Re: 21st Century repeat of ~ Sodom & Gomorrah ~

loiner2003 wrote:
Alwyn wrote:

In the case you mention, which is also where this thread started, I would imagine that conservative Christians would want to follow Paul, who has decided to do away with Jewish law but keep those bits he happened to be in agreement with. As we have seen, some want to condemn lesbianism, though Paul is vague on this point and nowhere is it mentioned in the so-called Books of Moses. The decision to reject female-to-female sexual relations depends therefore on a particular interpretation of a particular (and rather difficult) part of Scripture.

I broadly agree.


I meant to add. on this point:
Paul clearly finds the whole concept of homosexual relations distasteful; but then he doesn't seem wildly enamoured with sexuality anyway. How far this was due to personal concerns, and how far to a sublimation necessary for his driven mission zeal, we cannot say.

He describes himself as a Pharisee, though it is unclear how far he was ever actually involved in that movement. (I am sceptical of Luke's assertion about Gamaliel!) But even as a Pharisee sympathiser he would have found it very hard to see beyond the Levitical proscription.

Nevertheless I think it is worth noting that he only judges homosexuality in passing, as it were, especially in the key passage in Romans 1. As you say his remarks about women are ambiguous - maybe as Queen Victoria was alleged to have thought - he couldn't really imagine it! :-)

I seriously doubt that he had any serious knowledge of what today we would know as committed gay love. Ken makes the point that such relationships were not unknown in Roman-Greek society and that is true. But the homosexual marriages mocked by Juvenal sound more like the drug-induced activities of luvvies than the kinds of real relationships that can be open today. And, in any case, Paul/Saul, living in a fairly closed Jewish community in his formative years, is unlikely to have known of these things other than superficially.

I don't think we should be too harsh on him just because his imagination, hugely exercised by the new issues of Christianity, hadn't reached into such social revolution; similar with what we see now as feminist issues. Instead let us look at the richness of his developing understanding of love and relationship, as in Romans 12 and I Corinthinas 13. Out of that we can develop a more compassionate Paulinism which sits well with the comprehensive love of Jesus. (Even he struggled with the task of rising above Jewish exclusivism!)

--

Revd. Eric Potts

"I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able
to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day."


.

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