The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), like many mainline denominations, is currently debating whether to relax its ordination standards for church officers. Specifically, the church is being asked to relax its historic standard of faithfulness in marriage or chastity in singleness for church officers, including deacons, ruling elders, and teaching elders, and, for the sake of peace and unity, to endorse practicing homosexuals and lesbians as candidates for ordination.
Throughout its history, the church universal has judged both the practice and endorsement of homosexuality to fall outside God’s expressed will for humanity. The practice of homosexuality has, consequently, disqualified persons from consideration for ordained offices in the PCUSA. Some would now urge the PCUSA to part ways from the witness of the whole church on this matter, and overthrow the common-sense understanding of Scripture and the denomination’s historic polity on this issue. They argue that the teaching of Scripture not only regarding homosexuality but sexuality in general is bound by cultural and historic norms that are no longer valid in a postmodern mindset. They interpret the freedom afforded in the gospel from the perspective of individual rights and privileges rather than as responsibilities to be conformed to the liberating image of Christ as set forth in Scripture. They want the church to join in the growing acceptance of homosexuality and lesbianism in Western culture and expand its standards of ordination to include those who desire to claim a license not permitted by Scripture.
In many respects, the controversy over homosexuality has defined the existence of the PCUSA for the past quarter-century. Should the church now compromise or abandon its rich heritage in theology, creed, and covenant in hopes of ending or lessening the divisiveness caused by this controversy? Should it concede to what some consider a practical imperative to consent to live and let live, accepting our differences and increasing our distance in order to reduce disagreement and acrimony, lest those differences rend the fabric of our unity? The answers we give to these deeply-felt issues will determine the future of our denomination.
Acknowledgment and Preservation of Truth
The lessening of the divide in our denomination and the healing of its wounds cannot be achieved by political compromise, but by reclaiming the confessional basis of the church. Church unity is not established or preserved by structural and procedural measures, but by establishing the grounds of unity in the purity of faith. Church unity begins with unity of confession, not with organizational and administrative unity. Any attempt to unite and preserve the church apart from confessional unity is to act apart from Jesus Christ as “the one Word of God, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture” as noted in The Theological Declaration of Barmen (Book of Confessions 8.11).
What is this word of God and truth of the gospel regarding human sexuality that alone is capable of healing our wounds and restoring our fellowship? We seek to understand and disclose that truth by imparting a vision of the gracious will of God and the purpose of human persons in it.
A. Male and Female as God’s Creation
The Bible begins the story of God’s dealings with humanity by proclaiming God as the creator of the universe. God is known and honored as the creator of heaven and earth (Acts 12:15). Our Confessions affirm him as the creator of all that exists.
Christian faith in God the creator is the response to the Biblical proclamation of creation. According to this proclamation, God created the human being to consist of two complementary genders, as male and female. As male and female, they are different from each other, but in this bipolarity they are God’s human creation. It belongs to the essence of being human to live either as male or as female, but also in mutual relation to one another as man and woman. The first creation account states, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). A literal translation of the original Hebrew underscores the mutual relation and unity of humanness more concretely than does the above English translation. It reads: “God created adam (=humanity) in his image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.” The second creation story tells that the female was taken from the side of the male, making her truly of Adam’s kind but at the same time completely different (Genesis 2:21f.), so that they are able to cling together and “become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). The point of both creation accounts is the same: God has created humankind in the complementarity of male and female. Each human being is either male or female, but man and woman are each other’s counterparts, two halves of a single whole.
Jesus unequivocally endorsed this design of God’s creation. In the coming kingdom of God, Mosaic rules about divorce are set aside in favor of a restoration of the basic blessing of creation. Jesus says: “From the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’. So they are no longer two but one flesh” (Mark 10:6-8).
Human life is God’s creation in the complementary structure of male and female. At its most fundamental level, it is defined by the relation and distinction of its male and female forms. While this complementary structure finds its most obvious realization in the marriage of one man and one woman, it marks all human life, including those who have chosen to remain single. It is the imprint of God’s will upon human life, for married and single people alike, that male and female are distinct from each other. But it is equally the will of the creator God that in this difference male and female are made to be related to the other, whether married or single, to live with and for the other. The rich harvest of human culture is inconceivable without the ever present force of this attraction of male and female to each other, but also of the tension that is caused by the difference between them.
