Some Thoughts on the Ordination of Gays and Lesbians in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

A majority of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s 173 presbyteries have ratified an amendment to the church’s constitution that removes a provision flatly prohibiting the ordination of sexually active unmarried Presbyterians as church officers....

The action replaces the current G-6.0106b in The Book of Order with new language. That provision, which was placed in the constitution following the 1996 Assembly, requires of church officers “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness.”

As a result of the vote, ordaining bodies ― local church sessions for elders and deacons and presbyteries for ministers ― will have more flexibility in determining individual candidates’ fitness for ordained office in the denomination....

The new G-6.0106b states: “Standards for ordained service reflect the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life. The governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation and suitability for the responsibilities of office. The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all the requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation. Governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.”

-from the PC(USA) website

This decision is not sudden, and it’s not particularly unexpected.  The notion that non-celibate gay and lesbian people should be eligible for ordained ministry has been steadily gaining ground in the Presbyterian Church (USA) for some time now; one pastor described it as more like tectonic plates slowly shifting than a sudden massive earthquake.  Still, the official change will be difficult for many, and the fact that the denomination as a whole has given more explicit and official (rather than merely tacit) approval of LGBT people in ministry will no doubt cause many to wonder whether they can in good conscience stay in a church that has, as they see it, willfully contradicted in its policy the clear teachings of Holy Scripture.

For my progressive, secular-minded friends and family, it may be difficult to see why anyone would give more weight to the words of a collection of two- to five-millennium-old documents like the Bible than to the assumptions of modern, Western, “enlightened,” scientific culture.  For them, it may be easier to write off people on the conservative side of this debate as unenlightened and self-deluded, having surrendered their wills and their minds to a pious fiction.  But to my Christian sisters and brothers, who believe that human beings are not nearly as wise and benevolent as we often think we are, that we need guidance—especially in ethical matters—from the Author of life and Creator of humankind, and that such guidance can be found in that infamous collection of ancient documents known as the Bible, this issue is fraught with difficulties and dilemmas, and it requires careful thought and speech as well as disciplined respect for those on both sides of the debate.

Let me acknowledge from the outset that I am an outsider to the Presbyterian Church (USA), a member of a denomination (the United Church of Christ) which has a reputation for being notoriously liberal on social issues (though I myself no longer identify as a liberal Christian).  My denomination has been ordaining gay and lesbian ministers of Word and Sacrament since the 1970s, and that fact has something to do with why I became a member.  As a person with beloved gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender friends and family, this issue has always been extremely important to me, and I cannot pretend to be unbiased in my ethical assessment of it.  But I also want to say that as the spouse of an ordained Presbyterian minister, I have come to see the Presbyterian Church (USA) as one of my communities of faith, and have grown to respect and love many Presbyterians (even “conservative” ones!) as members of my Christian family.  What happens in and to the PC(USA) matters a great deal to me.

In a recent conversation with a more conservative Presbyterian brother about the changes afoot in the denomination, he expressed real uncertainty about how Presbyterians could remain united in the face of such major shifts, but also a desire that people of mature Christian faith on both sides of the issue could sit together and dialogue respectfully about their convictions vis-à-vis Christian sexuality.  It is in that spirit (and to assist my own clarity of thought on the issue) that I put forward some suggestions for how to think about how followers of Jesus express their human sexuality.

First, we cannot ask whether the individual gay or lesbian Christian is expressing his or her sexuality ethically until we have inquired about the place of sex and sexual relationship within the Christian community as a whole. In the words of one of my favorite theologians, John Howard Yoder, “Biblical morality does not start by asking about the status of individuals.  It begins by asking about the shape of community,” (Yoder, “How Not to Approach a Question”).  Christianity is not a do-it-yourself religion, and it is not a coincidence that Jesus’ disciples have from the very beginning established communities for the living out of their faith.  Almost every ethical commandment in the New Testament is delivered in the second person plural: “this is what you [all] must be and do.”  It is only by entering into the corporate life of the redeemed and transformed people called the Church that we discern and understand the meaning of our lives as individuals.  So before we can know whether particular sexual relationships within the Christian community are ethical, we must ask about the purpose of sex within the community as a whole.  What is the role of sex in the life of the Church? What is it for?  What is its function?   How is it constructive (or destructive) of the life of the community of which we are but a part?

