CONTENTS
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ANOTHER LOOK AT
ROMANS 1:18-32
People need heroes, and mine is the Apostle Paul.
Why Paul? Paul, more than any other person with the exception of Christ, is responsible for the shape of the Christian faith. In his life, he took a relatively insignificant Jewish sub-sect and transformed it into a religion that has dominated Western History for almost twenty centuries. He provided an interpretation of the life of Christ that spoke equally well to Jewish and Greek (or Grecco-Roman) thinking. Were it not for Paul, and his ability to be used by God, you and I might be worshipping the ancient Celtic Gods, or whatever Gods your ancestors worshipped, instead of the God we do.
Paul was also a revolutionary. He saw that the Jewish practices were a hindrance to the acceptance of the faith and fought to removed them. According to Luke, he fought for the freedom of the Gentile converts in Jerusalem. He continued this fight through out his ministry. The one aspect of Jesus' message that he understood best was that the religious observances that did nothing for relationships were meaningless. While others were afraid to be contaminated by food sacrificed to idols, Paul realized and taught that these false gods were no gods at all. Therefor, food sacrificed to these gods could not pollute the believer. Paul is the one who preached best the message that salvation depends on faith in God's ability to save us and not on observing arcane laws that have no real meaning in the greater world.
Because of my admiration for Paul, I tend to study his work in more detail than I do the work of any other biblical writer. I attempt to get into his mind, to understand where he was coming from when he wrote. I am inclined to try to make Paul true, regardless of how I feel about the issue, regardless of the knowledge I have which tends to refute his teachings. Yet, I know who Paul was and what he stood for. He opposed the mindless orthodoxy that blindly accepted the wisdom of the day merely because the sages said it came from God. So, because I do admire Paul so much, I cannot and do not accept what he has to say just because he said it.
The latter half of Romans, chapter one, is a perfect example of this apparent paradox. In that passage I find much that is meaningful. At the same time, I find much that is drivel. In this section I will attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff. I will use that passage to demonstrate how our fixation with the issue of homosexuality shows how little we truly understand him. Then I will conclude this section by introducing a new term, "apostophobia," which is the basis of legalism and explains how our fixation with homosexuality demonstrates a total lack of understanding the message of "salvation by faith" that Paul preached.
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