Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships?, Part 1

CHIP: Our guest today is Rebecca McLaughlin. She is a best-selling author, PhD from Cambridge. She has written a number of books that literally have kind of taken the world by storm in about the last five to seven years. She is a young female who I think is one of the up-and-coming great apologists of our day. And I have invited her today to talk to us about one of the most controversial issues inside the Church. Rebecca, welcome to the program.

REBECCA: Thanks so much for having me.

CHIP: And for our listeners today, you know, we've been talking all month about all these issues that are bombarding us as a culture and caring enough to confront, how do we bring light and not heat to these issues that divide? How can we be true to Scripture and really be true to loving and caring for people? And Rebecca, I don't know you personally, this is our first time to talk up close, but my heart really resonates with you, and your commitment to truth, and to Scripture, and how you treat people. The Lord's given you a quick mind and great intellectual acumen, and you have a very unique background that I think allows you to speak into things that people can really hear and understand. So maybe you could just share a little bit of your faith story, and for those of you wondering what we're gonna talk about, The book is called Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships? Examining 10 Claims About Scripture and Sexuality. And we'll dig into that, but I think your background really informs how you speak about these things.

REBECCA: Yeah, no, happy to. So I grew up in the UK, which people of discerning minds might be able to tell from my accent. I grew up in London, predominantly actually in a church-going family. I don't remember a time when I wasn't a follower of Jesus, but I remember around the age of nine, feeling very sure that Jesus was the only person I could truly depend on, the only person who couldn't just be here today and gone tomorrow. And I was at that point and for all the following years that I was in high school and then college, I was in academic environments where I was surrounded by people who didn't share my Christian faith at all. You know, I was never in any kind of sort of Christian bubble. And at the same time as I was desperate for people to hear about Jesus, I was also, you know, from a relatively early age, finding that I was drawn to other girls and women in the way that, you know, my friends were drawn to other boys.

And this was something which, you know, I hadn't asked for or desired in any way and which for a long time I just told myself, This is a phase I'm going through and I'm going to grow out of this. And, you know, it was just a kind of embarrassing secret in my life. And it wasn't until I was in my mid-thirties, actually, and had already been married for a number of years to my delightful husband that I started talking to even my closest Christian friends about my own history of same-sex attraction. I had talked to my husband before we ever got married because you should never marry somebody without them knowing all your things and you knowing all their things, you know?

One of the biggest lies that Satan likes to tell all of us is that whatever we're struggling with, that's the one thing that you can't talk to your Christian friends about. Because actually we're designed to need each other. We have such an individualistic mindset in the sort of modern West that we can miss this memo from the Scriptures, but we're not really meant to be able to go it alone. We're actually meant to need our brothers and sisters in Christ for encouragement and support and correction and all the things. And so, for me, the more that I've dug into the Scriptures on these questions, the more sure I have become that the Bible does say no to same-sex, sexual relationships of any kind. At the same time, the more I become convinced that Christianity is really good news for everyone, including people who, like me, if left to their own devices, will be pursuing same-sex sexual relationships.

CHIP: I think where I resonate with you is you take seriously how people think and how people feel. And what I found is until you listen and really grasp, people have views that make sense because of the information they have, and the research they've done or lack of.

And so with that in mind, maybe we could just dig in. And I think the very first question that is in the book, Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships? Examining 10 Claims About Scripture and Sexuality. And it's framed around for those listening, those who would say that, hey, same-sex relationships are okay. And the first one is that Christians should just focus on the gospel of God's love, and this is a secondary issue. Help us learn and think why this isn't a secondary issue, but it's really, really core.

REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, I understand why people, especially in our kind of cultural moment today, really want to set this issue aside, because the reality is, you know, for you sitting where you are in California, for me sitting where I am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, if I go out into my neighborhood and start to talk to people about Jesus, this is actually one of the core areas where they are going to be offended by Christianity. And so there's a sense in which it would be so much easier for me to say, “Do you know what? This is something I'm just going to set aside. I'm going to focus on telling people the gospel of Jesus’ death on the cross for them.

