Same-sex advocates can assert that Jesus never said anything directly about homosexuality — it was not a topic of debate among Jews of His time — however, they cannot claim that Jesus never addressed marriage. Nor can they deny that the theme of marriage as the two created sexes “becoming one flesh,” imaging the union between God and His people, runs powerfully through Scripture and the Reformed tradition. But they can de-emphasize and obscure that theme.  The purpose of this smoke screen is to prepare the way for a revised teaching that reduces marriage to just an emotional attachment between any two (or more?) individuals. This is the strategy pursued by the Covenant Network in its adaptation of the PCUSA marriage study.

The Covenant Network of Presbyterians — the lead advocate for the 2011 repeal of the “fidelity and chastity” standard for Presbyterian Church (USA) officers — is now pushing the 2014 PCUSA General Assembly to take the next step in sexual revisionism: the redefinition of Christian marriage. Toward that end, the Covenant Network sponsored a recentconference on “Marriage Matters.” It is also distributing an “adaptation” of the denomination’s official study on marriage that tilts the table toward affirming same-sex marriage.

The Oct. 31-Nov. 2 “Marriage Matters” conference rallied support for an overhaul of church teaching on marriage. Princeton Seminary professor William Stacy Johnson asserted that “the gospel demands” that the PCUSA “open its understanding of marriage to the gay and lesbian people.”

Louisville Seminary professor Amy Plantinga Pauw denied that the Bible has clear and consistent teachings on marriage. Pauw rejected any linkage between marriage and God’s creation of humans as male and female with the ability to conceive a child when the two come together. Any such linkage, she declared, represents “ways of thinking about sexuality and marriage that are no longer considered normative today.” McCormick Seminary President Frank Yamada claimed that when Genesis 2:24 speaks of how “a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh,” the passage is not about “a man and woman, but that God has figured out a way to take away isolation from human beings.”

Young activist Matthew Vines told conference attendees about his “Reformation Project,” which aims to persuade conservative evangelicals that Biblical prohibitions of same-sex relations no longer apply today. A workshopcontemplated all the parts of the church’s wedding liturgy that would have to be expunged because they “no longer work as well.”

A subtler approach

The Covenant Network is trying a subtler approach with mainstream PCUSA congregations that may be unsure about same-sex marriage. It is offering “supplemental resources” for the study of marriage in which Presbyterians are supposedly engaged. The 2012 General Assembly, after narrowly turning aside proposals to redefine marriage as between any “two persons,” asked the denomination to step back and “enter into a season of serious study and discernment concerning its meaning of Christian marriage.”

The official study on “Christian Marriage in the Presbyterian Church (USA),” produced by the denomination’s Office of Theology and Worship, gives good background on what the church has said about marriage in the past. Yet it largely ducks the current controversy about same-sex marriage.

Directing participants to selected passages from the Scriptures, the PCUSA confessions and the marriage liturgy, the study spotlights a “main idea” for each of its six sessions. These themes include:

• that marriage is a gift of God going back to creation;
• that it is a covenant relationship witnessed by the community of faith;
• that it is the setting for “the full expression of love between a man and a woman;”
• that marriage “contribute[s] to the well-being of society,” especially through “the birth and nurture of children;”
• that marriage is “a holy mystery” reflecting the union of Christ and the Church;
• and that “marriage is a means by which Christian spouses live out their lives of discipleship together.”

These teachings are difficult to square with the notion of same-sex marriage; however, the official study does not remark on the tension. It simply asks open-ended questions about “how does the sexual identity of those who marry inform the understanding of marriage” that the church has traditionally held.

The Covenant Network aims to go beyond open-ended questions. It explains that it is “hearing that many congregations would like a study that goes a step further, challenging groups of faithful Presbyterians to consider a wider variety of perspectives on interpreting the scriptural and confessional traditional of the church around marriage.” Such congregations, according to the network, want to “draw on theological reflection, both traditional and contemporary, that is open to the possibility that our understanding of marriage (like all our theology) might be ‘Reformed and always being Reformed.’” The network also reports that “[s]ome congregations are finding that the sessions” of the official study “are difficult to complete in the usual time available on a Sunday morning.”

To fill these perceived needs, the Covenant Network is offering an “adaptation” of the official study on marriage. The adaptation, developed by the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Cuthbertson of Las Placitas Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque, N.M., adds some material and deletes some material. As it does not in any way signal where these alterations have been introduced, the only way to find them is to make a phrase-by-phrase comparison of the two documents.

On balance, it does not appear that Cuthbertson’s adaptation is any shorter than the denominational study. The main change is that the adaptation consistently emphasizes arguments for blessing same-sex marriages, while de-emphasizing considerations that might suggest retaining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The “wider variety of perspectives” promised by the Covenant Network turns out to be a single perspective — the perspective that “is open to the possibility that our understanding of marriage” needs to be revised.

What the Covenant Network added

First, note some of Cuthbertson’s additions to the study:

1. “How does the sexual identity (orientation) of those who marry inform the understanding of marriage as …?” [emphasis added] Into this key question that is repeated in the official study for each of the “main ideas,” Cuthbertson has inserted in parentheses the term “orientation” as a putative synonym for “sexual identity.” But “orientation” is not the same as “sexual identity,” and equating the two totally alters the thrust of the question.

In the original question, “sexual identity” would be understood naturally as referring to the identity given by God. “Male and female He created them,” according to Genesis 1:27. For Christians, our truest identity is always a gift of our Creator and Redeemer.

Yet the modern term “orientation” points in a different direction. It suggests that our “sexual identity” is rooted in our desires — for partners of the opposite sex, of the same sex, or of whatever characteristics attract us. But if these desires drive us toward actions that violate God’s will, is it right to embrace the desires as our “sexual identity?” The Covenant Network resource seems unaware of this dilemma, apparently assuming that any “orientation” constitutes a proper basis for one’s “sexual identity.”

2. The Covenant Network adaptation points study participants to two Old Testament passages describing descendants of a common ancestor as having the same “bone and flesh.” It then asks the leading question,“How do these references inform our understanding of the metaphor ‘one flesh’?” The obvious intended implication is to undermine the traditional interpretation of Genesis 2:24, in which “the two become one flesh” is understood as not just a metaphor but also a physical description of the union of a man and woman in sexual intercourse. The effect is to minimize the importance of that sexual union of opposites and to reduce marriage to a more metaphorical closeness among any persons.

3. The adaptation cites Old Testament practice of “levirate marriage — requiring the brother of a man who died childless to marry his widow and father a child to carry on his brother’s name” as “one example of how different the worldview of the Biblical writers is from our own.” It then asks, “How do we discern which Biblical admonitions are timeless principles and which are culture-bound?”

Cuthbertson provides no answer to that question. He thus sows a generalized suspicion that many Biblical commands, such as the prohibitions of same-sex relations, might be “culture-bound” and no longer applicable. He ignores a principle by which the church has long discerned which Old Testament commands still apply: the ones that are reiterated by Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. The requirement for levirate marriage is not repeated in the New Testament. By contrast, the honor shown to man/woman marriage and the disapproval of same-sex and other nonmarital sexual relations is, if anything, clearer and stronger in the New Testament than in the Old.

Readers of the Covenant Network study guide are not informed of this important distinction. They are left with the possible impression that much of the Biblical teaching on marriage is as obsolete as levirate marriage.

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