The
Bible's Surprisingly Consistent Message on a Male-Female Requirement for
Marriage
by
Robert A. J. Gagnon, Ph.D.
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary;
gagnon@pts.edu
July 27, 2011
For printing use the pdf version
here
I
give my permission for this article to be circulated widely in print,
email, and on the web.—RG
This article is a
merging of my op-ed piece for the
CNN Belief Blog (“My Take: The Bible really does condemn
homosexuality” [Religion Editor’s title, not mine], Mar. 3, 2011) with
my
Addendum (“More on Knust’s Blunders…” also Mar. 3), with some minor
editing.
In her Feb. 9, 2011 CNN
Belief Blog post “The
Bible’s surprisingly mixed messages on sexuality,” Jennifer Wright
Knust claims that Christians can’t appeal to the Bible to justify
opposition to homosexual practice because the Bible provides no clear
witness on the subject and is too flawed to serve as a moral guide.
As a scholar who has
written books and articles on the Bible and homosexual practice, I can
say that the reality is the opposite of her claim. It’s shocking that in
her editorial and even her book, “Unprotected
Texts,” Knust ignores a mountain of evidence against her positions.
It raises a serious
question: Does the Religious Left (i.e. persons generally dismissive of
Scripture) read significant works that disagree with pro-gay
interpretations of Scripture and choose to ignore them? I’m sure Prof.
Knust is a nice person in other contexts but it is inexcusable to be so
uninformed (and even condescendingly abrasive) about a subject on which
she claims to be an expert.
Knust’s misuse of the
gender-neutral human in Genesis
Knust’s lead argument is
that sexual differentiation in Genesis, Jesus and Paul is nothing more
than an “afterthought” because “God’s original intention for humanity
was androgyny.”
It’s true that Genesis 2
presents the first human (Hebrew adam, from adamah,
ground: “earthling”) as originally sexually undifferentiated. (I have
made this point myself, long before Knust.) But what Knust misses is
that once something is “taken from” the human to form a woman, the
human, now differentiated as a man, finds his sexual other half in that
missing element, a woman.
That’s why Genesis
2:18-24 speaks of the woman as a “counterpart” or “complement,” using a
Hebrew expression neged, which means both “corresponding to” and
“opposite.” She is similar as regards humanity but different in terms of
gender. If sexual relations are to be had, they are to be had with a
sexual counterpart or complement.
Knust cites the apostle
Paul’s remark about “no ‘male and female’” in Galatians 3:28. Yet Paul
applies this dictum to establishing the equal worth of men and women
before God, not to eliminating a male-female prerequisite for sex.
Applied to sexual relations, the phrase means “no sex,” not “acceptance
of homosexual practice.”
All the earliest
interpreters agreed that “no ‘male and female,’” applied to sexual
relations, meant “no sex.” That included Paul and the ascetic believers
at Corinth in the mid-first century; and the church fathers and Gnostics
of the second to fourth centuries. Where they disagreed is over whether
to postpone mandatory celibacy until the resurrection (the orthodox
view) or to begin insisting on it now (the heretical view).
Jesus’ belief in a
male-female dynamic as essential for sexual relations
According to Jesus,
“when (people) rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in
marriage but are like the angels” (Mark 12:25). Sexual relations and
differentiation had only penultimate significance. The unmediated access
to God that resurrection bodies bring would make sex look dull by
comparison.
At the same time Jesus
regarded the male-female paradigm as essential if sexual relations were
to be had in this present age. In rejecting a revolving door of
divorce-and-remarriage and, implicitly, polygamy Jesus cited Genesis:
“From the beginning of creation, ‘male and female he made them.’ ‘For
this reason a man …will be joined to his woman and the two shall become
one flesh’” (Mark 10:2-12; Matthew 19:3-12).
Jesus’ point was that
God’s limiting of persons in a sexual union to two is evident in his
creation of two (and only two) primary sexes: male and female, man and
woman. The union of male and female completes the sexual spectrum,
rendering a third partner both unnecessary and undesirable. The
sectarian Jewish group known as the Essenes similarly rejected polygamy
on the grounds that God made us “male and female,” two sexual
complements designed for a union consisting only of two (Damascus
Covenant 4.20-5.1).
Knust insinuates that
Jesus wouldn’t have opposed homosexual relationships. Yet Jesus’
interpretation of Genesis demonstrates that he regarded a male-female
prerequisite for marriage as the foundation on which other sexual
standards could be predicated, including monogamy. Obviously the
foundation is more important than anything predicated on it.
