Exclusive, committed monogamy. That was how I heard someone describe their same sex romantic relationship. It was language they'd found to express why, despite them being Christians, their relationship was good and should therefore be approved of by the church.
It got me wondering 'where does the Bible indicate that monogamy is good?' I mean, once you swap out the sexes, does monogamy still maintain its goodness? My instincts tell me that it's 'male and female' and not 'monogamy' that the scriptures extol. After all polygamy isn't condemned anywhere near as much as homosexuality. Having said that, monogamy is clearly in view when we're told of Adam and Eve becoming 'one flesh', but even then it's linked to male and female. Two members of the same sex cannot become one flesh.
Now, I appreciate that this is a sensitive and highly charged subject. Some may feel that 'thinking aloud' (or blogging aloud) on such a subject is inappropriate and overlooks the harms experienced by gay people. I get that but equally I find myself bemused by the church's confusion on an issue that seems so clear in the scriptures. I live in a town where the church I pastor is now among one of the only churches that still holds to a traditional Christian sex ethic. How the church has reached the position we're in genuinely confuses me.
Here's some reflections. I'm interested to know where I might be wrong on them.
Sexual relations between two people of the same sex is described variously as 'exchanging natural relations for unnatural ones' (since it's evidence of a departure from honouring God) and 'detestable' (since it's part of what the nations around Israel). Whenever the Apostle Paul talks about how men and women should behave he refers either to creation or to typology as his rationale. He does this not on the basis of primogeniture (the rights of the firstborn) but on the basis of orderedness and honour.
Genesis 1 introduces the creation to us as being made up of complementary pairs. As the poem expresses it, humanity being made male and female are the final manifestation of this ordered cosmos before the climax of the Sabbath comes in Genesis 2. By contrast the nations around Israel had a different creation myth, one based on dominance and chaos. I wonder if this also informed their sex ethic.
God's world has a structure to it and believers are to live in such a way that upholds it. Christians are called to avoid transgressing that order. Men are to bear responsibility as servant guardians, using their strength to lift burdens and honour others. Husbands are called to imitate the archetypal man Christ. They're to express self-giving love to their wives. This is what headship means for Christian men. It means that they have the right and privilege, nay the responsibility, to go first with self-denial in marriage. This is an act of submission, but it looks different from the wives'. Women are also called to live in a way that expresses peace with the creation, and shouldn't aim to undermine or subvert the created order (cf. 1 Cor. 11 on head coverings). A theology of womanhood might also include a calling to bring light and life to the world (cf. wisdom being feminine and Eve named 'life giver'), they're to respond to the men with whom they have a covenant relationship (their husbands) with honour and respect (cf. 1 Peter's marriage instructions), offering those men (within reason) the gift of their submission and willing partnership (cf. Eph 5 and Col 4).
These aren't tight moral codes but postures of heart and lifestyle, much of which exists in the realm of an individual's conscience - which is what makes it hard to legislate across cultures and sometimes even within a culture between generations, where social norms have changed. In the West it's an expression of virtue and Christlike servanthood for a man to wait on the family table or clear up after dinner, even in the presence of guests. In the East however it's a mark of dishonour that undermines the wife. In the West women don't need to pray whilst ensuring their heads are covered up, but in the East they may still need to. Cultural symbols apply but need translating. That being said Christ clearly overturns cultural conventions such as when he washes his disciples feet. All cultural practices must be contravened in favour of expressing Christ.
Moving beyond sex and gender we're told that our relationship to the State and Government also matters. Since God is the origin and instigator of all authority those who resist the State are in danger of resisting God. The world has an order to it and our lives and lifestyles communicate whether we are peace with the world (and its Creator) or are at odds with it (and him).
The Levitical codes of conduct are explicit statements of what living at peace with creation and its creator can look like. It extends to not crossing the boundaries of species, and it narrows to not having sexual relations with your brother's wife. Some of the prohibitions concur with our way of thinking like 'don't have sex with your sister' (because of genetic mutational problems we think), but many don't. Which indicates that it isn't only our safety (the gene pool) that's in view.
