Using the Bible in LGBTQIA Discourse (Part 5)

Posted on by Sam Powell
The Garden of Eden, Thomas Cole (1801-1848)

One of the foundational arguments of Christians who affirm that traditional view of homosexuality is that same-sex sex is contrary to nature.

This argument rests on a couple of assumptions: 1) that the world today is a corrupted version of the world’s original condition a few thousand years ago and 2) that Genesis 1-2 gives us a reliable picture of that original state.

I’d like to pose a few questions about these assumptions.

First, why are they important for the traditional view? It’s because if someone claims that the sciences have something to say about homosexuality and that they may not support the traditional view, traditionalists have a ready response: science studies nature in its corrupted, post-Genesis 3 state. As a result, while it can correctly describe nature as it is today, it is not describing nature in its original state. In this view, it is a fallacy to draw conclusions about morality from the results of scientific study. To derive a moral law from nature, one must use the Bible, which gives us nature in its original, uncorrupted state. Scientific studies used to show that homosexuality is not contrary to nature are thus deemed irrelevant.

Second, there is more than one problem with these assumptions. There is, for instance, the impossibility of giving scientific support to belief in a universe that, a few thousand years ago, existed in a state of uncorrupted perfection. I won’t comment further on this issue; it won’t have much persuasive power for those who lack confidence in the scientific project and distrust of the sciences is built into the traditionalist view in its current form.

Let me instead raise other questions about belief in an original, perfect world.

Take some phenomenon in nature today. How do we know whether and to what extent its current state is the result of corruption? For instance, many people suffer pain from wisdom teeth. The scientific explanation is that, over a span of several million years, the human jaw has shortened to the point that it can no longer accommodate those extra teeth.

What’s the traditionalist explanation? It can’t be that God created the human jaw too small for wisdom teeth. The explanation can only be 1) that the human jaw was originally the perfect size for the full set of teeth, including wisdom teeth, but 2) that due to the corrupting effects of sin, the jaw shortened and here we are today in pain. So, did God (after Adam’s and Eve’s sin in Genesis 3) cause the jaw to shorten in order to cause us pain? I’ll assume conservatives don’t want to believe that God deliberately shortened the jaw to cause us pain.

Or does the corruption of sin just work randomly? Maybe corruption could have resulted in the jaw getting bigger, resulting in gaps between our teeth, but actually it had the opposite effect. And if corruption had random effects, why was the jaw shortened? Why not the nose? Or fingers? Or did Adam and Eve originally have very long noses and fingers and they were shortened to their current size by the corrupting effects of sin?

Readers can make up their own minds, but to me the traditionalists’ assumptions become absurd once you think about them for a bit.

A form of estrogen

Here’s another example: various ailments of women (including osteoporosis and heart disease) are related to reduced levels of estrogen in menopause, when the ovaries cease production of this hormone. So, in the original state of creation, was it God’s intention that Eve would never undergo menopause? Is menopause the result of sin’s corruption? How in the world did Adam’s and Eve’s transgression result in the complex chemical signals that result in menopause? Why did sin not have a comparable effect on men, perhaps causing testes to stop producing sperm? Why did sin effect women’s fertility but not men’s?

A thistle. One result of sin (Genesis 3:18)

The truth is that no plausible reason can be given. Conservatives simply take whatever seems problematic in nature today and declare that it is the result of sin’s corruption. Diabetes? Caused by original sin. Male baldness? Same answer. Perhaps dry skin and hangnails as well.

The traditionalist assumption of a pristine original state could be considered quaint and imaginative if it were not for the way they use it in ethics. In particular, it functions as a picture of the way things should be: Marriage today should be between one man and one woman because that’s how it was in the beginning. Same-sex sex and attraction is against nature because it was not so in the beginning.

It turns out, however, that the traditionalist love affair with the beginning has limits. Genesis is pretty clear that in the original state, both humans and animals were vegetarian:

God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the air and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”

Genesis 1:28-29

It’s not until after the flood when God, apparently accepting humankind’s propensity toward violence, grants to humans the right to eat meat:

Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you, and just as I gave you the green plants [in Genesis 1], I give you everything. Only, you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

Genesis 9:3-4

Yet no one witnesses traditionalists rushing to embrace vegetarianism, even though it was God’s intention in the beginning. (Traditionalists are also curiously unworried by the prohibition of consuming blood.)

We can already hear traditionalists’ rebuttal: God’s permission in Genesis 9 overrules the original situation of Genesis 1. OK, but then why do conservatives not take the same view of divorce? Matthew 19:3-9 clearly states that divorce was not part of original creation but was granted only later as a concession. Why are traditionalists so excited about the original state of marriage but not the original state of human food? And why do many of them embrace wives’ submission to husbands (sanctioned in Genesis 3:16 after Adam’s and Eve’s transgression) but have no use for the more egalitarian picture we find in Genesis 1-2? If they are so bent on living according to the original state, what explains their devotion to wives’ submission?

The traditional view of a perfect, uncorrupted beginning is the sort of feel-good belief that indulges our nostalgic impulses. Probably every generation of humans has felt that things were better in the past and that the next generation was bent on wrecking all that is good. The truth, however, is that this belief in a perfect beginning will not stand up to even casual inquiry, especially when it is used to prescribe moral norms. For a theological source of ethics, we are much better off with the idea of the kingdom of God or the new creation.

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