In the previous blog I explored why the dispute between traditionalists and progressives regarding same-sex marriage is intractable. Now I want to focus on the specific problems in the ways in which each side justifies (primarily to itself) its belief with scripture. I’m going to start with the traditionalists.
The traditionalists charge that the progressives are “revisionist.” It is a charge leveled within all religious groups toward those whose interpretations of scripture move away from previously accepted norms. In this case it is the charge that the progressive interpretation of the Bible with regard to same-sex marriage runs contrary to that of Christian tradition.
The problem with the traditionalist argument is that at some point even traditionalists are revisionists. Interpretation of scripture in all traditions is continually changing in some ways. Scripture is complex, and always subject to multiple interpretations. Moreover our understandings of how to interpret scripture change under the influence of emerging cultural understandings of the ways in which words serve as a medium for communication, both human and divine. In medieval Europe it was taken for granted that all Bible verses and stories had both a literal and an allegorical meaning, as well as a moral and anagogic meaning. Thus it was perfectly legitimate interpretation to assign each character or event an allegorical equivalent and use these to interpret the passage. This led to what modern interpreters would find incredible and fanciful meanings. But they were not incredible or fanciful in their time. They were perfectly acceptable because there was a cultural consensus that they represented a legitimate understanding of how language was deployed in the Bible.
To see the inevitability of revision let’s look at two driving forces behind it: reassessments of God’s order based on emerging science, and reassessments of God’s order based on unrealized ideals from within the tradition.
But before doing so it is important to note that both of these forces can arise within a faithful reading of the Bible as God’s Word. Our emerging scientific understanding of the world influences our understanding of God’s Word because for the believer this understanding has its origin in the way God formed our minds to perceive the truth of God and the truth of God’s creation. Natural revelation and special revelation are complimentary. Similarly the evolution in understanding of how Christian ideals should be realized is based in a Christian understanding of the continual sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit in the church. In neither case are changing interpretations of the Bible necessarily driven by conformity to social norms and values external to the Christian faith.
So to return to revisionist readings of the Bible.
In the Bible God’s orderly intention is reflected in God’s creation of three overlapping orders. The first is the order of creation. This natural order is formed by separation (the division of light and darkness, day and night, earth and sky and water) and creation (the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the various orders of creatures, including humans.)
The second order is of human society, which according to the Bible consists of families, tribes, and ethic nations. Adam and Eve and their sons form the first family. Families have patriarchs to lead them. Tribes have tribal elders, and ethnic nations (by God’s provision) have kings, prophets, and priests.
Finally there is the order of the Body of Christ, the church, which is described in various terms in the New Testament with various leaders and their roles, all answerable to Jesus Christ, the head of the body.
How have Christian understandings of these three orders fared over the last two thousand years?
A scant three or four hundred years ago the description of the natural order in the Bible, as found in the book of Genesis and elsewhere, was taken as a basic data source for understanding the world. It was assumed for example, just as described in the Bible and obvious by observation, that the sun revolved around the earth. Today there is scarcely any disagreement that this Biblical picture of the natural order is wrong, and wrong in almost every respect. Across almost the entire spectrum of theology the Biblical view of the natural order is interpreted to have theological meaning as a revelation of God’s person and intentions, but not as a description of the physical universe and its history. Everyone with a few very marginal exceptions is a revisionist interpreter of the Bible with regard to the natural order.
This change in interpretation came about not so much because Biblical interpretation was forced to conform to the findings of science, but because Christian understandings of what God intended to communicate through God’s word were refined by and made richer with the recognition that natural revelation had its own wealth to contribute to human understanding. There were, of course, early efforts to show that the Biblical accounts were somehow “scientific” by relating the “days” of Genesis to eons of history, or to relate the unfolding the days of creation of plants and living creatures to evolution. But these efforts only diminished the meaning of scripture by making it subservient to science rather than enlarging it by freeing it from doing the duty of natural science in understanding natural revelation. In the end a much fuller understanding of the natural order is achieved when the Bible speaks of its inner meaning and purpose in concert with scientific understandings of its visible manifestations.
