Limapela Education Project
Faith in Action
This project aims to provide quality education to children in Zambia's Copperbelt Province.
In the early chapters of his letter to the Romans, Paul shows how sin affects every area of human life. The moral decline of societies begins with the corruption of their religious beliefs, and leads to the dehumanisation of human beings. A crucial threshold in this degrading of human life is the widespread acceptance of depraved or ‘unnatural’ sexual conduct. In this message on Romans, preached at Greyfriars’ Classical Service on 11 March 2007, Rob Yule illustrates the insightfulness and contemporary relevance of Paul’s analysis of moral decline.
This passage is one of the darkest and most sordid in the whole Bible. But I make no apology for preaching about it. Paul has said that the Gospel is ‘the power of God for salvation’ (1:16) — God’s effective means of transforming people’s lives and conduct. Now he shows what the Gospel saves people from — their sin and depravity. The Gospel is glorious. The sin from which it saves us is sordid.
Paul identifies three factors in the moral decline of societies and civilizations:
First of all, moral decline has a history, a progression. It starts with the denial of God, and leads to the degrading of humanity. It begins with suppression of truth (1:18-23), and leads on to the corruption of morals (1:24-32).
A Chinese proverb says: ‘A fish rots first in the head.’ To reject God, when God is plainly known from what he has made; to put idols in God’s place when so plainly they are not God — this involves a ‘darkening’ of the mind (1:21). It is something ‘foolish.’ To regard such things as ultimate is an expression not of wisdom, but of stupidity.
But darkening of the mind leads on to a degrading of the body (1:24, 26). Darkened thinking results in depraved behaviour. A society declines morally only because it has first deteriorated spiritually. The present moral state of many countries is the result of an underlying deterioration in their spiritual outlook.
Secondly, moral decline has a logic, a perverse but consistent logic. In one sense there’s no logic in sin, because sin, by definition, has no place in God’s purpose for human life. God never intended us to sin. Our humanity and humanness can’t be truly satisfied if we sin.
But in another sense there’s a certain perverse logic in sin: if we reject God, and want to be free of God, then logically we must reject everything that God has made, everything that comes from God, everything that reminds us of God. We must not only deny God, but deny the human nature created by God — including its sexual structure, physiology and orientation.
Philosopher Michael Polanyi calls this process ‘moral inversion.’ (Personal Knowledge [London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958], pp. 227-237). He sees the passionate championing of immoral ends as a major phenomenon of our times. Today moral people have become afflicted with moral cowardice, while immoral people become have become imbued with moral passion. Through a reversal of moral terms (Paul calls it an ‘exchange’), good is called evil and evil good. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair,’ as the witches chant in the opening scene of Macbeth.
Moral inversion can be compared to the polarity of an electric motor: if it is reversed, the current drives it in the opposite direction. Similarly, says Paul, the moral decline of society involves an exchange, a reversal of polarity; the replacement of one set of conditions for its opposite:
In this inversion the truth about God is exchanged for ‘the lie’ (Paul uses the definite article, because the view that God does not exist and that human beings are not accountable to him for their actions is the ultimate untruth). When God is denied, created things are treated as ultimate in God’s place. Because created relationships can’t carry such ultimate significance, natural relationships break down and give way to relationships that are ‘unnatural’ or ‘contrary to nature.’ What is ennobling and enriching of life (‘the glory of the immortal God’) is replaced by depraved and indecent conduct. Thus the logic of sin leads from the denial of God to the degrading of humanity.
Moral decline, thirdly, has a social pathology, a grim and sobering set of symptoms. Paul uses two significant terms to describe these outcomes:
Three times he uses the verb, ‘they exchanged.’ ‘They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images’ (1:23). ‘They exchanged the truth of God for a lie’ (1:25). ‘They exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones’ (1:26). Depraved and perverted sexual conduct is not a matter of biological determinism, but an expression of free will and choice. What we do with our sexual condition, with our abilities or disabilities, with our life experiences, hinges on our own personal responsibility. ‘To exchange’ is to turn from one form of conduct to another, by deliberate volition and choice. This is particularly obvious today in the public flaunting of bisexuality and transvestism.
