As we prepare in our presbyteries to wrestle with the emotional and difficult subject of homosexual ordination, an issue which has threatened, alas, to split our church and sunder our local communities, it is of supreme importance that we remember the one starting point which is always the sole and proper beginning for any discussion of the church’s life—the gospel of God’s grace and mercy given to us in the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Under Christ’s Lordship, we approach this issue from a position of fundamental equality and solidarity with our homosexual brothers and sisters, for all of us without exception are poor, lost sinners without hope save in the abiding mercy offered us by God in the cross of Jesus Christ. And in a church which lives by Christ’s Lordship, there can be no ultimate division into righteous and unrighteous, no looking down our noses at our errant brothers and sisters who fall short of the truth, no comfortable resting in our own righteousness, as if our own supposed obedience had supplanted Christ’s victory as the source of our hope! We are beggars at the Lord’s table one and all, wholly overcome by the power of our own sinfulness, utterly dependent upon the free grace which God offers us undeserving in the cross of Christ.
So whatever else we say about a conversation like this one, we must say first and foremost that it is a conversation among sinners who are saved by grace one and all. And that is also to say that it is a conversation which takes place between brothers and sisters under the one Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our inclusion together in the one body of Christ can and must take precedence over all the quarrels and strife which threaten to divide us. It is precisely our commitment to one another, grounded in our common desire to be faithful to Christ, that leads us to engagement, to discernment, to debate with one another, and finally to some very painful and difficult decisions.
Love and Liberation
The Christian Gospel is the joyous proclamation of God’s triumphant love for all the world, and a glorious message of liberation from our bondage to the powers of sin, slavery and death. Christ has risen victorious over every power and dominion which binds or threatens or oppresses human life and human existence. From these scriptural assertions, that God loves all people and Christ has brought liberation from bondage, one frequently hears the inference drawn that God in Christ therefore lovingly accepts homosexual lifestyles, and that fidelity to the Gospel requires solidarity with the gay liberation movement.
It is important for us as Christians that in the heat of debate we not lose sight of the fact that these foundational characterizations of the Gospel are in fact true—the Gospel is a message of love and of liberation. But that recognition does not in itself decide the issue in favor of an uncritical approval of homosexual lifestyles.
Genuine love for other people, as Christ has taught us, cannot be separated from our love of God’s truth as it relates to them. If I am poised on the brink of doing something stupid, of making a tragic mistake, of violating God’s will for my life, I like to think a person who truly loved me would not be accepting, but would rather have the courage to say, “Mark, wait a minute—you’re making a terrible mistake.” A true friend would step in and question my thinking, no matter how good and right it seemed to me. Our exercise of Christian love for one another cannot be separated from our apprehension of what is God’s will for us and for our neighbors. And real love means helping one another to discern God’s will and to live truthfully in accordance with it.
Striking in this connection is the Gospel story of Jesus’ encounter with the rich man in Mark 10:17-31 [cf. Matt 19:16-30, Luk 18:18-30]. In response to the man’s persistent questioning about the way to eternal life, the text says, “And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’” The love which Jesus here shows is no mere acceptance. It instead takes the form of a challenge—of a demanding call to a new way of life which desires above all else that the rich man should find peace in a life lived in accordance with God’s will for him. Genuine love cannot be separated from our understanding of what God desires for us and for our neighbors!
In the same way, real liberation cannot be separated from our apprehension of God’s truth and our clinging to it with all our might—“You will know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth will make you free!”[Jn 8:32] G.K. Chesterton once defined hell as the place where you get what you want. The New Testament is crystal clear that simply being free to indulge our desires without regard to God’s truth is not freedom but slavery—slavery to sin, slavery to our impulses. “Their God is the belly” is the way Paul puts it[Phil 3:19]. In Romans 6:15-22 he puts the matter very starkly: You have a choice between slaveries, he says. We can either be slaves of sin, or we can find our true liberation in becoming slaves of God. In a similar vein, II Peter 2:19 warns of false teachers who promise a worldly liberation but are in fact slaves of corruption.
