In Romans 1.16-17 Paul proclaimed the thesis of his letter: That the good triumphal news to which he has unashamedly devoted his life reveals God’s justice in God’s welcoming everyone, both Jew and Gentile, into the Kingdom of Heaven. Today’s text (1.18-32) starts the first big section of the letter’s body, a lengthy argument that stretches from 1.18 to the end of chapter 3 — an argument that starts in a rather unexpected way. But this is also a text that has become the major flashpoint in contemporary debates in Christianity about homosexuality, which makes it hard for many people today to read it in terms of the argument Paul is making. I’ve previously addressed the text through the lens of that debate, so if you’re interested, please see that post. But today, the goal will be look at the text largely apart from our own contemporary debates, reworking that earlier material for this series’ purposes.

Text

[1.18] For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven upon every impiety and injustice of people who suppress the truth in their injustice. [19] For what is knowable about God is clear to them, since God has revealed it to them. [20] For what is invisible to them — that is, God’s eternal power and divinity — has been visible and understandable from the creation of the kosmos in the things God has made, so they are without excuse. [21] But knowing God, they did not glorify or give thanks to God as God, but rather became futile in their reasoning and their senseless hearts were darkened. [22] Thinking they were wise, they became foolish, [23] and they exchanged the glory of the indestructible God for something destructible in the shape of a person, or birds, animals, or reptiles.

[24] Therefore, God handed them over to the appetites of their hearts, to the uncleanness of dishonoring their bodies with others, [25] exchanging God’s truth for a lie, and worshiped and served what was created instead of the maker, who is blessed until all eternity, Amen! [26] Therefore, God handed them over to their dishonourable passions: For their females exchanged their natural function for what is outside of nature, [27] and likewise, the males, leaving their natural function with women, burned in their desire for one another, males committing obscenity with males and receiving in themselves the proper penalty for their error. [28] And just as they did not see fit to hold God in their understanding, God handed them over to their discredited minds, to do what they shouldn’t: [29] filled with every injustice, evil, excess, and wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, and poor character, they are gossips, [30], slanderers, they despise God, they are arrogant, boastful, pretentious, they concoct wicked schemes, are disobedient to their parents, [31] foolish, bound by no relationship, without affection, and merciless. [32] Though they know what God has declared right — that all who do these things are deserving of death, not only do they still do them, but they applaud those who do them.

Experience

This is a great example for me of the importance of framing. As my previous Integral post on this text showed, this is a text which has historically had an outsized and generally negative role in my life, and so generally brings up big feelings when I read it. But, bracketing that conversation as I am here, the text becomes quite different: a rousing and inspiring testament to a kind of natural theology, of what creation can tell us about God, and what that means for how we live.

Encounter

The ‘characters’ we meet here are God, who is revealed in the created world, and humanity writ-large, apart from any kind of ‘special revelation’ or special relationship with God. And it’s not a pretty picture. It’s a story of progressive alienation — less a dramatic fall from grace than a slow but sure slipping down a mountainside.

Explore

The biggest questions the text raises revolve around the nature of Paul’s argument:

• How does Romans 1.18-32 fit into the overall picture of Romans?
• What is the internal logic of the argument?
• How does this logic compare with other treatments of these themes contemporary to Paul?

Literary Context

As we’ve seen, the conventions of first-century letter-writing suggest that the structure of Romans looks something more-or-less like this:

• Greetings (1.1-7)
• Introduction & Prayer (1.8-15)
• Thesis (1.16-17)
• Arguments (1.18-15.13)
• Exhortation (15.14-21)
• Conclusion (15.22-16.27)

This structure helps us to situate this passage. It follows directly after the letter’s thesis statement, and thus marks the transition into the body of the work and the arguments that support the thesis. As the first argument, we would expect it to set a common understanding of the problem that needs to be solved. So it might at first glance be a little surprising that Paul strikes such a negative tone to start off here — especially remembering that his audience is predominantly Gentile. But, if we ‘reverse engineer’ the problem from the solution Paul offers as the thesis, his rhetorical strategy becomes a bit more clear. If the answer is that God has acted to save both Jews and Gentiles alike in one common relationship, then the problem would be that both Jews and Gentiles are in need of salvation. And that is exactly what we see in the chunk of Romans that starts with our passage and ends at 3.20:

• 1.18-32: Gentiles have sinned
  • 2.1-16: But there is no room for spiritual arrogance
• 2.17-29: Those who have the Law have sinned
  • 3.1-8: But Jews have had the privilege of receiving God’s oracles
• 3.9-20: Both Gentiles and Jews are in the same position before God.

