God hands homosexuals over to their sin
The effect of the repeated “handed over” is not to imply any increasing depth of depravity, implying a downward spiral of degradation, since what is described in vv 26–27 is no different from and no worse than the state depicted more briefly in v 24. But the repetition of the same phrase, “For this cause God handed them over,” increases the solemnity and seriousness of the charge being made, the awfulness of the state to which man has come by virtue of turning his back on God, literally, the God-forsaken character of his plight. The description which follows is a characteristic expression of Jewish antipathy toward the practice of homosexuality so prevalent in the Greco-Roman world.
Paul’s attitude to homosexual practice is unambiguous. The third appearance of the word “changed” (cf. vv 23 and 25) seems to imply that the action described (“changing the natural use to that which is contrary to nature”) is of a piece with and direct result of the basic corruption of the glory and truth of God in idolatry, a similar turning from the role of creature to what is simply a perversion of the creature’s share in creating. But more striking still is his use of a sequence of words whose import is unmistakable.
Homosexuality is seen as a passion which is “worthy of no respect.” Homosexual practice is characterized with the emphasis of repetition as “unnatural,” where Paul uses very Greek and particularly Stoic language to broaden the appeal of the more characteristically Jewish rejection of homosexuality, and where he in effect appeals to his own readers’ common sense to recognize that homosexual practice is a violation of the natural order (as determined by God).
“Inflamed with desire”: taken individually the two words do not necessarily have a negative connotation, but together the implication is of something immoderate and ultimately self-destructive. “Committing the shameless deed”: Paul could not help but be thinking here of Lev 18 and 20, which include the homosexual act within the category of illicit sexual relationships, as one of the “abominations” of the surrounding peoples which Israel should avoid on pain of being cut off from the covenant (Lev 18:22; 20:13). The final clause with heavy and repeated strokes completes the picture of a perversion which is turned in upon itself in a tightening spiral of self-destruction—literally, “receiving in return in themselves the penalty which matches the deed and which is proper to their error”—sex treated as an end in itself becomes a dead end in itself, and sexual perversion is its own inevitable penalty.
In all this Paul had evidently no need to mount a strong argument to establish his point. No doubt the reason was that those present to hear his letter read would already be largely sympathetic to Jewish standards of sexual morality; indeed it was no doubt precisely this tighter ethical discipline which had previously helped attract many of them to the synagogue in the first place. But the effect of Paul’s argument at this point in the context of his whole letter should not be ignored. For it is designed not merely to placard pagan perversion, but to draw his listeners in their reaction against that perversion within the circle of the moral standards which had always marked Israel off from the surrounding nations.
That Paul simply takes it for granted that the Jewish abhorrence of Gentile sexual license is still the appropriate ethical response of the Gentile believer in Christ means that he recognizes at least one distinctive element of Israel’s covenant righteousness which remains unchanged within the wider freedom of the new covenant.
28 For one last time, lest there should remain any doubt, Paul emphasizes the direct link between humankind’s rejection of God and its disordered state. It all stems from the basic refusal to recognize God. The first clause brings out the character of this refusal as a deliberate act of human pride and selfsufficiency: they considered whether God should be retained as a factor of importance within their fuller reflective knowledge and decided against it; they tested the worth of acknowledging God and found him wanting. And once again, as in v 22, the consequence is phrased in a biting epigram: God handed them over to a disqualified mind. The test they thought they were applying to the knowledge of God was actually a test of their own understanding. The judgment they cast against God condemned themselves and condemned themselves to themselves. In claiming the ability to evaluate God they simply proved the unfitness of their own rational powers. And so God handed them over to the maturity they claimed—the maturity which only the immature would be bold enough to claim in the first place.
