In this episode Trent sits down with Pastor Brandan Robertson to discuss whether Bible-believing Christians should accept or reject homosexual behavior. In part three they finish their discussion of what Jesus and St. Paul had to say about this matter.
Trent: Hey, everyone. It’s part three of my interview with Brandan Robertson on the question, is homosexual behavior sinful? It’s been a wonderful dialogue so far. I hope you enjoy the conclusion of our dialogue here, as well as resources we’ll point people to at the end of our time speaking together.
Announcer: Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Brandan: Right, and this is again… We’re kind of going down this rabbit hole, but within the Catholic and Protestant traditions we have this differing theology of, again, I wouldn’t say sex is primarily meant for procreation, and I would say that male-male, female-female, male-female, all of those work together in a beautiful way and we don’t have to get into the anatomy.
Trent: What would you say, this is another basic question I ask people, what would you say sex is for? What has been revealed to us or what would you say sex is for?
Brandan: I think procreation is a purpose of sex. I also think sex is a unifying act in a relationship. It deepens relationships. It’s an expression of love. It’s an expression of pleasure in our relationship. And so when I hear people articulate what sex is to them, you actually rarely hear that it’s meant to just primarily be procreative.
Trent: And I don’t say that it’s solely for that. My answer to the question is it’s an expression of marital love and that’s a particular union that is achieved not just on an emotional level, but it’s also on a biological level.
Brandan: Right. And I would argue from that perspective, like chemically what’s happening in sex is you’re binding a relationship closer and closer together hormonally, all of these things are happening. It’s beautiful. And so sex is meant to be connective. It’s meant to be joining people together. And in the context of a relationship it becomes sacramental. And I would agree, we probably have different definitions of what sacramentality looks like.
Trent: Yes, in the Catholic Church a sacramental marriage is a valid marriage between a baptized Christian man and a baptized Christian woman.
Brandan: And I talk about sacrament as communicating God’s grace or a mystery of God in a physical action on earth. And so in sex, when you have a committed covenant relationship in marriage and sex is taking place in that, there is this beautiful sacramental nature of God being expressed and God’s grace and beauty being expressed in that. I would agree, and I think you’d probably agree probably with differing on terms and language.
Trent: Right, how it’s communicated as a sacrament is that it unites a man and woman towards the goals of … the Catholic Church believes there’s two purposes of marriage. There’s procreative and unitive, to form an actual union. So for example, the church has never formally condemned marriage between people who are sterile or sexual relations during pregnancy, for example. But when you divorce those two ends, that’s where it becomes disordered. While we still have a little bit of time left and we could go on and on forever, we’ll keep going, what’s nice is I had a chat with my supporters of the podcast and we came to the conclusion we should let these dialogues go as long as they feel like and just divide them up into 30 minute episodes. So our listeners will know, but I’ll release them all at once because you’ve got your drive time segments to bite.
Trent: Why don’t we talk about some more of the [inaudible 00:03:02] passages and then maybe we can wrap it up a bit here more. Because we only briefly touched on what Paul was saying and also … so we’re taking this from Jesus. Well I don’t know. I want to go back to Jesus, I don’t know, because he-
Brandan: I want to too.
Trent: Yeah, because I mean, here’s my thing. It sounds like you’re saying that if sex is for a committed relationship, it’s bonding, it’s love, then why would Jesus care if you have that with somebody else after you’ve divorced a spouse? For him it seems to be more than just forming a commitment. Or Paul, why not have this kind of great relationship with your stepmother? If you’re both adults and you’re now closer together to one another. I don’t see the Bible teaching us that that is what sex is for.
Brandan: I would just say, I think that you’re reading more into what Jesus is saying there. I think he’s addressing a specific question and a specific time and giving a specific answer based on his understanding of Jewish law. And he’s saying, he was asked about a man and a female getting divorced and he said a man shall leave his father and-
Trent: But he doesn’t side with Hillel or Shammai. He takes an extreme view, the most extreme view for his day.
Brandan: Sure, and he does that often in a lot of his ethical things. I agree and I say in the book he’s raising ethical standards. I believe that.
