This is the third part of this series that looks at Romans 1 (Read the first section here, and the second here). This part of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome is the most significant set of verses used to oppose homosexuality, and so it’s worth spending some time on. Thus far, I’ve shown three problems with the traditional reading:

1. A plain reading of the text makes it clear that Paul is talking about people who are filled with lust, sexually out of control and who are descending into moral bankruptcy. This is not relevant to God-fearing, loving gay couples.
2. There are sins – evil and wicked actions – listed in Romans 1. But there are also certain activities that Paul calls “culturally unacceptable” – these are not wicked actions and God is not opposed to them. In Romans 2, Paul will talk about circumcision in this way, and he’ll return to this theme over and over again in this letter, using many different examples, including observance of holy days and food sacrificed at the temples. In Romans 1, he talks about male homosexuality and women who have sex for pleasure alone (“unnatural sex” in the Jewish worldview), and says that some Christians find these socially unacceptable. But they are not evil or sinful. Do not call anything unclean, when God has not called it unclean.
3. The purpose of Romans 1 is Romans 2 – you cannot read the first without the second. It is clear when you do so that Paul’s main point is that we should NOT judge other people on the basis of the actions he listed in Romans 1.

I want to go even further in this part of the series and summarise all the points I’ve made so far by showing you that Paul has a progression in mind: These people have abandoned God, and started worshipping idols. As God abandons them to this, they slip into a lifestyle that spirals ever downward until it is characterised by “no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy” (verse 31). The progression, as we will see below, is from socially unacceptable behaviour to morally wrong actions, to complete loss of humanity. Paul is going to show the Jewish readers that they have a similar progression of issues that other people could point to as signs of them not being committed to God enough. This completely changes how we should read the verses on homosexuality, and makes the most sense of Romans 2, and, in fact, the whole letter. I will then show again – at the risk of repeating myself too much – the importance of Romans 2 (and the rest of the letter) to understanding how we interpret Romans 1. This is a vital key to identifying how we have so badly misinterpreted Romans 1 for so long.

What the sin actually is

Before we do this, though, I want to talk to those of you who still believe that God is opposed to homosexuality. Assuming you are right for just a moment, it’s still important to ask what this might mean. What part of “being homosexual” is actually sinful?
Continue reading The Bible and Same Sex Relationships, Part 12: What Romans 1 is Really All About →

In the previous section of this series, we showed that the letter to the Romans only makes sense as Paul’s treatise to Jewish and Gentile Christians to accept each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, and not to let their various cultural practices get in the way of this. Paul shows the Jews that although they are God’s chosen people and believe that they have a special status in eternity, actually they have failed God just like everyone else. Paul’s intent in Romans 1 is to set the Jewish believers up a bit, by caricaturing Gentile sinners, and sucker punching Jewish readers in Romans 2.

But this does not deal with the fact that Paul lists a lot of sins in Romans 1, and clearly indicates that these actions are evil. That Jews and Gentiles have both sinned does not reduce the impact of the list of sins in Romans 1. But does Paul really say that homosexuality is sinful? He says it is shameful. He says it is against nature. But is this the same as being sinful? And what exactly are the sins (and shameful things that are against nature) that Paul is concerned about?

The main traditional argument against homosexuality misreads Romans 1. It sees it as Paul’s condemnation of the Gentiles on the basis of their rejection of God and especially what is often called “creation order”. The traditional view is based on the view that God created man and woman, making them suitable for each other and that this is the only form of marriage allowed in Scripture. It argues that Jesus Himself (in Matthew 19 and Mark 10) appears to affirm that issues related to marriage hinge on how God created humanity (although Jesus was actually answering a specific question about divorce – we’ll deal specifically with Jesus’ comments later in this series). Therefore, the traditional argument says, the sin of homosexuality is the giving up of natural desires and engaging in unnatural acts, which are defined as any same gender sexual activity.

