LGBTQ+ inclusion

The debate over the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the church is one of the most heated today.

The Greek Terms in Debate

There are about 6 texts in the Bible used to condemn homosexuality. The most debated terms are:

Arsenokoitai

In the letter to the Corinthians, Paul uses the word arsenokoitai (1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:10). It is a word composed of the Greek arsēn ('male') and koitēn ('bed', with sexual connotations). Its direct translation would be 'macho-bed.'

Some scholars consider that Paul adapted this word by translating Leviticus 20:13 into Greek. The word was not translated as 'homosexual' until 1946.

Malakoi

Malakoi literally means 'soft' or 'effeminate'. Historical translations include: 'weak' (1525), 'effeminate' (1582, 1901), 'sensual' (1951).

Academic Perspectives

Progressive/Affirmative Interpretation

What Paul condemns in the cited texts is more accurately described as specific forms of exploitative sexual exchange, operating within institutions and structures of slavery in the Roman Empire.

At the Huntington Library, a researcher found a Lexicon from 1483 that translated arsenokoitai by the Latin equivalent paedic and praedic, which mean pederasty (abuse of boys).

Traditional/Conservative Interpretation

Scholar Robert Gagnon argues that in every instance in which the group of words arsenokoit- occurs in a context that offers clues to its meaning, it denotes homosexual sexual intercourse.

The Ethiopian Eunuch

In Acts 8, Philip baptizes an Ethiopian eunuch - someone who, by the law of Deuteronomy, would be excluded from the assembly. The Holy Spirit breaks down the barriers of religious exclusion.

The Patristic Evidence: Tertullian, Vulgate and the Roman Context

Closer philological analysis of Pauline terms reveals additional layers of evidence. Tertullian's and the Vulgate of Saint Jerome—the oldest authorized Latin translations—render arsenokoitai as masculorum concubitores ('those who penetrate males'), confirming that the focus was on the physical coital act of penetration, not on an affective orientation or innate identity. Patristic and ancient texts such as the chronicles of Joao Malalas, the Book of the Laws of the Countries by Bardesanes and the Refutatio by Hipólito reinforce this reading: the term described the active and dominating role in homoerotic acts inserted in asymmetrical power structures typical of the Greco-Roman world — slavery, pederasty, ritual prostitution. The modern Western concept of 'homosexual orientation'—a stable, mutually consenting, and egalitarian identity among adults—simply did not exist as a sociological category in classical antiquity. Projecting this concept retroactively onto rhetorical lists of vices from the first century constitutes, for most contemporary philologists, a hermeneutic anachronism.