Romans 1:18-20 puts forth the biblical idea of what theologians call “natural revelation”—the disclosure of God and his laws as they are seen in nature. Let me tell you straight up that those words drove me mad. I hate to think in terms of wrath, punishment, and the expectation that we all learn the same lessons from the same perceptions or experiences. Every fiber in my postmodern being retaliated against this way of thinking. But here we see that God holds us responsible for “suppress[ing] the truth in unrighteousness” (v. 18). He declares that ungodliness is “evident within them” (v. 19). He portrays man as “without excuse,” because his power and character have “been clearly seen” and “understood through what has been made” (v. 20).

The concept of sexual orientation was first used by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and its effect, if not intent, was to radically resituate sexuality from its biblical/creational context to something completely new: the foundational drive that determines and defines human identity. Nothing short of personhood was at stake. By defining humanity according to sexual desires and segregating it according to its gendered object, Freud was—intentionally or not—suppressing the biblical category of being made in God’s image, male and female, and replacing it with the psychoanalytic category of sexual identity. In both intent and language usage, Freud took aim at the Bible’s authority to diagnose gender and sexuality dysfunctions and prescribe solutions for them.

I do not believe that this was an innocent move. Throughout his career, Freud maintained that belief in the God of the Bible was a “universal obsessional neurosis” (The Future of an Illusion, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 43).

The category of sexual orientation carries with it a cosmology of personhood that undervalues image-bearers of a holy God.

Freud did not come out of nowhere. Ideas shape worldview and worldview shapes culture. Freud was a product of German Romanticism. The Romantic period is typified by an uncontested embrace of personal experience, not merely as self-expression or self-representation, but also as epistemology (study of and knowledge of the truth) and personal identity (who I am, ontologically).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s suicide memoir, The Sorrows of Young Werther, narrated this idea for western culture. Werther took Germany by storm in 1774, tragically spawning a number of suicides, while manifesting the idea that personal experience is itself a branch of epistemology. That is, Romanticism claimed that you know truth through the lens of your personal experience, and that no overriding or objective opposition can challenge the primal wisdom of someone’s subjective frame of intelligibility.

In Romanticism, this knowing and being known is identity-rooted and identity-expressive. Romanticism went beyond a solipsistic me-centered understanding of selfhood. Solipsism is the belief that only one’s own mind and its properties is sure to exist. Romanticism took this one step further to declare personal feelings and experiences the most reliable measure and means of discerning truth.

Both a theological and philosophical issue is at stake here. The theological issue is the development of a category of personhood that rejects original sin. In rejecting original sin, the Romantics declared their belief in the inherent divinity and goodness of humanity. The philosophical issue is epistemology (the study of how we know what we know) and the role of personal experience. Prior to the 18th Century, experience-as-truth—even in secular contexts—would have met with real life and theological challenges. Even today, experience-as-truth is the lowest form of epistemology.

The 19th Century category of sexual orientation reflects Romanticism’s claim on epistemology, redefining men and women from people who are made in God’s image with souls that will last forever to people whose sexual drives and gender identifications define them and liberate them and set them apart. Indeed, while the Christian maintains that image-bearing is what sets apart humans from animals, the 19th Century ushered in a new measure of man, one for whom sexuality and sexual pleasure became a defining marker. Thus, “sexual orientation” is what we call a neologism, and it creates fictional identities that rob people of their true one: male and female image-bearers. And sexual orientation is a world that extends the definition of sexuality beyond its biblical confines. Biblically speaking, sexuality is always teleological—that is, sexual desire implies a desired object and sexual practice implies a necessary outcome. Because the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) definition of sexual orientation includes nonsexual affection, this re-maps personhood in a way that God does not.

Put another way, biblically speaking, there is nothing sinful and nothing “gay” about nonsexual same-sex deep and abiding friendship….Desiring to bring someone a glass of punch or sacrificially helping a friend who needs you is an expression of our image-bearing of a holy God, not our persistent patterns of sexual desire or temptation. We must stop and ask: why would the category of sexual orientation include non-sexual affiliation except for the purpose of defining in a new way what it means to be human? This is no small issue. If we privilege secular categories of personhood over and against God’s, we are doubting the Bible’s ability to understand humanity, and we are denying to ourself our Maker’s instruction. Freud did not invent or discover or name something true about humanity that the writers of the Bible missed. Categories we use to represent image-bearers of a holy God matter. Words, like kitchen washrags, carry and distribute history (and bacteria) with each use, and the category invention of sexual orientation brings much bacteria with it.