Trent: Then should we meet that standard and say for example, that remarriage after divorce constitutes adultery? To me it just seems like he’s saying what he’s saying.
Brandan: I don’t disagree with what he’s saying. I think you can press me on… I’m not a scholar on divorce and remarriage, I haven’t thought through that as quite as much as I probably should. But what I would say is, I do think, I agree and side with you, as I say in a covenant relationship it’s really important that two people are committing to each other and that they honor a covenant that they make and that you shouldn’t enter into a covenant relationship with someone lightly, which I do think is a big problem in our world today and in the church today. So I would side with Jesus on what he’s saying there. The question is whether it’s… if he’s trying to clearly articulate that it has to be between one man and one woman or if he’s communicating that covenant is what is important.
Trent: But I think for me what he’s, because the thing is, the question would naturally become why does a covenant relationship have to be lifelong or permanent, or something that can only be dissolved by death, which is what he’s articulating there for marriage. Because you can have covenant with other family members. I mean you see that with adoption, with families coming together, things like that, and in the Bible. And family might be a little bit more, we understand somewhat of the lifelong nature. But even there people can disown their children in scripture, prodigal son goes off and you know, well he’s no longer my son anymore. They’re not my people anymore. They’ve abandoned me.
Trent: But to me the question is why is covenant commitment permanent? To me it seems that Jesus goes back to Genesis because it’s part of the created order that’s unique to men and women. Why God made them to be formed into one flesh. And that’s also something that even like the Essenes in Jesus’s time also appealed to that same kind of reasoning.
Brandan: Yeah, I would say I don’t think, first of all, I don’t think all covenants is till death. I think marriage is a unique covenant that throughout most cultures and most times, I do know that the general marital vow has been pretty much the same and it is this two people coming together and saying till death do us part. If you make that covenant, then you’ve made the covenant till death do you part. This is weird and off in left field, but I suppose if people made commitments to say, I’m committing to do life with you for six months, it would be a different kind of covenant than the covenant that we’re making in marriage.
Trent: Okay, so you’re saying that something intrinsic to marriage is that it’s lifelong?
Brandan: Yes. I think like if that’s the vow you’re verbally making during marriage, then that’s the vow.
Trent: But then you’re saying if someone says, I promise to love and honor you, and there’s people who have talked about this, renewable marriages. I promised to love and honor you and we’ll figure it out in three years when it’s up for renewal. I think you would say that’s not really marriage.
Brandan: Well see I think we might disagree on this too. I don’t think marriage is a thing unto itself that exists somewhere. Like there’s nothing objective called marriage that exists. I think marriage is what we call a covenant when two people enter into a relationship, typically for a lifelong relationship. And so I get-
Trent: Well when they enter… but it has to be a particular kind of relationship. So for example, if I choose to adopt a child and they’ll always be my child, we’ve entered into a lifelong covenant relationship, but that’s not marriage.
Brandan: Well yeah, because marriage has the relational, the love component that coming together-
Trent: Has the sexual component.
Brandan: Not necessarily. You just said-
Trent: But if I adopt a child, I’m going to love them for the rest of my life and their life.
Brandan: But there are also plenty of marriages where sex doesn’t happen.
Trent: Well you mean marriages where there’s impotency or where there’s-
Brandan: There’s so many reasons why a couple couldn’t have sex.
Trent: Well even… Are you familiar with work of John Corvino?
Brandan: Yeah.
Trent: Okay. So John Corvino is a self identified gay man married to another man. Probably one of the best arguers for so-called same sex marriage. And I use that term because I believe marriage has a specific meaning to it. For me, if marriage is just the union of two adults, you can put any prefix in front of it you want almost. But if it’s definitionally about men and women, same sex in front of it becomes a contradiction. So Corvino is asked often, you know, well what is marriage? And he has a very wonderful philosopher’s definition. He says it is a relationship involving more than one person where sex is permissible.
Brandan: I like it and I don’t like it, but yeah.
Trent: Well I mean, but even notice there, I think it makes sense that everyone agrees marriage… even just the permissability of it, we see like they get to something where we wouldn’t be surprised if married people have sex.
