The Pastoral Dilemma

When unavoidable controversial issues affect people we know and care about, as is the case in the current public ecclesial debate on homosexuality, the human factor is crucial in the disputation. Those who seek love in same-sex relationships are people—sometimes family or colleagues, or as with pastors, members of our congregation. Thomas E. Schmidt reminds us of the importance of the personal dimension of the issue in his book, Straight & Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexuality Debate:

These are people with faces, people with names, often Christian people, and whatever we conclude about the larger issues their stories represent, we must never lose sight of their individual struggles, their individual pain, their faces. If we neglect faces, we neglect the gospel.1

In that concluding sentence, Professor Schmidt articulates the pastoral dilemma. How shall I deal with this issue in such a way that I neglect neither the faces of the homosexual people I know and care about nor the gospel of Jesus Christ? Put positively, how shall I, as a minister of the gospel, serve the homosexual people I know (and don’t know) in my congregation?

My understanding of the gospel, as well as that of the Reformed theological tradition in which I stand, has been shaped in no small measure by the canonical letters of the apostle Paul. In Rom. 1:16, he declares programmatically that the gospel is “the power of God unto salvation for everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” The gospel is power, God’s power, God’s saving power. From what then does the gospel save us? Paul argues in Romans that the gospel delivers us from: (1) the power of sin to oppress us (Romans 6); (2) the power of the Law to condemn us (Romans 7); and (3) the power of death to hold us (Romans 8). Those thus liberated are declared just before God, and in their liberation God demonstrates his own justice. “For in [the gospel] the justice of God is revealed” (Rom. 1:17).

With regard to the oppression of sin, Paul gives examples elsewhere of the gospel’s liberating power. Of special interest is a text that relates the power of the gospel explicitly to the issue of homosexuality, 1 Cor. 6:9-11. The literary location of this brief passage is a section of 1 Corinthians (5:1-6:20) in which the apostle is addressing two instances of behavior in the Corinthian congregation that do not honor the gospel, one a matter of incest (5:1-13) and the other a case of fraud (6:1-11). In speaking to these matters, Paul introduces a series of “vice catalogues” (as they are called in New Testament scholarship) that give specificity to the ways in which sin evidences itself as an oppressive force in human life (5:10,11, and 6:9-10).2 In the first (5:10) he lists the sexually immoral, the greedy, robbers, and idolators. In the second (5:11) he repeats the list and adds to it revilers and drunkards. In the third (6:9-10) he warns that “wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God” and identifies the endangered as all those previously mentioned, plus thieves. Further, the sexually immoral are now specified as fornicators, adulterers, male prostitutes, and sodomites.3

Before stating the point that I wish to make from this third vice catalogue, however, it is imperative that we notice two important features of these three lists. The first is that sexual sins are not singled out for exclusive attention, but are conjoined with sins of economic injustice (perpetrated in a variety of ways by the greedy, robbers, and thieves) and the sin of religious idolatry. The second notable feature of these lists is that sexual immorality is specified first as heterosexual fornication and adultery, and only then is it further identified as homosexual behavior; which is to say that the latter is no lesser or greater an instance of sin than the former.

Unfortunately, in my judgment 1 Cor. 6:9-11 has been used in the debate on homosexuality primarily to establish the biblical view that same-gender sex is sinful. What is often neglected is the concluding verse, which attests to the power of the gospel to liberate people from conditions and consequences of behavior that is subject to divine indictment. The text reads:

And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. (1 Cor. 6:11)

Imagine such a congregation. Not all, to be sure, but some nonetheless were—in their pre-Christian lives—greedy, robbers and thieves. Some were drunkards and revilers. And, yes, some were fornicators, adulterers, male prostitutes, and sodomites. That was then, however. The past tense of the verb is crucial to our understanding of what the apostle is saying: “And this is what some of you were.” Now the situation is different. These very people were washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of God.

Gordon D. Fee calls this text “one of the more important theological statements in the epistle.”4 He explains:

As in 1:30, the three verbs are primarily metaphors of salvation, each expressing a special facet of their conversion in the light of the preceding sentences: they had been “washed” from the filth of their former life-styles expressed in the preceding list; they had been “sanctified,” set apart by God for holy, godly living that stands in stark contrast to their former wickedness; though formerly “unjust,” they had been justified, so that now right with God they may inherit the kingdom that before they could not…. Finally, since the three verbs refer to the same reality, and since each of them has “God” as the implied subject, the two prepositional phrases are to be understood as modifying all three verbs. The latent Trinitarianism of the sentence, therefore, is difficult to escape. God has effected salvation “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit.”5

The significance of this exegetical commentary on 1 Cor. 6:11 is its assurance that here we are not skating near the blue ice of the canon where its central witness to the gospel is thin. Rather, that witness is firmly attested in terms of the gospel’s cleansing, sanctifying, and justifying power to effect transformation of human life, including, and in particular, its moral character. Idolatry, greed and thievery, fornication and adultery may be deeply ingrained patterns of human conduct, but they are not necessary patterns because of the gospel. The same is true, Paul attests, of those given to same-gender sex. Evidently, there were faces in the Corinthian church whose experience of the gospel confirmed the apostle’s assertion.

Undergirding and informing this apostolic statement of the need for the possibility of homosexual transformation is the biblical understanding of creation. What qualifies homosexual liaisons for inclusion on Paul’s vice list is stipulated in his discussion of this topic in Rom. 1:26-27. Put simply, they are “against nature” (Greek para physin, v. 26). The apostle is speaking here, of course, in the idiom of the Stoics. But the term nature, as used here, is if not baptized by Paul the Christian, then at least circumcised by Paul, the Hellenistic Jew. For the Hellenistic Jew characteristically filtered Stoic terms through the medium of Jewish monotheism and thus identified nature with God’s Law and creative intention.6

Two comments by German New Testament ethicist Wolfgang Schrage are pertinent here. The first is that in Rom. 1:26 “physis designates what is consonant with the order of creation.” The second is that for Paul, “Marriage is consonant with the created order.”7 The divine intention for human sexual relations, as attested in the Genesis accounts of creation and affirmed by Jesus, is the union of male and female in marriage (Gen. 2:24; see also Matt. 19:1-6).8 It is this norm that makes homosexual behavior (as well as fornication and adultery) for Paul “a tragic distortion of the created order.”9 It is this distortion (among others) that God transforms by the power of the gospel to cleanse, sanctify and justify (1 Cor. 6:11). Such, in brief, is the pastoral response of the apostle Paul to the faces of those he knew and cared about who engaged in homosexual practice.

How then should the pastoral dilemma be resolved? Because the gospel is “the power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 1:16), I am faithful to the faces of the people I know and care about when I tell them the gospel truth: that the power of the triune God is at work in and through the good news of Jesus Christ to liberate all from the oppression of sin, whether their particular vices are sexual or nonsexual, and, if the former, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual in kind.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 14, No. 5 (Nov/Dec 2008).