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Rightly Handling the Word of Truth: Scripture, Canon, and Creed
A Theological Conference of the North American Lutheran Church, The Citadel, 21-22 July, Charleston, SC
"The Ethics of Sex, Marriage, and the Family"
C. Seitz
Personal Remarks
When Carl Braaten emailed me to participate in this conference, he likely knew Charleston would conjure up memories of past events and make the invitation all the more enticing. The Anglican Communion Institute hosted regular January conferences in Charleston for about ten years, beginning in 1996. We started a three-book series on the Nicene Creed, The Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer, with contributions by Carl, Robert Jenson, and David Yeago—from the Lutheran Tribe—as well as Methodist, Roman Catholic, Reformed, Orthodox and Free Church authors. "The Future for a New Ecumenism" was one book's optimistic subtitle. But church politics overtook us, and looking back it seems like a slow-moving train wreck was only beginning, leaving us with the break-up and carnage all of us in our various Christian tribes are now surveying. I started my teaching career 30 years ago as the first non-Lutheran to teach at the seminary in Philadelphia, and ate a frequent lunch at 2900 Queen Lane at the then Fortress Press. So your world and my own denominated world have intersected for many years. Though most of my PhD students at Toronto now come from the Missouri Synod Lutheran branch, I have never felt far from the wider Lutheran universe, here and in Germany, which under the hand of God is now not what you or I might have expected 30 years ago.
I. General Challenges
I want to mention a couple of challenges before I begin. They inform what I will say and guide the selection of what I choose to focus on. I recall speaking on homosexuality at Brite Divinity School in the late nineties and vowing never to do another conference on the topic, whose format featured a "diversity of viewponts." Something had obviously broken in our appeal to scripture that would not be resolved by everyone trying a bit harder or with more charity.
Secondly, the topic as sketched out seems to require the services of a paid-up Ethicist and I am a biblical scholar. So I am not going to wander too far from my own area of training. But I will try to embrace the challenge in this specific way. I will take Ethics to mean the way the biblical teaching from Genesis to Revelation takes practical form in our world of living the Gospel faith. Unavoidably, I believe that takes us straight to the marriage rites of the church. I know these differ amongst our Christian tribes, but they have had far more in common in their present various guises than ones that will soon be upon us. We may disagree about whether Christian marriage is a sacrament and what that means, but we can all agree that standing before God and making solemn vows and receiving the church's blessing constitutes an ethical act. Something is being agreed to, before God. And most importantly, what warrants the blessing of God Almighty is being set forth, heard by all, witnessed to and affirmed on those terms and not others.
The marriage rite in the Episcopal BCP will guide my ethical reflections because that is the tradition I am familiar with. I would be surprised if the basic warrants and contours, biblically rooted and biblically norming, were not familiar to you on similar terms. An important point is thereby registered. Mine will not be an examination of the crucial character of this or that marriage rite, as somehow more decisive than the scriptural landscape that gives rise to them. Every marriage rite assumes as much as it expresses explicitly, through its specific language and form. The relationship, then, between the whole scriptural landscape and what it expresses on this subject and what the rites functioning in the church foreground is a symbiotic one. A good rite follows what has been traditionally called the rule of faith, and the rule of faith is a faithful, proportional, comprehensive coming-to-boil of what scripture as a whole commends, under the lordship of Jesus Christ, who is its everlasting Word. Christian Ethics points to that place where scripture, in accordance with the rule of faith, comes into life and practice. This means when Christians make marriage vows in a rite of the church an ethical form of life is being embraced by us, bigger than us, and worthy of being bigger because warranted by God in creation, in Christ, and in his church from all eternity.
I am prepared to speak on this topic yet again because we now face a particular challenge in culture and in the church in understanding Christian marriage and family. The word 'marriage' is likely to be/is being taken over by culture and altered in respect of the goods formerly implied thereby. This won't be the first time language of the church has been bent to new purpose, and it won't be the last. But that gives the church the responsibility to be clear about what it means by the word 'marriage' when it finds its place within the ethical decision making inherent in a solemn rite, with scripture readings, solemn charges, vows, prayers, and blessing. It is to this 'marriage' that I will be speaking, and not to newer efforts to commandeer the word and alter the 'estate' to which we have been called by scripture through the rites of the church's ruled life.
Two final comments. Anticipating my conclusion, I believe it is clear that churches will alter marriage rites consistent with their altered understanding. They will create what they call gender- neutral rites, or they will seek to make a progressive new rite range alongside a former one, or they will eliminate a former one altogether and aggressively so; all three options are on the table.
In the light of this it is important to keep in mind and heart that what they cannot succeed in doing is erasing from the church's life and time the logic and ethical contours of a former one I will be working with today. They will believe they will be doing that, but in point of fact, ethically speaking, they cannot. Rather, what they will succeed in doing is not so much changing a rite, but changing the nature of the church into a very different one, one which will no longer be ruled and normed on these ritual terms and not by others. In spite of all that, the rites we have traditionally used and the scriptural and dominical warrants they presuppose will not vanish from the earth. Those who wish to enter into this traditional marriage estate, and understand it as the arena in which God's blessing is made possible in Christ, by action of the Holy Spirit, will continue do so and will thereby bear witness to a specific set of scriptural convictions. One may change a word. One may create a new self-understanding and call it church. One cannot vaporize an understanding of marriage whose sacred character will outlive semantic changes.
Second. In so much of the rhetoric of the modern and post-modern world we find the appeal to something called identity. Not a verbal but a nominal state of affairs, called "being Gay," or "LGBTi." Is this state of affairs socially constructed and so generated by specific cultural conditions, and if so, is it a desirable outcome or one that is corrigible of change, given other possible constructive forces? I believe this topic represents the coal-face of our modern and postmodern evaluation, and it is a deeply ethical question we are likely too in-the-middle-of- things for time in God's hand to have rendered a sufficiently clear verdict. But there is also a deeply biblical question about what the term "identity" might mean for those of us Paul describes as having died and been buried in Christ, whose present identity, as men and as women, is hid with him.
Do we speak far too confidently than God would allow us, in Christ, of any identity, as finally determinative of who we are in him? Perhaps the most Christian answer to the question of identity is permanently to confess that we do not fully know who we are, because day by day, as men and women, we are being made new creations in him, if indeed we are allowing his life to be the measure of who we are becoming. An entire lecture could be dedicated to this very important ethical question. I have said enough to indicate my own deep skepticism about whether there is something like a clear 'gay' or 'straight' identity, much less one that could be determinative in any major way for what it means to be a Christian.
II. The Character of the Biblical Witness and Christian Marriage
Now to the heart of the present challenge, which I believe is a familiar one in the ancient church as well.
Every opponent of Christianity—real or perceived—was an ardent scripture reader. We know this clearly from reading the works of the early church fathers. There we see steady and sustained engagement with rival views of scripture and interpretation, as they struggle to defend the church's faith and practice on the basis of the scriptures. It was said one time, 'there is no such thing as an impious heretic.' It could equally be said, 'there was no false or misleading account of Christian faith that did not take the form of an argument from scripture.' And how scripture delivers its proper sense.
Three examples.
If we are going to reflect on a theme like "The Ethics of Sex, Marriage and Family," and presume to be doing so on the basis of the canon of scripture, we must be prepared to accept a cardinal reality. To speak of Christian Ethics is to speak of scripture in action, in the lived life of Christian formation and catechesis. Increasingly, very few progressives dismiss the scriptural record on sex, marriage and family. Some of course still do. They are bold to proclaim that the biblical witness is not just wrong in its parts (Genesis 1-3 as ancient Hebrew musing, Paul as wrong or speaking about something else, Jesus as all loving and disinterested in a modern phenomenon like gayness, which exists in a timeframe the bible does not nor could ever be expected to comprehend). The Bible is wrong, outdated, or just not addressing the matter of the challenge of new understandings of sex and human thriving, altogether. If it gets things right, it does so accidentally or inferentially, like the proverbial blind hog finding an acorn.
I mention this right up front because, as with the early church, what we now see is something else: a heavy assault mounted from within Christian circles themselves on prior understandings of the estate of marriage and its goods. Not from cultural despisers or secularists, but from those who purport to argue that their new understanding is indeed scriptural after all. Many secular and religious proponents of same-sexuality had concluded earlier that marriage was a patriarchal invention that no card-carrying proponent of sexual liberation—gay or straight—ought to go near. Inside Christian circles, this has changed.
So alongside those dubious about scripture having anything to say, accidentally or properly, are those who argue that their new understanding of sexuality is somehow biblical after all. In this sense, the debate over marriage, sex and family is one in which both sides, or several sides, all appeal to scripture. That is, not unlike the early church examples just cited. So we must ask: What account of scripture is it that has been brought to bear on our present and older understandings of sex, marriage, and family. Because of its scale, depth, and complex two-testament character, Scripture is infinitely capable of producing multiple interpretations. Irenaeus used the image of a mosaic. One receives a gift of scripture with all its myriad pieces, and the goal of interpretation is to see the face of the king, Jesus Christ, when all the pieces are properly and proportionally assembled. But equally, one could toss out pieces that do not seem to fit what one is looking for. Or one could assemble them and produce a fox, or a mirror of one's own self: our needs and rights and our individual paths to thriving. Gregory spoke of scripture as a river in which infants could wade and elephants swim, at one and the same time. But he could equally have said, elephants drown and infants plumb false depths.
The church fathers appealed to a rule of faith when it came to proper interpretation of scripture. Much of the rule wanted to clarify that the scriptures of Israel, over their total warp and woof, spoke of Christ. He was the word to patriarch, lawgiver, prophet, the word that brought a good creation into being, one with the father. "In the beginning (arche) was the word" rhyming with "in beginning—in arche, in Christ—God created the heavens and earth." John 1 and Colossians 1 were telling us what the referents of the Old Testament truly were in the light of the Incarnation's filling full of them. In arche, in beginning the Word, rhyming with bereshith, in beginning, in Christ, God created the heavens and the earth. The triune God at work in his own special way inside Israel's scriptures, under cover within the privileged life God shared with the people of Israel. The logos asarkos—the word not yet made flesh—alive within the first testamental witness, because one with the only Lord God. In the language of Martin Luther, "Christ Jesus it is He, LORD Sabaoth his name, from age to age the same."
But several other things the rule would be seen to do. It ruled out pitting scripture against itself, so as to produce hotter or colder parts, some then to be rejected as false parts. It required that the totality of the witness be held in creative tension in one Lordly and coherent whole. It asked that prayer and humility accompany reading, because the difficult parts were likely to be where we would most learn, reliant now on a higher teacher than our first likes or instincts.
