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In this episode, Trent examines a common objection to the claim that the Old Testament shows homosexual conduct is sinful.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers Apologist, Trent Horn. And today I’m going to address a common objection to the church’s teaching on homosexuality. But before I do that, I myself have an objection. Some of you have not subscribed to the channel yet, but that’s a good thing because you can be one of the subscribers that gets us to a hundred thousand by the end of next month.
So if you want to help us reach that goal, click the subscribe button. And of course, if you want to help us reach more people, please support us at trenthornpodcast.com. All right, so the catechism says that scripture presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, paragraph 2357. But some scholars and activists say these passages are taken out of context. They say that even if some Bible verses seem to condemn same-sex behavior, they don’t apply today.
And so the Bible doesn’t really say homosexual conduct is sinful, which is hard to claim when the Bible clearly says things like, “You shall not lie with a male, as with a woman, it is an abomination,” Leviticus 1822, and, “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,” Leviticus 2013.
The most common objection to citing these passages in Leviticus in particular is I would call it the shellfish objection. A critic says Christians are inconsistent for following Leviticus. Leviticus is prohibition on same-sex behavior, but not its other prohibitions, including on seemingly innocuous behavior like eating shellfish, Leviticus 1110 or mixing fabrics, Leviticus 1919. In his book, The Gay Gospels, Keith Sharpe writes, “Until Christian fundamentalist boycott shellfish restaurants, stop wearing polycotton T-shirts, and stoned to death their wayward offspring, there is no obligation to listen to their diatribes about homosexuality being a sin.
This objection was popularized in a letter to Dr. Laura Schlessinger written in the 1990s. The author, J Kent Ashcraft, asked Schlessinger about her view that homosexuality was quote a biological error and is condemned in the Bible. Ashcraft wrote a satirical letter of agreement saying, “When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle for example, I simply remind them that that Leviticus 1822 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God’s laws and how to follow them.”
Ashcraft then asks Schlessinger questions like whether he should kill a neighbor who works on the Sabbath because of what Exodus 35 verse two says or whether eating shellfish is abominable? The letter sarcastically ends, Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.” This letter was also used for an argument in an episode of the West Wing. And even Father James Martin, surprise surprise, uses this argument when people ask him about Leviticus and homosexuality.
Fr. James Martin:
My friends get their hairs trimmed, including the hair around their temples. Even though this is expressly forbidden by Leviticus 1927. How should they die? And this is my favorite. Now we’re laughing, it’s good to laugh because people use the homosexuality texts in that way without any historical context. This is my favorite. My uncle has a farm. He violates Leviticus 1919 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his… With the homosexuality things that come from Leviticus, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread, cotton and polyester. So that’s context. I think we need context. Thank you.
Trent Horn:
All right, so what’s wrong with the shellfish objection. The Old Testament contains some laws that were only binding upon ancient Israel, the ritual ceremonial laws. And other laws that would be binding for all people and all times and places, the moral law, especially those found in the Ten Commandments.
The former ritual laws were temporary in nature. They were meant to keep Israel a unique and holy nation in comparison to the debauchery of its pagan neighbors. But the latter moral laws, they forbade evils like murder or adultery. These laws were not pedagogical in nature. They were meant to permanently protect God’s people from sin. That’s why even though Jesus declared all foods clean, he did not declare all sexual relationships to be clean.
And so Jesus affirmed the mosaic laws prohibition on adultery. Or decide another example, even though St. Paul said circumcision was not necessary and could even hinder a person’s salvation, he also said that the man in 1st Corinthians, Chapter 5, who was having sex with his stepmother, a violation of Leviticus 1808 and Deuteronomy 2230 by the way, he said, “That man should be cast out of the community.”
In Galatians 3 verses 24 through 26, Paul says, “The mosaic law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian. For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith.”
The word rendered custodian is pedagogos from which we get the English word pedagogy. In the ancient world, a pedagogos was a kind of babysitter who taught children in his care of valuable lessons. And the mosaic law taught God’s people how to understand his unique and absolute holiness. The Old Testament scholar, John Goldingay puts it this way, “Food is an expression of identity. God takes that fact and makes it contribute to the forming and articulating of Israel’s identity. Jews don’t eat pork. It’s one of the things that makes them stand out and keeps them separate.
God is holy, which means being different, being set apart. Israel is holy, which means being different, being set apart as the Jewish people have always been. Their distinctive customs meant they were always distinguishable from other people’s.”
One analogy I use for the ritual and the moral laws would be with my own children. So I have two rules for my children. Hold my hand when you cross the street and don’t drink what’s under the sink. Eventually my children get old enough, they don’t have to hold my hand anymore, but they will never be old enough to drink what’s under the sink. There are certain things that are always bad for them no matter what. So when it comes to Israel, the ritual laws did not have to be permanent. They were necessary for growth and development for keeping Israel distinct. But the moral laws are permanent because these actions are always sinful no matter what.
The goal of being distinct, from surrounding pagan culture is also seen in laws that condemned activities like cross-dressing in Deuteronomy 22, where planting more than one seed in a field, or as I mentioned earlier, wearing a fabric of different materials, Leviticus 19.
All of these offenses involve the idea of illicit mixing. The catechism says that God’s revelation involves a specific divine pedagogy. God communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages, the supernatural revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate word, Jesus Christ. In Romans 7:12, Paul says, “The law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good.” But Hebrews 7:19 admits the law made nothing perfect. The law was good, but not good enough.
