Marriage and Heaven (by David Opderbeck)

Marriage, Homosexuality, and Heaven
by David Opderbeck

I wonder if my personal feelings about the U.S. Supreme Court’s gay marriage case are common among Christians of my age and social location:  ambivalence, uncertainty, discomfort, regret . . . .

Some of this is unsurprising, I suppose.  As a lawyer, with a bent towards judicial restraint, I can’t fully endorse Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion.  I’m no expert on all the nuances of substantive due process, but I am, I confess, of the school of thought that Constitutional “penumbras, formed by emanations” too often lack the stability needed for the rule of law.  (If you didn’t catch that reference, it’s to the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut).  As a citizen in a pluralistic democracy, with gay friends and colleagues, I have a hard time sussing out the role of government in the face of such a contentious question that hurts people whom I love.  As a Christian, I’m disappointed, but not surprised, by the tone and content of much of our intramural and public discourse about the question.

Well, maybe in one way I am surprised:  it seems odd to me that so many conservative evangelicals cast this issue in terms of “heaven” or “salvation.”  This is evidenced, for example, in Kevin DeYoung’s “40 Questions for Christians Now Waiving Rainbow Flags,” which asks (Question 9), “[d]o you believe that passages like 1 Corinthians 6:9 and Revelation 21:8 teach that sexual immorality can keep you out of heaven?”  The notion here seems to be that “getting into heaven” is based on keeping certain rules – that is, on works – and that certain kinds of sexual misconduct, particularly homosexual conduct, is one of the big deal breakers.  For many conservative evangelicals, these texts seem to function as the hammer in this debate.  This strikes me as exceedingly odd, since a hallmark of evangelicalism is the belief that salvation comes by faith alone, not by works.  To suggest that “salvation comes by faith, not by works, unless you commit sin x, y, or z, in which case you’re out,” obviously doesn’t make sense.

Of course, even if we believe in salvation by faith alone, we have to grapple with texts like 1 Cor. 6:9.  Those of us who aren’t personally gay tend to ignore the other vices in these passages, such as greed, idolatry, and even “the cowardly and all liars” (Rev. 21:8).  Given Jesus’ teaching about the connection between lust and adultery, who among us can read the reference to “adulterers” and not shudder?  Can anyone living a comfortable life in America, while much of the world suffers in poverty, not be pierced to the heart by John the Seer’s reference to “cowards” and “liars?”  Who among us can read Paul’s broad, general reference to the “unrighteous ones” (adikoi) without falling to his knees with a forlorn cry for mercy?

I think Richard Hays sums up the sense of the 1 Corinthians passage well in his book The Moral Vision of the New Testament:  “The rhetoric of this passage treats the readers as participants already in a new life.  The statement that evildoers will not inherit God’s kingdom is set forward not as a threat to the Corinthian community but rather as an invitation to them to claim their own baptismal identity as a sanctified people under the lordship of Christ, no longer living under the power of sin.”  (Hays, at p. 41.)  In other words, the question in 1 Cor. 6:9 is not so much about “who qualifies for heaven” as “what does it mean to participate in the community called the Kingdom of God?”  That emphasis is exceedingly clear in 1 Cor. 6:1-8, which is about disputes in the local congregation over money leading to lawsuits, and even in Rev. 21, which is about God’s final eschatological dwelling among the community of his people in the context of a call for perseverance in congregations that are presently experiencing persecution.

Martin Luther correctly said that every Christian is simil iustus et peccator — at the same time justified and a sinner.  We might not opt for Luther’s stark contrast between “law” and “gospel,” but we should not, I think, understand the New Testament witness as a call to seek a future Heaven by keeping a temporal law.  It is, rather, a call to start becoming now, by grace, a new kind of community that anticipates its eschatological dwelling with God.  To be sure, how we live together now as sexual creatures is an essential part of that communal task.  When we engage in licentious sexual practices that destroy this beloved community, we endanger the community and our own place within it.  I think this means the Church ought to tread with great care over this ground, and in this sense I agree with DeYoung:  there is a great deal at stake in how we instruct, exhort, encourage, and even discipline ourselves within the Church on issues relating to sexuality.

For many, including for me, this means the Church can’t simply equate gay marriage with the lifelong union of one man and one woman.  As a side note, it also means, I think, that the Church can’t simply equate divorce and remarriage with a lifelong union between one man and one woman (recall Jesus’ warnings also about divorce, remarriage, and adultery) — which isn’t the same thing as saying all divorce and remarriage completely disqualifies a person from life in the Church.

So here is the uncomfortable place where I stand at the moment:  even if you think there is some place for committed gay relationships in God’s economy, it shouldn’t be a matter of simply taking up the culture’s rainbow flag; and even if you think there is no place at all for any kind of gay relationships in God’s economy, it shouldn’t be about a law an individual must keep to get into Heaven.  It should always be about the counter-cultural community God is forming us to become in Christ.