The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. [Romans 1.18-32, NIV]
In Romans 1.18-32, Paul gives us a telescopic look at mankind’s depravity. He asserts that God’s wrath is being revealed upon His rebellious creatures, and then He expands upon their rebellion: mankind inherently knows that God exists, for He has revealed His power and divine nature in creation. Creation instructs us to fear God and to be grateful for His provision. However, mankind has willfully suppressed these truths, refusing to honor or thank God, and our thinking has become futile and our hearts have been darkened. We exchanged the truth about God for lies of our own creation, and we became idolaters, worshiping the creation rather than the Creator. It is because of this – our suppression of natural truth, our rejection of God, and our idolatry – that God’s wrath is being revealed. His wrath manifests itself in that He ‘gives us over’ to our sin. Sometimes God’s judgment is to let us have our own way. It is here – in verses 26 and 27 – that Paul refers to homosexual activity: women sleeping with women and men sleeping with men. He says these practices are unnatural, or against nature, depending on your translation. However, these shameful acts provoked by shameful lusts are just the tip of the iceberg: all mankind, regardless of whether or not their sexual proclivities tend towards homosexual activity, stand in the docket for a variety of sins. Paul chastises not only those who commit these sins but also those who approve of those who practice them. A man may not be gay, but by showing solidarity in a Gay Pride Parade, he’s courting the unnatural evil of deviant sexual living and is judged alongside it.
That Paul condemns same-sex sexual activities is apparent; but what does he mean when he says that such activities are ‘against nature’? Some have argued that Paul is talking only about those whose sexual orientation is straight; for them, homosexual sex is against their personal nature. In the same vein, if a man of homosexual orientation were to have straight sex, that would thus be going against ‘his nature,’ and thus he would be guilty of personal aberrant sexual behavior. This assumes that God makes people homosexual and that He intends they live a homosexual life; many ‘Gay Christians’ (as oxymoronic a phrase as ‘Adulterous Christians’ or ‘Idolatrous Christians’ or ‘Incestual Christians’) argue that their homosexual orientation is a gift from God, that it is part of their nature, and thus they honor God by living how He created them (this is an example of what ‘futile thinking’ looks like in practice). We must reject this interpretation of what Paul says, for on the one hand he wouldn’t be aware of the concept of sexual orientation, as it’s a modern concept; and on the other he expressly believes that human beings are sinful to the core, so the whole argument of ‘this is how God made me’ would be met with ‘no, that’s how deep sin has infected you, so repent.’ Ultimately, Paul isn’t addressing one’s orientation so much as he’s addressing one’s behavior. He isn’t talking about those who war against shameful lusts but those who embrace those lusts in action. Some have argued that Paul is talking about the natural world: it isn’t natural for members of the same sex to have sex with each other. However, anyone who’s owned a dog can tell you that’s not true. A frisky male dog will mount other male dogs, their own brothers, a luckless human’s leg, and even inanimate objects. Dogs, then, are guilty of homosexual sex, incest, bestiality, and just plain stupidity. If Paul was talking about what we see in the animal kingdom, then he’s shown for a fool, and can we then assume that homosexual sex, bestiality, and incest are thus okay for human beings, since they’re present in the animal kingdom and we are animals, too? That’s absurd. We aren’t dogs and shouldn’t make canine behavior the litmus test for what is right and wrong for human beings. What, then, is Paul talking about when he says homosexual activity is ‘against nature’? The answer is found in Greco-Roman philosophy.
Classical Western Philosophy: A Primer
The Greek philosopher Plato lived in the 4th century BC, and it was his brand of philosophy that was tweaked by Aristotle and fine-tuned by the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas to become the foundation of classical western philosophy. Plato believed that all of reality is encompassed by three realms: the Immaterial realm, or ‘The Realm of Forms,’ which was the world of the abstract and home to concepts, ideas, and perfect forms; the Material realm, which was a dim and distorted reflection of the Immaterial realm; and the Internal realm, which was the world of consciousness and reason by which we know the Material and Immaterial realms. Plato taught that within the Immaterial realm were the ‘Perfect Forms’ of those things that appear, in dim and distorted form, in the Material realm. Forms are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations. Every object or quality in reality has an immaterial form to which it corresponds and by which it is judged: dogs, human beings, mountains, colors, courage, love, and goodness all correspond to their perfect forms in the immaterial realm.