So, we see how today’s passage fits in with Paul’s argument. It’s the first piece of a broader argument intended to show that, as Romans 3.23 will summarize the matter, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So, Paul is not targeting Gentiles generally; it’s one part of an argument that everyone is in equal need of salvation.

Rhetorical Analysis

With this in mind, how does Paul make his argument that Gentiles have sinned and are in need of salvation?

If the book’s overall thesis is found in 1.16-17, the thesis of our passage (and the whole section that lasts through 3.20) is in 1.18: “For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven upon every impiety and injustice of people who suppress the truth in their injustice.” One might imagine a new Gentile convert making the excuse that they couldn’t have been expected to live justly because God had not given them the Law. Paul heads this argument off at the pass: the whole world is a kind of divine revelation, so they have no excuse (1.20). But even though they could have known God from a proper understanding of creation, they instead misunderstood the grandeur in creation and worshiped it instead of its Creator (1.21-23).

This fundamental misunderstanding had important consequences for Gentile life; Paul introduces these with the same formula: “God handed them over”: to idolatry (1.24-25), to their ‘dishonorable passions’ (1.26-27), and to their ‘discredited minds’, which manifests in all sorts of social ills and injustice (1.28-31). Whether these are intended to be sequential (each building on the last) or parallel (all are equally manifestations of the same problem) is an open question. To me, it seems best to choose the latter option because the third example is introduced by “they did not see fit to hold God in their understanding,” which refers back to the error in reading creation in v. 21-23, not to their sexual behavior (v.26-27). But either way, the text tells us that mistaking the created world for God is the fundamental Gentile sin from which everything else flows. Paul ends by confirming the thesis that the Gentiles are therefore rightly under God’s sentence (1.32).

Text in Historical and Cultural Context

Understanding the historical and cultural context of the Scriptures is always helpful, but it’s particularly enlightening in the case of Paul’s argument here in the second half of Romans 1. While it’s impossible to fit Paul into any particular school of Hellenistic philosophy, it’s clear that he partook in a common cultural language and understanding of how virtue and vice worked. This language was rooted in Stoic philosophy. Terms used in this passage, including ‘appetite’ (epithymia, 1.24) ‘uncleanness’ (akatharsia, 1.24), ‘passions’ (pathe, 1.26), ‘natural’ (physike, physis, 1.26, 27), ‘desire’ (orexis, 1.27) ‘obscenity’ (askhemosyne, 1.27), and ‘what should be done’ (kathekonta, 1.28), are all part of this cultural vocabulary. Among Hellenistic Jews, this Greek pop psychology was supplemented by the vocabulary and narratives of the Septuagint, the version of the Bible used widely by Jews of the Mediterranean diaspora. Both of these strongly at play in Romans 1.18-32.

Gentiles in the Hellenistic Jewish Understanding

The general argument Paul makes against Gentiles is that they have been blinded by their mis-reading of creation so that they have descended into idolatry, abnormal sexual behaviours, and every other kind of vice and injustice. This linking of every type of Gentile sin with idolatry was extraordinarily common in Hellenistic Jewish thinking (Eberhart; Elliott 192). Books or writers as varied as the Wisdom of Solomon, The Testament of Judah, Philo of Alexandria, and Josephus all tell basically the same story: Gentiles misunderstood creation and worshiped idols instead of God and from this error got caught in all kinds of sin, especially sexual sin. Philo and Josephus for their parts, explicitly link idolatry with the Greek practice of pederasty, which involved a creepy combination of education, mentorship, and sex between an adult male and a younger male in his teens to early twenties. So it isn’t just that Paul is using common words here, but also that he’s using the Jewish party line about Gentiles. And, as it happens, even the reference to homosexual liaisons in 1.26-27 is slotted exactly where one would expect to find it from this ‘boilerplate’ assessment of Gentile life (Eberhart; Elliott 192; Keesmaat & Walsh; Kruse 118).

