Creation
Lawson Smith | Friday, July 15, 2011 The third piece in our series on homosexuality is contributed by Lawson Smith. Rather than speaking out against homosexuality directly, Lawson focuses on the creation story and what it means to be created in the image of God, male and female. He draws passages together that suggest that the highest use we can perform in this world would be to raise children who can come to know the Lord and serve Him. -Editor.
Coleman did a very good job introducing this difficult subject. He referred us to a site where we can find several studies from doctrine on it. Dylan brought in a key teaching from the New Testament on love toward the neighbor. Perhaps it would be useful to look through some passages in bite-sized pieces, rather than in the form of an extended dissertation. Here are some reflections on one passage, the creation story.
When we open the Word, the first story is creation. That in itself tells us a lot about who the Lord God is.
On the sixth day, when God created mankind, it says, “And God created man in His [own] image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply…” (Gen. 1:27-28)
From these verses, we can infer a couple of things. One is that the image of God consists in male and female together. “Man,” meaning mankind or the human race, is incomplete without both male and female. The Heavenly Doctrine says that married love makes both a husband and a wife become more and more truly “man,” that is, human: “In a marriage that is of love truly conjugial each becomes a more and more interior man (homo)1; for that love opens the interiors of their minds, and as these are opened man becomes more and more a man (homo), and to become more a man on the part of the wife is to become the more a wife, and on the part of the husband it is to become the more a husband” (Conjugial Love 200).
Another thing we can see is that God blessed us by making us male and female, and thus providing for marriage between husband and wife. Over and over the Doctrine teaches that the happiness of heaven springs from married love as its fountain (see Conjugial Love 316:3 for example). Sometimes the differences between masculine and feminine approaches to life can be perplexing, but the distinct and complementary natures are what allow men and women to bring unique gifts to each other. “Form makes one more perfectly in proportion as those things which enter into it are distinct from one another and yet are united” (Divine Providence 4).
A third point we can see is that one of the main points of marriage is to be fruitful and multiply. Clearly these words have a spiritual meaning, which is the soul and life of what the Lord is saying to us here. Fruitfulness consists in receiving new states of love to the Lord and toward the neighbor, and multiplication refers to the multiplication of truths and insights that form a good and wise life.
But the literal sense is also very important. The Lord’s purpose in creating the universe and mankind in it is that there may be a heaven from the human race, where angels who have been people on earth love Him and are eager to be with Him, and so are willing to receive the blessings He longs to give. To achieve this purpose, human beings need to be born in the natural world, where we have the opportunity to learn about God and choose whether or not to believe in Him and follow Him. This is “job number one” in creation: that human beings may be born and equipped to make a free, rational choice for heaven and the Lord, if they are willing.
The Doctrine says that the reason that all joys and all delights from first to last are gathered into married love is that marriage has the highest use, namely, to participate in the creation of human beings along with the Lord (Conjugial Love 68). Happiness, peace and satisfaction come with the performance of useful services. There is no higher service than “to let the little children come to Me” (Mark 10:14), by having children and raising them for a useful life both in this world and forever. All other uses, from government to business, professions and trades, all the formal and informal ways in which we help each other, essentially are in support of this greatest use, that children may be born and grow up into a useful life with the Lord. The Lord blesses us by sharing His uses with us.
A husband and wife become fruitful and multiply spiritually and grow closer to one another in the work of raising children more than in any other way (see Conjugial Love 174175176).
These are some points that stand out to me in this first story of the Word. What do you see? Maybe you would like to bring in some other passages.
Foot Note
1In the Latin original, homo is a word that means a human being, while vir means a male. Unfortunately English does not have words to distinguish these meanings very well.
Lawson Smith
Lawson is the husband of Shanon Jungé, father of eight, and pastor of the Kempton New Church.Wondering about the inspiration for this article? Look up the New Church, which is based on the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Reader Comments (55)
Great article, Lawson. You write:
"From these verses, we can infer a couple of things. One is that the image of God consists in male and female together."
I agree fully, but I have a few questions on this that I have not been able resolve by reading and by talking to people.
While I can think of an incorporeal, ineffable Jehovah as having, metaphorically, masculine and feminine elements, the Incarnation seems to have fixed the Lord's gender as male. The ancient Israelites worshiped Asherah as a consort of Jehovah, a practice with the prophets rightly denounced. In later Judaism, the female attributes of God were figuratively labeled the "Shekinah" without degenerating into the idolatries of pre-exilic Israel.
