Here’s what Lisa Miller wrote about the Bible and marriage:
While the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman.
And here’s a response from Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and board member of Focus on the Family, adapted from his Dec. 8 online article on Newsweek’s cover feature:
Miller’s claim is just patently untrue. Consider Genesis 2:24-25 — Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall become one flesh. This verse certainly reveals marriage to be, by the Creator’s intention, a union of one man and one woman.
To offer just one example from the teaching of Jesus, read Matthew 19:1-8: Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. This passage makes absolutely no sense unless marriage “between one man and one woman” is understood as normative.
The real issue is not marriage, Miller suggests, but opposition to homosexuality. Surprisingly, Miller argues that this prejudice against same-sex relations is really about opposition to sex between men. She cites the Anchor Bible Dictionary as stating that “nowhere in the Bible do its authors refer to sex between women.” She would have done better to look to the Bible itself, where in Romans 1:26-27 Paul writes: For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. This passage makes absolutely no sense unless it refers very straightforwardly to same-sex relations among both men and women — with the women mentioned first.
Miller concedes that Paul “was tough on homosexuality” but she takes encouragement from the fact that “progressive scholars” have found a way to re-interpret the Pauline passages to refer only to homosexual violence and promiscuity. As always, the bottom line is biblical authority. Lisa Miller does not mince words. “A mature view of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move beyond literalism,” Miller writes. “The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, it’s impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours.”
All this comes together when Miller writes, “We cannot look to the Bible as a marriage manual, but we can read it for universal truths as we struggle toward a more just future.” At this point the authority of the Bible is reduced to whatever “universal truths” we can distill from its (supposed) horrifyingly backward and oppressive texts.
Even as she attempts to make her “religious case” for gay marriage, Miller has to acknowledge that “very few Jewish or Christian denominations do officially endorse gay marriage, even in the states where it is legal.” Her argument now grinds to a conclusion with her hope that this will change. But — and this is a crucial point — if her argument had adequate traction, she wouldn’t have to make it. It is not a thin extreme of fundamentalist Christians who stand opposed to same-sex marriage; it is the vast majority of Christian churches and denominations worldwide.
Disappointingly, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham offers an editorial note that broadens Newsweek's responsibility for this atrocity of an article: “No matter what one thinks about gay rights — for, against or somewhere in between — this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism,” Meacham writes. “To argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt — it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Newsweek could have offered its readers a more careful and balanced review of the crucial issues related to same-sex “marriage.” It chose another path, and published this cover story. The magazine's readers and this controversial issue deserved better.