What about the social order? Well there are still missionary appeals to go out to the “tribes and nations” of the earth, but the outworking of this call takes place within and between nation-states that in no wise resemble the ancient kingdoms of the Bible. Again, one looks in vain across the spectrum of American Christianity for a call to return to the Biblical norm of kingdoms and empires that are themselves merely advanced forms of more ancient tribal coalitions. When the Book of Revelation asserts of the New Jerusalem that “The peoples will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it” no one expects that before the eschaton human societies will somehow revert to ancient forms of governance and self-understanding so that people will be grouped in ethnic nations and kings will lead. The Biblical description of the social order isn’t normative and universal, it is accepted even in traditionalist circles as culturally located and historical.
Once again we can see that by recognizing the social sciences, and political science in particular, Christians have a deeper knowledge of and appreciation for Biblical teaching as applied to the world we now live it, a world of nation-states bound into a complex global order no longer well-characterized by ethnic identities and affiliations flowing genealogically from the loins of Noah and his wife. These contemporary understandings serve to refine and enrich our understanding of the teaching of God in the Bible. When the Indigo Girls sing, “I’ve seen the kingdoms blow like ashes in the winds of change, Yeah but the power of truth is the fuel for the flame, So the darker the ages get, There’s a stronger beacon yet,” they call on powerful Biblical teaching without at all falling prey to outdated Biblical descriptions of the social order. Again, with regard to the social order everyone is a revisionist now because the social sciences enrich our understanding of revelation by freeing it from doing the duty of social and political science.
And what about the order of the church? Well here we confront the fact that there is almost no agreement about what the Bible teaches. And thus there are a huge spectrum of ways of ordering congregational life and associations between congregations. If God intended a single order for the church it certainly hasn’t emerged as a consensus among Christians quite regardless of what has been learned about group dynamics and management of hierarchies by sociologists.
However, there is one matter that until very recently in history virtually 100% of Christians agreed with regard to the ordering of the church: and that was the ordination of women. Women weren’t ordained by Methodists until the 1950’s, by Episcopalians until the 1970’s. In the largest protestant denomination in the US, Southern Baptists, they are still not ordained. And of course the same is true of the largest Christian groups in the world: Roman Catholic and Orthodox.
Despite the near universal agreement of Christians in the past regarding the ordination of women, an agreement that is still maintained by the majority of Christians, significant numbers of Protestant Christians including United Methodists now ordain women. The impetus for this comes, again, in part from changes in social and cultural understandings of gender and gender difference. In the 20th century West mounting scientific evidence along side emerging social realities demonstrated that in every capacity related to leadership women were equal to men. Protestant understandings of ordained leadership, which had de-linked it from the gender of Jesus, could thus allow the emerging social consensus to shape their reading of scripture and to be expressed in the ordination of women. Again, at least among Protestants there was near universal revision of previous readings of the Bible. A careful study of scripture would now find in Paul’s letters not a suppression of women in leadership, but a counter-cultural assertion of women in leadership.
And this revision didn’t take place only under the influence of changing understandings of reality within the larger culture. Scripture is also full of ideals not yet realized in either the church or society. So there is an internal impetus for constant revision under the influence of these ideals, and indeed this is the primary scriptural rational for changing interpretations of New Testament teaching regarding women, and for that matter slavery.
The statement of social ideals that will only emerge over time in Christian practice is found throughout the New Testament. In John 19 we read that Jesus inaugurates a new egalitarian basis for community: “So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” Then Jesus gives a new basis for community: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
In Acts 15 barriers inherit in Jewish law and Jewish Christian tradition that would have kept Gentiles out of the church are broken down when God reveals to Peter and Paul a new set of ideals regarding the practices that will bind the Christian community. Regarding these ideals Paul writes in Galatians chapter “For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
Much of the New Testament is the story of how Christian communities initially dominated by the then current Jewish understanding of order gradually revised their understanding of that order under the influence of the idea that baptism, being clothed in Christ, rendered the previous distinctions that were critical to the order of the religious community null and void. And further, since the entirety of the world was under the reign of Christ, these distinctions were ultimately invalid in the larger social order.
Historically this revisionist understanding of the social order would take centuries to take hold not only within the Christian community but in the larger society under its influence. Even in the 21st century ethnic and gender distinctions remain deeply embedded in the social order and the order of the church, even if in terms of leadership and membership they are no longer defended, but endured.
But there is one area in the order of both society and church where gender distinctions are not merely endured but vigorously defended, and that is marriage. While in the United States civil society has increasingly removed difference in gender as a requirement of marriage the United Methodist church has not. In this one respect the UMC has resisted responding to both changing understandings of gender and sexuality emerging from the scientific study of human persons, and has also resisted extending the ideals of equality apparent in New Testament descriptions of God’s Reign to LGTBQ person. In all else in the order of church and society may change, but not marriage between and man and a woman. Why?
