Rowan Williams' Wrong Reading of Romans

Posted by David Virtue on 2007/4/19 15:00:00
by Robert A. J. Gagnon

http://robgagnon.net/articles/homosexRowanWilliamsResp.pdf

April 18, 2007

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and titular head of the Anglican Communion, has been quoted by Reuters as saying that Paul's "primary point" in mentioning homosexual acts in Romans was to warn Christians against the smug self-righteousness of condemning the acts of others ("Anglican head Williams says anti-gays misread Bible," Apr. 17, 2007.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1767470620070417

So Christians apparently should not judge those who engage in homosexual acts, even though it is true that Paul regarded homosexual practice "as obviously immoral." If Reuters has accurately reported Williams' remarks to theology students in Toronto (always a big "if"), then Williams has seriously misread Romans. I say this with all due respect to the archbishop, who is a bright man and an able theologian (although not a biblical scholar).

Paul's own application of Romans 1:24-27 to believers later in Romans

Paul was emphatically not telling believers in Rome to avoid passing judgment on persons who actively engage in sexual immorality of an extreme sort, including homosexual practice. To the contrary: When Paul next used the term "sexual impurity" (akatharsia) in his letter (6:19), a term that he used elsewhere in Romans only in 1:24-27 to describe homosexual practice, he did so in direct address to the Roman believers. He reminded them that believers in Christ are no longer "slaves to sexual impurity," for to continue in such behavior was to engage in acts of which they should now be "ashamed" (echoing the shame language that dominates Rom 1:24-27 regarding homosexual practice). Such acts, he says, lead to death and the loss of eternal life (6:19-23; compare 1:32). Indeed, Paul's entire argument around the question "Why not sin?" since we are "under grace and not under the law" (6:15; cf. 6:1) culminates in 8:12-14 with the response:

If you continue to live in conformity to (the sinful desires operating in) the flesh you are going to die. But if by means of the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For only those who are being led by the Spirit of God are children of God.

This quotation makes it clear, if it were not already, that mouthing a few words of confession that Christ is Lord does not exempt Christians from leading a life consonant with that confession, nor even from the dire eternal consequences that would arise from failing to do so. For Paul the outcome for a believer who lives under the primary sway of sin in the flesh is no different from the outcome for an unbeliever who so lives. Both alike face the prospect of exclusion from God's eternal rule.

Again in Romans 13, Paul makes clear that sexual impurity is definitely not one of the matters of ethical indifference, like diet and calendar issues, that later in 14:1-15:13 Paul will warn believers against judging fellow believers for. Paul insists in 13:13-14 that, in view of the coming day of salvation and judgment, believers "lay aside works of darkness" such as "immoral sexual activities and licentious acts" and thereby to "make no provision to gratify the sinful desires of the flesh." The Greek word for "immoral sexual activities" is koitai, which literally means, "lyings" or "beds," a term that obviously links up with arsenokoitai, "men lying with a male," in 1 Cor 6:9 as a particular instance of an immoral "lying." The Greek word for "licentious acts" is aselgeiai, which refers to a lack of self-restraint with respect to refraining from prohibited sexual behaviors.

This takes us back to the discussion in Rom 6:19-22 where Paul insists that believers stop putting their bodily members at the disposal of the kind of "sexual impurity" cited in 1:24-27, which makes them slaves of sin and lacking in sexual self-restraint. If Paul had wanted his converts to stop passing judgment on fellow converts who were engaged in unrepentant sexual immorality then he would have been a monumental hypocrite, inasmuch as he himself regularly made such judgments (we'll see more in a moment). It is far more likely, though, that Williams has misinterpreted Paul than that Paul was a monumental hypocrite, in my opinion.

The immediate context of Romans 1-2

Indeed, nothing in the immediate context of Romans 1:24-27 suggests that Paul would have been opposed to believers making the judgment that homosexual practice puts the offender at dire risk of facing God's wrath.

For Rom 1:24-27 depicts homosexual practice as a particularly egregious instance of "sexual uncleanness," grossly "contrary to nature," and an "indecency." In fact, Paul treats homosexual practice as analogous on the horizontal dimension of life to the vertical offense of idolatry since in both cases humans suppress the truth about God and his will for our lives that ought to have been self-evident in creation structures still intact in nature (1:19-23, 25). Does Williams think that Paul would have chastised believers as "self-righteous" for speaking vigorously against Christians who worshipped gods other than the God of Jesus Christ? I would hope not since Paul clearly regarded belief in Christ as absolutely antithetical to idol worship. For example, he described the conversion of the Thessalonians as a turning from idols to serve the living God (1 Thess 1:9-10). Moreover, he severely chastised the "strong" among the Corinthian believers just for eating in a idol's temple, to say nothing of worshipping an idol, because it could provoke God to jealousy and wrath (1 Cor 10:14-22). Yet, if Williams would concur with this point, then he would have to give up his point about Paul being opposed to "judging" persons who engage in unrepentant homosexual practice. For Paul's remarks in chap. 2, where Paul allegedly says, "don't judge" (incidentally, he doesn't say this, as we shall see), as much follow the indictment of idolatry as they do the indictment of homosexual relations.