Jesus developed a
principle of interpretation that Knust ignores: God’s “from the
beginning” creation of “male and female” trumps some sexual behaviors
permitted in the Old Testament. So there’s nothing unorthodox about
recognizing change in Scripture’s sexual ethics. But note the direction
of the change: toward less sexual license and greater conformity to the
logic of the male-female requirement in Genesis. Knust is traveling in
the opposite direction.
It is not accurate to
say, as Knust does, that Jesus “discouraged” marriage. He merely created
the option for those like himself who “made themselves eunuchs because
of the kingdom of heaven” on pragmatic missionary grounds
(Matthew 19:9-12). Foregoing marriage and thus all sexual relations was
an option for those who wanted to proclaim the message about God’s
kingdom with greater freedom of movement and risk than would otherwise
be the case with a spouse and children.
A sidebar on the
“intersexed”
In response to my
rebuttal Knust might argue that the existence of hermaphroditic or
“intersexed” persons in our society undermines Jesus’ argument that the
creation of two primary sexes, “male and female,” is an indicator that
God limits sexual unions to two persons. It doesn’t.
First, the phenomenon of
the intersexed involves an amalgam of the two primary sexes, not
distinct features of a third sex. Second, extreme sexual ambiguity is
very rare, encompassing only a tiny fraction of one percent of the
general population. Usually an allegedly intersexed person has a genital
abnormality that does not significantly straddle the sexes; for example,
females with a large clitoris or small vagina, or males with a small
penis or one that does not allow a direct urinary stream. The extreme
exception merely underscores the prevailing rule of foundational twoness.
Third, the category of
the “intersexed” no more justifies an elimination of a two-sexes
prerequisite than does the equally rare phenomenon of conjoined
(‘Siamese’) twins justify the elimination of a monogamy principle; or
than does some fuzziness around the edges of defining “close blood
relations” and “children” justify the elimination of standards against
incest and pedophilia. Fourth, homosexual persons who seek to discard a
binary model for sexual relations do not claim, for the most part, to be
other than male or female. Thus they, at least, remain logically and
naturally bound to a binary model for mate selection.
Knust’s slavery analogy
and avoidance of closer analogies
Knust argues that an
appeal to the Bible for opposing homosexual practice is as morally
unjustifiable as pre-Civil War appeals to the Bible for supporting
slavery. The analogy is a bad one.
The best analogy will be
the comparison that shares the most points of substantive correspondence
with the item being compared. How much does the Bible’s treatment of
slavery resemble its treatment of homosexual practice? Very little.
Scripture shows no
vested interest in preserving the institution of slavery but it does
show a strong vested interest from Genesis to Revelation in preserving a
male-female prerequisite. Unlike its treatment of the institution of
slavery, Scripture treats a male-female prerequisite for sex as a
pre-Fall structure.
The Bible accommodates
to social systems where sometimes the only alternative to starvation is
enslavement. But it clearly shows a critical edge by specifying
mandatory release dates and the right of kinship buyback; requiring that
Israelites not be treated as slaves; and reminding Israelites that God
had redeemed them from slavery in Egypt.
Paul urged enslaved
believers to use an opportunity for freedom to maximize service to
God (1 Corinthians 7:21) and encouraged a Christian master (Philemon) to
free his slave (Onesimus). Knust’s insinuation that Paul wouldn’t have
cared if masters sexually abused their slaves is absurd, inasmuch as
Paul rejected all sexual relations outside of marriage, to say
nothing of coerced relations.
Relative to the slave
economies of the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
basin the countercultural dynamic of ancient Israel and the early church
appears quite liberating. The countercultural dynamic of Scripture with
respect to homosexual practice moves decisively in the direction of
equating liberation with freedom from enslavement to homoerotic
impulses. No culture in the ancient Near East or in the Greco-Roman
world was more strongly opposed to homosexual practice than ancient
Israel, early Judaism, and early Christianity.
How can changing up on
the Bible’s male-female prerequisite for sex be analogous to the
church’s revision of the slavery issue if the Bible encourages critique
of slavery but discourages critique of a male-female paradigm for sex?
Much closer analogies to
the Bible’s rejection of homosexual practice are the Bible’s rejection
of incest and the New Testament’s rejection of polyamory (polygamy).
Homosexual practice, incest, and polyamory are all (1) forms of sexual
behavior (2) able to be conducted as adult-committed relationships but
(3) strongly proscribed because (4) they violate creation structures or
natural law. Like same-sex intercourse, incest is sex between persons
too much structurally alike, here as regards kinship rather than gender.