Excess and Sin

The link between idolatry and other sins in this Hellenistic Jewish imagination was excess. And here it connects with Hellenistic thought as a whole, which was on this point particularly indebted to Stoicism (Barrett 36f; Witherington). While Paul only mentions excess in passing in this passage (as one of the sins listed in 1.29), we can see how it fits into this general scheme in a parallel passage, Ephesians 4.17-19:

1. the mind (nous) is faulty (cf., the ‘discredited mind (nous)’ in Romans 1.28), thereby
2. darkening the intellect (cf. Romans 1.25 where the ‘heart’ is darkened), which makes it so that
3. we cannot properly understand our bodily appetites (epithymia, cf. Romans 1.24), leading to
4. a confusion of need from want and thereby a lack of restraint, unclean (akatharos, cf. Romans 1.24) acts motivated by excess (pleonexia, cf. Romans 1.29). This is the sense of “God handed them over to the appetites of their hearts…” (1.24) and “…to their dishonourable passions” (1.26).

The ‘passions’ is an important word here. It is the blanket term in common Hellenistic and Roman, and therefore early Christian, understandings of the appetites gone awry. While Paul here talks about dishonourable passions, the opposite of this is not honorable passions — that would be a contradiction in terms in this framework — but passionlessness. It’s helpful at this point to connect passion, not with the idea of heat and excitement that the word connotes in English, but with passivity: To be passionate was to be passively pushed around by one’s appetites or emotions. In the hyper-patriarchal Roman world, such passivity was equated with effeminacy, while self-control was the hallmark of masculinity. As Cicero wrote, “Rule yourself … [and do not] do anything in a base, timid, ignoble, slavelike, or womanish way” (Tusculan Dis. 2.53f). In similar way, Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, wrote of his desire to “do nothing outside of control, nothing effeminately” (Epist. 67.4). What’s hard for us to understand from our own cultural viewpoint is that within this system, a man with many sexual conquests of women is ‘effeminate’ (see Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 7). Control over oneself is more important in this understanding of masculinity than power over others. In this context, homoeroticism was conceived of as an expression of sexual boredom more than anything: not as a ‘disordered sexuality’ but as sexuality lacking control.

Notice how well this fits with Paul’s argument in our passage: Gentiles have been ‘given over’ to their unrestrained appetites, leading to, among other things, sexual excess that manifests in homoeroticism. That what Paul has in mind excessive rather than inherently distorted sexuality is further demonstrated by how the Church Fathers read the passage. St. John Chrysostom wrote, “You see that the whole desire comes from an excess which cannot contain itself within its proper limits” (Fourth Homily on Romans); similarly, St. Augustine concludes from this passage that “He who is moderate in what is natural makes good use of it; but he who does not observe moderation abuses a good thing” (On Marriage and Concupiscence 2).

Natural and Unnatural

Before leaving this section, we have to address Paul’s use of the idea of what is ‘natural’ (physike) and ‘contrary to nature’ (para physin). For us, the idea of what is ‘natural’ comes with it a sense of ‘natural law’; this is heightened by this passage’s insistence that humanity should be able to know God from the created world. But we have to be cautious about this, because it’s not really now the idea of ‘naturalness’ was used in the first century. In this context, what is physike is less what is ‘in accordance with biological nature’ than what is ‘expected, normal, or conventional’ in terms of the good life. For example, in 1 Corinthians 11.13ff, Paul refers to men having long hair as being ‘unnatural’. This goes against not only physical reality — without active interference, men have long hair — but also against the many Old Testament passages that praise men with long hair (Samson being the clearest example). In a similar way, Roman writers like Cicero and Seneca referred to hot baths, potted plants, and feasting at night as ‘against nature’ (e.g Seneca, Epistles 122.7-8 and Cicero, De finibus 5.35-6). So the idea is far more about custom and expectation than ‘natural law.’ In the context of the argument of Romans 1, we’re talking about expectations surrounding gender roles. It’s telling that among the Church Fathers, Romans 1.26 was commonly interpreted not as talking about women having sex with women but women being ‘on top’ of a man! (Hanks 614; Eberhart).

