There is a young man (under 35) who sometimes stops and speaks to me at my “office” (the coffee bar at the Wild Oats Grocery Store). He is very articulate and highly intelligent, and I always enjoy my conversations with him. In our last few conversations it has become apparent to me that he is homosexual. He has been very anxious for me to read a particular book. The other day, he had it with him. It is John Boswell’s SAME SEX UNIONS IN PREMODERN EUROPE (Villard Books, 1994)¹. He left it with me to peruse while he did some shopping. Boswell is a Yale historian, and obviously a scholar. Probably homosexual himself, and the book, and his body of work (several other published books), probably has the homosexual agenda as a driving force. Never-the-less, still a real scholar. I only had to peruse the book for about 5 minutes to get the gist, and a whole lot of things began to fall into place for me. Boswell has dug up a whole host of rituals used in premodern times (prior to 1500) to, in one way or another, seal same sex unions. Some of them, he claims were used in the church.

Now, at the moment, I am not even interested in accuracy of his research. What this set off in me was a recognition that the “Barfield thesis” (original to final participation) has application to gender and sexual orientation issues. It is clear that that the ancient world was more pan-sexual than the modern world. The Roman antipathy to homosexuality (in the Republican era) was exceptional. The Greek Oriental situation was far more common. It is also true that homosexuals of the Oscar Wilde type, as a distinct class (queers, gay, faggots, etc. etc.) as a distinct and completely self contained group is only about 200 years old. Prior to that, human beings appear to have been more androgynous. I would suspect that through most of human history, not only homosexual, but also bestial contacts were not uncommon for many people who were also heterosexual and married. Marriage was far more a “business”, a matter of estates and generational line than of love or companionship. Not that love and romance did not exist before. After all, one of the most famous stories in the world is based on “the face that launched a thousand ships” with Helen of Troy. But it was quite rare, and an aristocratic luxury, and probably did not exclude other sexual behaviors in principle.

The Reformation put marriage at the center. I suspect that Luther’s marriage to Katie is one of the most important and central relationships in the history of the world. Beyond Luther and the Reformational emphasis on the centrality of marriage, C.S. Lewis makes the case that it was the Puritans who virtually “invented” or made normal the very idea of “companionate marriage.” Indeed, the affection and love between husband and wife in Puritan and Reformed households was quite remarkable. Jonathon Edward’s famous marriage is only one outstanding example.

But, with a new emphasis on marriage, in one more area the monism (here the sexual monism) of the ancient world began to recede, and human connection began to be redefined in terms of Christ instead of the cosmos. This is Barfield’s move to “final participation.” This would also begin to completely oust bestial contacts, and marginalize homosexual behavior. Hence, with the closer definition of sexuality within marriage, the redemptive theme would move forward. The progress of redemption seems to be from child in the early OT to young adult in the later OT now prepared for marriage (Ezekiel 16). The progress seems to be from the church often being referred to as a “son” in the OT to the bride in the New. Hence, marriage is a defining reality in the history of redemption.

As this is defined and progresses historically, homosexuality becomes increasingly rigidified and cut off from other androgynous behaviors, and becomes more and more a pathology to itself. So, the rise of the “queer” class is a result of the sharper definition brought about by Protestantism.

If all of this is true, it throws and interesting light on the current “homosexual agenda.” It is always presented as a revolutionary thesis, a step forward. Christians usually fall into the very trap of its own self definition, and we often end up combating it in a reactionary way. We want to go back to the way it used to be before the sexual revolution. But this is backwards. The homosexual agenda, along with the whole of the “sexual revolution” is itself reactionary, and a futile attempt to return to the undifferentiation of the ancient and pagan past. The homosexual agenda is certainly not interested ultimately in defending homosexual liberty in a narrowly defined way. It is an attack on sexual definition, and a desire for pansexualism. Marriage defined as a type of Christ and His Church is the unstoppable model of all of future history. All else is reactionary.

Richard Bledsoe is a Theopolis Fellow and works as a chaplain in Boulder, Colorado.

1. This is one contra Boswell article: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9411/articles/darling.html “Boswell’s approach to the historian’s craft has hallowed antecedents in the pious partiality and distortion that marked the writing of modern church history from its beginnings in the sixteenth century. While Boswell clearly aspires to influence the current American debate about such issues as the nature of marriage and the rights of homosexuals, his tendentiousness in the use of evidence is depressingly old-fashioned. In fact, for all its topicality, its commercial sales appeal, and its political timing (hardly by chance was it released on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall protests), the book’s methods fairly creak with age. To be sure, Boswell’s documents are real, but he uses them in a way that would be quite familiar to church historians of the era of “confessional” church history, famously represented by the Magdeburg Centuries among the Reformers and Caesar Baronius among the Catholics. Those writers, responding to certain pressing ideological needs of their own day, created a history to serve the purpose of their employers, whether the patrons of the Evangelische Kirche or Roman prelates. Like them, Professor Boswell has set out to create a usable past.” ↩︎