Romans 1: I Am Not Ashamed of the Gospel": The Opening and the Indictment

The longest greeting Paul ever wrote, a statement of what he is coming for, and then the beginning of an argument that will run for three chapters and that most readers stop halfway through.

He introduces himself to people who do not know him, establishes his credentials carefully, tells them he has wanted to come for years and been prevented, and says he is not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Greek.

And then the indictment begins. What can be known about God is plain from what has been made, he says, so nobody has an excuse; and what people did with that knowledge was exchange it — the glory of God for images, the truth for a lie, the created order for their own appetites. Three times he says God gave them over, and each time the handing-over is to the thing they had already chosen.

It ends with a list of twenty-one vices that takes in gossip and arrogance and disobedience to parents alongside murder.

And then chapter two opens: therefore you have no excuse, you who pass judgment on another, because you who pass judgment do the same things. That sentence is aimed at whoever has been nodding along, and it is the hinge of the entire argument.

I am going to spend most of this section on verses twenty-six and twenty-seven, because they are at the center of the bitterest conflict in the church of our time, and because a commentary that skated past them would be worthless. I will try to be accurate rather than comfortable, and I will not pretend to a certainty I do not have.

First, what the passage says. In the middle of an argument about idolatry — about humanity exchanging the glory of God for images — Paul writes: "For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. Likewise, the men abandoned natural relations with women and burned with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error."

That is the text. It is a negative judgment, it is the only place in the Bible usually read as referring to female same-sex activity, and no honest reading makes it a compliment. Anyone who tells you Paul is neutral here is not reading the sentence.

Now the things that also have to be said, which are usually left out of whichever side is speaking.

The passage is not primarily about sex. It is the second half of an illustration whose subject is idolatry. Paul's argument runs: humanity knew God, refused to honor him, exchanged his glory for images, and God gave them over — and what they were given over to is described as the visible social consequence of that exchange. The word exchanged appears three times and it is the spine of the paragraph. He is describing, in the idiom of Hellenistic Jewish polemic against paganism, what he takes to be the shape of a culture that has turned from God. Similar passages exist in the Wisdom of Solomon, which Paul almost certainly knew and appears to be echoing closely.

What Paul had in front of him when he pictured this is not what a modern reader pictures. The same-sex behavior visible in the Greco-Roman world he knew was overwhelmingly asymmetric and often coercive: men with adolescent boys, masters with enslaved people, and a pattern of excess in which a man's appetite was understood to overflow its bounds. The category of two people of the same sex in a permanent, faithful, mutual covenant is rare in the ancient sources, and it is not what the surviving moral arguments, on either side, are about. That does not settle the question — an argument from creation and gender does not obviously depend on the quality of the relationship — but it is a real difference between what Paul saw and what is being argued about now, and pretending otherwise on either side is dishonest.

And then the trap, which is the thing I most want to say about this chapter. Paul builds fifteen verses of indictment against pagan society, ending with a list that any pious reader would find satisfying. And then, with no break in the argument — the chapter division is a later invention — he turns: "You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on another. For on whatever grounds you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things."

The whole of chapter one is a set-up. He is doing what Nathan did to David: telling a story his hearer will condemn, and then saying You are that man! And the conclusion two chapters later is that there is no distinction, for all have sinned. Anyone who quotes chapter one at another person and does not feel chapter two land on themselves has been caught by a rhetorical device they did not notice.

So where does that leave a reader who wants to know what to do?

I will tell you what I think this project can honestly say. The rule this project has used for forty-four books is the one Jesus gave and a Jewish legal expert produced unprompted: everything hangs on love of God and love of neighbor, and the neighbor is defined by a story in which the hero is the person the audience despised. I have applied that rule to conquest narratives, to imprecatory psalms, to the woes, to slavery texts and to every place where scripture has been used as a weapon. Applying it here means at minimum this: whatever anyone concludes about the ethics, a reading of Romans one that produces contempt, exclusion, or the treatment of gay and lesbian people as a category of sinner distinct from everyone else in the room has been refuted by Romans two, a few sentences later, in the same breath, by the same author.

That is not a resolution of the ethical question and I am not going to pretend it is one. Serious, prayerful, careful readers of this text disagree about it, and the disagreement runs through families and congregations and this project's own likely readership. What I can say without hedging is that the way the passage has most often been used — as a club, quoted alone, by people skipping the verse that follows — is a misuse of it on the text's own terms. And I would add one observation about proportion: the list at the end of this chapter includes gossip, slander, arrogance, boastfulness and disobedience to parents, and churches have not, as a rule, barred the arrogant from communion.

On the hard places. Three more. First, "God gave them over," said three times. It is not a description of God actively corrupting anyone. The verb describes a handing-over, a withdrawal of restraint — God allowing a choice already made to have its own consequences. The wrath of God being revealed in this passage is not a thunderbolt; it is the process of people being permitted to become what they have decided to be. That is a more frightening idea than the thunderbolt, and it is what the text says.

Second, "for what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them... so that men are without excuse." This is the foundation of what later theology called natural revelation, and it is doing specific work in the argument: it establishes that Gentiles, without the law, are still accountable — which is what he needs in order to conclude, two chapters on, that Jew and Gentile stand on exactly the same ground. It is not an argument that everyone secretly knows the Christian faith. It is an argument that nobody can plead total ignorance of God.

Third, the opening itself, which is easy to skim. Paul calls himself doulos — slave — of Jesus Christ in the first line, and describes the gospel as promised beforehand through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures, regarding his Son, "who was a descendant of David according to the flesh." Before he says anything else to these strangers, he grounds the whole thing in Israel's scriptures and Israel's royal line. He also says he is obligated to Greeks and non-Greeks, to the wise and the foolish — the word is opheiletēs, a debtor. He does not describe himself as having something to offer them. He describes himself as owing it.

And the sentence he chooses as his thesis: "I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Greek." That order — first to the Jew — appears twice more in the letter, and it is not a chronological footnote. It is a statement about priority that the church spent nineteen centuries inverting.