The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is, as everyone knows, a story of God’s judgment against homosexuality, promiscuity, and other kinds of illicit sex. Except, Knust argues, it’s not. It’s a story about the danger of having sex with angels. In the biblical world, people believed in angels, and they feared them, for sex with angels led inevitably to death and destruction. In the Noah story, God sends the flood to exterminate the offspring of “the daughters of man” (human women) and “the sons of God” (angels, in some interpretations). Non-canonical Jewish texts tell of angels, called Watchers, who descend to earth and impregnate human women, who produce monstrous children — thus inciting God’s terrible vengeance. God razes Sodom not because its male inhabitants are having sex with each other, as so many contemporary ministers preach, Knust argues, but in part because the men of the town intended to rape angels of God who were sheltered in Lot’s house. And when the Apostle Paul tells women to keep their heads covered in church, he’s issuing a warning against inciting angelic lust: “The angels might be watching,” Knust writes.Knust's own article about this created a bit of a cyber-flurry at the time - i.e. numerous prayhards linking to some bloke's rejoinder which, sadly, merely confines itself to insisting "The Bible does so too condemn gay sex" and has nothing to say about the bonking angels issue. Well, except:
Her claim that “from the perspective of the New Testament” the Sodom story was about “the near rape of angels, not sex between men” makes an "either-or" out of Jude 7’s "both-and."So no homosexual sex, and no nailing cherubim* either. (And it's amusing that the NIV swaps in "perversion" for the KJV's "going after strange flesh". The newer version seems a trifle vague.)
* No, you're thinking of putti.