The use of the same phrase, “God handed them over,” for yet a third time is somber and sobering in its effect. Just as the thrice repeated “they changed” underscores humankind’s responsibility for the state of affairs they find themselves in, man’s own choice to be free of God is at the root of all evil. So the thrice repeated “God handed them over” underscores the point that in striking free of God’s immediate control, man has not escaped God’s overall ordering of his creation. He has certainly not escaped into Godlike independence, but neither has he left himself prey to an impersonal and arbitrary fate. The simple fact is that man cannot escape his own nature and the nature of the world as God made it. It is God who has handed man over to his desires and the endless pursuit of their satisfaction; man’s freedom to go his own way still leaves him within the limits set by God. The believer then should not be depressed at the disorder of society and the evidence of man’s degradation; it actually constitutes evidence of God’s overall control. Man is still the creature whom God made, and even when he refuses to recognize God his essentially creaturely instincts and their outworkings nevertheless bear witness to the Creator his conscious mind denies. In short, human fallenness is an ellipse caught by the twin foci of man’s freely chosen willfulness and God’s ordering of his creation. And thus it becomes clearer that God’s wrath is indeed the converse of his righteousness, since both express and bring to effect the world as God intends it to be: righteousness through faithful dependence on the Creator leads to salvation; wrath through selfdeceitful pride and self-indulgent desire leads to self-destruction.
29-31 The expression and outworking of the “disqualified mind” is a catalog of vice which would be familiar to the addressees as a type. No doubt deliberately, Paul again alludes to established Stoic terminology (“what is improper”) to describe the sort of antisocial attitude and behavior which thoughtful people generally would condemn. No real attempt is made to put the list in any particular order; it floods out in something of a jumble. Some of the words are clearly prompted by association of ideas (“rumormongers, gossips, slanderers,” “insolent, arrogant, boastful”), others by association of sounds (“envy, murder,” “foolish, faithless”). So obviously Paul has no intention of focusing on any particular sin or on any particular kind of sin; his object is simply to give an impression of the whole range of attitude and conduct which all fair-minded people would count as unacceptable. These too are all the direct consequence of man’s basic failure to acknowledge God. It is not simply sexual irregularity which marks man’s breakaway from God. The climax of Paul’s analysis of man’s fall and its consequences, if climax it be, is a picture of the general disorder of human society. The daily envy, deceit, whispering behind backs, heartlessness, ruthlessness, and so on, manifest human corruption quite as much, if not more than homosexual acts. Such homely, everyday vices which poison human relationships are as much a sign of man’s loss of God as any sexual perversion.
32 Paul refuses to accept that people generally are not aware of the negative character and ultimately destructive effect of such conduct. The Stoic recognition that such things are “not fitting, improper” shows this. But as Paul draws the first stage of his argument to a close it is the Adam background which shines through most clearly once again. Adam/man knew God’s warning (“In the day you eat of it you shall die” [Gen 2:16]), and yet went ahead and ate. In this way Paul interprets the less specifically theistic “good sense” of Stoicism in terms of Jewish monotheism. The Stoic recognition of what is proper, in accord with good order, constitutes evidence for Paul that man generally (not just the Jew) knows what is right, knows it in fact (or in effect) to be the requirement of God, and knows that to flout it is to court death, a death justly deserved.
It is this character of so much of man’s social relations, as deliberate rejection of what is known to be best, as willful rebellion against God’s ordering of things, which Paul reemphasizes with one final flourish. “They not only do such things but give their approval to those who do so too.” Their rejection of God is not merely a spur of the moment, heat of the instant flouting of his authority, but a considered and measured act of defiance. This is an important insight into one aspect of human sinfulness—its character of rebellion against what is known to be right (or best) its act of defiance in the face of known and perilous consequences of the act, its seemingly heroic “I/we will do what I/we will do and damn the outcome!” The miserable list of antisocial behavior (vv 29–31) illustrates just what human wisdom in its vaunted independence from God ends up justifying to itself (it would not be difficult to extend the list with twentieth-century examples). It is such self-delusion which lies at the heart of so much human conduct. And precisely because it is self-delusion, a self-destructive and society-destructive delusion, Paul attacks it so fiercely as the opening argument of his broader indictment.
