By David Gushee
Follow David: @dpgushee
Here are three proposals for responding to the very important claim that God’s design in creation rules out any same-sex relationships, a claim derived from Genesis 1-2, Matthew 19, Romans 1 and perhaps also Leviticus 18/20 and 1 Corinthians 6:9/1 Timothy 1:10. Nearly every biblical exploration in this series so far has been leading us to this point. These proposals are offered in recognition that theologically this is the ultimate fork in the road related to the LGBT issue. They are exploratory.
Proposal # 1: Treat Old Testament creation accounts, and any New Testament allusions or references to them, as theological accounts rather than human self-reports or scientific descriptions of the world as we find it. This requires faithful contemporary Christians to find ways to integrate two different kinds of knowledge — as we (sometimes) have done before related to other issues.
Essentially, this proposal suggests that the LGBT issue is a faith/science integration issue.
Christians (and Jews, and Muslims) have since the 16th century faced a major fork in the road concerning to what extent we are able or willing to integrate the findings of science with our primal creation narratives and the interpretive and theological traditions that we have developed from them. The problem is similar in kind today to what it was when Scripture, Christian tradition and its authoritative interpreters first confronted Galileo, Copernicus and Darwin. Just as Christians have had to come to terms with an earth that stubbornly continues to revolve around the sun rather than the other way around (as it was believed that Scripture taught), and with a multi-billion-year evolutionary process rather than a 6,000 year-old earth and a literal six 24-hour-days creation, on the LGBT issue we face the challenge of integrating contemporary scientific findings about gender and sexual orientation into our theological story of the world God made. It has never been easy for Christians to do this integration of biblical text with stubbornly resistant facts out there in our world. It isn’t easy now. This might be called the sexual creationism problem.
We know that Genesis 1 says, “God made them male and female” and blessed them with the ability to be fruitful and multiply. This makes sense, and we run into lots of clearly male and clearly female people (and their offspring) every day. But we also now know from real human beings and research about them that a very small percentage of the human population are intersex or transgender. (Intersex: a variation in sex characteristics involving chromosomes, gonads or genitals that do not allow a person to be distinctly identified as male or female. Transgender: a person whose gender identity or expression does not match their assigned sex.)
These phenomena, embodied by real people, exist. How are we to integrate these stubborn facts with Scripture, while responding compassionately to the real human beings in front of us?
We know that Genesis 2 says that God made the woman from the man, gave the woman to the man, and declared that the male and the female together make a marriage. This makes sense, and we run into lots of clearly male and clearly female people needing each other, wanting each other and partnering with each other all the time. But we also know from real human beings and research about them that something like 3.4 percent to 5 percent of the population cannot find a “suitable partner” (Gen. 2) in a member of the “opposite sex” because that is not their (fixed, enduring, unchangeable) sexual orientation. (Even if we reduce the number to 2 percent to account for bisexuals and some measure of sexual-orientation fluidity, the point still holds for the 2 percent.) Meanwhile we (ought to) know that a predictably very large percentage of these ineluctably same-sex attracted people have the same aching need for partnership and sexual companionship, and the same aching grief over being alone, that the man experiences and God recognizes as “not good” in Genesis 2.
These phenomena, embodied by real people, exist. How are we to integrate these stubborn facts with Scripture, while responding compassionately to the real human beings in front of us?
There are only three possible kinds of Christian responses to these two different kinds of knowledge, one offered in the biblical text and the other offered in stubborn facts offered by lives and scientific research.
One response seeks to reduce the cognitive dissonance by throwing out the biblical story as an ancient fable, and a dangerous one to those who are not described by it.
Another seeks to reduce the cognitive dissonance by throwing out the stubborn facts, such as the reported experiences of real LGBT people, and related research, as godless or impossible.
The third is to find some way to integrate both kinds of knowledge, as many Christians have previously done in relation to a heliocentric solar system and some kind of evolutionary process over billions of years.
