An Account of the History and Theology of Sexuality
Patrick Yu
Patrick Yu puts the
question this way: “If, morally speaking, everything else is equal between two
sexual relationships, does gender matter?” The history of the discussion, up
till recently, has been, “yes, it matters very much.”
Gender is part of our
being, Yu argues. Individually we are either male or female, but as a species
we are male and female.
“When a man and a woman make love, they act out the universal need each and every
man has of woman, and woman man, in every sphere of life.” When society tries
to bypass this context, in the quest for androgyny, or individual autonomy, it
substitutes an artificial creation for God’s own.
Our society crossed a
watershed with the invention of birth control. Intimacy has become the
principle end for sex and procreation has become an optional add-on. That is an enormous shift, historically and
theologically.
The tying of sexuality
almost exclusively with intimacy has another consequence in our contemporary
culture. Yu laments the loss of the idea of friendship. With the sexual
revolution the boundary between friendship and sexual intimacy has been
blurred. Society seems to promote the idea that sexual intercourse is the
logical conclusion in a continuum of increasing intimacy.
SYNOPSIS
Address to the Members of
F. Dean Mercer
Dean Mercer suggests
that to construct a rite of blessing of a same-sex union is premature until the
church has faced plainly a new and novel understanding of sexual relations
assumed in such rites, their challenge to the church’s doctrine of marriage,
and the revision that would be required of the church’s doctrine and its
authorized liturgies.
Mercer suggests that
there are two principle arguments used by proponents to advance the acceptance
of the blessing of same-sex unions.
The first he calls “Pragmatic.” The pragmatic proposal is
offered as a local option, and claims not to bear significantly on the
doctrine, discipline and worship of the church. Mercer argues that the wider
implications of such an new rite are over-looked, ignored, or, by some,
obscured for the sake of expediency.
The second he calls “Substantial.” Such a proposal for a
rite of same-sex blessing is distinct in both name and substance from the rite
of marriage. Proponents see such rites bearing witness to a new and distinctive
understanding of sexual relations which the church must face and be reformed
by.
The fundamental question
Mercer would propose is this: Does this proposal accord with Scripture, with
church doctrine and discipline, with a clear discernment of the church’s mind,
what’s known as the ‘common faith’ of the communion? Mercer argues that such an
historical and theological shift from what has gone before has not been
convincingly made.