Sometimes their appeal to the rule of faith sounds like, the rule that the faithful possess and live by, and which we simply do not recognize in your reading of scripture or your account of Christ or his church. That is, its sounds like, something is missing or wrong or dangerous in what you are proposing, and we know that because it collides with our own present practices and handling of scripture. A kind of 'what we have you do not have' and therefore it lacks the right rule. Catholic faith is not monolithic, but is exists within a circle outside of which you have strayed. Through attenuation, selection, wrong priority, higher spiritual ascent beyond the apostolic witness, rejection of major parts, a refusal to countenance the need to be taught, favorite books, and making the first testament Christ-less. Someone else's religion en route, maybe, but only partially, if at all, to a new religion.
How the faithful sensed these outside-the-rule-of-faith threats also arose as on collision with early baptismal rites, the preaching of the church, its sacramental self-understanding in the form of emergent rites and practices, its liturgical life in time, all emanating from the scripture's total impress on the church as the Logos alive via the Holy Spirit.
This brings me to my first main biblical/ritual point. The Bible exists in relationship to the church's ruled life, which gives expression to its totality, its order, the fittingness of its parts. We have marriage rites. We ought to be able to see in them the rule of faith ordering how scripture comes to boil. When we look at them, what account of scripture do they provide?
I want to mention four components that are either given clear expression or are assumed.
The first arise in the conjunction of Genesis 1 and Christ's teaching in Matthew 19: male and femaleness as integral to the purposes of God in creation. God creates by bringing into being by his word, Jesus Christ, and by ordering. Day and night. Waters above waters below. Big light and lesser light. Male and female.
Within the modern debate, various conservative readers have sought to see in the Genesis account some deep structure of binary or complementary creational order. This could be a possible deduction, but it runs the risk of abstraction. The verbs used in Genesis 1 are not all the same from day to day. There is 'create.' There is 'let there be'. There is 'separate' (five times). There is 'gather.' Some binary separations emerge as a bulwark against the chaotic 'formless and void' over which the Spirit of God brooded.
On the fifth day living creatures of various kinds are brought forth and for the first time the word 'blessing' appears, strikingly, in conjunction with the command to be fruitful and multiply. Now we are not speaking of ordered separation that will remain permanent and fixed—creation versus chaos—but of separations in the forms of species that nevertheless come together and propagate, in the light of God's blessing them.
Day six forms the denouement not simply because God announces through a first-time 'very good' it to be so, but also because the creatures blessed and so capable of multiplying, we learn, are to be overseen in a special way by the male and female separated pair that are blessed and commanded to be fruitful and multiply. This humankind, this very good creation, is male and female, in the image of God. The fundamental act of differentiation is somehow mysteriously grounded in God's own character. God creates everything through every day through his word, arche, with the Spirit of God mysteriously and sacramentally present. Christ is the true image and likeness of God. Male and female are created with reference to him, and in some sense mirroring the differentiation of the One God who is a fellowship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in overcoming love.
The Rule of Faith understands the NT's penetration into the literal sense deliverances of Genesis 1 to be faithful purchases on the eternal truth there imprinted. And they do this in no small part because in the NT, in Matthew 19:3-8, Christ refers to the 'from the beginning' purposes of God as eternally expressed in Genesis 1 and inseparably connected to Genesis 2. Ephesians 5:31 and 1 Corinthians 6 track along this same exegetical logic. The Rule of Faith sees to it, then, that the parts of scripture rhyme with each other. The Genesis 1 account tells of creation through the Word, through arche, and it is not a Hebrew myth, a past word trapped inside a history of religion (the 'P' source), but a Word speaking to Israel and over Israel to the church and the created world itself eternally. Even subsequent adjustments concerning divorce, such as are referred to in Matthew 19, are but hard-rhyming necessities, brought about by the hardness of human hearts as lesser evils, as the law of Moses seeks to regulate sinful, east of Eden, human falleness.
The permanent purposes of God in Genesis 1, then, are a regular feature in marriage rites because they are reinforced in myriad ways across the mosaic of scripture whose central and focusing image is the eternal Lord Christ.
The BCP (so too the LBW) opens with this clear reference to blessing in Genesis 1: "We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony. The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation." The "from the beginning" purpose of God as Christ refers to it in Matthew is the lens on which the marriage ceremony opens.
What is now frequently referred to as the second creation account goes over the same ground as Genesis 1 with more specificity. Human begetting is made possible by the stability of the heavens and the earth, and their generations: Genesis 2:4 closes account one and carefully prepares for what follows. The complementarity, the overlapping character of the accounts is what has always been assumed in the tradition as critical to how they deliver their deepest sense. Male and female are in the image of God (1:26-27). It is not good for them to be alone, 2:18 then clarifies. A helper fit for/over against the man is found, that exists nowhere else in the created realm. For the ish, there is the separated ishah, taken from him and to whom he cleaves. A man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh. Leaving father and mother does not result in being alone but in being joined and in the creating of new life. This is the life God blessed in Chapter One.
The marriage rite speaks of this second key component when it states: The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God's will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Many biblical couples have no children. Indeed often this becomes the arena in which God's mighty and wondrous, free and untamable action can occur, as with Abraham and Sarah, Elkanah and Hannah, until culminating in Mary and the Holy Spirit. Mutual joy, help, and sexual cleaving, making possible children, is fundamental to the work of God, whether such children are forthcoming or not. That remains within the mysterious purposes of God himself, inside his ordering and oversight of creation.
The marriage rite, in accordance with the rule of faith, unites the intention of God in creation with the dominical adornment and Yes in John 2. Here is the third key component. The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.
The word present at creation and in the ordering purposes of God becomes flesh and now is present at a wedding at Cana. His mother—styled by John as 'woman' here and at the Cross—is a new woman/Eve. She proposes ('do whatever he tells you') and he disposes ('fill the jars with water'). The water of first creation becomes by his word the wine of his abundant, blessed, present-time creational 'very good.' His act of new-wine creation is the completion by God through the image of God, his son, of the first creational purposes of God. Working in conjunction with the obedient woman/Eve, the obedient Adam reverses the act of the first Adam. The obedient woman/Eve ('do whatever he tells you') and the New Adam manifest the glory of God made known in him. The marriage rite uses the language of adornment to capture something of the grand sacrament of John 3. Who is the man and who is the woman present at this marriage? In the rites of the church, it is the couple now standing before the selfsame work of God in Christ which the rite itself embraces and calls upon for blessing. The consistent reference to John 2 in marriage rites is the third key component.
Ephesians 5 is the next text the rite calls upon consistent with the Rule of Faith's amalgamating and according purpose. It signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people. Paul uses the language of mystery (sacramentum) when he concludes his commendation to the Christian household. Quoting Genesis 2 explicitly, he writes, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying it refers to Christ and his church." The sexual differentiation of man and woman, and the love that overcomes and joins them, is but a figure, a mystery, pointing to the love of God in Christ for the church of his claiming and redeeming. Here is the fourth scriptural component.
The collect of the marriage service helps us understand that it will require God's sustaining grace to bring forth the love and fidelity necessary for the solemn vows undertaken to be honored and kept. There is nothing natural or created of itself that brings about the conditions for right or lasting desire, fidelity, honor or blessing. We call upon the ever-living God, through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit to bless what Christ blesses as the Word of Creation made flesh, as at that signal adornment in Cana of Galilee.
O gracious and everliving God, you have created us male and female in your image: Look mercifully upon this man and this woman who come to you seeking your blessing, and assist them with your grace, that with true fidelity and steadfast love they may honor and keep the promises and vows they make; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
As the rite proceeds, we then hear read aloud from sacred scripture those same texts that rule and order the rite being enacted (Genesis 1; Genesis 2; Song of Solomon; Tobit), reminding us of their norming character. Not as differing options, but as all together speaking forth the selfsame mystery. The same is true of NT and Gospel texts, and the Psalms appointed. Two psalms (127 and 128) speak of the gift of children. Psalm 67 speaks of the blessing of God in creation. That one Psalm may be more important given the age and hopes of the couple does not mean they are not all operating according to the same rule of faith. The earth bringing forth its increase (Ps. 67) bespeaks the blessing of Day Five, and his blessing of us through this evokes Day Six's culminating purpose. "Let all the earth fear him," picks up the solemn final line of the opening address to the couple and the congregation: Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God.
The final blessing points to the final eschatological purposes of God, which far from eliminating the creational blessing enacted for the couple crowns and projects it.
We thank you, also, for consecrating the union of man and woman in his Name. By the power of your Holy Spirit, pour out the abundance of your blessing upon this man and this woman. Defend them from every enemy. Lead them into all peace. Let their love for each other be a seal upon their hearts, a mantle about their shoulders, and a crown upon their foreheads. Bless them in their work and in their companionship; in their sleeping and in their waking; in their joys and in their sorrows; in their life and in their death. Finally, in your mercy, bring them to that table where your saints feast for ever in your heavenly home; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The prayer unites the protological purpose of God in Genesis with the eschatological hope of Revelation, inside of which the joyous and gracious notes of Song of Songs give refrain.
What the Rule of Faith guards against is selection and discrete literalism, whereby texts are not brought into conjunction and seen to be mutually illuminating, but played off of one another via chronology or simple preference. The Rule allows to arise the full-orbed network of associations the texts themselves call forth, from Genesis 1 to Genesis 2 to Hosea to the Psalms to Song of Songs to Matthew 19 and John 3, Ephesians 5, Colossians 3 and right up to the close of the NT canon (Revelation).
III. Conclusion
To speak of ethics is to speak of the scriptures' making their force known through the rites of the church that solemnize marriage in accordance with the logic of the rule of faith. I am providing only one example of such a rite from my own context. Thomas Cranmer's greatest accomplishment was the production of deeply scriptural rites that operate within the fullest scope of the rule of faith.
Over against this accomplishment, proponents of same-sex marriage will therefore have several choices before them.
They can reject the plain sense articulation of the rites as such, and try to bring in a generic version that avoids the specificity of the biblical texts. This resembles the gnostic appeal to scripture as metaphor or a "for-instance," en route to a present improvement enlivened by appeals to higher insight.
They can declare the rites impossible to retain and construct altogether new ones. This is closer to the marcionite instinct. Search about within the canvass of scripture for those bits that reinforce what is wanted: Jesus as engendering virtues like love and hoped-for permanence in relationships, unrelated to male and female differentiation and difference.
They can let either of the above options co-exist with rites such as are described above, in the between-time march for their eventual elimination.
I mention this in conclusion because these things will happen or have already begun to happen. The word 'marriage' is being altered and the goal of 'marriage equality' is now fully part of our confused cultural and religious landscape.
