Originally Posted by
TheGreatBout
Daniel Helminiak, in his book What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality, argues that homosexuality as a lifestyle and that homosexual acts are not condemned in scripture. To help support this claim he examines Romans 1:18-32. I’ve posted this passage below in the comments section for reference.
“…only verse 27 is a clear reference to homogenital acts, male homogenital acts, though verse 26 is said to refer to lesbian sex” (p. 75-76).
This biggest issue for Helminiak is the Greek term for “unnatural” in verse 26. The Greek is para phsyin. Physin means “nature.” Para means “beside,” “more than,” “over and above,” “beyond.” Para can also mean “contrary to.”
“But given Paul’s own usage of these terms, the sense is not ‘in opposition to the laws of nature’ but rather ‘unexpectedly’ or ‘in an unusual way,’ what we might mean if we said: ‘Contrary to her nature, Jean got up and danced last night’” (p.79).
Pages later, the author discuss how Paul does not use “unnatural” in the Stoic sense of acting against the natural law of things (though the author admits he uses several Stoic formulas of speech) but in his own personal terms that derive solely from Wisdom 13:1-9. Verse one states “Surely vain are all men by nature, who are ignorant of G-D, and could not out of the good things that are seen know him that is: neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the workmaster.” Helminiak writes that the stoic usage is abstract and Paul’s is concrete. He also claims that Paul is mangling the stoic language. His final claim concerned with this issue of stoic usage deals with it’s perverse influence on western culture and research by saying that scholars who say “…Paul sees homosexuality as a violation of this [G-D’s creation in Genesis] plan, as the subversion of the natural order built into the created universe” (p. 84) are reading a concern for our common day into the Genesis account. Essentially Helminiak declares one can make no case dealing with sexual orientation using the creation account from Genesis.
“For Paul these words do not mean ‘unethical.’ According to Paul’s usage, those words only say that the practices were different from what one would generally expect. Rather than ‘unnatural,’ the words para physin in Romans would more accurately be translated as ‘atypical’ - unusual, peculiar, out of the ordinary, uncharacteristic” (p. 79-80). In other words he is saying that the unnatural relations are not homosexual relations at all but could be “sex during menstruation, sex with an uncircumcised man, oral sex, heterosexual anal sex, having sex while standing up, or anything not considered the standard way of having sex” (p. 87) and this dismisses the case against homosexual acts being unethical according to Romans chapter 1.
Helminiak gives one other example in the New Testament in which para physin is used to mean “unnatural.” Romans 11:24 states “For if you were cut off from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these who are the natural branches be grafted into their own olive tree” (NASB). The author uses this scripture to purify the term in its earlier usage by claiming that G-D does “unnatural” things and therefore Paul’s use in the first chapter could not possibly have a negative connotation.
Helminiak dismisses the idea that this passage could be addressing lesbians. He concludes it is not possible that Paul is condemning women committing homogenital acts because 1) it is not wrong according to Jewish custom and 2) it never shows up anywhere else in scripture so there it is illogical to believe it was ever truly an issue. Paul must have meant something different.
“What sense would the case against homogenitality make if the Bible condemns only male, but not female, homogenital activity? …the Bible nowhere condemns homogenitality” (p. 89).
At the end of this argument Helminiak is making the case that “unnatural” simply means that the actions of Romans 1:18-32 are socially unacceptable and not ethically unacceptable. Since homogenital relations are socially acceptable now, there can be no argument against them biblically.
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