Author Archives: Obie Holmen

The UCC and Pilgrim Press

In 1620, a group of dissidents departed England aboard the Mayflower for the wilderness that would become Massachusetts and religious liberty. Their pastor encouraged them to keep their hearts and their minds open to new ways in the new world because God “hath yet more truth and light to break forth out of his holy Word.”

The Pilgrims had been printers and publishers who incurred the wrath of King James the 1st before they left England. Twenty years after they established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a printing press arrived from England, and the first American religious publication was the “Bay Psalms Book” in 1640.

Of course, the religious progeny of the Pilgrims would become a central feature of American educational and religious life. Three of their earliest colleges became Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, my alma mater. When I attended college, the UCC church in the center of Hanover, New Hampshire was known as the “White Church”—not for racial reasons but because it was painted all white.

The UCC and her predecessor church bodies going back to the Pilgrims boast many “firsts”, including a stand against slavery 150 years before the civil war, support for the Boston Tea Party, the first African-American ordained minister, the first female pastor, and the first gay man to be ordained in 1972.

And, the progeny of those original publishers would continue to offer cutting-edge religious publications through the centuries. Three centuries after becoming the first religious press in the colonies, The Pilgrim Press would publish the first book of a young, black minister of the south, Martin Luther King, Jr. The Pilgrim Press, like all religious publishing houses and the publishing industry generally, has cut back in recent years. Currently, they are only accepting 15-20 manuscripts annually for publishing.

And, I am pleased to announce that my book has been selected by Pilgrim Press for publication next year. Gays in the Pulpit will be a look back at the historical journey of the mainline churches toward full inclusion of the LGBT community. The manuscript is about 70% complete.

Critique of Paul Ryan

Here are a few political stories and opinions that appeared this weekend, and I’ll conclude with a video of Ronald Reagan … arguing for the Buffett principle, believe it or not.

National columnist EJ Dionne and New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman have similar opinions about the Paul Ryan budget.

Here’s a sample of Dionne op-ed piece from the Washington Post.

Obama specifically listed the programs the Ryan-Romney budget would cut back, including student loans, medical and scientific research grants, Head Start, feeding programs for the poor, and possibly even the weather service.

Romney pronounced himself appalled, accusing Obama of having “railed against arguments no one is making” and “criticized policies no one is proposing.” Yet Romney could neither defend the cuts nor deny the president’s list of particulars, based as they were on reasonable assumptions. When it came to the Ryan budget, Romney wanted to fuzz things up. But, as Obama likes to point out, math is math.

And, from Krugman’s NY Times’ piece:

The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”

The reaction from many commentators was a howl of outrage. The president was being rude; he was being partisan; he was being a big meanie. Yet what he said about the Ryan proposal was completely accurate.

Methodists and Marriage Equality

I have been researching and writing a non-fiction book about the LGBT journey to full inclusion in the mainline churches. These include the United Methodist Church (UMC), ELCA, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ. I will travel to Cleveland later this week to meet with persons in the home office of the UCC. Later this month, I will travel to Tampa to attend the quadrennial UMC General Conference.

The UCC has ordained openly gay clergy since 1972. The Episcopalians legislatively voted to ordain gays to all levels of clergy in 2009, but many bishops and dioceses had already been ordaining gays for many years. The ELCA and the PC (USA) both voted to allow openly gay clergy in 2009.

Thus, of the five, principal mainline denominations, the UMC is the only one not yet ordaining gays. Part of that is size; the UMC is by far the largest of these denominations, and there is simply inertia involved. The bigger reasons, however, are geographic. While the UMC has a significant southern contingency, the biggest roadblock is that their General Conferences include large numbers of international delegates, and they tend to be quite conservative.

The largest Methodist gay advocacy group is called Reconciling Ministries Network. During recent visits with their executive director and the Board President, I heard the suggestion that there is likely a healthy majority of US delegates in favor of change, but their number needs to approach 65% to offset the expected bloc of negative votes coming from Africa and other foreign delegates.

We shall see, and I hope to live blog from the General Conference with updates beginning April 30th.