Also used three times by Paul is the phrase ‘God gave them over.’ ‘God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity’ (1:24). ‘God gave them over to shameful lusts’ (1:26). ‘God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done’ (1:28 ). If we persistently choose to live our life in defiance of God’s plan, God will ultimately give us over to the way of life we have chosen. C.S. Lewis says that the damned ‘enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded.’ (The Problem of Pain [London, Bless, 1940; reprinted Glasgow, Fount, 1977], p. 101).
God does not give up on us lightly. He doesn’t give up on those who stumble temporarily then repent, but on those who are persistently obdurate and defiant. God’s giving us over to our choices is like what Jesus calls the sin against the Holy Spirit (Mark 3:29). An example is Pharaoh, who persistently rejected offers of God’s grace and ten times closed his heart to God’s appeals, bringing down judgment on his nation (Exodus 7-12).
The phrase ‘God gave them over’ indicates a moral threshold, a critical magnitude below which people cease to be responsive to moral appeal and become reprobate. Just as water ceases to be fluid and becomes solid below freezing point, so too human beings, when they persistently lower their spiritual temperature, reach a point where they cease to be capable of repentance and moral change and become fixed in the lifestyle they have chosen.
It is ominous when God gives up on a people; when a society, with its brakes off, begins to career downhill on a disaster course of its own choosing. And it is significant that Paul mentions one form of sexual sin as indicating when a society is approaching this moral threshold. That symptomatic sin is homosexual conduct — the exchange of ‘natural’ for ‘unnatural’ sexual relationships — by women as well as men (1:24, 26-27).
Homosexual conduct is not the only depravity listed here. Paul also mentions twenty-one other forms of wickedness (1:28-32). Rather like the characters in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, who go beyond good and evil and defy every social norm, Paul speaks of those who commit ‘every kind of wickedness,’ who display overweening pride, insolence and rebelliousness, and who practice hatred, cruelty and heartlessness towards other human beings. But it is the public condoning of widespread same-sex practice that indicates a society which God is about to give up on — a civilization in the advanced stages of moral degeneration and decline.
Why is this so? It is because our sexual nature as male and female is at the very heart of our humanity as created by God. Sexual identity and practice touches something that goes to the very heart of human sensibility. In Genesis 1:26-27 there is a vision of human sexuality unparalleled in ancient or modern times: human beings are created in a co-humanity, male and female, in the likeness of a relational, triune God. Our sexual nature is God-given; it is an expression of God’s image in us; it is right at the heart of our human identity.
Thus, rejection of heterosexual intercourse strikes at the very core of our humanity. It is a repudiation of the human nature that God has created — including the differentiation and physiology of the sexes. ‘They exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural,’ says Paul, or, as the Greek literally means, for relations that are ‘against nature’, ‘contrary to nature’, or ‘at variance with God’s created order’ (1:26).
For some, homosexual tendencies are the result of events or circumstances in their upbringing — the absence of a father figure, violation by a family member, teenage experimentation. For others, homosexual experience can be the expression of a confused and disoriented society that has lost its sexual moorings. Cat Stevens expressed this in his 1970s song ‘Tuesday’s Dead’:
What’s my sex?
What’s my name?
All in all
it’s all the same.
Everybody plays
a different game.
That is all.
But for others within the militant gay community homosexual activity is an act of what French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus described as ‘metaphysical rebellion’: rebellion against the human condition itself (The Rebel [Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1971], pp. 29-31). To deny God completely, it is necessary to repudiate every trace of God, including one’s God-given sexuality and physiology.
A striking example is Frenchman Michel Foucault, one of the founders of post-modernism. He deliberately chose a lifestyle of anonymous gay sex and sadomasochism in San Francisco in the 1970s and early 1980s to express his rejection of God and of God-given values. He died of AIDS in 1984.
History shows that widespread acceptance of homosexuality shows up in the advanced stages of a society’s decline. It signals the imminence of God’s judgment (1:18, 32). One thinks of Pompeii and Herculaneum, of Sodom and Gomorrah. A Jewish tradition says that the generation of the Noahic Flood was wiped out because they wrote marriage contracts between males just as they did for heterosexual couples. When homosexual behaviour is normalized, a civilisation is close to sliding into a black hole.
There is no room for smugness or moral superiority. Paul spends the next two chapters critiquing such self-righteous pride and complacency. Rather, we should plead with God not to give up on our society, not to abandon us to our own devices — to have mercy upon us before it is too late.
Rob Yule, 11 March 2007
© 2007, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church
