I Corinthians by Alan F. Johnson (InterVarsity Press, 2004)
This review focuses on a Wheaton College professor’s cursory but careless comments on I Corinthians 6:9, contrasted with his nuanced work on chapter 7. Noting the two terms in 6:9 that “have evoked considerable debate”, Johnson repeats some tired superficialities and moves on to a careful study of what he says is no less ambiguous material in 7. On 7, he admits: “the passage is complicated by numerous translation options”, “exegetically it is a very difficult passage”, “the sense of this expression is not clear”. Yet, such caution is missing in his dealing with the equally difficult terms in 6:9.
Johnson’s handling of 6:9 is no worse than others’, but it illustrates a common flaw with tragic consequences for millions – as well as for the grasping of God’s free grace in Christ. All this is even more unfortunate in a commentary, a genre with a long shelf life.
The series uses the NIV. Ed Palmer headed NIV’s executive committee. With pointed humor, he used to ask his Westminster Seminary students how a porcupine could be turned into an owl. His punch line: “By translation!” And it’s by just such “translation” that two admittedly enigmatic terms get turned into “homosexuals”. Palmer said that NIV translators did no close study of these terms that Johnson admits are “more difficult” than the others in Paul’s list. Palmer explained that malakoi was taken to mean “male prostitutes” and, with “offenders” added to “homosexual”, arsenokoitai was meant to refer to abusers like, as he put it, “rapists and child molesters”.
However, the 2011 NIV has: “men who have sex with men” and, in an overreaching footnote, asserts that this represents “two Greek words that refer to the passive and active participants in homosexual acts”. On malakoi, “soft”, Johnson goes with the same guess: it “seems in this context to point to playing the female role in sexual intercourse with other males”. But “this context” is merely a list! He grants that arsenokoitai “is unknown in Greek literature before these references”. He fails to note that, later, it was used of a heterosexual act. He quotes an antigay author’s saying it “literally means ‘bedders of males’”. But, of course, a “literal” meaning of a totally unknown word dropped into a list some 2,000 years ago cannot possibly be found via an etymological fallacy. Are “scholars”, 2,000 years hence, to conclude that our lady-killers murdered women and wise guys were known for wisdom? Moreover, as Paul knew, legalist nitpicking at the enigmas of dead letters kills what the Spirit can enliven. (II Cor 3:6)
Sarah Ruden, a scholar of ancient Greek language and culture, explains: In Paul’s day, “There were no gay households; there were in fact no gay institutions or gay culture at all.” In her Books & Culture interview for Christianity Today, she concludes: Paul “could have had no idea of anything in homosexuality that was not exploitative and cruel.” She cites a Roman poet’s describing being “cut to pieces [as] the ordinary term for ‘to be the passive partner’.” This does not describe caring gay couples today. Besides, most don’t engage in such “active” and “passive” stereotypes. Same-sex or not, what a loving couple is about is not penetration, but profoundest psychosexual intimacy. The pair is about persons, not body parts.
And, if these two “more difficult” words mean what Johnson et al. pretend they mean, that means that Paul is damning the victim as well as the abuser, for in his day, penetration of one man by another was to degrade the penetrated – as in rape of prisoners of war or subjugation of sojourners.
He says: “There is hardly a subject that strikes so close to where most of us live as the one before us in this chapter” on marriage, divorce, remarriage and singleness. But his callous take on 6:9 cruelly strikes at where others live. He contextualizes 7 but fails to do so at 6:9. On 7: “The thread that runs through the whole chapter is Paul’s principle of not changing one’s social status for spiritual improvement. … one’s social position is irrelevant to authentic Christian existence”. True! And, Paul says boldly: in Christ, there’s no significance to Jew or Greek, slave or free and no “male and female” (lifted from LXX Genesis). (Gal 3:28)
Paul begins 7 with a euphemism for heterosexual intercourse that Augustine read as Paul’s calling all heterosexual acts sin. Correctly, but conveniently for heterosexuals, Johnson sees that the phrase, “It is good for a man not to marry” (literally: “not to touch a woman”) is a slogan of Paul’s Gnostic opponents. Had it been: “It is good not to touch a man”, would it be attributed to Paul?
“We must recognize the occasional nature of Paul’s instructions,” he says. “He is answering real questions about specific cases at Corinth; he is not giving a treatise on Christian marriage.” True! But is Paul giving a treatise on “gay couples” in 6? No. The controversial terms –whatever they ever meant – are extrinsic to Paul’s argument against Christians suing each other in pagan courts – something Christians still do, especially in their antigay crusades.
C. S. Lewis wrote of “plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ …) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.” Historian Mark Noll notes KJV renderings of even clear Greek terms that were used against blacks and women. Modern paraphrases do that against gay folk. We’re horrified by ancestors’ foolish and evil ways. We apologize. But their victims aren’t here to hear us. Yet we, too, are blind to what Francis Schaeffer called our own “ugly orthodoxy”. Our children will be horrified and apologize. But, our victims, too, will be long gone.
Says historian George Marsden: “The weight of the New Testament … shifts to the principle of flexibility, especially the flexibility of not giving needless offense to a large portion of the culture to whom we are supposed to witness. Hence the Bible’s own principles invite adjustment to cultural circumstances on matters that do not threaten the heart of the gospel.”