So the Gospel is emphatically a message of love and liberation. But we cannot know what true love is, nor can we know what genuine liberation looks like, apart from an apprehension of the truth which is given us by God. Which brings us to the question of how we interpret the Bible with regard to these matters.
Seeing the Forest Beyond the Trees
Huge amounts of ink have been spilled in this debate over the detailed interpretation of six passages which have been commonly understood throughout most of the church’s history as prohibiting homosexual activity [The passages are: Gen 19:1-8; Lev 18:22; Lev 20:13; Rom 1:26-27; I Cor 6:9-10; and I Tim 1:10.] The debate has been fueled by the suggestions of a small group of biblical scholars that the relevant verses do not in fact mean what they seem to say or what the church has commonly understood them to say [see John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1980); Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983); William Countryman, Dirt, Greed and Sex (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988)]. These are important discussions, the details of which have been amply set forth in these pages and elsewhere. Time does not permit yet another detailed review of the arguments involved, but let it suffice for the moment to say that I for one have not found attempts to explain away the plain meaning of the texts very credible, and that is a judgment shared by a great many contemporary scholars and church people.
Another claim one frequently hears regarding these texts is that they are hopelessly out of date, that their judgments are no longer applicable in a modern context. The Bible’s understanding of homosexuality, so the argument goes, is so different from our modern, scientifically-informed concepts of sexual orientation that it is like comparing apples and oranges—the biblical prohibitions simply do not apply to our modern understandings.
These claims need to be considered seriously, but what they reflect more than anything is the weakness of an approach which seeks to construct a biblical ethic simply by paging through the text, as it were, in search of particular prohibitions relating to the issue at hand. The weakness of this approach is revealed in the fact that it would have little or nothing to say about child molestation, for instance, because the Bible nowhere contains specific commandments against the sexual abuse of children.
The meaning and purpose of the biblical texts becomes clearer if we take a step back from the trees—the particular prohibitions which the Bible sets out—and consider the nature of the forest in which the trees are rooted. We need to understand what the Bible has to say about God’s positive intentions for our sexuality in order to make sense of the negative commands and prohibitions which protect against the corruption of God’s intentions. Taking this approach it quickly becomes apparent that Scripture makes some strong and detailed claims about the way our sexuality fits into the broader picture of God’s will and intention for human life.
Starting right at the very beginning of the Bible in Genesis 1, we find God creating human beings specifically as male and female, with the importance of that division of the sexes underscored by its close association with our creation in the image of God [Gen 1:27, 5:1-2]. This suggests that the communion between male and female is intended by God from the very beginning and built into the fabric of creation. Further, this communion intended by God is intimately bound up with the gift of procreation, with God’s command to be fruitful and multiply [Gen 1:28].
This picture is further developed and amplified in Genesis 2, where Man and Woman are specifically created for, and given to, one another. That text makes very clear that this communion between male and female is founded on a very important foundation of complementarity between the sexes. Eve is not the same as Adam. God creates her not as a copy but as a helpmate who corresponds to Adam, who complements him [v.18]. And the Genesis 2 text is explicit that this divinely-willed complementarity and communion find their fulfillment and proper expression in the institution of marriage, in which a man and woman cleave together and become one flesh—a reference both to their sexual union and to the procreative aspects of this communion which are so intimately bound up with it [v. 24]. This affirmation of the institution of marriage between male and female as divinely founded is picked up and explicitly re-affirmed by Jesus in Matthew 19:4-6.
We see here, then, the centrality of the complementary, procreative communion between male and female in God’s plan for the world. The sanctity and integrity of this communion is fortified and upheld as it is hedged about by laws which guard against its corruption by adultery and other misuse of our human sexuality outside the bounds which God has set.
