This is one of the two longest chapters in the book.  It provides historical background that some readers will already know and makes a few arguments that will be relied upon elsewhere.  Readers can skip any parts they are already familiar with.  The main claims that will be argued are:

1. Paul’s letter to the church in Rome is an intervention in an ethnic dispute between Jewish and gentile Christians.  It is not a textbook of theology, though it has often been read in that way because its focus on the gospel as the solution to that dispute involves a lot of theology.
2. Paul speaks about gentiles and not Jews in Romans 1:18–32, meaning the passage is not a ‘biblical anthropology’ or any other kind of statement about all human beings.
3. Romans 1:18–32 fits with what we otherwise know about prevailing Roman sexual practices.
4. What Paul says about the nature and origin of same-sex ‘passions’ can be compared directly with the nature and origin of same-sex orientation as now understood.  This comparison shows he was not talking about anything like same-sex orientation in Romans 1, whatever he might have known or believed about comparable ideas at the time.

The purpose of this short introduction to Romans, and especially chs.1–3, is to understand why Paul refers to same-sex relations in Rom 1:18–32 and why he says what he does there.  We should be able to read these passages and feel that they make sense in Paul’s situation as well as that of the earliest churches in Roman society.  We should see how they serve his purpose in writing the letter.  We are not in the same historical situation as his audience, though, and must determine as best we can what that is.  We can do so partly from the letter itself, and partly from other background sources.

The first-century Mediterranean world is called Hellenistic, after the culture and language of Greece (Hellēne), which came to dominate the region after the conquests of Alexander the Great (d.323 BCE).  Alexander’s empire drew a line between the Classical period of Greek history and the subsequent rise of the Roman Empire, which ruled the whole region in New Testament times (30–70 CE, for our purposes).  For Romans, a Jew or a Judaean (Ioudaios, same word) was someone who followed the customs of Judea, which is the region of Israel.  This was not primarily a racial term in the way it is today; Romans mainly wanted to know whether people were governable.  Jews in turn referred to other people as ‘gentiles’ (the Greek word ethnos, as in ‘ethnicity’), meaning ‘nations.’

Many Jews lived away from Judea, spread throughout the Mediterranean world and the Ancient Near East.  The Apostle Paul, who was from Tarsus in what is now Turkey, was a Hellenistic Jew, equally at home in Jewish and gentile society.  In the middle of the first century, more than a decade after becoming a Christian, he began to travel and set up Christian churches in various cities around the eastern Mediterranean.  Of Paul’s letters to churches in the New Testament, only those to Thessalonica and Philippi suggest a mostly gentile membership; the others were addressed to a mixture of Jewish and gentile Christians.  There were no church buildings at these times, so churches met in the homes of wealthier Christians.

Paul’s letter to the Roman church has often been understood as kind of a gospel textbook.  On this understanding, he is sending a summary of his preaching to the church in Rome, where he knows some people, in the hope that they will sponsor him to travel further eastward to Spain.  Naturally, he should start with the problem of human sin, to which his gospel is the answer.  Romans 1 is therefore understood to describe human sinfulness in general, and to illustrate this with a range of sins among which same-sex relations take pride of place.  This letter is the most theologically complex of Paul’s writing, so it is in some ways natural to read it like this.

Richard Hays’ chapter on Homosexuality in The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) includes a short and lucid example of a traditional reading of the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Hays follows the German Lutheran commentator Ernst Käsemann.  His chapter has a few Reformed Protestant features, and Käsemann’s commentary has more again, but we’ll discuss those further in §5.c (Depravity), when we consider Evangelical arguments about human moral corruption.  There have been some large improvements in the interpretation of Romans since the 1970s, and one of these affects precisely the question of whether whether Paul, in Romans 1:18–32, is talking about all human beings.  Notice what this question means for Hays:

Having sounded this keynote, Paul abruptly modulates into a contrasting key by turning to condemn the unrighteousness of fallen humanity: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth” (1:18).

No alternative reading is considered:

The ensuing discussion (1:19–32) explains, documents, and elaborates this human unrighteousness.  Humanity’s unrighteousness consists fundamentally in a refusal to honor God and render him thanks (1:21).  God has clearly shown forth his “power and divine nature” in and through the created world (1:19–20), but the human race in general has disregarded this evidence and turned on a massive scale to idolatry (1:23).  The genius of Paul’s analysis, of course, lies in his refusal to posit a catalog of sins as the cause of human alienation from God.  Instead, he delves to the root: all other depravities follow from the radical rebellion of the creature against the Creator (1:24–31).

And if we read the passage with this basic starting point, we get an argument that:

Because human beings did not acknowledge God, “they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened” (1:21; cf.  2 Thess.  2:10b-12).  Paul does not argue on a case-by-case basis that every single individual has first known and then rejected God; instead, thinking in mythico-historical categories, he casts forth a blanket condemnation of humankind.  The whole passage is “Paul’s real story of the universal fall.”  As Kasemann puts it, “For the apostle, history is governed by the primal sin of rebellion against the Creator, which finds repeated and universal expression”!  The passage is not merely a polemical denunciation of selected pagan vices; it is a diagnosis of the human condition.  The diseased behavior detailed in verses 24–31 is symptomatic of the one sickness of humanity as a whole.  Because they have turned away from God, “all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin” (3:9).

Since the 1970s, Romans has increasingly been understood by Evangelicals as Paul’s intervention in an ethnic dispute between Jewish and gentile factions in the house churches in Rome.  It is an occasional and situational letter like all his others.  This better accounts for its content and structure.  It explains, as we will see, why he begins as he does.  It explains why the latter half does so little theology, offering instead a lengthy guide to getting along with each other despite conscientious differences.  This has confirmed longer-standing concerns about why so many big features of Paul’s theology are missing from the letter, and is by far now the dominant view – often combined with an older ‘textbook’ reading.  I will assume the ‘intervention’ reading in what follows but will comment from time to time on how a ‘textbook’ reading would see something differently.

Paul wrote this letter to a church that he had not himself started and had not even visited (Rom 1:8–15).  However, he asks his readers to warmly greet twenty-three different people by name and several complete households (16:3–21).  While some copies of Romans circulated without these greetings, it makes much more sense that that situational greetings would be omitted from copies later made for other churches than that names that had no general significance would come to be attached.

How does Paul know all these people?  Romans 16 very likely tells us where Paul was when he wrote the letter.  Sending a letter across the Empire meant entrusting it to a traveller, and in this case an eminent woman named Phoebe, a minister and patroness of the church in Cenchrea, carried his letter to Rome (16:1–2).  Cenchrea is just south of Corinth in Greece.  Of seven people who send greetings, Gaius and Erastus (v.23) may be the people of those names who are elsewhere placed in Corinth (1 Cor 1:14; 2 Tim 4:20).  Two people he greets there, Prisca and Aquila, previously hosted a church in their house in Corinth (v.3; cf.  Acts 18, 1 Cor 16:21).  Most likely then it was sent from Corinth.  These connections are unsurprising in a Jewish-Hellenistic movement, as Corinth was Rome’s economic gateway to the eastern Mediterranean and so, a likely stop for anyone traveling between Rome and Jerusalem.

Amongst the Greek and Roman names in chapter 16, we can say at least six of those greeted are Jewish.  Prisca and Aquila (v.3) are called Paul’s relatives in Acts 18; Andronicus and Junia (v.7), as well as Herodion (v.11), are identified as Paul’s compatriots or relatives, which either way means they are Jewish; and Mary (v.6) is of course a Jewish name.  There could have been other Jewish Christians with Hellenistic names, but these are enough to show that Rome had a mixed congregation of Jews and gentiles.

The major theme of Romans is how Jewish Christians relate to Hellenistic Christians and vice-versa.  Or rather, in light of apparent difficulties, how they ought to relate.  We can see this theme of Jewish-Gentile relations all through the letter.

Paul’s headline statements present “the gospel” as God’s promise, in Jewish scripture, to make gentiles his people too, just as much as Jews (Rom 1:1–4; 1:16–17; 15:7–13; 16:25–27, cf.  10:15; Isa 52:7; 61:1), whether they were the ‘wise’ Hellenists of Rome and Greece or mere ‘foolish’ barbarians (Rom 1:14).  God is not the God of Jews only, but the God of gentiles too (3:29), and ‘he’ shows no partiality in judging or saving either (2:11), thus showing himself to be just.  Good and evil will be recompensed, and those with faith and faithfulness (pistis, same word) will be saved, “the Jew first and also the Greek” (1:16; 2:9–10, and ch.2–3 generally).  Gentile Christians are like branches grafted into a Jewish olive tree (11:17–24).

Within this general picture, contentious questions arise between the two groups.  Is there any advantage in being Jewish (Rom 3:1–4); where is this ‘faith’ in the Old Testament (ch.4); what things may we “boast” about or take pride in, if not our identities as Jews or gentiles (Rom 2:17, 23; 3:27; 4:2; 5:1–11; 11:18; 15:17; cf.  1 Cor 1:26–31; 2 Cor 5:11–12; and 2 Cor 10–12 generally); was the Jewish law a bad thing (Rom 5:12–21); how is God’s grace related to it (Rom 6:1–14); does God’s grace mean sin doesn’t really matter (Rom 6:15–23); how do we overcome that same tendency to sin that made the law ineffective (7–8); did God’s promise to Israel fail and why aren’t more Jews Christians and is Israel finished (ch.9–11); how do people who respect food laws and religious holidays get on with people who don’t, without quarreling?  (Rom 13:11–15:6; cf.  16:17–20).

