On misunderstanding Paul – a response to Marcus Greene
by Martin Davie:
The basic claim made in Greene’s paper
In the latest addition to the ViaMedia.News series ‘Does the Bible Really Say,’ Marcus Greene addresses the question ‘Does the Bible Really Say…that St Paul ‘Hates Gays’?’[1]
At the start of his paper Greene answers this question by declaring unequivocally: ‘St Paul doesn’t ‘hate gays’. Short of Jesus, he’s our best friend in the whole of the Scriptures.’
In order to justify this claim he looks first of all at Romans 1:18-32 and I Corinthians 6:9-11, two texts which have been traditionally used to show that Paul disapproved of same-sex sexual activity.
Romans 1:18-32
On Romans 1:18-32 Greene makes two points.
First, Romans 1:26-27 is not about gay people as such, but only about ‘broken’ gay people. In Romans 1:28-32, he says:
‘St Paul is writing about folk who live in brokenness. He’s not writing about all relationships, and he’s not saying that every person is wicked, evil, greedy, envious, murderous, deceitful, malicious, insolent, inventing evil, faithless, loveless and merciless. He is saying that people (and this means predominantly straight people in our understanding – though Paul wouldn’t know the term) who are broken from God are set on this depraved path.’
This in turn means, that:
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