Now, the word \u201cmarriage,\u201d\u009d for thousands of years and cross-culturally has meant man and woman. Sometimes it\u2019s been one man and more than one woman. Occasionally it\u2019s been one woman and more than one man. There is polyandry as well as polygamy in some societies in some parts of history, but it\u2019s always been male plus female. Simply to say that you can have a woman-plus-woman marriage or a man-plus-man marriage is radically to change that because of the givenness of maleness and femaleness. I would say that without any particular Christian presuppositions at all, just cross-culturally, that\u2019s so.<\/p>\n
With Christian or Jewish presuppositions, or indeed Muslim, then if you believe in what it says in Genesis 1 about God making heaven and earth\u201d\u201dand the binaries in Genesis are so important\u201d\u201dthat heaven and earth, and sea and dry land, and so on and so on, and you end up with male and female. It\u2019s all about God making complementary pairs which are meant to work together. The last scene in the Bible is the new heaven and the new earth, and the symbol for that is the marriage of Christ and his church. It\u2019s not just one or two verses here and there which say this or that. It\u2019s an entire narrative which works with this complementarity so that a male-plus-female marriage is a signpost or a signal about the goodness of the original creation and God\u2019s intention for the eventual new heavens and new earth.<\/p>\n
If you say that marriage now means something which would allow other such configurations, what you\u2019re saying is actually that when we marry a man and a woman we\u2019re not actually doing any of that stuff. This is just a convenient social arrangement and sexual arrangement and there it is . . . get on with it. It isn\u2019t that that is the downgrading of marriage, it\u2019s something that clearly has gone on for some time which is now poking it\u2019s head above the parapet. If that\u2019s what you thought marriage meant, then clearly we haven\u2019t done a very good job in society as a whole and in the church in particular in teaching about just what a wonderful mystery marriage is supposed to be. Simply at that level, I think it\u2019s a nonsense. It\u2019s like a government voting that black should be white. Sorry, you can vote that if you like, you can pass it by a total majority, but it isn\u2019t actually going to change the reality.<\/p>\n