A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Mixing a cocktail of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.
We're a pastor and a philosopher who have discovered that sometimes pastors need philosophy, and sometimes philosophers need pastors. We tackle topics and interview guests that straddle the divide between our interests.
Who we are:
Randy Knie (Co-Host) - Randy is the founding and Lead Pastor of Brew City Church in Milwaukee, WI. Randy loves his family, the Church, cooking, and the sound of his own voice. He drinks boring pilsners.
Kyle Whitaker (Co-Host) - Kyle is a philosophy PhD and an expert in disagreement and philosophy of religion. Kyle loves his wife, sarcasm, kindness, and making fun of pop psychology. He drinks childish slushy beers.
Elliot Lund (Producer) - Elliot is a recovering fundamentalist. His favorite people are his wife and three boys, and his favorite things are computers and hamburgers. Elliot loves mixing with a variety of ingredients, including rye, compression, EQ, and bitters.
A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Does the Bible Affirm LGB Relationships? Interview with Matthew Vines (Part 1)
Matthew Vines is here to discuss the revised and expanded edition of his influential book God and the Gay Christian, marking eleven years since its initial release. The book sent shockwaves through evangelical Christianity and remains a powerful and compelling case for an affirming reading of the Bible for those who want to hold onto biblical authority (if you're counting, that's exactly one of the hosts of this podcast).
Matthew shares the backstory behind the book, including how he took a semester off from Harvard to come out to his parents and how he spent months studying the Bible and reading ex-gay literature with his dad. That process ultimately changed his dad's mind and started the trajectory to this book.
The heart of our conversation concerns Matthew's case for reading the Bible in an affirming way. He draws a fascinating parallel with how Christians approached biblical prohibitions against charging interest (usury) for 1,500 years—until John Calvin recognized that while Scripture categorically condemned the practice, its underlying moral logic was about protecting the vulnerable from exploitation. Similarly, Matthew argues, we must understand what same-sex behavior meant in ancient times before we can draw parallels to current practices and understandings.
Matthew is articulate and thoughtful and approaches the issue with a great respect for the Bible and for his interlocutors. (The new edition of the book includes new sections responding to some of his critics!)
This conversation ran so deep that we had to split it into two episodes! Stay tuned for Part 2.
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Cheers!
I'm Randy, the pastor, half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology and spirituality.
Kyle:We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air, around the proverbial table with a good drink in the back corner of a dark pub.
Randy:Thanks for joining us and welcome to A Pastor and a Philosopher. Walk into a Bar.
Kyle:So today on the podcast, we're talking with Matthew Vines, who you may know of as the author of a book that made a lot of waves back in mid-2010.
Randy:Many waves.
Kyle:It's called God and the Gay Christian.
Kyle:He's actually come out with a second edition of this book revised and expanded same title and so we got to sit down and talk to him. We've been wanting to talk to him since we started the podcast. He was on our first list that we put together Yep, and they reached out to us. Interestingly, his publicist and we were like heck, yeah, I had no idea that he was doing an expanded version of this and I had never read the original, so I was super excited to finally dive into it and I knew that there was a lot of controversy it caused. I had seen some of the responses from people, some more respectable than others right, some names that people I've met and spoken with about this issue and they had critiquiqued him, and then others that I don't respect at all had also very vocally and publicly critiqued him, and so the cool thing about this book is that it includes responses to some of that.
Kyle:There's a couple of full appendices in the back that directly respond to some of those critics, and I'm very glad I read this version of it to get that more fleshed out take once he's had like 10 years to think about it. So it's going to end up being I'll just say now a two-part conversation, because we got halfway into it and realized we have way more to talk about here.
Randy:Matthew's got a lot to say.
Kyle:He does You're going to see he's got opinions. So this was a really fun conversation and I'm glad we finally got to meet him.
Randy:Yeah, as you said, or similarly to you, I had not read this book and when it came out, I actively avoided this book.
Kyle:No way.
Randy:Because I was non-affirming and I didn't want to get confronted by some of the stuff and I felt like I knew the argument. That's what many of us do when we're non-affirming is we kind of be like I've heard it all. I've heard those arguments and that's the way I used to. I should say that's the way I used to avoid the conversation is just avoid books like this. So I'm so grateful to be able to read this book and it's fantastic. If you are a church leader, a pastor, if you're a Christian, a follower of Christ who is just wrestling with this stuff, if you're a parent of a LGBTQ child, if you're just a Christian in general, I think you need to read this book. It's similar to Changing Our Minds by David Gushy, but it's different enough that I think it's just an important book, and let me just read you a little bit, just one review. By someone who I think we hold dear.
Randy:God and the Gay Christian is a game changer Winsome, accessible and carefully researched. Every page is brought to life by the author's clear love for scripture and deep, persistent faith. With this book, matthew Vines emerges as one of my generation's most important Christian leaders, not only on matters of sexuality, but also on what it means to follow Jesus with wisdom, humility and Grace. That was Rachel Held Evans. These conversations were happening when not all of us were having these conversations and I'm so grateful that they were and for the groundwork and the foundation that they laid, and so I'm excited that Matthew, 11 years later, is keeping this current and moving the conversation forward, and we went to some places in this conversation, so I'm excited to share it with you, friends, and excited to just process together. Matthew Vines, welcome to A Pastor and a Philosopher. Walk into a Bar.
Matthew:Well, thank you so much for having me.
Randy:So, matthew, you kind of exploded onto the scene with this book God and the Gay Christian. In what? 2014, was it 2014,? Yeah, 2014. And your name was everywhere still kind of is, but really I feel like God and the Gay Christian was the weightiest and the book that kind of sent the most waves through the church about sexuality and about affirming sexuality and about the Bible in regards to this. So can you tell us a little bit about where the book originally came from, because now we're talking about this second edition, 11 years later. There's so much to what's going on and what's happened. But also we're very interested in why a re-release and why these new two chapters.
