Comments on Romans1:26-27

Timotheos,

As I write these words, I am deeply troubled in spirit. I am stirred with holy anger against all those who have and continue to participate in the starvation death of Terri Shiavo. How far humans have plummeted into wickedness! How desperately evil they have become! How utterly deceiving sin is!

The very judges who would eagerly punish to the full extent of the law anyone who would withhold water and food from an animal, starving it to death, actually order the starvation death of a woman, a woman who is made in the image of God. God surely has special orders for such creatures who would do this. May God inflict upon them, including the husband, Michael Shiavo, distress and trouble and agony that greatly and eternally exceeds that which Terri Shiavo is now experiencing. May God have mercy upon these poor and pathetic souls. May he deliver them from the wickedness that now enslaves them to do the convenient rather than the courageous and right thing. [For anyone who reads these words and puzzles over the juxtaposition of my calling upon God to curse them with my calling upon God to save them, my only suggestion is to read the Bible more carefully, and do it with a heart that truly yearns for God's justice to come and to come swiftly. In other words, learn how to pray the Lord's prayer--"Let your kingdom come! Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven!"]

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So, I come to offer just a few comments upon these two verses.

Romans 1:26-27

²⁶ Because of this, God gave them over to dishonorable passions, for even their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for that which is against nature. ²⁷ Likewise the men abandoned the natural sexual relationship with women and burned with lust for one another---men committed with men that which is disgraceful---receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

I am, of course, convinced that you have rightly translated the passage. Paul's adjective phusike is one of those words that he uses to depict his theology concerning natural law, which is to say, every human intuitively knows the natural sexual use (phusike chresin) of the body. It's really not very difficult to figure out, for even children with a modicum of intelligence can figure out how a picture puzzle fits together with its inter-penetrating pieces. In other words, it is not an unknowable and deep mystery that God designed the male and the female bodies to fit together and that God inscribed within us the knowledge that this is the right and proper use of our bodies. It is as you have said, "Humanity's very sexual make up, our sexual plumbing, teaches that man and woman belong one in the other. The woman is designed to receive and the man is designed to enter. Male parts do not go with male parts and female parts do not go with female parts." Isn't it strange that we even have to say such things? It's a lot like having to explain a joke or a riddle. When we have to explain the obvious, it is apparent that something has gone seriously awry.

Now for a further word about God's wry humor which I mentioned in my previous comments. Paul uses the verb allasso in 1:23 to describe the exchange the Israelites made in the wilderness, exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images that look like mortal man, etc. In verse 25 Paul uses the compound verb matallasso to portray the exchange of the truth of God for the lie, which surely alludes to Adam's failure in the Garden. Now, in the passage before us (1:26-27), Paul represents God's curse upon humanity for this disastrous exchange by using the same verb, matallasso. So, here is the irony and wry humor. For the exchange that humans have made, exchanging the truth of God for the lie, God curses humans with the exchange of the natural sexual use of their bodies for the unnatural sexual use of their bodies.

I believe you are on the right track to say "homosexuality symbolizes idolatry." I might express it slightly differently: "homosexuality is God's curse upon idolatrous humanity." As such, homosexuality is God's curse which symbolically displays the perversity of idolatry in graphic, repulsive, and visible ways, including the perversity of justifying and defending homosexuality as simply an alternative lifestyle. Homosexuality, then, is God's curse that signals to humanity the depth of wickedness entailed in the exchange humans make when they turn from worshiping the Creator, who is not a creature, to worship the creature, which is not the Creator. God has cursed humanity with humans whose sexual cravings dramatize daily the perversion of the human heart that worships the creature rather than the Creator. To have sexual cravings for another who is not different but the same is God's curse that dramatizes the perversity of idolatry, worshiping the creature and not the Creator.

As much as the serpent that crawls upon the ground, eating the dust, is an ever present divine reminder of the moral failure of humanity, so also, homosexuality, whenever we encounter it (as we do frequently these days), is a divine reminder of the perversity of idolatry.

So, what Paul tells us runs contrary to popular thinking among American evangelicals. So many fail to realize that homosexuality is God's curse already for the idolatry of humans. Instead, they look upon homosexuality as the wicked sin that is so badly in need of God's punishment. They fail to recognize that homosexuality is God's punishment upon human society for the greater perversion, namely idolatry.

With heavy heart,

Paulos