So the thread of the letter from start to end is how Jewish and gentile Christians should relate.  It is the conflicted state of these relations that calls forth Paul’s exhortations to love one another, live peaceably, and not think of ourselves more highly than we should (Rom 11:25, 12:3; 12:11–13:10, 15:7–13).  Paul emphasises all the way through that the gospel reconciles both Jews and gentiles to God and each other in Christ.

Because the letter focuses on Jewish and gentile relations to a high degree, it is significant that the church in Rome had an unusual ethnic history.  No-one knows who began it, and the only apostles he greets there are two of his own relatives (Rom 1:7) – not any of Jesus’ twelve apostles, but seemingly a second tier like Paul himself.  The Emperor Claudius, who ruled from 41 CE until his murder in 54 CE, had some significant number of Jews expelled from Rome around 49 CE, over disputes about someone whose name is suggestively recorded as ‘Chrestus’ (Acts 18:26; Suetonius: Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Claudius 25); though that was a common name meaning ‘useful’.  This kind of expulsion wasn’t remotely unusual in Roman politics.  Tiberius had done the same in 17 CE (Suetonius: Tiberius 36), and other groups were banished periodically, most frequently astrologers.  Many Jews would have gone to Corinth until the Emperor’s edict expired; which at the latest would have occurred with his death.

So, the most obvious explanation for the existence and peculiar concerns of the Letter to the Romans is that some Jewish Christians, who had most likely started the church, spent some time away and then found themselves sidelined when they returned.  The gentile Christians got on perfectly well without them.  This is a speculative reconstruction, though it seems to make the best sense of their disputes: two groups each thinking they’re better than the other, and, perhaps in consequence, should be in charge.  While it is possible that these conflicts developed in another way, they certainly did develop, and the letter has much to say about their divisions and quarrels.  These might have been compounded by the churches meeting in the homes of particular patrons, and external pressures may have made it all much worse.  The first half of the Emperor Nero’s reign did not see Christian persecution in the ways that later followed (Tacitus: Annals 15.44; Suetonius: Nero 16), but Paul alludes to some ‘sufferings’ and difficulties with both Roman authorities and Jewish opponents (Rom 8:17–25; 11:28; 12:14–15; 13:1–7; 15:30–32).  So it makes sense that Paul might have been asked for help or otherwise heard about their disagreements and decided to intervene.  He had previously dealt with Jewish-gentile issues in Corinth and Galatia and he knew people now in Rome.  He has wanted for some time to visit Rome and sees an opportunity for them to support him travelling eastward to Spain and starting churches there (Rom 15:20–21, 23–28).  So sometime around 55–57 CE, on most reconstructions, while Paul is in Corinth waiting to travel to Jerusalem, he sends them a letter.  Parts of it confuse modern readers no end, so it’s easy to miss the big picture, which looks like this:

This letter has been understood in many different ways because of its range of concerns, and it may be helpful to describe this with some broad approximations:

The letter invited all these readings because they could all be extracted from Paul’s answer to one original first-century question: How to reconcile a church that was divided into Jewish and gentile factions?  – And do so on the basis of their unity in Christ.

We now have a general picture of Paul’s letter.  The part of Romans that matters for understanding his references to same-sex relations (1:18–32) runs from 1:16 through to 3:31.  Here’s how this goes, in a symmetric structure I’ll mark A to C:

• [A]  Rom 1:16–17.  “The just shall live by faith.”  – Paul states the theme of his argument, concerning the gospel for Jews and gentiles, by quoting the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk.
  • [B]  Rom 1:18–32.  Gentiles chose idols over God, and became notoriously immoral.  Paul makes a long list of sexual and social wrongs, and says they know that these are wrong.
    • [C]  Rom 2:1–16.  “Thus you are without excuse, you who judge…” Judgemental gentiles are moral hypocrites, however wise they claim to be.  God, though, shows no favouritism.
    • [C’]  Rom 2:17–3:8.  “But if you call yourself a Jew…” Jews, who have God’s law, have conspicuously failed to keep it.  Paul continues, though, that Jews have an advantage in being given God’s scriptures; the unfaithfulness of some of them does not change that.
  • [B’]  Rom 3:9–3:20.  Jews are thus no better off than gentiles; both are under the power of sin.  Paul then quotes a string of hyperbolic statements about human sinfulness, from Jewish scripture.
• [A’]  Rom 3:21–31.  “Where then is boasting?”  The God of both Jews and gentiles demonstrates his own justice by justifying both through faith (and faithfulness).  Boasting is excluded by faith.

To a first approximation, then, Paul is saying neither gentiles nor Jews have any grounds for ethnic or cultural superiority.  Their problem is not that they made incorrect arguments about their status, though they have done so.  Rather, their problem is that arguing in this way shows a complete misunderstanding of Christian faith, which by nature excludes any such boasting.

Paul’s argument here isn’t always clear to readers.  The main problem is that it is disrupted by two highly confusing passages, in 2:1–6 and 2:17–24.  Here Paul switches into second-person language, that is, he says “you” rather than “they”, and speaks to his audience directly, accusing them of hypocrisy.

These passages are sometimes considered ‘diatribes’, because it doesn’t seem to make sense that Paul is addressing the Roman Christians themselves in this way.  A diatribe is a form of writing in which a hypothetical conversation partner is made to ask some questions that the author wishes to address.  In vv.1–6, he follows the denunciation of gentiles in vv.1–32 with “Thus you are without excuse, O man who judges” for judging others “while doing the same things”.  Yet, as we saw, it was unlikely that any individual gentile was guilty of even half what that passage accused them of.  And if some Hellenists did, why would Paul’s recipients identify with such people, and so feel embarrassed by them?  No, the culture in general – and boasting about cultural identity – has to be Paul’s focus, because that is something that the gentile Christians did take pride in.  Paul is not saying that the Roman Christians were all individually “doing the same things,” as the whole of gentile culture.  But they were identifying with that culture, and judging Jewish Christians, and feeling superior to them on that basis.  He is speaking to the culture – to a stereotype of a bad Roman – in the form of his diatribe partner.

The passage in vv.17–24 is similar.  The Jewish figure being addressed is an adulterer who steals idols from pagan temples yet has the same sense of moral superiority.  It’s oddly specific, and can’t mean all the Jewish Christians in the Roman church.  Even if there had been a few notorious, discreditable scandals involving adultery or theft of idols of silver and gold by some Jews somewhere in Rome, why would the other Jewish Christians identify with such people?  They must identifiy with them in order to absorb Paul’s point about about hypocrisy.  But again, they identify with hellenistic Jewish culture, and Paul is addrfessing that culture, by taking a stereotype of a bad Jew as a dialogue partner.  Like the gentiles, they were thinking their ethnic identity meant they were better, and Paul was using some notorious counter-examples to debunk that notion.

This makes sense of the ‘diatribes’.  The messages of the surrounding sections (1:18–32 and 3:1–20) are that neither Roman nor Jewish culture has grounds for “boasting”, that is, for a sense of superiority over the other.  When we read Romans 2 in these terms, it untangles.  On this view, the “man who judges” is the gentile (or the gentile Christian) who dismisses the Jewish Christians, and identifies with a supposedly superior Greco-Roman culture.  Likewise, “you who call yourself a Jew and rely on the Law,” is the Jewish Christian who identifies with Torah-observance, and presses this upon the in-their-view unclean gentile Christians.  Yet Jewish history shows consistent unfaithfulness, and Jewish scripture is as scathing toward them as it is to anyone.  Gentile culture stands discredited before God, and Jewish identity is no badge of superiority either.  In each case, Paul makes his diatribe partner a representative of the worst in gentile or Jewish culture, respectively.  The fractious Roman Christians stand convicted for taking the side of their cultures in their disputes with fellow Christians, and the passages thus makes good sense all the way through.  I will interpret them in this way as we proceed.

One problem we face in reading Romans today is that it is far removed from us in time and place, and so, in language and culture too.  People who heard Romans read aloud in small Roman communities in their first language in the first century will have had advantages in understanding it that no-one now alive will share.  We have to do extra work to see what was self-evident to them.  A second problem is that, like a murder-mystery novel, we will notice different things on our second reading, that is, once we understand where it’s going.  And many of us will expect to read it only once.

In the chapter so far we have covered the overall argument of the book and where this section fits.  We’re starting with the understanding that Paul will try to persuade the gentile Christians in the Roman church that they are not ethnically or culturally superior to the Jewish Christians.  Still, verse 1:18 and what immediately follows is going to feel like dropping the bass, dropping the clutch, dropping a bomb, or otherwise getting suddenly real.

We may treat Romans 1:16–3:31 as a single introductory argument, and the frame for understanding 1:18–32 and what it says about same-sex relations.  Here is the full passage, including the translators’ footnotes from the NRSV:

Romans 1:18–32 (NRSV UE)

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth.  19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  20 Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made.  So they are without excuse, 21 for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened.  22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.  25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever!  Amen.

26 For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions.  Their females exchanged natural intercourse[e] for unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse[f] with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another.  Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done.  29 They were filled with every kind of injustice, evil, covetousness, malice.  Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters_g insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.  32 They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die, yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

e 1:26 Gk use

f 1:27 Gk use

g 1:30 Or God-hated

Perhaps pause for a moment and highlight for yourself the repeated, emphasised, unusual, or confusing terms before continuing.