Brandan: No, but I don’t, I just, I have a really hard time and I don’t see how you’re getting there to say that sex is the thing that makes marriage marriage. That feels strange to me. And the other question just, this is my question to you, where scripturally, like this… Because I’ve heard a lot of Catholic apologists talk about this… this thing called marriage that exists, other than pulling it out of Genesis and giving it this title marriage and boxing it up, which is all non scriptural, like where are you getting this idea that marriage is a thing that exists somewhere and it’s a standard that’s out there that God has created definitionally?
Trent: Well, we get part of that from scripture, but Catholics of course don’t follow… we don’t believe in Sola Scriptura. We don’t believe in scripture alone that there are many things that are true, that are not explicitly revealed in scripture. In fact, the New Testament doesn’t even record people being married in a church for example, it doesn’t record that. It doesn’t record, it doesn’t answer the question of whether the children of believers have to be baptized if they’re born of a holy marriage. We have that from sacred tradition, but also just from, I would just say from natural law that we understand there’s certain kinds of relationships that… Well the Bible is not a philosophy book.
Trent: It’s not a textbook. It’s a story of God’s revelation to man and man’s response to God. And so here I would say that putting my philosopher’s hat on, I can use reason to discover there are certain objective relationships between people that we cannot change based on human opinion. So for example, I believe friendship is an objective reality. So friendship is something where… Friendship is a kind of relationship where two people are engaged in the benefit for one another and share mutual interests. Whatever you want. I would not say that the bully who makes someone do his math homework for him is his friend. That’s an abuse of the term. That relationship can never be friendship.
Trent: It’s an objective thing. But I would say that the relationship that exists between men and women where they fully give themselves to one another in a lifelong monogamous bond where they form a one flesh biological union, the apt term for that is marriage or matrimony. In fact, the word matrimony comes from Latin for mother. You know, to procreate, to give birth to, and then that makes sense. That explains this kind of universal recognition of the desire to solemnize the unions between men and women, and then to understand that that’s a unique kind of bond with unique things related to it. I think you see that that marriage is something, and you have an idea of what it is.
Brandan: I think I just disagree with these ideas that there’s, that friendship is an objective thing that exists. I think it’s a culturally defined thing. I think friendship would look different in different cultures at different times throughout human history. I think marriage has looked different in different cultures.
Trent: Yeah there are things that are going to change. I mean, even in the Catholic Church, we have the Eastern rite and the Western rite where there’s different… you know, one rite the priest is the one who marries you and the other rite it’s the bride and groom marry each other. And I go to an Eastern Catholic church so there’s different rites. The one you and your listeners are most… you know, Protestants are familiar with is the Latin rite. The largest one. I’m actually Byzantine. They’ve got this wonderful tradition where each, the bride and groom each wear a crown and the crowns are of equal size and weight and always have been to show that they’re equal partners in this and marry one another. So you’re right, there’s going to be marriage traditions, friendship traditions that differ, but there’s a bare minimum of what makes something a friendship and what makes something a marriage. That’s just universal. Well we’re getting into philosophy. I don’t want to get too far away. Let’s go-
Brandan: Can I throw out a Jesus thing real quick?
Trent: Yeah. I feel bad. Paul’s been on the back burner for a while here, but one last one and then let’s talk about Paul for a bit.
Brandan: Paul is not the incarnation of God, so he’s fine.
Trent: That’s true, but I believe he’s an apostle that Jesus chose, had confidence in and was inspired to write the Bible. So for me it’s still a big deal.
Brandan: Sure. The one thing, and I used to think that this was a weak argument, but the more I studied it during my master’s thesis, looking at culture and context, Jesus’ interaction and New Testament interactions with eunuchs is something that a lot of people have rolled their eyes at, but John Boswell did a lot of good work on, and I actually think that there’s something to be said. Eunuchs are definitely the sexual minorities in the first century of Greco Roman world. These are people who, many would argue and I have passages in this book from first century sources that would argue, that these are similar to the equivalent of gay men. Some of these people, we could argue that these are intersex people. Some people would argue these are trans people.
Trent: Traditionally though they’ve been people who are castrated to be trusted around queens and other female royalty.
