The Evangelical Alliance UK commentary on Paul’s discussion of same-sex relationships in Romans 1:26-27

I had reason to look at the UK Evangelical Alliance’s latest report on same-sex relationships this week: Relationships Matter: Affirmations Commentary. It was published last year and updates previous reports (1998, 2012), following the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2013. It is essentially a defence of what it calls the “classic evangelical” position on same-sex relationships.

Here my limited aim is to offer a critique of the standard interpretation of Paul’s teaching about male and female homosexuality in Romans 1:26-27. The view is that the argument here is grounded in the creation narratives and that it addresses the general human condition. So Relationships Matter asserts that the “historic, creation-theological reading of male and female sexuality in Romans 1:26–27 is inferred from the broad contours of Paul’s discourse.”

I think, rather, that when Paul says “the Greek,” he means the Greek, and that it is therefore the Greek condition that is under consideration in this passage. It is an argument not from creation but from cultural history interpreted through the lens of Israel’s troubled engagement with paganism, especially in the Hellenistic period.

My approach draws on extensive work done on Romans on this blog and in two books: The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom (2010), and End of Story? Same-Sex Relationships and the Narratives of Evangelical Mission (2019).

I have broken up the paragraphs from the report on Romans 1:26-27 for brief, and I hope not too disjointed, commentary.

No doubt, the broader context of the passage is a globalising one: charged with expounding a gospel that now includes Gentiles, Paul is keen to highlight the equal status of all Christians with respect to salvation (verse 16), while at the same time showing the equality of all with respect to divine wrath and judgment (verse 18, cf 2:3).

In these verses, and later in chapter 2, Paul differentiates not between Jews and everyone else (gentiles, humanity) but between the Jew and the Greek, with respect both to salvation and judgment. The report, like so much commentary on the passage, quietly ignores the terminological distinction.

What is in view, I think, is not one final judgment of all people but a historical process in which the God of Israel must first hold his own people to account before judging the Greek-Roman world—the Jew first, and then the Greek (Rom. 2:9).

In the first century context, “wrath” against the Jew is readily conceived in real historical terms—for example, as a catastrophic clash with Rome as an imperial and military force. So why not imagine wrath against the Greek along similar Iines, in this case as the destruction of a religious culture characterised, in the first place, by its exchange of the truth of God for the lie of polytheistic idol worship, then by the practices described in 1:24-32?

The more restricted civilisational focus is reflected elsewhere in connection with the Pauline mission (1 Thess. 1:9-10; Acts 17:22-31), but it also resonates with wider Jewish expectations:

Greece, why do you rely on mortal leaders who are not able to flee the end of death? To what purpose do you give vain gifts to the dead and sacrifice to idols? Who put error in your heart that you should abandon the face of the great God and do these things? Revere the name of the one who has begotten all, and do not forget it. It is a thousand years and five hundred more since the overbearing kings of the Greeks reigned, who began the first evils for mortals, setting up many idols of dead gods. On account of them you have been taught vain thinking. But when the wrath of the great God comes upon you, then indeed you will recognize the face of the great God. (Sib. Or. 3:545-557)

This second-century BC text anticipates Paul at a number of points: the Greeks had some knowledge of God but abandoned the “face of the great God” to worship idols; this was vanity and folly; but the “wrath of the great God” will come upon them.

Against this backdrop Paul writes in verses 26–27 of men and women “exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones”…

The “backdrop” is not universal or “globalising” but historical—the long and fraught antagonism between Jewish covenantal “monotheism” and classical, western paganism. This constitutes the linguistic and conceptual context for what Paul has to say about idolatry and degrading and unnatural sexual behaviour in particular.

Nature is not an Old Testament category. It appears rather to be observational or empirical; it is an appeal to what seems obvious or reasonable or normal: “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him…?” (1 Cor. 11:14). Pisias protests that “nature is transgressed when we are ruled by women” (Plutarch, Amat. 755C). The boundary between nature and culture is more or less fluid, at least from a modern perspective. It is difficult to find a Jewish writer who defines nature in expressly “creation-theological” terms.

