Here is the faulty theological argument - God celebrate LGBT marriage?
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| Canterbury Cathedral. View from the north west circa 1890–1900 (retouched from a black & white photograph). (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
This article was written by an Anglican priest. It seems like a nice cordial friendly piece which seeks to be open and friendly but at the cost of biblical truth. He has presented his flawed argument seeking to sound biblical, Christian and righteous. But in reality, it is a false charade of half truth and outright lies. For example read the quote below, and see where this is coming from.
"LGBT Christians do not want to be "included" on the basis that their sinful relationships are overlooked by a merciful God, but rather that their relationships can themselves be sacramental - visible signs of the divine love."
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THIS IS THE ARTICLE BELOW
While the Primates were ensconced in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, a fascinating exchange was taking place online. The debate between Martin Percy (Dean of Christ Church, Oxford - in the "affirming" corner) and Ian Paul (Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham - for the "traditionalists") provided ample evidence that each side needs the other. (Percy's arguments are online here, here and here, with Ian Paul's responses hereand here, and his analysis of the Primates' statement here.)
Drawing on the recent work of John Barclay, Ian Paul makes the important distinction between grace being unconditioned (in the sense that you do not need to be worthy to receive it) and grace being unconditional. As Barclay writes:
"Paul expects those who receive the Spirit to be transformed by the Spirit and to walk in the Spirit. As he puts it, we are under grace, which can legitimately lead to obedience, even obligation."
So what is the nature of the obedience and obligation to which God calls us? That is the crucial question in the debate, and as Ian Paul observed, none of Martyn Percy's essays offered anything to substantiate the assertion that same-sex relationships are compatible with the obedience to which the Scriptures call every Christian. Instead, Percy's main focus was on the inclusive nature of God's love and forgiveness.
The danger of Percy's line of argument is that it simultaneously "preaches to the choir" (convincing only those who already share his assumptions about the goodness of same-sex unions) and confirms the conservatives' suspicions (in a way that is in fact unhelpful to LGBT Christians) that the "affirming" viewpoint is somehow less committed to obedience and faithfulness.
In his response to Ian Paul's critique, Percy again sidestepped the challenge, arguing for the full inclusion of LGBT Christians on the basis of the "gospel of God's astonishing atoning, boundless, redeeming love in Christ, and of God's free grace - something that is not deserved, and cannot be earned by any of us, and is bestowed through Christ as our saviour." We express the "boundlessness" of God's love by what he forgives.
It is true, as Percy observes, that:
"[Jesus] has a habit of associating with the undeserving. He has habit of making peripheral people central. And in all of this, he asks us to rejoice with those he saves; be happy for them."
But this hardly helps us to answer the question at the heart of the Anglican divide. For, as traditionalists will quite rightly point out, the undeserving people whom Jesus makes central - tax collectors, adulterers and prostitutes - first repent, then are forgiven and change their way of life. Zacchaeus no longer extorts those who pay tax, and what Jesus says to the woman caught in adultery is "go and sin no more."
Martyn Percy seems to confuse two ideas. The first is that divine forgiveness is boundless. That is true whatever the sin, if there is repentance. The second is that Jesus's teaching encourages us to ask questions about what isreally sinful and what is not: sin is not to be seen in terms of the inherited purity code.
It is the second idea to which Percy can validly point. He observes elsewhere that LGBT Christians are not just seeking love and forgiveness; they want their relationships - and in some cases, their ordination - affirmed. As he writes, "Lesbian, gay and bisexual Christians don't just want love; they want equality and justice too."
The question is what acts are just, what acts are righteous, what acts are sinful. God forgives sinful acts, when there is repentance, but God does not bless or affirm what is unjust, what is unrighteous. The question of the intrinsic sinfulness - or (in my view) not - of homosexual acts cannot be sidestepped.
By sidestepping the Scriptural arguments on this issue, Percy fatally underplays the strength of the case for an "affirming" attitude to same-sex relationships. The case for permitting the blessing of same-sex relationships should not be made with question-begging appeals to inclusion. The fact that Jesus included all kinds of sinners does not help us to work out what kinds of sexual relationships might be sinful. If the Biblical case for an "affirming" attitude is based solely on Gospel passages about sinners, it will confirm traditionalists in their suspicion that such an attitude is based on the failure to distinguish accepting sinners from condoning sins.
Those of us with an affirming attitude to same-sex relationships should have more confidence in the Scriptural case for their position. For the ethical perspective, and the hermeneutic of Scripture, which the Anglican Communion has accepted in the case of remarrying divorcees and of ordaining women to the priesthood and episcopate would itself seem to lead towards the acceptability of the blessing of LGBT Christians' relationships. (There is a distinct question as to that whether this blessing should take the form of marriage, and it is interesting that the Primates' statement rules only on this latter issue.)
