God abandoned Homosexul Sodomites

As we consider the significance of Romans 1 for contemporary ethics, one view is that Romans 1 identifies a temporary Jewish purity rule rather than a universal moral principle. When Countryman makes that suggestion, he errs in reading the literary context. In this context, the passage, with its “nature” terminology, can be interpreted only as an appeal to creation. 

The words of verses 26–27 are on the level of universal moral principle. Unless the writer signals a change in meaning, context will not allow a limited purity rule to be sandwiched between universal moral standards in verses 24–28. The first and the third of three parallel passages clearly are universal and deal with sin, not impurity. Note Paul’s warning that “God abandoned them” in vv. 24, 26, and 28. God cannot consign the Gentiles to punishment for breaking a Jewish purity rule.

The literary form of Romans 1:1–2 also demands identification of homosexuality as sin. When Paul says that “God abandoned them,” the them in all three instances must refer to those who are the objects of God’s wrath from 1:18 on. Verse 18 characterises these people as morally and religiously culpable, as sinners: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in [their] unrighteousness.” 

Whether verses 24–28 use the vocabulary of “sin,” the passages before and after do. Without evidence to the contrary, we can only assume that all three instances of God’s “abandoning” (vv. 24, 26, 28) are judgments on and consequences for the idolatry and rejection of God that Paul sets out in verses 18–23. The “abandoning” accompanies the list of sins in verses 28–32.

In the flow of thought, Paul moves from the lie against our identity as created (pride expressed as idolatry) to the lie against one’s relationship with one’s own body and sexual identity (homosexuality) to various acts based on a lie about one’s relationship with others (the list of vices). 

Countryman tries to argue from silence at this point; Paul does not name sexual sins in verses 28–32. However, they are certainly within the scope of the terms used: all unrighteousness, evil, badness, and especially such words as pride, arrogant, and boasters.

The use of change and exchange in the passage argues that Paul is deliberately seeking to define nature and natural by the order of creation. Paul says that people “changed” the glory of God revealed in creation into an idol (v. 23 KJV); consequently, God delivered people to dishonouring their bodies (in their sexual impurity), by which they “exchanged” the truth of God for a lie and worshipped the creation rather than the Creator (v. 25). 

Wherefore, God delivered them to dishonourable passions, so that women and men “exchanged” the normal or natural use of sex for what is unnatural (vv. 26–27). The threefold use of “exchange” imagery in various cognates helps define natural by “what is created.” Rejecting God as Creator leads to rejecting created gender roles.86

Also, the order of beasts listed by Paul in Romans 1:23 (birds, four-footed animals, reptiles) corresponds to the realms over which God gave dominion to humans (fish, birds, cattle or four-footed animals, reptiles; Gen. 1:24, 26). 

Finally, the terms female and male also occur in Galatians 3:28, showing a reflection of the use of terms in Genesis 1:27. Paul shows that Genesis has shaped his concepts, reinforcing the point that homosexuality is set in contrast to creation as God designed it. 

Paul is influenced by Scripture with its unique claims, not by the surrounding culture. This dependence argues for universality. It also means that we cannot fully understand why homosexuality is wrong apart from an appreciation of the biblical record of Creation. All of this argues for a biblical worldview.

Countryman’s definition of unnatural as “losing continuity with the past” directly contradicts the context, in which the creation and its Lawgiver define natural. It is “unnatural” because it contradicts God’s created order and reflects the Fall.

This argument answers the literary context, but we are left to consider the literary relationship of this section of chapter 1 to the following chapters and the importance of this relationship. 

Is Paul using rhetorical method and not proclaiming what he really thinks? Does he pen the words merely for the sake of argument? 