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In Romans 1:18–32, Paul argues that gentiles, with Hellenistic Romans mostly in view, are part of a culture that God condemns:

One of the most curious features of the passage is its opening.

Rom 1:18.  For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth…

The Greek word that means ‘is revealed’ is a present tense verb, so it could be translated “is being revealed”.  So, what’s new?  On a ‘textbook’ reading, what has been revealed in the present time is Christ and his gospel.  On this view ‘wrath’ can be read as the final judgement that is announced in the preaching of the gospel.  However, Paul says a moment later that gentiles know that their many terrible practices are wrong and deserve judgement (1:32), which would not be a sudden, new development.  Elsewhere he twice implies that God overlooked gentile sins in the past (Acts 17:2x, Rom 2.

The meaning of ‘wrath’ is resolved, however, by one of the other curious features of the passage, the triply repeated phrase “God gave them over” to sin:

v.24.  Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.  …

v.26.  For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions.  …

v.28.  And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done.

If you think of “gay” as term for a kind of attraction or behaviour, then you might find this confusing; it might sound as if Paul were saying that God made those people gay (or violent, or anything else on this list).

See if you can say how the following statement from a popular 1970s book gets the order of Paul’s argument exactly backwards.

A homosexual violates God’s clearly prescribed will, thwarts his purpose for man, and has incurred “the wrath of God.”  If a man persists in this sin long enough, God will give him up to “a reprobate mind.”  (LaHaye 1978, p.111)

This language is reminiscent of Isaiah 64:7: “you [God] have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity,” or, with a little regard for context, Wis 11:6: that “one is punished by the very things by which one sins.”  Paul sees Greco-Roman society going sharply from bad to worse and understands this as mutual abandonment, both them of God and God of them.  People choosing egregious evils were delivered into their power, to be dominated by them.  This is not sin understood as freedom from restraint.  Rather, this is reminiscent of Paul’s language in Rom 5–7.  Sin is pictured as a subjugating and enslaving force, like a crime lord that moves into town and takes over.  As Michael Bird writes on those chapters:

Sin is personified by Paul as a something that “enters” (v.  12) and “reigns” (v.  20); later we learn that it can be “obeyed” (6:20), pays “wages” (6:23), seizes “opportunity” (7:8, 11), “deceives” (7:11), “kills” (7:12), and even “dwells” in people (7:20).  (XXXX)

As an event clearly happening in the present, this makes much better sense of God’s wrath being presently revealed.  It sharply underlines Paul’s argument that gentile culture and society is nothing for gentile Christians to be boasting about.

This degeneration is attributed to pagans suppressing their knowledge of a high God, who made the world, to whom they were morally accountable.  When honour and gratitude toward God was neglected, idolatry became a self-reinforcing delusion that led to escalating sexual and social sin (vv.24–27, 28–32).  Both the idolatry and the immorality were chosen and embraced by gentiles in deliberate “exchanges” of good for bad (vv.23, 25, and 26).  When Paul concludes his list of gentile sins he says that they know that these actions are wrong (v.32), but they do them anyway.  Paul assumes that the gentile Christians can’t deny or defend these notorious public examples of gentile violence and degradation in their culture.

Be sure to understand the structure of Paul’s argument here before continuing, and perhaps skim-read to the end of Romans 3, to satisfy yourself that this is what it’s saying.  You might consider how this compares to a shorter passage in Ephesians.  Here ‘abandoned’ is the same Greek verb as ‘handed over’ in Romans 1:24, 26, 28.

Eph 4:17–19.  Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds.  18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart.  19 They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

Understanding that Romans is addressing an essentially ethnic conflict draws much more attention to the way that Paul dismantles the cultural pretense and social pride (“boasting”) of both the Jewish and Gentile factions.  Jews boast in the law, in being kept separate from gentile sins – and gentiles themselves, much of the time.  Gentiles boast in Empire and philosophy, and also because they have a culture of self-assertion that offers patronage in exchange for praise.  There are interesting parallels in his letters to the church in Corinth, especially 2 Cor 10–12, where his opponents seem to literally call themselves “super apostles” and greatly magnify their own importance.  Paul replies with a short masterclass in irony that more-or-less says “If I was as foolish as that, I would big-note myself too.”  The boasting that was endemic in Rome’s honour-shame culture – and in ours, though we’re a little more subtle about it – is nothing to God.  The proper example is Jesus, who had more right to boast than anyone, but gave it up to serve others and suffer for their sake (Phil 2:5–8).

This all leads to Paul’s declaration in 3:21–31 that neither Jews nor Greeks have any advantages before God, but are reconciled to God by faith.  Thus God is righteous, neither Jews nor gentiles possess religious or cultural superiority over the other, each are reconciled to God by faith, and thus are reconciled to each other also.

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Having a general picture of Romans 1, and the place of vv.18–32 within it, should now raise some further questions.  In the textbook view, if Paul is setting up an explanation of the gospel by describing human sin, then he should be describing all people; so Evangelicals will sometimes treat Romans 1 as a ‘biblical anthropology’, a statement about fallen human nature.  Because same-sex relations are the main exhibit for the prosecution, we will want to know how well his description matches prevailing Greek and Roman customs, and how well Paul’s comments match same-sex orientation as we understand it now.  After looking at these, we’ll also note some questions about Romans that will come up later in the book but which need not be introduced here.

1. Does Paul describe all people or only gentiles in 1:18–32?
2. Does Paul address Roman ‘homosexuality’ as now understood?
3. Does Paul address same-sex orientation as now understood?

The first thing to notice about this passage is that Paul is employing a stock Jewish argument against paganism, that is, Greek and Roman religion, rather than writing anything that he considers new or innovative.  An earlier example of this can be found in Wisdom of Solomon.  This book appears in the Apocrypha, between the old and new Testaments, in Catholic Bibles.

As in Wisdom of Solomon, Paul focuses on things that Jews in the first century considered to be pagan problems, utterly beneath them: idolatry, sexual immorality, and a range of social disorders.  While the Old Testament is one long story of people relapsing into idolatry and immorality, this changed after the Babylonian Exile in 587 BCE, and their subsequent repatriation under Ezra and Nehemiah.  Statues of Asherah and other gods, which number in the thousands before the Babylonian conquest, vanish from Israel’s archaeology afterward.  By New Testament times, idolatry was a foreign menace.  Jewish bedtime stories told of young Jewish men refusing to worship a foreign king’s idol (Daniel 3); or the seven sons of one mother submitting to torture and death rather than eating pagan food (2 Maccabees 7, also in the Apocrypha).  The setting of this last story is the liberation of Israel from the Seleucid Empire by John Maccabeus and sons around 168 BCE, when the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes had tried to institute pig sacrifices in the temple, among other objectionable measures.

This is also the period of time in which Pharisees and synagogues first appear, setting up the social world of the gospels.  The terms idol, idolatry or carved image are not found even once in the four gospels, which are located almost exclusively in Israel; only a possible reference to Roman armies bearing military standards (Matt 24:15–16; Luke 21:20).  As we saw in the preceding chapter, this sense of Jewish superiority was also reflected in sexual morals.

Two Hellenistic Jewish writers provide important background for this time.  Philo Judaeus (c.20 BCE to 50 CE) was a philosophically minded Jewish leader in Alexandria in Egypt and Flavius Josephus (37 to c.100 CE) was a Jewish military leader who defected to the Romans (c.67–70 BCE).  Josephus describes one incident in these terms: The Jewish War V.  55–59.

But now Pilate, the procurator of Judea, removed the army from Caesarea to Jerusalem, to take their winter quarters there, in order to abolish the Jewish laws.  So he introduced Caesar’s effigies, which were upon the ensigns, and brought them into the city; whereas our law forbids us the very making of images; 56 on which account the former procurators were wont to make their entry into the city with such ensigns as had not those ornaments.  Pilate was the first who brought those images to Jerusalem, and set them up there; which was done without the knowledge of the people, because it was done in the night time; … 58 and when the Jews petitioned him again, he gave a signal to the soldiers to encompass them routed, and threatened that their punishment should be no less than immediate death, unless they would leave off disturbing him, and go their ways home.  59 But they threw themselves upon the ground, and laid their necks bare, and said they would take their death very willingly, rather than the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed; upon which Pilate was deeply affected with their firm resolution to keep their laws inviolable, and presently commanded the images to be carried back from Jerusalem to Caesarea.

For Philo, the making of idols is as much an imbecility as an evil (cf.  Isa 44:9–20):

Decalogue 76.  Let no one, then, who has a soul worship a soulless thing, for it is utterly preposterous that the works of nature should turn aside to do service to what human hands have wrought.

When Paul emphasises these precise issues in Romans 1, he would be understood to be only referring to the background of the gentile Christians.  The best argument that he refers to all people notes that he writes “all impiety and wrongdoing of humans (anthropoi)” in 1:18, and doesn’t mention ‘gentiles’ (ethnoi) anywhere.  However, his reference to ‘humans’ reads, “humans who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”  That is what Paul is saying idolaters do, which means Gentiles.  This makes sense for Paul’s argument, as Rom 1:18–32 would not be so persuasive if the gentiles could just reply to the charges of idolatry and sexual/social immorality undermining their superiority by saying “well so do they!”

