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CURRENTLY IN BOOKS
Homosexual couples and the church

Harold Jantz

Welcoming but not Affirming Stanley Grenz. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998. 210 pp.

Welcoming but not Affirming by Regent College/Carey College professor Stanley Grenz tackles the thorny issue for many churches whether they should accept and affirm same-sex persons committed to live within faithful homosexual relationships.

Grenz has read the arguments for such acceptance carefully and sympathetically, especially when the arguments are made by those who believe that to be gay is a condition in which people have no choice and when they are made by those who appear to take the teaching of the Bible seriously.

He concludes that while the church should welcome those who are struggling with their homosexuality, they should also call such persons “to live in true biblical chastity to the glory of God.” They should not affirm homosexual behaviour, however practised.

To come to an answer, Grenz asks his readers to engage in careful and “genuine reflection”. He argues that God’s primary concern with us, “how we live in the midst of the fallenness of this present age”, must be the church’s concern as well. The church cannot bless same-sex relationships because they are not marriages in the biblical sense – they do not bring two sexual “others” together to form “a new unity”. Nor is there a sense of moral failure when same-sex partners break up as with a heterosexual marriage. The ending of a same-sex relationship is the same as a close friendship breaking up. Moreover, a same-sex union cannot “be sealed with the sex act understood in its fullest sense”.

Behind his attempt to arrive at genuinely biblical ethical thinking is a body of knowledge coming out of the research by social scientists. In particular, he leans on the work of David Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Greenberg demonstrates against “static” theorists: “Sexual practices and the conceptual categories through which people understand them – including same-sex practices – vary greatly from society to society.”

Thus, it simply isn’t true that homosexuality is found to the same extent in all societies. The implication of this is that learning and personal choice are far greater factors in the movement into or out of homosexuality than most would generally acknowledge.

Greenberg says: “Where social definitions of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour are clear and consistent, with positive sanctions for conformity and negative ones for nonconformity, virtually everyone will conform irrespective of genetic inheritance and, to a considerable extent, irrespective of personal psychodynamics.”

That is why some cultures have more people than others who declare themselves to be gay or lesbian.

Grenz does not shortchange any of the issues facing churches around the issues of same-sex relationships. He is familiar with the arguments for the acceptance of homosexual couples. He understands contemporary culture and pays close attention to the church’s history and to recent biblical scholarship on this issue. He has listened carefully to the exegetical debate. In the end, he provides us with an answer that Christians at any time in the church’s 2000-year history would have understood: “The standard of sexual morality for all Christians is chastity, that is, sexual abstinence in singleness and fidelity in marriage.”

What I like about Grenz’s book is not only that he makes this argument so well, but that he does it while arguing that we love gay and lesbian persons and welcome them into the church. When we do, we will discover many who “long for release from behaviour patterns and relationships which they sense have entrapped them” and strugglers will encounter a “God who walks with us on the journey to wholeness.”

That’s what the church is all about.

Harold Jantz is former editor of MB Herald and founding editor of ChristianWeek. He is a member of River East MB Church, Winnipeg.

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Last modified March 20, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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