Romans 1:18-31
Last week we introduced ourselves to Paul’s letter to the Romans, especially examining its opening theme of “the obedience of faith.” I asked a friend of mine, Stephen Metcalf-Conte, what he thought this expression meant. He wrote me, “The ‘obedience of faith’ is the behavioral aspect of a complex motion of the soul that includes trust, conviction and fidelity.”
We finished our teaching by looking at that great verse in 1:17, “The righteous shall live by faith,” which I believe is a restatement of “the obedience of faith.” Our truth life is found in obedience to the will of God, and that obedience of faith is “is the behavioral aspect of a complex motion of the soul that includes trust, conviction and fidelity:”
This kind of life is our “natural” state: that is, the life we were made for, to live out a believing, trusting, committed life to God. But of course as we look around, and as we look inside ourselves, this is not what we see: our “unnatural” life is a life lived apart from, and actively opposed to, God. In the section we are going to examine this morning, Dr. Paul gives his diagnosis of how we got from our natural state to our unnatural state. As Paul develops his argument, I think it’s worth noting that it is very likely that Paul has in the back of his mind the stories of the early chapters of Genesis, which describe how humanity got its start in a natural state of life with God, but chose to disobey.
What I hope to do this morning is to do a close reading of the passage together. And because this is the most explicit mention of male homosexuality in the New Testament, and the only explicit mention of female sexuality in our entire Bible; and because homosexuality is such a hot topic in the church and in society today, I want to examine what this passage tells us about how the church should engage in thinking about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.
So, get your Bibles out and read with me.
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth.
There are a lot of little linking words in this passage. Paul begins by saying, “for.” He is explicitly contrasting the life of the obedience of faith to those who do not live a life of obedience. Paul mixes together two important thoughts: first, there is much ungodliness and wickedness in the world; and second, God’s wrath is revealed against this. This revelation is the “bad news” that makes the “good news” all the sweeter. Paul doesn’t yet describe what is the object of God’s wrath, but he signals its by describing it as “ungodliness” and a wickedness that suppresses the truth.
19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.
There is that “for” again. He now begins to explain more fully what brings on God’s wrath. When we look around the world, says Paul, we can see God’s handiwork: this world, this universe is evidentially the creation of a powerful God. We can’t see God, but we can see what God has made. Perhaps Paul has in mind Psalm 19:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmamentproclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voicegoes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.In the heavenshe has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy,
and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them;
and nothing is hid from its heat.
A very important question is who “they” refers to. We don’t have time to get into it right now, but Paul clearly means not just some individuals who are especially wicked, but all humanity. So, when Paul says “they” we can head “us”—not just us as individuals, but all of us together.
So they are without excuse; 21 for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools; 23 and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.
Paul hammers it home, bringing his point home: They/we have no excuse. First, they did not give to God what God deserves: honor and thanks, even though they could see God’s handiwork. Second, they refuse the evidence of their senses; and as a result they become senseless fools. They refuse the light of the evidence, and their minds are darkened. Third, they made a stupid trade: they exchnage the immortal glory of God for the mortal images of created things: the trade away eternity for the temporary; the creator for the creation; God’s glory for mere reflections of God’s glory. They should worship God, instead they end up worshiping teeny-tiny idols.
In terms of our description of “the obedience of faith,”
We see that humanity deserves God’s wrath. In God’s anger, we then receive punishment. And what is the punishment that Paul mentions? The answer, I think, is surprising. But it’s an important answer, because Paul says it three times. Here are the highlights — or, perhaps, the low-lights:
God’s punishment is to “give them up,” to let us go off and do whatever we want to with our hearts, our bodies, our passions and minds. In parenting, we call this, “natural consequences,” and for Paul the natural consequences of God’s letting us experience these natural consequences is for us to live unnaturally, against our natural state as God’s creation.
Paul completes this section with a laundry list of unnatural acts. It is not a pretty picture:
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. 29 They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.
This was the punishment of God: to let us go our own way, to keep acting out even though we know it’s bad for us. We can even twist this so that we start approving of these bad acts.