There certainly are local and regional pockets that are fully inclusive. One of these is Foundry United Methodist Church of Washington D.C. that was recently featured in a newspaper report that offers a good summary of the Methodist journey. The story calls attention to a YouTube effort that includes a series of personalized videos. Here’s a link to the church news article and here’s a link to the YouTube videos. One of these videos is embedded below.

In my research, I frequently encounter the idea that progress toward full inclusion comes as a result of meeting gays face-to-face and less so from attempts at rational debate. Here is how author Chris Glaser in his book Uncommon Calling states it:

After every biblical, theological, ecclesiastical, historical, psychological, and biological question has been answered, antigay feelings will still be present in church and society. “One can’t use reason to argue someone out of a position not arrived at by reason” … Phobias, irrational fears, are not overcome by reason so much as experience. I believe the church and society’s phobia regarding homosexuality and homosexual persons will be overcome by experiencing us. pp. 161-162.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, meet Jan Lawrence and Lindi Lewis, a lesbian couple from Foundry UMC.

ELCA Gay Icons Move On

Two ELCA pastors, a gay man and a lesbian, who made national news in the last decade, have accepted new positions. Anita Hill of St. Paul Reformation Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota will soon move to a new position as a regional director for Lutherans Concerned. Bradley Schmeling of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Atlanta has accepted a call to be the senior pastor of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, also in St. Paul.

In some respects, Pastor’s Hill’s return to Lutherans Concerned is a homecoming. Way back in 1980, she was elected co-moderator of the organization, then a fledgling pan-Lutheran gay advocacy group. Of course, that was a volunteer position, and her current assignment as regional director for Minnesota and the Dakotas will be a paid position.

Her departure from St. Paul Reformation will seem strange; arriving in 1987 to serve as lay director of Wingspan Ministries—a gay outreach ministry—Pastor Hill and St. Paul “Ref” will forever be tied together as icons of the Lutheran journey to full inclusion for the LGBT community. In 1999, St. Paul Ref asked St. Paul Area Synod Bishop Mark Hanson whether an exception could be made to the ELCA policy excluding gay clergy. Bishop Hanson forwarded the inquiry to churchwide, which quickly rejected the request. Two years later, St. Paul Ref made national news by calling and and ordaining her anyway, one of the more prominent extra ordinem ordinations of Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries (ELM). St. Paul Ref was censured, a relative slap on the wrist compared to the expulsions of two San Francisco congregations following extra ordinem ordinations a decade earlier. Anita Hill actually played a role in those earlier ordinations also—she had recommended that her St. Paul friends, Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart, apply for a pastoral position in San Francisco. They did, and the church would never be the same.

After her ordination, Pastor Hill remained a highly-visible spokesperson for the cause of full inclusion, and when the ELCA reversed policies in 2009, Pastors Hill, Frost, and Zillhart were received onto the roster of ELCA clergy in a celebratory Rite of Reception, which I attended and blogged about here.

Pastor Schmeling made history of his own in 2006. He was ordained as an out but celibate gay man, and he promised his bishop that he would advise him if his relationship status would ever change. When he met fellow ELCA pastor Darin Easler at a conference at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, his life and status changed. True to his promise, he notified the bishop. St. Johns, his Atlanta congregation, responded with support and publicly stood in solidarity with Pastor Schmeling as the synod bishop brought disciplinary charges against him. Eventually, he was removed from the clergy roster, but he remained pastor at St. Johns. Click here to go to the St. John’s webpages about the trial history.

Pastors Schmeling and Easler were the first to be returned to the ELCA clergy roster after the decisions in 2009.

Pastor Schmeling’s new call to Gloria Dei carries its own significance as a marker of how far the ELCA has come. Gloria Dei is a “high steeple” church, a cornerstone congregation with a membership of 2,300.

Gloria Dei is now the largest Lutheran church with a senior pastor who is openly-gay and in a committed same-gender relationship. This 2300-member congregation is heavily involved in social justice work and was also in the past the first large congregation to have a female senior pastor.

Godspeed, Pastors Hill and Schmeling as you step out on the next legs of your journeys.

NOTE: The details of Pastor’s Schmeling’s Atlanta call and trial have been revised above. The original post contained several factual errors, which have now been corrected.

