Hilton Head Island, SC – August 22, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 5:1-5, 7:1-9; I Cor. 7:32-38, 14:33-36
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. – I Corinthians 7:7 (RSV)
Without Saul of Tarsus, who became known as the apostle Paul, almost certainly there would be no Christian religion. As we learned last Sunday, by an agreement in the New Testament Church, Paul providentially became the apostle to the Gentiles, and Peter was the apostle to the Jews. In the first three decades of the New Testament period, which lasted ninety years, from 30 CE to 120 CE or thereabouts, nearly all of the very first “Christians” were Jews who became followers of Jesus. But from about 55 or 60 CE onward, virtually no Jews thereafter became Christians. Thus Paul’s effort to evangelize Gentiles was the primary catalyst in creating Christianity. Without him, likely only a few academics would ever have heard of Jesus of Nazareth.
Having said that, however, today I want to address some of Paul’s views on human sexuality. There have been many treatises written about Paul’s views about sex, and probably a few short books have been written about it, but I suspect that not many sermons have been preached about it. I am doing this because I am convinced that indirectly Paul has had a major negative effect on how millions of Christians down through the centuries have chosen to live their lives on the basis of what the Number One New Testament Apostle had to say about sex.
Many biblical scholars concluded that Paul likely was married, but perhaps an equal number are fairly sure he was not. From what he wrote in his letters, one could come to either conclusion. I personally suspect Paul probably never did marry. Furthermore, on the basis of what he boldly decreed about sex, it should not be surprising if he never married. Likely no woman would have him, and it seems probable to me that he also would have no woman.
We see that in some of the rather bizarre things he said in his first letter to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth. Corinth was a cosmopolitan place through which many people passed, especially sailors, from all over the Mediterranean world. Maybe they brought wild ideas about sex with them, because Paul writes about several unusual ideas in his two Corinthian letters. Apparently some of the Corinthian Christians acted like some of the people in some outlandish contemporary religious cults. They seemed to practice free sex, and you can take that to mean whatever you want it to mean.
For example, Paul began the seventh chapter of I Corinthians with these words: “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband” (7:1-2). The 20th-century Scotsman, William Barclay, is my favorite New Testament commentator. He translated those two verses as follows: “With regard to your letter and its suggestion that it would be a fine thing for a man not to have anything to do with a woman --- to avoid fornication, let each man possess his own wife, and each woman her own husband.”
Those two translations dot not imply the same things at all. “Not touching a woman” and “having nothing to do with a woman” are two quite different things. You can decide for yourself what the difference is, and also what the two translations imply. In a certain strand of Greek philosophy, the human body was considered utterly unimportant. Only the soul, the psyche, has importance. Therefore according to that philosophy, in one sense you can do whatever you want with your body, but if you come to the opposite conclusion, you must avoid sexual bodily contact altogether.
So what are we to deduce from these conflicting interpretations? Does Paul favor marriage, and thus sexual relations, or doesn’t he? Later he comments on what he is saying by adding, “I say this by way of concession, not of command.” In other words, you can decide for yourself what is best for you. But then he goes on to say, “I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another” (7:6&7). For Paul to say about sexual matters “I wish that all were as I myself am” is as jarring in its own way as if Donald Trump were to say about sexual matters, “I wish that all were as I myself am.”
Paul seems to be beating around the bush here. What, precisely, does he mean, because what he writes is not precise! William Barclay thought that Paul had been married at one time, and that either his wife died or that she left him when he became a Christian. However, I take these verses to mean that Paul was intentionally sexually abstinent and thus never married. And if that is the case, he would have been an odd-man-out to both Jews and Christians. He was a rabbi, and all rabbis were expected to marry. “I wish that all were as I myself am” to me implies that Paul never married, nor did he intend to. If everyone took that view, the human race would have become extinct in a matter of several decades after the first two male and female Homo sapiens evolved into becoming capable of being parents. The Shakers were a unique group of American Christians who practiced total sexual abstinence. For that reason they went out of existence not very long after they came into existence.
The sex drive is one of the most powerful features in all species of animals. When female dogs or cats are in heat, it can be agony for them, but it turns the males into super-charged Lotharios. Sex clearly is an important theme in most humans’ lives, and may be more consuming for our species than for any other. Otherwise it would not appear in so many works of literature and cinema. Without it, no animate species could ever have evolved into what they became.
Most people are heterosexual, some are homosexual, fewer still are bisexual, and as we all have discovered in very recent years, some are transsexual. I think Paul may have been asexual. That is, he was totally devoid of any sexual leanings. I don’t know that, and no one can know with any certainty anything about Paul’s sexual inclinations. However, Paul did say some very strange things about sex in I Corinthians. For that I think it would have beneficial if he had had his head shrunk about his notions regarding sex. However, in his day there were no psychiatrists or clinical psychologists. Even if there were, I think Paul would have avoided them like COVID-19, because on the basis of sex, Paul thought he was not only AOK; he thought he was the epitome of what everybody should be. To his regret though, they were not, which is why he wrote those strange things. To this I can only conclude that it is a major misfortune that regarding sex Paul thought what he did think. If we were all as peculiar about sex as Paul was peculiar about sex, the human race would be even far more confused and conflicted about sex than we already are.