Indeed this communion between male and female is so central to God’s plan for the ordering of human life that it takes on sacramental aspects, becoming widely seen in the later tradition as an image for the fulfillment of that glorious communion which God establishes with the chosen people. The Song of Songs is, on the literal level, a poetic celebration of God’s gift of this communion between male and female in all its sensual goodness. But this Song is also interpreted spiritually by the church and becomes a vivid image of the love which binds together Christ and his church. The prophet Isaiah portrays God’s redemption of Israel as a marriage, or a release from childlessness [Is 54:1, 62:4]. Israel’s faithlessness toward God is described by Hosea as the betrayal of a marriage covenant between a husband and wife.
The New Testament continues to view the communion between male and female as an image of God’s love for us. In all three synoptic Gospels Jesus compares his presence among his people to that of a bridegroom [Mk 2:20, Matt 9:15, Luk 5:34], and in John’s gospel the same affirmation appears on the lips of John the Baptist [3:29]. Jesus himself, following the Old Testament, describes the consummation of God’s kingdom in terms of a wedding banquet [Matt 22:1-14, 25:1-13]. John points very significantly to the fact that it is at a wedding feast in Cana that Jesus performs the first sign which reveals his glory. Paul paints a vivid portrait of the church as a bride betrothed to Christ the bridegroom [2 Cor 11:2], and John of Patmos describes the consummation of God’s reign as the marriage of Christ the Lamb to his spotless bride, the church [Rev 19:7, 21:9]. The conclusion from all this is inescapable that the divinely-willed communion between male and female, fulfilled in the marital union, is a feature of central and pivotal significance in God’s gracious plan for the ordering of human life.
But the Bible does not stop there, of course. It also speaks about a falling away from God’s loving will and intention for us, and this turning away from God inevitably brings with it a disordering of the communion between male and female which God intends. Already in Genesis 3, we find that one of the consequences of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God is the disordering of the communion between them: now the procreative aspects of that union become painful and dangerous for the woman, and in place of the loving complementarity which marks God’s original will for them we find that the woman’s husband will now rule over her [3:16].
It is in this context that we have to interpret the Bible’s negative portrayals of homosexual practice. As the creation falls away from God, the communion between male and female which is willed by God, including its sexual manifestations, also falls away from God’s intentions for it.
This explains the otherwise puzzling association which the Bible so often makes between sexual sins and idolatry: As the human race turns from the one true God to follow after idols, so also our sexuality falls away from God’s intentions for it and becomes unraveled and broken in its manifestations. This is precisely the connection which Paul draws in the very important passage found in Romans 1:18-26. Paul there describes the sinful perversity of human beings whose lives have been given over to false gods:
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator… For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another… [Rom 1:24-27]
Here the Bible describes homosexual practice as a manifestation of that brokenness which characterizes a world turned away from God.
We have raised the question earlier whether the Bible’s concept of homosexuality is so different from contemporary understandings as to severely limit its applicability in our modern context. And it does seem to be true that Paul, for instance, as a typical ancient, views homosexuality simply in terms of lusts which have run amok, in a way that is a bit different from our modern ways of thinking about sexual orientation.
But when we view the issue against the background of God’s positive will for our sexuality embodied in the loving, complementary communion of male and female, the differences between modern and ancient concepts of homosexuality do not amount to all that much, because we can recognize in both of them a falling away from God’s will and intention for human life.
Indeed, the fallen human heart can give rise to all sorts and manners of corrupt behavior of which the biblical writers never dreamed. But the fact that we cannot find a specific and detailed prohibition corresponding to each and every one of them does not make them any less recognizable as a manifestation of brokenness, a falling away from God’s positive intentions for human life, the shape of which the Bible makes quite clear.
Voluntary or Involuntary?
I have been very deliberately using the word ‘brokenness’ rather than ‘sin’ in this discussion, because in popular conceptions the word ‘sin’ tends to conjure up images of a choice which is deliberately and voluntarily perverse, and it is not at all clear that is what we are dealing with in matters of sexual orientation. For some people, at least, their homosexual orientation seems to present itself simply as a fact of experience which they have had to grapple with as long as they can remember. In important respects the inclination for them seems not to be a matter of choice.
