Communion and Koinonia: Pauline Reflections on Tolerance and Boundaries
N. T. Wright
A
paper given at the Future of Anglicanism Conference,
Introduction: Paul’s Context
From the very beginning, the church was faced with the problem of different
cultures coming together. Even in the earliest days, when all Christians were
Jews, there were Greek-speaking Jews and Hebrew (or Aramaic-) speaking Jews, and problems arose between them. Even during the
public career of Jesus, there were different reactions to him, including among
his own followers, and we may suppose that these were sometimes to do with what
we would call culture just as much as they may have been to do with
personality, preference, temperament, level of faith, and so forth. Once the
Christian message reached the Gentile world, not least in a swirling
pluralistic metropolis like
Coping with a
pluralist environment was not, of course, anything new for Jews, and early
Christianity remained very firmly Jewish. Diaspora Judaism had
faced the challenge of the pagan environment for many centuries; nor was
there an iron curtain screening off
The problem of what
counts as compromise, what is perfectly acceptable, what must be resisted at
all costs, and what you may get away with for a while but should expect to tidy
up sooner or later – all of this is therefore familiar ground to most Jews of
the first century, certainly those who did any travelling. And that, of course,
is what Paul spent a lot of time doing, living for a while not only in
One theme of Paul’s
letters, particularly those to
This highlights our
central theme, which is koinonia, ‘fellowship’ or
‘partnership’, and what it means in practice. Paul is our earliest Christian
writer. He preached the gospel in a radically plural world, with every variety
of culture, religion, politics, and ethics. He did indeed insist on
justification by faith, and on the unity of Jew and
Gentile, and by implication everyone else too, in Christ. What did he mean by
this? What was the basis of his ‘tolerance’? How do we explain the times when,
despite urging tolerance and unity, he lays down firm rules, even to the extent
of insisting that people who break them should be put out of Christian
fellowship?
Perspectives on Paul, the Law, ‘Tolerance’ and Ethics
As most of you will know, there has been a remarkable shift of opinion in
Pauline scholarship over the last generation. The massive though uneven work of
Ed P. Sanders, mainly in his book Paul
and Palestinian Judaism (1977), heralded what was quickly called ‘the new
perspective on Paul’. The very phrase has become something of a red rag to
several bulls over the last two or three years, and this is not the time to
enter into the current debate in any detail. I want to state two things very clearly:
first, that the so-called new perspective on Paul, with its main exponents as
Sanders and Dunn, has made two or three important, accurate and theologically
fruitful points; second, that it has also got quite a lot of things wrong, and
has in certain cases not followed through its own insights where they properly
should have gone. I am thus a critical insider to the New Perspective,
supporting some of its main thrusts but remaining deeply critical at certain
other points. If you want to see how this works out in practice, read my new
commentary on Romans in volume 10 of the New
Interpreter’s Bible. It simply won’t do to wave the New Perspective away,
as some have tried to do, and to go back to Martin Luther as though he solved
all our problems. Luther got some things gloriously right and other things
gloriously wrong. If, for instance, you have to choose between Luther and
Calvin in New Testament theology, in my judgement you
should normally go with Calvin; that, in fact, was where I myself came in, wresting
with Charles Cranfield’s essentially Calvinistic
interpretation of Paul and Romans, knowing that it was superior to the Lutheran
and evangelical commentaries I was used to, but discovering at an exegetical
level it didn’t quite work. It was in that context, in the mid-1970’s, that I
read Sanders, and found that, though there was much I didn’t agree with at the
time and still don’t, there was also much that was helpful in the essential
task: allowing the text to speak for itself, instead of imposing our traditions
upon it.
So what are the true
insights of the ‘new perspective’, and how may they help us in thinking about koinonia, tolerance, and related issues?
