Rev. Joshua
<img src=/cjv.jpg>
Gunther, they do refer to oral sex - which is a form of sodomy.
Joshua
Joshua
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Two Questions
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JesusisGod2
New Member
??????????????? Never heard that one before but then there is a lot I havent heard and have yet to learn!
Rev. Joshua
<img src=/cjv.jpg>
From the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Joshua
stubbornkelly
New Member
That's how most states with sodomy laws defined it, too. Some states limited it to same sex partners, but it was still the same idea - everything except copulation. That's what Virginia's law was, and many others (I use VA because I'm from there and know more about their statutes than I do other states').
JesusisGod2
New Member
Man -- you learn something new every day at this sight. I am not sure how Illinois defines it, any help?
But do you believe that is what the bible is talking about when it mentions it?
Just curious
But do you believe that is what the bible is talking about when it mentions it?
Just curious
Rev. Joshua
<img src=/cjv.jpg>
For the history of sodomy laws in Illinois, go here. It was the first state to repeal its sodomy laws.
"Sodomy" is an English word based on a biblical event. As such, defining it using common English usage is the only reliable way to do so. Because of its ambiguity, it is not used at all in modern translations. If I remember correctly, its usage is inconsistent in those translations that use it.
Joshua
"Sodomy" is an English word based on a biblical event. As such, defining it using common English usage is the only reliable way to do so. Because of its ambiguity, it is not used at all in modern translations. If I remember correctly, its usage is inconsistent in those translations that use it.
Joshua
I don't believe the word "sodomy" appears in the bible. However, the word "sodomite" appears. The word in biblical terms referrs to male temple prostitute (associated with idolatry). The word biblically does not refer to homosexuals in general.Originally posted by JesusisGod2:
But do you believe that is what the bible is talking about when it mentions it?
Just curious
It also is used to refer to an inhabitant of Sodom. Lot and his family were Sodomites.
[ July 11, 2003, 06:10 PM: Message edited by: Johnv ]
ScottEmerson
Active Member
That is your interpretation, but we've all been through this whole liberal parsing of words before.
</font>[/QUOTE]Sodomite in Genesis 19 talks about those who live in Sodom. God decided to destroy the city because it was "wicked" and this decision was made before any mention of supposed homosexuality. (Genesis 18:20) The specific nature of the "wickedness" of Sodom is stated in Ezekiel 16:49-50, and it’s pride and selfishness -not homo-sexuality. And the only time Jesus refers to Sodom, he does so in the context of lack of hospitality. (Matthew 10:5, 11:23-24, & Luke 10:10-12)In Deuteronomy 23:17-18, the word "Sodomite" does NOT appear in the original Hebrew text. The correct translation of the word used in Hebrew is "male temple prostitute."
I Kings 14:24 also uses the word sodomites. (qadesh), and again, a male temple prostitute. I know of no respectable lexicon that uses the word "homosexual" for qadesh.
It's not a "liberal parsing of the words." In the language of the Hebrew, sodomite is NOT an equivalent for homosexuality.
ScottEmerson
Active Member
For those who want to learn...
--------
The Origin of Sodomy
by Mark D. Jordan
The credit--or rather, the blame--for inventing the word sodomia, "Sodomy," must go, I think, to the eleventh-century theologian Peter Damian. He coined it quite deliberately on analogy to blasphemia, "blasphemy," which is to say, on analogy to the most explicit sin of denying God. Indeed, and from its origin, Sodomy is as much a theological category as trinity, incarnation, sacrament, or papal infallibility. As a category, it is richly invested with specific notions of sin and retribution, responsibility and guilt. The category was never meant to be neutrally descriptive, and it is doubtful whether any operation can purify it of its theological origins. There is no way to make "Sodomy" objective.
Peter's coining of the term is the result of long processes of thinning and condensing. These processes made it almost inevitable that there would be an abstract term for this specific kind of sin, so specifically stigmatized. One process thinned the reading of the Old Testament story of the punishment of Sodom. That complicated and disturbing story was simplified until it became the story of the punishment of a single sin, a sin that could be called eponymously the sin of the Sodomites. Another process, more diffuse but no less important, had to do with grouping together a number of sins under the old Roman category of luxuria. Luxuria came to be seen as the source of sinfulness in diverse acts, many of them having to do with the genitals. Peter Damian's coinage can only be understood against these processes.
I said that they were processes of thinning and condensing. The essential thing to notice in the processes by which "Sodomy" was produced is that they first abolish details, qualifications, restrictions in order to enable an excessive simplification in thought. Then they condense a number of these simplifications into a category that looks concrete but that has in fact nothing more concrete about it than the grammatical form of a general noun. The rather dry business of tracking words has in this case a very specific reward. It allows one to see, in the microcosm of grammatical form, the tyranny of generalization that results in there being a category like the category "Sodomy." The history of the word "Sodomy" is a history of the abuse of grammar, which is a reduction of thought.