Polyamory is a violation of the foundational “twoness” of the sexes.
The fact that Knust chooses
a distant analogue (slavery) over more proximate analogues (incest,
polyamory) shows that her analogical reasoning is driven more by
ideological biases than by fair use of analogies.
David and Jonathan
Knust makes a mistake
common to persons unfamiliar with ancient Near Eastern conventions when
she discusses David’s relationship to Jonathan. She confuses non-erotic,
covenant-kinship language with erotic love language.
All of the expressions
that she takes as erotic in the David and Jonathan narrative have
stronger Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern parallels with
non-sexual relationships between close kin of the same sex. The narrator
of the Succession Narrative (1 Samuel 16:14 to 2 Sam 5:10) legitimizes
David’s succession of King Saul by showing that David was accepted by
Jonathan into his father’s household as an older brother, not as
Jonathan’s lover (see my book The Bible and Homosexual Practice,
146-54). For example:
-
Compare “the soul of
Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as
his own soul” (1 Sam 18:1; cf. 20:17) with “[Jacob’s] soul is bound
up with [his son Benjamin’s] soul” (Gen 44:31) and “Love your
neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18); compare it too with the language
of covenant treaties, such as “You must love [him] as yourselves”
(addressed to vassals of Assyrian king Ashurbanipal) and the
reference in 1 Kings 5:1 to King Hiram of Tyre as David’s “lover.”
-
Compare Jonathan
“delighted very much” in David (1 Sam 19:1) with (1) “The king
[Saul] is delighted with you [David], and all his servants love you;
now then, become the king’s son-in-law” (1 Sam 18:22); with (2)
“Whoever delights in Joab, and whoever is for David, [let him
follow] after Joab” (2 Sam 20:11); and with (3) the reference to God
“delighting in” David (2 Sam 15:26; 22:20).
When David had to flee
from Saul, David and Jonathan had a farewell meeting, in which David
“bowed three times [to Jonathan], and they kissed each other, and wept
with each other” (1 Samuel 20:41-42). Is this an erotic scene? Not
likely. Only three out of twenty-seven occurrences of the Hebrew verb
“to kiss” have an erotic dimension. Most refer to kissing between a
father and a son or between brothers.
At one point in the
narrative Saul lashes out at his son Jonathan: “You son of a perverse,
rebellious woman! Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse
[David] to your own shame and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness?”
(1 Samuel 20:30-34). Does this remark imply that David and Jonathan were
in an erotic relationship? No, Saul here simply charges Jonathan with
bringing shame on the mother who bore him by acquiescing to David’s
claim on Saul’s throne (cf. 2 Samuel 19:5-6).
When David learns of the
deaths of Saul and Jonathan he states of Jonathan: “You were very dear
to me; your love to me was more wonderful to me than the love of women”
(2 Samuel 1:26). The Hebrew verb for “were very dear to” is used in a
sexual sense in the OT only two out of twenty-six occurrences. A related
form is used just three verses earlier when David refers to Saul as
“lovely”—hardly in an erotic sense. Jonathan’s giving up his place as
royal heir and risking his life for David surpassed anything David had
known from a committed erotic relationship with a woman. David is not
referring to erotic lovemaking on the part of Jonathan. As Proverbs
18:24 states in a non-erotic context, “There is a lover/friend who
sticks closer than a brother.”
The narrators’
willingness to speak of David’s vigorous heterosexual life (e.g., his
lust for Bathsheba) puts in stark relief their complete silence about
any sexual activity between David and Jonathan. Homosexual
interpretations misunderstand the political overtones of the Succession
Narrative in 1 Sam 16:14 – 2 Sam 5:10. Jonathan’s handing over his robe,
armor, sword, bow, and belt to David was an act of political investiture
(1 Sam 18:4) that transferred the office of heir apparent.
The point of emphasizing
the close relationship between David and Jonathan was to establish the
fact that David was not a rogue usurper to Saul’s throne. He was rather
adopted by Jonathan into his father’s “house” (family, dynasty). He has
become Jonathan’s beloved older brother. Neither the narrators of the
Succession Narrative nor the author(s) of the Deuteronomistic History
show concern about homosexual scandal. The reason for this is that in
the context of ancient Near Eastern conventions, nothing in the
narrative raised suspicions about a homosexual relationship.
