About this draft. This paper was drafted by an AI research assistant (Claude, made by Anthropic) from sources gathered and supplied by a Nazarene layperson, who set the question and directed the research. It has no named author and has not been reviewed by a biblical scholar, theologian or historian of the church. Its sources are listed at the end with notes on how each was checked. It is circulated for comment and correction.
Abstract
In 1993 the Church of the Nazarene revised its teaching on divorce and remarriage on the basis of a paper it had asked one of its own New Testament scholars to write, the second of two formal revisions after a membership change in 1972. This paper asks whether the method used then bears on a question the church now treats as closed: whether a covenanted, exclusive, lifelong union of two Christians of the same sex can be recognized as marriage. It does not argue that it can. It argues for a prior and more modest claim: that Scripture's direct statements do not settle the case, that the church's own method for unsettled cases yields substantial evidence on both sides, and that the church therefore owes the question formal study. The argument is set out in numbered premises so that a reader may name the one they reject. It grants the traditional reading of Paul's vocabulary, and turns on three contested premises: what grounds Paul states for his judgment in Romans 1, whether a prohibition applied beyond its stated grounds needs further warrant, and whether the creation texts teach sex difference as a condition of marriage or presuppose it.
1. Introduction
Alex R. G. Deasley taught New Testament at Nazarene Theological Seminary and died in March 2026. In August 1991 he wrote a paper, "Marriage and Divorce in New Testament Interpretation," for a small committee of the church: Lee McCleery (chair), James W. Daniel (secretary), General Superintendent Jerald D. Johnson (adviser) and Deasley himself (Deasley 1991, 1; Report 1993, 202). The committee had been formed on the authority of the General Board in February 1989 "to give guidance to district boards in their work with candidates for ordination," and at its first meeting, on October 11, 1990, it added the question whether Nazarene ministers might marry divorced persons (Report 1993, 201). Deasley set out two ways of deriving a theological position from the exegesis, that "the teaching of Jesus is viewed as prescriptive law" or that it "is viewed as an ideal," and "the committee unanimously agreed that the teaching of Jesus on marriage and divorce should be viewed as an ideal." At the committee's request he drafted the changes to the Manual, and the Twenty-Third General Assembly, meeting in Indianapolis in July 1993, adopted the committee's report (Report 1993, 200–206; General Assembly 2023, 15). The report states the consequence: "There is no longer a rule of thumb, namely: did adultery take place or not?" (Report 1993, 202; Herald of Holiness 1993, 6). Deasley later expanded the paper into Marriage and Divorce in the Bible and the Church (2000), which "had its beginnings in a paper for a denominational committee on divorce" (Deasley 2000, 9).
The 1991 paper shows something the book does not make plain. Deasley's exegesis did not soften Jesus' teaching. He concluded that Paul, Mark and Luke present Jesus as teaching that "marriage is lifelong and indissoluble; and remarriage is forbidden and adulterous," and that Matthew's exceptions "are not true exceptions" but cases in which a true marriage never existed (Deasley 1991, 14). The change came at the next step, which he called theological: "Exegesis is not theology, but the raw material from which theology is made" (14). The committee granted the strict reading of the texts and still judged that it did not settle how the church should treat divorced and remarried people, because "the law must be proclaimed in the context of the gospel" (19). That is the shape of the argument this paper makes about a different question. It concedes what the prohibiting texts cover (P1) and asks whether their wording settles the case (P5).
The book models a way of working. It holds that "the heart of the biblical ideal of marriage is partnership" (14). It reads the household of Ephesians 5 as patriarchal in structure, and says that within that structure "a powerful Christian leaven is implanted" that would "culminate in its eventual overthrow as being inconsistent with the principles and spirit of the gospel", adding that "it is in light of these principles and that spirit that this passage must be interpreted and applied today" (37). It warns that "it is hazardous to import metaphysical categories to interpret what is essentially a personal relationship" (19). It holds that Jesus "recognized that it was possible to enforce the law in such a way as to defeat its purpose and subvert its intent", and that "this point needs to be kept in mind regarding the application of other biblical laws" (156). It concludes that "there is no rule of thumb to be applied mechanically in all cases, no one-size-fits-all solution, no ready-made list of 'grounds'" (167).
Deasley was not writing about same-sex relationships, and his account of marriage is firmly traditional. He summarizes Jesus' view in these words: "marriage is a complementarity of male and female. It is not merely that it is the male and female sexes that together reflect the image of God (Gen. 1:27) but also that God makes one woman for one man" (25), and he finds in Genesis 2:24 "the complementarity of man and woman and their union in a covenant that is permanent" (19). He mentions homosexuality once in his own voice, among situations in which divorce is hard to exclude because "the capacities that make marriage possible are claimed to be absent (or never to have been present)", as when "a spouse would claim a homosexual or lesbian orientation with an intent to pursue the accompanying lifestyle" (176). Nothing here claims him for a conclusion he did not hold. The question is whether the kind of reasoning the church accepted from him in 1993 (reading commands by their purpose, distinguishing a text's social form from its theological substance, and refusing to let a rule defeat the good it protects) has any purchase on the question of same-sex marriage, and what would have to be shown for it to do so.
The literature on that question is large, and its main positions are well mapped (Sprinkle 2016). This paper adds two things. It states the argument in a form that separates what is conceded from what is contested. And it locates the argument inside Nazarene and Wesleyan method, using precedents the tradition already owns: Wesley on slavery, the early Nazarenes on the ordination of women, and the 1993 revision itself.
The comparison with divorce is not new. It runs through the wider debate (Keen 2018; Self 2024), and Nazarenes have made it. The fullest collection of affirming Nazarene writing (Oord and Oord 2023) returns to it several times. Balcom argues that the church's welcome of divorced and remarried members shows how interpretation rightly changes, reasoning largely from civil law and pastoral practice (Balcom 2023, 335). Dikes traces the Manual's wording on divorce from 1919 to the present and pairs it with women's ordination as evidence that "stances have been changed, even in the face of problematic biblical passages" (Dikes 2023, 133). McCormick, emeritus professor at Nazarene Theological Seminary, writes that "we have managed to hold the tension until consensus could be reached to change... our position on divorce" (McCormick 2023, 388). Powell puts the question about "nature" that section 3.2 takes up: why, "if we accept the argument from nature in Romans 1, we ignore Paul's argument from nature in 1 Corinthians 11" (Powell 2023, 396).
The specific comparison this paper develops has one predecessor. In April 2016 Bruce Barnard, writing a Doctor of Ministry paper at George Fox Evangelical Seminary, set out the 1993 revision and Deasley's "prescriptive law" and "ideal" as a pattern the church might follow on the LGBT+ question. He worked from copies of the 1991 paper and the 1993 report that the Nazarene Archives supplied to him that month (Barnard 2016, 10–13). His paper was never published, and the dissertation it was meant to begin was not completed. He frames the question through Webb's redemptive-movement hermeneutic, which the present argument does not rely on (see the note on Webb in section 4).
There is also an older Nazarene precedent for the argument itself. J. Kenneth Grider taught theology at Nazarene Theological Seminary for nearly four decades and wrote the denomination's standard systematic theology of its period. He prepared a monograph, "Wesleyans and Homosexuality", for the March 1999 meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society, of which he was a charter member. His own closing note explains what happened: "I asked not to, so as not to be an embarrassment to my university, Olivet Nazarene, where I am retained as distinguished visiting professor of religion and where they were to inaugurate, less than a month later, an annual Holiness lectureship in my name. Yet because of certain developments, I have initiated its publication in 2000" (Grider 2000, 42). Lodahl, who studied under him, reports that Grider "was prevailed upon by leadership at Olivet" not to publish (Lodahl 2023, 382). Grider knew the cost. He writes that one "who has an image of leaning toward conservative directions in theology, could suffer professionally" for raising the question (42).
Grider asks whether Wesleyans, who "have enjoyed a long history of running to help" the enslaved, women, the poor and children, might be called "to come running to help again" (1–2). He offers his points on Scripture as questions: "These observations are not conclusions" (36). Several of them anticipate the present paper. He suggests that Paul "assumes that everyone is heterosexual" (30), which is the judgment Loader later reached. He notes that the proscriptions might not apply to a couple who make "a mutual commitment of fidelity" as Christians, "not given to violence or idolatry" (30). And he gives four pages to the church's abandonment of the biblical ban on lending at interest (32–35). This paper does not follow him where he argues that same-sex acts are "unnatural" only for heterosexual people (30), a reading Hays had already answered (Hays 1986), or where he rests on the genetic research of the 1990s. His paper shows that the question has been raised from the centre of the tradition and not only from its edges.