Many contemporary exegetes agree that the Old Testament story about the destruction of Sodom cannot be read as a lesson about divine punishment of same-sex copulation. If any lesson is wanted from the story, the lesson would seem to be about hospitality. After all, the story in Genesis 19 is akin to the story of the Levite's concubine in Judges 19. A Levite and his party, on their way home from a trip to the concubine's father, are offered lodging by an old man in the town of Gibeah. The house is surrounded by some townsmen who demand that the Levite be brought out to them (19:22). As he recounts the events later, the Levite understood that they intended to kill him (20:5). The Levite instead pushes out his concubine, who is gang raped throughout the night. She dies on the doorstep in the morning. On returning home, the Levite dismembers her body in order to send its pieces to the tribes of Israel as a bloody call for revenge. The Israelites assemble an army that finally succeeds in killing the inhabitants of Gibeah and nearby towns.
Both of the stories, the one about Sodom and the one about Gibeah, narrate a terrible violation of the obligations of host to traveler. In the case of Sodom, the violation is punished by divine destruction. In the case of the Levite's concubine, the violation becomes an occasion for concerted military revenge. But the story of Judges 19 does not issue in a long tradition of moral reflection, much less in the naming of a special sin. Christian theology did not become preoccupied with a "sin of the Benjamites" (as the inhabitants of Gibeah were called), nor did European countries adopt penal statutes against "Benjamy." This is the more striking because the incidents at Gibeah are more horrible than the events surrounding Lot's hospitality to the angelic messengers in Sodom. The citizens of Sodom do nothing in the end. They are blinded by the angels, who then instruct Lot to hurry his family out of the city in view of its impending destruction. At Gibeah, there are no angels to rescue the sacrificed woman during the dark night of her torture. She has to suffer and then to die of her wounds. Nor does God punish Gibeah with fiery storm. The Israelite armies must do it themselves, after sustaining heavy casualties. Why is it then that the story of Sodom had such a long afterlife? How does it come to be misread so systematically and for so many centuries? The beginning of an answer lies precisely in the dramatic and total divine judgment executed on the city and its neighbors.
Sodom is already used by several books of the Old Testament as an image. It is not always the same image. Most often Sodom is an image of utter destruction, of desolation. It is thus a name for sudden divine judgment. Sometimes Sodom is an image of a poisonous land, a land producing bitter fruit. At other times it is an image for brazen or general sin. When the sin is specified by Old Testament authors, it is a sin of arrogant self-indulgence or self-satisfaction. Thus, the text of Ezekiel says, "This was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, overabundance of bread, abundance, and leisure, but they did not extend their hand to the poor. They were raised up and they committed abominations before me" (16:49-50). The two sentences are constructed in the familiar pattern of parallel repetition. The abomination is not a new sin; it is the sin of the previous sentence recapitulated.'
Sodom continues to be used as an image for divine judgment or barrenness in the few New Testament texts that mention it. Indeed, there are only two passages in the New Testament that associate Sodom with sexual sins. After invoking Sodom and Gomorrah as examples of divine judgment, Peter adds: "Above all {God] will punish those who walk according to the flesh in the desire of uncleanness (immunditia) and who contemn authority" (1:10). The "desire of uncleanness" might be construed as same-sex desire, except that a few verses later the text continues: "They have eyes full of adultery and [are] unceasingly sinful" (2:14).
The other New Testament text is no less problematic. Jude 7-8 reads:
"Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the nearby cities, fornicating and going after other flesh in the same way [as the aforementioned angels], were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire, so too it will be with those who stain the flesh and spurn authority and blaspheme against majesties."
The angels here are, of course, not the good angels who came to stay with Lot in Sodom. They are the evil angels who abandoned heaven and are now imprisoned in hell. The author of Jude understands their sin as sexual, as analogous to fornication and seeking after other flesh. The last, mysterious phrase may be a reference to the sort of legend that appears in Genesis 6:1 about the "sons of God" copulating with "the daughters of men." It seems certainly to reflect nonscriptural traditions that identified the sin of Sodom with sexual irregularity. In neither case does it refer necessarily to same-sex copulation. Moreover, in Jude these same sinners are guilty of taking bribes--a sin that exercises the author at greater length.
What is clear, I think, is that Sodom figures in the Christian Scriptures as the unsurpassed example of divine retribution. The challenge would seem to be that of figuring out what provoked it. The answer, as it appears in these lesser texts of the New Testament, is sexual. But within the Gospels, that is, in the mouth of Jesus, Sodom is not a reminder of a specific sin. It is a trope for divine wrath generally. Indeed, as Jesus is made to say several times, the sin of rejecting the Gospel merits greater punishment than the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah--whatever exactly it was. So Sodom is at this point not yet a geographical name for a particular kind of sin. It is a memorial site that records God's power to judge. It refers not to specific human actions, but to a story that is to be remembered for its present pertinence. What happened at Sodom is not an exotic, foreign vice that cannot be mentioned. It is, on the contrary, a most articulate reminder of the consequences of rebelling against God. We remember the story of Sodom because we need to learn obedience from it.
With these considerations, if not from the simple inspection of passages, it should be clear that there is no text of the Christian Bible that determines the reading of Sodom as a story about same-sex copulation. On the contrary, there is explicit scriptural evidence that the sin of the Sodomites was some combination of arrogance and ingratitude. This evidence was not ignored by patristic exegetes writing in Latin. Indeed many Latin theologians continue to speak of the inhospitality of Sodom, of its pride and arrogance, even as they speak of its association with forbidden sex. Views about the sense of a group of texts become convincing not through numbers so much as by self-directed reading. I will instead offer a few highly visible passages from the theologians that would be most authoritative for the Latin Middle Ages. Traditionally, the four "doctors" of the Western church were Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Each wrote on the story of Sodom many times in different contexts. I select the most extended or instructive treatments as examples.