But what about Jesus? Jesus is male, and there is no ambiguity about it. There is nothing in the three-fold word or in Christian tradition to indicate an androgynous identity for Jesus. And there is no female incarnation of Jehovah. God has a "soul" and a "body" and His body is unambiguously male.
The only way I can find around it is that the post-Ascension, spiritual body if Jesus is different for the gendered, spiritual bodies of angels, In other words, Jesus is ineffable in his Human and his Divine, and the attribute of gender does not apply to Him.
Any answers? The male-female nature of Jehovah which you referred to in this verse from Genesis seems to have been transformed into an all-male nature in Jesus.
Roger
I don't mean to distract from Roger's question, but my comment is related.
The teachings Lawson looks at from Genesis, and the related ones in CL 33 and CL 39 make it very clear that people were created to be distinctly male or distinctly female... and that this distinction is retained after death to eternity. (I love the explanation of why this is valuable in DP 4 which Lawson cited).
Thus, unlike the puzzle that Roger raises about the Divine gender, it seems that created humans are designed to start and remain distinctly of one gender.
And then we find anomalies where gender is either chromosomally or physically ambiguous. And perhaps in a related way, but with much greater prevalence, we find people attracted to the same sex rather than the opposite. To my mind, these anomalies diverge from the plan of creation outlined in the sacred scripture and heavenly doctrine. I am content (if unhappy) with that divergence because there is so very much in this natural world that diverges from the plan of creation. Like so many other things that are confusing on the natural plane, I expect gender to be clarified at the spiritual realm.
Passages which speak to this design/purpose or order of creation lead me to consider homosexuality and transgenderism as maladies, diverging from creation rather than as varieties, beautifying creation (like the distinctions mentioned in DP 4)
But I don't have much of any enlightenment on how to deal with these maladies while living in the world. At birth, doctors tend to resolve physical ambiguities but my impression is that they don't have any brilliant method for the choice they make. But for adults with chromosomal ambiguity, I really don't think that the person or the bystanders can know (with any confidence) whether the person is spiritually male or female. It remains a challenging issue to me, albeit, a rare one.
What I take from the doctrines is that distinctions are important, and thus that making and sticking to a choice seems superior to remaining hermaphroditic. And also that same-sex attraction should not be "resolved" through same sex, sexualized relationships.
Regarding same-sex attraction, I would be inclined to consider whether monogamous, homosexual relationships are a valid and useful adaption for people who, diverging from the plan of creation, find themselves with strong, same-sex attraction. In this respect, they are attempting to work around the malady, like a person born blind tries to adapt in order to live as full a life as possible despite the malady which was not the design of creation.
However, this possible approach to dealing with the malady, seems clearly decried in Leviticus, Romans and CL, AC, AE.
(I will take another opportunity to respond to the suggestion by Dylan, Edmund and others that Leviticus etc are non binding)
Brian
Thank you. I really appreciated the chance to remember to look at the positives in an issue. With something like homosexuality, which is such a contentious and often angry debate, I often get lost in the battle of trying to act and think with compassion, and by what I believe. So looking at it from the perspective of; I believe marriage between a man and woman is beautiful and precious, especially because it leads to the creation of children, and it's sad to me that you are missing out on one of the greatest gifts the Lord ever gave us, rather than; you're wrong, my church says so! is a very powerful idea. It is one I would like to try live by a bit more myself.
I'm really interested in gender, generally, and what it ultimately "means." I find myself resonating with Brian's comment - "I expect gender to be clarified at the spiritual realm," but probably not in the way he intended. I fully buy into the marriage of good and truth, love and wisdom, feminine and masculine, heat and light, will and understanding, etc - as the engine that runs the universe. The conjunction of these qualities, forming a whole from two distinct but complementary parts, and producing something new and useful as a result - this does seem to me to be one of those truths where once you let it sink in, you see it playing out all around you.
But, like all spiritual realities, the direct correlation in the natural world feels more slippery. For example, Roger's point is a very valid concern - I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that culturally, we've taken a "Him" dominated view of the Lord's human to elevate men artificially in our society. The Lord doesn't mean that God is masculine, obviously, but the gender is used mostly consistently regardless. Many languages have assigned gender to words, and we very often imbue inanimate objects with it as well. I would say that we humans have an interesting and deeply entrenched relationship with the notion of gender, in that we have a strong desire to categorize the world along gender lines, even when arbitrary (like in the case of language).