Living in congruence with God's world includes the proper use of our bodies. Our bodies aren't bits of lego that can be rearranged however we like or joined with whatever we want, they're our instruments of worship. Worship involves what we do when we're with the church, since God is a God of order and our services ought to communicate that, but it's not restricted to it. It involves our entire lives. Which means that what I decide to do with my hands and feet or mouth all express how I feel about my Creator. Lying falsely or casually going back on an oath I swore in God's name matters since I make God out to be a liar or double-minded. It's the same, but more so, with my sexual organs - 'more so' since sex involves intimate union with another which is the beating heart of worship.
Paul doesn't tell the young church in Corinth that they 'break the law' when they visit prostitutes but that they dishonour Christ. Is it like Christ to join himself to another for personal gain, without a thought for the one he joins himself to? Is it like Christ to use people for his pleasure and afterward disregard them? Paul's outrage is that Christ shall not, must not, be likened to a prostitute or taken to see a prostitute. What we do with our bodies tells a story about the cosmos.
All of which is to say that monogamy is mainly about telling a story of exclusive commitment but of male and female, heaven and earth, Christ and the church. Swap out the sexes and you tell a different story. It's perhaps for all these reasons and others beside that the scriptures offer a much firmer denouncement of homosexuality than they do of polygamy. Polygamy at least still tells a story of male and female and within it the men and women involved can still tell a story that has echoes of Christ and the church - though a corrupted story. Don't take me to be defending polygamy however. The widespread practice of polygamy even by some of the patriarchs demonstrates the scriptural tension between the ideal and the departure from ideals in a fallen world. Polygamy undermines core aspects of marriage just as homosexuality does, but there appears to be a toleration of it even without ever accepting it.
Swap out the sexes and you tell a different story. You live a life that expresses a longing for a universe unlike the one made by the wisdom of God.
Now, none of that is to say anything about how we're to treat or behave toward people who are same sex attracted. For other reasons we might want to suggest that moral/immoral is not the only way we ought to relate to such people. I ran this piece through AI for help with finding typos etc. It also gave me this paragraph which (annoying as it is to quote a robot) expresses an important sentiment I wanted to communicate: "Same-sex attracted people are not a theological problem to be solved nor are they a category of people to be managed. They are people made in the image of God, deserving of friendship, dignity, hospitality and the same costly love that Christ calls us to show everyone. Where there is loneliness, rejection or suffering, the church should be a place of refuge rather than another source of pain." (I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when a large LANGUAGE model is good with words!).
Just as we allow space for the man or woman who doesn't feel they easily fit within their society's gender expectations (ie effeminate men or butch women), or just as we would expect a high degree of variation for what 'wives submit to your husband' might look like in practice, especially for women whose life experience has taught them they should be cautious about submitting to men. We allow those individuals to find their own expressions of faithfulness to created or typological order without imposing on them narrow or restrictive forms of it.
I see this going on in the New Testament's instruction that an elder must be the husband of 'one' wife. Could this suggest that their were men in the church who had multiple wives? This was almost certainly the case in the wider culture from which the men and women in the church were becoming Christians.
Might it be the case that those men in polygamous marriages were considered full members of the church despite their living situation, they just were barred from occupying certain offices within the church. This is different from Corinth where a man was excommunicated for sleeping with his step-mother. Maybe unideal relationships (polygamy) existed in the church in Ephesus (to whom 1 & 2 Timothy was written) but Paul doesn't insist on their excommunication in the same way he did in Corinth. This may also explain why he offers his longest exposition of marriage roles in Ephesians.
All of which is to say: bodies matter, the sex of the bodies matters, the stories we tell with our bodies matters. Whether in our relationships, our family, our businesses or our communities and churches let us act morally in way that expresses our worship of God.
God created an ordered universe, how we live within it communicates what we believe about our Creator.