Friday 28 March 2014

Same Sex Marriage - gospel answers to some common questions

But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female'. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one.” 
Jesus - Mark 10:6-8

Whatever the law of the land might say, in these words Jesus defines Christian marriage as the union of one man and one woman for life.  In the Bible marriage is about more than a commitment that two people make to each other.  It is about two (who are different) coming together in their differences, like a nut and a bolt, to form a union in which they are serve the purposes of God – not least by being able to nurture children.

Does that mean that the God of the Bible doesn’t love gay people?
Jesus says “whoever comes to me I will never drive away” (John 6:37).  He does not say “whoever comes to me – apart from if you are gay – I will never drive away.”   The God of the Bible is not prejudiced.  Whoever we are, whatever our story, whatever we have done, whatever anyone has done to us, God loves us.  He loves gay people every bit as much as he loves anyone else.

But if God loves gay people, why does the Bible speak against homosexual practice?
The conviction of the Bible is that the God who is revealed in Jesus is the God who made us and who knows more about what is good for us than we do.  It is precisely because He loves us and wants the best for us that He calls us to follow His good ways.  At the heart of the experience of being a Christian is learning to submit to God as God and learning to trust that He is not just God, but that His ways are good. I know that for someone who is not a Christian it is very hard to see why anyone would want to do that.  It sounds like chains.  But Christians want to testify to how God’s ways are good; far from being chains His ways set us free to be the people we were created to be.

Why are Christians so hostile to the gay community?
There is no place for the sort of self-righteous outrage that you sometimes hear from those who claim to be Christians.  That simply doesn’t fit with the good news of Jesus, which tells us that we are all in the same boat, all equally in need of Jesus’ gracious rescue.  Those who truly understand that good news will be marked not by self-righteousness, but by humility.  The trouble is, it is really hard to communicate what the Bible says about homosexual practice without being misheard.  If, when asked, I say that the Bible says that homosexual practice is wrong I will, inevitably, be heard to be someone who hates gay people.  I long for my non-Christian friends to understand that my theological convictions don’t express my personal hang-ups.  I am convinced that there is a God who created us, whose ways are good and who has made those ways known in the Bible.  So when I say that the Bible teaches that homosexual practice is wrong, it is not because I hate gay people.  It is actually because I love them and long for them to come to know the God who loves them.  In discussions I always try and explain my motives, I try and get my friends to see what might make a Christian tick.  But I recognise that in this area it is very hard for them to believe that we are motivated by love.  That is why we must show them that we love them by how we treat them.

What gives you the right to say what is right and what is wrong?
What gives anyone the right?  That is, in debates like this we are pushed back to questions about the basis for morality.  So I will always say, “I say this on the basis of my conviction that there is a God who made us and has told us what is right and wrong.  On what basis do you say what is right and wrong?”  Is morality just what seems right to me?  (Which would be kind of arrogant).  Is it based on what the majority think? (What if the majority want to send the minority to concentration camps?).  Is it based on that which does least harm to others? (Whose definition of harm do we work with – the Stasi thought they were doing what was best for the people of East Germany).  Is it all culturally relative? (But when we see a woman tortured in a faraway country, we don’t just shrug our shoulders and say, “That’s how they do things in that culture.”)   Our whole notion of human rights turns on an understanding of justice as something which is universal.  But it seems to me that our view of what it is it to be human (“an accidental collocation of atoms”) does not give us a foundation for the sort of justice that we long for.  If all that I do is essentially chemically determined, what do we even mean when we talk about what Ishould do or should not do?  I just do what I do.   So the very fact that we are talking about right and wrong and matters of justice pushes us to establish a foundation for those discussions.  The Christian argues that the foundation for morality is the God of justice.  My friends may not agree with that foundation, but I want to try and show them that it is at least coherent and (politely) want to ask them on what basis they decide right and wrong – and push them to see the inconsistency in championing justice if the universe is as they describe it - godless and therefore amoral.

Why does the church think it can impose its values on the state?
I sympathise with this objection.  Sometimes the church sounds as though we want non-Christians to behave in a Christian way merely so that life is more comfortable for Christians.  Other times the church sounds like changing the law is the way to win the nation for Jesus.  I want my friends to know that Christianity is not a set of laws imposed from outside.  It is about a miracle that God does in our hearts to bring us into a living relationship with Him as our Father. That means that that greatest way for Christians to influence our country is for local churches to witness, by word and deed, to the reality of Jesus. If we want the nation to understand, for example, God’s view of marriage, then most of all we need Christians to model God’s view of marriage and show the world how beautiful it is.  If we are going to commend marriage we are also need local churches to be the sort of communities where those who are not married feel part of a wider family, where they are protected from our culture’s overwhelming pressure to pair up.

