Reflections on Marriage

As Baptists continue to debate the nature of marriage, here are some personal propositions as a contribution to this conversation.

What do we mean by marriage?

• Marriage is a function of society - and has been redefined many times over the years, from issues such as the age of consent to marry, to language around property and ‘giving the bride away’, to more recent changes in legislation on Same Sex Marriage.
• None of us would suggest that a Civil Marriage contracted in a Registry Office or a Hotel is not a marriage, nor is it any less a marriage than one contracted in one of our churches.
• The role of God’s people here is not to define marriage - and there is no such thing as a ‘biblical view of marriage’. For example, Joseph married Mary when she was a younger teenager, and plenty of the Men of God in the Old Testament had more than one wife / concubine. I don’t think any of us would suggest that these are biblical patterns for us to follow in our time, but neither do we condemn Abraham, Solomon, or Joseph for being people of their time.
• So if marriage is a function of society, then the church’s role is to respond to that, to challenge it where it is abusive, and to bless it where it is Godly. These are judgment calls that the people of God must make in each generation, rather than a set of rules for us to follow that are applicable for all time.
• In the light of the changes of law regarding same sex marriages some churches have, on the basis of their discernment from scripture, chosen contract such marriages in the presence of God’s people as part of a service of worship.
• Others have chosen to contract only marriages between a man and a woman, on the basis of their interpretation of scripture.
• Others have chosen a middle-path, declining to offer services of same sex marriage, but instead blessing such partnerships where they are civilly contracted
• None of this means that Christians own ‘marriage’, and nor do we get to define it definitively.
• As Baptists we resist the idea of state and church in the collusion of Christendom, including with regard to marriage. Rather, we respond to, speak prophetically to, bless or critique, the decisions taken by the state as it codifies the shifting sands of society.

What about the Bible?

• With regard to the Bible, we can argue about the ‘hot topic’ texts until the cows come home, and often that this is exactly what we do, time and time again. I’m just not sure it gets us anywhere.
• This post is not going to rehearse the different ways people interpret certain biblical passages - that has been done at length elsewhere - and just as no-one is going to argue one person into thinking that the Bible really does condemn their LGBTQI siblings, neither is that person likely to argue others into a conviction that it doesn’t.
• What we need is not arguments about exegesis, but a renewal of hermeneutics.
• We need to challenge people to re-think the basis of what they are asking scripture to be for them.
• Is it a book of instructions to be followed as literally as possible in the quest for a holy life?
• Or is it a record of the wrestling of God’s people with the revelation of God down the millennia?
• The Bible can be described as ‘a series of thought experiments about the nature of God’; and we can see this playing out in many places.
• For example, we find the Bible asking, ‘What if God is jealous and violent?’ in some places, and then in other places asking, ‘What if God is forgiving and loving?’
• Similarly, we find some places where scripture asks ‘What if God rewards the faithful and punishes the faithless?’, and then we meet the Book of Job which asks, ‘What if God doesn’t always reward faithfulness, and what if suffering is not a result of faithlessness?’
• I suggest we move to a view of the Bible as a record of God’s people trying to work out the nature of God, sometimes getting it right, sometimes getting it wrong; sometimes killing people in God’s name, but sometimes concluding that God’s kingdom is peaceful and peaceable.
• Then the question before us, as those who are relating the Bible to an issue such as whether to fully affirm LGBTQ+ people in the life of God’s people, becomes not ‘what does the Bible say in this verse or that verse?’, but ‘How can we discover the revealed character of God through the scriptures?’.
• This is an invitation to dialogue with the text, as we bring the revelation of God in Jesus into dialogue with other texts within the canon of scripture, and also into dialogue with our own experience of what God is doing in people’s lives today.
• So when some of us read texts such as the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, or Paul’s writing on sexual ethics, we read these differently to those who see within them a message of exclusion or condemnation for LGBTQ+ people.
• In addition to the ‘hot topic’ texts, we also need to hear the witness of the Song of Songs - a beautiful celebration of erotic love which makes mention of neither children nor marriage.

What about children?

• Some have asserted that marriage is for procreation or for the nurturing of children. Some see a child-less marriage as deficient. 
• Others see marriage as valid in God’s eyes even if it is intentionally child-free. Many would want to assert that child-free or child-less marriages are not selfish - they simply offer their blessing to others in other ways.
• We need to realise that sex and sexuality and sexual identity are gifts from God in and of themselves, and that whilst children and marriage often arise from our created nature as sexual beings, they do not define who we are.

Where do we go from here?

• Firstly, Christians need to listen more and talk less.
• Secondly, in our listening we should prioritise listening to those voices who have a history of being excluded from God’s people.
• And thirdly, we do this because the witness of scripture is that God is often encountered with the marginalised and excluded.
• So if we want to know what truly Christ-like love is, we need to look at whom Jesus loved, and to realise that his priority was those whom others told were unloved.
• We also need to think carefully what we mean when we talk of ‘sin’. Sin is not fundamentally the naughty things we do, nor the things others do that we think are naughty. Sin is displacing God as the centre of creation: the sin of idolatry is at the root of all that is evil in the world, and sinful behaviour is that which emerges from placing ourselves rather than God revealed in Christ by the Spirit at the centre of our personal universe.
• So when any of us normalise our own experience of what it means to be human, and impose that on others who experience humanity differently, that is sinful.
• The people of God are called to stand up and be counted for their conviction that God is love, and that all people are deeply, irrevocably, loved by God.
• It is a tragedy of the highest order that on key issues of inclusion, whether gender or sexuality, or ethnicity, or culture, Christians have often been at the forefront of exclusion.
• We need to realise that it is not our job to keep God righteous, it is God’s job to declare us righteous, which has been done in Christ.
• So we should resist all narratives of exclusion, and rebel against all empires of domination that keep people from discovering the gift of life in all its fullness in relationship with the Spirit of Christ.