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Nov

6

How I deal with the Issue of Homosexuality

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It seems it will be getting more attention in the years to come due to NAE’s president Ted Haggard’s forced exit of his closet.  The Christian homosexual Andrew Sullivan has given a response, accusing Haggard of the sin of false witness and hoping that he will repudiate the notion that to have a homosexual orientation is repulsive and dark and instead spread the truth about what being gay actually is.

There is truth in what Andrew writes, but it is not the whole truth re: “homosexuality”.  Here is a letter I wrote to an evangelical friend in Sweden.    

I remember there was a group conversation that inquiried about my views on homosexuality that I ended up turning into a joke.  If it’s not inappropriate, I hope you don’t mind if I share my views.  This is something I have thought some about.  Sorry if this doesn’t flow so well…

I take different strategies in dealing with different people on this topic.  Among gay rights supporters, I confess that I am a heterosexist and do not believe that all sexual orientations are equal.  I also share how I strongly dissent from making unqualified analogies between the civil rights and the gay rights movement, as there are many complex dimensions to homosexuality that were not present with the civil rights movement in the US.  I add that I believe this does not make me a homophobic, meaning having an irrational fear of homosexuals/homosexuality.  I have even added that I think it is possible that the apostle Paul may have had a homosexual orientation.  I would then add that I have read a good deal of the literature on homosexuality and watched gay-rights films, like “Philadelphia”, “French Twist”, “Kissing Jessica Stein”, “The Closet”, “Brokeback Mountain”, and others; not because I am gay but mainly because I feared how the issue was becoming such a black hole for people’s political capital in my country, not unlike the politics of abortion over the course of the past thirty-some years. 

To buttress my claims that I have studied the issue carefully, I would describe how I find the twins and sibling studies to provide key evidence that having a homosexual orientation is not genetic.  I think there is evidence that it is physiological and believe that the findings of Gunter Dorner are of seminal importance.  (Although, Dorner breaks Hume’s dictum in arguing from an is to an ought.  I think the key theological issue here is one over Naturalism or args like “God made me Gay, so it must be okay!”)  Dorner’s basic notion is that the hormonal balance formed in our brains when we are fetuses are key for the later development of our sexual orientations.  This makes sense, in part, of how “homosexuality” is both chosen and not chosen and how our sexual orientations are not immutable.  I would also add that I think it is wrong to make our sexual orientation a key part of our identity or for me to treat someone differently because I learn that they have a homosexual orientation.  I would then add that I think that a lot of the heat over “homosexuality” stem from the heterogenous array of phenomena commonly referred to as “homosexuality” and frequent semantic misunderstandings. 

Among Christians who are opposed to homosexuality or homosexual marriages, I make the distinction between God’s ideals and human laws that inevitably accomodate human fallenness.  I would point to how we allow for divorce and remarriage of divorcees as examples of said human laws.  The manner in which human laws accomodate human fallenness is even apparent in the Old Testament, as Jesus remarks in his parrying with the Sadducees in Matt 22 or how the laws permitted men to sleep with unmarried women/foreigners.  Jesus’s reply in Matt 22 is very appropriate in pointing out how the institutions surrounding marriage have never been God-given. 

This led me to do some research.  I found that if you search the book of Genesis in the NASB version, a version that tries to reflect the original hebrew, you’ll find that the root of the word marriage appears only in pagan contexts.  The patriarchs took wives, they didn’t marry them.  Marriage seems to have had a connotation of an alliance between families.  You find an example of how marriage is used for Hebrews then in the beginning of Exodus, which as I understand it shows that the Israelites had adopted certain institutions from the Egyptians during their time in Egypt. 

And so, to make a long story short, the ideal for “marriage” found in Genesis 2 is something God given and incorruptible.  I stand by that as a Bible-believing Christian.  However, the institutions surrounding legal marriages have never been God-given and can and should be open to alteration.  It is these institutions that are at issue in the politics of homosexual marriages, not God’s ideal for “marriage”.  We are deeply mistaken if we insist that the institutions surrounding legal marriages must conform to the ideal or that their deviations from the ideal mar the ideal. 

As such, from a Christian perspective, the key issue shd be a missiological one.  How do we best minister to the needs of people with homosexual orientations, who cannot/will not change, and lack the gift of lifelong celibacy that Paul had?  This is a separate issue from dealing with empathy with people who are transvestites, choose to engage in homosexual acts, experience some attraction to the same sex, or are gender anarchist/libertarians. 

In my opinion, the reason some Christians get worked up on this issue is a theological issue.  It is the notion from the free church heritage that we shd base our actions, ways of governing, on the Bible.  However, I don’t think the Bible sets out exhaustively or definitively how we ought to deal practically with these missiological questions of relating with and redeeming our fallen world.  That seems like something we shd discern from both study of scripture and our community’s deliberations on our experiences and the experiences of past Christians. 

dlw

ps, I added in a later letter that I also believe that homosexual couples married in a Bible-believing Christian church should be asked to abstain from anal intercourse in respect for Leviticus 18:22.  If you want an idea of what is an abomination, it pays to look at how the word is used in the rest of the Pentateuch.  The gist of it seems to be that an abomination is an act that goes strongly against the symbolic stories that lie at the base of one’s culture.  I think that would still apply for Christians today.  However, if we don’t deal with this issue with new wineskins, it is going to continue to torment our country and our democracy.  We are on the losing side of this “cultural battle” and it is time to deliberate and change strategies pronto.

dlw 

Comments

One Response to “

How I deal with the Issue of Homosexuality
”

  1. The Anti-Manichaeist » Blog Archive » How the Haggard Scandal will Impact the Christian Gays and Lesbians in Our Churchs. on November 9th, 2006 8:24 pm

    [...] I think it matters for us as Christians to be communities where people with homosexual orientations can be welcomed and ministered to in ways that are empathic to their different situations.  I think we’ll be better at doing that once we clear away more of the deadwood that make most rivalling monologues on the matter produce more heat than light.  [...]

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