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Homosexuality and the Bible
195
society. All the laws of Leviticus 18 may be understood as violations of
these principles.”10The activities proscribed in Leviticus 18 and 20 are
portrayed as “abominations” because homosexual practice violates the
divine order of gender set forth in Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24.n
This connection with the creation order is implicit in the refrain of
the Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13:
“with a male as one lies with a woman
”
(emphasis added).12 Such phraseology intertextually links with both
Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. In Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, homosexual activ
ity is regarded as an abomination rejected primarily because it involved
“behaving toward another man as if he were a woman by making him
the object of male sexual desires. That is an abomination, an abhor
rent violation of divinely sanctioned boundaries—in this case, gender
boundaries established at creation.”13The prohibition of homosexual
relations is not an issue of gender status (male honor or hierarchy),
as some would claim, but concerns “a distortion of gender itself, as
created and ordered by God.”14B. S. Childs perceptively captures this
biblical rationale, and the implication for today:
The recent attempt of some theologians to find a biblical opening,
if not warrant, for the practice of homosexuality stands in strik
ing disharmony with the Old Testament’s understanding of the
relation of male and female. The theological issue goes far beyond
the citing of occasional texts which condemn the practice (Lev
2 0 :1 3 ) . . . . The Old Testament views homosexuality as a distortion
of creation which falls into the shadows outside the blessing.15
Seventh-day Adventists have rightly defended the doctrine of
Creation against attacks from those who would wish to deny the
literal six-day creation described in Genesis 1 and propose some
form of theistic evolution for the earth’s origins. But a rejection or
undermining of the basic distinctions in the Creation order is just as
devastating an attack on the doctrine of Creation—perhaps more so.
In fact, the view that homosexual orientation is congenital and
therefore natural is built upon an evolutionary premise, namely,
that we are simply living out the urges that we naturally have as