The "natural" order of things...
Genesis, Matthew 19, and the complementarian revision...
A bit of a preamble.
I don’t know what to do with this week’s events in Ancaster. I’m writing this blog anonymously not because I’m particularly fearful of repercussions (there are people in my life I’d rather keep safe but I know that there are folks when gaining the power to not abide with folks like me will use it. Let them come. They will find the experience unpleasant.) I write anonymously because none of this is about me.
I don’t want attention. I don’t want a following. I don’t want to get in the way or take the story away from those who are in the middle of this and need to be seen, heard, loved, respected.
In the same way I think of Bekett Noble. How do I honour their struggle and story without making it about me? My anger, my response, my agenda?
I can’t. Instead, hear some of their words in the story printed in the Spectator.
This will be my policy. These stories are their stories. I will not use them for my own purposes.
May God receive His child into shalom.
Let’s talk creation bullshit.
If you can’t hang your hat on the mistranslations of porneia, arsenokoitai, and malakoi to make your arguments against LGBTQ+ inclusion the next eisegetical move is to grab hold of Matthew 19 and make an illegitimate plea for natural law.
Doesn’t Jesus say ““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’”” (Matthew 19:4-5, NIV).
Look! Male and female! The obvious, natural binary from which complementarian theology doth spring forth.
(Quick aside. Complementarian theology is simply repackaged headship theology when a bunch of men in a room in the 1980s realized they couldn’t fund-raise on overt sexism and formulated a saccharine version of it to keep women in their place. I’ll write about this at some point.)
Here’s the problem with the Matthew 19 pivot.
Jesus is dealing with a question of divorce. He’s not dealing with issues of gender and sexuality.
Jesus’ whole argument hinges on the second half: two becoming one flesh. Verse 6: “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”” It is an absurd notion to found your theology of human sexuality on the part of the quote that Jesus ignores for the rest of the text.
The story, as it goes, is this: The Pharisees want to trap Jesus in a logic puzzle. What about divorce, Jesus?
Jesus answers - marriage is one flesh, don’t take it apart.
They reply - But Moses said we can…
Jesus’ answers… Moses realized that you men were jerks and so put in place a system to protect the women. It’s not ideal, but necessary. If you really want to honour the spirit of the law then you’re not allowed to get rid of your wives (and throw them into hardship and destitution) unless they commit porneia (properly defined - prostituting oneself to gods other than the One True God).
But, they whine… Jesus! That’s really hard. If that’s true then we shouldn’t get married at all.
Jesus answers… If you can’t handle the responsibility of marriage and one flesh. If you think of your women as property to be thrown away when you’re tired of them. If you can’t be face to face with your ezer kenegdo then it would be better for you to live without one as a eunuch - who the very same Law of Moses wouldn’t permit to enter the sanctuary. (In this response - he both welcomes and affirms the eunuch into the presence of God!)
This isn’t a liberal reading of the text. It is the story in its full Old Testament context that is often ignored for the complementarian, anti-LGBTQ+ proof text.
Living as a eunuch being the better way turns out to be the complete antithesis of any appeal to “natural law”.
Now let’s think about Genesis.
The creation story isn’t a story about the creation. It’s the story of the Creator.
We often forget that in our attempts to draw a “natural law” out of the text for our own purposes.
It uses binaries in the story. In Hebrew poetry binaries are not used in a one or the other sense of ordering. They are used to highlight the all-encompassing nature of God’s sovereignty. Heaven and earth are not two binary places but everything from one end to the other.
It’s all God’s.
Genesis is not a science text. The assertion is not that this is the way God made it to be; it is that every square inch is declared his at the outset.
Earth and sea and every place in between them.
Sun and moon. Night and day. Plant and animal.
Proton and electron. Ice and steam. Vacuum and black hole.
And when we look at that very good book of creation closely we find that all of it declares God’s glory. Not just the extremes - but every place along the many spectra in which everything exists.
Not just black and white - but all the colours in between.
Not just man and woman - but the vast complexity that is people.
So even if, EVEN IF!, Jesus was leaning hard on male and female (which he wasn’t) - then the proper reading of the creation account does not support the complementarian revision of Matthew 19 and the argument collapses.
As a matter of afterward. If anything that I write is useful to you - use it. Edit it. Copy it. Share it. Polish it up. Claim it as your own (buy me a beer in glory, in friendship, not payment). The other aspect of writing anonymously is that I claim no ownership. It is yours to use, build on, tear apart, ignore, disagree with, whatever. I simply share it as my mind and heart for you to receive as you need.