The New Testament view
of the Sodom story
Citing Jude 7 Knust
alleges that “from the perspective of the New Testament” the Sodom story
was about “the near rape of angels, not sex between men.” She
misinterprets Jude 7. Understood in relation to leading first-century
Jewish commentators (Philo and Josephus), Jude 7 should be read as a
rhetorical figure known as hendiadys (literally, “one by two”): By
attempting to commit sexual immorality (men with males), the men of
Sodom got more than they bargained for: nearly having sex with angels
(compare the parallel in 2 Peter 2:7, 10). For further discussion of
Jude 7 see pp. 9-13 of an online article
here.
There is no tradition in
early Judaism that the men of Sodom were even aware that the visitors
were angels (on the contrary, compare Hebrews 13:2: “… entertained
angels unawares”). Furthermore, Paul’s indictment of homosexual practice
in Romans 1:24-27 has multiple echoes in its context to the Sodom story,
with no hint of an offense toward angels. The New Testament witness does
indeed understand a key element in the judgment of Sodom to be attempted
man-male intercourse.
The canard that only a
few Bible texts reject homosexual practice
Knust dismisses the
texts that reject homosexual practice as “few.” But limited explicit
mention can be an indication of an irreducible minimum in sexual ethics
that doesn’t need to be talked about extensively. Bestiality, an offense
worse than homosexual practice, is mentioned even less in the Bible; and
sex with one’s parent receives a comparable amount of attention to
homosexual practice.
The Bible’s attention to
homosexual practice is also not as limited as Knust pretends it to be.
Knust leaves out some texts that have to do with homosexual practice. A
case in point are the repeated references in Deuteronomy through 2 Kings
to the “abomination” of the qedeshim (so-called “sacred ones”),
cult figures who engage in consensual sex with other males, also echoed
in the Book of Revelation (22:15; 21:8).
Even more importantly,
every biblical narrative, law, proverb, exhortation, metaphor, and
poetry in the Bible that has anything to do with sexual relationships
presumes a male-female prerequisite – no exceptions. A more consistent
ethical position in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation could hardly be
found. This is not, as Knust claims, “a very particular and narrow
interpretation of a few biblical passages.”
Knust’s claim that the
Bible doesn’t reject homosexual practice absolutely
Knust claims that texts
like Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 and Paul’s indictment of homosexual
practice in Romans 1:24-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9, and 1 Timothy 1:10 are
not absolute indictments of all homosexual acts for all time. She makes
a number of sloppy allegations.
She states that the
Levitical prohibitions applied only to Jews living in Palestine.
However, the laws in Leviticus 17-18 apply also to non-Jews living in
Israel. By the period of the New Testament they make up the “Noahide
laws” that Jews thought were binding on Gentiles (see, for example, the
Apostolic Decree in Acts 15:20, 29; 21:25). Both Jews living outside
Palestine and “God-fearing” Gentiles attracted to the Jewish religion
understood the prohibitions of incest, adultery, man-male intercourse,
and bestiality in Leviticus 18 and 20 as morally binding on them.
Knust states that the
prohibitions address only male homosexual practice but this is true only
in a pedantic sense. Lesbianism isn’t mentioned in Leviticus because
such behavior was largely unknown to men in the ancient Near East where
society tightly regulated women’s sexual lives (it goes virtually
unmentioned elsewhere). The first-century Greco-Roman world did know
about lesbianism so it is not surprising that Paul explicitly rejected
it in Romans 1:26, in keeping with the normative Jewish view of his
time.
Knust states that
“biblical patriarchs and kings violate nearly every one of these
commandments.” It is true that some of the close kin marriages forbidden
by Levitical incest law were practiced by the patriarchs. Nevertheless,
this exemption is withdrawn for later generations by biblical narrators
- and the worst forms of consensual incest are never accepted in the
Bible. As with Jesus’ rejection of concurrent and serial polygamy, an
earlier permission in sexual ethics is retracted.
Knust says: “Paul’s
letters urge followers of Christ to remain celibate.” Like Jesus, Paul
commends to converts a celibate life, but on pragmatic missionary
grounds, not because sexual relations in the context of marriage are a
bad thing. Like Jesus, he insists that marriage is no sin and a
necessary institution for those who would otherwise drift into
immorality. Not that this was the only value of marriage for Jesus and
Paul. Neither person was known to be an ascetic. Jesus was accused of
being “a glutton and drunkard” (Matthew 11:19) and Paul boasted that he
knew how to be content both in lack and in abundance (Philippians
4:12).