The main thrust of
Sanders’s work, which I endorse, is that first century Judaism was not a system
of Pelagian-style works-righteousness. First century
Jews were not imagining that they had to earn ‘righteousness’, that is, basic
membership in God’s people, membership in the covenant, through doing moral
good deeds. They did not regard the Torah, the Jewish law, as a ladder of good
works up which they had to climb, with salvation as the reward at the top. On the contrary. As any good Calvinist could have told
Sanders, they regarded the Torah as a good, lovely, God-given thing, not a
ladder of good works for eager merit-earners, but the way of life for the
people already redeemed. God chose Israel; God redeemed Israel from slavery in
Egypt by an act of sheer grace and power; and God then gave Israel the Torah,
not to earn their status with God but to demonstrate it. Now it is true, of
course, that the Mishnah and Talmud, the codified
commentaries and elaborations on Torah-keeping which grew up over the
half-millennium after Paul’s day, do indeed look like the kind of casuistical law-mongering which many people think of today
when they hear the word ‘legalism’. But Sanders’s point here stands, despite
many attempts to dislodge it. The main motive for keeping the law in Judaism
was not to earn membership in the people of God, or justification or salvation,
but to express one’s gratitude for it, to demonstrate one’s membership, and
ultimately to become the sort of person God clearly intended you to become. In
Lutheran terms, it was tertius usus
legis. In Calvinist terms, this was why God gave the law in the first place.
What then about the
famous Pauline phrase, ‘works of law’? Here is the second insight of the ‘new
perspective’ comes into play, which I shall argue is the key one for discussion
we need in today’s Anglican communion in discussions of koinonia,
tolerance, and boundaries. James Dunn has argued strongly, following the line
of thought which I myself pioneered but taking it a stage further, that ‘the
works of the law’ which Paul declares do not justify are not in general moral
principles, a ‘law’ in that sense, but ‘the works of the law’ which marked out
Jews from their pagan neighbours. They are, in other
words, circumcision, the food laws, and the sabbaths – the three things which every Jew in the
ancient world, and many pagans in the ancient world too, knew were the boundary–markers
between Jews and pagans. The point in keeping these was to say, "We are
Jews, not pagans outside the Torah. We are God’s people; he has made his
covenant with us; we are called to be the light of the world, and by keeping
God’s law we will keep ourselves separate from the world and show the world who
God really is’.
The third insight
which I myself bring to, and take from the New Perspective has to do with
Paul’s critique of
This very brief
account of three points where I believe New Perspective has its finger on a key
issue which is of enormous help exegetically and theologically. It does not, as
is sometimes suggested, mean losing anything from the cutting edge of the
gospel as we have traditionally understood it; on the contrary, it sharpens it
up. But there is no time to develop this here. Rather, I want to indicate the
enormous gain, precisely for the debates which face us in the Anglican
Communion, in understanding Paul this way. The point is this: when Paul appeals
for ‘tolerance’ in the church, the issues over which he saying there should be
no quarrels are precisely the issue where there were cultural boundary-markers,
especially between Jewish and Gentile Christians. He is not being arbitrary in
selecting some apparently ‘ethical’ issues to go soft on, while remaining firm
on others. The things about which Christians must be prepared to agree or
disagree are the things which would otherwise divide the church along ethnic
lines.
This point is
sometimes missed because of the clever writing of the key chapter, Romans 14.
Nowhere does Paul mention the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Gentile’, though it eventually
becomes explicit in the next chapter. He doesn’t want them to focus on the fact
that some of them are Jewish and others of them are Gentile. He wants them to
say to themselves, ‘Some of us in this new movement are happy eating any meat
at all, others prefer to stick to vegetables.’ (If all
the meat you could get in a pagan city had been sacrificed to idols, and if all
the cheap meat you could get was pork, obviously people with Jewish scruples,
or with tender consciences of young ex-pagan Christians converted after years
of assiduous idol-worship, might well decide to go the vegetarian route
instead.) ‘Some of us’, he wants them to say, ‘like to observe special days in honour of the Lord; others of us are happy to treat all,
days the same way.’ Then, in 1 Corinthians 7, he says, in effect, ‘some of us
are circumcised and are happy to be that way; others of us are uncircumcised
and should be happy to stay that way.’ In all these things he wants Christians
to stop thinking of themselves as basically belonging to this or that ethnic
group, and to see the practices that formerly demarcated that ethnic group from
all others as irrelevant, things you can carry on doing if you like but which
you shouldn’t insist on for others.
