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Rowan’s Reflections: Unpacking the Archbishop’s Statement
by the Bishop of Durham, Dr N.T. Wright (in collaboration with ACI and Fulcrum)
Introduction
1. In the two days since the Archbishop released his ‘Reflections’ on TEC’s General Convention, they have already generated widely differing responses. We always knew, say some conservatives, that the ABC was a hopeless liberal, and this has confirmed it. Not so, declare many horrified radicals: he has obviously sold out to the conservatives. Some have warmly welcomed the statement and hailed it as paving the way forward. Cautious voices in between are trying to discern strengths and weaknesses. In my view, there is much to welcome, and much whose implications need further unpacking. The two main sections of this paper deal with these two aspects.
2. I have tried to bear in mind that the Archbishop is himself not only an Instrument of Unity but the one which has to hold on to everything at this moment. Lambeth 2008 didn’t say much (apart from what the ABC himself said); the status of ACC and Primates are under question in various quarters; it is up to him. He therefore has an obligation to maintain as broad a conversation as possible, and that is continually to be seen in his statement. As often (for instance in his poems, and in his recent book on Dostoevsky) the Archbishop’s writing challenges its readers to pause, to ponder, to think things through. One commentator has suggested that he employs a characteristically British habit of inviting the reader to draw the really important conclusions and giving them the space to do so. This piece is an attempt to take up that challenge and invitation.
Points to Welcome
3. The ABC rightly indicates that the Communion is indeed already broken. In (2) he speaks of ‘the broken bridges [from TEC] into the life of other Anglican provinces’ as the existing reality, and stresses that GenCon 09 has done nothing to repair these broken bridges. Though his explanatory clause ‘very serious anxieties have already been expressed’ is (perhaps deliberately) imprecise, the whole passage indicates, as the Primates did in 2003, that the breach has already occurred. We are not, then, looking now at TEC choosing for the first time to ‘walk apart’, but at the recognition that they did so some time ago and have done nothing to indicate a willingness to rejoin the larger Communion. This is all the more the case if it is indeed true, as the Presiding Bishop has said, that the new Resolutions were ‘descriptive’, that is, stating what is already the case: that is a way of saying, in fact, what some of us thought at the time, that the supposed ‘moratoria’ of GenCon 06 were never binding. This is what the ABC means, in the penultimate section of the whole document, by saying that the different priorities identified by different parts of the Anglican family ‘are bound to have consequences’. For too long TEC, and various other parts of the Communion, have spoken and acted as though there were no consequences. The ABC has now made it clear that this is not the case.
4. Once we penetrate the complex language, the ABC is also eventually clear that the great majority at GenCon voted, in effect if not in so many words, against the two relevant moratoria. ‘The repeated request for moratoria . . . has clearly not found universal favour’ is a roundabout but ultimately unambiguous way of saying ‘the majority voted against the moratoria’. This puts in a different light the reference in the first paragraph to ‘an insistence at the highest level’ (i.e. a letter from the Presiding Bishop) that the relevant resolutions ‘do not have the automatic effect of overturning the requested moratoria’. That may be true in a strict legal sense, though many will see this as an example of typical TEC behaviour, a grandmother’s-footsteps game of creeping forwards without being noticed. But the resolutions that were passed clearly had the effect (a) of reminding people that the way was in fact open all along to the episcopal appointment of non-celibate homosexuals, and (b) of reminding people that rites for public same-sex blessings could indeed be developed. The ABC is now clearly if tacitly saying, throughout the document, that there is no reasonable likelihood, at any point in many years to come, that TEC will in fact turn round and embrace the moratoria ex animo, still less the theology which underlies the Communion’s constant and often-repeated stance on sexual behaviour. Nor is there any reasonable likelihood that TEC will in fact be able to embrace the Covenant when it attains its final form a few months from now. That is the reality with which the Reflections deal.
5. Section 2 of the ABC’s Reflections addresses the presenting double-headed issue of same-sex blessings and the ordination (not simply the consecration as bishops) of non-celibate homosexuals. Here he basically reaffirms the church’s traditional stance, articulated in Lambeth 1.10 from 1998 but universally held, prior to that, whenever the point had been raised. First, the church cannot sanction or bless same-sex unions. Second, since the ordained ministry carries a necessarily representative function for the life of the church, those who order their lives this way cannot fulfil this representative role – cannot, in other words, be ordained. This is perhaps the strongest statement that the ABC has yet made of the Church’s position, and it should be noted carefully that he refers to the whole ordained ministry, i.e. deacons and priests and not just bishops. This has of course always been the official position of the whole Anglican Communion, repeated again and again by Lambeth Conferences, ACC and Primates and never overturned, for instance, in the Church of England’s General Synod. The ABC’s clear statement indicates once again that the two moratoria here expressed (with the second one actually strengthened) should be explicit prerequisites of Covenant membership. However much people may protest – and they have and will – that in some cases this is honoured more in the breach than in the observance, that is not an argument that the position is wrong, but a challenge to the way the church’s order and discipline currently functions. Creating ‘facts on the ground’ which fly in the face of the church’s well-known official teaching does not, as some suppose, generate a moral high ground; it is a form of dishonesty. If people want to object, they should argue the point, not assume it.
6. An aside at this point: some in TEC insist that their theological position has in fact been argued, and that the rest of the Communion is ignoring these arguments. As far as I can discern, there are two main arguments routinely used.
(i) First, the supposed modern and scientific discovery of a personal ‘identity’ characterised by sexual preference, which then generates a set of ‘rights’. The Archbishop has commented on ‘rights’ in this connection. Without entering into discussion of the scientific evidence, it must be said that the Christian notion of personal identity has never before been supposed to be rooted in desires of whatever sort. Indeed, desires are routinely brought under the constraints of ‘being in Christ’. This quite new notion of an ‘identity’ found not only within oneself but within one’s emotional and physical desires needs to be articulated on the basis of scripture and tradition, and this to my mind has not been done.
(ii) This leads to the second point, the appeal to baptism. It is now routinely said in TEC that all the baptised should have access to all the sacraments, on the apparent grounds that baptism indicates God’s acceptance of people as they are. This appears to ignore the New Testament teaching about baptism, that it constitutes a dying to self and sin and a rising to new life with Christ, specifically characterised by a holiness and renewed humanity in which certain habits and styles of life are left behind. From the first century until very recently it was universally understood that this included sexual immorality, and that that included homosexual behaviour. To try to use a supposedly ‘baptismal’ theology to overturn the universal Christian tradition of the meaning of baptism, and with it the universal and biblically-rooted appeal for sexual holiness, is a bold move. Most theologians will think that the first argument above (the proposal of an ‘identity’) is not strong enough to justify it. God’s welcome is always a transforming welcome, as the ABC has elsewhere stressed.
7. Section 2 contains strong and important warnings against personal prejudice and bigotry. The ABC does not spell out the difference between prejudice and bigotry on the one hand and a principled, thought-out moral stance on the other, but he clearly indicates that the two must be sharply separated. It is most welcome that he indicates the Church’s calling to a genuinely prophetic lifestyle: ‘if society changes its attitudes, that change does not of itself count as a reason for the Church to change its discipline’. No indeed. One of the most astonishing volte-faces in my lifetime has been the change from a liberalism which sought to be counter-cultural, anti-establishment, ‘agin the government’, protesting against the drift of society, and the present would-be liberalism which insists that because society has now drifted in a new direction the church should follow where that culture, the new ‘establishment’, and now even the government, are going. The ABC is far too good a theologian to be taken in by that.
8. Section 3, on the global and local decision-making processes, is a great strength.
(i) Though the ABC does not say so, this is basically a combination of the very heart of the Windsor Report and the one really good section of the Kuala Lumpur Report (Communion, Conflict and Hope, para. 104). At this point the ABC is simply articulating what the Windsor Continuation Group had said clearly before, during and after Lambeth 08.
(ii) The ABC here does three vital things and then homes in on the key point. (a) He insists that this is not (as is often sneeringly said) about bureaucratic or centralized ‘control’; (b) he warns against churches becoming ‘imprisoned in their own cultural environment’ (cognate with the point at the end of my previous paragraph); (c) he broadens the question so as to make it clear that this applies equally to issues such as lay presidency or inviting the unbaptized to receive Holy Communion.
(iii) The key point then is this (his paragraph 13): though some things can indeed be decided by a local church, the decision as to which things can be decided locally is not itself one that can be taken locally. And the criteria upon which the global church can decide this all-important question are (as in Kuala Lumpur) ‘intensity, substance and extent’. This really needs spelling out, but within the ABC’s document, and for that matter the present one, this can be left for another occasion.
9. Within the same section, the ABC makes the vital point that in our ongoing ecumenical work is it vital that our partners know ‘who speaks for the body they are relating to’. If many Anglicans don’t see why these presenting issues should matter, the same is not true for our ecumenical partners, particularly among the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. What is at stake, as well as Anglican identity and ecclesial density (i.e. being a church with a high doctrine of Communion, rather than a loose federation), is ecumenical credibility.
10. Many will not regard the language of a ‘two-track’ Communion as a strength. Some have objected that this is forcing apart what ought to be held together. Others, conversely, have sneered that ‘two-track’ sounds like a vote for pluralism pure and simple, a kind of ecclesial version of ’70s pop-psych ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’: you go your way, we go ours, and we’re both just fine as we are. But the ‘two-track’ option is not intended as an indifferentist, shoulder-shrugging thing (though no doubt some who find themselves in the incipient Track Two will want to see it like that). To say ‘two-tier’, as some have done at earlier stages in the discussion, implies that the two are still ‘tiers’ of the same thing, whereas ‘tracks’ may be going in quite different directions. And it is one ‘track’ rather than the other which will possess the coherence to work together in full solidarity, not least in ecumenical relationships.
11. Finally, the ABC recognises that one of the most urgent questions concerns those within TEC who have remained loyal to TEC itself and yet fully intend also to remain loyal to the rest of the Communion. Having already mentioned in paragraph 2 ‘a significant minority of bishops’ who have clearly said they intend to remain within the Communion’s consensus, he returns to them towards the end. His paragraph 25 is tantalisingly brief where many will want it to be elaborated and explicated, but there can be no doubt that here he holds the door wide open for such people ‘to be free to adopt the Covenant’. How this might work out we must consider below.
Discernment and Further Questions
12. Sex and ‘rights’. In relation to Section 2, someone, sooner or later, needs to spell out further (wearisome though it will be) the difference between (a) the ‘human dignity and civil liberty’ of those with homosexual and similar instincts and (b) their ‘rights’, as practising let alone ordained Christians, to give physical expression to those instincts. As the Pope has pointed out, the language of ‘human rights’ has now been downgraded in public discourse to the special pleading of every interest-group. The church has never acknowledged that powerful sexual instincts, which almost all human beings have, generate a prima facie ‘right’ that these instincts receive physical expression. Indeed, the church has always insisted that self-control is part of the ‘fruit of the Spirit’. All are called to chastity and, within that, some are called to celibacy; but a call to celibacy is not the same thing as discovering that one has a weak or negligible sexual drive. The call to the self-control of chastity is for all: for the heterosexually inclined who, whether married or not, are regularly and powerfully attracted to many different potential partners, just as much as for those with different instincts.
13. The depth of the problem.
(i) Apparent Caution: We should be careful to read the ABC’s cautious words in paragraphs 22 and 24 in the light of the crucial paragraph 2 (see above). The ABC says ‘it would be a mistake to act or speak now as if those decisions’ [i.e. on signing up to the Covenant] ‘had already been made’; and he warns against speaking ‘in apocalyptic terms of schism and excommunication’. He also speaks of the ‘twofold ecclesial reality’ as a ‘possibility’ in the ‘middle distance’.
(ii) The Reality: But, as he himself has indicated, key decisions have been made (obviously not yet in terms of voting on the Covenant, but certainly in terms of taking stances which will lead directly to such votes); schism has already happened; and not just a twofold, but a confusing and pluriform ecclesial reality, is not just a middle-distance possibility but an on-the-ground and in-your-face fact.
(iii) Confrontation Already Exists: Warning against ‘a competitive hostility between the two’ tracks may seem somewhat unrealistic to many in TEC and Canada who have lost churches, livelihoods and in some cases their Holy Orders – and, we should in all fairness stress, to others who, though theologically orthodox themselves, have been sniped at or sneered at by those who use the ‘orthodox’ label as a pretext for personal gripes or power-games. Speaking of an ‘ideal’ whereby both ‘Tracks’ ‘should be able to pursue what they believe God is calling them to be as Church, with greater integrity and consistency’, will sound idealistic at best when several loud voices in TEC are saying that what God is calling them to is to spread the ‘gospel’ of ‘inclusivity’, and several other voices are saying that God is calling them to resist precisely this.
(iv) Mutual Respect? Pleading for ‘mutual respect for deeply held theological convictions’ will seem straightforwardly unreal both to those who are fed up being called hopeless liberals by unthinking conservatives and to those who are fed up being called hopeless conservatives by unthinking liberals. ‘Deeply held theological convictions’ of course characterize plenty of other groups, not least (for instance) serious Muslim theologians. I respect such convictions, while still believing it proper to argue against them. This kind of plea could simply park the question, insisting (in good Anglican style) that we treat everyone as being in reality what they are in profession, but seeming to ignore the call, to bishops in particular, to guard the faith, teach the truth and refute error. Did Athanasius respect the ‘deeply held theological convictions’ of Arius and his followers? Perhaps he did; certainly he took them seriously enough to refute them vigorously. If the separation of two ‘Tracks’ generated, at last, a full-scale theological and exegetical discussion of disputed points, rather than emotive sniping, we might all be better served in the long run.
14. Representation on Ecumenical bodies. In paragraphs 9, 15 and 23 the ABC speaks of certain people being unable to represent the Communion’s voice in ecumenical encounters. He does not say who he means or how this is now to be worked out (as it must be very quickly if major ecumenical work is to proceed). Presumably the end of paragraphs 10 and 14 are a reference to the dangers inherent in TEC’s position, but again he does not spell this out (no doubt because it isn’t only TEC that faces this danger). In particular, the membership of the newly constituted international Faith and Order Advisory Group raises some questions, particularly (see below) if this group is to advise on the future role of the Instruments and the future structural shape of the Communion. So, too, the Joint Standing Committee as presently constituted includes people who, according to the Archbishop’s own analysis, have gone with the decision to move away from the rest of the Communion.
15. ‘In Communion’? A pressing question in all of this must be: who, both during this process and at its end, will be ‘in Communion’ with whom? Once Tracks One and Two have been identified, will there be mutual recognition of ministries? Presumably not if Track One is committed to Paragraph 8 of the Archbishop’s paper while Track Two is committed to demolishing it. Will communicants be welcome across the gap between the Tracks? If the Covenant becomes the gold standard, and if ACNA sign up as they may well, will the rest of the Communion (including of course the C of E) be ‘in communion’ with ACNA? These are difficult and uncomfortable questions. But they will certainly emerge; there is already a motion on the subject slated for General Synod in February 2010, though by then all sorts of things may look different.
16. No Delay. As this process continues to unfold, there is one major problem with a proposal to put all the eggs into the Covenant basket. (I had always understood that the Covenant was not designed to deal with the post-2003 problem, but rather to head off quite different problems that might arise in the future. I remain wary of trying, now, to put all the weight for the full sorting-out of the 2003 problem on to the Covenant, especially on to one brief, dense and inevitably controversial section of it, and particularly when the final drafting of that section is in the hands of a very small group, albeit then reporting to the ABC.) Now that GenCon 09 has happened, even if the Covenant is completed within a few months TEC will assuredly say that it can’t consider it until 2012, and that such consideration could only be preliminary, looking to a more definite decision in 2015. This delaying tactic – twelve years from 2003, when the crisis really began! – must be seen for what it is, and headed off. The obvious way to do this is to declare that ‘Track One’ is open, right away, to Covenant signatories, and only Covenant signatories. How precisely that could be done (granted that the Joint Standing Committee, for instance, includes some from TEC and other sympathetic provinces) remains a question. But it needs to be done, and done quickly. I offer some suggestions on all this in the conclusion below.
17. Section 4 of the Covenant. Picking up the point just made: Section 4 of the Covenant needs to proceed swiftly to its final form. This process is far too important to be left to a small group advising the Archbishop. When the Archbishop receives the group’s work, he should consult with key Communion representatives to ensure that there are no remaining hidden problems. In this process, any reduction or limiting of Section 4 (clearly the hope of the majority in TEC, not least those who pushed the ACC to postpone a decision) will be a large step away from the mind of the Communion as the ABC has himself expressed it, and would have the effect of nullifying all that he has said in his Reflections.
18. Retuning the Instruments? A further problem, not too far down the line, is contained in the ABC’s brief references to a restructuring or reworking of the Instruments themselves.
(i) New Cross-Track ‘instruments’? In paragraph 24 he speaks of hoping and working for ‘the best kinds of shared networks and institutions of common interest that could be maintained as between different visions of the Anglican heritage’. What might these be? Clearly not the Lambeth Conference, the ACC and the Primates. They, we must assume, will be Track One institutions; if they are not, the whole point (not least the whole ecumenical point) will be lost. So do we need some new institutions to enable the two tracks to talk to one another and to work together on shared ‘mission and service’ projects? This would constitute an unprecedented kind of internal ecumenism, fraught with frustrations and bad memories; yet perhaps it needs to be attempted.
(ii) The existing Institutions: And what about the existing Institutions? Paragraph 26 speaks of the present structures needing ‘serious rethinking in the near future’. This, presumably, will be a task for the newly constituted international Faith and Order Advisory Group – though, since some of that Group come from parts of the Communion which now appear likely to be in Track Two, that raises other difficult questions. (Why was the group chosen and named just before General Convention?) But the thought of the complex discussions that might swirl around any reshaping of Lambeth, ACC and Primates, and any ‘covering-both-tracks’ new institutions, is daunting. We already have a highly confusing situation both globally and nationally, with the ACO and Lambeth sitting uncomfortably side by side and with the shape and role of the existing Instruments remaining unclear. We need, if anything, to simplify and clarify, not to create more complexity. Complexity simply hands power to those with time on their hands and with well-developed skills in political manipulation.
Conclusion
19. Having worked very carefully through the Archbishop’s Reflections several times, having read what several others have said, and having had various conversations, I can understand the frustrations of those who wanted something more obviously crisp and clear. Yet at the heart of this document are two things which the Communion has badly needed to hear, hedged about with all kinds of assurances which make it clear that this is neither a knee-jerk reaction nor a mere statement of prejudice: a strong reaffirmation of the Anglican position on sexual behaviour, and a strong insistence on the Windsor point that global issues cannot be decided locally – and that the decision as to what is global and what is local cannot itself be decided locally. The ‘so what’ of all this needs now to be drawn out, and in my view this needs to happen more or less at once, not postponed until Section 4 of the Covenant is redrafted and ratified. In particular, the Communion Partner bishops, and parishes and individuals who take that stance, need to be assured that what is said rather briefly in paragraph 25 does indeed apply, and will indeed apply, to them, and that ways will be found very quickly to turn that into a reality.
20. How then can this ‘so what’ become a reality? We remind ourselves again that the ABC has no juridical authority outside his own Province, and that he is aware of himself being involved in the danger of trying, as a local Primate, to decide things for the whole Communion. Yet, as Archbishop of Canterbury, he carries within the whole Communion immense moral and pastoral authority, rooted in his exposition of scripture and articulation of the whole Christian tradition; and this, as he himself has insisted, is the real heart of all authority within the body of Christ. Too often in recent times legal and juridical ‘authority’ has been used, and perhaps abused, in the place of the genuine apostolic authority of the word of God and prayer. It is thus up to the Archbishop himself to move swiftly to implement what he himself has said, counting on support from bishops around his own Province and the whole Communion. The Covenant (which the ABC has repeatedly affirmed as the new instrument of our unity and common life) needs to be completed and offered to all Anglicans for signature. Those within TEC who sign it need appropriate Communion recognition and relatedness – if bishops, a Primatial relationship, if parishes or individuals, an episcopal relationship. Ways by which this can be done have been worked out by the Communion Partner bishops, and it is with them, first and foremost, that the Archbishop must work towards the necessary and urgent solutions. What now follows are some suggestions for how this might be attempted.
21. A Way Forward?
(i) How do ‘Communion Partners’ sign on? The question presses, as in the ABC’s paragraph 25, as to how dioceses, parishes and individuals within TEC will be able to sign the Covenant and thus not only align themselves, but be recognised by the wider Communion as aligning themselves, with that wider Communion itself. The ABC is certainly here referring to the ‘Communion Partner’ bishops, and to the parishes and individuals who take the same line that they do. As the ABC says, ‘there should be a clear answer to this question’, and actually the ABC himself is now the main person, if not the only person, in a position to give a clear and authoritative answer. But some proposals here may perhaps help.
