The Moral Teaching of Paul: Selected Issues by Victor Paul Furnish (Abingdon Press, 1979; Revised Edition, 1985, 142 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
This significant but non-technical book by the University Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, is for “people who believe that Paul’s moral teaching ought to be taken seriously but who are not sure what it means to do so”. Furnish begins by cautioning readers against forcing “our presuppositions and questions upon [Paul’s letters] too quickly”. (As Calvin Seminary professor John Stek said in Christianity Today: “Every time we turn to Scripture to ask ‘What does the Bible say about ____?’ … we set the agenda for Scripture’s speaking. … Preachers who rummage through the Bible to find texts on which to hang topical … sermons are often guilty of substituting their word for the biblical Word”.) Furnish elegantly refutes the twisting of Paul’s moral teaching into a sacred cow, “eternally and universally binding”. (As Stek censured: We “tend to use [the Bible] as we use other authoritative texts, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, rather than as a unified narrative of the story of salvation. … Isolated verses have become ‘God’s will’ for us”.)
Furnish also attacks the turning of Paul’s teaching into a white elephant, “perhaps once useful, but now outmoded, irrelevant, maybe even a little ridiculous”. Observing that, “Paul nowhere lays down a rigid legalistic code of Christian conduct”, Furnish reminds us that “Paul himself allows for differing ethical judgments, given the differing circumstances of individuals even within the same congregations and at the same time”. He says that “Within the New Testament itself we see the church interpreting, reinterpreting, correcting, and modifying its traditions for new times and situations”. A “law of varying relevancy” is posited: “he more specifically relevant any given moral instruction is to a particular situation, the less specifically relevant it is to other particular situations”. Furnish wisely warns: “Whenever one treats Paul’s moral teaching as if it were a sacred cow, one runs the risk of turning it into a white elephant.” Considering gay people’s tragic missing what Furnish calls the “timeless truths” of the gospel when they’re told they must also accept as eternally binding whatever some preacher insists Paul had in mind on hairstyles and “homosexuality”, this warning is of utmost evangelical importance. Furnish writes here on marriage and divorce, homosexuality, women in the church, and on governing authorities. The rest of this review will focus on Furnish’s longest chapter, the one on homosexuality, though his other chapters are valuable also.
Calling for a “sense of proportion”, he reminds us that in homosexuality, “We are not dealing with a fundamental biblical theme” and that “not only the terms [“homosexual” and “homosexuality”], but also the concepts …were unknown in Paul’s day”. He reviews Old Testament texts on “foreign idolatries” wrongly said to be about homosexuality and cites New Testament interpretation of Sodom as “a symbol of the reality of God’s judgment, not as a symbol of homosexuality”. Noting that “the rabbis regarded homosexual behavior as a typical Gentile vice”, he says Herod protected his young brother-in-law from the assumed “erotic purposes” of Antony. On Greco-Roman homosexuality, Furnish accurately describes a phenomenon opposite to homosexual romance known today: “the more a youth resembled a female … the more apt he was to become the object of [men’s] erotic attentions”. He cites Seneca, Paul’s contemporary, writing of male slaves forced to dress like women, pluck out their beard, and submit to cruel sexual exploitation by masters.
Furnish says that Paul shared the common contemporary criticism of such homosexual behavior but that his two well-known statements must be understood in terms of what they do not share with that criticism, namely the “literary-theological context”, the insight that both Jew and Gentile were in the grip of sin and that God’s grace was given to all. In the I Corinthians 6 traditional vice list, Paul uses “the very term the critics of ‘call-boys’ often used to describe those who offered their bodies for pay to older males” and Furnish says that it “seems likely” Paul is using it this way. Paul immediately adds a rare compound word that Furnish translates as the “men who have sex with them”, i.e., the callboys’ customers. He observes that Paul saw these vices, not as “sins” (plural) but as “symptomatic of sin”. To Paul, “the fundamental sin from which all particular evils derive is idolatry, worshiping what is created rather than the Creator, be that a wooden idol, an ideology, a religious system or some particular moral code”. Furnish sees that “’homosexuality’ is not the topic” in either of Paul’s two very brief and “relatively incidental” references. Again, with the Roman letter, Furnish details striking similarities between Paul’s assumptions and statement at Romans 1:26f and those of “non-Christian contemporaries”. And again, only in the theological context of Romans (1:18-32 and, indeed, the whole letter) is there a fundamental difference between Paul and non-Christians on the same-sex behavior to which they refer.
Furnish intelligently concludes that the homosexuality Paul knew “represented a rebellion against the Creator and his creation, a surrender to one’s own lusts, the debasement of one’s own true identity and the exploitation of another’s. It is no longer possible”, Furnish argues, “to share Paul’s belief that homosexual conduct always and necessarily involves all these things. But it can be said with certainty that whenever a homosexual or heterosexual relationship does involve one or more of these, [and it should be admitted that such does depict much of today’s sex scene, both gay and straight], it stands under the judgment of scripture”. Thus, Furnish properly concludes: “Paul’s fundamental concerns about homosexual practice (as he understood it) are as valid in the twentieth century as they were in the first”.