It also contained what the Second Vatican Counsel called imperfect and provisional things like animal sacrifices or ritual cleansing laws that would not be a part of God’s final universal plan to redeem all of humanity.
All of these things would point to their ultimate fulfillment in Christ, and so they would at some point no longer be necessary once Christ came in the flesh. But the moral laws would always be necessary because they reflect God’s will for all people and especially those under the law of Christ as Galatians 6:2 puts it.
So do the Old Testament’s laws on homosexuality fall under the temporary ritual laws or the permanent moral laws. We can know the Old Testament’s prohibitions of homosexual behavior are part of the perpetually binding moral law because Leviticus 1822 is sandwiched between moral laws, not ceremonial ones.
Verse 20, condemns adultery. Verse 21, condemns child sacrifice. And verse 23, condemns bestiality. Moreover, Leviticus makes it clear that actions like adultery, bestiality, and same-sex relations were part of the moral law that also applied to non-Jews. Only Jews were expected to follow things like the dietary rules.
God had judged the other pagan nations for engaging in moral defilements, and he expelled them from the land for doing so. Leviticus 1824 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 punished its iniquity and the land vomited out its inhabitants.”
However, the late revisionist scholar John Boswell claims that these prohibitions were actually part of the ritual ceremonial law because they describe homosexuality as an abomination. Boswell writes, “The Hebrew word toevah, here translated abomination does not usually signify something intrinsically evil like rape or theft, but something which is ritually unclean for Jews.” But toevah is often used to describe serious moral offenses that even Gentiles could be held accountable for committing. These include murder, lying, adultery, child sacrifice, and oppressing the poor.
Other revisionist claim Leviticus is only condemning prostitution that took place in pagan temples or sex between men and children, petiresti. But the passages in Leviticus do not limit either their condemnation or their punishments only to certain kinds of homosexual behavior. For example, the texts never say, “You shall not lie with a male prostitute.” They just say, “A male shall not lie with a male as with a woman.”
Ancient Mesopotamian texts like the Almanac of Incantations do describe consensual same-sex relationships during this period. It wasn’t an unheard of concept in the ancient world. So Leviticus is condemning these kinds of relationships, not just prostitution. There’s a word for prostitutes in Hebrew, kedeshem, but it’s not used in these passages. The law also treats this as a consensual act between two adults because both individuals are given the same punishment for breaking a law, which would be unjust if this were petiresti, an act committed against a child who doesn’t deserve any kind of punishment.
Moreover, unlike with idolatry, murder, adultery, or breaking the Sabbath, the Old Testament never prescribes the death penalty for violating mere ceremonial laws like the kosher food laws. Leviticus 20 mandates exile for someone who becomes unclean by having sex with a menstruating woman, but it prescribes death for adultery, bestiality, and same-sex behavior.
All of which fall under the unchanging moral law. The fact that today we don’t enforce such harsh penalties for these acts does not mean these acts are not serious violations of the moral law. The idea that Jesus upheld the Old Testament laws might surprise people who believe he simply, simply did away with them. But Jesus said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them,” Matthew 5:17.
In some cases, this fulfillment took the form of strengthening these laws such as when Jesus commanded the love of both neighbor and enemy. And when he condemned lust as a type of adultery. Or when he condemned anger as a type of murder. When it comes to sexual ethics, Jesus strengthened those laws as well, especially with his teaching on divorce.
If Jesus would not approve of divorce to serve a sexual ethic based solely on consent and instead say that a sexual ethic must be rooted in the permanence established in the creation narratives of Genesis, then there is no way Jesus would approve of sexual relationships that completely contradict the sexual complementarity male female pairing that is also taught in those same creation narratives. God made man, male and female and created sex as a way for men and women to become one flesh.
This is something that cannot happen in a same-sex context because the bodies of people of the same-sex have no procreative potential. And no an infertile opposite sex couple and a same-sex couple are not both infertile. One has a procreative potential blocked by disease or a disorder, whereas the other couple may be completely fertile. They just aren’t engaging in the marital act so they can never be said to become one flesh.
Finally, when revisionists use the shellfish objection, they’re almost always inconsistent about it. Father James Martin will use this objection to say, Leviticus’ teaching on homosexuality no longer applies today, but he will use Leviticus’ teachings on the foreigner in the land to apply it to modern issues of immigration. He’ll quote Leviticus 1934, “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native born among you.” And he’ll take that and just completely ignore the differences between the culture of the Bible and modern nation states and say that, that basically means we should have an extremely open immigration policy.
Even though these are two completely different contexts that are being mentioned. Here Leviticus can be applied to modern debates about immigration, but it can’t be applied to sexual acts like homosexuality that did exist during the time when Leviticus was written even though modern nation states and borders and issues related to immigration were not in existence during the time of Leviticus, it’s simply inconsistent.
All right, so I hope this was helpful for you and that it can help you show people that the Old Testament is not something that we can just reject because we feel like it no longer applies today. That’s what the heretic marcion did in the second century. The Old Testament reveals God’s eternal moral law for his people and the New Testament perfects that law on the person of Christ who through his grace, allows us to live out God’s law to be a light to the world. So thanks again so much for watching, and I hope that you all have a very blessed day.
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