This, too, is what
underlies the debate about justification and circumcision in Galatians 2. The
question underneath the passage is not, ‘Do we have to perform good moral deeds
in order to get to heaven,’ but rather, ‘Are Jewish Christians allowed to sit
down and eat at the same table as Gentile Christians, when the latter have not
been circumcised?’ For Paul this is a central issue; the heart of the gospel is
at stake. When Jesus Christ died and rose again he transformed the covenant
people of God into a single, worldwide family for whom the only defining badge
is faith, not just any old faith but the very specific faith that Jesus is risen from the dead as Messiah and Lord of the world. This,
indeed, is the meaning of ‘justification by faith’; that it is this faith, and
this faith alone, that marks out God’s people in the present time.
Making this
distinction between ‘works’ in general, ‘lawkeeping’
in general if you like, and the more specific ‘works’ which mark the
distinction between Jew and Gentile, frees us once and for all from the tyranny
of that vague liberalism which holds that Paul played ‘faith’ off against ‘law’
or ‘works’, and which then uses that as a way of avoiding the sharp edges of
every ethical issue in sight. If you want to know why Paul insisted on
tolerating some differences of opinion and practice within the people of God,
and on not tolerating others, the answer is that the ones that were to be
tolerated were the ones that carried the connotations of ethnic boundary lines,
and the ones that were not to be tolerated were the ones that marked the
difference between genuine, living, renewed humanity and false, corruptible,
destructive humanity. This is my shorthand for a range of issues which he deals
with in several passages. I take one classic example, from Colossians.
In Colossians 2 Paul
insists that the Jewish law has nothing to say to you if you are in Christ. If
with the Messiah you died to the elements of the world, why should you submit
to mere human regulations – touch not, taste not, handle
not! These, he says, all have an appearance of wisdom and of promoting ascetic
discipline, but they are of no real value. You don’t need Jewish law,
particularly food laws, in order to define who the people of God are and build
them up as God’s truly human people.
What then? Shall we
do as we please? Certainly not! In Colossians 3 Paul instructs us to ‘seek the
things that are above’; and when he spells out what this will mean in practice
the list in verses 5-11 boil down to two areas of life in particularly: sexual
malpractice, and anger, malice and so on. (It is interesting, and important for
debates within our Communion, that we note how he places these two side by
side; there are many churches where immorality would not be tolerated but where
anger and malice reign unchecked, just as there are many which are full of
sweet tolerance and people being nice to each other but where immorality is
rife and never rebuked.) The key to it all comes in verses 9-10: you have
stripped off the old humanity with its practices, and have put on the new
humanity, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its
creator. At this point there can be no dispute, no room for divergent opinions:
no room, in other words, for someone to say ‘some Christians practice
fornication, others think its wrong, so we should be tolerant of one another,’
or to say ‘some Christians lose their tempers, others think its wrong, so we
should tolerate one another’. There is no place for immorality, and no place
for anger, slander and the like. And then, immediately, as though to emphasize
the point I’m making, Paul concludes the passage by saying (v.11) that ‘in that
renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian,
Scythian, slave and free, but in Christ is all in all.’ Paul is absolutely
clear about the standards expected of the new humanity, and equally clear that
distinctions relating to ethnic, social and cultural origin become irrelevant.
