Articles From the July 1994 Unification News

 

The Trinity as the Basis for a Theological Critique of Homosexuality

The promotion of homosexuality to normative status is one dead-end of a major thorough-fare in human history. This promotion is possible only through the intensive deconstruction activities of western cultural elites over the past millennia. I term the homosexuals' now- legitimated interpretation of society, history and nature, "homosexualism." Homosexualism is an ideological systematization of the ethics of individualism, self-affirmation and self-gratification in their most extreme forms. It is a rejection qua critique of virtually every religious and moral tradition known to the human race.

Homosexualism is like Communism. As in the case of Communism, we love the sinner but hate the sin. As with Communism, homosexualism has moved from being a personal spiritual problem (viz., homosexuality, the parallel being the mix of utopianism and resentment in the communist man) to being an ideological threat, promulgated not by the numbers under its sway but by the few at the control of language and institutions. As with Communism, homosexualism offers two faces: peaceful co-existence at the same time as programmatic insurgency. As with Communism, our best strategy is vigilance and containment, as we develop a superior alternative which serves to liberate those oppressed under its spell. However, as with Communism, we cannot claim in all honesty that Christian thinkers have promulgated an explanation of the cause of homosexualism, that is, homosexuality, of what ultimately is wrong with homosexualism, and of how to avoid suppression, on the one hand, and uncritical approval (and surrender to its demands) on the other.

Investigation of causes draws us along two tracks. One is the general disintegration of the moral foundations of western civilization in the name of the liberation of the individual, centering on the physical body, with roots in the twelfth century. This concerns the context in which the demand for the legitimation of homosexuality can even gain a public hearing. The other is the more ancient, spiritual roots of homosexual desire itself.

Serious attention to causes, however, as well as useful thinking as to how to truly free this world from this malignity, presupposes clarification of what is wrong with homosexuality. The present essay is therefore dedicated mainly to that question, although in the process prescriptive implications appear.

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Logic cannot prove homosexuality evil, nor can the Christian tradition answer it. Who among the divorced majority can criticize the homosexual? Are we to argue for the pallid state of marriage, which leaves the society panting for the zestful physical "culture" of youth? Hundreds of thousands of men would not enter upon a path of sure self-destruction through homosexual life if the reality of man- woman love in our culture offered hope for true joy. Homosexualism names homosexuality "gay." It declares itself the love which makes people happy and joyful. No one objects to their self-advertisement; everyone knows who are the "gay" people. If you are not homosexual then you cannot be gay. If you are not gay, a friend-of-gays, or at least silent about your disapproval of homosexuality, you are labeled neurotic, uptight, hum-drum, and that worst of all sins: straight. Thus, Christian society in the late twentieth century, which exalts "love" as the reason for living, and Jesus as the one who came to make us happy, and salvation as being happy about oneself in front of God, becomes the hotbed of homosexuality. There is a deeper cause of Christian impotence in the face of homosexualism. Under the Christian archetype, wherein religious celibacy competes for and generally wins the high-ground commanding God's attention, heterosexual marriage cannot attain the status of a central paradigm. Marriage cannot become an absolute value for Christians, because the Lord and Savior did not marry, nor did he anywhere dictate that his followers do so. The ideal of Christian celibacy, rooted finally in Jesus' bachelor status, predetermined for 2,000 years an incorrigible ambivalence on the part of Christians toward the physical body, on the one hand, and toward the sexual relationship which produces it, on the other, even within the marital context. Blood, that of Jesus and of the martyrs, is the seed of the church, but it is not the seed of human procreation. Hence the awful and ultimately unnecessary division between physical life and spiritual life, between birth and rebirth. If the Christian church and culture is to resolve this problem, it must discover a new fundamental paradigm.

Paul presumably spoke from within the experience of the early Christian church when he wrote that in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. The separation into Jew and Greek, slave and free, I would submit, are results of the fall, and Paul was right with regard to the rightful ending of those divisions. But Paul was wrong, ultimately, concerning male and female. The separation into male and female is not a result of the fall; it is a principle of creation. In fact, the very image of God is male and female (Gen. 1:27). The masculinity and femininity in and of God, which are distinct, constitutive of God's creativity, and of equal and absolute value, were concretized directly as a man and a woman, who naturally long to re-constitute the unity of God in marriage.