The confession “We believe in God the Creator” implies the affirmation “we believe in our being created as male and female.” God the creator is honored by the thankful acceptance of God’s work that called us into being as men and women. It is our task to respect and uphold our call to be God’s creation by guarding equally the difference between us as men and women, and the wonderful bond that summons us to be each other’s mate, friend, and companion.
Homosexual practice and theory is the denial of the complementary structure of human nature expressed in the creation by God of the human being as male and female. It flees, for whatever reason, from the divine praise that lauded the creation of male and female as a work worthy to be called “very good” (Genesis 1:31), choosing instead to seek fulfillment not in the other, but in the reflection of its own self through a partner who is basically the same as the one seeking fulfillment. For that reason, homosexuality is essentially heterophobic. Homosexual theory and practice are, therefore, incompatible with the Christian confession of God the creator of male and female.
B. Reverence for the Life of Children
The biblical account of creation attributes the power of procreation to a special blessing of God. The creation of fish, birds, and animals is accompanied by God’s blessing that enables them to multiply (Genesis 1:22), and the creation of the human as male and female culminates in the sentence, “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’” (Genesis 1:28). From creation onward, the power to pass on life from generation to generation is praised and revered as a divine favor and a fulfillment of the divine will.
The capacity to procreate does not claim to give divine powers to a human couple. Fish and birds share this blessing with humans, and, together with the animals, a human pair does not reach God-like status by having children. A human life is valuable to God whether or not it is given offspring. Jesus and Paul were not married and remained childless. Hosts of God’s most dedicated servants through the centuries, both male and female, remained unmarried and produced no children. The gift of passing life on to a new generation is a gracious favor of God, not a passport to citizenship in God’s kingdom.
The gift of children, however, remains a blessing of God in the Christian community. In this community children are not incidental by-products of the love relationship that unites husband and wife. After blessing the human couple God’s first commandment is for them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), thus indicating the God-ordained causal relationship between human conjugal love and human offspring. Such offspring are welcomed, loved, and nurtured. As a gift of God, their well-being becomes a primary responsibility of their parents.
Today, there are various means to have children. From artificial insemination to adoption, methods exist to provide new life for adults that avoid the physical union of a man with a woman. But all such methods depend on the fact that human life cannot be regenerated except through the union of a male reproductive cell with a female reproductive cell. The complementarity of human nature is the precondition for the continuance of human life.
Homosexual theory and practice embraces a sexual activity that cannot reproduce life. It is, by its nature, an exercise in barrenness. The claim that homosexual acts are morally equivalent to heterosexual acts declares barrenness to be equal to life. Homosexual acts are, therefore, flights from the Christian confession of God, the creator of life.
C. Marriage and God’s Covenant
Several Old Testament prophets have spoken of God’s covenant with Israel as a marriage between God and God’s people. God stands in a relationship of husband to Israel his wife. For the prophet Hosea, the fervor of God’s love for his people is cast into language of a husband’s intense struggle for an unfaithful wife. Israel is to God a disloyal spouse who is being divorced (Hosea 2:2) because she continually runs after other lovers (Hosea 2:5). Yet God, contrary to law and custom, will restore the covenant with the divorcée. Thinking of her, his heart recoils within him and his compassion grows warm and tender (Hosea 11:8) so that he will eventually return her to him in a new covenant in which she will be called “my wife forever” (Hosea 2:19).
In the New Testament this image is transformed into the picture of Jesus Christ as the groom of his bride, the church. The analogy between a marriage on earth and the covenant of God is captured in Ephesians 5:31-32: “A man will leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and thus the two will become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church.” These words declare that God’s covenant with his people is the prototype of the covenant of marriage that unites a human couple. Christian marriage of a man and woman is thereby conferred the dignity to reflect the bond and dedication through which God chooses to be committed to the church through Christ’s love. Christian marriage is called to be an image and parable of God’s covenant with those whom he has called.
There is a world of difference between the covenant of God and his people, and the bond that unites a husband and a wife. But both prophetic language and the language of the New Testament dare to establish an analogy. God and Israel, as are Christ and the church, are simultaneously distinct and different from each other, yet they are shaped into a unity with one another that is the nerve center of their lives. This distinction and difference is not a cause of alienation and separation of one from the other. It is, rather, the very ground of a joyful and enriching life together. The same is true for the marital relationship. Husband and wife are made by God to be distinct from each other, but also ordained by God to love and serve each other in a companionship for life. No husband and no wife can do for each other what God in Christ alone can do for them. But their actions and attitudes can, and will, be inspired by Christ’s care for them so that they become, in their earthly union, images of the love of Christ for his church (Ephesians 5:29).
