I spent years wrestling with Romans 1 and what it actually says about homosexuality and eternal punishment. What I discovered challenged everything I thought I knew about Paul’s letters and how we read scripture.
The conversation usually starts the same way: someone quotes Romans 1, declares that homosexuals are going to hell, and considers the matter settled. But here’s what struck me when I actually studied Paul’s writings: he never mentions hell. Not once.
I mean this literally. Paul wrote roughly half the New Testament, and the word “hell” appears zero times in his letters. The Greek language has three words that English Bibles translate as “hell”: Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus. Paul uses none of them. Not in Romans 1, not in the entire book of Romans, not anywhere in his epistles.
This absence becomes even more significant when you look at how Paul actually handled serious sexual misconduct in his communities. In 1 Corinthians 5, he addresses what he considered a grievous sexual sin. His response? “Deliver him to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his soul may be saved in the day of the Lord.” The goal was restoration and ultimate salvation, not eternal damnation.
Think about that for a moment. When Paul confronted what he saw as the worst sexual behavior in his churches, his prescription aimed at saving the person’s soul, not condemning it forever. If Paul believed certain sexual behaviors automatically sentenced people to eternal torment, why would he prescribe a remedy designed to save them?
The second issue runs even deeper and challenges how we approach these texts altogether. We throw around the phrase “the word of God says” as if the Bible calls itself by that title. It doesn’t. The phrase “word of God” as a synonym for scripture is a later innovation, something that developed after the biblical texts were written.
This matters because when someone says “the word of God condemns homosexuals to hell,” they’re making two moves that aren’t actually biblical. First, they’re using a title for scripture that scripture never uses for itself. Second, they’re inserting a concept (hell) that the author they’re quoting (Paul) never employed.
I’m not arguing here about what Paul thought about same-sex relationships or what modern Christians should believe. I’m simply pointing out that the specific claim—that Paul in Romans 1 condemns homosexuals to hell—fails on its own terms. Paul didn’t write about hell. The text doesn’t say what people claim it says.
These discoveries forced me to reconsider how confidently we make declarations about what the Bible “clearly teaches.” When our strongest assertions rely on concepts absent from the actual text, we need to pause and reconsider. The real Paul, the historical Paul who wrote these letters, had a theological framework that didn’t include hell as a destination for anyone, regardless of their sexual practices.
Understanding this changed how I read Paul entirely. Instead of seeing him as the eternal prosecutor, condemning people to infinite punishment, I began to see someone whose ultimate concern was always restoration, always salvation, always bringing people back into right relationship. Even when addressing behaviors he opposed, Paul’s focus remained on redemption, not damnation.
The implications extend far beyond this single issue. How many of our theological certainties rest on similar foundations—on words never used, concepts never expressed, connections never made by the original authors? How often do we read our own theological constructs back into texts that were operating with entirely different categories?
These aren’t comfortable questions, but they’re necessary ones. The integrity of our reading demands that we let Paul be Paul, not force him to be the spokesman for theological positions developed centuries after his death. When we do that, we find a more complex, more interesting, and ultimately more hopeful message than the simplified condemnations we often attribute to him.