Hey! Glad you’re asking and glad you’re taking the topic seriously. I think it was the seriousness of the topics and taking seriously those we were leading that led a lot of us to the outcomes in which we landed.
I’m a pastor as well! I work in the PCUSA. I work in an open/affirming church! In fact our worship minister left to be a drag queen 😂😂😂. They said they could make more money that way. Which...may be a damning indictment on how much we get paid lol.
A book that was crucial for me in this conversation was sex and the single savior by Dale Martin. It works through interpretation and rhetoric we use when talking about the Bible. Maybe it’ll be helpful for you as well!
Dale Martin's essay in <em>Sex and the Single Savior</em> is probably still the best survey of the translation issues relating to arsenokiotês. His basic point is that the meaning of a word, especially one with such little external attestation—can't be derived from combining the meaning of its component parts but should always be defined by the contexts in which ancient authors used them. Moreoever, he (rightly, I think) argues that how translators choose to render the word tells us more about what the translators think than about what Paul thought. Or, as he puts it, "Perhaps ideology has been more important than philology" (43).
Masturbating and watching porn are two very different things. Pornography can really desensitise your brain and damage the way you relate sexually to your partner. Masturbation doesn’t do that.
I don’t want to tell anyone what to do, but the bible teaches to avoid “porne”, which is Greek for any kind of immoral sexual acts. The ancient people would have interpreted this as most non-traditional sexual unions: so no threesomes or more, no weird positions during sex, etc etc.
However, Paul actually also argues that one should abstain from sex all together, and only to do it in marriage if you are “too hot”. In fact, Paul seems very concerned with “heat” or how we might say “horniness”, and that it distracts from devoting your life to God. He doesn’t explicitly say anything about masturbation, and if we take his concerns about “heat” seriously, masturbation could be regarded as an acceptable solution to your “heat”, that allows you to get back and focus on God.
There is an excellent book by renowned Yale scholar and biblical historian Dale B. Martin called “sex and the single saviour”, where he thoroughly reinvestigates what scripture says about sexuality. https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Single-Savior-Sexuality-Interpretation/dp/0664230466
All I can recommend is that you learn for yourself, and don’t follow one church’s view or tradition blindly.
Masturbating and watching porn are two very different things. Pornography can really desensitise your brain and damage the way you relate sexually to your partner. Masturbation doesn’t do that.
I don’t want to tell anyone what to do, but the bible teaches to avoid “porne”, which is Greek for any kind of immoral sexual acts. The ancient people would have interpreted this as most non-traditional sexual unions: so no threesomes or more, no weird positions during sex, etc etc.
However, Paul actually also argues that one should abstain from sex all together, and only to do it in marriage if you are “too hot”. In fact, Paul seems very concerned with “heat” or how we might say “horniness”, and that it distracts from devoting your life to God. He doesn’t explicitly say anything about masturbation, and if we take his concerns about “heat” seriously, masturbation could be regarded as an acceptable solution to your “heat”, that allows you to get back and focus on God.
There is an excellent book by renowned Yale scholar and biblical historian Dale B. Martin called “sex and the single saviour”, where he thoroughly reinvestigates what scripture says about sexuality. https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Single-Savior-Sexuality-Interpretation/dp/0664230466
All I can recommend is that you learn for yourself, and don’t follow one church’s view or tradition blindly.
Feel free to link some such articles.
First, the history of translation for passages such as Lev 18:22; 20:13; Rom 1:26-27; 1 Cor 6:9, and so on is complicated, reflecting all manner of political and historical textures that intermix with the histories of how sexuality has been understood. Chapters 3 and 4 of Dale Martin's Sex and the Single Savior could be of interest.
The broader issue that scholars of ancient ideas about gender/sexuality and the New Testament traditionally focus on is whether ancient sources give us evidence that there was even an idea of "sexual orientation," and thus the possibility of a category like "homosexual" or "heterosexual," in antiquity. Note that this is a different issue from whether ancient sources discuss men having sex with or desiring other men, women with women, and so on. No one really denies the latter. The questions involve the cultural meanings and categories used for talking about such things. This debate about all this continues. David Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality is one of the classic arguments that ideas of "homosexual" or "sexual orientation" were not part of those ancient cultural grammars. Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women disagrees. And there are countless publications on all this. I would again point you toward the above mentioned chapters in Dale Martin's book for a discussion of these issues in relation to New Testament sources.
Second, I have not heard the claim that Lev 18:22 refers to young boys as opposed to men. That's an argument that people sometimes advance for 1 Cor 6:9 (and thus that Paul was including pederasts in his list of people-types who will not inherit the kingdom of God). There is still a lot of debate about what kind of activities Lev 18:22 and 20:13 are proscribing ("And with a man you shall not lie the lying down of a woman"). Saul Olyan's article reviews much of the debate and argues that both passages are, indeed, about men who have anal sex with other men. But he also argues that the Holiness Code's (the source of that material in Leviticus) problem with such actions isn't a timeless moral aversion to "homosexuality" (Olyan would dispute that such a category existed for the ancient writer). Instead the HC proscribes male-male anal penetration because it involves the mixing of two defiling substances: feces and semen. I only run through Olyan's argument to illustrate the web of issues associated with interpreting the Leviticus passages.
But again, all of this stuff is much-debated.
The funny thing about the verse against women teaching is that the book it appears in (1 Timothy) is almost certainly written by someone other than Paul, claiming to be Paul.
For Paul's views on sexuality, I highly recommend everyone read Dale Martin's Sex and the Single Savior. He's a brilliant Bible scholar who is also an out gay man and a Christian, and does a thorough yet readable job of exploring the basically alien ancient context in which Paul was writing.
An alternative is Dale Martin's book, Sex and the Single Savior.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Sex-Single-Savior-Sexuality-Interpretation/dp/0664230466
Progressive Christians generally acknowledge that there are many incredibly problematic passages in the Bible, but still find peace in beliefs that are no problematic: that God loves and accepts his creation, that God wants his creation to love and accept each other, that God lifts up the downtrodden and condemns greed, violence, and abuse. Sometimes the Bible reflects that, other times it doesn't. The Bible consists of about 700 years of vastly different cultures and philosophies, so of course it wildly contradicts itself. Finding something worth believing in all of that, that makes you a better person, and that makes the world a kinder, more loving place -- that's what progressive Christianity often is.
On a more specific note, Dale Martin is a Yale professor of religious studies and a gay Christian man; his entire semester of New Testament is freely available on YouTube. I've watched the whole class and think it's brilliant, but he's also written a book I have not read called Sex and the Single Savior, which looks like it confronts a number of these issues. He is an absolutely brilliant scholar, and the course he teaches at Yale answers all of your concerns more eloquently and elegantly than I could ever hope to. Of course, it's literally a semester of college, so it is not short. But I do hope you check it out.
> IMO, statements like this could be used in a politically inappropriate manner.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? (Certainly, I see how it could be abused, but what are you suggesting practically? Many comments, even many biblical ones, are often applied inappropriately in a political setting, so I don't understand the point of your comment.)
> Also, there is a very interesting and well-informed earlier thread concerning this subject matter here.
>
> Furthermore, some may be interested in checking out Dale Allison's collection of essays entitled: Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation.
Thank you for the referrals. Out of curiosity, though, did you mean them as a response to my comment or as general recommendations for all readers of the thread?
I recommend Sex and the Single Savior by Dale Martin as a good example of a book from a more liberal perspective.