The Apostle Paul on Sexuality

By Neil Elliott

In the ongoing controversies over sexuality and sanctity in our church, a handful of Bible passages that seem to address homosexual practice have received a degree of attention out of all proportion to their number or weight compared, for example, to the wealth of exhortations about the dangers of wealth.

Among that handful of passages, only one — Romans 1:24-27 — appears as part of an extended theological argument, and so it attracts particular attention. Paul’s comments about "unnatural intercourse" can’t be dismissed as mere cultural prejudice, we’re told, because they appear in a deliberate broadside against the rampant immorality of the pagan world. At its heart, Paul’s gospel depends on the principle that "all — both Jews and Greeks — are under the power of sin" (Romans 3:9). Paul singles out women and men who are "consumed with passion" and engage in "shameless acts" with others of their own gender, we are told, because this intimate sin is simply the most self-evident example of the depravity that infects the race.

It’s no surprise that gays and lesbians haven’t warmed to a passage where they seem to be held up as poster children for human wickedness.

I want to step back from that heated debate long enough to notice that in some important ways, the received reading of Romans 1 simply doesn’t make sense. Consider, for example:

1. Paul describes a spiral of increasing depravity. People have refused to honor God, and so been made "futile" and "darkened" in their understanding, turning to the worship of images of "a mortal being" or of animals (1:21-23). As a consequence, God gave them up to bodily impurity and sexual depravity (1:24-27). (Thus, homosexual desire appears, not as a sin, but as a punishment that God imposes on idolaters.) They still refused to honor God (1:28a) so God abandoned them to all-consuming iniquity — "every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless" (1:29-31).

That hardly describes the faithful and loving men and women who ask the Episcopal Church today to bless their relationships, or to honor their vocations to ordained ministry. More to the point, that picture would not have been true to social reality in Paul’s day, either. Even sympathetic commentators acknowledge that this picture "does not do justice" to Paul’s pagan contemporaries (Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, 46). Rather, the commentaries explain, the apostle was relying on a prejudicial Jewish stereotype of gentile behavior (as found, e.g., in Wisdom of Solomon 12—15 or the writings of Philo of Alexandria). But that begs the question: what theological weight should we give to a passage that we recognize as a prejudiced exaggeration?

2. Paul’s appeal to hyperbole and prejudice is appropriate, we are told, because Paul is trying to "set up" a Jewish listener for the accusation in 2:1: "Therefore you are without 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." But we’re never told just how a Jewish listener has come into Paul’s cross-hairs in a letter explicitly addressed to gentiles (see 1:5-6, 13-15). Recently some interpreters have begun to warn against "importing" Jews into the letter as Paul’s targets (see Stanley Stowers, A Rereading of Romans, 29-33). Just as important, we should recognize that the only Jews conceivably targeted by such a rhetorical "trap" would be Jews who not only held gentile sinners in contempt, but did the same things — i.e., moved from stubborn idolatry to reckless sexual self-indulgence and then to murder, deceit, etc., etc. Needless to say, not many Jews would have fallen into that supposed trap.

3. Even in the first century C.E., for his argument to go so seriously off the track into stereotype and caricature would have strained his presumed audience’s indulgence to the breaking point.

   At this point Paul’s argument appears on the verge of disintegrating into incoherence. That’s especially troubling since this is supposed to be Paul’s most important theological writing, aimed to win over the hearts and minds of the Roman church. Paul himself says he’s talking about something that is "revealed," "manifest," self-evident (1:17-18). Even in the first century C.E., for his argument to go so seriously off the track into stereotype and caricature would have strained his presumed audience’s indulgence to the breaking point. That’s one reason some interpreters have gone so far as to question Paul’s ability to make theological sense at all.

On the other hand, maybe it’s our own effort to enlist Paul in our own causes that relies on prejudice and stereotype.

I want to propose another reading of this passage that makes better sense of Paul’s argument by setting it in the context of current events in Rome in the 50s of the first century.

Paul wrote Romans only a few years after the emperor Nero came to power upon the death of his uncle and adoptive step-father, the emperor Claudius. Nero’s mother, Agrippina, was widely suspected of having poisoned Claudius to secure her son’s rise (Suetonius, Claudius 44; Tacitus, Annals 12:66). Nero’s first official act, to award his murdered stepfather divine honors, was widely seen as a nakedly cynical move. His own adviser, Seneca, wrote a vicious satire of the event, called the "Pumpkinification of Claudius" (the Apocolocyntosis). Paul may well have had this same spurious political "deification" in mind when he insisted, at the beginning of Romans, that he served a real son of God, son of David by the flesh and "declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead" (1:4).

Nero’s sexual passion for his own mother was "notorious," Suetonius says, but then Nero "practiced every kind of obscenity," defiling "almost every part of his body" with men and women, usually under threat of force (Nero, 28, 29). His cruelty and sexual predations paled, in the eyes of the Roman aristocracy, next to his profligacy with money: when he had devoured his personal fortune he turned to "robbing temples" (32).

In all this Nero resembled his notorious ancestor Gaius ("Caligula"), for whose "far-fetched extravagances no parallel can be found" (Suetonius, Gaius, 37). Gaius had begun his reign by commanding that he was to be worshiped as a god: recall that he almost brought on war in Judea by ordering his statue erected in the Temple. He maintained incestuous relationships with his sisters and abused the wives of Rome’s senators, demanding sexual favors from them and forcing them to service his own brothel. He forced himself sexually on some of his own officers, and (to the great horror of the Roman historians) had submitted sexually to men, even to "foreign hostages" (Suetonius, Gaius, 24; 36). One of his humiliated officers gathered a conspiracy to assassinate him; Gaius died from multiple sword wounds, "including wounds through his genitals" (Gaius, 58).

My proposal is, simply, that when Paul describes God’s justice as "revealed" against the wicked — against those who had suppressed the truth, preferred idolatry to honoring God, and consequently been abandoned by God to every form of perversion and wickedness — the average Roman listener would not have stopped short to wonder whether Paul had made a clumsy over-generalization about the everyday gentile world. Rather, the average Roman would have thought immediately of the recent string of emperors, for whom Paul’s indictment would have held an almost clinical accuracy. And they would have recognized Paul’s point with a shiver: that the pretended "justice" of the Roman emperor was an obscene parody of the actual justice of God.

Showing respect for a vulnerable ethnic minority would have run as counter to the prevailing mood in Nero’s Rome as it does in modern American cities.

The challenge we face, I believe, is to get beyond our own cultural and sexual prejudices and to hear what Paul has to say. As we ask about the ways our lives are corrupted by imperial culture — by any culture where power over people is the highest value — we begin to understand the true challenge of Paul’s letter: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect (Rom. 12:2).

The Rev. Neil Elliott is chaplain for the University Episcopal Center at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minn. He may be reached by email at chaplain@uec-mn.org