Can an LGBTQIA person open the Bible and find a book that tells the truth about God, rather than one more verdict against them? David Bennett says yes. He gets there by reading the hard passages more slowly and more completely than most people who quote them, without ignoring them. His conclusion is that the Bible can be trusted by LGBTQIA people, though not when it is used as a weapon.
Bennett did not start out as a likely witness for that answer. By his own account he was an anti-Christian gay activist in Sydney, Australia, until what he calls a radical encounter with Jesus in a pub in the city’s gay quarter. He went on to spend years in Oxford, and was finishing his doctorate there when he spoke with Lisa Fields. He lives today as a celibate gay Christian. He has felt the full weight of these texts, and he has studied them at a level few of their critics or defenders reach.
Why does the Bible feel like a closed door?
Bennett names the suspicion before he answers it. When people read quickly, he says, and “we treat it as a proof text or a manual for our lives, rather than the very human, but very divinely inspired word of God,” the result looks like total rejection: no relationship with God, no romantic love, no flourishing. His summary of how that lands is blunt: “door shut in your face.” Add the church’s history of oppressing LGBTQIA people, and he calls trust “a high bar to get over.”
Bennett locates the hostility in a shallow way of reading, one that treats Scripture as a list of rulings rather than a story with arguments, settings and a center. He borrows an image he credits to the physicist Werner Heisenberg about science and faith. The first sip makes you an atheist. In Bennett’s retelling, the longer drink changes everything: “when I kept drinking the glass, I found God at the bottom staring up at me.”
He applies that image to his own life. His first sip of his sexuality and the Bible together pushed him toward unbelief. He remembers the question that made faith seem impossible: “how could God allow me to have these desires do nothing to change them and condemn me for them?” He decided he could never worship a God like that.
What had to change before the reading could change?
The surprising part of Bennett’s story is the order of events. He did not argue his way from Leviticus to faith. “I had to go on a journey, to discover the love of God before I could really read the Bible properly.”
That could be misread as a retreat from study. Bennett went on to spend about a decade working through Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6 and Leviticus at an academic level. His point is that a reader certain God despises him cannot hear what a text is saying. Fear does the reading. Once he met the love of God in Jesus, he could ask what Paul meant rather than what Paul was accused of meaning.
Then comes the line that keeps his story from being a simple tale of reinterpretation: “I still believe the same things now, but the process to get there is very different.” His conclusions did not soften. His grasp of why they hold, and what they mean for someone like him, changed completely.
Lisa Fields put words to the same distinction. Someone can reach a proof-texter’s conclusion by a completely different road. In her words, “we may land in the same place as somebody that proof texts,” but “you could proof text and actually do damage.” One reading leaves people condemned. The other leaves them redeemed and hopeful. The difference lies in whether the reader has followed the whole argument of the text.
A promise to people who didn’t fit
Bennett says the passage that opened Scripture to him is one almost no one brings up in these debates. Isaiah 56 speaks of God’s house becoming a house of prayer for all people. In the same chapter, the prophet turns to two groups who had reason to feel shut out: foreigners and eunuchs.
The setting makes this striking. Under Deuteronomy 23:1, a man made a eunuch was excluded from the assembly of the LORD. A eunuch also had no children to carry his name, a deep loss in Israel’s world. Isaiah 56:3 voices exactly that fear: “neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree.” Then God speaks to eunuchs who keep his sabbaths and hold fast to his covenant. In Isaiah 56:5 he promises them, within his house and his walls, a place and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name that will not be cut off.
Bennett reads eunuchs in that world as a kind of sexual minority, people outside the ordinary pattern of marriage and children. He is careful about what he draws from this. God is not rewriting the created order of marriage between a man and a woman as the place for sex. God is promising those who lack marriage and children something greater than what they lack.
Bennett connects this to Jesus, who never married and had no children, and who in Matthew 19:12 speaks of those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He sees Jesus giving up real human goods for the kingdom and so standing alongside those who do not fit the usual pattern. That link is Bennett’s theological reading, not something the prophet spelled out. The core of Isaiah 56:5 stands on its own: God promises the excluded a place and a name in his own house. For Bennett, that is where the Bible stopped being only a list of prohibitions.
How can Romans 1 become a favorite passage?
Bennett says Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 have become his favorite passages in Scripture. His reason is simple: “So we can’t just read Romans one. We have to read Romans one, right to Romans three.”
Paul’s letter is a sustained argument. Romans 1 describes a humanity that has turned from God and whose desires have gone astray. Romans 2 then turns on the reader who has been nodding along: “for thou that judgest doest the same things” (Romans 2:1). Romans 3 lands the point: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). The people who used Romans 1 to stand above others find themselves on the same ground.
