"Owning the Curse: Rethinking Same-Sex Marriage"
(Credenda/Agenda, Memorandum - Volume 16, Issue 2)
The two Dougs claim that it is the Church's fault -- particularly in the failure of domestic and cultural fathering -- that the West is being overrun by homosexuality. They argue that God is causing homosexuality to flourish as a means of chastising and sanctifying His People, and, hence gay marriage should be endorsed, at least passively, by Christians, rather than denounced or actively opposed.
While this is a rather startling, even absurd, claim at first glance, I do agree with Wilson and Jones that a good deal of the collapse of the West is due to the Church's broadly inadequate obedience to Christ.
They also make a very good point about the spiritual shallowness of homosexuality:
At its root, homosexuality is a love of sameness rather than difference. ... we understand that homosexuality is a deep longing for communion with the masculine, a longing that has been trampled by neglectful or abusive fathering. ...
A twisted form of heterosexual fatherhood lies at the root of homosexuality, and tragically, this form of twisted fatherhood is not rare in the believing Church. ...
Homosexuals say they are "queer" as a point of pride, while outsiders use it as a taunt or insult. But they both agree that homosexuality is in fact queer.
But our charge against those who promote this sin is that they promote a dull and monotonous love of sameness, and the last thing we may call this is queer. ... A resentment of true difference and dogmatic insistence upon sameness is the sine qua non of homosexuality. However desperate the attempts, this tenacious loyalty to sameness cannot be obscured or hidden by odd mannerisms, paper hats, grease paint, outlandish outfits, and Mardi Gras style parties. Under all the odd and outlandish clothing, when the couple have disrobed, everything is the same and not queer at all. What God did at the beginning is truly queer—male and female created He them. So just as we avoid calling them gay when they are miserable, so we avoid calling them queer when queer is precisely what they are refusing to be.
Having said that, I think these men have overstepped their pastoral bounds and are, ultimately, functionally, implying an apolitical, fatalistic, and unfairly self-accusatory strategy for Christians.
... The American Church's compromises with idolatry are deep and dated, and God appears to be sending us a highlighted curse. ...
To focus on "them" as if homosexuality were primarily a secular problem is to miss the issue in a large way. Denunciations of homosexual sin tend to place the speaker in the position of cleanliness: "we are judge over you." ... If we are the cause of the curse, then we need first to confess and repent for whatever brought it on. Anything short of this risks missing the purpose of the curse. ...
What if we confessed publicly before the non-Christian community that we are the problem? What if we concede that the American Christian tradition is largely responsible for the resentment that expresses itself, in part, in homosexuality? ...
Instead of duplicating the sins of the past by dealing with fruit rather than with roots, i.e., denouncing the spread of homosexual marriage and culture, we need to own the cultural curse. By this, we mean we must accept the fact of it as just. Pointing to "their" corrupt fruit does not address our corrupt root. This is the core failure of neglectful/domineering fathers and husbands. ...
In the brewing culture wars, we ought not to stand with those seeking to ban same-sex marriage (or with those seeking to impose it). We ought to declare publicly (frustrating both sides) that we embrace this curse. ...
At the same time as offering no resistance in the civil realm, we increase the fight within the Church. ...
For the sake of argument, we should readily grant homosexual genetic claims. God controls everything, and so we can grant any and all scientific claims about the genetic bases of sin. Accept it all in the providence of God. Every sin is genetically grounded, and yet, in a Christian cosmos, we are still responsible. ...
This raises a thorny question. It's one thing, and a rather easy thing, to speak in the abstract of God sending something, say homosexuality, as a curse. (It is, in fact, as easy and meaningless as saying "God loves the whole world" until you are faced with the actual individual humans He loves -- and find you have everything but love for them.) It's quite another thing, and much less easy, to point to a specific person and say she is directly caused by God to be part of some divinely instituted curse. Do the Dougs truly believe each and every gay person is directly caused by God to be a member of a scourge on the Church? (As Calvinists, I suspect they do.) And if they so, are they so out of their theological minds for believing it? "What," after all, "can the pot say to the potter?"
Well, to be frank, I'm not sure what a gay pot might say to such a God. But I do know there is a crucial difference between God allowing a person to be born into a fallen world, by fallen parents, with "intrinsically disordered" dispositions and Him creating that person for the express purpose of populating a swarm of homosexuals sent as judgment against the Church. In the first case, God could use the corruption of original sin brought upon each and every homsexually inclined person as a lesson for His people, while nevertheless offering each and every person the fullness of His grace in Christ. Their reprobation for sexual immorality is just, but not antecedentally, arbitrarily and irrevocably decreed by God for the higher purpose of chastising the Church.
But in the second case, it seems necessary that, in order for God to accomplish his goal of chastising the Church, He must create and preserve at least one active homosexual, otherwise the material means of his "curse" would evaporate and His foreordained chastisement would never obtain. It's important to stress the fact that the members of this "gay plague" mustn't simply be predisposed (genetically or psychologically) to homosexual attraction, but must be actively homosexual. For, according to Wilson and Jones, the heart of the "gay plague" is the proliferation of active homosexual behavior, not merely the presence of ungratified homosexual attractions.
With this mind, I can't see any alternative in this second scenario to God forcing a person to become, and remain, actively gay if His entire goal is to use that gay person as one of many reprobative instruments against His Church. Their reprobation as sexually immoral seems a necessary, antecedent and irrevocable decree imposed upon them by God for the ultimate good of the Church. The dilemma then becomes this: God's alleged desire for the conversion of all active homosexuals into more godly obedience of Him (i.e., non-heterosexual chastity or heterosexual intimacy) seems totally at odds with His desrie to chastise His Church by the very means of the recalcitrant non-conversion of active homosexuals. In this second scenario, God must want to make persons actively gay -- to preserve a "gay remnant" -- just as seriously and efficiently as He wants to chastise His Church: the desires are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.
In the first scenario, by contrast, I can easily imagine God foreseeing the rise of homosexual dispositions in our world and using that as a chastisement of His Church, while nevertheless fully and truly desiring the redemption of the sexually immoral (homsexual and heterosexual). At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, the second scenario seems to me but another emergence of the chillingly tyrannical aspect of Calvin's view of God, an aspect his followers never seem able to mask completely. It's easy to dilute the implications of a voluntaristically sovereign God in the seminary classroom, but the icy, inscrutable ways of Calvin's God become unnervingly clear in these very potent, very personal current events.
In true repentance, we should invert as many contemporary categories as we can—own the curse of homosexuality upon our parenting, grant the science, and explicitly embrace God's transformation of our civil order. True repentance in the Church, not trust in civil coercion, will either restore that order or establish a different order. So we openly accept homosexual marriage in the civil realm as God's means of undermining that civil realm, and we accept that He has done this in judgment for wicked fathering within the Church.
Thoughts, comments, tomatoes?
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