Should We Support Gay Marriage? NO
By Wolfhart Pannenberg
Good News Magazine
November 2004
Can love ever be sinful? The entire tradition of Christian doctrine teaches
that there is such a thing as inverted, perverted love. Human beings are
created for love, as creatures of the God who is Love. And yet that divine
appointment is corrupted whenever people turn away from God or love other
things more than God.
Jesus said, "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me..." (Matt. 10:37, NRSV). Love for God must take precedence over love for
our parents, even though love for parents is commanded by the fourth
commandment.
The will of God be the guiding star of our identity and self- determination.
What this means for sexual behavior can be seen in Jesus' teaching about
divorce. In order to answer the Pharisees' question about the admissibility of divorce,
Jesus refers to the creation of human beings. Here he sees God expressing
his purpose for his creatures: Creation confirms that God has created human
beings as male and female. Thus, a man leaves his father and mother to be
united with his wife, and the two become one flesh.
Jesus concludes from this that the unbreakable permanence of fellowship
between husband and wife is the Creator's will for human beings. The
indissoluble fellowship of marriage, therefore, is the goal of our creation
as sexual beings (Mark 10:2-9).
Since on this principle the Bible is not time bound, Jesus' word is the
foundation and criterion for all Christian pronouncement on sexuality, not
just marriage in particular, but our entire creaturely identities as sexual
beings. According to Jesus' teaching, human sexuality as male and as female
is intended for the indissoluble fellowship of marriage.
This standard informs Christian teaching about the entire domain of sexual
behavior.
Jesus' perspective, by and large, corresponds to Jewish tradition, even
though his stress on the indissolubility of marriage goes beyond the
provision for divorce within Jewish law (Deut. 24:1). It was a shared Jewish
conviction that men and women in their sexual identity are intended for the
community of marriage. This also accounts for the Old Testament assessment
of sexual behaviors that depart from this norm, including fornication,
adultery, and homosexual relations.
The biblical assessments of homosexual practice are unambiguous in their
rejection, and all its statements on this subject agree without exception.
The Holiness Code of Leviticus incontrovertibly affirms, "You shall not lie
with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination" (Lev. 18:22 NRSV).
Leviticus 20 includes homosexual behavior among the crimes meriting capital
punishment (Lev. 20:13; it is significant that the same applies to adultery
in verse 10). On these matters, Judaism always knew itself to be distinct
from other nations.
This same distinctiveness continued to determine the New Testament statement
about homosexuality, in contrast to the Hellenistic culture that took no
offense at homosexual relations. In Romans, Paul includes homosexual
behavior among the consequences of turning away from God (1:27). In 1
Corinthians, homosexual practice belongs with fornication, adultery,
idolatry, greed, drunkenness, theft, and robbery as behaviors that preclude
participation in the kingdom of God (6:9 10); Paul affirms that through
baptism Christians have become free from their entanglement in all these
practices (6:11).
The New Testament contains not a single passage that might indicate a more
positive assessment of homosexual activity to counterbalance these Pauline
statements. Thus, the entire biblical witness includes practicing
homosexuality, without exception among the kinds of behavior that give
particularly striking expression to humanity's turning away from God. This
exegetical result places very narrow boundaries around the view of
homosexuality in any church that is under the authority of Scripture.
What is more, the biblical statements on this subject merely represent the
negative corollary to the Bible's positive views on the creational purpose
of men and women in their sexuality.
These texts that are negative toward homosexual behavior are not merely
dealing with marginal opinions that could be neglected without detriment to
the Christian message as a whole.
Moreover, the biblical statements about homosexuality cannot be relativized
as the expressions of a cultural situation that today is simply outdated.
The biblical witness from the outset deliberately opposed the assumptions of
their cultural environment in the name of faith in the God of Israel, who in
Creation appointed men and women for a particular identity.
Contemporary advocates for a change in the church's view of homosexuality
commonly point out that the biblical statements were unaware of important
modern anthropological evidence. This new evidence, it is said, suggests
that homosexuality must be regarded as a given constituent of the
psychosomatic identity of homosexual persons, entirely prior to any
corresponding sexual expression. (For the sake of clarity it is better to
speak here of a homophile inclination as distant from homosexual practice.)
Such phenomena occur not only in people who are homosexually active.
But inclination need not dictate practice. It is characteristic of human
beings that our sexual impulses are not confined to a separate realm of
behavior; they permeate our behavior in every area of life. This, of course,
includes relationships with persons of the same sex. However, precisely
because erotic motives are involved in all aspects of human behavior, we are
faced with the task of integrating them into the whole of our life and
conduct.
The mere existence of homophile inclinations does not automatically lead to
homosexual practice. Rather, these inclinations can be integrated into a
life in which they are subordinated to the relationship with the opposite
sex where, in fact, the subject of sexual activity should not be the
all-determining center of human life and vocation. As the sociologist Helmut
Schelsky has rightly pointed out, one of the primary achievements of
marriage as an institution is its enrollment of human sexuality in the
service of ulterior tasks and goals.
The reality of homophile inclinations, therefore, need not be denied and
must not be condemned. The question, however, is how to handle such
inclinations within the human task of responsibly directing our behavior.
This is the real problem; and it is here that we must deal with the
conclusion that homosexual activity is a departure from the norm for sexual
behavior that has been given to men and women as creatures of God. For the
church this is the case not only for homosexual, but for any sexual activity
that does not intend the goal of marriage between man and wife particular,
adultery.
The church has to live with the fact that, in this area of life as in
others, departures from the norm are not exceptional but rather common and
widespread. The church must encounter all those concerned with tolerance and
understanding but also call them to repentance. It cannot surrender the
distinction between the norm and behavior that departs from that norm.
Here lies the boundary of a Christian church that knows itself to be bound
by the authority of Scripture. Those who urge the church to change the norm
of its teaching on this matter must know that they are promoting schism. If
a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat
homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized
homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage,
such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the
unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease
to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, arguably the preeminent contemporary theologian,
recently retired after 27 years as professor of systematic theology at the
University of Munich, Germany, and director of the Institute of Ecumenical
Theology. Translated by Markus Bockmuehl for publication in the Church
Times; copyright Wolfhart Pannenberg.