Bennett places this in a historical setting. He describes the church in Rome as divided between Jewish and Gentile believers after the emperor Claudius expelled Jews from the city. In his reading, some Jewish believers were telling Gentile Christians they had to come under the law to be fully righteous, and Paul writes to show that everyone needs the righteousness that comes through faith in Jesus. The law’s verdict in Romans 1 is turned against those who use the law to condemn.
That is why Bennett can say of Romans 1, “It’s not actually about my condemnation.” He adds, “God has made a way where it seemed like there was no way.” Fields made the same observation about Romans 2: whatever our struggle, “we are equal at the cross and we have no right to condemn another.”
This reading does not claim Romans 1 is silent about same-sex sex. Bennett still reads Paul as teaching that sex belongs within marriage between a man and a woman. What changes is the role the passage plays. Read alone, it looks like a charge sheet with one group’s name on it. Read as Paul wrote it, it opens an argument that ends with everyone needing the same grace.
“Such were some of you”
In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Paul lists people who will not inherit the kingdom of God. One of his words, Bennett notes, draws on the language of Leviticus 18 about men lying with men. Conversations often end there. Bennett thinks the next verse is where the passage turns. In 1 Corinthians 6:11 Paul tells the Corinthians that some of them used to be exactly those people, but they have been washed, sanctified and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.
From this Bennett draws an observation that is easy to miss: “In other words, the early church was full of gay people.” He means people “who used to define their lives around that action and no longer do.”
He is careful not to overclaim. “So it doesn’t mean they’ve ceased to have that orientation,” he says, but “it does mean that they have been included in the covenant, that they are children of God alongside straight people.” The passage describes people who were washed, made holy and declared right with God, and who now belonged, without suggesting their attractions vanished.
That shapes how Bennett talks about himself. “I don’t see being gay as something that I have to run away from or try to change.” He brings it under the lordship of Christ. He chose celibacy, and he pushes back on the idea that his path is a rule for every gay Christian. Each person, he says, needs to wrestle with Jesus and follow where Jesus leads them in holiness.
Isn’t this just a gentler way of saying no?
Two serious objections come from opposite directions, and Bennett takes both seriously.
The first comes from Christians who affirm same-sex marriage, a view Bennett calls side A. They often argue that the New Testament writers had in mind the exploitative, power-based same-sex practices common in the Greco-Roman world, not loving, faithful partnerships. If so, the texts would not address modern gay marriage at all. Bennett does not dismiss this. “I would love to be convinced,” he says, and he names what that would mean for him: a partner, an adopted child, a home. But he points back to Romans 2:1. If Paul tells the judging Jewish reader that he does the same things, Bennett argues, Paul is not only describing pagan abuse. He is speaking to a wider reality and to the meaning of male and female in marriage. “I cannot see that in the text, when I really, really deeply read it,” Bennett says. He adds that he pressed his former professor Tom Wright on these passages, and Wright told him he could not honestly see them another way either. Faithful readers disagree with Bennett here, and his reading is his own argument. It matters that he reached it after wanting a different answer.
The second objection comes from the other side: talk of inclusion must mean the moral teaching is being quietly dropped. Bennett rejects that too. He wants to push back against “that dangerous conservatism rather than that deeper rarefied orthodoxy” while also “providing some challenge and pushback to the more liberal perspective.” He holds the historic teaching and condemns the cruelty that has often traveled with it.
So the answer to the objection depends on how much of the story counts. Bennett’s reading says yes to belonging, to being a child of God, to a name better than sons and daughters. It also says sex belongs within the marriage of a man and a woman. That pairing is the one Jude 3 Project holds: the historic Christian sexual ethic, delivered with genuine welcome, honesty about the church’s failures, and the love of God first. Bennett shows what holding both looks like from the inside, as a gay man who still finds the book on his side.
Reading to the end
Trusting the Bible, on Bennett’s account, does not mean finding every passage comfortable. He is open that the road is hard. It means believing the text tells the truth about God, and that God is better than the God of the proof-texts.
The passages that seem to shut the door are the same ones Bennett now calls his favorites. Nothing in them was edited. Isaiah 56 still begins with a eunuch calling himself a dry tree, and it still ends with a name that will not be cut off. Romans 1 still describes a fallen world, and it still runs into “all have sinned” two chapters later. 1 Corinthians 6 still has its list, and it still has the word “were.” What changed for Bennett was that he kept reading past the line where most readers stop, and found that the verdict he feared was not the last word on the page.