Jerome, master of the scriptural text and its renowned translator, not surprisingly preserves the widest range of readings. In his commentary on the passage from Ezekiel, for example, he paraphrases the prophetic teaching quoted above quite succinctly. The first of the crimes of Sodom and her daughters is pride. Its primacy is supported by abundant quotation from the New Testament. The seedbed of this pride is abundance with leisure, or, in words that Jerome takes from the Septuagint, "the opulence of delicacies and of luxury." The lesson is summed emphatically: "The Sodomitic sin is pride, bloatedness (saturitas), the abundance of all things, leisure and delicacies." In another passage, from his commentary on Isaiah, Jerome adds to this list the feature of brazenness. Princes are said to be Sodomites when they publish their sins abroad, not taking any trouble to conceal them. The princes "publicly proclaim" their sin "without having any shame in blaspheming." On Jerome's reading of these texts, the sin of Sodom is brazen arrogance bred of opulence.
Elsewhere Jerome acknowledges that Sodom has taken on a variety of allegorical or spiritual meanings. So, for example, he reports a reading according to which Samaria and Sodom mean respectively "heretics and Gentiles." He contests the heretical interpretation according to which Jerusalem, Samaria, and Sodom signify spiritual, animal, and earthly. Again, in defending the literal sense of Jude 7-8, he refuses to let Sodom mean this visible world. But Jerome's most striking reference to Sodom comes in a letter on a practical matter. Can a woman whose husband is an adulterer and "a Sodomite" count her marriage to him as dissolved? Jerome's answer is a strong no. His phrasing of the question and his answer to it both make clear that to be an adulterer is different from being a Sodomite. They do not make clear what a Sodomite is. It clearly involves some form of sexual irregularity, but it might well be irregularity in the mode of copulation with the man's wife or with his mistress. With Jerome, then, we run the full range from the prophetic use of Sodom's arrogance through scriptural allegorizations of it to its use to refer to a specific but unstated sexual act.
In Ambrose the moral sense of Sodom begins to narrow around sexual or at least bodily sin. He does recognize that the threat against the angels was a violation of hospitality. Elsewhere, though, and especially in his treatise On Abraham, he identifies Sodom straightforwardly with fleshly indulgence and lasciviousness. The Sodomites were, he says, fierce and sinful, given to crimes beyond the mean of human wickedness. Their special province seems to be that of luxury (luxuria) and disordered desire (libido). When Lot's wife turns back to look at the burning city, she is turning back to the impure region of lust.
The evidence from Augustine is, as always, complicated. On the one hand, there are passages in which Sodom is understood as a sign of human depravity generally--of "the pernicious society of humankind." The Sodomites were unclean and proud; they were blasphemers. On the other hand, Augustine is quite clear that the citizens of Sodom wanted to rape the male angels. In his narrative of Old Testament history within the City of God, Augustine gives as reason for the destruction of Sodom that it was a place where "debaucheries in men" (stupra in masculos) flourished by custom. That is why Lot tried to offer his daughters instead. Better for men to violate women than to violate other men. Another passage from the Confessions is much quoted by medieval theologians as being equally explicit, since Augustine there mentions the Sodomites in a condemnation of iniquities done against nature (flagitia contra naturam). In fact, Augustine uses the story of Sodom in the Confessions only as an illustration of divine punishment. The crimes being discussed, the exact nature of which is unclear, are always and everywhere to be published as harshly as the Sodomites were punished.
With Augustine, then, we reach an explicit description of the sin of the Sodomites as the desire for same-sex copulation. It was a custom among them, and it was immediately understood by Lot as the reason for the demand that he hand over his guests. But even in Augustine the sin of the Sodomites is not merely same-sex desire. That desire is a symptom of the madness of their fleshly appetites, of the underlying delirium of their passions. The root sin of the Sodomites is not the desire for same-sex copulation. It is rather the violent eruption of disordered desire itself. The distinction is crucial for Augustine but quickly lost in the readings of him.
One piece of evidence for the sexual fixation of the reading of Sodom comes in a poem written by an unknown author in fifth-century Gaul. The poem narrates the whole story of destruction--from the infamy of Sodom's sin and the mission of the angels through the city's conflagration. The poem makes absolutely clear that Sodom was known for sexual irregularities and, indeed, for same-sex copulation. No male visitor could enter the city without fearing damage to his sex from a citizenry known for its "mixed," incestuous marriages, its rebellion against nature. Lot even tries to reason with the crowd, a foretaste of theological reasonings to come, by arguing that no other animal gives way to same-sex desire. "A woman is spouse to every [man]," he pleads, "and never has anyone's mother been other than a woman." For the author of this poem, the men of Sodom not only like to rape strangers, they like to marry each other. In short, the sexual interpretation of Genesis 19 is now assumed. It has begun to fuel more and more vivid imaginations about what happened that night within the doomed city.
