What’s the Sin?

Let’s talk about sin. Queer sin, to start with, although I will come around to straight sin before this piece is done. I want to talk about sin for two reasons.

The first is that many people seem to assume that living queer is living in sin. This is often true even for people who believe that the church should not condemn LGBTQ+ people. Love the sinner, they say, not the sin. They often add something to the effect that everyone is a sinner, thinking, I suspect, especially about sex. Since Augustine, there has been a strong association between sex and sin. And especially between queer sex and sin. In this piece, I would like to address this assumption.

The second reason I want to talk about sin is that the synod of my own denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, has used a peculiar argument from sin to blow up what the denomination has been. They argue not only that queer sex is sinful but that anyone who says anything to the contrary sins by supporting sin. And this, the synod has said, is a very serious matter. On the basis of 1 Corinthians 6:9 (and a handful of other texts) and Q&A 87 of the Heidelberg Catechism, they claim that advocating for same-sex marriage effectively places one outside the company of those who belong to Christ and threatens not only their own salvation but the salvation of others. Such people, they have ruled, must either repent or be thrown out of the denomination.

Two questions then. The first is whether queer sex is (always) sinful and why. The second is whether one’s view of such things should be used by the church to rule people in or out. As often is the case, I started with the intention of answering both of these questions in a single piece. Alas, it has not worked out that way. So in this piece, I’ll try to answer the first question; in a subsequent piece, I’ll look at the second question.

I gave this piece the title, “What’s the Sin?” Ask it slightly differently: what makes queer sex sinful? Some might say in answer to this: “Because God has said so.” I’ve heard delegates on the floor of synod say just this. They are so sure that the Bible says that queer sex is sinful and that in this matter the Bible speaks directly for God that they are astounded that anyone could think anything else. If God commands it, should we not just obey it?

But it’s not that simple, is it? Go back through the previous paragraph. Indeed, there are passages in the Bible—a very small number of passages, I should note—that condemn some kinds of queer sex: four passages, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 in the Old Testament and 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 in the New, that refer to a man bedding a male after the manner of a man bedding a woman, language which would seem to refer to pederasty, sex between an older man and a boy. In addition to these there is only one other text, Romans 1:26-27, which is more inclusive (women as well as men) but also vaguer: it speaks of exchanging “natural relations for unnatural ones” and of burning “with desire for one another, doing shameful things, males with males.” And that’s it. Two other passages are frequently cited in this regard, stories about mobs intent on homosexual rape (Genesis 19 and Judges 19), but these stories concern heterosexuals (note Genesis 19:4) intent on violently humiliating foreigners. They have much to teach us about sexual violence and nothing at all about queer sex. It is a legitimate question whether any of these passages in the Bible address a socially sanctioned married relationship between people of the same sex.

To discuss the question properly, it’s important to ask not only about these texts but about what they are ruling and ruling out: What’s the sin? Rules require reasons. I know that it’s sometimes claimed that God needs no reasons. Something like this is often suggested for the rule in Genesis 2 that the first couple should not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It’s claimed that this rule is purely arbitrary, merely a test of the obedience of Adam and Eve, but that’s a poor reading of the story and, were it true, an indictment of God. The scriptures are replete with passages saying that God is just. To say God is just is to say that God is not arbitrary. What God asks of us makes sense, even if at first we cannot fully understand the sense of it.

As I said, rules need reasons. They need to make sense. What is the sense of those biblical prohibitions of same sex relations? And do those prohibitions make the same sense in our present culture? It’s not enough to say, “God commanded it.” We have to ask: What precisely did God command? And why?

Which brings us back to the question: “What’s the sin?” Is it the physical act itself? And if so, which physical act? Homosexual relations are not all that different from heterosexual relations. Pleasuring one’s own body by pleasuring another’s body is just that, pleasuring. The sin can hardly lie in the pleasure. To take an example, adulterous sex and married sex are not physically different, but the first we (and the scriptures) regard as wrong and the second we regard as blessed by God. It’s not the act, which often confuses adulterers. They ask: Can anything that feels this good be wrong?

If not the act of giving pleasure, then the issue must be in the relationship, and this is indeed what those who oppose same sex marriage end up arguing. The argument is presented in different forms, but it usually comes to something like this. There existed at the beginning of time, at least in God’s mind, a paradigm for humanness. This paradigm is reflected in Genesis 1 and, separately, in Genesis 2. The paradigm is that humans are created to be biologically gendered, male and female, and they are made to live in pairs: one male with one female. Further, the argument requires that any variation on these paradigmatic pairs is not only a variation but a moral deviation. Thus, so goes the argument, same sex marriage is a deviation from the divine paradigm for humans. This is what the report on homosexuality to the CRC 1973 argued, although a bit reluctantly, and it’s what the recent CRC report to the 2022 synod argued all too enthusiastically. 

But you will note something about this argument: it’s entirely circular. It assumes what it argues. The issue is not whether human beings are biologically gendered. They are, although even there, a considerable variation exists. Genesis 1 limits itself to this: “Male and female God created them” (vs. 27). Biological gendering.

That humans tend to live in pairs is also patent, although here the biblical account in Genesis 2 gives us a wink-wink. After surgery to biologically divide humans into male and female, the male—we know him as Adam—sees the female—we know her as Eve—and does a little verbal happy dance:

This time we have bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; She will be called “woman” for she was taken from “man” (vs. 23).

