Homosexuality

Well, I’ve been away from blogging for several weeks now. I went on vacation — back to North Carolina and then to the mountains — and I just sort of forgot about blogging. Anyway, I’ll get back into it. For now, here are some noteworthy articles related to the recent resurgence of interest in homosexual unions/marriage.

“Gay Marriage” by Carl Trueman, Westminster Theological Seminary

“For people like myself, now in middle age, dislike of homosexuality came with the territory; our reasons for opposing it were more to do with our own cultural backgrounds than with any biblical argumentation.  Our opinions on the issue may have happened to coincide at points with biblical teaching, but that was more by accident than design.   We were basically bigots and we needed to change.”

“Those evangelical leaders, academics and evangelical institutions that prize their place at the table and their invitations to appear on `serious’ television programs, and who enjoy being asked to offer their opinion to the wider culture had better be prepared to make a choice.  As I have said before in this column, we are not far from the place where to oppose homosexuality will be regarded as in the same moral bracket as white supremacy.”

“The End of Marriage in Scandinavia” by Stanley Kurtz

This is a rather long article on the social scientific data related to the Scandinavian separation of marriage and procreation, a separation which has encouraged the normativity of homosexual and multi-sexual relationships. Here is an excerpt:

“Kari Moxnes, a feminist sociologist specializing in divorce, is one of the most prominent of Norway’s newly emerging group of public social scientists. As a scholar who sees both marriage and at-home motherhood as inherently oppressive to women, Moxnes is a proponent of nonmarital cohabitation and parenthood. In 1993, as the Norwegian legislature was debating gay marriage, Moxnes published an article, “Det tomme ekteskap” (“Empty Marriage”), in the influential liberal paper Dagbladet. She argued that Norwegian gay marriage was a sign of marriage’s growing emptiness, not its strength. Although Moxnes spoke in favor of gay marriage, she treated its creation as a (welcome) death knell for marriage itself. Moxnes identified homosexuals–with their experience in forging relationships unencumbered by children–as social pioneers in the separation of marriage from parenthood. In recognizing homosexual relationships, Moxnes said, society was ratifying the division of marriage from parenthood that had spurred the rise of out-of-wedlock births to begin with.”

“So What? How Does Homosexual Marriage Affect Me?” by R. Scott Clark, Westminster Seminary California

“Not only is the term “parent” being re-defined but, of course, the basic natural definition of “family” is necessarily being re-defined to include homosexual marriages and homosexual parenting. This is not an insistence upon small nuclear families as a definition of marriage but it is an insistence that family and marriage have something to do with objective, natural reality. I understand that the way we often think of “family” as a small nuclear unit is the product of modern social forces and even of marketing and mass media but the older idea of family (including extended family and even, if we go back to the classical and biblical periods, of household servants) was grounded in the nature of things. The redefinition of “family” to include units that are contrary to the nature of things is much more an act of radical nominalism (we can call things anything because there’s no intrinsic connection between names and things) and voluntarism (the human will is ultimate) and a denial of the very existence of nature.”

Also, I am happy to see that Wesley Hill’s book on celibate homosexuality is to be released in a few weeks: Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality. You should read this article by Hill if you have not already. Here are my reflections related to his article.

Creation, Redemption, and Homosexual Desire

Halden has pointed us to a very poignant reflection on homosexuality by Wesley Hill, asking the question, “Will the Church be the Church for homosexual Christians?” You should read it before you read my meager considerations below.

Hill is a committed Christian and “non-practicing” homosexual. Perhaps “non-practicing” is a curious way to put it; as is clear, he does not, and cannot, partition his male-attraction to a latent and unaffective part of his brain. It is constitutive of his experience and longings in the world, as he tries to make sense of Christ’s call to a moral order in a disordered reality. In his case, he is more aware than others that the disorder is not “out there.” It cuts across the deepest parts of our personality, with wounds that endure, despite the sincere intentions of a superficial faith (“I’m trading my sorrows”) or a creative reworking of God’s order (the liberal project). In the latter, we literally become the creators — usurpers of God’s creative holiness; in the former, we dismiss a creation that doesn’t really need to be redeemed.

Submitting to the Creator is all the more difficult when the disorder is not of our making, when we find ourselves (our very self) with desires, not in-themselves sinful, but nonetheless, if acted upon and made real in our relations, contribute to a subversion of God’s order. This is a hard truth, to say the least. Our longings — what we believe are proper objects of fulfillment — do not necessarily partake of the beauty and goodness which inheres in God. The sources of the disorder in these longings are not easily located, i.e., “why am I made this way” does not always have an answer, other than the classic Pauline-Augustinian answer: the Fall.

It is fundamental to secular anthropology that morality can be read off of nature, under conditions of “fulfillment” given from humanity itself; it is fundamental to Christian anthropology that morality must re-create nature, under conditions of “fulfillment” given by God. The secular and Christian hermeneutics are irreconcilable here. It is futile for Christians to argue against the sanctioning of homosexual practice using the secular presuppositions of an anthropology  “from below.” The Christian theorists of “natural law” must be tempered by this point. However, this is not to say that Christian morality “condemns nature” per se; rather, it “fulfills nature” as it is intended by its Creator. This is part of the larger fact that Christ did not come into the world to condemn it, but to bring it to holiness (by way of His sacrifice and our repentance).

So, the homosexual has an especially difficult cross to bear — a cross given in his creation as this particular human being, a homosexual human being. And if all of us were more honest about how deeply we are fallen, we would discover similar “creation-constituted” crosses, and probably many that are sexual and relational. Yet, our hope is found in a Cross that is neither taken away (Jesus was tortured and executed) nor sanctioned (Jesus conquered death). Our life in Christ is, thus, both a sickness unto death and a healing unto life. Our disorders must be borne and taken to our grave, so our faith can be revealed in the glory of a new creation. With this as our foundation, the necessary and fulfilling relations with homosexuals in the Church, that Hill eloquently pleads for, can be nurtured.