How does this work? Let’s take dogs for an example. There are plenty of dogs in the world, and they vary in all sorts of ways, and each and every one is an imperfect representation of the ‘true’ concept of dog that exists in the Immaterial Realm as an abstract yet perfect idea. This ‘form’ of the dog in the immaterial world defines what it means to be a ‘Good Dog.’ A ‘Good Dog,’ then, is one that conforms to the pattern of the Form of Dog. The Form of Dog defines the purpose and function of the dog. Let us say that the ‘Good Dog’ is one that travels in packs, eats meat, doesn’t shit where it sleeps, and fetches a stick and returns that stick to its owner. It would follow, then, that a dog that doesn’t have a pack is still a dog but is not a ‘Good Dog’ in the sense that it’s not being true to its form; a dog that eats cucumbers would, in the same vein, not be a Good Dog. A dog that fetches the stick and then drops it wouldn’t be a Good Dog, nor would the dog that defecates in its own cage. In all these instances, the dog is failing to conform to the Form and is thus a ‘Bad Dog.’ Platonic philosophy teaches that all dogs are imperfect representations; in some way or another, all dogs fail to conform to the Form of Dog. Some dogs do it because they’re stubborn or don’t care; some may be too stupid to fetch a stick, and others may be crippled by no fault of their own and would thus be unable to fetch a stick. The reasons for the imperfections are absolutely irrelevant; what matters is whether or not a dog conforms to the Form of Dog. The more a dog does conform to its perfect Form, the ‘better’ the dog is; conversely, the farther it varies from the perfect Form, the ‘worse’ it is. Note that a ‘Bad Dog’ doesn’t cease being a dog; it’s simply a dog that is failing to live up to its nature – to its purpose and function – as defined by the Form of Dog.
There is also a Form of Mankind, even a Form of Man and a Form of Woman. For Plato – and Aristotle, and the medieval philosophers who followed them – the Form of Mankind captures the essence of what it means to be human. To be a ‘Good Human’ – or a ‘Good Man’ or a ‘Good Woman’ – is to conform to the Form in the Immaterial Realm. What makes a man or woman good isn’t subjective – it isn’t based upon feelings or personal values – but is objective, and this objective ‘good’ captures the essence of what it means to be a man or woman; the Form informs the nature of mankind, and of man and woman respectively; the Form informs the purpose and function of mankind, and of man and woman respectively. ‘Goodness’ as a man or woman has literally nothing to do with what any individual man or woman happens to value or desire at any given time; goodness has to do entirely with how much (or little) a man or woman conforms to what it means to be a man or woman in the Immaterial Realm. In Christian thought, God as Creator has established what it means to be a ‘good’ man or a ‘good’ woman, and the Christian life involves abandoning our deviations from that form and striving to adhere to it.
The Forms in the immaterial realm don’t only correspond to physical things, like atoms or rocks or trees or dogs or human beings. The Forms in the immaterial realm also include things not physically present in the material realm but which are instinctively known (such as ‘Justice’ and ‘Love’) or found to be true (such as mathematics, geometry, language, etc.). To deny the Immaterial Realm is to completely corrode the basis for mathematics, geometry, and even science itself (and this is a problem that modern philosophers continue to tackle, though unsuccessfully). Let us take, for example, the abstract concepts of ‘Justice,’ ‘Love,’ and ‘Truth.’ Plato argued that there was a Form of Justice, a Form of Love, and a Form of Truth in the Immaterial Realm, despite their physical absence in the material realm (you can’t tell me the color or shape or texture of justice, can you?). To deny the Immaterial Realm is to deny the reality of justice, love, and truth; modern philosophy has done this very thing, and the consequences have been absolutely disastrous. If there is no such thing as Justice, then there is no such thing as Injustice; if there is no such thing as Love, then there is no such thing as hate; if there is no such thing as Truth, then there’s no such thing as Lies. To get rid of the Immaterial Realm, where Justice and Love and Truth are defined and used as a measuring stick for us in the ‘real world,’ is to plunge society into a dark age wherein justice, love, and truth are no more than silly ideas with no moral authority.
Plato taught that human beings instinctively know of Justice, Love, Beauty, and Truth because human souls are immortal and, before being planted in the material realm, existed in the immaterial realm where they came into contact and came to know the Forms of these abstract concepts. The highest Form, according to Plato, was The Form of the Good. The Form of the Good cannot be clearly seen or explained, but it is the form that allows one to realize all the other forms. The definition of the Good is a perfect, eternal, and changeless Form, existing outside space and time, in which particular good things share. Medieval philosophers taught that Plato’s Form of the Good was, in reality, God Himself. God is perfect, eternal, and changeless; God exists outside space and time; and He is the source not only of everything that exists but also the source of the Forms themselves. Medieval philosophers believed that the reason human beings knew of the Forms – in what we would nowadays call ‘common sense’ – is because we are created in God’s image. As God’s special creatures, just a bit lower than the angels and a good step above the animals, we have one foot in the Immaterial Realm and one foot in the Material Realm. Our instinctive knowledge of Justice, Love, and Truth is a knowledge not shared by any non-human creatures; it is a knowledge that has been given to us not because we existed ‘eternally’ with the Forms in the Immaterial Realm but because we have been granted this knowledge of the Forms by the God who created us.