And we're going to sort of pretend that this isn't a critical issue for Christians.” The problem with that is twofold. Number one, the New Testament speaks with extreme seriousness about sexual immorality in a variety of forms, actually. And so it's really important for us to understand what sexual immorality is and is not, because if we read our New Testaments, whether we're reading the words of Jesus Himself in the Gospels or whether we're reading from Paul's letters, for example, we're going to find that sexual immorality is absolutely not okay for Christians to pursue and that it is the kind of thing which if not repented of is walking people out of God's kingdom. So this is like serious high-stakes stuff.

At the same time, the more I've dug into what the Bible says about marriage and sexuality, the more it's been evident to me that actually the gospel is really at the heart of a truly Christian understanding of these things. So the picture starts to build in the Old Testament as we see this recurrent metaphor of God as a loving, faithful husband and Israel as His all too often unfaithful wife. You know, Israel is always cheating on God with these other so-called gods, these idols. And it's like this marriage is in crisis because this holy God cannot live with this sinful people.

And then Jesus comes. And one of the strange claims that Jesus makes about Himself is that He is the bridegroom. It's a very odd thing for a man to say who never married in His life on earth, but Jesus is using that language to step into the shoes of the Creator God of the Old Testament. He's saying, “Listen, I'm the bridegroom, I'm the husband, I've come to claim God's people for Myself.” And we see that then clarified in Paul's letter to the Ephesians when Paul describes Christian marriage as being like a little scale model of Jesus' love for His people. And if we recognize that Jesus and His love for His people is at the center of Christian marriage, it will help us to understand, you know, that marriage is meant to point us to Christ.

It'll also help us to understand that marriage is meant to disappoint us. Because we're trained by our culture to think that marriage is the thing. Like it's the ultimate sort of pinnacle of human experience. You know, find your soulmate and have this, like, experience that is the pinnacle of human life. Actually, that's not how the Bible describes it at all. The Bible describes marriage as being a picture, a signpost, a model of something so much greater. And when we recognize that, our understanding of marriage kind of falls into its right place and our understanding of singleness falls into its right place because we recognize people who don't get married are not missing out on the thing.

CHIP: Right.

REBECCA: Missing, the one relationship we cannot live without is a relationship with Jesus, not a relationship with a husband or a wife. And it helps us sort of reframe our whole conversations when it comes to sexuality, because these are really high stakes. And I sometimes say to people, “You know, Christian sexual ethics is much weirder than you think. It's not just that I believe that sex only belongs in marriage between one man and one woman for life. It's that I believe that this is all about a metaphor of Jesus’ love for his people. So let's talk about that.

CHIP: That really reframes our whole view of sexuality. Of all the claims, you address ten of them in your book, but of all the claims, which one do you hear the most or even which one causes the most confusion from your perspective?

REBECCA: Gosh, it's hard to pick one, but I'll pick one for the sort of sake of argument. And that is the claim that a God of love can't be against relationships of love. And I think that claim has real sort of emotional power for us because we know that the God of the Bible is a God of love. I mean, it's actually specifically stated, I think especially for those who maybe were raised in church contexts where you were sort of taught to think people who were in same-sex sexual relationships would be, bad people. And then people will meet someone who is in a same-sex relationship, which seems to be loving and faithful and, you know, have many of the good things that we might look for in an opposite sex sort of marriage relationship. And so people are thinking, Well, how can, how can God be against what looks like love here? And actually, if we look at what the New Testament has to tell us, we find not only a very clear “no” to any form of sex outside of male/female marriage and specific “no's” to same-sex sexual relationships, both between men and between women.

We also find, and this is what I think people have often missed, we also find a beautiful, glorious, life-giving vision for love between believers of the same sex. Now, if you don't believe me, I challenge you to do this. Sit down with your New Testament, get out a highlighter and read from Matthew to Revelation. And I want you to highlight every time you are commanded, if you're a follower of Jesus, to love your brothers or your sisters in Christ. In a different color, I want you to highlight every passage that's about marriage specifically. What you'll find, I think, to many people's surprise is the Bible, has actually far less to say about marriage, not to say marriage isn't important, I think it's actually very important, but the consistent non-negotiable command that we have to love one another like Jesus has loved us, I mean, that's how Jesus puts it on the night that he was betrayed, “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this that he lay down his life for his friends.” We see that echoed in one version or another time and time again.

