More Perfect Union? Understanding Same-sex Marriage by Alan Wilson

Author:Alan Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Darton,Longman & Todd Ltd
Published: 2014-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

6

Biblical marriage

Those searching the Scriptures with the twenty-first-century question ‘Can gay people marry?’ will approach the text with very different cultural baggage.

All of us over a certain age were brought up in a profoundly homophobic society. For the first 12 years of my life gay sex was illegal. Social attitudes softened in the years that followed. Another few years, and the idea that gayness was some kind of mental illness passed away. There was a certain amount of music hall ribaldry around it, but people became increasingly less nasty about gay people. Homophobia’s final frontier, however, is its fundamental assumption that the sexualities of LGBTQI people are somehow anomalous, whether culpably, as people thought in the 1950s, or clinically, as was believed in the 1970s.

My personal context coloured the way in which I first read the Bible. I always wanted to be nice about it, but, even more than science, it was getting to know real gay people that changed my mind. The present generation of young people live in a society which still suffers from more ingrained prejudice than most of us would care to admit. They do not, however, suffer from the profound structural homophobia of the culture in which I grew up, which shaped the definitions of the words I thought I was reading in the Bible.

What can a reader who does not see homosexuality as deviance make of the Bible? What does it say about marriage anyway, and the possibility that gay people might be able to marry?

No Bible writer would recognise terms like homosexual and heterosexual, any more than they would other modern words like ‘paranoia’, ‘inflation’ or ‘electricity’. This does not mean that people in Bible times could not be mentally unbalanced, or that the value of their money was constant, or the fundamental physics of the universe was different. All these things, however, were understood very differently. Therefore careful translation is necessary, as always, if we are to apply biblical wisdom to our lives in a way that is good news.

As we turn to what the Bible says about marriage, it is sometimes suggested that from time immemorial: ‘I conceive that marriage, as understood in Christendom, may for this purpose be defined as the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others.’1

This definition, minus mention of Christendom, used to hang on the walls of register offices. Registrars used to quote it during marriage ceremonies, with the preface ‘marriage, according to the law of this country is …’.

At first hearing, this definition sounds timeless and absolute. In fact, this definition of marriage comes not from the Bible but a Victorian judge, LORD Penzance. The Purpose of which he spoke was assessing the legal status of Mormonism and polygamy in the leading case of Hyde v. Hyde and Woodmansee (1866).

His words exude Victorian clarity and self-confidence. Surely, people might think, since the time of Adam and Eve, voluntary monogamy of a man and a woman for life was always the norm.

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