Scripture's "Silence"

… ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

What, if anything, can we read into Scripture's silence about this issue and why was it silent? And if we can’t, why didn’t God in his word just speak directly and plainly to us about this issue, so that we could have avoided this debate? (And I could have continued writing my fantasy novel saga rather than this website!)

After the long distance run of Bible, Sex and Marriage, you might be pleased to hear this section is pretty short! So most shouldn't need a summary. But in case you’re feeling lazy, tired or in a hurry I’ve done one here anyway!

“Scripture isn’t silent - it only speaks about gay sex to condemn it, so mustn’t it follow that same-sex marriage is wrong?”

That's what I used to believe. But I can now see I'd got that wrong. Scripture simply never addressed the issue. In Matthew 19 we saw a group of Pharisees asked Jesus whether it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason and we get Jesus’s very clear reply – no. In 1 Thessalonians 4, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 5 to 7 and 1 Timothy 1, Paul very clearly instructs his congregations to discipline themselves to keep sex within marriage and especially avoid sexually exploiting those weaker than them through their uncontrolled lusts, whether that involved sex with prostitutes or slave boys. But within marriage Paul actively encourages regular consensual sex (1 Cor. 7) – as much as either spouse – husband or wife - wants. And he sets no restriction on the form that marital sex takes: coital, manual, oral or even anal sex are all on the sexual menu for married partners provided both consent.

However, Paul simply never addresses the question of whether marriage – which legitimises all forms of consensual sex between spouses – is permissible between two men or two women.

“Hasn’t God spoken to us on this issue by his silence? Since his word hasn’t said same-sex marriage is acceptable, surely it isn’t?”

No. I'm now convinced that's the wrong way to look at it - for three reasons.

First, this is effectively saying that unless Scripture tells us we can do something then we mustn’t do it. But Scripture was never intended to work that way. And so hardly any evangelical Christians normally apply Scripture that way, even the most conservative of us. If we did we wouldn’t be able to drive a car, fly in a plane, use a computer or mobile phone, receive most life-saving medical procedures or prescription drugs, use contraception or undergo infertility treatment. After all, all these things can have significant moral consequences. Somewhere along the line even the Armish will be doing something never contemplated by Scripture. In fact, even the ultra-legalistic Orthodox Jews don’t take this approach to Scripture. They will strictly follow everything they think Scripture or the Talmud tells them they must do or must not do. But if there’s something which isn’t on the banned list, for the most part they will regard themselves as free to do that.

We must also acknowledge the law was an imperfect standard. There are things that the law permitted that were less than what God really wanted. It imposed limitations on revenge – an eye for an eye, but Jesus showed us that God really wanted us to turn the other cheek. But this does not mean we should replace the old law with its long but limited banned list with a new “higher” law that says nothing is permitted unless it’s on a “permitted” list of things the Bible expressly sanctions. This would be a total contradiction of Paul’s message about spiritual freedom in following the higher law of love, rather than a long list of dos and don’ts – read, for example, Colossians 3.

In reality no Christians consistently live like that. However, occasionally we inconsistently take that attitude towards certain issues – often issues that don’t impact us personally. I believe same-sex marriage is such an issue.

Second, beyond occasional prophesies, as I understand it, Scripture does not teach general truths that would have been completely hidden to the original audience and only understood centuries later. Rather, the Holy Spirit often shows us how Scripture’s underlying truths that the original audience could have seen apply to our own particular situation today that they could not have seen. But Scripture was not going to directly teach a message that neither its human writer nor his audience would have understood at the time to answer a question no one was asking: can same-sex orientated people get married? But that is surely not how Scripture works. It is "breathed" by the Holy Spirit but through the mind and the words of human authors in a particular place and time, addressing issues that the writer and his audience would have understood at the time (with rare prophetic exceptions). We should no more expect Scripture to directly tell us whether same sex-orientated people can get married than to tell us if we should own a gun, smoke pot, or drive a diesel car .

Third, as we'll look at below, I believe there were very good reasons why the Bible did not and could not teach its original audience that they should embrace same-sex marriage. And so, of course, it couldn't directly give us this teaching either.

Why doesn’t the Bible directly address the issue of same-sex marriage?

When we understand the contexts in which both the Old and New Testaments were written I believe we can readily understand why the issue was never directly addressed there.

Why the Old Testament didn’t address the issue

The Old Testament neither comments on the issue of same-sex marriage nor gives us any examples of same-sex marriages. However, if you were to ask an ancient Hebrew why that was, he would have looked at you, not in horror but in bewilderment - why were you even asking such an odd question? Even if he'd known (which he wouldn’t) that some men or women were only sexually attracted to people of the same gender, it would have made no difference to a man’s need to get himself a wife to produce heirs for after he was gone. You would hope for a love match like Jacob and Rachel but you might have to settle for something less like Jacob and Leah had. But the point was every man needed a wife to produce his heirs to provide for them when the were old (there was no state pension!) and inherit his property after he was gone and every woman needed a husband to provide for her when her father had gone.

He might also have added that if a man (or woman) felt drawn to sex with someone of the same sex, as long as you avoided male-only intercourse, there was nothing in the law to prevent that. But again what did that have to do with marriage?