Brandan: Which today we might identify… and it’s, you’ve got to be careful here to honor the trans community, but you might identify that as a transgender person, a person who’s willfully gone and transitioned the way their gender is expressed.
Trent: And that, well we’ve been LG here for a while and a little bit with the B. The T is going to be an entirely different show. I’m happy to do it another time. Maybe I’ll be back for that. But yeah with eunuchs Jesus talks about how there are people who were born eunuchs, people who made eunuchs, and people have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. Which many people interpret to be those who have taken vows of celibacy since people who are eunuchs are also celebrate because they can’t engage in the marital act.
Brandan: I think the celibacy argument is weak based on evidence of what we have for first century Greco Roman world, what eunuchs are expressed as, how they’re written about by non biblical sources. I think it’s a really strong, I think it’s a strong argument to say these are sexual minorities whether you’re going to put them under LGB or T, these are sexual minorities. And the way Jesus treats some of them, the way they’re treated in the Book of Acts as being the first people baptized into the church. I think there’s something there that needs to be grappled with about what Jesus’ disposition is.
Trent: You’re talking about when Philip meets the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts chapter eight. Well here, that would probably fall under my definition. This person, we don’t know what his sexual attractions or orientations are. He could be a straight man who’s had his testicles removed because then he’s trusted to guard the queen basically. I mean-
Brandan: Yeah, that’s one instance, but I would say from my understanding of the historical sources, it’s almost never just a celibate person. Jesus was a celibate person and not called a eunuch. Eunuchs are sexual minorities. These are either people who were born intersex or with an inability to use their sexual organs in the way that should be normally used. There are people who are made eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom, which there’s a lot of ambiguity about what exactly that means. And then there’s those who are who become eunuchs and that there are some cases for people to serve in royal courts, and there are clear cases, again, the book has first century references and a fourth century references about people who have become eunuchs because that’s an expression of who they believe themselves to be.
Brandan: And so whether we’re talking about trans or LGB, I do think the eunuch, if anybody’s actually serious, I want to set up a serious argument about this, I would just encourage folks and listeners to dig in and talk about how Jesus… What is a eunuch, look it up, read the book and see that Jesus is at least having a gracious disposition towards this group of people.
Trent: But I agree with you that, and I think that this is, there’s a dichotomy here in thinking, okay, how do we reach out to people like Jesus did for those who have lived apart from God for a very long time? And what made Jesus merciful was not an accommodation of behavior that’s at variance with God’s law, but a merciful compassion to not abandon people to those sins. So for example, like prostitutes, tax collectors, I mean tax collectors were the villainous scum of first century Judea, and Jesus would scandalize people today for, you know, it’d be like if he was off with Bernie Madoff or something like that. And yet he’s reached out to these people, not because he condoned what they were doing. Even if it’s saying the Gospel reaches the Samaritan woman who had five husbands, or the eunuch, whatever that eunuch… the Ethiopian eunuch was doing… that it’s reaching these people in spite of the fact that they’re very far from God. God wants them to be closer to him. Not necessarily an endorsement of everything that they do.
Brandan: But I would say the key points here is that there’s never a condemnation, only a welcome, only a blessing to eunuchs in both the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.
Trent: That would get us in far left field about what that means, because I would agree with this. Someone who is born intersex, someone who has ambiguous genitalia or even has something like Turner’s Syndrome or Kleinfelter Syndrome, they’re a man or woman made in the image of likeness of God and deserve to be treated with respect. They’re not barred from the kingdom and we ought to treat them with ethical, compassionate medicine. That is… this is separate how we-
Brandan: But it’s an interesting philosophical question. We won’t go down it but I just want to pose it, is, so you have an intersex person who the doctors will determine at birth what their gender is. They may or may not then be a homosexual for the rest of their life, whether they appear homosexual or not. What is the theological argument for them?
Trent: About what?
Brandan: If you’re an intersex person and you’re born with both female parts and male parts and what often happens is the doctors will choose which part you’re going to have to be a healthy human.
Trent: To identify what you are, yeah.
