I knew this was going to be good when I saw the Simone Weil quote.
This is so timely because I was just reading the part of The Name of the Rose where Salvatore tells Adso ‘when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose the weaker enemies…only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are’.
Honestly, I was hooked at “My dearest Wormwood…” but this all feels rather relevant and real (as someone this also directly affects), so I appreciate the thoughtfulness behind this. I was talking with a Side B friend today, just about how there is an alarming tendency to be distracted by what divides us (scapegoating, as you said), rather than living out the principles of our faith without asking questions about the person we’re showing love to and without having any strings attached. This is honestly why writing about a positive view of the law in a landscape of Christendom that is hyperfixated on “(cheap) grace alone” is at the top of my “To Write” list. With that, I'll concur with my Side B friend that trying to find how to see the humanity in others and loving as Jesus taught us to might be the biggest issue facing Christianity in our century. I think this definitely addresses some of those issues.
Have you read any Girard? All the scapegoat stuff here is loosely based on his idea of the mimetic cycle and his understanding of the Atonement is that Christ is ending the mimetic cycle by voluntarily taking the sins of the world upon himself
i think it would be slightly inaccurate to restrict the issue to simply gay people, though they are included. Overall i think it’s sexual ethics as a whole that have been idolized, in pentecostal and fundamentalist baptist homes, a very very big one is if the daughter fornicates she is either disowned or it’s hidden from the church. if she gets pregnant out of wedlock they force her to have an abortion so the congregation doesnt find out. And if you’re present in any fundamentalist community, they’re incredibly strict about clothing worn, what exactly sex is, etc etc. they’re sexual legalists in short, and far beyond homosexuality. a pentecostal “bible institute” that used to operate near where i live had a law that dating/engaged couples cant even hold hands on campus, which i think is very screwed up.
In short, i wouldnt at all restrict it to homosexuality. Sexual ethics has unfortunately been equated by the contemporary church to be entirely equivalent with Christian ethics, however, i wouldn’t distill it further than that, just because i’ve seen so much more than just a rejection of homosexuality being the test of faith as a regular occurrence
Entirely reasonable! I’m speaking from my own context where I’ve seen homosexuality become the defining issue that divides houses, churches, denominations, etc, but I absolutely recognize that there are other contexts where the rules are different. I hope the part on scapegoating being the real issue can at least speak to those contexts as well—or even contexts where sexual ethics are not the defining issue at all. As I say, the real issue is not “gay vs straight” but “us vs them”.
David! I enjoyed this a great deal! you’ve really put a lot of thought into something worth discussing, so thank you!!! And I wanna challenge you precisely BECAUSE I like where you’re headed. I think one fix would make your argument way more consistent though!
Using the Screwtape Letters was a brilliant move! But, I’ll remind you that Lewis’ depictions of these devils are omnidirectional. They’ll tempt anyone in any direction… as long as it’s away from trusting Jesus. So the same mirror you held up to the fundamentalist Right could also technically be turned… without actually really changing anything… on the progressive Left too. A parallel or mirror letter could easily unfold as: Screwtape coaching Wormwood to influence a young gay Christian ‘patient’ towards competition in the victim Olympics rather than simply toward spiritual despair. Screwtape could urge the reframing of every call to discipleship as oppression and every norm as violence, until the patient drifts from “is gay marriage permitted?” all the way to “why marriage at all? why any limit at all? why not live wholly for the autonomous self?And ultimately “who is God but the ultimate oppressor invented by patriarchal colonialism to subject the masses?” And this would feed off of the exact same engine as conservative fundamentalism: “at least I’m not one of THOSE people.” It’s just the opposite target. You tell us the scapegoat’s identity doesn’t matter… but then you really only apply this to one of the two warring factions in our polarized culture war.
