Homosexuality, marriage and the church: a conversation

Christian Century, July 1, 1998 by David Heim, Max Stackhouse, Luke Johnson, David Matzko

I was in the monastery myself for ten years before leaving at age 28 and getting married, and I saw both sides of the divide. Whatever one might think about the state of monastic life in the 1950s and early '60s, the monastic life was a chaste life. The monks I knew were suppressing and sublimating--doing whatever they had to do to be chaste. They did not have the notion that sexual fulfillment is the be-all and end-all of existence. This is not to say there were no problems. But the habits and virtues of chastity did exist.

It's when those habits and virtues collapsed that people began to be sexually exploitative. A way of life became corrupted from within.

STACKHOUSE: The Protestant experience has been different but certainly parallel. The impact of existential theology in the 1960s and certain forms of neo-Reformation theology and liberation theology led to a stress on the freedom of God. This translated into normlessness. Any thing people want to do is identified as a calling to live out God's freedom. After you heard six sermons in a row on the freedom of God, you had to watch either your spouse or your wallet. Is God's liberty really normless?

HEIM: I take it that, despite the differences around the table, we have quite a bit of agreement. That, for example, it is not appropriate to talk about anybody having a "right" to sexual fulfillment.

JOHNSON: Sexual activity is not a right. It is only appropriate within a committed relationship. Commitment first, then intimacy, then passion--that is a more ordered mode of expression than the reverse, which is what our romantic notions of love have perpetuated.

STACKHOUSE: Or to put it another way, the level of intimacy should be appropriate to the level of commitment.

JOHNSON: I think, in fact, that we can see in our time a recovery of the language of virginity. Fifteen years ago when I taught 1 Corinthians to undergraduates, students would be uncomfortable with Paul's talk of virginity. There would be titters in the classroom, and you'd have to explain why Paul thought virginity was an important option. Today the atmosphere is different. There's a total acceptance of the option of virginity. Whether or not students are virgins themselves, they don't see it as a laughable issue.

MATZKO: I think we are all trying to say that faithful heterosexual procreative marriage is a classic model or a paradigmatic case. I would want to add to this that it is not a limiting case, although it is clearly representative. The paradigm does not exclude other cases, but it gives them definition. That's where we differ, I think. I take it, Max, that you want to make male-female complementarity and the possibility of procreation the limit of possible cases.

STACKHOUSE: I want to protect the notion that there is a norm. I don't think there is a single opposition to the norm. Rather, we have a wide range of relative approximations of the ideal.

At the same time, I don't want those who have basically happy heterosexual marriages to think that they have everything because they have that. What they have is also only a relative approximation, and there are other relative approximations. But if we lose or intentionally obscure the ideal, we blur the vision of God's law, purpose and love as governing norms.