ABSTRACT
At least three types of difficulty confront any reader of the New Testament (NT) seeking to discern the revealed mind of God for sexual understanding and behaviour. The first type of difficulty is conflict between texts. This difficulty is illustrated below by texts about divorce and marriage. The second type lies in the institutional, diachronic discontinuity between biblical times and our own, and is illustrated by texts about marriage and family: in short, when we talk now about these, we are talking about institutions which are importantly different from, and discontinuous with, those embedded in the Bible. The third type lies in the social or relational, diachronic discontinuity between the biblical text and our own times. When we read the NT to discern God’s will about, say, homosexuality, we already impose a strikingly modern understanding of same-sex desire upon the text: in short, texts ostensibly about what we now call ‘homosexuality’ may be about something else, in this case, gender infraction.
