A small tangent from something that occurred to me while writing my previous post. What do we moderns think motivates homosexual behavior, and is that still the same motivation that our ancient Christian counterparts would have named? In short, I think that the Bible explains homosexuality as a failure to control one’s sexual passions while we moderns understand it as an “orientation” preceding any sexual passions. It’s been relocated in our modern understanding, much like Heaven and Hell, and our reaction to those passages that mention it should be reverently reevaluated just like the ones that mention heaven being “up”.
While Heaven and Hell were once thought to exist in physical locations that one could point to — up and down respectively — we now think of them residing in other dimensions or outside of our physical universe or some such. We don’t know where they are but they’re not up in space or under the crust of the Earth. In contrast to that, when the apostle Paul wrote about every knee in the universe bowing to Jesus (Phil 2:10) he knew that some of those knees were “up” in heaven with God, some were on the Earth with us, and some where under the Earth in hell.
I think a similar relocation should occur with respect to homosexuality.
Since adulthood I’ve understood homosexuality as something that originates in someone’s brain; it’s a sexual “orientation” in the mind. That is the modern understanding: a person doesn’t act like a homosexual, one is a homosexual. My question is whether an ancient man like the Apostle Paul would have seen people in these modern categories of “gay” and “straight”. Was he condemning “gay men” as we understand them, or was he condemning a particular sexual activity and referring to those who practiced that activity as “homosexuals”?
Frankly, I can’t imagine that Paul was using the categories of gay and straight the way we use them. I think he saw homosexuality as an act. An action. Or maybe as an indication of a cluster of other spiritual failings like a rapacious sexual appetite, moral depravity, and cruelty to others. Those are not the fruits of the Spirit, and certainly deserve to be condemned. But they’re also not any more necessary to a homosexual orientation than they are to a heterosexual one.
So I guess that my understanding of homosexuality has been relocated, just like Heaven and Hell. I see homosexuality as something personal that happens in your mind; Paul saw it as something that involved others and happens under your tunic. In light of that relocation, the next question would be exactly what was Paul prohibiting? And is that prohibition different than “everything anyone at any time” might broadly refer to as homosexuality?