Of course, if someone
were to say, ‘Because I’m a Scythian, and we Scythians simply lose our tempers
a lot, that’s part of our culture,’ Paul would respond, ‘Not now you’re a
Christian you don’t.’ If a Corinthian were to say, ‘Because I’m a Corinthian, I
have always had a string of girl-friends I sleep with, that’s part of our
culture,’ Paul would respond, ‘Not now you’re a Christian you don’t.’ This is
where the word ‘culture’ lets us down, because it covers so many things. We
need to make a clear distinction between the aspects of a culture which Paul
regards as morally neutral and those which he regards as morally, or immorally,
loaded. And we need to note carefully what Paul’s reaction is when someone
disagrees at either side of his balance. When Peter and the others tried to
insist on keeping their Jewish distinctives, i.e.
only eating with other circumcised people, in
I hope it is clear
from all this that Paul is thinking with entire consistency. Of course, if we
come to him with a less than adequate frame of reference, such a low-grade
protestant understanding which has downgraded free grace into cheap grace, it
is easy to get muddled and then, projecting our problems onto Paul, to accuse
him of the muddle, as though he had simply decided to hold onto some bits of an
ethical code and go soft on other bits. No: when we get to know Paul better we
see what is going on.
In particular, we may
remind ourselves of the towering significance, in his thought, of Romans
6.1-11. Having just expounded the gospel of grace, God’s rich, welcoming and
forgiving love meeting us where we are, helpless sinners (5.6-10), he faces the
question: if God’s grace meets while we are sinners, must we therefore stay as
sinners so that God’s grace can go on meeting us there? He knows the answer as
soon as he has asked the question, but a great many people in today’s church do
not know it and cheerfully answer, ‘Yes!’ instead. It is one of the most
important principles of biblical ethics, and one trampled in the mud again and
again in contemporary debate: that God’s grace meets us where we are, but God’s
grace, thank God, does not leave us where we are; that God accepts us as we
are, but that God’s grace, thank God, is always a transforming acceptance, so
that in God’s very act of loving us and wooing our answering love we are being
changed; and, more dramatically, in baptism and all that it means we are
actually dying and rising, leaving one whole way of life and entering upon a
wholly different one.
Let us hear no more,
then, of the sub-Pauline idea that since we are justified by grace through
faith there is no need for a life of holiness, and that to insist on one is to
smuggle ‘works’ in by the back door. Another potential great gain of the
so-called ‘new perspective’, though not usually worked out by its major
exponents, is the fact that it allows Paul’s own emphasis on final judgement according to works, which he insists on again and
again, to emerge into its proper light without damaging or endangering in any
way the basic principle of justification by faith itself. (See, for instance,
Romans 2.1-16; 14.10-12; 2 Corinthians 5.6-10; and compare e.g. 1 Thessalonians
3.19-20; see my Romans commentary on the key passages.)
This, indeed, is the
principle that underlies some of the most subtle and joined-up thinking in that
subtle and joined-up letter 1 Corinthians. When Paul writes a long chapter on
the resurrection of the body (chapter 15), this is not simply because he has
been working through a long list of topics and has now decided to deal with this
one. It is because the resurrection of the body has been basic to his
understanding throughout, not least his understanding of ethics, not least his
view of sexual ethics. The argument of 1 Corinthians hinges on the fact that
what you do with your body matters, since God intends to raise it from the
dead. Paul faces moral relativism in this chapter and names it for what it is:
it is dehumanizing and degrading. The body of the Christian is already the
temple of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit will be God’s agent in raising
the body from the dead. The continuity, therefore, between the present body and
the transformed, resurrected body lies at the heart of Paul’s appeal here and
elsewhere in the letter. When final judgement occurs,
it will not be arbitrary; it is not the case that God has made up a list of
rules upon some kind of whim. Final judgement will be
according to genuine humanness, and genuine humanness is what truly reflects
the image of God. That is why the language of image-bearing, and other related
concepts, are found in Paul, at several key points. We
have already noted Colossians 3.10, which is itself dependent on Colossians
1.15-20; and we should add Romans 8.29 and 2 Corinthians 4.1-6 as other obvious
examples.
