Dr Radner argues that same-sex marriage is still wrong; and it

Same-Sex Marriage Is Still Wrong; And It’s Getting Wronger Every Day

by Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner
Wednesday, July 17th, 2013

(This is an edited version of the longer article published with permission on Anglican Communion Institute website)

The unexpectedly rapid civil acceptance of same-sex marriage in the West may lead one to imagine that the issue is somehow already settled. Whatever doubts one may have had, they have been swept away by the overwhelming flood of changed public opinion. Fait accompli. Traditional Christians must simply step aside now.

Such a judgment would be a mistake. Indeed, far from the matter being settled, at least form a Christian perspective it has hardly been engaged, despite claims to the contrary by proponents of same-sex marriage. The question of a “slippery slope” is hardly a fallacy here, for in this case we have a historical track-record of legal advocacy and movement that stands as quite rational “evidence” for the slope’s existence.

But here we are: changes to “marriage canons” and Prayer Books are now in the works. And because the arguments have been unaddressed, they also remain potentially open to persuasive reordering. Traditional Christians should not, therefore, think that they have “lost” the argument. They have not yet been engaged, and it is possible to press for the truth openly and therefore effectively – indeed we are responsible for doing so.

Let me summarize where it seems to me the public arguments for same-sex marriage in the Church have in fact arrived – basically, a heap of unsubstantiated assertions that are, in their ensemble, incoherent. Indeed, it is both important and sad to note that forceful assertion rather than careful argument is now the way TEC carries on most of its business.

1. Scripture

Forceful assertion unaccompanied by convincing argument has proved to be the modus operandi for the advocates of change. For one thing, the Bible offers several rather pointed prohibitions to homosexual acts. This has, with reluctance, been an immovable challenge to advocates. True, these prohibitions are not numerous, but they occur in both the Old and New Testaments. In addition, the Bible is suffused with a vast, rich, and interconnected fabric of heterosexual marriage imagery, and explicit discussion, much of it deeply charged theologically.

The basic approach to these facts by advocates of change has been to press, theoretically, for an interpretive method of Scriptural reading that stresses historical discontinuities and cultural relativism. In brief: whatever the Bible says about sexuality, sexual relations, marriage, etc., is fundamentally irrelevant to the current life of human beings in the Church. Rather, it is shaped by cultural outlooks and social practices that are distant from us and from our understandings. Christian attitudes towards sexuality today, therefore, must be shaped by something other than the “commands” or sanctions of Scripture’s explicit discussion of sex.

Here we must raise the first objection to those who have assumed the argument is over. For in fact, all these attempts at asserted historical cultural divides, between the minds of “biblical authors” and contemporary moral understandings, are nothing but speculation.

From the historian’s point of view, they are founded on the thinnest of evidence, if any at all. We know nothing of the “authors” of the Bible. Further, we know very little about their “cultures” other than what we have in the Bible itself. What it might mean to understand how people in the past “think” – let alone people we do not know! – is a task fraught with irresolvable difficulties. The practice of historical word-study has been shown, except within very tight parameters (which we do not have with the Biblical text) to be wildly misleading. In short, from a purely social-historical perspective, the entire project of arguing the same-sex issue on the basis of human discontinuities, especially those purportedly evident in the biblical text, is methodologically bogus. Believe none of it, because none of it is provable, and much of it is highly improbable on a purely historical basis.

One might, of course, note a central contradiction that same-sex advocates have accepted in all of this. For they have also tended to argue on behalf of profound continuities in human sexual orientation: people’s sexualities are stable, embedded, and consistent across cultures and epochs. There have “always been” large numbers of gay persons and so on. How this conviction lines up with scriptural-cultural relativism is not clear. What it demands, from this perspective, is a strong notion of “progress”, in human knowledge , moral fiber and sensitivity. That is, in this case the “divide” is one, finally, of the heart and spirit, not really of culture at all: today, we are more compassionate, more open, just, and the rest. We are, in short, “better” people than before, better, certainly, than the “authors” of Leviticus or than Paul. Needless to say, this is a difficult claim to make in the wake of what we know about contemporary human behavior.

In any case, the claims of the historical relativists with respect to the Bible are, to this point, simply unsupported by any commonly accepted method. And these claims, as a whole, not only beg the question of what the Bible “is” in with respect to the Christian Church’s life, they press the question insistently. In Anglicanism, we are (or were) agreed that Scripture is the “rule and ultimate standard of faith”. But how this is the case has not been addressed by same-sex advocates in any common fashion, if in any fashion at all. Don’t be fooled: the exegetical job simply has not been done by advocates of change.