(ii) The Anaheim Statement: In his second paragraph, the Archbishop notes that a substantial minority have indicated their dissent from the position taken by TEC as a whole. The document they have produced (‘the Anaheim Statement’) could now form something of a bridge between the present confusion and the not-too-distant future when the full Covenant will be available for signature. Some reports indicate that bishops who voted with the majority in Gen Con are now realising the predicament they’ve put themselves in and are starting to sign up to Anaheim instead.
(iii) What about Parishes and Individuals? But here’s the problem: it is one thing for bishops and their dioceses to be ‘Communion Partners’, recognised by Lambeth and the wider Communion as full ‘Track One’ members. (That carries its own problems, but if the diocese is the primary unit, as the ABC has insisted, it is clearly possible.) But how a parish in a non-signing diocese, or an individual in a non-signing parish or diocese, can become a ‘Track One’ Anglican, recognised as such globally, remains to be seen. Many in that position neither want nor intend to join a movement like ACNA, nor should they be put in a position where they have no other option. But a way forward must be found.
(iv) Getting from Here to There: Covenant Sections 1-3. The Covenant, when completed, will provide a line in the sand. However, we do not need to wait until Section 4 is redrafted. The first three sections are already completed and agreed, and they (especially Section Three) already prohibit the kinds of things which General Convention has done, and which many TEC bishops are doing. These three sections could be signed and adopted right away by CP bishops and dioceses as a signal of their intent.
(v) Getting from Here to There: Anaheim. The Anaheim Statement itself could also function as a preliminary rallying point around which more may gather than had initially been supposed. Perhaps, indeed, signing this statement, along with Sections 1-3 of the Covenant, could function, ahead of the availability of the final version of the Covenant, as a prerequisite for participation, from this moment on, in representative Anglican functions and bodies and, not least, in bodies that deal with the Covenant itself and the future of the Instruments. That would give actual and practical expression to what the ABC has now said. Indeed, unless something like this is implemented at once it will be hard to sustain trust in the ongoing process.
(vi) Interim Structures? We need some interim structures to get us from where we are to where we need to be – and not only in TEC, but also in Canada and perhaps elsewhere. But we need these now, not in six months, let alone six years. The Communion Partner bishops should perhaps restate their willingness to provide, with the permission of the relevant Diocesan, alternative episcopal relationship and cover for parishes in Dioceses whose bishops might find their relation to the wider Communion to have changed. The now largely discredited ‘DEPO’ system (‘Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight’) may have been a signpost, albeit one that didn’t seem to be capable of working well at the time, towards some kind of a solution. Issues of polity should, if possible, be dealt with at a provincial, not a global, level.
(vii) Urgent meetings? Ideally, the CP bishops, and perhaps some of the Rectors, should meet with the Archbishop to discuss some kind of a revived DEPO. The ABC could then invite others, including both representatives of TEC leadership on the one hand and ACNA on the other, to further meetings to work out agreements that would avoid future confusions or accusations. There is a need, perhaps, for a call to mutual respect, and maturity of decision-making, in recognition of where things now stand. There is no point pretending things are otherwise than they are. We have come to the tipping point, and wisdom suggests that all involved take counsel in recognition of that.
(viii) What about ACNA?
All this raises, then, the question of ACNA itself (and, indeed, other would-be Anglican bodies). Without some kind of clear steer on the issues just raised, we can expect that ACNA will continue to attract individuals, congregations and perhaps even dioceses. This is, indeed, already happening. However, though the situation on the ground is often confused, ACNA has expressed a clear willingness to work with the Communion Partner bishops towards whatever greater good may come. And ACNA itself has shown itself eager to sign the Covenant when it is complete. All this will go into the melting pot of whatever new alignments the Communion will discover over the coming months. It is important that bridges, not fences, be built during this period.
22. These are only suggestions, designed to help those on the ground not only to think through the issues but to take concrete and immediate steps. I have said many times that, for all those involved in this whole messy situation, the main priority at the moment is prayer. That remains my conviction and my plea. Prayer for the church; for our beloved Communion and the many other Christians with whom we seek to deepen fellowship; for Archbishop Rowan; for wisdom, courage, clarity and vision; for God’s glory, the extension of his kingdom, and the power of the gospel and the Spirit at work in hearts, lives, communities and throughout our world.
Discuss this Article on the Fulcrum Forum
Forum Posts About This Article:
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Friday 28 August 2009 - 07:52pm
Oh, sorry about that. There has been quite a lot of discussion in some critical literature about demons and thought forms in the context of first century beliefs.
Posted by: Celinda
Friday 28 August 2009 - 04:08pm
You made a typo ("demoms") in reference to your cold and I didn't know what you were referring to. About casting out demons: I don't think all (or even most) illness in that time period was thought to be caused by demons. I only remember the "casting out of demons" in the context of mental illness in the healing narratives in the NT. About the linking of illness with sin: I don't think that was a constant, either. There's the
"did this man sin, or his father" comment in one of the narratives having to do with healing but I think Jesus's response didn't address that issue.
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Friday 28 August 2009 - 02:26am
You don't know what demons are? When someone presented themselves to Jesus in need of healing, he removed the demons! They believed that illness and sin were linked. That's why people died - because of sin. That's why a sinless person did not have to die, and thus became attached to the exchange-theology of Christ - who did not have to die but did so that others could live. When the Kingdom would arrive fully, people would stop dying. People asked Paul about people still dying and what would happen - why were they dying?
It was commonly thought that rich and better living people had fewer demons: why Jesus's reverse ethics about them was a revolutionary message. Jesus healed the poor and said sin no more as a means of preparing them for a deathless life in the coming kingdom.
It's not a viewpoint we share - we die for biological reasons. We conk out, basically, and it is irrelevant whether we are good, bad, healthy or unhealthy (though being unhealthy obviously can tip you over into death). The rich still have more life chances.
Posted by: Celinda
Thursday 27 August 2009 - 02:02am
Sorry to be talking so much, but Pluralist, one of the things about evangelicals is that we do have the opportunity to be with other people who think of the universe in a religious context when we can. In groups like the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer, and Daughters of the King, and the Order of St. Luke we can lift each other up in prayer for whatever the needs are--a four week cold, the next election (guidance, not that any particular candidate be elected), parts of the world where bad things are going on, a son in Iraq (my situation), a difficult pregnancy, cancer, safety for a loved one travelling, guidance with a difficult decision, and simply thanksgiving. Again, hope you are soon over your cold.
Posted by: Celinda
Thursday 27 August 2009 - 01:57am
Pluralist, I'm sorry you've had a cold for four weeks. That is too long. I hope you're over it soon. I don't know what denoms are.
Posted by: Celinda
Thursday 27 August 2009 - 01:55am
Pluralist--if you're talking to me about atheists in a list, yes, there are atheists in the list I gave you and by no means was I talking about theologians. I was responding to fellow linguist Tony's comment about the complexity of texts and ways they are understood. Sacred texts and secular ones are all texts and some of the challenges in reading them are similar.
Posted by: Phil Almond
Wednesday 26 August 2009 - 09:27pm
John Goldsmith
To find my 5 assertions (31 July 2009) click on my name on any of my posts and scroll down until you find them.
The passages I have challenged Clare about, in various places, besides Luke 13:1-5 which you mention, include:
Luke 17: 20-37 (The OT portrays these events as acts of God’s judgment. I agree that Jesus does not explicitly confirm that they are. But he does not deny that they are either. The position that Jesus’ said these words but in Jesus’ view they were not the acts of God, or in Jesus’ view they were the acts of God but were immoral, is incredible to me.
It is a reasonable assumption, although I agree we are not explicitly told, that children were among those destroyed by the flood and among those destroyed in the overthrow of Sodom).
Luke 19:27
Matthew 13:36-43
Matthew 7:21-23
Matthew 25:40-46
Matthew 15:4
Matthew 10:14-15
Matthew 11:20-22
Did Jesus say these words? What do you understand them to mean?
Also, there are numerous other parts of the New Testament which also support my assertion
‘The wrath of God is a punitive wrath which is final for the objects of that wrath unless they are delivered from it’.
Hebrews 10:29-31
Romans 2:8-9
Romans 3:5-6
Rev 6:12-17
Rev 14: 4-20
Rev 19:11-21
Rev 20:12-15
2 Thessalonians 1: 4-9
What do you make of those?
I have given my view on the right understanding of Luke 13:1-5 in my 30 July post. I don’t think your (Tom Wright’s?) view is right.
Phil Almond
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Wednesday 26 August 2009 - 04:40pm
Some of those are hardly Christian theologians - 'new atheists' among them. Allowing for the possibility of transcendence, I'm basically a non-theist and that's the position I'm naturally going to reproduce.
People are very defensive when it comes to religion and belief, like they throw a switch when challenged and come up with all sorts of doctrinal belief. But then when they relax a bit they don't go around asking what God is doing in the weather or in the activity of business or trade unions. I've had a cold for 4 weeks now but no one has offered to shift any demoms. People simply do not think like this any more, including so called orthodox believers. It takes a pretty hefty sectarian to use religious language for the everyday. That wasn't the stance of Jesus and the first century believers - they really did think they lived in a religiously pregnant universe, with all sorts of stuff going on. It is completely different now and I just want to produce material that reflects such a shift in ordinary, everyday, perspective.
Posted by: Celinda
Wednesday 26 August 2009 - 03:44pm
Iconoclast--I agreed with much of your last post, but still strongly disagree that "liberals" and "conservatives" can be as sharply contrasted as you seem to do, so much so that (in your words) "the Gospel preached by the Liberals is in the Conservative view a different message." For instance, Bishops Breidenthal (Southern Ohio) and Marshall (Bethlehem, one of the Pennsylvania dioceses) are "liberal" on the sexual issues (they voted "yes" to the resolutions at the 2009 GC which led to +Mark Lawrence's recent statement, as well as reactions by +Wright and the ABC and many others). However, they voted "no" on the consecration of Kevin Thew Forrester+. They wrote independent, well-written expositions of why Forrester's Christology was incompatible with the teachings of the church as developed in the creeds and the Book of Common Prayer. Have you read them? So few "conservatives" cite them that it's hard not to think that the defining issues for some conservatives are the sexual ones, and they are not interested in orthodox statements on other issues by people they have tagged as "liberals."
Posted by: Celinda
Wednesday 26 August 2009 - 03:35pm
Tony--it's amazing how many posts there have been since yours of 24 Aug. at 3:44 PM, which at this point was hard to find! You mentioned linguists' awareness of "the complex relationship between textual genesis and meaning." I did take a course in the history of 20th century French literary criticism in 1986, which--for me--included a review of what had been going on in the field since 1960, when I had a course in Explication de Textes at Middlebury which I loved. In that older course, we were taught a method which began with a brief statement of what we considered the purpose/meaning of the text to be after a cursory reading. We were then to expound on the literary devices used to develop that meaning as we plumbed the text further. We weren't to read any commentaries on the text as a part of that course, since we were to concentrate on the text itself. I've read texts that way ever since, and found it helpful as a springboard (by no means exhaustive, but a springboard) to further discussion of the text. In the 1986 course we read de Saussure, Derrida, Genette, Foucault, Barthes (my favorite), and many others. I thought of the Bible somewhat with Derrida's onion skin metaphor: but where he thought the continued peelings revealed that there was nothing at the center, I thought that the continued peelings kept pointing to God, and that the act of revealing successive layers was infinite (and thrilling, to refer to someone's thread on religious experience). Anyway: we also talked about metatextualism, which I think is important to this "unpacking" thread. How do different people "unpack" a text when they write texts referring to an original? As I have implied above, I do think the Bible has a unifying thread and although it was written by human beings, it was inspired by God. I have a Lockean view, I think, of the Bible: not all of it is completely of God then, and now, and to come (to borrow Phil's terminology), but most of it is. Locke steered that middle course, and thought the church fathers did also (he referred to "the blessed Hooker"). And of more consequence than isolated individuals "unpacking" the Bible is how larger groups did and are still doing it (as someone reported to Pluralist above). The church fathers' writings, the councils, etc. are all examples of pre-Renaissance unpacking. Cranmer et al did post-Renaissance unpacking as they developed Anglican liturgy--AND, importantly, Cranmer made sure that Bibles in English were available in as many churches as possible. For Cranmer and similar reformers, it was of utmost importance for people to read the Bible themselves. People who came to America (many groups) for religious freedom thought so, but they did all did their own "unpacking" of the Bible. I would call all those "unpacking" texts "metatexts." In the late 19th and early 20th century Charles Hurlbut told "stories of the Bible" which he eventually put into a well-loved, much read book (with successive editions). That book had a great influence on me as a child and on many other people. Chautauqua Institute in western New York (near our vacation place in NW PA) was founded to teach Methodist Sunday School teachers how to do a better job. The building next to the theater (where we took grandchildren last week to see _The Winter's Tale_) is named for Hurlbut. Chautauqua is no longer dedicated to a unified view of Christianity; the programs there have a very wide range. But it began with the Bible and explanatory "metatexts" like Hurlbut's.
Posted by: Dave
Wednesday 26 August 2009 - 10:49am
Adrian,
I would have thought that the debate about God is quite active. Looking down the Amazon best sellers for Christian theology I note books by Karen Armstrong, Christopher Hitchins, Sam Harris, Francis Collins, Robert Wright, Keith Ward, Daniel Dennett etc. I would have thought that there is plenty to interest you.
David
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Wednesday 26 August 2009 - 01:30am
What is being seen in the Anglican Communion? As far as I can see, those who have an inclusive view are still trinitarians, still focus upon the tradition of Jesus Christ and where it takes believers and the world, still operate within a narrow liturgical framework.
I don't. I don't regard Jesus as being in any sense exclusive, either morally or religiously, and in fact religion is about what we do. I want a wholly different approach to the language of worship, far more open and pluralist/ universalist (in the widest sense). But then this is not something I operate within the Anglican Communion, or recommend for it, and where anyone has come anywhere near it (for example Kevin Forrester) then it has been rejected.
Don Cupitt has stopped regular churchgoing now, Richard Holloway operates his agnosticism outside Anglicanism (apparently he preached recently in an Anglican church in a recognisably orthodox form - I found that quite disappointing if so) and no one is pushing for reform of the tradition, only some leeway in interpretatation according to biblical research and theological insight. There is no John Robinson today. Those who might say something interesting are just silent. That's why I'm going elsewhere in terms of creativity because as well as regarding Anglicanism as unethical it is also stuck.
There is more breadth in the US and in Scotland and some other places, but it's almost as if people are scared. It is now the rule of duplicity - thinking one thing and saying another, not even now the coded sermon whereby some hearers could hear orthodoxy and those with theological education could hear the code words.
Theology and biblical work is broader and wider than it has ever been, but it isn't reflected in Anglicanism. It is only reflected in the output of individuals. The difference now is that anyone can find out what these variations are, thanks to the Internet and search engines, but it is not reflected in church life which is tame and limited.
Now that I am writing my own service content into a structure and will write the sermon too, I feel quite liberated, but it would never fit within the boundaries of Anglicanism. I rarely mention God, Jesus or Buddha. It seems to me that Anglicans are quite close to each other and this idea of distance is only because evangelicalism has take such a swing to the right with its obsession over details, a position once held by very few within Anglicanism but which many an evangelical who wants the label finds difficult to escape.
Posted by: Iconoclast
Tuesday 25 August 2009 - 11:28pm
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John,
Last post on this before I go off on holiday.
You wrote:
Which is the more important, us getting God right or God getting us right?
My initial answer would be both! However if I had to choose it has to be the latter but let me qualify this a little.
God has been working at getting us right since the Fall. I think one aspect of God’s dealings with people throughout thy Bible is that you are led unmistakably to the conclusion that He treats us as individuals. This comes home to me every time when I get up and preach and look across the congregation.
(I confess I also sometimes think of the Muppet Show but that’s by the way..).
You talk to people and you find out different things about them, their perceptions and experiences of God and so on. The question that then arises in my mind is how much of what they say is authentic? That they have had a human religious experience I am not questioning. What I want to know, is it a *Christian* human experience?
So how are we to judge this? As a Conservative I will do so by the Bible. If someone for example claims to have experienced a vision or even received a teaching that Jesus and Buddha are one then I have to test its validity. If Joseph Smith for example claims that God gave him special revelation by an Angel called Moroni, then is this a Christian experience? I think that Liberals might judge this using extra Biblical sources since they believe that the Bible is unreliable, whereas Conservatives would not.
Now this is not to say that the individuals concerned must wholly be out of touch with the Christian God. However the message they are preaching is contrary to what is believed to be the truth. Mormons are an extreme example, but I think we see something of what I am trying to articulate in Acts 10 when it states that ‘Priscilla and Aquila taught Apollos more accurately’. Not that anything was wrong with Apollos’ faith – his understanding was defective. He only knew the Baptism of John so the message he was preaching was inaccurate. Priscilla and Aquila were concerned that his inaccuracies would have a detrimental effect on the preaching of the gospel.
Now there are inaccuracies and inaccuracies. Jesus before he ascended to heaven said in John 16 12-15, that the Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth . So if someone has the Spirit of Christ within them , what they say and do will inevitably point to Jesus.
If some Liberals believe that Jesus isn’t the only way to God or that there is no judgement or no hell and that what is right for you is just dandy as long as you are sincere, then we need to see what effect this will have on the message that we are preaching. We also need to compare it with what has been written in the Bible, what has been received through the Apostles and what has been understood by the historic church. If for example, you don’t think that people need to be saved or you take a kind of Giradian approach to the Gospel because your reason or conscience commends you so, then its hard to see how people will see their need for a Saviour. The message has changed.
And here lies the rub: the gospel preached by Liberals is in the Conservative view, is now sufficiently different to be regarded as a different *message*, so what is received by the hearers is defective. Furthermore, they think that the primary criteria Conservatives use i.e. the Scripture, or judging whether something is Christian or not, is unreliable. The Christian message is Liberal hands, thus evolves.
I take Pluralist’s point that there are Liberals close to evangelicals and the gulf between them can sometimes not be that great, but what we are seeing in the AC is not of that kind. So I think John, that the difference between Liberals and Conservatives is in general, very great indeed.
Now as a Conservative I don’t believe that Liberals are ‘damned’ because they have got all or some parts wrong. On the contrary I think we will be very surprised as to whom we will find in Heaven. However if the message is wrong or that we cannot agree what it is; or we have doubts about it, then we sound an uncertain note and this will effect who will enter the Kingdom.
So this is why Conservatives are concerned with getting God right.
Posted by: John Goldsmith
Tuesday 25 August 2009 - 09:23pm
Phil, I think you may be refering to Jesus refering to those killed by the fall of the tower at Siloam and others killed by Pilate, and saying that all were equally likely to fall under the same judgement.
I think it likely that he did say those words, but would interpret them (following Tom Wright) as applying to the fate of those who would be killed if they persisted in violently resisting Rome. Falling buildings and soldiers with swords would be the result.
This tells us how the Romans were likely to behave. It does not tell us much about God's behaviour.
Posted by: Phil Almond
Tuesday 25 August 2009 - 07:27pm
John Goldsmith
What we are clashing over is who is the true God and
‘…..wholly repugnant to the God we see in Jesus’
who is the true Jesus. Did the true Jesus say the words I have challenged Clare about?
Phil Almond
Posted by: John Goldsmith
Tuesday 25 August 2009 - 05:51pm
Iconoclast, I am very grateful for the full, moving and completely relevant description of your journey. You made it so clear that religious experience is less about us polishing our interiority, and more about God reaching out with a love which transforms. This vision and experience I share with you, and so do many liberals. Pluralist is right in saying there are many varieties of liberalism. However, someone who describes themselves as a liberal Christian is likely to believe in God (who is not just part of our own psyche)and the impact of Jesus in helping us recognize, focus on and respond to God’s reaching out in love.
If this is the case, I would like to put this challenge before you in love. Which is the more important, us getting God right or God getting us right? If it is the latter, then surely we are on the same journey and should not split. Of course in my eyes you are a defective liberal: of course in your eyes I am a defective conservative. So what!
Jesus certainly talked about the narrow way. Most of us (in all traditions) spend a lot effort in trying to domesticate the challenge of God on our lives. Aslan is certainly not a tame lion! I don’t think, however, that these words are aimed at anything like our current divisions.
Phil Almond I tried to follow up your suggestion but unfortunately couldn’t find the place. I don’t think it would make much difference anyhow. In the last paragraph I suggested that we are likely to find ourselves defective if judged by the other’s rule book. I expect it is the bible we would clash over. I believe it to be a book written by people about God rather than a book written by God about people. I believe there are plenty of mistakes in it, places (such as the genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Book of Joshua) which are wholly repugnant to the God we see in Jesus, and places which bring us most powerfully into the real presence of God. The bible is one of the things of God, but like all such things (church, sacraments etc) it should not be put on a pedestal and confused with God.
Marginal, thanks for what you said. You sum up the situation in your final words: “How surely we are loved. How may we best share this love?” I am sure we both agree that this is not simply a rhetorical question.
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Tuesday 25 August 2009 - 02:59pm
You flatter me. You describe perhaps one or two liberal approaches. Some liberals are next door to evangelicals and some next door to Catholics, and some are better called one of those two labels. And then you have a range of theists, exemplarists, spiritists, non-theists, non-realists in different denominations, groups and none.