The Nature of Man and Woman in Romans 1
This brings us back to what Paul says in Romans 1. When he says that men and women acted ‘against nature’ in engaging in sexual acts with members of the same sex, he was borrowing from Greek philosophy. To say that homosexual activities are ‘against nature’ is to say that they do not correspond to the essence of what it means to be human. Both the form and function of men and women, their reproductive organs, and the result of sexual union informs us that it is normative for a man to bed a woman and to produce children: the form of the penis and vagina fit lock-and-key, and the intended result or function of that union is the production of offspring. The form of man and the form of woman indicates that we are designed for heterosexual sex: it was for the purpose of procreation that God designed the penis and vagina the way they are – He designed the penis to fit deep inside the woman, He designed the vagina to secrete lubrication to facilitate this penetration, and He designed the penis to ejaculate semen into a specific place in the female so that the sperm can connect with an egg and fertilize. This may be a bit graphic, but it’s an important point: the basic biological design of man and woman indicates that sex is designed for procreation between a man and a woman. Any sexual activity that deviates from this is inherently unnatural; this is why Paul can say, in Romans 1, that men sleeping with men and women sleeping with women is ‘against nature.’ It is clear that God designed men and women to operate sexually in tandem with one another.
No one can argue that the final and natural purpose of sex isn’t procreation. It doesn’t matter if people engage in sex for their own reasons; their reasons may differ from nature’s reasons, but it is nature’s reasons that inform us of what is natural and good for mankind. Some may argue that the purpose of sex is pleasure, and there’s no denying that sex is pleasurable; but pleasure isn’t the final or natural end of sex. Sexual pleasure has its own ‘final end’ in getting people to have sex so that they will procreate. Just as eating is pleasurable, the biological point of eating isn’t to give us pleasure but to fuel our bodies for survival. The pleasure we experience in eating is God’s way of getting us to do what we need to do to keep us trucking along. In the same way, the purpose of sex is procreation, and pleasure serves to get us to the point where we have sex so that we can procreate; God commanded us to ‘multiply and fill the earth,’ and He gave us pleasure so that we had a reason to do it. God has also built us in such a way that sexual arousal is hard to resist and occurs frequently; the end result is that it’s difficult to avoid pregnancies resulting from indulging that arousal. Thus God didn’t just make sex pleasurable for us so that we would engage in it, but He also made our desire for it frequent so that we really would ‘fill the earth.’ With this in mind, we can address a poignant question and make an observation:
The Question: ‘Is it sinful to have sex for the purpose of pleasure?’ The natural end of sex is procreation; that is its purpose. The purpose of sexual pleasure is to get us to have sex, and the purpose of sex is to get us to have babies. Some might argue that because the ultimate purpose of sex is to have babies, then having sex for the pleasure of sex is somehow sinful. This is preposterous! It’s like saying that because the purpose of eating is to fuel the body with nutrients, it is sinful to eat a shepherd’s pie because you like the way it tastes and are satisfied afterward. God made food taste good so that we would be driven to eat; He knows most of us aren’t sitting down at a banquet saying, ‘I’ve really expended some calories this afternoon, time to refuel my energy so that I can continue operating at peak performance.’ Nor does God believe that most of us are going to have sex for the sole purpose of procreating; as any married couple who’s trying for a baby knows, sometimes the act itself can be exhausting if that’s your prime motivation. God has designed us with arousal and the desire for sexual pleasure, and it isn’t sinful to be driven towards sex by virtue of seeking that pleasure, because that is the way God designed us. However, it is sinful if we seek to wholly deprive sex of its intended end, frustrating its natural goal. While there are often good reasons for delaying procreation, there are far more reasons not to delay procreation; and while there are good reasons for engaging in foreplay that may not result in procreation, there are no good reasons for deliberately terminating the life of an unborn child that results from sexual activities. Abortion, at its most base level, is the brutal termination of life and a frustrating of the natural purpose of sex, which is procreation.
The Observation: A Nuclear Family is a Natural Product of Procreation. If ‘nature takes its course,’ then women are put under a heavy burden. They’re bound to become pregnant and to do so frequently. The children, too, are burdened, because for a long time they are utterly dependent upon others for their needs. These needs include biological needs – food, water, and shelter – as well as moral and cultural needs, since human beings are rational creatures. Children require education in what is right and wrong and discipline when they error. For human beings, procreation isn’t just about producing a bunch of new organisms but also of raising them into persons who can fulfill their essence as rational and moral people. Thus, if the nature of procreation runs it course, women and children are put under a heavy burden – which is why nature has also ‘ordained’ someone to provide for them. Fathers have a strong incentive to look after their own children rather than the neighbor’s kids, and they are naturally jealous of the affections of the women with whom they have children. Thus nature – or, as Christians understand it, God – has put a heavy burden on fathers, too, so that they’re pushed to devoting their daily labors to providing for their children and the mother of his children. When the nature of procreation runs its course, it’s only natural that the man fathers multiple children, so that his commitment is necessarily long-term. In this way, the final purpose of sex – procreation – pushes the man and woman who procreate towards something like marriage and the nuclear family. Marriage, and the nuclear family, exists not merely as a consequence of reproduction but for the purpose of nourishing children biologically, morally, and culturally.