The advocacy of homosexual behavior as a possible Christian life-style refuses to acknowledge the theological and ethical significance of our being created as male and female. It views marriage between a man and a woman as a form of attachment that is equal to a love relationship between partners of the same gender. The existence of a love relationship does not in itself justify sexual intimacy. Like all relationships, love relationships, too, are subject to the Lordship of Christ; they cannot be defined apart from discipline and obedience, and they may not lead to sexual relationships apart from marriage between a man and a woman. Advocacy of homosexuality obscures the analogy between God’s covenant of grace and the bond of human marriage. It does harm to the Christian confession of God’s solemn commitment to the church, and to the calling of Christian couples to grow, through their union of structurally different lives, into paradigms and signs of Christ’s saving act.
D. The Love Commandment
“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,’” taught Jesus. “This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matthew 22:37-39). According to the explanation given to Jesus’ saying by the apostle Paul, the summation of the law in the love commandment is not the annulment or abrogation of the law, but the fulfillment of the law. Paul states that “one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8), and the Ten Commandments are concrete explications of what love accomplishes in crucial areas of life: “The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in the word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Romans 13:9).
Reformed teaching has been characterized from its inception by the conviction that the reception of God’s unmerited grace results in the constant amendment of life. The Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 described Christian ethics in their totality as acts of thankfulness. The question: “Since we are redeemed from our sin and its wretched consequences by grace through Christ without any merit of our own, why must we do good works?”, is given the answer: “Because just as Christ has redeemed us with his blood he also renews us with his Holy Spirit according to his own image, so that with our whole life we may show ourselves grateful to God for his goodness and that he may be glorified in us” (Book of Confessions 4.086). In the same vein the Theological Declaration of Barmen of 1934 states: “As Jesus Christ is God’s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so in the same way and with the same seriousness he is also God’s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of the world for a free, grateful service to his creatures” (Book of Confessions 8.14).
The commandment to love one’s neighbor furnishes no license to approve of every desire, either of one’s own heart or of one’s neighbor’s. Christian love is discerning. Paul insisted: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good” (Romans 12:9). We have to learn concretely what love requires in the specific decisions that are demanded of us. Our natural blindness to the liberating power of God makes it necessary that we continually learn what true love of the neighbor entails. This learning must be guided by Scripture as the Magna Charta of our liberation to genuine love. God’s commandments are the charter of Christian liberty, and in their power to set the boundaries of liberty, they instruct us in finding the ways of true and unpretentious love.
The thankful response of individuals for the forgiveness of sin in Christ’s death is to love God by obeying his commands. In the first and last references to faith in the Epistle to the Romans the apostle Paul refers to this response as “the obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5; 16:26). This obedience of faith is a call to live righteously with God, with others, and with the created order. Loving God is not limited to personal and individual ethics. It also involves the love of neighbors by desiring that they, like we, might experience Christ’s love and righteousness, and respond to both by living in love and righteousness. The duty of love requires of Christians that they seek the wholeness of their neighbors in every possible way.
Indifference toward the needs of our neighbors, whether those needs are spiritual, moral, or material, is a grave infraction of the Christian love command. The good news that “God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8) implies a duty of love that leads Christians to share the good news of the gospel and seek those who apart from the gospel do not know the salvation of Christ. Those who have accepted Christ as Lord and Savior and who through baptism have become members of the church have a special claim on this duty of love. Christians are obligated to help one another live into the fullness of the new life in Christ by proclaiming the good news of the gospel, by the celebration of worship and the sacraments, by humility and confession of sins, and where necessary by rebuke and discipline. Each of the above is commanded of Christians in Scripture.
The homosexual agenda in the church has been advanced by the thesis that the New Testament has no consistent and distinctive sexual ethics. This thesis assumes that the requirement of loving others in consensual acts of trust is the only basic guide to personal ethics in the New Testament, while all concrete elaborations of this guide are time-bound products of a dead culture. We reject this thesis because it is irreconcilable with a widely shared understanding of the love commandment and of the sanctification of the Christian individual within the Christian community that is brought about by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in us through the Word of God. Indeed, if consensual acts of love are seen to legitimate sexual activity, then not only lesbianism and homosexuality can be condoned, but also other relationships in which love and trust can be present, including sex with multiple partners, sex with close blood relatives, and even perhaps sex with children and animals.
