The term ‘sodomy’ for
homosexuality comes from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18-19. The use of this term by the Church indicates the consistent
understanding of the text throughout the Church’s history: it is a story about,
among other things, homosexuality in Canaan.
Not so, say a number of modern interpreters who wish to find some other
meaning in the story or who, more likely, have an agenda to find anything in the text
other than a story about disordered sexuality.
In the Pilling Report, David Runcorn follows the recent
interpretation of several others as he puts forward a single interpretation
that fits his agenda. For these
interpreters, the story of Sodom is a story about hospitality—not accepting the
stranger. In this way, the text is made
irrelevant for the Church of England’s present confusion over the issue of
homosexuality.[1]
So, have modern
interpreters, followed by some western Anglicans such as Runcorn,
discovered a better interpretation of Genesis 18-19 than that which interpreters
through the centuries have previously held?
I have addressed the issue of this passage in greater length elsewhere
with an examination of the text and its interpretation in Jewish and early Christian
literature.[2] As a narrative,
the text lends itself to various applications, without limiting
interpreters to a single point as is often the case in interpreting, for
example, epistles. The primary purpose
of the story is to illustrate how completely wicked Sodom and Gomorrah were—a key
point made earlier in Genesis (Gen. 13.13).
This makes limiting the text to a single sin unlikely. Indeed, Jewish texts interpreting the story identified
several sins with Sodom and Gomorrah, not just one.
Runcorn makes note of a
single Jewish text interpreting the story: Ezekiel 16:
Ezekiel 16:49-50 (ESV) Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and
her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid
the poor and needy. 50 They
were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw
it.
Oddly, he reduces this passage to the sins of pride and inhospitality. However, Ezekiel intends to charge
Sodom with a variety of sins, not just one or two. Also, reference to Sodom’s ‘abomination’
(whether taken as a single sin, as in the ESV translation, or as a collective
noun (as the NRSV or NIV) may well address or include its sexual abomination. The term
‘abomination,’ after all, is used of homosexuality in Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13
(though the term is not limited to this application). Also, Ezekiel intends to draw parallels
between Sodom and Jerusalem, and one of the latter’s sins is repeatedly
described in Ezekiel 16 as sexual immorality (Ezek. 16.15-17, 20, 22, 25-38,
41, 43, 58). While the indictment is
metaphorical for Jerusalem (her ‘whoring’ after other nations, her idolatry),
it was not metaphorical for Sodom. The
meaning of ‘abomination’ in Ezekiel 16.50, therefore, surely stands for Sodom’s
sexual immorality.
Another text that makes impossible any
reduction of Sodom’s sin to something non-sexual is the parallel passage of
Joshua 19. As in Genesis 19, there is a
background in the story of hospitality to a stranger. Yet the story has so much more to it than
this. In both stories, there is an
attempt by males in the city to have sex with another male, and this, not
violence, is the primary focus of the texts (Genesis 19.5; Judges 19.22). To be sure, violence and rape are awful sins,
and these are more pronounced than the matter of inhospitality in the stories. Yet the ‘wicked’ (Gen. 19.7; Jdg. 19.23) and ‘vile’
(Jdg. 19.24) act is a description of the men of both cities wanting to ‘know’
the male visitors. ‘To know’ someone in
such contexts means to have sex with that person.
If in Genesis the men are angels,
in Joshua the man is human—the issue is not sex with angels but sex with other
males. In Joshua, the man succeeds in avoiding homosexual abuse by sending out his concubine instead, whereas in Genesis Lot’s daughters
are offered to the crowd but are not sent out.
In Joshua, the woman dies, and the man cuts her body up and sends the
parts out to the tribes of Israel. The
response of Israelites is that ‘Such a thing has
never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out
of the land of Egypt until this day; consider it, take counsel, and speak’
(Judges 19.30). It is simply impossible
to read this story as a story of inhospitality or pride. The issues are violence, gang rape, and,
especially, homosexuality. The parallel
with Genesis suggests that the town of Gibeah had taken on practices associated
with the Canaanites. The reason for wiping
out Sodom or Gibeah is not that they were inhospitable—even if
this is a minor aspect of the stories. God does not wipe out a population over inhospitality. The main reason is that they sunk
so low in their unrighteousness as to engage in homosexual acts.
Beyond the issues already noted,
another problem with the 'inhospitality' interpretation of the story of Sodom is that it
does not explain Gomorrah’s destruction.
The angels only visit Sodom, but both cities are destroyed. Also, they came to see if there were any righteous in the city (Gen. 18.26-32),
not to see if they would be received well as strangers. Lot’s offer of his daughters in place of the
strangers for sexual abuse leaves most modern readers cold: how could he do
such a thing? At such a point, the simplistic
hospitality interpretation becomes morally repugnant, for it suggests that
having your daughters raped is better than being inhospitable to (male) strangers. Yet this is not the intention of the
story. Rather, the ethical point of the
story is that the men of Sodom were so sinful that they would not accept sex
with females over their preference for males.
The reader is intended to gain moral instruction not from Lot’s offer of his daughters
but from the depth of Sodom’s moral turpitude.
The story in Judges 19 carries the same message: the men of Gibeah had
sunk to an equally low morality—homosexual acts.
Finally, Christians need to consider the
Biblical canon as a whole, not just individual texts examined on their
own. In the case of Genesis 18-19, we
particularly need to consider Jude 7 and 2 Peter 2.6-7:
Jude 1:7 (ESV) just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities,
which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve
as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.
2 Peter 2:6-7 … if by
turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to
extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the
ungodly; 7 and if he rescued
righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked….
Neither text, of course, suggests
that Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin was inhospitality, and both texts highlight the
two cities’ sexual immorality. The
problems addressed by both Jude and 2 Peter are the false teaching and
practices of persons compromising Christian orthodoxy with the alien views of
an ungodly culture—as is now the case in western society and, sadly, western mainline denominations. This can happen when false teachers simply
oppose the teaching of Scripture, and it can happen when people let the
influence of culture weigh so heavily on their reading of the Scriptures or
hearing from the Church’s teaching that they actually begin to think that the
Biblical text says something else than it does. Runcorn's error is the latter, although the Pilling Report also expresses the voice of others quite willing to set aside Scripture entirely. Either way, false teaching is perpetrated in the Church of England and true Christian witness to the culture will have to be found elsewhere.
[1] David Runcorn, Appendix 4: ‘Evangelicals,
Scripture and Same Sex Relationships—an ‘Including Evangelical’ Perspective,’
in Report of the House of Bishops:
Working Group on Human Sexuality (Nov. 2013); online https://www.churchofengland.org/media/1891063/pilling_report_gs_1929_web.pdf
(accessed 24 December, 2016), pp. 176-195.
[2] S. Donald Fortson and Rollin G.
Grams, Unchanging Witness: The Consistent
Christian Teaching on Homosexuality in Scripture and Tradition (Nashville,
TN: B&H Academic, 2016).
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