Do christians hate gay people

Christians often try to clarify that they love gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning people, even though they believe those people are disobeying God. Many LGBTQ+ Christians struggle to reconcile their faith with their gender or sexual identities, which can lead to self-harm or suicide. The Bible is often used as a source of authority, but it. What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?Aren't a person's sexual desires simply a private matter?

Does it really matter what people do in the privacy of their own homes? As we saw last time, sexual deviance is destructive to the individual.

But God's Word also teaches that it has wider effects on society. The book of Romans illustrates its broad impact. In the first chapter of his.

God’s love for (gay) people.

A Pew Research Center poll found that the majority of Orthodox Christians in the Eastern European and former USSR states surveyed believe that homosexuality "should not be accepted by society"; 45% of Orthodox Christians in Greece and 31% in the United States answered the same way. [43]. First, Christians don’t judge homosexuality as sin — God does. God says that any sexual behavior outside of marriage, between a man and a woman, is an abomination, i.e.

a sin (Lev , ). Second, God ordained marriage and sexual union to be between a man and woman. The relationship of homosexuality to Christianity is one of the main topics of discussion in our culture today. There are a number of other books that take the opposite view, namely that the Bible either allows for or supports same sex relationships. Over the last year or so I and other pastors at Redeemer have been regularly asked for responses to their arguments.

The two most read volumes taking this position seem to be those by Matthew Vines and Ken Wilson. Hence the length. Vines and Wilson relate stories of people who were sure that the Bible condemned homosexuality. However, they were brought to a change of mind through getting to know gay people personally. It is certainly important for Christians who are not gay to hear the hearts and stories of people who are attracted to the same sex.

In fact, they must have been essentially a form of bigotry. They could not have been based on theological or ethical principles, or on an understanding of historical biblical teaching. They must have been grounded instead on a stereotype of gay people as worse sinners than others which is itself a shallow theology of sin. So I say good riddance to bigotry.

However, the reality of bigotry cannot itself prove that the Bible never forbids homosexuality. We have to look to the text to determine that. Vines and Wilson claim that scholarly research into the historical background show that biblical authors were not forbidding all same sex relationships, but only exploitative ones — pederasty, prostitution, and rape. Their argument is that Paul and other biblical writers had no concept of an innate homosexual orientation, that they only knew of exploitative homosexual practices, and therefore they had no concept of mutual, loving, same-sex relationships.

These arguments were first asserted in the s by John Boswell and Robin Scroggs. Vines, Wilson and others are essentially repopularizing them. However, they do not seem to be aware that the great preponderance of the best historical scholarship since the s — by the full spectrum of secular, liberal and conservative researchers — has rejected that assertion. Here are two examples. Bernadette Brooten and William Loader have presented strong evidence that homosexual orientation was known in antiquity.

Whether Aristophanes believed this myth literally is not the point. It was an explanation of a phenomenon the ancients could definitely see — that some people are inherently attracted to the same sex rather than the opposite sex. Contra Vines, et al, the ancients also knew about mutual, non-exploitative same sex relationships. That is mutuality.

Paul could have used terms in Romans 1 that specifically designated those practices, but he did not. He categorically condemns all sexual relations between people of the same sex, both men and women. Paul knew about mutual same-sex relationships, and the ancients knew of homosexual orientation. I urge readers to familiarize themselves with this research. Loader is the most prominent expert on ancient and biblical views of sexuality, having written five large and two small volumes in his lifetime.

A third line of reasoning in these volumes and others like them involves recategorization. In the past, homosexuality was categorized by all Christian churches and theology as sin.