My argument, then, is
that if we learn to read Paul aright, taking the best of contemporary
scholarship while refusing some of the follies into which it sometimes falls,
we have a sharp tool with which to understand why Paul says what he does about
tolerance of different view points on the one hand and why he says what he does
about not tolerating immorality on the other hand. And this leads to my final
section, in which I want to reflect on where we are as a culture in handling
these issues, and then to say some Pauline things about three issues currently
before us.
Current Issues in Pauline Perspective
Let me first reflect on our own cultural climate. The fact that our early
twenty-first century instinct is to analyse Paul in
terms of prejudices and inconsistency shows well enough what sort of
intellectual – or perhaps we should say anti-intellectual – climate we now live
in within the western church at least. We have allowed ourselves to say ‘I
feel’ when we mean ‘I think’, collapsing serious thought into knee-jerk
reactions. We have become tolerant of everything except intolerance, about
which we ourselves are extremely intolerant. If someone thinks through an issue
and, irrespective of his or her feelings on the subject, reaches a considered judgement that doing X is right and doing Y is wrong, they
no sooner come out and say so than someone else will accuse them of phobia. If
someone says stealing is wrong, we expect someone else to say, ‘You only say
that because you’re kleptophobic.’
You will see easily
enough where this argument is going. In order to have any serious discussion
about ethical issues, we need to remind ourselves the whole time of the
importance of Reason (along with, and obedient to Scripture and Tradition) as
one strand of the classic threefold Anglican cord. The current fashion for
substituting ‘experience’, which all too easily means ‘feeling’, or ‘reported
feeling’, is simply not the same sort of thing. Experience matters, but it
doesn’t belong in an account of authority; put it there, and the whole notion
of ‘authority’ itself deconstructs before your very
eyes.
Another major feature
of our contemporary culture must be put on the table from the start. We are in
the middle of a painful and complex transition, in the western world at least,
from what is often called ‘modernism’ to what is loosely called
‘postmodernism’. In very broad, general terms, modernism was the philosophical
and cultural movement that came from the European Enlightenment, and produced
not only the French but also the American revolution.
One of its primary moves was rebellion against authority – in the French case,
against the church and crown, in the American case against
This modernist/Enlightenment
movement has produced large syntheses of thought, including the split,
inherited from Deism, between God and the world, making religion a matter of
private opinion and ethics a matter of private feeling (see above), and
insisting that everybody’s religion, and way of life, was more or less as good
as everybody else’s. At least, the Enlightenment insisted on this in theory;
many prejudices remain intact in practice. That is another story. Equally,
modernism has bequeathed us what now appears to most people a standard mode of
political discourse, with a right/left split in which all kinds of political
and even theological judgements are ranged across a
spectrum in which, once you have discovered where someone is located on one
issue, you can more or less guess what other views he or she will hold. This
suggests, in fact, that these are not views which have been thought through,
but are simply the assumed posture for someone who ‘feels comfortable’ (note
the language) at that point. The Age of Reason has thus begotten the Age of
Feeling, as Romanticism has taken a ride on the back of revolutionary thought.
‘What Many of Us Feel’ is thus elevated to the moral high ground, without
noticing that the Holocaust itself, that ethical (or anti-ethical) benchmark of
the twentieth century, was perpetrated by people who were doing What Many of
Them Felt.
Romanticism in turn
has undergone a transition into existentialism, where the quest for personal
authenticity has become self-justifying. Being true to oneself, discovering
‘who I really am’, ‘getting in touch with my inner identity’ and phrases like
this have also become ways of claiming a moral position to which there is no
allowed answer. If a murderer or child-molester turns out, on careful
interviewing, to have been expressing and living out who he or she truly was,
then of course we quietly demur and hope that there is a
psychiatric ward secure enough, if it cannot cure them, to keep them off
the streets. Our society does not choose to notice that there is no obvious
break in this respect between different types of behaviour,
some of which are deemed completely unacceptable socially and some of which are
not. And we should not be surprised that the rhetoric of existentialism has
made room for a sharp rise, in the West, of a now very fashionable
neo-gnosticism. Discover that you have an inner spark, underneath the layers of
learned or imposed morality or convention, and then you must be true to it,
whatever it takes, so that you can be truly free, truly yourself. Why do you
think that the Gospel of Thomas has
suddenly returned to vogue?