Since we noted above Paul's stern opposition to idolatry in 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians as illustrations of his opposition to idolatry in all his letters, it bears mentioning that we see in these letters an equally stern opposition to any continuance in sexually immoral behavior. When Paul begins his moral exhortation in his first extant letter, he starts off by warning his converts not to engage any longer in the forms of "sexual impurity" (akatharsia) that once characterized their lives as Gentiles; and that failure to heed such a warning would leave them prey to an avenging God (1 Thess 4:1-8). Similarly, in 1 Corinthians Paul's couples idolatry and sexual immorality as the two main offenses that led God to wipe out the wilderness generation (10:6-12) and focuses an additional three chapters of his letter (5-7) on the paramount importance of sexual purity for believers. One need only compare Paul's command to "flee from idolatry" in 1 Cor 10:14 with his equally urgent command to "flee sexual immorality" in 1 Cor 6:18.

Obviously, then, in Romans 1-2 Paul is not telling his readers to stop passing judgment on severe and obvious cases of idolatry and sexual immorality. For Paul states that idolatry and same-sex intercourse, among other offenses, are already and in themselves manifestations of God's wrath (not grace). The wrath appears initially in the form of God stepping back and not restraining humans from engaging in self-dishonoring behavior that arises from gratifying innate desires to do what God strongly forbids. Such behavior degrades the human being who has received the imprint of God's image. The continual heaping up of such sins, Paul says, will ultimately lead to cataclysmic judgment on the eschatological Day of Wrath (1:32; 2:3-9). Thus to accept homosexual practice in the church would be to consign persons who engage in such behavior to the ongoing wrath of God with the ultimate prospect of exclusion from God's kingdom (compare also 1 Cor 6:9-10; Gal 5:19, 21; Eph 5:3-8). This is not grace but wrath. This is not love but hate. This is not the absence of judgment but the substitution of one's own verdict of acquittal for God's verdict of wrath.

Paul in Romans 2 is debating, in the first instance, with a non-Christian, imaginary Jewish dialogue partner or interlocutor. Despite what Williams suggests, Paul does not tell the interlocutor to stop judging pagans for committing idolatry, sexual immorality, and an array of other sins (including murder, 1:29), as if by doing so the interlocutor could escape God's judgment of his own sins. Rather, Paul maintains both that God's judgment is indeed coming on those who do such things and that the interlocutor, when he does these or similar things, will likewise face God's wrath if he does not repent (2:3-4; he may sin less quantitatively and qualitatively than Gentiles but he knows more about God's will through Scripture). Essentially Paul is moving the interlocutor to the view that mere possession of the Jewish law of Moses does not exempt him from responding to the offer of salvation in Jesus Christ, an offer equally accessible to sinful Gentiles (3:3-26).

Everybody is in want of the atoning, amends-making death of Jesus and the indwelling Spirit of Christ that makes possible a life lived "for God" (compare Gal 2:19-20).

Yes, Paul has laid a trap for the Jewish interlocutor who evaluated God's judgment against the Gentile world as "just" and "righteous" (3:3-8). However, it is not a trap designed to preclude judgment of immoral behavior within the Christian community. Instead, it is a trap designed to convince moral unbelievers that they too need the grace of God manifested in the atoning death of Christ and the attendant moral transformation that comes with being a recipient of such grace: "For sin shall not exercise lordship over you, for you are not under law but under grace" (Rom 6:14). There is also a layered trap for Christians at Rome who judge one another over matters of moral indifference such as diet and calendar (14:1-15:13). As we have seen, though, sexual immorality, like idol worship, does not fall for Paul in the category of moral indifference.

Williams thus confuses his own context with the context for Paul's remarks in Romans. There is a big difference between, on the one hand, Paul chastising a non-believing Jew for using his sense of moral superiority to consign unbelieving Gentiles to hell while exempting himself from the need to receive Jesus as Savior (Rom 2:12-29) and, on the other hand, Williams chastising some in the church today for standing firmly against approving serial, unrepentant immoral sexual practices among institutional leaders of the church.

The parallel case of the incestuous man in 1 Corinthians 5

Just how far off the mark Williams' theological analysis of Paul's views on the matter is becomes clear when one looks at how Paul deals with the case of the incestuous man in 1 Cor 5-6. There an exasperated Paul asks the Corinthian believers the rhetorical question: "Is it not those inside (the church) that you are to judge?" (5:12). The news article about Williams, if accurate, suggests that Williams' response to such a question would be "no," at least as regards the comparable case of homosexual practice. But from Paul's standpoint "no" is the wrong answer. "No" is the answer that the "tolerant" Corinthian believers would give, but not the answer Paul wants them to give.

Far from tolerating the case of incest, Paul advocated temporary removal of the offending member from the life of the community and did so not only for the sake of the purity and holiness of the community but also for the sake of the offender who needed to be recovered for the kingdom of God (5:3-11; 6:9-11). Paul did not take the approach adopted by Williams, namely to caution the Corinthians against self-righteously passing judgment on the incestuous man's behavior. Paul also, in the broader context, explicitly rejected any attempt to view the morally significant issue of sexual immorality as comparable to morally indifferent issues surrounding dietary practices (6:12-20).

