(LifeSiteNews) — Father James Martin’s pro-LGBT activist group “Outreach” has posted an interview with a Protestant pastor who wrongly claimed the Bible does not condemn homosexual acts.
In the interview, Martin, the editor of Outreach, asked Protestant pro-LGBT pastor Brandan Robertson what his response is “when an LGBT person [sic], or a family member, or anybody says, ‘doesn’t the Bible condemn homosexuality?’”
READ: Cdl. Müller: Father James Martin’s LGBT propaganda is ‘heresy’
Ironically, Robertson said that the downside of the Protestant schism was that “it gave the Bible to a lot of folks that don’t have the complex training to understand the culture, the context, and language from which the Bible emerges.”
“The Bible is not just a book that anybody can pick up and readily understand; it’s a book that comes from a different world with different perspectives and different cultural norms,” he claimed.
Due to the possibility of people misinterpreting the Bible according to their own wishes and biases, the Catholic Church teaches that the Magisterium is the competent and infallible authority to interpret Sacred Scripture and resolve controversies regarding questions of faith and morals because it was instituted by Jesus Christ Himself.
The Protestant pastor claimed that “the concept of sexual orientation didn’t exist in the ancient world, so it’s impossible for the word homosexuality to actually be a translation of any Greek or Hebrew word.”
Furthermore, he falsely asserted that “when you simply look at the sexual practices of the Greco-Roman world of the first century, for instance, they’re vastly different.”
“It was permitted for any Roman man to sexually engage with anybody of a lower status than themselves, and often that would be exploitative relationships between a man and his slave or a man and somebody from a conquered nation, and my best research over the past decade has led me to believe that what Paul is talking about in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians and even what Leviticus is talking about are all referring to common pagan practices that revolve around sexual exploitations and abuse, between men usually, and that is nothing like modern, loving [sic] same-sex relationships.”
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“I’d say the Bible doesn’t say anything about LGBT relationships as we know them today, but it does rightly condemn sexual abuse and exploitation, which is something that all of us should be willing to condemn,” Robertson concluded.
Martin called Robertson’s response “a superb two-minute explanation of one of the most commonly asked questions of Christian leaders” and said, “I think we should use that as a two-minute clip from now until the end of time.”
Robertson, who is a well-known “progressive” LGBT-identifying pastor in the social media sphere, states that “his pronouns” are “he/him,” and he has “Queering Christianity” accompanied by an LGBT rainbow flag written in his bio on X, formerly Twitter.
Shortly after the publication of the controversial Vatican declaration Fiducia Supplicans on the “blessings” of same-sex and other irregular “couples,” Martin performed a highly publicized “blessing” of homosexual, civilly “married” men in his continued push to normalize homosexual acts.
READ: Father James Martin blesses homosexual ‘couple’ at Jesuit residence in New York City
Refutation of heretical pro-LGBT interpretations of Sacred Scripture
Contrary to Robertson’s view, which Martin called “superb,” the Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are intrinsically evil and always sinful and that Sacred Scripture condemns them.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) explains that “Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex.”
The CCC further states:
Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
Since homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law, it follows that they are always sinful, and the judgment of their morality is not bound to the sentiment of any particular age, as is often inferred by pro-LGBT Bible “apologists.”
READ: No room for ‘inclusion’: Homosexuality and transgenderism are sins against nature itself
In a recent video, well-known Catholic theologian and apologist Trent Horn addressed the claim made by Robertson and other heterodox activists that the concept of consensual same-sex relationships was utterly unknown in ancient times and that the Bible, therefore, only condemns men raping other men.
“That’s not true because ancient Mesopotamian texts like the Almanac of Incantations do describe consensual same-sex in the ancient Bronze Age when Leviticus was written,” Horn said.
Furthermore, he explained that the ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote in his Symposium about women who “do not care for men but have female attachments and of men who exclusively hang about men and embrace them.”
Plato also called homosexual acts “contrary to nature” and said that those who engage in them are “impelled by their slavery to pleasure,” debunking the myth that homosexual acts were universally accepted in Ancient Greek society.
The Roman satirist Juvenal (born in 55 AD) recorded “his contempt for men who ‘married’ other men in Roman wedding ceremonies,” according to Horn, further proving that consensual homosexual relationships were known in ancient times.
In another video addressing the heretical pro-LGBT interpretation of the Bible, Horn refutes some of the common misinterpretations of the verses cited by Robertson.
In Romans 1:26-27, St. Paul writes:
That is why God abandoned them to their shameful passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural practices. Likewise, men gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameful acts with men and received in their own persons the fitting penalty for their perversion.
Pro-LGBT “apologists” like to claim that St. Paul is mainly condemning the sin of adultery in this passage, i.e., husbands and wives leaving their spouses to have intercourse with another person. Horn refuted this interpretation, saying, “If St. Paul was condemning adultery, then he would talk about the most common kind of adultery for straight married people, that is, engaging in sexual acts with people of the opposite sex whether they are married or unmarried themselves.”
“The point of Romans chapter 1 is that Paul is saying that Gentiles know they have sinned and need redemption in Christ.”
“Even though they never had the Old Testament to teach them, the Gentiles had their consciences, and the natural law to guide them, so Paul picks two obvious examples of immorality that a person should know based on what nature intends and conscience commands. It’s wrong to give worship meant for God to a mere idol [cf. Romans 1:22-23] and it’s wrong to give sexual acts meant for a person of the other sex, to persons of the same sex,” Horn concluded.
READ: Archeology appears to confirm biblical account of Sodom’s destruction