What Christians can do is explain, commend, and defend the logic of the rites presently in place; maintain these as a rule of faith best capturing the totality of the scripture's witness, including Christ's own stated logic over the breadth of the scriptural testimony to him; and be prepared to understand the identity of the church as an increasingly minority witness to the truth as handed down from scripture and the scriptural impress on preaching, catechesis and liturgical ethics over the ages. Others will operate with versions of scriptural witness that should be familiar to us from the life of the early church, where they represented distinct challenges. We may take it as a given that we will have to be as robust and clear about how scripture informs the rites we are unwilling to forfeit, no matter what other options others wish to pursue, for this present season of confusion and a poverty of rightly hearing God's word. It can surely be no bad thing, and requisite upon us, to go to school again and hear how it is that God speaks through the totality of his word.
Especially critical will be learning how to hear the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, through the fog of developmentalism, historicism, consumerist choice, and individual preference that now blankets our churches, our culture, and our theological training centers. When Christ appeals to God's purposes in creation he is allowing the scriptures of Israel to rhyme with his own eternal life with God, as those scripture set him forth, and as the early church will proclaim when it declares his life, death and rising as in accordance with them (1 Cor. 15:3).
As one church father put it, the rule of faith is the harmony of the covenants at the coming of the Lord. That harmony one must seek through prayer and fasting to discern. Difficulty is not overcome by selection or pitting one portion against another, but by deep penetration into the scripture's totality, where Christ lives. This is the accomplishment of the marriage rites as ethical works norming the life of those who come for His blessing, as once he adorned the marriage at Cana of Galilee.
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First, the report is very conscious of the church's context and the demand it find a fresh way to address the issue of sexuality, particularly same-sex relationships (although it touches also on heterosexual non-marital cohabitation at paras 138, 148). This demand arises pastorally with gay and lesbian couples who are Anglicans and with Anglican clergy being approached for spiritual support by gay and lesbian parishioners. There are also the missional demands, particularly in the public square in the light of the legislation introducing same-sex marriage. It is noteworthy that the practical recommendations end by stressing that they are "the pastoral response which the majority of our group believe the Church of England should make as a result of the missiological challenges we identified earlier" (para 414, italics added).
These demands are pressing, second, because of the clear distance that has opened up between the church's teaching and the wider culture, particularly among young people and the political and media elites. This can lead to a strong sense of cultural dissonance. The report, after explaining its origins and task, begins here (paras 39-54) and frequently highlights this as a major new challenge the church must address (e.g., paras 123-173, Recommendations 8-12). This is particularly pressing in a national, established church, as demonstrated for example in Sweden. During my evidence to the group, when pressed on whether we did not therefore need to change I replied that the point may come when we have to decide whether we are primarily the Church of England or the church of Jesus Christ.
Third, the demands and dissonance are strong because of the recognition of homophobia, which the report stresses "is still as serious a matter as it was" (Recommendation 5) for which the church needs to repent, although it is clear that "no one should be accused of homophobia solely for articulating traditional Christian teaching on same sex relationships" (Recommendation 6). To counter this problem, its first recommendation, presented as the foundation of the report, is that "we warmly welcome and affirm the presence and ministry within the Church of gay and lesbian people, both lay and ordained" (Recommendation 1).
In this context the fourth reality is that of significant and increasing diversity and disagreement within the Church of England about how the church should respond. In relation to the church's teaching and practice the range can be categorised in terms of different mixes of reassertion, reassessment and revision. The group (a lay Chair, four bishops and three advisors) embodied a wide spectrum of views (although its weight, given known personal views, would appear to be between reassessment and revision) and was left in no doubt about the extent and strength of views in the evidence it received. The report encourages greater openness about this diversity, particularly among the bishops who have tended to seek to hold a common line, recommending that "all, including those with teaching authority in the church, should be able to participate openly and honestly" in debate and discernment (Recommendation 12).
This diversity and disagreement relates, fifth, to church teaching or doctrine. Here the report sets out, with extensive quotations, what the church has taught (paras 101-122) but offers little substantive explanation, let alone defence, of "the current teaching" in the face of the four challenges noted above. Although subtle, and under the guise of presenting something which all agree upon, the moral doctrine of the report itself — from the otherwise brilliant opening Prologue by Jessica Martin onwards — works with a paradigm focussed on virtue and the qualities of sexual relationship ("permanent," "faithful," "stable") as the key determinant in a Christian sexual ethic (e.g., paras 123-148). Little or no attention is given to divine commands or natural law or the created order or the witness of Scripture as providing a normative structure for sexual relationships. Indeed, on the key question of Scripture, one of its central arguments is that "we do not all believe that the evidence of Scripture points to only one set of ethical conclusions" and "Christians who share an equal commitment to Scripture do not agree on the implications of Scripture for same sex relationships" (para 235). Two alternative views are set out in the appendix with no evaluation by the group, although one suspects most are closer to the revisionist position of David Runcorn than the reassertion of a traditional reading offered by fellow group member Keith Sinclair.
Despite this, the report states "at the level of declared doctrine, we are agreed that there is not sufficient consensus to change the church's teaching on human sexuality" (para 349) and so "we uphold the church's official teaching whilst recognising that it is important for alternative views to be explored openly as part of an ongoing process of discernment" (para 350). However, why the teaching of the church should remain unchanged is never explained with reference to Scripture or tradition but left as simply a pragmatic judgment that "there is not sufficient consensus to change."
The diversity and disagreement relates also, sixth, to discipline, or how the church orders it own life, in particular its public worship and its requirements for clergy conduct. Here the upholding of doctrine leads to no change in one sense: there should be no formally approved liturgy for a service for a same-sex relationship (para 384) and all ministerial candidates should still "order their lives according to the will of the Church on matters of sexual conduct, and they should be asked to give an assurance that they will seek to live by that standard" (para 411). In relation to the latter area the only slight change is to stress that "whether someone is married, single or in a civil partnership should have no bearing on the nature of the assurances sought from them" (Recommendation 18), although it is said that the church needs to consider "the extent to which different disciplines on sexual conduct should be required of bishops, clergy and laity" (para 373). It is left unclear whether "married" here would include clergy legally married to someone of the same sex, an issue the House of Bishops will have to address in the near future.
It is in relation to public worship that the most significant change is made. Here it is argued that whereas in the past "the Church has resisted calls to celebrate civil partnerships in any formal or liturgical way" (para 380), "we believe that parishes and clergy, who conscientiously believe that celebrating faithful same sex relationships would be pastorally and missiologically the right thing to do, should be supported in doing so" (para 391). Although not authorised at a national or diocesan level, "it may be that the House of Bishops should issue guidelines" (para 393). The language of "blessing" is avoided (but the Chair reportedly said he would not write a letter of complaint if the press used such language) and reference made instead to "celebration" (paras 391, 392) and "an act of worship to mark the formation of a same sex relationship" (para 399, Recommendation 16) which it appears the majority thought could extend to same-sex marriages although it is stressed the service must nor resemble a marriage service.
Among the many serious questions this recommendation raises, four areas in particular are worth noting. First, although presented as a form of "pastoral accommodation" its institution of "local option" at a parish level does not fit well with the need for great care to ensure that, in the words of the FAOC report which used this terminology, any service is "bearing witness in special ways to the abiding importance of the norm" and will "proclaim the form of life given by God's creative goodness and bring those in difficult positions into closer approximation to it." It represents "local option" at the most local level and is more congregational than Anglican in its ecclesiology. Second, it appears to be more of a political accommodation or compromise within the group — conservatives get to uphold the doctrine but concede a change in discipline (this is almost hinted at in para 391). In practice it will lead to services being constructed by those who do not wish to uphold the doctrine and so are unlikely to do so in practice. Third, explicitly following the Church of Scotland's approach, it creates a disjunction between the church's teaching and its practice, risking the establishment on a formal level of precisely the hypocrisy that many have complained has existed informally for decades. It officially puts the practical cart before the doctrinal horse. Fourth, if approved by the bishops, this proposal appears to violate the Communion moratorium given the Joint Standing Committee made clear in 2007 that "the celebration of a public liturgy which includes a blessing on a same-sex union is not within the breadth of private pastoral response envisaged by the Primates in their Pastoral Letter of 2003" and the American bishops' assurances therefore were only acceptable if they meant that "the use of any such rites or liturgies will not in future have the bishop's authority."
Alongside these attempts to navigate the differences over doctrine and discipline the central proposal of the report is, seventh, dialogue. The group argues that this is the next step for the Church of England at a national and diocesan level. It prefers to speak of "facilitated conversation" rather than "indaba," although this appears to be a very close relative of the latter (paras 352-68). This should take the form of "consultation on this report … with a sense of urgency, perhaps over a period of two years" (Recommendation 3) and be "in close dialogue with the wider Anglican Communion and other Churches" (Recommendation 4). This is explicitly modelled on the group's own working pattern (paras 55-83) and although it recognises "we are not certain that consensus … is possible" (para 70) it believes that it may enable people "to recognize, first all each other's humanity, and then, perhaps, our shared belonging to one another in Christ through our common baptism" (para 71). Its purpose should be "relational, not institutional," listening "so the journey can continue in an atmosphere of respect for difference"(para 357). Although it is said there would need to be "clear plans for evaluation and determining next steps" (para 365) it is unclear how such a process will relate to and shape the necessary formal corporate decision-making. A weakness of the report is that by choosing to set out and argue for its own vision, it largely fails to set out clearly the arguments on key decisive questions and issues that need to be discussed in a way that enables the wider church to understand the range of views that exist. Here the report Some Issues in Human Sexuality, although ten years old, remains a far superior guide to the theological debate than this new report.
Eighth, the report clearly represents a proposed development in the Church of England's stance that may set a new trajectory. This is evident in both some of its substantive proposals developing the Church of England's position and in the methodological approach to this issue that it embodies and recommends. Although this may appear to be only small, gradual, and evolutionary on the surface, it is arguably revolutionary in both substance and method in that it represents at its heart a departure from received doctrine.
To draw together the various areas above, the report and what it recommends appears to be driven by the need to respond to perceived pastoral and missional demands in a changed culture and to combat any hint of homophobia. Alongside this is put a claim that the existence of diversity and disagreement means that we need facilitated conversations based on acceptance of that diversity, and claimed consequent uncertainty, as the only way forward. In addition, to honour that diversity the church's discipline must change and develop as soon as possible in order to reflect the diversity and reduce cultural dissonance and apparent homophobia. Throughout this, received doctrine in the form of church teaching and its sources in Scripture and tradition is effectively reduced to a silenced spectator. Although it is said that this is currently left unchanged, doctrine is explicitly detached from discipline (a move the Chair reportedly described as "Anglican in the best sense of the word") and implicitly detached from Scripture whose teaching it judges unclear. It is noteworthy that the only substantive sections of the report not cited to explain its recommendations are those on Scripture and theology and that the wording in recommendation 2 that the conversations "should continue to involve profound reflection on the interpretation and application of Scripture" appears to be a last minute "fig-leaf" addition (it is missing from p. 22).
