Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies

This article, published in Sojourners in 1991, later became a chapter titled “Homosexuality” in Richard B. Hays’ influential 1996 book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament. In a 2024 interview with Sojourners, Hays explained how his own understanding of scripture and LGBTQ+ people had changed and said that he wrote a new book, The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story, as an act of repentance. –The Editors, October 2024

Speaking the Truth in Love

Gary came to New Haven in the summer of 1989 to say a proper farewell. My best friend from undergraduate years at Yale was dying of AIDS.

During the week he stayed with my family, we went to films together, we drank wine and laughed, we had long, sober talks about politics and literature and the gospel and sex and such. Above all, we listened to music. Some of it was nostalgic music: the record of our college singing group, which Gary had directed with passionate precision; music of the '60s, recalling the years when we marched together against the Vietnam War -- Beatles, Byrds, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell.

We prayed together often that week, and we talked theology. It became clear that Gary had come not only to say goodbye but also to think hard, before God, about the relation between his homosexuality and his Christian faith. He was angry at the self-affirming gay Christian groups, because he regarded his own situation as more complex and tragic than their stance could acknowledge. He also worried that the gay subculture encouraged homosexual believers to "draw their identity from their sexuality" and thus to shift the ground of their identity subtly and idolatrously away from God.

For more than 20 years, Gary had grappled with his homosexuality, experiencing it as a compulsion and an affliction. Now, as he faced death, he wanted to talk it all through again from the beginning, because he knew my love for him and trusted me to speak without dissembling. For Gary, there was no time to dance around the hard questions. As Dylan had urged, "Let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late."

In particular, Gary wanted to discuss the biblical passages that deal with homosexual acts. Among Gary's many gifts was his skill as a reader of texts. After leaving Yale and helping to found a community-based Christian theater group in Toronto, he had eventually completed a master's degree in French literature.

He had read hopefully through the standard bibliography of the burgeoning movement advocating the acceptance of homosexuality in the church: John J. McNeill, The Church and the Homosexual; James B. Nelson, Embodiment; Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. In the end, he came away disappointed, believing that these authors, despite their good intentions, had imposed a wishful interpretation on the biblical passages. However much he wanted to believe that the Bible did not condemn homosexuality, he would not violate his own stubborn intellectual integrity by pretending to find their arguments persuasive.

The more we talked, the more we found our perspectives interlocking. Both of us had serious misgivings about the mounting pressure for the church to recognize homosexuality as a legitimate Christian lifestyle. As a New Testament scholar, I was concerned about certain questionable exegetical and theological strategies of the gay apologists. Gary, as a homosexual Christian, believed that their writings did justice neither to the biblical texts nor to the depressing reality of the gay subculture that he had moved in and out of for 20 years.

We concluded that our witnesses were complementary, and that we had a word to speak to the churches. The public discussion of this matter has been dominated by insistently ideological voices: on one side, gay rights activists demanding the church's unqualified acceptance of homosexuality; on the other, unqualified homophobic condemnation of homosexual Christians. Gary and I agreed that we should try to encourage a more nuanced discourse within the community of faith. He was going to write an article about his own experience, and I agreed to write a response to it.

Tragically, Gary soon became too sick to carry out his intention. His last letter to me was an effort to get some of his thoughts on paper while he was still able to write. By May of 1990 he was dead.

This article, then, is an act of keeping covenant with a beloved brother in Christ who will not speak again on this side of the resurrection. I commit it to print sorrowfully aware that it will outrage some. At the same time, I commit it to print praying that it will encourage others as Gary was encouraged, and that it will foster compassionate and carefully reasoned theological reflection within the community of faith.

What Does the Bible Say?

The Bible hardly ever discusses homosexual behavior. There are perhaps half a dozen brief references to it in all of scripture. In terms of emphasis, it is a minor concern, in contrast, for example, to economic injustice. What the Bible does say should be heeded carefully, but any ethic that intends to be biblical will seek to get the accents in the right place.