The last of the four Latin "doctors," Gregory the Great, treats of Sodom theologically in two prominent passages. Together they show that alternate readings have been pushed out of the way by the sexual ones. Gregory knows the reading that Ezekiel gives to Sodom. He reproduces it as scriptural commentator and applies it in his own voice. But when Gregory thinks of Sodom, his first thought is of sexual sin, not of pride or inhospitality. This is clearest in his Moral Readings of Job, a book that would enormously influence medieval moral theology. At one point in explicating Job, Gregory wants to gloss the image of sulfur. He thinks at once of the destruction of Sodom. "That we should understand sulfur as signifying the stench of the flesh, the history of the holy Scriptures itself testifies,, when it narrates that God rained down fire and sulfur upon Sodom." Sodom is punished for "crimes of the flesh" (scelera carnis), for "perverse desires from the stench of the flesh" (peruersa desideria ex fetore carnis), for "what they did from unjust desire" (ex iniusto desiderio). In his Pastoral Rule, Gregory makes the moral explicit: "To flee from burning Sodom is to refuse the illicit fires of the flesh."
One other passage from Gregory must be mentioned. It is not theological so much as legal or administrative. The passage comes in a letter in which Gregory instructs one of his subordinates how to deal with a case of a priest who is accused of idolatry and of being "stained by the crime of the Sodomite." Here, as in the earlier letter from Jerome, the meaning of the accusation is presumed. In both cases, it is interesting that it accompanies an accusation of idolatry. But I mention the letter now in order to emphasize a terminological point. Gregory writes "the crime of the Sodomite." In two tenth-century copies of the text, there is a telling scribal error. "Of the Sodomite" becomes "of Sodomy." This slip is the reason a number of dictionaries will record Gregory's letter as the first appearance of the abstract term "Sodomy." In fact it is not. The term appears after Gregory, and then as a scribal error. But its absence here is worth noting. If patristic readers of the Christian Bible fixed on a sexual interpretation of the sin of Sodom, they did not yet make up a word to single it out. The entire Latin interpretation proceeds through Gregory and beyond without the help--or hindrance--of that kind of abstraction. You would not know this from the English translations, of course, which tend to become particularly irresponsible when translating terms having to do with same-sex copulation. Some translators disappear into prim vagueness; others apply an overly precise and definitely modern vocabulary. Either tactic will obscure important features in the history of moral theology, such as the entire absence of an abstract category "Sodomy" for some ten centuries of Christian theology.
We need to move forward in order to witness the birth of the term. But before we can do so responsibly, we have to notice one other process that has run parallel to the misreading of Sodom. The passages from Gregory make two things clear. The first is that Latin exegesis had by the end of the patristic period fixed on a sexual interpretation of Sodomitic sin, even if it kept repeating the other interpretations offered by the Scriptures. In some passages, though not in all, the sin is specified as that of same-sex copulation. In most passages, it is stigmatized as a sin of corrupted, luxurious flesh. The second point, the one yet to be investigated, is that the interpretation of Genesis 19 has been taken up into a much larger system of moral teaching about a sin called luxuria. The scope of the teaching can be seen especially in Gregory. When Gregory speaks of Sodom and luxuria, he says something quite specific. For Gregory, luxuria is one of seven principal or capital sins. It has a certain rank among sins, as it has certain properties or consequences. The misreading of Sodom has intersected with the formation of Christian moral categorizations in the Latin-speaking West.
When Jerome chose the Latin luxuria to translate several different terms in the Old and New Testaments, he imported into Christian theology a moral category with an ancient Roman pedigree. That pedigree is more important than the sense of the Hebrew or Greek terms that luxuria displaced. Luxuria recurs in Latin moral texts as the opposite of the stern virtues of the Republic. It is often coupled with licentia, with the threat of a general social dissolution, the loosening of bonds necessary to keep the city and then its empire intact. Whatever may have been the original Christian teaching on the dangers of the flesh, it arrived in the Latin-speaking portions of the empire both reinforced and distorted by the teaching of Rome itself.
Mark D. Jordan is professor at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarcy of Philosophical Discourses in Aquinas (1986).
--------
The Origin of Sodomy
by Mark D. Jordan
The credit--or rather, the blame--for inventing the word sodomia, "Sodomy," must go, I think, to the eleventh-century theologian Peter Damian. He coined it quite deliberately on analogy to blasphemia, "blasphemy," which is to say, on analogy to the most explicit sin of denying God. Indeed, and from its origin, Sodomy is as much a theological category as trinity, incarnation, sacrament, or papal infallibility. As a category, it is richly invested with specific notions of sin and retribution, responsibility and guilt. The category was never meant to be neutrally descriptive, and it is doubtful whether any operation can purify it of its theological origins. There is no way to make "Sodomy" objective.
Peter's coining of the term is the result of long processes of thinning and condensing. These processes made it almost inevitable that there would be an abstract term for this specific kind of sin, so specifically stigmatized. One process thinned the reading of the Old Testament story of the punishment of Sodom. That complicated and disturbing story was simplified until it became the story of the punishment of a single sin, a sin that could be called eponymously the sin of the Sodomites. Another process, more diffuse but no less important, had to do with grouping together a number of sins under the old Roman category of luxuria. Luxuria came to be seen as the source of sinfulness in diverse acts, many of them having to do with the genitals. Peter Damian's coinage can only be understood against these processes.