Likewise, the passage Lawson brings up, "And God created man in His [own] image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." Later on it's revealed that the man was created first, and the woman created from his rib, in a sort of concession to Adam's loneliness. We wouldn't take this latter Genesis passage literally, and I don't necessarily think this first passage is referring explicitly created men and women either. Swedenborg's discussion of the internal sense of this concludes that "the understanding in the spiritual man they therefore called male, and the will female, and when those acted as one they called it a marriage." (AC 54). The "they" here are the Most Ancient Church, who Swedenborg tiptoes around somewhat, but who he characterizes chiefly like this: "Being also internal men, they were delighted only with internal things. External things they merely saw with the eyes, but they thought of what was represented."
So, again, I'm drawn back to the internal nature of gender. Gender as a representation of spiritual conjunction comes first, and everything else, it would seem, is a manifestation of that. I would say that created men and women *are* great, very neat and obvious manifestations of that conjunction, but just flipping through the writings suggests that spiritual truths don't limit themselves to specific manifestations.
Lawson,
Thank you for an excellent article that points to God's Divine design. I attemped in my recent comments to focus our attention on this 'design'- of which God bestows on us the greatest gift possible- conjugial love, with joys and blessednesses that grow eternally. But with this 'design', or God's order, we also have the free will to turn away, pervert, and cultivate disorder.
The angels rejoiced after Swedenborg published his book "Conjugial Love". The standard, or ideal- is the marriage of a man and a woman who serve an exalted use. This arrangement -and no other- is the containent of all the joys and blessings the Lord can confer on mankind.
Swedenborg then details the opposites of true love, in greater and lesser degrees. All of these degrees of disorder are spiritually harmful according to these degrees. Unless honest repentence and reformation takes place, the soul of the violater is rendered incapable of receiving the atmosphere of heaven. The violater is tortured to such an extent that he rushes headlong down to hell where a more 'viable lifestyle' revives him.
There are typos in my previous post.
This is how one of the sentences should have read:
"The only way I can find around it is that the post-Ascension, spiritual body OF Jesus is different FROM the gendered, spiritual bodies of angels. In other words, Jesus is ineffable in his Human and his Divine, and the attribute of gender does not apply to Him."
I hope I did not distort my meaning because of the typos.
Roger
Hi Lawson, Coleman and Dylan
I have really enjoyed reading these thoughtfully articulated and thought-provoking articiles on the subject of homosexuality. I especially want to commend you three and the other correspondents/respondents for the largely sensitive, non-confrontational and mature tone of discussion - a welcome departure from the usually crude and/or cruel, sometimes dogmatic and often ill-considered views expressed on the subject, both within and outside of the Church.
So as a citizen of one of the world's newest democracies, governed by an arguably "radical" constitution which enshrines the rights of all citizens including (by specific mention) gays and lesbians, I often feel conflicted by the Church's traditionally antagonistic position on homosexuality.
Lawson's selection of passages on marriage and children and the idea of heaven as humankind's 'raison detre,' strike a real chord with me as a husband, father and Church member. In particular, the notion that God is both good and truth whose fruit is an everlasting life in heaven is fundamental to my faith; along with the belief that marriage between a man and a woman and the children they produce is the closest possible earthly representation of His essence and purpose for us.
But where I diverge perhaps, is in the notion that this representation (of the marriage of good and truth by earthly marriage) necessarily relegates homosexuality - its orientation and/or commission - to a perversion, evil or disorder. If this were so, then childless couples, whether as a result of choice or for physical reasons such as infertility, should attract equal condemnation for their failure to imitate God's essence and purpose. While we may feel sympathy for such people for their unfulfilled dreams, we give them latitude to represent or fulfill the Lord's purpose for us in other ways, and would consider it ludicrous to alienate them in the same way as the Church does (practicing) Gays. And what of single (unmarried) people? We embrace them and celebrate their many attributes and contributions to society, their community and of course the Church, without condeming their lifestyle.
