Homosexuality and the Family

Aug 10, 2017 by

by Dr Joe Boot, Christian Concern:

Adapted and excerpted from The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society (London: Wilberforce Publications, 2016).

The biblical view of homosexual acts will be viewed by many today as draconian, intolerant and unthinkable. Indeed, as Jonathan Burnside points out regarding present sensibilities, the biblical references to sodomy, “will find themselves labeled as ‘texts of terror,'”[1] and certainly in the West, these parts of the Bible would be considered ‘hate speech’ by human rights commissions. This leads people to think that because the contemporary social context is in some ways hostile to biblical sexual ethics, biblical law must at best be irrelevant or, at worst, should be actively excluded from the debate. But this hasty conclusion is misguided in light of the present social crisis and current legal reforms. Burnside continues, “When we compare biblical law with recent sexual offenses reform…we will find that biblical law is not irrelevant. On the contrary, we will see that consent is not the only way of thinking about sexual offenses in modern society. Biblical law provides us with the idea of relational sexual order.”[2]

But is Burnside right? Are penalties for sexual offenses necessary for preserving the survival of the biblical family unit? Is relational sexual order destroyed by the reduction of sexual offenses to a matter of individual consent? Social history, not just the biblical material, suggests he is right. As we reflect on fifty years since the passing of the Sexual Offences Act and the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain, and the more recent redefinitions of marriage in Europe and Canada, we see that relational chaos has indeed ensued. After a decision of the European Court of Human Rights, it is now lawful for a father-in-law to marry his daughter-in-law and likewise for a son and his mother-in-law to wed. The result is ‘scrambled parenthood,’ a conflict of generationality where fathers and sons are sexually interchangeable.[3]

Once marriage and family are redefined, the floodgates are opened to a bewildering world of confused, ruinous, relational chaos. It must also be said that this reality is not simply an unintended consequence of socially libertarian attitudes. Homosexual acts were decriminalized by political pressure in the West because a religious and ideological agenda underlies the thinking of many of the intellectuals and activists at the heart of the social revolution against the family.

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