Clearly, at least one of the chief purposes of sex within the Christian community is the procreation of children, which as conservatives are quick to point out, is not a possible outcome of gay sex (“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” and all that).  But just as we question the purpose of sex within the Christian community, we must also question the purpose of bearing and raising children in the Christian community.  Are our Christian reasons for having children the same as those of the world, of those who do not know the sovereign love and loving sovereignty of God in Jesus Christ?  As Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon have written in their classic little book, Resident Aliens (and if you do not know this book, I suggest you acquire it and read it as soon as possible—it’s a very easy read):

Christians have children, in great part, in order to be able to tell our children the [Christian] story….It is our baptismal responsibility to tell this story to our young, to live it before them, to take time to be parents in a world (though intent on blowing itself to bits) is God’s creation (a fact we would not know without this story).  We have children as a witness that the future is not left up to us and that life, even in a threatening world, is worth living—and not because “Children are the hope of the future,” but because God is the hope of the future.

At the same time, they say, Christians are free not to have children. 

Christians are free not to have children not because of most contemporary rationales (“I don’t want to be tied down,” “I would not bring children into this messed up world,”), but because we believe in the power of God to create a people through witness and conversion rather than through natural generation.  The church must be created new, in each generation, not through procreation but through baptism…It is our privilege to invite our children, and others’ children, to be part of this great adventure called church.

It is precisely for this reason that the Church recognizes the validity of the marriages of heterosexual couples who have no intention of having children, or who are biologically incapable of doing so.  We know that it is God—not procreation through heterosexual sex—who sustains the ongoing life of our Christian community through time, and it is the responsibility of all God’s people, of every Christian, to play a part in the nurture and formation of young people, whether they are married or not, whether they are biological parents or not.

If, then, the procreation of children is one of the chief purposes of sex within Christian community, but not its only chief purpose, what other role does sex have? Christians see sex as a legitimate and God-given expression of love and affection within lifelong, committed, monogamous relationships between sisters and brothers in Christ.  We believe that these relationships, called marriages, strengthen the community as a whole and the individual members of it, whether or not they produce biological children.  In the words of Eugene Rogers in his excellent paper, "Marriage as a Discipline of Sanctification" (click here to read it):

Christian theologians best understand marriage as a form of sanctification in community over time. Marriage takes time both to expose faults for healing and to develop virtues for incorporation into the trinitarian life [of God]....Christian theologians understand marriage only shallowly as the making licit of sexual satisfaction. They understand it better as a form of sanctification. Sanctification practices a structure that liberates, a discipline or ascesis such as monks and committed couples undertake, in which God uses the perceptions of others from whom one cannot easily escape to transform difficulty into growth, into faith, hope, and charity.

Throughout the history of our religious tradition, Christians have seen marriage as a vocation, just as serious and challenging as the vocation to celibate priesthood or monasticism.  Marriage and celibacy are two spiritual/religious paths, two methods of sanctification; they are each a way that God binds human beings together in the hard work of living in community with others.  God knows (as does every married person and religious celibate) that day-to-day living in community brings out the worst in people.  And it is only through this day-to-day life in community with others that the worst in us can be healed.  In the wise words of Wendell Berry, “It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.”  The married couple, the monastic community, the celibate person (ordained or lay) within the life of his/her local congregation, each is a little microcosm of the greater community that God has called forth for the fashioning and redemption of his peculiar people: the Church Universal.  Again, the words of Yoder are apt:

The fundamental meaning of sexuality is not that God wants us to have fun with our bodies but that God wants families (extended families) to be knitted together in linkages of mutual caring, in which erotic relations do not dominate at the expense of other kinds of bodily affection and bodily expressions do not dominate at the expense of other kinds of affection. (Yoder, “How Not to Approach a Question”)

Sexuality, expressed rightly, is a gift that God has given us for the same reasons God gives us any other gift: for the mediation of God’s grace, the expression and demonstration of God’s glory, the refining and purifying of human love, and the building up of the community of God’s people on earth.