Coleman's "parallel" between homosexuality and paedophilia is with respect, at odds with his generally loving and inclusive approach and is also in my opinion an emotionally loaded and unfortunate comparison in the light of attempts by some anti-gay groups to draw unwarranted links between the two practices. Not only are these two tendencies distinguished by the issue of valid consent as pointed out by Edmund and Karl, but the innocence of a child represents our highest potential "state of being" in our quest to regenerate and shed our worldly baggage, and any threat to or actual destruction of that state rightfully invokes our revulsion and horror on a level beyond what could surely ever be justified as a reaction to homosexuality.
I thought Brian's contributions were particularly well-considered and sensitive, and his point that we should be looking for the Lord and not ourselves when we read the doctrines is one which I personally struggle with often. Particularly since my original attraction to the Church and it's doctrines as a young man nearly 30 years ago, was the resonance I experienced with my already partly formulated understanding of God as a loving Creator who would not turn away any of us from his kingdom on the basis of the religion, circumstances or influences into which we are born or subjected to on Earth. I believed then as I do now that He understands how our ability to choose has been constrained, and will look kindly on the choices we make WITHIN those constraints in deciding whether we have honoured or abandonded Him.
Haydn Osborn
Westville, South Africa
Haydn,
It doesn't surprise that people bring a lot of emotion to this subject. One person may be actively practicing homosexuality and feels inappropriately attacked while another is trying to be committed to religious principle and feels that the practice of homosexuality is clearly condemned as terribly harmful to the individual and society. And most people fall somewhere in between. But in each case, high emotion is understood, and like you, I very much appreciate the efforts people make to remain civil and respectful.
Aside from tone, I thought you articulated two ideas very well which I'd like to respond to.
You point out that the New Church (and Christianity more broadly) accepts single people and hetero sexual couples unable to have children. I'm sure both of these groups feel some stigma in a society that extols marriage and childrearing, but clearly not the level that practicing homosexuals feel. For me this point illustrates what parts of Lawson's argument do and do not achieve. I read Lawson's arguement as laying out the ideal in such a way as to explain WHY homosexuality might be prohibited by God, but not THAT it is prohibitied. Both the WHY and the THAT are needed to make a strong enough case against a practice that is increasing accepted in western culture. Leviticus gives us a direct prohibition but does not explain why. Without the WHY, we may wonder if Moses simply gave us these laws "because of the hardness of our hearts" (Matt. 19.8) Or we might question if such a law was hateful, or against order - in which case we would be justified in doubting our interpretation of an otherwise plain law because it seemed to contradict the supreme law of love the neighbor and to the Lord.
I am not claiming that I have just sufficiently defended the prohibition side of the argument, but my point is that, as you say, Lawson's article is insufficient by itself to make a strong case against the practice of homosexuality. Both prohibition and a rational explanation tend to be required.
Your last paragraph really got me thinking, and this is how I see it: what you described of God's acceptance, mercy and understanding of our limitations is beautiful and might be summed up by the word "compassion." This type of compassion is something we would like to emulate in our Creator. And the question of how to bring compassion to this issue (and each and every issue) is an important enough topic that it should be focussed on all by itself. However, in order to best exercise compassion, we have to have an understanding of the issue involved. If one woman is an excellent writer and another an excellent mathamatician, we might appreciate both their minds. Perhaps we would feel a greater affinity for one or the other. If someone from birth has a severely retarded brain, we would respect the person, have compassion for their challenges, and even appreciate the strengths and successes the person has in using a severely faulty mind. But we wouldn't have "retarded brain pride parades." We might have a "special needs pride parade" to celebrate the people who deal with these challenges, but we are not unclear about whether we consider the retardation of the brain itself to be a blessing or a corruption of God's creation.
I think it is very true that people (myself certainly included) are very poor at distinguishing the stuff around a person from the person herself. When we are trying to figure this world out, and decide what we think of various issues we often act with fear and anger when compassion is required. I'd wager that this is easily as serious a problem a the practice of homosexuality. But, the fact that we screw up in this area, does not mean that we should fail to make distinctions. If variety in race or ethnicity is a positive, orderly variety, then there is no reason to feel special compassion toward a caucasion or a mongol for his race. If homosexuality happens to be a divergence from creation, and a disorder, then compassion is required, and allowances and understanding, but not parades to celebrate the disorder or state documents to equate the disorder with the ideal. Again, this isn't an argument which demonstrates that homosexuality is prohibited. But rather, it is an appeal to say that we have two tasks: 1) to know whether homosexuality is prohibited, lesser than heterosexual marriage or equal to heterosexual marriage and 2) to focus on, study and committ ourselves to appropriate compassionate responses to those individuals who deal with the issue.
