Bible, Gender, Sexuality

Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships

James V. Brownson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781467437370
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexualität & Gender in der Religion

Grapples conscientiously with biblical texts at the heart of the church's debate over same-sex relationships This thought-provoking book by James Brownson develops a broad, cross-cultural sexual ethic from Scripture, locates current debates over homosexuality in that wider context, and explores why the Bible speaks the way it does about same-sex relationships. Fairly presenting both sides in this polarized debate — "traditional" and "revisionist" — Brownson conscientiously analyzes all of the pertinent biblical texts and helpfully identifies "stuck points" in the ongoing debate. In the process, he explores key concepts that inform our understanding of the biblical texts, including patriarchy, complementarity, purity and impurity, honor and shame. Central to his argument is the need to uncover the moral logic behind the text. Written in order to serve and inform the ongoing debate in many denominations over the questions of homosexuality, Brownson's in-depth study will prove a useful resource for Christians who want to form a considered opinion on this important issue.

PART III

Exploring the “Boundary Language” of Romans 1:24-27

8

Lust and Desire

In the next four chapters I wish to shift the focus, at least to some extent. Whereas the previous chapters focused on identifying central themes and values that lie at the heart of the biblical vision for sexuality, the next four chapters focus on the boundaries that distinguish an emerging biblical vision for sexuality from a variety of distortions and corruptions. The subjects I will cover are lust, honor/shame, purity, and natural law. In each case I will explore the nature of this boundary language, its cultural particularity, and its transcultural significance. These four categories are all drawn from the language of Romans 1:24-27:

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 worshiped 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.

Paul characterizes the sexual behavior in these verses as lustful (“lusts,” “passions,” “consumed with passion”), as impurity, as shameful (“degrading,” “shameless”), and as “unnatural.” In each case, we must explore why Paul speaks in this way, and what is the more specific moral and rhetorical force of his comments. This close examination of negative ethical language illuminates the forms of moral logic that shape and undergird Paul’s discussion here, and they help us discern the underlying forms of moral logic that shape the Bible’s treatment of same-sex eroticism in general. In this chapter we turn first to Paul’s understanding of lust and desire.

The Larger Context of Paul’s Letter to the Romans

Before exploring lust and desire more specifically, however, it is important to get an accurate picture of the overall flow of Paul’s thought in this opening of his letter to the Romans. These verses are part of a larger section of Romans (1:18–3:20), and the overall goal of this larger section is to demonstrate the universal sinfulness of humanity and the universal need of humanity for the salvation that is found in Paul’s gospel (1:16). Paul concludes this larger section beginning in Romans 3:9 by saying, “We have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin.” He follows with a long list of Scripture quotations affirming the universality of human sinfulness. Within this larger section, Romans 1:18-32 focuses on the sinfulness of Gentiles who are “without excuse” (1:20) in their sinfulness and their refusal to worship the true God, even though they have not received the law. Paul argues that the truth about God — God’s eternal power and deity — is plain to them in the created order (1:20). The core Gentile problem is idolatry: it is their refusal to worship the true God and instead their devotion to “images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” (1:23). This practice of idolatry constitutes rebellion against God, and as a result God hands them over “in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves” (1:24). The verses following verse 24 depict a cascading and intensifying montage of evil and corruption that culminates in a list of twenty-one separate vices in Romans 1:29-31.

Yet this is not the end of Paul’s argument. As Richard Hays has argued, Paul engages here in a “homiletical sting operation.” Hays writes:

The passage builds a crescendo of condemnation, declaring God’s wrath upon human unrighteousness, using rhetoric characteristic of Jewish polemic against Gentile immorality. It whips the reader into a frenzy of indignation against others: those unbelievers, those idol-worshipers, those immoral enemies of God. But then the sting strikes in Romans 2:1: “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”¹

Hays’s point is an important one. Paul’s argument assumes that his readers will agree with him entirely in Romans 1, and will applaud and join him in his outrage against such wickedness. This rhetorical ploy helps Paul expose the more subtle but no less deadly sins of judgmentalism and selfish ambition in the second chapter of Romans.²

But the rhetorical turn of Romans 2:1 only raises a further question. What does Paul mean when he says, “For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself because you, the judge, are doing the very same things”? A literal meaning of “the very same things” makes no sense. If Paul’s Roman readers are engaging in the same licentious and unlawful behaviors that Paul describes in chapter 1, they are not likely to be responding in judgmentalism but rather in defense of their actions. Why would anyone be outraged over the same behavior in which he or she is also engaged? The whole movement of Paul’s argument is based on the expectation that his readers will join him in rejecting the litany of specific sins described in Romans 1, and that these readers are at least trying to avoid living in this way. So what does Paul mean when he says in 2:1, “You, the judge, are doing the very same things”?

