So first off, when I say that God is neither male nor female
I should clarify that He is not less than male and female but more. As humans are divided into both male and
female sexes and are made in the image of God we must assume that God contains within
Himself both male and female genders.
(If I remember right, St. Thomas believed there were seven genders, but
only two for physical beings. God
embodies all but only expressed two of them in His physical creation.)
So souls, made in the image of God, are either male or
female. Building off of Aristotle I
believe that the body gives expression to the form found within the soul (that
is, as there is purpose in creation I believe the bodily sex given to us by God
reflects the gendered soul He has placed within us). Given this, sex is not just a bodily act, but
a connection of some sort between souls.
So we cannot look to physical matters alone (i.e. the fact that God does
not have a body) to determine the morality of a sexual act, we need to look
beyond it.
So what does sex signify?
It is the union not just of two bodies, but of two souls and out of this
union (this love of souls) comes life.
Obviously not every act of sex produces life, but life is produced by
sex. What is more, in the act of sex we
in some way imitate our relationship to and connection with God. This is why so many Pagans personified and worshiped
sex (e.g. Venus, Asherah, etc.). It is
also why God has revealed Himself to us as Father and Husband (as opposed to
Mother and Wife) even though He transcends our binary gender divisions. Like a husband, God comes to us from the
outside, He is the Ultimate Other. It is
He that from beyond space and time unites Himself to us, becomes one with us,
and implants His life within us.
How does this apply to sexual morals? Bodily homosexuals cannot produce life, but
that isn’t my main concern (though many fixate on this even though many
straight couples are infertile). My concern
is that homosexuality, metaphysically, cannot imitate the Good that God intended
it to imitate.
Likewise sex, in imitation of God’s love for us, is supposed
to be lasting. Fornicators do not intend
their commitment to last (at the very least they do not take the idea of
commitment seriously enough to make a public declaration of it). What is more, as sex produces children and
children require a family for their own good (and society requires families—they
are the building blocks of stability), sex outside of marriage is an inherently
selfish act. You are putting your good above
that of your children and fellow citizens.
God instituted sex not just for pleasure or to connect us to
others (which is what homosexuals are limited to), and not just to produce life
(which fornicators can do). He also
created sex in such a way as to imitate a metaphysical truth. Sex is the bodily form or imitation, the
reenactment on a lower level, of a spiritual truth. When we engage in sex apart from this, we
violate the rules of Reality.
Another, though I think weaker way of looking at it goes
something like this. When man fell, we
lost not only our ability to do good, but to know the good. Therefore ethics, though they can be
partially understood via reason, cannot be perfectly known via reason (Luther:
Reason is the devil’s whore). Because of
our weakness we require revelation (I’ve been reading a lot of Barth lately…). This revelation is most clearly found in the Bible, but all cultures share it to
some degree (e.g. see Lewis’s argument in The
Abolition of Man). Morality is not a
conclusion, it is a premise that we can accept or reject (see Alasdair
MacIntyre on this). Few, like Nietzsche,
reject all of it, most want to accept part, but not all (or they want to accept
all of it, but limit it to their family, like the mafia, their race, like the
Nazis, their class, their nation, etc.).
But if part is bad, and our reason fallen, how do we determine what part
is valid and what is invalid? We cannot
and in picking and choosing we undermine the whole system. As human nature does not evolve or progress
(we are still violent, envious, greedy, lustful, etc. all that has changed is the
object of our sins or our sophistication of doing them or we have progressed in
one area while declining in another—e.g. we are less cruel but more cowardly) there
can be no such thing as moral progress in the sense of a new or innovative
morality. We have but one moral system
and we must accept wholesale or reject it all.
In accepting all we accept the fact that marriage is limited to one man
and one woman for life in marriage (as that is the teaching made clear in the
Bible).
So I think we can tie Christian sexual ethics into a notion
of Natural Law.
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