Here’s why this is an important idea.  If Paul is only talking about gentiles in Romans 1:18–32, then he is not describing all human beings.  He does believe that all human beings do sin, and quite substantially, he’s just not talking about that here.  Nor in Rom 3, where a corresponding argument indicts Jews for having had God’s law and not kept it.  The references that are often used to indict all human beings are actually indicting only Jews, using their own scriptures.  This is an enormously disruptive idea in Evangelical theology, since major historical forms of Protestantism have built large parts of their understanding of universal human ‘fallenness’ on this passage.  We will consider this more fully in §5.c (Depravity).

We know quite a lot about same-sex relations in the Greek and Roman world, as the Greeks and Romans had no qualms about discussing them, and this has been studied academically since the 1970s.  Having some idea of what went on there will allow us to put Paul’s argument into its social context.

Craig A. Williams organises his representative 2010 book Roman Homosexuality around a set of rules determining a man’s masculine honour.  The rules were frequently broken, which is one of the reasons we know about them.  Often, they were broken by emperors, who, uniquely, could do so without any consequence other than scandal.  Rule one says that a free-born Roman man dominates: he does not take the passive or receptive role in intercourse, or if he does, he keeps that secret.

Rule two is that free-born Roman citizens other than his own wife are off limits.  Sex may be freely undertaken with slaves, prostitutes, or non-citizens, whether male or female, young or old.  He may do this whether he himself is married or single, without any effect upon his social status or moral reputation.  Williams illustrates this with a moment in the opening scene of Curculio, a comedic play by Plautus (d.184 BCE).  A young gentleman has discovered that the door of a young woman he loves is also the door of the house of a local pimp (!).  His attending slave and advisor seems relieved by this discovery, as it means the young man is not doing anything stupid, bad, or dangerous, like adultery.  He offers him the following encouragement:

nobody stops or forbids you to buy what’s in the open market, if you’ve got the cash.  Nobody stops anyone from walking along the public highway.  Provided you don’t make inroads on fenced-in preserves, provided you keep away from married women, widows, virgins, young innocents, and children of respectable families, love anyone you want.

Rule three is that a Roman man is masculine, never effeminate.  Roman masculinity looked toward the bravery of soldiers and the austerity of farmers, and despised feminisation and luxury in the style of Greek same-sex relations.  In this and a few other ways, same-sex relations in Roman society differed from those in Greek society.  Williams defines the Greek custom of paiderastia as “openly celebrated sexual and romantic relationships between citizen men and free-born adolescent males” (ch.2).  Romans disapproved of this sharply, as they did of the nudity in Greek gymnasia, not because young males were an inappropriate subject of desire for Roman men, but because these particular youths were free-born citizens.  Zeus and Ganymede were popular artistic and literary symbols of a married free-born Roman man’s right to exploit a foreign slave, and the power of a beautiful youth to attract admirers and sexual partners of either sex.  Roman writers speak about the objects of men’s desire as women or boys interchangeably, and, without apparent embarrassment, they idealise the ‘smoothness’ of boys between the onset of puberty (at 12 or 14) and the appearance of the manly beard of adulthood (at 20).

So when Paul in Romans 1 makes no mention of pederasty, this may reflect the wording of the Levitical prohibitions (‘male’, not ‘boy’ or ‘man’), but it may also simply reflect that Jews and Roman citizens actually agreed that it was wrong – at least between free-born citizens.  There’s no need to attribute the behaviour in Romans 1 to pagan temples; it was endemic in the culture at large; which is exactly the point of Paul’s argument.  This would by no means have been lost on the Christian slaves of pagan masters in Paul’s churches, who could be raped with impunity by their masters, and had no legal recourse of any kind if they were.

It will be clear from all this why I put ‘homosexuality’ in quote marks when referring to same-sex relations in antiquity, and why I use the term ‘same-sex orientation’ for the sake of greater clarity.  Today the word ‘homosexuality’ means same-sex orientation, whereas this was rarely the case more than a generation or two ago.  Same-sex orientation will have been as much a part of human nature in Roman times as it is now, and sexual preferences were observed as much as they are now.  But – and this will seem strange to modern readers – even had orientation been understood, it would have remained largely irrelevant to actual sexual practices in the cultures surrounding the Old and New Testaments.  Being gay would not have stopped a person marrying heterosexually, for they had to produce legitimate heirs.  And being straight would not stopped them – and manifestly did not stop them – having sexual relations with subordinates of either sex.  Thus ‘homosexuality’, not homosexuality.

This is doubtless some of the background for Paul’s discussion of same-sex relations.  He treats them as a slam-dunk argument against the endemic immorality of Roman culture, and so, Roman cultural superiority.  This was Paul’s primary reason for mentioning same-sex relations as he did.  Like in Sodom and Gibeah (Gen 19; Jdg 19), same-sex relations are used here to exemplify social evil.  This was not a wholly male issue.  In his play ‘Tales of the Courtesans’, Lucian of Samosata portrayed women exploiting their female slaves in similar ways.

However, although Paul’s moral ‘slam-dunk’ is made simpler by the reprehensible nature of Roman ‘homosexuality’, we cannot suppose that Paul only understood abusive relationships to be wrong, nor thought such abuse was the only problem with same-sex relationships.  We’ll discuss this further presently (§3.c, Reasons.)

We will consider in an appendix (§7.a) whether Christian scripture should have taken account of same-sex orientation, especially in light of the death penalty for same-sex intercourse in Leviticus.  Here, we want to ask the more limited question of whether same-sex orientation might have been known to Paul in the first century, and what that might say about what he writes in Romans 1.

Some Evangelicals have argued that Paul must have been familiar with ideas that were at least comparable to orientation, or was acquainted with long-term same-sex unions and theories about why people might be so inclined.  The point of saying that Paul was aware of orientation, or something like it, is to say that this changed nothing for him and we should think the same way.  As Michael Bird and Sarah Harris have written, in Sexegesis (2012):

As a Greek-speaking Roman citizen, who moved freely between the cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Paul would have come across men and women involved in long-term same-sex relationships.  For instance, the Roman Emperor Hadrian was publicly and explicitly homosexual and had a long-term relationship with his partner Antonous before the latter accidentally drowned.  …

They mention Marti Nissinen’s use of tribades and kinaidoi as people whose lives are characterised by male and female same-sex relations, as well as evidence of long-term and thoroughly romantic relationships, as well as writers who ponder the causes of this phenomenon, and conclude,

So it is naive to assume that Paul was ignorant of lifelong homosexual partnerships, or that Paul had no awareness of homosexuality as related to psychological, social, or biological factors.  (pp.96–97)

They then say that Paul’s reasoning addresses idolatry and creation’s order, and quote several scholars who say, in consequence, that orientation would presumably not have altered those considerations.  (We look at those questions in §5.b, §5.d.)

However, focusing on life-long unions doesn’t, on its own, address same-sex orientation.  A person can have a long-term same-sex relationship that is romantic in nature and still be perfectly capable of having heterosexual relationships too.  That’s just bisexuality, which is actually more common than the total ‘inversion’ of desire that characterises same-sex orientation.  Bisexuality does not present the same problems to Evangelical theology, as there is no Christian understanding of it which it expects mandatory lifelong celibacy.

Others have argued that nobody in antiquity knew about orientation as it is understood today, with the implication that Paul cannot have been addressing it – at least not as we now understand it.  The point of saying that nobody in antiquity understood orientation is to is to say that scripture in general had no comment on the matter, and its condemnations of same-sex relations can be supposed to be irrelevant.

The Reformation Project is a leading Christian LGBT organisation.  It has a set of online courses of which are mostly just good general introductions to the biblical and historical issues.  Their primary course, “The Biblical Case for LGBTQ Inclusion,” argues that orientation was not understood in antiquity, and so, that scripture cannot have been talking about it.  Matthew Vines, who presents the talks, mentions Craig Williams, who, as we have seen, describes how Romans could have a range of preferences for men, women, or adolescent boys (Part 6, 12m54s).  Vines is correct to observe that “Preferences are real, but they don’t rise to the level of immutable personal characteristics.”

The most discussed ancient reference of this sort is Plato’s Symposium.  The title indicates a drinking party for show-offs, and so, the guests each give short speeches on a chosen topic, in this case, the topic of love.  There’s a great deal more about pederasty than modern readers will be comfortable with.  When it is the turn of the playwright Aristophanes, he says that he thinks human beings have underestimated love’s power.

Aristophanes introduces an etiology, that is, a mythical tale about why things are the way they are.  It could be a well-known story or a satire of such stories, but he tells it like this: Human beings first existed as round spheres, with eight limbs and two faces.  For some, both the halves were male, for others, female, and others still had male and female sides – the relative populations of each of these three groups are not discussed.  These first humans didn’t reproduce sexually, but through some process like planting eggs in the ground.  They were formidable creatures who could roll about at a great pace, and, as always happens in these stories, they grew proud and challenged the gods.  Zeus decided to weaken them, and had them split them in two.  Aristophanes likens this to halving a boiled egg by slicing it with a hair.  But they were left pining and withering away without their literal other halves, or else would cling to them endlessly to the neglect of the own health.  So the gods intervened again, and reshaped them into their modern forms, drew their skin around and tied it off at the belly button, and set them up to reproduce sexually.  And that – here’s the etiology – is why people now spend their lives seeking out their ‘other half’ and hold onto them for dear life when they do.  The key passage focuses on the two halves of the original male-male humans:

A man of this sort is at any rate born to be a lover of boys or the willing mate of a man, eagerly greeting his own kind.  Well, when one of them – whether he be a boy-lover or a lover of any other sort – happens on his own particular half, the two of them are wondrously thrilled with affection and intimacy and love, and are hardly to be induced to leave each other’s side for a single moment.  These are they who continue together throughout life, though they could not even say what they would have of one another.  No one could imagine this to be the mere amorous connection, or that such alone could be the reason why each rejoices in the other’s company with so eager a zest: obviously the soul of each is wishing for something else that it cannot express, [192d] only divining and darkly hinting what it wishes.

