not tolerate homosexuality, became the proof of manhood.
Paul named the Jew s the enemy of Christ, of Christianity, and
of Paul. He emphasized the Jew ish character, which he invented:
legalistic, intellectual, socially tolerant of sin, intellectually arrogant in putting law over revelation and faith, lost to Christ through intellection and abstraction and legalism and social liberalism, having a false relationship to God (no longer God’s people).
Paul was not talking about some Jews who did this and some Jew s
who did that; Paul was talking about
It was especially important for Paul, in getting power, to change
the perception of what Jew ish law was and how it functioned.
Turning something holy, from God, into something cultural, the
work of a group of corrupt men, is to turn the absolute into the
relative. A nything cultural can be changed or abandoned or manipulated. The people whose law begins to represent culture, not divinity, are more imperiled than they were because their status depends on the status of culture in general in any given society: the
infamous “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”
denotes how low the status of culture can be with obvious consequences to those who represent it. Also, unless the law is made concrete because people obey it, it is abstract: and the abstraction
of Jewish law became, in Paul’s rhetoric, a major synonym for sin;
in a sense, concentrating on the abstraction of the law literally
turned intellection (more abstraction) into sin. What was not faith
in Christ was Jewish stuff: abstract laws, tolerance of sin, law and
writing and thinking as cultural diversions from the true faith.
What does it mean that Paul especially concentrates on the sin of
homosexuality in relation to the Jews and their law: the homosexual Greeks were at the pinnacle of culture five centuries before the birth of Christ—reading, writing, and ideas were their domain;
Paul passed the mantle of high culture to the Jews after the demise
of Greek culture—law substituted for both dialogue and tragedy.
Culture, through Paul’s agency, came to mean both homosexuals
(the Greek heritage) and Jews (the law as a basis for culture). For
hundreds of centuries, believing Christians have committed mass
murders, pogroms, vast persecutions, crafted and enforced systems
of civil and religious law so vicious and discriminatory that Jews
have been prohibited from owning land, denied citizenship and all
manner of civil rights, and even been defined as subhuman: sexual
intercourse with them has been regarded as a form of bestiality. In
at least two genocides of indescribable cruelty, both Jews and homosexuals were searched for, found, and killed: the Inquisition and the Holocaust.
The suffering of the Jews, the seemingly endless attempt to
purge the Jew from history and from society by driving him out or
exterminating him, has not made the Jews good. Jews remain human, to the astonishment of everyone, including Jews. But even more shocking to Christians is the undeniable fact that persecution
has not made Jews into Christians. As one liberal Christian leader
said on Sunday-morning television: we thought the Jews would
wither away; we have to face the fact that the Jews are still with us
and that even after the Holocaust there are still Jews who cling to
their identity as Jews; those of us who thought that conversion was
the answer to the Jewish problem have to face the fact that we
were wrong; we are going to have accept the fact that these are
