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Homosexual Marriage July 21, 2008 By Wendy
Scoggins Considering that most Christians believe marriage to be an institution ordained by God and a construct of a Judeo-Christian heritage, have you ever wondered why all cultures and societies--even those lacking a history of Judeo-Christian influence--contain marriage and family as the bedrock of those cultures and societies? Believe it or not, the answer to this question has a great impact on how one views homosexual marriage. I recently read an arresting little book called The Redemption of Love: Rescuing Marriage and Sexuality from the Economics of a Fallen World by Carrie Miles, due to an interest in the implications of the study of the economics of scarcity for women in the ministry. However, in this book, I found much more, for Miles distinguishes between two types of marriage: one ordained by God as a one-flesh relationship intended to reflect His divine nature and Christ's self-sacrificial love for the Church and another ordained by man for economic sustainability and upheld by the state. After the Fall, man was forced to make his living by the sweat of his brow. As man grew apart from God, marriage quickly degenerated from the ideal given by God to Adam and Eve and their descendants into an economic contract between a man to provide for a woman if she would, in turn, provide children for him. In a pre-industrialized economy, children were a cheap, trustworthy source of labor to a man and therefore invaluable in his pursuit of economic viability. Conversely, infertility almost always spelled economic disaster for a couple (hence the stigma seen so often in scripture). In this way marriage, relationships and the emphasis on exclusive sexuality (particularly the woman's) evolved more from economic necessity than moral virtue and adherence to God's original design. This economic model of marriage and family changed drastically with the onset of industrialization. For the first time in history, a man could make a living apart from his dependence on a woman to bear children for him. The demand for family lessened and demand for birth control grew as children went from being viewed (economically speaking) as priceless commodities to luxury items. In a pre-industrial society, the home and family was the center of production - it produced almost everything it consumed, which included necessities such as healthcare and provision for the elderly. However, in the industrial society in which we find ourselves, the home (whether a family is present or not) is now the center of consumption and necessities such as healthcare and provision for the elderly are now outsourced to others. It is important to note that because of the laws of the state, the benefits of health and life insurance are primarily granted only to spouses and dependents. Laws of probate and inheritance, for example, make no provision for close friends or "life partners." People who are not children of God, whether homosexual or otherwise, have never and will never enjoy the marriage ordained by God and realized today through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which Joshua Remington described in his article; they only enjoy and benefit from the economic contract created by and supported by the state. When one realizes this difficult but crucial distinction, one realizes that homosexuals are being denied the rights to necessary state-sanctioned services enjoyed by heterosexuals (as are single people, but that's another argument). I believe that, as Christians, we can approve of homosexuals being granted these rights through state-sanctioned contracts of "marriage" even as we call the church to seek the higher standard of God-sanctioned marriage. We must realize that without the full operation of the Holy Spirit in our lives, even we who call ourselves Christians may be settling for nothing less than an economic contract, that even we can fall short of God's glorious intent for oneness and unity between a man and his wife. After all, there's marriage and then there's marriage. Why not have ours and let the world have theirs? © 2008, Wendy Scoggins ----- Wendy Scoggins
is a former
blogger for ninetyandnine.com.
You can read more of her writings at www.goddivas.net,
where she is a co-blogger. She has never committed any “acceptable
sins” and is thankful she's not like all you publicans who have.
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