Does he or doesn't he?

When I was a kid, hair colouring ads were pretty lame. Who can forget, "Which twin has the Toni?", a slogan apparently now in the advertising Hall of Fame. Clairol was equally famous for "Does she or doesn't she?" The original campaign went on the say, "Hair colour so natural that only her mother knows for sure." This was later changed to "only her hairdresser knows...." Sounds silly now, although it really worked at the time.

Well, I kind of feel that way with St. Paul and his views on homosexuality. Does he or doesn't he?--denounce, of course, not participate. People can't seem to decide for sure.

I've tried to establish in earlier posts that Paul was the furthest thing from a knee-jerk apologist for the old Mosaic laws, whether to do with women, marriage, circumcision, Sabbath-keeping, kosher foods, or any others of those mysterious taboos. Very much to the contrary, in fact. His protestations directed toward the traditional Jewish understandings of the law couldn't have been more controversial in their time (see, for instance, Acts 15:1-27).

If we accept St. Paul at his word, then we have to look at any particular aspect of his teaching through the lenses of freedom in Christ, inner motivation, self-discipline, and responsibility for the greater good in the long-term.

Romans 14:14 - I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself...

1 Corinthians 6:12 - "I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but I will not be mastered by anything.

1 Corinthians 10:23 -  “I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive.

With these caveats, then, let's look at the critical passage in context:

Romans 1: 18ff
¹⁸ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹ since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
²¹ For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²² Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. ²⁵ They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
²⁶ Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. ²⁷ In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
²⁸ Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. ²⁹ They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹ they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. ³² Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

[We know that the Roman leaders of Paul's day were renowned for their dissolute behaviour, including not only the usual kinds of heterosexual lust, but sex of any kind, including group sex displays and pedophilia. Bill O'Reilly, author of the best-selling book Killing Lincoln, covers this debauched Roman lifestyle very thoroughly in his equally excellent Killing Jesus; e.g., Tiberius pp. 99, 112ff, Julius Caesar, p. 116. Paul was clearly addressing a social ill modeled by the upper classes.]


Paul is concerned here with people who should know better--they understand what God is about but have deliberately chosen to do things that are contrary to God's revelation concerning his very nature while ignoring his incredible power. How this knowledge is transmitted isn't stated in so many words. Theologians use terms like general and special revelation, and so on, ad nauseam. The important thing is that we have it within us to recognize right from wrong, and sufficient free will to make choices.

But rather than being grateful for this knowledge, people substituted their own preferences. While some behaviours are listed--degrading of bodies, murder, gossiping, slander, boasting, and disobedience--a large number of attitudes and motivations are included as well, such as lust, greed, envy, malice, insolence, lovelessness, and mercilessness. In every case, the preference is for self-indulgence and advancing one's causes and preferences without regard to what it might cost another person.

It is easy for some to conclude that one of these indulgences is gay sex, because Paul uses it as an example of the evils he is talking about. But we would be too hasty to assume that it is the sex act itself that is at issue here. It could just as easily be the motivation for the act. Let me give a parallel example.

In Genesis 19:1-9 we have the famous story of Lot and his angelic visitors. The men of Sodom, the city in which Lot resided, showed up at Lot's door and demanded that Lot hand his guests over to them for sexual purposes: 

The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. “My lords,” he said, “please turn aside to your servant’s house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning.”
“No,” they answered, “we will spend the night in the square.”
But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate. Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”
Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”
“Get out of our way,” they replied. “This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them.” They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door.

The passage is one that is typically used to show God's animosity for gay sex. Not surprisingly,  our English word 'sodomy' (anal copulation) comes from the name of this town. Note, however, that Lot offered them his own virgin daughters as substitutes. He recognized that his fellow citizens were not discriminatory in their tastes--when it came to lust, any outlet would do.