Did Jesus Exist?

Mention the University of North Carolina during March madness, and the Tar Heels basketball team will come to mind–the Religious Studies department, not so much. But, Chapel Hill professor Bart D. Ehrman made March news of his own with the release of his latest book, Did Jesus Exist?
Professor Ehrman has carved out his own slice of fame as a best-selling author of historical books of the early Christian era, offering his own take on the recurring quest to discover the historical Jesus.

Ehrman’s popularity stems from his down-to-earth writing style that targets the folks in the pews rather than the scholarly elites of the academy—and always with tantalizing hints of controversy. Not that his views are outside the scholarly consensus; to the contrary, Ehrman interprets the findings of the academic community for a lay audience.

Ehrman is often about debunking simplistic Christian notions learned in third grade Sunday school. Not so with his current book. This time, he takes on the conspiratorially-minded “mythicists” who would argue that early Christian writers, primarily the person behind the gospel of Mark, created a Christ out of whole cloth; in other words, they made him up.

From the outset, Ehrman makes it clear that there is overwhelming evidence that there really was a Jesus of Nazareth and that no serious, credible scholar would disagree. He’s probably right, but that begs the question: “why respond to a few crackpots and internet blog conspiracists who won’t accept your evidence anyway?” It would seem his task is akin to arguing with political “birthers”.

Are there thick theological layers to the gospels? Yes. Did the gospel compilers awkwardly attempt to squeeze Jesus into preexisting Hebrew models? Yes. Does the Jesus of the third grade Sunday school class misconstrue the historical person? Yes. Are some gospel episodes fabrications? Yes. Ehrman argues that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. The leap of the mythicists from these starting points to the conclusion that Jesus never existed goes well beyond reason and the evidence.

So, what is Ehrman’s essential argument and what evidence does he cite to support it?

The reality is that every single author who mentions Jesus—pagan, Christian, or Jewish—was fully convinced that he at least lived. Even the enemies of the Jesus movement thought so; among their many slurs against the religion, his nonexistence is never one of them. pp. 171-72.

Ehrman meticulously takes the reader through the earliest sources, including canonical and non-canonical gospels, letters, early Roman and Jewish authors, and the oral and written traditions that predated and served as source material for the gospel accounts. He identifies the independent strains that underlie the gospels. Ehrman concludes that there are multiple sources that go back to the decade following Jesus’ death and each early story begins with the premise that there was a Jewish man named Jesus “known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified … in Judea during the reign of Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea.” That the stories contain theological interpretations doesn’t negate this common root assumption.

Most importantly, Ehrman cites Paul the apostle, which is ironic since the mythicists base much of their argument on the fact that Paul writes little about the life of Jesus. True enough, says Ehrman, but what Paul does say is compelling. According to Paul’s written account in his letter to the Galatians, he traveled to Jerusalem where he visited Peter and James, “the brother of the Lord”, a few years after the crucifixion.

Paul was personally acquainted with … Peter and James. Peter was Jesus’ closest confidant throughout his public ministry and James was his actual brother. Paul knew them for decades, starting [soon after the crucifixion]. It is hard to imagine how Jesus could have been made up. Paul knew his best friend and his brother. p. 173.

The more intriguing question for me, Ehrman, and a century’s worth of scholarship that goes back, at least, to Albert Schweitzer and his Quest of the Historical Jesus is not did he exist but who was he? What did Jesus of Nazareth do? Believe? Say? Finally, in the last of his three sections, Ehrman gets around to what is really interesting to all but the conspiracy-minded—Who was the historical Jesus? His conclusion? Turns out he thinks Schweitzer had it right all along:

I agree with Schweitzer and virtually all scholars in the field since his day that Jesus existed, that he was ineluctably Jewish, that there is historical information about him in the Gospels, and that we can therefore know some things about what he said and did. Moreover, I would agree with Schweitzer’s overarching view, that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish prophet who anticipated a cataclysmic break in history in the very near future, when God would destroy the forces of evil to bring in his own kingdom here on earth. p.14.

Let the theologizing begin.

**Disclaimer. I was given a complimentary copy of the book by a publicist representing the author/publisher and asked to offer a review.

