Audio only:
In this episode Trent responds to Fr. Casey Cole’s video “What does the Bible ACTUALLY Say about Homosexuality?”
Transcript:
Father Casey Cole just released a video asking the question, “What does the Bible actually say about homosexuality?” But instead of giving us solid answers, Father Casey just creates more confusion, and provides ammunition for critics who want to completely reject the Bible’s teaching on sexuality. I wasn’t planning to address this topic again, because I just covered it in my last episode on the pro-gay documentary 1946, but I felt it was justified because Father Casey just released this episode on his channel.
Now, to be clear, Father Casey claims to fully support and defend the church’s teaching on homosexuality, so he’s not like the outright dissenters that you see in the 1946 documentary. However, many of Father Casey’s claims about the Bible are the same ones made in that 1946 documentary. In doing this, whether he knows it or not, he’s undermining the strong teaching on sexuality and scripture, and provides support for those who want to outright dissent against church teaching. So let’s jump in and see what he gets wrong, but also what Father Casey gets right.
There is no passage that speaks to the concept of homosexuality, per se. There are a few passages that speak of homosexual acts, but often mixed together with other circumstances that make any definitive statement about homosexuality difficult to make, not impossible, and ultimately not ambiguous, but also not as clear as some might make it out to be.
The catechism does make what we would informally call a definitive statement on the matter, when it says, “Basing itself on sacred scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” Saying the Bible doesn’t speak to the concept of homosexuality is like saying the Bible doesn’t speak to the concept of alcoholism. True, the Bible does not talk about the genetic, social, and psychological origins of attractions or how often they persist, those are scientific questions. Likewise, the Bible doesn’t talk about how a predisposition to alcohol abuse can have a genetic and social component, those are also scientific questions. But the Bible is clear that acts of drunkenness and sexual acts outside of marriage, including homosexual acts, are gravely evil. That’s why St. Paul includes both of these sins in his vice list in 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10. So we don’t need the Bible to speak about the origins of people’s desires for sinful acts and the scientific facts around that for the Bible to sufficiently tell us that these acts are indeed sinful.
Take for instance the story of Sodom and Gomorrah found in Genesis 19. For many people, this is the quintessential example of why homosexuality is wrong, and what is most quoted in debates.
Maybe some laypeople do this, but when I debate the Bible’s teaching on homosexual acts, I don’t quote this story, because it’s a story, it’s not a formal command against homosexual acts that we do find in other parts of the Bible. I agree with Father Casey, this is not the best example for a defender of traditional moral principles to use. Father Casey then gives an overview of the story involving the residents of Sodom trying to rape Lot’s guests, who are angels disguised as men, which prompts the city’s destruction. Father Casey then explores what the rest of the Bible says the sin of Sodom exactly was noting that while it references sexual immorality in some verses, none of the verses explicitly say the sin was homosexual acts.
According to the Prophet Ezekiel, the reason Sodom was destroyed had nothing to do with sexual misconduct or faith, but everything to do with greed and injustice. “Now, look at the guilt of your sister, Sodom. She and her daughters were proud, saded with food, complacent in prosperity. They did not give any help to the poor and needy. Instead, they became arrogant and committed abominations before me. Then, as you have seen, I removed them.”
The verse actually says in the singular, “They committed abomination before me.” The Hebrew word translated abomination is toebah, and the same phrase is used in Leviticus 20:13, where it says, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.” As Bible scholar, Robert Gagnon, has noted, “The two other singular uses of toebah in Ezekiel refer to sexual sin.” That’s why ancient and medieval Jewish commenters considered one of Sodom’s sins to be homosexual practice and not just in hospitality. Father Casey goes on to say that some people may have interpreted the story this way at the time, but this should caution us against using it as a definitive proof. I agree, but it does serve as cumulative evidence for the definitive case that divine revelation shows homosexual acts are sinful.
Father Casey then comments on Romans 1, where it clearly says that it is immoral and unnatural for men to have sexual relations with men, and women to have sexual relations with women. However, he says the passage may not mean what we think it means.
And yet, scholars have noted that it still may not be speaking to homosexuality as we understand it today, but rather to straight married men and women who choose to leave their wives and husbands to lie with each other. Even today, proponents of same-sex unions can agree with Paul that leaving your husband or wife to lie with another probably isn’t a good thing.
Maybe, where they might say these people are just gay people in denial who should be free to find love wherever they see fit.
The passage is likely about homosexuality, but it could just as easily be read as condemning adultery.