Now (and only now) that we have sketched out (in broad strokes, at least) an understanding of the purposes of sex and sexual relationship within the Christian community, we can start to ask questions about the individual gay or lesbian Christian within that community.   First, though, a disclaimer about language: as Yoder reminds us, “homosexuality,” though it is often discussed as one thing, is not by any means monolithic:

- what strong men in prisons or military camps do to weaker men;

- what strangers do with each other in public restrooms or gay bars;

- what mature men like Plato did with beautiful boys;

- what two persons of the same sex and values want to do by living in one household voluntarily;

- what the men of Sodom in Genesis 19 wanted to do with Lot's angelic visitors;

are not merely different forms of the same thing. They are quite different realities, in most morally significant respects. (Yoder, “History and Hermeneutics")

So in what follows, I will often put quotation marks around the word “homosexuality” as a reminder to us that the word does not represent one monolithic behavior, activity, or group of people, but could be used to include any number of morally distinct acts.

Be that as it may, conservative sisters and brothers will claim that due to the mandates of certain passages of Scripture, gay and lesbian Christians are precluded from having any sexual relationship with persons of the same gender, and that therefore their only faithful options are to change their sexual orientation (which, if possible at all, is extremely rare) or to live as celibates.  First, let’s take a look at some of the Scriptural passages that some believe forbid all homosexual relationship within the Christian community; then, we’ll look at whether the above-mentioned options really are the only two options for devout gay and lesbian Christians.

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The Holiness Code: Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13

There is one specific prohibition of male-male penetrative sex (“lying with a man as with a woman”) mentioned twice in parallel terms in the “Holiness Code” of Leviticus 17-20.  This collection of laws is so named because its underlying theme is grounded in God’s command: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am Holy,” (Lev. 19:2).  The idea was that the Israelites needed to be visibly different, to live their lives differently from the non-Israelite communities around them.  One way of doing this was by creating precise ritual categories for everything—food, clothing, agriculture, animals, sex—and avoiding the mixing or confusing of these ritual categories.  For instance, milk and meat could not be eaten together in the same dish.  Garments could not be made of more than one kind of fabric (no cotton-polyester blends).  Fields could not be sown with more than one kind of seed.  Animals with cloven hooves should chew their cud—and if they don’t you can’t eat them: no pigs (cloven hooves but no cud).  Sea creatures should have scales—and if they don’t, you can’t eat them: no shellfish.  In the same way, humans with penises should be the penetrators in sexual activity, and humans with vaginas should be the penetratees.  To have sex any other way would be a confusion of ritual categories.  This kind of ritual confusion is termed toevah—abomination—by the Book of Leviticus.  An abomination is not a really, really bad sin.  It’s an act that makes a person ritually unclean—like having sex with a woman while she is menstruating; that’s another toevah.

Christians believe that in Jesus Christ, the Law of Moses (including the Holiness Code) was fulfilled, and thus it is non-binding for Christians.  If we Christians are allowed to eat oysters, why would we think that these two verses Lev. 18 and 20 would be binding upon us?

The Gang-Rape Passages - Genesis 19 & Judges 19

In two passages in Genesis 19 and Judges 19, there are stories about homoerotic gang-rape in the towns of Sodom and Gibeah, respectively.  In the former case the rape is intended, in the latter it is accomplished.  In each case the perpetrators constitute the entire male population of the town, not individual homosexually-oriented people who desire to make a home together.  In each case female substitutes are offered—in the former they are accepted, in the latter they are not.  In each case the impetus for the violence is probably to punish an ethnic minority (Jewish) household for receiving guests without the permission of the ethnic majority of the town (Bedouin).  These passages have much more to do with the social mores of ancient Bedouin tribes than with the modern phenomenon of “homosexuality.”  If the men of Sodom and Gibeah had desired to gang-rape a female houseguest, would we understand the stories as condemnations of “heterosexuality?”

The Vice Lists: 1 Corinthians 6:9 & 1 Timothy 1:10

These two verses contain lists of different kinds of people who will not inherit the Kingdom of God.  They include idolaters, adulterers, theives, greedy people, drunkards, revilers, swindlers and the like.  Conservative readers also believe they include references to people who practice “homosexuality.”  They read these verses that way because the lists include two Greek words—malakos and arsenokoites—which they believe refer to homoerotic activity.  Malakos occurs only in 1 Corinthians 6:9; arsenokoites occurs in both verses.  We’ll look at them both.

