God and Gay Marriage
This is an essay cobbled together from various Usenet posts in response to questions about the Christian church's behaviour surrounding gay marriage.
I finally decided to write something about the current crisis, if you'd like to call it that, in the Anglican church. I know I'm writing mainly for an audience of non-Christians trying to understand what all the fuss is about. Now I know that a lot of the problem comes when people use Biblical quotes and/or principles for their own benefit, and you'd be right to catch me out in doing that. So I have a problem here, in that if I quote individual verses, I can rightly be accused of taking them out of context, but if I give an overarching view of the whole thing, I can rightly be accused of not being specific. I shall try to steer a middle course. I shall probably fail, but I hope you're interested in the journey as much as the destination.
The other thing I need to say up-front is that I don't have all the answers. I don't have a great revelation from God about all this that I'm trying to lay down and solve the problem once and for all, and I suspect you wouldn't be interested in it if I did. I'm just trying to set out, as I've set out before, how a thinking Christian approaches the whole issue, thinks through the various sides involved, and tries to see God's perspective on this, without swallowing someone else's prejudices wholesale, or being too dogmatic about it. I don't do normative theology. That would be to make the mistake of thinking that Christianity is a religion, which it isn't. But we'll get onto that in a minute.
I guess I'd better start with the Bible, though, it being God's word and all. Don't get me wrong, I'm not being flippant; I place huge emphasis on the Bible - but only if it's taken as a whole guide to understanding God's character, rather as being a source of cheap debating points. People can go back and forth about this verse or that verse, but the key Biblical principle for Christians really ought to be what Jesus says about the issue. If Jesus really is God made flesh, then anything he says about marriage is probably worth listening to. And the key text there is Matthew 19. The thing with Jesus, though, is that, then as now, he tends to address the issues of the day in ways that the religious leaders don't expect at all. He's countercultural.
So we look at Matthew 19, and specifically the discussion with the disciples, and we find that Jesus is spot on. OK, he starts with a controversial statement: "Look, if you're going to marry, it needs to be between one man and one woman, and you should not divorce apart from for reasons of adultery." That's going to cause problems. But you know, Jesus knew it was going to cause problems, because he goes on, as I read it: "Yes, quite a lot of people are going to have serious problems with this idea, for reasons of nature, nurture or even religious obligation." So far, so abundantly clear.
What about the Old Testament, and that niggly little verse in Leviticus. The only reason people drag this up these days is not because they're interested in the Jewish Law (which Christians are explictly freed from, because Christianity isn't a religion, but we'll come to that in a moment) but because they want to lay a trick question.
What they would have me believe is that, in order to be "consistent", I either need to be in favour of gay marriage or I agree to being stoned for wearing polycotton shirts and eating shellfish, because obviously there's simply no difference between desert hygiene principles and moral codes. And then then they get to ask who decides which is moral code and which is hygiene law, and I start to need a radical way out of the discussion.
Which is convenient, because Christianity is a radical solution. It doesn't have any moral laws. I'd be happy to get rid of the whole of the OT. The minute Christianity becomes dependent on legalistic rule-observation is when it stops being a relationship with God and starts being a religion. Being a religion was never in the game plan. (God so loved the world that sent his Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life. And that's it, basically, the whole Gospel. Notice anything about rules in there?)
Apologies for the history lesson, but the inevitable happened pretty early on, at the council of Jerusalem. Peter had been next to Jesus the whole time, and so he got the plot ("Now therefore why make ye trial of God, that ye should put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in like manner as they.") and had Paul got hit very hard with the holy stick, and so he got the plot too ("All things are permissible for me, but not all things are beneficial") but James really lost it, and managed to persuade a majority of the other delegates too, so the Church went on to make its first of many mistakes: Oh, we shouldn't make these Gentiles follow the whole Law, but you know, they shouldn't do this, and they shouldn't do that, and they shouldn't do the other.
The idea that Christianity is based on what rules you keep pretty much came out of that, and things haven't really got that much better since. The story of the Christian church is about people being only human and somehow God using them despite it all.
But if you don't have any moral laws or codes, what can the Christian's stand on gay marriage be?
Here's the analogy I use. It's only an analogy, and all analogies have problems, but it's good enough. The new covenant with God, that thing which distinguishes Christians from Jews, is a bit like a marriage covenant. Or is it the other way around? I keep forgetting.
Anyway, when you get married, you make a series of vows. Your marriage does not stand or fall based on whether or not you keep those vows; it stands or falls based on whether or not you consistently do things that you know pisses your spouse off. It's pretty much impossible to go on with a marriage without pissing your spouse off, so at times you need to ask forgiveness and put the relationship back on the rails. But for the most part, you try not to do things that you believe to be hateful or harmful to your other half. This is not because you've promised to do this and are just following the vows to the letter, but because there's presumably some love involved somewhere. The vows are not an end in themselves. They are the formalization of a love relationship.