Matthew:Yeah, it's a great question. Originally, the book just grew out of my own experience. So I grew up in an evangelical Presbyterian church in Wichita, kansas. It was actually PC USA, but it was part of the now non-existent evangelical wing of the PC USA. So, non-affirming though no, definitely not. The church that I grew up in left the PC USA over this topic in 2011. So there was back in the first decade of the century. There was an evangelical wing of the PCUSA and they basically entirely left either for eco or EPC or you know other more conservative alternatives. So the church that I was raised in I think this is probably relevant to know actually supported women elders and at least women associate pastors. So my mother and father were both elders at my church at different points, but the church was completely against any affirming view. So there was no overlap there at all.
Matthew:I don't know if it was a fully egalitarian church. It did not. People did not identify that way, but in practice I never was. You never heard a lot about subordination based on gender in marriage or anything else. So it was functionally egalitarian and formally in certain respects related to leadership positions Although I don't think they identified that way because leadership positions, although I don't think they identified that way, because that might have, I don't know but the church still saw itself very much as a conservative evangelical church. I think that might sound strange, because today you would think of any evangelical church that is functionally egalitarian as at least moderate evangelical, not conservative evangelical. But I think that that identity probably came from the fact that it was part of the PCUSA and so they were definitely on the conservative end of the PCUSA, I mean, you know to the point where then they kind of fell off that end and, you know, went to a different denomination. So that was more than you wanted, maybe with the dumb denomination question.
Matthew:But yeah, so I grew up in a conservative Presbyterian church where evangelical was definitely an important identity. I mean, the core identity was just Christian, but we certainly, like it was evangelical authors and theologians and like cultural figures who really shaped the beliefs and identity of the community. But by the time I was in high school and then going to college, I had become. My faith was very important to me from a very young age and it always has been, and I never had any faith crisis in terms of questioning my core faith beliefs not where I'm not open to questioning them right at a like. I think all beliefs should be. We should be open to questioning, but not where I was feeling this great angst about whether my beliefs were true or not. But I was feeling increasing angst about the beliefs that I've been raised with about same sex relationships. That was really the only thing that was a major sticking was becoming a major sticking point for me.
Matthew:Point for me and that and some people say how can that be the only thing that was a major sticking point Does that mean that you have no other concerns about anything else going on in the evangelical world? It's like, well, people don't come out of it's not a monolith. And so the church that I was raised in honestly didn't have a lot of the same problems that I have heard from many other people who have been from part of more conservative evangelical churches. It was not a church that preached politics from the pulpit. It was not a church that I mean. So many of the issues that people have and that they understandably have with their evangelical communities or with evangelicalism more broadly were not really significant issues or problems at my church. So that's why, for me, it's like this was my one thing where I just thought no, this is not, this is increasingly just not fitting. This does not seem to match up with everything else that I've been taught in terms of. It's not just that it's a hard teaching, it's that it seems to be a destructive teaching in a way that I don't see with anything else, seems to be destructive to a small minority of people in a way that seems at odds with a lot of Jesus's ministry and modeling of going after that one lost sheep and right that that could care and concern for the other, somebody who right is, is treated differently or or maligned because they are, you know, don't fit in in some in some court respect. So I think that, uh yeah, I'll try to be more concise here.
Matthew:Why did the book happen? It's because I eventually worked through my beliefs at an impersonal level. Only after doing some Bible study first year of college and with some other students in the Christian ministry, and then changing my mind on the topic at an impersonal level, only then, in the next year, I was able to actually ask myself whether or not I was gay, which I was very, very resistant to letting myself even think about that or to you know, and I'd done a lot of mental gymnastics to decide that wasn't the case. But once I'd gotten to a place where it wouldn't cause me as much as much angst because I had already changed my mind about the moral question and the theological question Then I was able to ask the question and it caused me a tremendous amount of angst, not because of not because I thought that it was wrong, but just because I thought well, this completely upends my sense of belonging in the world and I don't know what my relationship will be with my parents and my church community or what my ability to walk into any church and, with any sense of confidence, feel. Like you know, my presence will be not be a problem at some point. So that's when I then decided to just I took I took a semester off school, I worked, I came out to my parents and study the topic together, in particular with my dad.
Matthew:Both my parents were not affirming, but my dad in particular had pretty strong beliefs about it. But he was willing to hear me out and consider my perspective. He just wanted to know what that perspective was. So I think that whole process, which did end with him actually changing his mind he was hoping I would change my mind. I was hoping he would change his. He ended up changing his mind. He had never, even though he had strong beliefs about it. He'd never really done a detailed study of the topic before, and once he did, I think he just began to realize that some of the presuppositions he had had about certain scripture passages were not quite. You know, it wasn't quite as straightforward as he had assumed that it was.
Matthew:But then eventually I came out to the broader church community. You know it was hit and miss in terms of some positive, some negative, and then it was a different church in town to let me give. I wanted to give a talk on the subject. This was an hour long talk that I recorded and posted on YouTube in 2012. And that was actually the genesis of the book. My original goal was just to give the talk and post it on YouTube. I thought, well, that would be a lot more accessible for people than anything that you know is like a book that requires people to write, you know. So there was no part of me when I posted this talk that was planning on writing a book, but it just kind of happened, or starting an organization, for that matter, but both of those things just kind of happened.
Matthew:The reason I gave the talk and then later wrote the book was because I had experienced a real deficit of resources that were affirming and also theologically conservative, that were upholding the authority of Scripture while also explaining in a clear and effective way how Scripture was not speaking to the sorts of same-sex relationships that we are talking about today. Most of the resources that I found that were affirming came from more explicitly progressive theological positions that would instantly be disqualifying not only to my parents if I were thinking about giving it to them, but also just to me, like it was not persuasive to me based on how I had been raised and my beliefs about scripture. So, but I felt like I grew up in a community that still had a nuanced approach to scripture. So, but I felt like I grew up in a community that still had a nuanced approach to scripture. It's not like people didn't recognize the importance of cultural context and hermeneutics and all of these things. In fact, I was taught about that when I was a student in college and was part of an intervarsity group. It was very non-affirming. They had a book by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stewart called how to Read the Bible for all. It's worth that. You may be familiar with right, which, if you read it, there's a lot of good, nuanced approaches there, and I just so I think, because I was raised with an understanding that, yes, actually it's good to have a more informed, nuanced approach to scripture I felt like when it came to same-sex relationships, we weren't applying any of the careful methodologies that have been established and accepted on various other topics, and so all I wanted to do was, hey, let's just, can we just extend this same methodology consistently to this topic, because it seems like nobody wants to touch this topic and that's why we're just accepting fairly surface level negative assessments and we're not really evaluating more carefully whether or not the methodologies that have led to a position, say related to women in leadership, would have what that actually looks like if you apply it in a careful way to same-sex relationships, not kind of in a slapdash way or a way that's not even seeking to uphold the authority of scripture.
