Romans 1 and Homosexuality
In Romans 1:18-3:20,
Paul is building toward the conclusion he reaches in chapter 3, variously
captured in 3:9, 20, and 23. Paul concludes that all human beings are
"under sin" whether they would be Jew or Gentile.
In building toward this
conclusion, Paul begins with some general comments in Romans 1 with which his
audience would readily agree. These arguments seem particularly targeted at a
person who might consider him or herself a "Jew" and "boast in
God" (2:17). "You know the will of God and approve of things that are
excellent revealed from the Law and have become convinced that you are leader
of the blind, a light of those in darkness..." Whether Paul has in mind a
person who is ethnically Jewish or simply a conservative Gentile Christian is not
important for our purposes (the answer is not as clear as one might think). But
the person Paul has in mind is someone who thinks they might boast about their
knowledge of the law.
To set up such a person,
to catch him or her in hypocrisy, Paul presents a number of sins in Romans
1:18-32 that such a person might readily rail against. While Paul never
mentions Gentiles explicitly in these verses, he invokes the two most
stereotypical Gentile sins: idolatry (1:23) and sexual immorality, homosexual
sex in particular. This is a sting operation--not that Paul doesn't believe
these things are sinful--it is just they are not the point that he is really
working toward. His real purpose is to show that anyone who might boast in
their own righteousness stands just as condemned as anyone else, just as
subject to the wrath of God as anyone mentioned in Romans 1.
These facts lead us to
our first observation. Before a person comes to Christ, all sins have the same
effect and are thus, for all intents and purposes, the same. Some of you will
know that I do not believe that all sins are of the same consequence after
we come to Christ. But before we are justified by faith, all sins may as
well be equal: they all imply that we lack the glory God intended for us
(3:23). Similarly, we are all just as easily and freely justified by the blood
of Christ (3:24). For all intents and purposes, homosexual sex is no
different from any other sin when it comes to the time before we have faith in
Christ. When we come to Christ, this sin is forgiven just as much as any
lie we might have told or any stealing we might have done or any hateful word
we might have said.
Romans 1:18-32 itself
presents a process of abandonment by God with a resultant deterioration into
darkness and shame. We might capture the train of thought as follows:
First, the wrath of God
is against all human ungodliness (1:18). Paul plays out this general statement
in the rest of the chapter.
The starting point for
such ungodliness among most humans is as follows. While the invisible things of
God should be clear to everyone (his eternal power and divinity), humanity has
not glorified God or given Him thanks accordingly. They have exchanged the
truth of God for a lie (1:23). They worshiped idols and images rather than the true
God. This comment alone makes it clear that Paul primarily has Gentiles rather
than Jews in view in Romans 1.
Three "He
delivered" sections follow. Paul implies that in response to the Gentile's
failure to acknowledge God as God, in response to human idolatry, God lets a
process of deterioration take place. God abandons the pagan world to several
consequences:
1. Therefore, God
delivered them to the desires of their hearts. This involves dishonoring
their bodies among themselves (1:24) and worshiping the creature rather than
the Creator (1:25). It is possible that Paul then plays out these two comments
in the rest of the chapter. In other words, 1:24-25 seem a kind of general
statement whose particulars appear in the rest of the chapter.
2. So 1:26-27 play out
the first comment: Gentiles dishonored their bodies among themselves. 1:26 says
God delivered them to dishonorable passions. Paul then enumerates female
and male homosexual sex. 1:26 speaks of women exchanging the natural use for
that beside nature (para physin). 1:27 then speaks of males leaving the natural
use of the female and burning toward one another, "males among males doing
the shameful."
3. 1:28-32 then play out
the second comment on "exchanging the truth of God for a lie" from
1:25. God delivered them (1:28) to a worthless mind. What follows is a
list of vices that Paul considers "worthy of death" (1:32).
OK, now that we have
presented the basic thrust of this chapter, what might it contribute to the
matter of Christianity and homosexuality?