Clearly when Paul spoke of judging those "inside" the church he qualified that judgment in many ways. Judgment should be implemented (1) in a spirit of gentleness and an awareness that one's own self is vulnerable to temptation (Gal 6:1); (2) in a mournful manner (1 Cor 5:2) and with regard for the offender as a brother and not an enemy (2 Thess 3:15); (3) out of a desire to reclaim the offender for God's kingdom rather than punitively condemn the offender to hell; (4) with a zeal to restore him quickly and enthusiastically to the community following repentance (1 Cor 5:5; 2 Cor 2:5-11; 7:8-13); and (5) in proportion to the recalcitrance of the offender and the severity of the offense (1 Thess 5:14; 1 Cor 5:1-2). Yet, equally as clearly, Paul insisted that the church do its job of judging those within the community of faith who have deviated into serious sexual immorality. Anything less would be unloving.

Perhaps Williams would respond that a loving and consensual relationship between a man and his mother or stepmother is far more serious than a loving and consensual relationship between persons of the same sex. And yet I don't see how Williams could demonstrate such a point from Paul, taken in his historical context. For all the evidence from ancient Israel and early Judaism, as well as Paul's own description in Rom 1:24-27, indicates that Paul regarded homosexual practice as comparable to or worse than a case of man-mother incest, even of a consensual and loving sort.

There is no evidence that Jesus' view of the matter would have been any different since Jesus predicated his view on marital 'twoness' on the 'twoness' of the sexes: "male and female he made them" (Gen 1:27) and "for this reason a man may leave his father and mother and become joined to his woman and the two shall become one flesh" (Gen 2:24; both cited in Mark 10:6-8; Matt 19:4-6). For both incest and homosexual practice are instances of immoral sexual relations between persons too much alike on a structural or formal level (one as regards kinship, the other as regards the sex or gender of the participants). The only difference between the two is that a two-sexes prerequisite for sexual relations is more strongly grounded in the creation texts and is more absolutely sustained in Scripture generally and in the traditions of early Judaism (i.e. with no exceptions) than is even a prohibition of incest. Moreover, the issue of too much structural sameness, of a na rcissistic arousal for what one already is, is if anything more keenly felt in the case of same-sex intercourse than in the case of consensual, adult incest. Of the two, the prohibition of incest and the prohibition of same-sex intercourse, the prior and more foundational analogue is clearly the prohibition of same-sex intercourse.

Partly what this boils down to is this: Williams does not regard homosexual practice as a particularly significant sexual offense, if even an offense at all. (I have read in the press that he may have moderated or even changed some of his earlier strong support for homosexual practice but the evidence for such a change is at best conflicting.) For I can't imagine Williams arguing that it would be inappropriate for the church to split over the issue of, say, ordaining bishops who were in committed sexual bonds with a parent, full sibling, or adult child. I suspect that in such a context he would never introduce issues such as 'judgmentalism' or self-righteousness or divisiveness on the part of those who opposed ordination of such. Yet neither he nor anyone else who talks in this way has made a convincing case that Paul would have viewed loving and committed same-sex intercourse involving people "oriented" to such behavior as a significantly lesser offense than adult, consensual, and loving incest of the first order. Until he or anyone else makes such a convincing case, no basis exists for arguing that severing ties with a schismatic Episcopal Church of the United States of America would be an unfaithful, self-righteous, and anti-Pauline act. Indeed, the truly anti-Pauline act would be a business-as-usual approach to a renegade body that endorses sexual immorality among its leaders.

This is not the first time that I have addressed these issues. Much (though not all) of the material above in a different form can be found in works of mine already published, such as The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Abingdon Press, 2001; cf. esp. pp. 277-84: "Does Romans 2:1-3:20 Condemn Those Who Condemn Homosexual Practice?" and pp. 240-46: "Romans 1:18-3:20 Within the Sweep of Paul's Letter and the Situation at Rome") and a more recent article, "Why the Disagreement over the Biblical Witness on Homosexual Practice?" (Reformed Review 59:1 [2005]: 19-130, esp. pp. 83-90: "Addendum: Does Paul reject judgment of homosexual practice?" and "Is Homosexual Practice the Diet and Circumcision Issue of Today?"). It would be nice in the future if persons making the kinds of claims about Paul that the Archbishop has made could at least acknowledge the counter-arguments already made and attempt to respond to them.

If I have misunderstood the particulars of Archbishop Williams' reported remarks in any way, then I would be happy to be corrected. I respect him and nothing said here should be interpreted otherwise. Of course, I would be delighted to discover that the Archbishop actually does not believe that Paul warned his converts against judging believers who were actively engaged in sexually immoral behavior of a severe sort such as homosexual practice. One holds out the hope that it is the reporter, and not the one being reported on, whose interpretation of Paul's letter to the Romans is in need of correction.

Robert A. J. Gagnon, Ph.D., is a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. He can be reached at gagnon@pts.edu.

Copyright 2007 Robert A. J. Gagnon

---The Rev. Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon is Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. gagnon@pts.edu