An excerpt from the new book by William Stacy Johnson

A Time to Embrace:

Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law and Politics

Chapter Three
(excerpt)

Becoming Family: The Consecration of Same-Gender Love

Scripture progresses along with those who read it.

Gregory the Great

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When two people give themselves to one another in a mutual act of loving and life-long commitment, something transformative happens: they become family.  Becoming family is the kind of thing that religious communities should honor, nurture, and support.  With that in mind, my aim in this chapter is to make a constructive biblical and theological case for the religious blessing of exclusively-committed same-gender unions.  The case I wish to make here builds on the insights of the consecrationist viewpoint that I have set forth in the previous chapter.  The question is this: how do religious communities honor the integrity of gay families while also honoring the integrity of their own deepest traditions?  I believe that both of these honorings are possible, and that is why I base my argument squarely within a biblical and theological framework.  And I want to underscore the possibility of doing that and the need to do it.  For too long now our religious communities have been told that taking a supportive stance toward gay people somehow violates everything our religious traditions hold dear.  That is not the case.  Supporting exclusively-committed gay unions represents not a departure from our biblical and theological traditions, but rather a deepening of them.

For Christians, Scripture is the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ, the divine Word mediated and spoken through inspired human words.  Christians always look to Scripture to be a reliable guide in matters of faith and morals.  Unfortunately, the plain fact is that nowhere does Scripture explicitly address the question of mutually-committed same-gender unions.  This is simply one of those cases where we have to read with Scripture in order to see beyond what the biblical writers themselves could envision.  We do not approach Scripture as a collection of abstract propositions, for Scripture is a living Word, as well as a living conversation partner that we engage time and again.  When we demand of it answers to questions that its writers never anticipated, as we are doing here, we must approach it with a special measure of wisdom and grace.

On what biblical and theological basis might the blessing of a religious community be given to a gay or lesbian couple?  And what would such a blessing signify?  My perspective is deeply informed by the traditional purposes of marriage.  Marriage is primarily about transformation: it functions as a “means of grace.”  Moreover, as Rowan Williams has argued, the mutual delight of the couple symbolizes something important about God: God delights in the human beings God has created.  Not only does God delight in us, but God has determined to remain committed to us through thick and thin.  Both this delight and this divine dedication are symbolized for human experience through the love between spouses.  Marriage is born of two people knowing themselves as desired by one another and determining to stand by one another for better or for worse.   

What are we to make of same-gender couples who embody the same kind of dedication and desire we see in heterosexual marriage?  The best way to answer this question is to look at the traditional purposes of marriage and then ask what light these traditional benchmarks shed on gay unions.  In general, the tradition has conceived of marriage as a context for embodying three fundamental realities: companionship, commitment, and community.  Upon investigation, I think we will see that gay couples are just as capable as straight couples of embracing all three of these ideals.  Not only are they capable, but many gay and lesbian couples are already living out these three values in exemplary ways.

William Stacy Johnson holds the Arthur M. Adams Chair of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. An ordained Presbyterian minister and a lawyer, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, his J.D. from Wake Forest University, and his M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond.

A frequent speaker in churches, he served for four years as theologian-in-residence of Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas and was the first theologian-in-residence at First Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas. For five years he worked as a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. He has also served as co-chair of a Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptural reasoning group located at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton.

His teaching and writing focuses on constructive theological reflection amid the challenges of a postmodern, post-September 11 world.