Christian doctrine, rooted in Scripture, rather than providing a basis for assessing and critiquing other factors such as context and practice, is now to be reshaped by them. As a result, the quality of life and the life expectancy of "the current teaching of the Church of England" appears to be much reduced by the Pilling Report.
The final feature of the report to note is the present and looming reality that this explosive cocktail will likely result in division or at least differentiation among Anglicans in England as it has in North America. This is evident on the face of the report in that, very unusually, it includes a significant "dissenting statement" from the one evangelical bishop on the group, the Bishop of Birkenhead, the Rt. Rev. Keith Sinclair. The report offers no basis to support the view that further dialogue is likely to prevent this outcome and yet it appears to have nothing to say to the bishops about how best to address this situation other than further dialogue about sexuality. Yet this focus for dialogue is one where it is clear many — across the range of views — believe that diminishing returns set in some time ago. As illustrated by initial responses to the report, there are such strongly held but incompatible theological and missiological worldviews driving people that the dialogue, when it is not simply the dialogue of the deaf, is increasingly more akin to interfaith dialogue than even ecumenical dialogue.
What the Pilling Report and its reception will perhaps show us is that rather than following its recommended departure from doctrine under the guise of "pastoral accommodation" or simply more talking about sex, what we urgently need are facilitated conversations that focus on the reality of our deep-rooted divisions on doctrine and the need to discern what differentiated church structures should be created in response to this reality. If some new structures can be found, that would mean that Anglicans committed to different patterns of doctrine, rather than continuing to struggle to establish their view as that of the Church of England, could be given the security and freedom to respond as they believe right. Shaped by their different doctrines, they could each address the real and challenging pastoral and missional demands, respond to the experience of cultural disconnect and dissonance, combat homophobia as they understand it, and establish their own form of church discipline in terms of clergy conduct and public acts of worship. If we can find a way to put such structured freedom and security in place so that we can all bear witness with integrity to what we believe is true and represents good news for our nation, we may, paradoxically, find it much easier to dialogue and work together across our diversity and disagreements. Then, as each approach seeks to share faithfully in God's mission as they understand it, we could follow the Gamaliel principle cited by Runcorn and leave God to judge which developments and which trajectory is more faithful.
Andrew Goddard is associate director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics based in Cambridge and has taught Christian ethics at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and Trinity College, Bristol, and is an adjunct professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. He is a canon at Winchester Cathedral and assistant minister at St. James the Less, Pimlico, where his wife, Lis, is vicar. He is author of a number of books, most recently Rowan Williams: His Legacy (Lion, 2013).]]>
1. Claim:
"Final authority in matters concerning all was vested in General Convention and, in due course, Executive Council between Conventions [5]…. From the beginning until now, [the General Convention] has limited its decisions with respect to specific local situations, but in making decisions for the whole church, its authority is supreme [9]…. Episcopalians have, since 1785, consistently assigned final authority and function in our church to the General Convention itself [10]."
ACI Response:
It is likely that the sole purpose of this Primer is to make these two (related) claims about final authority and supremacy. We note the following:
2. Claim:
"Article VII (now Article VIII) required all members of the clergy to "conform" to the "doctrines and worship" of the Church — which are decided by the General Convention [6]."
ACI Response:
This references the Declaration of Conformity, often referred to as the ordination "vows." The current declaration of course refers to the "doctrine, discipline and worship" of the Church. But the Primer misrepresents the Ordinal and the pledges it requires of ordinands.
3. Claim:
"From the beginning, the first Constitution made it clear in its second Article that "if … no deputies either lay or clerical, should attend at any General Convention, the Church in such state shall nevertheless be bound by the acts of such Convention [6]."
ACI Response:
This claim is legally uninformed and intellectually irresponsible. The legal language "bound by" as used in the 1780s has been analyzed in one of the most influential law review articles of recent years. This language does not mean what the authors of this paper imply. In any event, this language was completely removed from TEC's Constitution over a hundred years ago.
4. Claim:
"That third [1789] General Convention met and adopted the first Constitution and Canons (unlike the United States Constitution, which was ratified by the individual states) [6]…. So the General Convention created and adopted the Constitution, without referring it first to the several state conventions (in fact it was originally their reason for being) [9]."
ACI Response:
This is a misrepresentation of the process by which the Constitution was adopted. It was not adopted by General Convention as an entity, whether by a majority of votes or even by a majority of votes by orders or states. It was adopted by the duly authorized representatives of each state church, who signed the Constitution on behalf of their state churches.
5. Claim:
"There is no record of any congregation in the United States that did not accede unconditionally and irrevocably to the authority of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church [7]."
ACI Response:
Again, this misrepresents the constitutional process. Dioceses do not accede to "the authority of the General Convention."
6. Claim:
"Over and over, the foremost nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators on the government of The Episcopal Church have refuted this ["states' rights"], and General Convention has never accepted any legislation tending in that direction. While each diocese has significant latitude in ordering its life in adaptation to its local needs, it cannot make decisions that affect the whole Church, including itself [9]."
ACI Response:
7. Final ACI Response:
The paper ignores the legal structure of TEC, which is that of a voluntary association of dioceses.
The Bishops' Statement on the Polity of The Episcopal Church (April 2009) can be read here.
The Affidavit of Mark McCall (April 2013) can be read here.
The revised Primer can be read here:]]>
I am someone who once assumed that TEC was a single entity, and that dioceses were an integral part of this entity, gears in a larger machine. The notion of a diocese "leaving" TEC never crossed my mind, and in fact seemed simply antithetical to the meaning of "Church". I still think this, deep down, and much of my academic writing on the Church has been devoted to trying to understand how Christian unity properly founds the very nature of our Christian faithfulness, as it is engaged by God's gracious gift of Himself to our rebellious hearts and hands: God for the godless.
Nonetheless, this past year I found myself on the side of supporting just those arguments that Judge Ortbal made upholding the Diocese of Quincy's departure from TEC. I did so for two reasons. The first was a more limited one: several years ago I had become convinced by the careful work done by my ACI colleague Mark McCall on the legal and procedural significance of TEC's Constitution for our polity, framed within its historical context as well as its formal meaning. This work has yet to be answered in any convincing way by those who disagree, and now appears to be persuading courts over and against 815's expert witnesses. McCall's thesis, in sum, argues that the Constitutional framework in which TEC was set up and long continued to operate into the present, was one in which separate dioceses gathered and worked together on the basis of each diocese's willingness to participate. TEC is a "voluntary association" of dioceses, in which member dioceses are free, under certain procedural constraints, to disassociate, just as they were to join. As I said, I have found it difficult to escape the conclusion of McCall's reading of our Constitution on this matter, even though it has gone against instincts I had previously trusted.
But just this sense of contradiction has also forced me to reconsider the character of our church's life more theologically. This brings me to the second, and more profound, reason for my support of Judge Ortbal's reasoning: at the root of TEC's fracture lies our General Convention's failure to engage our church's own identity, an identity rooted in the deeper character of unitive mission that ought to inform our life. In brief, the Church's unity is given in her "apostolicity", her apostolic mission. When the latter is subverted, unity disintegrates, and this is what we have seen happen in TEC. The result is not a "good" – I continue to believe that the disassociation of dioceses like Quincy, Fort Worth, South Carolina, and San Joaquin constitutes a failure of the Christian life. But the reversion to diocesan "independence" represents the almost natural reassertion of the will to apostolicity that one would expect in a situation of profound ecclesial dysfunction. And that reversion has something to teach us.
The polity question has to do with General Convention in this case. Dioceses, at least in theory, joined the Convention because such joining represented the furtherance of the apostolic ministry of the Church. They have disassociated themselves when that ministry was being impeded by General Convention. Part of the demanded reconsideration of our common life has to do with figuring out why this has been the case, and on what basis.
As I have tried to do this, I can articulate the following explanation, identifying basic theological claims as they work themselves out within the limits of our particular life as an Anglican church.
In the first place, I think it important to understand the Church as an entity of organic unity, rather than in simple structural terms. The Church is "united" as she lives in time, lives in a certain way while doing certain things, and does so through the concrete lives of her members. Individuals make up the Church, and hence it is called "the people of God". The organic life of the Church, in unity, is thus constituted by actual people who follow Christ, make choices about this, and live in and through Christ Jesus. If there is to be a "oneness" to the Church, it is only as these individuals live together in a certain way, and subject themselves mutually to one another, much as in a marriage. (Ephesians 5 is a crucial text here.) And the Church's mission is given in just these kinds of actions by people for the sake of such actions by other people. The "apostolic" character of the Church lies in the outgoing life of her members as they give themselves – what we might call "self-expenditure" – for others in the truth of Jesus. The web of mutual subjection grows, even as the sign and reality of God's self-giving in Christ takes ongoing shape in time. Properly speaking, "apostolic ministry" is that ministry that furthers this reality. And the focus of apostolic life – not its exhaustive reach – has been given, we believe, in the Church's episcopal ministry of Bishops.
The second step, in this reflection, is to place General Convention within this broad theological framework. General Convention was set up, in the 18th century, for the purposes of furthering the ministry of that "communion" identified formerly with the Church of England in America. But its purposes were facilitative, not essential. It held key duties – guarding the BCP, and integrating ministries of various kinds. But these duties were diaconal, in a real sense. If General Convention was a synod, it was one that served other synods, both those on the diocesan level, and those that bound this local "communion" to the larger Church's broader communion (a possibility that did not take flesh until almost a century later). Synodal life, after all, is also something that is bound by the apostolic calling of the Church, and General Convention's function is properly judged by this calling.