So, there were very good practical reasons why no one among God’s people in Old Testament times would have looked to form a marriage with someone of the same sex. Two men together could not have made heirs. They would also have been failing to provide a man’s protection and support for a woman somewhere. Likewise, two women could not magic a child themselves and would struggle to look after themselves without the support of a man. In that time and culture same-sex marriages just simply could not have worked on any practical level. That’s why no one was asking the question about them and why the Old Testament nowhere says – same-sex marriage don’t do it, it’s bad, it’s toveah or even tevel! Quite simply, in that society, even if you happened to be gay, no one would have been interested in pursuing it.

In fact, even in surrounding nations of the Near East there was virtually no precedent for same-sex marriages that the Hebrews would have been tempted to copy. We have some evidence of occasional all-female marriage in Ancient Egypt. However, given the limited property rights of Hebrew women without the support of a father or husband, an all-female marriage would have been a particularly untempting prospect!

So, under the Old Testament, to argue that God must oppose same-sex marriage because it only talks about marriage between men and women simply does not add up. The cultural and legal context make it quite obvious that the reason why the Old Testament does not mention same-sex marriage is because for these very practical reasons no one among the Israelites, whatever their sexual orientation, would have been asking for it.

Some might say, but even if people at the time hadn’t thought about same-sex marriage, our all-knowing God knew that in the future people might ask about this. So if he supported it wouldn’t he have said so in Scripture? But that’s an entirely circular argument. I could just as easily argue that since our all-knowing God knew that in the future people might ask about this, if he opposed it wouldn’t he have said that in Scripture? Both arguments are equally invalid and cancel each other out.

Scripture’s silence on this issue is no different to numerous other important issues we grapple with today which scripture also does not directly address, e.g. abortion, contraception, euthanasia, infertility treatment, genetic engineering, AI and numerous climate crisis issues.

Why the New Testament didn’t address the issue

I believe Scripture and the historic context reveals the following very good reasons why the New Testament could not have endorsed same sex-marriage in the time and place it was written:

As we’ve seen, in that patriarchal world the only accepted marriage model was the unequal complementarian one of the dominant husband and submissive wife.
This allowed no room for marriage between two men or two women unless one of them took on a “faked” opposite sex gender role (with its own myriad problems – very soon illustrated by Nero and Sporus – see below)
So, before the church could endorse same-sex marriage, it first needed to accept full equality of the sexes and specifically within heterosexual marriage. Don’t run before you can walk!
As we’ve seen, Jesus and Paul after him were moving the church towards accepting a full equality of the sexes in both church leadership and marriage model. So, they had already made major changes in equalizing divorce (Matthew 19) and sexual rights (1 Corinthians 7).
However, Paul considered it was still far too soon to accept a full equality of the sexes in church leadership (see e.g. 1 Timothy 2) or in marriage roles (see e.g. Ephesians 5)
Paul had good reasons for putting some brakes on these radical changes, which I explore further in my essay which I will link here. In summary, those reasons were:

Do nothing to damage the reputation of this new church in the eyes of wider society and so impede the spreading of the gospel
Submit to the existing authorities and structures: whether your emperor, your slave-master or your husband
Avoid unnecessary dissension between believers to maintain church peace and unity

The reputational harm for the church of endorsing same-sex marriage would have been severe because:

The more “moral” part of that patriarchal society strongly rejected all male-only sex as demeaning to the passive partner– the ultimate sexual abuse of misusing a man as if he were a mere woman!
It would have sent a message that could easily confused - that the church was aligning itself with those libertarians for whom “anything goes”.
Accepting same-sex marriage would have looked like a direct challenge to the existing legal structures, especially men/husbands over women/wives, because ultimately you couldn’t have same-sex marriage without allowing fully equal marriage that removed complementary gender roles

Such huge social changes would inevitably have caused huge disagreements and disunity within the church.

In a society that wasn’t even ready to accept fully equal male-female marriage, it would have been impossible for Paul to promote such a hugely radical change as same-sex marriage without causing great damage to church reputation, challenging society’s well-embedded patriarchal structures and causing much dissension between church members – the very things Paul wanted to avoid.

Young churches would have been strangled in their early childhood as they tore themselves apart or were even closed down. The spread of the gospel would have been seriously damaged, and no matter how important new social freedoms were, nothing was as important as the gospel’s work of saving lives.

Until patriarchal society changed to give women full social and legal rights and freedoms without a husband’s protection, two men marrying each other would also have deprived two women somewhere of a husband and all the benefits, protections and respect that would go with that. Similarly two women marrying each other could not enjoy those benefits either.

Until all slaves were set free - not just Philemon - allowing same-sex marriage also would have opened a backdoor by which the church encouraged sexually exploitative homoerotic relationships between masters and male slaves – keep the wife but just formalize your male bit on the side by making your slave-boy your husband.

And a terrible illustration of this was coming in AD 67, only two to three years after Paul died, in Nero’s “gay” marriage to his poor slave boy, Sporus. In a wickedly farcical ceremony he had the poor lad castrated and shamefully dressed up as his bride.

Imagine if Paul, just before he died, had suddenly announced the opening up of marriage to two men (or two women) - a huge break from existing societal norms. How would that have looked just three years later? It would have seemed like the church had given Nero licence for his wicked wedding to his slave boy. What awful damage might that have done to the reputation of the church and the spread of the gospel?

As Ecclesiastes 3 tells us, “There is a time for all things.”

But until it was time for church and society to accept full equality of the sexes and freedom for all slaves, it was not the right time for the church to accept same-sex marriage.