Countryman, Edwards, and Nissinen want to answer these questions in the affirmative. Countryman argues that in Romans 1 Paul is conveying the viewpoint of Jews about “dirty” or impure Gentiles to gain the sympathy of the Jews and to set them up for his rebuke in chapter 2.87 Edwards and Nissinen take the same tack, although they emphasise a linkage of idolatry, adultery, and homosexuality, rather than impurity.88

Of course, we should always include Paul’s “rhetorical trap” in 2:1 when we read 1:18–32. This fact does not make Paul’s words about homosexuality in 1:26–27 “merely rhetorical” or irrelevant to moral decision-making. 

Such reasoning does not work if Paul is building continuity with the authoritative standard of Old Testament sexual morality, as we have seen. Now that Christ has come, Paul has no sympathy for Jewish scruples unless they are God’s universal standards. Romans 1 is moral instruction at the most fundamental level—the design of the Creator for the righteous living of His human creatures in all areas of life, including sexual behaviour. No other Scripture withdraws this instruction or qualifies it.

Another of Countryman’s major arguments is that Torah “stood or fell as a whole”; one class of laws did not have greater authority than another.89 He uses this argument actually more narrowly to support the unity of the purity system, with the point that the New Testament rejects all of it. 

But he cannot be so narrow; purity rules were enmeshed with moral and civil laws, and some concerns had implications for all three. A better approach or principle of interpretation for deciding whether something is an ongoing prohibition is to inquire whether the New Testament reiterates or repeats the prohibition.90

Homosexuality had a moral dimension (Genesis 19; Levit. 18:23; Judges 19–20), as well as legal (Levit. 20:13) and purity ramifications (for example, Deut. 23:17–18). Paul’s reiteration in Romans of prohibitions of homosexuality has the interpretive force of making it an ongoing moral wrong.91 

As Thomas Schmidt observes, “The Christian faith does not change morality; it offers power for morality.”92 We may deal with some legal and purity and cultic matters differently, for we are not living in a theocracy under the sacrificial system. Yet the moral significance continues.

Or does it? Remember Prank’s view that moral argumentation within the whole human community, not theology, determines what is good or bad (see pp. 165–66). This appeal to the authority of tradition has a place, and it is proper to distinguish exegesis (meaning) from hermeneutics (rules for interpretation and application). 

But what about the decisions of a community that has deliberated on this since Moses’ time? Both inside and outside of theology, the vast majority in this community have consistently viewed homosexuality as sin. The community has consistently agreed to abide by the teachings of God’s revelation. 

Since the first century A.d., has not the community regarded this reading of Romans 1 to be normative? The historical interpretation is true, even if the community reads the chapter incorrectly over all this time.

However, if Pronk is wrong in interpreting physis in Romans 1:26–27 to refer to the social conventions of Paul’s day, and it rather refers to the normative creation order, then his whole approach fails for a stronger reason.93 

Community consensus can no more change this law than it can vote against the law of gravity. With no other Scripture qualifying the condemnation of homosexuality, consensus is irrelevant regarding the morality of a true natural law.

If, as I have argued, Paul by “nature” refers to the creation order, then Paul places homosexuality in a transcendent normative category—normative for past and present. To state the matter from a negative perspective, Pronk’s argument that the community determines morality places him at odds with a Christian worldview. 

Both orthodox Jews and Christians posit a God who has set clear standards and revealed them—regarding the Ten Commandments at least. Human beings did not invent such standards. Indeed, the community disobeyed the standards against idolatry and immorality at the very time Moses was receiving the commandments. In the end, Scripture, not community, determines morality.

Pronk’s approach to the concept “against nature” in Romans 1 is such a serious challenge to traditional interpretation that it will be evaluated more fully in excursus 2.

The net effect of the revisionist interpretations of Romans 1:26–27 is to make the passage seem irrelevant in contemporary ethics. Those who argue that homosexual inversion or orientation was unknown by Paul cannot escape the question of whether inversion was a known orientation in his day. Proponents must hold orientation to be universal for their view to be valid. 