All of these – the
age of reason, romanticism, existentialism – are in
their various ways the products of the Enlightenment, and the revolutionary
subtext they carry continue to be powerful. Don’t try to stop us going this
way, they all say, or we will declare that you are taking us back to the feudal
age, trying to imprison us within old-fashioned categories. You are being
‘mediaeval’. It is important to say, right from the start, that none of these
interesting lines of thought have very much to do with Christianity, with the
gospel of Jesus Christ or with Christian behaviour.
And it is also important to say that many people, not least in the Western
world and church, do not realise this.
Over recent decades,
modernism has had a bad press, particularly (and in my view rightly) because
its grand scheme has allowed two centuries of western imperialism to proceed
unchecked, on the assumption that since we have come of age it was our duty to
bring the benefits of our new-found wisdom to the rest of the world. This, it
has now been said, times without number, has simply served to underscore the
arrogance and greed of empire. The so-called ‘masters of suspicion’ who arose
within the Enlightenment project – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud – stuck pins into
what looked like objective statements of facts and truth and discovered that
they could usually be accused of being in someone’s interests, whether sexual,
political or financial. We now distrust everything, and indeed the erosion of
trust within Western society has become such a feature that this year’s Reith
Lectures were devoted to the subject. The remarkable revelations about
large-scale financial irregularities of some of the West’s major companies
makes one wonder how much further we have to go before we hit rock bottom and
admit that we are all living simply by the law of the jungle.
Within this world, postmodernity has come to birth, overturning grand
narratives (‘metanarratives’) by which people have
ordered their lives and celebrating instead the small narratives, the little
stories of this group or that, of this culture or that, claiming the right for
them that they need not fit into anyone else’s pattern, they must just be
themselves. This too has become a fixed point of would-be moral discourse in
western culture: if I can claim that this is the way my culture does something,
you have no right of reply. Hence the anguished debates among feminists, for
instance, about female circumcision, with the feminist instincts all being to
say that such a practice is degrading and damaging to women’s rights and the
postmodern instincts all being to say that if that’s how they do things in that
culture, we have no right to criticize. This is not to say, of course, that postmodernity has not elevated its own moral standards into
high, lofty principles, to offend against which is to be instantly outcast. But
that, though ultimately very relevant to our subject, must wait for later.
All of these cultural
forces shape the way that western persons have, for some time, been
conditioning themselves to think and behave. These values are reinforced daily
and hourly by the media, the movies, and the iconic celebrities of our culture.
We should not be surprised when many within the churches conduct their
discourse by appealing to these norms; it would take very serious Christian
moral teaching to enable people to stand upright amidst these swirling
hurricanes of fashionable opinion, and (with some notable exceptions) serious
Christian moral teaching is not something we have had very much of in the West
in recent years. In particular, much of the Western church has learnt, partly
by explicit teaching and partly, I think by a kind of happy-go-lucky blend of
bits and pieces of Christian teaching and bits and pieces of the surrounding
culture, a general attitude to faith and morals which functions as a low-grade,
watered-down version of the gospel announced by Jesus himself and applied by
Paul. I hardly need to quote anyone in particular on this, because you have all
met it again and again: every other day in newspapers someone comes out with
it. Jesus, people say, was a very inclusive person; he never excluded anyone.
He preached, therefore, a grand tolerance and acceptance of people. He welcomed
sinners and outcasts. He found the people on the margins and brought them in.
This is brought together into the standard street level version of liberal protestantism, which in
If, within this
culture, people think to appeal to the apostle Paul, which
they often do not, they will not have much difficulty bringing him onside.
