Three contributors to a discussion on Genesis and sexuality:

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher

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The first person wrote:

I am again surprised that God's creation mandate so clearly given in Genesis of one man and one woman for companionship, pleasure and procreation, in which together a couple display the glory of God, in whose image they are created, could ever be construed to include sexual relations between two men or two women. It seems to me, that like many other things in the world today, homosexuality came after the fall, and was never intended by God in His perfect design. Thank God that Jesus came to restore all things, and this includes our broken sexuality.

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Nathan responded

I think this argument from the "perfect design" is a much more promising and coherent way of arguing for the maintenance of traditional prohibitions of homosexuality than the argument from the seven mentions, but I still don't think it stands up.

Part of the difficulty with it is that it depends on a literal belief in the existence of a pre-fall humanity, and even if that is taken for granted, it depends on our ability to be able to identify the details of the "perfect design" that existed before the fall. I suspect that any attempt to identify such details is going to involve more projections of our current beliefs than actual finding evidence in the brief description of the pre-fall world in scripture.

But even if we assume that we can discern the blueprint, I still don't think the argument adds up. If I accept the idea that God had a "perfect design", I can accept that that design did not include homosexuality. That upsets some of my gay friends, but I have difficulty accepting that God would have "designed" homosexuality without removing their desire to procreate. It would call into question the justice of God and thereby create as many problems as it solved. So, while operating within a literal understanding of perfect world preceding a fall, that means that homosexuality only emerged after the fall. Does that mean that living as a homosexual is, in itself, a sin? Well, if it does, then how is it different to living as a speaker of another language? Genesis attributes the existence of more than one language to the fall too.

That's the trouble with the "perfect design" argument. You can't take a conception of the "perfect design" as the starting point for ethics, as though ethics is about strict conformity to the "perfect design". If Christian ethics was about living with the "perfect design" restored by Christ, then getting sick would be a sin; having Downs syndrome would be a sin; wearing clothes would be a sin, because they all emerged after the fall and diverge from the "perfect design".

Christian ethics has to begin with the actual state of the world and its people as they presently exist, and then discern how love and grace are to be lived out from here. We do not have the option of going back to the garden. Let me illustrate this from my own story.

I am a divorced person. I didn't choose to be a divorced person, but I am, and there is nothing I can do to reverse that. So if the ethics of sexuality for me begin by pointing back to the garden and saying that I must live according to the original "perfect design", then that means I have had my one chance at one-man-one-woman-for-life and any sexual intimacy outside that is therefore sinful, falling short of God's "perfect design", and prohibited. On that basis, I found myself, at the age of 24, facing a lifetime with all possibility of a future sexual relationship prohibited (unless perhaps my ex-wife died sometime). Can Christ restore my broken sexuality to its pre-fall condition? Can Christ make me into a person who has never had that broken marriage? Or do we have to conclude that not even Christ can undo what has been done, but instead comes to bring forgiveness, healing of the wounds, and a gracious new beginning? I have remarried because I met Christ as one who comes offering mercy and a fresh start.

But I now have a responsibility to ask who else, like me, has found themselves on the wrong side of the "perfect design" argument and is being told that all possibility of sexual intimacy is to be denied them because they are, through no fault of their own, unable to measure up to the original design of one-man-one-woman-for-life. Something has rendered that impossible for them. When I stood out there as one of the failures and looked around, I found that the homosexual people were facing the same recover-an-unfallen-state-or-abstain-for-life theology. I found that the "perfect design" theology which I had previously believed now meant that I could not find any basis to conclude that God's mercy should be applied to me and other divorced heterosexual people but not applied to homosexual people. I can't become undivorced. They can't become heterosexual. We both have to work out how our sexuality is to be lived faithfully, lovingly and respectfully from where we are, not from where we might have been in an unfallen world.

Now I know that there are some people and organisations which claim that homosexuality can be "cured". There are apparently some success stories. Given that there is no consensus on a single cause of homosexuality, and that there are many heterosexually oriented people who become involved in a homosexual lifestyle, I think there are ample grounds on which to doubt whether a few "success stories" prove that absolutely every homosexual person can have their sexual orientation reversed. If it was heterosexuality that were deemed sinful, I can't imagine what it would take to reverse my sexual orientation. Can anyone else? Whenever someone has confidently told me about the success of some program in curing homosexuals, I have asked them whether they would now be confident to allow their daughters to marry graduates of this program, and every time they have just looked sheepish and dodged the question. So if that's how much we really believe it, how unjust is it to be holding it out as the great hope to homosexual people?

Trying to do ethics from the Genesis mandate sounds biblical and convincing on the surface, but it seems to me that when you try to apply it to the real world, it ends up being either another variation of graceless legalism or just unworkable.

Peace and hope,

Nathan Nettleton

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To which another responded:

Nathan,

I think that one would be very hard pressed to demonstrate that one has to read Genesis "literally" in order for the point of the narrative to be clear. This is particularly so given that the Genesis narrative is firmly located within a literary context which itself has something to say about the sorts of theological issues that Genesis raises.

By way of analogy, I believe it would be erroneous to argue that parables must be read "literally" in order to make a theological point. Nor should they be divorced from their context within the Gospel narratives as a whole.

Personally, I consider it obvious that the primordial narrative in Genesis (ch. 1-12) intends to advance monogomous heterosexual relationships as normative. But that is only my view.

You are prehaps right to say that this does not, by definition, make homosexuality a "sin" - but it certainly makes it "abnormal."

Incidentally, the same could be said for language difference which comes about as a consequence of human pride and results in fracture of relationship. To the extent that language differences prevent humans from living in harmony they are clearly a bad thing. I notice, incidentaly, that the eschatological vision of Revelation suggests that language difference will, ultimately, be done away with (and again, the narrative doesn't need to be read literally to make the theological point).

The primary point is that the "perfect design" argument doesn't require that "imperfect" be equated with "sinful" I notice that she nowhere stated that it should. Rather, her point was simply that homosexuality is "abnormal" by the standards of the Genesis narrative, therefore contrary to God's intended order of things, and therefore to be criticised on that basis.