With love and respect (to all the people reading)
Brian
Various contributors to this thread have started to identify various questions. Having some questions outlined might be helpful as we look through the passages from the Word. Here are five that occurred to me. Maybe you can suggest others, or rephrase some of them.
1) How should we treat people who are gay? This is an especially important question for those who are not sure how to think of this lifestyle or who think the practice of it is harmful. How can we wisely and usefully express love toward a gay person even though/if we believe his current practices are harmful?
2) Is it correct to call a homosexual relationship a “marriage”? If we accept that marriage is God’s institution and idea, how does He define it?
3) Supposing that one concludes that it is not correct to refer to a homosexual relationship as a marriage, nevertheless, is there any reason to give marriages special treatment in the law more than other close relationships, such as between brothers or sisters, or adult parents and children, or between people who are best friends?
4) How do we balance religious freedom with the civil rights of gay people? For example, suppose some parents hold it as a point of conscience that the practice of homosexuality is not healthy. Should those parents be allowed to withdraw their children from a public school when classes promoting homosexual relationships as normal and equivalent to marriages are being taught, or not? Should a religious charity holding similar principles be compelled to arrange adoptions for gay people as it does for married couples? Should pastors be allowed to teach their congregations what Scripture teaches on this subject as they understand it, even if it is not favorable to a homosexual way of life?
5) In general, can we tell from the Word how the Lord regards homosexual practices and relationships, and thus how we should regard them? For example, we might find that they are of equal potential as marriages. Or we might find them to be of lesser value than marriages, but still at least as useful as remaining single, if one cannot enter into a marriage in this life, for whatever reasons. Or we might find that they are harmful; or some other possibility.
What questions do you have, or how might you restate some of these questions?
Roger, I have not yet found a clear answer in Scripture and Doctrine to your question about gender in relation to God. As you say, God clearly presents Himself as male in the Scriptures with very few exceptions. A theory about why this might be has both love and wisdom aspects to it.
First, God is our Father. "Father" in the Word signifies love. Love is the origin of everything we do, thus the father, the starting-point of all things. God creates us out of His love for us, and He is the only source of true love in the universe.
Further, the Lord came into the world to renew His relationship/conjunction with us and we with Him. Thus He comes as the Bridegroom who, out of love, asks the Bride for her free consent to conjunction with Him. In a wedding in heaven, the bridegroom offered his right hand to the bride, signifying the Lord's love toward us, and she gave him her left hand, signifying how we receive the Lord. (See CL 20 and 21.)
Second, the way we consciously, freely and rationally receive the Lord, as of ourselves, is through our understanding. We learn truths from His Word, reflect on how they apply to life and relate to our other knowledge and experiences, and we do what the Lord says, sometimes by self-compulsion. This is how we offer our left hand to the Lord. Meanwhile the Lord quietly, secretly comes to us by the remains of innocence, peace, love, and charity that He implants in us as children, and that He inspires into us as we freely approach Him. Eventually, our as-from-self life according to truths is infilled with His love. The childhood remnants become freely chosen, adult states.
There are two stages in our preparation for heaven, called reformation and regeneration, an ascending series and then a descending series. The ascending series is when we start by learning truths through sensual experience, and the Lord gradually raises up our thinking higher and higher, provided we are willing to practice real repentance and live by the truths we are learning. This is reformation. It is like the masculine side. But then there is a descent, as from a new will and love, we have whole new insights into how to live wisely. Bringing this new love down into life is regeneration. It is like the feminine side.
So since the way that we FIRST receive the Lord has to do with truths being applied to life, the Lord came into the world to restore truths to us when we had lost them. He came to reopen the Word, sealed with seven seals or made of no effect by our traditions. Thus He came as the Son of man(kind), because a son, a male, represents truth. The purpose of truth is to lead us to LOVE the Lord above all things and our neighbor as ourselves. But the starting-point, from the point of view of our free choice, is the truth.
One more point that seems important is that we need to be able to picture the Lord as Human -- not merely human, but nevertheless Human -- so that we may worship a visible God. I think -- emphasizing that this is now a theory -- that we need the image of a male as a background for our picture of the Lord, because something of two genders would not be human.