Brandan: Yes. There’s no science behind knowing what the gender identity of a person is there. They’re arbitrarily choosing-
Trent: Well gender identity is something that’s subjective. I mean you have people who have very clear genotypes and phenotypes and yet say that they’re the opposite sex. So gender identity is a subjective phenomenon of what a person conceives of himself or herself, or ski self.
Brandan: Well the sex is, but the sex is ambiguous. Somebody is making an arbitrary choice.
Trent: Well I would say even in the… and I’m going to have the last word on this because I want to move on because this is another subject we could go down… in the vast majority of intersex cases it’s very clear we can determine that what is present in this patient is a male or female who has some kind of stunted development or abnormal phenotype, that we can still, even in Turner’s, Kleinfelter’s, super male syndrome, that XYY, XXYY, in the vast majority of these cases, I’ve only found one case in literature where it becomes hard.
Trent: Where you have someone with chromosomal mosaicism who is 46XY and becomes pregnant. You know? But that is the, even that they’re like 80/20 XX, XY, so it you know. The point is, there are cases… they’re only a very slim majority of cases we’re not sure. But to make an analogy, to say from these very tiny, tiny minority of cases that we can’t figure out whether people are men or women, would be like saying that there are a sliver of cases where we’re not sure if someone’s alive or dead. There’s a guy named TK for example, he is brain dead. He has no electroactivity in his brain, but his body is not decomposed, was not decomposing. You could feed him. He’s alive. Like well is he alive or is he dead? But in the vast majority of cases we could still see who’s alive and who’s dead, even if there are these minority cases where we’re not sure.
Brandan: I think just the point that I’m trying to make, and it’s the first thing I said on the podcast today, is sexuality and gender identity altogether is one of the most complex topics we can talk about of humanity, and jumping to theological answers about how sexuality and gender identity are expressed with black and white clarity I find just to be an unwise path to go forward.
Trent: But you have a black or white standard yourself. You’d say that, you know, you and I would agree that rape is wrong. That is just obvious that’s a sexual sin. And then we put other sexual sins under it. I think you and I agree incest is wrong. Committed relationships are good.
Brandan: Rape and incest aren’t part of our God wired identity as I would say homosexuality, heterosexuality is.
Trent: Well let me give you an example with incest. And I agree some people use that example poorly, but you know Paul condemns them in First Corinthians five and I’ll give you an example that I don’t think falls prey to the idea that, well this is obviously wrong because there’s familial abuse. Suppose two men have a romantic relationship with each other. They meet each other, they’re just a few years apart. But then they do a genetic test and it turns out they’re half-brothers because their father is a sperm donor. And this is actually not uncommon. People are dealing with now with the rise of sperm and egg donors that people are becoming romantically involved with people that are their half brothers and half sisters. So then here it would seem like if one opposes these relationships it’s because of a particular genetic difference between these two people, that logic would seem to carry over towards the argument that of the genetic and biological differences between men and women mattering.
Brandan: Yeah, just hearing that argument, I don’t know that the reason that we oppose incest is there are scientific biological reasons why incest is bad and if reproduction happens out of incest, there are lots of terrible consequences that are possible.
Trent: There can be, that’s between opposite sex incest, one. And then two, but I don’t think that’s the [inaudible 00:21:56] because there’s physical evidence that women who have children over the age of 40 are more likely to have Down Syndrome children or children with genetic abnormalities. That doesn’t make it wrong to have relations with someone who’s an older woman for example.
Brandan: No, but this is where I do lean on science and doctors with them and a lot of doctors would say hey a woman over 40, you should probably not try to get pregnant because you’re going to increase the risk of having a child that’s harmed. Yeah, I lost my train of thought on all of this stuff.
Trent: That’s okay. But my point is that I hear this too sometimes and I’ve listened to other dialogues between traditionalist and revisionist. I listened to the one with, on Unbelievable with Gagnon and Ozan, I don’t know if you got a chance to listen to that one. I actually had met Gagnon a few years ago. He’s a hilarious guy, but he’s definitely comes at you like a machine gun basically.
Brandan: A bit extreme.
Trent: Well, he’s forceful and confident in his view, and I don’t think that’s wrong because Ozan said in the dialogue like, you know, Robert your certainty is the problem here. Like you’re just so darn certain. But I would say any of us who come to the table on this question are like, you’re certain that relationships between two men or two women that are committed are not sinful. Like we all have equal degrees of certainty.