Everyone loses when we define ourselves using categories that God does not. People who identify as heterosexual and homosexual have much to lose. In 2014, Michael Hannon wrote an absorbing essay in the journal First Things entitled “Against Heterosexuality: the Idea of Sexual Orientation Is Artificial and Inhibits Christian Witness” (March 2014, 27–34).

He begins his essay with Michel Foucault, the famous French historian of ideas who died of AIDS in 1980. Hannon writes:

Michel Foucault…details the pedigree of sexual orientation in his History of Sexuality. Whereas “sodomy” had long identified a class of actions, suddenly for the first time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the term “homosexual” appeared alongside it. This European neologism was used in a way that would have struck previous generations as a plain category mistake, designating not actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil “heterosexual”….with secular society rendering classical religious beliefs publicly illegitimate, pseudoscience stepped in and replaced religion as the moral foundation for venereal norms. (p. 28)

Sexuality moved from verb (practice) to noun (people), and with this grammatical move, a new concept of humanity was born—the idea that we are oriented or framed by our sexual desires; that our differing sexual desires and different objects of desire made up separate species of people, and that self-representation and identity rooted now in sexual orientation, and not in the purposes of God for His image-bearers. In Foucault’s words, “homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality…when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was a new species’” (28, emphasis mine). Prior to the 19th Century category invention of sexual orientation, no one’s sexual practice or sexual desire prescribed personhood or defined their personal identity.

Notice Foucault’s use of the words form, soul, and species. The use of the word form implies that sexual desire shapes our organizing frame, the basic building block of selfhood. The use of the word soul implies that sexuality, not God’s image, was the real harbinger of humanity. The use of the word species means that a new concept of humanity was born, at least within the history of ideas. Sexuality, according to this new definition, exceeds sexual desire.

Even in Foucault’s articulation, non-sexual affections are catalogued under a person’s sexual orientation, thus relocating sexual desire from teleology (its end point) to psychology (personhood, personality, likes, dislikes, etc.). Sexual orientation is thus said to encompass every fiber of a person’s selfhood, from margin to center. If I self-define as heterosexual or homosexual, I express that this deep and originating mark of selfhood presents itself in everything I do—how I walk the dog in the morning, stir the pot of soup at lunch, and take the garbage out at night. With this comprehensive shift in personhood, a new kind of sexual freedom emerged, where everything, including nonsexual affection, is subsumed by this new humanity of sexuality, and everything is a character trait that flows from this humanity of sexuality.

Indeed, sexual orientation went from a categorical invention to heralded immortal truth in 100 years, taking out the concept of being created in God’s image and bearing an eternal soul in its wake. It is now a term embraced uncritically by believers and unbelievers alike. Sexual orientation defines selfhood as the sum-total of our fallen human desires. Through it, we get no glimpse of how the covenant of grace defends our real identity in Christ, or why, say, biblical marriage is a God-designed creation ordinance and a living reflection of Christ and the church, and not merely a man-made convenience.

Heterosexual Blindness and Comparative Sin

I believe that sexual orientation is a lose-lose paradigm for everyone, but especially if you struggle with unwanted homosexual desires. Hannon, in contrast, thinks that self-described heterosexuals have the most to lose. He writes: “the most pernicious aspect of the orientation-identity system is that it tends to exempt heterosexuality from moral evaluation. If homosexuality binds us to sin, heterosexuality blinds us to sin” (p. 30). This heterosexual blindness seems to have two forms: excuse making for sexual sins of a heterosexual bent (pornography, incest, fornication, and adultery), and an excessive, scintillating focus on what gay men do in bed, known in evangelical circles as the “gag reflex.” Indeed, because of the unwitting deceitfulness of the sexual orientation paradigm, we are much more likely to be numb to “heterosexual” sin and excessively focused on “homosexual” sin than we would have been prior to the 19th Century.

