Yes. Read together, the passages that speak to sexuality point one way. Genesis presents sexual union as designed for a man and a woman in marriage, and every passage that mentions same-sex sexual relations forbids them. That is the historic Christian sexual ethic, and Jude 3 Project holds it: sexual intimacy is reserved for the marriage of one man and one woman. Yet the first chapter of the Bible to speak about human sexuality opens by giving every person the image of God. That fact governs how the church must treat the people this question touches.
The answer only holds up if it is reached the right way. A single verse quoted at someone proves very little and wounds a great deal. Dr. Preston Sprinkle, a Bible scholar who holds the traditional view, insists on a slower method. Start with what God says about human design. Read each passage that addresses same-sex relations in its own context. Then ask what the passages show together.
Why isn’t counting verses enough?
A common objection is that the Bible barely mentions same-sex relations, and Jesus never mentions them at all. Sprinkle grants the facts. His point is that frequency is the wrong test for moral weight: “if we built an ethic around what Jesus did and didn’t talk about, we would have a really weird faith.”
He offers a sharp comparison. The land of Israel comes up in Scripture far more often than the deity of Christ. Nobody concludes from that count that the land matters more than who Jesus is. A topic’s importance comes from what the text says about it and how that teaching connects to the rest of Scripture. The count cannot decide the question, and neither can one verse lifted out of its setting. The reading has to.
What does creation establish, and what does it leave open?
Sprinkle’s starting question is the most basic one available. If there is a Creator, and if he has spoken in his written word, what has he said about how he designed us as sexual beings?
The creation account answers in two places. Genesis 1:27 reads, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Before the text says anything about marriage, it says that every human being bears God’s image. Genesis 2:24 then names the union: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” The word “therefore” matters. The narrator draws a conclusion from the story of the woman being made from and for the man. Marriage flows from the way God made humanity male and female.
Later biblical writers keep returning to this passage, including Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 and Ephesians 5. When the Pharisees question Jesus about divorce, he does not answer from custom. He goes back to the beginning: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). Jesus treats Genesis as the pattern that still governs marriage.
Here Sprinkle makes a move that surprises people on his own side. He says Genesis 1 and 2 do not, by themselves, end the discussion, because “a positive affirmation of heterosexual marriage doesn’t, in and of itself rule out the possibility that there could be same-sex marriage.” Saying what something is does not automatically say what it excludes. He illustrates with his own marriage: saying he is married to his wife does not, as a matter of pure logic, rule out a second marriage. Other reasons rule that out.
Creation sets the pattern and the expectation. To ask whether the Bible permits an alternative, a reader has to look at the passages that address same-sex relations directly. Sprinkle warns evangelicals “not to want their conclusion to be so correct that they settle for easy, simple answers.” When he consults the five or six passages that speak to the question head on, he concludes “it does forbid all forms of same-sex relations.”
Is the Leviticus prohibition just another food law?
Leviticus 18:22 reads, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Leviticus 20:13 restates the prohibition and attaches a penalty. The familiar response is that Leviticus also forbids certain foods, Christians eat them, so this law can go too.
Sprinkle calls that one of the worst arguments for the affirming view, and he says so as someone who thinks the affirming side has a few better ones. A judge hearing it, he says, “you’d be rubbing your eyes thinking, is that the best you have?” The flaw is simple. Leviticus also contains “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). It forbids stealing. No Christian drops those commands because they share a book with the food laws.
The better question is which laws still bind people under the new covenant. Context helps. Leviticus 18 is a chapter about sexual conduct, forbidding incest, adultery and bestiality, and Christians still accept nearly every prohibition on that list. The verse on same-sex relations sits among laws the church has never treated as obsolete. That places the burden of proof on anyone who wants to set this one aside.
Sprinkle adds his own test: “the ultimate test of whether it’s still for a believer is if it’s repeated in the new.” Faithful Christians use different approaches to how Israel’s law applies today, and this test is one of them. Here the approaches converge, because the apostles’ letters do speak to the subject.
What do Paul’s two words in 1 Corinthians 6 mean?
In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 Paul gives a list of wrongs: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
“Effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” translate two Greek words, malakoi and arsenokoitai. The KJV’s older English does not map neatly onto modern usage, and modern translations render them in different ways. Some interpreters argue Paul meant only exploitative sex, such as male prostitution or men using boys.
Sprinkle grants that the words need work: “I’m not saying we don’t know what the words mean. I’m saying we have to do some study to figure out what they mean.” His evidence centers on the second word. He states that it first appears in Greek literature here, in Paul, and that later writers do not use it only for prostitution. It is built from the words for a male and for a bed found together in the Greek translation of Leviticus 20:13. In his words, “the word itself just simply means one who sleeps with a male.” That Levitical verse is general. It does not single out prostitutes or abusive relationships.
He adds an argument from Paul’s choice of vocabulary: “there’s many words and phrases he could have used to refer to a male prostitute. He doesn’t use that one.” Greek had terms for the narrower practices. Paul chose general language drawn from a general prohibition. The same word appears again in 1 Timothy 1:10, where the KJV renders it “them that defile themselves with mankind.”