The joke here is that in response to the creation of Eve, Adam creates gender in the language: to Hebrew ʾîsh, “man,” he adds ah to make ʾîshah, “woman.” It’s a common way in Hebrew to distinguish nouns that are masculine from nouns that are feminine. 

And then the wink. The writer adds, “Therefore, a man will leave behind his father and mother to cling to his woman, and they will be as if one flesh” (vs. 24). This was not what actually happened in that culture. The man didn’t leave his father and mother; the woman left behind hers. It’s the writers’ winking way of saying that from here on out it doesn’t always go according to plan.

Which indeed it doesn’t, not even in the story. How human beings pair up varies considerably. Or how they don’t pair up. The Bible has everything from Solomon’s thousand wives to Paul’s passionate plea for not pairing up at all. How the pairing goes varies considerably in human history. When we think of marriage, our minds go to marriage as we know it and experience it. But marriage, even in our own culture, has been changing. Everything from how couples come together to what they expect from the relationship has changed and is changing still. Marriage is cultural, not biological; it changes, evolves, as we well know, and now includes same-sex marriage. The notion that Genesis 2 proposes a paradigm for marriage seems to ignore not only history but the Bible itself.

We need a better way to think about this. We need to consider human sexual relationships not from the beginning but from the end—the destination of humanness. It’s this that the Bible is driving towards. In the New Testament, it takes a huge step in the direction of this destination by changing the basic unit of society from family—including ethnicity—to the gathered community of Christ.

This is what Paul is working at in 1 Corinthians 6 and other places. It’s what Jesus is getting at in Matthew 19, a passage ill used in the 2021 CRC human sexuality report. In the new community, married people together with their children form a unit. They are, as both Jesus and Paul say, quoting Genesis 2, “one flesh.” One unit. Or, in Paul’s preferred metaphor, one “member” of the body. But single people are also a unit. The bond of the community is not the sharing of bodies but the sharing of souls, spirits, within the body of Christ. Paul says, “Do you not recognize that your bodies are members of Christ’s [body]? Should you then take the members of Christ and prostitute them? Certainly not. Do you not recognize that anyone who is bonded to a prostitute becomes one body? As it says, ‘The two will become one flesh.’ But anyone who is bonded to Christ becomes one spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:15-17).

Paul has in mind here much more than literal prostitution. He is concerned with forming the new community in Christ, a community distinguished from the community in which these new Christians were once immersed. We might paraphrase Paul’s words: “We are trying to form new community here. So don’t get in bed with the surrounding culture. If you get bed with the culture around us, you will become like them. You will join them. And if you join them, you will find it difficult to be joined to Christ.” 

But sex is no mere metaphor. Sexual relationships are powerful. Joining bodies involves joining souls. That’s why we call it “making love.” In sexual relationships you literally make love. And so its important that sexual relationships be bounded. The next chapter in 1 Corinthians, chapter 7, is all about managing sex. We get so focused on the managing sex part that we miss what is happening in these chapters. A seismic shift has taken place. Marriage has been decentered (something Jesus already starts). The new community will not grow biologically. The church is not a new ethnos. It is a new community in Christ. Spiritual, not biological.

With that in mind, think about how homosexual relations of the kind Paul would have known would have played out in these new communities. It would have been exactly as Paul describes when he describes linking up with prostitutes. It would involve not only bonding with pagan culture but, in Paul’s opinion, bonding with a particularly unsavory part of pagan culture, the custom of pederasty: older men hooking up with boys. 

In Paul’s move to decenter marriage there is a distinct trajectory. The trajectory is away from the dictates of biology. The purpose of human life according to the New Testament is not just reproduction, despite what J.D. Vance has lately been suggesting. We are not moving in the direction of nature. We are not rabbits. We are moving in the direction of a conception of community that includes married people with children, married people without children, and people who are not married. For this kind of community to take shape requires we not “get in bed with” much of culture not only in Paul’s day but in ours. 

“Getting in bed with” includes much more than sex, as I have already said. It includes the toxic masculinity of our culture. It includes racism and sexism and much more. It includes all the ways we bond with what is fraught and sinful in our sex lives. Ask again the question: What’s the sin? It’s not about bodies giving pleasure to other bodies. Bodies are to be celebrated as God’s gift; pleasure is to be celebrated as God’s gift. But if these things replace and disrupt the community of Christ, they become idols. Here, as elsewhere, the fundamental sin is idolatry. Notice how in Romans 1 Paul moves pagan worship to homosexuality. 

For these reasons, same-sex marriage is a gift. Same-sex marriage permits relationships that have existed for all time to be brought into the new community. Before same-sex marriage there was no way for a woman to fall in love with another woman in the way women fall in love with each other and remain part of the new community. In the same way there was no way for a man to fall in love with another man in the way men fall in love with each other and remain part of the new community.  There was no way to recognize them as a couple, a unit, in the new community. Instead, the old rules often led those who fell in love to dissemble, denying their love. Or to marry someone they did not love in that way. Or to not marry at all, but to burn. 

And this is what makes the recent history of churches like the CRC so tragic. They have been so focused on their narrow reading of the rules that they have failed to see the way the gospel has shifted the paradigm and offered to us a new way of life.

So, what’s the sin? It’s not what you do in bed—although there is room enough for sin in bed, whether heterosexual or homosexual. It’s what you do in community. And if the community can embrace, same sex couples, then in biblical terms, it’s not sin after all.

Clay