"Paul's most significant comments on what we call homosexulaity occur in Romans 1:26-27. "For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error." The first thing to be remembered here is that Paul is not writing about homosexuality in Romans--neither about homosexuality as he would have understood it nor about homosexuality as we now understand it. He is writing about the fallen nature of humankind. It is this fallen nature, this "corrupted will" to use a favorite phrase of Saint Augustine, that has caused both Gentile and Jew to suppress the truth by their wickedness. They are able to know what is knowable aobut God: his invisible nature, his eternal power and deity. The creation itself bears witness to this. The nature, power and goodness of God are not hidden. There is therefore no excuse for this ignorance of God. The people knew God but did not honor God. They were not grateful to God. They substiuted their own minds and their own thinking in place of God. As Paul says in Romans 1:21: "They became futile in their thinking and theri senseless minds were clouded." In other words, the creatures ignored the Creator, and they themselves became the objects of their own worship and veneration. They became worshipers of self, caught up in their own egos, and they gave to created things the glory and dignity that belong to the Creator. This is what he means when he says that in the fallen state of total self-absoprtion and self-deception, human beings, "claiming to be wise...became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptile." This is the golden calf of the Old Testament all over again, the worship of the Canaanite and Babylonian fertility gods, and, in Greco-Roman civilization, the worship of worldy wisdom and philosophy.
We become what we worship. It is this sophisticated psychological insight that Paul applies to those who worship a lie rather than the truth, who submit themselves to images rather that to the divine reality. Such people are disordered, that is, they have their priorities wrong; they have lost their perspective. God's judgement is that they will reap the consequences of these lesser, inferior gods. This is what is meant at verses 24-25: "Threefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever!"...
...
When modern readers scrutinize Romans 1:26, with its discussion of "dishonorable passions," "unnatural relations," and "shameless acts," conditioned as we are by the characterization of homosexual behavior prevalent amoung us since the late nineteenth century, which in the current cultural debate is described both loosely and pejoratively as the "gay lifestyle" and the "homosexual agenda," we are tempted to give a content to those words and a profile, largely negative, to those behaviors and are persuaded by own own infallible opinions that Saint Paul is "obviously" talking about the same thing as we are. The hard question we must persuade ourselves to ask is, is this so?