I said that they were processes of thinning and condensing. The essential thing to notice in the processes by which "Sodomy" was produced is that they first abolish details, qualifications, restrictions in order to enable an excessive simplification in thought. Then they condense a number of these simplifications into a category that looks concrete but that has in fact nothing more concrete about it than the grammatical form of a general noun. The rather dry business of tracking words has in this case a very specific reward. It allows one to see, in the microcosm of grammatical form, the tyranny of generalization that results in there being a category like the category "Sodomy." The history of the word "Sodomy" is a history of the abuse of grammar, which is a reduction of thought.
Many contemporary exegetes agree that the Old Testament story about the destruction of Sodom cannot be read as a lesson about divine punishment of same-sex copulation. If any lesson is wanted from the story, the lesson would seem to be about hospitality. After all, the story in Genesis 19 is akin to the story of the Levite's concubine in Judges 19. A Levite and his party, on their way home from a trip to the concubine's father, are offered lodging by an old man in the town of Gibeah. The house is surrounded by some townsmen who demand that the Levite be brought out to them (19:22). As he recounts the events later, the Levite understood that they intended to kill him (20:5). The Levite instead pushes out his concubine, who is gang raped throughout the night. She dies on the doorstep in the morning. On returning home, the Levite dismembers her body in order to send its pieces to the tribes of Israel as a bloody call for revenge. The Israelites assemble an army that finally succeeds in killing the inhabitants of Gibeah and nearby towns.
Both of the stories, the one about Sodom and the one about Gibeah, narrate a terrible violation of the obligations of host to traveler. In the case of Sodom, the violation is punished by divine destruction. In the case of the Levite's concubine, the violation becomes an occasion for concerted military revenge. But the story of Judges 19 does not issue in a long tradition of moral reflection, much less in the naming of a special sin. Christian theology did not become preoccupied with a "sin of the Benjamites" (as the inhabitants of Gibeah were called), nor did European countries adopt penal statutes against "Benjamy." This is the more striking because the incidents at Gibeah are more horrible than the events surrounding Lot's hospitality to the angelic messengers in Sodom. The citizens of Sodom do nothing in the end. They are blinded by the angels, who then instruct Lot to hurry his family out of the city in view of its impending destruction. At Gibeah, there are no angels to rescue the sacrificed woman during the dark night of her torture. She has to suffer and then to die of her wounds. Nor does God punish Gibeah with fiery storm. The Israelite armies must do it themselves, after sustaining heavy casualties. Why is it then that the story of Sodom had such a long afterlife? How does it come to be misread so systematically and for so many centuries? The beginning of an answer lies precisely in the dramatic and total divine judgment executed on the city and its neighbors.
Sodom is already used by several books of the Old Testament as an image. It is not always the same image. Most often Sodom is an image of utter destruction, of desolation. It is thus a name for sudden divine judgment. Sometimes Sodom is an image of a poisonous land, a land producing bitter fruit. At other times it is an image for brazen or general sin. When the sin is specified by Old Testament authors, it is a sin of arrogant self-indulgence or self-satisfaction. Thus, the text of Ezekiel says, "This was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, overabundance of bread, abundance, and leisure, but they did not extend their hand to the poor. They were raised up and they committed abominations before me" (16:49-50). The two sentences are constructed in the familiar pattern of parallel repetition. The abomination is not a new sin; it is the sin of the previous sentence recapitulated.'
Sodom continues to be used as an image for divine judgment or barrenness in the few New Testament texts that mention it. Indeed, there are only two passages in the New Testament that associate Sodom with sexual sins. After invoking Sodom and Gomorrah as examples of divine judgment, Peter adds: "Above all {God] will punish those who walk according to the flesh in the desire of uncleanness (immunditia) and who contemn authority" (1:10). The "desire of uncleanness" might be construed as same-sex desire, except that a few verses later the text continues: "They have eyes full of adultery and [are] unceasingly sinful" (2:14).
The other New Testament text is no less problematic. Jude 7-8 reads:
"Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the nearby cities, fornicating and going after other flesh in the same way [as the aforementioned angels], were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire, so too it will be with those who stain the flesh and spurn authority and blaspheme against majesties."
The angels here are, of course, not the good angels who came to stay with Lot in Sodom. They are the evil angels who abandoned heaven and are now imprisoned in hell. The author of Jude understands their sin as sexual, as analogous to fornication and seeking after other flesh. The last, mysterious phrase may be a reference to the sort of legend that appears in Genesis 6:1 about the "sons of God" copulating with "the daughters of men." It seems certainly to reflect nonscriptural traditions that identified the sin of Sodom with sexual irregularity. In neither case does it refer necessarily to same-sex copulation. Moreover, in Jude these same sinners are guilty of taking bribes--a sin that exercises the author at greater length.
What is clear, I think, is that Sodom figures in the Christian Scriptures as the unsurpassed example of divine retribution. The challenge would seem to be that of figuring out what provoked it. The answer, as it appears in these lesser texts of the New Testament, is sexual. But within the Gospels, that is, in the mouth of Jesus, Sodom is not a reminder of a specific sin. It is a trope for divine wrath generally. Indeed, as Jesus is made to say several times, the sin of rejecting the Gospel merits greater punishment than the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah--whatever exactly it was. So Sodom is at this point not yet a geographical name for a particular kind of sin. It is a memorial site that records God's power to judge. It refers not to specific human actions, but to a story that is to be remembered for its present pertinence. What happened at Sodom is not an exotic, foreign vice that cannot be mentioned. It is, on the contrary, a most articulate reminder of the consequences of rebelling against God. We remember the story of Sodom because we need to learn obedience from it.