And so one of the things I think we need to rediscover as Christians is this understanding of brotherly and sisterly love that we have honestly lost sight of. And it's important to recognize this is not a sort of exact parallel to married love. There are really important differentiators. So, number one, brotherly and sisterly love is not meant to be sexual. And number two, whereas marriage is exclusive, just one man and one woman, friendship is actually meant to be inclusive. It's not just like, you know, you find your one best friend and kind of drift off together in this, you know, covenant partnership kind of thing. But that actually we have, if we're followers of Jesus, so much more love to offer than the world has to offer. And as my friend Sam Allberry likes to put it, if somebody leaves a same-sex sexual relationship in order to become a Christian, they should find more love in the Church and not less.

REBECCA:  Followers of Jesus should always experience more love in our relationships with sisters and brothers in Christ. And the fact that I, you know, my kind of natural sinful tendency is to crave, at times, a sort of, an inappropriate form of that love, a kind of exclusive and romanticized and sexualized form of that love, actually, it's kind of like grabbing for the junk food when there's a real feast on offer. And I think the original lie that Satan told God's people was, “You can't really trust God. You know, He's actually withholding something good from you. And if you could just kind of grab at the thing, you'd be so much happier.” I think we all need reminders that that's a lie. And one of the best reminders for me is actually the love of my close Christian friends.

CHIP: It is hard to explain to a person that doesn't know the Lord, of the level of camaraderie and depth of sharing and being for one another. And candidly, even those who are married, there's things that I can only share with another man. And likewise for a woman, God has a very beautiful picture of different kinds of relationship. And we've so made sex and love almost interchangeable that it can't be real love unless it's sexual. And of course, we're bombarded by that. Well, there's a lot of kind of, okay, this is why you Christians are wrong who hold to what you and I are sharing as a biblical ethic of marriage is between a man and a woman and sexual relationships are between a man and a woman inside the institution God created to reflect His love for us in marriage. And, people will hear some of these things and they just get stuck. Like, well, gosh, read all of the gospels. Jesus was silent on same-sex relationships. How do you address that?

REBECCA: Yeah, I think this is a common point that people make and they say, “Well, you know, since Jesus didn't say anything about this issue in particular, it can't be that important. It can't be that God is particularly concerned with it. And there are a few problems with that view. One is that Jesus actually did address a term that's often translated in our Bibles as sexual immorality, which was a Greek term, pornea, which was an umbrella really for any form of sex outside of male/female marriage. And that absolutely at the time would have included, if we think about the sort of Greco-Roman empire, into which, under which the Jews were living, that would have included various forms of same-sex sexual relationships. So it's actually not accurate to say that Jesus didn't address this in any form.

So you might say, “Well, why didn't Jesus specifically address this head on?” And the answer there is actually because Jesus was almost exclusively addressing fellow Jews in His ministry on earth. And it's something that we see kind of quite deliberately in the Gospels there are occasions when He’ll interact with Gentiles for sure, but predominantly He’s talking to His fellow Jews. And because the Old Testament law was exceedingly clear that a man shouldn't have sexual relationships with another male under any circumstances, this was not a question that Jews of Jesus' day were debating. Just as, actually, you know, for example, the Old Testament prohibitions on idol worship mean that Jesus didn't actually need in His ministry to address idol worship because it just wasn't something that the people He was talking to were debating.

But then when the gospel goes out to the Gentiles, to the non-Jews on Jesus' direction at the end of His ministry on earth, and in particular through the apostle Paul whom Jesus commissions to be the apostle to the Gentiles, of His day, Paul is then writing to Christians who have come to Christ from a sort of pagan Greco-Roman context. And so that's why Paul addresses it rather than Jesus.

It's also important to recognize that Jesus, in Matthew 19, when He’s asked a question about divorce, specifically defines marriage. And it's interesting how He does it because He quotes two verses from the Old Testament. One is that He quotes the verse in Genesis 2, which says, “Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, be united to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.” And actually that by itself would have been enough to make Jesus' argument about divorce and the sort of lifelong one flesh nature of marriage. But Jesus begins, “Have you not heard that God from the first made them male and female,” quoting from Genesis 1 when God makes human beings male and female in His image. So Jesus is actually sort of underscoring there the male/female nature of marriage.

So we have the, you know, it's very clear definition of marriage from Jesus’ lips. We have this clear condemnation of pornea, any kind of sexual immorality. And we have the difference of audience between Jesus and Paul and some of the other New Testament authors.