Genesis 19:1-29. The notorious story of Sodom and Gomorrah -- often cited in connection with homosexuality -- is actually irrelevant to the topic. The "men of Sodom" come pounding on Lot's door, apparently with the intention of gang-raping Lot's two visitors -- who, as we readers know, are actually angels. The gang-rape scenario exemplifies the wickedness of the city, but there is nothing in the passage pertinent to a judgment about the morality of consensual homosexual intercourse. In fact, the clearest statement about the sin of Sodom is to be found in an oracle of the prophet Ezekiel: "This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy" (Ezekiel 16:49).

Leviticus 18:22, 20:13. The Holiness Code in Leviticus explicitly prohibits male homosexual intercourse: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination" (Leviticus 18:22). In Leviticus 20:10-16, the same act is listed as one of a series of sexual offenses -- along with adultery, incest, and bestiality -- that are punishable by death. It is worth noting that the act of "lying with a male as with a woman" is categorically proscribed; motives for the act are not treated as a morally significant factor.

Quoting a law from Leviticus, of course, does not settle the question for Christian ethics. The Old Testament contains many prohibitions and commandments that have, ever since the first century, generally been disregarded or deemed obsolete by the church, most notably rules concerning circumcision and dietary practices. Some ethicists have argued that the prohibition of homosexuality is similarly superseded for Christians: It is merely part of the Old Testament's ritual "purity rules" and therefore morally irrelevant today.

The Old Testament, however, makes no systematic distinction between ritual law and moral law. The same section of the Holiness Code also contains, for instance, the prohibition of incest (Leviticus 18:6-18). Is that a purity law or a moral law? In each case, the church is faced with the task of discerning whether Israel's traditional norms remain in force for the new community of Jesus' followers.

1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:10. The early church did, in fact, consistently adopt the Old Testament's teaching on matters of sexual morality and on homosexual acts in particular. In 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10, we find homosexuals included in lists of persons who do things unacceptable to God.

In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul, exasperated with the Corinthians -- some of whom apparently believe themselves to have entered a spiritually exalted state in which the moral rules of their old existence no longer apply to them (see 1 Corinthians 4:8, 5:1-2, 8:1-9) -- confronts them with a blunt rhetorical question: "Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?" He then gives an illustrative list of the sorts of persons he means: "fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, malakoi, arsenokoitai, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers."

I have left the terms pertinent to the present issue untranslated, because their translation has been disputed recently by Boswell and others. The word malakoi is not a technical term meaning "homosexuals" (no such term existed either in Greek or in Hebrew), but it appears often in Hellenistic Greek as pejorative slang to describe the "passive" partners -- often young boys -- in homosexual activity.

The other word, arsenokoitai, is not found in any extant Greek text earlier than 1 Corinthians. Some scholars have suggested that its meaning is uncertain, but Robin Scroggs (The New Testament and Homosexuality) has shown that the word is a translation of the Hebrew mishkav zakur ("lying with a male"), derived directly from Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 and used in rabbinic texts to refer to homosexual intercourse. The Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) of Leviticus 20:13 reads, "Whoever lies with a man as with a woman [meta arsenos koiten gynaikos], they have both done an abomination." This is almost certainly the idiom from which the noun arsenokoitai was coined. Thus, Paul's use of the term presupposes and reaffirms the Holiness Code's condemnation of homosexual acts.

In 1 Corinthians 6:11, Paul asserts that the sinful behaviors cataloged in the vice list were formerly practiced by some of the Corinthians. Now, however, since they have been transferred into the sphere of Christ's lordship, they ought to have left these practices behind. The remainder of the chapter counsels the Corinthians to glorify God in their bodies, because they belong now to God and no longer to themselves.

The 1 Timothy passage includes arsenokoitai in a list of "the lawless and disobedient," whose behavior is specified in a vice list that includes everything from lying to murdering one's parents, under the rubric of actions "contrary to sound teaching according to the glorious gospel." Here again, the Old Testament prohibition is presupposed.