Jen Rude Rite of Reception

Like much of the country, the greater Chicago area is enjoying unbelievable early spring weather. Last Sunday, I drove through NW suburbs to Evanston. There were bikers, joggers , and dog-walkers everywhere. Leaves are budding, flowering crab apple trees exploding in pink, and brown lawns are turning green. Life abundant, life abounding, life amazing.

I attended a festive celebration at Grace Lutheran of Evanston where Pastor Jen Rude became the latest to join the official roster of the ELCA through a Rite of Reception. Grace is a delightfully diverse congregation that had plenty of gray haired ladies, but also a healthy contingent of blacks, and a growing LGBT community, especially following the breakthroughs of CWA09. “Here is a church where we are welcome” is the word of mouth message that spreads through the gay community just to the south, which Pastor Dan Ruen jokingly referred to as “Grace Lutheran south campus”.

A Rite of Reception is the process worked out between ELCA leaders and Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries (ELM) that recognizes earlier extra ordinem ordinations but also celebrates in a formal way when the pastor joins the ELCA clergy roster. Bishop Wayne Miller of the Greater Chicago Synod laid on hands and presided over the rite and the Eucharistic celebration.

Pastor Rude was extraordinarily ordained in 2007 at Resurrection Lutheran Church in Chicago. She is called to minister to homeless youth, many of whom are gay, at the Night Ministry in Chicago, a ministry of “presence of faith in the nighttime streets”. She also serves on the board of directors of ELM and as director of “Proclaim”, a new auxiliary of ELM:

“the professional community for publicly-identified LGBTQ Lutheran rostered leaders and seminarians. This network of rostered leaders and seminarians from multiple Lutheran rosters are committed to changing church culture and transforming society through their ministry as publicly-identified LGBTQ rostered leaders.”

As a seminarian, Jen was the first recipient of the Joel Workin scholarship. From my research into my current book project, I have learned that Joel was a seminarian in the late eighties who “came out” along with three of his fellow seminarians during the candidacy process. Though he and the others were initially approved, the newly formed ELCA caved under a public outcry and yanked the approvals. This is all part of a larger and fascinating story of the extraordinary ordinations in San Francisco in the early 1990s. Joel died of AIDS in 1995 after distinguished service through the Lutheran Volunteer Corps. Rising from his coma, Joel proclaimed to the family and friends surrounding his deathbed, “We’re all children of God. Can I get an amen to that!” ELM is currently re-releasing a book of Joel’s writings.

Check the ELM website for more about Pastor Jen.

Congregation pastor Dan Ruen offered a prophetic, emotional, and inspiring sermon, reminiscent of civil rights oratory, and punctuated with plenty of amens from the congregation.

Ah, ha, ha, ha stayin’ alive

March 12, 1978.

I spent the late winter Sunday in the Burtrum Hills, west of Upsala, Minnesota. My dad was in his mid-fifties, and he and mom had not yet retired to the snowbird’s life. So, if you live in Minnesota in the wintertime, you either hibernate or you adopt a wintertime hobby—snowmobiling & ice fishing were two of dad’s favorites, but that winter he spent making wood. He bought stumpage rights to a 40 acre parcel of hardwoods. Now, there was no practical reason why he made wood—after all, his business was as the fuel oil distributor in Upsala—but it was something to do to stay active.

There was a man who had two sons. The younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living.

We brought a six-pack along, as always. Dad would work the chain saw, and I would split logs. Then I would gather the lopped off small branches and heave them atop the bonfire started earlier with glugs of fuel oil. Flames must have leaped twenty feet in the air. His transistor radio blared the number one song of the day by the Bee Gees.

Well you can tell
by the way I use my walk
I’m a woman’s man
no time to talk
Music loud and women warm
I’ve been kicked around
since I was born

I had my own wintertime hobby. And summertime too. I drank.

When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything.

We finished up as the red sun dipped behind a stand of white pine. We covered some of the gear with a canvas tarp and piled ourselves into his pickup. Mom had chili cooked back in Upsala, which I washed down with a couple more beers. Soon my wife, six-month old baby daughter, and I headed to our own home along the Mississippi River north of St. Cloud.