Plato, Symposium 192b–d.

Suppose, says Aristophanes, the god of blacksmiths should appear to them at night and offer to join them back up again, would they not instantly accept?  Aristophanes is not necessarily making the point that people were once spheres, but rather is telling a story which illustrates something that everyone acknowledges: that love is powerfully binding.  Whether between people of the same and opposite sexes, there can be romantic and sexual love that is permanent, lifelong, and exclusive.  This is his basic point, and the one that is most relevantly similar to orientation in the modern sense.  However, there are also arguments against this prima facie reading.

On the passage in the Symposium, Vines mentions Ormond’s 2008 book Controlling Desire, another excellent introduction to Greek and Roman sexuality, as an example of a scholar who doesn’t think it refers to orientation in the modern sense.  Ormond’s book follows Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality in the judgement that same-sex orientation is a concept from the 1800s.  Ormond acknowedges that other scholars differ, and that certain passages definitely sound like orientation.  On the whole, though, he doesn’t think it fits the way that Greeks and Romans thought.  He gives three reasons for reading this passage in that way:

1. Zeus’s reason for setting up sexual reproduction was so that M-F pairs would reproduce and other pairs would have pleasure or relief but then return to their “ordinary lives”.
2. The male pairs are shown as inclined to pederasty.
3. Aristophanes refers to excesses of affection in each case; adulterers and adulteresses in the M-F pairs, and either F-F prostitutes or the most willing adolescent partners in pederasty.  These notable excessses are not automatically a bad thing for Aristophanes, who disapproves of the first two examples, but approves of the last.)

These three points underscore that Greeks had very different sexual ethics; but they don’t cancel out the apparent reference to at least some having permanent and exclusive same-sex attraction.  Of course, in the first case, society requires that people must reproduce and bear children whatever their sexual desires.  The male-male pairs “have no natural interest in wiving and getting children, but only do these things under stress of custom.”

In the second case, as a Greek, the character of Aristophanes speaks of love for women and boys interchangeably, those being the main objects of Greek men’s desires.  Yet his concern is not with accepted Greek forms of pederasty, but rather the opposite.  Recall when speaking of the male-male pairs, he wrote “whether he be a boy-lover or a lover of any other sort.”  He is concerned with the more scandalous possibility that male-male relationships continued when both partners were adults.  This is an obvious way in which orientation might have come to public notice in Ancient Greece, because that was how it would have clashed with prevailing sexual norms.

And thirdly, while Aristophanes does refer to excesses, these may also have been how the strength of the passions – his topic – became most visible in public life, by subverting the principal virtue of self-control.

It doesn’t seem that these three considerations exclude the possibility that, say, one or two percent of Ancient Greeks were same-sex oriented.  They just underscore that there were very few circumstances in which it might look visibly different from prevailing Greek sexual practices.

When we discuss how much orientation may have been known in antiquity, we are looking for background for understanding scripture.  Romans 1 is the only passage with enough context to assess this, though we may find its answer supported elsewhere once we know what to look for.

We may allow that Paul did indeed know that some kinds of same-sex attraction were lifelong and exclusive, were considered the defining characteristics of at least some people, and produced long-standing same-sex relationships.  It doesn’t seem possible to categorically exclude ideas that were common knowledge among the literate, even if, as happens today, this was overprinted by a combination of conspicuous public immorality or a general desire for sexual autonomy.

However, it is a weak form of argument to say that Paul might have known this or might not have known that.  We can do better.  In fact, we can say with certainty that Paul did not address anything resembling same-sex orientation in Romans 1, whatever such ideas may have been widely known, and whatever he or other Jews and Christians may have thought about them.

The key thing to notice is that, in Romans 1:18–32, Paul clearly describes both the nature and the origin of the same-sex desires he is discussing.  We can simply compare this with the nature and origin of same-sex orientation as we now understand that, and see whether they are the same phenomenon, or whether there is any substantial overlap.  Reading Romans with this experience of same-sex orientation in mind highlights eight major incongruities in how Paul talks about same-sex attraction.  Here I mean same-sex desires themselves and what causes them.  In Romans 1:18–32, we can see Paul is talking about ‘passions’ that are:

Notice that, for most Evangelicals, none of these eight statements about Romans 1:18–32 is true of same-sex orientation.  I’ll comment presently on #7 and concupiscence in the Reformed Tradition, which is the only possible exception.  Read back over that list to confirm this to your satisfaction.  These points all clash with same-sex orientation as we encounter it in modern life, including with how it is described by celibate evangelicals with entirely traditional theology (see §1.b, Orientation).

The qualities that characterise same-sex attraction, as Paul describes it, are peculiar to gentiles.  In his argument in Romans they count against taking pride in Greek and Roman culture.

1.  A characteristically gentile problem

First of all, in Romans 1, Paul is addressing a characteristically Gentile problem.  This is comparable to how Leviticus 18 addressed characteristic behaviours of the nations that surrounded Israel (Lev 18:1–5, 24–30).

As we saw above, the church in Rome is ethnically divided, having gentile and Jewish factions.  This is like the division we find in other culturally mixed churches like Galatia, where some people were wanting gentile converts to follow the Jewish law.  In Rome the issue seems to be that each party believes that they are culturally superior to the other.  Paul says in Romans 1–3 that neither gentiles nor Jews can boast in these identities, only that they are reconciled to God in Christ, and thus to each other as well.  In Romans 2 and 3, in which he challenges Jewish pretensions, he writes that they had God’s law but historically had not kept it; and adds that the Old Testament itself portrays all people as hyperbolically corrupt.  But he takes on the gentile pretensions first, in Rom 1:18–32, with a seemingly well-known polemic against their idolatry and immorality, of which a prior example can be found in Wisdom of Solomon 12–14.  The point of focusing on idolatry, notorious sexual immorality, and finally social strife, is to establish that gentile Christians have reason for shame, not for pride, in their cultural background.  Idolatry, sexual impurity, and social strife were standard polemics against the Greco-Roman world from Hellenistic Jews.  They were easy pickings, and Paul tales them over.  Paul does not need to indict all people everywhere and in all times; or even all gentiles; his argument need only cover his Roman contemporaries.  But it would not work if his gentile audience replied, “But Jewish culture is no better!  They do the same!”  So Paul uses issues Jewish Christians felt were utterly beneath them.  This will be apparent in almost every quote from the period in this book.

So, when Paul compiles a master list of scandalous Hellenistic behaviour in Romans 1, it suggests that he was not addressing same-sex orientation, as we would understand it, which occurs in every racial and national group, including of course among Jewish people.  It may be objected that Jewish same-sex attraction could have been known to Paul and simply omitted from his argument because it was only in Hellenistic society that same-sex relations were approved, and became a conspicuous public scandal.  Perhaps he knew this but believed that any Jew so predisposed would marry heterosexually regardless and be faithful to their marriage.  So, it is important to consider what he understands to cause same-sex attraction of the kind that he considers self-condemned here.  The causes he mentions include God’s judgement, the effects of idolatry, deluded but voluntary choices, and a progressive corruption of heterosexual desire.  We will see these in the points that follow.

2.  A problem affecting a whole society

As an issue affecting gentile culture, and specifically the Hellenistic world of Greece and Rome, this same-sex attraction is not restricted to just one or two percent of people see (§7.c).  Rather it is representative or characteristic of the cultures of large empires.  Same-sex orientation would not account for the prevalence of Roman same-sex practices.

When Paul writes ‘Even their women’ (ai te gar thēliai autōn) in Rom 1:26, he might be saying “here’s how bad it’s gotten”.  Roman women were seen as moral guardians in Roman society, and in these respects morally purer than men.  Charles Hodge, writing with the similar sensibilities of pre-Victorian England, picks this up immediately in his Commentary On The Epistle To The Romans (1835):

Paul first refers to the degradation of females among the heathen, because they are always the last to be affected in the decay of morals, and their corruption is therefore proof that all virtue is lost.  (p.63)

3.  A consequence of literal idolatry

A third reason why Paul is not addressing same-sex orientation is that he addresses a consequence of idolatry.  Recall the logic of the passage: for the idolatry condemned in v.23, gentiles were handed over to sexual immorality in v.24.  Then “for this reason” in v.25, whether for the idolatry (again) or for the immorality resulting from the idolatry, they were handed over to degrading passions in v.26.  The connections could not be much clearer.  This follows the kind of argument we saw in Wisdom of Solomon 12–14 that idolatry led to immorality.