Romans 1:18-32. The most crucial text for Christian ethics concerning homosexuality remains Romans 1, because this is the only passage in the New Testament that places the condemnation of homosexual behavior in an explicitly theological context.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator ... Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their own error" (Romans 1:24-27).

(This is, incidentally, the only passage in the Bible that refers to lesbian sexual relations.)

The aim of Romans 1 is not to teach a code of sexual ethics; nor is the passage a warning of God's judgment against those who are guilty of particular sins. Rather, Paul is offering a diagnosis of the disordered human condition: He adduces the fact of widespread homosexual behavior as evidence that human beings are indeed in rebellion against their creator.

The fundamental human sin is the refusal to honor God and give God thanks (1:21); consequently, God's wrath takes the form of letting human idolatry run its own self-destructive course. Homosexuality, then, is not a provocation of "the wrath of God" (Romans 1:18); rather, it is a consequence of God's decision to "give up" rebellious creatures to follow their own futile thinking and desires.

The unrighteous behavior cataloged in Romans 1:26-31 is a list of symptoms: The underlying sickness of humanity as a whole, Jews and Greeks alike, is that they have turned away from God and fallen under the power of sin (see Romans 3:9).

Paul singles out homosexual intercourse for special attention because he regards it as providing a particularly graphic image of the way in which human fallenness distorts God's created order. God the creator made man and woman for each other, to cleave together, to be fruitful and multiply. When human beings engage in homosexual activity, they enact an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality: the rejection of the Creator's design. They embody the spiritual condition of those who have "exchanged the truth about God for a lie."

Homosexual acts are not, however, specially reprehensible sins; they are no worse than any of the other manifestations of human unrighteousness listed in the passage (verses 29-31), no worse in principle than covetousness or gossip or disrespect for parents.

Repeated again and again in recent debate is the claim that Paul condemns only homosexual acts committed promiscuously by heterosexual persons -- because they "exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural." Paul's negative judgment, so the argument goes, does not apply to persons who are "naturally" of homosexual orientation. The "exchange," however, is not a matter of individual life-decisions; rather, it is Paul's characterization of the fallen condition of the pagan world. In any case, neither Paul nor anyone else in antiquity had a concept of "sexual orientation." To introduce this concept into the passage (by suggesting that Paul disapproves only those who act contrary to their individual sexual orientations) is to lapse into an anachronism.

The expression para physin ("contrary to nature"), used here by Paul, is the standard terminology in dozens of ancient texts for referring to homoerotic acts. (For details, see my article "Relations Natural and Unnatural: A Response to John Boswell's Exegesis of Romans 1" in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Spring 1986.) The fact is that Paul treats all homosexual activity as prima-facie evidence of humanity's tragic confusion and alienation from God the Creator.

One more thing must be said: Romans 1:18-32 performs a homiletical sting operation. The passage builds a crescendo of condemnation, declaring God's wrath upon human unrighteousness, whipping the reader into a frenzy of indignation against others. But then, in Romans 2:1, the sting strikes: "Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things."

We all stand without excuse under God's judgment. Self-righteous judgment of homosexuality is just as sinful as the homosexual behavior itself. That does not mean that Paul is disingenuous in his rejection of homosexual acts and all the other sinful activities mentioned in Romans 1. But no one should presume to be above God's judgment; all of us stand in radical need of God's mercy. That warning must temper the tone of our debate about homosexuality.

The Wider Biblical Framework

Though only a few biblical texts speak of homoerotic activity, all of them express unqualified disapproval. In this respect, the issue of homosexuality differs significantly from matters such as slavery or the subordination of women, concerning which the Bible contains internal tensions and counterposed witnesses. No theological consideration of homosexuality can rest content, however, with a short list of passages that treat the matter explicitly. We must consider how scripture frames the discussion more broadly.

1.God's creative intention for human sexuality. From Genesis 1 onward, scripture affirms repeatedly that God has made man and woman for one another and that our sexual desires rightly find fulfillment within heterosexual marriage (see, for instance, Mark 10:2-9; 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8; 1 Corinthians 7:1-9; Ephesians 5:21-33; Hebrews 13:4).