E. Sexuality and Idolatry
Many people in the church today are asking what their duty is toward neighbors who engage in same-sex behaviors. Christians cannot avoid the unambiguous declarations of both Scripture and the confessions that such behavior violates the will of God, and that unrepentant practice of such behavior can separate those who indulge in it from the kingdom of God. “Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals (effeminate males who have sex with men), nor men who lie with a male, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9). Love of neighbor requires that Christians not lead their neighbors into such judgment, whether by practicing such sins, condoning them, or being indifferent to them. The Confession of 1967 is particularly clear that “anarchy in sexual relationships is a symptom of man’s alienation from God, his neighbor, and himself.” The Confession admonishes that, “The church, as the household of God, is called to lead men out of this alienation into the responsible freedom of the new life in Christ…. The church comes under the judgment of God and invites rejection by man when it fails to lead men and women into the full meaning of life together, or withholds the compassion of Christ from those caught in the moral confusion of our time” (Book of Confessions 9.47).
According to Scripture and our Confessions, God’s creation of the human family in its polarity of male and female is to be received with thanksgiving and honored as God’s gift. But God’s good creation can turn into chaos. The life together of men and women can change into a problem, a temptation, a burden. The Old and New Testaments do not attribute the root of this disastrous mutation from good to evil simply to weaknesses of human character or to vicissitudes of fortune. The root issue is not moral but religious. The Testaments disclose infidelity to the one God of Israel, and unfaithfulness to the one Lord Jesus Christ, as the breeding ground of human perversion that transforms the excellence of creation into a cup of poison. Sexuality deteriorates into idolatry and the veneration of false gods produces sexual perversion. The corruption of nature through corrupt religion is expressed nowhere more clearly than in Romans 1:23-24, where idolaters “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”
Idolatry is not only virulent in sexual forms. The Heidelberg Catechism defines idolatry very broadly: “It is to imagine or possess something in which to put one’s trust in place of or beside the one true God who has revealed himself in his Word” (Book of Confessions 4.095). But it is not by coincidence that Paul’s indictment of idolatry and the resulting ethical perversion is followed by his condemnation of lesbian and homosexual practice in pagan society (Rom 1:26-27). Paul’s coordination of idolatry and sexual deviancy echoes the frequent charges in the Old Testament that Israel’s infidelity to its God is tantamount to whoredom. Israel prostitutes itself by perverting the exclusive attachment to God through the adoption of nature cults, and by engaging in fertility rites that enact through human actors the procreative forces of nature.
The celebration of fertility rites and the veneration of fertility gods have all but disappeared from our religious landscape. But the elevation of sex to an almost god-like status is widespread in our culture. The lure of sexual attraction and the desire to gratify sexual drives are omnipresent. The dynamic of this impulse resides in the conscious or sub-conscious conviction that sexual fulfillment is essential to the goal of finding one’s true personhood. Sexual identity, so it is claimed, determines the true self, and the loss of this identity results in injury to one’s realization of personal worth. Knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly, defenders of homosexual practice perpetuate this cycle of sexual self-absorption. They are enmeshed in, and often captivated by, a culture in which sex decides the value of the self. A healing from this pseudo-religious disease is possible only if we can teach convincingly, and act persuasively, so as to lead ourselves back to the fundamental starting point of Christian identity. The Christian finds his or her personhood by losing it, by burying the idolatrous old self in the death of Christ, and by rising with him to a new life that receives its value and fulfillment in discipleship. The cure of our sexual ills, personally and collectively, does not come at a cheaper price.
The church has a duty to turn people from idolatry to faith in the one saving gospel and to the joyous freedom of being formed into the image of Jesus Christ. The church inherits this duty because it is the body of Christ. The Reformed Tradition rightly sees in Jesus Christ the fulfillment of the three crucial offices in the Old Testament by which God is revealed, those of prophet, priest, and king. The Apostle Paul also speaks of the church as “the body of Christ,” the corporate and contemporary presence and mission of Christ in the world. If the church is the body of Christ, and if Christ is the perfect fulfillment of the Israelite offices of prophet, priest, and king, then it is proper to apply the offices of prophet, priest, and king to the church as well.
In its prophetic role, the church proclaims the Word of God, which it understands as the Truth. By “Word of God,” the church intends first, the Incarnate Jesus Christ; second, the proclamation of the gospel; and third, the written attestation to both in Holy Scripture. The church proclaims and interprets the Word of God to particular circumstances in the church and in the world. When rightly proclaimed, the Word of God reveals both the judgment of God on sin and unrighteousness, and the mercy of God to repentant sinners. It challenges people both within and without the church to turn from idolatry to the one true God, revealed finally and forever in Jesus Christ. It calls people to repentance of sin, reception of God’s forgiveness in the gospel, and the embracing of a new and joyous life of transformation not simply to God’s will, but to the very person of his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.
