The Bible and Sexuality: Romans 1 by Mark Rich

Romans 1:18-32

The desire to use the Bible as a weapon against LGBTQ people gets especially toxic with this passage. However, when we actually read it while thinking, the attack falls apart rather quickly.

“¹⁸For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth.¹⁹For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰Ever 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. So they are without excuse; ²¹for 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. ²²Claiming to be wise, they became fools; ²³and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

“²⁴Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, ²⁵because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

“²⁶For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, ²⁷and 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.

“²⁸And 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. ²⁹They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, ³⁰slanderers, God-hated, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, ³¹foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³²They 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.”

In today’s overheated toxic environment, the whole passage has been ignorantly assumed to be talking about LGBTQ people, and then we start bashing away – not because that’s what Jesus wants, but because that’s what we who are evil want. However, a moment’s thought will show that this evil interpretation is clearly not right.

First, it’s very odd that Paul, who’s a very talented rhetorician, doesn’t actually say who he’s talking about. He just launches, beginning in v. 18, into the pronomials “those…their…them…they” without giving us an actual proper noun to attach them to. So the reader is put off balance, and has to work to infer the reference without Paul telling us. But the reference quickly becomes very clear. It’s not LGBTQ people; it’s pagans: “…they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.”

There’s no reasonable way this reference can be fairly attributed to LGBTQ persons either then or now. There is no evidence at all from any time or place that LGBTQ persons are somehow solely and uniquely engaging in idolatry. And all the other evils that the passage attributes to “them” are all understood to flow directly from the one central evil of pagan idolatry. So the subjects being referred to by the pronouns in this passage are pagans, not LGBTQ persons. This passage is not anti-LGBTQ; it is religious chauvinism.

Second, because of the ancient practices of pagan temple prostitution and other forms of temple sex, the descriptions of non-heterosexual behavior in verses 26 and 27 cannot be understood to be the practices of people with a certain sexual orientation.

Third, it’s absurd to on the face of it to charge LGBTQ people alone with the huge barrage of evils cited in verses 29-32. In fact, it’s even absurd to charge all non-monotheists with all those things, because any society in which these practices were the norm would certainly destroy itself.

Finally, why in the world would the pre-eminent apostle to the Gentiles launch into such an open and viciously chauvinist diatribe? This passage had to have been just as shocking in the first century as it is in the twenty-first. If Paul himself really believed those things he would be trying to oppose and destroy Gentiles and not to save them – in other words, he would be doing the exact thing that the modern LGBTQ persecutors are doing. But that’s not what he was doing, because that’s not who he was and that’s not the gospel.

Scholars have been asking these kinds of questions for several years now, along with other questions about chapter 2 in Romans. They have come to realize that the argument in 1:18-32 is not actually Paul’s own argument. He is quoting and summarizing the diatribe of a particular person he identifies in chapter 2 as ‘the Teacher’. This is evidently a Jewish teacher and polemicist in Rome who has developed this diatribe as a way of attacking the powerful (and often anti-Jewish) Gentile culture around the smaller and poorer Jewish community in Rome.

So here is what we think Paul was doing. He repeats in summary form the Teacher’s diatribe in chapter 1 in order to then turn the tables on the Teacher himself in chapter 2, specifically accusing him of both adultery and temple-robbing but also generally accusing him of hypocrisy, because he himself is breaking the Torah that he claims to champion and honor. Paul then goes on to broaden his two attacks, against Gentiles in chapter 1 and against the hypocritical Jewish teacher in chapter 2, into a single accusation against all humanity in chapter 3. There he makes the wholly shocking accusation, which no one in history had ever made before, that all humanity is entirely sinful: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Paul doesn’t make this argument out of general misanthropy. He does it in order to highlight the extraordinary, undeserved, and wholly gracious act of God in Jesus Christ.

“²¹But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, ²²the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ [or rather, through the faith of Jesus Christ] for all who believe. For there is no distinction, ²³since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; ²⁶it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus [or, who has the faith of Jesus].”

Paul’s rhetorical strategy in chapters 1-3 is to use the vicious and chauvinist force of the Teacher’s diatribe, but to broaden it into a full-blown indictment of all of humanity, in order then to proclaim all the more strongly the wholly gracious response of God through Jesus Christ into salvation available for all.

Now that’s divine grace! And I hope we can now see how very, very tragic, sad, and senseless it is to use this one part of Paul’s very powerful argument for the wholly undeserved grace of God for all humanity as a club with which to beat a small minority of humans. How completely contrary to the undeserved, unmerited grace of God!

Tomorrow we will look at the world’s and the church’s insanity, and how the gospel can cure it.

Mark Rich is a lecturer in theology and New Testament with ELCA Global Mission in East Africa.