CHIP: Good word. And I think too, more and more I hear is, “Chip, you just don't understand. Not only do we really love each other, but really what the Bible's talking about,” and what they've heard and what they've read in some books is that a loving, monogamous relationship is okay, it's exploitive relationships. It's, you know, lustful relationships with multiple partners. And I think that's been a very strong mantra that we've heard. And I think it's really important for people to understand what does the Scripture actually say? Because that is really not accurate at all.

REBECCA: Yeah. And one of the helpful things for us to do here is to look at the language that Paul uses in particular, because it's interesting. Paul seems to have coined or kind of invented a new word. Now it's possible somebody had used it before, but we don't have any sort of manuscripts prior to Paul using this word. And it's a word which, forgive me for getting technical here for just a minute, but you if you think about the fact the Old Testament is written originally in Hebrew, but Jews of Paul and Jesus' day were often reading it in a Greek translation called the Septuagint.

And the word that Paul uses when in a couple of instances when he's talking about same-sex sexual relationships is a word which takes the word for male and the word for bed from the Old Testament prohibition in Leviticus, which says that you shall not lie or bed with a male as with a woman. And he makes this new word, which we might translate sort of literalistically as male-bedder. And it's quite interesting because there were a number of terms that spoke to what we would now recognize as sort of unequal or exploitative relationships that Paul could have used. But instead he goes back to this Old Testament text and takes the very basic word for male, which is the same as the word in Genesis 1 when God creates humans, male and female. And he prohibits sex between a man and another male.

So, you know, regardless of age, regardless of status, regardless of, you know, love or not love or sort of any of the other features. It's also tricky when we look at Romans chapter 1, you know, another of the passages where Paul is specifically condemning same-sex sexual relationships for two reasons.

One is that Paul there talks about women and women as well as men and men. And whereas there was certainly, you know, a cultural norm around men having what we'd now see as sort of exploitative unequal relationships, there wasn't really that sort of same cultural norm around women. It wasn't sort of seen as an unequal relationship necessarily. And two, Paul talks about people being consumed with lust for one another. So there's a sort of sense of mutuality there rather than, you know, one person forcing themselves on somebody else.

So whereas there certainly wasn't the level of kind of normalization of equal consensual same-sex monogamous relationships that we have today, there was in Paul's time an understanding that there could be genuine love between people of the same sex that would express itself this way. I mean, if you look at some of the Greek literature that was very formative of the culture that he was living in, for example, we absolutely see that. And we would really struggle from the terms that Paul uses to say, “Oh no, this is, his condemnation is just limited to particular forms of sex that we recognize as wrong today.”

CHIP: I think it'd be helpful for people, and this, you know, comes out of your research, is just to kind of have a sense of, in the Greco-Roman world that Paul's writing to, there were multiple homosexual practices that were, very exploitive, but it was just a part of the culture. And I love the point that you make is Romans chapter 1 is not about, oh, how terrible just homosexuality is. There's a list of multiple other sins that we all commit. His point is we all need Jesus.

REBECCA: Yeah.

CHIP: He's just looking at what's happening in the culture and the multiple expressions, both internally and externally, of we fall short of God's glory. We're not flourishing the way God wants. And he’s letting us know whether that's greed or gossip or multiple other sins there in Romans 1. But I don't think most people get sort of an overview of the cultural context of homosexuality in general and the impact of what you just shared about what Romans 1 says in light of that.

REBECCA: Anytime you find a text in the New Testament, which is specifically condemning sexual immorality or even particularly same-sex sexual relationships, you will find an expression of the Gospel very close to it. So one example that I love is in Paul's first letter to Timothy, where shortly after naming men having sexual relationships with other males as, you know, one of the sinful practices that God's people must steer away from. He then famously says, “This is a trustworthy saying worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost.”

And it's so striking to me because Paul is sometimes sort of portrayed as this like homophobic bigot standing on his moral high ground, you know, hurling rocks at those people out there. Actually Paul's saying, “I'm the worst sinner I know. And Jesus saved me to show that even somebody as bad as me could be saved.”

And I think that's really helpful for us as we think about our posture if we're Christians when it comes to these questions, we're not standing on a moral high ground. You know, when Jesus says, “Anyone who's looked at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery in his heart.” Like we're adulterers, the whole lot of us, one way another.  And so, you know, we don't just need a set of better rules or a life coach or a kind of good example, we actually need a Savior and that's who Jesus came to be.