2. The fallen human condition. The biblical analysis of the human predicament, most sharply expressed in Pauline theology, offers an account of human bondage to sin. As great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as free moral agents, choosing rationally among possible actions, but scripture unmasks that cheerful illusion and teaches us that we are deeply infected by the tendency to self-deception. We are "slaves of sin" (Romans 6:17), which distorts our perceptions, overpowers our will, and renders us incapable of obedience (Romans 7). Redemption (a word that means "being emancipated from slavery") is God's act of liberation, setting us free from the power of sin and placing us within the sphere of God's transforming power for righteousness (Romans 6:20-22, 8:1-11; see Romans 12:1-2).

Thus we must reject the apparently common sense assumption that only freely chosen acts are morally culpable. Quite the reverse: The very nature of sin is that it is not freely chosen. We are in bondage to sin but still accountable to God's righteous judgment of our actions. In light of this theological anthropology, it cannot be maintained that homosexuality is morally neutral because it is involuntary.

3. The eschatological character of Christian existence. The Christian community lives in a time of tension between "already" and "not yet." Already we have the joy of the Holy Spirit; already we experience the transforming grace of God. But at the same time, we do not yet experience the fullness of redemption: We walk by faith, not by sight.

The creation groans in pain and bondage, "and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies" (Romans 8:23). This means, among other things, that Christians must continue to struggle to live faithfully in the present time. The "redemption of our bodies" remains a future hope. The transforming power of the Spirit is present in our midst; the testimonies of those who claim to have been healed and transformed into a heterosexual orientation should be taken seriously. If we do not continue to live with that hope, we may be hoping for too little from God.

On the other hand, the "not yet" looms large; the testimonies of those like Gary who pray and struggle in Christian community and seek healing unsuccessfully for years must be taken with no less seriousness. Perhaps for many the best outcome that is attainable in this time between the times will be a life of disciplined abstinence.

That seems to be the spiritual condition Gary reached near the end of his life. He wrote in his last letter:

Since All Saints Day I have felt myself being transformed. I no longer consider myself homosexual. Many would say, big deal, you're 42 ... and are dying of AIDS. Big sacrifice. No, I didn't do this of my will, of an effort to improve myself, to make myself acceptable to God. No, he did this for me. I feel a great weight has been lifted off me.

4. Demythologizing the idolatry of sex. The Bible undercuts our cultural obsession with sexual fulfillment. Despite the smooth illusions perpetrated by American mass culture, sexual gratification is not a sacred right, and celibacy is not a fate worse than death. Scripture, along with many subsequent generations of faithful Christians, bears witness that lives of freedom, joy, and service are possible without sexual relations. Indeed, however odd it may seem to contemporary sensibilities, some New Testament passages (Matthew 19:10-12; 1 Corinthians 7) clearly commend the celibate life as a way of faithfulness.

Biblical Authority and Other Voices

We must consider how the Bible's teaching is to be weighted in relation to other sources of moral wisdom. I offer only some brief reflections as places to start the discussion.

1. The Christian tradition. Far more emphatically than scripture itself, the moral teaching tradition of the Christian church has for more than 1,900 years declared homosexual behavior to be contrary to the will of God. Only within the past 20 years has any serious question been raised about the church's universal prohibition of such conduct. If anything, a passage like Romans 1 might serve to moderate the tradition's harsh judgments.

2. Reason and scientific evidence. Here the picture is cloudy. Some studies have claimed that as much as 10 percent of the population is inclined to same-sex erotic preference, and some theorists hold that homosexual orientation is innate (or formed by a very early age) and unchangeable. This is the opinion espoused by most advocates of full acceptance of homosexuality in the church: If homosexual orientation is a genetically determined trait, then any disapproval of it is a form of discrimination analogous to racism.