Evaluating the recent shape of General Convention's life, I see a tremendous set of failures in the Convention's inability to further this apostolic ministry. On the one hand, General Convention has herself failed in the outgoing life of subjection in Christ; and on the other, Convention has subverted the ability of her members to do the same in their own spheres of personal life, especially bishops acting as pastors with their flock, or dioceses. One can outline this briefly:
What can I conclude from this albeit broad and incomplete assessment? Only that General Convention has ceased to be a truly apostolic synod. Its procedural and relational myopia has robbed it of its capacity to fulfil, at least for the moment, its apostolic calling. And not all synods, after all, are apostolic, something that is known only by a synod's fruits. When the fruits of a synod subvert the apostolic unity of a church, that synod has simply ceased to fulfill its function. And thus, the relationships of bishops and dioceses to this gathering become ipso facto, matters of prudential deliberation, not essential ties. It is not odd if, say, the Diocese of South Carolina, has chosen to disassociate from General Convention: where a bishop and diocese find their ministries, construed as best they can to be faithful, to have been subverted by their association with the Convention, they are bound, in our polity, at least to consider this option.
To me, this began to become clear already before 2003. The past decade has confirmed General Convention's problematic ministry. The point isn't that leaving General Convention is somehow demanded; I don't think it is. (The apostolic calling of bishops and dioceses works in both directions). But this period has nonetheless underlined the more basic responsibilities of bishops and their dioceses, which properly exist independent of General Convention (although not independent of the larger Church). Bishops represent the personal form of the Church's apostolic calling, and their diocesan ministries embody this in a more immediate organic sense than do the larger councils of the Church. This is why the Lambeth Conference and other Pan-Anglican gatherings have consistently held dioceses to be the "fundamental units" of the Church in Anglican understanding. Councils are not personal entities, but rather serve them. Bishops and their dioceses, instead, are the objects of God's judgment in the way that larger councils cannot be, for just this reason. The fact that American dioceses, as it seems, can disassociate themselves from General Convention is a purely local legal matter (in other Anglican churches, let alone other traditions, they cannot). But their ability to do so, in TEC, at least underscores this more fundamental reality of apostolic faithfulness and judgment: bishops and their flock are accountable before God for the witness of self-giving to the sinner in Christ's truth. They are accountable, for they carry out personally the choices of faith that lie before all disciples.
But this personal accountability before God that falls on bishops and dioceses also provides American Anglicans with a constructive opportunity – this would be a positive outcome to the "After Quincy" moment. That is, our bishops and dioceses have the responsibility and means, as personal agents, to respond to those who have disassociated themselves from TEC, with actions of apostolic holiness. Those bishops and dioceses who remain in TEC and understand their vocation as here described should seek to win back, through their witness and love, those who have disassociated themselves. As Paul reminds us, even enemies can be persuaded by our acts of faithful outreach towards them. How might this happen? My goal here is not to outline this aspect – which involves, obviously, not just being "nice", or dropping lawsuits, and the rest; it involves the hard work of rethinking decisions, articulating dogma, re-establishing relationships of trust with the larger Communion, and providing space for the flourishing of reconciled brethren, on terms that are mutually acceptable. These would all be aspects of "apostolic holiness", because they will require the cost of self-giving to those deemed "far off", out of a love for God's truth and glory in Christ.
But my point here is that, whatever is involved in such efforts, they would amount to a personal act, bound to the personal Lord whose personal words call us forth into life. The "fundamental unit" of the Church has a fundamental responsibility, one that no one else can assume. This is all the more true when we find ourselves in a time of fracturing. This is not a matter of the House of Bishops taking some initiative. It is the responsibility of each and every bishop and diocese taken as accountable agents, "builders" who stand before God on their own terms (1 Cor. 3:1; Gal. 6:4-5). I am appealing here to individual Bishops to reach out on whatever terms they can.
That General Convention's actions seem to limit such personal witness is, from the start, a mark against its synodical integrity. That litigation and legal repudiation have been the order of the day on the part of General Convention's servants only underlines this failure. Rather, "After Quincy" seems to be a clear call to the permission of a distinct agency of apostolic life on the part of bishops and dioceses to pursue responses of repentance, reconciliation, concession, and self-giving, quite apart from what we might judge to be the indifference or opposition of a General Convention meeting every three years If we have anything to learn from the civil judgments against TEC's institutional claims over individual dioceses, it is that these dioceses and their bishops bear a responsibility, greater than perhaps they had realized, to make those decisions necessary for the healing of Christ's body. There are, I would guess, more bishops and dioceses who are up to this, even seeking this, than the weight of General Convention has allowed to flourish. This calling is one that falls on dioceses and bishops that have disassociated themselves from General Convention as much as on those that have chosen to remain (sympathetic as they may be with their departed brethren, given the deteriorating state of affairs).
In a providential arc of history, Episcopal churches have begun to revert to the condition of the Anglican "communion" prior to General Convention's invention. We are all "missionary dioceses" in a way. And ones, I pray, on the way to a more faithful union.]]>
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Toronto, Ontario
September 20, 2013
Greetings to the Faithful of the Anglican Communion and all our Friends in Christ:
We write to you from a conference in Toronto, Canada, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 Pan-Anglican Congress held here. We are Primates and bishops representing the Anglican Global South, including the chairmen of the Global South Primates' Steering Committee, Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa (CAPA), and Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON).
We thank Wycliffe College and her friends for hosting us.
We have heard talks recollecting our Anglican legacy from this 1963 Congress, and gave thanks in worship and fellowship for the astonishing missionary growth to which the congress both called and pointed us. In the midst of our gathering, we were blessed by a live address from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, commenting on the Congress theme of Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ.
We commend the calls we received in the conference talks, which included:
Our final talk inspired us to a revival of the missionary spirit of the Toronto Congress.
In this spirit, we lay before you the following:
We ask that our Communion consider our offering and our desire to be faithful in it to the vision laid out not only 50 years ago at the Toronto Congress, but for many years before in our common life.
Finally, please know that we rejoice that Jesus is the center of our unity, amidst all our hopes and struggles. "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete." (1 Jn. 1:3-4)]]>
There are numerous background issues and specific historical factors that probably need a quick review—what role does a solemn declaration have in ACoC; does TEC have a basically diocesan polity by constitution and canon; what happened at GC 2012 in respect of SS blessing rites and how has that morphed into other things on the ground; is 'extra-provincial' a Communion-warranted category (approved at Dar Es Salaam) available for dioceses like SC which find themselves isolated in the province in which they were located.
But I want instead to begin with a more simple illustration, the now typical 'story' that introduces the Sunday morning sermon. I do this because to use the word 'encouragement' is to point to the fact that for conservative Anglicans it is no longer about serious debates, or theological arguments, or a proper liturgical understanding of this or that new rite.1 Rather, it is about the more basic question of continuance in a church that in many serious ways no longer resembles itself through time. Conservatives have become strangers—in worry or in fact—in their own church, because time marches on and the claim is made that as it does it makes "ancient good uncouth" (as the hymn puts it). That may look slightly different on the ground in Canada—more polite, perhaps—but here the Episcopal and Anglican counterparts in NA face I think the same basic challenge. Our vocation is to live in God's time and that will require suffering, confusion, and struggle to preserve what we hold true as the friction with another account of time—in culture and in the church—is increasingly great.
For the last three months I have been working on a commentary on the prophet Joel on a grant from the German foundation Alexander von Humboldt, in Lower Saxony, at the University of Goettingen. My preferred pattern is to take long walks in the afternoon to clear my head and to think through how I want to return to the next block of writing. My setting for this was ideal, for next to our rented house was a grand forest full of logging roads and more basic forest paths. At times, when I started exploring, the forest world be so dark I had to get my bearings by listening for the train on its regular back and forth from Hannover north and Frankfurt south, or by searching for a massive communication tower that stood at the top of the forest preserve and towered over it. Only when one knows the paths and roads well can one relax enough to move forward with confidence and freedom of mind.
In thinking about this talk, my mind wandered to the same setting in snow. Having learned the paths and recognized the familiar clues, the same daily hikes would be a pleasure, now cloaked in the white powder of God's glorious raiment.
For many conservatives or traditional Anglicans, we are being beckoned to leave the paths we and our forebears have travelled. We see enthusiastic supporters and their cultural secular colleagues striking out on fresh trails. Their footprints are visible in the snowy detours from the main path. They may say with boldness and much conviction that here are Jesus' footprints as well. Either he blazed the trail in ways formerly we did not see; or it is his job perennially to encourage 'prophetic' trail-blazing and this is the warrant for striking out. We might pause to tease the distinction out here, but it isn't necessary at this juncture, given the enthusiastic conviction that the new paths are the main business of our common life, however much the older paths may remain selectively useful.
The question for conservatives, especially if a word like "encouragement" now points to the kind of vocation that is incumbent on us, is: Will we be allowed to travel the well-worn paths of our faith, mission, and common life'? We find on the one side warrants for the new paths in calls for diversity and inclusion and that is fine. Our questions may take instead these forms:
I hope that by what I have said it is now no longer a matter of insisting that the new trails have no theological warrant we might all agree, and that therefore they are to be ruled out of our common life by means of measured debate. The time for that discussion is now past. Decisions have been made. Camp has been struck and the footprints in the snow bear present testimony to travel as a fact—indeed an exciting and promising fact—on the ground.
This also means we are in a new time. What was advocated for, fought for, and strategically brought about, is now here. In the same march of time to which we were called, against our wills and against our own sense of God's time, we can now see a before and an after. We are not in the same time as ten years ago, or even five. In the march of this new time, with a new map, one group has brought about what they wished, and another group has been defeated, politically, in trying to preserve a former theological vision and inheritance. We are at a different place on the march of time than we previously were. The new time we have inherited turns out not to be monolithic—for that everyone needed to be a winner, excited to have a new map—but has hours and minutes after all. In the season we now inhabit, our theological convictions have not won the day or even been safeguarded, but have been set in the shade of present victories for the new map of new travelling. For how long will the former understanding—once held by all—still be possible to maintain?
This temporal fact may also be a genuinely 'new thing' even though it might not have been contemplated by those who have sought and won new trails to follow. Traditional Anglicans, operating on the basis of a common prayer, catechesis, scripture, pastoral rites, and mission, have "lost." Lost, in the sense that if one believed there was a single rite and a single understanding of marriage (or the sacrament of Holy Communion), that is no longer so. The only question, one supposes, is whether two different rites will exist side-by-side, which is itself a clear pointer to the defeat and to a different understanding of rites as such.
As a footnote, it was probably always the case that intermediate steps on such a quest for new maps, would never retain any integrity, if such they had in the first place. General Convention in TEC discovered it would not be possible to produce a supplemental liturgy even if they wanted to because the rules governing that could not be properly followed (they needed more bishops, especially retired ones, present for a vote). So we got a blessing rite of some description that each Bishop was to approve or disapprove. (The irony here is of course that this version of 'diocesan polity' was anathema in other areas of our common life).
In August—and this is but one example amongst many—a Seattle newspaper reported that a same-sex couple would be married in the Episcopal Cathedral there with a service out of the BCP. The couple—a Roman Catholic and a Methodist—were quoted as solemnly declaring that they didn't want a service that was 'made up.'
