For all four of these posts on biblical texts, which are attempts at exegetical dialogue, I will be pairing Peter Gomes and Richard Hays as conversation partners. Gomes, now deceased, was an American preacher and theologian, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School as well as the University’s chaplain. Richard Hays was the Dean and George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolino. I will be drawing from Hays’s book The Moral Vision of the New Testament and Gomes’s book The Good Book. *When I initially crafted these documents nearly a decade ago Hays formally had a non-affirming position. As recently as of the September of 2024, Richard Hays ostensibly amended his position in the book The Widening of God’s Mercy, which he coauthored with his son Christopher. I have only heard about Hays’s amended position and have not read the book.
Romans 1:26 For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, 27and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
The Contextual Argument
To make sense of these verses they need to located within their larger context. What Gomes and Hays agree on is that in 1:18-32, Paul is pointing the guilt of humankind. Paul is speaking negatively about the universal situation of humanity. Everything that is referenced in what follows should be understood in this light. The wickedness of humanity is that they have suppressed the truth (v 18). Humanity has denied “the real nature of things,” to put it colloquially. In Hays’s words, “the genius of Paul’s analysis, of course, lies in his refusal to posit a catalog of sins as the cause of human alienation form God. Instead, he delves to the root: all other depravities follow from the radical rebellion of the creature against the Creator. (384)”
Ernst Kasemann says it this way, “Paul paradoxically reverses the cause and consequence: moral perversion is the result of God’s wrath, not the reason for it.” Here’s an example from real life that might illustrate this more clearly. In the pictures below one can see both the ladder that leads to my son’s bunkbed and that ladder occupied by my youngest daughter Mabel. Mabel, who had just turned one in this picture, loved to climb. My wife and I diligently worked to keep her off the ladder. After about the 50th time we caught her on the ladder, my wife (not seriously) remarked, “maybe we should just let her fall off sometime, that would teach her.” That is the sense in which God executes his wrath in Romans 1. Unlike the Exodus story where God actively inflicts plagues on Egypt, in Romans 1 God merely gives humanity up to themselves, letting them live with the results of their own choices.
This is an exegetical cue for us when we repeatedly read Paul say “God gave them up,” (vv 1:24, 26, 28). “Idolatry finally debases both the worshiper and the idol. God’s judgment allows the irony of sin to play itself out: the creature’s original impulse toward self-glorification ends in self-destruction. The refusal to acknowledge God as Creator ends in blind distortion of the creation. (Hays 385)” This is Paul’s main point of this section and the referent we need to keep in mind in order to talk more specifically about 1:26-27.
Because I’ve given Hays so much attention already I’ll begin with him. Hays argues that the prior reference to “Creator” in 1:24, would recall the Genesis 1-3 story and subsequently establish that story as a paradigmatic basis to make the ensuing argument. Said differently, Hays is suggesting that Paul is making the “God created Adam and Even not Adam and Steve,” argument albeit in a less inflammatory and offensive way. “In Romans 1 Paul portrays homosexual behavior as a ‘sacrament’ (so to speak) of the antireligion of human beings who refuse to honor God as Creator. When human beings engage in homosexual activity, they enact an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality: the rejection of the Creator’s design. (386)”
Dishonorable Passions, Unnatural Relations, and Shameless Acts
What Peter Gomes agrees with Hays on is that the litany of “antireligious sacraments” listed in 1:24-31 are there to illustrate a problem that is condemned by Paul. What the two would disagree on is that “dishonorable passions,” “unnatural relations,” and “shameless acts” are references to homosexual activity as we understand it in the 21st century. I now turn to Gomes.
Dishonorable Passions:
Gomes begins by pointing out that the House of Bishops of the General Synod of the Church of England wrote: “Passions are more than emotions; they are emotions out of control. Dishonorable passions are a disordering of God’s purposes.” Eventually he makes the point that, “Paul is speaking here of passion out of control, that become an end in and of themselves, that are in fact idolatrous. Dishonorable passions refer to the worship of sexual pleasure, an excess to be condemned with all other excesses. (Gomes 157)”
Unnatural Relations:
I begin by reminding readers that unnatural relations are those that have been exchanged for the natural relations: for women in 1:26 and men in 1:27. Gomes follows by suggesting that what is being described by Paul is not, “the conduct of homosexuals, but rather of heterosexual people who performed homosexual acts.” (Gomes 157). To bolster his point Gomes cites Boswell who argues that the whole point of Romans 1 is a discussion of people who know what is right but who, because of their arrogant willfulness in their fallen state, choose to act contrary to the knowledge.
Shameless Acts:
Here Gomes makes an argument that I have most consistently heard from those who argue for Biblical permission of same-sex relationships. “The ‘shameless acts’ of which Paul speaks may well refer to the assumption that homosexual acts, whether experienced by heterosexuals or homosexuals, always involved lust and avarice, and act of will, and an unavoidable degree of exploitation where the stronger took advantage of the weaker. In these same-sex relationships the passive partner, the female role, was taken advantage of by the active partner, the male role; and in the most disagreeable form of homosexual activity known to Paul and his contemporaries, pederasty, the adult male exploited for sexual purposes the younger male. (Gomes 158)”
I have said little in response to the validity of either argument because as I was reading these sections on Romans it struck me that the looming question is, did Paul understand the concept of homosexual relationship and or a homosexual disposition like we do in the 21st century? That question will be taken up in my next post.