A simple way to bring such integration is to say that normally gender identity is clearly male or female, normally gender identity matches gender assignment, and normally sexual orientation is heterosexual. That is to say, this is statistically what most people experience, and thus the way that most societies have structured their marital, sexual and familial expectations, and thus the account most likely to be reflected in ancient religious texts, including the Bible.
But that is not to say that the normal equals the normative in all cases. It is a stubborn fact that difference also exists in the human family, and not just in the area of sexuality. That small minority of people whose gender identity and sexual orientation turn out to be something different than the majority ought to be able to be accepted for who they are and assisted, where necessary, in the ways most congruent with their overall well-being. This better reflects the teaching of the Bible as a whole than demanding an impossible uniformity and rejecting those who do not achieve it.
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Proposal #2: Because arguments from God’s purported design in creation have proven remarkably problematic in Christian history, do not rely on them for sexual ethics.
Essentially, this proposal suggests that Christians should look forward to new creation rather than backward to original creation when thinking theologically-ethically about the LGBT issue.
I noticed in working through the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer last year that after initially accepting the language of “orders of creation” drawn from his Lutheran tradition, he abandoned it for a new language of “mandates.” He did this at least in part because he had become increasingly alarmed by the dangers of “orders of creation” language in his increasingly Nazified German Christian context. There, many Christians had long defended conservative and even reactionary social conditions as reflecting God’s will in creation. Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, Nazi or Nazi-influenced thinkers took concepts such as blood, soil, race and nation and linked them to a theological ethic of creation, adapting Lutheran “orders of creation” language for this purpose. Thus, it was claimed, and by some top-ranking theologians, that God established different races, of different bloods, in different lands, with a racial hierarchy among the different groups, with a consequent divine prohibition of “race mixing,” and so on.
Bonhoeffer instead shifted to “mandates” language. His approach retained a recognition that life comes to us structured in various important institutions or spheres such as family, state and people. But he rejected any claim that what we see around us in a fallen world is simply equal to what God originally created or intended. And he rejected Nazi ideology’s version of what God originally intended. And, finally, he deemphasized creation as an ethical category in favor of the realistic earthly preservation of the conditions of life necessary for human well-being and preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ.
This issue reminds me of debates in my own lifetime in which claims from the creation narratives have been used and abused:
• Christians who claim from Genesis 1:26-31 that God gave humans dominion over the earth to do with as we wish, and thus “creation care” talk is a violation of God’s plan for human dominion over creation.
• Christians who claim from Genesis 9:11 that God promised never again to send another flood, so the climatologists’ fear that runaway climate change might change sea levels must be rejected.
• Christians who claim from Genesis 2 that woman is to man as submissive helper to divinely-established leader — and from Genesis 3 that woman was “first in the Edenic fall” and therefore morally inferior.
• Christians who claim (or once claimed) that Genesis 9’s “curse of Ham” means that all those of African descent are morally inferior and destined to be slaves.
I am not suggesting from these sad examples that Genesis 1-11 can play no constructive role in Christian ethics. But I am suggesting the idea that Christian theology does better leaning forward toward Jesus Christ, his person and his work, his way of doing ministry and advancing God’s coming kingdom, the new creation he brings forth, rather than leaning backward to the primeval creation narratives, where we so often run into trouble.
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Proposal #3: Instead of relying just on Genesis 1-2, we should consider more seriously the implications for sexual ethics of living in a Genesis 3 world. Essentially, this proposal suggests that there can be no actual or theological return to the primeval Garden briefly depicted in the beginning of Genesis.
Historically, most Christians have read Genesis 3 as an account of a primeval human “fall” into sin, and Genesis 4-Revelation 22 as illustrating the consequences of the fall and God’s redemptive response with Israel and in Christ. Let’s stay within that thought world for a moment here, even while recognizing that its exegetical foundation in Genesis 1-3 is arguable.