With these considerations, if not from the simple inspection of passages, it should be clear that there is no text of the Christian Bible that determines the reading of Sodom as a story about same-sex copulation. On the contrary, there is explicit scriptural evidence that the sin of the Sodomites was some combination of arrogance and ingratitude. This evidence was not ignored by patristic exegetes writing in Latin. Indeed many Latin theologians continue to speak of the inhospitality of Sodom, of its pride and arrogance, even as they speak of its association with forbidden sex. Views about the sense of a group of texts become convincing not through numbers so much as by self-directed reading. I will instead offer a few highly visible passages from the theologians that would be most authoritative for the Latin Middle Ages. Traditionally, the four "doctors" of the Western church were Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Each wrote on the story of Sodom many times in different contexts. I select the most extended or instructive treatments as examples.
Jerome, master of the scriptural text and its renowned translator, not surprisingly preserves the widest range of readings. In his commentary on the passage from Ezekiel, for example, he paraphrases the prophetic teaching quoted above quite succinctly. The first of the crimes of Sodom and her daughters is pride. Its primacy is supported by abundant quotation from the New Testament. The seedbed of this pride is abundance with leisure, or, in words that Jerome takes from the Septuagint, "the opulence of delicacies and of luxury." The lesson is summed emphatically: "The Sodomitic sin is pride, bloatedness (saturitas), the abundance of all things, leisure and delicacies." In another passage, from his commentary on Isaiah, Jerome adds to this list the feature of brazenness. Princes are said to be Sodomites when they publish their sins abroad, not taking any trouble to conceal them. The princes "publicly proclaim" their sin "without having any shame in blaspheming." On Jerome's reading of these texts, the sin of Sodom is brazen arrogance bred of opulence.
Elsewhere Jerome acknowledges that Sodom has taken on a variety of allegorical or spiritual meanings. So, for example, he reports a reading according to which Samaria and Sodom mean respectively "heretics and Gentiles." He contests the heretical interpretation according to which Jerusalem, Samaria, and Sodom signify spiritual, animal, and earthly. Again, in defending the literal sense of Jude 7-8, he refuses to let Sodom mean this visible world. But Jerome's most striking reference to Sodom comes in a letter on a practical matter. Can a woman whose husband is an adulterer and "a Sodomite" count her marriage to him as dissolved? Jerome's answer is a strong no. His phrasing of the question and his answer to it both make clear that to be an adulterer is different from being a Sodomite. They do not make clear what a Sodomite is. It clearly involves some form of sexual irregularity, but it might well be irregularity in the mode of copulation with the man's wife or with his mistress. With Jerome, then, we run the full range from the prophetic use of Sodom's arrogance through scriptural allegorizations of it to its use to refer to a specific but unstated sexual act.
In Ambrose the moral sense of Sodom begins to narrow around sexual or at least bodily sin. He does recognize that the threat against the angels was a violation of hospitality. Elsewhere, though, and especially in his treatise On Abraham, he identifies Sodom straightforwardly with fleshly indulgence and lasciviousness. The Sodomites were, he says, fierce and sinful, given to crimes beyond the mean of human wickedness. Their special province seems to be that of luxury (luxuria) and disordered desire (libido). When Lot's wife turns back to look at the burning city, she is turning back to the impure region of lust.
The evidence from Augustine is, as always, complicated. On the one hand, there are passages in which Sodom is understood as a sign of human depravity generally--of "the pernicious society of humankind." The Sodomites were unclean and proud; they were blasphemers. On the other hand, Augustine is quite clear that the citizens of Sodom wanted to rape the male angels. In his narrative of Old Testament history within the City of God, Augustine gives as reason for the destruction of Sodom that it was a place where "debaucheries in men" (stupra in masculos) flourished by custom. That is why Lot tried to offer his daughters instead. Better for men to violate women than to violate other men. Another passage from the Confessions is much quoted by medieval theologians as being equally explicit, since Augustine there mentions the Sodomites in a condemnation of iniquities done against nature (flagitia contra naturam). In fact, Augustine uses the story of Sodom in the Confessions only as an illustration of divine punishment. The crimes being discussed, the exact nature of which is unclear, are always and everywhere to be published as harshly as the Sodomites were punished.
With Augustine, then, we reach an explicit description of the sin of the Sodomites as the desire for same-sex copulation. It was a custom among them, and it was immediately understood by Lot as the reason for the demand that he hand over his guests. But even in Augustine the sin of the Sodomites is not merely same-sex desire. That desire is a symptom of the madness of their fleshly appetites, of the underlying delirium of their passions. The root sin of the Sodomites is not the desire for same-sex copulation. It is rather the violent eruption of disordered desire itself. The distinction is crucial for Augustine but quickly lost in the readings of him.