Two answers seem evident from the text. The first answer appears in Romans 2:1: “Passing judgment on another” is the sin that is equated with the licentiousness, greed, and lust portrayed in 1:18-32. The posture of judgmentalism entails essentially the same sin described in the previous chapter. But this only raises the further question: What does out-of-control lust have in common with judgmentalism? In both cases, what Paul seems to have in mind is the attempt to advance one’s own honor, status, and will at the expense of others. This interpretation is confirmed by a second piece of evidence found a bit later in the passage, in Romans 2:8, where Paul characterizes those who are subject to divine judgment as “those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness.” The Greek word translated here as “self-seeking” (eritheia) is an uncommon word and somewhat difficult to translate. But most interpreters follow the lexicon’s suggestion of “selfishness” — or, even better, “selfish ambition.” What is at stake here is the thirst for honor, status, and prestige that is so prevalent in the ancient world.³ Hence, as Paul sees it, what lustful pagans have in common with self-righteous judgmental Christians is that both are driven by the thirst for their own agenda — their own way, their own status, their own honor — while ignoring the concerns of everyone around them, particularly those of the living God. At the root of all sin is the will to power that resists the posture of humble gratitude and trust that marks human life as God intends it.

Indeed, as Robert Jewett has argued in his recent magisterial commentary on Romans, this is the discovery that marked Paul’s own conversion: the realization that his zeal for the law was in reality selfishly driven by his own longing for status and honor. In commenting on Romans 7:7 (“I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’”), Jewett defines the core problem driving covetousness as “the sin of asserting oneself and one’s group at the expense of others.”⁴ Jewett notes how this includes both Gentile competition for honor, as well as the Jewish desire for superior status through law observance. Such analysis also links with our discussion of Romans 1 and 2. The word for “covet” here in Romans 7:7 (epithumeō) comes from the same root as the word translated as “lusts of their hearts” (epithumiais) in Romans 1:24. Covetousness, out-of-control lust, and judgmentalism are all manifestations of the same root problem: “the sin of asserting oneself and one’s group at the expense of others.” These are “the very same things” (Rom. 2:1) that all sinners do. Later, in Romans 13:8-10, Paul will state the same case more positively, arguing — in keeping with the words of Jesus — that loving one’s neighbor as oneself represents the fulfillment of the law. This stands over against the many varieties of self-seeking that lie at the core of all human sinfulness and idolatry. Jewett argues that this concern for mutuality and cooperation among Christians lies at the heart of Paul’s overall agenda in writing Romans: urging the competing factious and disparate Roman tenement and apartment churches to welcome each other (15:7) and to unite together in support of Paul’s planned gospel mission to Spain (15:22-24).

Passion and Lust in Romans 1 — and in the Larger Historical Context

This larger rhetorical context helps to illuminate Paul’s discussion of passion and lust in Romans 1. In contrast to some streams of Hellenistic Judaism, Paul is not writing as a Christian philosopher, preaching about the irrationality of lust and the supremacy of reason informed by the law, as we see in some early Jewish texts like 4 Maccabees, which declares, “Devout reason is sovereign over the emotions” (1:1). Indeed, for Paul, the unredeemed mind is every bit as problematic as the flesh. Romans 1:28 not only speaks of the “lusts of the flesh” as a result of idolatry, but also describes how God “gave up” idolaters to a “debased mind.” The consequences of idolatry encompass the entire person. Hence, for Paul, the central conflict is not between reason and lust but between the “lusts of the flesh” and the renewing of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:16-17). What is centrally wrong about lust is not that it is irrational, or that it takes over and controls people’s lives (though Paul would certainly agree that lust does these things — and that that is a problem). Rather, the central problem with lust in Romans 1 is that it is an expression of idolatry in a specific sense: lust involves serving one’s own self-seeking desires rather than worshiping the one true God.⁵

Ironically, however, such self-seeking results in the loss of self-control. Paul speaks in Romans 1:26 of “dishonorable passions.” The word for “passions” in Greek (pathē) comes from a root that literally means “to suffer,” or “to be passive.” In the Greek language and the thought forms influenced by the language, emotional states were conceived as states of passivity in which the will and the higher powers of reason lost control over the person. Here is the central paradox that Paul describes in Romans 1: seeking to avoid their appropriate worship and service to God, and to establish their own agendas and their own independent purposes, humans end up enslaved to lustful passions instead, passions that control their lives and lead them to disgrace and corruption. Seeking greater autonomy, they lose control over their lives.