Matthew:So that's why I originally did the video and then the book grew out of that, when it just kind of naturally, you know, as there became the opportunity to expand on that and a lot of the responses I got to that video and many positive, many negative, so it just it just kind of naturally grew out of that. That was not that concise, sorry.
Randy:No, it's great, and your book kind of caught the church world by storm. I feel like I don't know when Gushy's Changing Our Minds came out. Do you know, Matthew?
Matthew:So my book came out April 2014. His came out in October, November 2014.
Randy:Throughout the book, you mentioned your journey with your parents, your conversations, particularly with your dad, which is fun, because throughout the book, you use that dynamic of coming out to your parents, and the journey of biblical study and reflection that you and your dad did is an example of the process of moving from a non-affirming theology to an affirming theology based on the scriptures.
Randy:We have listeners who are going through very, very similar things. We have listeners who are in your position when you were, you know, whenever you had this conversation and this journey with your parents, and we have parents who are listening, who are trying to figure out how to move forward and what am I supposed to do? Who do I be loyal to? My church and God or my kid, as if there's a choice that you have to make there? Right, but can you tell us a little bit about what that was like between you and your dad and how much anxiety you had in it or how much joy you found in it? And just just tell us a little bit about that, and how long did that last? I'm very interested.
Matthew:Yeah, it's. It's all great questions. You know, I would never try to presume that my experience could just be, you know, everybody's different. Everybody's relationship with their parents are different, and some I'm sure there are parents where I could have approached it the exact same way and they would not have been interested in engaging, right, absolutely. And I've heard from some parents who say, wow, I read your book and I just thought I really wish my kid would have, would have been this open to having the conversation with me, because they just kind of said you know this is me, bye, and you know I. So I guess my dad and I maybe are both not the most typical in that respect, but it was. It was a very helpful combination, I think. Yeah, I mean.
Matthew:So I first came out to him right around Christmas, a few days after Christmas, and my mom separately by a few days, and I had already, though, when they came to visit me at college a few months prior. We went out to dinner and all I did the whole time was just ask them their beliefs about gay people and Christianity, because it was really bothering me, and this was. I still wasn't fully accepting that that was me yet, although I think I was beginning to grapple with that, but I was just deeply bothered by the non-affirming position because it seemed very wrong in terms of the effect that it had on people in practice, and that was my number one issue with it. Right, it's not theoretical, it's like look at what this is doing to people who are gay, and that was the original sticking point. My dad was saying well, I think the issue, matthew, is that you're assuming that being gay is a permanent thing that can't be changed. And I said yes, I am. That is absolutely my understanding of what being gay is. I do believe that there are people who are just gay, who that's not a choice and it's not something they can change, and it's something that will be a an aspect of their, of who they are for their whole lives, whether they act on it or not. And he just said well, you know, I that's just not where I'm coming from, and so I thought that was. He said I've heard stories of people who changed, and so I was frustrated. I mean, you know, it was a perfectly like, respectful conversation, but it was still frustrating because I felt like we were talking past one another.
Matthew:So then I go home a few months later, having worked through it more, having accepted that I was gay and know I'm going to come out to him, well, the first thing he does, or the day after I come home, he's like hey, matthew. So I've been thinking more about our conversation and I went to the church library and I got. I got all the books on homosexuality. They're all these ex-gay books, right, men and women who found freedom in freedom, you know, who overcame homosexuality through Jesus, and things like that.
Matthew:And I initially, my initial response was not positive and I essentially indicated I didn't want to read these books.
Matthew:Because that I said, I said not to be offensive, but that to me feels like if you give me books about why women can't do math and science, or if you give me books about why one race is inferior to another race, it feels that wrong to me, like I'm not going to read.
Matthew:I won't read those books either, because to me I just feel like I have limited time in my life, I don't want to spend it doing that, something that just feels so clearly incorrect and harmful to one group of people. But he said, well, matthew said that doesn't sound very open-minded. And I was like, okay, you're right, you got me. It's. Yeah, I guess. Okay, I was like, if I want, if I'm asking you to be more open-minded, okay, even if it is my reaction, I should at least do you the because also, like, clearly he didn't see it that way, right, he did not see it as analogous to those other topics and so and he certainly was not coming from a place of hate or anything like that that was just he did not know any openly gay people in his entire life until I came out to him, and so not that he had never heard of them, right, or maybe briefly encountered, but in terms of people he actually knew, he did not know any openly gay people.
Randy:I think that's the story of many people, many particular conservative Christians.
Matthew:Yeah, I think it's increasingly changing, especially generationally. Where you know people my age and younger, it would be hard not to at least know one openly gay person, if not multiple. But in his generation it was a very different context. So I ended up after I came out to him. I mean, I came out to him. He responded as well as he could have given his beliefs at the time. He just told me that he loved me, which is always a great thing to say, and if you mean it and that he was grateful. He realized that this must have been hard for me to tell and he was right about that. But so then I I. What helped a lot is I decided to take the next semester off school. I didn't go back to school, I just stayed at home, basically for the primary purpose of just working through this conversation with my parents. And first my dad and I read the books, the ex gay books.
Randy:And it was off of school at Harvard. This is right, yeah, you At Harvard this is right. Yeah, you took off of a semester to just be present with your family and walk through this.
