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.

Okay, time to tackle Paul

St. Paul is one of my heroes. So are Stephen the Martyr and the prophets Nathan, Jeremiah and Habakkuk. Nehemiah is pretty high on my list as well. Why this grouping you ask, oh faithful reader? I think it's because they were all plain-spoken. They specialized in the unvarnished truth. The more difficult the circumstances, the more assertive they became. None of them would win any popularity contests. Today's tastes run to everybody feeling good about themselves, and never is heard a discouraging word. Not so with these guys. Each was the Don Cherry of his day--only with the ability to speak his native language. And wear normal clothes.

The Apostle Paul in particular gets a bad rap in many quarters. My daughter spent a year studying at my alma mater, Queen's University in Kingston, ON. She told me of an English professor who took it upon himself to (mis)represent Paul's view of women as being subordinate to males (Paul actually considered women to be men's equals in every respect). The reaction of one female student was to bang her fist on her desk, exclaiming, "Bad, bad Paul." In fact, many modern female Christians dislike the Apostle a good deal because of their regrettable misunderstanding of his teaching on the subject.

I had a friend at a church I once attended who was himself soft-spoken and tender-hearted, who championed the vulnerable, and always tried to smooth over difficulties--all lovely characteristics, of course. He couldn't stand Paul. Proponents of that most hard-nosed, mechanistic of theologies, Calvinism, find their inspiration in his writings. Many find him arrogant. The poor fellow can't catch a break.

Paul is also lauded in some quarters--and vilified in others--as being the champion of the anti-gay crowd, as we read in a recent post. His words in Romans chapter 1 are seen as the clear and decisive re-statement of Leviticus 18; i.e., that homosexuality is an abomination.

But as with his views on women, I believe that Paul's teaching on gay issues is completely misunderstood. Here's why.

[I am grateful for the outstanding scholarship of James V. Brownson for the discussion that follows. His book Bible. Gender. Sexuality: Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships, Eerdmans, 2013 is must reading for anyone interested in an exegetical and theological study of the Bible and homosexuality.]

We have already seen in the New Testament the abrupt change in views of certain Levitical and Deuteronomical teachings having to do with kosher foods.

1. The Apostle Peter in Acts 10:9ff - Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”
“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”
The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven....Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people. He said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection. 

2. The Apostle Paul in Romans 14:14 - I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean.
 
These two Christian leaders had clearly understood that with the dawning of the age of the Messiah, that all the old bets were off. A radical reevaluation of what it meant to live a life worthy of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit involved a whole new reorientation of the relationship between principles, values, and behaviour.  

No longer was the focus on a scrupulous avoidance of those things in one's environment that could make one ritually impure--coming in contact with a leper; non-kosher food; working on the Sabbath; even a woman's "time of the month". Rather, the critical issue was one of motives. 

And they didn't learn this from anybody strange.

1. Jesus on defilement from food: Mark 7:5ff - The Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”....Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”.... “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)

2. Jesus on the defilement that comes from contact with leprosy: Mark 1:40-41 - A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!”

3. Jesus on the defilement that comes from a woman's menstrual flow: Mark 5:25ff - And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.... Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” 

4. Jesus on working on the Sabbath: Matthew 12:1ff - At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.”
He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that the priests on Sabbath duty in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are innocent? I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
Going on from that place, he went into their synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Looking for a reason to bring charges against Jesus, they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” He said to them, “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”
Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other. But the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus.

St. Paul really got this. Look at his definition of commendable behaviour to his Corinthian readers in 2 Cor. 5:9-12 - We make it our goal to please [Christ], whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience. We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us, so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart.

What is seen, rather than what is in the heart. Sounds familiar. Look up above again at Jesus speaking in Mark 7. Paul, the self-described former Hebrew of the Hebrews, is setting aside all of the old categories of acceptable godly behaviour--that which can be seen and assessed--in favour of something that is comes from within. Another translation of 2 Cor. 5:12 captures it nicely: We are not again commending ourselves to you but are giving you an occasion to be proud of us, so that you will have an answer for those who take pride in appearance and not in heart. 

Sounds a lot like Jesus' denunciation of those scrupulous Pharisees in Luke 11:42-43, doesn't it? "Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs [conspicuous behaviour], but you neglect justice and the love of God [inner motivation]. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone. Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important seats in the synagogues and respectful greetings in the marketplaces" [pride in appearances].