But Paul is not talking about just any ordinary kind of lust in this passage. The flow of the rhetoric makes it clear that the whole range of behaviors Paul describes in Romans 1, including same-sex eroticism, is for him an extraordinarily powerful and excessive manifestation of lust. We see a similar connection between idolatry and excessive lust and perversion in the Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish apocryphal text dating from a period not long before Paul’s writings.

¹²For the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life. . . . ²³For whether they kill children in their initiations, or celebrate secret mysteries, or hold frenzied revels with strange customs, ²⁴they no longer keep either their lives or their marriages pure, but they either treacherously kill one another, or grieve one another by adultery, ²⁵and all is a raging riot of blood and murder, theft and deceit, corruption, faithlessness, tumult, perjury, ²⁶confusion over what is good, forgetfulness of favors, defiling of souls, sexual perversion, disorder in marriages, adultery, and debauchery. ²⁷For the worship of idols not to be named is the beginning and cause and end of every evil. (Wisdom 14:12, 23-28)

It was a commonplace of Jewish rhetoric to link idolatry with excessive perversion and corruption, a “raging riot” of every form of evil. But we also find more specific references to same-sex eroticism as an expression of insatiable lust in Greco-Roman sources. The Roman orator Dio Chrysostom, for example, who wrote shortly after Paul’s time, speaks of same-sex eroticism as the manifestation of insatiable lust:

The man whose appetite is insatiate in such things, when he finds there is no scarcity, no resistance, in this field, will have contempt for the easy conquest and scorn for a woman’s love, as a thing too readily given — in fact, too utterly feminine — and will turn his assault against the male quarters, eager to befoul the youth who will very soon be magistrates and judges and generals, believing that in them he will find a kind of pleasure difficult and hard to procure. His state is like that of men who are addicted to drinking and wine-bibbing, who after long and steady drinking of unmixed wine, often lose their taste for it and create an artificial thirst by the stimulus of sweating, salted foods, and condiments.⁶

The early Jewish philosopher-theologian Philo, writing a bit earlier than Paul, makes a similar equation between same-sex eroticism and self-centered lust that refuses any boundaries. He comments on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah:

The land of the Sodomites, a part of the land of Canaan afterwards called Palestinian Syria, was brimful of innumerable iniquities, particularly such as arise from gluttony and lewdness, and multiplied and enlarged every other possible pleasure with so formidable a menace that it had at last been condemned by the Judge of All. The inhabitants owed this extreme license to the never-failing lavishness of their sources of wealth, for, deep-soiled and well-watered as it was, the land had every year a prolific harvest of all manner of fruits, and the chief beginning of evils, as one has aptly said, is goods in excess. Incapable of bearing such satiety, plunging like cattle, they threw off from their necks the law of nature and applied themselves to deep drinking of strong liquor and dainty feeding and forbidden forms of intercourse. Not only in their mad lust for women did they violate the marriages of their neighbours, but also men mounted males without respect for the sex nature which the active partner shares with the passive; and so when they tried to beget children they were discovered to be incapable of any but a sterile seed.⁷

Note that in all of these contemporaneous texts we see a clear echo of the language we find in Romans 1:27, which speaks of men who, “giving up” (or, to translate more accurately, “leaving behind”) natural intercourse with women, “were consumed with passion for one another.” What Paul has in mind here is not the modern concept of homosexual orientation, that is, the notion that some people are not sexually attracted to those of the opposite sex at all, but instead are inclined to love those of the same sex. Such a perspective is found nowhere in the literature of Paul’s day. Instead, in that literature, whenever same-sex eroticism is viewed negatively, particularly in sources contemporaneous with Paul, it is regarded as a particular manifestation of self-centered lust, one that is not content with women alone but is driven to ever more exotic and unnatural forms of stimulation in the pursuit of pleasure. It represents the pinnacle of wanton self-indulgence at the expense of others. It is entirely reasonable to assume that this is the kind of image that Paul’s language in Romans 1 would have stirred up in the minds of his original readers.⁸ Of course, this also raises questions about how this text should be applied to committed gay and lesbian unions today, questions that I will address in more detail below.

A Possible Allusion to the Roman Imperial House?

But there may well have been something even more specific that Paul intended to refer to with his words about sexual excess in Romans 1. Neil Elliott has called attention to the striking similarities between Paul’s language and the incredible greed, violence, and sexual excesses of Gaius Caligula, an emperor who reigned in a period not too long before Paul wrote Romans.⁹ First of all, Gaius is closely linked to the practice of idolatry. The Roman writer Suetonius reports how Gaius “set up a special temple to his own godhead, with priests and with victims of the ...