God and the Gay Christian by Matthew Vines

Author:Matthew Vines [Vines, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60142-517-1
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

Customary and Uncustomary Gender Roles

In the ancient world, if a man took the active role in sex, his behavior generally was deemed to be “natural.” But if he took the passive role, he was derided for engaging in “unnatural” sex. The opposite was true for women: sexual passivity was termed “natural,” while sexual dominance was “unnatural.”

Same-sex relations challenged those beliefs about nature and sex by putting a male in the passive role or a female in the active role. This inversion of accepted gender roles, combined with the non-procreative character of same-sex unions, is why ancient writers called same-sex behavior “unnatural.”

Plato, who lived and wrote more than four hundred years before Paul, is a leading example. In his dialogue Laws, Plato contrasted “natural” sex between men and women “for the purpose of procreation” with “unnatural” sex between same-sex partners.16 In another dialogue, Plato emphasized the problem of gender-role transgressions in same-sex unions. As Plutarch would later quote him, same-sex behavior is shameful because it involves “weakness and effeminacy on the part of those who, contrary to nature, allow themselves in Plato’s words ‘to be covered and mounted like cattle.’ ”17

The first-century Jewish writer Josephus labeled procreative heterosexual sex “natural” and same-sex behavior “unnatural.” He also argued that women are “inferior in every respect” to men.18 Philo, after condemning men who “[mount] males without respect for the sex nature which the active partner shares with the passive,” accused them of spreading a “female disease.”19

Philo’s view of women as inferior was the main reason he objected to same-sex behavior. It required “those who [are] by nature men to submit to play the part of women.”20 Applying the same principle to women, the first-century Jewish text Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides warned females not to “imitate in any way the sexual role of men.”21 A third-century Greek text also taught that “neither should the female be masculinized contrary to nature nor too should the male be softened in an improper manner.”22

These texts show us how the terms natural and unnatural were used in ancient writings. They were not synonyms for straight and gay. They were boundary markers between what did and didn’t conform to customary gender roles in a patriarchal context. In fact, some interpreters argue that Romans 1:26 doesn’t even refer to female same-sex relations, but to heterosexual sex that was considered “unnatural” because a woman was in the dominant position.23

In societies that viewed women as inferior, sexual relationships between equal-status partners could not be accepted. Same-sex unions in particular disrupted a social order that required a strict hierarchy between the sexes. We see that hierarchy reflected in Romans 1 by the use of the phrase “their women” in verse 26, which points to the subordinate role of women in ancient times.24 And in Jewish and Christian circles, as we saw in the last chapter, men who penetrated other males were also condemned, as they were seen as degrading their passive partner’s masculine honor.

What does that cultural background mean for us today? Not all

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