Matthew:Yeah, and I was my. Honestly, my favorite thing about Harvard and I don't mean this as a backhanded compliment is how easy they make it to leave, because there are a lot of schools that are make it very difficult for students to take a leave of absence, and I think there was actually a movement in the early 2000s pushing back against that for mental health reasons, and I think Harvard had responded really well to that. So all I had to do was send one email to one resident dean saying I would like to take the next semester off, and she just said great, just fill out this one-page form and then just let us know when you want to come back. Technically, I am still on leave, okay, all right, yeah, I knew that. I mean, I'd only been there for a year and a half at that point, and my relationship with my parents was extremely important to me, so it just felt like the obvious thing to do. Like of course, I prioritize my relations with my parents, and this is just I don't know to me, this is just I don't know. To me, this is like like almost existential in terms of, like its level of importance to me, and so, yeah, like I'll just wait on school. So, yeah, so I think that I mean that made a huge difference, because then, first of all, the first few weeks we didn't really talk about it right, but we still saw each other every day. We were able to still talk about other things and have normal conversations. I think it helped a lot for my parents to see that I hadn't radically changed as a person. I was still the same person, with the same values and the same personality.
Matthew:And then we ended up so we started reading the a month or so when we started reading the ex-gay books and it was amazing how helpful they were actually, because by reading the ex-gay books themselves, my dad decided that ex-gay was not a real thing. Ok, ok, the covers make it sound like there's a sexual orientation change, but in most cases the books themselves were much more careful than that Once you read carefully about the claims that they made and they were just sort of saying oh well, by change we mean he was a promiscuous person, and now he's not. He was using and abusing drugs and alcohol, and now he's not. And it's like well, that's not really about your sexual orientation. And the modest claims of sexual orientation change were so modest that my dad was unimpressed and he felt like the examples that they were talking about, the befores and before, the afters, had no relationship whatsoever to me and my life. And so he I was actually through reading those books that he began to realize, huh, maybe sexual orientation really is a permanent thing that cannot be changed through therapy or prayer. And he said to be careful, anything could be changed through prayer, like he would never rule that out as a category. But this does not. We do not have evidence of prayer ministry is related to sexual orientation succeeding in this change, and so it is not something that we should be expecting. And your dad's a lawyer, right, he's a lawyer. You can probably already, yeah, he's a thoughtful guy and it may come through some way in the way, in the way that I argue to in in the book, like there's just something like you know, a logical, analytical approach, but yeah, so then after that?
Matthew:But even once he changed his mind about sexual orientation being a permanent thing, he still that did not make him affirming, because he still was very concerned about the six texts in scripture that describe the referred to forms of same-sex behavior, all of which negative, and so we then just studied those together, and it was through that process that he began to look at those differently, because the questions that he was asking of the text began to change. Originally, the prior questions he was asking were just what does scripture say about same-sex anything? And same-sex anything all gets put in one category called same-sex relationships. And so-sex anything all gets put in one category called same-sex relationships. And so if you have six data points and they're all negative, well then there's no question, it's 6-0, moving on. But after I came out to him, after he began to have a more like a fuller understanding of what it means to be gay and of the possibilities for gay people to enter into like lifelong monogamous same-sex relationships, he began to say okay, well, what does the Bible have to say about the sort of same-sex relationship that Matthew would like to have? And that was a very significant shift in framing, because suddenly then the story of Sodom and Gomorrah doesn't really seem like it is nearly as germane to that topic as it is to just same-sex anything, and so we can get into some of the text in more detail, if you like.
Matthew:But it was through that process that, about six months in actually, he ended up changing his mind, which, as I now recognize, is pretty fast for the average person. I think, though, it probably could have taken a lot longer Like the fact that I was there and that was just what we were doing for this eight month period was incredibly helpful from a relational standpoint. So not everybody has the ability to do that, for any number of reasons, but I do think that, yeah, to the extent that parents are willing to at least, you know, give their child a hearing, and to the extent that kids are willing and able to try to um like meet their parents where they're at in a respectful, loving way, I think it can be a really positive thing. But it depends greatly on every situation and, yeah, that it would not work with every parent. It would not work with every, you know. So I feel very grateful and blessed for my parents, you know, being who they are.
Randy:Yeah, absolutely. And for those of you who are listening to this and thinking man, I wish, I just wish I had parents like Matthews who are willing to go there with you and, you know, spend six months or however long it takes. We're with you, we love you, we see you. Um.
Randy:So, matthew, you do an incredible job of breaking down the six passages in the Bible that seem to speak to same sex, and I'm putting this in scare quotes same sex, sexual behavior. Um, the clobber verses that some people refer to them. Rather than picking through each, each one here, whether it's Sodom and Gomorrah, or Leviticus 18 or Romans 1, whatever, all of them, can you just give our listeners a summation of your arguments about the Bible and homosexuality? How did you get to the point and what in your book do you advocate for in a very particular? Because in your book you break them all down, chapter by chapter, text by text, in a really thorough, really, really great way. Can you just give us that summation of here's what I think the Bible has to say about same-sex behavior, sexual behavior?
Matthew:Yeah, if I just say it in a sentence, I would say that the Bible does speak negatively of same-sex relations, but that the reasons that it does do not extend to same-sex marriages today.
Randy:So flesh that out, thank you.
Matthew:So, and this is an argument that I make, and I may be jumping ahead to something you would ask later if that's okay, but I think it's a helpful analogy and this is a part of a new chapter that I added this time. But it's the issue of usury, or charging interest on loans, and this is also an issue where it's no one really argues much with the reality that the Bible condemns usury. Usury is charging interest on loans and it is charging any amount of interest on a loan, not the modern redefinition. Is charging excessive interest. No, no, no.
Matthew:In the biblical context and throughout the great majority, throughout three quarters of the Christian tradition, usury was defined simply as charging any interest whatsoever. And the Bible in the Old Testament first you've got some texts in the Torah that specifically prohibit it for the poor or just to other Israelites, but then in Ezekiel 18 and in Psalm 15, it is prohibited categorically, and in Psalm 15, it is prohibited categorically. And then Jesus was seen I mean in Luke 6, when he's talking about you know, you should lend to sinners, expecting nothing in return. After all, even sinners lend to sinners, expecting you know to get back the full amount. And so that was seen by many in the church and in the church tradition as raising the bar even higher. Not only should you not be charging interest, you shouldn't even be expecting the original amount that you loaned to be returned to you.
