How the Bible’s ethical standards for Sex and Marriage Changed over time

So, the real question must be - could God accept marriage between two men or two women? 

What we learn from Adam and Eve

Many traditionalists would say the story of Adam and Eve shows us that God intended for all time that marriage could only be between a man and a woman. ​But a careful examination of the text shows the essence of their original marriage model – before the Fall - was similar, equal, permanent, life partners forming the closest kinship bond. This is the sort of relationship you might expect same-sex couples could fulfil just as well as opposite sex couples couples (we’ll examine the evidence about whether they do in my Answers section).  

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There is a theory that Genesis 2 show us an "androgenous Adam" who was split in two by God to make a male and a female. Becoming “one flesh” in marriage involves a man and a woman reuniting those two halves of humanity to re-make the original androgenous human. Two men or two women can’t do that so they can’t be married in God’s eyes. However, this interpretation goes entirely against the Hebrew words of the text. For example, the text is clear that the original Adam was already fully male when God carried out the divine surgery of removing his rib to create the female.

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The whole emphasis in the passage after that is not on Adam and Eve’s differences, even in a compatible way. There’s no mention of the need to procreate children or of any anatomical differences. The emphasis is on their similarity, in contrast to the other creatures among whom Adam was unable to find a suitable mate, because they were too different.

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The fundamental pivot preceding Eve’s creation and her union with Adam is the Lord’s recognition that “It is not good for the man to be alone, I will make a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:18) To answer Adam’s loneliness problem he did not merely provide him with another human being he could chat to but, a kenegedo ezer - a strong equal partner to do life with, of a similar, not different, kind to him. The passage also explains the reason why men and women had got married since – to be suitable help-mates to one another. Verse 24 relates back to verse 18. This was not a command or prophesy. Genesis is primarily a book of history. The passage was just describing and explaining the basis for the marriages the original Hebrew audience had seen, which had always been between men and women.

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Their “one flesh union” did not primarily mean having sex – their union was formed before they’d had sex. It meant to form the closest of kinship bonds. Similar words are used in Scripture to describe same-sex kinsmanship, e.g. Jacon and Laban and Ruth and Naomi.

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Scripture elsewhere shows that the “one flesh union” of marriage does incorporate a sexual union (e.g. 1 Cor. 6:16). Sex symbolizes forming the one flesh marriage bond, just like baptism symbolizes passing from death to new life in Jesus. So, sex should be reserved for marriage. However, there is nothing in Scripture which says the sexual consummation of marriage has to involve coital intercourse. Legally, it always has done so, but Jesus taught us to look at the heart of our behaviours and motivations. We also know non-coital sex can be just as pleasurable and work just as well at making couples feel emotionally connected. Indeed, most women cannot experience orgasm through intercourse alone and require other external stimulation. Of course, coital male-female sexual intercourse was necessary for Adam & Eve to create children for God’s humanity project to work. However, before the Fall, Genesis 2 and 3 don’t even indirectly refer to the need for procreation as part of the purposes of marriage.

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Before the Fall, Scripture indicates the following essentials were required to make suitable marriage partners:

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• partners of a similar intellectual and spiritual kind, i.e. made in God’s image

• partners who can be equal life help-mates

• partners who can form the closest lifelong kinship bonds

• insofar as the “one flesh” union is cemented through sex nothing suggests this can only be fulfilled through coital sexual intercourse

Should same-sex couples not able to fulfil all these purposes?

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But, after the Fall, same-sex couples could not fulfil the Old Testament’s requirements for marriage. That’s because part of the curses resulting from the Fall was that marriage must now involve the complementary roles of a submissive wife and a dominant husband ruling over her (Genesis  3:16).

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This was God’s first curse on humans for breaking his first law . But Galatians 3 tells us, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us" and in him there is now “neither male nor female”.

What Jesus and Paul Teach Us

Most traditionalists will say (like I used to) that Matthew 19 and Ephesians 5 enshrine the complementary male-female marriage as the only marriage model for all time. I'm now convinced this is a misreading of these texts. 

In Matthew 19 Jesus was not quoting Genesis 2 to say that marriage could only ever be between a husband and a wife. He was quoting it to answer a specific question the Pharisees had put to him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” and to make the point that marriage was meant to be an unbreakable kinship bond. It would hardly have helped his argument if he had gone out of his way to also address a question no one was then asking about same-sex marriages - then unheard of.

I believe we see Jesus here moving marriage away from the post-Fall gendered, unequal, hierarchical marriage model codified by Mosaic law. Jesus points us towards a different, older, better marriage model as it was “from the beginning” - before the Fall. This involved a uniquely close, unbreakable bond of two equal partners, under which husbands have no more right to divorce their wives than wives do their husbands. On the face of it, there’s nothing about this original marriage model that same-sex couples couldn't fulfil.

All Jesus’s words tell us about same-sex marriage is that if same-sex marriages are acceptable to God they should be permanent kinships bonds like all marriages. But they do not tell us  - one way or another - whether same-sex marriages are acceptable to God. The reason why Jesus here links the creation of men and women with marriage is because he was making a deliberate point that women ultimately should count as equal marriage partners with their husbands, as before the Fall, both having been made in the image of God.

But many claim (as I used to) that Ephesians 5 and Revelation 21 give us deeper reasons why marriage can only ever be between a man and a woman - because only they can represent the church’s eternal marriage as bride to Christ, our husband. It’s true that Ephesians 5 and elsewhere in Scripture sometimes portray God/Christ’s relationship with Israel/the church as like a marriage. However, this is simply a metaphor which is no more literally true than the church being the branches to his vine or the sheep to his shepherd. The main metaphor used to describe our relationship with him in Ephesians 5 is not his bride but his body for which he gave himself up. So, likewise a husband should sacrificially love his wife as if she were his own body. Christ himself says his followers won’t be married to anyone in the next age (Matt 22:30). So, we can’t be Christ’s bride. Instead, we are his little brothers and sisters (Romans 8:29) and guests to his wedding (Matt. 22:1-14). Christ’s bride in Revelation 21 is not the church but the bejewelled heavenly city of Jerusalem coming down to earth, which we’ll enter with him.

When Paul described the husband as head of the wife he was merely stating a social and legal fact of that patriarchal society. This required unequal complementarian marriage roles of a dominant husband and submissive wife. But Paul was no more intending to make a permanent fixture of unequal gendered marriage roles than he was the similary unequal roles of master and slave. In both cases Paul was here giving practical household instructions about how to do these unequal hierarchical relationships society had given them in a Christ-like, servant-hearted way. Paul’s own teaching, like Jesus before him, in fact encouraged Christians towards more equal relationships (see e.g. 1 Cor 7) as they gradually realised the vision of full equality (Gal 3:28).

If we take Ephesians 5 as a strict model for marriage for all time then, to be consistent, we should apply 1 Corinthians 11:3-11 in the same way to the headship of men over women in the church and ban women from church leadership, which most evangelicals don't any more.

We should avoid over-spiritualising marriage. As the Reformation taught us, marriage is not a sacrament but a lifelong practical and legal commitment between two human beings - not a contract with God but a contract before him which he expects us to honour.

We live in a very different world where men and women are socially and legally equal. But the main teaching of Ephesians 5 applies to our relationships today: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” This simply requires marriage partners, whether husbands or wives, to serve and and love each other just as Christ loved the church. There would seem to be no reason why two husbands or two wives could not fulfil those scriptural aims just as well as a husband and a wife.

When properly understood in its cultural context and then applied to our own different context, the age-abiding principles in Ephesians 5 offer no reason why marriage could not include partners of the same sex.