This paper shares these writers' starting point and differs in method. None of the anthology's contributors mentions Deasley or the 1993 committee, and one of them draws the opposite lesson from the history. Dikes concludes that on divorce "the church never sought to engage the Bible as its position softened" (Dikes 2023, 133). The record shows otherwise. The 1993 change rested on a paper the church commissioned and on a committee's unanimous judgment, printed for the whole church in the Herald before the Assembly voted. That matters because the usual reply to the divorce comparison is that the church simply yielded to cultural pressure. The documents give a more exact picture, taken up in section 6.3. Pastoral pressure was real and had built for a generation, and the church answered it with a deliberate theological judgment about how to hold a teaching whose wording it did not dispute. That is a precedent of method. The two scholars' fates also differ. Deasley was asked by the church to make his case. Grider judged that he could not publish his without embarrassing his university.
The church's current position is not in doubt. The Manual teaches that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and the Board of General Superintendents has reaffirmed that same-sex sexual intimacy is contrary to God's will (Board of General Superintendents 2019). The question here is whether that position has been reached by the method the church used in 1993, or only asserted.
2. The argument stated
Let K be a covenanted, sexually exclusive, lifelong union of two Christians of the same sex, both of settled same-sex orientation, entered before God and the church. "Paul's texts" are Romans 1:26–27, 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10. "The creation texts" are Genesis 1:27 and 2:18–24 with Jesus' use of them in Matthew 19:3–12 and Mark 10:2–12.
In their wording, Paul's texts cover same-sex intercourse as Paul knew and understood it. (P1)
The grounds Paul states for his judgment in Romans 1 are idolatry, exchange, excess of passion, and that the acts are "contrary to nature"; and in the moral discourse Paul shares, "contrary to nature" rests on procreation, on gender order and on the restraint of desire. (P2)
Paul's remedy for unfulfilled desire is marriage, which presupposes that marriage is open to the one who burns. (P3)
K does not instantiate idolatry, exchange or excess; it is "contrary to nature" only in respects, non-procreation and departure from gender order, that the church does not treat as disqualifying elsewhere; and for the persons in K male-female marriage is not a real remedy. (P4)
When a scriptural prohibition is applied to a case where its stated grounds do not hold, or hold only in a form the church has already declined to treat as binding, the wording alone does not settle the case, and the application needs further warrant. (P5)
So Paul's texts alone do not settle K. (C1, from P2–P5)
The creation texts presuppose a male-female couple, and it is exegetically undetermined whether they teach sex difference as a necessary condition of marriage. (P6)
Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are independent scriptural evidence, and on Wesleyan terms they may belong to the moral law that still binds Christians; but whether the enduring norm they express reaches K depends on the ground of the prohibition and its reception in the canon, which their wording alone does not settle. (P7)
Other texts commonly brought into the discussion, chiefly Genesis 19, Jude 7 and Hebrews 13:4, belong in the evidence but do not independently settle K; their application to K depends on conclusions established elsewhere. (P8)
So Scripture's direct statements do not settle K. (C2, from C1 and P6–P8)
For cases its direct statements do not settle, Scripture models a method: law read by its life-giving purpose, the sexual commandments tested by whether they wrong the neighbor, manifest fruit of the Spirit weighed as evidence, and judgment by the body. (P9)
That method has authority for Nazarenes, who have used it before. (P10)
So that method supplies the criteria by which the wider evidence about K is to be weighed. (M1, a methodological warrant from C2, P9 and P10)
Applied to K, the method yields substantial evidence on both sides. (C4, a weighing of considerations set out in section 7)
When a question of conduct is unsettled by Scripture's direct statements and the church's method yields substantial evidence on both sides, the church ought to provide formal study and permit accountable advocacy. (P15)
So the Church of the Nazarene ought to study K formally. (C5, from C2, C4, P15)
"Settle" needs defining, because the argument would otherwise trade on two senses of it. A case may be unsettled by the prohibiting texts taken alone, or unsettled for the church on the whole of its evidence, which includes the canon's wider pattern and the tradition. Stage one (steps 1–10) claims only the first. The conclusion needs something closer to the second. Step 14 weighs the wider evidence, and step 15 states the threshold at which study is owed; section 8 defends that threshold. Steps 11–13 are not a further link in the deduction. They warrant the procedure by which step 14 is reached, by saying which considerations may legitimately be weighed. Formally, the conclusion follows from C2, C4 and P15 alone.
Step 14 is a judgment of weight and not a deduction, and it is marked as such. Every other inference is deductive. The first premise is a concession to the traditional reading and will be defended only briefly. Four premises bear unusual weight: P2, on the grounds Paul states; P5, on applying a prohibition beyond its stated grounds; P6, on the creation texts; and P7, on the continuing force and scope of the Levitical prohibitions. If any one of them fails, C2 fails and the conclusion with it. P8 is a narrower claim about the other texts commonly cited.
The conclusion is deliberately modest. It does not require that sex difference be inessential to marriage. It requires only that the creation texts leave the matter undetermined. A further premise, that sex difference is not a necessary condition of marriage, would be needed to conclude that K is marriage in the theological sense. Without it, the most the argument supports is pastoral accommodation. Section 8 returns to that distinction.
3. What Paul's texts settle
3.1 The concession
A generation of affirming exegesis tried to show that Paul's vocabulary does not cover consensual adult relationships: that 1 Timothy 1:10 describes the sex trade (Harrill 1999; Scroggs 1983), that Romans 1 has only pederasty in view, or that the two words of 1 Corinthians 6:9 mean something else. The most careful treatment of those words is Martin's, and it is more modest than it is often made to sound. Of arsenokoitai he writes: "I am not claiming to know what arsenokoitês meant. I am claiming that no one knows what it meant. I freely admit that it could have been taken as a reference to homosexual sex." From the word's place in later vice lists, among sins of economic injustice, he thinks it "probable" that it "referred to a particular role of exploiting others by means of sex, perhaps but not necessarily by homosexual sex" (Martin 1996; 2006, ch. 3). He grants that some later uses can reasonably be read as sexual. On malakoi he is confident, and rightly: the word means "effeminate" in a broad sense that covered luxury, cowardice and softness of many kinds, so that "all penetrated men were malakoi, but not all malakoi were penetrated men." It is not a technical term for the passive partner, and it should not be defined by the obscurer word beside it.
This paper nevertheless concedes the traditional reading of Paul's vocabulary as the more probable, and rests the concession on arsenokoitai alone. Martin's objection to arguing from etymology, that "the etymology of a word is its history, not its meaning", is sound for old words whose sense has drifted. It has less force for what appears to be a new compound matching the Greek wording of Leviticus 20:13, since a freshly coined word has had no time to drift. Romans 1:27 speaks of men inflamed "for one another", which is mutual desire. Loader, who supports the recognition of same-sex unions, concludes that Paul's disapproval included consensual adult relations and rested on a reading of Genesis (Loader 2012; Loader in Sprinkle 2016), and Brooten reaches the same result for female relations (Brooten 1996). Martin himself says that his goal "is not to deny that Paul condemned homosexual acts." P1 accepts that conclusion. The argument that follows does not depend on narrowing Paul's words.
The verse after the list strengthens the concession. "And such were some of you," Paul goes on, "but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified" (1 Corinthians 6:11). The natural implication is that conversion meant a break with the practices the list names. A traditional reader is entitled to say that Paul did not imagine the conduct he meant by arsenokoitai as something a Christian could retain without repentance, and this paper grants it. Verse 11 strengthens P1: whatever Paul meant by the word, he held it incompatible with the life from which believers had been delivered. What the verse does not do is widen the word's reference or add a new reason for Paul's judgment. It therefore does not answer the question P5 raises, whether a prohibition whose traditional meaning is granted settles a case that may differ from the cases and grounds Paul had in view. If P5 is wrong, verse 11 makes the traditional objection stronger. If P5 is sound, verse 11 intensifies Paul's judgment without settling its scope.
3.2 The grounds Paul gives (P2)
Romans 1:18–32 is not a treatise on sexual ethics. It retells a standard Jewish account of the Gentile world, close to Wisdom of Solomon 13–14, in order to spring the trap of 2:1 on the reader who has been agreeing: "you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others." Within that account, same-sex acts are a consequence. The sequence is explicit. They exchanged the glory of God for images (1:23), "therefore God gave them up" (1:24), and "for this reason God gave them up to dishonourable passions" (1:26). The verbs that follow are verbs of exchange and excess: the women "exchanged" natural relations, the men "gave up" natural relations with women and "were consumed with passion."
