It seems to me that much of the debate about
homosexuality boils down to one basic theological question: the question of
creationism versus evolution. Most
Christians now, apart from some extremely conservative believers, accept evolution
as the scientific explanation of life. They do not believe that God literally
made everything in six days. God created the world, they say, but he created it
through evolution. But if they use expressions like “the divinely ordained order of creation”, or “God’s plan for human
life”, they are actually creationists at heart. Evolution is not just a way of explaining
how we human beings “came from apes”. If we take its implications seriously, it
is a fundamental fact about the nature of the universe, the way things are. There is no order laid down from the beginning. The whole universe
evolves: it always has and it always will.
The evolution
of life mostly happens by accidental mutations, only a small minority of which give
rise to a survival advantage that is reproduced in subsequent generations. Often
they produce a one-off anomaly or a variation that has little or no effect on survival. In spite of what the Bible says about God
creating male and female, we know from actual experience that sometimes babies
are born with mixed male and female characteristics. When this is an obvious
physical fact it cannot be denied, but when it is psychological – someone
feeling they are a woman in a male body or a man in a female body – it can be very hard to convince other
people of it, and this causes enormous pain to the person involved. Similarly,
it is all very well to quote the Bible about a man leaving his father and
mother and cleaving to his wife (Genesis 2:24), but there are men and women in
whom this instinct is not present: they have a deep need to cleave to someone
of the same sex. Again, because this is not physically obvious, some people
deny it, saying that homosexuality is a life style choice and so causing a lot
of hurt to those who know within themselves that it is not a choice. Whatever
we may say about the “divine plan”, it doesn’t always seem to work.
If there is a creator God, we can best imagine him as an experimenter. His experiment with dinosaurs seemed to work for a few
million years, but proved non-viable in the long run. He is currently
experimenting with human beings. Among them are lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals
and lots of other variations. Experience, not abstract theory, will tell us
whether they work or not.
This kind of perception of God is in fact
reflected in parts of the Bible. Even in Genesis we are told that when God saw
the way human beings were behaving he regretted that he had created them and
decided to destroy them with a flood. Just one man seemed to be an exception to
the general sinfulness of humanity, so God arranged for him and his family to
survive. Then, after the flood was over, he regretted what he had done and
resolved never to destroy the world with a flood again. But the subsequent
story of Noah and his descendants shows that in any case sparing him and his
family wasn’t such a bright idea as it had seemed! The Bible itself seems to
suggest that there is no fixed “divine plan”: God keeps experimenting, and sometimes
gets it wrong.
God is also open to persuasion by human beings.
Abraham haggled with God over how many righteous people it would need to stop
him destroying Sodom. Soon after bringing the Israelites out of Egypt God found
them so ungrateful and rebellious that he wanted to destroy them, but Moses
persuaded him not to. God sent Jonah to the city of Nineveh to tell them that
it would be destroyed in forty days, but when the people repented and prayed he
changed his mind. We tend to dismiss stories like this as examples of a
primitive view of God, but perhaps they are telling us something very profound.
This is a dynamic, evolving, unpredictable, open-ended universe, and so is God’s relationship with
the human race.
If this is so, there is no divine blueprint, no
preordained order, and the moral decisions we make should not be decided by
eternal laws laid down by Scripture or by the “natural order”. Christian faith
at its best has always been oriented to the future. Modern science has
discovered things previously unknown and this has led to achievements once
thought impossible – like flying, or having conversations with people thousands
of miles away., or walking on the moon. In the same way a deepening understanding of human experience
and a more attentive listening to previously unheard voices has taught us to
welcome things once thought impermissible or “unnatural”. We have discovered
things about human life that were previously unknown, or known only to
minorities who were ignored or persecuted.
To base our morality on experience rather than
law or “revelation” does not mean throwing all morality to the winds. Nor does
it mean, as some people put it, turning our backs on God’s way and choosing our
own. The God presented in the Bible may be unpredictable at times and even
cruel, but through the many-sided conversation of the Bible another view
emerges and comes to its full-blown expression in Jesus:
a God who is pure, universal love. Guided by our faith in this kind of God we
try in all the dilemmas of life to find the most loving solution. We can never
be a hundred percent sure that we have found the right solution. In fact there
is no “right” solution, only the “best” solution as it appears at the time.
Science advances by experiment leading to theory and theory being tested by
further experiment, and if this reflects the way the universe is, then our
understanding of God and of morality have to proceed in the same way.