Matthew:And so, in that sense, does the New Testament do away with the Old Testament prohibitions on usury? No, as most Christians saw it throughout the church history, the New Testament just raised the bar even higher, and so that's why, for the first 1500 years of church history, there was complete unanimity among Christians that charging interest on loans was a sin, and many were very explicit a sin that would lead to hell, a sin that separates you from God. A first order like issue, not an agree to disagree issue, that this denomination thinks this, this congregation thinks this, you know, oh, we have some people, some people in our church leadership, think this. Some people think that. No, up until the time of John Calvin, there was complete agreement that charging any amount of interest on a loan was a terrible sin.
Kyle:What was the proposed penalty for doing so?
Matthew:Well, in Ezekiel 18, the penalty is death and the punishment language is virtually identical to the punishment language for male-same-sex relations in Leviticus 2013,. That his blood will be upon him, that's what I wanted to make clear.
Matthew:It's called an abomination, right An abomination, the word toevah, so the exact same word. And I point out, in this chapter in the book there are the number of parallels in the way that both the Bible and the Christian tradition talk about usury and same-sex relations. It's almost eerie. What did Augustine say about like? Basically, augustine specifically quoted 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10, which comes up a lot in the conversation around same-sex relationships because of these two Greek words that can encompass forms of male same-sex behavior malakoi and arsenikoitai in 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10, which is describing people who will not inherit the kingdom of God. Well, also in this list, it includes the greedy and extortioners, or swindlers. And so Augustine specifically quoted 1 Corinthians 6, 9, and 10 because of the reference to greedy and extortioners and said therefore, people who are charged he was referring to bishops in particular who are charging interest on loans he said they will not inherit the kingdom of God. It is plain in scripture and so it's. You know. That's why people sometimes want to take, you know, other issues and say, oh well, because this is about who inherits the kingdom of God, because it's related to, like this, this moral dimension, we could never be so bold as to reinterpret that, because what if we were wrong?
Matthew:Argued that the original prohibition of charging interest on loans, even though it was a categorical prohibition in scripture, that the cultural context and historical context for that would have been the primary reason would have been to protect the poor from being exploited. And it's not that no one was aware of even the concept of possibly giving a loan to someone who was well off, because they were the concept, but that the overwhelming majority of loans at the time were just taking people who were already desperate and making them more desperate, which is pretty clearly a bad thing to do, like that's not an ethical thing to do and so we don't need to look at. I think some people look at the Bible's prohibitions of charging interest and they are like oh, here's just another reason why the Bible is not a good guide to morality. No, it's actually another reason why the Bible is a good guide to morality, because the Bible's prohibition of charging interest on loans was all about protecting vulnerable people, and so all that Calvin said was we need to honor what the intention of the lawgiver was here, while also recognizing that, as our economy is changing in profound ways, shifting from an agrarian society to an increasingly commercial one, where now interest-bearing loans can actually really benefit a lot more people. It's not that no one ever knew they could benefit some people, right, but just the balance was tipping much more Now.
Matthew:I would argue although this is getting outside of my area of focus, but I would argue that Calvin's reinterpretation of the biblical text on usury based on their underlying moral logic. So what he said is that we can charge interest on loans as long as we are still abiding by the moral logic of scripture's prohibitions, which is you do not exploit the poor. In fact, calvin said you should not charge interest to the poor at all. I actually think, if anything, as a society we could come back a little bit closer to where Calvin was on those things. But he opened the door to allowing some forms of interest to be charged on loans based on saying, yeah, even though the Bible doesn't make this distinction that our cultural context has changed enough from the context of Scripture that we should recognize that the purpose for those prohibitions is about something that does not cover every dimension of interest that we're talking about today. So I would actually argue that Calvin's reinterpretation of scripture, unusually, is responsible for the rise of capitalism and consequently for the quality of life and the wealth of nations to, if we're talking about. To quote Adam Smith, I don't think you could have the quality of life that we have today if you, if we, had maintained an absolute prohibition on charging interest. Now we should still be really careful with it, because it's really easy for people to exploit that and to see a loophole and want to drive a truck through it, and plenty of people do so. It's again. I still think that the Bible's teachings are very important, but we just need to make sure we're honoring the underlying moral logic. So I think the very same dynamic applies to the question of same-sex relationships in Scripture.
Matthew:The six references to same-sex relationships relationships really actually is a bit of a misnomer. It's just behaviors. Relations to same-sex relations in Scripture are all uniformly negative and they are very negative, especially Leviticus right Leviticus 20.13 has the death penalty for male same-sex relations. Paul clearly takes a very negative view of same-sex relations in Romans 1. There's no question about that and I don't think it's constructive. Sometimes I try to hear people make arguments for oh, you know, or it was only about such and such or temple prostitution, that sort of thing. There's no evidence for that. I think that they were effectively categorical prohibitions within the ancient world, and I think that also is appropriate and makes a lot of sense if you look at the same-sex behaviors of the ancient world.
Matthew:The best book on this topic is a book called Roman Homosexuality by Craig Williams. He's a fantastic classic scholar. And there's another book by KJ Dover called Greek Homosexuality, and KJ Dover was like the preeminent Greek classicist, but the book was written in 1979 and it's held up incredibly well, but it still feels a little bit more, you know, a little dated. Craig Williams' book was most recently updated in 2009. Anyway, and so there are hundreds and hundreds of Greco-Roman texts in particular that refer to forms of same-sex relations, and none of them meet the basic criteria of the relationships that we're talking about today, and I added an appendix to the updated edition of the book that addresses this question in particular, called did same-sex marriage exist in the biblical world?