Others, however, regard homosexual orientation as a form of developmental maladjustment or "symbolic confusion." Some therapists claim significant clinical success rates in helping homosexual persons develop a heterosexual orientation; others challenge such claims. A major cross-cultural study recently published by David F. Greenberg, professor of sociology at New York University (The Construction of Homosexuality), contends that homosexual identity is socially constructed rather than inborn.

Even if it could be shown that same-sex preference is somehow genetically programmed, that would not necessarily make homosexual behavior morally appropriate. Surely Christian ethics does not want to hold that all inborn traits are good and desirable.

The argument from statistical incidence of homosexual behavior is even less useful in ethical deliberation. Even if 10 percent of the people in the United States should declare themselves to be of homosexual orientation, that would not settle the normative issue; it is impossible to argue simply from an "is" to an "ought."

3. The experience of the community of faith. This is the place where the advocates of homosexuality in the church have their most serious case. Scroggs argues that the New Testament's condemnation of homosexuality applies only to a certain "model" of exploitative pederasty that was common in Hellenistic culture; hence, it is not applicable to the modern world's experience of mutual, loving homosexual relationships. I think that Scroggs' position fails to reckon adequately with Romans 1, where the relations are not described as pederastic and where Paul's disapproval has nothing to do with exploitation.

But the fact remains that there are numerous homosexual Christians -- like my friend Gary and some of my ablest students at Yale -- whose lives show signs of the presence of God, whose work in ministry is genuine and effective. They are evidence that God gives the Spirit to broken people and ministers grace even through us sinners, without thereby endorsing our sin.

In view of the considerable uncertainty surrounding the scientific and experiential evidence, in view of our culture's present swirling confusion about gender roles, in view of our propensity for self-deception, I think it prudent and necessary to let the univocal testimony of scripture and the Christian tradition order the life of the church on this painfully controversial matter. We must affirm that the New Testament tells us the truth about ourselves as sinners and as God's sexual creatures: Marriage between man and woman is the normative form for human sexual fulfillment, and homosexuality is one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people, alienated from God's loving purpose.

Living Under the Cross

Having said that the church cannot condone homosexual behavior, we still find ourselves confronted by complex problems that demand rigorous and compassionate solutions. On the issue of civil rights, there is no reason at all for the church to single out homosexual persons for malicious discriminatory treatment: Insofar as Christians have done so in the past, we must repent and seek instead to live out the gospel of reconciliation.

Those who uphold the biblical teaching against homosexuality must remember Paul's warning in Romans 2:1-3: We are all "without excuse"; we all stand or fall under God's judgment and mercy. If homosexual persons are not welcome in the church, I will have to walk out the door along with them, leaving in the sanctuary only those entitled to cast the first stone.

We live, then, as a community that embraces sinners as Jesus did, without waiving God's righteousness. We live confessing that God's grace claims us out of confusion and alienation and sets about making us whole. We live knowing that wholeness remains a hope rather than an attainment in this life. The homosexual Christians in our midst may teach us something about our true condition as people living between the cross and the final redemption of our bodies.

Gary wrote urgently of the imperatives of discipleship: "Are homosexuals to be excluded from the community of faith? Certainly not. But anyone who joins such a community should know that it is a place of transformation, of discipline, of learning, and not merely a place to be comforted or indulged."

In the midst of a culture that worships self-gratification, and a church that preaches a false Jesus who panders to our desires, those who seek the narrow way of obedience have a powerful word to speak. Just as Paul saw in pagan homosexuality a symbol of human fallenness, so I saw conversely in Gary, as I have seen in other homosexual friends and colleagues, a symbol of God's power made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Gary knew through experience the bitter power of sin in a twisted world, and he trusted in God's love anyway. Thus he embodied the "sufferings of this present time" of which Paul speaks in Romans 8: living in the joyful freedom of the "first fruits of the Spirit," even while groaning along with a creation in bondage to decay.

Richard B. Hays was associate professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut and was working on a book on New Testament ethics when this article appeared. In the fall of 1991 he joined the faculty of Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina.