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Homosexuality, Marriage, and the Church
distortion of the Edenic ideal, but I find in Scripture no culpability
for homosexual orientation per se, just as there is no condemnation
of natural fallen tendencies and temptations to heterosexual lust, if
these are not harbored or acted upon.19
But now consider homosexual practice itself: same-sex intercourse.
How much is at stake in the issue of same-sex intercourse may be
judged by how seriously it is regarded in God’s eyes. Robert Gagnon
makes a strong case that, according to God’s Word, “homosexual
practice is a more serious violation of Scripture’s sexual norms than
even incest, adultery, plural marriage, and divorce.”20Only bestiality
is presented as a worse sexual offense.
Gagnon first presents the evidence that in Scripture there are
different degrees of severity when it comes to sin:
In the Old Testament there is a clear ranking of sins. For instance,
when one goes to Leviticus 20, which reorders the sexual offenses
in Leviticus 18 according to penalty, the most severe offenses are
grouped first, including same-sex intercourse. Of course, varie
gated penalties for different sins can be found throughout the legal
material in the Old Testament.21
Jesus also prioritized offenses, referring to “weightier matters of the
law” (Matt. 23:23,
n k j v )
and to different degrees of punishment for
different offenses (see Luke 12:48). Paul’s attitude toward the case of
incest in 1 Corinthians 5 also makes clear that he differentiated among
various sexual offenses, with some being more serious than others.
Having established that Scripture does consider some offenses
more serious than others, Gagnon then gives three main reasons as to
why same-sex intercourse is one of the gravest sexual sins:
1. It is the violation that most clearly and radically offends against
God’s intentional creation of humans as “male and female” (Gen.
1:27) and definition of marriage as a union between a man and a
woman (Gen. 2:24).... Since Jesus gave priority to these two texts
from the creation stories in Genesis when he defined normative
and prescriptive sexual ethics for his disciples, they have to be