Ron is a Gay Christian Network member who believes gay Christians are called to celibacy. The following is a sidebar to his argument for celibacy.
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Context of Leviticus 18:22 and 10:13
[continued from the main essay]
In the following paragraphs, I will try to examine the merits of some of the arguments from the context of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, and explain why I do not find them convincing.
Some have suggested that because 18:19 forbids sex during menstruation, and that commandment is part of the ceremonial or purity laws which are not binding on Christians, then the prohibition on homosexual activity may relate to ceremonial or purity law, and thus not apply to Christians.
I would begin by agreeing that Leviticus 18:22 is one part of the whole Old Testament law. As Christians, we are not “under” this law in the same sense that the Jews were. Nevertheless, I believe that even if this law were not “binding” on Christians, it is still “useful for instruction” because it tells us something about God. Therefore, we should still try to understand what this law meant for the Jews, because that would teach us something about God.
However, the attempt to use verse 19 to link verse 22 to the ceremonial or purity laws seems to me a weak argument. My first reason for believing this is that the surrounding verses condemn various forms of sexual immorality: principally incest, but also adultery, and bestiality. Verse 21 condemns sacrificing children to Molech. There is certainly no evidence in the New Testament that adultery was part of the ceremonial law that passed away. Jesus specifically addresses adultery and raises the bar by condemning even lustful thoughts.
Second, we have no direct evidence that sex during menstruation is permitted for Christians. The New Testament is silent on the subject. It is true enough that most Christians today assume that it is permitted. But that is a matter of theological deduction, and not a matter of proof-texts. Therefore, in order for this argument to work for me, I would first have to construct an iron-clad proof that sex during menstruation was in fact ok for Christians (rather than just accepting the present cultural assumptions), and then I would have to construct an iron-clad proof that verse 22 belonged with 19 and not with any of the other verses in chapter 18.
Third, even if I conclusively proved that the prohibitions on sex during menstruation and on homosexual acts are linked and must be treated the same way, it would seem more logical to me to conclude that sex during menstruation is prohibited for those who walk in the Spirit. If it is definitely in the same classification as homosexuality—which is explicitly prohibited on three separate occasions in the New Testament—then those explicit prohibitions would take precedence for me over assumptions and arguments from silence about sex during menstruation.
I believe that there are interesting arguments to be made about sex during menstruation, but those arguments don’t seem particularly relevant to my situation. As a celibate man attracted to other men, sex during menstruation just isn’t an issue on my horizon. And arguments about it don’t seem relevant to questions about homosexuality, because while sex during menstruation is not mentioned in the New Testament, homosexual activity is.
Others have suggested that in these passages in Leviticus, God did not forbid all homosexual acts, just those homosexual acts associated with pagan worship. Those who make this argument will point out that God introduces these laws by saying, “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you dwelt, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes” (Leviticus 18:3). Since ritual homosexuality was a part of certain Canaanite worship practices, the argument goes that this passage meant to condemn those rituals; it was not aimed at a loving, committed same-sex relationship. Some buttress this argument by pointing out that the verse condemning homosexual acts immediately follows the prohibition against sacrificing children to Molech, indicating a possible strong connection between verse 22 and pagan worship.
For me, the first problem with this is that the surrounding verses condemn various forms of sexual immorality, principally incest, but also adultery, sex during menstruation, and bestiality. In the case of incest, adultery, and bestiality, no serious theologian is going to argue that a Biblical sexual ethic would only forbid those acts when committed in the context of pagan worship.
Second, the surrounding text is very specific about what is prohibited. The prohibition of incest begins with the command, “None of you shall approach any one near of kin to him to uncover nakedness” (18:6). Then verses 7-18 describe in very precise detail who qualifies as “near kin.” On the other hand, the prohibitions on adultery, homosexual acts, and bestiality are simple, blanket prohibitions, without qualifications. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that if God were concerned with homosexual acts only when connected with idol worship, He could very easily have introduced that clarification.
Third, 18:21 forbids offering children as sacrifices to Molech. But no serious theologian would argue that it is ok for parents to kill their children as long as the killing is not associated with pagan worship. In the case of a passage which does specifically reference pagan worship, we do not automatically conclude that the act condemned is only condemned in the context of pagan worship. Therefore, even if I proved that the prohibition on homosexual acts in 18:22 were as specifically linked to pagan worship as the prohibition on killing children in 18:21 (an claim which the text does not seem to me to support), that proof would not prove that homosexual acts were ok outside the context of pagan worship, because nobody argues that killing children is ok outside the context of pagan worship.
Fourth, one might easily argue that the prohibition on sacrifices to Molech fell in among sexual sins in part because the children sacrificed to Molech would be overwhelmingly the fruit of unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted pregnancies usually result from lack of sexual restraint. In our own times, abortion is a huge problem, which Christians reject because it involves the taking of a human life. But we have widespread abortion because of the sexual revolution, not because of a widespread desire to disobey the commandment against taking innocent life.
It seems to me that the best evidence we have for God’s intent is the inspired text of the Scripture. This text forbids homosexual activity generally, without limiting the prohibition to the context of pagan worship practices. This broad prohibition is consistent with the broad prohibition of adultery and bestiality.