Orfeo, what conclusions did you come to studying Romans 1 etc? What was the turning point for you?
*Deep breath* Ooookay…. 😉
Seriously, I’ll try and explain the best I can.
I didn’t really come to terms with the interpretation of the Bible passages until AFTER I’d come to better terms with my sexuality. It was as if I couldn’t look at the passages with clear eyes until after I was comfortable with the possiblity that what I’d thought they said wasn’t true.
I remember two major points before that:
1. There was a moment where I felt very strongly, and I was fairly confident that it was God saying this to me, that I needed to spend a period of time AGREEING to lead my life as a gay man, and see where that led. Instead of constantly wrestling, just to be.
2. The next time I was having a major crisis and threatening to go back on point 1, and doubting where that idea had come from, I was talking and praying with a friend at church. Someone else, who knew about my sexuality issues but definitely did NOT know the precise content of the conversation I was having, came up to us with a word of knowledge that ‘God is behind what you are doing’ or something along those lines. I can’t remember the exact wording. I can just remember me and the friend I was talking to looking at each other and both thinking “well, THAT was a clear and direct answer”.
I realise that there are plenty of people who would doubt the truth of what I’m saying here, and it’s always impossible to put it properly into words, but these things persuaded me that God wanted me to experience genuine life as a gay man without all the second-guessing.
It was only in that frame of mind that I was genuinely able to start looking at the ‘clobber passages’ in an honest, clear way. And what I found was that the traditional interpretations of many of them either didn’t stack up AT ALL (Genesis 19, Sodom and Gomorrah – it truly does fall apart), or were doubtful or arguable because of problems to do with translation into English or needing to understand the cultural context.
I looked up a lot of material on the internet, both ‘pro-gay’ and ‘anti-gay’. I threw a lot of it away, on both sides, because it wasn’t rigorous enough or clearly came from an entrenched point of view.
It’s interesting that you mention Romans 1, because most of the BEST bits of commentary I found, whether pro-gay or anti-gay, were the ones that acknowledged that Romans 1 was the most difficult and challenging passage out of all the ones that are usually brought up. I know of theologians, including Tony Campolo, who base their view that homosexuality is wrong just on that passage, because they don’t think any of the other passages are strong enough to justify that view. I respect such people, because at least they haven’t just had a knee-jerk reaction.
Where I’ve ended up, myself, is that I think people have truly dumb ideas about why Sodom was destroyed.
I think that reading Leviticus we need to have an understanding of the word ‘toevah’ that gets translated as ‘abomination’ and recognise that it is used in a lot of places but not always translated the same way, and tended to have more of a ritual/religious connotation not a moral one.
I think that reading a couple of NT passages that refer to ‘arsenokoitai’ we need to understand that Paul may have invented a new word, that there’s very little context available for translating it properly, and that what context there is arguably points to it being a condemnation of adult men using adolescent prostitutes in a very uneven power relationship.
And I think that we need to be aware that reading one verse of Romans, in the context of a larger passage about worshipping idols, is a challenging exercise, and that we need to consider that it may be intended as a reference to the Leviticus passages and therefore has the same connotations.
I don’t KNOW that any of my interpretations are right – I can’t know that for any Bible passage, really. All I can know is that they are open and honest and based on a sense of integrity, not just twisting things to suit my needs.
All of the views I have are based on commentary that seemed willing to explore the text in an honest way. The techniques used to explain the context of passages are exactly the same techniques used to argue why women no longer have to wear hats in church.
Another way of saying it is that I don’t have any sense that my intepretations are definitely WRONG. That’s important. Because the other thing, besides the text, that makes me comfortable with my interpretations is that they do fit with my personal experience. I am far happier accepting that I am gay than I ever was denying or suppressing it. Because of that, if someone wants to persuade me that homosexuality is in fact wrong, they really need to PROVE to me that a ‘pro-gay’ interpretation is incorrect. Because attempting to live with an ‘anti-gay’ mindset was such an utter failure for years of my life.
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