But how much does it matter whether a homosexual orientation is chosen or not? Just because a same-sex orientation is experienced as involuntary in some cases does not make it any less a distortion of God’s loving will for humankind. One of the greatest fallacies put forward in connection with this discussion is the notion that if science can show that homosexuality is something we are born with, that means it must be natural and therefore by definition good.
But we need to remember that human beings are born into this fallen world with all sorts of involuntary brokenness, from spina bifida to predispositions toward violent behavior, and the fact we are born that way does not make these things either benign, or accurate reflections of the way God desires us to be. The New Testament quite to the contrary describes sin and brokenness as slavery—as something those of us who come after Adam and Eve did not choose. At its deepest level the dreadful inclination of the human heart (and the human body!) away from God and God’s will for us is an affliction we are all born with. Our brokenness at its roots is not voluntary—we are all born into sin.
So while the question whether a same-sex orientation is the product of genetic inheritance or environmental factors or deliberate choice may be an interesting area for scientific study, it has very little bearing on our theological assessment of the situation. Brokenness is still brokenness, whether it is voluntary or not.
All Have Sinned
We have thus far been presenting a biblical understanding of homosexuality as a manifestation of the brokenness which characterizes a fallen creation. But up to this point we have left out a very important element of the Bible’s witness. It is absolutely essential that we also recognize there is nothing in the Bible which would lead us to single out homosexual inclinations or practice as special or unusual in some sense, as if this disordering of our sexuality were among the most serious manifestations of creation’s brokenness. In the very same passage from Romans 1 which we have cited earlier, Paul lists many other manifestations of creation’s brokenness: wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, gossip, slander, hate for God, insolence, haughtiness, boastfulness, evil devices, disobedience to parents, foolishness, faithlessness, heartlessness, ruthlessness… and the list could presumably be expanded almost indefinitely [vv. 28-31].
In fact, Paul takes considerable pains to emphasize that every single one of us—not just our homosexual neighbor!—is caught up in this brokenness which has overtaken creation; and every single one of us—including our homosexual neighbor!—is absolutely dependent on the grace of God given in Jesus Christ for the overcoming of that brokenness.
For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus…. [Rom 3:22b-24]
There is no distinction! Here the Bible stands in judgment over all our attempts to deal with the speck in our homosexual neighbor’s eye before we have attended to the log in our own eye. Here the Scripture casts its shadow over all our sinful attempts to separate out homosexuality as a form of brokenness which is liable to some sort of special judgment all its own, or which stands in a class by itself apart from all the myriad forms of brokenness which manifest themselves in the lives of each and every one of us.
The New Testament undercuts every attempt to cast this issue as us versus them, righteous versus sinners, believers versus infidels. The Bible’s teaching is that we all together stand shoulder to shoulder with our homosexual brothers and sisters, because every single one of us, gay and straight alike, stands before God as a lost, broken sinner whose only hope is the grace of God offered us in Jesus Christ. Every time we welcome a new member into our churches….we welcome a sinner! Every time we ordain a person to the ministry of the Word….we ordain a sinner! There is no distinction.
Thus, if we take the New Testament seriously, the issue which confronts us here is not and cannot be “homosexuality and the church,” as if this were an isolated and separable phenomenon standing off in a category by itself. The issue must rather be, “our brokenness and the church,” and that is a matter which directly implicates each and every one of us.
The Role of the Church
How then ought we to deal with that brokenness which is a part of all our lives in the context of our common commitment to Christ? Augustine’s image of the church remains extremely helpful in this connection, even after sixteen centuries: the church is a hospital for sinners. “Those who are well have no need of a physician,” says Jesus, “but those who are sick” [Mk 2:17]. God calls us together in the community of Christ’s body as a fellowship of grace and healing, where we may comfort one another with his forgiveness and encourage and build up one another in the new life which Christ has opened up to us.
