Is our Doctrine of God at stake in Sexuality Discussions?

Introduction

Is our “Doctrine of God”, the technical term used by systematic theologians for our vision of God’s nature and attributes, at stake in our debates within the church concerning the ethics of human sexual practices?

In my experience, it is often generously and, to some extent, understandably presumed that both conservatives and liberals basically hold to the same vision of God but that they merely differ in their respective hermeneutical understandings of particular key “proof” texts.

However, I would like to examine the question of whether that assessment is actually accurate.

Why this question and why ask it now?

I think my exploring this question is worthwhile because I think it is only rarely discussed within our current inter-Church debates and that the main debate has instead focused on how one’s theology of the interpretation, inspiration and authority of Scripture might go on to influence one’s views on the ethics of human sexual practices.

As has rightly been pointed out, those of us either currently in positions of ordained leadership or training to be in such positions are, provided they are decided on the matter, no longer pragmatically afforded the luxury of being able to be silent here. It would therefore be irresponsible of me not to be open and honest about my personal views now.

Our doctrine of God, however, precedes and outranks our doctrine of Scripture because God eternally predates Scriptures, and Jesus even came before the New Testament of course. That is certainly not to say that the Bible is unimportant, uninspired or non-authoritative. However, it instead means that we must establish our doctrine of God before we then go on to examine our doctrine of Scripture if we are to do things in an orderly and proper manner.

After many years of reading, research, discussions and interviews on the Christian ethic of human sexuality, I have never heard a liberal Christian openly deny Jesus Christ’s perfect and certain foreknowledge, divine omniscience, the perfect unity of the Triune Godhead, or the infallibility and eternality of Jesus’s teachings.

However, I would like to suggest that some of the arguments that liberals use today to try to reconcile New Testament passages, which would on a plain reading undermine their conclusion, with their sexual ethic could unwittingly lead them to compromise on the doctrine of God.

This is of course a serious charge and so I do not take it lightly. I always try to graciously and humbly presume that their arguments are innocent of error until and unless they are definitively proven to be inconsistent. With all that said, let me dive into some of the passages and the accompanying reasonings.

Arguments from Silence are Unreliable

Liberals often assert that Jesus himself never explicitly mentioned gay sex, gay relationships or gay people. This is true and cannot be denied. However, arguments from silence are always unreliable and just because Jesus is silent on an issue does not necessarily mean that he approves of it or that it is not a grave moral matter. There are a huge number of grave moral vices which Jesus never mentions.

However, while Jesus never explicitly mentioned gay sex, gay relationships or gay people, this is unsurprising as no one ever asked him about it.

This is, at least partly, because his moral views on the subject would have been obvious, predictable and taken for granted. Furthermore, if we are to presume that Jesus did approve of gay sex, surely the onus would have been on him to bring the subject up himself and explain his views on it as they diverged from the Jewish status quo? Yet, he never does this. All this means that, putting Mark 10:2-9 and Matthew 19:3-8 to one side for the moment, at a minimum, it is clearly more reasonable to presume that Jesus’s moral views on gay sex did not contradict those of the Old Testament or the Judaism of his day.

Jesus implicitly rules out gay sex morally in Mark 10 and Matthew 19

However, I would argue that Jesus implicitly rules out gay sex as a morally permissible path when he talks about marriage in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. In both Mark 10:2-9 and Matthew 19:3-8, he answers a question about divorce by freely and unnecessarily choosing to refer back to the original opposite-sex definition of marriage stated in Genesis 2. By this, he is clearly implying that the doctrine of marriage has not changed since creation and that its particular setup is itself a divinely-directed creation ordinance. He did not have to make that choice and could have instead chosen not to directly quote from the Old Testament. He could instead have stated that marriage is the divinely-ordained, lifelong, monogamous, union of any two individuals. However, it is both striking and revealing that he refuses to do so.

‘Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?”They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”’

(Mark 10:2-9)

‘And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so”’

(Matthew 19:3-8)

It is indeed true to say, as liberals observe, that Jesus is not responding here to a question about homosexuality. However, I do believe that his answer clearly states that marriage is inherently heterosexual in nature and that homosexuals are thereby excluded from it.

Even if Jesus had never mentioned marriage or sex at all, it would only be reasonable Christianly to presume that the Levitical prohibition remained in force during his time and to this day, especially as it is repeatedly reasserted throughout the New Testament.

There are no positive mentions of gay sex within either the Old Testament or the New Testament and, additionally, all mentions of it are unanimously condemnatory. I find it very difficult to believe that this is merely coincidence, or “divine oversight”. Indeed, even the most respected liberal Biblical scholars, including Walter Brueggemann^{[^[i]]}, William Loader^{[^[ii]]}, Luke Timothy Johnson^{[^[iii]]}, E. P. Sanders^{[^[iv]]}, Walter Wink^{[^[v]]}, Dan Otto Via^{[^[vi]]} and Diarmaid MacCulloch^{[^[vii]]}, all openly and specifically admit that the Bible clearly sees gay sex as immoral. However, they then go on to state that they believe all the condemnatory verses are mistaken and are therefore not morally binding upon us today.

Did Jesus lack Foreknowledge while He was Incarnate on Earth?

It seems to me that, in these sorts of situations, liberals are unwittingly compromising on orthodox and long and ecumenically-established visions of God’s nature. As Dr James White, Dr Michael L. Brown and Sean McDowell have all argued, if Jesus did not believe gay sex was wrong, why would he not only have not mentioned it but also have said something which would, on a plain reading, rule out its moral virtue? If Jesus has, as has historically been believed by Christians, perfect and certain foreknowledge, he would have known that Christians would, in the future, use his silence and pronouncement of marriage as being inherently heterosexual to wrongly exclude gay people from marriage.

Was Jesus Trapped by His Culture?

If one is to agree with the liberal perspective here, one has to presume, as the Rev’d Dr Ian Paul has astutely observed, that Jesus was essentially trapped both by and within his culture and that he could not, therefore, say anything counter-cultural at all on the ethics of human sexuality. This is clearly untrue as Jesus’s departure from the Mosaic allowance of divorce for any reason in both Mark 10:2-9 and Matthew 19:3-8 was a radical, unexpected and counter-cultural moral teaching both for the Jews and also the surrounding culture of his day.

Furthermore, we would also have to logically say that Jesus is not fully divine, does not have perfect and certain foreknowledge and can make mistakes in his teachings. However, any of these moves would clearly put one outside of the long and ecumenically-established orthodox Christian tradition.

As Voddie Baucham has argued, as Christians we believe in Christ’s eternal pre-existence and that he is a full member of the triune godhead and is therefore one with God the Father. If we accept this as true as the Christian tradition long has, then what God the Father inspired the Old Testament to repeatedly say about gay sex must, in some way, be broadly in line with what Jesus himself says on the subject. At the very least, even on a more liberal understanding of the inspiration of Scripture, one must concede that these two visions must not contradict each other. However, the liberal cannot accept this and must therefore, in order to be consistent, concede that Jesus is not actually one with the Father, that he was not eternally pre-existent, that he does not have perfect and certain foreknowledge and that his teachings are not necessarily infallible.

As always, in a spirit of humility I would love those who disagree with me here or have spotted flaws in my argument to privately contact me via the Contact Page here but, in my research and listening so far, I have not personally found a coherent counterargument to the above points.

By Ben Somervell