Why must the continual revision of our understandings of God’s order stop when it comes to marriage?
Actually it does not. In another aspect of marriage revisionism is found among traditionalists, and that is with regard to divorce and remarriage. A century ago remarriage after divorce in a church would have been unimaginable by the vast majority of Christians, as it remains unimaginable for Roman Catholics and Orthodox. After all, in Matthew 19 Jesus explicitly recognizes only the right of a man to divorce a woman, and then only for unchastity. Otherwise divorce results in adultery. But for the last half century traditionalist United Methodists, like the great majority of American protestants, have revised their understanding of the teaching of the Bible regarding marriage so as to directly contradict the clear teaching of Jesus. The basis for this change is that the arc of God’s grace in history allows us to see that because in God’s Reign there is “neither male nor female” the women have a right equal to men with regard to divorce, and that because of God’s forgiveness and grace both men and women should have a chance to start over in a new relationship when a marriage goes bad.
So we’ve revised even our understandings of that fundamental social institution, marriage, with regards to divorce and remarriage. Why then do traditionalists maintain their insistence that marriage is only between persons of two different genders?
Self-identified traditionalists seem to maintain that gender difference is an essential part of the natural order. It is rooted in the obvious physical attributes of all mammals, including humans, as they were originally created by God as man or woman. Moreover, they maintain, marriage between a man and a woman is fundamental to the social order. Regardless of what facts might be brought to bear by biologists, social scientists, psychologists, or individuals the traditionalists insist that in these two areas there can be no revision of the traditional meaning of the Biblical text in this case. To which I think it is reasonable to ask: “Why?”
The supposedly obvious physical differences between genders are no different in kind than the obvious fact that the sun revolves around the moon. Looking between your legs (or someone else’s, but lets not be tasteless) isn’t any better evidence for the reality of what it means to be male or female than watching the sun come up in the morning and set in the evening (having watched it move in an arc across the sky.) Asserting that historically most human societies have recognized something like marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman (or women) isn’t different in kind than noting that over the span of human history virtually all societies were organized into something like kingdoms, tribes, or clans and believed that the sun revolved around the earth.
Moreover traditionalists, assuming they accept the understanding of marriage found the United Methodist church, no longer believe that the purpose or basis of marriage is heterosexual sexual union and procreation, so there is no necessity for gender difference there.
In this light it is at least problematic to refer to Biblical standards for sexual morality that forbid sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex. Even if Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians unambiguously referred to contemporary homosexual relationships (which is contested) traditionalists would have to explain why there couldn’t be marriage between persons of the same sex who abstained from sexual relations. Or perhaps more problematically, why these supposed sins remain sins while Jesus calls adultery is no longer a sin so long as it is in the context of a second marriage.
Logically it isn’t incumbent on the so-called revisionists to justify their revisions in the matter of LGBTQ marriage. They are simply following a pattern of revisionism found among even traditionalists. As new understandings of human personhood emerge they are seeking to revise traditional understandings of gender and gender relations to reflect the long egalitarian and liberating arc inaugurated by Jesus Christ and confirmed each time a person is baptized into a church.
It is incumbent on the so-called traditionalists to justify why they stopped revising at just this point, and this point only in their theology of the order of nature and the order of human society. What made them reject a growing social consensus rooted in rapidly emerging scientific understandings of human personhood and social evolution when they readily accepted the normative status of the sciences (natural and social) in other matters when interpreting God’s order as found in the Bible? What makes them reject carrying the long arc of realization of God’s ideals for humanity as revealed in scripture into the realm of marriage relations between two persons of the same sex?
I do not offer the question thinking that there is no answer, but because if there is one I haven’t heard it. Still it seems clear that an answer could not simply reference this or that passage of scripture or teaching of Jesus, since all such passages could be subject to the same forms of revision I’ve discussed above. It would need, rather, to give a coherent picture of God’s natural, social, and ecclesial orders that, to remain orderly, require both gender distinctions and specifically gender distinctions in marriage. And it will need to do so bearing in mind that Jesus specifically teaches that marriage is NOT an institution found in the ultimate fulfillment of God’s Reign.
In asking this question of traditionalists I do not, however, want to imply that progressives, with their continual revisionism, have nothing for which to answer. I’ll turn to that in the next blog.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In