Dunn, J. D. G. (1998). Romans 1–8. Word Biblical Commentary (Vol. 38A, pp. 73–76). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.
Paul’s attitude to homosexual practice is unambiguous. The third appearance of the word “changed” (cf. vv 23 and 25) seems to imply that the action described (“changing the natural use to that which is contrary to nature”) is of a piece with and direct result of the basic corruption of the glory and truth of God in idolatry, a similar turning from the role of creature to what is simply a perversion of the creature’s share in creating. But more striking still is his use of a sequence of words whose import is unmistakable.
Homosexuality is seen as a passion which is “worthy of no respect.” Homosexual practice is characterized with the emphasis of repetition as “unnatural,” where Paul uses very Greek and particularly Stoic language to broaden the appeal of the more characteristically Jewish rejection of homosexuality, and where he in effect appeals to his own readers’ common sense to recognize that homosexual practice is a violation of the natural order (as determined by God).
“Inflamed with desire”: taken individually the two words do not necessarily have a negative connotation, but together the implication is of something immoderate and ultimately self-destructive. “Committing the shameless deed”: Paul could not help but be thinking here of Lev 18 and 20, which include the homosexual act within the category of illicit sexual relationships, as one of the “abominations” of the surrounding peoples which Israel should avoid on pain of being cut off from the covenant (Lev 18:22; 20:13). The final clause with heavy and repeated strokes completes the picture of a perversion which is turned in upon itself in a tightening spiral of self-destruction—literally, “receiving in return in themselves the penalty which matches the deed and which is proper to their error”—sex treated as an end in itself becomes a dead end in itself, and sexual perversion is its own inevitable penalty.
In all this Paul had evidently no need to mount a strong argument to establish his point. No doubt the reason was that those present to hear his letter read would already be largely sympathetic to Jewish standards of sexual morality; indeed it was no doubt precisely this tighter ethical discipline which had previously helped attract many of them to the synagogue in the first place. But the effect of Paul’s argument at this point in the context of his whole letter should not be ignored. For it is designed not merely to placard pagan perversion, but to draw his listeners in their reaction against that perversion within the circle of the moral standards which had always marked Israel off from the surrounding nations.
That Paul simply takes it for granted that the Jewish abhorrence of Gentile sexual license is still the appropriate ethical response of the Gentile believer in Christ means that he recognizes at least one distinctive element of Israel’s covenant righteousness which remains unchanged within the wider freedom of the new covenant.
28 For one last time, lest there should remain any doubt, Paul emphasizes the direct link between humankind’s rejection of God and its disordered state. It all stems from the basic refusal to recognize God. The first clause brings out the character of this refusal as a deliberate act of human pride and selfsufficiency: they considered whether God should be retained as a factor of importance within their fuller reflective knowledge and decided against it; they tested the worth of acknowledging God and found him wanting. And once again, as in v 22, the consequence is phrased in a biting epigram: God handed them over to a disqualified mind. The test they thought they were applying to the knowledge of God was actually a test of their own understanding. The judgment they cast against God condemned themselves and condemned themselves to themselves. In claiming the ability to evaluate God they simply proved the unfitness of their own rational powers. And so God handed them over to the maturity they claimed—the maturity which only the immature would be bold enough to claim in the first place.
