Spong on Paul

Bishop Spong’s Claim That Paul Was a Repressed Gay Man

Bishop Spong, you have written, quote, "'Yes, I am convinced that Paul of Tarsus was a gay man, "'deeply repressed, self-loathing, rigid in denial, "'bound by the law that he hoped could keep this thing "'that he judged to be so unacceptable totally under control, "'a control so profound that even Paul "'did not have to face this fact about himself,' end quote.".

Would that be a proper rendering?

You're reading that out of the Sins of Scripture? Yes. Yeah, when I first wrote that, I wrote it as a speculative theory. I've become more convinced of its reality, but it's still my belief, and there's a difference between stating your belief and stating that you know what it is, but that's a belief, yes.

You are convinced of that? I am personally convinced of that, yes.

Am I correct to believe that you view his words in Romans 1 as nothing more than the words of a repressed homosexual?

Romans 1 as an Autobiographical Clue to Paul

Romans 1 is a fascinating passage of Scripture, and it was actually the clue to my understanding of Paul when I finally unpacked, because what Paul really says there is that if you don't worship God properly, God will confuse your sexual identity.

First place, I don't believe in a God who would do that, and the second place, that led me into looking at Paul autobiographically, and Paul gives us a lot of autobiographical material in the epistles, and in there, I began to, I took this from a, I can't even remember his name, Darby, I believe, a man I found in the Yale library and a book written about 1935 that suggested Paul might have been a repressed gay man, and I decided I would read all of the Pauline corpus as if that's true and see if it illumined the corpus in any way, and you run into passages where Paul talks about this inner struggle going on between his mind and his body.

His mind follows one law, his body follows another law. He talks about sin dwelling in my members so that my members don't obey the law of my mind, and the Greek word for member is m-e-l-o-s, melos, and it means a bodily appendage.

I don't know anybody's arms or legs that don't obey the law of their mind, but males have another appendage that is gland that isn't always obedient to the law of their mind. That's why we have impotency in human life.

That's why Viagra has business, because it does not obey the law of the mind. In other words, I find this self-hatred in Paul, oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?

Paul, as a God-fearing Jew, was well aware of the prescriptions in Leviticus that said that if you're homosexual, you're under the condemnation of death, and then I think you don't understand Paul until you understand that whatever his conversion experience was, and I don't trust the book of Acts' description of that on the Damascus Road as history, because Paul never refers to it, he never refers to Ananias or any of that, so I don't know what happened, but I do know Paul went through a cataclysmic conversion experience, and in that conversion experience, I think he came to the realization that God loved him just as he is, as we indeed sing, just as I am, without one plea.

That's how God loved him, and he came out of that convinced in what I think is a very revealing statement that nothing could finally separate him from the love of God. Not even, he says, my own nakedness can separate me from the love of God.

Now, I don't know that Paul was gay, and I have no sense that even if he were gay, he ever acted it out. My sense is he lived bound by the law in such a way that it was killing him inside, but his conversion experience was the sense that whatever it is that God is, God loved him as he was, and so he breaks into this great epiphany of wonder that not height, not depth, not angels, not principalities, not things present, not things to come, nothing can separate me from the love of God.

Now, let me just finally say, I don't know that Paul was gay. That's a supposition. I'm personally convinced of it. I'll ask him when I get to the kingdom of heaven. It'll be a very revealing conversation, but I'm content to at least make that public possibility as a way of saying that it's the dark side of a man who lived in the first century that drew us into an understanding of what the grace of God is all about, and I suspect if we're honest with ourselves, it's when we are able to accept whatever the dark side is of each of us that we become whole people, and that's certainly what Carl Jung had to say, and I think that's worth thinking about as a gospel message.

Why Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 Should Be Read in Context

Bishop Spong, why should anyone on a scholarly level examining Paul's writings conclude that his words about homosexuality in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 are the result of repressed homosexuality rather than a consistent application of the law and the prophets as is seen throughout his writings on a wide variety of topics and issues?

Well, I think you have to learn to play with the scriptures in a little bit more flexible manner than you seem able to do. I know that if you read Maccabees, for example, it's not in the scriptures, but it's in the Apocrypha, and it's very popular literature in the first century, and Paul certainly was familiar with Maccabees, and Maccabees says that if you can repress all desire, then you're not gonna have any trouble, and I think Paul really tried to do that.

The person that helped me to see that for the first time was a gay man who said, Paul, it's just like I am. I couldn't accept the fact that I was gay either, and I fought against it with all my heart.

I tried to repress it. I did all sorts of things. I sometimes hid in a marriage, making even more people complicitous in your own inner struggle, but once you accept the fact that being gay is not evil, or you can act evil out of being gay, there's no doubt about that, but maybe you haven't noticed you can be pretty evil if you're heterosexual too.

You can be a prostitute, you can be a pimp, you can abuse children. Those are all heterosexual proclivities overwhelmingly. Sexuality itself, in my opinion, is absolutely morally neuter. You can act out homosexuality with holiness.

You can act out heterosexuality with holiness. You can also act out both of them with great corruption and great destruction.

The Bible as a Growing Book and the Word of God

Bishop Spong, you wrote concerning Paul's statements about homosexuality in Romans 1, quote, is there any reason why anyone should believe that this convoluted and bizarre understanding of the tortured Pauline mind could ever be called the, quote, word of God, end quote?

Could you explain, sir, why you isolated Paul's statement from the context before and after, ignoring its consistency in that argumentation, and ignored the balance of the entirety of the text which addresses the entire spectrum of human sin?

You see, I don't see the Bible as the word of God. I see the word of God as that which I hear through the words of the Bible, and there's a very big difference. I don't want to blame God for a lot of things in the Bible.

I think some of the things in the Bible are dreadful. I think they reflect our tribal upbringing. They reflect the adolescence or even the childhood of our humanity. I think the Bible is a growing book.

There's an enormous difference between when you get into the prophets, for example, and you get Malachi, who says, from the rising of the sun to its setting, God's name shall be great among the Gentiles.

That would have been something that the God in the book of Exodus would not have understood.