In Matthew 23:27 Jesus words are particularly condemnatory: You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. This statement dramatically turns Levitical teaching on its head. To touch a tomb made a person ritually defiled, and unable to participate in religious rites. But the Pharisees defiled others by their inner lives.

Paul pounded this new view--that defilement comes from within--home in his first letter to the Corinthians. Concerning the outside defilement that comes from non-kosher food, Paul said this:

I Cor. 10:23-33: 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. No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.
Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience, for, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.”
If an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience. But if someone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, both for the sake of the one who told you and for the sake of conscience. I am referring to the other person’s conscience, not yours. For why is my freedom being judged by another’s conscience? If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for?
So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God—even as I try to please everyone in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved.

This is a truly remarkable passage. It uses the Jewish view of defilement from non-kosher food as a case study for what should determine behaviour. Paul starts off by saying that there is nothing that can necessarily be condemned on its own merits. Nevertheless, circumstances might dictate different responses to the same cues. How does one assess the import of circumstances? The likely impact your decision will have on the long-term well-being of the other person. For further study, look at parallel teaching earlier in the letter at chap. 8.

Or consider this equally remarkable teaching on marital relationships from 7:12-14: If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

One only has to compare this teaching with that of the great Jewish leader Ezra in the 6th century BC, whose express purpose was to rid the newly restored nation of Judah of ungodly influence. Marriage to unbelievers ranked high on his list.

Ezra chaps. 9 & 10: After these things had been done, the leaders came to me and said, “The people of Israel, including the priests and the Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the neighboring peoples with their detestable practices.... They have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them. And the leaders and officials have led the way in this unfaithfulness.” When I heard this, I tore my tunic and cloak, pulled hair from my head and beard and sat down appalled. Then everyone who trembled at the words of the God of Israel gathered around me because of this unfaithfulness of the exiles. And I sat there appalled until the evening sacrifice.

Then, at the evening sacrifice, I rose from my self-abasement, with my tunic and cloak torn, and fell on my knees with my hands spread out to the Lord my God and prayed:

“I am too ashamed and disgraced, my God, to lift up my face to you, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens. From the days of our ancestors until now, our guilt has been great. Because of our sins, we and our kings and our priests have been subjected to the sword and captivity, to pillage and humiliation at the hand of foreign kings, as it is today....

While Ezra was praying and confessing, weeping and throwing himself down before the house of God, a large crowd of Israelites—men, women and children—gathered around him. They too wept bitterly. Then Shekaniah son of Jehiel, one of the descendants of Elam, said to Ezra, “We have been unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign women from the peoples around us. But in spite of this, there is still hope for Israel. Now let us make a covenant before our God to send away all these women and their children, in accordance with the counsel of my lord and of those who fear the commands of our God. Let it be done according to the Law....Then Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, “You have been unfaithful; you have married foreign women, adding to Israel’s guilt. Now honor the Lord, the God of your ancestors, and do his will. Separate yourselves from the peoples around you and from your foreign wives.”

Don't be confused by the reference to foreign wives. The issue here was not race. Moses married a non-Jewish woman. Ruth was a Moabite. The issue was that as foreigners, the women would not be followers of Yahweh. These Gentile women, and any offspring, would be unholy--that is, they would not be followers of the one true God. The only cure was to remove this dangerous and defiling element immediately. Paul's position couldn't be more different. Rather than an unbelieving spouse being an unhealthy influence that must be got rid of, the believing spouse is a sanctifying influence on the non-Christian. And the kids themselves are deemed to be holy, rather than the opposite as Ezra saw it.

Paul the Liberator.

What you will find in Paul's teachings, following Jesus' lead, is a complete moving away from the avoidance of anything that might cause a person to become impure in God's eyes, to a confident engagement with the wider culture. With respect to sexual behaviour, sexual impurity is defined by an inward state of lust, or a lack of self-restraint. As with other behaviours, no longer are acts themselves to be debated, but the inner motivation of the person in question. 

But what then do we make of Romans 1:18-32? Is this a singular instance where Paul focuses on specific acts themselves rather than on motives?