2. Science

One of the elements in the historical relativist argument is that we “now know more” than in “biblical times” about sexuality. This is usually linked to the progress of scientific knowledge. But what has “science” told us in this realm? Same-sex marriage advocates in TEC’s Theology Commission chose to eschew the “findings of science” in their discussion, and well they might have, for scientific studies about sexuality have in fact offered little of solid or commonly accepted evidence for single theories. The search for genetic structures that directly determine sexual feelings and orientations has been frustrated. Notorious studies of twins have failed to gain methodological acceptance. Psychological theories, obviously, are wildly divergent and now politically unpopular (though still hovering about in many corners, and not only of the Freudian variety). Most scientists agree – though without any precise and synthetic evidentiary frameworks to back them up – that genetics plays a key role in sexual development, but they also agree that social location is deeply important. How the two relate is completely unknown, and recent studies regarding the reality of neural “plasticity” have only made this matter more murky (as well as casting a shadow on the simple claim that “God made us this way”). As one adolescent psychiatrist told me, “we are in the scientific Dark Ages” on this topic, much like cosmology was in 1400. It’s a sobering thought in the face of irresponsible claims to the contrary.

3. Philosophy:

If not exegesis or science, what in fact lies behind the claim that same-sex marriage has a compelling rationale? This is an important question. At the very least, we can say that people go forward in their decisions, at least if they do so deliberately, with an underlying and informing philosophy. When it comes to same-sexuality, including same-sex marriage, there are no doubt many informing philosophies at work. It is important to realize that many of these are often incompatible amongst themselves.

I suspect, however, that there is one philosophy that is more commonly held than many, especially among younger people. It is what I would call “benign individualism”. In religious terms this fits with what some have dubbed “therapeutic deism”, the notion that God’s nature is to provide a general context for our selves’ individual comfort. At its base, it is a conviction that individuals are good, and that their goodness demands self-affirmation and expression. Politically, it views society’s purpose in terms of permitting, encouraging, and protecting this affirmation. Anybody can be anything they want to be. Indeed, anyone can be anything they want to call themselves, as long as it “doesn’t hurt anybody else”. And we should help each other do this.

This isn’t a particularly well-formed “philosophy”, to be sure. It is minimalist and derives from the mixed dregs of a pot-pourri of inherited cultural-political attitudes. Still, it is well-engrained, with Facebook and YouTube providing iconic frames for self-presentation, of every kind and in what (despite worries over cyber-bullying and predation) most people believe to be intrinsically benign contexts. Watch me play the guitar (poorly)! See how I can say the most silly things and get away with it! Listen to my poetry (please)! Notice the funny things I’m doing with my body!

The philosophy of benign individualism, is incoherent, or at least seriously incomplete on several fronts. Self-affirmation is not universally upheld in many realms. E. g., in the sexual realm, society firmly rejects pedophilia – although we know cultures have had different views of this, from the Greeks in terms of homosexual engagement [whence the contemporary NAMBLA group] to the marriage of children. We can rightly ask: what age is appropriate for “reason” or “responsible” freedom of sexual self-expression? What makes “sex” “consensual”? What are the lines within which sexual behavior “doesn’t hurt any one” and outside of which it does? The bottom line is that, however much self-expression is valued, all societies impose order on these matters. Where does it come from? Some larger meta-philosophy?

At the moment, such an overarching philosophical framework no longer exists in common. And it certainly has not been articulated in any clear way by advocates for same-sex marriage. In our society, such order has emerged by default from or been imposed by largely commercial dynamics – via music, film/TV, internet, social media. These are money-making ventures.

It is true that Christians have traced disordered lives to the universally present disorders of individual human hearts, rather than primarily to social and economic “forces”. But Christians have also always understood, as Scripture confirms, the powerful effect of formation, especially upon the young. Eli does not escape the judgment God brings upon his sons! And it is odd to see how insouciantly the overarching “philosophy of sexuality” has been so easily handed over to the Eli’s of the market.

Just here we see how the “benignity” issue remains a thorn. “I am a gay man. I love another man. I want to be married to this other man. Gay marriage doesn’t hurt anybody.” How is the benign defined, so that it “doesn’t hurt anybody”? Who is defining it? How do we know? Back to science and social science: we don’t! Hence, all that is left are the dynamics of the market-place, and the putative philosophical claims are shown to be tied to nothing but the powers of commercial interests.Ideas have been marginalized, and in fact have slipped out the back door altogether.