The meaning of the word arsenokoites is very difficult to ascertain, given that it occurs with no context within a wide-ranging list of moral failings, and it is also the first time the word ever appears in either Greek or Jewish literature.  The word can be broken down—arsen means “male” and koites means “bed”—but making the assumption that the word therefore means all males who go to bed together is linguistically fallacious.  The word, “understand,” for instance, has nothing to do with standing or being under.  The only linguistically valid way of ascertaining the meaning of a word is by analyzing the way different authors use it in as many different contexts as possible.  Based on their analysis of how the word is used in later Greek literature, most scholars conclude that the word has something to do with prostitution or some other sort of economically coerced homoerotic sexual activity.

The word malakos is quite easy to define, because it appears often in Greek literature.  It literally means, “soft,” but was used to refer to men understood to be effeminate.  This was a moral failing in Greek culture because effeminacy—acting like a woman—meant over-indulgence in material pleasures and lack of self-control.  Today, most of us would for good reason be hesitant to assign these moral failings to women as a group, or to label men who act in such a manner “effeminate.”

It would be irresponsible scholarship to claim that either of these words refer to monogamous same-sex couples.

Sexuality and Idolatry - Romans 1:18-32

This is perhaps the most difficult of the Scriptural passages dealing with homoerotic activity, because 1) it is in the New Testament and so cannot be said to be non-binding, and 2) it is the longest and most detailed passage in the NT to describe what we think we recognize as “homosexuality” in the modern sense.  I want to challenge us to look more deeply however, to see if the condemnation of “homosexuality” as such really is Paul’s objective here.

First, we have to recognize this passage as a classic Jewish invective against pagan idolatry.  Regardless of what we think it says about gay and lesbian sex, we must first understand that this passage is primarily about idolatry (not in the contemporary spiritualized sense of valuing some things more highly than God, but rather in the ancient Jewish and Christian sense of worshiping the images of created beings) and only secondarily about sex.  What Paul is doing here is recounting the stereotypical Jewish view of “filthy, idolatrous pagans,” their behavior and their character.  Secondly, we have to look carefully at the way homoerotic activity is described in the passage.  The pagans’ “unnatural” sexual relations are described not as the cause of God’s wrath, but as a punishment for their idolatry (God “gives them up” to evil desires as the “due penalty for their error”).  The people Paul is talking about are not faithful, monogamous, gay and lesbian Christians (presumably Paul didn’t know any of those), they are godless, presumably “heterosexual” idolaters who have exchanged “natural” relations for “unnatural” ones (this was a common Jewish description of pagan sexual activity, which included ritual temple prostitution and secular prostitution, homoerotic activities between masters and slaves, pederasty, and general promiscuity—but very rarely lifelong, same-sex, monogamous fidelity).  Thirdly, not only does God give these awful, nasty people up to “evil desires,” he also fills them with “all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice.  They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.  They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless,” (Rom. 1:29-31).  By now, I think it should be pretty clear that Paul is talking about someone quite other than the faithful, devout, caring, monogamous gay music minister at First Presbyterian Church of Anytown, USA.

What is perhaps even more interesting, though, is what Paul does next.  He is a master rhetorician, and he hasn’t just recounted this description of the nasty, awful pagans for nothing.  Just when he’s got his Jewish audience full of self-righteous pride and presumed superiority over those dirty pagans, he turns the tables: “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges.  For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things…Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God?” (Rom. 2:1, 3)  Here, Paul is almost certainly not talking about sex.  He’s not saying, “Don’t judge gays because you’re gay too.”  He’s saying to his Jewish listeners, “You judge and stereotype pagans as dirty and filthy and sexually immoral and evil and slanderous and covetous and malicious—and yet you’re the same way!”  So when we read further, to Chapter 2 of Romans, we begin to realize that Paul’s purpose here is not to condemn “homosexuality”—he’s not really talking about sexuality at all—but to condemn ethnic prejudice!  Context is everything.

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My argument, then, is that Scripture does not specifically forbid monogamous same-sex relationships because it does not refer to them at all.  I am in full agreement with my conservative sisters and brothers that humans are capable of going to some very dark, nasty, evil places in our lives as individuals and as a species, and that we need every bit of divine guidance we can get.  The fact is, however, that much as we would like clear guidance from Scripture on this particular matter, it just isn’t there.  There are any number of new cultural practices—trading stocks, surfing the Web, democratic elections—that are not mentioned in Scripture because they did not exist within the cultural context of its authors.  Permanent, monogamous, same-sex relationships including the possibility of child-rearing is one of those new cultural practices.  In order to determine what Christian morality looks like in relation to new cultural innovations that are not specifically discussed in the Bible, we must go through the process of thinking about how those innovations would operate within our community, the Church.

