Response to Tony Jones on Homosexuality

Just over a week ago Tony Jones asked a ques­tion:

OK, I’m seri­ous about this. I’m not even being snarky. Really.

If you are one who thinks that homo­sex­ual sex is sin­ful, can you please explain to me WHY a gay or les­bian per­son who is in a long-term, monog­a­mous rela­tion­ship would not be able to whole­heart­edly fol­low Christ?

My only stip­u­la­tion is this: You may not quote one of the six verses in scrip­ture that men­tions homo­sex­u­al­ity. Instead, you must use the­o­log­i­cal and/or philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments to attempt to con­vince me that when you have gen­i­tal con­tact with some­one of your own gen­der, it some­how inhibits your rela­tion­ship with Christ.

Thank you in advance for your civil­ity in answer­ing this question.

With­out appeal­ing to the ‘six clob­ber verses’ it seems to me that any argu­ment — ‘the­o­log­i­cal and/or philo­soph­i­cal’ - against a ‘long-term, monog­a­mous (homo­sex­ual) rela­tion­ship’ would be pred­i­cated upon the open­ing chap­ters of Gen­e­sis, the words of Jesus and the book of Eph­esians. From this foun­da­tion one would need to show God’s inten­tion for mar­riage and what mar­riage reflects, if indeed it reflects any­thing (and of course I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t think it did). This would then imply that there is some­thing found in het­ero­sex­ual mar­riage that can­not be found in same-sex marriage.Which is to say that from this, it’s prob­a­bly more dif­fi­cult to show that one should not ‘lie with a man as one does with a woman’ with­out explicit pro­hi­bi­tion of such conduct.

While the argu­ment has been marred by the obnox­ious ‘Adam and Steve’ mantra, there is some­thing to be said by the fact that accord­ing to the Bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, when God said it is not good for man to be alone, He cre­ated woman. Woman com­ing from man (sep­a­ra­tion), man leav­ing his father and mother, cleav­ing unto the woman (uni­fi­ca­tion of what was sep­a­rated). This seems to sug­gest to me, then, that mar­riage is com­pli­men­tary in nature. There is some­thing that men and woman bring to each other in mar­riage that, alone (or man to man, woman to woman) they don’t have. Men and women are incomplete.

I think there is a lot of con­fu­sion over this com­pli­men­tary nature of mar­riage. Many read the Bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, notice the dif­fer­ent roles of men and women (espe­cially what’s said in Gen­e­sis 3) and con­clude that women, being ‘servile’, are not equal with men, who are ‘in author­ity’. I don’t think this is the case though, espe­cially in read­ing Eph­esians 5, which calls hus­bands to love their wives to the point of dying for them. Men have a ser­vant author­ity to their wives. The needs of a hus­bands wife and fam­ily are put before his own needs. This role within mar­riage is lost when con­sid­ered within same-sex marriage.

To sum, it inhibits one’s rela­tion­ship with Christ because it goes against Christ.

Related posts:

1. Joel Osteen on Homosexuality
2. The Bible and Homo­sex­u­al­ity: Introduction
3. Say what?!