One of the perennial temptations in this healing fellowship of the church, of course, is our tendency to focus totally on our neighbor’s sickness to the exclusion of our own. A helpful check on our thinking in the current instance is to make sure we are willing to apply those statements we make regarding that brokenness which is homosexuality to other forms of brokenness as well. I find a useful test case here to be a person who suffers, let us say, from an explosive temper which gets out of control and leads to actions and statements which the person later regrets. This kind of brokenness it seems to me exhibits some of the same complicated interplay between voluntary and involuntary behaviors which in many instances characterizes the condition of homosexual persons.
So what do we say about the brokenness which all of us carry with us in our lives as Christians? First and foremost our proper response is one of repentance. The purpose of a hospital is healing! Jesus’ own invitation with the coming of God’s kingdom into our midst was: “Repent and believe the good news” [Mk 1:15]. The Christian life is a continual process of turning away from our brokenness, of struggling against it, and of turning toward the new life of righteousness which God offers us in Jesus Christ [cf. Rom 8:18-27; I Cor 1:18; II Cor 3:18, 4:16; Phil 3:10-16; Col 3:10].
That does not mean we can expect to overcome completely within this lifetime all those manifestations of brokenness which we all carry with us. Every Christian engages in the warfare against “sin, the flesh and the devil,” struggling and praying, wrestling and backsliding, repenting and beseeching God’s continued support.
So just as the healing fellowship of the church presents Christ’s call to someone with an out-of-control temper as an invitation to repentance, prayer and struggle in order to bring his or her anger under control, so also the church presents Christ’s call to the person whose sexuality is disordered as an invitation to repentance, prayer and struggle in order to bring this particular manifestation of brokenness back into conformity with God’s will.
Such a pilgrimage of repentance can assume a variety of different forms. Quite obviously what we would pray and hope for above all else is that God would grant healing for our disordered passions, removing our brokenness and bringing our inner life into full and joyous conformity with the divine will. So we continue to pray and hope that the person with the out-of-control temper will receive healing and be delivered from that burden by an act of God’s grace. Similarly, we hope and continually pray that the homosexual person will be healed and delivered by God’s hand.
And it does happen! It is important that the church not give up its hope in God’s grace. Anyone who has spent significant time in the church has seen it happen—God’s miraculous, healing intervention in people’s lives, delivering them from all manner of affliction and brokenness and temptation. For this reason, we Christians ought to support and encourage the various healing ministries which have arisen in the church for persons struggling with homosexual orientations.
But complete healing is not always given. Paul himself reports his own ongoing struggle with an unidentified “thorn in the flesh” from which the Lord never saw fit to deliver him [2 Cor 12:7]. What do we make of the ongoing presence of weakness, of the impulses of the Old Adam, in the Christian life? Paul saw God’s hand at work in his ongoing struggle with this “thorn,” subduing his pride [v.7] and teaching him the power and sufficiency of God’s grace [v.9].
The struggle with our brokenness will not always be completely and successfully resolved in this lifetime. Following Paul’s example, we Christians continue to confess our brokenness, to seek God’s help in prayer, to rely on God’s grace and God’s strength in the midst of our weakness, to “press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” We do not give up, we do not simply accept our own brokenness as an inevitable status quo. We encourage and exhort one another, but at the same time we also deal compassionately with our neighbors, knowing they and we are participants together in this pilgrimage of faith toward the new life we have been given together in Christ.
The church must be prepared to minister compassionately to all of the “sin-sick souls” who come to it seeking healing from the Great Physician. The community of faith rejoices with those persons who have been so transformed by grace as to completely overcome certain aspects of their former brokenness; but the community also prays and supports and continues to stand by those individuals who never find complete healing this side of the Kingdom, and whose resistance to their own brokenness constitutes a lifelong struggle that continues with God’s help and mercy.
Where the church must firmly call persons to account, however, is in those situations where repentance is lacking, and where persons are inclined simply to overlook or deny the brokenness of whatever sort that they carry with them in their lives as Christians. Just as the church cannot say to habitually angry persons that their temperamental outbursts are a matter of indifference, so the church cannot say to homosexual persons that their disordered inclinations and practices are matters of no consequence, nor ought the church accede to demands that these disorderings be reinterpreted as gifts of God to be celebrated and affirmed.
