For all four of these posts on biblical texts, which are attempts at exegetical dialogue, I will be pairing Peter Gomes and Richard Hays as conversation partners. Gomes, now deceased, was an American preacher and theologian, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School as well as the University’s chaplain. Richard Hays was the Dean and George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolino. I will be drawing from Hays’s book The Moral Vision of the New Testament and Gomes’s book The Good Book. *When I initially crafted these documents nearly a decade ago Hays formally had a non-affirming position. As recently as of the September of 2024, Richard Hays ostensibly amended his position in the book The Widening of God’s Mercy, which he coauthored with his son Christopher. I have only heard about Hays’s amended position and have not read the book.
Of all the Biblical texts that I will examine over the next few days Genesis 19 happens to be the one in which our two authors offer opinions in consonance. “The story of Sodom and Gomorrah—often cited in connection with homosexuality—is actually irrelevant to the topic (Hays 381).” And “nowhere in the Old or New Testaments is the sin of Sodom, the cause of its sudden and terrible destruction, equated with homosexuals or with homosexuality (Gomes 152).”
A curious finding given the denotation of the term “sodomy” in our own English language. John Boswell in his comprehensive work Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, points out that “Throughout the Middle Ages the closest word to ‘homosexual’ in Latin or in any vernacular, was ‘sodomita’ … [sodomy] has connoted in various times and places everything from ordinary heterosexual intercourse in a atypical position to oral sexual contact with animals. At some points in history it has referred almost exclusively to male homosexuality and at other times almost exclusively to heterosexual excess. (Boswell 93).”
The only sin that can be pointed to in the text is that the “men of Sodom” come pounding on Lot’s door with the intention of gang-raping Lot’s two visitors who, readers with 3rd person omniscience know, are actually angels. As Hays points out, “The gang-rape scenario exemplifies the wickedness of the city, but there is nothing in the passage pertinent to a judgment about the morality of consensual homosexual intercourse (381).” Save an obscure reference in Jude 7, there isn’t any canonical evidence suggesting that the sin of Sodom is at all related to sexual behavior.
What the Bible does offer is conclusive data suggesting that sexual misconduct was not the sin of Sodom. Both Hays and Gomes point to Ezekiel who lets us know, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, bud did not aid the poor and needy (16:49).” Catholic readers may also remember that in the Apocryphal books Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom Sodom’s sin is listed as pride.
At this juncture we would do well to hear Hays’s prophetic critique:
“Would that the passion presently being expended in the church over the question of homosexuality were devoted instead to urging the wealthy to share with the poor! Some of the most urgent champions of ‘biblical morality’ on sexual matters become strangely equivocal when the discussion turns to the New Testament’s teaching about possessions (381).”