I’m pressing you on this as someone who’s got skin in this game. I’m a gay Christian in a same-sex marriage. I’m obviously affirming. But I don’t think this “oppressed vs. oppressor” dynamic is the flex people think it is. I’d actually argue the best case for gay marriage isn’t a grievance claim at all! I think a far more durable claim is the question of “what does marriage do to us? What is its role in discipleship?” That’s a question that queer theorist progressives are unwilling to face. (As are the conservative fundamentalists I might add!) the progressive refusal to face this is exactly what feeds the conservative reaction it claims to oppose. Both of these sides are simply mimetic twins reacting and counteracting the other’s worst behavior and increasing the pendulum swing ever further outward.
So my challenge is just this: turn the mirror you gave us onto the side claiming oppression also. The progressive side claims to be ‘for the oppressed’ but it still operates with its own ‘Us vs. Them’ moral litmus test. If you claim scapegoating is the problem… apply your criticism consistently… because after all, the real problem here was never one side. The real problem is the us-versus-them mechanism itself. And Christ’s kingdom refuses ever to be slotted into partisan politics.
Thanks for reading! You've got a lot here so I'll try to go through each paragraph.
Of course the devils Lewis speaks of are omnidirectional. I feel like I expressed as much towards the end of the second half:
> Now, lest I give the impression that I am somehow the perfect Christian handing down these thoughts from on high, I should express my own responsibility here.6 There is an equally terrible danger that I can and do fall into: repeating and recreating the same oppressive structures which hurt queer people. It is far too easy, far too tempting, to become evil for the sake of victory over evil. Kierkegaard challenges each of us to read the Bible as though it is speaking solely to ourselves. Presenting Christ’s call in a way that challenges only others and not myself would be the gravest of misunderstandings. I am guilty of the thought “at least I’m better than…,” which makes me complicit in all of this. Let him who is without sin cast the first brick.
There are a couple reasons I'm only (directly) applying it to one "side". First, only one side consistently claims to be "Christian" or claim to be part of the Church. I'm not really interested in attempting to change non-christians' minds on an issue with this article—this article is addressed to my fellow members of the Church who care about the wellbeing of the Church. In this context, it may be possible that someone would argue that God is the "ultimate oppressor invented by patriarchal colonialism" but I certainly have never heard someone do so while claiming the full weight of Christianity behind it. Maybe it's a bigger problem on social media than I'm aware of, but I'm not on instagram or TikTok or any such thing so I have no idea what the most liberal of liberal pastors are saying about "God" (nor do I know how they claim to not believe in God but still be Christian.) I also don't feel like I can experientially claim to have been "oppressed" by the "leftist" crowd; my background is in the conservative church, and I speak from that background.
The second reason is that, well, this article isn't actually an argument for gay marriage? The point here is not "this is why you should believe in gay marriage," the point is "let's stop tearing each other's throats out and do more important things like help the poor and treat the sick." This article makes precisely zero claims about whether one should or shouldn't believe in gay marriage in the Church; I even note in a footnote that my own theology here is not settled yet!
(If I were to make an argument for the affirming position I would start with something like Eugene Rogers' excellent book "Sexuality and the Christian Body", which argues exactly as you say—that marriage is a fundamentally kenotic/ascetic act that trains the believers in mutual self-giving.)
The final reason is that I'm addressing one side because in my experience and in those I know best, I've watched far more people lose family and friendships over coming out as gay than over coming out as republican. I'm sure the latter can and does occur, but I am not in a context in which that occurs, and I've never heard of a 15 year old being disowned and forced onto the street because of being conservative the way I have with queer kids. All of us are complicit in us vs. them thinking, but in my experience on this issue one side is the clear aggressor.
And to address your last paragraph, I feel like you're reading things I didn't say into things I said? This is one of the difficulties of human communication but I don't really see where you think I'm actively defending the "progressive" side. To ask the more conservative wing to not make queer issues the defining question of Orthodoxy vs. Heresy (which is what many of them are doing—your Doug Wilsons and Al Mohlers and Rosaria Butterfields, etc.) is not a defense of progressivism as such. I'm apolitical at best; my political views have an extremely strong dose of Kieregaardian skepticism that politics is worth anything at all.
