St Paul & Sexuality - Part 1

In a comment on one of my previous posts I was asked what I thought St Paul actually said to those disciples of Jesus who were sexually attracted to people of the same sex. 

That’s a terrific question!
But one of the reasons we have genuine debates about this is precisely because nowhere does St Paul say, “Now about those gay people, this is what you should think,” or “Now about those two blokes in your church who are planning to get married - here’s my take.”

Does this mean we know nothing about St Paul’s thoughts? 

No.

We know a lot - but we know it because of all sorts of things St Paul wrote, and not just proof texts that mentions certain words. And we can add to what we know with other stuff that seems pretty darned clear - 

If we keep the same rules for everyone, and remain civil and humble as we negotiate our way around the Scriptures.  

That said, whenever I begin to talk Bible and don’t simply repeat the traditionalist viewpoint (though, of course, that should read “one of the traditionalist viewpoints” - like evangelicals generally, traditionalists are the modern counterpart of the old Jewish joke - put two traditionalists in a room, get three opinions…) I know that someone is going to label me a ‘Revisionist’. Usually this is not meant entirely kindly. 

Well, confession time, I love this label. 

To be a re-visionist, one is trying literally to see something again. To see something that was always there, but which somehow has become difficult to make out clearly. It is always time to peel away the mist of time and culture and expectation and “see again” in God’s word what God always had for us. Last year was the 500th anniversary of the start of Luther’s Reformation, and in the shadow of that, it’s good to note that we are all, always called to be such “Re-envisionists”. I love to be gifted with this label - or anything close to it -  and I take it as an enormous compliment whenever it comes my way.  

For example: 

At a time when the #MeToo movement is winning the Time ‘Person of the Year’ award, and when the BBC is joining Hollywood in being attacked for still perpetuating a gender pay-gap, these words from Thomas Cahill are a useful sharp intake of breath:

“Christianity’s claim that all were equal before God and all equally precious to him ran through class-conscious, minority-despising, weakness-ridiculing Greco-Roman society like a charged current. It is no wonder really that the primitive church seemed an almost fairyland harbour to women, who had always been kept in the shadows, and to slaves, who had never before been awarded a soupçon of social dignity or political importance.”

Re-envisioning changes life.

The Church should always be at the forefront of fighting social injustice. The Church should always be challenging accepted social mores and changing them into something more akin to God’s Kingdom. The Church should always be standing with those on the fringes of society and giving them a harbour and a home and a place where at last they are seen as fully human, fully loved. 

Because if we don’t, if we just get comfortable with what we’ve always done - then forget the fringes of society, it tuns out that it is in my ministerial lifetime that women have attained any kind of parity with men in the Church of England pastoral ministry, and it’s actually since I moved to my current parishes that women have begun to attain that parity in episcopal ministry. No matter what large letters St Paul might use to write “No male or female” , our vision has gotten lazy.

So let’s do a little re-envisioning for those who need it as we consider how God reveals his truth around the whole issue of sexuality; let’s re-envision what God’s word has always had for those who won’t stay in the shadows on this one too.

I’m going to write a series of pieces on St Paul and the sexuality question; if I don’t answer everything today - please wait patiently. More is coming!

Back to Romans 

But where to start?

Romans 1.

Take a moment to click the link and read it again.

St Paul with his life-long background in the Jewish faith as taught by the Pharisees of his day fills the letter to the Romans with Old Testament ideas. Throughout the Epistle he speaks from his Jewish heritage. The Old Testament Scriptures are there again and again and St Paul uses the Torah, the Prophets (major and minor) and the Psalms to form his Christ-centred world-view. He make his points, referencing Adam, Abraham, Moses and the place of the Old Covenant Israelite people of God in God’s continuing purposes. He considers the Temple festivals of the Day of Atonement and the Passover as he talks about the Cross of Christ. And although he often adds in nuanced overtones for an audience made up of Gentiles as well as Jews, it is his own people who get the lion’s share of his thinking – obviously: this is where he comes from. He plays the home crowd. Without understanding the Old Testament it is impossible to understand Romans. 

