David Bennett 13 June 2017 | https://www.christiantoday.com/article/the.pain.for.those.who.are.both.gay.and.celibate.when.a.church.changes.its.doctrine.on.marriage/109958.htm
The Church of Scotland was brave to
apologise to LGBT people for the prejudices and horrors in the past week. Yet,
no one in the recent decision by the Scottish Episcopalian to redefine marriage
Church has asked the question of why saying sorry for the past has anything to
do with playing God's role in the present.
Instead, the Scottish Episcopal
Church, among many others, has trampled on celibate LGB people with the
decision to depart from God's own teaching in scripture. Next year, when I move
to Scotland to study, I may not be able to attend a Scottish Episcopalian
Church. The question of whether I can continue to attend in line with the
Anglican church I attend in the south of England hangs over my head.
A certain comment from the recent
synod flagged this for me. 'Gay people can now be married in God's eyes.' Such
a view highlighted the danger we first witnessed in humanity's parents. This
danger is making God in our own image by eating from a kind of knowledge and
role that God has. We are redefining things that God has already defined for
the Church. We hear that voice whisper 'Did God REALLY say [that he made them
male and female for marriage]?'
When quoting directly from the
creation narrative in Genesis, Jesus does so by rendering what appears in the
Hebrew as God's voice, straight from the Creator's own 'mouth'. In Matthew
19:4, 'Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them
male and female and said, for this reason a man shall leave his father.' When
one decides who and what God's image is in contradiction to what he has said,
one puts themselves in the place of God. When the Church exalts herself above
God, she breaks covenant with God.
As a former agnostic gay rights
activist involved in campaigns for gay marriage, I thought the Christian God
was the justification of homophobes and a moral monster. He was a weapon in the
hands of conservatives who deprived LGBTQI people of their rights. A God of
such objectionable character, who wrathfully rejected homosexual people and yet
'made them that way' was beyond the pale of existence. It wasn't until I
experienced God's love in a pub in 2009 that my life was turned entirely upside
down. I discovered that what I thought at that time, in fact couldn't be
further from the truth. God's incredible love for all people, beyond any label,
is the reality that must be stressed above all, shown most principally in the
giving of Himself on a cross to save us from our own self-made destruction.
The journey from agnosticism to
Christian faith was what pushed me, among other obvious reasons, for gay
marriage rights. I wanted to marry my partner in the holiness of Christian
marriage. However, as I mined the depths of scripture, and came to know Jesus
Christ more profoundly, deep doubts about the revisionist theology I had
adopted to quickly started to emerge.
Why would this God of love make us
male and female to the exclusion of other realities? What was the effect of our
fall from relationship with God in these bodies and our sexuality? From these
discussion, I discovered I wasn't created this way but like all human beings, I
was born as a beautiful but broken creation.
As I discovered who God was in
worship, I came to realise that marriage was not for just the sake of
procreation or to exclude homosexual people from marriage as I often heard from
conservative Christians. Rather, marriage between one man and one woman was
designed as one way that our Earthly lives can reflect our deepest unity with
God in Christ. The creation of physical sexes was to allow us to enjoy an
allegory of this greater hope, not to exclude LGBT people. To enshrine gay
marriage in the Church as the Scottish Episcopal Church has done is to erase
the unique humanity of the sexes, and to 'exchange the image of the Creator'
expressed in the designation of male and female sexes for another image. This
is a false reformation, an anathema, equivalent to those who taught the Law had
to be added to salvation.
And yet part of the issue lies in the
Reformation, and that it did not go far enough. When Martin Luther reformed the
church, he threw celibacy out as the pendulum swung one way against the
corruptions of Catholicism at the time. He made celibacy into a 'lofty
asceticism', and marriage, the godly ideal of the average Christian. This has
done damage ever since, especially to those like myself who want to follow
Christ with our homosexuality. Celibacy is now seen as some cruel deprivation
of a human right, and absolute necessity for human flourish. Scripture teaches
the exact opposite.
What I see in this recent decision by
the Scottish Episcopalian Church is not just a decision on a societal issue,
but a complete misunderstanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is
built on the good news that your worth or value is not dependent on marrying;
our worth and value and acceptance are based in Christ and in our identity as
children of God.
As a gay celibate man, who has given
my whole self to God, and He, His Son, I am not interested in self-justifying
theology – I am interested in the truth of the unchanging, holy God, our Father
in Heaven. By standing against His image in creation in such a decision also
disenfranchises one group of LGBTQI people, gay Christian celibate people like
myself. We are already a minority within a minority, with the loud voices of
the romantic sectarianism, which will continue to insist that we need romantic
love to be whole. We are often treated with contempt or spat at by many in
secular society. Now we will have to enter churches in the future
where our deep sacrifice for Christ is dismissed as a joke.
My heart mourns for the church of
Jesus Christ who is forgetting the everlasting wisdom repeated by God since
humanity fell: 'Flee Idols, and worship me alone.' Anything less is not worth
the deathly dividend. If the whole church was living in the costly sacrifice of
normal Christian discipleship, homosexuality and celibacy would not be an issue
in the slightest.
The decision to legalise gay marriage
reflects our cultures inability to see nuance, and shows that the damaging
effects of polarisation and the ignorance of the culture war. This ignorance
has become so deeply ingrained we have opted to change God to accommodate our
hurt, brokenness and fallen desires.
I am deeply grieved for LGB people
like myself, who have denied ourselves, picked up our cross and followed Jesus.
We will have to find our place in the wilderness as activists and churches
continue to ignore, neglect, culturally marginalise, malign and close their
doors to us. Our voice is left unheard. For many of us our choice to be
celibate is not some easy gift, but a costly sacrifice that speaks louder than
these words ever can. I wish my family walked the narrow path of righteousness
with me. Nothing has really changed since Jesus' own life – his true followers,
like him, will be thrown out of the places of worship as he predicts in John
16. Perhaps we are better off there.
David Bennett has recently completed
postgraduate studies in theology at the University of Oxford and is currently
completing his first book, A War of Loves: A Gay Rights Activist Encounters
Jesus Christ, with Zondervan to be released mid-next year. Follow him on
Twitter @davidacbennett.
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