Thanks again for reading though, I appreciate the thoughts!
"Nor are many questions of sexual ethics directly resolved by the biblical text: gay marriage, modern divorce law, even masturbation are all understood now in vastly different ways than they were by the cultures which produced the Bible."
What do you mean when you say that cultures produced the bible?
I mean that the Bible is not an object which is devoid of cultural influence or context. Several cultures had their hands in producing the object we now call the Bible: Judea in 900 BC is a much different culture than that which diaspora Jews inhabited in the 500s onward, which is when most of the Old Testament was finalized into its current form, and neither of those cultures are super close to the apocalyptic Second Temple + Roman culture of the 1st century that Christ, Paul, and the rest of the New Testament authors lived within.
All of those cultures have a hand in producing the Bible because all of those cultures deeply influenced the way the authors of the various texts in the Bible viewed the world. This doesn’t render the Bible any less divinely inspired, of course—I just don’t think “divine inspiration” required God to men-in-black memory wipe the authors he worked through. The Bible is authoritative, the rule of faith, etc etc, but that doesn’t mean it’s a culture-less, history-less text; rather the opposite. If we value the text as God’s word then we are responsible for doing the work required to understand what the scriptures meant in their original context.
How does our understanding of the original context change the way it is applied to our context? For instance, why does the context of 1 century Judea impact the why we think about masturbation or marriage today?
I'll focus on the marriage example here because it's been years since I looked into the context of masturbation in that time—I included it in that because it's never directly addressed in the Bible at any point.
The cultural understanding of marriage that the Bible assumes people are working with throughout is that marriage is a contract between two patriarchs of families; in particular it is a contract which gives *property of* the woman to the man. When Genesis 1-3 says that they became "one flesh" it's being said within the context of people who think that marriage is subordinate as a relationship form to several other relationships, including that of parent-child and siblings.
This view of marriage as a contract (because women were property) is a lot of why divorce is so frowned upon in the New Testament—Jesus's words about divorce are so harsh because divorcing a woman was almost always a death sentence. No one will buy damaged goods, so a divorced woman's main options are begging or prostitution. It is absolutely out of the question for a woman to initiate a divorce in the first century.
Now, the change in context doesn't mean we can just ignore the New Testament on divorce—that's not my point at all—but it does mean we have to be aware of these differences. If Christ's logic for speaking so harshly of divorce was for the protection of women, then what we should be seeking to preserve is not the letter of the law but its spirit—the letter kills, the spirit gives life. Many abusive husbands can and have used Christ's words about the grave sin of divorce to keep their wife and children in an abusive relationship. They may be preserving the letter of the law but they are, in my view, completely failing to understand the spirit of the law.
It's honestly difficult to describe how much of a difference there is between our understanding of sexuality and marriage compared to the ancient Roman or ancient Hebrew world. The past is a foreign country to begin with, but this subject in particular is almost completely disjoint from ours. None of our views about sexuality are shared by the 1st century world, and none of theirs are shared by us.
While divorce teaching does work off of a cultural assumed understanding of marriage at one level, it at a deeper levels revolves around the sanctity of Marriage as a sacred institution created by God. Would you say that cultural understandings of institutions take secondary priority to that which is directly established and prescribed by God as foundational to created order? For instance, that marriage is that which exists between only one man and one women, or would you say that that is merely a cultural understanding of marriage?
I mean, I would agree that anything which God intended to be set in stone overrides cultural differences, but I will not grant that he set it in stone to be one man and one woman only, since the question at hand when it comes to gay marriage (which I suspect is what you're really interested in here) is precisely whether God intended it to be only one man and one woman or not. No begging the question!
