Grant LeMarquand’s Simply Stunning 10-Minute Summary of the Conservative Position on Homosexuality

from Stand Firm by Sarah Hey:

Dr. LeMarquand received his ThD from Wycliffe College; he is the Academic Dean and Associate Professor of Biblical Studies and Mission at Trinity School for Ministry. From his bio: "Grant's research interests are Pauline Epistles; Synoptic Gospels; the Bible and mission; the New Testament and the Roman imperial world; non-Western, especially African, theology and biblical exegesis; and African church history."

I really wish I could just excerpt the entire three pages and post it here, but you will have to go to the link at the Trinity Seminary [website] and read the rest for yourself.

Imagine, for a moment, your being assigned to the same task. You must, in ten minutes, summarize the conservative position on same-gender non-celibate sexual relationships in front of a group of your own church's "leaders" who are largely hostile to your position, and also in majority persons who do not believe the Gospel,despite affectations otherwise. Many of them are deconstructionists, and therefore innately dishonest and manipulative sophists. Among them are a woman -- the head leader -- who has publicly pronounced against the Gospel repeatedly, as well as engaged in vicious canonical abuses and illegalities, along with scores of lawsuits. What would you say?

Right off the bat, Dr. LeMarquand acknowledges the inability of his words to persuade or influence the vast majority of persons in the room -- just as those of us who are peons in blogland acknowledge the same thing with revisionists. We simply don't share enough of the foundational beliefs in common to be persuasive on either side. So why then does one speak?

This is a brave ten minutes and my hat's off to Dr. LeMarquand:

First of all, let me say that I would not be honest if I said how happy I am to be with you. I am more than aware that the majority of you in the room today, as much as you may welcome me personally, will not pleased with the message that I have come to bring. The process which our theological panel has been through has been congenial, and I can say that all of us – on both sides of this question of same-sex marriage – have come away with new friends and with respect for one another. But we did not enter into this project with joy in our hearts and a song on our lips. Most of us would have preferred to spend a few days chewing glass than going through this work. For someone, such as myself, on the conservative side of this question to be here now, is a bit confusing. I will say things that most of you will find unconvincing and many of you may find offensive. I do this not because I am foolish (although that may be true), or because I am a glutton for punishment, but simply as a witness to what I, and my traditionalist colleagues on the panel, believe to be the truth.

I have heard it said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. That is, however, exactly what I will be doing for the next minutes – not providing any new insights or fresh thinking but, as straightforwardly as possible, saying the same old thing one more time.

I am also aware that because this time is being spent on this issue, there is no time to discuss the outrageous events in Jos, Nigeria where Anglican Christians are literally being slaughtered in their beds. Something is wrong with our priorities.

1. The conservative position as set forth in our essay and in our response to the paper of the liberal side is that, according to scripture, the Christian tradition and human reason reflecting on scripture, tradition and the order of God’s creation, genital sexual activity is to be expressed only between one man and one woman who are joined together in a covenantal bond of marriage. The purposes of such bonds include mutual help and comfort, the procreation, care and nurture of children, and the restraint of sin. This institution was ordained by God, as we see in the stories of Genesis 1 and 2, as a way in which human beings image God in the world (“God created human beings in his own image...male and female he created them” Gen. 1:27). In the epistle to the Ephesians we are similarly told that the marital union between a man and a woman reflects the love of Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:32). Unions other than marital unions between one man and one woman (be they pre-marital, extra-marital, homosexual, polyamorous, polygynous, polyandrous, or any other union) are in themselves disordered and sinful. We have no doubt that God loves, redeems and uses people who are in such unions. We do not believe
those unions themselves to be God’s desire for his people, and we do not believe that the Church should bless such unions or ordain to any ministry those in such unions.

2. The conservative argument for this position is, first of all, based on scripture. It was not our contention that the traditional argument rests entirely on the seven texts in scripture which speak (all of them negatively in some way) about homosexuality. Those texts are discussed in our paper, and I will not repeat the exegesis which can be found there. More importantly, we believe our position to be shaped by the entire story of God’s dealing with humanity as this is given to us in the canon. What we say as a Church about the marriage, therefore, will also say volumes about our Church’s attitude and approach to scripture. It is the conservative contention that the story of the Bible is not just illustrative of something we know from some other source, whether cultural, or personal intuition. Although the liberal side attempts to use scripture as one way of grounding their argument, we believe that their attempt has failed, that they cannot argue that same-sex marriage is a fulfillment of scripture, that their argument is in fact against the plain sense of scripture, and that it reads some parts of scripture in ways that make them (as the XXth of the XXXIX Articles puts it) “repugnant” to other parts of scripture. This is not a biblicist or fundamentalist argument. We are aware of the cultural, literary and theological diversity in scripture, but we also affirm a unity by which those of who are ordained have vowed to shape our lives.

3. Our argument also attempts to buttress our reading of scripture with arguments from natural law. We see these arguments as second-order arguments which help us to understand the reason for the biblical story – scripture says what it does about the goodness of marriage between a man and a woman because that is the good way that God has given us for the good order of the world. In this argument we seek nothing more than to say that scripture moves with the grain of creation, rather than against it.

4. In discussing the witness of scripture we must also mention a subject not as well developed (as Dr. Charry has pointed out) in our essay, that is the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit who “leads us into all truth” (John 16:13). It is our joy that the Holy Spirit does not simply lead us arbitrarily into new and contradictory revelations, but that the Spirit always bears witness to the Son in a way that does not contradict the plain sense of scripture. In our own tradition Richard Hooker bore witness against both the Roman Church of his day and against Protestant “enthusiasts” who claimed to have new revelations which were contradictory to scripture. In spite of their assertion to the contrary, we discern a similar pattern of language about the Spirit in the liberal paper, which claims that the new pattern of marriage which they call “expansionist” is being offered to the Church by the Spirit who has “contrived with social change” to bring about a new understanding. Rather than scripture constraining our feeble hearts and minds as we read scripture, the liberal side asserts that we must be constrained by what is taken as the self-evident experience of same-sex couples and by liberationist trends in our culture.