But it was not the proposed sex act itself for which the men and boys of Sodom were denounced in later biblical passages, but rather the objectionable inner lives of the town's citizens: their lack of gratitude for their good fortune; their greed, lovelessness, cruelty, and self-indulgence, despite their favoured situation. Note that in Genesis 13, the area where Sodom was located is referred to as "well watered, like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt" (v. 10). But as in Jesus' parable of the rich fool who tore down his storage barns to build even bigger ones to hold his ever increasing wealth, their wealth had made them insensitive to the needs of others.

Ezekiel 16:49-50 - Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it.

Take note of the reference to Sodom's 'daughters'; i.e., other nearby cities which had not participated in the specific incident related in Genesis 19 but who presumably shared the same cruel, self-centred and loveless lifestyle. The inhabitants of all of these cities had participated in the 'abomination' (the meaning of which is not spelled out in detail), not just the Sodomites. Therefore, anal penetration doesn't appear to be the focus here. So many things were called abominations in the legal material of the Old Testament that we can't know what laws were broken. 

Sodom becomes a byword for great sinfulness generally, rather than for homosexuality, in Isaiah 1 and 3, and Jeremiah 23. Jerusalem is called Sodom in Revelation 11:8 because it is the site of Christ's crucifixion. Jude 1 also uses Sodom as a metaphor for those who profess to be fellow believers, but who use freedom in Christ as license for any kind of evil behaviour--the very thing that Paul warned his Roman readers about in Romans 6:1-2. What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?

Perhaps surprisingly, given the way in which Sodom was held up as the epitome of evil, Jesus puts their sins into perspective in the passage in Matthew 10 where he sends his apostles out on their first 'tour':

Matthew 10:5-15 - These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay. Acquire no gold or silver or copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics or sandals or a staff, for the laborer deserves his food. And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart. As you enter the house, greet it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.

Here there is certainly no reference to debased sexual sin. What was worse than the sins of Sodom and the other cities (including Gomorrah)? More to be condemned were people seeing the power of God (healing of many diseases, ridding the possessed of demons, even resurrections), and refusing to accept the obligations that this knowledge placed upon them (providing hospitality, learning from God's servants, responding in love and gratitude to God's revelation). This sounds very much like Ezekiel 16 above, but with this amplification: having an even clearer revelation of God's power and nature through the activities and teachings of Jesus' disciples, they are more accountable for their response.
  
I am proposing then, particularly when we remember the Apostle's revelatory take on Levitical teaching (see my earlier posts), that it is not acts in themselves but the motivation for the acts that is in question in Romans 1. Paul is looking at men and women who, if they took their knowledge of God's nature, power, and priorities seriously, would be loving, merciful, faithful, self-disciplined, and concerned for what's best for others. But he sees just the opposite--including individuals who are seeking sexual satisfaction wherever and however they can find it. Note that the individuals in Romans 1 appear to be exercising a choice to abandon their usual practice in favour of another solely for sexual gratification. Paul turns himself inside out to denounce this choice and the degraded motivations that prompt it.

Now, if we believe as many do, that there is only one sexual orientation that all share (an unambiguous, full-on attraction to the opposite sex), then an argument that Paul was dismissing all gay sex as sinful could possibly be made. But I am convinced by scientists who have no reason for fabricating or misinterpreting their evidence, that there is a small but significant percentage of God's creatures who feel attracted to the same sex in the very same way that I feel attracted to women. Such people would not be abandoning their natural inclination for the opposite sex in order to mate with someone of the same gender as is referenced in Romans 1 above. Theirs would not be some kind of impure and degrading lust, but a simple following through on one's normal orientation, with the same possibilities for monogamy, full commitment, and fidelity as are there for me.

I also believe that one would be taking biblical teaching farther than it was ever intended if one were to say that a person's same-sex attractions are no different morally than kleptomania, homicidal mania, pedophilia, or any other compulsion or perversion; i.e., outside of the person's control but evil if acted upon.

But this post has gotten pretty long. So we'll look at this matter next.