Which gives us a problem as we think about the sexuality question, and notably the way he addresses same-sex issues here in chapter one.

For someone grounded in Jewish scholarship, all the gay stuff people get hung up on in Romans 1 is not very Old Testament. 

In fact it all feels very modern – our current concerns, our contemporary social issues – we evangelicals are happy to see that if people fall away from God then the ultimate result is sexual sin, and chief amongst it – blokes with blokes, women with women. But our cultural take blinds us to the simple truth that it’s really hard to get this from the Old Testament. 

So is this what Romans 1 is about?

Sometime ago I wrote an essay to the Pilling Commission as they worked out how the Church of England might approach its looming crisis on sexuality. I wrote about Romans 1. A bit of re-envisionism. 

I was surprised that people were surprised by it, and all I can say is that as I speak to people now, I’m glad that some of the ideas in it seem to have got around a bit. Though even today I had time to sit down with a wonderful friend, a theologian in the church, who had never come across my angle before.

All I said was - Romans 1 isn’t about sex.

It’s about sin.

Sin not Sex

Sex and sin are very different things. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron got into trouble in the 2017 election for his views on gay sex - first for not saying what he believed, then for saying he didn’t think gay sex was sinful, then in early 2018 for saying he regretted saying that. 

His interview (on Premier Christian Radio) in 2018 was bound to cause trouble - as he acknowledged - because he was going to use a theology that was beyond the soundbite of the Media World. Sin, said Tim, was about falling short of the glory of God. We’re all sinners, all of us. It’s not about what you do. How could he explain that to journalists who just wanted to know what his moral view was on what other consenting adults did in private? It’s not the same! Understanding human sinfulness before God and being judgemental about other people - it’s not the same thing!

And in that Tim gets St Paul really clearly.

St Paul has two big ideas in Romans 1 - sin and righteousness. And we understand them better as we see them play together. Righteousness is a right relationship with God (and from that, with each other); sin is that relationship broken. Falling short, in Tim’s words. St Paul describes it in Romans 1 (and 2) in its bleakest form - 

Idolatry.

The right relationship is the created person loving and worshipping their Creator. The broken relationship is the created person loving and worshipping something else other than God. Maybe something bad, maybe something good, but when put in God’s place - it’s a disaster. 

Romans 1 seems to focus on the Gentile disaster; Romans 2 brings it home to any smug Jewish believers - #UsToo! says St Paul. And when we have all broken away from God, our worship choices are shown in the lives we choose to lead. So Romans 3 hits hard: all have sinned - and then hits again gloriously, surprisingly, harder - but for all, a gift…

So why the gay stuff in Romans 1? Why indeed. If you were starting from the Old Testament and making an argument of a journey from the brokenness with God to the life it leads on to - from idolatry to immorality as it were, from leaving God to losing everything, and you had to choose your first, prime, major morality issue to put at the height of a piece like this, something that would make the argument clear, something that would bring everyone on side, an example that would prove your case – I don’t even think homosexuality would even occur to you. Three, maybe four texts in the whole Jewish Scriptures? Even scraping around for extras, we are pushed for half a dozen. Certainly not double figures.

If the argument is about idolatry leading to immorality, brokenness in our relationship with God leading to fully broken lives in the world today, then what about using major Old Testament issues such as oppression of the poor? Adultery? Disobeying parents? Why doesn’t St Paul just go there?

Just on numbers of people affected – why go “Everyone is broken from God so people do gay stuff”. Seriously, no matter how bad you think that is, why make your most important point and then make your application fit only a tiny minority? I remember reading a comment about this on a blog somewhere (years ago) that said something like: "The Bible contains 6 admonitions to homosexuals and 362 to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision."  I think Tim Farron might want to address some theology there… My point here is - relatively speaking, gay people just don’t get any print space in the Scriptures, whilst straight people are constantly being brought to heel for all their sexual shenanigans. 