If one studied the affair closely, it appeared that the Bishop's own statements about this service sought to clarify that it was a different kind of liturgy and not one out of the BCP. But here the very problem with new maps and new trails raises its head. For the couple and for the newspaper this only amounted to so much distracting footnoting. Isn't even the new 'intermediate period rite' not out of the BCP anyway, they might counter, and not be all that wrong in so doing. Once the clutch is released on intermediary stages, one cannot really control the departures from the former, constitutional rite or say how they should stand still. Other forces come into play in the very nature of the case. That is what it means to blaze a trail – you cannot know for sure what will happen. Or, you know very much what will happen because you know where you want to get ahead of time and will be sure you arrive there in the end.
And so we are in a new time. This is no longer a time of advocacy and strategy, but of accomplishment and tidying up.
And so we find ourselves before the title assigned for this session. "Why encouragement for North American Parishes and Dioceses matters?" It matters because of where we are in time. New maps and new trails are the markers of our present time. We did not believe they were proper trails to follow, but the time of that conviction, in the practical terms of our common life, is drawing to a close. Others who were concerned have left already and have their own new trails to blaze in that choice. So it is time to shift the question—given the reality it correctly presupposes—to another, slightly different, formulation: 'what would encouragement for parishes and dioceses look like?' What form would it take?
We are an episcopal church—a church with Bishops and dioceses—so perhaps it is best to start there instead of with the question of parishes – which in this understanding only flows from it and cannot be taken therefore in isolation. It might be possible to speak of parishes independently of Bishops and Dioceses, but to do so would be to point to a state of affairs more in extremis than, I believe, even this new time is requiring.
Encouragement would take the form of allowing the status quo ante to remain among us. Not the starting of a new church, or a new province, with all the work that is required properly to do that: liturgies, provincial structures, new Prayers Books, fresh Constitutions and Canons. (This is another kind of 'new time' creation). It would mean allowing traditional Anglicans the space and right to hold on to the forms of Christian life they presently inhabit. If a new liturgical rite, a new metro-political PB, and probably a new constitution (in the case of TEC, reinforcing a new polity) are now part of the agenda of the new season, will dioceses and parishes be permitted to do what has been done up until this new time, as the church inhabited this time and space previously? The "conservative" in this instance, demurs any longer from comment on the new map—the time for that is now past; our disagreement is firmly in the record—because we are able to "conserve" what has been the church's teaching, preaching, worship and mission and not be required to come out onto the new trails. Can Bishops be given oversight of parishes, if they exist in dioceses which wish to inhabit the new trails and new maps? Can dioceses which wish to conserve the patterns of worship and common life they have been inhabiting, be allowed to do so? If parishes in their midst wish to strike out on the new trails, they will be free to do so as well.
At issue here is the conviction that where the Anglican and Episcopal churches in North America have been was then and remains still a valid and trustworthy expression of the church catholic. A single rite for the sacramental blessing of a Christian marriage has been the practice of the church catholic, and it is found in the liturgical rites of Canadian and American Anglicans. Can this be retained as such, as a single rite? Those who wish to augment this, or replace this, will do so, and will determine for themselves which of these two trails, or others, is to be preferred. That would obviously no longer be the business of the minority of traditional 'conservers.'
In the Episcopal Church, it may be necessary in time to do the work to alter the Constitution so as to warrant new understandings of the office of Presiding Bishop, General Convention's relationship to church property, a new Prayer Book with new pastoral rites, or all of the above. I cannot speak about the Canadian counterpart, including things like the Solemn Declaration, which is itself tied into a self-understanding of a Church of England also in flux. If this happens (constitutional alteration), it would formally bring to an end any for-now arrangement of cordiality toward conservatives, such as is being here described. That is only logical, if those who wish to remain with the previous self-understanding indeed did so. They would then say goodbye to erstwhile colleagues and fellow Anglicans, and would be parted in the same manner by those who wish to move out onto new trails and an embrace of convictions regarding sexuality, worship, mission, polity and other matters.
This 'encouragement' for parishes and dioceses, it can be argued, comes as a consequence of both sides acknowledging what is now a fact – and a hard-won one for those who have worked for this new time. We are in a new time. The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in Canada want to move onto new trails with new maps, and they are boldly and enthusiastically so doing. The footprints clutter the snowy fields beyond the well-worn paths.
Can those of us who do not wish to strike out into this territory, and who have made our case against it and have been out-voted in our respective church contexts, be allowed to retain the paths and patterns of our life heretofore, which previously we all shared? Can we resolve to find the practical ways to do that for our new time, mindful that it might not last very long in any case, as new formal self-understandings take form to regulate a new life on new trails for those who out of conviction believe God is calling them to them? At the very least it would send a better signal to the world than the trail of litigation and expense we have witnessed in severe terms in the US. It would also help identify where Anglican Christians stand in this divide, so that our Communion friends could recognize and acknowledge us, morally if not more formally.
It would also hand back to God the time that is his own, and allow him to judge in the times that are in his hands, how he means to extend his church throughout the world. Let justice and mercy kiss each other, as conservative are permitted to remain on familiar trails, while the larger Episcopal and Anglican bodies in North America forge ahead where they believe God is calling them. If in time they part ways, at least it could happen in a spirit of charity and loving-kindness. That in my view is the opportunity this particular chapter in the new time allows us. Modest and taxed though it is, it might be a gift of encouragement to parishes and dioceses in North America.
As I have prayed about this talk and reflected on God's time in scripture my mind has returned again and again to Isaiah and his words in chapter 8. "Bind up the testimony, seal the teaching among my disciples. I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding his face from the House of Jacob, and in him will I hope." The prophet was not exempt from this season. The LORD's face was hidden from the House of Jacob, not individual rooms within it. So it was. So the waiting and hoping were sharpened on just this stone. This is where I believe we now are, and this is what encouragement for parishes and dioceses in North America now looks like. Waiting and trusting, as God hides his face for a season, for his own eternal and final purposes. As he remakes us all.
A version of this article is available for download here (PDF)]]>
In April I submitted an affidavit in federal court in South Carolina on behalf of Bishop Mark Lawrence. It was one of several affidavits submitted by the Diocese of South Carolina in response to litigation filed against Bishop Lawrence by parties supporting the position of the Episcopal Church in South Carolina. My affidavit included work on issues relating to TEC polity that I have done over the last three years but had not previously published. This affidavit has been part of the public record for several months. ACI is now posting it online.
My affidavit contains a detailed analysis of the legal structure and history of TEC. The following paragraphs provide an overview of the analysis:
26. In the remainder of my affidavit I will examine the account of TEC's structure and history presented by Plaintiff's expert witness, Robert Bruce Mullin. This account is profoundly mistaken and contains numerous errors, misrepresentations and failures to understand relevant legal concepts. But before turning to the detailed analysis it will be useful to present an overview of what that testimony is trying to accomplish.
27. As I will show below, Mullin concedes as he must that TEC's governing document, its Constitution, contains no explicit language giving any central body hierarchical supremacy over its member dioceses in recognizable legal language. He claims instead that such supremacy was an "assumption" that is only "reflected," not stated, in the church Constitution. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that while "explicit language of supremacy was necessary" for other churches, for TEC "language of supremacy in the Constitution was unnecessary and, indeed, inappropriate."
28. To justify why TEC alone does not need the standard legal language readily found elsewhere Mullin develops an alternative theory of TEC's structure and legal history that he characterizes at the outset of his testimony as "an extended historical and theological analysis of the development of the Church's hierarchical structure from its earliest days to the present."
29. In this section I will consider carefully what Mullin admits about the lack of standard legal language expressing hierarchy. In the next section I will show that his alternative theory cannot withstand scrutiny.
30. Although I challenge in this affidavit Mullin's interpretations of TEC's legal history, constitution and canons and 200 years of related documents, it is important to reiterate that Mullin characterizes his testimony as "an extended historical and theological analysis." When his testimony is understood as he himself describes it, it is clear that the Plaintiff is asking the Court to go far beyond anything the First Amendment permits. Courts cannot sift through 200 years of ecclesiastical history pursuing "assumptions" that were allegedly made in the 1780s and never stated explicitly but were only "reflected" in an ambiguous historical record. Courts cannot constitutionally enter a theological thicket that requires "immersion in doctrinal issues or extensive inquiry into church polity." Maryland and Va. Churches v. Sharpsburg Church, 396 U.S. 367, 370, n. 4 (1970).
The entire affidavit can be read in pdf format here.]]>
The unexpectedly rapid civil acceptance of same-sex marriage in the West may lead one to imagine that the issue is somehow already settled. Whatever doubts one may have had, they have been swept away by the overwhelming flood of changed public opinion. Fait accompli. Traditional Christians must simply step aside now.
Such a judgment would be a mistake. Indeed, far from the matter being settled, at least form a Christian perspective it has hardly been engaged, despite claims to the contrary by proponents of same-sex marriage. What we have had instead is a bait-and-switch set of tactics, first seeking civil and religious recognition and affirmation somehow of same-sex attractions, then pressing for ordinations, then blessings of unions. What comes next? The question of a "slippery slope" is hardly a fallacy here, for in this case we have a historical track-record of legal advocacy and movement that stands as quite rational "evidence" for the slope's existence.
All the while, most discussions claimed that "marriage" was never nor could be ever the issue at stake. But here we are: changes to "marriage canons" and Prayer Books are now in the works. At this stage the advocates of change are merciful enough to suggest "conscience clauses" for those who disagree.
"Disagree" how, exactly? What happened? Was a carefully developed argument offered, studied, engaged consultatively across lines of commitment and ecclesial fellowship, and then adopted by a kind of consensual accord? Of course not! Failure to persuade on the part of same-sex advocates has simply been reinterpreted as "legitimate decision in the face of minority dissent".
What is key to remember is that no sustained argument or persuasive action has taken place on the matter of same-sex marriage. Attempts, like TEC's "Same-Sex Relationships in the Life of the Church" (2010) have been largely ignored, in part perhaps because they witnessed to the irresolvable differences governing the views expressed. I write this to traditional Anglicans who might have missed this fact. For if no persuasive argument has been offered, all that has been at work are the currents of unconscious sentiments tethered to the impersonal dynamics of institutional policy-making. The arguments, meanwhile, remain unaddressed.
And because the arguments have been unaddressed, they also remain potentially open to persuasive reordering. Traditional Christians should not, therefore, think that they have "lost" the argument. They have not yet been engaged, and it is possible to press for the truth openly and therefore effectively – indeed we are responsible for doing so.