Posted by: Iconoclast
Tuesday 25 August 2009 - 12:36pm
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John Goldsmith
You wrote
I am genuinely interested in how you came to hold this position. Presumably it was not a sudden choice on a whim. Presumably it was not a blind doing what you were told and then finding it to be conservative.
I imagine you chose it because you found you couldn’t drop it. Perhaps a person, perhaps a group, perhaps a text, perhaps an act of worship, perhaps another experience was the cause of your finding yourself touched by God in a decisive way. If I have guessed right, then it would seem you chose it because it worked. But this is a very liberal approach.
I think it is a number of these things. First of all I came to faith as a young person ‘(I am now in my 50’s) praying the ‘sinners prayer but not really expecting anything to happen. I was strongly influenced at the time by the Jesus Movement on the west coast of America in the late sixties and seventies which had a deep and lasting effect on my Christian beginnings (I am still a bit of a hippie at heart although I have less hair now and was into Eastern Mysticism before I became a Christian).
What did happen afterwards was a powerful sense of the presence of God which I could no more deny than as if I had been punched in the face. Furthermore I found that when I prayed for quite specific things I got answers. This has not gone away! Just the other week, I prayed and asked God for something quite specific for my wife and got a very precise answer. I find all this slightly scary- not in the ‘dreaded’ sense -but I think I experienced something of what I think CS Lewis referred to as the “numinous” - the sense that you are in contact with a being that is bigger than you are, and is interested in what you are doing . So as Jonathan has pointed out, this is my human religious experience over the years. This question of course, is how true is it?
The Jesus movement in the US essentially had an Evangelical framework and so I initially gravitated towards this. I read the Bible and came into contact with the evangelical sub-culture in England. Because I have a rigorous scientific training I am predisposed to analyse things and my Christian experience was no exception. I found quite quickly that many of the Evangelical rank and file are not very literate biblically and simply accept what is said to them. Either they do this because they lack the necessary critical skills to study the Bible or because they are lazy and prefer someone else to do it for them. Evangelical leaders are also often poor at pastoral skills. Proper study of the Bible takes effort. I think that Liberals have much to teach evangelicals how to do this which is one reason why I enjoy reading Pluralist’s blog so much, even though I largely disagree with most of what he has to say.
However, what I did find was the Evangelical scholarship is very good and of very high quality. People like Packer, Stott F.F .Bruce Alan Millard and more contemporary scholars like NT Wright and Alister McGrath, Peter Enns and John Bimson not to mention ’undefinables’ like C.S.Lewis and John Drane, were all over time, able to put an understanding on my Christian experience which was logically consistent and is conservative. I have read a number of Liberal works and although I find they ask interesting questions, their answers seem to me to be subjective, sentimental and lacking in authority. I also find them very chameleon-like. When I have attempted to put a rational framework on my human religious experience then it has always seemed to me that the conservative approach offers a more consistent explanation.
I would like to add another point here. My impression on this forum is that many think that CE’s are drawn exclusively from organisations like Reform, AM, and so on. The constituency is much wider than that and goes beyond Anglicanism. I think it is important to differentiate between what I believe Canon Michael Saward once called ‘Sectarian Evangelicalism’ which is more about church politics and personalities, and true historical evangelicalism. I think we see a lot of the former described on Fulcrum (I do not BTW, think that that Liberals are immune to sectarianism). I actually prefer the title “Classical Evangelical’ a term which I think was coined by John Richardson and reflects more of its historical roots, but then this is yet another label to add to the evangelical stable.
It does not seem to me that there is a straight road between, on the one hand, finding God has touched someone through a particular tradition to, on the other, God insisting that this tradition is the only fully authoritative expression of what God wishes to say. God has clearly entrusted something special and important to you. It does not follow that this necessarily devalues God’s approach elsewhere.
I think first of all that Jesus stated that the road to eternal life is a narrow one. There are not many paths up the same mountain, however I sometimes think that evangelicals make it too hard for people to be saved. We cannot make judgements as to how God will bring someone in to the Kingdom, although conservatives would say that you can know *how* to get into the Kingdom - and what will keep you out. But that it is God that is at work at the end. He is Sovereign. But all these things must be tested. As a Conservative I will test them against the Bible whereas I don’t think a Liberal necessarily would.
One of my New Age friends is into something called ‘Deeksha’ which is connected with a New Age philosophy of ‘Oneness’ and invites me to go along. What I have noticed is that Deeksha has a number of similarities with charismatic evangelical experience. in so far as the participants enter a state of spiritual ecstasy by receiving the laying on of hands and some even fall over. There is no doubt in my mind that my friend is having a religious human experience that to the outside might look like something you might see at say, HTB but I don’t think it is the Holy Spirit she is in contact with, although I think some Liberals would argue otherwise.
I don’t know if this has answered your question John. I’m not sure that what I have described would be called it a Liberal approach although you might think so.
Another long post. I will stop here before I am told off by the board administrators for rabbiting on too much. I am off-line for the next week as I am on holiday.
Posted by: Marginal
Tuesday 25 August 2009 - 12:59am
John Goldsmith –
What a generous and beautifully expressed post.
I think we could all benefit from reflecting on our faith journeys. My own involved the intervention of a (wonderfully) dramatic charismatic evangelical, but also understandings absorbed in an Anglo-catholic church community.
Therefore, unsurprisingly, I regret the tension that sometimes seems to exist between different Anglican traditions, all of which have something to tell us about the inexhaustibly rich and wonderful God that loves us. And so I thank you for taking a generous, rather than a narrow, tribal, approach.
Surely all of our explorations will lead us to the one true God, if we stay anchored to the word and the Spirit. We shall all learn to say: how awesome is our God; how much wider is His love than our understanding (1 Corinthians 13:12).
Posted by: Marginal
Tuesday 25 August 2009 - 12:39am
John Goldsmith -
What a carefully expressed and generous post. I think we would all benefit from reflecting on how we came to the place where we stand.
For example, my own journey involved the intervention of a spritual genius, a charismatic evangelical of the most (wonderfully) dramatic kind - but it also involved absorbing insights from an Anglo-catholic community. Consequently I find it a pity that members of any of our Anglican traditions choose to look down on others, so I thank you for taking the opposite approach, for reaching out in love.
I think you have found the right way; for surely, in the end, all of our faith journeys will surely point the way to the one true God, if we stay anchored to the Word and the Spirit. We may find less scope for wandering, but in compensation we do not travel alone; and grace gives us a wider-than-expected space to speak, and approach each other freely, if we have the courage to accept this.
Maybe we shall set devilish in-fighting aside, as we remember the overwhelming truth: how awesome is our God! How surely we are loved!
Now, how may we best share this love...?
Posted by: Phil Almond
Monday 24 August 2009 - 07:57pm
John Goldsmith
I am in the middle of replying to Clare on ‘Phil and Clare talk about God and the Bible (again)’ where some of these issues are debated, but I would like to make a post on this thread which is not a response to your question
‘how you came to hold this position?’
but a repeat observation on what I see the real issue to be. The real issue where we differ is fundamentally different and irreconcilable convictions about who God and Christ are, what they are like, what they have done, are doing, will do, what they have said, are saying and will say, what human beings supremely need saving from and how that salvation is brought about.
To see how far apart or how near we may be to each other in terms of convictions see 31 July 2009 'A positive model for responding to unorthodox theology': 5 assertions: how many of them do you agree with?
Phil Almond
Posted by: John Goldsmith
Monday 24 August 2009 - 05:06pm
I would like to thank Jonathan and Iconoclast for their interesting debate on liberals and conservatives. I too must admit to being an Anglican MCU liberal like Jonathan.
Iconoclast, I am fairly comfortable with the way you describe (at least my) liberalism. You also say: "The Conservative position: This takes the view that the Bible is the Word that God spoke and speaks to his Church, and is finally authoritative for faith and life. It is a record of divine revelation which is complete and authoritative and contains the principles of interpretation within itself."
I am genuinely interested in how you came to hold this position. Presumably it was not a sudden choice on a whim. Presumably it was not a blind doing what you were told and then finding it to be conservative.
I imagine you chose it because you found you couldn’t drop it. Perhaps a person, perhaps a group, perhaps a text, perhaps an act of worship, perhaps another experience was the cause of your finding yourself touched by God in a decisive way. If I have guessed right, then it would seem you chose it because it worked. But this is a very liberal approach.
It does not seem to me that there is a straight road between, on the one hand, finding God has touched someone through a particular tradition to, on the other, God insisting that this tradition is the only fully authoritative expression of what God wishes to say. God has clearly entrusted something special and important to you. It does not follow that this necessarily devalues God’s approach elsewhere.
Please forgive my speculation which is focused less on you than on all who hold this sort of conservative position. Please correct me if I have misunderstood or been unfair to you.
Elsewhere on this site reconciliation between Evangelicals is being urged. Is it not more important that reconciliation between Christians of differing traditions should be sought even more urgently?
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Monday 24 August 2009 - 04:46pm
>I have never gained the impression that he is sentimentally religious in any way –this is not a criticism of you Pluralist<
Depends what you mean by sentimental, but I'm sentimental enough to be creating a liturgy this afternoon (and other times) for delivery soon and will write a sermon for the same occasion.
Would that liberals actually follow Ritschl through. The grandfather of liberal theology is Schleiermacher, the father is Ritschl and the two sons are Harnack and Troeltsch and I presented a piece about these to a church group.
Posted by: Tony
Monday 24 August 2009 - 03:44pm
Celinda, I seem to be inaudible and invisible around here (perhaps it's not an unfamiliar fate for ex-evos, with too little time to post at length). What I said further down about the ways we use the scriptures to find out about our relationship to God in Christ suggests that there are different epistemological assumptions involved. The bible simply isn't the unitary voice that iconoclast wants -- as a modern linguist like me, you know how complex the relationship between textual genesis and meaning can be. If I struggle to follow the twists and turns of thought, form, and meaning in Goethe's Faust, written/compiled/re-written over a creative life-time, how can I give less serious attention to the scriptures? Which is not to say I have to do all that digging when I'm the actor playing Mephistopheles! in via Tony
Posted by: Jeremy C
Monday 24 August 2009 - 01:00pm
Celinda, I didn't take Jonathan's post as referring to a difference in the understanding of scripture per se, as much as a difference in the understanding of science. I thought his point was that a modernist reading of scripture might well clash with a modernist understanding of science, (scientism, if you like) but current scientific understanding is much more nuanced than the sort of thinking which led Victorian scientists to lament the fact that (they thought) there would soon be nothing new left to discover. Physics has shown the universe to be a far stranger and more mysterious place than could ever have been imagined in, say, 1880.
Posted by: Iconoclast
Monday 24 August 2009 - 12:45pm
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Jonathan,
Thank you for responding in depth to my comments. I think we are discussing here, what marks the difference between Liberals and Conservatives. I will try to respond the best I can.
You write:
When Iconoclast describes liberals as believing that ‘the real subject matter of theology is not that truths are divinely revealed, but are the products of human religious experience’ I think he’s making a false contrast. We cannot know, believe or think anything at all without it being human experience. And if you believe our minds and the universe have been created by God, we cannot know, believe or think anything at all without it being divinely revealed. All the subject matter of theology – and for that matter everything else we know – is both divinely revealed and received by us through our experience.
I don’t think that Conservatives would disagree with this. This is the reason the Word was made flesh. Human experience is what we are. Information about the physical world flows through to us via the five senses by which we construct a model of physical reality. Truths are divinely revealed via human experience. They are not hard-wired in. When John for example, had his visions in Revelation he was definitely experiencing something through his five senses. When Paul fell to the ground on the road to Damascus by a vision of Jesus this was definitely a human experience which probably resulted in bruising! So while on Patmos, had John eaten something with hallucinogenic properties by mistake or had Paul had an epileptic fit? I have read Liberal explanations similar to this.
Yet -- the Bible says states it is possible to know truth spiritually and this is done by revelation through faith. So as a Conservative while I could not prove to you that Jesus literally rose from the dead (although I could make a well argued case), I accept by faith that He did so. This is the kind of thing I think Paul meant in 1 Peter 1.8-9
‘you love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. 9 The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls.’
And of course the definition of ‘faith’ as the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen' in Heb 11v1.
Notice here that I am quoting from my preferred source the Bible and I am assuming it authoritative but this is a dubious document to Liberals - they don’t think it trustworthy, and only provisional at best ( at least it is so to Pluralist!). So at once we differ. The real question here is whether the *origin* of John’s or Paul’s human religious experience was divine or whether it was the product of non-divine rational processes? I think that Liberals would tend to the latter as they prefer to reject supernaturalism as a rational process and faith in the Bible as an unreliable guide.
I suspect – though he can answer for himself – that his contrast is based on the assumption that only limited sources of information count as divine revelation, and only limited types of experience count as religiously acceptable. In that case, his point would boil down to the refusal to accept theological truths unless they come through his preferred channels – presumably the Bible. I believe God reveals things to us in other ways as well. That’s why we no longer consider slavery acceptable, and why we allow unhatted women into church.
Now I think you are getting closer to the difference between us. I have already touched on this a little, but I will set out what I think it means for Liberal and Conservatives. The channels for my theological truths are not preferred ones any more than your preferred liberal ones. So I think my assessment of the difference goes something like this:
The Conservative position:
This takes the view that the Bible is the Word that God spoke and speaks to his Church, and is finally authoritative for faith and life. It is a record of divine revelation which is complete and authoritative and contains the principles of interpretation within itself. The Holy Spirit which dwells in the believer at conversion has been given to the Church to enable believers to recognise it for the divine revelation it is and to enable them to interpret rightly and understand its meaning. I do not BTW think that conservatives believe that church tradition is unimportant. It can give help in understanding what the Bible teaches but it forms a commentary on the Bible that must be tested by the Bible itself (this is what I believe Wilberforce did , when he tested slavery against the Bible and found it wanting).
This does not mean that Conservatives are devoid of reason when interpreting the Bible. However rather that looking to reason to tell us whether Scripture is right, Conservatives look to Scripture to tell us whether reason is wrong. So if Scripture tells me that Jesus rose from the dead and my reason tells me that this cannot happen (it is unreasonable to the rational mind), then it is Scripture that is right. This is the problem that Thomas had in John 20:27-31 (whoops! –there I go quoting the Bible again!). It is interesting to note Jesus reaction to Thomas in v.29.
Conservatives will accept other theological truths but they will judge them against the Bible. This does not mean that they will necessarily reject them as being of no value. I come in to contact with quite a lot of New Age folk some of which are good friends. There are some commendable things they believe, but I will reject the underlying theology of New-Agism because having tested it against Scripture I find it in error. In the case of for example homosexuality; for Conservatives, the arguments advanced for the acceptance of faithful committed same-sex relationships and so on, fail when tested against Scripture. It is wrong to say as many do, that Conservatives are being homophobic about this – they are not. They just don’t think the arguments stack up when compared with what the Bible teaches and they think the teaching of a new doctrine of marriage (which is really what is being proposed here), is grossly in error.
The Liberal position:
As I indicated earlier, I think that Liberals take their starting point from Schleriermacher’s attitude to theology and get their rationalism from people like Ritschl who held to a kind of religious positivism and the ‘faith of the community’. Whereas the guiding principle for Conservatives is faith in the written Word, for lLberals, the final authority for faith and life is the verdict of their reason, conscience and religious sentiment (although I think Pluralist, who is a good example of a liberal, would reject the third, as I have never gained the impression that he is sentimentally religious in any way –this is not a criticism of you Pluralist).
Liberals examine the Scripture with an ‘open mind’ without presupposing that its own account of itself is true and measure its worth by external historical, philosophical, religious and scientific sources. The essential message of Liberalism is that the Bible is an outstanding example of religious inspiration and God was with the authors, but their writings were not of a kind that would make them the Word of God. Scripture is uneven in the sense that some of it is true, some in error, some parts contradictory and others plain wrong and out of date. It is the task of the Liberal to divorce the Bible from its archaic trappings, re-formulate it, and put it in terms suitable for modern society and norms. The proper ground for believing whether something in the Bible is true is not that Scripture says it is, but that reason and conscience commend it to be so.
----------------------------------------
The Conservative position I think is closer to Articles VI and XXXIV of the CofE than the Liberal one although my understanding is that Liberals do not in general, hold the Articles in any great esteem. The logical outworking of the Liberal hermeneutic will inevitably lead to clashes with established doctrine and this has now become so severe we are seeing the schism that happening in the AC at the moment. Liberalism by its nature will attempt to evolve Christianity. While I think the form of Christianity will change over the centuries, its content should remain the same and while the degree of differences have been contained in the past, I think this is now no longer possible.
So Jonathan, I think we are on different graphs describing different gospels. In my view, the difference between Liberal and Conservative is very large and mutually incompatible. I am not in favour of the ‘them and us’ mentality’. Seeing Liberals and Conservatives as enemies is not particularly helpful as with the associated acrimony that goes with it. I respect the Liberal position, but I think it is wrong as I am sure you think so with Conservatives. However, I think things are at a pass now, where the co-existence of them in some parts of the AC has now become untenable and we will see it spreading to the wider Communion in the future.
I actually think there is a solution to this polarity within the AC that would gain wide support from both Liberals and Conservatives but it would need another thread to discuss it (the Bishops might not like it though).
My apologies for the long post. I will stop here before I go off the end of the text buffer!
Posted by: nersenpaul
Sunday 23 August 2009 - 01:57pm
(a post I left on this thread on Saturday has not appeared....maybe there is a gremlin in the system) With all the discussion below re the clash of "liberal" and "conservative" ideas, one has to come back to the remarkable statement of the ABC post GC09 (not even +Tom's explanation of it)..... why are the "liberal" arguments not persuading Rowan Williams to push "the mind of the Communion" in a "liberal" direction? Perhaps the "liberal" arguments are still failing to make a positive case from scripture which might change the mind of the Communion?
Jeremy - given you say below that you sometimes come to scripture with a view and see how it fits, it is a perfectly fair question to ask what you do it if does not fit - this is not a trap....possible answers are that you give your view more weight or you give scripture more weight or your views are shaped by scripture but not determined by scripture.... or you might say that you think scripture teaches that "the mind of the Communion" is wrong and therefore it should change. Now, we disagree on what Lambeth 1.10 calls "incompatible with scripture" but I am willing to change my view if people can show that rather than being "incompatible with scipture", certain behaviour is actually good, holy and pleasing in the eyes of God....i.e. if a positive case from scripture for changing the mind of the Communion is put forward. I have never seen that case made....have you?
Posted by: Celinda
Sunday 23 August 2009 - 12:52pm
Interesting to read the update on the Jesus Seminar (part of the Westar Institute) after reading Jonathan Clatworthy's post. Clatworthy's group seems to have similar goals. One of the things I've admired about +Wright is that in responding to members of the Jesus Seminar (like Crossan and Borg) he takes the stance Waterangel just did--he is glad they care about Jesus and want to make him accessible to people. What I saw toward the end of Clatworthy's post, however, was the implication that only one set of biblical scholars are right (the ones in the group he represents). I spent a few days with people influenced by the Westar Institute with classmates of my husband's a couple of years ago; they are quite aggressive in their desire to meet the goals of Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus they want to make accessible was simply a human being. Not someone you can reach through prayer, or who can help you, or who loves you; just someone you can reach through shared discussion, like any other human being in the past who has been a great teacher. They are aggressive in their criticism of Christian traditions passed on by the church (the creeds, and so on). They say anything in the New Testament indicating that Jesus was God (like the blasphemy charge in his trial) was an addition by leaders of the early church. --One of the traditions of the evangelical "wing" in the church, which Fulcrum represents, is to say (as early Protestants did) that individual people can find God's word in the Bible without the intervention of priests. It seems to me that Clatworthy and the Jesus Seminar are saying that you can't find God's word in the Bible without the intervention of certain scholars.
Posted by: WATERANGEL
Sunday 23 August 2009 - 09:27am
Jonathan
Thankyou for your clarification on iconoclast view of your write up..I hope you dont mind if i say that I found iconoclast brief explanation of the difference to liberalism and conservatism helpful, in the first instance, ie so that i could remember basic differences, memory for me is an issue for me seeing things clearly explained in that way is a good foundation..However your deeper explanation is also very valuable and it all helps to build on the knowledge base..
I guess it is just the way that people understand each other and how we interpret what is said but lets remember we are here to make Jesus accesible to all , it is a tough call.. It made me look for Schlemacher so now I know who he was..It really is very inspiring..
With Regards
In Christ
Waterangel
Posted by: Jonathan Clatworthy
Saturday 22 August 2009 - 02:39pm
I have never before taken the nom de plume ‘user 2138’ and I didn’t intend anonymity, so I must have pressed the wrong button at some stage. I am in fact Jonathan Clatworthy, the author of the MCU statement previously discussed, and I’d like to thank the Fulcrum nerds for allowing me space here as a self-confessed Anglican liberal. (If you can change my name to the real thing, please do!)
