What did jesus say about gays

This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the statement on the shirt. He writes. Never in the Bible does Jesus himself offer an explicit prohibition of homosexuality. Oremus seems to suggest that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it.

Take a 1-minute survey to join our mailing list and receive a free ebook in the format of your choosing. Read on your preferred digital device, including smart phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. First, there are many ethical issues about which Jesus made no explicit statement.

That observation hardly means that his moral vision has no relevance to those issues. Jesus never said anything explicit about abortion, same-sex marriage, or child molestation. Second, Jesus did speak explicitly about sexual immorality in general and the nature of marriage. He denounced the former e. Mark —8.

Jesus affirmed the covenanted union of one man and one woman as the only normative expression of human sexuality. It is incredible to suggest that these words from Jesus have no bearing on the question of homosexuality.

What Did Jesus Teach about Homosexuality?

They surely do. He writes:. Even if Jesus viewed homosexuality as a sin, he had a penchant for reaching out to sinners rather than shunning them. In Romans 1, Paul denounced gay sex as unnatural—an egregious example of pagan decadence—and said it would bring the wrath of God. Here is another iteration of the hermeneutical cage match that is so popular today—the view that Jesus and Paul are fundamentally at odds over a variety of ethical issues.

On the one side is Jesus: peace-loving, enemy-forgiving, egalitarian, and inclusive with regard to homosexuals. On the other side is Paul: war-loving, death penalty—supporting, patriarchal, and exclusionary with regard to homosexuals. And so the slogan from the T-shirt appears to be vindicated. Despite the hang-ups of people like Paul, Jesus was not a homophobe.

Sex was created by God for his glory. Those who stage hermeneutical cage matches between Paul and Jesus are staging a contest that neither Jesus nor Paul would ever have tolerated. At the end of the day, this argument is not about the color of letters but about the nature of Scripture. Those who wish to establish biblical authority over the long haul will avoid the cage-match approach.

And those who truly wish to be red-letter Christians will heed the words of Paul and the other apostolic authors of Scripture as the very words of Christ.