The Living Instance (2 of 7)

Abominable deeds — the Hebrew is to'ebah, the precise word Leviticus 18:22 uses for the practice in question. The hospitality reading requires stopping Ezekiel mid-thought. And the New Testament closes the question entirely:

"So also Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighboring towns, since they indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire in a way similar to these angels, are now displayed as an example by suffering the punishment of eternal fire." — Jude 7 (NET)

Jude names the sexual immorality and the unnatural desire by name. Peter adds that Lot was worn down day after day by the lawless deeds he saw and heard among them (2 Peter 2:7–8). Sodom's sins were plural — the pride and the neglect of the poor are in the indictment, and the churches that preach Genesis 19 while ignoring Ezekiel's economics have their own selectivity to answer for. But a rereading that must stop Ezekiel one verse early and skip Jude altogether is not an interpretation. It is the buffet operating inside a single citation.

Next, Leviticus, and the objection everyone has heard: you eat shellfish and wear blended fabric, so why does this one verse survive?

"You must not have sexual relations with a male as one has sexual relations with a woman; it is a detestable act." — Leviticus 18:22 (NET)

The answer to the shellfish objection is in the same chapter, and the objection has never engaged it. At the close of Leviticus 18, God states that it is precisely for these practices — the sexual catalog of this chapter — that the nations already in the land are being driven out, so that the land "vomited out its inhabitants" (Leviticus 18:24–25). Stop and see what that means. The Canaanites never received Israel's ceremonial law. They were never bound by the food laws, the fabric laws, the festival calendar — and God never judged them for shellfish. He judged them for Leviticus 18. Which means Leviticus 18 was never a ceremonial boundary marker for Israel alone. It is moral law, binding on the nations, enforced on the nations, before Israel ever entered the land. And the New Testament ratifies exactly that division: the food laws are explicitly released — Jesus declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19), and Peter's vision confirmed it (Acts 10) — while the sexual standard is explicitly retained, in the Jerusalem Council's abstention from porneia and in Paul's vice lists. The shellfish objection treats the two categories as one. Scripture separates them in both Testaments, in writing.

Then Paul, whose words in Romans are the ones most often called a product of his time:

"For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones, and likewise the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed in their passions for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error." — Romans 1:26–27 (NET)

Exchanged the natural. The Greek is para physin — contrary to nature — and it is not Paul borrowing Greek philosophy. It is Paul reading Genesis. The whole passage is built on exchanges: the glory of the immortal God exchanged for images, the truth of God exchanged for the lie, the natural function exchanged for what is against it. The argument is that idolatry and this practice are the same movement — the created order traded away at the level of worship and then at the level of the body. When a reader says the practice is not natural, they are not expressing a cultural discomfort. They are quoting the apostle's own category, from the Text, where it has stood for two thousand years. And the trap of Romans 2:1 stands exactly where it stood earlier in this book: the reader who finishes Romans 1 pointing at someone else has not yet reached Romans 2, where Paul turns and indicts the pointer.

Finally, the word itself, because the whole modern evasion runs through one Greek word: porneia — translated sexual immorality, or in older English, fornication. The revisionist move is to declare the word vague, a catch-all whose meaning each generation fills in for itself. It was not vague. For a first-century Jew the word had a fixed referent: the sexual catalog of Leviticus 18 — every sexual union outside the one-flesh covenant of husband and wife. That is what the word meant in the mouths that spoke it, and Jesus is one of the mouths:

"For out of the heart come evil ideas, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander." — Matthew 15:19 (NET)

Jesus named porneia as what defiles a person, from the heart. The Jerusalem Council retained it as binding on Gentile believers (Acts 15:20) while releasing the ceremonial law in the same letter. Paul deployed it in every vice list. The word is defined by its referent, not by the preferences of the reader — and its referent has not moved. What has happened in the modern church is not that the word became obsolete. It is that the word became avoided. Those are different things, and the difference is the subject of this book.

That is the inventory. The texts run from the second chapter of the Bible to one of its last letters. They include the creation design, the prophets, the words of Jesus, the apostolic council, and Paul. They are not ambiguous, they are not few, and they have been sitting in the pew Bible the entire time the congregation was being told the historic reading was a relic. What is called an obsolete interpretation is, on the page, simply the interpretation. The rest of this chapter examines what has been built — in both directions — to avoid saying so.

The case for the change, stated at its strongest.

The affirming argument deserves to be heard in its best form, because a generation of churchgoers has been taught it and many of them believe it sincerely. It runs like this. The church has changed its reading of Scripture before. Christians once defended slavery from the Bible, chapter and verse, and were wrong. Most evangelical denominations once refused to ordain women, citing plain texts, and many now ordain them. The church once held the line on divorce and remarriage from Jesus' own words, and then quietly accommodated. So the texts on homosexuality, the argument concludes, are the next chapter in the same story — sincere readings of their time, now obsolete, as the Spirit leads the church further along Scripture's own arc of widening welcome. Some add Acts 15 as the model: the church once changed its mind about who could belong, and can do so again. Congregations hear this framework preached for years. By the time the vote comes, revising the reading feels like maturity, and holding it feels like the people who defended slavery.

That is the case. Here is what happens when each pillar of it is examined.

The slavery argument runs backward. The abolitionists did not defeat the slaveholders' exegesis by loosening their grip on Scripture — they defeated it by reading Scripture more closely. The image of God in every person from Genesis 1. The Exodus. Paul sending Onesimus back to Philemon "no longer as a slave, but... as a dear brother" (Philemon 16). And the vice list of 1 Timothy 1:10, which places those who steal and sell human beings alongside murderers. Slavery appears in Scripture as a fallen institution regulated and then subverted from the inside; it is never grounded in the creation order. Marriage is grounded in the creation order — Genesis 2, before the Fall — and when Jesus is asked about it, He does not loosen the creational definition. He reasserts it and tightens its implications, telling His hearers that Moses' divorce allowance was a concession to hard hearts and "from the beginning it was not this way" (Matthew 19:8). The trajectory of the canon on slavery bends against slavery from within the Text. The trajectory of the canon on marriage runs back toward Eden — in Jesus' own mouth. The two cases move in opposite directions, and an argument that needs them to be parallel has not read either one closely.