Newsweek and the Problem of Hermeneutics

by Matt Sutton

For those of you who have missed the controversy, Newsweek’s Lisa Miller wrote a cover story on the religious case for gay marriage. To make her point, she essentially tried to debunk the more conservative interpretations of Pauline texts such as Romans 1 (“And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet”). To nobody’s surprise, she did not convince the anti-gay marriage crowd to rethink how they read their Bibles. Instead, she enraged them. Who is she, they asked, to be telling them how to read their scriptures?

They are right. Journalists don’t have the right to tell any community how to interpret their sacred texts, whether they are Jews, Muslims, or evangelical Christians. Asking conservatives to rethink Romans 1 and other controversial passages based on some scholar’s analysis of the “true” cultural context is futile. It would be more helpful to engage with the conservatives in a discussion of their own hermeneutical principles.

In true post-modernist style, I prefer to enter the evangelicals’ hermeneutical world. Once I have granted their interpretive presuppositions, I begin asking questions based on those presuppositions. Rather than deal with gay marriage head on, I want to know what the Bible says about marriage in general. Of course the evangelical understanding of marriage begins with Genesis 2: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” What is this “one flesh”? And when can it be re-divided? According to the ultimate authority, Jesus, a marriage can only be dissolved in the case of adultery. In the book of Matthew, Jesus preached, “But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.”

Yet how many evangelicals welcome divorcees into their churches? Even more important, how many ministers freely officiate over heterosexual re-marriages? Almost all of them.

If conservatives really believe that allowing homosexuals to marry is going to undermine God’s immutable laws and therefore wreak havoc on American society, they need to deal first with the problem that is closer at hand and FAR more prevalent—divorce. Until they fight to make church policy and American law reflect Jesus’ teachings on divorce, their efforts against gay marriage will continue to look much more like a crusade of hate than a legitimate response to the teachings of their scriptures. We need to either throw out the divorcees and the gays, or welcome them both to the altar. I prefer the latter.