I’ll take the marriage bond first. I agree with Dr. Blair that although friendships can be deeply engrossing, nurturing, and life-giving, the marriage relationship is special and unique. Friendships, while we hope they stick around, may come and go, ebb and flow as seasons and priorities change. The primary, distinguishing features of marriage, in my mind, are both its exclusivity and its lifetime commitment. The exclusivity and commitment of marriage make it a uniquely safe and protected place. These same aspects also bring their own set of challenges, and their own opportunities for discipleship and growth – the vow keeps you in the relationship, and keeps the relationship your primary focus, even when things are rough and evolving. It is only in this bubble of safety, exclusivity, and commitment, that most of us can give ourselves to another fully, risk for another fully, sacrifice fully, and allow ourselves to be fully vulnerable (fully naked, in every sense). It’s in marriage that the really deep, long-term stuff comes out, and we deal with it in the safety and loving embrace of our partnership with this other person who is also dealing with their deep, long-term stuff. We plan together, we build on one another’s strengths, we accomplish more together than we could separately. I feel sure that you would agree with me so far.

Furthermore, marriage is also held up in scripture as a special sign of the relationship between God and His church – there is something about being chosen freely, cherished joyfully, and loved faithfully, through better and worse, that mirrors the gospel message in a unique way. It’s my understanding that the people who choose lifetime celibacy from a healthy psychological place, do so because they are already so full to the brim with being God’s chosen that they do not need a sexual marriage relationship to mirror that. Or sometimes they already had a sexual marriage relationship that mirrored that, and they’re ready to engage the Body of Christ in a new way. They still need other people, and a certain amount of complementarity, which is why they often join communities where they can still partner with others, etc., but they don’t need to experience the vulnerability and chosen-ness of sexual surrender in the same way that the rest of us do. There’s a Richard Rohr quote that I can’t find whose gist is that the ultimate point of religion is this experience of union with God, which then shapes our relationships with other people. And some of us get to God first and relationships second, and more of us need the relationships to model God for us first – whichever way you get there is the right way. Again, that’s the gist, so it’s probably more me than Richard Rohr.

Anyway, all that to say that the reason I feel so strongly about, and am willing to fight for, gay equality in marriage is exactly because the marriage experience is so special, so crucial to so many people for finding out how God can really love them completely, in all their imperfections and vulnerabilities and failures, that I believe that denying that experience to gay couples can, and does, impair their ability to experience God the way that they were meant to. They deserve to be freely chosen, and to freely choose, and live with the lifetime consequences, just like the rest of us. And a gay person who is encouraged only to freely choose if he or she is choosing a person of the opposite gender, is not being truly granted the permission to choose freely. Dr. Blair is correct in saying that sexual orientation is about more than orgasm – it’s about falling in love, it’s very much about natural inclinations. When Adam first saw Eve, his response was not “that’s very interesting, I can learn much from this complementary person,” it was “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” – he knew what he wanted when he saw it, and it was Eve. He didn’t have to “work on” his heterosexual side. To put it another way, here’s a great excerpt from a poem I love, “Old John’s Blessing On Erotic Poetry Night,” from the late, great Jack McCarthy (http://standupoet.net/read/): “A young man seeking praise volunteers that he has taken up with a woman he does not find physically attractive. He believes she might deliver “undiscovered wonders.” Old John draws wetly on his cold pipe, admonishes, “Son, God made them beautiful to us for a reason. If you can’t see the beauty in her, get out of her way. A woman is entitled to someone who can.”” I believe that gay people are also given, by God, partners who can see their beauty, in every sense of that word, and getting in their way inhibits not only their happiness, but often also their spiritual development.

Where I might start to differ from you, and I’ve said this before, I’m just trying to round out my thoughts a little more, is in the *necessity* for that partnership to be man-woman. I have not had a chance to read Ruby Slippers yet, although I think it would be a perfect suggestion for one of my book clubs, so I plan on recommending it, so I don’t have a complete understanding of your ideas of the complementarity of the male-female binary, but I’m wondering what you have to say about the brain research that suggests that gay people seem to have brains that reflect the brains of the opposite gender in some ways?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080616-gay-brain.html

What I love about this is that it allows for the possibility that it is possible for a person to encompass both masculinity and femininity in one body, and yet still require and desire the interdependence of the Body of Christ, and especially the intimacy and chosen-ness of marriage.

