'Acceptance of traditional teaching with regard to sexual difference entails a certain asceticism. If sexual difference is so significant that it should be an organizing principle fior married life, then, as the revisionists point out, many men and women who want to marry will probably not, for their erotic desires do not appear to respond to the opposite sex. But like the young Augustine, revealed in Confessionum, many of these gays and lesbians will equally be unable to imagine a continent life. These people would appear to be trapped. The prospect of life without the embraces of those for whom they long strikes them as miserable and impossible, but a life without marital embraces is what the tradition appears to suggest. Are the churches prepared to insist that such a life is nevertheless necessary and redemptive? Where is the good news here?
It would not the the first time that, for the sake of the gospel, the church has insisted on renunciations that strike the culture as absurd. The rich man in Mark 10 "was shocked and went away grieving" when Jesus told him to share his many possessions. Are the contemporary romantics and revisionists, the gays and lesbians who want to marry perhaps a new version of the rich man? The revisionists speak for men and women who, like the young Augustine, are shocked and grieved at the prospect of forgoing certain erotic embraces. Could it be that expectations of erotic-fulfillment, an attitude of sexual entitlement, is a variation upon wealth, a new possession modern people grip so tightly that we cannot be whole-hearted followers of Christ? If so, the insisting upon a nuptial significance for sexual difference, a significance that would order ecclesial life into the twofold ranks of the continent and the married, would be a difficult thing to do, but it would be prophetic. As with the church's teaching on voluntary poverty, or other types of suffering, a language will have to be recovered, to the effect that there is freedom and joy in a life without those things the world calls necessary.'
Christopher C Roberts, Creation & Covenant, p.245.
