When my daughter was stillborn in 1998, I learned something: Good Theology Must Answer Hard Issues. No glib word, Christian cliché, or reassuring pat on the back can ever put a new frame around what is bad and make it good, make the hard easy, or turn any wrong into a right.

Good theology meets us in the hard places, in the hard issues, and in the cold hard realities of life.  And it offers the Gospel as an answer.  It offers Compassion in the form of Love.  And it offers Truth.

With that in mind, I want to confess up front that my “Wrong Questions” series began in my mind with the one I’m going to answer today, Asking All the Wrong Questions about Homosexuality.  Over the past 3 months, a daily series of events has kept this issue in front of my eyes.  I know I need to answer it because Good Theology Answers Hard Issues…and it does so with the Gospel’s Truth and Love.

The Gospel enters another person’s pain.

When you’ve been in the waters of deep pain, you are in a unique place to see the pain of others up close and personal.  Many people preach from the glassy-walled observation room.  I preach the Gospel from the deep waters of the ocean of pain.

From the depth of pain, I know the topic of homosexuality hits people in their hearts much like the women-in-ministry debate hits me in the heart. 

For those of us affected by topics in a direct way, it’s not just a theological plank in a platform.  It’s personal.

For the homosexual reading this, I want you to know that I understand.  For you, it’s personal.

Over the course of the past decade, on AllExperts, a few brave souls publicly solicited my view of homosexuality.  The questioners have been sincere and kind—as most homosexuals I know are.  Note, however, that the vast majority of questions I’ve answered were flagged as private—private, because homosexual thoughts and tendencies are a source of deep confusion.  It’s very personal to them.  My answers remain between the questioner, myself and God.  I bring my thoughts about the topic out of the closet today because I have something to say:

The question that I’ve been asked in a hundred different ways is the same, “Who made me homosexual: God or me?”

I’ve grown to see that this is the wrong question.  The right question is “What will be my response?”

“Who made me this way?” is a question designed to affix blame—on God or on self.  But the blame squarely rests with the broken world in which we live.  It’s like my asking, “Who killed my daughter?”  Do I blame God for why this happened…or me?

Pain looks for someone to blame.  The Gospel ministers a response of hope.

I’d like to take this a step deeper as it relates to homosexuality.  If you’d like to see how Christians can understand the difference between the wrong question and the right question, please join me on the next page.

Asking the wrong question “Who can be legally married?” leads us to wrong answers.  Instead, we need to remember the original purpose and definition of marriage being one man and one woman becoming “one flesh” to the glory of God.  God both established and defined marriage.

Society now circumscribes–through a series of written laws–something like marriage, just without God.

The redefinition of marriage began.   

In Part 1 we traced the history of marriage from Bible times to the Middle Ages.  Now we will explore six of the watershed events resulting in the legal code that we see today in Europe and America.

1.  Ironically, the great concern over mutual consent was the first of six pivotal events that determined the course of Western marriage as we know it.  

Mutual consent can be considered pivotal because marriage shifted from a family-endorsed social structure with dual purpose (religious and social) to an individual decision apart from a religious framework or social benefit.  This was not a bad thing since many families arranged marriages for completely political or worldly reasons.  But a shift from community to individual paved the way for future changes.

Mutual consent was an issue because, under Germanic law in the 5^th to 9^th centuries A.D., marriage didn’t require the bride’s consent at all.  The families arranged a Brautkauf or bride-purchase agreement in which the groom consented and the bride was assumed to consent by her family.  Originally, a nuptial pretium (a certain amount of property or money) was contracted as the purchase price given to the father or guardian of the bride-to-be.  Eventually, to combat the idea of a wife as purchased property, the nuptial pretium became a sum given to the bride as her security should her husband die prematurely.

At this point, we’re in the central and late Middle Ages and the Catholic Church altered Germanic marital practice to insist upon direct, free, and fully mutual consent by both parties in the marriage.  To ensure that the union was by mutual consent, the Church established the suggestion that unions be blessed.

A religious blessing became part of the union and occasionally the Catholic Church threatened to excommunicate any persons who married without the blessings of the local priest.  Given that the position of women (prior to the Catholic canonists) was extremely low in Frankish tribes, the mutual consent aspect was a good development.

