Gay marriage is untenable biblically; it is a capitulation to the culture; it is a caricature of real marriage. As Kenyan Anglican Archbishop Eliud Wabukala noted, marriage is under attack and the homosexual movement has become an ideology that attacks human identity as male and female created in the image of God. He also said that laws legalizing same sex marriage passed in England recently are “a profound rejection of the law of God.” He is right.

The Church of Jesus Christ, in all its myriad manifestations, is in the midst of the greatest cultural change on sexuality since Apostolic times.

Never before in church history has the ontology and cosmology of human sexual behavior been so challenged. Not even the Borgia Popes dared challenge the definition of sexuality, however debauched their behavior was. In some denominations today efforts are underway to overturn prevailing definitions. The speed with which all this has taken place is breathtaking in its brevity and stunning in its acclamation.

When I wrote my first editorial in 1979 for the Virginia Churchman titled Gay is Not Okay, I could not have envisaged, over three decades later, the ordination of openly homosexual practicing bishops, both men and women. Nor could I have possibly dreamed that this would become such a defining issue that it would tear the fabric of the Anglican Communion apart, pitting province against province, diocese against diocese, archbishop against archbishop, bishop against bishop, splitting whole congregations, and leading to massive schism with lawsuits running into the tens of millions of dollars. It has also led to broken friendships, angry bloggers, screams of homophobia, and capitulation by churches, including bishops and archbishops, as well as corporations, states and possibly, in time, an entire nation led by a homosexual affirming President.

It has been a sexual blitzkrieg without moral equal and with a ferocity unequalled since the beginning of the Civil Rights movement with its struggle for racial equality in the 1960s.

Still the case has not been made that the Bible is either irrelevant on the subject or can be ignored or deconstructed to make it mean something other than what it says and means. It is disingenuous to write off the Apostle Paul as locked into his own culture or that the Bible never speaks to committed, faithful same-sex unions. Few, if any, serious Christians will deny the Apostle spoke prophetically and wisely on adultery and fornication. To say that what he said about homosexuality can now be discounted is to deeply violate Scripture.

While many denominations and churches have conceded that monogamy (from monos, “single,” and gamos, “marriage”) is the same as or the virtual equivalent of a “stable homosexual union,” Gamos in scripture is usually always rendered “marriage,” which assumes a heterosexual union. It is a highly idiosyncratic use of gamos to translate it as a “stable homosexual union.” Gamos (“marriage,” “wedding”) and gameo (“to marry”) occur 16 and 29 times respectively in the New Testament. In NO case do they refer to same sex oral or anal intercourse.

So also with the term homophobia, which so often appears in anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant polemics. The word rightly refers to fear of sameness, not to fear of homosexuality at all, as is often assumed.

Wherever homophobia is bandied about, its etymology should be first examined before any knee-jerk defensiveness or marginalization is elicited. “Classic Christian teaching is not homophobic but hemophilic in the sense of attesting God’s love for all of us as the same kind of sinners in need of unmerited grace,” writes Thomas C. Oden, Professor of Theology at Drew University.

Christian marriage is by definition an enduring covenant between one man, one female since grounded in the potential gift of sexual generativity, bonded with a solemn promise of enduring mutual commitments in the service of holy matrimony, offered up in the presence of God and the community of faith, so as to provide a nurturing environment for the parenting of children, the most precious gift that can come of sexuality, says Oden.

Same-sex intercourse cannot offer this gift or lead to generativity or natural birth, but only to fleeting individualistic, narcissistic pleasure that may haunt memory, undermine identity, and sear conscience.

Classic Christian teaching views it as an oxymoron that persons of the same sex might be feigned in God’s presence as being “married” in a valid holy matrimony, though they may indeed have enduring friendships and may, like all of us sinners, receive the forgiving grace of baptism and Eucharist, says Oden.

JESUS AND HOMOSEXUALITY

When Jesus was asked questions about marriage, he went straight back to the defining passages in Genesis that say that marriage is between male and female and is meant to be life long. He saw the Creation accounts in Genesis as authoritative in His day. And what is authoritative for Jesus is authoritative for Christians, also. While Jesus did not specifically teach on homosexuality, His establishment of the Genesis passages as the fundamental passages on marriage (even more fundamental than the Law) leaves no doubt as to the outcome. One might also point out that Jesus said nothing about Bisexuality, Bestiality and any of the now 58 other sexualities that litter the sexual lexicon. He did firmly condemn child abuse.

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