Furthermore, from your comment about how “throughout history” we’ve limited homoeroticism, I’m also wondering if you’re familiar with the different Native American formulations of gender and sexuality?

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/two-spirits/

There was not one Native American view on gender and sexuality, so I would hesitate to extrapolate too much from this, but I found the idea of four genders to be very intriguing – the masculine male, feminine male, masculine female, and feminine female. To my mind, instead of insisting that a gay man explore femininity by marrying a woman, I need to broaden my own understanding of the human experience by nurturing my close friendships with those who define either their gender or their sexual orientation, or both, in different ways. As long as the standards for romantic relationships involve reverence, mutuality, equality, chosen-ness, and commitment, I’m happy to let people discover love and interdependence in the way they feel most moved to do so. I also think this applies to bisexuality. My experience of bisexual friends is mixed 50/50 – about half used it for a while as a cover for homosexuality until they were more comfortable with themselves, but I do know a couple people that I think I could qualify as truly bisexual, able to fall in love with either gender. In that case, I’m fine with them finding a partner who can cherish them romantically and sexually, regardless of gender. Insisting that the partner identify as a particular gender seems kind of arbitrary. I guess I just still don’t see why “Adam and Eve” *must* be taken as prescriptive for all people across all time, rather than being seen as a phenomenally beautiful, divinely inspired myth (and I mean that in thebroadest, most important sense) reflective of the culture from which it sprang. I believe there’s a tremendous amount of truth about the human condition buried in the first two chapters of genesis, but I don’t see a comprehensive and *exclusionary* doctrine of gender and sexual orientation being part of that. Maybe I’ll just have to read your book…

Ok. This is plenty long enough, but I did also want to take a short paragraph to affirm how much I am appreciating the depth and range of this conversation, the tenacity and perseverance of the commenters, and the humble spirits, open hearts, and meticulous minds that have contributed, and a special thank-you to Jonalyn for making this possible and for nurturing such a respectful dialogue. Respect and affection.

As you note, pais can be rendered in several ways but, since a young servant boy often did function as a wife substitute for centurions in outpost Palestine and in other remote regions of the Empire, and as this centurion goes to great lengths and apologizes for troubling Jesus about the health of his “mere” servant, an obviously very special servant who apparently could not be so easily replaced by commandeering just any other, there’s no reason to assume this was not such a case. Conservative Christians certainly go much further in reading today’s gays into arsenokoitai. In a debate I had with a prominent evangelical leader, he insisted that the arsenokoitai were, indeed, homosexuals because, as he yelled at me after again inquiring of me, “What was that word?”: “Arse! Arse! They put the penis in the arse!” After I recovered from the shock of what this man with 2 doctorates (one from Oxford) said, I replied: “They don’t all but the penis in the arse — especially the lesbians.” The antigay sponsor of the debate decided not to use the recording of the debate (he told me that the wrong side won) and asked if I’d, instead, go head to head with another scholar (who then died before that could be arranged). BTW, I’m using “Golden Rule” as shorthand for Jesus’, Paul’s, John’s, et al focus on love’s supreme ethical importance — as one does in comparing what Jesus said with what others, e.g. Hillel, said negatively.

Thank you. There are a LOT of interpretations.

This passage in 1 Cor 11 is a tricky one. My thoughts on headship are to lean heavier on “source” than on “authority”. My main reason being that Jesus only submitted himself to the Father while he was on earth (Phil 2), after which he took up all authority (Matt 28), again. This temporal one-way submission of Jesus is not something I think wives are to exhibit to their husbands since I take Eph 5:21 to mean two-way submission.

I believe Jesus, the God-Man, relied on the Father as his source of power while on earth. But this was because he emptied himself of his power, this is not an analogy to women. Nevertheless, it is an analogy of dependence, or better interdependence. It was through the Spirit’s work that Jesus knew other’s thoughts, could perform miracles and, as Paul puts it, the power of the Father, through the Spirit, raised Jesus from the dead. The incarnation is the best picture we have of the Trinity at work.

In a like manner, every woman can trace her source, her heritage to being made out of a man’s body. And likewise (1 Cor 11:11) every man can trace his origins from a woman’s body (except Adam). So I believe Paul is pointing out the headship of men in 1 Cor 11 refers to Adam as all women’s common source. The main point of 1 Cor 11 is, I believe, interdependence, not top-down hierarchy or submission.

And if, at any time, you want to go deeper into this, feel free to email heidi@soulation.orgto set up an Ask Live to chat more!
Glad you asked.