On the Road, the journal of the Anabaptist Association of Australia & New Zealand, have just republished a conference paper written by my dear friend Bruce Hamill. The paper, which was written in an effort to bring some constructive theology to bear upon a vexed set of questions, is titled ‘Anabaptist Ethics and Same-Sex Marriage’. Here’s how it concludes:

Marriage — that ancient institution serving the nurture of companionship and human flourishing in love — has for most of Christian history been assumed to be defined by the biological complementarity of ‘male and female’, although not necessarily by procreation. In Jesus and the apocalyptic Christian writers not only does the coming kingdom relativise the institution of marriage to this ‘time between the times’, it sets it, and all the other institutions within which we live, under the authority and judgement of Christ. In doing this it re-establishes marriage in terms of a new purpose for disciples of Christ — indeed a two-fold purpose — to bear witness to the new creation seen in the love of Christ for the church and to practise the life of that new creation in intimate acts of mutual and bodily self-donation. This ethical revolution reaches its clearest expression when Paul concludes that even creational structures like ‘male and female’ do not define life in Christ. It is thus a small step with the benefit of biological and psychological science to conclude that other creational structures such as samesex orientation might, for some, provide a more appropriate vehicle for the discipline of marriage.

You can read the entire piece online here and here, or as a single pdf here.