A Substack at the End of the Semester

a ramble about Romans 1 and the trickiness of temporality at this time of year

It’s a little obnoxious how proud I am that Mitch and I regularly elicit surprise when we tell people that we only moved to New York City about a year and a half ago. (It’s actually been just fifteen months; I’m very much rounding up.) Time works different in this city, as anyone living here can describe, and I think none of us really quite comprehend our movement through time in the first place—but I am glad to be adapting and to be where I am in this journey, especially know that I’ve closed up coursework for the semester and am finally peeking my head up enough to realize just how long it has been. Temporality is a tricky thing, as I’ve learned not in the moments in which I feel genuinely confused by how long it has been since our move to NYC. Temporality, too, is a topic bouncing around a lot of conversations I have in school and in ministry, sometimes explicitly, somehow always implicitly.

Another multisyllabic word beloved by academics (like me), temporality simply refers to one’s relationship with time. Temporality is how we understand past, present, and future; it’s how we experience concepts like now and then; it’s how we sense the shape and size of any one moment or even of the entirety/eternity of time itself. Once you tug at the tug at the idea of temporality, you get taken quickly to concepts that make comprehension a complex task.

Temporality is important for church work, I think. This is true when one centers the Christian calendar, which I think is a vital gift church has to offer in a world that’s speeding up with spinning out systems of late-stage capitalism. Seasons like Advent and holidays like Easter join a chorus of minor moments that, when woven into patterns of meditation and reflection, can become an invitation to a new sense of time. Church work, like most any community work, is also about simply walking with people together finding sense of pasts, presents, and futures. This happens in collective care in moments of grief to critical conversation about responding to current events.

For such reasons (and many more), temporality has become an important topic in biblical studies, too, especially the queer kind in which I engage. This came to life the New Testament Letters course I took this past semester, touring through the bulk of the collection of canonical scripture that comes from letters passed around cities in the Roman empire during the first generations of what became Christianity. Though many passages have been pulled out into timeless, poetic inspiration (take 1 Corinthians 13, for example, read at marriage ceremonies every week in the world), a bulk of the letters do not quite make sense without taking into understanding their relationship with time.

Our course integrated concerns about the letters’ historical context. What was the world like in the first and second century? What can we know—or educatedly guess—about Paul and the other authors who wrote in his name? How do moments in the past “rhyme” with moments in our contexts? Drew Theological is a school full of diversity and of dynamic commitment to justice and transformation. Conversations in class were thus lively, critical, and creative, casting a new sense of how to take these ancient letters in the present in order to figure out better futures for what we do with the Bible.

Paul, in whose name most of the New Testament is written, can get a bad reputation. It’s understandable when one accounts for the passages attributed to him that have inspired quite misogynistic and homophobic uses of the Bible. In 1 Corinthians 14, he (or perhaps a later editor) tells women to be quiet in the church. His “vice list” in the same letter lambasts various kinds of sinners and (with the help of poor translations in the the twentieth century) lends people a dangerous prooftext to say that “homosexuals will not inherit God’s kingdom” (1 Corinthians 6:9).

Let’s take a moment to look at Romans 1, though, which includes lines like:

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” (Romans 1:25-27)

This passage held me up the longest after I first started thinking concretely about what have become queer concerns, privately googling things in high school like “What does the Bible say about homosexuality?” Even when I was an evangelical teenager, the other “clobber passages” seemed…flimsy to me, while this moment in Paul’s letter, standing as part of what I then believed to be the literal word of God, was enough for me to wait years to really start rethinking not only what the Bible said but about what I believed the Bible to be in the first place.

As I let go of my own past relationship to scripture and folded into more full readings, I learned to better appreciate the passage’s temporality, including it’s context in ancient culture. There are a variety of ways in which people have situated this passage, often pointing to Paul’s larger rhetoric against the “Gentiles,” non-Jewish people. Even though he was likely writing to people who themselves were not born Jewish, Paul lived and wrote long before “Christianity” was some separate religion; he was a Jewish person doing Jewish things addressing people whom he considered “Jewish” in a new way because of his own understanding of Christ.

Furthermore, past context shows that there were rites and rituals in worship across the Greco-Roman world in which men would have sex with men and women with women. Past context, then, suggests that Paul—a stranger to modern concepts of gender and sexuality (especially with some homo versus hetero binary)—is condemning idol worship, not what we know now as homosexuality. Understanding the past’s difference helps us take Paul (who never even wrote, I might add, that he considered his words to be scripture) on his own terms.

Temporally speaking, though, we should do more than just try to get a clearer look at the past, especially if all we want to do is distance ourselves from it. The past is quite different, but it is not disconnected to the world we live in now. There’s a feminist biblical scholar named Bernadette Brooten who describes this particularly in relationship to Romans 1. To talk about “natural” and “unnatural” sexual behavior implicates not a complementarian understanding of man and woman but rather a hierarchical relationship that really, more than anything, is man and not-man. This hierarchical understanding valued man over woman, masculine over feminine, active over passive. Even though it was complex and not perfectly cohesive (especially with current understandings of masculinity/femininity, something I find myself wanting continuingly to queer), it provides an important part of the past in which Paul’s rhetoric was written.

This passage may be participating in more misogyny than homophobia. The problem with two men having sex, beyond just being idol worship, is that one of them is presuming the passive/feminine role. (The opposite is true about two women, which many will note is a rare thing not just for Paul but for ancient literature to mention in reference to having any sense of sexuality.) Brooten points out how this framework is still present today. Think about the way we say “screw you” or “that sucks.” Although these can be kidding comments in colloquial conversation, they betray the same logic of Paul’s own “natural” sexuality. “Screw you,” and its more vulgar versions, conjure up an image of the “you” assuming the passive role in relationship to the active “I.” This is haunted by the same ancient hierarchical understandings that built up Paul’s “natural” and “unnatural.”

Temporality turns us from the past into the present towards better futures, which frankly, for me, can still be a challenge in regards to Romans 1. Later passages reach toward some universal sense of salvation; I like those. And there is something important to the way in which Paul turns around in Romans 2 to say that we are none to judge; this rhetoric might have just been to rile up an audience to rupture one’s sense of judgement in the first place. I like that.

But I’m still uncomfortable with Romans 1. Beyond its misogynistic logic and homophobic uses, Paul is still using rhetoric with some sort of racializing motivation— why need to construct some image of the Gentile “other” to proffer an instruction against judgment and point to some universal salvation (that still comes to one race before another). Critical understandings of the past can help clarify what’s going on, but they don’t erase the way in which the passages have been used. I think particularly (especially in the midst of reading queer theory catalyzed by the AIDS epidimic in the 80s and 90s here in New York City) about how that “received in their own persons the due penalty for their error” bit has been brought forth as scriptural evidence that AIDS was punishing queer folk for their sin.

Temporally speaking, I get dizzy when I get into all of these dynamics, but the dizziness doesn’t feel dangerous; it feels alive with the divine possibility that comes from queerly considering new possibilities for the future, even and especially from the things that feel directed toward dead ends. The dizziness reminds me that temporal travels are important.

I’m thankful that you’re traveling with me, reader, if even just by reading this many words in a Substack post sent out on a Saturday morning. If you’re curious about figuring out with me better futures— accept the advertising finale for this semester post. I’m curious: what kind of future would you like to see with regards my presence on this platform? As I begin thinking about where my writing will take me in 2025 and beyond, I’d love the feedback you can quickly give via the pretty purple button below.