The next verse changes the tone of the whole list: “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Paul wrote that list to a church made up of the people named in it. Greed and drunkenness stand beside sexual sin, and the passage ends with grace. Quoting verses 9 and 10 without verse 11 misreads Paul.
What does “against nature” mean in Romans 1?
Romans 1:26-27 is the fullest treatment of the subject in Paul. Lisa Fields reads it as clarifying 1 Corinthians 6, on the expectation that Paul is consistent in his thinking. The KJV says that “their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another” (Romans 1:26-27).
The strongest affirming argument lives here. Sprinkle concedes that “the evidence for consensual relations in the first century is pretty slim. Okay. So I think conservatives need to consider that.” If Paul mostly knew exploitative relationships, perhaps he was not addressing a committed, monogamous partnership. Some interpreters add a reading of “nature.” They take it to mean what is natural to a particular person, so that acting against one’s own orientation would be the real violation. Others note that Paul elsewhere appeals to nature for a cultural custom, the length of a man’s hair in 1 Corinthians 11:14, and argue that “against nature” here may mean little more than contrary to convention.
The surrounding passage tells against both readings. In Romans 1:20-25 Paul has been speaking of the Creator, the things he made, and people who worshiped the creature rather than him. His list of idols, images of man, birds, beasts and creeping things, echoes the creatures of Genesis 1. The language of exchange then carries from worship into sexuality. The point of comparison is the created pattern of male and female, not an individual’s inner disposition. The phrase “the natural use of the woman” describes the sexes, not a personal orientation. Paul also names women and men alike, which is hard to square with a focus on men exploiting boys.
The evidentiary limit should be stated plainly. Paul does not discuss orientation in modern terms, and Romans 1 does not describe a committed partnership one way or the other. Sprinkle says conservatives should weigh whether Romans 1 could apply to such relationships rather than dismiss the question. His judgment is that it does, because Paul grounds the argument in creation rather than in abuse. That is also why the traditional case does not rest on Romans 1 alone.
Romans 1 also belongs to a larger argument with a sharp turn. In Romans 2:1 Paul rounds on the reader who has been nodding along: “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things.” By Romans 3:23 the conclusion is universal: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” The passage names same-sex sexual acts as part of humanity’s turn from God’s design, and in the same breath removes every reader’s ground for superiority.
Why does the case have to be cumulative?
Asked whether each argument is weak on its own, Sprinkle corrects the framing: “I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re individually weak.” No single argument should carry the whole weight. Creation presents marriage as male and female. Jesus affirms that pattern in Matthew 19 and Mark 10. Leviticus forbids same-sex relations within its laws on sexual conduct. Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1 restate the prohibition. Sprinkle also points to the testimony of the early church.
Then he adds a historical claim about the Jewish setting: “Judaism unanimously and unambiguously prohibited all forms of same-sex relations and Christianity was born outta Judaism.” His argument from it is about expectation: “if Christianity is gonna depart from Judaism in their unanimous view, it’s gonna need to be very clear about that.” Jesus and Paul were Jews speaking to people formed by the Torah. If they meant to overturn its sexual ethic, readers would expect them to say so.
That argument needs testing. The claim of unanimity is Sprinkle’s, and the full range of ancient Jewish writing deserves a specialist’s checking before anyone leans on the word. Affirming interpreters also turn the argument around. Ancient Jewish writers, they reply, prohibited the relationships they knew, so their agreement does not settle a question about partnerships they may never have pictured. The reply has force against an argument from continuity alone. It is weaker against the texts themselves, which tie the prohibition to the created pattern of male and female rather than to the forms of relationship common in their day. Continuity with Judaism supports the reading. Creation carries it.
Sprinkle does not caricature people who land elsewhere. “I’ve got friends who love Jesus, love the Bible, who disagree with me on this,” he says. He grants that the affirming view has one or two good arguments and defines the term: “a good argument doesn’t mean it’s correct, it just means it has some evidence to support it.” His conclusion comes from weighing the whole body of evidence, and on that weighing he finds the traditional view far stronger.
What does the church owe the people most affected?
Sprinkle names two sins. The first is the one the debate is usually about. He believes same-sex sexual relations are sin before God, and he admits how harsh that can sound to someone wrestling with it or to their family.
The second is closer to home for many churches. Speaking of his gay and lesbian friends, Sprinkle says “they’ve been really dehumanized by fellow Christians,” and adds, “I think that also is a sin.” The text backs him. Genesis 1:27 gives every person God’s image, and Romans 2 strips the judge of his self-righteousness. As he puts it, “the Bible never encourages people to be dehumanized, to be unloved, to be untouched.” So he refuses to let exegesis be the whole task: “the issue isn’t just solving what the Bible says about same-sex relations. It is also modeling the radical one way love of Jesus towards all people.” He says his own camp needs to do much better at it.
Love includes telling the truth about what Scripture offers, and not only what it forbids. Jesus himself lived unmarried, and singleness is a full and honored way of following him. Isaiah 56 speaks to eunuchs, men who would never marry or have children and who feared they had no future among God’s people. God answers them directly: “Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off” (Isaiah 56:5). A church that holds the historic ethic owes people that kind of place in the house: friendship, family, and a name no one can cut off.