1:26 AM
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From Romans 1, we understand that homosexual activity is a result of a people who know God, but choose not to glorify Him as God. In other words, it is a symptom of a society that has rejected God.
From a theological point of view, a Christian could oppose gay marriage on the grounds that his g...
I'm not convinced that @AffableGeek's answer qualifies as "Christian".
Yes, Romans 1 does say that homosexual activity is a result of a society that has rejected God.
However, that passage in Romans does not conclude with, "therefore you must oppose gay marriage." It
concludes with, "therefore you have no excuse when you judge others, for in passing judgment you condemn yourself."
Paul is exhorting the Christians to live righteously, not to write their morals into law.
Later, in
Romans 13 Paul tells the Roman Christians to submit to the pagan civil authorities, adding, "rulers are not a terror to good conduct".
Affable Geek says the government is "acting on his behalf", yet Jesus taught that the governments of this world are not where our allegiance ultimately belongs. Instead, he said, "My kingdom is not of this world."
When
Zebedee's wife asked Jesus to let her sons sit at his right and left side when he became king, Jesus declined, adding that his followers were not to "lord it over" others, but to be servants.
For those of us in the United States, we are living in a vastly different culture from what the early Christians experienced. About 75% of U.S. citizens call themselves Christians, and we choose our rulers by majority vote. Therefore U.S. Christians have a lot more secular power than the Christians of the first century.
But that doesn't mean our government has the right to act as a representative of Christ or to act on the behalf of Christians.
If there is no biblical justification for the claim that the secular government is acting on our behalf, then it does not follow that a Christian must necessarily oppose government actions that we personally detest (whatever actions those may be).
Affable Geek's second "Christian" argument is that marriage is an institution ordained by God. This is affirmed in numerous places in the Bible, e.g. Genesis 2:24, Mark 10:7, Ephesians 5:31. I have no problem with that.
But it's a fallacy to go from there to, "marriage is an institution ordained by God, not a function of the state." In fact, in the U.S. it is both.
We have both religious marriages and civil marriages. Many couples do both in the same ceremony.
(We have something of an analogous situation with Christmas, which is both a secular and a religious holiday in many places.)
Now I can buy the argument that the civil ceremony should be called something other than marriage, if this is your political philosophy. But I don't see any biblical justification for asserting that Christians can tell the state what words it can use in its laws.
Affable Geek states, "When Jesus said, 'for this reason a man shall leave his mother and cling to his wife,' it is because that is the order which God prescribed."
But then he adds, "A Christian response would ask why the state gets to (re-)define that which God has defined and put together."
However, that's not at all what Jesus was saying
in that passage. Jesus was talking about divorce, and arguing that if God ordained a marriage, human beings should not break it up.
The passage has nothing to do with whether the state can define its own concept of marriage, with its own set of benefits.
And, in fact, many Christians have made peace with the reality of divorce, so if we want to take Jesus seriously, we ought first to live up to his actual teaching, rather than attempt to use this passage as a weapon against others.
TL;DR: It is not a genuinely Christian response to assert that (A) the government is acting on our behalf and therefore should refrain from actions of which we do not personally approve, and (B) the Bible prohibits the government from defining a ceremony called marriage.
A Christian response would consider that, (A) given power, followers of Christ are not to lord it over others, and (B) the state often acts in ways that are orthogonal to the Christian faith. As Christians, we should never act in ways that would push people away from being receptive to the gospel.
If we act as bullies who want to impose our beliefs on others or to shove our religion down their throats (or even if we just come across that way), we are not proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God.
The Upper Room
The Upper Room