No, it can’t. If St. Paul was condemning adultery, then he would talk about the most common kind of adultery for straight married people, that is engaging in sexual acts with people of the opposite sex, whether they are married or unmarried themselves. The point of Romans chapter one is that Paul is saying the Gentiles know they have sinned and need redemption in Christ. Even though they never had the Old Testament to teach them, the Gentiles had their consciences and the natural law to guide them, so Paul picks two obvious examples of immorality that a person should know, based on what nature intends and conscience commands, it’s wrong to give worship meant for God to a mere idol, and it’s wrong to give sexual acts meant for persons of the other sex to persons of the same sex.
Also, if Father Casey’s argument is that we can’t be sure what the Bible teaches because some modern scholars have different views, then we could never be sure of anything the Bible teaches, because you can always find some scholar who says all kinds of crazy things about the Bible. The scholar he’s probably referring to is John Boswell, a self-identified gay Catholic who gave an academic veneer to this kind of revisionism with books like Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. In that book, he said the following of Romans chapter one, “The persons Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual. What he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons.” This coheres to Father Casey’s claim that Paul might only be condemning people who are, “straight,” quote, unquote, but choose to go against their own nature and have sex with people of the same sex.
This is such a silly argument that even critics who say the Bible is not against homosexual acts, even those revisionist critics reject this theory. Matthew Vines, a self-identified gay man, and author of the book, God and the Gay Christian, says Boswell is wrong because, quote, “Paul seems to be describing latent desires that were being expressed, not brand new ones. I don’t think it’s consistent to say that Paul rejected same-sex behavior only when it didn’t come naturally to the people involved.” So Father Casey has given us nothing to doubt the traditional understanding of these verses.
The same issue may be at play in passages like 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10, and 1 Timothy 110, in which lists are given for those who will be excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven, and sodomites are listed. At first reading, it would seem pretty clear that the text is referring explicitly to homosexuality, and yet the note from the New American Bible, the translation produced by the Catholic bishops, offers a helpful insight.
The NAB was produced by a few Bible scholars in the middle of the 20th century, and was later approved in the 1980s as the only translation that can be used in Latin rite liturgies. However, that does not mean the bishops wrote or even endorsed the footnotes in this Bible, as we’ll see.
The Greek word translated as boy prostitutes may refer to catamite, boys or young men who were kept for the purposes of prostitution, a practice not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world. In Greek mythology, this was the function of Ganymede, the cup bearer of the gods, whose Latin name was Catamitus. The term translated sodomites refers to adult males who indulged in homosexual practices with such boys. It’s possible, even probable, that what’s being condemned here is not homosexuality as a concept or same-sex unions as we understand them today, but pedophilia, while we can read the word sodomite as its modern equivalent.
I also spoke about this in my review of the 1946 documentary, but this is easily one of the worst explanations of what is being condemned in 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10. I wish Father Casey would slow down and see what he is saying. This passage doesn’t just condemn sodomites, or in Greek, arsenokoites, man bedders, it condemns malakoi, Greek for softies, which he renders, and the NAB renders, boy prostitutes. These boy prostitutes were young. In Latin, some of them were called puer delicatus, exquisite and dainty boys, about 12 to 13 years old, as depicted on this Roman cup from the first century. This includes Ganymede, who was between the ages of 12 and 16, though some ancient Greeks disputed that Ganymede was a sexual partner of Zeus. Instead, the story of Ganymede being used for sexual favors was probably invented by the cretins to justify their pederastic rape of young boys.
The philosopher Plato wrote the following in his laws, “When male unites with female for procreation, the pleasure experienced is held to be due to nature, but contrary to nature, when male mates with male, or female with female, and that those first guilty of such enormities were impelled by their slavery to pleasure, and we all accused the Cretans of concocting the story about Ganymede.” By the way, this shows Paul was correct in Romans chapter one, because at least some of the Gentiles knew homosexual acts were unnatural, even if others engaged in them. It also shows Paul was right in Titus chapter one, the letter he wrote to Titus, who was left on the island of Crete to minister there. Paul writes, “One of themselves, a prophet of their own said ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’ This testimony is true.” And no, I’m not going to address the paradox of a lying Cretans saying, “All Cretans are liars.” Have fun with that as you will.