We also need to be careful before reading too much into the language of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ in Romans 1 because Paul revisits this language in Romans 11, when talking about the salvation of the Gentiles. There, in a lengthy metaphor describing the Gentiles as a branch grafted from one tree onto another, he writes:

…For if you have been cut from what is by nature [kata physin] a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature [para physin], into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree. (11.24)

So, in the very same letter, Paul calls the Gentiles’ salvation — the very thing to which he has dedicated his life — ‘contrary to nature’ in exactly the same way as he describes sexual expressions that transgress expected gender roles in chapter 1. What we have with the use of ‘natural’ and ‘contrary to nature’ is not about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but about what is expected versus what is unexpected.

Concluding thoughts for the ‘Explore’ Section

This has been a very long discussion and barely scratches the surface of the material. (Please do check out the resources in the bibliography for more information and fuller discussions.) But were does all this leave us? The argument Paul makes in 1.18-32 is not a new, Christian teaching; instead he’s trafficking in the customary Jewish stereotypes about Gentiles of his time, ideas grounded not in Scripture or the revelation about Jesus but in the popular psychology of the day. This is helpful not only in rescuing the passage from our own contemporary debates, but also in understanding what Paul is doing: This is not a highly questionable origin story of homosexuality; rather, it’s an argument that uses shared presuppositions to get his audience on board, in order to further his argument that Gentiles are in need of salvation, which is itself one prong of his main argument in 1.18-3.20 that both Jews and Gentiles are in the same boat. And as we’ll see in future posts, in doing this he is setting a rhetorical trap for his readers.

Challenge

This step is largely about asking uncomfortable questions of us and the text. It becomes particularly challenging in a text like this, where there are clear cultural differences at work. The biggest questions that need to be asked here are:

• Whose story is being told and who is telling it? And why? Who is excluded from this process?
• Does the story make sense from what we know of human behaviour?
• Does Paul’s dependence on Hellenistic philosophical concepts make those concepts and ideas also authoritative for us?

Storytelling: Jews and Gentiles

In Romans 1.18-32, Paul is telling a Jewish story about what’s wrong with Gentiles. And as we’ve seen, he does this by trafficking in a common, shared story from within the Jewish community. It’s not the story Gentiles would tell of themselves. But it seems that Paul is doing something really smart here. By repeating the common story about Gentiles, he can rile up his audience before flipping the script on them in the next chapter, where he emphasizes that everyone does those same things and so everyone is worthy of the same fate, whether they are under the Law or not (2.1-16).

One interesting thing about the story Paul tells about Gentiles is that he could have told exactly the same story about Jewish history. For, the whole Old Testament is a story of how those who were under the Law kept on falling under the sway of idolatry and suffered the consequences. So while Paul is telling a Jewish story about Gentiles, he’s really telling a Jewish story about humanity, as chapter 2 will make clear. I don’t think we’d be off the mark, then, to call Paul’s telling of this story ‘ironic’: He’s using a story usually told to separate one community from another in the interests of uniting them under one story. (We’ve previously seen him use this same strategy in Ephesians.)

Storytelling: Virtue and Vice

Tightly connected to Paul’s Jewish story about Gentiles is a philosophical story about vice and virtue. Drawn primarily from Stoicism, but becoming a broader shared story in the Roman period, this says that when the mind (nous) is working properly, we can properly discern how to respond to all of the ups and downs and curveballs of embodied life. But if it’s not working properly, we confuse needs and wants and spiral down an unending vortex of excess, leading to all sorts of bad behaviour. It’s clear from both Ephesians 4-5 and Romans 1 that Paul bought into this story, at least enough to use it when it suited him.

But is it true? After about 150 years of scientific and social scientific observation, does this story comport with what we’ve learned about human behaviour? Obviously no philosophy, ancient or modern, is going to mesh perfectly with scientific knowledge, but there do at least seem to be some areas of alignment. The biggest that comes to mind is ‘hedonic adaptation,’ the body’s rapid adjustment to pleasure such that it takes more and more of a stimulus to achieve the same positive sensations. This is most clearly demonstrated in the processes behind addiction, but is a general rationale for why hedonism — the centering of pleasure as the highest value — is a bad idea, or at least needs to be constrained (as it was in the early Roman Empire’s other major philosophical system, Epicureanism, which centered pleasure but avoided ‘highs’). And, considering our culture of excess, in which we are literally consuming the resources of several ‘Earths’ a year, growing fat on unhealthy foods, buying clothing we don’t need, and have so many things that we have warehouses dedicated to storing possessions we don’t have room for, it seems to me that this story might be particularly beneficial in our circumstances.