Concordances and contexts
On all three issues, the key question is how the Scriptures are to be read. At one extreme, we have what I will call the concordance approach. The methodology here is simple: to find out what the Bible says (about divorce, gender and sexuality) you just need to find the key words ("divorce," "women," "homosexuality" or whatever) in a concordance, and then try and make the plain sense of the various passages as consistent as possible.
While that is the logic some in the Anglican Communion want to follow on homosexuality, it is obviously not the approach which has been adopted by many Anglicans on divorce or on women's leadership. On both of these issues, the "concordance" approach would yield a traditionalist position - although affirming views have been deemed permissible.
On divorce and on women's leadership, the affirming position is still one rooted in the Scriptures. But it has involved a more contextualized approach. On divorce, the key passage is Matthew 5:31-32
"It has been said, 'Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce'. But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery."
To accept the remarriage of divorcees, the church has gone beyond the plain sense of the passage, and contextualized it in two key ways.
Firstly, it has sought to understand the context of divorce in Jesus's own day, and the particular practice he was condemning. In a society where a husband could abandon his wife to penury by issuing a certificate of divorce, simply because he preferred another woman, the practice of divorce would indeed be adulterous. But this does not answer the question of whether all divorces in all societies have the qualities Jesus is condemning.
This first contextualization - a deeper understanding of the practice being condemned - leads on to the second: a prayerful exploration of the contemporary issue. Sometimes, it may well be that a woman is trapped in a marriage with an abusive spouse. Or it may be that someone is single after a marriage which fell apart many years ago. The wider witness of the Scriptures - as well as those other sources of authority for many Anglicans: experience, reason and tradition - leads many Anglicans to conclude, in such situations, that the practice of divorce and remarriage is acceptable in such situations. A crucial part of such discernment will be our lived experience of second marriages. Do they manifest the "fruits of the Spirit," as they are described by the New Testament writers? Another will be our evolving understanding of what the goods of marriage actually are.
These same considerations are deployed in the debates surrounding the ordination of women. It is precisely because so many Anglicans have experienced the fruits of women's ministry as priests and now as bishops - of lives transformed by Christ and communities renewed and revitalized - that an increasing number recognize the validity of their ministry. Such discernment is both mandated by the Scriptures - which promise that the Holy Spirit will guide believers in their understanding of God's purposes - and must go alongside a deep engagement with what the Bible itself has to say.
Again, a concordance approach would clearly uphold the traditionalist position. Some traditionalists have sought to evade this by arguing that, unlike homosexuality, Scripture does not speak with one voice on women's leadership. But if our sole guide is the plain sense of the text, surely we ought to interpret them as consistently as possible. In which case the message of Scripture is very clear. In 1 Timothy 2:11-15, the reasons given for women to be silent in Church are explicitly not ones which only relate to the context of its time:
"A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing - if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety."
All of the other passages on women's leadership could be interpreted in a way that rendered them consistent with 1 Timothy 2:11-15. So the choice made by supporters of women's ordination - among whom I would include myself - recognizes that there is more to the authority of the Bible than simply forcing the texts to be as consistent as possible and then applying them.
The process of contextualization must again go beyond the plain sense of the particular passage. To move from the clear intent and logic of this passage to the ordination of women to the episcopate requires a recognition that what St. Paul says here is conditioned by the perceptions of women that were dominant in his culture. Guided by the Spirit, informed by later experience of the leadership gifts which women clearly have, the church has judged that the egalitarian message of Galatians 3:28 and the practice of Jesus overrides the plain sense of this passage.
How might these principles apply to the debate about same-sex relationships? The key passage here is, of course, the first chapter of St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, where - as so often in the Bible - sexual immorality is associated with idolatry: the abandonment of the true God, as "men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another" (Romans 1:27).
Here, again, the concordance approach will undoubtedly yield a traditionalist position, whereas a more contextualized understanding would ask the following questions:
- What kind of same-sex relationships was St. Paul aware of?
- How did he understand them?
- What, therefore, is being condemned here and in other parts of his writing?
- What is our contemporary experience of same-sex relationships?
- How do they differ from what is being condemned in Romans 1 - and, indeed, 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10?
- What are the fruits of these relationships?
These, of course, are considerations commended by Jeffrey John in his book Permanent, Faithful, Stable, which was published more than twenty years ago. My own views on the issue owe much to the case he and others have made for understanding St. Paul's condemnation to be of practices that no one - whether of the "affirming" or "traditionalist" viewpoint - would wish to defend.
