Albany Via Media

November 25, 2011

To the Editor:

Can “any person other than God have the authority to forbid marriage?” Obviously, the civil state can, since same sex marriage has only been legalized in a handful of states and countries. (Undoubtedly there will be more to come.) And a bishop has the authority in some cases to forbid marriages, since we still require permission to perform a marriage of those have been married before.

But I think Dave DiSisto means to say something else: On a more fundamental level, isn't it up to God and not narrow human prejudice and self-interest to define whether two people of the same gender should love, and express that love in the outward and visible practice of marriage?

Implicit in the question is the idea that those who oppose same sex marriage do so out of mean-spiritedness, presumption, or fear of difference and diversity. While there may be cases in which this is true, such claims strike me as being a sort of reverse bigotry.

Can any person other than God ULTIMATELY forbid marriage between people of the same gender? The point is: most Christians believe that God HAS forbidden it (though a growing minority disagrees). This is not based on ill will, or fear of difference, but because we believe that a straightforward reading of Scripture indicates that complementarity of gender is fundamental to God's purpose in creation.

While Dave DiSisto says that such interpretations are not “universally accepted,” most revisionist readings of these texts seem contrived (except, maybe, the hospitality argument in regard to Sodom). The intellectually honest argument is that of Roman Catholic biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, who says that Scripture speaks unambiguously against same sex conjugal love, but, for various reasons, two thousand years later we do not need to accept that teaching for ourselves.

So far as “the greatest of these is love” is concerned, the Greek word is “agape” not “eros.” (For an extended reflection on the different aspects of love in the New Testament, see C.S. Lewis' book, “The Four Loves.”) No reasonable person could deny that self-sacrificial love (agape) can exist between two people of the same gender — it is obvious that in many cases it does. There is nothing in that to condemn — much the reverse. The question is: can we fit that sort of love into the sexual, covenantal and procreative framework of Christian marriage? This is where the differences lie between us.

Fr. Christopher Brown