Paul also says, twice, that the acts are contrary to nature: the women exchanged "the natural use for that which is contrary to nature", and the men gave up "the natural use of the woman." This is the most explicit ground in the passage, and any account of what Paul states must begin with it. The question is what "nature" means here.
One reading takes it as the design of the sexed body, given in creation. The passage refers to the Creator (1:20, 25), it uses the unusual words for "females" and "males" found in the Greek of Genesis 1:27 (Schreiner 2006), and Gagnon counts eight points of correspondence with Genesis 1:26–27 (Gagnon 2001). Hays adds that the repeated verb "exchanged" ties the sexual acts to the primal exchange of God for idols (Hays 1986). Loader, who favours recognizing same-sex unions, agrees: "natural" here "must mean... sex with the opposite sex" (Loader 2012).
The other reading takes "natural use" as the ordered, self-controlled use of desire, and "unnatural use" as desire that has broken its bounds. Fredrickson argues from the philosophical vocabulary of "use" that "unnatural use... has less to do with the gender of the persons having sex and more with the loss of self-control", and that in the passage "the immediate problem is passion" (Fredrickson 2000, 207, 222).
Martin's article is the fullest statement of this reading, and it should be reported for what it is. He says plainly that his purpose "is not to argue that Paul approves of homosexual sex" (Martin 1995, 332). His claim is about Paul's logic. Paul "does not here mention Adam, Eve, Eden, the Fall", and the scenario he sketches "has to do with the invention of idolatry and its consequences, not the Fall of Adam" (334), a point on which Martin cites Fitzmyer and Stowers against Hooker (334 n. 7). The background is the Jewish "decline of civilization" narrative, as in Jubilees and 1 Enoch, which blames the vices of the Gentiles on their turn to idols (335–36). The passage then works as the first move of a rhetorical trap sprung in chapter 2, and Martin notes that on this point his reading "is not original or unusual" (337). He translates the key phrase as "beyond nature" (336 n. 11) and explains it by the ancient logic of appetite: "The problem had to do not with a disoriented desire, but with inordinate desire. Degree of passion, rather than object choice, was the defining factor of desire" (342). He agrees with Hays that Paul had no conception of sexual orientation (340). This reading matches a common ancient account of where such acts come from. Dio Chrysostom, whom Martin quotes, describes the man "whose appetite is insatiate in such things" who, finding women too easy a conquest, "will turn his assault against the male quarters" (Discourses 7.151–52).
Martin does not stop at excess. He goes on to ask which features of same-sex intercourse the ancient writers counted as unnatural, and his answer is the one this paper adopts. Aristotle and Plato locate the offence in a man's taking "the despised, lower position appropriate for women", so that the act "frustrated the gender hierarchy of 'nature'" (345). Plutarch calls it contrary to nature because of "the weakness and effeminacy" of those who allow themselves "to be covered and mounted like cattle" (346). Philo objects to "the feminization of the penetrated man and the unfruitful expenditure of seed by the penetrator" (346). Martin summarizes the shared view in three points: same-sex desire was itself considered natural, same-sex intercourse sprang from an excess of desire, and "the aspects of same-sex intercourse assumed to be 'unnatural' are (a) disruption of the male-female hierarchy and (b) sexual intercourse that does not have procreation as its goal" (346). Of Paul he adds two things. Paul shared these assumptions, "with the exception that Paul shows no concerns for procreation whatsoever (see 1 Corinthians 7)" (347). And "doubtless, Paul also objects to same-sex intercourse due in part to his assumption about the cosmic hierarchy of male over female. While this is not made explicit in Romans 1, it is probably assumed" (348). His evidence is the only other place where Paul argues ethically from nature, 1 Corinthians 11:2–16, where what makes long hair on a man unnatural "is its disruption of gender hierarchy" (349). He notes that Fitzmyer admits the verse "creates a problem" for an uncritical use of the nature argument in Romans 1 (349 n. 43), and that most early Christian commentators took Romans 1:26 of unnatural intercourse between women and men (348 n. 40, citing Brooten).
Martin's argument has limits that matter here. He shows that Romans 1 is not a story of Adam's fall. He does not address the narrower claim that the vocabulary of 1:23 and 1:26–27 echoes the Greek of Genesis 1:26–27, and he notes himself that Dio treats male-female intercourse as "according to nature" (342 n. 25). A passage can be about Gentile idolatry and still draw on the created order. He quotes John Chrysostom for the excess reading, "all such desire stems from a greed which will not remain within its usual bounds" (343), and does not mention that the same homily appeals to Genesis 2:24. And his Paul offers the present argument less than might be hoped. On Martin's reading Paul has no concept of honourable passion at all: "for him all passion is dishonorable", and marriage is "a prophylaxis against desire" (347–48). That supports the claim of section 3.3 that Paul's remedy for burning is marriage. It does not give us a Paul who would have blessed K. Martin says as much: "I am not arguing that Paul was pro-gay or even neutral on the topic of homosexual sex" (349).
The ancient witnesses are mixed, and should be reported as mixed. Philo speaks of "the disease of effemination", and in the same passage of "pleasure which is contrary to nature" and of the man who wastes his power of begetting like a farmer who lets good land lie fallow (Special Laws 3.37–42). John Chrysostom, preaching on this text, presses the theme of exchange: "no one can say that it was by being hindered of legitimate intercourse that they came to this pass", they "had the means of gratification, and left that which they had", and "the changing implies possession." He attributes the whole to "an exorbitancy which endures not to abide within its proper limits." But he also grounds the sin in creation: "It was meet, that the two should be one, I mean the woman and the man. For 'the two,' it says, 'shall be one flesh'" (Homilies on Romans 4). For Chrysostom the acts are both an overflow of desire and a breach of the created pairing. He supports the claim that Paul's argument assumes something was left behind. He does not support the claim that excess is Paul's only ground.
Neither reading can claim the ancient evidence for itself alone, because the sources that use the phrase mix their grounds. Musonius Rufus holds that sex is justified only "for the purpose of begetting children" and is wrong "when it is mere pleasure-seeking, even in marriage", and in the same breath calls sex between men "contrary to nature" (Discourse 12). Josephus says the law permits only the union of a man with his wife, "and that this be used only for the procreation of children" (Against Apion 2.199). Philo's account of Sodom names "intemperate indulgence", men "treated like women", and cities that would be left desolate, all within a few lines (On Abraham 135–36). Pseudo-Phocylides joins "the limits set by nature" to the rule that women are not to "imitate the sexual role of men" (190–92). Brooten concludes that Paul calls these relations unnatural because he "shares the widely held cultural view that women are passive by nature" (Brooten 1996, 216, as quoted in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 1997.05.07). In this discourse "contrary to nature" carries three things together: sex that cannot beget, sex that confuses the roles of male and female, and desire that has escaped restraint. That is also Martin's summary (Martin 1995, 346).
Gagnon's reply to the excess reading is sound as far as it goes: "the concept of 'disoriented desire' logically precedes the concept of 'inordinate desire'", and the language of excess was a way of demeaning what was already judged wrong on other grounds (Gagnon 2003, 219). The point is granted. Excess alone does not explain the phrase. But the other grounds, once named, are procreation and gender order, and that matters for what follows.
The church does not apply either of those grounds in the form Paul's contemporaries held them. Musonius and Josephus condemn non-procreative sex within marriage. The Manual does not: it speaks of "the joy and pleasure of sexual intimacy" and says that from it "new life may enter the world", and it nowhere forbids contraception. Paul appeals to nature for the length of men's hair (1 Corinthians 11:14), and Gagnon concedes that this is "arguably a case in point" of reading a moral absolute into an indifferent feature of nature. The Church of the Nazarene ordains women and teaches mutual submission in marriage, which sets aside the ordering of active and passive on which Brooten shows the ancient judgment to rest. Williams made the general point long ago: "in a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts, or on a problematic and non-scriptural theory about natural complementarity" (Williams 1989). Anscombe granted the same logic from the opposite side, arguing that if contraceptive intercourse is permissible no objection to same-sex intercourse remains (Anscombe 1972).
The traditional reply is that this is a false choice. The ground is neither fertility nor hierarchy but the bodily complementarity of male and female as created, which survives contraception, since the contracepting couple is still male and female, and survives women's ordination, since difference is not rank. Gagnon and Sprinkle both set procreation aside and rest their case here (Gagnon 2001; Sprinkle 2015). This is the strongest form of the objection, and the Genesis vocabulary of Romans 1:23–27 supports it. The answer offered here is that complementarity in this sense is not among the grounds Paul states. The text names nature, and the writers who share Paul's phrase explain nature by begetting and by gender order. Complementarity with both of those removed is a modern refinement, offered to explain why the judgment should stand after its ancient reasons have been given up. It may be correct. It is a theological proposal to be argued, and it cannot be read off the wording of the text. That is all that P2 and P4 require.
