Why Did Paul Speak Strongly About the Danger of Same-Sex Intercourse?

Why did Paul speak so strongly about the danger of same-sex intercourse?

In Romans 1:18-23, the apostle Paul observes that God is deeply concerned about what happens when people willingly turn away from what He as Creator has revealed about Himself in nature.

According to Paul, those who turn away from a grateful relationship with their Creator are likely to worship what has been created. The result is a long list of attitudes and actions by which persons show their lack of relationship with God, while harming themselves and one another in the process (1:29-32).

In the middle of this chapter, Paul makes some very strong statements about same-gender sexual relationships. Before emphasizing even more damaging forms of evil, Paul shows how confused people become when they begin to look for life and satisfaction in a fallen creation rather than in the design of their Creator. So he writes of those who turn their backs on God,

“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion” (Romans 1:24-27).

It’s important to understand that in Paul’s day,¹ homosexual behavior was recognized as “against nature” by the most universally admired school of pagan philosophy—the Stoics.² Under inspiration of God, Paul therefore saw that same-sex eroticism physically illustrates both the nature and the effects of sin on a culture and its individuals.

Because even pagans recognized the design of masculine and feminine distinction,³ and because common people could see that same-sex intercourse is “against nature,” Paul wrote that the confusion and misuse of gender (Romans 1:26) violates the purpose of sexuality on the basis of natural evidences alone. Paul’s use of such expressions as “the degrading of their bodies” (v.24), “shameful lusts” (v.26), and “indecent acts” (v.27) emphasizes its unnaturalness.

On the basis of the consequences of acting against nature (“received in themselves the due penalty,” v.27), same-sex unions were selected by Paul as a vivid physical example of spiritual sins that confuse, twist, and distort a wide range of heart issues (1:29-31).⁴

1. For Paul, same-sex intercourse was not just a dishonoring of gender dispositions, much less of cultural conventions, but a dishonoring of gendered “bodies” through a disregard of the visible physical (and functional) difference of men and women (Romans 1:24). Further, same-sex intercourse is comparable to idolatry in its deliberate suppression of the visible evidence in creation for the attributes of the true Creator (Romans 1:18-23). (Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, p. 378) Back To Article
2. Here is an example of a Hellenistic Stoic’s view of homosexual behavior, quoted from Gagnon’s The Bible and Homosexual Practice, pp. 165-66:
   

   But of all sexual relations those involving adultery are most unlawful, and no more tolerable are those involving males with males, because the daring and flagrant act is contrary to nature (para physin; XII). (Quotation from first-century Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus.) Back To Article

3. In Romans 1:24-27, Paul is not appealing to the stories and laws of Scripture—which he could not assume that Gentiles had knowledge of—but he is appealing to “empirical observation of what actually exists” inasmuch as “the world designed by God” still showed the marks of the Creator’s hand. This was true of the grandeur of the created world and was true as well of the anatomical and procreative complementarity of male and female. Hays is correct that “nature” in the sense used by Paul here does not embrace everything that existed as a good. Some things that are innate, such as many of “the desires of the human heart,” listed in 1:24-31, have been skewed by the fall and are not safe indicators of God’s intention for human sexuality. However, in the anatomical and procreative complementarity of male and female, empirical observation of what is, and intuitive understanding of what ought to be, merge because the fall did not obliterate this physical and functional aspect of human sexuality. The Stoics too appealed to empirical observation of sexual differences between men and women as a way of determining right behavior.” (Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, p. 255) Back To Article
4. The context for Paul’s strong language regarding same-sex intercourse “finds parallels not only in the level of disgust towards same-sex intercourse exhibited by other Jewish writers of the period but also in the responses to homosexual behavior in Paul’s Scripture: the narratives of homosexual rape (Ham, the men of Sodom, and the Benjamites at Gibeah) as examples of the zenith of detestable behavior; the intense revulsion against homosexual cult prostitutes manifested in Deuteronomic and Deuteronomistic texts; the special attachment of the label ‘abomination’ to all male homosexual intercourse in the Levitical prohibitions; and possibly the unmentionable character of same-sex intercourse in Ezekiel, who refers to such behavior only by the metonym ‘abomination.’ ” (The Bible and Homosexual Practice, pp. 268-69) Back To Article