FU - FairAndUNbalanced.com

I was part of the audience and, during the participation period, I made my disagreement known. The fellow relied heavily on the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans to prove the sinfulness of homosexuality. He went to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians to prove that women should be subordinate.

I am struck by Protestant literalists who reject the infallibility of the Catholic Pontiff, and yet embrace the infallibility of Paul. Paul did not hesitate to offer his personal opinions and sometimes did so explicitly, often differentiating it from Jewish Law or the Words of Jesus. He seemed not to realize he was creating scripture whenever he wrote or spoke. I don't see Paul proclaiming his own infallibility. He was most effective when witnessing from personal experience, something we should all do more often.

In the passage from 1 Corinthians, the speaker quoted from Chapter 7, possibly not the best possible passage for him. Paul goes back and forth, almost contrapuntally in self-dialogue, between what he is saying and what the Lord has said.

Paul has taken some posthumous heat for condemning homosexuality in the first chapter of Romans. His condemnation seems a bit sympathetic to me. To be sure, he does see homosexuality as unnatural. It is worth noting that the most widely practiced homosexual relationships in those days were those of slave to owner and child prostitute to moneyed customer. Both were exploitative. It is true that the passage makes no such distinction. Paul rather groups the forbidden sexual practice with such things as envy, gossip, slander, boasting, disobedience to parents, and foolishness. He does not describe these as sins but rather as afflictions.

He views them as being the result of a single sin, idolatry. Idol worship can be the substitution of a thing for God. Worship is given over to a golden calf, or some other object. Paul was familiar with such practices through the times in which he lived and the scriptures he followed.

Idolatry regards God as limited and defined. Paul expressed his opinions on earthly matters, and witnessed to his personal experiences. But he limited his description of God as being beyond his imagination and that of any mortal human. He refused to define God as in any way limited to his own understanding.

Today's idolaters have no such inhibition. They present God to us with all the limitations of their own understanding. The creator is not at all mysterious to them. They can turn the Lord around and upside down. These are the sides. This is the top. They assure us God shares their hatreds and intolerance. Unlike Paul, they present God to us prepackaged. No need for a spiritual journey of wonder and discovery.

They give us God in a box. They instruct us to join the worship of that box.