First of all, it seems clear
that Paul believes homosexual sex of both the male and female kind to be shameful,
dishonorable, and unnatural. Paul is not speaking of same-sex rape or pederasty
or violence. He is speaking of a man doing with a man what a man
"naturally" does with a woman. Paul's language here evokes images of
Leviticus 18 and 20. We might also mention that this is the only reference in
the Bible to female homosexual sex.
Some have argued at this
point that the connection between idolatry and homosexual acts points to male
temple prostitution as what Paul has in mind. Their argument is thus that Paul
is only condemning homosexual sex associated with a pagan temple here and not
something like a monogamous homosexual relationship. This argument seems highly
unlikely to me. For one, I'm not sure how common male-male temple prostitution
was in the ancient world, in fact if it even existed at this time. I have
serious doubts about how prevalent such a practice was. I could be wrong, but I
don't think homosexual sex was considered honorable in most of the Roman world
even by pagans. A former student of mind reminded me of a reference to the emperor Nero's preference for “young men” at his court (Tacitus) and how the text looked down on him for it. Ancient
Second, Paul considers such
desires the consequence of the Gentiles' failure to acknowledge God properly.
Because the Gentiles do not acknowledged God as God, God has abandoned them to
these desires. It is probably significant to note a slight strangeness to this
train of thought, for Paul makes it sound like the entire pagan world, as a
consequence of their idolatry, ends up engaged in homosexual sex. The reason
this is significant to note is because it reveals that Paul is not thinking of
the small segment of the human population that we today would classify as
homosexual. His argument is about the whole world, and the failure of the
whole pagan world to acknowledge God as God has lead,
for one thing, to sexual shame.
One difficult
interpretive issue comes from Paul's comment that such people were working the
shameful "and receiving the punishment among themselves that was necessary
because of their error" (1:27). What punishment did Paul have in mind?
Many turn at this point
to something like AIDS or venereal diseases as the punishment "in
themselves." But no mention is made of physical consequences. Such a line
of thought fits suspiciously with the way we in a medically, scientifically
oriented culture think--it seems anachronistic. Given Paul's honor-shame world,
I think the most likely answer is that the action itself is so shameful that it
is its own punishment. In other words, might we dynamically translate the
statement something like the following: "men with men working the shameful
and thus receiving among themselves the punishment of disgrace necessary given
their error." I am not 100% certain of this interpretation, but it seems
the one most likely given the way Paul's world thought.
Third, it is not clear at all
that Paul considers homosexual sin here worse than the viceful
individuals he mentions later in the chapter. Indeed, it is those with vices in
1:29-31 that Paul speaks of as worthy of death--people like slanderers. There
is nothing in the chapter to lead us to believe that Paul meant to emphasize
the homosexual sinners of 1:26-27 as being worse than the others in the
chapter. Indeed, if Paul were giving a downward spiral--and I don't necessarily
think he is--then the sinners at the end of the chapter would be worse than
those in the middle.
To summarize: Paul considers
homosexual sex of all kinds not only as sinful, shameful, and unnatural, but he
sees it as a consequence of a failure to acknowledge God as God. However, Paul
is not writing about a specific group of people like homosexuals--a modern
category--he is making a universal argument about Gentiles as a whole and
homosexual sex as the kind of thing that results among
pagans who do not believe in God. Sexual sins of this sort are common to all
non-believers in general, not just a particular group with a certain
orientation, because Gentiles are pagan and idolatrous. Finally, Paul gives us
no indication that he considered homosexual sex as more sinful or a greater
object of God's wrath than the other sinners at the end of the chapter.
I
might add here that I don't think Paul thought in terms of a "homosexual"
if by that term you refer to a person with a certain "orientation,"
someone "attracted to" the same sex.
This category seems to have arisen in the 1800's when doctors first
"diagnosed" a person as having "homosexuality" as a kind of
psychological disposition. For Paul, a
homosexual was someone who was known for having sex with someone of the
same gender. The word he uses in 1
Corinthians 6:9 "arsenokoites" implies
sharing a bed with a man rather than an orientation.