Now, let’s fast-forward to ancient Rome and Emperor Nero. He had one of these dainty boy slaves, named Sporus, castrated and dressed up to look like his wife after she died in childbirth the year before. Let’s be clear, these are not boy prostitutes, these are child rape victims. The view Father Casey is suggesting is that St. Paul taught that the men who rape children and the children being raped will both not inherit the Kingdom of God. That’s horrible. Instead, we should hold the common sense view, that St. Paul was condemning men, arsenokoites, who engage in same sex relations, whether it is raping boys who are not culpable, or engaging in sex acts with other grown men, the malakois, softies, who can be held accountable for their actions, regardless of what some academic biased towards defending homosexuality might write in the NAB.
Father Casey then goes over the passages in Leviticus, and says they aren’t helpful because…
Surely there will be some that point out that Christians are no longer bound by the law of Moses, and even though we know that moral truths are part of the eternal law and do not change, some may not be convinced.
Except we can show that these passages about homosexual acts are grouped with other passages that deal with universal moral prohibitions, not just old ritual laws. In Leviticus 18, we see this in the fact that verse 20 condemns adultery, verse 21 condemns child sacrifice, and verse 23, right after the verse condemning homosexual conduct, 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 the dietary laws. God had even judged the other pagan nations for engaging in these defilements, and expelled them from the land for doing so.
Father Casey then offers what he thinks is the best argument from the Bible against homosexual acts.
Which is why I believe there is a far more compelling argument to be made from scripture than the ones usually quoted, and it might serve us well to avoid the above passages and look in a different direction. When asking the question of whether same-sex unions have a place in the church today, it might be helpful to look to scripture to acknowledge that none exists. In the 2000-odd pages of the book, in the hundreds of stories and dozens of relationships, not a single instance can be found of God speaking favorably of, endorsing, consecrating, or acknowledging in a covenant a couple in a same-sex union, and so the strongest argument in understanding the will of God on this subject is not what may or may not be condemned, but in what God institutes and upholds.
The problem with this argument is that a revisionist will simply say, “I agree, homosexuality is never portrayed positively in scripture because modern, egalitarian, same-sex relationships simply didn’t exist at that time. The only same-sex relationships at that time involved rape. But now that we have these modern relationships that have come into existence, we can include them alongside heterosexual marriages because the Bible never condemned them.” In the 1946 documentary I reviewed, a Protestant preacher makes Father Casey’s argument, and he gets that exact response.
… example in the Bible that speaks of same sex relations in a positive way. One example.
No.
No, because there are none.
Why? Because it was written in the context of the social-
Well, there are plenty of examples of marriage relationships in the Bible, man and a woman. Paul gives very clear instructions about sexual relationships. In the book of 1 Corinthians chapter seven. He talks about how man and a woman should come together and not deny one another. He gives zero instructions of any other kind of sexual relationship. I would think if I’m writing a book on sexual relationships, and when you should have them and when you shouldn’t have them, and something is common in the church, I would include that which was common.
It was not. There was always an age or power differential when there was a same sex relationship.
Emperors were well known for [inaudible 00:14:34].
Always an age and power differential.
Father Casey himself clears the way for this revisionist argument when he says that what we see in modern same-sex relationships was simply unknown during the Greco-Roman period.
The fact of the matter is that homosexuality as it exists today would’ve been a foreign concept to ancient writers, and so it is unlikely that we are going to find a direct condemnation in the Bible of monogamous same-sex unions debated today. The Bible is an old book. It doesn’t have a direct teaching for every modern reality.
But this is false, as I demonstrated in my previous episode, since you can read Roman authors, like Juvenal, who made fun of same-sex marriages between adult men, the existence of lesbians in antiquity, which was always among equals, and the writings of Plato, like The Symposium, that describe men who only preferred long-term relationships with other men, and women who preferred the same.
The proper ends of all sexual acts are directed towards the union of the couple and procreation. Acts that are closed to either purpose have never been, nor ever will be, permitted. But this is not the same as homosexuality or same sex attraction in itself. While the Bible may be clear in its condemnation of certain actions, it would be a major mistake to read the Bible as condemning people with same sex attractions, or treating them as unfit for The Kingdom.
Here, I agree with Father Casey. That’s why I’m not a fan of the RSV’s translation of 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10, that says, “Homosexuals will not inherit the Kingdom of God.” I’d prefer it say something like, “The active and passive participants in homosexual acts,” or, to put it crudely, “The top and the bottoms will not inherit The Kingdom.” It’s about actions you choose, not orientations or feelings that you have that are beyond your control. Paul was specific in this use because he was not condemning men who penetrate men as being domineering or violent, he was condemning all participants in acts that corrupt the gift of sexuality God gave us, which is why St. Paul also condemns those who commit adultery and fornication. But St. Paul also gives hope to all of us who struggle with sin by writing this, “And such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God.”
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