Let me summarize where it seems to me the public arguments for same-sex marriage in the Church have in fact arrived – basically, a heap of unsubstantiated assertions that are, in their ensemble, incoherent. Indeed, it is both important and sad to note that forceful assertion rather than careful argument is now the way TEC carries on most of its business.
1. Scripture
Forceful assertion unaccompanied by convincing argument has proved to be the modus operandi for the advocates of change. For one thing, the Bible offers several rather pointed prohibitions to homosexual acts. This has, with reluctance, been an immovable challenge to advocates. True, these prohibitions are not numerous, but they occur in both the Old and New Testaments. In addition, the Bible is suffused with a vast, rich, and interconnected fabric of heterosexual marriage imagery, and explicit discussion, much of it deeply charged theologically.
The basic approach to these facts by advocates of change has been to press, theoretically, for an interpretive method of Scriptural reading that stresses historical discontinuities and cultural relativism. In brief: whatever the Bible says about sexuality, sexual relations, marriage, etc., is fundamentally irrelevant to the current life of human beings in the Church. Rather, it is shaped by cultural outlooks and social practices that are distant from us and from our understandings. Christian attitudes towards sexuality today, therefore, must be shaped by something other than the "commands" or sanctions of Scripture's explicit discussion of sex.
How does one support such an argument? First, one must demonstrate this cultural divide in understanding that separates the authors of the Biblical text from today, and that informs the actual substance of the text's meaning. One can do this in various ways. First, one can try to reconstruct the cultural attitudes of the biblical authors, and show how alien they are to ours. Second, one can engage in historical word studies that purport to relocate the meaning of certain words used in the Bible into contexts that in fact alter their referents from apparent contemporary meanings. So, for instance, one tries to demonstrate that porneia in the New Testament does not refer to homosexual activity in any general way but to something else altogether. Third, one can show that today's shared attitudes about these matters have changed and are accepted as such.
Here we must raise the first objection to those who have assumed the argument is over. For in fact, all these attempts at asserted historical cultural divides, between the minds of "biblical authors" and contemporary moral understandings, are nothing but speculation. From the historian's point of view, they are founded on the thinnest of evidence, if any at all. We know nothing of the "authors" of the Bible. Further, we know very little about their "cultures" other than what we have in the Bible itself. What it might mean to understand how people in the past "think" – let alone people we do not know! – is a task fraught with irresolvable difficulties. The practice of historical word-study has been shown, except within very tight parameters (which we do not have with the Biblical text) to be wildly misleading. I could go on. In short, from a purely social-historical perspective, the entire project of arguing the same-sex issue on the basis of human discontinuities, especially those purportedly evident in the biblical text, is methodologically bogus. Believe none of it, because none of it is provable, and much of it is highly improbable on a purely historical basis.
One might, of course, note a central contradiction that same-sex advocates have accepted in all of this. For they have also tended to argue on behalf of profound continuities in human sexual orientation: people's sexualities are stable, embedded, and consistent across cultures and epochs. There have "always been" large numbers of gay persons and so on. How this conviction lines up with scriptural-cultural relativism is not clear. What it demands, from this perspective, is a strong notion of "progress", in human knowledge , moral fiber and sensitivity. That is, in this case the "divide" is one, finally, of the heart and spirit, not really of culture at all: today, we are more compassionate, more open, just, and the rest. We are, in short, "better" people than before, better, certainly, than the "authors" of Leviticus or than Paul. Needless to say, this is a difficult claim to make in the wake of what we know about contemporary human behavior.
To be sure, the notion of sexual continuities across time is not universally held by the advocates of change. The idea of social and now individual construction of sexual forms is one prominent element within so-called Queer reflection. But the latter's deeply anarchic moral project fits incoherently with most Scriptural arguments on behalf of same-sexuality, and should probably be seen as an altogether alternative path from that pressing for same-sex marriage. The distinction between Queer Theology and the public attitudes of most same-sex marriage advocates, however, is rarely acknowledged, and people should be aware of this. Similarly, the category of "bisexuality", that has been fastened into the midst of the "LGBT" identity acronym, sits uneasily within a notion of stable sexual orientation (as it does within any notion of "faithful" gay "marriage"). Again, this is something that has rarely been addressed openly.
In any case, the claims of the historical relativists with respect to the Bible are, to this point, simply unsupported by any commonly accepted method. And these claims, as a whole, not only beg the question of what the Bible "is" in with respect to the Christian Church's life, they press the question insistently. In Anglicanism, we are (or were) agreed that Scripture is the "rule and ultimate standard of faith". But how this is the case has not been addressed by same-sex advocates in any common fashion, if in any fashion at all. Not that there are no theories, which range from political readings to ascetic translations of pneumatic character. But virtually all of these fall far outside the longstanding traditions of Scriptural interpretation across denominations. Don't be fooled: the exegetical job simply has not been done by advocates of change.
2. Science
One of the elements in the historical relativist argument is that we "now know more" than in "biblical times" about sexuality. This is usually linked to the progress of scientific knowledge. But what has "science" told us in this realm? Same-sex marriage advocates in TEC's Theology Commission chose to eschew the "findings of science" in their discussion, and well they might have, for scientific studies about sexuality have in fact offered little of solid or commonly accepted evidence for single theories. The search for genetic structures that directly determine sexual feelings and orientations has been frustrated. Notorious studies of twins have failed to gain methodological acceptance. Psychological theories, obviously, are wildly divergent and now politically unpopular (though still hovering about in many corners, and not only of the Freudian variety). Most scientists agree – though without any precise and synthetic evidentiary frameworks to back them up – that genetics plays a key role in sexual development, but they also agree that social location is deeply important. How the two relate is completely unknown, and recent studies regarding the reality of neural "plasticity" have only made this matter more murky (as well as casting a shadow on the simple claim that "God made us this way"). As one adolescent psychiatrist told me, "we are in the scientific Dark Ages" on this topic, much like cosmology was in 1400. It's a sobering thought in the face of irresponsible claims to the contrary.
And the "science' here is not just about biology. Social science similarly, especially with regard to adolescent formation, media influence, peer molding, and of course family, is in a constant state of flux and contestation. The Mark Regnerus controversy merely underlines how little we know about family rearing. (The respected sociologist Regnerus, to remind readers, did a rigorous review of studies, as well as his own research, and dared to question claims that had been made regarding the benign outcomes to same-sex parenting. For this he was not only vilified, but subjected to outrageous academic harassment. It is important to note that this kind of political coercion is rife in the so-called "scientific" community.) The debate also exposes the ongoing inability within the discipline to have the kind of "random" sampling from the general population that must undergird any valuable study related to this issue. (This was one of Regnerus' major points, whatever one thinks of his own conclusions.)
The notion that "science shows us" x and y about same-sexuality, and in a way that can and ought to inform our ideas about same-sex marriage is, frankly, ludicrous at this point. This is not to say that there is nothing to learn from such scientific study; only that it is not of a form in our era yet to have provided useful knowledge. Furthermore, it is legitimate to raise the question, "how can we responsibly make sense of the scientific data we do have within a Christian framework?". That question has yet to be posed, let alone answered in this discussion.
3. Philosophy:
If not exegesis or science, what in fact lies behind the claim that same-sex marriage has a compelling rationale? This is an important question. At the very least, we can say that people go forward in their decisions, at least if they do so deliberately, with an underlying and informing philosophy. When it comes to same-sexuality, including same-sex marriage, there are no doubt many informing philosophies at work. It is important to realize that many of these are often incompatible amongst themselves. I have already mentioned the contradiction between historical-cultural relativism and notions of a continuous and stable sexual human "nature. Related to this are the tensions between Queer theory's constructivism and many claims to genetic essentialism. There are also divergences between notions of evolutionary (moral) progress and embedded human diversity that must be respected. None of these views fit well with each other, and are often at odds with each.
I suspect, however, that there is one philosophy that is more commonly held than many, especially among younger people. It is what I would call "benign individualism". In religious terms this fits with what some have dubbed "therapeutic deism", the notion that God's nature is to provide a general context for our selves' individual comfort. At its base, it is a conviction that individuals are good, and that their goodness demands self-affirmation and expression. Politically, it views society's purpose in terms of permitting, encouraging, and protecting this affirmation. Anybody can be anything they want to be. Indeed, anyone can be anything they want to call themselves, as long as it "doesn't hurt anybody else". And we should help each other do this.
This isn't a particularly well-formed "philosophy", to be sure. It is minimalist and derives from the mixed dregs of a pot-pourri of inherited cultural-political attitudes. Still, it is well-engrained, with Facebook and YouTube providing iconic frames for self-presentation, of every kind and in what (despite worries over cyber-bullying and predation) most people believe to be intrinsically benign contexts. Watch me play the guitar (poorly)! See how I can say the most silly things and get away with it! Listen to my poetry (please)! Notice the funny things I'm doing with my body!
Of course, we can always turn the computer switch off on this kind of benign self-expression, as boring, irrelevant, embarrassing, immoral, or just too much. My son, as an 8 year-old, thought he could sell his signature on eBay: "I could be the next Lincoln!". And he was free to peddle himself as such. But the market finally rules, and not one person took the bait. For those whose inner needs are compulsive, by contrast, benign self-expression requires more than a forum; it requires external support and sanctions, in order to be embraced by others. "You will listen to me! You will affirm me!" That turns the philosophy into a claim with a coercive edge, which is just what we have seen.
The philosophy of benign individualism, however, is incoherent, or at least seriously incomplete on several fronts. Self-affirmation is not universally upheld in many realms. E. g., in the sexual realm, society firmly rejects pedophilia – although we know cultures have had different views of this, from the Greeks in terms of homosexual engagement [whence the contemporary NAMBLA group] to the marriage of children. We can rightly ask: what age is appropriate for "reason" or "responsible" freedom of sexual self-expression? What makes "sex" "consensual"? What are the lines within which sexual behavior "doesn't hurt any one" and outside of which it does? The bottom line is that, however much self-expression is valued, all societies impose order on these matters. Where does it come from? Some larger meta-philosophy?
At the moment, such an overarching philosophical framework no longer exists in common. And it certainly has not been articulated in any clear way by advocates for same-sex marriage. In our society, such order has emerged by default from or been imposed by largely commercial dynamics – via music, film/TV, internet, social media. These are money-making ventures. We are all aware of this: "self-expression" is a slippery concept, when the "self" itself is formed by a range of imposed identities and its "expression" is defined by a set of socially formed and peer-received shapes. Sexuality – and sex – is a commodified reality in our society, something bought and sold, and exchanged for the sake of further commerce. To what extent this is the case is debatable; but it is hard to question the basic fact. Lurking behind benign individualism, then, are larger social and economic realities that weaken the philosophy's claims to integrity from the ground up. And on this ground we can see the self-immolation of "progressive" sexual claims: for they appear to be among those most cravenly toadying to the potentates of Capital.