3.3 The remedy Paul gives (P3) and the case he did not address (P4)
Paul's counsel to those who burn is to marry (1 Corinthians 7:9). That counsel presupposes that marriage is open to anyone who burns. Celibacy, for Paul, is a gift that some have and others do not (7:7). Jesus says the same: "not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it is given" (Matthew 19:11).
K is a case that Paul's stated grounds reach only in part. The persons in K have not exchanged the worship of God for idols. They have not left a natural use that they had, because on the evidence now available they never had it. Their desire is not the overflow of heterosexual appetite, and a lifelong exclusive covenant is a form of self-control and not the loss of it. K is contrary to nature in the ancient sense in two respects: it cannot beget, and it does not observe the ancient ordering of male and female. The church accepts both of those things in marriages it blesses. And the remedy Paul offers to those who burn is not a remedy for the persons in K. Deasley touches the same point from the other direction, when he lists a spouse's homosexual orientation among cases in which "the capacities that make marriage possible are claimed to be absent (or never to have been present)" (Deasley 2000, 176).
Two replies carry weight. First, Paul is describing humanity in the mass and not individual biographies, so it misses his point to say that a given couple exchanged nothing. Second, ancient writers knew of lifelong same-sex disposition, as Aristophanes' myth in Plato's Symposium shows, so Paul may not have been ignorant of it (Brooten 1996). Both are fair. Neither shows that Paul's stated reasons reach K. They show that Paul might have condemned K had he considered it, which is a different claim from saying that he did.
4. The interpretive principle and its limits
P5 says that when a prohibition is applied to a case its stated grounds do not reach, the wording alone does not settle the case. The obvious objection is that this dissolves any command an interpreter dislikes. The principle therefore needs stated limits, and it needs to be shown refusing cases.
Four conditions are proposed here, all of which must hold. The grounds must be stated in the text and not supplied by the interpreter. The case must fall outside those grounds on the text's own terms. The proposed practice must meet every other scriptural norm, above all Paul's test that "love does no wrong to a neighbor" (Romans 13:10). And the judgment must belong to the body and not to the individual who stands to benefit.
So limited, the principle refuses the cases one would want it to refuse. Adultery that claims to be loving wrongs a spouse, and the ground of the commandment holds in full. Sex outside covenant lacks the fidelity and permanence the commandments protect. Polyamory contradicts the ground Jesus states, that "the two shall become one." Consensual adult incest falls within the ground Leviticus 18 states, which is nearness of kin.
The principle is not new. It is how the Western church came to permit lending at interest. Scripture's references to usury are uniformly negative (Exodus 22:25; Leviticus 25:35–37; Deuteronomy 23:19–20; Psalm 15:5; Ezekiel 18:8, 13), and for well over a thousand years the church forbade it. Calvin, in his 1545 letter on usury, argued that the ground of the law was the protection of the poor: "the end for which the law was framed was that men should not cruelly oppress the poor." A loan between parties of equal strength, to mutual benefit, falls outside that ground, and is to be judged by "the rule of equity which Christ prescribes" in Matthew 7:12. He added seven restrictions so that the permission would not swallow the law (Wykes 2003). Almost every church now accepts his conclusion, including those most cautious about development in ethics.
The principle has also been applied to the apostolic decree of Acts 15, which forbids blood and what is strangled in the same sentence as sexual immorality. The Council of Florence said of the food rules that "the reason for that prohibition having ceased, its effect ceased as well" (Cantate Domino, 1442), and Augustine had already written that the apostles "consulted the time in choosing an easy observance" (Contra Faustum 32.13). Wesley reads the usury texts the same way, forbidding only "such interest as even the laws of our country forbid" (Sermon 50, I.3). Grider made the comparison within the Nazarene discussion a quarter of a century ago, and added a point that bears on section 3.2: the ancient and medieval writers "said that to charge any interest at all is basically unnatural", since money that grows without labour grows against its nature (Grider 2000, 34). The church once condemned a practice as contrary to nature on the authority of uniformly negative texts, and later concluded that the ground did not reach the ordinary case.
These cases answer the claim that a practice Scripture never mentions favourably cannot be reconsidered. They do not show that K is like a commercial loan or a rule about food. The comparison has been made before (Tallon n.d.), and it has been answered. Dulles argues that the change on usury was "not... a reversal of the original teaching but rather a nuancing of it", since the church still condemns exploitative lending (Dulles 2005). One evangelical study of Calvin's letter warns that to use his form of argument "does not in and of itself demonstrate the cogency or acceptability" of a proposed revision (Goddard 2003). Both points are right, and both concede the principle. Dulles's church still holds that there is a sin of usury and asks which loans fall under it. That is the question P5 asks about K. The traditional answer is that the ground of the sexual prohibition is creation and not circumstance, so that no case falls outside it. That returns the dispute to section 3.2, where it belongs.
Martin makes a version of this point about Romans 1 itself. If we follow Paul's logic, he writes, "we would have to assume that once idolatry and polytheism were forsaken, homosexuality would cease to exist", which is not something modern Christians believe, so that the condemnation can be retained "only by eliding the supporting logic of that condemnation" (Martin 1995, 338–39). One need not accept his account of interpreters' motives to see the force of the observation. A reader who keeps Paul's conclusion while setting aside Paul's stated reason owes an account of the reason he is putting in its place.
One difficulty remains, and it cannot be removed. The first condition requires that the grounds be those stated in the text, and Paul states that these acts are contrary to nature. P5 helps the argument only if section 3.2 is right that the content of that ground, as Paul's world understood it, is one the church no longer applies, and that bodily complementarity as such is a later proposal and not a stated ground. P5 is only as strong as P2.
A note on Webb
The most careful evangelical account of cultural and transcultural commands is Webb's (2001). He argues that on slavery and on women Scripture moves ahead of its surrounding culture toward freedom, and so points beyond its own letter, while on same-sex acts Scripture is uniformly more restrictive than its culture, so there is no movement to extend. The observation is accepted here. The present argument does not claim a trajectory in the same-sex texts. It claims that these texts, like the usury texts, state grounds, and that a case outside those grounds is not settled by them.
5. The creation texts
If Genesis 1–2, as Jesus reads them, teach that sex difference is a necessary condition of marriage, then Scripture settles K whatever is said about Paul. P6 claims only that this is undetermined: the texts presuppose a male-female couple, and it cannot be shown whether they also teach that presupposition as a boundary.
5.1 Genesis 2
The problem the narrative names is aloneness, the first thing in Scripture called "not good" (2:18). The animals are brought and rejected because none corresponds to the human. The remedy is a helper "corresponding to him", and the man's recognition stresses likeness: "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." That phrase is a kinship formula. Laban uses it of Jacob (Genesis 29:14), and the tribes of Israel use it of David (2 Samuel 5:1). Verse 24 then explains a custom: a man leaves his kin and "cleaves" to his wife. "Cleave" is covenant language, used of Ruth and Naomi (Ruth 1:14) and of Israel and God (Deuteronomy 10:20). On this reading, to become "one flesh" is to become one kin by covenant (Brownson 2013). Deasley reads the passage in much the same way, and goes further. He lists the same parallels (Genesis 29:14; Judges 9:2; 2 Samuel 5:1; 19:12–13) and follows Brueggemann in taking "bone and flesh" as "a formula of covenant commitment" that "in the first place has nothing to do with biological derivation" (Deasley 2000, 16). He notes that "leave" and "cleave" are "standard stock in covenantal contexts", and concludes that the man's discovery of partnership prompts him to "enter into a covenant with his wife." In the next sentence he adds that "the awareness of complementarity is the basis of marriage" (17), so he holds both emphases together. His warning against metaphysical accounts of one flesh points in the same direction: "It is one thing to say that marriage is permanent and binding because it is a covenantal relationship provided and sealed by God. It is another thing to say that it is indestructible" (19).
The narrative also stresses difference. "She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man" (2:23). The story is of a sexed pair, and of the reunion of what was divided (Goddard 2014; Sprinkle 2015). Both emphases are in the text. What is unclear is whether an etiology of the typical case legislates against the atypical one. "Be fruitful and multiply" is addressed to humanity as such, and the church does not count Jesus, Paul or the infertile as having disobeyed it.
5.2 Genesis 1:27 in Jesus' argument
When Jesus is asked about divorce he joins Genesis 1:27 to 2:24 and concludes, "what God has joined together, let no one separate" (Matthew 19:4–6). Traditional interpreters take the citation of 1:27 as teaching that marriage requires male and female (Gagnon 2001; Belousek 2021). That is a natural reading. There is evidence that it is not the only one available in Jesus' setting.
