The author’s argument:

1. The controversy re same-sex marriage is about heterosexual marriage, not just about gay issues.

2. The ‘gay agenda’ fundamentally undermines traditional Christian marriage in grounding arguments upon the secular culture’s “ethic of intimacy” --individualistic and personalist deconstruction of “classical Christian marriage” replacing procreation with personal satisfaction as ‘end’ of marriage. This trajectory of individualism is already evident in canon changes which admitted divorce and remarriage and the ordination of women to the priesthood.

-- homosexual relationships are constituted only by “erotic love and genital acts” (17), not by Covenant with God, for God has instituted marriage of the two sexes, which in ‘difference’ and complementarity’ , in the God given roles of husband and wife reflects typologically the relationship between the Lordship of Christ and the Church. There is no marriage absent this hierarchical ordering of the sexes “The bond between wife and husband becomes at best a benevolent monarchy...”and he shall rule over you.”(48).

--primacy of genital sex acts for gay relationships violates the biblical teaching, citing Tikva Frymer-Kensky, ”Biblical thought does not see sexuality as a gift of God.(my emphasis)To the bible, the sexual and divine realms have nothing to do with each other.”(54) That the biblical proscription of homosexuality Noll sees as ”part of the biblical refusal to mix sexuality and spirituality.”(55)

--”Relationality” within marriage cannot exist without “headship”, and in a same-sex relationship the essential character of male initiative and female receptivity, given biologically, is absent. That same sex unions, by definition lacking difference and complementarity are incapable of genuine relationality for “...God has provided only one design for the union of persons.”(47) “Egalitarian homosexuality requires one partner to play the role of the opposite sex...” (My emphasis) Procreation and hierarchically arranged gender roles embody that “one design”.

--in undermining the divinely ordained and biologically ordered difference and hierarchy between the sexes, “will only further corrode the place of marriage in contemporary society, and the whole liberationist project of which it is a part will eventually come to grief.”(53)

--violates the laws of nature, as well as the customs and laws of all cultures. “There is simply no role in the tradition for same sex couples.”(56) Noll attacks the women’s movement only obliquely referring to the “social engineering” which undermines “fundamental polarity” of the sexes, citing C.S. Lewis. (82ff.)

--Noll’s bete noir is the understanding of sex and gender as social constructions ¹rather than biological givens, unchanging forms of nature, divinely ordained by which maleness and femaleness have their essential ²character. (49) The “Liberation Theologies” “deconstruct” so-called oppressive institutions, such as slavery, capitalism, and heterosexual marriage in the name of the “self-defining individual” (58).

5. The project of same-sex “marriage” “...is only one plank of an entirely different construal of the Christian faith.”(78)

6. Hermeneutical basis for Noll’s reading of Scripture is “plain sense” , non-contextualized, opposition to the historical-critical method, as an unfaithful relativizing of the authority of the Text, exemplified in the work of Borsch or Countryman(34-5) Noll’s selective literalism in scripture is joined to a firm essentialism with respect to social institutions such as marriage, femaleness and maleness to ground his conviction that there are unchanging “exceptionless moral norms” (97) citing the Catholic University moralist John Finnis and to claim otherwise is to invite chaos.

--”one of these absolutes is the nature of the male-female sexual union and the moral norms and legal statutes that flow from it.”(97) This is probably the most basic of Noll’s hermeneutical principles. He has more invested in guarding this than the “plain sense” of Scripture, which he flagrantly departs from! E.g. that the Bible talks more about the sins of the rich and powerful than of the flesh.

7. The Closet. Pastorally, he affirms that the church is not resistant to privately gay people or couples. What is so offensive is the institutionalizing, i.e. the public acceptance of homosexuality as on a par with normative heterosexual marriage.(94) Note how this differs from Roman Catholicism, in which homosexual people are judged to be “morally disordered” whether in the closet or not--a more logically defensible and honest position!

Some problems associated with Noll’s arguments

1. Explicit areas of disagreement:

--Hermeneutics, principles of Biblical interpretation. Noll takes a virtually pre-critical approach to the bible, “plain sense” implying it is possible to read without interpretation, or the contextual approaches of the historical-critical method. He looks to Scripture as a rule book, a source of timeless, uninterpreted truths and thus dismisses those who seek to understand the words of the text as revelatory of the Word, Jesus Christ, living in our time. He gives no acknowledgment of the human limitations of the text. Yet his literalism is selective, ignoring for example the overwhelming preponderance of ethical reflection on the presence of the poor, the weak, the stranger in both Hebrew Scripture and the NT. Nor does he address himself to the ways in which the Gospels call into question the OT purity codes. Noll ignores the Development of doctrine: how the Purity code mentality crept back into the Christian Movement with St. Paul and even more decisively in the Pastoral Epistles.