I’d like to respond to some of Iconoclast’s points, starting with his account of liberalism and working back from there to his account of rationality.
When Iconoclast describes liberals as believing that ‘the real subject matter of theology is not that truths are divinely revealed, but are the products of human religious experience’ I think he’s making a false contrast. We cannot know, believe or think anything at all without it being human experience. And if you believe our minds and the universe have been created by God, we cannot know, believe or think anything at all without it being divinely revealed. All the subject matter of theology – and for that matter everything else we know – is both divinely revealed and received by us through our experience. I suspect – though he can answer for himself – that his contrast is based on the assumption that only limited sources of information count as divine revelation, and only limited types of experience count as religiously acceptable. In that case, his point would boil down to the refusal to accept theological truths unless they come through his preferred channels – presumably the Bible. I believe God reveals things to us in other ways as well. That’s why we no longer consider slavery acceptable, and why we allow unhatted women into church.
On rationality. Iconoclast sees liberals as always seeking ‘“rational” explanation’ whereas ‘The conservative on the other hand will accept by faith that “irrational processes” are possible’. This is to confuse rationality with regularity. The difference between being resurrected and being slowly eaten by worms in a coffin is that the second often happens while the first happened, if at all, only once.
Iconoclast appears to identify irregularity with miracle, an identification developed in the late 17th century with the rise of modern science. All the authors of the Bible believed that for the sun to rise and set every day was an act of God, and when the authors of Joshua said that one day God caused it to stay still in the sky, they believed that was an act of God too. Irregularities were ‘things to be wondered at’ (Latin: miracula), but regularities were just as much caused by God. It was only with the beginnings of modern science that people began to believe in unbreakable ‘laws of nature’ as forces independent of God’s creative work. It was then that ‘miracles’ became ‘events which break the laws of nature’ and must therefore have been performed by God. Once this idea had caught on, John Locke and others seized on it to prove the truth of Christianity. The Bible records events breaking the laws of nature; only God can break the laws of nature; therefore the Bible records God’s activity, showing divine approval for the Christian church. It is such a bad argument that it isn’t surprising Hume and a variety of atheists stood it on its head, using the same logical sequence to prove that the Bible tells porkies. What is much more surprising is that ‘conservative’ Christians today still try to defend Locke’s position, imagining that liberals still defend Hume’s position. We dont: science has moved on, and so have we.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Saturday 22 August 2009 - 01:55pm
Hello Jeremy ....given you said below that you sometimes come to scripture with a view and see how it fits.....it is a fair question to ask what you do if it does not fit. A possible answer is that you let your view dominate if scripture does not support it.... or that you let scripture dominate if you cannot square your view with it ....or that you let your views be shaped by scripture.....this is no trap but a perfectly fair question.
Jeremy - have I anywhere suggested that my "interpretation of scripture is the only legitimate and honest one" ?? Because some assert that certain behaviour is widely acceptable in the CofE/AC, I mention what the ABC calls "the mind of the Communion" - this is precisely to show that I am not pushing my "interpretation" of the bible nor my view of the position of the Communion nor just an evangelical view - using the ABC's words is aimed at injecting some objectivity into the discussion when not all posts pushing a "liberal" view are objective (or even on topic) in this forum. Of course some people reject the "mind of the Communion" but it is important not to let the assertion stand that "the mind of the Communion" is somehow not what it is just because some disagree.
Rather than merely asserting that "my interpretation" or the position of the ACI or the Fulcrum leadership on Lambeth 1.10 is infallible, I have been asking for the positive case from scripture to support "liberal" arguments against Lambeth 1.10. I am willing to change my view and the mind of the Communion may well change if people can show that rather than being "incompatible with scripture", certain behaviour is good, pleasing and holy in God's sight.
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Saturday 22 August 2009 - 12:59pm
If the graphs are plotting 'two different things' it is only doing so in more recent times from our perspective: previously there was a narrower, cultural Christian perspective. However, if you lived in previous times the argeuments were on narrower matters and thus people then readily accused on another of being outside the true faith.
There is no 'writing out' the possibility of revelation in any scriptures, but that such revelation should be open to reasoning across the board in all the academic disciplines available.
So when it comes, for example to resurrection, the first question is the status of the documents. For a historian, the gospels and letters referring to the resurrection do not stand up as primary documents. They are primary documents of the early Churches, but secondary regarding matters to do with resurrection. Then we come to see that resurrection is a concept that fits in with other last days concepts at the time, believed by some, and by these people, but not by others. We read not just contradictions and variations regarding time, place, body (matter) and apparent spirit, but also the literary devices that focus in on the earliest practices of the early Churches.
So for example is the story of Jesus unrecognised on the Emmaus Road, and it is only when they 'get it' at the eucharistic meal that he fully appears, and as soon as he appears he is gone. The whole thing begins to look like a literary device - not to recognise someone and then to do so at the crucial moment. And it looks like the connecting of the meal and the still soon expected Kingdom of God coming in. And these themes and devices are not exclusive to after Jesus died and his expected return, from the perspective of the early Church, but throughout these texts. The relationship with actuality is speculative.
So if you ask me whether I believe in resurrection, his or anyone's, the answer is no. And I say no also because we know that when someone dies the brain along with the body rots at tremendous speed. There is not an alternative history of the universe where one person reversed this physical, biological process. Of course there always might be, but then there might be pieces of cheese on the moon. The people in this corner of the first century, including Jesus, had fantastic beliefs that have no place in our ordinary discourse for what is our outlook regarding solutions to problems and existential questions.
Some people, of course, still have views like this but retain views about incarnation and resurrection in general. I make the argument in my blog entry on liberalism that J A T Robinson was one who reasoned thoroughly, but when it came to the incarnation he argued that it was the task of the Church to find reasons for. He was, on this, dogmatic - he had no reasons for. This is not my position of course. Those attributes that constitute being 'divine' are open to anyone, whether they are holiness, ethical behaviour or self-sacrifice. It is only a religious tradition that piles exclusivity on to one person.
Posted by: Tony
Saturday 22 August 2009 - 12:35pm
Iconoclast: Thank you for bringing up the question of what evangelicals of various kinds think those they call liberals are doing when they exercise faith. (I hope that's a fair paraphrase.) The comments you make about Schleiermacher and human experience are helpful (I don't know anything about him.) Surely, though, even the most conservative evangelical must think that the various and variously generated texts that we call the Bible (Gk the books) are at some level, and in a significant way, the record and product -- and perhaps even an event -- of human experience? Isn't the liberal question simply and how do you draw the line? I don't think my evangelical friends are irrational in their methods -- but I might often feel that they apply the battery of reasoned argument to an irrational project. Similarly, some evangelical as well as Ignatian or Benedictine ways of meditating on the scriptures aren't worried about being rational, but nevertheless bring us to valid insight and understanding, maybe via the right side of the brain.
(Incidentally, I found J Clatworthy's account of youthful evangelical excesses alarmingly familiar, and not unknown here in Oxford even now.)
Posted by: Roger Hurding
Saturday 22 August 2009 - 10:18am
Thank you User 2138 for your useful summary of the uses and misuses of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’. I also take Iconoclast’s correctives. It seems to be that the latter point to the historic understanding of liberalism within Christianity and that is helpful. However, much of our debate hinges on the misuse of the word ‘liberal’ in relation to its historic sense.
It is, rather, that there’s a strong view that you are dubbed ‘liberal’ if you, like Jeremy C, myself and others, hold to the authority pf scripture and yet depart from the conservative consensus (to use Nersenian language) in one area, namely that of holding an understanding that the Bible does not clearly exclude the rightness of faithful same-sex relationships. As we’ve said repeatedly, Church history is littered with other examples of ‘liberal’ revisionism where, finally and after much anguish, the scriptures are revisited and dearly held positions are reversed. Yesterday’s ‘liberals’ become today’s ‘conservatives’.
Posted by: Iconoclast
Friday 21 August 2009 - 11:37pm
User 2138,
Thank you for the link.
The article states:
According to this distinction, liberals are those who allow divine revelation to be modified by rational processes, while conservatives insist that the right answers are to be derived from appeal to truths which have been infallibly given by God and can therefore be known with certainty.
I don't think this distinction is quite correct. It is making the assumption that conservatives so not use reason when interpreting scripture - they do.
The article you quote does not state what is meant by 'rational processes'. There are plenty of things in the Bible that are not 'rational processes'. The resurrection is not a rational process but a supernatural one. No one living today was present when the resurrection happened so in that sense, the only certainty can be from the testimony of those who were there.
This depends on knowing how reliable the records of the event were. If you look at this from the starting point of rational processes you conclude (because we do not see resurrection processes occurring today - at least they are uncommon!), that there must be some other 'rational' explanation or that a metaphorical interpretation is appropriate, or that the records are wrong in some way Your faith is in the rational process.
The conservative on the other hand will accept by faith that 'irrational processes' are possible. But this does not negate their reason. It is perfectly possible to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead as being the most reasonable explanation if you accept that God is able to work supernaturally. I say this BTW, as someone who is a professional physicist by training. Conservatives are rational people.
I think the principal point where Liberals depart from Conservatives is that they accept the assertion of Scheliermacher insofar that the real subject matter of theology is not that truths are divinely revealed, but are the products of human religious experience . The proper study of theology for liberals is therefore that of man. The Bible for Liberals is thus a record of the religious experience of man- primarily that of the Hebrews but others also. I believe this is the position of posters to this forum like Pluralist (and perhaps Clare).
(no doubt they will correct me! )
So I think liberalism has no real problem in admitting para -christian or universalist interpretations of Scripture and modern human behaviour. In fact it is a logical outcome of the 'rational process'. We can see this very clearly exemplified in what is happening currently in the Episcopal Church.
Now its not hard to see that these two approaches are mutually incompatible since they lead to quite different gospels although they largely use the same terminology. How they can co-exist in the same organisation without tension is a near impossibility. In fact the tension now so great that the organisation is coming apart.
My final point. The article draws an analogy of the Liberal/ Conservative divide as being a spectrum rather like the visual spectrum of light with shades and hues. I think this is incorrect . If you have ever had experience of plotting graphs, I think the divide is more like two graphs of separate phenonema in which each graph has its own allowable errors bars for the positions plotted, but the graphs are describing two quite different things.
Posted by: Jonathan Clatworthy
Friday 21 August 2009 - 04:39pm
Thanks to those of you who have discussed the MCU’s recent paper. This comment will just focus on one issue, the question of who is a liberal.
The word ‘liberal’ is often used as a catch-all for everyone who disagrees with the speaker. That doesn’t describe real people. As I see it there are three common ways of using the word. I’ve described them in greater detail on http://www.clatworthy.org/libthlibscons.html.
Firstly it is used to describe views on specific issues. This mirrors non-religious uses of the term. Institutions find reasons for change, and at their best they allow different points of view to be discussed until a consensus emerges. Within that discussion those who oppose change may be described as conservatives and those who support it as liberals. In this sense most people are conservative on one issue and liberal on another without any contradiction.
The second refers to a person’s general approach to issues of debate within a subject area. All traditions of enquiry inherit a range of teachings but also have tools to question them and develop new ideas. Within any tradition conservatives tend to give more weight to inherited teachings, liberals to new ideas. There is a spectrum of positions; at the extremes are the very liberal and very conservative, while most people are somewhere in the middle. Conservatives of this type may describe themselves as committed to the authority of the Bible, but ‘within reason’. They do not, for example, expect to obey every biblical command. This spectrum - with a few extremists at each end but most people being more or less moderate liberals or moderate conservatives - characterizes many religious traditions as well as non-religious ones. What makes moderate positions possible is that neither the new ideas nor the old traditions win the argument every time. Each issue has to be judged on its merits.
The third distinction is a sharper one. It claims that the second, with its spectrum of positions, is itself a liberal process, and conservatives who take part in it are betraying their conservatism. According to this distinction, liberals are those who allow divine revelation to be modified by rational processes, while conservatives insist that the right answers are to be derived from appeal to truths which have been infallibly given by God and can therefore be known with certainty.
This distinction between conservatives and liberals is often found in religious debate but in every other sphere of discourse it is considered just too extreme because it denies any possibility that we might learn something new and decide to change. Yet it is the one which dominates the current debate in the Anglican Communion. It is the basis on which ‘conservatives’ (in this sense) insist that gays can’t be bishops, etc.
Posted by: Tony
Friday 21 August 2009 - 04:16pm
I have begun to see that fulcrum and its evangelical supporters need to be left to pursue their own particular interests and discourse. There is much that conservatives and 'open' evangelicals agree about in relation to sexual ethics and questions of ministry in the churches: no gay priests or bishops (though they probably differ about what to do with the ones we already have). They do have different views about ecclesiology but +Graham's response to +Lawrence seems to suggest a closing of ranks there too (or have I misread that?) And there are no doubt differences about women in both orders of ministry too. I suppose the key questions for evangelicals now are both strategic and tactical. If their current ascendancy is to be maintained , it's going to be important to devise ways of extending influence -- given that the Turnbull model (forgive my shorthand) seems to have foundered. In this context the passage in Andrew Goddard's recent review of Marin's book Love is an Orientation that caught the eye of Changing Attitude's Colin Coward is striking, even and perhaps particularly in relation to +Tom Wright's exposition of ++Rowan's real meaning: Andrew Goddard says
"I found that Marin powerfully expresses much of what I’ve begun to learn (and warns against much I continually have to un-learn) but also made me aware how much more I need to learn - intellectually, experientially and spiritually. In particular, his book showed me how narrow and in-house my listening – and probably most of the (admittedly limited) evangelical listening to GLBT people - has been, focussed as it has been on the church debate. It has left me wrestling with whether and how I can participate in that debate from a traditionalist position and also find a way of doing at least a small part of what Marin has been doing by going beyond the confines of the church and its political battles and seeking and sharing Christ in the GLBT community.
"For the growing number of evangelicals who are aware of – and embarrassed by - the scandal caused by evangelicalism being identified simply as “anti-gay”, who know they cannot line up behind some of the public face of evangelical responses to sexuality debates, who are eager to really understand and share the gospel with GLBT people and who want to work out what it means to welcome them with integrity into the church and refocus the whole debate and controversy that plagues the church, this book provides what until now we have lacked in terms of evangelical wisdom rooted in Scripture and practical experience of God’s mission."
It way be that there is a conversation here to be had in the fulcrum constituency and its forums too, as well as with gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. If so it's certainly one best sustained without interventions by more liberal, modern-catholic, or postmodern (!) christians.
Posted by: Jeremy C
Friday 21 August 2009 - 04:04pm
Nersen, no-one is trying to censor you. I suggest chance would be a fine thing ;-)
What people are, maybe doing, is choosing not to respond to your posts, which they perceive to be loaded and repetitious, and don't really advance the debate. We all know you are in favour of an interpretation of scripture which you believe regards homosexual genital acts as sinful. Repeating that ad infinitum is stonewalling, not debate.
Nor are some people, myself included, particularly impressed by attempts to manipulate the terms of the debate in order to score points. This was the "when did you stop beating your wife" question about scriptural authority which I declined to answer. Now I'm sure you did get the point, but on the offchance that you didn't I will spell it out.
The premise behind your question is that your interpretation of scripture is the only legitimate and honest one. Thus, whatever answer I give I would be branded as a liberal denier of biblical authority or someone who is failing to live out his professed position. In fact I am neither. I accept both the authoritative nature of scripture, and the belief that homosexual genital acts are acceptable within the context of same-sex marriage. Rather, it is your premise that I believe to be mistaken.
As for the difficulty of my position being that the ABC and +Tom are not convinced, the difficulty of your position is that, if surveys are to be believed, and I see no reason to disbelieve them, most young evangelicals in this country seem to read the scriptures as I do, rather than as you do.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Friday 21 August 2009 - 08:16am
So predictable....the "liberal" approach and the demand for "listening" is accompanied by attempts to censor opposing voices..... "listening" is supposed to be only one way, of course....even on an evangelical forum.
The reality of the CofE and the AC is that excluding a conservative from an "open evangelical" forum (to please 1 or 2 non-evangelicals (a pluralist and a "liberal" who have posted most here (sometimes with ad hominem attacks as they get away with it for some reason) will achieve nothing.....one unpersuaded conservative evangelical is not your problem.....not being able to persuade the ABC is the real problem facing "liberals". That is why we see attacks on him and +Durham from CA and the MCU (same small group of people mostly?) +Durham is a focus for attacks because his arguments are winning through - evidenced by the ABC's recent statement re GC09.....in which he went further than I expected eg re representative functions, taking a biblical line. Why? Because he knows the AC and he knows how little support their is for revisionist positions in it and he never supported the fait accompli approach of TEC(USA) in 2003....he is not letting the tail wag when most of the AC can sign the proposed Covenant and be in communion - the only barrier is the divisive actions of a small number of revisionists. Why is the ABC not persuaded by all the "liberal" arguments from CA/MCU? It ain't because of my posts on Fulcrum!!! Maybe those "liberal" arguments have some flaws....maybe, as he says, "the mind of the Communion" is what it is despite the years of campaigning to change it....maybe that is why some people do not like to hear about it.
CA/MCU have to attack the ABC and +Durham because their "liberal" arguments are not winning through.....even with the ABC who gave them, twenty years ago, some of their strongest arguments for change - but he is not dancing to their tune so faces the heat now. If CA/MCU cannot persuade Rowan Williams that "the mind of the Communion" must be changed now ..... they know their arguments are not persuasive in the AC....or even the CofE! This leads to the ABC and those who have made solid, persuasive, biblical arguments consistently (like +Durham) being attacked (sometimes personally)....... evidence of the lack of strong arguments against their positions. Fucrum forums can be left to pluralists and "liberals" but that does not change "the mind of the Communion" nor the stance of the ABC.....who has certainly considered the revisionist case given he wrote some of the strongest bits of it.
Adrian...you don't like "cracked records" but are you one as a pluralist wanting the CofE to follow pluralistic ideas? If someone keeps on saying that England is part of Asia, it may be necessary to repeat many times, with evidence, the truth that it is part of Europe ..... the fault is not always with the repetition of truth but sometimes with the repetition of error based on a rejection of the truth. You, despite not being a Christian by your own admission, think the AC should follow your pluralistic ideas and do not like the repetition of where the AC stands but I am am a Christian and a member of the CofE and I am most encouraged that the ABC (not a conservative evangelical, you know) talks about "the mind of the Communion" as his views have a certain authority and relevance in the CofE - he is honest about "the mind of the Communion", causing the anger of those who would subvert the CofE / AC from inside by asserting their revisionist position has wide support when it does not (and they have lots of empty churches to prove it). The "liberal" arguments have to be persuasive....if I never post here again, "the mind of the Communion" will still be what it is .....
Posted by: Deleted user 974
Friday 21 August 2009 - 02:21am
Thanks Pluralist, the MCU piece is very good. That way of doing theology and speaking rationally and with respect gives me some hope.
I'll never understand --I don't imagine, why Rowan sold out. He could have done so much good.
It was also good to be remind of HR McAdoo and his work and witness, from a solid truely anglican base. I followed up some of the threads and links, and got on to some radical URC sites and so on ! Very encouraging.
Again, thanks.
Posted by: Iconoclast
Thursday 20 August 2009 - 10:32pm
Whatever we may or may not represent, I for one am not going to respond to a cracked record approach simply because that's all that will come the next time.
I come to this forum to read both sides of the argument. But it occurs to me Pluralist, that your appoach is just as much a cracked record as you accuse Nerson's of being. Having read many of your posts both on this forum and your own blog which I read often, your liberal response to evangelical thought on this forum is entirely predictable and repetitive.
Still. unlike L.Roberts, at least you are prepared to engage the issues, which Nerson does also and should be given credit for. And you have many more posts than him.
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Thursday 20 August 2009 - 09:07pm
Whatever we may or may not represent, I for one am not going to respond to a cracked record approach simply because that's all that will come the next time.
I am quite sure Nersen will ruin these discussion boards, and I have said so previously. In the end he will be the same parrot voice going on and on, while others get on with what they have always done.
Meanwhile a very good article by the MCU has appeared, at last understanding Rowan Williams for what he is doing, and the impatience of N T Wright with the similarities and differences between him and Williams. I think at last people at that end of Anglicanism are smelling the coffee and have decided each with the other that enough is enough. MCU always was against the Covenant, but there is a growing unity of response among those of that sympathy. There will be key Churches now that just won't let this happen and a way will be found to preserve the looseness and variety of Anglican Churches where there is no such thing as a 'mind' of the Communion.