I believe it's up to the Christian to use the guidelines as indications of the sort of thing that pisses God off, along with the teachings of Jesus as God-with-us and the witness of the Holy Spirit. Like any relationship, it's a learning process.
Now when it comes to gay marriage inside the church, there are Christians like Gene Robinson who believe that they can have a gay relationship and that doesn't piss God off. If it doesn't impede their relationship with God, then great. I have no problem with it. But on the other hand, a lot of Christians over the years who've done some of that learning and listened to the Holy Spirit and know God really well believe that they have learnt that it does piss God off. Based on my experience of a relationship with God, gay marriage doesn't seem like the sort of thing He'd be OK with. But I can only speak for myself in that. I can't tell you what the rules are, because there are no rules.
If I have a problem with the way the Episcopalians are going about things, it's not because of their doctrines, but because of their unilateralism that is very close to undermining the unity of the Anglican communion. Jesus left us very little normative theology. He did, though, encourage us to be united in whatever we did with that theology. Ordaining a gay bishop was particularly problematic because it was done deliberately when the Communion had decided on a policy of patiently sitting down and talking to each other about this, and this didn't seem to be going the way the progressives wanted it to. Rather than waiting for a compromise in the name of love for each other, they engaged in a course of action that was guaranteed to be provocative and cause outrage. It could have been about anything. Ten years ago it would have been the ordination of women. This time around, it happened to be about homosexuality.
The problem is that this isn't a satisfactory answer for most people. I'm being too easy going. I haven't said what I really think about the issue. This is because humans, and particularly Westerners, have a tendency toward black and white issues. They like to be able to point to a verse and say "See, I told you". I know, because I find myself doing it sometimes. I try not to, and I'm doing so less, but I still do it. It's a temptation. But the more I work with Japanese Christians the more I'm coming to the opinion that this is purely a Western thing; the Japanese, who are happier being feeling-driven rather than rules-driven have no problem feeling their way around a relationship. And that's what Christianity's about; not mindlessly following rules, but living in such a way as to please the living God. It's a relationship, with all the vagueness and mistakes that that entails.
But, to be honest, I would rather side-step the issue entirely. (Which I'm sure will add more fuel to the complaints that I'm havering.) To see the issue as a question of either homophobia or human rights is to miss a much bigger issue in the life of the Christian, or of anyone making any kind of commitment. This is a bigger issue. It's an issue of an individual's attitude towards the sovereignty of God.
You see, in contrast to what some people think about "faith", I believe that people who make a commitment should do so with their eyes open, in full knowledge of what that is going to entail. If it is going to entail something that they disagree with, then something is going to give. Faith is not walking into something blindfolded; it is believing something based on the evidence, and then working out what the consequences of that are for you.
Let's stick with the homosexuality example, but as long as you remember that the principle has wider application. Let's say you're a gay man looking into Christianity, and you happen to know that the church has, throughout its two thousand year history, been reasonably uniequivocal in the opinion that homosexual activity does not help the believer's relationship with God. You've kind of got to think about that. You can't just sail into Christianity without facing it head-on at some point.
And at that point, you have three possible attitudes:
- "I think this Christianity thing is absolutely right, and so I'm prepared to change the way I live, if necessary, to accommodate it."
- "I think this Christianity thing looks fine, but I'm not prepared to give up what I believe to be an OK thing, so I can't in good faith align myself with it."
- "I think this Christianity thing is absolutely right, but I'm not prepared to let it affect the areas of my life I believe to be important to me."
Note that we're talking about attitudes here. Whether or not the believer in case 1 actually needs to change the way he lives is immaterial. He may commit to relationship with God and discover that he's absolutely fine being in a gay marriage. That might happen. I don't care, though. We're talking about a wider application. We're talking about attitude. The important thing for me is that he demonstrated an attitude of submission to God. That's not even a prerequisite for salvation; I just think it demonstrates he understands the nature of the commitment. That's going into it eyes open.
Attitudes 1 and 2 I have the utmost respect for. Attitude 3 I have absolutely no respect for. This is the "double-minded man" Paul speaks about. (Hey, I'd been doing well avoiding quoting Paul until then.) If God is God, then you have no right to tell Him what's really important. Sorry.
Let's move to the final trick question, which tries to pin me down again. Do I believe that someone else being in a gay marriage impedes their relationship with God?
It's a trick question because I either judge my fellow man, something Jesus said He doesn't like, or I refuse to take an interest in someone else's relationship with God. And I can't refuse, because I am my brother's keeper. Isolationism is a bad idea no matter who practices it. But if I can't refuse to get involved, I can choose how I get involved. As I've said, I think the homosexuality issue is a smokescreen. I have more important things to deal with.
My job is to ensure that when the time for system shutdown arrives, as many Japanese people have accounts on the new machine as possible. From that point of view, the gay marriage issue is not only irrelevant but is an annoying distraction from the real work.
It may be a big deal. It is a big deal, because people are making it a big deal. But there are the bigger deals. Get the bigger deals sorted out, and the smaller deals will take care of themselves.