Nicholas Wolterstorff's Unconvincing Case for Same Sex Marriage

Wolterstorff is one of my heroes. He is a philosopher, and I am a student of Philosophy; He writes on justice, and my PhD dissertation was on justice; and he is a Christian, and I am a Christian too. I have learned so much of moral and political philosophy from his writings. And when I learned of his support for same-sex marriage within the church, I was so disappointed; and when I listened to his lecture in youtube, I was even more disappointed.  One of the reasons for my disappointment with his lecture was because of the unusual pattern that I observed in his work. I have found his work to be dense. His engagement of Scripture is always rigorous. Yet in the lecture, the usual rigor is missing. It was rather a shallow piece of engagement, an uncharacteristic mark of his scholarship.

Let me summarise his line of reasoning. Is expression of homosexual orientation like kleptomaniac expression of stealing someone's belonging? Well, the issue is not with the orientation; the issue is with the expression. Stealing someone's belonging is wrong; no doubt about that. Is a homosexual practice wrong or right? To figure that out, we have to go to the biblical text. The holiness code of Leviticus contains explicit teaching against same sex practice. But the same chapters also include injunction not to stitch two different fabrics of cloth together. Shortly put, the Old Testament holiness code is not really the proper guideline for the Christians. For this reason, one must go to Romans 1 in the New Testament. However, the text in Romans that speaks of homosexual relation as unnatural refers to the kind of practice that evil people practice; it does not refer to the loving, caring and nurturing kind of relationship that we find today in many same sex couples. Moreover, the church tradition that speaks of procreation as a purpose of marriage does not mean to include procreation as an essential purpose of marriage. After all, couples who are way beyond their fertile age also get married.

Without delving into the text in Romans, let me go elsewhere to argue against same sex marriage within the church. ( My point is not to be extrapolated onto the polity and the law. For that we have to see how Bible interacts with Political Philosophy.) In Genesis, it is said, " For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife." If we take the narrative in Genesis 1 and 2 as God's original intent, what we find is a heterosexual marriage. The text did not say " For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his partner". ( We cannot expect the text to say "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to her partner.) Wolterstorff has written a great deal on the idea of "image of God", drawn from the Genesis text. Now I don't know why he just skipped the creation narrative that speaks of one male and one female and jumped onto some other text. I find this surprising.

If we go to Revelation, we again find this symbol. In Revelation 21, the new Jerusalem is pictured as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband, Jesus Christ. The symbol is not of Jesus uniting with his partner. It was a symbol of the uniting of the bridegroom and the bride, a male and a female. Isn't marriage as God showed John symbolised by the union of a male and a female? Well, in Revelation that is what we find. It is not the image of a male and a male. Given the culture, John might as well have been shown that way. But John was not shown that way. He was shown the Holy City dressed as a bride for her bridegroom.

If the creation narrative and the eschatological narrative show marriage as a union of bridegroom-bride or man-woman, same sex marriage is a distortion of God's intent for marriage. I won't dispute the fact that some same sex couples can be loving  just as some heterosexual couples can be uncaring. But this observation should not distort what the Scripture teaches. The Scripture teaches, as the church has understood throughout her history, that God's intent is for heterosexual marriage; not same sex marriage.

Given that Nick is committed to engaging with the biblical text, I would love to see him engaging the issue from a different perspective.