Posted by: Celinda
Wednesday 19 August 2009 - 04:49pm
L Roberts, the thing is, all of us--you, Nersen, Jeremy, Clare, Phil, Pluralist, and everyone else--isn't just speaking for him/herself. Nersen is particularly determined, but many like him--equally determined on the issues--simply don't speak up. I'd rather hear those convictions expressed so we all know what they are.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Wednesday 19 August 2009 - 11:20am
Jeremy - will you not answer to the question.....it is fair, given what you said below about coming to scripture with a view and seeing how it fits....what happens if scripture does not support a particular view? You move us on to church order....how does the church react when some insist on going against its "mind"....I guess the Covenant is all about addressing that, following a period of some in the AC asserting a right to do whatever they like but also demanding to stay in the Communion....let's see if the campaign to get the covenant (section 4) neutered works. Re unity, not sure we are always separating from Christ if we cannot accept certan teaching in the church....St Paul taught that it is necessary sometimes to separate from people in the church precisely because of their life and teaching (eg 1 Cor 5:9-12).....none of the apostles taught that we must at all costs stick together with all who want to be in the church regardless of behaviour and teaching (again, there is a positive case from scripture for not accepting all teaching and behaviour in the church...unless you think St Paul was being a bit OTT in 1 Cor 5)
L Roberts....many more posts from you (982 and counting) on Fulcrum than from me......quite a few from you totally off topic (e.g. below) and throwing toys too......but, for some reason, you seem to be able to get away with it.....how about engaging with the issues?
Posted by: nersenpaul
Wednesday 19 August 2009 - 07:47am
Hi Jeremy - unless the bible says that it should only be available in one or certain languages, there is no positive case from scripture re the Papal point you raise...... Luther and others proposed changes but what was striking was the strong backing they could show from scripture for some of the changes they wanted to see in the church ......I am not opposed to people proposing changes, I just want the case to be made with more than negative and indirect arguments.....I would not have been convinced by someone saying, "The bible does not say, 'Thou shalt not hold slaves', so we can hold slaves" and I am not happy with arguments which are similarly indirect and selective in seeking to excuse other behaviour, claiming it was not imagined in the OT/NT times etc. A good test of such arguments is to ask for the evidence that God sees what is being excused as good and holy and blessed.... i.e. a positive case from scripture.
Posted by: Celinda
Wednesday 19 August 2009 - 12:10am
No doubt he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. I'm not questioning that. I'm asking a secular question about that particular aspect of the morality of all three Abrahamic faiths. I thought someone else on Fulcrum might have an answer. Sorry you obviously do not think it's relevant.
Posted by: Jeremy C
Tuesday 18 August 2009 - 10:15pm
originally posted by nersen:
"what do you do when a "reforming" agenda is not ...compatible with scripture? Which wins? Does scripture just have the authority we give it on any issue?"
Nice try, nersen, but surely that question is the bulletin board equivalent of "when did you stop beating your wife". The real question is "what do we do when we cannot, as christians, agree as to whether an "agenda" ( a somewhat loaded word, but I'll let it pass) is compatible with scripture or incompatible with scripture. Or, at least, that is the question with which we are faced, even if it's not the one you would prefer to have answered. And the answer to this, the real question, is that, with humility, we accept as a given the good faith of the other party, we continue to interact without demonising those with whom we disagree, we argue strongly for that which we believe to be true, and we continue to "discern the body of Christ", recognising Him in the "other". What we do not, or maybe should not do, I believe, is misrepresent those who do not see things in the way that we do, and we do not, or should not, move towards breaking communion with them. Now, no doubt, both sides are, to some extent, guilty of "missing the mark" here, and therefore, on both sides, repentance is called for. But, to the extent that we exclude our brothers and sisters, we exclude Christ to that same extent.
If I may interject a personal note, in a sense I have no dog in this fight. I'm a straight, middle-aged bloke, who has only nodding aquaintance, as far as I know, with a few gay or lesbian people. But, and it's a big but, I am bound, whether I like it or not, in one body with my brothers and sisters. If I separate myself from them, I separate myself from Christ. In all conscience, and bearing in mind that I shall have to give an account of my conduct in these, as in all, matters, I would rather err on the side of inclusion than of exclusion. I believe that my position is the one that is most compatible with the scriptures taken as a whole, but, even if I should be wrong, I would rather give an account for being too generous than for being too restrictive.
Posted by: Deleted user 974
Tuesday 18 August 2009 - 09:24pm
Is everyone happy with the way Fulcrum has morphed into the
'Let's dialog with Nerson' site ? If so, why not re-name ?
I propose either 'An at home with Nerson' or simply 'Let's dialog with Nerson' to replace the now inaccurate and redundant name 'Fulcrum'.
(For myself I can no longer bring myself to wade through their mind-numbing predictability of his posts. ~But getting through all the replies to him is pretty boring too, very often. How could it be otherwide.)
Posted by: nersenpaul
Tuesday 18 August 2009 - 02:27pm
Hi Celinda .....it is fascinating and instructive that St Paul was dealing with highly sophisticated, powerful cultures in Greece and Rome which rejected OT morality but , while wanting to be all things to all people for the sake of the gospel and despite fighting St Peter in public when others tried to put rules on gentiles which were not necessary, St Paul reinforced OT teaching re morality. I trust we take it that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit and that is why his stance is totally consistent with the rest of the NT and the OT.
Hi Jeremy - so, what do you do when a "reforming" agenda is not ...compatible with scripture? Which wins? Does scripture just have the authoriy we give it on any issue?
Jeremy, you mention slavery....I would have asked the same question back in the time when the CofE and TEC(USA) were benefiting from owning slaves......where was the positive case from scripture for the slave trade? It does not exist....people had to justify involvement in slavery by going round the houses, arguing from what was not said directly in the bible rather than what was clearly said about how we all ought to treat all other people, ignoring verses which say there is no difference between humans whether slave or not, Greek or not...in Christ, ignoring the "Greatest Commandment" and the second greatest. There was no positive case from scripture for slavery.....nobody could say that it was a good, holy and blessed phenomenon in the eyes of God....even though some tried to excuse it.
Posted by: Jeremy C
Tuesday 18 August 2009 - 01:23pm
originally posted by nersen:
"Also, I am not falling for the trap which is the position insisting on space in the church for the condoning of behaviour incompatible with scripture merely because a minority view has not changed the mind of the Communion in the last few decades.....because that is a recipe for division and is why we have been divided in the AC."
Presumably, then, you think that the Pope was right to anathematize Luther. After all, the church was settled in its view that the Bible should not be available in the vernacular, and had been ever since the beginning of more widespread literacy. Pearls before swine, and all that. And, of course, it was Luther who caused the division in western Christendom, not the Papal authorities who refused to allow him "space" in the church.
Of course, to us it is axiomatic that the Scriptures should be available in the vernacular, but it was not always thus, and without the prophetic discontent of people like Wyclif, Hus and Luther, who was to suggest that the traditional interpretation of the scripture was wrong. Sure, a rational case had always, in theory, existed for preferring the application of the general principle of "how shall they believe if they have not heard", over the (then) traditional (and we would now, universally, regard as erroneous) "pearls before swine" argument. But, without some predisposition to examine the case rigourously, would anyone have considered that there was a "positive case from scripture" for reform?
Posted by: nersenpaul
Tuesday 18 August 2009 - 07:43am
Hello Roger. I am not calling for any uncritical acceptance of views....but I am pointing out that many if not all of the revisionist arguments raised for changing "the mind of the Communion" have been considered carefully for years and decades....that is, I am not accepting uncritically the "liberal" call for endless listening to revisionist views while ignoring the may good answers already given. Also, I am not falling for the trap which is the position insisting on space in the church for the condoning of behaviour incompatible with scripture merely because a minority view has not changed the mind of the Communion in the last few decades.....because that is a recipe for division and is why we have been divided in the AC. The job of a bishop is to chase away strange doctrine....not promote it.
Most importantly, I am critical of the LACK of a positive case from scripture to change "the mind of the Communion". If I want a bacon sandwich, I do not have to go round the houses to justify it ..... I do not have to say that since some twisted scripture to justify slavery, therefore we maybe should doubt that the traditional interpretation that the OT prohibits eating pork, therefore I can have a bacon sandwich until the question is settled in future years......or maybe they did not understand today's bacon in the OT and NT times and only meant wild pig meat....not lovely Danish bacon from the supermarket..... these lines of argument sound weak and tenuous, I am sure you would agree. But I can show from the NT that I am free to enjoy a bacon sandwich.....no need to go round the houses. Similarly, to accept a change in "the mind of the Communion" someone has to show a positive case from scripture - nobody has shown that "the mind of the Communion" is in fact not faithful and prohibiting something which to God is holy, pleasing and blessed. I am not accepting the "liberal" view uncritically....I agree with you completely that we should not be uncritical....both ways.
Posted by: Roger Hurding
Monday 17 August 2009 - 05:35pm
Nersen, you write, ‘Do people really think +Tom, and others, have not considered all the issues or does he need a tutorial from Simon,Celinda, Roger on others on why he is wrong and should accept a more "accepting" position?’
Like you, I greatly respect Tom Wright’s hermeneutical conclusions and especially value the insights expressed in his monumental Jesus and the Victory of God. However, I’m sure Tom Wright himself wouldn’t expect us all to accept his every utterance uncritically. Many years ago I seem to remember the much loved John Stott holding quite a dispensationalist view on the gifts of the Spirit and yet he had the grace to adjust those views in the light of the charismatic movement and further reflection on scripture.
Don’t we all need to follow the example of the Beroean Jews who welcomed Paul and Silas’s message ‘very eagerly and examined the scriptures every day to see whether these things were so’ (Acts 17:11). There are other faithful exegetes who come to different conclusions to Tom Wright on the question of faithful same-sex relationships and their voices also need to be carefully considered.
Posted by: Simon Morden
Monday 17 August 2009 - 05:31pm
Unfortunately, I don't have any time at the moment to devote to the arguments here, but I have to just say something to this:
Do people really think +Tom, and others, have not considered all the issues or does he need a tutorial from Simon,Celinda, Roger on others on why he is wrong and should accept a more "accepting" position?
Yes. +Tom is an excellent bishop - but that does not mean he cannot be wrong on certain matters. Nersen, perhaps you've never spoken out against a person in a position of authority - an elected politician, a church leader, your own boss - and perhaps you're consequently unaware of the cost some people suffer for 'speaking truth to power'. You should give it a go sometimes. I always entertain the possibility that I might be wrong - unlike you, it seems - but if I believe that in all good conscience I need to speak out, then I will.
Posted by: Celinda
Monday 17 August 2009 - 04:57pm
Nersen, I certainly don't think +Wright needs a tutorial from me or anyone else and I'm sorry you took it that way. The question I asked doesn't have to do with scripture, but I think it is relevant. That question is: why did Greek and Roman society accept homosexual behavior, but Jewish, Christian, and Islamic societies (the Abrahamic faith communities) did/do not? Was it only because God--through scripture-- taught against it, or was there something else involved? Other ethical and moral questions are addressed by other faith groups or by philosophers, but this one (homosexual behavior) is not, as far as I know. Many people in this "post-Christian" society in the west (I don't like to call it that, but I'm afraid that's where we're headed) are asking all the questions that were asked in the first millennia, but aren't looking to Christianity or the church to find the answers. You've said yourself that the questions are all old. St. Paul addressed Greek intellectuals on some of those questions without putting them down and religious thinkers throughout the history of western society have done the same, often coming up with answers (or other questions) that reinforce the Word as spoken in scripture. +Bishop Wright does this a great deal. I was simply saying that I have not seen this question addressed outside of scripture, and I wondered if anyone knew why. Perhaps sociologists have studied the issue. Why did the Abrhamic faiths preach against the behavior, while the "highest" cultures (in the west, at least) did not? Again, I certainly meant no disrespect to Bishop Wright and was not giving him a "tutorial," or anyone else. I was just asking a question to which I have not seen an answer anywere and I didn't ask in order to weaken the case against the acceptance of homosexual practice--I asked it as part of a way, perhaps, to strengthen it.
Posted by: Jeremy C
Monday 17 August 2009 - 02:32pm
Well, first, nersen, I'm not that sure that people are actually demanding that +Tom, for instance, should adopt a more "accepting" position. I think all would agree that he should follow his own conscience in the light of his understanding of scripture, in exactly the same way in which those who have become convinced of the contrary view should be free to follow theirs. But, of course, this doesn't seem to be on offer.
With regard to your comments about the absence of a "positive case in scripture" for the reforming (as I would say)/revisionist (as you would say) view, I think this is to misunderstand the way in which, in the past, reform has occurred within the church. In general, this has not happened because people have searched the scriptures, found a new or different principle there that impacts on the way Christians should view an issue (say, slavery or usury) and from that moment of scriptural revelation have gone forth to convince the church catholic of the validity of their understanding. You might find that schema appealing, and I can understand, in part, that appeal, but historically, that is not what has happened. Mostly what has happened is that people have been stirred up by what they perceive as a weakness in the current teaching of the church, and have gone to the scriptures to examine whether scripture is compatible with what they already (under the influence, they believe, of the Holy Spirit) believe to be true. In other words, they come with a committment (or at least a predisposition towards a committment) towards reform. I do not consider this attitude is in any way to weaken the authority of scripture; rather it is to take seriously the dynamic interplay between the scriptures and those who seek to meet with God through their "lively oracles".
Actually, I do think that the issue of slavery does bear analysis when we are considering issues of full inclusion. Firstly, historically, it is the reason why TEC has been in the forefront of the advocating of reform in terms of same sex relationships. It is hardly surprising that a church which endured the trauma of the battle for civil rights in the twentieth century should be especially sensitive about whether they might be stigmatising another group, and of course, that stigmatisation was the aftermath of slavery.
But, more than that, the scriptural argument against slavery involved setting a background principle over and above specific texts which seemed to accept, if not necessarily commend, slavery. I suspect that, when the church does come to a mind which is accepting of same-sex relationships (as I have no doubt that it will, probably within my lifetime), the same process will be involved.
Posted by: Tony
Monday 17 August 2009 - 12:26pm
Just a brief comment on DavidH's reply to Jeremy where he says 'I do not think their baptism and/or confirmation is denied. They [gay and lesbian christians] are still on the books and welcome to worship and partake in communion with the body of Christ. Yes the church excludes from teaching and eldership those whose lifestyle is at variance with it's teaching.' This looks like hospitality and generosity, for which we must be grateful, but it's bound to be on the basis of an inconsistency, surely. If people in homosexual partnerships can't be priests or bishops without 'repenting' and desisting (and as the case of Jeffrey John made clear, desisting is not sufficient!), how can they be given baptism or confirmation and then admitted to the Eucharist without the same rule applying? (Similar inconsistencies are practiced in relation to divorced people too, unlike in the Roman Catholic Church.) But it must be inconsistent, mustn't it? It flies in the face of a strict reading (on your own understanding, David) of the prefatory remarks that appear before the Order for Holy Communion in the BCP, for instance; and I expect Nersen would want to hammer it home with his incompatible-with-scripture slogan. I have only anecdotal evidence, but I am pretty certain that such exclusion from communion operates in some evangelical anglican (and of course other) churches, & even in my own diocese a few years back. Thanks for your kindness, David.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Sunday 16 August 2009 - 12:50pm
Relating back to the thread title and +Tom.....some argue below as if evangelical scholars (people like+Tom and many others) have not considered carefully the "liberal"/ "accepting" arguments, as if these arguments are all brand new rather than decades old (if not older) and have not been answered; as if people stand for "the mind of the Communion" (not a popular or costless stand) without having thought extremely carefully about the key issues wth regard to OT and NT teaching, interpretation of biblical languages, culture then and now, past errors of the church etc. Do people really think +Tom, and others, have not considered all the issues or does he need a tutorial from Simon,Celinda, Roger on others on why he is wrong and should accept a more "accepting" position?
What is missing is a positive case from scripture in "liberal"/"accepting" arguments.....too often the arguments are negative i.e. attempts to cast doubt on "the mind of the Communion" and assuming that doubt has been cast, demand space for revisionist views. That is not persuasive....what nobody has shown is that the Lord and his apostles would have blessed behaviour which some today want to assert is compatible with scripture. There is no evidence to suggest that they did....they were not scared to say what was man made religion and what was of God. So, we get arguments like "the church got things wrong before...." - i.e. not making a case from scripture.
We often hear that some, sadly, tried to justify slavery and apartheid....all that proves is that sometimes people try to twist the bible justify doing what they want to do anyway.....the point is that their attempts to use the bible were not persuasive to many and were in the end easily demolished by scripture....and many Christians who took seriously what the bible says did oppose those systems. Some have tried to justify their sin from scripture in the past.... it really does not follow that we must ditch "the mind of the Communion" and break further away from the "Church Catholic" because some in the AC today want to justify what they want to do or think is right. If revisionist ("liberal"/"accepting") arguments made a positive case from scripture, the "mind of the Communion" might be changed.....pointing out errors from the past (or present) does not mean we must make space for more error. Where is the positive case from scripture? I feel free to eat a bacon sandwich because the NT is quite clear that I am free from OT food laws.....but I am not free to ignore the OT when it says "do not steal" because that law is reinforced by the NT ...... that some tried to justify slavery and apartheid does not mean that I am free to steal - that would be a ridiculous thing to try and argue.
When the snake said to Eve, "Did God really say that....?" She ought to have said, "Yes" - but if she was confused, she ought to have asked, "Did God say he was happy for us to eat from that tree?" and before eating, she ought to have checked with God..... it was an error to eat just because of a negative argument like "Did God really say that?"
The negative arguments will never persuade many, nor should they as they do not address the key issues. A positive case from scripture is required to change "the mind of the Communion".....showing that rather than being incompatible with scripture, certain behaviour is good, holy and pleasing to God.
Posted by: User 2134
Sunday 16 August 2009 - 04:14am
Many words are spoken on the subject of our times and human rights. The responses to the ABC, no matter which side of the coin your are in favor of, still attempt to reconcile the human equation, from the human perspective, to Father’s law and His plan for His creation.
Those of us who have lived in sin, with all of its appeal, have always attempted justification of it through our (or others) view and interpretation of scripture.
Taken literally, there is no justification for our behavior, but as fallen men and women born with a sin nature, we will continue to find ways to do just that, justify.
Father, with His amazing ability to grant mercy and grace, will forgive us. Nevertheless we will suffer the consequences of the actions that He as the Creator of life forbade. I find the reality of consequences never spoken on to the extent that it should be.
Sin brings death and death has many facets other that not breathing. Broken relationships, AIDS, venereal disease, divorce, depression and children left in gutters or the abortion sink are but a few.
Life under this dispensation of spiritual time is not about our rights, it is about bringing glory to Jesus, who gave his life for us. It is about being bond servants to the Lord of Lords and King of Kings. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I have no rights. I only have the responsibility to follow him, his teachings and his example of love.
While I am doing poorly, I at least understand what is required and will strive to do my best, which again is not, nor ever will be worthy of what he accomplished on the cross for me.
Making excuses will only serve to limit your potential to accomplish your destiny. Eternity is a long time, but most of you seem only to be concerned about the next few decades. May our Father have mercy on all of us.
Sincerely
Posted by: Dave
Saturday 15 August 2009 - 08:16pm
Jeremy,
Porneia is used to mean "illicit sexual intercourse" in the NT at times as a general term including adultery and at other times in distinction to it. It includes incest. I can't find any explicit teaching on rape in the NT at the moment which shows that we still need the OT and the NT is not an exaustive ethical manual. In the OT zanah is used for fornication, using a prostitute and serving other gods. I think that sexual sins within marriage is beyond the normal meaning of the term.
I find the view that sex is good, sex between husband and wife is good,marriage is necessary to make sex good clear in 1 Cor 7
David
Posted by: Jeremy C
Saturday 15 August 2009 - 02:54pm
Originally posted by DavidH:
" If you accept the traditional Christian view of marriage, it follows that all sexual activity outside marriage is sin."
Does this necessarily follow? The traditional Christian view of marriage has certainly been that sexual activity outside of marriage is sin, (at least in the last few centuries) but I'm not sure the one follows from the other. Of course, particular sexual behaviours are labelled "sinful", but if we accept (as I would maintain we must) that a manifestation of "porneia" such as rape is evil outside marriage, then it is evil within it as well, and it follows that "porneia" is not merely a synonym for sexual activity outside marriage. Rape may be an extreme case, but who would argue that sexual behaviour designed to humiliate or demean one of the participants, to tear down rather than build up, is "porneia" as Jesus would have understood it?
I think it is quite possible to hold to a "traditional" view of marriage, whilst still maintaining that sexual activity for those not married is not necessarily sinful.
Posted by: Dave
Saturday 15 August 2009 - 10:21am
Simon,
The Ekklesia challenge has several parts. They accuse mainline denominations and evangelical bodies of:
-rejection of faithful gay relationships
-denial of their baptism and Christian ministry,
-refusal of their wisdom,
-negotiate opt-outs from equalities legislation so they can themselves discriminate against lesbian and gay people in employment and in the provision of goods and services.
And mention the Evangelical Alliance's removal of the Courage Trust from its membership when the Trust made a Christian commitment to affirming lesbian and gay people.
If you accept the traditional Christian view of marriage, it follows that all sexual activity outside marriage is sin. At this point I hear the cries of rejection. This is because this statement is heard by a world which says "There is nothing wrong with me" or at least "I'm as good as anybody else" whereas the statement is made as part of a theology which starts on the basis that we are all sinners. Gay relationships, even faithful gay relationships fall short of this ideal, Rejection is a loaded and carefully chosen word designed to condemn rather than inform.
