Tackling Tradition (Part 26) Romans 1:18 - 32 (Again)

 

Rom. 1:18 - 20:  God created everything, & gave it a specific moral intention — to testify to **HIS** image (existence & attributes) & **HIS** authority.   


Rom. 1:19 - 23: God indicts & condemns humanity for suppressing His image & authority & supplanting it with their own image & others drawn from the created order, which is how they wound up with idols that looked like people & animals. 


Rom. 1:24 - 27: The people did worship & sexual ethics accordingly. 


Rom. 28 - 32:  God proverbed them by permitting kitchen sink immorality that led to the rise & fall of multiple civilizations. 


The tradition bound view says that 1:26 - 27 can’t be restricted to homosexual temple prostitution & other cultic acts because “natural” means “heterosexual/heteronormative” & “unnatural” means “homosexual.”


That can’t be true for multiple reasons.

  • 1:20 states the moral intention of the created order is to testify to God’s image & authority.   
  • If “natural” = “heteronormative” then that necessarily entails the human body & psyche is definitionally heterosexual.   
  • AND God (after indicting humanity for doing worship & sexual ethics out of their own & other created images) allows us to use the human image to warrant sexual ethics.  
  • That, in turn, leads to up to 5 logical, epistemic, & exegetical fallacies: 
  1. Is - Ought:  If it’s possible to deduce abstract moral principles from the created order then since worship & sexual ethics are bound together, God has sexual characteristics like we do.
  2. Special Pleading: God indicts us for doing ethics out of created images then plays by a different set of rules when it comes to homosexuality.  To that question: homosexuality is a sin because of the human body & psyche not the human moral heart. + if a gay person says his sexual ethics are underwritten by his biogenetics that’s the Is-Ought Fallacy but when we use biogenetics to underwrite sexual ethics that’s righteousness.  
  3. Overspecification:  Importing a bunch of Naturalistic Theology into “natural” & “unnatural.” overfreights these words.   They are about what is morally natural & unnatural. It’s morally natural to look to God’s image & authority for ethics & unnatural to look elsewhere. 
  4. Vicious Circularity: Only God’s image & authority globally warrant faith & practice.  His image is necessary for authoritative faith & practice to exist — our image isn’t.  
  5. Category Error:  Rom. 1:18 - 32 & Lev. 18 follow the same outline in general & in the details.  Running to Gen. 1 & 2 to talk about what God did (male & female) commits # 1 and conflates God’s (descriptive) decretal will with His moral (prescriptive) will. 
What does it mean to abandon the natural use of the woman?    It means to refuse or cease reasoning from God’s image & authority, & instead suppress God’s image & authority with images drawn from the created order & then do worship ethics & sexual ethics accountability.     Instead of worshipping Gods who is infinite, eternal, & immutable and who has no sexual attributes / characteristics, women turned to pagan pseudodeities who had female characteristics & did the worship rites for them & sexual ethics in general followed (which was basically temple prostitution at home, in the temple, & at large. 

Men did the same thing with the male cults like Apollo & Zeus, which is the unnatural use of the male / male image in worship & sexual ethics.  “Unnatural” doesn’t mean “homosexual” in any generalized sense.  Rather, it means any individual (as well as corporate) worship as well as sexual ethics that assert (on the basis of the human image) that males are inherently superior to females &/or that God’s economic (and immanent) attributes are masculine in a manner that makes women inferior to men because of the female image depends on the male image or is otherwise derivative from the male image is heretical & therefor forbidden as matter of Theology Proper.   It also refers to the male dominant or only cults & some female dominant cults in which men had sex with men in the service of one or more pseudodeities.   It does not refer to David & Sam, the egalitarian Presbyterian lawyers who have been married since 1988s. It refers to Doug Wilson & his ChristIan Nationalist sect as well as the members of the Worldwide Confederation of Goat God Worshippers & their ancient analogs who head to their hovel to do sex for Baphomet &/or his equivalent.   

May God bless us all, each & every one, and “Go & sin no more.” 

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