Matthew:So the three basic criteria for what we're talking about today are relationships that are lifelong, that are monogamous and that are between partners who are of the same social status, so there's not like a hierarchy built in between the partners where one is dominant and one is subordinate. And those three basic criteria do not apply to any instance of same-sex relations described in any extant ancient literature. And so somebody's like. Well, what if somebody finds you know some new Dead Sea Scroll, some you know new work of so-and so and does have one example of it? Well, even if there were an example of it, we have such an abundance of evidence of what the social norms were that it is basically guaranteed that the social assessment of that would be negative.
Matthew:No-transcript. But consequently you got your primary forms of same-sex behavior. Not only do no examples of same-sex behavior in ancient literature actually correspond in a meaningful way to what we're talking about with same-sex marriages today, but the primary examples are quite terrible things on their face. So you've got, I mean, the worst is the practice of pederasty in ancient Greece and also in Rome in a somewhat different way, where you've got adult men with adolescent boys and what we call that is a felony, and rightly so. Then you also have sex with people who are enslaved, both male and female.
Matthew:Then the other form would be prostitution, and while I mean I guess you could find some you know secular thinkers today who would think prostitution is okay, you're not going to find very many people in the church I hopefully no one, if you read 1 Corinthians 6, who would think that prostitution is okay, and so those are your primary forms of same-sex behavior. And so it's actually a. I think it's a better case than Calvin had. It's, it's actually a. I think it's a better case than calvin had, because calvin there, you at least do they did know about the possibility of interest-bearing loans to the rich. They just that that wasn't their primary context, whereas what we are talking about today, with lifelong monogamous, equal status, same-sex marriages, is a distinct phenomenon, categorically from what is represented in any existing ancient literature.
Kyle:There's a lot to dig into then, a lot, a lot. You opened the book, so I'm assuming there's a particular piece of it that you want to dig into.
Randy:Yeah, you go first.
Kyle:I want to ask about and we can come back to some of this other stuff you were just talking about but I want to ask about the weight of tradition.
Kyle:So we mentioned David Gushy a little bit ago.
Kyle:One of the objections, probably that he takes the most seriously in that book and we talked to him about this is that one of the biggest hurdles for him to change his mind about this was the weight of tradition.
Kyle:Being apparently univocal on this, in the sense that all of Christian history, all of the greatest minds who trained their insight onto this, came to the conclusion came to a non-affirming conclusion, to use your vocabulary and if I'm going to now, in the 21st century, say that was, we have to overthrow all of that. I have a huge burden right, a huge burden of evidence. And so you say at one point in your book and I like this analogy you say Christians did not change their minds about the solar system because they lost respect for their Christian forebears or for the authority of Scripture. They changed their minds because they were confronted with the evidence that their predecessors had never considered. And, of course, the evidence that they were confronted with was the ability to see further out in space with this wonderful tool called a telescope. So that raises the obvious question what are in your mind the analogous lines of evidence that can outweigh that traditional consensus, that are as definitive as a telescope?
Matthew:Yes, I mean one is what I just talked about with the issue of same-sex marriage as we understand it today, some of the basic characteristics of same-sex marriages that we are discussing in the church today and their complete absence in ancient literature. But the other appendix that I added was somewhat related and that's the question of did the concept of sexual orientation exist in the biblical world? And once again, I do not think that there. I've gone through all the you know, various counter arguments that Preston Sprinkle and some other people have put forward, and really there are. What the modern understanding that there is a minority of people who are exclusively attracted to members of the same sex, in a way that is, that lasts throughout their whole life and that forecloses the possibility of being attracted to the opposite sex, that is not a concept that we see in any society until the late 19th century, initially in Germany, and it doesn't really gain a foothold in the general consciousness of Western societies until about the mid 20th century. So and I think you don't even have to read the whole appendix and get into the weeds of some of these ancient texts there's a very basic way of demonstrating the distinction and that gap, that conceptual gap, and that is this.
Matthew:Non-affirming writers today, like Preston Sprinkle, nt Wright, many others, will acknowledge that for at least many people, the consequence of saying no to all same-sex relationships is lifelong singleness and celibacy. This is why you have the whole conversation about Side B and like celibacy as somehow a consequence of opposition to same-sex relationships until the middle of the 20th century. The first person I've been able to see talking about this was CS Lewis in a letter in 1950, either 53 or 54. It's one of the two. So if they had the same understanding of sexual orientation that we do today and they recognize that some people are exclusively attracted to the same sex, that would have come up pastorally.
Matthew:It comes up like what do we do? The whole reason this is an issue, the whole reason this is like a topic that won't go away, is because some people are gay, and now that is an increasingly undeniable thing. Some people may still try to deny it, but it's not very compelling when people try to deny it now because the evidence is quite apparent. And so if that had been something, that had been a concept that was understood and discussed at any previous point, you would see writings about this, you would see discussions about how so-and-so is my brother in Christ, but he's attracted to the same sex, and only attracted to the same sex, and worked real hard to become straight but he couldn't, and so he's going to be single and celibate for life. You don't see any discussion of this whatsoever, because we're simply talking about. We have a completely different framework for thinking about what same-sex attraction is and also for the possibility of what same-sex relationships can be.
Kyle:So I do think that the distinction is effectively as categorical as the distinction pre and post the telescope, in that sense, when it comes to those two primary data points. So we're not just talking about ancient Greeks here, we're talking about Romans, we're talking about Egyptians, we're talking I mean, this is very widespread. So how did they think about it? Why would it not have been apparent to them that lifelong celibacy was a consequence of you know what NT Wright and Preston Sprinkle and others are thinking? What's another way to think about it that has so radically changed? Because it's hard for us to even get outside of the way that we're currently thinking about it.
Matthew:Yeah, I mean again. Obviously you know ancient societies. Anyone is not a monolith, right. You can find differing schools of thought, so I would say the two. There are two primary views of this. One would be the view of ancient peoples who thought that same sex behavior could be okay in certain contexts, and one was those who were broadly opposed to it. So if we start with the group and this was, I would say, most ancient societies that we have records of allowed for same-sex behavior, and almost all of the discussion is male same-sex behavior. There's much less discussion of female same-sex behavior. So, for the purposes of this, I'm just going to be talking about male same-sex behavior, because this is about what we have the evidence for.
