Re: Sin?

From: George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 07:44:56 EDT

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    John W Burgeson wrote:
    >
    > George, provocatively, wrote: "Though I think that Paul is speaking of
    > gentiles in general here, let's pursue
    > possibility B, that he's referring to some manifestly bad subset of them.
    > Consider one
    > member X of that subset who lies, cheats, steals and also engages in
    > homosexual activity
    > with a single partner in a long-term relationship. According to this
    > interpretation of
    > Romans we can & should consider all of these things as sinful. Now
    > suppose this person
    > has a dramatic conversion experience and comes to talk to me (M). The
    > following
    > conversation might ensue.
    > X "I'm sorry for my sins, believe in Jesus Christ as my savior and
    > want to
    > start living as a Christian. What kind of changes should I make?"
    > M "To start with, you should stop lying, cheating and stealing."
    > X "What about my homosexual relationship? I was told before that that
    > was
    > sinful too."
    > M "It was then, but it's OK now."
    > This seems kind of odd to me."
    >
    > It did to me also -- at least at first. But the clause "According to this
    > interpretation of
    > Romans we can & should consider all of these things as sinful" may be the
    > hooker here.
    >
    > Your thought question points out, at least to me, that if one wishes to
    > assert that same-gender relationships are not sinful, then one must also
    > assert (as I do) that it is likely that Paul was considering gentile
    > homosexual acts only within a pagan ritual. It does seem 99.44% likely
    > that he knew of the prohibitions to the Jews in Leviticus.

            I think it's plausible that Paul (& his contemporaries) did not have anything
    like our modern understanding of sexual orientation. But it seems very unlikely that he
    wasn't aware that homosexual activity sometimes took place outside settings of pagan
    ritual. & was there any significant lesbian pagan ritual? (The Romans passage is the
    only biblical one to mention female same-sex activity.)

                                                            Shalom,
                                                            George

    George L. Murphy
    gmurphy@raex.com
    http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

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