--Change in the mentalities and institutions of the human world is also ignored. Marriage is a social institution which varies widely over time, place, culture. The fact that the woman was without legal standing, the virtual property of father and husband from OT times, into the 20th c. Is no where acknowledged in Noll’s passionate defense of marriage as an unchanging gift of the Creator. Even human desire, which Noll understands to be rooted in changeless biology is socially shaped for “sex is in the head”. Noll’s knee jerk rejection of the historicity and social construction of our gendered realities, desires, sex roles, and understandings of what is natural/perverse, fundamentally undermines his argument against a revision of the Church’s teachings on marriage and sexualities.

--Essentialism. Noll’s views of marriage, sex and gender which he claims to be grounded in biology are little more than a reification of traditional white middle class 19th c. sex roles. That is, he presumes that men are from Mars, women from Venus, that even in same-sex relations the partners must fall into this gendered complementarity such that one is permanently “instrumental’ (a top), the other expressive and responsive (a bottom). Though these views are widely held by the public, especially by religious persons, the work of social scientists, e.g. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, of indubitably orthodox theologians such as Frederick Borsch, Bishop of Los Angeles, Richard Holloway, Primate of Scotland, and in fact the attitudes and behaviors of our children and the popular culture have abandoned essentialism in a search for respectful and equilibrated relationships. Sex and Gender are increasingly understood to be fluid and performative in terms of behavior and dress.

-- Relationality Noll explicitly denies relationship as the center of marriage (in favor of procreation), failing to look to our Trinitarian model of Persons-in-Relation, mutual, equilibrated, self-giving. We do need a new theology of marriage which will substitute relationship for genital acts as the focus of our ethical reflections. This requires a renewed theological anthropology, a fundamental re-vision of what we mean by feminine and masculine, male and female.

--Such a new theological anthropology would also overcome the dualism between eros and agape which stands at the center of Noll’s argument. Noll abandons incarnational theology, the foundation of Anglican spirituality, in his explicit profanation of the erotic. His position is pornographic, in its disconnection of human desires from God’s Desire.

2. Implicit themes of Noll’s argument.

--In his attack on “Liberation Theologies” Noll fails to deal with the intersection of race/class/gender as categories of power and dehumanization. He misses the Gospel critique of cultural fears of Otherness, whether the leper, the Samaritan, the widow, the gentile, the uncircumcised. Does Noll really want to nullify the “liberationist” movements of the last two centuries, whether that of chattel slavery or the oppressed of industrial and market capitalism? Is the fear and loathing of Homosexuality a code for getting Blacks, women, immigrants, wage slaves back in their place?

--What Noll is attempting to defend is not marriage, but a particular form of marriage--in which the defining test of “natural” and “divinely ordered” is male headship. This is what is at stake in his insistence upon the essential and biologically grounded character of maleness and femaleness in our culture (and that of the biblical texts) in which the husband is the type of the Lordship and Fatherhood of God. Noll said it: to question marriage as we have constructed it, is to challenge at once, the doctrine of Man (and woman) and the doctrine of God. Yet, this challenge is, theologically, Gospel. It is Good News that men as well as women can experience themselves as whole persons, each capable of affect, agency and receptivity, of the generativity of authorship and parenthood. The opportunity which gay and lesbian Christians present the church, especially in their committed faithful, covenanted relationships in Christ is just that experience and model of human wholeness.

--There is also Divine wholeness. Noll’s book is chapter two of the old arguments against the ordination of women to the priesthood. “A woman at the Altar threatens the authority of every husband in the congregation” was heard in the 1970's. Women who choose to live in committed relationship with another woman, who choose to be whole women without benefit of phallic completion, the woman priest who stands as fully Representative Person, in persona Christi , imaging in the midst of the People, God...this is what profoundly disturbs Noll. The fear is not of homosexuality so much as of the loss of male dominance, but also, of a “single vision” Sky-God which authorizes human male power (“When God is only Father, all fathers are gods.”) Is there not a deep fear of male vulnerability and female power, which the Jesus of the Gospels, rightly met, offers us? Not only St. Aelred of Rieveaulx’s equilibrated “holy friendship”, and Our Lady, powerful “Heavenly Queen”, but Jesus, “ecce Homo” crucified, Jesus our Mother giving us suck from his vulnerable side...these are the icons of divinity which gay and lesbian Christians uncover. Indeed, this fundamental change in marriage does signal, “a changing of the gods”.

2. “Essentialism” is a model of reality which understand human nature and social institutions alike to be characterized by an unchanging givenness, from God or Nature. This world view is rejected by students of history as well as of Christian theology, who understand the world to be “timeful”, the only constant is change. For Christians it is God who makes time and change meaningful, having acted, decisively in Time, “on this Day.”

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