The Damascus Document condemns those who are caught in fornication "by taking two wives in their lifetimes although the principle of creation is 'male and female He created them' and those who went into the ark 'went into the ark two by two'" (CD 4.20–5.1, trans. Cook). Here Genesis 1:27 is cited in a marriage dispute, in the same period, as proof of pairing. The second proof-text confirms the point, since the animals are invoked for their number. Jesus' own citation of Genesis 2:24 follows the Greek in adding the words "the two", and his conclusion concerns permanence. The relevance of the Qumran texts to the divorce sayings is a commonplace of the literature (Instone-Brewer 2002), and Deasley was himself a Qumran specialist. Read against this background, Jesus cites 1:27 for what it was cited for elsewhere: that marriage joins two, and that the two are not to be parted.
This reading of the Qumran passage is the ordinary one among scholars of the scrolls. Noam reports that most infer from it that the sect saw marriage as "an unbreakable covenant between one particular man and one particular woman", and that the parallel with Jesus' citation "has long been noted" (Noam 2005 [date to confirm]). Its scope is disputed: Fitzmyer takes it to exclude both polygamy and remarriage after divorce, which he calls the majority view, while Vermes limits it to polygamy (Fitzmyer 1976). In the sources reviewed for this paper, the passage has not been used on the affirming side of the present debate. It has been used on the other side. Gagnon argues that the sectarians and Jesus alike derive the number from the sexes: "the fact that God had designed two (and only two) primary sexes for complementary sexual pairing was Jesus' basis for a rigorous monogamy position" (Gagnon 2012). On that account sex difference is the premise doing the work, and cannot be set aside as incidental.
Gagnon's reading is coherent. It is not required by the texts. The second proof in the Damascus Document is that the animals entered the ark "two by two", where what is drawn from the verse is the pair. A premise that an argument presupposes is not thereby a norm that the argument teaches. Jesus' argument also presupposes that a man is the one who divorces, and Mark's version has to extend it to women (Mark 10:12).
This does not show that Jesus thought sex difference incidental. No Jewish teacher of his time imagined otherwise, and his silence is fairly read as assent to the common view. It shows that what the citation is doing in his argument is establishing permanence and pairing. What a text presupposes and what it teaches are different, and Nazarenes already depend on that difference. The same passages presuppose that a man "takes" a wife and that a father gives her. Deasley's treatment of Ephesians 5 rests on exactly this distinction between a social form the text assumes and the theological substance it teaches (Deasley 2000, 36–37). The distinction does not tell us on which side sex difference falls. It tells us that the text alone does not decide.
5.3 The eunuch saying
In the same conversation Jesus adds that some "have been eunuchs from birth" (Matthew 19:12). Within a few sentences of citing "male and female", he names without blame a class of persons who stand outside the male-female marriage pattern. DeFranza argues from this and from intersex conditions that Genesis 1 names the majority forms of creation, as it names day and night without denying dusk (DeFranza 2015). The traditional reply is that the eunuch is honoured for not marrying, so the saying commends celibacy to those outside the pattern. That is a fair reading. It concedes that "male and female" is not treated as exhaustive, and the same sentence says that continence is "given" and not to be presumed.
The result is a stalemate in which the traditional reading is the more natural and the alternative is responsible. That is all P6 asserts.
5.4 Two further premises
A formal check of the argument (see the note on method at the end) showed that earlier drafts relied on two premises they did not defend. Earlier drafts treated the Levitical prohibitions as binding Christians only as Paul takes them up. That is not defensible in Wesleyan terms, and this draft withdraws it.
The Levitical objection (P7). The strongest objection here comes from the Wesleyan tradition itself. Article VI of the Methodist Articles of Religion, from Wesley's abridgment of the Anglican Articles, distinguishes the ceremonial and civil law of Moses from the commandments "which are called moral," from whose obedience "no Christian whatsoever is free." A Nazarene reader cannot set Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 aside because they stand in the Mosaic law. Wesley's own notes sharpen the point. Of the neighbouring prohibition of intercourse during menstruation (18:19) he writes that it "was not only a ceremonial pollution, but an immorality also, whence it is put amongst gross sins" (Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament, Leviticus 18:19). An appeal to 18:19 as a rule the church no longer keeps therefore does not answer the Wesleyan objection, since Wesley classed it as moral.
The question has to be narrower: what enduring moral norm do 18:22 and 20:13 express? The traditional answer is direct. The prohibited object is male-male intercourse as such, and nothing further is needed. On that answer K falls under the prohibition and the argument fails at P7. The alternative must show why the wording does not by itself specify the whole moral norm, whether because the prohibition has a discernible rationale, because its reception in the canon fixes its scope, or for some other reason. Paul's apparent coinage of arsenokoitai from the Greek of Leviticus is relevant evidence, but it cannot make Leviticus disappear into Paul, and Acts 15 may preserve Leviticus 17–18 as the background of the apostolic sexual ethic. P7 is therefore an independently contested premise, not an inference from P2. If the church's Wesleyan commitment to the continuing moral law is enough to classify these verses as applying to every instance of male-male intercourse, C2 does not follow. A formal study would have to decide that question rather than presuppose the answer.
The remaining texts (P8). P8 does not claim that no other text bears on the question. Several do. It claims that they do not independently decide K. Genesis 19 narrates an attempted sexual assault by a mob on vulnerable guests. Whatever it presupposes about male-male intercourse, the act it describes is coercive and inhospitable, not a covenanted union, and Ezekiel names Sodom's sins as pride, excess, neglect of "the poor and needy" and "abomination" (16:49–50). Jude 7 is harder and should not be waved away. The traditional reading takes Sodom's going after "strange flesh" (sarkos heteras) as a condemnation of same-sex intercourse. Bauckham reads the phrase as pointing to the angelic visitors: in verse 6 angels cross the boundary between heaven and earth, and in verse 7 humans attempt the reverse (Bauckham 1983). That reading has wide support and is disputed. On either reading Jude invokes Sodom as grave sexual transgression, and on the traditional reading it adds weight to the traditional case, but its bearing on K still depends on what the transgression was. Hebrews 13:4 commands that marriage be honoured and the marriage bed kept undefiled, and warns that God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers. It is central to Christian sexual ethics, but it does not specify the sex of the spouses. Its force against K depends on the prior claim that marriage is necessarily a male-female union, which is the question of P6. If a study shows that any of these texts independently settles K, P8 fails.
6. A method for unsettled cases
If Scripture's direct statements do not settle K, the question is how the church should proceed. Scripture shows the people of God meeting such cases, and the pattern is consistent enough to be called a method (P9). The Wesleyan tradition and the Church of the Nazarene have both used it (P10).
6.1 The method in Scripture
Exclusions revised within the canon. Deuteronomy 23:1 bars from the assembly the man whose genitals are crushed or cut off. Isaiah 56:3–5 promises eunuchs who hold fast the covenant "a name better than sons and daughters." In Acts 8 an Ethiopian eunuch asks what prevents his baptism, and nothing does. The example is limited. Eunuchs were admitted as persons, and no act was newly permitted. It shows that an exclusion of sexually non-conforming persons, grounded in Torah, was open to revision in the light of God's welcome.
Acts 10–15. Circumcision was given as "an everlasting covenant", and the uncircumcised male was to be "cut off" (Genesis 17:13–14). The church set the requirement aside for Gentiles, and the order of its reasoning is instructive. First comes the evident work of God: the Spirit falls on the uncircumcised, and Peter asks, "who was I that I could hinder God?" (11:17). Then Scripture is re-read in that light: "with this the words of the prophets agree" (15:15). Then the body judges: "it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" (15:28). Johnson (1996) and Fowl (1998) have argued at length that this is a pattern for ecclesial discernment.
The strongest reply is that the same decree retains the prohibition of sexual immorality (15:20, 29). There is wide agreement that its four rules are drawn from Leviticus 17–18, which includes 18:22 (Paul n.d.; Arnold 2014), and the council's decision rests on a scriptural warrant, Amos 9, as well as on experience. Gentiles were welcomed, and Gentile sexual practice was not (Gagnon 2024). The reply is correct and it limits what Acts 15 can show. It cannot show that K is permitted. Two things can still be said. The decree's other three rules were later judged to have lapsed with their reason, as section 4 noted, so the decree is not self-interpreting, and what falls under porneia is itself a question of grounds. And an argument from Acts 15 needs a scriptural warrant of its own to stand where Amos 9 stood. Isaiah 56, on the eunuch and the foreigner, is the nearest candidate, and it is not a close one. What Acts 15 supplies is a procedure, in which manifest grace in a group of people sends the church back to its texts.