The use of the same phrase, “God handed them over,” for yet a third time is somber and sobering in its effect. Just as the thrice repeated “they changed” underscores humankind’s responsibility for the state of affairs they find themselves in, man’s own choice to be free of God is at the root of all evil. So the thrice repeated “God handed them over” underscores the point that in striking free of God’s immediate control, man has not escaped God’s overall ordering of his creation. He has certainly not escaped into Godlike independence, but neither has he left himself prey to an impersonal and arbitrary fate. The simple fact is that man cannot escape his own nature and the nature of the world as God made it. It is God who has handed man over to his desires and the endless pursuit of their satisfaction; man’s freedom to go his own way still leaves him within the limits set by God. The believer then should not be depressed at the disorder of society and the evidence of man’s degradation; it actually constitutes evidence of God’s overall control. Man is still the creature whom God made, and even when he refuses to recognize God his essentially creaturely instincts and their outworkings nevertheless bear witness to the Creator his conscious mind denies. In short, human fallenness is an ellipse caught by the twin foci of man’s freely chosen willfulness and God’s ordering of his creation. And thus it becomes clearer that God’s wrath is indeed the converse of his righteousness, since both express and bring to effect the world as God intends it to be: righteousness through faithful dependence on the Creator leads to salvation; wrath through selfdeceitful pride and self-indulgent desire leads to self-destruction.
29-31 The expression and outworking of the “disqualified mind” is a catalog of vice which would be familiar to the addressees as a type. No doubt deliberately, Paul again alludes to established Stoic terminology (“what is improper”) to describe the sort of antisocial attitude and behavior which thoughtful people generally would condemn. No real attempt is made to put the list in any particular order; it floods out in something of a jumble. Some of the words are clearly prompted by association of ideas (“rumormongers, gossips, slanderers,” “insolent, arrogant, boastful”), others by association of sounds (“envy, murder,” “foolish, faithless”). So obviously Paul has no intention of focusing on any particular sin or on any particular kind of sin; his object is simply to give an impression of the whole range of attitude and conduct which all fair-minded people would count as unacceptable. These too are all the direct consequence of man’s basic failure to acknowledge God. It is not simply sexual irregularity which marks man’s breakaway from God. The climax of Paul’s analysis of man’s fall and its consequences, if climax it be, is a picture of the general disorder of human society. The daily envy, deceit, whispering behind backs, heartlessness, ruthlessness, and so on, manifest human corruption quite as much, if not more than homosexual acts. Such homely, everyday vices which poison human relationships are as much a sign of man’s loss of God as any sexual perversion.
32 Paul refuses to accept that people generally are not aware of the negative character and ultimately destructive effect of such conduct. The Stoic recognition that such things are “not fitting, improper” shows this. But as Paul draws the first stage of his argument to a close it is the Adam background which shines through most clearly once again. Adam/man knew God’s warning (“In the day you eat of it you shall die” [Gen 2:16]), and yet went ahead and ate. In this way Paul interprets the less specifically theistic “good sense” of Stoicism in terms of Jewish monotheism. The Stoic recognition of what is proper, in accord with good order, constitutes evidence for Paul that man generally (not just the Jew) knows what is right, knows it in fact (or in effect) to be the requirement of God, and knows that to flout it is to court death, a death justly deserved.
It is this character of so much of man’s social relations, as deliberate rejection of what is known to be best, as willful rebellion against God’s ordering of things, which Paul reemphasizes with one final flourish. “They not only do such things but give their approval to those who do so too.” Their rejection of God is not merely a spur of the moment, heat of the instant flouting of his authority, but a considered and measured act of defiance. This is an important insight into one aspect of human sinfulness—its character of rebellion against what is known to be right (or best) its act of defiance in the face of known and perilous consequences of the act, its seemingly heroic “I/we will do what I/we will do and damn the outcome!” The miserable list of antisocial behavior (vv 29–31) illustrates just what human wisdom in its vaunted independence from God ends up justifying to itself (it would not be difficult to extend the list with twentieth-century examples). It is such self-delusion which lies at the heart of so much human conduct. And precisely because it is self-delusion, a self-destructive and society-destructive delusion, Paul attacks it so fiercely as the opening argument of his broader indictment.
Dunn, J. D. G. (1998). Romans 1–8. Word Biblical Commentary (Vol. 38A, pp. 73–76). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.