Philo says that Torah rightly condemns to death “the man-woman (androgynon) who adulterates the precious coinage of his nature,” and that the pederast, who pursues “that pleasure which is contrary to nature (para physin),” should suffer the same punishment (Laws 3 38-39). The Law is hostile to same-sex sexual activity because such behaviour is unnatural. Philo does not say that it must be judged unnatural because it is either contrary to the creation of men and women in the image of God or prohibited by the Law.

…and thereby bringing “degradation” and “punishment” upon themselves.

People do not bring degradation and punishment upon themselves by engaging in “unnatural” sexual relations. Rather, God has demonstrated the force of his anger against idolatry by consigning this civilisation to unclean, dishonourable, degrading passions, expressed notoriously in the Greek world in the exchange of natural for unnatural sexual activity.

It is in this sense that they receive in their own persons the “penalty” (antimisthian) for the specific error (planēs) of idolatry. To Paul’s mind, the depravity of the dominant Greek culture—he knew of exceptions (Rom. 2:26)—was concrete evidence that it was subject to the wrath of God and would sooner or later be judged.

God had not abandoned his own people to social and sexual disorder. He had given them Torah, with its strict commandments governing sexual behaviour among other things. The Greeks were given the opportunity to “seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him,” but they chose instead to worship images “formed by the art and imagination of man” (Acts 17:26-29).

The author of Testament of Naphtali makes just this point. The nations went astray (planēthenta) some time in the past, abandoned the Lord, worshipped trees and stones, “following spirits of error (planēs).” But Israel would recognise in the created order “the Lord who made all things, that you not become like Sodom, which changed the order of their nature” (T. Naph. 3:3-4).

This is in fact the third of three vital ‘exchanges’ that he presents—exchanges which demonstrate a healthy and an unhealthy construal of creation, and which are thus seen to derive not only from Israelite disobedience of the Mosaic Law but also from the pre-Mosaic fall of humanity as a whole.

The gospel speaks of salvation for the Jew and for the Greek (Rom. 1:16). The situation is like that described in Habakkuk: God would use the Chaldeans to punish unrighteous Israel, and the righteous person would live by faith (1:17; cf. Hab. 2:4); but in turn the barbarous Chaldeans would be subject to the wrath of God. So the Greeks, who have some knowledge of the transcendence of God, experience the wrath of God because that knowledge has been suppressed (1:18, 21; cf. Acts 17:28).

The references to creation in Romans 1:19-25 need to be understood in connection with this specific argument. Creation is relevant not for what it says about humanity but for what it says about God, who is the creator (ktisanta) of all things and should not be replaced by the created object (ktisei).

The point is only that since the creation (ktiseōs) of the world people have in principle been able to discern in the natural order the “unseen things” of God—that his power and deity transcend the corruptible physical order.

Some Greek intellectuals had this insight. The second century BC Jewish philosopher Aristobulus claimed that Greek philosophers and poets were inspired by Moses and that he was “very carefully followed in all by Pythagoras, and Socrates, and Plato, who said that they heard the voice of God, when they were contemplating the arrangement of the universe so accurately made and indissolubly combined by God” (Fr. 4.4 in Eusebius, Praep. Ev. 13.12 664b).

But such a “revelation” from the created order (cf. Rom. 1:19-20) was swamped by the prolific mythologising and material culture of popular religion (cf. Acts 17:16), for which reason God has now at last fixed a day on which he will judge this civilisation by a man whom he has appointed, “and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31).

First, in verse 23 Paul states that the wicked characteristically “exchanged (ēllaxan) the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.” One thinks of the Israelites’ golden calf (Exodus 32), and clearly the second of the Ten Commandments against “graven images” looms large here (Exodus 20:4).

We may think of prohibitions against Israelite idolatry, but more relevant is the well represented Hellenistic-Jewish polemic against pagan idolatry:

Therefore there will be a visitation also upon the idols of the nations, because, though part of the divine creation, they have become an abomination, a stumbling–block for the lives of human beings and a trap for the feet of the foolish. For the invention of idols was the beginning of fornication, and the discovery of them the corruption of life. For they did not exist from the beginning, nor will they last forever. For through human conceit they entered the world, and because of this a speedy end was planned for them. (Wis. 14:11-14)

Like Paul, the author of Wisdom of Solomon does not regard idol worship as a primordial development; he attributes to the practice both a general sexual misconduct (heterosexual porneia rather than than homosexual activity) and the corruption of social life; and he foresees its end within human history.

