By Gregory Coles. Greg holds a PhD from Penn State, is a Senior Research Fellow at The Center, and is the author of Single, Gay, Christian, No Longer Strangers, and The Limits of My World.
Before we begin, a brief content warning: If you don’t like thinking nerdily about language (especially New Testament Greek), this blog post may not be for you. For those of you who’d prefer a less nerdy discussion of Greek, I recommend this clip from My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
You’re still here? Great! Let’s get started.
I’ve recently been dialoguing with a pastor who asked me, “Do you believe same-sex attraction is godly or ungodly?” Our conversation about attraction led us to grapple with the English word “desire,” which is especially tricky because of its mixed use in English.[1] The word “desire” often appears in our English translations of the New Testament Greek word epithumia, which usually means “lust.”[2] But when we talk about “desire” in English today, we often mean something more like attraction, which isn’t the same as the willful mental behavior of lust, though it might form the circumstances under which we experience temptation to lust.
In the midst of all this dialoguing, the pastor expressed his dissatisfaction with arguments (like mine) that parse out the nuances of “English word meanings” instead of “sticking with Biblical word meanings.”
His comment got me thinking about a tension I often feel when I talk about (and perhaps even debate) New Testament ideas with 21st-century English speakers. The vast majority of the questions I’m asked about the theology of sexuality are being asked in English. But the first places I go for my theological answers—the New Testament Gospels and Epistles—are written in Koine Greek.
As a person who really loves the messiness of language, I rather enjoy navigating this tension! But I do think we face a danger whenever we bring our English questions to the Greek New Testament and then expect these texts to give us straightforwardly English answers. This is part of why I’m so obsessed with nuancing the English words we use:
No matter how hard we try, our English words will never match up perfectly with the Greek words of the Bible.
This realization certainly doesn’t need to make us throw up our hands and abandon the pursuit of good and thoughtful (English) answers to theological questions! But I hope it gives us the humility to speak slowly, listen well, admit our languages’ limitations, and be patient as we theologize in translation.
To illustrate what I mean, let me share with you what I wrote in my most recent email dialoguing with this pastor:
When you contrast “English” with “biblical,” am I right in understanding you to mean that you’d prefer to limit the conversation to Koine Greek (or biblical Hebrew) terms? If so, I’m sympathetic to the idea. Of course, part of the challenge you face as a pastor (and the challenge I face in dialogue with pastors and other thoughtful Christians) is rendering Koine Greek and Hebrew terms into their closest English equivalents, while recognizing that there’s not always perfect equivalency between the languages. When someone approaches any of us with a question framed in English words, we always need to ask, “How well (or poorly) do these words map onto the terms that appear in the text of Scripture?”
Toward that end, perhaps it would be helpful for us to restate your questions (or at least their key words) in Koine Greek. That way, we can be sure we’re talking about the same concepts as they’re invoked directly in Scripture, rather than potentially speaking past each other with English words that have multiple potential definitions and don’t always map perfectly onto the Greek of the New Testament authors.
I alluded in my previous email to the idea that, of the words that appear in the Greek New Testament, I think what we now mean by the English “attraction” is probably closest (though still imperfectly aligned) to peirasmos, “temptation.”[3] (Origen's word propatheia might be an even better analogy, but that one doesn't show up in the New Testament itself. Of course, words like "Trinity"—triada in Greek—also don't show up in the New Testament and still have notable theological value.) “Godly” could map fairly straightforwardly onto the simple genitive[4]theou, “of God,” or onto eusebōs, “godly” (in the sense of human piety towards God). We know from James 1 that God does not tempt (peirazō) anyone; so if your question is, "Is same-sex sexual temptation (peirasmos) godly (theou)?" then the answer is a definitive "surely not!" (We could even render that answer in one of the few Greek optatives[5] that makes it into Paul's Koine Greek: mē genoito!) Yet we also see in the same passage that peirasmos is chronologically prior to sin (hamartia) and only becomes sin once desire (epithumia) has conceived (sullambanō); so to describe peirasmos as synonymous with lust and therefore synonymous with sin seems to elide the temporal and categorical distinctions articulated by James.[6]
While we're in James 1, I also find it helpful to remember what the earlier part of the same chapter has to say about temptations: "Consider it pure joy... whenever you face trials (peirasmois) of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance." Peirasmoi aren't theou, then—God is not the agential source of temptation—and yet perasmoi nonetheless create opportunity to cultivate a eusebōs[7] life, hence inspiring occasion for joy.
In other words, the English question “Is same-sex attraction godly?” deserves different answers depending on what we mean by it. If we’re asking, “Is sexual temptation given to us by God?”, the book of James clearly tells us that the answer is no. Then again, if we’re asking, “Does sexual temptation provide us with an occasion to pursue godliness?”, the book of James tells us equally clearly that the answer is yes.[8] All temptation is an invitation to deepen our faith, which makes it an invitation to be joyful!
[1] When I say “mixed,” what I really mean is polysemous: it has multiple potential meanings. But given the plenitude of Greek words already making this blog post difficult to read, I figured I didn’t need to make things any more difficult by using words like “polysemous” (or “plenitude”). If you’ve decided to be extra-nerdy and read the footnotes, I trust you know what you’re getting yourself into.
[2] When Jesus condemns lusting in Matt. 5:28, for instance, he uses the word epithumeō, the cognate verb form of the noun epithumia.
[3] To be clear, I’m certainly not saying that all of what the English word “attraction” refers to is accurately captured by the New Testament Greek notion of peirasmos. I’m just saying that I can’t think of a different New Testament Greek word that maps more closely onto “attraction.” I welcome other nominations.
[4] For those of you not familiar with Greek grammar (or the grammar of another language with a genitive case), a genitive is a noun form that often means something like the English phrase “of _____.” The genitive form of the Greek word for “God,” theou, thus (often) means “of God,” hence “godly.”
[5] The optative mood is a Greek verb form indicating wish, will, or desire. It’s rarely used in the New Testament’s Koine Greek, but of the relatively few times it does appear, the most notable are Paul’s recurring uses of the phrase mē genoito, “By no means!”
[6] A thoughtful reader pointed out to me that the logic of this phrase might be hard to follow, so—without changing the contents of an already-sent email—let me offer this restatement: “James puts peirasmos into a different category than sin, and he places them at two different points on his timeline. So if we declare that they’re the same thing, we’re ignoring the ways James treats them as different.”
[7] As you may recall from the previous paragraph, eusebōs means “godly” (in the sense of human piety towards God).
[8] Of course, there are lots of other things we could potentially mean by “Is same-sex attraction godly?” beyond the two options I’ve just mentioned—most notably, all the meanings in which “attraction” refers to something other than “sexual temptation.” But these other meanings and responses will have to await a future blog post.