Male and female in the image of God

In what way does the lifelong intimacy of a man and a woman have something to do with the image of God; and why would lifelong intimacy of a man and a man (or a woman and a woman) not have something to do with the image of God?

I am conscious of the fact that it is all too easy to read too much into the creation stories. However, we have what seems to me a fairly straightforward line of thought. Having created the world and everything in it, God decides to ‘make man in our image, after our likeness’ (Gen.1:26). This is not directly explained, but the continuation is surely the best indication of what this might have meant, or of what significance it might have had: humanity is created in the image of God as male and female (the connection is certainly very close between image and sexuality) and given the task of gaining dominion over the earth. The means by which this dominion over the whole earth is achieved (and not simply the bit that Adam and Eve could reasonably have governed on their own) is through procreation. So the link between rule over the earth (which I would see as an extension of God’s ‘good’ creative activity) and creation in the image of God is the procreative power of male and female. Does this in itself invalidate homosexual behaviour? Possibly not if it suggests that being male and female is functional rather than in some stricter sense ontological. But that’s getting into rather speculative exegesis.

The more substantial difficulty arises with Gen.2:24. The issue here, I would suggest, is not the reasons for leaving mother and father but the basis for being ‘one flesh’. The woman is taken from the man, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, and therefore ‘they shall become one flesh’. Logically, perhaps, as you suggest, this does not disallow homosexual union, but the ‘one flesh’ ideal must be an expression of the union of man and woman. This is why I think that the church (including any homosexuals in it) still has to say that the created ideal is of man and woman as one flesh. Incidentally, we haven’t considered the implications of this for singleness and celibacy. Someone might want to pick up on that.