One piece of evidence for the sexual fixation of the reading of Sodom comes in a poem written by an unknown author in fifth-century Gaul. The poem narrates the whole story of destruction--from the infamy of Sodom's sin and the mission of the angels through the city's conflagration. The poem makes absolutely clear that Sodom was known for sexual irregularities and, indeed, for same-sex copulation. No male visitor could enter the city without fearing damage to his sex from a citizenry known for its "mixed," incestuous marriages, its rebellion against nature. Lot even tries to reason with the crowd, a foretaste of theological reasonings to come, by arguing that no other animal gives way to same-sex desire. "A woman is spouse to every [man]," he pleads, "and never has anyone's mother been other than a woman." For the author of this poem, the men of Sodom not only like to rape strangers, they like to marry each other. In short, the sexual interpretation of Genesis 19 is now assumed. It has begun to fuel more and more vivid imaginations about what happened that night within the doomed city.
The last of the four Latin "doctors," Gregory the Great, treats of Sodom theologically in two prominent passages. Together they show that alternate readings have been pushed out of the way by the sexual ones. Gregory knows the reading that Ezekiel gives to Sodom. He reproduces it as scriptural commentator and applies it in his own voice. But when Gregory thinks of Sodom, his first thought is of sexual sin, not of pride or inhospitality. This is clearest in his Moral Readings of Job, a book that would enormously influence medieval moral theology. At one point in explicating Job, Gregory wants to gloss the image of sulfur. He thinks at once of the destruction of Sodom. "That we should understand sulfur as signifying the stench of the flesh, the history of the holy Scriptures itself testifies,, when it narrates that God rained down fire and sulfur upon Sodom." Sodom is punished for "crimes of the flesh" (scelera carnis), for "perverse desires from the stench of the flesh" (peruersa desideria ex fetore carnis), for "what they did from unjust desire" (ex iniusto desiderio). In his Pastoral Rule, Gregory makes the moral explicit: "To flee from burning Sodom is to refuse the illicit fires of the flesh."
One other passage from Gregory must be mentioned. It is not theological so much as legal or administrative. The passage comes in a letter in which Gregory instructs one of his subordinates how to deal with a case of a priest who is accused of idolatry and of being "stained by the crime of the Sodomite." Here, as in the earlier letter from Jerome, the meaning of the accusation is presumed. In both cases, it is interesting that it accompanies an accusation of idolatry. But I mention the letter now in order to emphasize a terminological point. Gregory writes "the crime of the Sodomite." In two tenth-century copies of the text, there is a telling scribal error. "Of the Sodomite" becomes "of Sodomy." This slip is the reason a number of dictionaries will record Gregory's letter as the first appearance of the abstract term "Sodomy." In fact it is not. The term appears after Gregory, and then as a scribal error. But its absence here is worth noting. If patristic readers of the Christian Bible fixed on a sexual interpretation of the sin of Sodom, they did not yet make up a word to single it out. The entire Latin interpretation proceeds through Gregory and beyond without the help--or hindrance--of that kind of abstraction. You would not know this from the English translations, of course, which tend to become particularly irresponsible when translating terms having to do with same-sex copulation. Some translators disappear into prim vagueness; others apply an overly precise and definitely modern vocabulary. Either tactic will obscure important features in the history of moral theology, such as the entire absence of an abstract category "Sodomy" for some ten centuries of Christian theology.
We need to move forward in order to witness the birth of the term. But before we can do so responsibly, we have to notice one other process that has run parallel to the misreading of Sodom. The passages from Gregory make two things clear. The first is that Latin exegesis had by the end of the patristic period fixed on a sexual interpretation of Sodomitic sin, even if it kept repeating the other interpretations offered by the Scriptures. In some passages, though not in all, the sin is specified as that of same-sex copulation. In most passages, it is stigmatized as a sin of corrupted, luxurious flesh. The second point, the one yet to be investigated, is that the interpretation of Genesis 19 has been taken up into a much larger system of moral teaching about a sin called luxuria. The scope of the teaching can be seen especially in Gregory. When Gregory speaks of Sodom and luxuria, he says something quite specific. For Gregory, luxuria is one of seven principal or capital sins. It has a certain rank among sins, as it has certain properties or consequences. The misreading of Sodom has intersected with the formation of Christian moral categorizations in the Latin-speaking West.
When Jerome chose the Latin luxuria to translate several different terms in the Old and New Testaments, he imported into Christian theology a moral category with an ancient Roman pedigree. That pedigree is more important than the sense of the Hebrew or Greek terms that luxuria displaced. Luxuria recurs in Latin moral texts as the opposite of the stern virtues of the Republic. It is often coupled with licentia, with the threat of a general social dissolution, the loosening of bonds necessary to keep the city and then its empire intact. Whatever may have been the original Christian teaching on the dangers of the flesh, it arrived in the Latin-speaking portions of the empire both reinforced and distorted by the teaching of Rome itself.
Mark D. Jordan is professor at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarcy of Philosophical Discourses in Aquinas (1986).
Joshua,
1. On a rare occassion, but usually homosexual or gay and on occassion "queer". Just like sometimes I refer to a person addicted to alcohol as an alcoholic, but usually refer to them as a drunk, but NEVER as a person who is suffering from the illness of chemical dependancy. I have no interest in harming that person but I also have no interest is downplaying their sin so that it doesn't sound so bad.