But on the other hand, besides "the Lord," and also "God," the phrases most commonly used for the Lord in the Heavenly Doctrine are "Divine Human" and "God-Man" ("Man" here being "Homo" in Latin, that is, the Human Being). These phrases do not have a specific gender. So in this way, perhaps the Lord is leading us to let the starting-point of our thinking, which was male, fade into the background, and He leads us to focus on the essential qualities that make Him (and so us) Human, namely, His love and wisdom.
Sorry this is so long. It is a difficult topic to capture briefly.
Lawson,
Thanks for your response. You said it is important to picture the Lord as a male human (Jesus). I agree, this is needed to enhance our love and devotion. It is hard (but not impossible) to love and pray to a completely transcendent Deity, as do the Jews and Muslims.
But the gist of my question is: Is this just a construct for visualization and meditation and prayer, or does the Lord ACTUALLY retain a gendered, male body as He did when He was incarnate on this planet? Angels have gendered, spiritual bodies that are substantial but not physical. Is that also true for the Lord?
Roger
Roger,
I have a couple (inconclusive) thoughts about the spiritual, substancial bodies of angels and the Lord.
In general, the Lord is said to appear to the angels in the sun of heaven (HH 123). But He is also said to take on an angelic form, at times, to be with the angels in person (HH 121). In these cases, His divintiy shines out of the angelic form and fills it, but this form is not His essence as fully as is seen in the sun of heaven. So, you could say that this is merely an appearance, but it sounds like there is no mistaking His Divine presence when He shows Himself in an angelic form.
AE 401 references His appearance to John on the isle of Patmos as an example of this process of appearing in human form. The description of the Lord here does not sound like the body that Jesus used, because we wouldn't expect the 33 year old Jesus to have white hair as John described.
In talking about how the Lord appears in the sun, AR 53 references Jesus transfigured and shining like the sun as an example. It also references the woman clothed with the sun in the book of Revelation. Granted, it explains that the woman signifies the church, but the sun shining from her means the Lord's presence and love, thus a kind of example of the Lord appearing in an angelic female form.
I suspect that angels consistently see the in the Lord in the sun of heaven and then at times amongst themselves in a wide variety of human forms, male and female, black, white, Asian, Martian -- but always with His unmistakable divinity shining through. (and because no two angels are exactly alike, He has zillions of choices of forms which He can use for this purpose (HH 20).
Angel partners, despite each having distinct gender to their spiritual bodies, appear at times as one and are called one. (CL 42, 50). The story in CL 42 describes the angels first appearing as one from a distance and then as two once they come closer. I imagine that these angel couples would either appear as female or male from a distance depending on their state.
So, all this may simply miss your question about whether the Lord retains a gendered, spiritual body. But for me at least, these forms the Lord uses are more than merely a mental construct for sake of prayer, but process for presenting Himself in substancial, human form before the angels (and occassionally before prophets who are still on earth).
Personally, I worship the Man, Jesus Christ, because His story is told in the gospels, but in heaven,I expect to worship the Divine Lord in the sun and get to meet (him) shining forth from both female and male forms.
Brian
After reading all these deep and complex comments, my comment may seem very simplistic, but what struck me as important in Lawson's article was the point that not only are there statements in the Word about creating us male and female and commanding us to be fruitful and multiply, but that these are at the BEGINNING of the Word. The Lord didn't bury them in a bunch of laws in Leviticus, or in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount.
That which is at the beginning shapes, defines, sets the course for everything that follows, so to me this means that the Lord thought these points about gender and reproduction are pretty key to His whole Divine plan. So whatever we think about the issue, it seems to me that we're making decisions about one of the most basic or important issues in God's creation.
I think my previous comment must have been too wordy. I was trying to draw attention to a certain bias we take in reading the bible, where we categorize things that don't make sense to us as symbolic or correspondential, and take on the things we like as literal, plain truths. I think we should strive to be as consistent as we can, though obviously our affections will always inform our understanding.
The New Church doesn't take Genesis to be a literal work. The first several sections are from the ancient Word, and are considered to be among the most deeply correspondential passages in the entire bible. We don't take the creation story at face value, and likewise, the creation of male and female, being so front and center as it is, corresponds directly and explicitly to the will and the understanding, and marriage to the conjunction of these two qualities. This is what the Writings actually say, when discussing the internal meaning of these passages. When we put the weight of the interpretation on the external representation rather than the internal meaning, I think we are inverting the truth, to some degree. It would be like considering the use of toilets to be an abomination, because water very clearly corresponds to truth, and we're defiling it in the process of going to the bathroom.