But this is not what Paul actually says. As we have to do with all Biblical passages, we need to look more closely at the words and phrases used and see if they’re as clear in the original language and context as we imagine them to be in our own. When we do this, we find immediately that they are not. “Shameful” or “degrading” practices are clearly linked to cultural preferences. And going “against nature” does not mean something that is inherently evil, but rather something that is against accepted practice. When read in the light of this understanding, we see a clear progression in Paul’s description of a descent into moral decay, from idolatry to culturally unacceptable behaviour to sinful actions to moral decay to the complete destruction of humanity (we’ll come back to this in the next section in more detail). Homosexuality falls into the culturally unacceptable category, and is not considered sinful and evil.

But let me not get ahead of myself here. Have a look for yourself.

Continue reading The Bible and Same Sex Relationships, Part 11: Shameful Acts and Going Against Nature →

So, eventually we get to Romans 1. When looking at the Biblical verses that speak against homosexual practice, this is the most important. I am going to take four blog posts to deal with this passage, because it is so significant for the issue of whether God affirms same gender marriage.

We’ve seen already that the other Biblical verses that have traditionally been used to show that God is against same gender marriage and sexual activity are actually talking about specific abusive and cultic sexual practices. If you’re just joining the conversation now, you might want to go back and catch up on the parts of the series you’ve missed. Romans 1 is important because it appears to do more than this – it seems to say that homosexuality is “against nature”, and therefore a direct affront to God. It also implies that homosexual desires are actually a curse from God and a sign of the moral degradation of society. This is what many Christians believe – and Romans 1 is where they go for Biblical proof.

If we’re going to change the church’s traditional view on homosexuality, we’re going to have to show that Romans 1 does not actually say what most Christians have believed it says for the past 2,000 years. But that’s precisely what I am going to do.

I’m going to do this in a few different ways.

In this post, I want to start by actually looking at the plain reading of the text, but through the eyes of a gay person committed to living to a godly life. I want you to see – without any detailed analysis of the text – that actually the plain reading of the text is not what you think it is. It talks of people consumed by lust and sexually – and morally – out of control. This is not true of most gay couples.

Continue reading The Bible and Same Sex Relationships, Part 10: Re-Read Romans 1 →

This is part 9 of a series of blog posts looking at the issue of the Bible and how Christians should approach the issue of LGBT people and same sex relationships. You can find the full index of the series here.

Words matter. The Bible wasn’t written in English. In fact, the languages it was written in are no longer used anywhere in the world. In order to understand the Bible, we therefore need to trust that the words we read today have been accurately translated for us, and that we understand their meaning and the meanings of idioms and phrases we find in the Bible. Sometimes the experts will argue – often at length – about the meanings of particular words and phrases. They do this so that we can be sure that we understand what God meant us to understand in the words of the Bible. They do this because words matter.

My New Testament lecturer when I was at seminary, Prof. Jack Wiid, had written a Masters thesis of about 600 pages on the translation of just one word in the New Testament. He consulted with the NIV translation team on that particular word, convincing them of the correct interpretation. Words matter.

Take for example two words we’re going to meet again later in this series: “helpmate” and “head”.

Continue reading The Bible and Same Sex Relationships, Part 9: The ‘Soft’ in 1 Corinthians – the meaning of ‘malakos’ →

So far, we have seen that we cannot look to the specific Old Testament references to homosexuality nor to OT stories usually associated with homosexuality for assistance in our primary goal of discovering whether monogamous LGBT relationships are acceptable to God. As we move to the New Testament, three things immediately strike the reader: (1) none of the NT authors quote or refer to the OT laws about homosexuality; (2) there are no stories of the church dealing with homosexual individuals, even though we know it was absolutely pervasive in the prevailing culture; and (3) Jesus himself has nothing directly to say on the topic.

There are, in fact, only three verses that refer directly to homosexuality in the New Testament: Romans 1:18-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and 1 Timothy 1:8-11. Most scholars agree that 1 Cor. 6 and 1 Tim. 1 are ambiguous at best, and it is to these that we now turn.

Why Did Paul Make Up a Word – and What Does It Mean?