I do not think their baptism and/or confirmation is denied. They are still on the books and welcome to worship and partake in communion with the body of Christ.
Yes the church excludes from teaching and eldership those whose lifestyle is at variance with it's teaching. Homosexuals are not singled out in this.
Their wisdom on this and other subjects continues to inform the church. I would certainly continue listen to Roy Clements for example see http://www.courage.org.uk/articles/articles.asp?CID=4
There are many positions in which a church would only wish to employ those who share it's vision and morality
As the basis of Courage's ministry changed, it is not surprising the were asked to leave the Evangelical Alliance.
For the Evangelical Alliance's position on homosexuality, I would recommend the ACUTE report Faith Hope and Homosexuality at http://www.eauk.org/resources/publications/upload/Homosexuality.pdf
In short I consider the way that Ekklesia has linked mainline denominations and organisations with Westboro Baptist to be disingenuous spinning. I find this wearisome but it does not drive me to the anger which is consuming Colin Coward
http://changingattitude-england.blogspot.com/2009/08/angry-anglicans.html
David
Posted by: Simon Morden
Saturday 15 August 2009 - 12:46am
Celinda - you're probably right (for 'probable', read 'most certainly'). Still, it does show that the church can hold, as you put it, aberrant views on major issues because we can, not because it's right. It does strike me that the defining issue for Britishevangelicals of Wilberforce's generation was the anti-slavery movement, while for ours it's the right in law to be beastly to gays.
David H - you may be right. I've read your link, and it pretty much confirms what I thought, that while polygamy was allowed, it had pretty much fallen by the wayside by Paul's time. The 10th century seems late for an official ban! The Genesis texts are a bit flimsy to support monogamy, though the prophets (esp Ezekiel iirc) do better. But most of the OT heroes took more than one wife, and sometimes many, many more - were David and Solomon that unaware of the creation ordinance that was monogamous marriage?
Yes, civil partnerships are indeed 'facts on the ground'. And yes, being in one should be no bar to communion... but I anticipate practice differing widely depending on churchmanship. Your last point is what I am trying to discern.
As a matter of interest, how would you answer ekklesia's charge? (you can find it here www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8726)
Posted by: MattS
Friday 14 August 2009 - 03:28pm
Simon,
Thanks for the 2nd response. I hope the tiling went well!
My charge that you are inconsistent is not in your application of the value of monogomy. I'm sure you are very consistent about that. Your problem stems from the fact that you don't seem to accept that marriage is defined by God. This God-given definition has three aspects- it is life long, it is monogomous, and it is between a man and a woman. I accuse you of inconsistency because you take 2 of the 3 aspects of the NT definition of marriage, which you get from scripture (i.e life long and faithful) but then, it seems to me, ignore the 3rd requirement, which is that it is between a man and a woman. I don't know why you should have the right to do this and others shouldn't have the right to ignore the other two.
Now, imagine, for the sake of argument, that I lived in, say a part of Africa, where plural marriage is common. For good social reasons I could argue that plural marriage works well and is important for social cohesion and you should support it. I could look to scripture to support my new definition of marriage but what I have actually done is, again, take two of the three aspects of the God given definition (man/woman, permanent) of marriage and ignored the third one. (monogomy) What I am left with at the end is not marriage as God defines it at all but something very different.
I've also seen people argue that it is in this day and age it is impossible to ask people to commit to life long faithfulness, but while you are in a relationship you should be faithful to that person. Again, on what consistent basis can you oppose that? If you've already thrown out one of the God defined elements of biblical marriage, what can you say against this? They are, after all, only doing the same thing, but this time choosing to keep monogomy and man-woman but leaving out life long.
So I hope you see that my worry is by no means a slippery slope argument but comes back to the logic of your argument. You (or others who share your view) need to show me why you have a warrant to ignore one of the God given parameters which define marriage and keep the others without arbitrariness.
Best Wishes
Matt
Posted by: Celinda
Friday 14 August 2009 - 02:45pm
Simon--it didn't take 18 centuries for people "to wake up to the fact that black people were their brothers." It took two+ centuries (the 17th, 18th, and part of the 19th) to spread the lie that they weren't our brothers. The concept of race as we know it today is fairly new, only a few centuries old. It was invented to explain differences in people encountered by European explorers, and capitalized on when Europeans or people of European descent needed a cheap source of labor for their sugar and coffee plantations in the Antilles, and tobacco and cotton there and elsewhere, as in the U.S. Slavery is as old as you say. But the linking of slavery with one particular "race" was a recent occurrence. Unfortunately, some Christians found passages in the Bible to justify this aberration. Other Christians (Wilberforce et al) saw that this use of the passages was profoundly heretical.
Posted by: Dave
Friday 14 August 2009 - 11:38am
Simon,
I think the distinction you make between the OT and NT is too sharply drawn. The ideal of monogamy is clear in the wisdom and prophetic literature. This article on polygamy in Judaism is interesting http://jhom.com/lifecycle/marriage/polygamy.htm
What does "deny the possibility of monogamous same-sex partnerships" mean? They exist as a fact on the ground. They are recognised in civil law. As far as I am aware, they do not present a barrier to receiving communion. The point at issue is do we know that God instituted them and has promised to bless them in the same way he has for heterosexual marriage. Given that these relationships exist we should hope and pray that those involved will prosper but this is a different thing from declaring them holy ground.
David
Posted by: Simon Morden
Friday 14 August 2009 - 10:10am
Perforce more briefly - I have a bathroom to tile.
Yes, it is inconsistent to be truely egalitarian and deny the possibility of monogamous same-sex parterships. I'll let other people tell you how they justify that, because I'm reasonably certain that I can't anymore.
It is the Christian (as opposed to OT Judaic) ethic to be monogamous rather than polygamous. You can assume inconsistancy in my position all you like, but I don't think it is.
Are the practices of the church consistent? No. As I replied to Nersen, we've changed both doctrine and practice repeatedly throughout the last 2000 years, sometimes not due to revelation but due to simple craven expediency - it's no less 'official' for that. And why not look at slavery? That slavery was supported from the Bible is a historical fact. It took the church 18 centuries to wake up that black people were also their brothers.
As to your last point, preachers do it all the time. You came within a gnat's whisker of doing it yourself. Jesus and Paul had a high view of marriage - certainly higher than we have today with our serial monogamy... sanctioned by the church.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Friday 14 August 2009 - 09:06am
Simon - I did not say the "Church Catholic" can never be wrong, did I? Best not to misrepresent posts....even if it is the only way to score a point, it is not helpful.
What I said below was - perhaps a few "accepting evangelicals" have the correct interpretation of scripture and the "Church Catholic" and "the mind of the Communion" and 2000 years of tradition are, therefore, wrong.....I am not convinced and I find the liberal approach of some who say they simply reject some texts as out of date a more consistent way of coming to the same conclusion on certain behaviour.
I suggested that to make a strong "accepting" case, what was missing, if it was "evangelical", was a positive argument from scripture. For example. you raise the red herring of clergy marrying....but you know that scripture never prohibited that and even apostles were married....where is the incompatiblility with scripture in allowing clergy to marry? Similarly, what is missing from the "accepting" case, which claims to have a high view of scripture, is a strong argument that shows the Lord and his apostles were absolutely fine with what they want to give certain exemptions for today i.e. a strong case from scripture....just like the one which allows clergy to marry....or allows me to have a bacon sandwich this morning.
You bring up usury - but if you think your savings account and mortgage are sinful, how can you keep them? Or perhaps you are bringing up usury to score a point but do not really think you are engaging in behaviour incompatible with scripture? You bring up various points which would be relevant if I had made the weak argument that the "Church Catholic" can never be wrong - but I did not ......please do not misrepresent posts - replying to weak arguments not made is a waste of your time.
Posted by: MattS
Friday 14 August 2009 - 08:42am
Simon,
Thanks for your response. Again, I just have some questions back to you again. Most of them around the question of consistency.
You said one of the things that made you reconsider your position was the fact you are egalitarian. Would you say it is inconsistent to be egalitarian and hold to the standard position on sexual morality? (I think this would be quite important for fulcrum supporters to interact with)
My point was not that you support other non-marriage relations (or that other pro-gay people do). My point is that I think you are inconsistent in not doing so (assuming those relationships are loving and committed, of course). I can certainly see more support for plural marriage in scripture than gay marriage and think this is probably more common in world terms. Given your position on the gay issue, you'd be more consistent in supporting it, I think, than not. If I'm wrong, show me how, please.
Whether the church believes or has believed something patchily is, for me, also not really relevant. The issue of consistency again comes into play- are the practices of the church consistent with scripture in a given time period or not? (NB note to everybody: I've thought about slavery so please don't tell me early modern African slavery was consistent with scripture as I think some might be tempted to do!)
On Ephesians, I think you are introducing a straw man here yourself :-) I'm not aware of any theologians who backfit the relationship between Christ and the church and the analogy of marriage! Don't you think Jesus and Paul, following the old testament law, had a high view of marriage?
Posted by: Simon Morden
Friday 14 August 2009 - 01:44am
MattS - it's late, but I'll try and make sense...
1. No - but with a massive caveat. Jesmond is a church with a high proportion of tertiary educated people: almost everyone is either studying for, or has at least, a Bachelors degree. Sermons are therefore pitched at that level. If any or all of our four main preachers hadn't read some or all of the books Ian lists, or the Gagnon one, and incorporated the arguments into their sermons, I would be immensely surprised. Either, I still remain unconvinced despite hearing them repeatedly, or what the hell did they think they were doing?
I don't buy many theology books (I usually get one or two at Greenbelt - last year's was Tom Wright's Surprised by Hope), so I tend to rely, for better or worse, on my preachers having read them. I concede that not having read them, I lay myself open to a "if you read it, you'd be convinced", but I've not read any of the pro-gay theology texts either. So I'm pretty much unaware of their arguments, too.
2. I have maintained a traditional view of homosexuality for almost my entire life. It is only within the last, may be five years, that I've had to rethink my position. Partly, this was due to actually knowing some gay people (and discoving that their homosexuality is the least interesting thing about them), partly due to the unrelenting negativity from the pulpit, which I perceived to be based on some seriously bad theology (feminism, Marxism and single parents were also targets for this "hell-in-a-handbasket" style of polemic: which as I have passing knowledge of all three and what was said was so twisted to be untrue, it made me doubt the teaching on homosexuality, too), and partly because I am an egalitarian - something I believe the Bible teaches. I found I couldn't square the circle anymore.
3. We got plenty of teaching regarding how good and godly marriage was. Married people live longer, have more satisfying sex lives, are more emotionally and mentally stable, and the outcomes for their children are, on average, better. But be careful about backfitting the marriage between man and woman and that of Christ and the Church. Paul used the former as an analogy for the latter - not the other way around. The church got into the marriage business late and patchily. It's not a good argument, and yes, an example of sloppy proof-texting.
4. You're introducing a strawman, slippery-slope argument here, and it doesn't hold water. It's a common traditionalist jibe that if you're in favour of same-sex marriage, you must be in favour of polyamory, paedophilia and bestiality. It's no more than a dog-whistle, and another example of a really poor argument. I am quite socially conservative: I believe in exclusive relationships with just one other person. Marriage, preferably for life, provides social and personal cohesion and stability. It's entirely consistent of me to wish to extend that ethic to same-sex partnerships.
One of the common themes of anti-gay rhetoric is "they're all so promiscuous!", yet when they want to settle down with their partner and legalise their status, it's "they're devaluing marriage!". Who's not being consistent here? The gays who hate marriage so much, they want to be married? Or those who attack them?
5. Evangelical should not be a set of fixed doctrines. It should be a way of studying scripture, earnestly and dilligently, in community with other believers, with an eye on the traditional teaching of the church, and with a greater degree of intelligence than it appears to have been done in the past (I refer back of Os Guiness', Fit bodies, fat minds). I'm happy to be that sort of evangelical - open (!) to the possibility of change.
Posted by: MattS
Thursday 13 August 2009 - 11:51pm
Simon,
If I may I have some responses to your post which you might like to comment on.
1. Have you read any of the books that Ian Paul listed as affirming the "traditional" position? (I'd also add Rob Gagnon's "The Bible and Homosexual Practice" as a key text as well) Would you maintain that these works are all arguing from "proof texts" and a flimsy hermeneutic?
2. I may be reading too much in but you say you are "unconvinced" by the traditional position. this implies that your "default" position is the radical one (pro-gay) and you would need to be convinced by the traditional arguments. Surely for most people in the evangelical world, this situation would be reversed.
3. Could it be that your experience is coloured by people coming across as being "anti" something, but in fact, in my view, the traditional view is really based on being "pro" something (i.e the goodness of humanity created as male and female and the marriage covenant symbolising Christ and the church). I personally, can't see this as being anything other than what underlies the deep structure of biblical sexual ethics, and not, as you claim, being simply surface level proof texting.
4. You strike me (in how you write, not knowing you personally) as someone who looks for consistency in your beliefs. If you are convinced by the rightness of sexual relations between people of the same gender, would you also be open to affirming other forms of relationship (e.g cohabitation, "serial monogamy", plural marriage etc.) In my view, in order to be consistent you would need to show why these forms of committed non-married relationships could not be permitted in your system.
5. Your post raises for me lots of issues about how we should acquire our beliefs about doctrine and also ethical behaviour. (i.e the relationship between scripture, community, tradition including creeds and confessions and our own private judgement). However, what is becoming clear is that the term "evangelical" is really becoming very nebulous now. I almost think the label is no longer helpful and needs to be ditched (maybe "confessional protestant" would be more descriptive and narrower?)
Posted by: Simon Morden
Thursday 13 August 2009 - 11:01pm
Nersen - you know full well that the church has changed doctrine more often than the date of Easter.
We were pacifists, then we weren't. We didn't practice usury, now we do. We didn't remarry after divorce, now we do. We had women priests (or apostles), then we didn't, then we did again. We had married priests, then we didn't, now we do again. We don't have women bishops, we will soon. We spawned both the Cathars and those who cried "Kill them all, God will know his own!". We had crusades against the infidel, now that sort of thing is frowned on. We held slaves, now we campaign against it.
To suggest that the Church Catholic has never misunderstood scripture is frankly, laughable. If that's the best argument you can come up with, you've lost.
Posted by: Iconoclast
Thursday 13 August 2009 - 08:45pm
John Marshall,
Having read many of Nerson's posts, I have never got the impression that he thinks that all liberals are on a chicken chute leading to a lake of fire and brimstone nor has he stated such. I think you have misrepresented his position without engaging his arguments. Nerson thinks that the liberal hermeneutic is false as I would guess that the liberals think his is also. If there is one thing that this sort of comment shows is that debate between liberals and conservatives is too often plagued by hyperbole.
I believe the male chickens end up at KFC.
Posted by: Iconoclast
Thursday 13 August 2009 - 08:44pm
John Marshall,
Having read many of Nerson's posts, I have never got the impression that he thinks that all liberals are on a chicken chute leading to a lake of fire and brimstone nor has he stated such. I think you have misrepresented his position without engaging his arguments. Nerson thinks that the liberal hermeneutic is false as I would guess that the liberals think his is also. If there is one thing that this sort of comment shows is that debate between liberals and conservatives is too often plagued by hyperbole.
I believe the male chickens end up at KFC.
Posted by: John Marshall
Thursday 13 August 2009 - 06:59pm
A long time ago I was introduced to the gentle art of chicken sexing. We were on a scout camp on a chicken farm in the Dales, and the kindly farmer shared some of the secrets of his trade. From the boxes of newly hatched chicks, we picked up a tiny bird, examined the relvant bit of its anatomy, and then sent it doen the appropriate chute. The females were reared for a life of egg production. What happened to the males was not disclosed.
This instructive episode came to mind as I read Nersen's latest. Nersen, dear friend, you cannot sort out interpreters of the Bible as easily as you can sex chickens. There is no chute for the "sound" leading to a productive life, nor a chute for the "liberals" leading to a lake of fire and brimstone. The criteria for such judgments are many and complex. They are not as straightforward as reading a balance sheet. An apparently liberal interpreter may have, by the grace of God, some powerful insights. Another, "sound" interpreter may have nothing to say.
To sort out Bible teachers, you have to listen to what they say, not examine their credentials or their CV. I fear that this is something you are unwilling to do, in case you catch some dire infection. But if you listen, you might just find that occasionally a liberal has an insight into the Gospel which brings light into your life, and helps you to know Jesus better and to follow him more closely.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Thursday 13 August 2009 - 05:19pm
Ian - your story is really disappointing.....what can be done to get people (especially ordained people) acquainted with all the good work which has been done by evangelical theologians? How has a situation come about in which someone like the person you describe can be forming views without reading the work you mention?
Tony - I guess "monolithic" is not a compliment .... actually, many threads have mentioned the small number of people who call themselves evangelical but take a liberal view on certain issues..... in that, they are coming to similar conclusions as those "liberals" who are very open that they are rejecting certain parts of scripture which they see as out of date or limited by the culture in which they were written. I wonder which group is being most consistent in their approach to scripture. Perhaps the last 2000 years of tradition and "the mind of the Communion" and the "Church Catholic" have all misunderstood scripture but it is the superior interpretation of the "accepting evangelicals" which understands it correctly ..... perhaps St Paul ought to have been clearer that he was only speaking against exploitation (if he was) and the Lord ought to have used more "inclusive" language when he spoke of marriage (if he intended to do so)..... that would have given a positive case based on a high view of scripture which might have persudaded the "mind of the Communion"......the positive case, based on scripture if it is "evangelical", is what is missing.
Posted by: Tony
Thursday 13 August 2009 - 01:36pm
I think this is the first time the fulcrum forums have given any sense other than of monolithic unanimity among evangelicals (open and conservative) on questions of sexuality or of the nature of biblical authority. So I am very grateful indeed to David and to Simon for opening up this space. Jonathan Bartley's challenge -- that the churches which distanced themselves from the position of Fred (god hates fags) Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church in fact pursued similar repressive policies themselves -- reminds me of a debate in a liberal-catholic church where I worshipped in London. It was about using a Bible in services with inclusive language, such as the NRSV. A lot of us thought textual authenticity required us to stick to 'sons' 'brothers' etc: but a very strong case was made that in the end this would render the scriptures 'repugnant'. i think that is a continuing problem in relation to the current debates, but also in relation to the way some evangelicals understand the state of Israel -- I find that political myth hard to take too.
This suggestion maybe belongs on the Book Blog thread -- but why isn't Walter Brueggemann's account of scripture as a constant interweaving of 'imagination, ideology and inspiration' good enough? (Introduction to the Old Testament, 1989: p. 11 -- he does mean inspiration in the traditional sense!) thank you once again for opening up this aspect of the evangelical position. (I've heard anecdotally about a gap between teaching and congregational thinking at Greyfriars, Reading, too.) Thanks Tony
Posted by: Dave
Thursday 13 August 2009 - 11:05am
When a encountered liberal argument on homosexuality and turned to mid level evangelical commentaries, I found them of little help. I think the most accessable commentary which I found which discussed them was Tom Wrights's New Interpreter's Commentary on Romans. Of some help is Anthony Thiselton's essay in The Way Forward? ed Timothy Bradshaw SCM This certainly gives the options and explains why some find them not convincing.
David
Posted by: Simon Morden
Thursday 13 August 2009 - 01:02am
Ian - yes, it was me.
I come at this from my own experience, so I'd be interested to hear what others have to say. Over the course of twenty years at Jesmond, the condemnation of homosexuality was a common motif for sermons, and was often the subject of the vicar's monthly letter/article in the church newsletter. There could be no doubt as to what the traditional view of sexuality was - sex was only for life-long hetrosexual marriage.
This was called 'biblical', and the monogamous hetrosexual marriage was the 'traditional family'. The problem I began to encounter was that the arguments used to support such a hermaneutic were paper-thin. I have no doubt that I'll be castigated for going against the authority of scripture, but it was a respect for the authority of scripture that made me realise that there really should be something more substantial to back up this stance than a few dog-whistle phrases and some poor proof-texting. For one thing, when I looked in the Bible, the 'traditional biblical family' looked nothing like my own, or anyone sitting around me in church on a Sunday.
So, if two decades of sermons from one of the CE power-houses haven't inured me to looking afresh at this whole issue, it must be a truely catastrophic failure of theological education. And if I'm not convinced - hetro, married with kids, evangelical, educated - there must be a very great number of people like me who are also unconvinced. Perhaps this is, as you suggest, because evangelicals are increasing biblically illiterate, but I think there are a number of other more important factors in play.
As it stands, the challenge ekklesia threw at the Evangelical Alliance troubles me most: how does your/our stand against homosexuality differ from that of Fred Phelps, except in the level of rhetoric?