Hi, Dylan.
I agree with your point in general, that we must be careful how we go back and forth between the spiritual and the literal, and that the spirit is the life of the Word. These are good points. Jesus said, "It is the spirit that makes alive; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and are life." (John 6:63)
On the other hand, if the point under discussion is the distinctness and complementarity of the masculine and feminine, or the great importance of procreation, we know from the Heavenly Doctrine that these are key points in the spirit of the Word, or we could say, in the Lord's holy spirit.
We are also taught that doctrine must be drawn from the sense of the letter and be confirmed by it, lest it appear to be merely human intelligence (SS 53-54). Otherwise it would be like a house without a foundation or a castle in the air. (SS 54) The Lord is in the spiritual sense with His Divine and in the natural sense with His Human (Invitation to the New Church 44). We need both.
Speaking for myself Dylan, I didn't misunderstand you, I just chose to ignore you. :)
Actually, to the contrary, I find the type of argument you express to be the second most compelling argument for a New Church acceptance of homosexuality, and by far the most interesting. And so, I look forward to the chance to address it at some other point.
But unlike Lawson, I will struggle to offer a two paragraph response and instead am fighting off a book's worth of swirling ideas.
Brian
Thanks Lawson and Brian. Thoughtful responses as always. Brian, I think you more than anybody make me feel optimistic about debating hot button issues with people I may disagree with on fundamental levels, because you're always open to a strong argument, even when it obviously pains you to admit its strengths. I live for those half-concessions, because it makes me feel that bridges are indeed possible. It also makes me strive to be likewise magnanimous in my debating, and to always try harder than I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. If you feel like it (and maybe you don't, because you have actually important things to do with your time), I'll happily read and critique that swirling book.
In fact, I feel at some point that we should have a debate-y podcast together. That could be fun in the masochist ways that we both seem to seek out fun. We could cover issues like this one, and principle vs pragmatic governing.
Thanks you all for the courtesy of the conversation and particularly the articles.
There is not way to convince another to believe other than the way they are inclined to do, and yet this conversation has so much in helping us to get a rounder view. All of it has been useful to me.
After reading what Lawson posted from the book of Genesis I felt a kind of peace come over me --
The burden of homosexual feelings is a hard burden to carry - I would imagine this is true almost no matter how you were to view your own emotions, if you had homosexual longings or desires. And how painful for those on the sidelines not to be allowed, not to be permitted, even to say that we feel sad, because even this is considered offensive to those who don't see the issue that way.
For myself, I trust that the Lord means what he says in Genesis and in the book Marriage Love. For me they are true, so beautiful. ( I don't see the procreation thing quite as Lawson does perhaps - raising children isn't something I want to keep on doing forever!), I trust that the Lord knows what he is doing, and that he will lead the world to a better place.
With love.
I wanted to speak to an idea that was introduced several comments back, about people who fall outside the ideal of a nuclear family. As a woman, I know that I have love and wisdom inside me. As an unmarried person, I know that I am able to bring them together and put them to use. Everyone does the best they can with the cards they are dealt; I don't believe that the Lord deals anyone a hand with which they have no chance at fully living up to their spiritual potential. Regeneration, love and intimacy, usefulness, service -- these are the important things, not necessarily the way we get there.
Would anyone claim that a 95 year old never-married woman just never had her shot at doing it "right"?
I appreciate this conversation. I think that ongoing respect for how we each interpret the Word is vital to the future of the General Church. Sometimes GC discussions devolve into a need to fix or solve or put a period on an idea. I like the UCC campaign: God is still speaking.
Here's a piece of a paper I wrote a while back that seems to apply to this discussion:
"There is always a risk that our doctrine will be a false one (tcr 255); and we cannot be sure that what we believe is actually true doctrine. Swedenborg describes how nearly impossible it is for us to shake free from ideas that we have learned as children. We operate from and in reaction to our original perspectives throughout our lives (tcr 254)."
It seems the only sins we cannot recover from are the ones we are determined not to be recovered from. It is an open mind that hears truth.
I resonate a lot with what Molly said in her last comment about post discussion action and with Dylan's take on the hierarchy of the two great commandments over all else.
-RSM