Marriage matters: what should the Church be saying?

Jul 29, 2016 by

By Rachel Fox, Anglican Mainstream.

[Editor’s note: This is adapted from the text of a talk given at a church in southern England in July].

G.K Chesterton once observed that the family is the most effective check on government power. It is indeed the bed-rock of a free society. It is also more important to the very survival of a society than most people realise.

Two years ago, civil marriage in the UK became genderless. It is no longer an institution intimately bound up with sex and procreation, but a private agreement between two people, to be defined largely as they choose to define it.

Society has been asking itself not what marriage is, but what does society want it to be. Or our esteemed leaders have been telling us what they think it should be. And so the family as defined in law has been irrevocably changed.

And the church has been asking itself how it should respond to this monumental change, and to the change in societal attitudes that have led us here.

This is a difficult subject to talk about because it arouses great passion. It goes to the very heart of the relationships within society. What actually is marriage? How important is it? Most importantly what does God say it is in his word?

I am aware that many of you will have suffered pain around this issue – you may be the product of a broken marriage, or perhaps you experience same-sex attraction, or you identify yourself as homo-sexual, or someone close to you struggles over one or both of these issues. You may disagree with what I am going to say. Please do come and talk to me or one of the service leaders, afterwards, if you would like to.

But I want to try and unpack what has happened – where we have come from – as well as talking to you about what I think the consequences are and will be, and to make some suggestions as to where we as the church might go from here.

Where are we and how did we get here? Significant legal changes that have taken place in the last 50 years.

It was only in 1967 that homosexual practice was legalised in the UK. In 2002, same-sex couples were given the right to adopt children. Then in 2003, the age of consent for all sexual relationships was reduced to 16 .

Civil Partnerships legislation was passed in the UK in 2004 – this conveyed all the rights of marriage on same-sex couples. Then in 2008, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was passed. It went largely unnoticed at the time. But it did 2 things:

1.     It removed the need for IVF clinics to consider a child’s need for a father in the decision to grant assisted reproduction services to single women, making it easier for lesbian couples to bear children using genetic material from one of them.

2.     It extended the right to parenthood in law to gay and lesbian couples who bear children using the genetic material of one of them.

In summary, it gave same-sex couples the right to form legal families, and to become legal parents to their children. Then in 2014 same-sex couples achieved full civil marriage rights.

Why are we here?

There has been a quiet revolution in the last 60 years! We have moved away from one way of looking at the world – we could call it the “traditional” way (the way people have looked at the world throughout history), where people understood that the quality of our lives is affected by the quality of our relationships and family life. They understood that these things were important for society at large and needed to be protected. Sexuality had a place, but within marriages. The focus was the creation of families, whether children came or not. These ideas went right back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle who understood that we are created as relational beings. We all yearn for family in some form. He also understood that sex is an appetite and that boundary of marriage was necessary for it not to become an addiction.

The Bible of course places high importance on marriage, but only as a subset of life in relationship with God. Marriage is not everything in the Bible. It does not teach that everyone will marry. But it does teach us to respect marriage, not to undermine family, and to love one another as brothers and sisters. We are called to set up communities in this way.

What is marriage?

History of marriage

Origins of marriage actually coincide with the origins of human civilisation itself – about 5000 years ago in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley – historically called Mesopotamia (now Iraq), and in the nearby Nile valley in Egypt. In these two river valleys humans first built cities, wrote literature and laws, developed the wheel, the sail – created state bureaucracies and kingdoms. Here marriage was launched as a fully formed social institution.

Marriage between a man and a woman has been a culture that has been part of virtually all known societies and people groups ever since. Aristotle (384BC) said it was “an older and more fundamental thing than the state”. He put man and woman’s natural “pairing” first and foremost down to their “natural impulse…to leave behind something of the same nature as themselves”.

Clergy and theologians of the church – thinking God’s thoughts after him –  developed a robust theology and law of marriage between a man and a woman from as early as the first century, starting with Jesus’ teaching on divorce and re-marriage.

Throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, we find a consistent pattern of lifelong, heterosexual monogamy. Where this pattern is departed from in the Bible, by polygamy or adultery, we see disaster in the lives of the biblical characters in the form of jealousy, rivalry, family breakdown and even murder. Before the recent re-definition, our marriage laws were based on the biblical definition of marriage as found in the words of Jesus from Matthew 19:4 – 6:

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (NIV)

Significantly Jesus quotes here from two Old Testament passages (Genesis 1:27, Genesis 2:24). The biblical view is that marriage relationships are founded on the way we were made, both men and women. Importantly it “was for this reason” that marriage is exclusively heterosexual.

