My Original Approach to Romans - Christianity and Queer Communities
Part 5
The Romans 1 Dilemma
It is time to turn our attention to the Apostle Paul.
But before we dive into the text, I want to pause and be entirely transparent with you.
The material I am going to share in these next two posts comes from the original study I did several years ago. It represents how I first began to untangle these verses. However, over the many years since that study, I have greatly increased my understanding of Paul and his writings. That growth in understanding has actually led me to a new reading of this passage.
However, when I asked myself: Does my new reading invalidate the careful work of my original study? I don’t believe so.
So, here is how we will proceed: I am going to share my original approach first. Then, I will offer an update on how I read this text now. I believe that the best of both concepts will come together to offer us significant, challenging material to consider.
With that in mind, let’s look at the letter to the Romans.
When discussing the Bible and homosexuality, this is an inevitable destination:
Romans 1:26-27 “Because of this, God gave them over to degrading passions, for their females exchanged the natural relations for those contrary to nature, and likewise also the males, abandoning the natural relations with the female, were inflamed in their desire toward one another, males with males committing the shameless deed, and receiving in themselves the penalty that was necessary for their error.”
For many, this is it. The clearest judgment on the sinfulness of homosexuality in the entire Bible: it is contrary to nature.
But as we dig into the context, we find that the passage quickly proves to be less than clear.
Is it about Idolatrous Sex?
Some who argue for the affirming side claim that Paul is specifically looking at idolatrous sex acts committed in service to a pagan temple.
The late historian John Boswell rightly finds fault with this argument, and I have to agree with him. When we look at the text, it is evident that Paul is not describing a religious act. He clearly speaks of personal desire or passion being involved, rather than people simply performing sex acts out of religious duty.
The Leviticus Connection: Bestiality or Lesbianism?
The greatest difficulty with Paul’s words actually follows in the exact same vein as the Leviticus passages we reviewed in our previous posts.
Paul makes no clear reference to lesbianism. He speaks simply of women taking on “unnatural” sexual relations.
We run right back into the same problem we found in the Old Testament. A literal reading of Paul does not literally allow us to apply his words to homosexuality as a whole—unless we fill in the blanks however we want.
We know that there are hundreds of explicit references or allusions to the Old Testament in Paul’s writings. In fact, he alludes to the Hebrew scriptures in Romans more than in any other book. Because of this, Paul’s phrasing regarding women could just as easily be a reference back to the Levitical concept of bestiality rather than lesbianism.
We are forced to ask a difficult question: Is Paul making the first-ever biblical reference to lesbianism, despite not doing so clearly? Or is he echoing Leviticus regarding women having intercourse with animals?
Picking up the hierarchical considerations of penetration from our Leviticus study, it is very possible that Paul is speaking out of this same Hebraic hierarchy concern. This means he isn’t necessarily focused on the modern concept of homosexuality, but rather on social structure as understood in his culture.
What if Paul is essentially saying that God allows a breakdown of “proper” social barriers to fall on those who do not follow him? The order collapses in their lives, and people are left in chaos.
Paul’s context was a society where gender superiority and inferiority were seen as built into nature itself. Thus, he could use men leaving their primary social position to be penetrated like a woman—and women replacing men with beasts—to describe the collapse of social order in the terms of his day.
This reading makes profound sense when you consider that Paul goes on in the Romans 1 context to list other social order issues that come with the breakdown of community: murder, envy, malice, gossip, and more.
The Problem of “Punishment”: A Reality Check
But there is another major hurdle in this text that we have to address.
Let’s assume for a moment that Paul is talking about modern homosexuality. If we read the passage closely, Paul clearly frames these “unnatural relations” as a specific judgment from God on people who refused to acknowledge Him.
According to Romans 1, there is a very specific sequence of events:
The Starting Point: A group of people (or a single person) know about God and have “natural” (heterosexual) desires.
The Rebellion: They actively choose to reject God.
The Punishment: As a direct penalty for their idolatry, God “gives them over” and changes their sexual orientation.
If this passage is the definitive, universal biblical explanation for why homosexuality exists, it creates a massive theological and pastoral problem.
Why? Because it simply does not match reality.
Think about the real lives of people in our churches and communities.
What does this passage say to the child of God-loving parents who also loves God their entire life, yet experiences same-sex attraction from a very young age?
What does it say to the devout teenager who grows up seeking God, loving Him deeply, and begging with tears at the altar for their homoerotic desires to go away—but they don’t?
What about the spouse who has fought their same-sex attraction and entered into a heterosexual marriage and started a family—trying as hard as they can to be righteous, praying and praying to no longer be gay, and they are never changed?
If Romans 1 is a formula, what exactly is being “judged” in the lives of these fully repentant, Jesus-loving, submissive people?
The Romans 1 formula—rebellion causes God to turn you over to being gay as a punishment—completely falls apart when we look at the lives of righteous, faithful Christians who are experiencing same-sex attraction. They did not start out straight, reject God, and get handed over to being gay as a divine penalty.
The “Collateral Damage” Argument
When faced with this reality, some traditional theologians try to explain it away. They argue that God doesn’t inflict homosexuality as a punishment on a case-by-case basis. Instead, they say that homosexuality is just a general curse of God’s permissive judgment on a fallen, unrighteous world.
In this view, if you happen to be a faithful Christian who is gay, you are simply “collateral damage” of humanity’s general rebellion and God’s infliction of punishment.
But there is a major flaw with this argument.
Paul’s own words do not support it.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul is incredibly precise. He doesn’t just throw a blanket curse over all of humanity. He distinctly separates people into two camps: the righteous (who live by faith) and the unrighteous (who actively do what they know they shouldn’t). In Romans 1, Paul is speaking about a specific group of people who became unrighteous through their own personal, deliberate choices, and God judged them for their unique sinfulness by allowing “gayness” to overtake them.
That group is a distinct “them” from the other group of righteous people.
He is not describing a generalized “fallen world” where innocent bystanders accidentally catch a judgment. He is describing a direct penalty for a direct crime.
Aside from the linguistic issues that make a generalized homosexual punishment difficult, given what we now know about the psychological and biological realities of sexual orientation—that it is deeply woven into who a person is—it is incredibly difficult to accept this collateral damage interpretation.
Note: Such an interpretation is called eisegesis. This interpretive error starts from a conclusion and then works to make the text fit it—often unconsciously. In the care of Romans 1, the collateral damage interpretation comes from the assumed conclusion that homosexuality is certainly a sin, so an interpretation of this passage must come up with why otherwise righteous people are gay. Thus, the words of Paul are twisted.
Harmonizing Paul’s Goal
I believe there is a strong case to be made that Paul was not explicitly focused on the modern concept of homosexuality. He was focused on the breakdown of social propriety that comes when people live unrighteously.
As Paul understood it, when God judges a rebellious society, He simply removes the guardrails of order on a person’s life.
In Paul’s male-elevated world, that was pictured as the ancient gender and penetration tiers disappearing—the exact same tiers we saw in Leviticus: men first, women second, and animals last.
If Paul is speaking of this collapsing social hierarchy rather than establishing a universal origin story for sexual orientation, everything clicks into place.
It harmonizes perfectly with the Levitical passages. It continues his pattern of pulling from the Old Testament. And it places his words squarely into the setting of his own day.
If we are going to read Paul well, we have to sit with him in his own context.
And it is exactly to that ancient context that we will turn in our next post, as we consider more about how Paul uses the ideas of “natural” and “unnatural.”