The point I'm trying to dive at here is that the institution of marriage you're imagining as "set down by God" has only come about within the last two centuries. Which doesn't mean it's wrong, but it does mean that whatever *you* mean by "marriage" which is "directly established and prescribed by God as foundational to created order" is not what the writers of the Old Testament meant, nor of the New Testament, nor anyone writing before at bare minimum 1750. If what you're claiming is that our 21st century Western understanding of marriage is what God always intended, then I would have deep disagreements there. We're probably closer to the ideal but I don't think we're there yet.
Additionally, while they do things differently there -that is, the past- there is also the fact that nothing is new under the sun and that our God is the same yesterday, today, and forevermore. There are some aspects of our obedience and love for Him that are socially contingent. Take for instance 1 Corinthians 8, where Paul says that we should not do that which proves to be a hindrance or encumbrance to our brothers and sisters in the faith when it comes to matters of conscience-specifically, the consumption of temple sacrifices. However, that which is a matter of conscience is secondary and extrapolated from the direct commands of God and they always have to do with abstaining from that which is permissible, not engaging in that which has been specifically prohibited.
I mean that there are acts which are always sin. Murder, sex outside of marriage, theft, greed, worshipping false idols. Whether or not someone may be allowed to get a divorce may be a spirit of the law issue, and I am inclined to agree with you that a wife who is abused by her husband should have legal recourse for the safety of her and her children, and that our understanding of how the positive law ought to function in our context is different, but that doesn't ultimately change the fact that that action which would be cause for the end of a marriage and a breach of a covenant is sin in the eyes of God and is thus worthy of our contempt. We then must, as you aptly point out, come to an understanding of what qualifies as marriage.
Lewis condemned homosexuality and would not approve of your twisting of his writing.
Anyway, I've yet to encounter a church that approved of gay marriage that also didn't approve of every sort of breach of sexual ethics as well as abortion. It's never like everything is the same except this one thing. Its part of a package.
To see why gay marriage is bad I advise attending a gay pride (the sin is literally in the name) parade. If it's not obvious after that, I don't think there is much I can say to you.
I knew this was going to be good when I saw the Simone Weil quote.
This is so timely because I was just reading the part of The Name of the Rose where Salvatore tells Adso ‘when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose the weaker enemies…only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are’.
An incredible book by an incredible author—I read it last year and was blown away. Glad you enjoyed!
Excellent post!!! And congrats on the PhD admission!
Thanks! I’m looking forward to it.
Honestly, I was hooked at “My dearest Wormwood…” but this all feels rather relevant and real (as someone this also directly affects), so I appreciate the thoughtfulness behind this. I was talking with a Side B friend today, just about how there is an alarming tendency to be distracted by what divides us (scapegoating, as you said), rather than living out the principles of our faith without asking questions about the person we’re showing love to and without having any strings attached. This is honestly why writing about a positive view of the law in a landscape of Christendom that is hyperfixated on “(cheap) grace alone” is at the top of my “To Write” list. With that, I'll concur with my Side B friend that trying to find how to see the humanity in others and loving as Jesus taught us to might be the biggest issue facing Christianity in our century. I think this definitely addresses some of those issues.
Have you read any Girard? All the scapegoat stuff here is loosely based on his idea of the mimetic cycle and his understanding of the Atonement is that Christ is ending the mimetic cycle by voluntarily taking the sins of the world upon himself
i think it would be slightly inaccurate to restrict the issue to simply gay people, though they are included. Overall i think it’s sexual ethics as a whole that have been idolized, in pentecostal and fundamentalist baptist homes, a very very big one is if the daughter fornicates she is either disowned or it’s hidden from the church. if she gets pregnant out of wedlock they force her to have an abortion so the congregation doesnt find out. And if you’re present in any fundamentalist community, they’re incredibly strict about clothing worn, what exactly sex is, etc etc. they’re sexual legalists in short, and far beyond homosexuality. a pentecostal “bible institute” that used to operate near where i live had a law that dating/engaged couples cant even hold hands on campus, which i think is very screwed up.
In short, i wouldnt at all restrict it to homosexuality. Sexual ethics has unfortunately been equated by the contemporary church to be entirely equivalent with Christian ethics, however, i wouldn’t distill it further than that, just because i’ve seen so much more than just a rejection of homosexuality being the test of faith as a regular occurrence
great work though!