Brandan: I wouldn’t say certain. Again, I always argue, and I say this in my church nearly every week when I get up to preach, we’re arguing for epistemological humility. So I’m saying this is my best understanding of what I understand the Bible to teach, how I understand the world, how I perceive myself. I’m not certain of anything. I think that this is the right way to go. I advocate it because I believe it’s right. But I’m open always to my mind being changed on anything. And even as an LGBT activist, I’ve always said I think it’s right because of science and reason and my Christian faith that I’m an LGTB person.
Trent: And so your standard, I just want to put it out here, for what makes something sexually sinful or not, because I want to… because you know mine’s related to the monogamous bond between man and woman in marriage. It’s related to committed relationship and so far it seems the things that it would preclude what in our conversation had been adult incest, and because you’re open to premarital sex, to polyamory, you’re open to these things. So we’ll just take it as just a given. We’re talking about relationships that are not exploitative. Among non exploitative relationships, it seems like the only thing that you have a problem with would be incestuous ones. And of course also ones that are, that would be between a human and a nonhuman, I guess.
Brandan: Because there are scientific biological reasons why those relationships are not good.
Trent: Well, okay, so what’s interesting here it seems to me that your standard for whether something is sinful or not, it’s not really what we derive from the Bible, it’s what we derive from like scientific studies.
Brandan: Because I do take an ethical standard on questions of these personal ethics, and I know you disagree on my interpretation of Romans 14 but for people who want to dig deeper into it, Ken Wilson wrote a book called A Letter to My Congregation, which articulates it much better than I am here, but it’s this ethic that says we center around Christian values, but the way those values are expressed is different in different contexts for different people.
Brandan: So I call people to the fruit of the spirit. I call people to commitments and covenants and love and recognize that for some people that’s going to look different. For some people, premarital sex is sinful. For some people I don’t think it is.
Trent: Why? What would make, what would be the difference?
Brandan: Conscience.
Trent: It’s just how you feel if it’s sinful or not?
Brandan: Paul says in Romans 14 that it’s a matter of conscience between these people. Should we eat these things? Should we not eat these things? Should we celebrate this? Should we not celebrate it? Should we do this or not do this?
Trent: But he doesn’t take that same stand in… So we’ll end with Paul. I know he’s been waiting for awhile. Let’s go to First Corinthians five and six, that he doesn’t take that stand though. When it comes to sexuality, he talks about how being connected to a prostitute is the same one flesh union you would make with a spouse, that the sex involved there is a very serious thing. It can preclude you from entering in the kingdom of heaven. And in First Corinthians 6:9-10 he talks about how two particular groups of people, it’s translated in different ways, we could do a whole show on how it’s translated, but he presents a vice list of things that can keep you out of the kingdom of God.
Trent: And so he talks about the immoral, porneia, idolaters, adulterers, homosexuals, what the RSV says, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers won’t inherit the kingdom of God. He lists these vices not if well, if your conscience, if you think getting drunk on the weekend or being a greedy businessmen is okay, or adultery… he just lists them. And for homosexuals, he has two Greek words and that’s where people can disagree. I don’t want to… when you have to head out of here? We already went too long. Let’s, ah, when do you got to go?
Brandan: I can do 10 more minutes.
Trent: Okay. All right. All right. So, but this is-
Brandan: It’s good.
Trent: This is good. I mean, when we have to keep having these conversations, we’ll see where we agree, where we disagree. Yeah, so I mean, why don’t we just summarize the cases and then people can take from this, just so they know the debate. The Greek words are arsenokoitai and the malakoi. The traditional view holds arsenokoitai is a word possibly that Paul coined that seems to be a literal translation of a mishkav zachur in Hebrew that in Leviticus the words arseno and koitai literally mean man bedder, one who beds men has sex with men. And the malakoi are soft, effeminate, the traditional view would hold that these two individuals are the active partner and the passive partner in male, same sex relationships. The revisionist view has a different take on it, I guess.