Jesus' rule for reading law. Twice in Matthew, Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 against his critics and tells them to "go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice" (9:13; 12:7). He teaches that the Sabbath was made for humankind (Mark 2:27), that teachers are known by their fruit (Matthew 7:15–20), and that all the law and the prophets hang on the two love commands (22:40). Deasley builds on this. To keep the Sabbath law at the expense of hunger or suffering was, he writes, "a blind perversion of the purpose for which the Sabbath law was given, namely, for humanity's good", and Jesus "recognized that it was possible to enforce the law in such a way as to defeat its purpose and subvert its intent" (Deasley 2000, 156). Keen (2018) develops the same point as an account of how biblical law is deliberated.
The New Testament's own handling of Jesus' command. Deasley's 1991 paper makes a point the later book mutes. The New Testament does not transmit Jesus' saying on divorce in one fixed form. Mark and Luke give it without exception, Matthew adds the exception clause, Mark extends it to a woman who divorces her husband, and Paul, having cited "the Lord," adds a ruling of his own for a believer deserted by an unbeliever (1 Corinthians 7:10–15). Deasley judged that Paul's application of the command "is in no way wooden or legalistic" (Deasley 1991, 5), and he quoted Fitzmyer on the variations: "These have Scriptural authority. Cannot the Spirit-guided Church do the same?" (Deasley 1991, 17; Fitzmyer 1976). The apostolic church applied a word of the Lord to cases the word did not name, and did so within Scripture itself.
Paul's criterion for the sexual commandments. "The commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet'; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:9–10). The author of Romans 1 gives, twelve chapters later, a test by which commandments are understood, and he heads his list with a sexual one.
6.2 The method in the Wesleyan tradition
Wesley's Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) is the clearest precedent. The New Testament regulates slavery and instructs slaves to obey, and the pro-slavery argument from Scripture was, on its own terms, formidable. Wesley does not contest it text by text. He asks whether the trade can be "reconciled (setting the Bible out of the question) with any degree of either justice or mercy" (IV.1). The parenthesis should not be over-read. He is showing that slavery fails even by the standard of "heathen honesty", and he is not setting Scripture aside as an authority. But the tract as a whole argues from justice, mercy and natural liberty, and Field and Bentley (2025) show that this was an application of his usual method and not a lapse from it. Wesley read particular texts by "the analogy of faith", which he defines as "the general tenor" of Scripture, "that grand scheme of doctrine which is delivered therein", adding that "every doubtful scripture" is to be "interpreted according to the grand truths which run through the whole" (Explanatory Notes, Romans 12:6). The holiness movement followed him into abolition.
The disanalogy should be stated plainly. Wesley held the moral law to be unchanging and counted sexual sin within it. Slavery is regulated in Scripture and never commanded, while same-sex acts are forbidden. The precedent does not show that Wesley would have accepted the present argument. It shows that reading particular texts by the tenor of the whole is Wesleyan method, not an import from elsewhere.
6.3 The method in the Church of the Nazarene
The church has ordained women since its founding, against the surface of 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34. Bassett, a Nazarene historian of theology, explains the original rationale. For Bresee, "apostolicity was the sole qualification for ministry": one was fit for ordination "if one clearly possessed the gifts and graces of ministry presented in Scripture." In that judgment "gender was incidental." He describes the hermeneutic behind it: "As Wesleyans, we do not seek proof texts and we continually seek the testimonium Spiritus Sancti in our use of the Bible" (Bassett n.d.). Evident grace was treated as evidence about how restrictive texts apply.
The objection is that gifts for ministry concern who may serve, and not which acts are moral. That is a real difference. The 1993 revision is therefore the closer precedent, because it concerned conduct. Jesus calls remarriage after divorce adultery (Mark 10:11–12). The church now blesses such marriages in defined circumstances, on the strength of a theological judgment that held Jesus' sayings as an ideal and refused a "rule of thumb" (Deasley 1991; Deasley 2000). Belousek, who defends the traditional view of marriage, grants that the church's practice on remarriage sits uneasily with the rigour it applies elsewhere (Belousek 2021). A church that has done this once cannot say that the method is foreign to it.
The change was slow, and the record of it is fuller than the anthology suggests. The first Manual (1908) held that persons divorced without scriptural grounds who "have subsequently remarried, are living in adultery," allowed only "the Biblical cause for divorce, namely, adultery" as a ground for remarriage, and declared that ministers were "positively forbidden to solemnize the marriage of persons not having the Scriptural right to marry" (Manual 1908, 37, as quoted in Barnard 2016, 10). A later Nazarene history records that the rule was restated "with no change in wording" and "given more legislative force when the 'Special Advices' became 'Special Rules' in 1928," and that it drew "numerous debates and questions raised in General Assembly action" (unidentified history, 160–61). In 1968 the editor of the Herald of Holiness, W. T. Purkiser, wrote on the eve of the General Assembly that "a four-year study of marriage and the family is being considered." The church's stand for permanence, he wrote, "must be unqualified," and yet "we must not impose limitations that would automatically exclude many who most need the gospel of full salvation" (Purkiser 1968, 10–11).
The first step came in 1972. Purkiser reported a few weeks after the Eighteenth General Assembly at Miami Beach that the issues "were carefully studied for eight years by two commissions authorized by previous General Assemblies," and that the Assembly adopted the commission's report and recommendations: "the vote was almost unanimous" (Purkiser 1972, 16). The report did not reinterpret the divorce texts. Its reasoning turned on a distinction: "The Bible is explicit on the subject of divorce. The Commission does not alter that. The Bible is silent on the subject of specific requirements for church membership. In this area we are free to use sanctified judgment and recognize the completeness of God's forgiveness and redemptive grace." It reasoned from the Mosaic concession: since God "once made provision for divorce in view of the hardness of men's hearts," it asked whether God might "lead His people to make such provision" now, and answered, "We believe He will" (17). Of its five recommendations, the second held ministers "to the historic standard and requirement regarding their marriage relations when being considered for ordination," and the fifth extended "the fellowship of the church and its ministry to such as have experienced the grace and forgiveness of God and are rebuilding their lives under His leadership" (17). Purkiser explained what had changed. The old rule said such persons "are living in adultery," and "the present tense of that clause has said more than we really have meant." A second marriage, "although consummated contrary to the will of God, does represent a valid marriage," and on a literal reading of Matthew "both the remarriage and the adultery that results from it are one-time events." He called this "the generally accepted view among us for over half a century," citing J. B. Chapman, and summed up: "What has changed is one item in our requirements for church membership" (18). The Special Rules thereafter admitted divorced persons to membership "at such a time as they have given evidence of their regeneration and awareness of their understanding of the sanctity of Christian marriage" (General Assembly 2023, 15; see also Dikes 2023, 133). Sam Powell recalls hearing from Frank Carver, who taught New Testament at Point Loma, that Carver did the New Testament work for one of these studies and reached a reading close to the one adopted in 1993; the commission's reports themselves have not yet been located (Powell 2026).
The 1972 action is a precedent of a narrower kind than 1993, and the difference matters for this paper. It left the exegesis and the rule for ministers untouched and justified a change in church practice by locating it where Scripture is "silent." That is a jurisdictional argument, and it would not carry over directly to a question on which the prohibiting texts do speak. What it shows is that the church, confronted with a present-tense reading of Jesus' word on adultery, re-examined what that word required of people already in second marriages, and judged that its own formulation had "said more than we really have meant."
What remained after 1972 was the adultery-only ground and, as the second recommendation intended, its effect on ministers. The 1989 Manual still stated that "only adultery is a scriptural ground for divorce and only adultery will supply such ground as may justify the innocent party in remarrying" (¶35.3), and a previous divorce and remarriage barred a candidate from licence or ordination unless the Board of General Superintendents lifted the barrier (¶403.1, as printed in Report 1993, 203–4). The 1993 committee began there. It was formed "to give guidance to district boards in their work with candidates for ordination" (Report 1993, 201). The Assembly removed the adultery-only sentence and adopted a new ¶35.1: "In biblical teaching, marriage is the commitment of male and female to each other for life, reflecting Christ's sacrificial love for the Church. As such, marriage is permanent, and divorce an infraction of the clear teaching of Christ. Such infractions, however, are not beyond the forgiving grace of God when this is sought with repentance, faith and humility. It is recognized that some have divorce thrust upon them against their will, or are compelled to resort to it for legal or physical protection" (Report 1993, 202–3). In the rule on ordaining divorced persons it changed "scriptural grounds" to "biblical basis," and gave the reason: "'Biblical basis' expresses the spirit of the new proposals, whereas 'biblical grounds' suggests the strictly legal view" (Report 1993, 204–5). The church's own historical statement records the outcome: divorced persons "are not automatically disqualified from serving as ministers" (General Assembly 2023, 15). The Manual now says that divorce "falls short of God's best intentions" (Manual 2023).
