Loving Idolatry?

Rowan Williams and others have attempted to blunt the force of Paul’s condemnation of homosexual relations in Romans 1 by working backward through the passage. It becomes clear at the end of the passage that the disorder that Paul condemns is a failure to pursue the love and righteousness that God has exhibited in Jesus. For Paul, same-sex relations show disordered desires, and in his historical context he was quite right: Homosexual relations were relations of dominance and abuse. But what he doesn’t think is the possibility of same-sex relations that do exhibit the fruits of the gospel and the Spirit.

If that logic applies to same-sex relations in the passage, why not to other evils that Paul lists? Perhaps Paul was only condemning disordered, unloving gossip and slander; he just hadn’t imagined the Christian sort. In the first century, the only disobedience to parents on offer was the unChristian kind, but perhaps now we are able to think the possibility of righteous, loving disregard of parents. Good greed and good envy – Paul was too much a man of his culture, and couldn’t yet imagine the insight of a Gordon Gecko, who envisions an entire world-order founded on greed.

And why not idolatry? Paul condemned idolatry just because he didn’t know of the tolerant, nice sort of idolatry that we moderns practice.