But in saying no to unrepentance and in challenging such indifference, we need to be very sensitive to the roots from which such problems spring. There are within our churches many sincere persons whose honest wrestling with Scriptures and genuine commitment to Christ have led them to conclusions about homosexuality which are different from our own. While the presence of such disagreement does not relieve the church of the obligation to make decisions about the ordering of its life, it is important in such cases that our response to each other embody that caring witness and mutual respect which characterizes the relations between brothers and sisters who share membership in the body of Christ.
That is a very different situation from one in which persons make claims or demands upon the church from a standpoint which has rejected the witness of Scripture and cast off Christ’s Lordship in favor of other voices and other masters, whether those of secular culture, or a misunderstood “science” or simply personal inclinations and experience. Such claims and challenges demand a firm confession and defense of the church’s faith that “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death” [Theological Declaration of Barmen, article 1].
In sum, if the church is a hospital for sinners it cannot and must not forget that its members are one and all sick, falling short each and every one in our own ways from the fullness of life to which Christ calls us. But at the same time the church cannot and must not forget that the purpose of a hospital is for healing, and that the essential form of the Christian life for every one of us is repentance and struggle and growth in grace.
Church Leadership
We come finally to the question of ordination. The Christian church has always understood the ministerial office to be a gift given to the church by God for the upbuilding of the Christian community. It is not and cannot be a “right” claimed equally by all persons. There are in fact all sorts of reasons, congenital and otherwise, for which the church denies people ordination to the ministry of the Word and Sacrament. Examples in the Presbyterian Church would include a paralyzing fear of public speaking, or an inability to learn Greek and Hebrew, or a manner which makes interpersonal relations difficult.
Furthermore, the Scriptures are clear that leaders of the church are to be models and exemplars of life in Christ [see, e.g. I Tim 3.] This does not mean we can expect them to be without sin—if the church demanded sinless ministers we would not have a ministry! But it does mean that those who would lead Christ’s church must themselves be actively and vigorously engaged in the struggle against the sin which still clings to them. The process of repenting and wrestling with our sinfulness—what Calvin referred to as the “mortification of the flesh”—must be firmly established and well advanced in such persons. The “Fidelity and Chastity” amendment to the Book of Order, which our presbyteries are presently considering, mirrors this understanding quite closely, specifying not personal sinfulness but “refusing to repent” as the disposition which ultimately disqualifies a person from ordained office.
And the practical implications of this understanding of church leadership are that the church can and should ordain qualified homosexual persons whose brokenness in this area has found successful accommodation in the context of a chaste lifestyle. Indeed, the witness of such discipline on the part of these people can serve as a very positive example to the church of godly discipline and self-control!
But the church would be committing a grave error if it were to ordain as Christian leaders those persons whose brokenness in this regard continues to find active, outward sexual expression. Again, this is not to single out homosexuals as being in a class by themselves. Persons whose temper causes them to lose control of themselves ought not to be ordained either. The church needs to scrutinize carefully the life and witness of every candidate for the ministry, with an eye toward seeing that the leaders of our church can present a worthy example to the flock in every area where the brokenness of our fallen world manifests itself in their own lives. The struggle over the issue of homosexuality perhaps can provide impetus to the church to exercise greater vigilance in all areas of life for those candidates it considers for ordination. One senses at times a most unfortunate tendency in the church to single out sexuality as the only area of life deserving scrutiny—as if greed and pride were of only minimal concern!—to the detriment of the ministerial office generally.
As our presbyteries grapple with these difficult issues in the months ahead, may God work in and through our struggles and our debates to lead Christ’s church into a clearer apprehension of his truth for our lives, and a fuller manifestation of his love in our church and our world. May the glory be Christ’s and not ours, and may the Holy Spirit work quickly to correct all of our errors and establish us in the truth!
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Sep/Oct 1996).