The report of the committee that proposed the change is explicit about its reasoning. It asks: "are they to be regarded as prescriptive law, or as a Christian ideal? Are we to allow the law to overcome the grace of the gospel?" It notes that "some of our most careful New Testament scholars" hold that the Bible recognizes no grounds for divorce at all, so that the old rule was exegetically insecure on its own terms. It adopts Deasley's principle that "the law must be proclaimed in the context of the gospel", with three guidelines: the permanence of marriage is "the baseline of the biblical view", repentance and forgiveness "must be given recognition", and "there must be some defined discipline." And it states the effect: "to throw the weight of the evaluation of individual cases from the legal side to the pastoral and spiritual" (Herald of Holiness 1993, 6). A Nazarene theologian later described the episode in these terms: on divorce, "with seemingly very clear biblical directives from Jesus himself... our leaders tasked our best Bible scholars to research and publish their findings, then calmly help us work through the matter" (Crofford 2024).
Two features of this precedent matter here. The church moved a teaching of Jesus about marriage from the category of prescriptive law to the category of ideal, on theological grounds and after granting the strict exegesis, without ceasing to call its breach an infraction. And it did so by asking a scholar to argue the case, not by disciplining those who raised it. It did not happen quickly or without pressure. The question had been before the church in formal study since 1964, and the pastoral cost of the old rule had been felt for a generation. What distinguishes 1993 is that the church answered that pressure with a stated theological judgment and not with silence or drift. The precedent also has limits, which section 8.3 takes up: what the committee produced was grace for those who fall short of an ideal that stands.
The church's 2013 Scripture Study Committee states the principle: "Christian ethics are formulated as the Church interprets Holy Scripture guided by the Holy Spirit" (Scripture Study Committee 2013).
7. Applying the method
This section is a weighing of considerations and not a proof. Its claim (C4) is that an honest application of the method to K finds substantial evidence on both sides.
7.1 For recognition
The goods of marriage. Deasley identifies the recurring marks of biblical marriage as divine institution, covenant, monogamy, union, permanence, equality and self-giving, and places partnership at the centre (Deasley 2000, 14, 41). He adds that not all of these elements "are present in every context, nor need they be" (41). Genesis names the need that marriage answers: "it is not good that the human should be alone" (2:18). A union of kind K can be covenanted, monogamous, permanent, equal and self-giving, and it answers the need Genesis names. It wrongs no neighbor, which is Paul's test in Romans 13:10. Rogers (1999, 2004) argues further that marriage is an ascetic discipline, a school of sanctification parallel to monastic life, and that to refuse it to those who cannot enter it otherwise is to withhold a means of their sanctification. That argument needs translating into Wesleyan terms, since Wesley did not list marriage among the means of grace, but its central claim is a holiness claim and so belongs in a Nazarene discussion.
Deasley's committee paper also quoted H. B. Green's observation that the texts on marriage "have come down to us from a period when marriage was more of a guaranteed institution of society, and less of a demanding personal relationship, than it has become in modern times," so that "the contemporary application of them must take into account the greater weight now laid upon the aspect of personal relationship" (Deasley 1991, 17). Deasley applied that remark to divorce and not to the question of this paper. It shows that the committee's foundational paper already allowed a change in how marriage is lived to bear on how its texts are applied.
The cost of the alternative. This difficulty does not depend on an affirming account of orientation. The church's own pastoral guidance distinguishes orientation from conduct. The General Superintendents' Pastoral Perspectives on Homosexuality states that the Manual and the Board's official statement make "a clear distinction between behavior and orientation. One is sinful, the other is not," and offers "full participation in the life and the ministry of the church" to "the reoriented or celibate single homosexual" (Diehl et al. n.d., 9, as quoted in Watson 2015, 56). A later clarification from the Board stresses that "reoriented," "celibate" and "single" are "operative terms" (quoted in Watson 2015, 58). The church's position therefore contemplates a person whose orientation persists without being counted as sin, and asks of that person lifelong celibacy. That may be the right Christian calling. But the cost cannot be answered by saying the person should cease to be so oriented, because the church's own guidance does not make reorientation a condition of faithfulness.
The traditional teaching, joined to what is now known about orientation, requires lifelong celibacy of a whole class of persons whether or not they have the gift. Jesus and Paul both describe celibacy as given to some and not to others (Matthew 19:11; 1 Corinthians 7:7). Wesley calls those who receive it "the happy few, to whom it is given" (*Explanatory Notes*, 1 Corinthians 7:7). Deasley, commenting on 1 Corinthians 7:9, writes that "if the pursuit of abstinence merely results in incontinence, then the goal has become self-defeating" (Deasley 2000, 126). The biblical writers never faced this tension, because they assumed that anyone who burned could marry. This is what makes the modern knowledge morally relevant. It does not outrank Scripture. It exposes a conflict between two things Scripture teaches (Keen 2018). Sprinkle replies that hardship does not determine what is moral, and that the church asks chastity of all who are unmarried. The order of argument he insists on is right: the difficulty of celibacy cannot show that K is good. It can show that the traditional position carries a scriptural cost of its own.
There is Nazarene evidence of how that cost is felt. A 2015 doctoral study interviewed thirteen Nazarene senior pastors, all ordained and educated at Nazarene Theological Seminary, about homosexuality and their contact with gay and lesbian people (Watson 2015). The sample was small and self-selected, and the author, who has a gay sister, says so (Watson 2015, 75). The pastors were nearly unanimous that Scripture condemns same-sex practice (277–79). Yet one of them said of the celibacy requirement, "you're asking the homosexual person to never express their sexuality" (192), another observed that "right underneath many of our noses are families with gay children, gay relatives" (120), and the study found that the question "touched the lives of all the participants" (310). The church's own guidance for pastors, Pastoral Perspectives on Homosexuality, sets celibacy as the requirement for gay and lesbian members (Porter et al. 2011, as quoted in Watson 2015, 58–59).
Fruit. Jesus gives fruit as the test of teachers and their teaching (Matthew 7:15–20). Where unions of kind K show fidelity, patience, hospitality and growth in love of God and neighbor over decades, that is evidence to be weighed, as the gifts and graces of women preachers were weighed by the early Nazarenes. Two limits apply. Sprinkle is right that Galatians 5 sets the fruit of the Spirit against works of the flesh that include porneia, so that loving character cannot redefine an act. And Wesley is explicit about what experience can do. He grants that "experience is not sufficient to prove a doctrine which is not founded on Scripture", and holds that "experience is sufficient to confirm a doctrine which is grounded on Scripture" (Sermon 11, IV.1, V.1). On Wesley's terms fruit can confirm a reading of Scripture that has its own exegetical ground. It cannot supply the ground. It also cuts both ways, since the lives of celibate gay Christians who hold the traditional view are evidence too.
7.2 Against recognition
Every mention of same-sex acts in Scripture is negative. No text commends, or imagines, a same-sex covenant.
The echoes of Genesis in Romans 1 suggest that Paul's deepest ground may be creation, which would defeat P2.
The Jerusalem council retained the sexual prohibitions in the very act of setting circumcision aside.
The teaching of the church was unanimous until about fifty years ago. Most of the global church holds it still, and that includes most of the 2.7 million Nazarenes, whose fastest growth is in Africa and Asia-Pacific (Church of the Nazarene 2024). Wesleyan method gives tradition real weight.
Belousek (2021) offers a developed theology in which sex difference belongs to marriage from creation, and marriage itself is surpassed in the resurrection, so that celibacy is an honoured vocation and not a deprivation.
The 1993 committee itself kept the male-female pairing. Its new baseline paragraph begins, "In biblical teaching, marriage is the commitment of male and female to each other for life" (Report 1993, 202–3). The precedent this paper invokes wrote sex difference into the very sentence that relaxed the law.
Pressure alone is not a reason. A Nazarene scholar who knew the earlier divorce study has observed that the pressure behind the 1993 change came from within the church, from many families touched by divorce, and that the pressure for change on this question is smaller (Powell 2026). The Watson study points the same way: eight of its thirteen pastors were "mostly comfortable" with the church's stance (307), and some families had joined Nazarene congregations because mainline churches had "caved in" (139).
The list of goods in 7.1 omits conformity to a created sexual order. If that is a good that marriage serves, K lacks it. This is the question of section 5 returning, and the two stand or fall together.
Neither list defeats the other. That is the claim of C4.