In its priestly role, the church intercedes for people by offering God’s grace through the sacraments, as commanded by Christ. In its unique role of administering the sacraments, the church assures believers that in Christ their sins are forgiven and that in faith they are bound together into a new people of God, the body of Christ. The sacrament of baptism is a singular sign wherein by the washing of water believers signify that by God’s saving grace they have died to their own self-serving wills and by his redeeming power they have been raised to new and eternal life. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is a repeated sign wherein by bread and wine believers are continually reassured of their growth, protection, and inclusion into Christ’s Body by the gifts of his own body and blood. Both sacraments cleanse sinners, reconcile them to God, and empower them to embark on the joyful journey to Christ-likeness.
In its kingly office, the church governs through order and discipline. Through order and discipline the church attests to its unity and purity. Unity depends on the provenance of the Spirit, and purity rests in the protection of the Spirit. The governance of the church through order and discipline is not a repressive exercise, but rather a means of building up the faith, of maintaining believers in the faith, and of restoring and renewing them in the faith when they have fallen from it.
The three-fold offices of the church do not exist simply to establish or prolong the existence of the church, and certainly not to curtail human life. Their purpose, always and everywhere, is redemptive. They are the means by which the saving presence and work of Christ are made effective in the earthly lives of believers. They declare the promise of new and eternal life to persons caught in sin, confusion, addiction, fear, and death. The Preamble to the Rules of Discipline in the Book of Order rightly identifies the purpose of discipline not as an execution of vengeance but as an exercise of redemption in service of the great ends of the church. “The power that Jesus Christ has vested in his Church, a power manifested in the exercise of church discipline, is one for building up the body of Christ, not for destroying it, for redeeming, not for punishing.” Church discipline is the church’s exercise of an authority given by Christ for the guidance, control, and nurture of its members. It nurtures believers as they seek to submit their weak and resistant lives to the liberating transformation of the gospel. It amends and corrects the lives of believers from false paths to the One who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
As the primary way God wills to order the life of his earthly covenant community, the three-fold offices are God’s redeeming gift to and for the church. Whenever a group within the church seeks to establish an alternate polity valid for one constituency or place but not for another, the redeeming purpose of the one Lord, one faith, and one church is imperiled. The great bishop and theologian of the early church, St. Augustine, was once chided for not allowing another bishop to break from the church. “Why do you seek after us?,” he was asked. Augustine replied thus:
Who is it who seeks after you, either through the Scriptures or by the voice of the church or by the discipline of the church, except the God who dispenses mercy to you in all things? We seek you that we may find you. We love you because we want you to have life with the same intensity with which we hate your error. The purpose of our seeking is not to destroy you, although we would destroy that which destroys you. We pray that we might seek you in such a way as to find you, and be able to say with rejoicing of each of you, “He was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Augustine, Letters to Petilian, II, 37, 89).
“We pray that we might seek you in such a way as to find you, and be able to say with rejoicing of each of you, ‘He was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’” The bishop who sought to assert a parochial view of the church couched his appeal in terms of individual rights and freedoms. Augustine was convinced that when the health of the church as the redemptive community of God was at stake that appeal to individual rights and freedoms was foolish. For Augustine, the desire to separate for the sake of peace was like an errant sheep that strays from the flock: unless found, it will perish. There is no greater joy on earth, and no greater sign of health in the church, than to see those who have strayed restored to saving faith and rightful fellowship in the people of God.
In Augustine’s day it was not clear that his position would prevail. Likewise, we cannot today guarantee that faithfulness to Scripture and the ordination standards of the church throughout time and space will prevail over the attempts of those who would dismantle them. Nevertheless, we choose to stand with Augustine. Arguments and actions that do injury to the truth of the gospel cannot promote either the unity or peace of the church. We seek with unflagging zeal those who promote personal exemptions and parochial interpretations over the one God, one faith, one gospel. We pray fervently for the division in our church to be healed. We are bold to hope for the triumph of the truth of the gospel, for the truth of the gospel produces purity of faith, and purity of faith produces peace and unity in the church. We do so because it is a duty of love.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 11, No. 3 (May/Jun 2005).