Justification by faith was what Paul preached, after all, as opposed to
justification by works of the law; therefore Paul cannot have intended that the
old moral rules and regulations would clog up the works of the free-and-easy
Christian church, celebrating its freedom in Christ and discovering its true
identity. Justification by faith clearly means, once more, that God accepts us
as we are; so the church has no right to impose anything else on people. They
must be allowed to be themselves, to find themselves, to do their own thing,
and we must indeed learn from their ‘experience’ as they do so. They must
maintain the unity of the church at all costs. That is what Paul is supposed to
stand for. And, if proof of this remarkable thesis is required, it can, it
seems, be found: Paul insisted, after all, in both 1 Corinthians and Romans
that the ‘weak’ and the ‘strong’, those with radically different opinions about
various different issues, should learn to defer to one another, and ultimately
to live together in fellowship within one family. I hope I have said enough in
the main section of this lecture to show that this way of reading Paul and
early Christianity is entirely without foundation. We desperately need fresh
and clear biblical thinking if we are to take on the casual assumptions of our
culture, in both church and world, and point the way forward.
So
to our three issues; and first, the issue of homosexual behaviour.
It is, of course open to anyone to say, on the basis of my argument so far,
that they regard the distinction between homosexual and heterosexual behaviour as one of those cultural distinctives
which are irrelevant in the gospel; that homosexual behaviour
simply is part of some cultures today, and that the church must respect, honour and bless it. You will not be surprised to know that
I do not share this view. I am not an expert on current debates, and defer to
two splendid books: Richard Hays, The
Moral Vision of the New Testament, and Robert Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. But I
may perhaps, as a long-time specialist on the letter to the Romans, put in my
small contribution.
Paul’s denunciation
of homosexual practice in Romans 1 is well known but not so well understood,
particularly in relation to its place in the argument as a whole. It is too
often dismissed as simply firing some Jewish-style thunderbolts against typical
pagan targets; and it is regularly thought to be dealing only with the
deliberate choice of heterosexual individuals to abandon normal usage and
indulge in alternative passions. It is often said that Paul is describing
something quite different from the phenomenon we know today, e.g. in large western
cities.
This is misleading.
First, Paul is not primarily talking about individuals at this point, but about
the entire human race. He is expounding Genesis 1-3, and looking at the human
race as whole, so here he is categorizing the large sweep of human history as a
whole – not, of course, that any individuals escape this judgement,
as 3.19f makes clear. Second, the point of his highlighting of female and male
turning away from natural usage to unnatural grows directly out of the text
which is his subtext, here and often elsewhere: for in Genesis 1 it is of
course male plus female that is created to bear God’s image. The
male-plus-female factor is not of course specific to humanity; the principle of
‘male plus female’ runs through a great deal of creation. But humans were
created to bear God’s image, and given a task, to be fruitful and multiply, to
tend the garden and name the animals. The point of Romans 1 as a whole is that
when humans refuse to worship or honour God, the God
in whose image they are made, their humanness goes
into self-destruct mode; and Paul clearly sees homosexual behaviour
as ultimately a form of human deconstruction. He is not saying that everyone
who discovers homosexual instincts has chosen to commit idolatry and has chosen
homosexual behaviour as a part of that; rather, he is
saying that in a world where men and women have refused to honour
God this is the kind of thing you will find.
The fascinating thing
is what Paul then does with this analysis of the plight of humankind. In Romans
4.18-22, when describing the way in which Abraham believed God and so was
reckoned as righteous, Paul carefully reverses what has happened in Romans
1.18-23. Abraham believed that God had power to give life to the dead; he honoured God and did not waver in unbelief. That is why he
is reckoned within the covenant, as ‘righteous’. And the result, of course, is
that Abraham and Sarah become fruitful. Romans 1 is
not a detached denunciation of wickedness in general. It is carefully
integrated into the flow of thought of the letter. (See too 7.4-6 for the
contrast between sinful lives which do not bear fruit, and life under the new
covenant which does.) In particular, we may note the strong ethical imperatives
of chapters 6, 8 and 12, in each of which, but particularly in 6.1-11 and
12.1-2, there are echoes both of Romans 1 and Genesis 1-3 which underlies it.