Matthew:So most Mesopotamian and Mediterranean ancient societies allowed for same-sex behavior if it reflected the basic hierarchies on which society was structured. What was that core hierarchy? The core hierarchy was men over women, and so in order for a same-sex encounter to be accepted, it had to mirror that hierarchy. That's why you could have, even though we are rightly horrified by it. That's why they thought it was okay for a man to be in a sexual relationship with an adolescent boy, because there was a clear distinction One person is the superior, one is the inferior. That's why they thought it was okay for a man to have sexual relationships Again, that's really the wrong word when it comes to people who are enslaved, and for prostitution, that sort of thing too as long as clear status distinctions were maintained. And Craig Williams said in his book Roman Homosexuality that the one thing a free Roman adult male could not do was to form a lasting reciprocal relationship with another free adult Roman male, because there's no hierarchy. That would mess with the system, that would not be accepted. And it's so ironic because even a lot of non-affirming Christians today recognize that a same-sex marriage is at least ethically better right than these other types of same-sex practices. But that's such a different way of looking at it than the Greco-Romans in particular would have seen it. But and so that's kind of your hierarchy-based approach and that's why all the same-sex practices I actually think we can agree with Paul that whatever same-sex practices you know were, especially he's talking about same-sex behaviors.
Matthew:He says in Romans 1.32 that these are things that people not only did but they approved of those who practice them right. So the sorts of behaviors he's talking about are behaviors that do meet with a certain degree of social approval, and all of the same-sex behaviors that meet with some degree of social approval in the first century context, I don't think Christians should accept, I think Christians should regard as wrong. So I don't think we need to disagree with Paul and his judgment about this. We can just recognize that our context differs and that the sort of same-sex relationships that we're talking about today are significantly different and therefore should be evaluated as like, should be evaluated distinctly. The other group, though, would be the group of people who saw these same-sex practices and did not like them, did not approve of them. So you do see some voices. I mean Plato, never, you know.
Matthew:Often, what is Plato's view right is a question that you know people will debate. Plato's view, right? It is a question that you know people will debate of. Is he, is this really his view, or is it the view of this character? And or he says this thing in this dialogue, this thing in this dialogue at least in Plato's dialogue laws he does advocate for banning male same-sex relations. Now, the reason he says they should do this, they should ban it, is to support the loving bond between husbands and their wives. So clearly he's seeing this as something that is happening on the side right. He's basically saying cut down on these same-sex extramarital affairs. But for him, like that's what banning same-sex relations is. There's no other thing that isn't, there's no other version of it. That would be like same-sex marriage, for instance.
Matthew:You get Musonius, rufus, diocresistum in the first century, and they saw, they looked at these same-sex practices and they began to describe them and Plato first described them this way basically as sexual excess on the part of people who did not have some fundamental difference in their basic nature, but simply who lacked self-control. And so, in the same way that we see vices like gluttony and drunkenness, not as, oh, only some people are capable of those things. No, everybody is capable of gluttony and drunkenness. Now, some people may have a greater predisposition than others, but no one is incapable of it, right? Anybody. If they simply let themselves go too much and were eating and drinking too much, then that is the end result, and that is the way that Plato and other ancients who were critical of same-sex relations described them. It was I mean, those three issues were often all paired and put together of gluttony, drunkenness and same-sex relations. That same-sex relations was an effective illustration of kind of the height of sexual excess for individuals who had lost self-control, and many of them are very clear about this.
Matthew:Philo, the first century Jewish philosopher in his interpretation of the Sodom story, he actually pioneered the same-sex reading of the Sodom story, which didn't then really become the Christian consensus until the time of Augustine in the early 5th century. But Philo, while taking this incredibly negative view of same-sex relations in his discussion of the story of Sodom, also describes it as people who men who were having sex with women. Then they become insatiable in all of their appetites, including food and drink. They go off have sex with other men, then they go back to having sex with women and are found to then be have nothing but a sterile seed, Obviously. So he was arguing that same sex behavior then makes you right, like infertile. It's not how it works biologically, but it's an interesting point because it illustrates that for him he's definitely not looking at this as like you know, like it's like oh, why did?
Matthew:Paul did not have an attitude about gay people as such? None of these ancient writers had an attitude about gay people. It's not just like oh, why didn't they ask for their coming out story and hear their journey? That's not at all what's going on, and so what they have an attitude about is like excess, and so I see Paul's rejection, paul's condemnation of same-sex relations in Romans 1 effectively as a condemnation of excess as opposed to moderation, and same-sex behavior was an effective illustration of that vice of excess in the first century context. We just need to be more careful about how we apply that today. While affirming what Paul is saying and the reasons he's saying it, recognizing that the sorts of same-sex marriages we're talking about today do not fit within the framework of what Paul was describing.
Kyle:Yeah, it's so fascinating because you talk about in the book like it's almost as if the norm in the ancient world was some sort of sexual fluidity or what we might consider bisexuality. And it's not that there weren't people who identified in one direction or the other, who had a preference right strongly in one direction or the other, but that it just wasn't weird like that.
Matthew:it was assumed that most folks would have that kind of yes, especially in Greece and Rome, there was a widespread expectation of at least the possibility of of bisexual attraction among men. Women's internal experiences were not typically considered. But that, and even to the extent some some people say oh well, this person said he, only he that he preferred boys to women, but that doesn't mean that he was thought to be incapable of attraction to women. And the analogy that I draw from a classic scholar named David Halperin, and I talk about this in the book, is an analogy of vegetarianism that when people tell you today that they're vegetarians, you don't think that they're literally incapable of being nourished by meat or incapable of eating it. They just don't want to. Right, they have various reasons why they may not want to, and a vegetarian could change their mind, right, and 10 years later you meet up an old friend, they're no longer vegetarian.
Matthew:You're not going to be shocked. I mean, maybe depending on the person, right, but you're not. Like how is this biologically possible? Right, like, it's obviously possible. Like their vegetarianism is a preference. It is not like a fundamental difference in their food orientation, right, and so, to the extent that you see some examples of an exclusive preference, in antiquity that is how it was viewed as a preference, literally a chosen preference to some degree, and therefore not something that would necessarily foreclose the possibility of heterosexual attraction. That's the core distinction of the exclusiveness of same-sex attraction that you don't see reflected as a concept anywhere until the late 19th century.