Since when does the state of Illinois or Virginia, or, for that matter, any other state get to define the Bible. Sodomy is a synonym for homosexuality whether anybody likes it or not. Homosexuality is a sin not because what they DO is wrong, but, because THEY aren't allowed to do that with each other. Example: Sex isn't a sin, sex with my neighbor's wife IS. The Bible nowhere defines specific sexual acts as sin. It defines sexual acts of any kind between members of the same sex as sin.
Lev 18:22 ‘You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.
Lev 20:13 ‘If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act;
Rom 1:26 For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.
I Tim 1:9...law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers 10 and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching,
It wasn't the acts, in and of themselves, that were an abomination, detestable, unnatural, degrading, indecent, in error, and contrary to sound teaching. It is the fact that these acts were commited by men with men and women with women. THAT is what makes it sin. ...and it still is.
2. Yes, the Holy Spirit really does exist and can still work miracles and can even overcome your reprobate teachings.
You could have said, "except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish" or "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." or "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out" or "Repent therefore of this thy wickedness" or "repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance". Which are real quotes, instead of your made up nonsense to make fun of "Bible thumpers" who are always quoting the Bible.
You said you "talked about the Gospel". I am curious as to what your good news was. It seems to be, "Good news, you can do as you please, just be nice about it."
1. On a rare occassion, but usually homosexual or gay and on occassion "queer". Just like sometimes I refer to a person addicted to alcohol as an alcoholic, but usually refer to them as a drunk, but NEVER as a person who is suffering from the illness of chemical dependancy. I have no interest in harming that person but I also have no interest is downplaying their sin so that it doesn't sound so bad.
Since when does the state of Illinois or Virginia, or, for that matter, any other state get to define the Bible. Sodomy is a synonym for homosexuality whether anybody likes it or not. Homosexuality is a sin not because what they DO is wrong, but, because THEY aren't allowed to do that with each other. Example: Sex isn't a sin, sex with my neighbor's wife IS. The Bible nowhere defines specific sexual acts as sin. It defines sexual acts of any kind between members of the same sex as sin.
Lev 18:22 ‘You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.
Lev 20:13 ‘If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act;
Rom 1:26 For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.
I Tim 1:9...law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers 10 and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching,
It wasn't the acts, in and of themselves, that were an abomination, detestable, unnatural, degrading, indecent, in error, and contrary to sound teaching. It is the fact that these acts were commited by men with men and women with women. THAT is what makes it sin. ...and it still is.
2. Yes, the Holy Spirit really does exist and can still work miracles and can even overcome your reprobate teachings.
You could have said, "except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish" or "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." or "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out" or "Repent therefore of this thy wickedness" or "repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance". Which are real quotes, instead of your made up nonsense to make fun of "Bible thumpers" who are always quoting the Bible.
You said you "talked about the Gospel". I am curious as to what your good news was. It seems to be, "Good news, you can do as you please, just be nice about it."
Scott:
About the author of your article:
In other words, I don't give a hoot about what your Professor has to say on the subject. All I care about is what God says. And some of the points in that article you posted border on blasphemy!
Is this what is preached at the First Baptist Church of Ocala?
Now, why, oh why, would you think those of us who believe the WHOLE BIBLE would want to learn from a Reprobate mind (Romans Chapter 1)?
About the author of your article:
Learn? Learn? When it comes to morality, I'll take my education from the Bible, thank you, and not some liberal theologian who may or may not know the Author of the Book.
In other words, I don't give a hoot about what your Professor has to say on the subject. All I care about is what God says. And some of the points in that article you posted border on blasphemy!
Is this what is preached at the First Baptist Church of Ocala?
D
dianetavegia
Guest
AMEN!
Amen!!!!!!
The preachers of apostasy, and sanctifiers of iniquity:
2 Peter 2:
17: These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever.
18: For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.
19: While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.
20: For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.
21: For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them.
22: But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.
A servant of Christ,
Drew
The preachers of apostasy, and sanctifiers of iniquity:
2 Peter 2:
17: These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever.
18: For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.
19: While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.
20: For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.
21: For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them.
22: But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.
A servant of Christ,
Drew
ScottEmerson
Active Member
Well, did you read what he had to say, or were you too busy engaging in ad hominem attacks?
But you don't address what he has to say. He brings up some valid points regarding the use of the word "sodomy" that you haven't even tried to address.
Such as what? I didn't see anything that I would call blasphemy. While it is, indeed, of utmost importance to understand what God said, we must also be aware of history. The fact is that the word "sodomy" has a much different history than what some people on this board says.
I believe that homosexuality is a sin. I have never on this board or anywhere else said that it wasn't. I believe that it is wrong. However, I think that it is valuable to understand the other side and how the other side thinks. For example, I have an understanding of modern rock and pop music. This serves me very well in relating to the students who I work with. I don't enjoy most of it, but I know who Britney Spears is, what she sings about, and what she stands for, even though I disagree with most of what she stands for. I have also read the texts of many other religious works, such as the Koran, and even the Satanic Bible.
I believe that Christians have a responsibility to grow in wisdom. One of the ways to do so is to understand the way those who disagree think. We can then engage them responsibly, instead of beating them over the head, proclaiming, "nuh-uh!"
That said, would you care to engage the text that I posted, or are you willing to just pass it by because you already have decided you disagree with it?