4. A Christian Understanding of Sexuality

This is not the place for a substantive discussion of what, in the face of the empty “arguments” for same-sex marriage, ought to be a genuinely Christian alternative. But it is worth sketching that alternative from one perspective, however compactly.

First, we might ask, is there a “Christian” perspective here? In light of disagreements about scriptural exegesis, and the thinness of science, and the contestability of informing philosophies, should we not just say that everyone chooses their informing vision arbitrarily, and thus all that is left are the often mysterious manipulations of the levers of social power?

The social philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has argued that human beings order much of their common life in response to the inescapable fate of death. For most of the world’s history, the usual form of this response was to achieve some kind of “immortality” through procreation, the leaving behind of children for the future, and Bauman places traditional Christianity within this philosophical matrix. What we have today in the West, he says, is a shift in which a sense of immortality is now grasped in the moment, the unextended experience of “now” – pleasure, self-expression, and so on. Understandings of sexuality will emerge from this difference, and procreation will give way to sentiments of immediate gratification. This isn’t a question of who is right. Simply take your pick. And social dynamics will see to it that one is more pickable than the other.

For Christians have never understood their necessary encounter with mortality as resolved through procreation as an escape or genetic necessity. Just the opposite: procreation, given within the primordial shape of our humanness, leads us more fully into the reality of mortality and into its divine meaning and outcome. To be a mortal human being is to be born to parents, and to die in the wake of the struggle for familial generativity. It is how one does this that determines the character of a life.

So, the Christian view is not “immortality through procreation”, but more starkly, “suffering procreative love”. Suffering, in the full sense of receiving and bearing, of patience and yes, even of pain. It is just this line that connects creation, Fall, and the free redemptive act of God in Christ, that draws itself out through the renewed lives of Christian women and men. It is just this line that connects the outline of Genesis’ opening, Israel’s calling and fate, and the final vision of Revelation’s divine marriage. The love of human beings one for another creates new life through sexual coupling, and this love is nurtured and lost in remarkable ways, such that only the grace of God, given in the body of Jesus crucified and risen, uncovers its final beauty and meaning, in an act that heals.

This outlook has proven itself – and I believe it is provable textually in biblical and traditional terms – remarkably synthetic and coherent of Scriptural and ecclesial realities over the centuries. It has made sense, not just of the world for this or that people in this or that time; but it has done so for a “catholic” range of life, and in doing so has made sense of the Christian Gospel as it was given and proclaimed in diverse places and times, and as written within the whole of the Scriptures.

Further, it explains the shape of the Church’s explicit teaching and ordering of life over the centuries as well. The suffering of procreative love, after all, has social implications. It is not simply a set of ideas. Socially, it implies – and has generally upheld — a broad, yet defined, framework of mores, within which there are a range of experiential realities. These have included, centrally, heterosexual marriage, the demand for fidelity and stability, the begetting and raising of children, the responsibilities of husbands and wives, and of parents for their children, and so on. But the social frameworks for the suffering of procreative love are vital precisely as they permit suffering: the suffering of infidelities, abandonments, childless marriages, divorce, and the rest. It is not that these elements are goods, but rather that they come upon us through sin and must be borne faithfully.

For Augustine, marriage was about three things: begetting children, faith, and the sacrament, in that order. This is a conclusion he comes to and insists upon, even after contorted discussions of Old Testament vs. New Testament times, the population of the world, the nature of Paradise, and so on. It is based, as he opens his famous treatise on “The Good of Marriage”, upon the fact that we are all descendents of Adam and Eve, “one race” joined through the character of procreation. But not procreation alone; procreation that is bound to faith and sacramental grace, each of which reflect the realities of God’s own suffering love in Christ, and that finally found the “society” of human life itself. To have children as a husband and wife, suffering in love their generation and mortal fate, is to reflect the “shadow” or figure of God’s act in creating us and redeeming us.

Warning, hope, and realism together on this matter means that traditional Christians cannot and must not consign themselves to an easy acceptance of the shifting status quo on same-sex marriage. We must continue to speak articulately, to teach faithfully, to challenge energetically, and to accept the consequences of our commitments on this score. We can no longer rely simply on our intuitions, let along our institutions, whose strength ebbs and flows and whose form fluctuates and changes; nor must we allow others to do the same.