Most Christian thinkers have said something like this: God creates a good creation, human beings sin and mess it up, and then God acts to offer redemption, a process which will continue until the end of time when Christ returns. We can still see glimpses of the original good creation, we can certainly see plenty of evidence of sin and its disordering effects, and we certainly hope we can see glimpses (or more) of the redemption breaking in through Christ. This remains a theological account I find deeply compelling.
A suitably dark theology of sin recognizes “total depravity,” which means that there is no aspect of human or planetary life unaffected by sin and its disordering effects. This would certainly include human sexuality, which is distorted and disordered in a thousand different ways. Think about the sexual offenses and scandals that surface in each week’s news. But it is just as true of all aspects of creation and of human life. A sunny liberal optimism about human nature is out of sync with the Christian theological tradition and the evidence of our eyes. It is also out of sync with the strenuous moral exhortations offered throughout Scripture to the people of God, and the obvious limits of those exhortations in bringing fundamental transformation to sinful human beings — even when those human beings are attempting to cooperate with the help of God’s Spirit.
My suggestion here is simply this. Traditionalists appeal to Genesis 1-2; God made them male and female and male for female, and so everyone needs to conform to this pattern or live as a celibate. But they rarely mention Genesis 3, which (most Christians have said) tells the story of the beginnings of human sin, with the disordering consequences that are so painfully described in Genesis 4 through Revelation.
If we live in a Genesis 3 world, and not a Genesis 1-2 world, this undoubtedly means that everyone’s sexuality is sinful, broken and disordered, just like everything else about us. Nobody has Genesis 1-2 sexuality. To paraphrase a statement about the U.S. military from former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (surprised you there, didn’t I?), we go into adult life with the sexuality we have, not the sexuality we might want or wish to have. No adult is a sexual innocent. Our task, if we are Christians, is to attempt to order the sexuality we have in as responsible a manner as we can. We can’t get back to Genesis 1-2, a primal sinless world. But we can do the best we can with the Genesis 3 sexuality we have. Catholic ethicist Lisa Cahill once wrote that Christian sexual ethics in the world we actually live in must help people come to “the most morally commendable course of action concretely available” in their particular circumstances. That pertains to all of us.
Traditionalists often speak as if heterosexual people’s sexuality is innocent while gay and lesbian people’s sexuality is broken/damaged/sinful. Revisionists often speak as if everyone’s sexuality is innocent. I am suggesting that in Genesis 3 perspective no one’s sexuality is innocent. Everyone’s sexuality is broken in ways known quite well to each of us in our own hearts. Everyone’s sexuality needs to be morally disciplined and ordered. Meanwhile, basic standards of Christian humility (cf. Matt. 7 about logs and specks) forbid us from any posture other than attending to our own issues rather than those of others.
I will argue in the next essay that the Christian tradition has already proposed a norm for human beings wrestling with Genesis 3 sexuality: that norm is covenant. It is a rigorous standard, challenging us to the most strenuous effort, and constantly flouted today, including by Christians.
If we really care about getting our sexual ethics right in a Genesis 3 world, we need a sturdy recommitment to covenant. It is a standard that all of us sinners can strive for, and be measured by.
Previous columns:
God made them male and female: The LGBT issue, part 12
Two odd little words: the LGBT issue, part 11 (revised)
Leviticus, abomination and Jesus: The LGBT issue, part 10
The sins of Sodom (and Gibeah): The LGBT issue, part 9
How traditionalists connect the biblical dots: The LGBT issue, part 8
Biblical inspiration, human interpretation: The LGBT issue, part 7
If this is where you get off the bus: The LGBT issue, part 6
Six options for the churches: The LGBT issue, part 5
Gay Christians exist: The LGBT issue, part 4
Change we can all support: The LGBT issue, part 3
What exactly is the issue? The LGBT issue, part 2
Starting a conversation: The LGBT Issue, part 1
Next column
Toward covenant: The LGBT issue, part 14