And now it’s all right, it’s ok
and you may look the other way
We can try to understand
The New York Times’ effect on man

Lynn put Karin to bed while I chipped some ice for a Beefeater’s martini. I was a classy drunk. I only drank the best. I rolled a joint. Before long, I was exquisitely high, and Lynn looked away. She knew it was pointless to say anything.

I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you;I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”

But this night was different. I had a secret plan.

Whether you’re a brother
or whether you’re a mother
you’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Feel the city breakin
and everybody shakin’
and were stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive

The next morning, I went early to work as a young associate at the leading St. Cloud law firm, and I placed a letter on the senior partner’s desk. Then I drove a few blocks to the St. Cloud hospital where Karin had been born the previous fall. The lady at the information desk said the Alcohol & Chemical Dependency unit was on 2 South.

So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.

The folks at the nurse’s station weren’t quite sure what to do with me. They didn’t usually get Monday morning walk-ins in pin stripe suits. I called Lynn and told her where I was. She came as soon as she could arrange a babysitter, and my boss showed up too.

Well now I get low and I get high
And if I can’t get either, I really try
Got the wings of heaven on my shoes
I’m a dancin man and I just can’t lose

You know it’s all right, it’s ok
I’ll live to see another day
We can try to understand
The New York Times’ effect on man

Life goin’ nowhere
somebody help me
Somebody help me, yeah
I’m stayin’ alive…

That was thirty-four years ago, and I’m still clean and sober. Saplings that we left on the slopes that day are pretty high by now. Karin’s three years sober herself.

But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate;for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’

UMC leadership structure

I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the five, principal mainline Protestant denominations lately (UMC, ELCA, PC(USA), Episcopal, and UCC). The ELCA is a full communion partner with each of these, and I heard Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefforts Schori speak highly of the Episcopal/ELCA partnership at an Episcopal Diocesan Convention.

Both the ELCA and the Episcopal Church function with a national presiding bishop, a full-time, long term position. Bishop Mark Hanson, only the third ELCA Presiding Bishop since the denomination was formed in 1988, is nearing the end of his second term. Presiding Bishop Schori serves out of the Episcopal Headquarters in NYC though she was previously Bishop of the Nevada Diocese. She is only the 26th presiding bishop in Episcopal history which goes back to Revolutionary War days.

The UCC has a General Minister/President, the Presbyterians have a General Assembly Moderator, and the Methodists have a President of the Council of Bishops who serves a two year term while continuing to serve as bishop of his or her regional body.

At the upcoming UMC quadrennial General Conference in Tampa, delegates will consider revisions to their organizational structure. Among the proposed changes is the creation of a full-time President of the Council of Bishops without responsibility for any jurisdiction other than the national church.

Would this position be more like the presiding bishops of the ELCA and Episcopal Churches? “Commenters have called the proposed position everything from a United Methodist archbishop to the denomination’s CEO.”

Click here for full details from a UMC News Service report.

Sweet Home Alabama

Have you seen the British Petroleum (BP) produced ads extolling tourism in the Gulf? They’re actually done quite well and make the region from the Florida panhandle, across Alabama and Mississippi, and ending in Louisiana look pretty appealing. After despoiling the gulf with their oil spill, I assume the ads are part of BP’s payback.

Many years ago, I spent a little time in Louisiana, home to an aunt and cousins, but the rest of the region could as well be a foreign country, as far as I know. I hear they play really good college football down there, and the ads make the beaches appear attractive and the cuisine sounds delicious. However, the politics and the religion down there scare the beejeebers out of me.

For a century, this was the “solid south” for the Democratic Party, the days of segregation and Jim Crow, and the Republicans were remembered as the party of Lincoln, the Union Army, and carpetbaggers. That began to change at the 1948 Democratic Convention when Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey offered a stirring speech promoting civil rights, and the “Dixiecrats” led by Strom Thurmond stalked out, determined to protect what they portrayed as the southern way of life beset by an oppressive federal government while proclaiming “segregation forever.”

Hubert Humphrey’s famous civil rights speech–1948

The circle was completed in 1968 when Richard Nixon recognized that he could turn the south into the Republican promised land by exploiting racism. This “Southern Strategy” has defined the last forty plus years of American politics.

