WHEN MARRIAGE IS NOT

David Cameron’s announcement of a consultation period aimed to lead to the legalization of gay marriage, and the support for this from the leaders of all the main Parties, has moved this issue up the political agenda. As I posted the other day, the Coalition for Marriage have launched a campaign to resist this move, and I guess most readers of this blog would be supportive of that campaign (and I’d encourage you to sign the petition). However, I think many Christians struggle to provide an adequate answer when pressed as to why gay marriage should not be allowed. In the following extract from my book Sex Talks I try to answer that question…

Gay marriage is a hot issue across the western world because an increasing number of governments are allowing it in one form or another. This means that if you live somewhere where gay marriage is allowed but say that it is wrong, you could find yourself on the wrong side of the law. So we need to be really clear about what we think about this, and the best place to start is with what we have already seen marriage is meant to be about: Fruitfulness, faithfulness and sacrifice.

Fruitfulness

Marriage is meant to produce children, because sex is meant to produce children and sex is meant to be part of marriage. Obviously, this cannot be the case in a gay marriage. Baby, it takes a man and a woman to make a baby.

This means that gay marriage fails the first test of what a true marriage is. However (and this is an important point that gay couples will want to make), not all heterosexual marriages produce children. Do we say that these are not really marriage as well?

The difference here should be obvious. If a married man and woman are unable to have children because they are infertile, that is what philosophers call accidental effect, whereas the inability of a homosexual couple to reproduce is an essential and inevitable aspect of their relationship. Heterosexual couples can be fruitful, unless there is some biological reason preventing it, but the only way a homosexual couple can have a child is by involving a third party – by buying or borrowing someone else’s eggs or sperm, which is a form of adultery.

Marriage is the basic building block of community and having children is an extension of that community. If a couple refuse to have children they fail to create community and so miss out on that aspect of God’s intended plan for marriage – and I would argue that they shouldn’t have got married in the first place! Gay relationships, by definition, fail to create community because they are by definition incapable of producing children. And this means they are incapable of receiving this aspect of God’s blessing upon marriage.

Faithfulness

It is on the grounds of faithfulness that the strongest argument can be made in support of gay marriage. If a gay couple love each other, and are committed to each other, why shouldn’t that relationship of faithfulness be recognized and celebrated just as much as would be the case for a heterosexual couple?

That is a good question! To answer it we need to be clear about how the Bible defines faithfulness. The biblical model for faithfulness is God himself – God makes promises to his people and is faithful to them. It is this example that then becomes the model for faithfulness within human marriage.

But here’s the thing: The Bible always describes this kind of faithful marriage as between husband and wife. Of course, there needs to be faithfulness in all kinds of other relationships – between parents and children, between friends, between neighbors – but these relationships are different from marriage. Gay relationships can be faithful, but they do not reflect the marriage relationship between Christ and his church, which is always described in the language of male and female. This distinction between male and female is not merely a question of language – it has profound implications for how marriage partners relate to one another, as we will see when we consider the sacrificial aspect of marriage. 

Sacrifice

Ephesians chapter 5 is one of the key Bible passages that helps us understand God’s intention for marriage. In verse 32 Paul describes the relationship between Christ and the church (and between husband and wife) as “a profound mystery.” What does this mean? Why are these relationships mysterious?

A large part of this mystery is down to the fact that the partners are so very different.

Think about the relationship between Christ and the church. There is a mystery to it! How could it be that God should be so passionate about a bunch of sinful humans? How is it that God should give himself up for us, even dying on a cross for us? How is it that God should make such great promises over his church, that he will keep us and guard us, and that he is preparing a wedding feast for us? How is it that God can say that we are his body on earth?

These things are a profound mystery!

The point Paul makes in Ephesians 5 is that the relationship between husband and wife is also mysterious, because men and women are so different. There is mystery about the way in which a man and a woman can become one flesh in marriage. There is a mystery about the way in which two people who are different can experience a greater sense of unity in this relationship than they do in any other.

We see the mystery of marriage especially worked out when a couple have a baby. We might understand the biology of how this happens, but there is still something spiritually mysterious about the way that sex can create babies. When Grace and I had our babies it felt mysterious every time. We knew how Grace had got pregnant – I mean, that didn’t just happen somehow in our sleep – but that this thing should be the result felt utterly mysterious, magical and miraculous.

Marriage is an embracing of this mystery – it is an embracing of the difference between a man and a woman. When we marry we join ourselves to someone who is fundamentally different from us, but, mysteriously, we become one flesh with them – which means there is a total joining together, in body and spirit.

Understanding this is difficult, because it is so mysterious. But the mysterious, sacrificial, meaning of marriage is probably the main reason why there really cannot be such a thing as gay marriage.

The difference between true marriage and gay “marriage” is that when two people of the same sex join together they are embracing someone the same, rather than someone different. Doing this doesn’t require the same degree of sacrifice, and it cannot involve the same degree of mystery. It cannot reflect the relationship between Jesus and his church in the way that marriage is meant to.

And because of this, and because it cannot be fruitful and is not faithful in the way described in Scripture, I do not think there can really be any such thing as gay marriage.