What the Bible Still Says About Homosexuality

/ Benjamin Palmer

A friend from seminary was kind enough to point me towards this article from the CNN BeliefNet blog. Frankly, I didn’t find anything new in it as far as biblical arguments for homosexuality. Strangely, if you’ve read any scholarly works from the consistently Christian end of the spectrum, there’s nothing in this article that Christians haven’t been refuting since at least 1978. Yet the same tired arguments are simply being recycled again and again.

This just proves that what the homosexual rights crowd wants isn’t a conversation or discussion. What they want is a monologue. You would think that if your arguments had been soundly refuted over a period of more than thirty years, you would start to modify your arguments; or maybe respond substantively to your critics. Instead, we just hear the same old arguments all over again, only this time repeated more loudly. So, for the next couple of days, I’m going to break out of my series on civil rights and homosexuality, as much of what this article argues for goes to the heart of the Christian argument against homosexuality as normative ethical behavior.

We’ll begin by dealing with the first argument made by Daniel Helminiak in his blog for CNN:

In the past 60 years, we have learned more about sex, by far, than in preceding millennia. Is it likely that an ancient people, who thought the male was the basic biological model and the world flat, understood homosexuality as we do today? Could they have even addressed the questions about homosexuality that we grapple with today? Of course not.

Hard evidence supports this commonsensical expectation. Taken on its own terms, read in the original languages, placed back into its historical context, the Bible is ho-hum on homosexuality, unless – as with heterosexuality – injustice and abuse are involved.

This is the type of argument I refer to as “chronological snobbery”. The underlying assumption is that we can’t learn anything from those morons who lived thousands of years ago, those peons who were clearly our intellectual inferiors. We also have a case of “proof by assertion” here as well. Mr. Helminiak has simply asserted, not proven, that the human authors of the Bible believed the world was flat. It takes more than just his say so as evidence for that statement to be considered proven. Leaving that aside, however, his argument is non-sensical; whether or not these ancient peoples believed in a flat Earth has nothing to do with sexual ethics. All he’s doing is poisoning the well, by implying that these people were as dumb as a sack of hammers and cannot be trusted. So in the space of just the first paragraph quoted above, we’ve already found no less than three logical fallacies.

The deeper issue is what these two paragraphs say about Helminiak’s view of inspiration. He doesn’t approach the Bible as a book delivered to us by God for our benefit, but rather as a collection of writings from ancient, drooling idiots. This is a position that cannot be taken by a biblical Christian.

Related articles

One thought on “What the Bible Still Says About Homosexuality”

  1. Pingback: What the Bible Still Says About Homosexuality (Part 2) | Southern Reformation

"I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naïve." (Romans 16:17-18) Please read "The Comments Policy."