In both of these passages, the author, Paul, uses a particular word to describe people who engaged in activities he considers to be sinful. The Greek word is arsenokoit?s and scholars agree that Paul actually made this word up. Consider this carefully. In a cultural context where homosexuality was considered acceptable and was commonplace, Paul had a number of options for the words he could have used to describe whatever was in his mind. These included, for example, paiderast?s, pallakos, kinaidos, arrenoman?s, and paidophthoros. There are also technical terms, such as the lover (erast?s), the beloved (er?menos, paidika), to give the body for purposes of intercourse (charis, charidzesthai), as well as slang terms that could have been used to indicate various forms of culturally accepted homosexuality, or even homosexuality in general. Paul doesn’t use any of these.

We saw in the previous section of this study that homosexuality was referenced extensively in ancient literature. Greek and Roman writers such as Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle and Plutarch all talk about homosexuality, discussing it’s merits and demerits, and none use arsenokoit?s. First-century Jewish writers, Josephus and Philo, wrote about homosexuality, including the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, but did not use arsenokoit?s in their works. Early Christian writers like Tatian, Justin Martyr, Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom all wrote negatively about homosexuality, but they used different words and phrases.

If it was Paul’s intention to deal with general homosexuality or any of these specific activities, he would surely have selected one of the more common and less ambiguous terms available to him. Instead, he chooses to make up a word that previously did not exist in the language. He clearly had something specific in mind. We need to be clear what that is.

Continue reading The Bible and Same Sex Relationships, Part 8: Male-Bedders – the meaning of ‘arsenokoitai’ →

We’re at part 7 of this series, and we arrive now at the New Testament. There are three verses that reference same-gender sexual activity directly, and some references by Jesus to the form of marriage (made in response to a question about divorce). Before we deal with each of these verses in turn, we need to understand the prevailing culture of the Graeco-Roman world in which the NT was written. This context is vital to our own understanding of the Biblical texts we will look at.

Some people use this cultural context to say that Paul’s commands to us today can safely be ignored. They put these in the same category as the length of men’s hair, women wearing jewellery or the repeated commands to greet each with “a holy kiss”. While it is important to understand how Biblical instructions and principles should be applied today – and we will see when we look at Romans 1 in a few posts from now that we cannot avoid the question of applicability in one key area of Paul’s “argument against nature” – I don’t rely on this line of argument to make my point. I don’t think Paul was anti-women, and I don’t think Paul was anti-gay. I think we’ve misunderstood his instructions, and in some cases even mistranslated his words.

So, to understand Paul – and Jesus – better, we need to get an understanding of how the world they lived in treated homosexuality and homosexuals – and dispel some myths in this regard. This will help us understand what they were saying when they talked about it.

The Graeco-Roman world

A few years before Jesus was born, in 27BC, Octavian became sole ruler of Rome, ended the Roman Republic and began the Roman Empire. He became Augustus Caesar, and ruled until 14AD, rapidly expanding the Roman Empire. Judaea and the Middle East were conquered in 6BC, becoming Roman provinces. In 54AD, Nero became Emperor, and he waged a brutal assault on both Jews and Christians, culminating in the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem in 70AD.

Throughout Jesus’ lifetime and the period of the writing of the New Testament (commonly held to have been completed towards the end of the first century AD), the Roman Empire, with it’s amalgam of Greek traditions and language with Roman culture and law, was the dominant cultural backdrop. The most significant issue for the early followers of Christ, who were all Jewish, was how to take the message of Jesus – a Judaean-based Jew – and make it relevant and accessible to “the Gentiles”. Paul, a Jewish scholar, trained in Greek and a religious leader held in high esteem yet also a Roman citizen, was the ideal “Apostle to the Gentiles”. Many of his writings address this specific issue, with the books of Romans, Galatians and Hebrews (who’s author is unattributed) almost entirely devoted to this topic.

Continue reading The Bible and Same Sex Relationships, Part 7: Graeco-Roman culture and homosexuality →