Knust adds to her
indictment of Paul that he “blames all Gentiles in general for their
poor sexual standards.” I’m not sure what her point is here. Relative to
the sexual morality of Jews, Gentile sexual morality on the whole was
indeed in very bad shape. Read the graffiti found in the ruins of
first-century Pompeii to get a sense of how bad things were. Homosexual
practice was a case in point but so too the widespread sex with
prostitutes, adultery, and fornication.
Paul’s indictment of
homosexual practice in Romans 1:24-27 is clearly absolute. This is
indicated by multiple layers of evidence, including: the strong echoes
to Genesis 1:26-27 in Romans 1:23-27; the nature argument based on the
material structures of creation (compare Romans 1:26-27 with 1:20); the
indictment of lesbianism, not known for exploitative practices; the
emphasis on mutuality (“inflamed with their desire on one another,”
1:27); Jewish and Christian texts from the second and third centuries
rejecting same-sex marriage; and the broader Greco-Roman context where
some moralists and physicians condemn as “against nature” even loving
forms of homosexual practice by persons congenitally predisposed to
same-sex attractions.
After her skewed
assessment of what Scripture has to say about homosexual practice, Knust
asks: “So why are we pretending that the Bible is dictating our sexual
morals?” There is no pretending. The Bible’s witness against homosexual
practice is consistent, strong, absolute, and countercultural, as any
informed stance will recognize.
The contribution of
philosophical reasoning and science
The notion that
Scripture provides firm and clear moral guidelines against homosexual
practice is all too obvious. Although Knust intimates that the only
arguments that could be used against societal endorsement of homosexual
unions are (invalid) scriptural ones, there is also a strong case from
reason and science. These include good philosophical arguments, where it
is reasonable to view as inherently self-dishonoring and self-degrading
sexual arousal for what one already is and has as a sexual being – males
for essential maleness, females for essential femaleness – and the
attendant effort at reuniting with a sexual same as though one’s sexual
other half.
In effect participants
in homosexual practice treat their individual sex as only half intact,
not in relation to the other sex but in relation to their own sex. If
the logic of a heterosexual union is that the two halves of the sexual
spectrum, male and female, unite to re-form a single sexual whole, the
logic of a homosexual union is that two half-males unite to form a whole
male, two half-females unite to form a whole female.
Finally, there are good
scientific arguments against affirming homosexual practice, including
the disproportionately high rate of measurable harms associated with it.
These harms correspond to gender differences between males and females:
for homosexually active males, higher numbers of sex partners lifetime
and STIs; for homosexually active females, shorter-term unions and
mental health issues (even relative to homosexually active males). These
gender-type harms are not surprising since in a homosexual union the
extremes of a given sex are not being moderated, nor the gaps filled, by
a true sexual counterpart.
Condemnation, love, and
grace
Knust caricatures the
moderate view of the Bible on homosexual intercourse as “the Bible
forces me to condemn them” (i.e. “gay people”). Augustine put it better
in explaining his dictum “Love and do what you want”: “Let love be
fervent to correct, to amend. . . . Love not in the person his error,
but the person; for the person God made, the error the person himself
made.”
Ironically, it is Knust
who brings condemnation on persons who engage in homosexual practice in
a serial-unrepentant manner. She acts as judge and jury, substituting
God’s judgment for her own by acquitting persons of behavior that the
Bible’s authors view as endangering their inheritance of eternal life.
Which set of parents is
loving? Parents who are negligent in preventing their young children
from touching a hot stove (or, worse, give assurance that no harm will
come) or parents who strenuously warn their children to avoid such
behavior? Much more is at stake in affirming homosexual behavior than
any burn that comes from touching a hot stove.
Judgment and grace are
the opposite of what Knust portrays them to be. In Romans 1:18-32, which
includes Paul’s searing indictment of homosexual practice (1:24-27),
Paul depicts God’s wrath as God stepping away from moral
intervention, thereby allowing people to gratify themselves in impure,
degrading, and indecent behavior. As a consequence, offenders heap up
their sins and bring upon themselves cataclysmic judgment at the End. By
contrast, Paul presents God’s grace in Romans 6:14-23 as God
through Christ actively stepping back into the lives of believers in
order to destroy the rule of sin and put a stop to impure and shameful
practices.
I welcome further
dialogue or debate with Prof. Knust in print, radio, or television. It
is disturbing to read what passes nowadays for expert “liberal”
reflections on what the Bible says about homosexual practice.