Tonight, the Republicans of Alabama and Mississippi hold their primaries, and the eyes of the nation are again focused on the politics of the region. The pollsters tell us that not much has changed.

Interracial marriage ought to be illegal according to roughly a quarter of the Republican voters.
Three to four times as many think President Obama is a Muslim compared to those who think he’s Christian.
Two to three times as many do not believe in evolution compared to those that do.
Twice as many in ‘Bama prefer the Crimson Tide football team to the Auburn Tigers. Ok, I guess that’s irrelevant.

Despite those appealing ads, I don’t think I’ll be heading southeast anytime soon. I admit it, I’ve got prejudices of my own.

Interpreting Paul the apostle

Paul is such fun.

While his preeminent importance in the development of normative Christian doctrine is indisputable, his writings are enigmatic at best and indecipherable at worst. What is the heart of Paul? Does Paul reveal himself in Galatians 3:28, the so-called “Christian magna carta” —no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female—or in other writings that seemingly support slavery and the subjugation of women?

Paul also finds himself plopped down in the midst of 21st century debates over gays. Again, the question arises whether he was the great inclusivist who encouraged Gentile participation in the early church without precondition, without the proper male genitalia, against the wishes of church leaders, and contrary to scripture and centuries of tradition, or was he the greatest gay-basher in history? Though his “vice lists” have been dubiously translated to include homosexuality, his ranting in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans may be the favorite “clobber passage” of modern gay-bashers.

they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

²⁴Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, ²⁵because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

²⁶For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, ²⁷and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

²⁸And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. ²⁹They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, ³⁰slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, ³¹foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³²They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

How do modern exegetes unpack these harsh words? Yes, this passage is about idolatry, first and foremost. The evils of homosexual behavior are his assumption not his point. Yes, Paul’s words must be viewed from the cultural perspective of the 1st century Greco-Roman world, and yes, Paul must be understood as a Jew learned in the law to include the Levitical abominations. These influences certainly colored his perception, and it is unfair to ask a 21st century question of this 1st century man. He simply would have harbored a radically different understanding of human sexuality than we do today.

But, we can go further. What was Paul’s central theme of his letter to the Romans? Grace. That humankind is made right with God through God’s own offer of welcome and not through human effort, achievement, or merit—“works of the law” in Pauline terms. Trust God and rely upon that promise (faith). Paul works this out as he wrestles with the premise of Hebrew religion that Jews are God’s chosen over against his view that Gentiles should also be included. Justification by grace through faith and not by works is the simplified summary. So, if these are Paul’s themes in his letter to the Romans, where do his introductory remarks (quoted above) fit in?

Paul is setting a trap. He is speaking to Jewish listeners, and he gets them nodding as he recites their cultural stereotypes about the unclean gentiles. But wait, he suggests as chapter two unfolds, aren’t we Jews also guilty of breaking the rules? How are we different? Don’t we also depend upon God’s grace? And then Paul is off and running with his interplay of the themes of grace, faith, works, Jew and Gentile, etc. throughout the remainder of his letter to the Romans.

In doing research for my current book project about the history of the movement for full inclusion of gays in the life of the church, I came across a succinct version of this exegesis, which came in a 1977 Presbyterian debate. George Edwards of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, a member of a Presbyterian Task Force on homosexuality, spoke these words:

Paul says here that “God gave them up to dishonorable passions”. Is this, then, Paul’s theology? Of course not! God never gave anybody up! What kind of theology would that be? Paul is here using a rhetorical device to get his legalistic reader all worked up in self-righteous frenzy before he hits him over the head with his own inadequacy and dependency on God’s grace.**

Perhaps we can take meaning from this passage of Paul after all. Perhaps it is a clobber passage that offers an analogy for our current debate, but no, not to strike gays but to slam the “self-righteous frenzy” of 21st century legalists and to point them, and all of us, toward our inadequacies and dependency on God’s grace.

Paul, you sly fox. What a wretched man you are. Sounds like a good book title.

**Quoted in Chris Glaser, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988) p. 164.