In these references, Paul and other Jewish writers were surely thinking about literal pagan idols, both as objects and as the public face of a larger systems of belief.  For Jews looking on, it was a short and straight line from the sexual depravity and violence of the pagan gods to parallel behaviour in pagan society.  Greek pederasts appealed to Zeus abducting Ganymede (Homer, The Iliad, Book XX) to justify their own behaviour:

… and Ganymede who was comeliest of mortal men; wherefore the gods carried him off to be Jove’s cup-bearer, for his beauty’s sake, that he might dwell among the immortals.  (lines 233–235)

Josephus, in Against Apion, made this charge more explicit:

they ascribed these sodomitical practices to the gods themselves, as a part of their good character; and, indeed, it was according to the same manner that the gods married their own sisters.  This the Greeks contrived as an apology for their own absurd and unnatural pleasures.  (2.275)

There is a long tradition, especially in Reformed theology of seeing idolatry as a metaphor for the human tendency to recenter their lives on lesser things than God.  We’ll consider in §5.c (Fall) the argument choosing a same-sex identity over God would represents a figurative idolatry.

For now we note that neither literal nor figurative idolatry can explain how young people in our own congregations come to be same-sex oriented, especially if we observe that 60% are aware of this attraction by age 13 (see §7.c).  This cannot be attributed to them suppressing the knowledge of God, or worshipping and serving created things, whether through literal idolatry or sexual impurity in the way Rom 1:23–24 describes.  It’s precisely their faithfulness that puts them in a bind.  If Paul had been thinking of orientation in this sense he would not have made a causal connection with the worship of literal idols.

4.  A consequence of God’s judgement

As we saw earlier, the framing idea of Rom 1:18–32 is that God’s wrath “is being revealed” in the present time (apokalyptetai, present tense) “against the ungodliness and wickedness of those who suppress the truth” (v.18).  How is this seen to be happening?  Three social phenomena are attributed to God’s judgement in the passage:

• In the area of: Heterosexual Immorality
• Gentiles did this: “though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (v.21); “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (v.23, 25)
• So God did this: “gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves” (v.24)

• In the area of: Same-Sex Attraction and Relations
• Gentiles did this: “For this reason” could refer to the denial and idolatry, and/or the sexual immorality that has just been mentioned (v.24).
• So God did this: “gave them up to degrading passions.”  (v.26) Men and women abandoning ‘natural’ sexual relations for ‘unnatural’ same-sex relations.  (v.27)

• In the area of: Strife and Injustice
• Gentiles did this: ““did not see fit to acknowledge God” (v.28)
• So God did this: “gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done.”  (v.28) [a long list follows]

Because of idolatry and its resulting immorality, Gentiles were “handed over” to impurity (v.24), degrading passions (v.26) and a debased mind (v.28).  That is to say, Greco-Roman excess in the areas of heterosexual immorality, same-sex attraction and relations, and strife and injustice in society are attributed to God’s judgement in Romans 1.  Imagine for a moment the stereotypical exchange in which Person A says “God made me gay!”, and Person B replies, “No!  God doesn’t make people gay!”  If Romans 1 refers to orientation, as we have described it, and the “handing over” in vv.24, 26, 28 is how God’s wrath from v.18 is being revealed, then that would suggest God does make people gay – but as a punishment for idolatry and possibly other sexual sin.  This issue frames all others in Romans 1:18–32, and is its most confusing feature for many readers.  Why would God cause sexual immorality, same-sex attractions, and social strife?”  How would he?  And why would this be how his ‘wrath’ is revealed?

In the Septuagint the term paredokan primarily refers to God, in judgment, giving people over to their enemies.

Jdg 2:14.  So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers who plundered them, and he sold them into the power of their enemies all around, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies.

These passages in Romans read like that.  Later in the book Paul almost personifies Sin, Death, and Law as active powers or forces in several passages.  In Romans 6–8 especially he advises people once enslaved by sin and now freed by God’s grace: “do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.”  (6:12).  Paul laments that we don’t do what we want, as the flesh wars with the spirit, and so strongly that it there is great debate about whether he means before he became a Christian.  Even God’s Law is undermined, so that it has “imprisoned the world under sin” (Gal 3:21–22).  In this language of ruling powers, we are ‘in Christ’ rather than ‘in Adam’, and so delivered from sin and death, reconciled to God by grace rather than works of law, now to live by the Spirit and not by ‘the flesh’, that aspect of humanity susceptible to sin’s dominion.

We have similar ways of speaking of sin as a power today, especially when someone is dominated by destructive behaviour.  In malicious rage, serial adultery, or a gambling addiction, we meet a strange combination of pointlessness, foolishness, powerlessness, and indiscriminate damage.  Yet it feels as if there is, somewhere, a team of experts working around the clock to perfect its tools for exploiting and destroying human lives.

Sin like this is a parasite that uses up its host.  A whirlpool of addiction that leaves unattainable cravings in its wake.  A masquerade that can’t admit it’s true nature, even to itself.  An escalating panic that must keep on sinning to cover its tracks.  Sin is the promise of autonomy, and yet autonomy is what it puts at risk.  Those who turn to it lose their defenses against it, and stumble into its traps.  Then the enticements fade and the costs begin to bite.  This might be seen as natural justice, but also as abandonment to sin, especially in those extreme cases in which our ordinary defenses are swept away.  “You… have delivered us into the hands of our iniquity.”  (Isa 64:7); as “one is punished by the very things by which one sins.”  (Wis 11:15) [REPEATED].

Paul looks at Hellenists in general in Romans 1, and writes down what he sees.  He emphases headline sins like violent, malicious strife, and sexual immorality, which he uses same-sex relations to exemplify.  Here sin is a subjugating force that takes control of those who serve it.  Judgement is how Paul explains the present and exceptional depravity of the Greco-Roman world, and establishes that the gentile Christians in Rome have no basis in culture for boasting over Jewish Christians.  (And vice-versa, he will say in Romans 2–3.)  It is apparent that Paul is using same-sex relations to exemplify the very worst of gentiles depravity in this passage.  One reason this is such a knockout punch is that slaves in Paul’s churches would likely be exploited for sex by gentile masters (though to be clear, he is not only addressing abuse).  They had no legal recourse against abuse and could be executed for running away.  This makes the advice in about slaves submitting even to harsh masters a good deal more chilling.

When same-sex attraction is attributed to God’s judgement in Romans 1, we face an obvious problem in applying it to same-sex oriented youth in Evangelical families and churches today.  Their situation is not something we ordinarily describe as a divine punishment or judgement, let alone a consequence of ‘wrath’.

There are three ways a person might wish to argue this.  Same-sex orientation could be seen as (a) an individual judgement on individual sin; (b) the collective judgement on humanity understood as The Fall in Genesis 3; or (c) a collective judgement on the whole of first century gentile culture.

(a) Can same-sex orientation be seen as God’s wrath on individuals?  Suppose you have a teenaged son or daughter who is in every respect a faithful Christian but who falls into the 1–2% of humanity who are exclusively same-sex oriented.  If Romans 1 covers same-sex orientation, then how could we explain them being under God’s specific individual judgement?  The wrath is revealed “against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth” (v.18).  But is that what these people have done, even in broadest and fuzziest terms possible?  Recall from §2.1 that 25% of same-sex oriented people knew this by the age of 10, and 60% by the age of 13.  If we look at the reasons for which “God handed [people] over” in Romans 1, there is in their case no evident denial of God’s nature and power, no consequent idolatry, and no consequent sexual immorality in these people’s lives.  We can fudge the issue by talking about living in a “sexually idolatrous culture”, but Paul emphatically means literal idolatry – that’s the heart of the Jewish polemic against paganism.  We can’t maintain that individual teens have been punished with same-sex orientation because of their own individual sin, and merely ambient self-interest and self-gratification in society (figurative idolatry) is not the kind of problem that we find connected with same-sex orientation in Romans 1.  So we may dispense with this idea.

(b) Can same-sex orientation be seen as God’s ‘wrath’ on all humanity?  Is this just life in a “fallen world”, equating this judgement with the corruption of the world and of humanity in Genesis 3?  Early Genesis has been introduced in §4.2.2, with a discussion of the many questions that it raises; we may assume here that it gives us a foundational picture of God, the world, humanity, and in important ways, of scripture itself.  The most important hardships of an Israelite’s existence, agriculture and childbirth, are named as a curse on human sin in Gen 3:17–19, as human beings are effectively sentenced to hard labour in the world.  These problems are usually understood to represent the larger problem of everything in life that is not the way it is supposed to be: the fracture that runs through all of human life as individuals and societies.  Many Evangelicals connect the ideas of same-sex attraction and human fallenness together in the term “sexual brokenness”.  Understood most positively, this is a way of uniting heterosexual and same-sex oriented Christians in the same struggle against sexual temptation, and is intended as an inclusive and unifying approach to same-sex orientation.

But can wrath “being revealed” be equated with corruption that has effectively always existed?  Wrath is not Paul’s language for fallenness, any more than ‘fallenness’ itself is (see §4.2.3).  For Paul, the flesh wars with the spirit (Rom 6–7); the creation groans and is subjected to futility (Rom 8); and the corruptible must put on incorruptibility when death will be swallowed up by life (1 Cor 15).  The corrupted life ‘in Adam’ means being “made sinners”, with condemnation, judgement and death following.  This corrupted nature leads to wrath:

Eph 2:1–3.  And you were dead in the trespasses and sins … we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

Paul contrasts life ‘in Adam’ with life ‘in Christ’ (Rom 5:12–21), but the ‘fallen’ bodily existence is common to both, and that is where same-sex orientation is located.  But who would think a same-sex oriented teen ‘in Christ’ is experiencing God’s wrath in the present time on that basis?  On the other hand, Paul clearly attributes God’s wrath on gentiles to denial, idolatry and immorality.  Because they did X, he handed them over to Y (Rom 1:24, 26, 28).  The language of wrath makes sense in Romans 1, but not as universal human corruption.

