Infographic: What Does the New Testament Say about Homosexuality?

What does the New Testament say about homosexuality? You can find an excellent article here.

It's important to realize we can't take the historical attitudes of the past and apply them uncritically to today. This is called anachronism: misplacing persons, objects, and customs of one era into another. No matter where we fall in the spectrum of attitudes surrounding gender and sexuality in Christian denominations today, we need to be cautious about grabbing from the past to prove our points.

That said, we can challenge common assumptions by pointing out that the past isn't as clear-cut as we sometimes would like it to be. Diversity existed in the past, too. There were all kinds of Christians. Even the writers of books that appear in the New Testament didn't all share the same theology. Sometimes they even edited each other's work to suit their own communities' needs and beliefs! The Apostle Paul regularly complained about missionaries with alternate messages for his communities. An early Christian handbook known as the Didache provided instructions for at least one Christian community to test the validity of itinerant preachers.

To quote Anne Lamott in Traveling Mercies, "If the God you believe in hates all the same people you do, then you know you've created God in your own image." History, especially the history of religion, is more complex and more diverse than we usually imagine, and it doesn't easily fit into modern categories.