But Paul quickly broadens his conception of idolatry to take in the first Commandment too, and with it, a second exchange: “they exchanged (ēllaxan) the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator” (verse 25, cf Exodus 20:1–3, our emphasis).

There is no broadening of the conception of idolatry in verse 25. To exchange the truth of God for the worship of the material object is little different to exchanging the glory of the imperishable God for the “likeness of an image of a perishable person and of birds and four-footed animals and reptiles” (1:23).

Again, the frame of reference is not Torah but contemporary Jewish criticism of Greek religious practice—as a continuation, no doubt, of the scorn poured on idol worship by the Old Testament prophets. “Professing to be wise” reminds us of the testimony of the Greek philosophers and poets. Paul will not go on to accuse the Jews of idol worship in his attack on Jewish hypocrisy in Romans 2:17-24. Indeed, they publicly abhor idols but “rob temples.”

The Greeks exchanged the truth about God for a lie, but they did not break the commandment. Only Israel had the commandments. The Greek error was simply to have misconstrued the evidence for the true nature of God available in the things made. The distinction between Israel and the nations is not abrogated in the New Testament; it remains important for understanding both mission and eschatology.

This, in turn establishes the framework for the third exchange of natural intercourse between men and women for “unnatural” intercourse between people of the same sex.

The framework for the third exchange, therefore, is not broadly anthropological or creational but narrowly civilisational. Because the Greeks ignored their own best insights into the true nature of divinity and worshipped the created object rather than the creator, they have been handed over by God both to unnatural sexual practices, which Paul no doubt regarded as a hallmark of Greek culture, and to unrestrained social evil. The depravity was the concrete sign that this world was under the wrath of God and that it would be judged in due course.

That third exchange is even more explicitly construed in relation to creation and its despoliation by human sin and disobedience: Paul’s theological and moral reasoning here is profoundly defined by divine creation as depicted in Genesis and, more specifically, by the depiction of humanity made “male and female” in God’s image in Genesis 1:27, and called to procreate in the context of a “one flesh” union in Genesis 1:28 and 2:24.

Wesley Hill says: “If humanity was created as ‘male and female’—if in fact that was humanity’s ‘nature’ in the beginning—then same-sex coupling can only be judged, however common and acceptable it might have been in Paul’s day, as theologically ‘unnatural.’”1

But the appeal to “nature” and the polemical character of Paul’s analysis suggest a Hellenistic rhetorical provenance for the “males/females” (arsenes/thēleiai) terminology. Musonius Rufus, for example, derides the sexual excess of men who “crave a variety of loves … not females (thēleiōn) alone but also males (arrenōn)” (Discourse 12: On Sexual Indulgence).

It’s likely, too, that in this context the language of the Levitical prohibitions is more pertinent than Genesis 1:27: “And he who lies with a male (arsenos) in a bed for a woman, both have committed an abomination” (Lev. 20:13; cf. 18:22). Paul uses thēly as the natural equivalent to arsen in ethical discourse (cf. Lev. 15:32-33 LXX).

Apart from these two widely used terms, nothing suggests that Paul is consciously arguing from Genesis 1:27. No doubt, he would have understood the error of the Greeks as an instance of the sinfulness that entered into the world through Adam (cf. Rom. 5:12), but this does not alter the fact that the connection between idolatry and same-sex relations belongs to a particular prophetic-apocalyptic account of the past, present, and future of the religious culture of the Greeks. It goes back to the invention of idols; it looks forward to a day when the nations of the oikoumenē, the Greek-Roman world, will as nations worship one God and acclaim one Lord.

To conclude, the EA theological commentary relies heavily on a “creation-theological” hermeneutic. My argument has been that there is no appeal to the creation of male and female in the image of God in Romans 1:19-27. The narrative and polemical scope of Paul’s analysis is civilisational. Creation is mentioned only because the Greeks should have known better than to disregard the evidence from the created order that it is folly to worship the creature rather than the creator. Paul shared the quite often expressed Jewish conviction that this deeply offensive and corrupting religious system would be brought to an end—along with the manifold forms of uncleanness and unrighteousness associated with it.

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  Hill, Wesley. “Christ, Scripture and Spiritual Friendship.” In Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible and the Church, edited by Preston Sprinkle (2016), 124–47.