Wednesday, October 28, 2015

In our last visit we quoted from John Stott’s commentary on Romans. He continues, “What does Paul mean by ‘nature’ in Romans 1:26-27? Some homosexuals argue that their relationships are not ‘unnatural’, since they’re perfectly natural to them. John Boswell has written that ‘the persons Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual: what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual people.’ This would mean that abandoning natural relations, and exchanging them for unnatural would not apply to homosexuals. “John Stott answers, that Richard Hays has written a thorough exegetical rebuttal of this interpretation. He provides ample contemporary evidence that the opposition of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ was ‘very frequently used…as a way of distinguishing between heterosexual and homosexual behavior’. “Besides, differentiating between sexual orientation and sexual practice is a modern concept; ‘to suggest that Paul intends to condemn homosexual acts only when they are committed by persons who are constitutionally heterosexual is to introduce a distinction entirely foreign to Paul’s thought-world’, in fact a complete anachronism. “So then, we have no liberty to interpret the noun ‘nature’ as meaning ‘my’ nature, or the adjective ‘natural’ as meaning ‘what seems natural to me’. On the contrary, (‘natural’) means God’s created order. To act ‘against nature’ means to violate the order which God has established, whereas to act ‘according to nature’ means to behave ‘in accordance with the intention of the Creator.’”