The biblical view is shared by the Roman Catholic Church, the Muslim Council of Britain and senior members of the Jewish and Sikh communities, who all spoke out against the re-definition of marriage when it was being debated in Parliament.

Marriage has certain fundamental features:

• Life-long commitment made publicly

• personal commitment as well as an institution (recognised and encouraged by the state because of the benefits of kinship ties and the nurturing of children)

• conjugal relationship which is inextricably linked to sex and procreation (provides roots for any children that may be born – a mother and a father – with the distinctive qualities that each bring to the upbringing of a child).

Same-sex marriage is a threat to the VERY CORE of marriage. It denies the complementarity of the sexes, and divorces marriage from its procreative purpose. It has entrenched into law a definition of marriage that is reduced down to just an agreement between 2 consenting adults – a personal commitment rather than the institution it has been.

It represents the state’s approval of the re-definition of marriage from a pro-child social institution into a post-institutional private relationship.  Post-institutional because going forward the state needs to have no interest in it as a private agreement between consenting parties.

Further, the concept of same-sex marriage – unless they are always childless – means same-sex parenting. This fundamentally undermines the complementary roles of a mother and a father in the life of every child. It has entrenched an understanding of marriage that has been developing in society some time, but which is unbiblical.

How did we get here?

Through the centuries and through the influence in particular of enlightenment thinking – the throwing off of religion, and the quest for answers through rationality – using purely science and mathematics – the authority for morality became the self. 19th century philosophers such as Nietzsche came to the conclusion that “the why has no answer”. The Scottish philosopher David Hume said “you can’t derive an ought from an is”. They had realised that morality cannot be explained in rational terms – pleasure and pain cannot be contained in mathematical formulae. So people began to look inwards to find themselves. So people began to look inwards to find themselves. These ideas exploded in the 1960s when the wisdom of the ages (what I described as “the traditional world” just now)  – the biblical way of doing things – was jettisoned.

So we have moved into what Dale Kuehne calls the “i-world”

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sex-iWorld-Rethinking-Relationship-Individualism/dp/0801035872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469785272&sr=8-1&keywords=dale+kuehne

The relationship ethic of the i-world is “the quality of my life is the quality of my life” (in contrast to the old ethic “the quality of my life is about the quality of my relationships”). The i-world says “I need to be in a sexual relationship with the person I am most attracted to, in order to gain the best possible fulfilment”. The i-world does not know how to cultivate areas of intimacy other than sexual ones. The i-world has only 3 rules:

1.     Do not hurt anyone

2.     Everything must be consensual

3.     Do not tell anyone else that their life choices are wrong

As long as you keep these 3 rules, you can do what you please.

Its is fairly easy to see where this leads. Casual sex, losing restrictions on sexual relationships which were previously discouraged (eg adultery, homosexual practice, incest); a myriad of types of sexual identities emerging, because people are looking within to decide who they are and how they should behave.

Clearly that is a simplistic and rather inadequate explanation. But I hope that you can see why the law has moved in the direction that it has, and the trajectory that we are on. Its foundation is atheistic philosophy that denies God and puts self in his place. The latest question is that of “gender identity”. “How can I tell if I am male or female?”. People are even asking “How do I know I am even human?”. It is a difficult place for us to live in as Christians, because we challenge the assumptions of the i-world, and the intolerance of our views is extreme. We will be rejected if we break the 3rd rule in particular.

But the story-line of our time is really the implosion of marriage. Ideas about its “expansion” through including same-sex marriage are really something of a distraction.

Consequences

Many 25-34 year olds don’t believe they can be in a life-long relationship. People are losing faith in marriage. There is a widespread loss of relational hope – which leads to the loss of hope itself. Attempts to “re-define” marriage are a symptom of this. We are witnessing the collapse of the family on unprecedented scale. The consequences are striking – and unsustainable – when put in purely economic terms.

The Relationships Foundation – a charity based in Cambridge – produce an annual “Cost of Family Failure Index”. This recently revealed that the 2016 cost of family breakdown to the taxpayer has increased for the seventh year in a row to £48 billion, up from £37 million in 2009. If children are not taken care of by their biological parents, they are less likely to take care of their biological parents when they grow up. The cost of caring for the elderly resulting from the implosion of family is simply unsustainable.