Entirely reasonable! I’m speaking from my own context where I’ve seen homosexuality become the defining issue that divides houses, churches, denominations, etc, but I absolutely recognize that there are other contexts where the rules are different. I hope the part on scapegoating being the real issue can at least speak to those contexts as well—or even contexts where sexual ethics are not the defining issue at all. As I say, the real issue is not “gay vs straight” but “us vs them”.
David! I enjoyed this a great deal! you’ve really put a lot of thought into something worth discussing, so thank you!!! And I wanna challenge you precisely BECAUSE I like where you’re headed. I think one fix would make your argument way more consistent though!
Using the Screwtape Letters was a brilliant move! But, I’ll remind you that Lewis’ depictions of these devils are omnidirectional. They’ll tempt anyone in any direction… as long as it’s away from trusting Jesus. So the same mirror you held up to the fundamentalist Right could also technically be turned… without actually really changing anything… on the progressive Left too. A parallel or mirror letter could easily unfold as: Screwtape coaching Wormwood to influence a young gay Christian ‘patient’ towards competition in the victim Olympics rather than simply toward spiritual despair. Screwtape could urge the reframing of every call to discipleship as oppression and every norm as violence, until the patient drifts from “is gay marriage permitted?” all the way to “why marriage at all? why any limit at all? why not live wholly for the autonomous self?And ultimately “who is God but the ultimate oppressor invented by patriarchal colonialism to subject the masses?” And this would feed off of the exact same engine as conservative fundamentalism: “at least I’m not one of THOSE people.” It’s just the opposite target. You tell us the scapegoat’s identity doesn’t matter… but then you really only apply this to one of the two warring factions in our polarized culture war.
I’m pressing you on this as someone who’s got skin in this game. I’m a gay Christian in a same-sex marriage. I’m obviously affirming. But I don’t think this “oppressed vs. oppressor” dynamic is the flex people think it is. I’d actually argue the best case for gay marriage isn’t a grievance claim at all! I think a far more durable claim is the question of “what does marriage do to us? What is its role in discipleship?” That’s a question that queer theorist progressives are unwilling to face. (As are the conservative fundamentalists I might add!) the progressive refusal to face this is exactly what feeds the conservative reaction it claims to oppose. Both of these sides are simply mimetic twins reacting and counteracting the other’s worst behavior and increasing the pendulum swing ever further outward.
So my challenge is just this: turn the mirror you gave us onto the side claiming oppression also. The progressive side claims to be ‘for the oppressed’ but it still operates with its own ‘Us vs. Them’ moral litmus test. If you claim scapegoating is the problem… apply your criticism consistently… because after all, the real problem here was never one side. The real problem is the us-versus-them mechanism itself. And Christ’s kingdom refuses ever to be slotted into partisan politics.
Thanks for reading! You've got a lot here so I'll try to go through each paragraph.
Of course the devils Lewis speaks of are omnidirectional. I feel like I expressed as much towards the end of the second half:
> Now, lest I give the impression that I am somehow the perfect Christian handing down these thoughts from on high, I should express my own responsibility here.6 There is an equally terrible danger that I can and do fall into: repeating and recreating the same oppressive structures which hurt queer people. It is far too easy, far too tempting, to become evil for the sake of victory over evil. Kierkegaard challenges each of us to read the Bible as though it is speaking solely to ourselves. Presenting Christ’s call in a way that challenges only others and not myself would be the gravest of misunderstandings. I am guilty of the thought “at least I’m better than…,” which makes me complicit in all of this. Let him who is without sin cast the first brick.