But setting Paul’s meaning aside, should we look at same-sex orientation as fallenness in retrospect, and then interpret Romans 1 on that basis?  Should we say that same-sex orientation is a defect in human nature, and not part of the human ideal.  And should we then call this wrath and judgement in a similar way analogous to how Paul uses the term?  Well, if we want to call that ‘wrath’ we have to start calling every other infirmity God’s ‘wrath’ as well, which virtually evacuates the terms of all its normal meaning.  Depression as ‘wrath’, anyone?  In any case there is no warrant for this in what Paul is saying about his Greco-Roman contemporaries.  So, what is he saying about them?  (c) Is this a collective judgement on Greco-Roman gentiles?  It should be clear from the preceding argument that this is Paul’s meaning.  He indicts gentiles for idolatry, involving both denial and hypocrisy, and for the social and sexual sins that arose from it.  To make his argument he only needs to speak about the kind of gentiles that are found in Rome (not barbarians, Rom 1:14), and the sense of gentile superiority that prevails there – from wisdom and Empire, most obviously.  Paul counters the cultural pride of each faction in the Roman church, the gentile and the Jewish sides, and leads them back to reconciliation to God and each other in Christ by the end of Romans 3.  In this argument it is literal idolatry and a conspicuous and multifaceted depravity that provide a refutation of Hellenistic pride.  He sees the failings of that world as so extreme and so perverse that it should be explained as gentiles being handed over to their sins by God in judgement.  The far extremities need not apply to every gentile for Paul’s argument to work, though it must apply to many individuals if the gentile Christians are to recognise it as their culture.

Because the ‘wrath’ in Romans 1 is best understood as God delivering gentiles into the power of their sins, and the shameful spiralling madness that follows, we notice an enormous disconnect between his concerns in that passage and the experience of same-sex oriented teens, say, in Evangelical churches today.  It can scarcely be maintained that their experience is judgement for their own sins, or the sins of their contemporary world.  Nor Paul is addressing human fallenness, which we have no reason to connect it with the language of ‘wrath’, which is neither our language nor Paul’s in any case.  As a result, the attribution of same-sex attraction to God’s wrath in Romans 1, along with other sins and tendencies, means Paul is not referring to anything comparable to same-sex orientation.  There is more to say, however, on some of the factors which contribute to this larger understanding of same-sex attraction as a judgement: idolatry, voluntary choice, and perversion of desire.

In addition to being considered a solely gentile problem, same-sex passions are also seen in Romans 1 as being wilfully and voluntarily acquired.  This is how they can be seen to be shameful.

5.  A corruption of prior heterosexual desires

The progressive nature of this sexual corruption is apparent in the escalating consequences of Rom 1:21–27 (see above), in which same-sex desires arise at the final stage of moral degeneration.  The inapplicability of this to orientation can be noticed immediately: A person who has never had heterosexual orientation or desire has also not experienced any progressive corruption of that desire, whether this would be thought to have happened through their own choices, the influence of culture, or in any other way.

However, when Evangelicals went looking for something like same-sex orientation in scripture, we equated it with heterosexual lust rather than heterosexual orientation.  Part of the problem, as we have seen above, is that Paul himself links same-sex attraction with immoral choices, and we have transferred that judgement onto orientation without reflecting that the cases we and Paul are considering could be substantially different.

Paul focuses on a progressive corruption of heterosexual desire.  This is especially clear if the heterosexual impurity in v.24 is considered to escalate into the same-sex desires in vv.25–27.  In the modern world sexual experimentation would be a similar phenomenon.  However, even if the handing over to heterosexual impurity and same-sex desires are unrelated consequences of idolatry, which occur in parallel with the moral effects of a darkened mind (vv.28–32), the same-sex desires are still a development: natural heterosexual relations are still being “exchanged” for unnatural same-sex relations in each case.

This is reminiscent of one of Paul’s near contemporaries called Dio Chrysostum (c.40–c.115 CE), a writer and speaker who had the chance to properly live out his Stoic convictions through exile and poverty in mid-life before once again finding Imperial favour.  In his Seventh Discourse, he considers the nobility of shepherds, hunters, and farmers, saying that “poverty is no hopeless impediment to a life and existence befitting free men who are willing to work with their hands, but leads them on to deeds and actions that are far better and more useful and more in accordance with nature (kata physin) than those to which riches are wont to attract most men” (§103).  He then extends this to how poor people can live just as nobly in cities, before complaining that bad morals tend to multiply in society.  He gives three examples of this, first how the toleration of brothel-keepers increases rather than restrains immorality, then how the toleration of adultery with “outcasts” leads to the seduction of daughters from good families, and then, when bored with such pursuits, to the seduction of the sons as well.

Firstly, Dio considers prostitution unnatural.  He contrasts it unfavourably with breeding livestock: “mating human beings that do feel shame and revulsion, with lecherous and dissolute men in an ineffectual and fruitless physical union that breeds destruction rather than life” (§).  He considers this impiety in pagan terms; such a person does not respect the gods – “not Zeus, the god of family life, not Hera, the goddess of marriage, not the Fates, who bring fulfilment, not Artemis, protectress of the child-bed, not mother Rhea,⁠ not the Eileithyiae,⁠ who preside over human birth, not Aphrodite, whose name stands for the normal intercourse (kata physin) and union of male and female (thelu kai arrenos)” (§135).

It is not just that the unions avoid bearing children; Stoics, like Christians, and for similar reasons, did not believe that anything beyond a person’s control brought them honour or dishonour, but that they are fundamentally equal in nature.  We are “under no condition to bear this mistreatment of outcast and enslaved creatures with calmness and indifference, not only because all humanity has been held in honour and in equal honour by God, who begat it, having the same marks and tokens to show that it deserves honour, to wit, reason and the knowledge of evil and good” (§XXX), but also because evils of this kind spread and multiply.  “For evils are never wont to remain as they are; they are ever active and advancing to greater wantonness if they meet no compelling check.”  (§137).  “Indeed, beginning with practices and habits that seem trivial and allowable, it acquires a strength and force that are uncontrollable, and no longer stops at anything.”  (§138) Thus, “that a great many persons copy the storied amours of the gods” (§143).

Or will it not, while it satisfies its lust for women in every conceivable way, find itself grown weary of this pleasure, and then seek some other worse and more lawless form of wantonness?  Yes, the seduction of women—especially, one might almost say, of the freeborn and virgins—has been found easy and no task for a man who pursues that kind of game with money; and even against the highly respected wives and daughters of men really respected, the libertine who attacks with the device of Zeus and brings gold in his hands will never fail.  But the further developments, I presume, are perfectly evident, since we see so many illustrations.  The man whose appetite is insatiate in such things, when he finds there is no scarcity, no resistance, in this field, will have contempt for the easy conquest and scorn for a woman’s love, as a thing too readily given—in fact, too utterly feminine— and will turn his assault against the male quarters, eager to befoul the youth who will very soon be magistrates and judges and generals, believing that in them he will find a kind of pleasure difficult and hard to procure.  (§XXX)

Here Dio is not saying that same-sex intercourse itself was hard to find in the ancient world, but rather that corrupting the sons of good families was a greater challenge than corrupting their daughters, for heterosexual men who became bored with women.

6.  A voluntarily ‘exchange’ of good desires for bad

Paul addresses same-sex attraction as a consequence of voluntary and thus culpable choices.  This was to some extent implicit in his attribution of same-sex attraction to God’s judgement, as only conscious choices merit judgement.  It is possible that Evangelicals project this understanding onto the experience of orientation when they use the term ‘lifestyle choice’ in contemporary discussions.  This appears to correctly observe that Paul is addressing a choice.  However, that only highlights the differences between what we are saying and what Paul was saying.  He speaks about ‘exchanges’: first, people exchanging a worthy view of God for idols, with heterosexual immorality following; then exchanging heterosexual for same-sex relations.

Rom 1:21–27.  Although they knew God, they … 23 exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images … 24 Therefore, God gave them over … to sexual impurity … 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things … 26 Therefore God gave them over to shameful passions … Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.  27 In the same way, men also abandoned natural relations with women…

The word ‘exchanged’ (v.23) seems to be an allusion to Psalm 106:20 in the Septuagint, where it refers to the Golden Calf made at Mt.  Sinai in Exodus 32:1–6 (called Mt.  Horeb in other places).  Hosea 4:7 makes the same allusion, saying “they turned their glory into their shame.”

Psalm 106:20 (LXX).  They exchanged (ēllaxanto) the glory (doxan) of God [lit.  their glory] for the image (homoiomati) of an ox that eats grass.

Romans 1:23.  and they exchanged (ēllaxan) the glory (doxan) of the immortal God for images resembling (homoiomati eikonos) a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

A biblical allusion is a naturally Jewish way of referring to idolatry, including gentile idolatry; so it does not mean that Jewish idolatry is also in view in Romans 1, or that all human failings are of this kind.  The action of the Israelites was, though, a morally culpable choice.  And while Paul need only be referring to a tendency, whether toward idolatry or immorality, that was prominent enough to be notorious, a cultural tendency must be expressed by the choices that individuals make.