Brandan: Yeah, I mean, ish. I think the First Corinthians passage is really important because I think it’s a condemnation, clearly again, of exploitive relationship between older men and younger boys. I do think Paul is talking about pederasty and I think if we would have been interpreting it that way, not to cast dispersions, but both the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church would have a little bit more accountability with pedophile relationships and things like that, because I think that’s what Paul’s getting at. He’s trying to protect people and by taking these two words, arsenokoitai being a word, like you said, that’s never used before this, only used after Paul coins the term. It’s a literal translation from Leviticus.
Trent: Well, okay, I’m going to, sorry, I’ve got fire back. Do you think it’s wrong for teenagers to have sex?
Brandan: With each other?
Trent: Yeah.
Brandan: Probably not.
Trent: But it’s wrong for them to have sex with adults?
Brandan: Yeah.
Trent: Why? What’s the difference?
Brandan: Power differential. We know that psychologically there’s a difference. You said it earlier in our conversation that adults are fully developed, youth are not fully developed, so for an adult to use their fully developed brain to exploit a youth who doesn’t have the full capability to choose to be with an adult, I think that’s a power differential.
Trent: But the two teenagers don’t have the full capacity to choose to be with one another either. It’s to me that would be like saying, well an adult can’t give kids alcohol, but two teenagers can go get drunk.
Brandan: It’s not a great comparison. I would say that two people of equal brain development, they’re not exploiting one another unless, I mean there’s other ways that it could-
Trent: Well that can happen among adults. But here I would say that the… I don’t see that Paul doesn’t use a Greek word for referring just to pederasty, like paiderastia or anything like that.
Brandan: Well he’s using man, bed, and also malakoi, which malakoi has always been referred to generally as the passive partner. Also, soft one is another way to translate it, is also often used to refer to the young boy in a pederastic relationship.
Trent: But then here’s the problem though. Why does Paul condemn the malakoi? Why doesn’t he say just the arsenokoitai? Because if they’re the ones being abused and they’re the victim here, why do they not inherit the kingdom of God?
Brandan: Because I wrote a great chapter in my book about patriarchy that goes into this in depth. The problem here is that we’re going to the way the Greco Roman world, we’re not going to have time to get into this in the way it needs to be explained, but in the Greco Roman world, the way sexuality was viewed, the reason homosexuality was despised was because the active partner going into the passive partner was emasculating the passive partner and emasculating himself. By a man to have sex with another man, he was rendering the man being penetrated as a woman, which was seen as a terrible thing in the Greco Roman world, and he was becoming guilty by being the one who was doing the emasculating work. So that person, the reason they’re sinful in Paul’s mind in his Greco Roman mind, is because that person has lowered-
Trent: But then the objection is Paul using this one Greco Roman patriarchal standard, or is he like we see in Romans for example, is he calling back to Genesis and the created order standard? I would say that there’s no, it’s not patriarchy here that’s motivating Paul, he’s going back to what Leviticus has said. But also in the Greco Roman world that you had a consensual adult relationships that were not looked down upon. In Plato’s symposium there are homosexual relations between adults that aren’t looked down upon.
Brandan: No, totally, and I would absolutely affirm that, but when we’re talking… There’s so many aspects to go here. I think the apostle Paul, first of all, I take the view that I have a lower view of scripture first of all. We haven’t articulated that on this podcast yet, but I don’t believe in an inerrancy. I wouldn’t hold to those views. I have a view that the Bible is a book created by humans that God has spoken through faithfully for generations, but it contains errors. And I think Paul is a man of his time. I think Paul is writing from a human perspective, doing his best to communicate what he believes is from God. And I think we should expect to find these cultural Greco-Roman standards of the world that Paul is traveling and living in, to find their way into the scripture. And this is where even though William Webb would still hold a high view of scripture, he makes similar arguments and anybody who’s arguing for egalitarianism from the New Testament is making these similar arguments.
Trent: Right. People are arguing for like women should be pastors just as much as men.
Brandan: Right. And Paul says the exact opposite.
Trent: Right. But I actually agree with Paul here, that one, he doesn’t hold that patriarchal view because in First Corinthians 11 he allows women to prophesy in church. He doesn’t believe that they have to be universally silent or subjective. In Romans 16 he has female coworkers. First Corinthians seven a wife has conjugal rights over her husband’s body.