There are a couple reasons I'm only (directly) applying it to one "side". First, only one side consistently claims to be "Christian" or claim to be part of the Church. I'm not really interested in attempting to change non-christians' minds on an issue with this article—this article is addressed to my fellow members of the Church who care about the wellbeing of the Church. In this context, it may be possible that someone would argue that God is the "ultimate oppressor invented by patriarchal colonialism" but I certainly have never heard someone do so while claiming the full weight of Christianity behind it. Maybe it's a bigger problem on social media than I'm aware of, but I'm not on instagram or TikTok or any such thing so I have no idea what the most liberal of liberal pastors are saying about "God" (nor do I know how they claim to not believe in God but still be Christian.) I also don't feel like I can experientially claim to have been "oppressed" by the "leftist" crowd; my background is in the conservative church, and I speak from that background.
The second reason is that, well, this article isn't actually an argument for gay marriage? The point here is not "this is why you should believe in gay marriage," the point is "let's stop tearing each other's throats out and do more important things like help the poor and treat the sick." This article makes precisely zero claims about whether one should or shouldn't believe in gay marriage in the Church; I even note in a footnote that my own theology here is not settled yet!
(If I were to make an argument for the affirming position I would start with something like Eugene Rogers' excellent book "Sexuality and the Christian Body", which argues exactly as you say—that marriage is a fundamentally kenotic/ascetic act that trains the believers in mutual self-giving.)
The final reason is that I'm addressing one side because in my experience and in those I know best, I've watched far more people lose family and friendships over coming out as gay than over coming out as republican. I'm sure the latter can and does occur, but I am not in a context in which that occurs, and I've never heard of a 15 year old being disowned and forced onto the street because of being conservative the way I have with queer kids. All of us are complicit in us vs. them thinking, but in my experience on this issue one side is the clear aggressor.
And to address your last paragraph, I feel like you're reading things I didn't say into things I said? This is one of the difficulties of human communication but I don't really see where you think I'm actively defending the "progressive" side. To ask the more conservative wing to not make queer issues the defining question of Orthodoxy vs. Heresy (which is what many of them are doing—your Doug Wilsons and Al Mohlers and Rosaria Butterfields, etc.) is not a defense of progressivism as such. I'm apolitical at best; my political views have an extremely strong dose of Kieregaardian skepticism that politics is worth anything at all.
Thanks again for reading though, I appreciate the thoughts!
"Nor are many questions of sexual ethics directly resolved by the biblical text: gay marriage, modern divorce law, even masturbation are all understood now in vastly different ways than they were by the cultures which produced the Bible."
What do you mean when you say that cultures produced the bible?
I mean that the Bible is not an object which is devoid of cultural influence or context. Several cultures had their hands in producing the object we now call the Bible: Judea in 900 BC is a much different culture than that which diaspora Jews inhabited in the 500s onward, which is when most of the Old Testament was finalized into its current form, and neither of those cultures are super close to the apocalyptic Second Temple + Roman culture of the 1st century that Christ, Paul, and the rest of the New Testament authors lived within.
All of those cultures have a hand in producing the Bible because all of those cultures deeply influenced the way the authors of the various texts in the Bible viewed the world. This doesn’t render the Bible any less divinely inspired, of course—I just don’t think “divine inspiration” required God to men-in-black memory wipe the authors he worked through. The Bible is authoritative, the rule of faith, etc etc, but that doesn’t mean it’s a culture-less, history-less text; rather the opposite. If we value the text as God’s word then we are responsible for doing the work required to understand what the scriptures meant in their original context.
How does our understanding of the original context change the way it is applied to our context? For instance, why does the context of 1 century Judea impact the why we think about masturbation or marriage today?
I'll focus on the marriage example here because it's been years since I looked into the context of masturbation in that time—I included it in that because it's never directly addressed in the Bible at any point.
The cultural understanding of marriage that the Bible assumes people are working with throughout is that marriage is a contract between two patriarchs of families; in particular it is a contract which gives *property of* the woman to the man. When Genesis 1-3 says that they became "one flesh" it's being said within the context of people who think that marriage is subordinate as a relationship form to several other relationships, including that of parent-child and siblings.