“Heterosexual” blindness makes a Christian ignorant to the very sins that may destroy him; “homosexual” approval makes a person unable to enter into a gay neighbor’s life in a way that God may use to spare him from God’s wrath. Both take Christian witness out of the game. This might raise another question: does Paul’s observation in Romans 1:26 that homosexual sex is unnatural warrant the conclusion that heterosexual sexual sin (such as adultery or pornography) is a less heinous form of sin? John Murray’s commentary on the book of Romans has been used to defend this paradigm of comparative sin, as he says this on Romans 1:26: “The implication is that, however grievous is fornication or adultery, the desecration involved in homosexuality is on a lower plane of degeneracy; it is unnatural and therefore evinces a perversion more basic” (The New International Commentary on the New Testament: The Epistle to the Romans, 47).

Does it necessarily follow that heterosexual sexual sin is on a higher plane of evil? The question might be posed like this: is Murray endorsing the paradigm of comparative sin (i.e., comparing your sin to someone else’s in order to conclude that yours is not as bad)? Many Christians follow a line of reasoning like Murray’s and draw the conclusion that same-sex sin is somehow farther from the reach of God’s redemption than other expressions of sexual sin. But pride, lust, bitterness, anger, and a multitude of other sins lie behind our sexual sins in a way that prohibits sweeping generalizations as to the evil of one over and against all others. After all, there are heterosexual perversions and abuses that are unspeakably abhorrent. A heterosexually married man who rapes and abuses his wife is committing horrific evil that is in no way mitigated by the fact that it is heterosexual. God forbid that anyone might suggest otherwise.

We do have a biblical model based on excusing yourself from repentance on the grounds of comparative sin. It is found in Luke 18:10-13, in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, and it doesn’t go so well for the Pharisee.…

The paradigm of comparative sin proves to be a boat with holes, as the sins of self-righteous Pharisees reveal themselves more often than not to be more heinous than the sins of humble Publicans. This is true, even if the Pharisees sin in their heterosexual lust and the Publicans sin in their unwanted homosexual lust.

The practice of sexual sin is a fruit of other, more devastating sins: pride and lust. Satan loves best those Christians who delude themselves with fantasies of excused fleshly grandeur, but then walk the road to hell with misapplied confidence. Hannon says that this presumption that heterosexual sexual orientation is sanctified simply because it is heterosexual “ushers in a pathetically uncritical and…unmerited self-assurance, not to mention an inaccurate measure for evaluating temptation” (p. 30). I agree.

But we still must confront what the Bible says about the “unnaturalness” of homosexual sex (see Romans 1:25-27).

Romans 1 will always hold a powerful place in my life as a believer. I first read those words when I was in a committed lesbian relationship. My first response was to ridicule them. I had not always identified as a lesbian, but once I met my first lesbian lover, I was hooked. I was sure I had found my real self. And I was mighty sure that I knew myself better than this ancient book whose words called into question my ability to discern right from wrong. But after working through the rest of the Bible multiple times, I had to confront that the God who created us has the right to define those “ordinances” of His creation, including human sexuality. While I came to believe that by God’s design, sexuality is for the fulfillment of God’s creation ordinance, I did not experience this truth. I only embraced God’s truth because my conscience condemned me. At a certain point, I realized that the Bible was God’s Word, and it had the right to condemn me, and not the other way around.

Through God’s power, I embraced the Bible, as I do any number of things about God and faith that in my sin or limitation I don’t experience firsthand. And because I embraced it, as a new believer who still felt very much like I lived experientially on the wrong side of the natural revelation tracks, I had to study this idea of biblical sexuality from two perspectives: 1) biblical ethics (what the Bible declares) and 2) personal growth in Christ. Personal growth in Christ flowed from the pastoral care given to me by Pastor Ken Smith and other members of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church and through the means of grace that lead us, in spite of our feelings or past behavior, to live as new creatures in Christ, standing in the risen Christ alone. It occurred to me early in this journey that to declare the biblical ethics of natural law scriptural is not necessarily implying that its point of view is always pastoral.