Posted by: Charles Read
Wednesday 12 August 2009 - 11:43am
I just want to agree with Ian entirely about Biblical literacy - I think all college and course staff see this and it is not hard to find 'liberal' ordinands who know their Bibles better than some evangelical ones. This fact alone should give cause for concern for all shades of evangelical.
On the substantive issue here, I think we need some kind of guide to how different people use the scriptures in the debate on same-sex relations. This is not just about how we might interpret the texts which explicity deal with homosexuality but also about what hermeneutical strategies might be appropiate (and inappropriate) in using the texts today. Such a guide (a multi-author work I suspect) might help us to see where others are coming from!
Posted by: Ian Paul
Wednesday 12 August 2009 - 10:43am
I'm coming into this forum a little late, so apologies if I have missed something. But could I pick up on the debate about the survey of younger evangelical attitudes? I am sure the survey has it quite right, speaking from my own interaction with younger folk in churches, but it points to something key which is underlying and serious: the plummeting levels of biblical literacy.
I think is it Simon Morden who asks: is it possible that evangelicals have heard the arguments and are not persuaded by the traditional view? Possible, but unlikely, since I don't think the subject of what the texts say is any more discussed with any seriousness. Two examples.
The first relates to this subject. I remember a year ago being in conversation with a bright graduate evangelical clergyperson, trained at an evangelical college now leading a liberal C of E church. Faced with the reality of practising gay members of the congregation this person was reconsidering the traditional view (incidentally the position of the bishops which clergy have sworn an oath to obey!). I asked if this person had read some of the (what I would consider) basic evangelical works in this area, eg True Union in the Body, Richard Hays' Moral Vision of the NT, Schmidt's Straight and Narrow? and said person had read none.
The second example is more general. In discussing the psalms, I have mentioned to several folk recently that the word Lord in small caps in the OT signifies the name of Israel's God, often written as Yahweh. This has been news to one and all! I mention this because it seems to me that this is a fairly entry-level fact to be aware of in reading the OT.
For me, these two diverse and simple examples show that as a church we have forgotten how to read the Bible, even amongst those who claim that Bible reading is their distinctive characteristic.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Sunday 9 August 2009 - 05:39pm
It is misleading to assert that the ABC has let "fundies" in, Adrian, when he has merely been honest about what is the "mind of the Communion". Perhaps he has not studied your website enough but I suspect he knows what he is talking about. It makes sense for the ABC to pay somewhat more attention to the Bishop of Durham and the Archbishop of Nigeria than to any pluralist or hindu or buddhist or atheist..... however interested they may be in AC matters. Some Anglicans assert that most of or many in the church are fine with certain revisionist ideas - when I hear such assertions, I refer to what the ABC says as his view has obvious authority in and relevance to AC issues.
Posted by: Celinda
Sunday 9 August 2009 - 05:15pm
I prefer to be in a church which politely allows people like Nersen to speak, as well as people like Pluralist, and people like me. If we belittle each other by calling ourselves "fundies" or "revisionists" (or "false teachers") or "naive," unworthy of the time it takes to respond, we've become yet another caricature of a church. Each one of us is probably representative--at least in part-- of a group of people whom we consider to be more typical of the "center" which Fulcrum is trying to represent. I think it's important to remember that, however grandiose we think the other's claim is. It's frustrating, of course, when someone doesn't seem to have read what one has written. But if that's the case, it's a good reason to keep saying it, varying the approach to try to make the other person understand, and being open to change ourselves, or at least to a deeper understanding.
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Sunday 9 August 2009 - 04:47pm
The fact is that the Archbishop of Canterbury has written as he has, and that it gives people with views like Nersen Pillay's enough rope to repeat themselves to the point of driving people nuts, and this is what, in the end, is so criminal in the Archbishop's about face over these years. He has allowed in the fundies with their megaphones when he would never subscribe to their methods or views. As faras I am concerned, the Archbishop has wrecked the Anglican name, that it now stands for social attitudes and an outlook with which I, for one, do not want to be associated, and the whole situation has become a disaster for really 'local' churches trying to relate to their neighbourhoods.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Sunday 9 August 2009 - 04:01pm
Jeremy C.....it ain't my "nterpretation" which is, according to the ABC, the "mind of the Communion" and the teaching of the "Church Catholic"........tiny nos of Christians in the world try to claim the bible is not clear on what it calls sinful with regard to morality and an even small number disagree but still want to be called "evangelical".... perhaps I should start calling myself an "Accepting Liberal"....accepting the "mind of the Communion". Your spin is misleading.....the ABC is much more honest, despite his more liberal writings in the past, on what is the "the mind of the Communion" and I am glad he is not letting the church deviate from it just because a few people want to take it in another direction.
Posted by: Rudy
Saturday 8 August 2009 - 09:00pm
A really excellent article. It is helpful for us in the USA to have this unpacking of the ABC's complex statement.
Posted by: Jeremy C
Friday 7 August 2009 - 11:19pm
originally posted by nersen:
" Also, I find it hard to believe, when there are lots of liberal churches around, that people would go to churches with which they diagree on something so fundamental like the approach of a church to the authority of scripture. "
Why do I still feel like you aren't reading what I actually posted, nersen? They don't disagree about the authority of scripture! They think it's authoritative all right, they just think that "your" interpretation is in error. They read the bible, pray, ask the Holy Spirit for guidance, and, in the light of those activities, are unconvinced by the conservative argument.
Posted by: Simon Morden
Friday 7 August 2009 - 09:27pm
I suppose there's only one thing left for you to do, Nersen - write to the Barna Foundation and Professor Francis at his university and complain. I'm certain two well-respected, peer-reviewed and standards-compliant organisations would welcome you giving them your incisive and detailed criticism of their survey methods and conclusions. I'm expecting that you'll be copying their abject and fulsome apologies here on this thread in due course.
Jeremy - I'm guessing that most younger people know at least one gay relative and/or have a gay friend. That, I think, makes this issue personal and not peripheral, and is in part a driving force for them not to take what they hear from the pulpit at face value. When you sit there and get told that "OMG gayz = evil!", you realise that they're talking about your friend John or your sister Sue. If such talk doesn't engender some level of discomfort, you're probably not a very good friend/brother.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Friday 7 August 2009 - 08:21pm
Jeremy ....do you know the survey asked about incompatibility with scripture? The questions asked matter a great deal. As I said, if surveyed I am not against civil partnerships - so I would go down as a young conservative evangelical who is not against civil parnerships......but that does not mean I want the church to condone what the world condones.
As I have said a few times (and my stats lecturers would be proud that I paid attention), polls and surveys do not necessarily prove anything. Also, I find it hard to believe, when there are lots of liberal churches around, that people would go to churches with which they diagree on something so fundamental like the approach of a church to the authority of scripture.
Simon wants to score a point by asserting something he cannot prove i.e. that young evangelicals are more liberal re "the mind of the Communion".....this cannot be proved (that is why no point is scored) but even if true, it is great that they are coming to evangelical churches - much better than them being at churches which teach them that they can ignore certain parts of scripture if they do not like them e.g. those which are the basis for what the ABC calls "the mind of the Communion".
Posted by: Jeremy C
Friday 7 August 2009 - 06:35pm
Originally posted by nersen
"Simon -ï¾ you have made weakï¾ assertions from survey statsï¾ andï¾ now, you want to assert that condoning behaviour "incompatible with scripture" is not very, very unusual in those who call themselves "evangelical"....but it is very unusual indeed, that is why you cannot show large support for an "accepting" (that is liberal) position.ï¾ "
Nersen, I really don't know why you cannot see this argument. Of course, if you ask an evangelical, of whatever age, "do you condone behaviour incompatible with scripture?" they are going to say "no". If you ask them, "do you believe that stable, permanent and faithful homosexual relationships are incompatible with scripture," then the surveys suggest that they are going to say "no" again. You might believe that there is a contradiction there, but most younger evangelicals, it seems, do not. Why would such people want to leave Evangelical Churches, just because they disagree with the leadership over one issue (which, unless they have gay friends, may seem to them to be peripheral)?
Posted by: nersenpaul
Friday 7 August 2009 - 04:13pm
Hi Clare....well, I gave up going to my Oxbridge chapel quite quickly because it was all about the choral music ....and George Herbert....it did not attract many students but that did not cause it to change.... You will be unimpressed but not surprised to hear that I am thinking of drums and electric guitars when I say the music is good!! Sorry! But young people (I hope I just about qualify still...) can relate to that more easily than choral music.....it is the content, the words being sung to God and each other which matter, of course.
Simon - you have made weak assertions from survey stats and now, you want to assert that condoning behaviour "incompatible with scripture" is not very, very unusual in those who call themselves "evangelical"....but it is very unusual indeed, that is why you cannot show large support for an "accepting" (that is liberal) position. I know a few people have tried to make the case from scripture for a more liberal approach but have not persuaded many. At least some liberals do not pretend that their revisions are based on scripture...they are more persuasive. My old hero from Cambridge, Roy Clements has a mind and speaking skills which few can match but even he has persuaded few that "the mind of the Communion" and the "Church Catholic" are wrong on the basis of scripture on the presenting issues....if anyone could do it, he could. I was worried he would come up with strong arguments and we would have to get Don Carson to respond line by line - but even Roy (who I think is a great man) could not make a strong case from scripture - even the ABC seems to accept this his own work in the eighties has not changed the "mind of the Communion"....I admire him for that honesty. I do not see lots of evangelicals wanting the church to take a liberal line on moral issues. Even cuddly open evangelical leaders (and the not so cuddly ones!) agree with Reform on this -on the basis of scripture and its authority. It would be much easier for us all if scripture allowed us relax our stance....... Because a few people want to call themselves evangelical while taking liberal approach to scripture on certain issues, I am grateful to the Fulcrum (and ACI) leaders for being so clear on the key issue i.e. the authority of scripture and its application to all areas which it addresses including morality.....
Posted by: Clare
Friday 7 August 2009 - 12:13pm
Nersen....'the music is good'. In an evangelical church?? Really? I must come and visit and be amazed as how it stands up against music at one of the Oxbridge colleges you have written so scathingly about. Do give me details of times of services. Do I have to cover my head?
Come on, give us our due, we may be rubbish at mission, have fewer young people and be liturgically inflexible and unimagintative at times, but choral tradition -not often found in evangelical churches I think -is infinitely superior in purely aesthetic terms than 'Shine Jesus Shine' and its ilk. Or maybe things have moved on in evangelical churches music wise?
(that is not to say that I necessarily believe that choral music is the best vehicle for introducing most people to the gospel - I agree for some people it may be actually off putting, but in terms of pure musicality it wins hands down)
Posted by: Simon Morden
Friday 7 August 2009 - 11:54am
Is this an actual Black Swan argument you're using? I'm genuinely surprised you can be this dense - it's a new low, even for you.
I'll spell it out for you: evangelicals can decide, on the basis of an evangelical hermaneutic, that faithful same-sex relationships can be biblical. So these are not people who hold liberal views on morality - they are quite conservative. These are not people who deny the authority of scripture - on the contrary, they have used scripture to arrive at their decision.
They are not liberals. They are evangelicals. They are evangelicals who reject the theology that says all expressions of same-sex relationships are sinful. They apply the Bible to heterosexual and homosexual relationships equally.
Now, you may not like this. You may choose, in your own inimitable fashion, to completely ignore this evidence (which you asked for from Jeremy) and instead carry on with believing that evangelicals cannot possibly hold such thoughts and those that do cannot be evangelicals.
But you'd be, as you are on so many things, wrong.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Friday 7 August 2009 - 07:33am
No Simon, you hear the sound of yourself failing to score yet another point....this time because even statistics courses at GSCE level teach that survey and poll results do not necessarily prove anything. If you want to believe that hundreds of young people in, for example, CoMission churches every week secretly agree with liberal views on morality but choose to go to an evangelical church when there is so much choice in Southwark, that is fine...I do not believe it and I hope it is not true for the sake of the liberal churches!
Even if you are right and people choose to go to, serve in and give their money to a church with which they disagree on fundamental issues like the authority of scripture, it is great they come week by week to hear bible teachers who uphold the "mind of the Communion" based on a high view of scripture......people may arrive with ideas common in society but they may learn from the bible as they are taught and read, mark, learn.....and the Holy Spirit does his work.
I am sometimes said to be disrespectful of liberals....but I think it is quite harsh to suggest that they cannot even attract to their churches young people who agree with them. I know our music is good and the preaching is excellent but I don't think that draws in lots of people who disagree with the high view of the authrity of scripture taken and evident every week, not just in addressing certain issues. But if lots of liberal young people are coming, GREAT! They are very welcome.
Posted by: Deleted user 974
Friday 7 August 2009 - 12:34am
The moral seems to be 'Where there's death, there's hope.' Bravo. Btw a lot of Quakers many elderly or middle-aged felt led of the Spirit, at Yearly meeting, to marry all couples with out prejudice--and let the State go hang ! (Not their words exactly--the lst bit !).
I offer this as a corective or at least a kind of encouragment. I am no spring-chicken myself.
Posted by: Art
Thursday 6 August 2009 - 11:41pm
I too have heard this line, Simon Morden, of “young evangelicals”. And what comes foremost to mind is the entire thing about those cultural ponds we all as humans naturally swim in. The subculture of most “young” people simply has the assumption - or if you prefer technical language, those “plausibility structures” (Peter Berger) - that deem multiple forms of sexual expression to be de rigeur. So; what does that actually prove? Not much - until both old and young Christians have together sifted the likes of Rom 12:1-2, and we have concluded what is of this world/age and what truly of the image of Christ into whose renewed human form we are supposed to be conformed.
Posted by: Simon Morden
Thursday 6 August 2009 - 05:59pm
Is that the sound of a point being missed? Why, I do believe it is!
The young people under discussion are evangelicals. They self-identify as evangelicals and they attend evangelical churches. So the point is - as evangelicals - a majority of them see no problem with evangelical theology encompassing same-sex relationships. They are not liberal Christians (and let's leave out the scare quotes). If they were liberal Christians, they'd go to a liberal church.
Is the notion that evangelicals have actually heard the arguments for and against (and hear the case against every other week), and decided for same-sex relationships so profoundly shocking? Or do you take the phrase "we, like sheep" a little to literally?
Posted by: nersenpaul
Thursday 6 August 2009 - 05:49pm
Survey / poll results need to be used with care....rushing to conclusions can be very misleading. Also the questions asked matter...for example, I am not against civil partnerships. That does not mean that I want a vicar who condones behaviour incompatible with scripture to teach me week by week. But I recognise the value of civil partnerships eg for inheritance justice.....I only wish an elderly brother and sister did not, if one dies, have to sell the house an pay inheritance tax but the government, though asked, did not want to extend the same justice to that small group of people who share homes with their siblings.....j
Young Brits can go to liberal churches if they want to do so. Some say the social scene or Arabellas wanting to meet Crispins and marry their trust funds together works in favour of evangelical churches but there is, of course, no reason why the same factors should not help liberal churches attract young people....especially those who are coming primarily for the purposes of finding a mate!
CoMission gets lots of young people every week.....your survey result interpretation implies they should be losing people to the liberal churches in Southwark! Young people are free to go wherever they want.....the CofE data shows where they are choosing to go.
Oh no..... we need a decade long indaba on interpreting survey results now.......
Posted by: nersenpaul
Thursday 6 August 2009 - 04:41pm
Simon - if you really want to argue that your surveyed young people with liberal views on morality prefer to stay at evangelical CofE churches despite disagreeing with the moral teaching.....well that is terrible news for "liberals".....they cannot even attract people who agree with them?
I think you do a disservice both to "liberal" churches (which do attract some young people who have views which fit with them) and to the young people who are able to choose who teaches them on a Sunday ..... I have seen one or two people leave evangelical churches for "liberal" ones.... it happens, normally because of a relationship that they want to justify. I have not seen many people staying in evangelical churches but arguing for a more liberal approach. (pls don't tell they are too afraid to speak....but keep on coming every week despite the terrible regime of fear .... people are free to go where they will....they vote with their feet....all are free to chose ...real choices are shown by attendance nos in the CofE.....sometimes it is a choice to get into the nice church school and nothing more.....)
Posted by: nersenpaul
Thursday 6 August 2009 - 04:29pm
Well, I would rather look at real CofE churches and real attendance rather than surveys....any basic stats course will teach one that surveys and polls do not necessarily prove anything....but real members of real CofE churches does give us important information.
I do not know of a "liberal" CofE church which gets hundreds of Brits in their 20s and 30s every week......that is a proper congregation, week by week. Where are all the liberal young people from the surveys going? The pub?
Our own CofE data for real members is not trumped by surveys of anonymous people...... thankfully, CofE evangelical churches (of all types) attract many (some of them have congregations of hundreds) of young people every week..... being out of step with society and in step with the "mind of the Communion" seems to be the way forward if we want young Brits to be interested.
Posted by: DavidR
Thursday 6 August 2009 - 02:38pm
This is classic Nersen - 'Surveys do not necessarily prove anything but we can look at which churches in the CofE, in London and elsewhere in England, attract hundreds of people in their 20s and 30s every Sunday and which do not...... ' (was something edited here?)
We are warned that professionally conducted opinion research isn't reliable Instead Nersen claims to reliably know (without offering any evidence) the views on sexual morality of hundreds of young people in churches nationwide every Sunday and - sure enough - they contradict these surveys.
Nersen I hope you approach your financial research and discussions with more rigour? Christian thinking and discussion deserves the same.
Posted by: Simon Morden
Thursday 6 August 2009 - 02:21pm
Surveys don't necessarily prove anything - sheesh, listen to yourself. Yes, let's go out and ask (in the case of the Francis survey, over 10,000 kids) and then pretend the results are meaningless. Denial - it's not just a river in Egypt.
"we can look at which churches in the CofE, in London and elsewhere in England, attract hundreds of people in their 20s and 30s every Sunday" This is exactly my point. Those people in their 20s and 30s hear traditional sexual morality preached from the pulpit - but the surveys indicate they do not hold to it themselves, nor see any reason in their faith to do so.
They're, for the most part, fine with same-sex civil partnerships. They don't see it as a bar to an active Christian life. No matter how much us old folk go on, the younger ones are - again, for the most part - convinced that being gay and being in a relationship isn't a sin. The result will be that in fifty years time, all protestant mainstream churches will have officially accepted this.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Thursday 6 August 2009 - 12:06pm
Surveys do not necessarily prove anything but we can look at which churches in the CofE, in London and elsewhere in England, attract hundreds of people in their 20s and 30s every Sunday and which do not......
The sooner we move in the direction +Durham suggests with the Covenant, avoiding more years of delays, being clear on the language and the intent,; the sooner we are no longer distracted by revisionist teaching and its demand for space in the CofE given its small size outside the church, the sooner we build bridges amongst those willing to covenant together and have a covenant which is not to be merely redefined to accomodate all and every view, the sooner we can get on with reaching out to all those in the parishes - especially those who have no idea that parish boundaries even exist (they ought to be our focus). It is possible....many CofE churches have hundreds of young people attending every week.....something to celebrate and learn from (not to knock)
Posted by: Simon Morden
Thursday 6 August 2009 - 10:34am
There are at least a couple of large surveys that show that a large majority of younger evangelicals, both in the UK and in the US, hold opinions on sexual morality that are 'non-traditional'. For example, the majority of younger (for the US survey, I think that's anyone under 30) evangelicals believe that same-sex partnerships should be recognised in law. For older people (like me! Arrgh!), the majority held the traditional view.
IIRC, the UK survey was carried out by Bangor (Leslie Francis), and the US one by the Barna Foundation, if folk want to do more digging.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Wednesday 5 August 2009 - 03:52pm
Hi Jeremy - I think taking what St Paul says in the context of Ephesians does rather impact what you were saying and using his letter to support. Re the "mind of the Communion", I trust the ABC knows what he is talking about..... Obviously I am closer to the Bishop of Durham in outlook than the ABC, but both agree that revisioist ideas are not widely held in the AC. Sure, society is what it is ....although the media is "left" of society as a whole and perhaps paints a more liberal view than is really the case.....re the CofE, we will see exactly how much support there is for deviating from the "Church Catholic" given CA et al are now openly campaigning for greater ambiguity in the Covenant....I suspect if CA cannot even get Rowan W to do what they want, they cannot get a majority in the CofE...... but I am glad everything is coming out into the open and we are moving to resolutions rather than sweeping everything under the carpet, e.g. don't ask don't tell policies which still operate despie being dishonest.....
Posted by: Deleted user 1543
Wednesday 5 August 2009 - 01:00pm
Sorry Nersen - didn't see your first response, only the second.
Beware assuming anywhere is a "liberal environment", and that therefore you know what people think and can therefore discount it - that is prejudging people in precisely the sort of way Jesus tells us not to.
My whole point is that on this one occasion the assumption (by one of the resident clergy) that there would be a fairly conservative consensus over questions of sexual ethics and that the sermon might arouse some controversy proved to be - as far as we can tell from the considerable feedback that I and the redisentiaries have received - entirely misplaced and people's views were other than we assumed. I have heard now of two families in a prominent evangelical church where they are furious with their minister for his alliance of the church with FCA simply assuming that people would back it. They do not agree with either his politics or his view of the controversy in hand. There is a regular poster on these pages who I think rather falls into that category. So my point remains - there is movement in the views of people in the pews and it probably won't do to rest on the assumptions of yesteryear that everybody in "onside".