I have also been deeply influenced by my experience of LGBT Christians: people like Jayne Ozanne, who have paid a very heavy price for seeking to live according to a traditionalist worldview, being prayed over for "healing" repeatedly before coming to recognize their orientation as God-given, and gay relationships as godly; and couples who have lived out Jeffrey John's ethic of "permanent, faithful, stable" relationships, many of them engaged in deeply sacrificial Christian ministry in contexts where heterosexual couples with children would often hesitate to serve.
When can we agree to differ?
None of this is to argue that every Anglican who accepts the remarriage of divorcees and the ordination of women is somehow logically committed to accepting the blessing of same-sex relationships. But it is hard to see why Anglicans are able to agree to disagree on the first two issues and not the third:
- To remarry divorcees and to conduct same-sex marriages both go against the Primates' Communique, which affirms that marriage must be "between a man and a woman in faithful, lifelong union."
- To remarry divorcees and to bless same-sex relationships both involve a contextual judgement that the reference of the key Scriptural texts is narrower than the plain sense would suggest - which is to say, that Jesus's words only apply to certain kind of divorce, and that St. Paul has in mind a kind of same-sex relationship which is very different from those now being blessed.
- To ordain women, unlike remarrying divorcees and conducting same-sex marriages, goes directly against a New Testament injunction, rather than simply narrowing its scope - and indeed, in the case of 1 Timothy 2, against the basis of the injunction offered by St. Paul which he appears not to regard it as specific to his culture and time.
- To allow a diversity of views within the Communion - and, indeed, within a Province - on any of these issues means canon law will have to allow for some ministers to conduct marriages and ordinations which others will consider invalid.
All of this might lead one to wonder: is it really respect for "Biblical truth and godly order" that has led the GAFCON Primates to be willing to share Communion with brothers and sisters who remarry divorcees and ordain women, and yet to draw the line at same-sex marriage?
By accepting the first two and baulking at the third, are the Primates of the Anglican Communion being "prophetic" and "counter-cultural," or does this pattern in fact reflect the norms which prevail across their different contexts? In contexts as diverse as North America and Africa, the Far East and Western Europe, the remarriage of divorcees and the leadership of women meets less cultural resistance than same-sex relationships. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the order in which the Communion has addressed these issues is driven less by the logic of Scripture than the mores of their prevailing cultures.
I have argued elsewhere that the Church of England will - for both theological and pragmatic reasons - have to treat the blessing of same-sex relationships as a difference of view which is consistent with continued unity of the Body. I suspect that the same will, in the end, be true of the Anglican Communion. It is hard to see how ultimately we will be able to "walk together" on any other basis. More importantly, fidelity to the Biblical hermeneutic which has allowed us to agree to disagree on remarrying divorcees and ordaining women applies - possibly with even greater force - to this issue.
The gift we can be to each other
It was a very un-Anglican poet who wrote:
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie usTo see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion
As Burns's Night approaches, his words may help us see the enduring value of the Anglican Communion. Continued prayer, conversation and engagement across different cultures and traditions can rescue each of us from narrowness of vision. Seeing ourselves as our brothers and sisters in Christ see us may in turn help us see ourselves a little more as God sees us. This will encourage us to do more than "preach to the choir" of our particular corner of the church, and to engage patiently with the (sometimes justified) concerns others may have about our practice, doctrine and reasoning.
The exchange between Martyn Percy and Ian Paul, from one small corner of that Communion, suggests some of the ways in which we might need each other's correction and challenge.
"Affirming" Christians need to move beyond the appeal to secular equalities legislation, the (empirically dubious) claim that a more liberal church is better placed to win converts, and appeals to the "inclusive" ministry of Christ based on passages where he forgave sinners and called them away from their sins. We need to engage more confidently with the Scriptural texts at the heart of the traditionalists' concerns.
HERE IS THE LIE BELOW:
LGBT Christians do not want to be "included" on the basis that their sinful relationships are overlooked by a merciful God, but rather that their relationships can themselves be sacramental - visible signs of the divine love. Percy concludes his final essay by quoting F.W. Faber's wonderful hymn There's a wideness in God's mercy. There is indeed a wideness in God's mercy, but it is a mercy they need no more or less than any other child of God.
Canon Dr Angus Ritchie is Executive Director of the Centre for Theology and Community. He is currently Priest-in-Charge of St. George-in-the-East, Shadwell and Assistant Priest at St. Peter's, Bethnal Green.