Paul clearly believes that the application of the gospel to human lives
produces new behaviour, renewed-human behaviour, newly imagebearing behaviour. It is not using Romans 1 as a prooftext, but as part of the tightly woven fabric of
Paul’s greatest letter, to say that he certainly regards same-sex genital behaviour as dehumanized and dehumanizing.
A
footnote on sexual behaviour in Paul’s world.
If one looks at the ancient world there is of course evidence of same-sex behaviour in many contexts and settings. But it is
noticeable that the best-known evidence comes from the high imperial days of
Second, more briefly, a
comment about authority in the church. When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians he
seemed to be able, quite cheerfully, to tell the church what to do, including
giving instructions about expelling a notorious offender. Subsequently,
according to 2 Corinthians, he made a painful visit to the church, and clearly
found things not as he would have liked. (2 Corinthians 1.23-2.11).
Subsequently again, or perhaps at the same time, he became aware that there was
a substantial body of opinion in the church, egged on by some newly-arrived
teachers, who were stirring up trouble and opposition against him. He addresses
this issue in 2 Corinthians; and I want to tell you, having recently completed
a translation of both the Corinthian letters, that 2 Corinthians is so
different in writing style that I am quite surprised some enterprising scholar
doesn’t argue that Paul didn’t write it. He has clearly been shattered in the
exercise of his authority, but is continuing to exercise it through tears and
prayers, with warning and irony. He has, of course, no official standing that
would give him legal means, in local courts, of forcing his will on the church.
He can only use moral persuasion. That puts him in a not dissimilar position to
the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has no official jurisdiction outside
This leads me,
thirdly and finally, to plead with you that in taking a biblical line, as I
hope you will in your consultations, you maintain the wisdom of the serpent as
well as the innocence of the dove. We cannot and dare not rely on the old
shibboleths of Left and Right, of radical and conservative, that we have
assumed over the last two centuries. They are breaking down. In particular, I
appeal to my American friends to realise the
political spectrum within which they live is not the same as the many different
ones within which the rest of us live. Do not assume that if you are what is called right-wing on this issue you will be what is
called right-wing on everything else too. Do not make this part of a package of
issues which will mean that many who might otherwise join with you find they
cannot. There is a real danger that if those who campaign on the issue of
homosexual behaviour are heard to be also denouncing moves
to remit third-world debt, or are known to be staunch opponents of women’s ordination,
many who are eager to join you on this issue will turn away. As the Lambeth voting figures made clear, there must be many
first-world bishops on both sides of the Atlantic who are not hard line
right-wingers, who are not ‘the usual suspects’ on every political issue that
comes up, but who are heartland Episcopalians who know in their bones that the
gay agenda is leading in the wrong direction and will quietly oppose it. There
is such a thing as strident right-wing agenda, and if we tackle this issue as
one aspect of that we will lose support, and understandable so.
Instead – I don’t
want to finish on a negative note, since I’ve been talking about Paul, who is
always positive and always gospel-oriented – I cast my vote for a fresh and
biblically based way forward towards a koinonia characterised by faith, in which ethnic distinctions become
irrelevant precisely because, together, we are becoming one body, one new humanity, in Christ. Our Communion is at a crisis
point which should also be a growth point. We clearly need to learn new things,
and like a child growing to adulthood we may have to put away childish things
and acquire some more adult ways of going about how we ‘do’ koinonia.
We may have to renounce our somewhat easy-going and informal structures. It is
clear that not many people in North America want anyone East
of the Atlantic to tell them what they can and cannot do, but they still want
to be in Communion with