We have thus seen that classical western philosophy teaches that all things have certain natures – which encompass both their form and function – and that deviation from that nature or essence is to reject conformity to what it means to be good. Homosexual activity, which deviates from the form of heterosexual sex and the function of procreation, is thus a ‘defect’ in that it is a refusal to conform to the natural essence of what it means to be a man or woman. Some have argued against this by asking, ‘So what if homosexuality has a genetic basis? Would it thus be natural?’ Even if it were to be discovered that there’s a genetic basis to homosexuality, that doesn’t mean homosexuality is thus ‘natural’ for human beings. Researchers have found that genetics plays a role in babies being born with cleft lips; are we then going to state that cleft lips are ‘natural’ for human beings, corresponding to the way humans are to look? Obviously cleft lips are unnatural, a defect, despite there being a genetic basis; they are defects because they break from the nature of how a palate is to form. No one who has a cleft lip would take offense if you were to note that cleft lips are unnatural; nor would someone with a cleft lip be necessarily led to embrace and celebrate it because it has a genetic basis. The possibility of a genetic basis for homosexual desire doesn’t mean that the desire is natural, anymore than a genetic basis for cleft lips means cleft lips are natural.
Thus we can see, from the position of classical western philosophy, that the form of man and woman are matched in order to procreate. Since the final cause of human sexual capacities is procreation, what is good for human beings in the use of those capacities is to use them only in a way consistent with this final cause or purpose. To embrace sexual perversions is to embrace a lifestyle that is subhuman, in the sense that the lifestyle falls far from the mark of what it means to be human. This doesn’t mean, of course, that those who embrace sexual perversion are no longer human; it simply means that they aren’t acting as a human should act. They have not lost any of the inherent worth, value, and dignity that human beings have by virtue of being made in God’s image. To embrace forms of subhuman living – and, in reality, all sins have in common the fact that to practice them is to court subhuman living – is to embrace a detrimental lifestyle. The goal of Greek philosophy was to live a fully flourishing human life, what the Greeks called eudaimonia. Greek philosophy sought to determine how to live as a fully flourishing human being. To live as such is to acknowledge that there is such a thing as good living and bad living, and the litmus test of such living was the perfect Form of man and woman. A fully flourishing man lived as a man was to live; a fully flourishing woman lived as a woman is to live; to live otherwise was to detract from a flourishing life. Christians acknowledge that there is such a thing as a fully flourishing human life: it is living as God designed men and women to live. We can know how God designed us to live from both natural revelation – ‘What does basic biology tell us about men and women, of their form and function?’ – and divine revelation, in which God reveals what He expects of us. It isn’t shocking that natural revelation and divine revelation go hand-in-hand, informing us that sexual perversions are against the essence of what it means to be human. All sin is deviation from the way God created us to live, and sanctification – the process whereby we daily repent of our sins and seek to conform ourselves to God’s desires for us – is not only about pleasing God in the way we live or in our obedience of His commands; it’s ultimately about getting back on track with how human beings are created to live. Morality doesn’t rest on arbitrary divine commands but on what is good and proper for human nature; this is the teaching of both the Bible and classic western philosophy. A fully flourishing life is discovered in living as God designed us to live specifically as men and women.
To bring all this to bear on the subject at hand, sexual activity between two members of the same sex is a deviation from what it means to be a sexual human being. It is an unnatural thing to do, and it is a defective way of living as a human being. Such a statement is seen nowadays as shocking and offensive, but it’s been the standard view of western civilization for up to about five minutes ago, and it remains the standard view outside the secular west. In the western world, not only homosexual behavior, premarital sex, and the like, but even contraception between married people was widely condemned until very recently. Sigmund Freud himself noted matter-of-factly that: ‘It is a characteristic common to all the perversions that in them reproduction as an aim is put aside. This is actually the criterion by which we judge whether a sexual activity is perverse – if it departs from reproduction in its aims and pursues the attainment of gratification independently.’ Western society has gone on a totally different path in the way it views human sexuality and sexual expression, and we’ll look at this next week; but in light of this, it’s good to remember this golden rule as established by Anthony Esolen: ‘If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.’
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