Divorce and Homosexuality

From Touchstone Mag's Mere Comments website, they printed a reader's response. I relay it here without comment, for your consideration:

Touchstone is thought-provoking as always. A small sketch of thoughts provoked:

To state the obvious, weighing the relative harm to the institution of marriage of (a) divorce or (b) homosexual “marriage” depends, of course, not only on the definition of marriage, but also, ultimately, on how we understand what it means to be human.

The American secular view of what it means to be human seems to combine a philosophical dialectical materialism with a religious gnosticism. The human is the individual, “a spark of the divine imprisoned in a corrupt world.” (Leander Harding has done a nice synopsis of Harold Bloom’s The American Religion and Phillip Lee’s Against the Protestant Gnostics.)

In a characteristically American style, the individual is involved in a romantic, heroic quest to discover/recover its true self, the divine spark that has been imprisoned and held hostage, a victim of the oppressive forces of custom and nature. “Salvation” is the achievement of wholeness and self-discovery unrestrained by either nature or custom. Along the way to “salvation,” the individual realizes that a given gender, among other things, is accidental, not essential to its true nature. Gender can be self-selected as a mode of expressing the individual’s true inner self. The accidental effect of biology is a hindrance that can be overcome.

Starting from this foundation, arguments to oppose same-sex marriage seem to have an arbitrary character, the shackles of oppressive custom, with no compelling force in either equity or reason.

Biblically, however, “the Adam,” as the Hebrew says, is created male and female in the image of God. The essentially human, then, is not the individual in its stark freedom, but the man and woman in community with their Creator. The Fall was the sundering of the primary relationship with the Creator, and the result was spiritual death with its inevitable progression into the physical world. Homosexuality is one further expression of sin’s alienating effect, further estranging the individual from the primal community found in the original “image of God.”

To put it succinctly, homosexuality violates, not just human biology, but ontology. Putting it another way, using divorce as a comparison, while divorce fractures the image of God, homosexuality perverts the image of God.

This sounds harsh and strange to our culturally conditioned ears. But the distinction is reflected in Scripture — for example, in the proscriptions of the Mosaic Law.

The difference between divorce and homosexuality is immediately apparent in the respective penalties imposed: for homosexuality and bestiality, as for sorcery, the penalty is death. Divorce, on the other hand, is permitted and regulated (albeit, as Jesus points out, it is still sin, a result of human “hardness” of heart). That isn’t the arbitrary decision it may at first appear to be. Both homosexuality and bestiality strike at the essence of what it means to be human, the community (as male and female) of the image of God. They profane the name of God.

This severity of judgment continues in the two accounts that relate specifically to homosexuality in the Old Testament: the narratives about (1) Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), and (2) the Levite and his concubine in Gibeah (Judges 19, 20). Both narratives end in the corporate deaths of the communities, a literary dénouement that we feel sure is neither incidental nor accidental.

Divorce per se is not a threat to the institution of marriage; it is a threat to specific marriages, which fractures God’s original intent.

Homosexual “marriage,” on the other hand, is a rejection of the image of God as male and female. Humans have forged many kinds of relationships, but the only one essential (of the essence) to the imago dei is the marriage relationship. The threats posed to the institution of marriage by divorce or homosexual “marriage” are threats of a different order.

After all, as the old saying goes, the devil is in the details.