BHP journal: The Hermeneutical Relevance of the Biblical Witness

The chapter starts with,

Given the Bible's clear opposition to homosexual conduct, there remains the question of what these texts mean for the church today.

I would just make this slight modification, "Given the Bible's clear opposition to homosexual conduct as it was understood, there remains the question of what these texts mean for the church today.

These four words, "as it was understood" are entirely fair to be added here, in fact, it is intellectually irresponsible of Gagnon not to include them. Further, they sum up my argument to this point and devastate his.

The first section of Chapter five is,

The Bible condemns only exploitative, pederastic forms of homosexuality

These section headings are stated as the common arguments affirming theologians use. This section seems redundant to me, as the whole of the book up to this point strains to prove that even equal, consensual, committed homosexual relationships would have been prohibited by the biblical authors. Unlike Gagnon, I'm not going to repeat myself unnecessarily.

Then we have,

The Bible primarily condemns homosexuality because of it's threat to male dominance.

Huh?

Moving on,

The Bible has no category for "homosexuals" with an exclusively same-sex orientation; same-sex passion was thought to originate in over-sexed heterosexuals

This is interesting. This is possibly true, but for me, it's not a strategic argument to make on the path to Christian affirmation of modern homosexual relationships.

Then there is this gem,

Homosexuality has a genetic component that the writers of the Bible did not realize.

This section is full of bad science. Even considering this was written 20 years ago it's bad. You can find all of this thoroughly refuted elsewhere, and this is not part of my argument anyway.

There are only a few biblical texts that speak directly to homosexuality.

This is true of course, but it's not the end of the story.

We do not follow all the injunctions in the Bible now, so why should those against homosexual conduct be binding?

He even goes into a weak discussion of slavery here. But yeah, this is no argument, each "injunction" must be handled individually.

And he has a wonderful subsection here,

The Dearth of Lifelong, Monogamous Homosexual Relationships

in which he tries to shock us with the number of sexual partners that homosexuals have.

And finally (we hope),

Since we are all sinners anyway, why single out the sin of same-sex intercourse.

My argument is it's not a sin.

And he leaves us with the lovely subsection,

The Negative Effects of Societal Endorsement of Homosexuality

I've been waiting on this. But this section is chuck full of opinion, hand-picked stats and bad science you can find refuted elsewhere. I mean honestly.