However, people who are same-sex oriented have never made that sequence of voluntary exchanges which, in Paul’s critique of Hellenists and Hellenistic culture, resulted in these “shameful passions.”  This is fudged by framing same-sex issues in terms of individualism and emotivism, especially after the sexual revolution of the 1960s; but orientation predates all such things and has no necessary connection to them.  Same-sex oriented people – especially Christians – have not first chosen to suppress their knowledge of God, to pursue idolatry, to possibly pursue heterosexual impurity, and finally to pursue same-sex impurity.  Paul is not speaking about their experience of lifelong same-sex orientation.

A modern Evangelical might well be thinking at this point: hang on, while same-sex orientation is not a choice, it is certainly a moral choice to act upon same-sex attraction and engage in same-sex intercourse, relationships, or marriages.  Which is correct, and we will look at that as a moral question shortly (§3, Morals).  For now though, we’re just establishing that Paul does not refer to orientation, and the fact that he refers to same-sex attraction as a consequence of voluntary and culpable “exchange” goes a long way to establishing that.

7.  Shameful or dishonourable passions

Paul speaks of same-sex attractions as “dishonourable lusts” or “shameful passions”, depending on the translation (pathē atimia, v.26).  He has just traced out a voluntary descent through successive levels of depravity, first with heterosexuals ‘dishonouring’ their bodies with each other (atimazesthai, v.24), then resorting to the language of conspicuous public indecency for same-sex relations (aschēmosynē, v.27).

21 For thought they knew God they did not honour (edoxasan) him as God…

24 Therefore God gave them over in the desires (epithumiais) of their hearts to impurity (akatharsian), to the dishonoring (atimazesthai) of their bodies among themselves.  …

26 For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions (pathē atimia).  …

27 Males committed shameless (aschēmosynē) acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

Notice the kind of terms used here:

• Epithumia: ranging from wanting to coveting
• Akatharsia: unclean
• Amatizo: dishonour
• Atimia: shameful (used of pathe: passions)
• Aschemosyne: shameless

Speaking of shame could mean three different things, or a combination of them.  It may be contradicting and rebuking the gentile Christians by saying their boastful cultural pride is really a source of shame.  It may be echoing Septuagint terms for sexual immorality.  It may be that Old Testament language of shamefulness and ritual uncleanness has been translated to morals, even for gentile Christians who don’t have to obey the ritual parts of the law.

Although the verb form aschēmosynē does not appear in the condemnations of same-sex relations in Lev 18:22 or 20:15 (LXX), its verb form appears 24 times in the other condemnations in Lev 18, mostly involving incest (‘you shall not uncover the nakedness of [your kin]’).  Eleven verses in a row begin with the term (vv.7–17).  So it works as an allusion to immorality in general.

Describing ‘shameful passions’ must refer to desires for something wrong, but might also mean desires that are shameful even to have.  Consider how modern people think of paedophilia, even if they recognise that for some it might be something comparable to an orientation.

Most Evangelicals, and most people, would say that for anything to be shameful to a person, it must be something they have chosen.  Nothing that happens to a person can be a legitimate source of shame for them.  It is for Jesus what comes from the heart – a person’s own intentions – that makes them akatharsia, unclean.

This differs from the Roman idea that subordination is implicit in being the penetrated partner and that this is unmanly for a free citizen.  Following Leviticus, Paul does not distinguish between active and passive partners, and if malakoi refers to the latter, he may explicitly include them.  To be raped and have no legal recourse against this – the situation of at least some Roman slaves in Paul’s churches – is not dishonouring, because it is not chosen.  To have paedophilic desires and not act upon them is not dishonouring, as the person’s choice was to reject them.

This makes sense in light of what we have explained thus far: influenced by their idolatry, Greco-Romans wilfully perverted naturally heterosexual desires and were abandoned to their sins.  Every aspect of this descent is shameful, degrading, and dishonourable.  From a Jewish or Christian perspective, or virtually any modern perspective, the same is true of Roman homosexuality.

8.  Not something that calls for empathy or compassion

We should also notice something that Paul does not say here, but which modern Evangelicals will typically take special care to mention.  Paul shows no sympathy for anyone involved and seems to feel his readers will agree.  If it is considered to cover the same-sex oriented, then Paul’s ethos in Romans 1 stands in considerable contrast with that of pastorally minded Evangelicals today.  We now go out of our way to show how deeply we feel for the plight of those “struggling with unwanted same-sex desires”, and to feel their pain, even if it is a pain that we believe cannot ever be wholly healed on earth.  Tim LaHaye, who I quoted at the start (§1.a, Letters) as an example of Christian statements from the 1970s, writes in the same book:

The prejudice and hatred toward homosexuals on the part of Christians who have never harbored a homosexual impulse is appalling, existing even among some who teach that spirit-controlled Christians must show love and compassion toward their fellow man.  (p.148)

There is nothing inauthentic in these statements.  Both authors are to be respected for getting to the heart of their subject, both moving far beyond the attitudes of former generations.  In this regard they would be motivated greatly by some of Paul’s writings: that we should weep with those who weep (Rom 12:15), that we who are strong should “bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves” (Rom 14 and 15, 1 Cor 8), and that we should clothe ourselves in “compassion, kindness” and more (Col 3:5).  But did Paul think, in writing Romans 1, that he was speaking about a weakness, a brokenness, a burden, the language that Evangelicals employ today?  Did he think he was speaking of anything deserving of compassion?  There is no sign of it.

Is there some other explanation of this lack of empathy?  Is Paul speaking of remote gentiles outside the boundaries of his communities, and so there is psychological distance involved?  Surely so, although he probably had gentiles in the church who formerly acted in this way, as he did in Corinth (1 Cor 6:9–11).

Moving beyond Paul, did Leviticus show empathy, much less lament?  Did any passage anywhere?  So far as I can see there is none present in any single thing that Scripture says about same-sex intercourse, and certainly not in the major two sections in Romans and Leviticus.  It is seen as immoral and abhorrent in a simple and obvious way, and wholly culpable, deserving of the strictest judgements.  This must be accounted for by any understanding we put forward.  If you are an Evangelical who is speaking of the same phenomenon that Paul is speaking of, shouldn’t you be able to speak about it in the same way?  If you can’t, are you sure that you’re speaking about the same thing?

By what he says about same-sex attraction, Paul in Romans 1 shows that he is not thinking or writing about same-sex orientation.  If he had been considering orientation – as seen in Evangelical churches today – he would not have described same-sex attraction itself as

1. a characteristically Gentile problem,
2. something which characterised the whole of gentile society
3. an act of God’s present, visible judgement on gentiles’ sins,
4. a consequence of literal idolatry, and its resulting heterosexual immorality,
5. a consequence of voluntary and thus culpable choices,
6. a progressive corruption of naturally heterosexual desire, and
7. something intrinsically shameful and dishonourable.
8. not something that called for empathy or compassion.

In contrast, if Paul had meant to address same-sex orientation, as we now understood it, he would have to have considered a form of same-sex attraction that was:

1. common to all people, including Jews, and so, not a point of difference between Jews and gentiles
2. something which only characterised a small percentage of people in society
3. not reasonably a temporal judgement on particular individuals and whole societies,
4. common to pagans and Christians, and so, unrelated to any particular religious practices or lack of them,
5. unrelated to any person’s own voluntary choices,
6. unrelated to prior heterosexual sin,
7. a desire that, like any other sin, accrues no legitimate shame (or guilt) unless acted upon.
8. a matter for both empathy and compassion.

So, Paul did not intend to address same-sex orientation in Romans 1.  Rather he addressed Roman homosexuality.  Same-sex orientation differs from from Roman homosexuality in its nature and origin, and by being a choice made by people individually and as whole cultures.

This means that Evangelicals cannot simply take the reasoning which Romans applied to same-sex attraction and apply it to same-sex orientation.  Nor, in consequence, take what it says about same-sex relations apart from both orientation and marriage, and apply it to a same-sex marriage between same-sex oriented Evangelicals.  It must be shown to apply.

However, this is a limited conclusion.  It removes one perhaps naive supposition about same-sex orientation, that is, that Paul might have been thinking about it in Romans 1.  It does not remove the idea that same-sex relation might nonetheless be condemned, in this passage, in some other way that covers same-sex orientation or marriage.  Of course, Evangelicals typically believe this to be so.

This chapter has provided a accessible introduction to Romans 1–3, but has not exhausted the questions that it raises.  Here is where some of the others are addressed in this book:

• When Paul says ‘unnatural’, is he referring only to things anybody could perceive in the natural world?  (See §2, Nature)
• When Paul says ‘unnatural’, is this a euphemism for unusual or otherwise unspeakable perversity?  And what does Paul say gentiles know about morality?  (See §3.c, Reasons)
• Is Paul quoting or alluding to Genesis in this passage?  When Paul says ‘unnatural’, does he mean contrary to a “created order”?  (See §5.b, Order)
• Does Rom 2:14–16 connect conscience with a universal moral law?  And does Rom 1:18–22 assert natural theology or natural law?  (See §5.c, Law and §5.c, Purpose)
• Are same-sex relations presented in Romans 1 as a ‘sin qua non’ – the paradigm example of human rebellion and depravity?  Does Romans 1 endorse the idea that idolatry is a super-category for human sinfulness?  (See §5.c, Fall)