I am being slightly facetious in my last observation. But only slightly. It is true that Christians have traced disordered lives to the universally present disorders of individual human hearts, rather than primarily to social and economic "forces". But Christians have also always understood, as Scripture confirms, the powerful effect of formation, especially upon the young. Eli does not escape the judgment God brings upon his sons! And it is odd to see how insouciantly the overarching "philosophy of sexuality" has been so easily handed over to the Eli's of the market.
Just here we see how the "benignity" issue remains a thorn. "I am a gay man. I love another man. I want to be married to this other man. Gay marriage doesn't hurt anybody." How is the benign defined, so that it "doesn't hurt anybody"? Who is defining it? How do we know? Back to science and social science: we don't! Hence, all that is left are the dynamics of the market-place, and the putative philosophical claims are shown to be tied to nothing but the powers of commercial interests. If someone were to charge our young people and their sexual spokespersons with being patsies of "the Man", here more than anywhere else I would frankly agree.
Isaiah Berlin argued that philosophy is intrinsically "revolutionary". In this case, the philosophy behind same-sex marriage both is and is not revolutionary. It is, in that the claims of a radical benign individualism are tied up with the wholesale demolition of social structures and moral claims of the past. It is not, in that the "philosophy" involved here is suspiciously a front for already embedded interests, which have seemingly conspired with some of the most involuted of human motives. Ideas have been marginalized, and in fact have slipped out the back door altogether.
4. A Christian Understanding of Sexuality
This is not the place for a substantive discussion of what, in the face of the empty "arguments" for same-sex marriage, ought to be a genuinely Christian alternative. But it is worth sketching that alternative from one perspective, however compactly.
First, we might ask, is there a "Christian" perspective here? In light of disagreements about scriptural exegesis, and the thinness of science, and the contestability of informing philosophies, should we not just say that everyone chooses their informing vision arbitrarily, and thus all that is left are the often mysterious manipulations of the levers of social power? And when traditional arguments that place the begetting of children at the center of sexual life are dismissed as but one outdated social idiosyncrasy, is it possible to respond?
The social philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has argued that human beings order much of their common life in response to the inescapable fate of death. For most of the world's history, the usual form of this response was to achieve some kind of "immortality" through procreation, the leaving behind of children for the future, and Bauman places traditional Christianity within this philosophical matrix. What we have today in the West, he says, is a shift in which a sense of immortality is now grasped in the moment, the unextended experience of "now" – pleasure, self-expression, and so on. Understandings of sexuality will emerge from this difference, and procreation will give way to sentiments of immediate gratification. This isn't a question of who is right. Simply take your pick. And social dynamics will see to it that one is more pickable than the other.
Perhaps this overall sense of arbitrariness is true. It is difficult for me to know how to prove that it isn't. But what is not true is the characterization of a Christian outlook given here, tethered to some more general human yearning in the midst of a short and brutish existence. And this is important to see, precisely because the distinctiveness of the traditional Christian outlook on sexuality, to be fair, must be evaluated on its own terms of expression. It is my conviction that, if it is so expressed clearly and evaluated fairly, its persuasiveness will be compelling. It will certainly be far more compelling than the flaccid alternatives that we have been told are the given future of our race.
For Christians have never understood their necessary encounter with mortality as resolved through procreation as an escape or genetic necessity. Just the opposite: procreation, given within the primordial shape of our humanness, leads us more fully into the reality of mortality and into its divine meaning and outcome. To be a mortal human being is to be born to parents, and to die in the wake of the struggle for familial generativity. It is how one does this that determines the character of a life.
So, the Christian view is not "immortality through procreation", but more starkly, "suffering procreative love". Suffering, in the full sense of receiving and bearing, of patience and yes, even of pain. It is just this line that connects creation, Fall, and the free redemptive act of God in Christ, that draws itself out through the renewed lives of Christian women and men. It is just this line that connects the outline of Genesis' opening, Israel's calling and fate, and the final vision of Revelation's divine marriage. The love of human beings one for another creates new life through sexual coupling, and this love is nurtured and lost in remarkable ways, such that only the grace of God, given in the body of Jesus crucified and risen, uncovers its final beauty and meaning, in an act that heals.
This outlook has proven itself – and I believe it is provable textually in biblical and traditional terms – remarkably synthetic and coherent of Scriptural and ecclesial realities over the centuries. It has made sense, not just of the world for this or that people in this or that time; but it has done so for a "catholic" range of life, and in doing so has made sense of the Christian Gospel as it was given and proclaimed in diverse places and times, and as written within the whole of the Scriptures.
Further, it explains the shape of the Church's explicit teaching and ordering of life over the centuries as well. The suffering of procreative love, after all, has social implications. It is not simply a set of ideas. Socially, it implies – and has generally upheld — a broad, yet defined, framework of mores, within which there are a range of experiential realities. These have included, centrally, heterosexual marriage, the demand for fidelity and stability, the begetting and raising of children, the responsibilities of husbands and wives, and of parents for their children, and so on. But the social frameworks for the suffering of procreative love are vital precisely as they permit suffering: the suffering of infidelities, abandonments, childless marriages, divorce, and the rest. It is not that these elements are goods, but rather that they come upon us through sin and must be borne faithfully. Indeed, it is possible (and, I would argue, more than probable) that this framework can contain elements that gay advocates early in the movement sought – civil protections of various kinds. What is highly unlikely – and I would argue actually impossible – is that the framework of marriage outlined here can itself be translated into something else, without changing the very terms involved. "Procreation", "suffering", and a "love" that is defined within the shape of the former two realities, cannot be reconstituted in homosexual relationships, which cannot sustain the line from Genesis to Revelation noted above. There are, after all, only three explicitly sexual components to human life: friendship, sexual attraction and engagement, and procreation. The three do not always coincide, nor need they. And only when all three do coincide does the social framework of Christian marriage – and I would argue, the civil community – have an essential interest. Only here is the suffering of procreative love an extended reality.
An old Vaudeville joke goes: What's red, hangs on a wall and whistles when you squeeze it? The answer is: "a herring". But a herring isn't red; "you can paint it red". But a herring doesn't hang on a wall; "you could hang it on a wall". But a herring doesn't whistle when you squeeze it; "if I made it too easy, you'd guess it right away". One could apply the rhetoric to the present case: What sleeps together, loves each other, and has children with each other? Members of the same sex can and indeed do sleep with each other (sexually); can and do indeed love each other. The imprecisions and porousness of experiential logic allow for all this. Why not? But the concluding qualifier is possible to assert only as a form of enforced trickery. Even with medical interventions, it is "too hard" to accomplish. One can mock the image of Adam and Eve as the "parents" of the human race. But the theological logic is not so easy to dismiss: we are human beings as we are born of a mother and father, suffer that begetting, and enter into its explicit current within the grace of God.
Indeed, this is why the issue of children has become the crucial focus of the same-sex marriage debate. For Augustine, marriage was about three things: begetting children, faith, and the sacrament, in that order. This is a conclusion he comes to and insists upon, even after contorted discussions of Old Testament vs. New Testament times, the population of the world, the nature of Paradise, and so on. It is based, as he opens his famous treatise on "The Good of Marriage", upon the fact that we are all descendents of Adam and Eve, "one race" joined through the character of procreation. But not procreation alone; procreation that is bound to faith and sacramental grace, each of which reflect the realities of God's own suffering love in Christ, and that finally found the "society" of human life itself. To have children as a husband and wife, suffering in love their generation and mortal fate, is to reflect the "shadow" or figure of God's act in creating us and redeeming us.
This does represent a coherent, and historically consistent, Christian perspective and set of claims. Children derive from a single mother and a single father who have joined themselves for this purpose, and have committed themselves – in the face of many past and future failures – to raising their children together. The love that sustains this is procreative, and the frameworks that order this are those within which we bear our lives and live them. One can rightly call this "natural law"; one can also rightly view this as Scripturally demanded. And within both perspectives, the still unmet arguments of Bible, history, and science noted above do in fact find a common resolution. They all "fit". And thus far, in the face of this staggering fit, same-sex marriage proponents only mumble. And it remains a wholly unmet challenge to offer an alternative whose fit is of equal or even comparable clarity.
This is the answer to the charge of "arbitrariness" for traditional Christian claims. Worse than that, if the fit is real, the mumbling is actually deeply destructive. Refashioning procreation to forms of relationship that are no longer founded on the prior demands (whether met or not) of mothers and fathers within formative families is to rearrange the character of divine creaturehood. When some traditionalists argue that a child has a "right" – a "human" or "divine" right – to be raised by his or her own mother and father, the claim is to be taken seriously, for it is, from a Christian perspective, prima facie compelling. And if it is true, as it appears to me to be, then the civil permission of same-sex marriage, with all the protections it offers for child-conception, bearing, and parenting by same-sex partners, must represent an assault on the "rights" of children of the deepest kind. And from a Christian perspective, this assault must be resisted with all our vigor.
This is a strong conclusion. And it is not one to be shrugged off in the face of the rapid civil and in some places, ecclesial acceptance of same-sex marriage. We should not be lulled into thinking this is minor, as if it were impossible for so many good people, including Christian people, to be so wrong. Remember what happened with slavery! A practice basically outlawed, on moral, civil, and theological grounds by the 15th century (indeed, much earlier), was, in a matter of a few years, universally taken up again by Christians, with only marginal resistances. Not until the late 18th century did Christians once again find themselves recalled to their evangelical duty on this score, and in the face of much opposition. This single case is a warning to all sides in the same-sex debate, to the Left and Right both: it is possible to be deeply and horrendously wrong; it is possible to be a Christian and be horrendously wrong, along with one's leaders and friends and fellows. The case of slavery is also a word of hope: it is possible to be horrendously wrong, to have gone wrong, and yet eventually for the church to regain its evangelical bearings. It is, finally, a word of realism: such a recovery of sight can take centuries, including centuries of unwarranted suffering and evil.
Warning, hope, and realism together on this matter means that traditional Christians cannot and must not consign themselves to an easy acceptance of the shifting status quo on same-sex marriage. We must continue to speak articulately, to teach faithfully, to challenge energetically, and to accept the consequences of our commitments on this score. We can no longer rely simply on our intuitions, let along our institutions, whose strength ebbs and flows and whose form fluctuates and changes; nor must we allow others to do the same.]]>