Kyle:Yeah, and so, in case the entailment isn't crystal clear to all of our listeners, spell out the impact that that has now on interpreting something like Romans 1. Why does that change how I should read a prohibition like that?
Matthew:Well, I would actually say the more relevant thing in Romans 1 is just the sorts of relationships, the sorts of same-sex practices that were in view in the first century and the sorts of same-sex relationships that we're talking about today and just recognizing that, yes, people say well, why didn't Paul say that the married gays I'm excluding them because there were no married gays? That's not a thing, that's not part of the biblical world.
Randy:I mean it wasn't in the 1970s, that's less Right.
Matthew:But so I mean, yeah, so I think Paul is able to speak categorically in a way that is accurate in his context. But, like the biblical statements on usury, right, if our context is different enough that, in order to actually uphold its moral, the moral logic of Bible's teachings, we need to recognize why Paul made the statements that he did and it is related to, it has a lot to do with the types of same-sex practice and people say, oh well, so if you just ask Paul, in theory, what would he think about a lifelong monogamous? You can't even really begin to do that. Like the, the cultural context is so different you. The real question would be what if Paul grew up and and grew up and there was a gay couple down the street where he was growing up, I mean and by this point he's not Paul anymore, right, like you, so it doesn't, it doesn't work, but we can at least like, try to actually understand, like, what his world was, I mean Paul. I actually mentioned this in the updated edition. This is one line, but I just love it so much. So I found this a couple of years ago when I was doing some more research.
Matthew:Obviously, we know Paul's hometown is Tarsus, right and Dio Chrysostom, who's a first century Greco-Roman orator contemporaneous with Paul. He had a whole discourse about Tarsus and how pederasty he, he said, was rife in Tarsus. It's actually a funny discourse because he says that the telltale sign of a pederast was someone who sneezes, and so he called it the sneezing disease. But how? Basically he's just talking about how pederasty was everywhere in Tarsus. Well, I think that's very interesting, given that Diocritus is writing around the same time as Paul. That I think that's very interesting, given that Diocresistim is writing around the same time as Paul. That, like, I think you know what was Paul's growing up world like To the extent that he was exposed to same-sex relations. According to Diocresistim and Tarsus, it was through pederasty Like. Of course, this is going to give you a negative, categorical view and that that is appropriate and that is the correct moral judgment to be making about the same-sex practices of the biblical world. Sorry, I may have. Did I get any afield from what you were originally getting?
Kyle:at. No, this is all great so for people still stuck in this, but sexual orientation is real and we know it, like if that is pointing to an objective reality, right, that there is some small percentage of people who are by no choice of their own in this trajectory, right in this track, and they cannot get out of it. I mean that's pointing to some kind of physical reality, some kind of psychological reality that's stable across time and like at a species level, right, it's the sort of thing that we can zoom out even further and see it in other species and have very good reason for thinking that it's been that way for hundreds of thousands of years. So if we know, where we have very good evidence that what we consider gay and lesbian and bisexual people today definitely existed, then they might not have been understood that way, but given the physical reality of our you know species, they existed. How should we think?
Randy:about them, uh, and might not have understood themselves as such Exactly.
Kyle:How should we think about how they were viewed in those societies and why Paul wouldn't have had them in mind? You know when he said stuff like that.
Matthew:Yeah, I mean, if I'd been born 50 years earlier, I would not have understood myself as gay and I in all likelihood would have married a woman and I would have been faithful and I would never have come to terms with it and I would never I would have done, you know, herculean efforts, that just repressing awareness of that and that's what I think a lot of, probably most gay people throughout history have done. And sometimes, you know, people are like oh, you know, why is it that? You know, some of the gay people we see just seem to be over the top about being promiscuous or something like that. I'm like. Well, first of all, like, if any group of people, with anyone, there's a spectrum of like moral beliefs and values. There's a spectrum of like moral beliefs and values and, of course, the people who are fine with promiscuity are probably going to be people who have the easiest time like coming to terms with having something about them, like being gay, that doesn't fit into social norms. Right, if they're not, if they don't, if they believe that social norms around say commitment and monogamy, if they don't even share those social norms or believe that those are good and are comfortable not fitting into them, well then, the cost for those individuals of also being gay is not going to be as high as for people who have a more conservative sexual ethic and are seeking to live their lives in accordance with that. So I think partly it's like yeah, the first people who are going to be, you know, the most comfortable coming out are probably not going to be the people with the most conservative sexual ethic, but it doesn't mean that those people aren't still there, and so I think that's yeah.
Matthew:I mean for me, yeah, would I still have been gay? I mean yes if you mean that I'm exclusively attracted to people of the same sex. Yes, if you mean that I'm exclusively attracted to people of the same sex. Yes, but it's up to you whether you want to acknowledge that to yourself. I guess yeah, when there's no reason to, and there's no, yeah, you can do. I mean I did.
Matthew:You know you can try to do as many mental gymnastics as you want, and I actually I tried to do mental gymnastics up till I was 19 and just thinking you know, maybe, like you, you've never been anyone other than yourself. So how do I know this isn't what everyone experiences? How do I know that being straight isn't actually seek, just an active attempt to repress your same sex attractions and to work to be attracted to the opposite sex. I don't know that no one else feels that way, because I'm not telling anyone. I feel that way. Yeah, does make a lot of logical sense. No, not really really. But it doesn't need to, because as long as you have this like possible fig leaf of like plausibility, then that's all you need in order to be like hey, it's possible that literally everyone else is having the same experience and none of us are talking about it, so maybe I'm actually just like everyone else matthew, this has been so fun.
Randy:there's so much more to talk about and we have more questions. Would you be willing to have another conversation with us and make a part two?
Matthew:I would be very happy to.
Randy:Awesome. All right, so thank you for this. Can't wait for the next time we're going to chat. Next episode let's go.
Matthew:All right.
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