Brandan: I agree with you, and that’s the ethical trajectory of scripture. But Paul doesn’t oppose patriarchy, with all of that there’s always caveats of women being subservient.
Trent: Right, but the Catholic Church holds it’s an infallible teaching that the priesthood itself is reserved to men based on Jesus’ selection of the 12 apostles. But no-
Brandan: Whole different context.
Trent: I’m closing it off because you got to get back to work. And this was, I think this was productive. I think a lot of people will learn a lot from what we’ve discussed and I would encourage you all. So I tell you what, here’s how I would like to end it. Please point our listeners towards resources that you find are helpful for your view and then I will point them towards resources I find helpful for the view that I had been articulating, and then that will allow them to go a little bit deeper. So go right ahead.
Brandan: I think one of the best books that I ever read on this was Sex and the Single Savior by Dale Martin from Westminster John Knox Press. Great book and he does a really good job of fairly succinctly going deep into cultural contexts and scripture and he holds a fairly high view of scripture as he is articulating. You’ve already mentioned, I think for people just trying to get into the skimming the surface, both Justin Lee and Matthew Vines have written books. Justin Lee’s is called Torn-
Trent: Rescuing the Bible from-
Brandan: God versus Gay-
Trent: Christian Debate. Yes.
Brandan: And then Matthew vines is God and the Gay Christian. I think John Boswell, I’ve grown to like him more and more. William Loader I’ve grown to like more and more. I think both of them have good arguments. And then Colby Martin, who’s another San Diego based pastor, wrote a book called Unclobber. He’s a straight pastor, used to be a pastor at our church. And his book is kind of become one of the standard books in the past couple of years. So it’s called Unclobber by Colby Martin. Those are just to get you skimming the surface. And then if you want to go deeper, my book, The Gospel of Inclusion. I do think it presents an argument that you’re not going to find in any of those other texts.
Trent: Sure. And then I would recommend for listeners if you want to go deeper from the view that I had been defending, probably the best defender is Robert Gagnon. He has a book called The Bible and Homosexual Practice. I think we referenced him earlier. He comes at you with footnotes upon footnote though he has, obviously his critics, and his website, robertgagnon.net, he responds to more of his critics. Other books I would recommend, I think Kevin DeYoung has a book called What Does the Bible Teach on Homosexuality. And you dialogue with Preston Sprinkles, I don’t know if he wrote anything on this. Has he written anything?
Brandan: Yeah, he wrote a book called A People to Be Loved.
Trent: Yes, that’s it.
Brandan: I know this is anathema, but I’m going to throw it in. My good friend, Father James Martin wrote a great book on this called Bridging the Divide, I believe.
Trent: Building a Bridge.
Brandan: Building a Bridge.
Trent: I saw on his Twitter he mentioned you and your book. Right? Did he read the book or have any thoughts on it or?
Brandan: Yeah, when we were hanging out in New York a few months ago, he just promoted it out there for me and got a lot of pushback for it, but I think he-
Trent: So there was no part of the book that he expressed any reservations about? He just thought it was good?
Brandan: I’m sure he has reservations, but we didn’t get into that.
Trent: Yeah, okay. But he was happy… he promoted it to people.
Brandan: Right. I think he gets unfairly attacked in the Catholic world, but I think he’s doing a good job for what he’s trying to do in occupied space where there can be healing between the LGBT people and the Catholic Church.
Trent: And oh the other thing I’d recommend, so yeah, so Preston Sprinkles, Kevin DeYoung, Robert Gagnon, and then finally listeners, a great resource apostled within the church is Courage. Courage is an apostolate that helps people with same sex attractions lead chaste lives. My friend, Father Paul Check used to run it and now the executive director is Father Philip Bochanski. Wonderful guy. Be sure to check out Courage. I think their website is couragerc.net or.com, but Courage Catholic apostolate, you can’t miss it. Brandon, thanks for being on the show today.
Brandan: Thank you.
Trent: I appreciate it.
Brandan: It’s so good to be here.
Trent: Thank you guys for listening and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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