Gender and Theology series: Implications for the Homosexuality Debate
January 4, 2013
Table of contents for the series:
4. Implications for the Homosexuality Debate
According to the Westminster Confession of Faith, “Marriage is to be between one man and one woman.” The Confession of 1967 relates this union to the purposes of God in creation: “The relationship between man and woman exemplifies in a basic way God’s ordering of the interpersonal life for which he created mankind.” The current controversy dividing the Presbyterian Church is a question of whether the ordering of these two persons, in marital fidelity, is predicated upon a necessary and intrinsic ordering of persons by their gender. Is the gender binary of male and female of the essence of marital and sexual union? Given the significance of this question of gender, it is peculiar that fellow “traditionalists” (not my favorite term) in our denomination have focused so intensely over the biblical passages that explicitly reference homoerotic unions, to the relative neglect of Paul’s model of a covenant ordering in our creation as male and female. As we argued with the help of Barth, this is an ordering established by God, as a similitude of his covenant purposes for creation. It is here, in dogmatic reflection on the nature of God and his creation, that we understand the purpose of our differentiated and irreversible ordering as male and female.
 Chapter 24. Likewise, the Second Helvetic Confession, chapter 29.
 9.44 in The Book of Confessions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). This statement is likely influenced by Karl Barth’s account of man and woman in Church Dogmatics III.4.
 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 (eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1961), 173.
Image: An oil lamp, recalling the parable in Matthew 25:1-13.