(LifeSiteNews) — Dissident Jesuit priest Father James Martin has claimed Christians “shouldn’t do everything” the Bible “commands” in his new “Outreach Guide to the Bible and Homosexuality.”
Martin attempts to show how an explicit defense of homosexual behavior can be reconciled with Christianity in his “guide,” citing biblical scholars who allegedly help interpret Biblical passages on homosexuality. However, the advice of Martin as well as the scholars boils down to this: Even Christians can ignore Scriptural prohibitions on homosexual behavior.
Martin laments that such biblical verses “are used against LGBTQ people over and over,” and goes on to advise that “one response” to these verses “is to see them in their historical context and remember that even devout Christians shouldn’t do everything that [the] Old Testament commands. Likewise for the Epistles in the New Testament.”
His selective rejection of New Testament Scripture passages is at odds with the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), according to which the authors of Scripture are inspired by the Holy Ghost, and thus, “we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”
Martin’s rejection of Scriptural passages condemning homosexual behavior also appears inconsistent with his suggestion that what the Bible has to say on homosexuality matters. In his introduction to his guide, he writes, “The questions, though, remain: How can we best understand what the Bible says on homosexuality? What did these passages mean then and what do they mean today?
The writers the dissident Jesuit cites do little to clarify the question. Walter Brueggemann, who Martin refers to as a “giant in the field of biblical scholarship,” claims that St. Paul’s intention in his passage condemning homosexuality is “not fully clear.”
St. Paul writes: “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” (Rom. 1:23-27)
Brueggemann then concedes that “it is impossible to explain away” this text as well as a clear prohibition on homosexuality in Leviticus (“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Lev. 18:22).
The scholar suggests that because Scripture expresses God’s welcome, in an apparent self-contradiction, to those who don’t keep “purity codes” (in this case, eunuchs, who are forbidden from the community of God according to Deuteronomy 23:1), that those who don’t abstain from homosexual behavior are likewise considered part of God’s covenant family, as if the moral law were equivalent to temporary Jewish ceremonial law.
Brueggemann fails to address this distinction between moral and ceremonial law, whereas Catholic apologist Trent Horn has pointed out that homosexual acts fall squarely within the moral domain, considering that their penalty under the Old Testament is death, something only assigned to sins like idolatry, murder, and adultery, not to the violation of ceremonial laws. Horn has also noted that mention of homosexual sin is “sandwiched between moral laws and not ceremonial ones.”
The very passage Brueggemann cites, in fact, indicates that eunuchs can be considered part of God’s family if they “hold fast” to His covenant, which means keeping God’s moral law and avoiding serious sin: “For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.” (Isaiah 56:4-5)
Brueggemann ambiguously concludes that “the full acceptance and embrace of LGBTQ persons follows as a clear mandate of the Gospel in our time.” It is true that, according to the CCC, that those with same-sex attraction “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.” However, it also affirms that “homosexual acts … are contrary to the natural law, that “they close the sexual act to the gift of life,” and that “under no circumstances can they be approved.”
None of the other scholars cited by Martin can refute Scripture’s clear prohibition on homosexual acts, but instead claim there may be loopholes, or, like Brueggemann, they suggest that because we are called to “welcome all,” active homosexuals must be included in the Body of Christ as well.
Fr. Martin is notorious for his open and heretical promotion of homosexual lifestyles and his celebration of homosexuality as a great “gift” for the Church. His tweets stating the homosexual Pete Buttigieg was “married” drew strong condemnation from numerous bishops and priests, with a Spanish priest denouncing him for “speaking out on social media in a scandalous way against the Catholic faith.”
Martin has a longstanding record of promoting LGBT ideology in dissent from Catholic teaching. Among his most notorious actions, Martin has promoted an image drawn from a series of blasphemous, homoerotic works, showing Christ as a homosexual, promoted same-sex civil unions, and has described viewing God as male as “damaging.”