It took significant time for divorce—common in Germanic law—to be abolished by the spread of Catholicism.  In the Frankish tribes, legal matters (including marriage related issues such as adultery, divorce, etc.) were typically resolved by ordeal–an ordeal being by fire, water, combat, etc.  Eventually a system of compensation—the giving of money to satisfy grievances—was encouraged by the Catholic Church to curb violence and paved the way for the development of the system of indulgences.  For those of you who know Reformation history, the system of indulgences eventually became one of Martin Luther’s hot button issues.

Join me on the next page for the next watershed moment, marriage as a sacrament.

A recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “The Divorcé’s Guide to Marriage” opened with, “Want great marriage advice?  Ask a divorced person.”   I’d say “Ask History.”  After 30 years of marriage to my husband, I’m convinced it has much more to do with understanding what marriage is all about.

These days, the topic of marriage is getting confusing.

In American culture, a war has been escalating over the question, “Who is legally allowed to have something called a marriage?”  But we’re asking the wrong question.

The right question is “What was the original purpose of marriage as an institution?”

I’ve been wondering something for a while now.  Somewhere down the aisle it seems marriage has changed from a sacred institution of God (Genesis chapter 2) to something that courts decide as they subordinate the original religious ideal beneath an increasingly complicated legal code requiring decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court.

It bubbles up from the oddest of places as even the recent Chick-fil-A vs. gay marriage controversy demonstrates.  Why is the definition of marriage so blurred?

In short, sin.  To counteract sin, the Bible outlined a few laws.  But for the past 250 years, we’ve added new laws upon existing laws to deal with problems with applying prior laws.

But what was the original purpose of marriage?

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28).

In the beginning, marriage was intended as one man and one woman to be joined as one flesh by God, then blessed by God to be fruitful (literally fertile, hence increase in number); to fill and subdue the earth; and to rule over it all.  God’s design was for the image of God present in both man and woman to be multiplied by length of days and production of offspring.

Somewhere, though, we’ve gone off-track.  In the pages that follow, I will trace the history of marriage.  In Part 2, I will explain how 6 pivotal events have shaped marriage law–for better or for worse.  These 6 watershed moments–some of which represented progress at the time–had unintended consequences as they paved the way to a redefinition of marriage:

1. Mutual Consent
2. Marriage as a Sacrament
3. The Protestant Reformation
4. The Council of Trent
5. The Clandestine Marriage Act of 1753
6. Vatican II

Would you like to learn more about the history of this important institution called marriage?  Join me on the next page.

With the recent Supreme Court’s upholding the constitutionality of the Health Care Law known as Obamacare and the upcoming Independence Day holiday, I’ve been pondering how many pundits are asking and answering the wrong question.  Headlines are everywhere about the government upholding every American’s right to, in this case, health care.

That’s asking and answering the wrong question: “What rights does the government give us?”

Because the truth is the government didn’t come first.  The rights we have date back to our Creator. 

That’s what the Bible says and for those who don’t like the Bible, it’s also what the Declaration of Independence says.  

Significantly drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the same man who took a pair of scissors to his Bible to make a book scrubbed of any supernatural elements, the United States Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the anniversary we celebrate as the Fourth of July, Independence Day. The text of the second section of the Declaration of Independence states,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

If we take the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to be correct, the government doesn’t give us any rights.  Our Creator does.

So the right question becomes, “What is the purpose of the rights we have?” 

The rights we have are given so that we might freely choose how to live (i.e. whether we will follow God or choose a different way).  The government’s role is not to give any rights whatsoever.  The role of government is to guard and protect our freedom and to preserve those God-given rights that we already have.

• Will we find life with God or without Him?
• Will we enjoy full liberty in Him or apart from Him?
• Will we pursue and find genuine happiness with God or on our own?

It’s part of what makes the United States of America a beautiful place to live.  It is why America is the envy of an oppressed world which yearns for the political freedom to pursue God-given rights.

Would you like to go deeper into the topic of Freedom and Rights? If so, please join me on the page.