8. What the church owes the question
8.1 Study and accountable advocacy (P15)
A minority reading exists for almost every doctrine, so the bare fact of exegetical dispute cannot oblige a church to reopen a question. P15 needs a threshold. This paper proposes that study is owed when four things are true together. The prohibiting texts, read by their stated grounds, leave a real question about the case, as argued in sections 3 to 5. The alternative reading is held by recognized scholars, including some who grant the traditional exegesis of the vocabulary. The pastoral stakes are grave for an identifiable group of the church's own members. And the proposal meets the controls of section 4, so that it does no wrong to a neighbor and leaves the rest of the church's sexual ethic intact. K meets all four. Polyamory and sex outside covenant fail the first and the fourth.
The third condition has some Nazarene evidence behind it, though less than a study would need. The pastors in Watson's sample reported almost no outreach to gay and lesbian people (Watson 2015, 311, 416), and one district superintendent, asked how a gay minister's case would be handled, answered, "I think that would depend on which General you had sitting in front of you" (106–7). The church's 2011 guidance for pastors anticipated the question: "sooner or later we... may be asked to respond to the serious questions" (Porter et al. 2011, as quoted in Watson 2015, 60). Watson's own recommendation was that the church invite "its biblical and theological scholars to develop a more nuanced Manual statement" (317). That is close to what the 1993 committee was: a response to district boards facing hard cases with candidates for the ministry.
A critic may fairly say that the Nazarene precedents had more to work with. Women's ordination could appeal to positive texts such as Acts 2:17 and Romans 16, and the divorce revision to exception clauses already in the text (Matthew 19:9; 1 Corinthians 7:15). K has no positive text. That is a reason to expect that a study might well reaffirm the present teaching. It is not a reason to refuse one.
The objection is also weaker than it looks, because the 1993 revision did not rest on the exception clauses. It removed the one rule that did. The adultery-only ground was the church's reading of Matthew's exception, and the committee set it aside on the ground that "some of our most careful New Testament scholars" find no grounds for divorce in the Bible at all (Herald of Holiness 1993, 6). Critical scholarship agrees. Martin judges that the exception clauses "are certainly later additions", and that Jesus "forbade both divorce and remarriage outright. The modifications of that teaching came later" (Martin 2006, ch. 9). He observes that "no Christian church has followed the strict interpretation and forbade divorce and remarriage completely and absolutely", and that every major branch of Christianity "has figured out some way to permit divorce and remarriage, usually claiming that they are actually following the clear teachings of Scripture" (ch. 9). Martin regards much of the exegesis offered for leniency as special pleading, naming Keener and Instone-Brewer, and a critic could say the same of Deasley. The charge does not hold against Deasley. He does not claim that Jesus permitted divorce: his 1991 paper concludes that Jesus taught marriage to be "lifelong and indissoluble" (Deasley 1991, 14). He claims that the church should hold that teaching as an ideal and not as legislation. But the point stands either way. The church now recognizes marriages that, on the most probable reading of Jesus' words, he called adulterous, and it reached that position by asking what his teaching was for. The General Assembly can change the church's positions only if someone is permitted to argue for a position it has not adopted, and on divorce the church appointed a committee and asked one of its New Testament scholars to do so (Herald of Holiness 1993, 6).
The present situation is different. In 2023 the Board of General Superintendents ruled that the Covenant of Christian Conduct, which contains the statement on human sexuality, is essential doctrine, and ministers have since lost their credentials for advocating change (Shimron 2024). The ruling settles what is permissible. It does not settle what is true, and it was itself a recent change in how the Manual's categories are ranked. The argument of this paper is that the ruling closed a question that the church's own method leaves open.
Two misreadings should be excluded. This is not a claim that ministers may teach what they like. A church may require its ministers to represent its teaching accurately and to distinguish their own proposals from it. Nor does the argument apply to the creeds. Nobody holds that the doctrine of the Trinity is unsettled by Scripture's direct statements, so the first stage of the argument would not go through for it.
8.2 Scripture's authority
Article IV confesses that the Scriptures are "given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation." The argument of this paper does not say that Paul erred about the will of God. It says that the church may have extended Paul's condemnation to a case his stated reasons do not reach, which is a claim about the church's application and not about the text's truth. That is the kind of judgment the 2013 Scripture Study Committee describes when it says that Christian ethics "are formulated as the Church interprets Holy Scripture guided by the Holy Spirit." The same committee declined to add the words "inerrant throughout" to the article, calling the addition "untrue to the Wesleyan tradition", and the article's wording has been understood since Wiley to leave the church's scholars what Ingersol calls "elbow room" (Ingersol n.d.).
The committee also wrote that "to live intentionally violating the law of God as interpreted by Jesus and the apostles is the antinomian denial of the faith." A traditional reader will say that this sentence covers K, and that 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 places the matter among things necessary to salvation. If Paul's words reach K, that is so. Whether they do is the question this paper asks the church to study.
8.3 Affirmation and accommodation
A formal study would have to take up the further question this paper leaves open. Deasley's method, applied as he applied it, yields accommodation: the creation ideal stands, and grace meets what falls short of it. The committee said so in terms. Its first guideline was that "the biblical ideal of the permanence of marriage must be clearly and unambiguously acknowledged as the baseline", and it insisted that treating lifelong marriage as an ideal was "far from being a charter for easy divorce" (Herald of Holiness 1993, 6). The church's practice on remarriage has that shape. Deasley's 1991 paper states the logic. Asking whether Moses' concession to "hardness of heart" still has room among Jesus' followers, he answered that it "may well be yes," but only "as a concession to human sinfulness, and not as part of the divinely ordained order" (Deasley 1991, 7). And the committee's new baseline paragraph named marriage as "the commitment of male and female" (Report 1993, 202–3). Holmes, a traditional theologian, has suggested that pastoral accommodation of same-sex partnerships might be argued on similar lines (Holmes in Sprinkle 2016).
Affirmation claims more: that K is itself a holy covenant and shares in the good of marriage. Whether that claim can be made depends on P6. If the creation texts teach sex difference as a condition of marriage, K can be at most accommodated. If they leave the matter undetermined, and if the goods set out in section 7.1 are the goods that marriage serves, then K shares in those goods and affirmation is available. Song (2014) proposes a third possibility, a covenanted vocation distinct from marriage. The distinction matters for how the present paper should be received. A reader who holds the traditional view of marriage can accept its conclusion, since the conclusion is that the question deserves the church's study.
9. Conclusion
The argument stands or falls on four premises. The first concerns "contrary to nature" in Romans 1. Section 3.2 argued that in the discourse Paul shares the phrase rests on procreation, gender order and restraint, that the church no longer applies the first two in their ancient form, and that bodily complementarity as such is a later proposal and not a ground the text states. Most scholars, including Loader, hold instead that Paul's ground is the created pairing of male and female, and the Genesis vocabulary of the passage supports them. The second premise is that a prohibition applied beyond its stated grounds needs further warrant. The church used that principle on usury and on the food rules of Acts 15, and it needs the controls proposed in section 4. The third is that the creation texts presuppose a male-female couple without teaching it as a boundary. The Damascus Document's use of Genesis 1:27 makes that a responsible reading, and Qumran scholarship supports it, though Gagnon reads the same evidence the other way and his is the more natural reading. The fourth, set out in section 5.4, is the hardest for a Wesleyan reader: that the Levitical prohibitions, which the tradition may count as moral law, do not by their wording alone settle the scope of the norm they express.
None of these premises is secure, and the paper has tried to say where each is weakest. But none is frivolous, and together they describe a question that Scripture's direct statements leave open and that the church's own method is able to address. In 1972 and again in 1993, after a generation of pastoral pressure and formal study, the Church of the Nazarene showed that it could re-examine a teaching on marriage, grounded in the words of Jesus, without abandoning the authority of Scripture. The request of this paper is that it be willing to do so again.
References
Status notes say how each source was handled. Entries without a note are standard works cited from general knowledge; their details should be confirmed against a library catalogue before this paper is cited.
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Deasley, Alex R. G. 1991. "Marriage and Divorce in New Testament Interpretation." Paper for the Committee on Marriage and Divorce in the Ministry, Kansas City, August. Unpublished; photocopy from the Nazarene Archives. Read in full.
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Porter, Jeff, et al. 2011. Pastoral Perspectives on Homosexuality. Kansas City: Church of the Nazarene. Quoted from Watson 2015; not opened.
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A note on method. The argument's logical structure was checked with the Lean 4 proof assistant. The check confirms that the conclusions follow from the premises as stated and that the premises are consistent. It says nothing about whether the premises are true. It exposed two premises the earlier drafts left implicit, now set out in section 5.4.