Natural Revelation as Biblical Ethics

Romans 1:18-20 puts forth the biblical idea of what theologians call “natural revelation”—the disclosure of God and his laws as they are seen in nature.

Let me tell you straight up that those words drove me mad. I hate to think in terms of wrath, punishment, and the expectation that we all learn the same lessons from the same perceptions or experiences. Every fiber in my postmodern being retaliated against this way of thinking. But here we see that God holds us responsible for “suppress[ing] the truth in unrighteousness” (v. 18). He declares that ungodliness is “evident within them” (v. 19). He portrays man as “without excuse,” because his power and character have “been clearly seen” and “understood through what has been made” (v. 20).

When I read this as an unbeliever, I found this patronizingly insulting. I loved my lesbian partners and the community that we created, and yet these verses made it evident that God wanted me to behave differently than I did. Only later as a believer could I see why this argument did not convince me: God does not claim that the gospel is found within this portrayal of his power and divinity in nature. In other words, “natural revelation” exposed my sin, but God understood that there is a difference between the diagnosis and the cure. Natural revelation portrays God’s diagnosis, but only in the gospel do I find the cure. That seemed fair. It seemed to be saying that my responsibility as an image bearer required that I know more of God than that which is found in the law. Specifically, it goaded me to know the gospel, to study it, to ponder it, to allow it to creep through the wall that I had built around my heart. Natural revelation revealed my sin and caused me to doubt the unitarian message that sin did not matter. This burgeoning awareness reminded me of one of my favorite dead white guys.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 A.D.) believed that natural law led to natural moral awareness. Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) through a Christian lens in the same way that St. Augustine (354–430 A.D.) read Plato (422–347 B.C.). I found Aquinas to be one of the best minds that ever walked the earth, and I was troubled to arrive at a conclusion that he did not. But I also knew enough about my own sins to know that some held more surface interests, while others really pulled at my heart. Sexual sin ran deep and hard for me. I needed a whole lot more than moral awareness, and I knew it, even if those around me didn’t.

But I had bigger problems than those posed by squaring off with a dead white guy, even one for whom I felt affection. Every time I heard a Christian in my church declare natural law as the trump card to end the problem of homosexual sex, I just wanted to scream. Do you have any idea how many times people have told me that the Bible made Adam for Eve, not Adam for Steve? If I had a nickel for each time, I would be a millionaire! I could not understand why people in my church were so convinced by this argument. Adam and Steve did not rock my boat in the least bit.

Natural law is effective biblical ethics and public policy, but it is an incomplete pastoral instrument, because natural law is not the gospel. When we preach the gospel, we preach the promise of a new life, new mind, new hope, new purpose, new union with Christ, new company of the Holy Spirit, new pardon of sin, new affinity for repentance and closeness with God, new love of the law, new ability to obey, new understanding of why God demands chastity outside of marriage and fidelity inside of marriage, new patience with people who do not yet know Jesus, new perspectives of suffering and affliction, addiction and change, new hatred of our own sin and patience with the sin of others, new responsibilities, new heartaches, new friendships, a new family from within the body of Christ, new allegiances, new dangers, and new grace. I needed the expulsive love of my risen Savior to whisper in my ear that my burgeoning conviction of sin was truer than what my flesh craved.

Through the power of the gospel, it became clear that God’s provision of salvation required that I understand from His point of view a biblical sexual ethic. Because God in Jesus Christ was my Savior and friend, I realized that I needed to take the time to really get to know Him. I needed to steep myself in the means of grace and wean myself from the world. And God used natural revelation to reveal my sin in this way: my knee-jerk response to creation ordinances revealed to me that I was resistant to know God. And that was sin. So I committed myself to study these ordinances. It became clear that marriage between a man and woman was by God’s design. It also seemed clear that God did not design everyone for marriage. Natural revelation told me what God required, but without gospel grace, I could no more live out these Christian ethics than I could walk on water.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is a full-time homeschool mother, pastor’s wife, and author of The Secret Thoughts of An Unlikely Convert. She is married to Kent Butterfield, pastor of the First RPC of Durham, N.C. She also wrote Openness Unhindered for me the most the most helpful book yet on homosexuality.