Nevertheless we may deduce that there were serious problems regarding sex in Corinth, such as when he referred to “a man who was living with his father’s wife” (5:1). On the face of it, that sounds pretty kinky, as we now say. But exactly what does that mean? Paul doesn’t explain. Were they living in sin? He doesn’t say. Were they committing what he considered to be incest? He doesn’t say. So why does he say anything? Maybe the man was an invalid, and maybe his mother had died, and maybe his father remarried and then he died, and his stepmother, in a burst of kindness, invited the poor guy to live with her. But when Paul prefaced those sentences with this sentence, “It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans,” what are we supposed to deduce from these cryptic and potentially saucy words? What is going on here?
Later, in Chapter 7, Paul says, “If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry; it is no sin.” Is that a truly lofty endorsement of holy matrimony, or what? If a man, walking down the street with his fiancée, is looking lustfully at every woman they pass, he’d better get married. After all, says Paul, it’s no sin to marry. What a progressive chap he is! Then, to let the recipients of this letter know what he really thinks, Paul says this: “So he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (7:36-38). It is possible Paul said that because he believed that the world would soon end and that the apocalypse would come, but if so, he doesn’t say that. Therefore we are left wondering what he really did mean.
Most of the things Paul writes in I Corinthians are of a much more spiritual nature, including I Corinthians 13, the famous Hymn to Love. However, it is not about erotic love (eros in Greek), but agape love, love for the entire human race. In the very next chapter he writes this, not about sex as we normally think of “sex,” but about gender: “As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church” (14:33-35). Where’s the agape in those words, huh, Paul?
In the 20th and the 21st centuries, those are fighting words, at least to the women who are members of most Mainline Protestant churches, but also in many Roman Catholic and evangelical churches. To the women’s liberation movement, those verses are like having to swallow brussel sprouts by the bushelsful. Who, for heaven’s sake, was the misogynist misanthrope who wrote them? What kind of man was Paul?
Without question, Paul was an outstanding writer of what is known as Koine Greek, the kind of Greek in which the New Testament was written. By every measurement, I Corinthians 13 is a literary masterpiece. Paul was a brilliant theologian and biblical scholar. He was an indispensable linchpin in the early development of Christianity. But on the matter of sex, he was so far out in left field that he was no longer even in the ballpark. On sex and on gender, he was simply an extremely peculiar person, and a blatant misogynist to boot.
So why would I even preach a sermon like this? I do it for two basic reasons. First, Paul’s views on sex had a profoundly negative effect on Christianity after his time, and on all three branches of Christianity: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant. Secondly, Paul has been a major factor in the western world preventing women from taking their rightful place in both the Church and in society in general.
When Paul urged that “the women should keep silence in the churches,” he was reinforcing a male tendency to be dominant over females. That ancient tendency certainly needs no encouragement. Men hardly need any promotion for “doin’ a-what-a comes naturly,” as Annie Oakley sang in another context in Annie Get Your Gun. There seems to be a natural inclination for men to try to dominate women if at all possible, and it seems incomprehensible that Paul would boost such a faulty notion.
In all three branches of Christianity and in most denominations up until the 20th century, women were forbidden to become members of the clergy or to hold office in congregations. A few American denominations in the 18th and 19th centuries allowed women to be ordained, but very few. For ten centuries the Roman Catholic Church allowed a few priests to be married, but most priests were voluntarily celibate. Then, ten centuries ago, they began to ban married priests altogether. They still ban female priests, as do most of the Eastern Orthodox Churches. Most Mainline Protestant denominations have ordained women for several decades, but many if not most evangelical churches still have no female clergy or other female church officers. It is impossible to quantify how much of that is due to one cockamamie verse written by the apostle Paul in I Corinthians 14, but it is deliberate intellectual blindness to claim that Paul had no part at all in this particular illustration of ongoing ecclesiastical misogyny.
Most cultures and societies in the long sweep of human history have been highly male-dominated. In general, the sex drive of males is apparently much stronger, or at least more persistent, than the sex drive of females. Therefore men are more apt to force sex upon women than vice versa, and physically it would be hard for most women to force sex upon most men, even if they had the sudden yen to do so.
To some degree, the zest for sex is nearly universal to everyone, but from what Paul said in I Corinthians, we may conclude he had zero zest for it, and seemed to think no one else should have it either. Such a position is a deliberate ignoring of the human nature of nearly all people. Besides, if indeed Paul got his wish “that all were as I myself am,” the earth would be completely devoid of people.
We might give Paul a pass if he just never happened to come across the right woman for him. But Paul being Paul, I doubt that there ever could have been a right woman for him. Therefore it would have been better if he had written nothing to anybody about his thoughts on sex and gender. Nevertheless he did, and the Church and the world have paid an incalculable price for his twisted thinking ever since.
We believe, as Genesis 1:1 says, that it was God who created the heavens and the earth. It took literally billions of years for the various species of animals to evolve, including humans, but a sexual attraction toward others in the opposite sex is what guarantees the perpetuation of every species. Therefore, despite all of Paul’s addled observations, sex is fundamentally a good and necessary aspect of all life upon this earth. Some of the biblical laws and rules regarding sex are unacceptably stringent. However, if people are thoughtful and considerate, and if they wisely follow sensible biblical rules, men and women can live together in inter-gender harmony. In conclusion though, it is best to avoid most of the sexual observations of the primary New Testament advice-giver.