Hi, I'm not trying to be hostile and before I ask my question, let me say that I don't hate homosexuals. Now on to the question: you and other gay christians believe that you can be gay and right with God, right? What do you guys think of Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:25-27, Mark 10:6-9, and 1 Corinthians 7:2. Again, I'm not hating homosexuals, I'm just asking for the gay Christian thought process towards these verses
First of all let me warn you for future reference that saying things like “I don’t hate homosexuals” does not negate homophobia (not that you’re necessarily being homophobic in asking a question) but using such phrasing can set some serious alarm bells in queer people’s heads. Next time maybe try phrasing it like “I’m an ally looking for a better understanding of {question}”.
Sidenote: this is a place for all queer people, meaning trans, ace, bi and pan kids too.
Secondly, I can understand the desire to look at every single clobber passage (passage used against the queer community) and hyper analyze translations and exact meanings. I’ve done an entire presentation on this to my Bible study before. At the beginning, it helped me reconcile my identity and my faith. If you really need these explanations, check out hope remains or Matthew Vines. Apologetics and proof texting are baby steps into a much bigger life of peace, joy, empowerment, and love in Jesus Christ. But they can be dangerous.
Proof texting (using bible verses out of context to prove your point, bickering over meanings) can be used to justify awful and entirely ungodly things. As I’m sure you know, it was used on a widespread scale to justify slavery in America. Even today it’s used to justify sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all sorts of other awful things. If I’m not doing a good job explaining this, here and here are some words from Fr. Shay that do a better job.
So how do I know that God loves me? Because I have a relationship with him. Because I pray to him and I hear him when I worship and I feel him when I serve and he is encouraging me and smiling upon me and he loves me just the way I am. He calls me to this community, to be his hands and feet in healing the pain here. I know God loves me because when I read the Bible—which is a collection of words written by people whom God was breathing through, but were still growing followers living in a different time period— I see over and over and over again that God stands with the marginalized. He stands with the people oppressed and hurting. He stands with us.
So what I think of those verses are that they’re probably mistranslated, but either way, they were written by people still growing in faith, and they were written in a different time, and not every verse in a Bible full of oddities and contradictions has to directly affect my faith. I have freedom in Christ- and that means freedom to love the way he made me- no matter what other people and their interpretations of scripture have to say about it.
Feel free to come to me if you have more questions! God loves you a lot and so do I, so I’ll be praying for you in your quest for answers. Have a great day!
