GAY TRUTH

It is God’s settled and perfectly righteous antagonism to evil. It is directed against people who have some knowledge of God’s truth through the created order, but deliberately suppress it in order to pursue their own self-centred path.  And it is already being revealed, in a preliminary way, in the moral and social corruption which Paul saw in much of the Greco-Roman world of his day, and which we can see in the permissive societies of ours. The Bible says nothing specifically about the homosexual condition (despite the rather misleading RSV translation of 1 Cor. 6:9), but its condemnations of homosexual conduct are explicit. The scope of these strictures must, however, be carefully determined. Too often they have been used as tools of a homophobic polemic which has claimed too much. The exegesis of the Sodom and Gibeah stories (Gn. 19:1–25; Jdg. 19:13–20:48) is a good case in point. We must resist D. S. Bailey’s widely-quoted claim that the sin God punished on these...

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 t...

Image via Wikipedia Author Elodie Ballantine Emig Romans 1:26,27 is perhaps the most difficult passage in the Bible for pro-gay, revisionist theologians.  Not only does it appear to condemn male homosexuality, but lesbianism as well. So too, revisionists cannot dismiss it as being part of the Old Testament Law, subsequently fulfilled in Christ. Nor can they write it off as part of a “vice list” which Paul may have borrowed and with which he may not have been in entire agreement.  Taken at face value, in Romans 1 we find Paul’s pronouncement that homosexuality is both shameful and unnatural. Before we examine the revisionist reactions to and interactions with the passage, however, we must turn to introductory matters. It is useful to know that Paul had not planted the church in Rome. Although he knew some of the Roman Christians (see chapter 16), he did not have the intimate relationship with them that he had with the recipients of his other letters.  Romans is the least...