That said, we live in a democracy and have a democratic right to get involved in the country’s legal processes.  Laws don’t just reflect a culture, they shape it.  What should motivate us in this is not a desire to fight for our own rights, but a conviction that God’s ways are good and that when a country turns against God’s ways it will be harmful for everyone.

But why should what two people get up to in privacy of their own home be harmful to society?
No relationship is an island. Changing the shape of marriage will change the shape of our society.  To give one example: same-sex marriage will, inevitably, open the door to more same-sex parenting.  Once we detach marriage from the moorings of biology, we will detach children from their parents.  I have heard people respond to this by saying, “If nurturing children is so central to marriage, what about the heterosexual couples who cannot have children, should their marriages be annulled?”  We tend to think in individualistic or couple-centred terms.  It is one thing to have a society in which some couples cannot have children, or one in which marriages break up, or children are put up for adoption.  It is another to structure our society in ways which will intentionally break the link between a child and either its biological father or mother.   We all know of bad experiences of heterosexual parents and can think of caring homosexual couples.  But we are only just beginning to sift through the data that analyses the social impact of the sexual revolution of the last 50 years.  Have we thought through the consequences of such a re-drawing of the landscape of family life?

But Jesus didn’t say anything about it
Jesus cites Genesis 2 as the biblical norm.  He upholds the OT teaching in every other way (think of Matthew 5:17-19).  Given that he challenges the religion of his day in so many ways, his silence speaks of his accepting the prevailing view (summed up in his quoting Genesis 2 in Mark 10)

You say God forbids homosexual practice yet when was the last time you sacrificed a goat?  Doesn’t that just show that you pick and choose the Bible texts that fuel your prejudice? 
The NT explicitly says that the rituals of Israel point forward to Jesus.  For example, in the OT God is teaching his people the principle that he will provide a sacrifice to pay for their sins.  By the time of the NT, Jesus is seen as the one who fulfils the pattern set out in the OT.  His is the sacrifice that all the OT sacrifices pointed to and his sacrifice pays for sin once and for all.  That is why there is no longer the need to sacrifice goats.  On the other hand, when it comes to sexual ethics, Jesus intensifies the OT’s call for purity and obedience to God’s ways, promising the Holy Spirit to empower his people to walk in God’s ways to a degree that was not possible for the OT believer.   So this is not picking and choosing, it is an attempt to read the Bible in a way that is true to its intention.

The Church changed its mind about slavery, why not this?
It is true that some corners of the Church used the Bible to justify slavery, but the abolitionists did not arrive on the scene and say, “Look the Bible is out of date, we need to move on.”  No, it was the teachings of the Bible about the equality of all people that drove them to fight for the rights of slaves.  Theology is not about changing our views over time to fit with the changing culture.  Theology is about going back to the unchanging word of God.  It is true, each generation has blind spots, and there will be ways in which we are liable to misread the Bible.  But the slavery debate is not an example of the church moving on from the Bible, but going back to it.

Of course, many will laugh at the idea of basing our lives on a book of “bronze age fairy stories”.   But laughing at it is not the same as having a rational discussion about it.  The fact is that Christians think there are compelling reasons for seeing the Bible as the Word of God.  When my friends laugh at the Bible “because it’s full of inconsistencies” I always ask them which inconsistencies they have in mind.  If we are going to have a thoughtful debate, each side needs to examine the foundations upon which the other side makes its claims.  Otherwise the whole thing will collapse into “No it isn’t”, “Yes it is”, “No it isn’t”, “Yes it is”...with an increasingly ugly tone.

Isn’t opposition to gay marriage a fundamental denial of human rights? 
If I opposed the legal right for a man and a woman of an ethnic minority to be married in this country that would be racist.  In that instance I am not redefining marriage; I am barring people from it solely on the basis of the colour of their skin. But if I opposed the right for two men to marry there is something else going on.  I am not merely barring them from marriage solely on the basis of their sexuality; I am asking a legitimate question about the nature of marriage.  I think we can ask that question (as we would if a brother and sister asked to married) without being shouted down as homophobic.

Why do Christians go on about sex so much?
Actually we don’t want to.  We want to talk about Jesus.  It’s just that one of the reasons people stay well away from Jesus is because sex is such a big issue for them and they are fearful of what Jesus might ask of them in that area.  I want to say, let’s leave sex to one side, look at Jesus, get answers on who he is, and why he came.  If he is just another 1st century teacher, then what he says about sex is irrelevant.  But if he is the Son of God, who loves you so much that he laid down his life for you, to restore you to the relationship with God that you were put on this planet for, then whoever you are, wherever you are from, whatever your story, He calls you to follow him, to put your life in his hands.  And the thing is, as you follow him, you will find that He is good.  But don’t let your fears about what he might ask of you in the area of sex be a reason not to go near him.