To make the big argument, surely if St Paul were doing the whole journey from wrong worship to wrong living, and a sexual sin was required to underscore that point, adultery is a huge Old Testament issue and would fit the bill? Or there’s plain old generalised prostitution – both of which sins were used as metaphors by the Prophets for the causes of the Exile, that great, disastrous, world-changing turn-around for the Jews six hundred years before Jesus. The whole idolatry to immorality trip is strangely and perversely indicated by St Paul by using homosexuality as his key issue; it just doesn’t work in the Bible terms that the rest of his argument depends on. 

A Jew of his day would frankly look at it and go - “Huh?”

Or perhaps St Paul really does hate gays? 

I was having tea with a friend of mine a little while back, a bishop known for his occasional outspoken remark, and we began to speak about how St Paul writes of sexuality issues in Romans. I started to tell him how I read the passage before my friend cut me off by saying - 

“I just think he’s wrong.”

Words guaranteed to make a good evangelical spit his tea out.

But if St Paul writes what he writes in Romans 1 ignoring the Old Testament world that surrounds him at every other point because he simply does hate gays, why shouldn’t my outspoken bishop friend be right to call him on it?

You see, talking about gay sex in this context may look obvious to us, but our contemporary terms are not I fear so obvious either to St Paul or to his readers, and that’s a huge problem. 

Getting the context

I’m afraid this thought occurs to me every time I read excellent books on this topic. I’ve already referred on this blog to William Loader’s very thorough ‘Sexuality in the New Testament’. It provides an in-depth run-through of how people in the First Century understood sexuality, and how a Jewish audience of St Paul’s time would read texts on homosexuality. And although Loader does refer to the main theological argument of Romans 1, he basically goes on to use the chapter as if it is simply a theological treatise on attitudes to gay people and what they get up to. Given the rest of contemporary literature, Loader has no doubt that Paul is pretty clear that gay sex is not acceptable. 

Loader’s work is detailed, his understanding of the surrounding literature extremely thorough, and I recommend reading his work - with this caveat: Romans 1 is not about sex and sexuality. And it’s certainly not about homosexuality. Any work on Scripture and sexuality has to wrestle with the issue of context because (again) nowhere in the New Testament do we find anyone simply saying, “Now, about those gay people and what they get up to, this is what you should think”.

Let me repeat that in case you missed it.

Nowhere in the New Testament do we find anyone simply saying, “Now, about those gay people and what they get up to, this is what you should think”.

Certainly not in Romans 1.

Romans 1 is not about sex. 

It is about sin. 

Sin is not about sex, it is about a broken relationship. As a Welsh friend of mine puts it, Wrong-shusness, rather than Righteousness.  

St Paul does not begin his great theological treatise with an issue that would be beyond the relevance of almost all of his readers/hearers. He knew a thing or two about being obtuse, but he also knew how to be clear when being clear really mattered. 

Arguments that try to understand what Romans 1 has to say about the sexuality issue must fail, until, of course, we stop using proof texts and start getting the context. 

Romans 1 (and 2 for that matter) are about being broken from God. The thing is, for us in our world, people who don't love God, who don't put him first - they look like Guardian readers. They would have voted Obama the third time. They have party weekends in Magaluf, which they don't entirely remember. They walk the dog quietly before opening a bottle of something nice. St Paul lived in a different world, and something of that world spills out of his words as he talks about what brokenness looks like.   

Am I saying that St Paul has no problem at all with gay sex and that Romans 1 is clear about this?

Please, let’s do this step by step. I am going to say - clearly, and without fear of contradiction - that St Paul is the gay person’s best friend. But we have more work to do before I can say that.

For now, what I am saying is that Romans 1 is not a text about sex. Any kind of sex. It’s a text about sin. About people who live broken away from God. Righteousness and Wrong-shusness. 

To apply the words of Romans 1, without a second thought, to gay people today whose lives may be given to Christ, and lived out in Christian faithfulness, love and service - well, that may lack a certain ethical rigour, and it certainly smacks of what one evangelist I know refers to as ‘imposition of the Scriptures’ rather than ‘exposition of the Scriptures’. 

We are going to do better than that. 

Next time in this series - if it’s not about sex, why confuse the issue? Why did St Paul have to go there at all? And why does he pick on gay sex more than straight sex anyway?