This view of marriage as a contract (because women were property) is a lot of why divorce is so frowned upon in the New Testament—Jesus's words about divorce are so harsh because divorcing a woman was almost always a death sentence. No one will buy damaged goods, so a divorced woman's main options are begging or prostitution. It is absolutely out of the question for a woman to initiate a divorce in the first century.
Now, the change in context doesn't mean we can just ignore the New Testament on divorce—that's not my point at all—but it does mean we have to be aware of these differences. If Christ's logic for speaking so harshly of divorce was for the protection of women, then what we should be seeking to preserve is not the letter of the law but its spirit—the letter kills, the spirit gives life. Many abusive husbands can and have used Christ's words about the grave sin of divorce to keep their wife and children in an abusive relationship. They may be preserving the letter of the law but they are, in my view, completely failing to understand the spirit of the law.
It's honestly difficult to describe how much of a difference there is between our understanding of sexuality and marriage compared to the ancient Roman or ancient Hebrew world. The past is a foreign country to begin with, but this subject in particular is almost completely disjoint from ours. None of our views about sexuality are shared by the 1st century world, and none of theirs are shared by us.
While divorce teaching does work off of a cultural assumed understanding of marriage at one level, it at a deeper levels revolves around the sanctity of Marriage as a sacred institution created by God. Would you say that cultural understandings of institutions take secondary priority to that which is directly established and prescribed by God as foundational to created order? For instance, that marriage is that which exists between only one man and one women, or would you say that that is merely a cultural understanding of marriage?
I mean, I would agree that anything which God intended to be set in stone overrides cultural differences, but I will not grant that he set it in stone to be one man and one woman only, since the question at hand when it comes to gay marriage (which I suspect is what you're really interested in here) is precisely whether God intended it to be only one man and one woman or not. No begging the question!
The point I'm trying to dive at here is that the institution of marriage you're imagining as "set down by God" has only come about within the last two centuries. Which doesn't mean it's wrong, but it does mean that whatever *you* mean by "marriage" which is "directly established and prescribed by God as foundational to created order" is not what the writers of the Old Testament meant, nor of the New Testament, nor anyone writing before at bare minimum 1750. If what you're claiming is that our 21st century Western understanding of marriage is what God always intended, then I would have deep disagreements there. We're probably closer to the ideal but I don't think we're there yet.
How then ought we pursue biblical marriage? Is that even something worth aspiring towards?
Additionally, while they do things differently there -that is, the past- there is also the fact that nothing is new under the sun and that our God is the same yesterday, today, and forevermore. There are some aspects of our obedience and love for Him that are socially contingent. Take for instance 1 Corinthians 8, where Paul says that we should not do that which proves to be a hindrance or encumbrance to our brothers and sisters in the faith when it comes to matters of conscience-specifically, the consumption of temple sacrifices. However, that which is a matter of conscience is secondary and extrapolated from the direct commands of God and they always have to do with abstaining from that which is permissible, not engaging in that which has been specifically prohibited.
I don't see how this is relevant at all
I mean that there are acts which are always sin. Murder, sex outside of marriage, theft, greed, worshipping false idols. Whether or not someone may be allowed to get a divorce may be a spirit of the law issue, and I am inclined to agree with you that a wife who is abused by her husband should have legal recourse for the safety of her and her children, and that our understanding of how the positive law ought to function in our context is different, but that doesn't ultimately change the fact that that action which would be cause for the end of a marriage and a breach of a covenant is sin in the eyes of God and is thus worthy of our contempt. We then must, as you aptly point out, come to an understanding of what qualifies as marriage.
Lewis condemned homosexuality and would not approve of your twisting of his writing.
Anyway, I've yet to encounter a church that approved of gay marriage that also didn't approve of every sort of breach of sexual ethics as well as abortion. It's never like everything is the same except this one thing. Its part of a package.
To see why gay marriage is bad I advise attending a gay pride (the sin is literally in the name) parade. If it's not obvious after that, I don't think there is much I can say to you.