But this ancient story also played on misogynistic gender stereotypes. To be a man was to be dominant and in control, to be a woman was to be dominated and carried away by emotions and appetites. What made homoeroticism suspect was that the ancients could not conceive of sex as something that could happen between equals; it was inconceivable for a woman to ‘play the man’s part’ in sex and it was a betrayal of masculinity to ‘play the woman’s part.’ The linkage between masculinity and virtue and femininity and vice not only justified patriarchal domination (which Genesis puts as part of the fallen, not created or redeemed order), but simultaneously makes masculinity into something fragile, that must be reasserted time and time again, generally at others’ expense — which is the opposite of the heart of God as revealed in the Prophets and Gospel. That Paul mentions women’s sexuality here shows that he was tweaking this story a bit, so that women’s moral actions were now worth consideration. But we have very good gospel reasons for pushing that much further and for working to tear down harmful gender stereotypes. If we are going to perpetuate ancient stories about how the world works, we need to put them through the refiner’s fire to ensure we are using them well and responsibly for the benefit of everyone — including the 52% of humanity that is female.

(I’ll not discuss the damaging ways this text continues to be used against lesbian, gay, and other queer people here. But if you’re interested, please see this section in the parallel post that focused on this topic.)

Conclusions from the ‘Challenge’ Step

This section has posed a number of questions to the story Paul tells in Romans 1.18-32. On some counts, the story fares okay: He’s using an anti-Gentile story ironically as part of a goal to unite Jewish and Gentile Christians, and the general idea of Stoic thought that we can get easily distracted by things or appetites and lose control over our actions and cease to be the people we want to, or were created to be, seems to have a lot of truth in it. But the ancients’ association of such loss of control with femininity does not hold up to scrutiny and we would do well to excise any remnant of such assumptions from our belief systems. And, while not a focus of today’s post, the story also makes a series of false assumptions and claims about homosexuality — at least as it experienced today. Paul supported his argument bringing Jews and Gentiles together by unwittingly making recourse to an example that, while convincing to his intended audience, doesn’t actually work, and in our context ends up dividing rather than uniting people. We shouldn’t feel too bothered about this because this example comes not from the gospel but from the pop philosophy of his day. While we can, and maybe even should, respect those aspects of ancient philosophy that are beneficial, we aren’t beholden to those aspects that are not.

Expand

This final step in the Integral hermeneutical method is to bring things together in a way that is faithful, responsible, and expansive. How does the interpretation of this passage that has emerged in this process meet these criteria?

The biggest thing this reading of the text does is shift the focus away from the problematic case study to where it rightly belongs, to the point all this is written to support: that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3.23). To leave Romans 1 with the idea that “gays are disordered, straight people are rightly ordered” is actually far less faithful reading than what I’m proposing here, because the last thing Paul is trying to do here is to divide humanity into insiders and outsiders! Paul’s argument is that we are all disordered in our own ways, but, ultimately, that we are all loved and all within the scope of God’s grace. That is the message of Romans.

Moreover, it makes the passage relevant for and challenging for straight people as well as queer folk. If we read this passage primarily as a prooftext against homosexuality, it means straight Christians are free to use it as a weapon against the LGBTQ2S+ community instead of a mirror by which to examine and confront the sins in their own lives. The interpretation that has emerged here prevents this and demands that we all use our sexuality wisely and in ways that honour the values of God’s kingdom. To paraphrase Paul, it allows us to move beyond the question of “Is this permitted?” to the more important questions of “Is this edifying?” and “Am I being controlled by this?” (1 Corinthians 6:12). And in this way, it can bear much better fruit in the lives of all Christians.

Summary and Conclusions

Romans 1.18-32 is the first prong of Paul’s larger argument in 1.18-3.20 that everyone, Gentile and Jewish alike, is sinful and in need of God’s saving grace. In it, he focuses his attention on Gentiles, telling a story about what has gone wrong with humanity writ large that was commonly held in first-century Judaism. Paul’s aim in writing it was not to mark a small subset of humanity as uniquely sinful, but to unite all humanity in our shared status as people whose natural drives, appetites, and emotions can cause us to miss the mark and break faith with each other and God. And that should be the main take away.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.