If, then, you are willing to follow my argument (at least temporarily, for the sake of debate) that permanent, monogamous, same-sex relationships are not in fact forbidden by Scripture (because they are not discussed at all), we can begin to look at the possibilities for the relationships of gay and lesbian Christians within the context of the Christian community.

Above, we discerned that the two chief functions of sex within the Church community are 1) procreation of children and 2) the expression of love and affection within the marital relationship, which is itself a path of sanctification.  It is clear, as noted above, that gay sex is not useful for function 1, the procreation of children.  The question we must answer, then, is, “Can same-sex sexual intercourse function as an expression of love and affection within a permanent, monogamous relationship like those already affirmed among ‘heterosexual’ Christians?”

The only answer I can give to this question is, “Why not?” Throughout the relatively short span of years I have been on this planet, and the even shorter span of years in which I have been serving the Church, I have been blessed to encounter a good many monogamous, faithful, same-sex partnerships, some of which have been in existence nearly as long as I have been alive.  I have encountered devout, faithful Christians who have been living in marital fidelity with partners of the same sex for 10, 15, 20 years, who God has visibly transformed and sanctified through these relationships.  I have been blessed to know and love gay and lesbian Christians whose marital relationships I can count as role models for mine. 

I have yet to encounter a convincing argument for why these relationships cannot function in the same way they function in the lives of “heterosexual” Christians.  Gay and lesbian Christians have the same capacity for human love and affection we all do, and they are certainly in need of the sanctification that marital relationship can provide as much as any of us is.

A conservative Christian might argue that since celibacy is affirmed in our tradition as an equally valid path toward sanctification as marriage, it would be more faithful and obedient for gay and lesbian Christians to commit to the path of celibacy.  The problem is that celibacy has never been seen in the Christian tradition as a vocational path meant for any whole class of people.  The vocation to celibacy, like any individual Christian’s vocation, is unique to that beloved child of God, and must be discerned as such.  It is quite possible that a gay or lesbian Christian may be called to celibacy as a spiritual path, just as it is possible for a “straight” Christian to be so called.  But we must also take it as a matter of course that some gay and lesbian Christians will not be called to celibacy, but to marriage, as God’s plan for the sanctification of their unique, beloved personhoods.  If that is true, then as Eugene Rogers reminds us, by denying gay and lesbian Christians the possibility of marital relationship, we are denying them one of the primary means of their sanctification.  This is an untenable and ethically irresponsible position for the people of God.

It is for these reasons that I welcome the decision of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to affirm the vocation to ordained ministry of all of its qualified, baptized, and called members, regardless of sexual orientation.  At the same time, I understand how difficult the decision has made the lives of many sincere, faithful Presbyterians.  It is important for those of us who rejoice in the church’s decision to remember and honor the difficulty presented by this occasion, as well as to remember and honor the difficulty for any of us of changing our minds on this loaded issue.

Many of us grew up being taught to see homoerotic activity as a cultural taboo, similar to the messages we get from our societies about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of certain kinds of food.  For many faithful Christians, reaction to the idea of “homosexuality” is as much visceral as it is logical.  When some people see two men kissing, their visceral reaction is similar to my reaction at seeing Zambians eat termites and caterpillars, or Southeast Asians eating dog.  It is just wrong, we feel.  It’s nasty.  Logical or not, cultural taboos are notoriously difficult to change.  We need to remember that.

Even more difficult, this issue is deeply bound up in our communities of accountability.  Our feelings about sexual ethics are intimately related to the communities by whom we were raised, among whom we live, and to whom we minister.  As a Christian who has historically moved in liberal circles, I could lose a lot of friends (especially my beloved gay and lesbian friends) were I to change my mind about this issue.  The same is true for conservative Christians.  If they change their minds, they stand to lose friends.  This is a near-impossible position for anyone to be placed in, and we need to respect that.

This issue is one of the most difficult and divisive that the Church of Jesus Christ has handled throughout the course of its 2000-year history.  My prayer is that all of us, on whichever “side” of the argument we fall, will seek the guidance and empowerment of the Holy Spirit of God to have patience and Christian humility as we love one another, dialogue with each other, and move forward together as the one holy, catholic, apostolic people of God.  Amen.