This re-constitution of God's unity by two separated, complimentary beings is the chief insight underlying the Unification model of the Trinity, the three-in-one: God, man and woman. This is the substantialization of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and every married couple is meant to be a representation of the love-fellowship of the Trinity. The best of Christian theology instructs us that the Trinity is life-giving, procreative. This revelation is made a thorough-going principle, systematically coherent, through the Unification view of the Trinity. Indeed, this is a new self-disclosure of God. From this viewpoint, homosexualism is a denial of God, for it is denying the Trinitarian image of God.


One could probably compare it with one or other of the classical heresies which denied the Trinity. At first glance, I would suggest that homosexualism is akin to "modalistic monarchicism". That teaching, judged to be Christian heresy, collapsed the Trinity back into the unity of God. It called the three persons of the Trinity mere masks or appearances of the One. The three persons lost their personhood; there was only one individual person. That individual could appear in any guise. This would seems similar to the homosexualist view that sexual identity is epiphenomenal to personhood, both spiritually and physically. As God could appear as Father, Son or Holy Spirit, homosexualism allows any individual to appear as a man, woman or something in-between. (That "something in- between" may be an angel, as the current Broadway play suggests. Whatever that third position is, it is not fully human.)

Modalistic monarchism denied any real relationality in the Trinity. Thus there was no true love in the Trinity, because there was no "other" involved; it was only God loving Himself. This is also the ultimate significance of homosexuality. There is no true love of an ultimate other; at best (and this is undoubtedly rare, considering the typicality of promiscuity among homosexuals) there is a limited love for one other person. This love by nature does not extend into time through children. Homosexual couples who adopt are participating in a false or imitation form of natural love between man and woman. They are acting as parents. Little girls like to act as parents, too.

In contrast to modalistic monarchism, orthodox Trinitarian theology maintains, even at the cost of coherence within the framework of Greek philosophical categories, the separate identities of the three persons, so that the love between them might have significance. Homosexual love has no significance, at least no constructive significance in relationship to the human community in time.


The new paradigm for Christian thought roots itself not in the historical existence of Jesus but in the theological affirmation of the Trinity, based upon revelation. The development brought by Unification revelation is in the contention that the Holy Spirit is feminine. This obviously has major theological implications with reference to homosexuality. An all-male Trinity is exactly a homosexual image. A masculine God, masculine Son of God, and masculine Holy Spirit are one as the fount of love. What fundamental criticism, then, can be made of those who follow this model physically? Unificationism simply asserts that the fundamental model of love is not male-male, but male-female.

The contention is that Jesus Christ is indeed the Son of God and that this means he is not the Daughter of God. But God is the Creator of woman as well as man; God must have a Daughter in order to completely disclose Himself. That Daughter of God was not revealed on earth, for such could come about only in relation to the Son, and the Son, tragically, was killed. However, the Son lived on in the spirit world, and in the spirit world the installation of the Holy Spirit obtained, as the Daughter of God and spouse of Christ.

Thus the Holy Spirit embodies in the church, the bride of Christ. Thus the true believer is reborn through the Holy Spirit, and stands as a spouse of Jesus. Mystics perceived this throughout the ages, even enjoying love relations. But there is a further ground for the femininity of the Holy Spirit, for the "sex-inclusive Trinity". That ground is the creation event itself, the "original Trinity" consisting of God, Adam and Eve. Again, deepest Christian insight has understood Jesus as the second Adam (Paul, Ireneaus). There is an obvious wanting of a second Eve; at least this seems obvious from the Unificationist perspective. Blaming Eve for the fall may have sufficed to justify her exclusion from the intimacy of the Godhead for 2,000 years, but no one countenances such exclusion today.

The creation of the world came from the physically procreative power of God, man and woman (Adam and Eve). The recreation of the human race came from the spiritually procreative Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Christians call this "rebirth", a spiritual creation of new life. Thus reborn (baptized) Christians are physically of the fallen physical parents, Adam and Eve, and spiritually of the true, spiritual parents, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The result of this duality of births is the split of the spirit and flesh, or mind and body. This conflict will be reconciled at the end of the age, with the second coming of Christ. And this paradigm provides a powerful vision for that event: the advent of a true man and a true woman, married as true husband and wife, substantiating the dwelling place of God on earth and the procreative power over the physical world and spiritual world as a unified whole. This is the Unificationist paradigm of the True Parents.

 

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