Therefore, they must allow Paul to have been aware of it. If he was aware of it, they must allow his terminology to include it. One either accepts Paul’s condemnation or rejects Paul’s ongoing authority.94 This must be the conclusion, for nowhere does he or the rest of Scripture allow for sexual expression outside a heterosexual, monogamous, permanent marriage (see, for example, Rom. 7:2–3; 1 Cor. 5:1–7:17; 2 Cor. 6:1–8; Eph. 5:3–5; Col. 3:18–19; 1 Thess. 4:1–8; 1 Tim. 3:2; 5:1–15; and Titus 2:4. C.f. Heb. 13:4).

For Scroggs to make the model of mutuality unknown to Paul, or not addressed by him, goes against the very examples Scroggs and others allow, and it ignores the evidence given above.95 To assert that one cannot know what Paul would have thought about this model is to reject his clear teaching elsewhere.96 He is not hesitant to say what sort of sexual behaviour is acceptable.

A final problem with this mutuality principle is that one could make the same argument about any sort of fornication, be it incest or adultery—as long as the relationship was characterised by permanency and mutuality. All that is required is for there to be the fulfilment of adult mutuality (love?). Any means to that end can be justified.




KJV King James Version of the Bible.

86 Ulrich S. Mauser, “Creation and Human Sexuality in the New Testament,” in Robert L. Brawley, ed., Biblical Ethics and Homosexuality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), emphasises how homosexuality “fears or denies, despises or ridicules, the goodness of God’s creation of male and female” (13). He goes on to criticise the use of human experience (whether obedient or disobedient) as the measure by which we judge God’s creation of sexuality. 

“The New Testament has resolutely chosen to make the revelation in Genesis 1 and 2 of human sexuality as God’s good creation the measure and judge of our conduct, not the other way around” (13). Similarly, in the same work, J. Andrew Dearman, “Marriage in the Old Testament,” writes that the “Creation accounts are foundational for the understanding of marriage and sexuality” (63). 

Other contributors to this volume find Scripture to be neutral on the subject of homosexuality or place modern experience and science over Scripture. The contributions arose in the context of the 1995 Consultation on Biblical Ethics and Human Sexuality, sponsored by the Presbyterian Church (USA). This represents the diversity of thought within a large denomination.

87 Dirt, 120–23. By this line of reasoning, would not Paul have offended the Jews by attacking them so strongly in the universal passages before (1:18–25) and after (vv. 28–32), even if not in-between?

88 Gay/Lesbian Liberation, 86–96; Homoeroticism, 111–12. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: Harper, 1996), 386. 

Hays describes homosexuality as a “particularly graphic image” (388), even as a sacrament in which homosexual behaviour is the “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality: the rejection of the Creator’s design” (386).

89 Dirt, 42–44.

90 For a significant defence of how the impure and immoral relate, and are reflected in the prohibition of homosexuality in the New Testament, see Out of Order, esp. 144–75, 188, 196–205.

91 There are other considerations regarding a hermeneutic that both interprets and applies the OT and NT, but these are beyond the scope of this study. On the role of worldview in hermeneutics, see James B. De Young and Sarah Hurty, Beyond the Obvious: Discover the Deeper Meaning of Scripture (Gresham, Ore.: Vision House, 1995), 83–122.

92 Schmidt, Straight & Narrow? 57, cites Paul’s words in Romans 3:31; 6:15–16; 7:12–13. See also his discussion on 90ff.

93 Nissinen, Homoeroticism, similarly views nature as equivalent to culture.

94 As Scroggs, New Testament and Homosexuality, 124–25, acknowledges.

95 Nissinen makes several allowances for orientation and mutuality, though he regards them as exceptions (Homoeroticism, 131–34, for example).

96 New Testament and Homosexuality, 125–29.

De Young, J. B. (2000). Homosexuality: Contemporary Claims Examined in Light of the Bible and Other Ancient Literature and Law (pp. 159–162). Kregel Publications.