Secular research into every known society by Oxford anthropologist J.D Unwin, and published in his book “Sex and culture” in 1934, came to some startling conclusions. He was certainly ahead of the curve in this area. In particular, cultures that adopt what Unwin dubbed “absolute monogamy” (a strict moral code where sex can occur only within one-man/ one-woman marriage – the biblical ethic) proved to be the most vigorous, economically productive, artistically creative, scientifically innovative, and geographically expansive societies on earth. Perhaps of even greater importance he also found that no single society had retained its “creative energy” once it had abandoned the preferred norm of monogamous relationships between men and women for more than a single generation.

So our society will decline. It may never recover from the damage done.

In a world where the fundamental source of truth is the self, there is only confusion. Facebook gave up on mapping the possible gender identities when it reached the figure of 70. You cannot look within to find out who you are. As Thomas Aquinas noted back in the 18th century, you need to engage with truth outside yourself if you are to find contentment.

How is the church responding?

There is division and confusion in the C of E over this issue of same-sex marriage. Although the cultural issues are far greater, the church has been hijacked by this. There is great pressure, mainly from within, but also from without for it to go down the route of recognizing same-sex marriage. An important report commissioned by the C of E and chaired by the Civil Servant Joseph Pilling that came out a few years ago suggested a 2 year process of “facilitated conversations” to take place on a regional basis to give people within the C of E the opportunity to engage with one another over this issue. It seems that the purpose was to encourage us down a line of agreeing to disagree – or “good disagreement“.

The problem with this as I see it is the depth of the chasm that exists between those who believe the church’s teaching should alter on this, and those who feel that this simply cannot be justified from Scripture. I was privileged to be part of the process for my Diocese, and the differences of view that were present in the group, only some of whom were biblically orthodox, was striking. I am not convinced we made much progress in bridging the chasm I have described!

The General Synod met in York recently and the general consensus seems to be that the Bishops will try to introduce something in the near future – probably along the lines of a “pastoral accommodation” such as allowing prayers to be said in a service to “bless” a same-sex union. The pressure to go further is very strong, and will only build once a concession such as this is made. I suspect it will only be a few years before there is a fully capitulation to culture, and same-sex marriage will be introduced in the C of E.

How should we respond?

I think we need to recognise that we have lost the cultural battle for now. But equally we need to take hold of God’s eternal truth about the way we have been made, male and female, for relationship with one another, to love and be loved. For some of us this involves or will involve a marriage relationship, which will be with someone of the opposite sex. It is not God’s best for people to pursue sexual relationships in any other context. We need to be confident that we have truth and that the prevailing culture is making a disastrous mistake. We need to pray about how we can make our voices heard on this in a way that is gracious and loving, and not be afraid of the consequences. Some of us may lose our jobs or even end up in prison for it. But our calling to care for people means that we cannot remain silent.

Secondly, we need to make our voices heard within the Church of England. The church needs to recover its understanding of Eros, and appropriate and inappropriate ways of showing love to one another. We can write to Deanery and Diocesan Synod Reps and to the Bishop. We must speak truth into this situation. We need to be aware that the future of the C of E as a united church, and as a church in relationship with the wider Anglican Communion is under threat over this. Doing nothing is really not an option.

Importantly, in the meantime, we need to be working on building authentic Christian communities of loving brothers and sisters that the Bible envisages. We need to demonstrate the deep and fulfilling nature of friendship for the ‘i-world’ to see. This is what they crave, but are unable to achieve because they are looking for it in the wrong place. We need to be there to pick up the pieces and to help when the ‘i-world’ turns to us as their only hope.

Conclusion

Society has lost its way when it comes to marriage and sexual identity. But as Christians we know that the marriage relationship between a man and a woman is a unique gift from God, a fundamental part of his creation order, because of its role in companionship, procreation and child-rearing.

So, to conclude, I strongly believe that people who identify as gay, bi-sexual or trans-gender (or any other form of identity) are precious to God and deeply loved by him. There is no doubt that when anyone has an encounter with the living God, the truth of Christ can set them free from attachment to self-image, desires and actions which lead away from the plan which God has for them.

There is nobody for whom the gospel of Jesus Christ is not good news! The gospel is good news for gay people and trans-gender people – of course it is! As Paul said in Romans 1:16

“I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes”.

There is no room at all in the church for complacency or self-righteousness. The ways in which we struggle and fall below God’s perfect standards are different for each of us. There may be some here who struggle with same-sex attraction, or who have fallen into sexual sin in any way at all. But no-one is beyond God’s saving power of forgiveness and restoration.

1 Cor. 6:11

“And this is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God”.

Rachel Fox (not her real name) is a vicar’s wife. She trained as a Barrister and now teaches at an international law school.

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