like, it’s never repeated enough, and rules they do like, as long as it’s mentioned once, that’s good enough for them.
So this is just another arbitrary standard Vines and other revisionists put forward to do anything they can to escape meaning of the texts. They just set up their own arbitrary guidelines of what parts of the text apply today and what don’t.
Matthew Vines:
Well, Leviticus calls it an abomination. And if it was an abomination then, then it certainly can’t be a good thing now. The term abomination is applied to a very broad range of things in the old law; eating shellfish in Leviticus 11, eating rabbit or pork in Deuteronomy 14. These are all called abominations. As I just said, sex during a woman’s menstrual period is also called an abomination. The term abomination is primarily used in the Old Testament to distinguish practices that are common to foreign nations from those that are distinctly Israelite.
This is why Genesis 43:32 says that for the Egyptians to eat with the Hebrews would be an abomination to the Egyptians, and why Exodus 8:26 says that for the Israelites to make sacrifices near the Pharaoh’s palace would be an abomination to the Egyptians. There’s nothing wrong with the Israelites sacrifices of course, the problem with both of these things is that they would blur the lines between practices that are specifically Israelite and those that are foreign. The nature of the term abomination in the Old Testament is intentionally culturally specific. It defines religious and cultural boundaries between Israel and other nations, but it’s not a statement about what is intrinsically good or bad right or wrong. That’s why numerous things that it’s applied to in the Old Testament have long been accepted parts of Christian life and practice.
Trent Horn:
It’s true that toebah, the Hebrew word we translate as abomination, can refer to infractions against the ritual purity laws. But more often in the Old Testament, it refers to infractions against moral laws that are still binding today. Deuteronomy 12:31 uses that word to describe child sacrifice, Ezekiel calls adultery an abomination, Proverbs says murder is an abomination, and we know Ezekiel 16:50 refers to the moral sins of Sodom as abominations, which is good evidence that also includes homosexual conduct. So is Vines going to say, “Well, adultery, yeah, it’s an abomination in the Old Testament, but is it really that bad? I mean, eating shellfish is an abomination.”?
Once again, you could take this revisionist theology and make any sin in scripture turn into a virtue with this kind of relativistic way of looking at the text. It’s clear that in being described an abomination and also as Damien described in Leviticus 18 as something that defiled the other non-Jewish nations, it’s clear that Bible is speaking of this as a moral abomination, not merely a ritual purity matter.
Matthew Vines:
Okay, but the penalty is death. Certainly, that indicates that the behavior in question is particularly bad and we should still regard it as sinful. But this overlooks the severity of all of the other punishments in the old law. Given the threats posed to the Israelites by starvation, disease, internal discord, and attacks from other tribes, maintaining order and cohesiveness was a paramount importance for them. So almost all of the punishments in the Old Testament will strike us as being quite harsh. A couple that has sex during a woman’s menstrual period is to be permanently exiled from the community.
If a priest’s daughter falls into prostitution, she has to be burned at the stake. Anyone who uses the Lord’s name in vain is not only to be reprimanded, but to be stoned. Anyone who disobeyed their parents is to be stoned as well. Even some things that we don’t see as moral issues at all received the death penalty in the Old Testament. According to Exodus 35 verse two, working on the Sabbath was a capital offense. In Ezekiel 18, the death penalty is applied to anyone who charges interest on a loan. This too is called an abomination at the chapter’s close.
Trent Horn:
So, to Vines’ credit, he does anticipate the death penalty objection, that relations with a menstruating woman in Leviticus 18 do not merit capital punishment, but homosexual behavior does, so it’s in a different class of sins. His argument is that, yeah, but here are all of these other sins, things that we don’t consider worthy of capital punishment today. There’s a very subtle switch, what he does here. He tries to rely on us saying, “Yeah, we would never execute someone who committed prostitution. We wouldn’t execute someone who took the Lord’s name in vain.” Right, we wouldn’t do that today, but that doesn’t mean that the sin is not serious. We may not bear out earthly execution, but these sins involve grave matter, they can involve spiritual execution of the soul.
Remember Hebrews chapter 10, if you disobey the mosaic law, the punishment was death. In the new covenant, it’s even worse than physical death, it’s spiritual death, eternal life separated from God. So when he tries to bring in these other examples that include the death penalty in the Old Testament, yeah, we don’t give an earthly death penalty to that today, but you can still be subject to a spiritual death penalty, that if you engage, if you freely choose and understand the gravity of the sin involved and it’s a serious nature of the violation of the commandment involved, then yeah, you could engage in mortal sin clearly through prostitution, taking the Lord’s name in vain, dishonoring one’s parents, not keeping the Sabbath.
So these things have the death penalty attached to them and they still are grave evils today, and that would also include homosexual behavior. Now, the passage on usury, when he throws usury in there… Now, I know some people watching this may say that usury still is a mortal sin. It’s a topic for another video. Usury is just lending. The word just means lending. Today, it’s come to mean lending at extraordinarily high rates of interest or exploitative rates of interest. But I would say that the passage on usury that Vine sites in the Old Testament, it is a cautionary tale, it’s not a prescription to execute someone.
Usury was not an absolute evil among the Israelites like prostitution, taking the Lord’s name in vain, not keeping the Sabbath. Usury was a relative evil because the Old Testament allowed Israelites to lend money to non-Jews at interest. So you couldn’t engage in prostitution with non-Jews, you couldn’t engage in idolatry with non-Jews, but you could lend money to them at interest or usury to non-Jews, you were just prohibited from doing that with your fellow Jews. So it wasn’t an absolute evil even in the time of Israel, it was a relative evil. So the passage that says the man who lends at interest shall die, it’s a cautionary tale saying he’s leading a life that’s reckless.
He’s going to lend money to someone who ends up in a jam and is going to kill him in order to not repay back the loan. It’s a cautionary tale in that regard. It’s not saying, “This is the punishment for lending an interest,” because you could lend at interest in the Old Testament in certain circumstances, but you couldn’t engage in prostitution, blasphemy, dishonoring parents, or homosexual behavior. They’re just completely different classes of sins. They were severe then and they’re severe now.
Matthew Vines:
Simply because something received a death penalty in the Old Testament doesn’t mean that Christians should view it as sinful. There’s too much variance for that to be a consistent and effective approach. The default Christian approach for nearly two millennia now has been to view the particular hundreds of rules and prohibitions in the old law as having been fulfilled by Christ’s death and there is no good reason why Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 should be exceptions to that rule. So if our three Old Testament passages do not, upon closer examination, furnish persuasive arguments against loving relationships for gay Christians, then what about our three New Testament passages?
Trent Horn:
Thank you guys so much for listening. And remember, if you want to hear my full rebuttal video on Matthew Vines in the Old Testament, and then if you want to catch part two where I talk about how Vines misinterprets the New Testament on homosexuality, be sure to go to the Counsel of Trent YouTube page and click subscribe. If you do that, you’ll also catch Thursday and Fridays episodes of the Counsel of Trent Podcast that’ll be airing on YouTube as well. But of course, we’re still going to keep doing the episodes here on the podcast as well. Be sure to go to iTunes or Google play to leave a review.
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