And now finally we can turn to the two verses that discuss what we would call homosexual behavior:
26 For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
I say, “what we would call homosexual behavior,” because the word, “homosexual” never appears in the Bible. In fact, it could not be in the Bible. Even though it looks like a good Greek or Latin cognate, the word was not invented until the eighteenth century. The idea of people being sexually attracted to members of the same sex as a basic orientation was not a thought that Paul had, or (perhaps) could have. For Paul, the background for ‘unnatural’ sexual behavior is rooted, I think, in two ideas. First, as I said earlier, he probably has the stories in the early chapters of Genesis in mind that tell of how the God created humanity in God’s own image as male and female. Second, Paul has in mind the same-sex practices that were common in his own time, especially the availability of so-called sacred prostitutes, where people could engage in same-sex behaviors as part of worship of the false gods; or the practice of older men having sex with boys and young men—what we would call pedophilia.
In our natural state, thinks Paul, God gave humanity sexual desire for the opposite sex. Paul thinks about what he has seen: men and women going off to have sexual intercourse with members of the same sex as part of their worship practices, or men taking young boys as temporary lovers. It is not surprising that this comes to mind as a prime example of what happens when God gives up people to their base desires; as Dostoyevsky said, “if there is no God, then all is permitted.”
I have been trying to think about what a good analogy is to Paul’s discussion of unnatural, i.e., same-sex, activity is in our times, and it is not hard to come up with examples. But the closest example I could think of is homosexual prison rape. Speaking very generally, people who are in prison because they have done something wrong, some crime against the state for which they are being punished. In prison, they do not have the natural opportunities for relationships they have outside of prison. Furthermore, prisons create a situation where power relationships and the pecking order become very important. The result is that homosexual rape is not uncommon in prison: one recent estimate says that 1 in 20 prisoners are homosexually raped while in prison. It is a consequence of bad behavior to start with (at least, in many situations) that people come into this situation. Many of the rapists return to heterosexual sex when outside prison; and, of course, many of the people who are raped have no homosexual desire.
No one could defend this kind of homosexual behavior, and it is clear to see how this behavior—both by the rapists and the people they rape—is a consequence of the original acts they got them put into prison to begin with. It’s a terribly sad situation (and things should, and are, being done about it), but it’s not a bad analogy for both the kind of sexual behavior Paul discusses and the overall consequences of sin.
In particular, Paul is not thinking about loving, life-long, mutually-chosen homosexual relationships. As I stated, Paul’s Greek background would teach him about so-called sacred prostitution and about sex between older men and boys and young men. Very little, I guess, is known about lesbian relationships. This is the background for calling these relationships ‘unnatural,’ especially in contrast to the Genesis stories about males and females being created in the image of God.
Next time we will turn to chapter two of Romans. In this chapter, Paul will warn us that when we condemn people we condemn ourselves, because we ourselves engage in similar acts. At this point in Paul’s argument, he is setting us up to fall: he practically invites us to be critical of others in order that we might realize our own need. And that is absolutely the main point of this part of the chapter and the next section: we all stand in need of some good news. Paul is especially talking to Jews and Greeks at Rome, but this goes for other divisions in the church as well: conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and charismatics, peace churches and just-war churches. We’ll sit under this message some more the next time I teach, God willing.
But a secondary point emerges, which warns us not to over-apply this passage to gay and lesbian relationships as they exist in the present time, based on gay and lesbian relationships as they existed in Paul’s time. We, too, find it easy to be against any kind of prostitution and any kind of sexual contact between adults and minors. This does not mean, however, that loving, life-long, mutually chosen homosexual relationships are to be prohibited in the church or in society at large. These verses are the closest thing to prohibitions on gay and lesbian relationships in the New Testament, and, as we have seen, they are not the main point of the passage, nor is the kind of homosexual relationship described here likely to apply to modern adult homosexual relationships. And, of course, we don’t live in a country ruled by the Bible (and, I at least, thank God for that), so we should especially avoid arguing that gay marriage should be outlawed because the Bible is against it. Actually bringing together what the church should do with respect to gay marriage is outside the bounds of this teaching, of course.
This has been a challenging teaching for me to put together. I look forward to your comments and criticisms, and I am open to “reproof and correction.”