Jesus christ homosexual
What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?
What Does The Bible Speak About Homosexuality?
Introduction
For the last two decades, Pew Research Center has reported that one of the most enduring ethical issues across Christian traditions is sexual diversity. For many Christians, one of the most frequently first-asked questions on this topic is, “What does the Bible say about attraction to someone of the equal sex?”
Although its unlikely that the biblical authors had any notion of sexual orientation (for example, the term homosexual wasn't even coined until the belated 19th century) for many people of faith, the Bible is looked to for timeless guidance on what it means to honor God with our lives; and this most certainly includes our sexuality.
Before we can hop into how it is that Christians can maintain the authority of the Bible and also affirm sexual diversity, it might be helpful if we started with a little but clear overview of some of the assumptions informing many Christian approaches to understanding the Bible.
What is the Bible?
For Christians to whom the Bible is God’s very written word, it is widely understood that God produced its contents through inspired
Same-Sex Attraction
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints acknowledges that same-sex attraction is a sensitive issue that requires kindness, sympathy and understanding. The “Same-Sex Attraction” section of ChurchofJesusChrist.org reinforces the reality that, in the words of one Latter-day Saint scripture, God “loveth his children” (1 Nephi 11:17), and seeks to help everyone better understand same-sex attraction from a gospel perspective.
The Church does not grab a position on the cause of same-sex attraction. In 2006, Elder Dallin H. Oaks said, “The Church does not own a position on the causes of any of these susceptibilities or inclinations, including those related to same-gender attraction.”
Feelings of homosexual attraction are not a sin. President M. Russell Ballard said: “Let us be clear: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believes that ‘the experience of gay attraction is a complex reality for many people. The attraction itself is not a sin, but acting on it is. Even though individuals perform not choose to own such attractions, they undertake choose how to respond to them. With cherish and understanding, the Church reaches out to all God’s children, incl
Does Jesus Ever Communicate About Homosexuality?
I was in my mid-20s living in San Diego. I united some people from a nearby church and went to a Pride pride to pass out water, give hugs, and hold signs saying “We are sorry the church hasn’t loved you the way Jesus would” (or something along those lines). All of a sudden, I was descended upon by a film crew with a microphone asking me what Jesus had to say about homosexuality. I was not expecting this, but I was giddy to share the love of Christ and talk about how we are all sinners saved by grace and how Jesus never singled out homosexuality as worse than any other type of sexual immorality. In the middle of my sentence (which I had been certain would be received with amazement, tears, and more questions about how to understand this Jesus guy), the film crew interrupted me and said, “NOTHING. He said nothing about homosexuality.” And then they walked away without a synonyms, off to detect their next “interview.”
I sat there dumbfounded. What had just happened? And was it true that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality? And if not, why not?
Spoiler alert: Jesus really doesn’t ever address homosexuality specifically, and in our cu
Was Jesus queer?
About
By Halvor Moxnes, Professor Emeritus at The Faculty of Theology, UiO.
This text was first published in 2019.
Both these proposals regard Jesus as a modern unattached individual, taking it for granted that sexuality is the most crucial element of identity and that sexuality must always be practiced. Therefore, there are such imaginative suggestions that have little point in the stories about Jesus or in the words attributed to him. Instead, one should rather initiate with the material that actually is found in the gospels of Jesus and family relationships, in light of what we know about men and masculinity in the Jewish community in ancient times.
Read Da Jesus ble mann [When Jesus became a man]. Read the article «Det moderne gjennombrudd» og kristen maskulinitet hos borgerskapets teologer i Norge [«The modern breakthrough» and Christian masculinity of the bourgeois theologians in Norway].
Ancient people were not individualists
Ancient people were not individualists. Their identity was strongly linked to the home, the family and the village. It was this social and economic community that everyone depended on, and everyone was bound to contribu
This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? series.
Silence Equals Support?
In a 2012 article for Slate online, Will Oremus asked a provocative question: Was Jesus a homophobe?1
The article was occasioned by a story about a gay teenager in Ohio who was suing his sky-high school after academy officials prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe.”
Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the expression on the shirt. Oremus suggests that Jesus’s views on homosexuality were more inclusive than Paul’s. He writes,
While it’s reasonable to presume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would have disapproved of gay sex, there is no record of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself offer an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.
Oremus seems to recommend that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it.
There are at least two reasons that we should be skeptical of this view.