Posted by: Deleted user 1543
Wednesday 5 August 2009 - 12:49pm
Nersen - thank you for your comments. There is evidently a lot more to say than I did in a few minutes - and I think that there is a hermeneutical context in which Eph 4:17ff can be read entirely comfortably within the point that I am wanting to make. BUT - that is to get off the point. My point was about your assertion about people not being convinced about arguments for change - I am suggesting that leaders may assume they have the wholehearted support of people in the pews, and yet I have not seen any evidence of this, while on the other hand there is evidence of changing attitudes in the population generally. So the question returns - who is not convinced? Looking at today's statement from Inclusive Church and others, there are clearly even evangelicals who are convinced that we should be moving towards change.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Wednesday 5 August 2009 - 10:30am
Hi Jeremy - just read your sermon, thanks for referring to it. What surprised me was that you mention Ephesians to support your case but you do not apply Eph 4:17-24 to your subject.... I think it is very relevant to what you say re society changing etc as well as to the church's teaching. As for your ending and doing to others as we would be done by, I would want others to encourage me to repent if I was trying to justify anything incompatible with scripture....for my sake and their integrity.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Wednesday 5 August 2009 - 10:04am
Hi Jeremy - a warm reaction to one talk (in quite a liberal environment?) does not mean the pews of the CofE are full of people who want the church to deviate further from the "Church Catholic", of course. You hope that our leaders in the CofE and AC are out of touch with the pews and more in line with your views.....but you have little evidence to back that up. I have listed below some reasons why I think most in the CofE and AC are still in line with Lambeth 1.10 in what it calls "incompatible with scripture". Do you really think the ABC would be going against his own views on the presenting issue if there was great support for the revisionist position?
BUT....now that Inclusive Church, CA et al have made an open statement re their aims and strategy of taking over the General Synod and changing the CofE, we will see how much support there really is for revisionist views in the CofE..... or whether it is the same small group of peope registered in many groups. I am glad to see these groups openly campaigning rather than following an "inch at a time" incremental, insider strategy.... I think the groups are largely made up of the same people and not really very representative of the CoE.....but we will see. If you are right, the General Synod will in the next few years move in a revisionist direction and more in line with TECUSA
(re TECUSA's name - I add the USA (perhaps I should put it in brackets) because it is not the only Episcopal church in the world.....it is an episcopal church based in the USA.)
Posted by: Deleted user 1543
Wednesday 5 August 2009 - 09:22am
Nersen - I think you are missing my point.
I don't contest the fact that the ABC tells us that "this is the mind of the Communion" at present. Nor that most primates don't agree with the actions of TEC (shall we agree to be courteous and call people what they like to be called?). Nor yet that those provinces supporting a new perspective have minorities in them that disagree, sometimes very vocally, with the actions of the majority. All that we agree on.
But I am wondering where you get any evidence at all for your assertion that "few have been convinced" in relation to the ordinary members of the Church of England? To take a couple of examples of what I am getting at from the recent launch of FCA: Chris Sugden runs Anglican Mainstream - this is basically a blog which provides him and colleagues with a platform rather than an active membership organisation. Paul Perkins is vicar of a large "successful" south London church - this gives him a platform. Do either of them have any evidence of how seriously they are supported by ordinary members of the Church of England? Filling (or part filling from accounts I have read) Westminster Hall with the supportive and the curious for a launch with lots of razzmatazz is one thing - but do either of them find out what the views of people in the pews are - or are they too busy telling them what they should be?
There is no doubt at all that there has been a huge sea change in attitudes to LGBT people in Britain over the last fifteen years, with a significant level of generalised acceptance of homosexual relationships measured by polling data. Anecdotal evidence suppports this. Many more people now know that they have homosexual colleagues at work and homosexual neighbours, that the couple in their street or their village are a gay couple andd so forth. Gay people are less invisible and less ghettoised. Gay people are their nieghbours and their friends. Of course there are ghastly gay people and ghastly straight people, but you get my drift.
My point is that it would be surprising if this accepting attitude that takes people as it finds them was not also reflected in the the pews of our churches, in the attitudes and understandings of ordinary Christians. Perhaps more of them than you think (or even I think) are inclined - to put it no stronger - to think that homosexuality is not a terrible thing to be resisited at all costs and to wonder what all the fuss is about. I preached last Sunday on this very topic - the sermon is on the Changing Attitude blog. I warn you, you won't like it. But what I want to say is that what amazed me was the reaction I received from a large number of people. All uniformly positive and appreciative, all elderly and small c conservative, almost all married and heterosexual. What they said was - At last! We have been waiting for someone to say this - I hoped I would hear this in this cathedral - A breath of fresh air and sense - We have gay friends and we hate hearing things that hurt them come from the church - and much more along the same lines. Southwell Minster is no hotbed of radicalism, I assure you.
I was surprised by the reaction; in truth, quite overwhelmed. But I also began to realise that nowadays the voices of leaders may not necessarily be rightly assumed to speak for their people. And if they don't then at some point their polity becomes incredible. I wonder what evidence you have to the contrary?
Posted by: nersenpaul
Tuesday 4 August 2009 - 07:37pm
Martin - how is your post engaging with anyone or any idea, since that is what you say you want to see?
Your post certainly does not strengthen the case for the acceptance of behaviour which is "incompatible with scripture" nor show in any way that it is widely acceptable....which is what we were talking about. I hope you do not want to imply that people not accepting the revisions you wish to see are "unthinking" ..... there is plenty of thinking going on about the meaning of scripture and church order and dealing with organised subversive groups in the church and not deviating from the "Church Catholic". The ABC seems persuaded by much of the good thinking that has been done.....but not persuaded by the single agenda groups which would have him follow their agenda even if the AC disintegrates as a result.
Posted by: Martin Reynolds
Tuesday 4 August 2009 - 06:46pm
Jeremy, one of the problems on these threads (apart from Nersen) is there is little real engagement with any of the serious concerns raised - instead, there are quite a lot of unthinking WELL DONE's from people obviously looking for a better job!
Posted by: nersenpaul
Tuesday 4 August 2009 - 05:13pm
Jeremy.....it is not a controversial point that many have not been convinced....
- do you not think the Ridley Draft of the Covenant and the ABC's recent letter would be quite different if many in the AC had been convinced by revisionist arguments and the very well orchestrated rights-based campaign (playing on emotions whenever possible, of course) inside the church in the last thirty years?
-the ABC says that "the mind of the Communion" is.... what it is.... the AC has not been convinced to deviate from it (that is, further away from "the Church Catholic") despite many years and decades of active, clever, persistent, political campaigning in the CofE and AC;
-few provinces support TECUSA's revisions;
-those provinces that do support TECUSA revisionists are very small (i.e. despite their ironic self-labelling as "inclusive", they fail to include many in their own countries e.g. Canada, Scotland, Ireland, South Africa et al......)
The ABC would have written a very different letter, perhaps one which reflects his published personal views more closely, if there was serious doubt that few have been convinced by revisionists in the AC in the last few decades. Thank God, he is clear about "the mind of the Communion" (thanks in large part to GAFCON and groups like the Fulcrum leadership and the ACI) and he is clear about his role as ABC and an instrument of unity - this has disappointed people who thought his arrival at Lambeth Palace meant their agenda could be pushed through......but it cannot, because so few inside or outside the CofE and AC want to join a revisionist church....TECUSA, Scotland, Wales et al prove that...sadly.
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Tuesday 4 August 2009 - 05:00pm
Once again, this time in response to Jeremy, Nersen Pillay uses his cracked record technique with a focus on money, numbers and his assumptions about worldwide Anglicanism. Repeating things ad nauseum does not make them true. He tries to concoct a picture of Anglicanism that is different from its expression in The Episcopal Church. But if we look at the Church of England's description of itself through history, it clearly refers to three streams now, Evangelical, Catholic and Liberal and this is described as A Comprehensive Church.
When the Archbishop feeds a few new lines to Nersen to add to the repetition, then you realise just how damaging and narrow is his latest 'Reflections'. The ecumenism of the Archbishop is also very narrowly defined - basically Roman Catholic - and it brings to mind his bizarre questioning of women's ordination a few years ago that he jumped back from as soon as he made it. That he has not done this regarding the numbers of silently partnered gay priests and even higher up 'representing' the Church of England tells us much. It tells us something about religious bureaucracy over ethics, about turning around 180 degrees and losing credibility, and about forms of deception over what actually exists.
For what it's worth, I sense a sea-change regarding this Covenant. Those liberal groups that wanted to participate in the Covenant and make it more inclusive now are beginning to realise, after these 'Reflections', that the only option is to oppose it and oppose even its concept. There is less chance that those who would be badly affected by this Covenant will let it sleepwalk through the General Synod, and if it is stopped there it might just save Anglicanism from being innovated by primates and others into something it never was.
Posted by: Deleted user 1543
Tuesday 4 August 2009 - 04:34pm
Nersen -
"few are convinced even in the West". How do you know? What evidence do you have one way or the other?
Posted by: nersenpaul
Tuesday 4 August 2009 - 08:51am
Jeremy...after decades of orthodox Anglicans leaving (from the time of Spong et al), TECUSA and its GC are hardly representative of Anglicanism..... the ABC has just that made very clear by recognising its deviation from the "Church Catholic" and orthodox views on key issues which he has somtimes described as "the mind of the Communion"......also note how small TECUSA (0.7m on a Sunday) and shrinking....few are convinced even in the west.
Roger - during the years and decades of polite discussion with those who want the church to condone behaviour "incompatible with scripture", are we supposed to house and pay the small numbers of people who want to change the teaching of the church and accept them going against it while they attempt do so? I think what the ABC said re "representative functions" applies.....it is in line with what the apostles taught the early church and how they dealt with each other when in error.
Posted by: Roger Hurding
Tuesday 4 August 2009 - 07:51am
Thank you for those encouraging words David. Let the conversations, prayerfully and thoughtfully engaged with, continue.
Posted by: Deleted user 1543
Monday 3 August 2009 - 11:32pm
Nersen - I question your conclusion that few have been convinced. They just don't shout as loudly as some who are threatened and dismayed by this new perspective. What they did do was vote in representatives who affirmed this perspective - and they passed the resolutions at General Convention.
Posted by: DavidR
Monday 3 August 2009 - 10:10pm
I share your hope Roger - and that means praying and working for a church which is secure enough to live with and to contunually test questions of faith together and to live courteously and respectfully with our differences as we do so. As you have pointed out more than once on these threads, there are significant examples in church history where once unthinkable beliefs are now accepted within Christian living on the basis of rigorous and careful biblical reflection. Majorities were not right in these instances. 'Small voices' need listening to with extra care.
So this kind of continued 'testing' conversation is not only humble and essential it is also something to do with being Godly.
Posted by: nersenpaul
Monday 3 August 2009 - 04:04pm
Roger - groups like "integrity" are angry with the ABC's words...they point out, correctly, that we have had decades of exegis done to support their cause..... that few are convinced is not denied, but the work has been done - the ABC did some of the best bits of it. Still, few have been convinced.
Posted by: Roger Hurding
Monday 3 August 2009 - 02:51pm
One section of Rowan Williams’ Reflections that Tom Wright does not seem to comment on is this:
'6. However, the issue is not simply about civil liberties or human dignity or even about pastoral sensitivity to the freedom of individual Christians to form their consciences on this matter. It is about whether the Church is free to recognise same-sex unions by means of public blessings that are seen as being, at the very least, analogous to Christian marriage.
7. In the light of the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years, it is clear that a positive answer to this question would have to be based on the most painstaking biblical exegesis and on a wide acceptance of the results within the Communion, with due account taken of the teachings of ecumenical partners also. A major change naturally needs a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding.'
However tentatively expressed, this section seems to me to offer some hope (albeit remote) for those of us who question the traditionally held view on homosexual relationships – not least on those that are committed and faithful. Yes, let’s have the ‘painstaking biblical exegesis’ if there is to be any hope for the gay Christians that have contributed to this thread and the many others like them. Then, in time, there may be, as there has been with women's ordination and many other issues, ‘major change’ with ‘a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding’.
Posted by: Peter Waddell
Sunday 2 August 2009 - 07:24pm
Two very brief thoughts:
1. it is problematic for Anglicans to say that it is not up to the local church to decide what issues may be locally decided - after all, Anglicanism began with precisely such a decision against the claims of the Papacy (and, indeed, against the unbroken tradition of more than a millennium, counting conservatively). It may be that looking back Rowan wishes that hadn't happened ... but it did, and rather sets the tone for what counts as the Anglican way of doing things from then on.
2. The point of 'track one' is that it will be internally in full communion with itself, and sufficiently coherent to engage as a recognisable ecumenical partner with others. So ... will track one have women priests and bishops or not? Internal and ecumenical disagreement goes at least as deep on this one as it does on gay bishops.
Both Bishops seem to assume that the CoE will obviously be on 'track one'. I think that is not altogether clear...
Posted by: Lorenzo
Sunday 2 August 2009 - 01:21pm
I posted something to this effect on TA, but thought it might be useful to hear reactions from the other side.
I would like to take issue with the Abp’s statement that no Anglican has any business questioning the dignity of LGBT people or their place within the Body of Christ. What exactly is our place in the Body of Christ, the church? It seems to me that this is precisely what the is questioned. If indeed our partnerships cannot receive a blessing that would carry the authority of the Church Catholic, and –I carefully note his use of the conditional mood—if this is the case, a person living in such a union is in the same case as a heterosexual person living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond, then none of the sacraments are available to us safe arguably the last rites for the already baptised. We should not receive Holy Communion lest we see our relationships as a sin that must be repented of, just as an adulterer should keep away from the Eucharist if unrepentant. If we are so spiritually blind as to consider our relationships to be good, in defiance with current Church or covenant teaching, neither should we be deemed capable of receiving absolution, since we have no wish to turn away from our sin. Though most parishes would never dream of turning us down for baptism, it remains true that, to the question: Do you repent of your sins? we can offer no adequate answer. Just as parish priests should refuse baptism to a violent man who sees beating his wife as good, unless he changes his ways, so should they refuse a gay person, unless he or she deems her so-called lifestyle to be sinful. Last, we may of course not be ordained, since such incongruity between our lifestyle and Church teaching remains. If there is indeed no identity characterised by sexual preference which then generates a set of rights as Durham seems to think, if indeed the problem with homosexuality is merely about sexual activity, then provided we abstain of such activity, we are heterosexuals in all but name. If we do not abstain, our place is in the Body of Christ is that of apostates and public sinners. The glass is not half full; it is utterly empty.
Posted by: Martin Reynolds
Saturday 1 August 2009 - 09:03pm
And then:
I'm deeply shocked to see Wright try and rewrite the Windsor Report.
In 13(iv) there is a determined attempt to ignore 146 (WR) and to abandon the respect for differing views and large tent Anglicanism. On the morning of the publication of the Windsor Report I was advised to begin at 146 and to read everything through this lens, to try and replace it with this "unthinking" comment is reprehensible
Posted by: David Baker
Saturday 1 August 2009 - 05:17pm
Many thanks to Bishop Tom Wright for a thoughtful and incisive article here which is very helpful to read.
At times I think he slightly puts his own "spin" on Rowan Williams' words (eg two tiers vs two tracks) to make them more palatable to some evangelicals; and I wonder what he will do if + Rowan does not act as he suggests ~ is there a plan B?
I'm just grateful + Tom is speaking out in this clear way; also again for his recent Times article.
Sincerely
David Baker
Posted by: Martin Reynolds
Saturday 1 August 2009 - 01:24pm
This is a little better organised than the unfortunate rant in The Times, though once again it seems to have missed so much and assumed far too much.
Just to start, I would be interested to find the list of prerequisites Wright mentions, I cannot find them.
I have read the Covenant again just to check but it seems there is nothing here to indicate that churches need to comply with any pre-established standards. Indeed as I read the wording, it assumes the member churches will have a wide disparity of views and practices.
Not the least of these is the ordination of women, and so I find the constant references in the text to Catholic without the addition of Reformed something of a puzzle. There can be little doubt that the ordination of women approved of by the majority of Provinces has, in the eyes of our Romish and Orthodox partners, "reduced" us to a Protestant sect.
Still, it would have been useful to record such things as the views of those who sit in the English pews, as polls have shown they are happy with gay priest - even the majority welcoming partnered gay clergy. The consensus fidelium within his own English Church should count for something?
Posted by: Pageantmaster
Saturday 1 August 2009 - 03:10am
Many thanks to Bishop Tom and to Fulcrum and ACI for this helpful piece. It is encouraging to see all working together and the resulting Action Plan in sections 21 and 22 extrapolated from the Archbishop's Reflections. I hope that having come together this co-operation will continue and be built on, perhaps bringing in other organisations.
Two head are better than.....and all that.
Posted by: MattS
Friday 31 July 2009 - 07:25pm
Hello Waterangel,
Sorry, yes, I note now that you emphasised the individual aspect of the first point. I think I understand what you are saying.
Posted by: WATERANGEL
Friday 31 July 2009 - 03:20pm
Hi Matt
Yes on point one i had highlighted that very statement earlier, (INDIVIDUAL) that the issue of homosexuality and women in ministry are different..So i am glad someone understands that. But they are by some treated the same when it comes to the giving and recieving of communion..This of course causes confusion..especially for young and new christians.
Point 4 you are right in what has created the changes to attitudes to gays..I come from a background where the protection of the vulnerable in society is paramount..I understand that in some instances not all but some homosexuality becomes a life choice because of abuse sometimes church abuse..I would therefore defend their right to having a personal and corporate relationship with God..
Point 5 Yes I am saying we are all sinners, There is an honesty about homosexuality between consenting adults , but with alchoholism wife beating etc all which are happening in the church, amongst other even less pleasing to god issues the same honesty is not apparent.. So whereas they may not ask the church to endorse this behaviour they are often asking the church to endorse them without disclosing it and it affects their preaching and leadership.. What I am trying to communicate perhaps a little clumsily is that we as Christians are called firstly to Love the person not what they do..
Finally Of course in an ideal world the clergy would not abuse their congregation and the congregation would always care for one another , but we do not live in an ideal world, we tell people that we have a God who loves uncontionally it is that issue i am concerned about..In a world where people do not have families, there is no-where else for them to learn about acceptance of who they are in Christ but the church.. I hope this clarifies it a bit more for you..
Waterangel
Posted by: WATERANGEL
Friday 31 July 2009 - 02:45pm
L Roberts
I am sure some of them certainly started on council estates..But I would like to ask you why you want to emulate a group of people who use intellectual sarcasm as a means of communication..It is not a nice attribute and is nothing less than bullying..I understand that this can be a result of private and public school teaching, so the word hubris to describe an arrogant person is perhaps not nessesary call a spade a spade and all that.. As Christians we need to stand against bullies .whether privately or state educated because it leads to private personal and social breakdown , worse still when they become leaders they have the potential to be dictators and be the cause of diplomatic incidents and wars not to mention the fact that they can mess weddings and funerals up...I hate seeing politicians bully one another and i dont want to see it in the church either..It is in direct opposition to what we are taught.. No doubt I will be accused of being a liberal now the inference being that conservatives are not capable of love and care which of course is rubbish..Anyway whats wrong with being liberal I have witnessed good people dying defending the church and country that were liberal..
Waterangel
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Friday 31 July 2009 - 02:31pm
The flaw in the argument is this, that a baptismal theology does then lead to a renewal of the inner life and that faithfulness that should be in all of your life and is is idealised in marriage and seen in a constraint of chastity, also for the faithful gay relationship. Only then does identity come into it, that is the differences regarding being heterosexual, gay, lesbian, transexual, or even to say that these are more flexible and unhelpful as suggested in Queer Theology. Andrew Linzey made a good shift of the discussion with reference to theos-rights, where rights have origins in God related to but different from Enlightenment rights.
So all this stuff from Tom Wright and Rowan Williams is just tactical blinkered material to throw people of the scent, when for those who need it the theology is there and needs little search to be found. Dishonesty seems to be part of the job description of being a bishop these days - Bishop Tom to Ground Control I call it.
Posted by: MattS
Friday 31 July 2009 - 02:17pm
Hi Waterangel,
Regarding your first point. I'm really not sure about you putting women and homosexuals in the same category. In order to say that, you'd surely have to argue that the lifestyle choices of gays are as uncontrollable as the characteristics of human gender.
I'm also not sure about your point 4. The gay lobby seem to play a very important role in the media (for example) where they are pushing hard for them to be given priviliged status, i.e by having criticism of them banned. I also suspect that the changes in attitudes to gays have been driven through entertainment and aesthetics with programmes like "Will and Grace" rather than through rational or ethical arguments.
I'm not sure what point you are making with point 5. If you are arguing that the church is full of sinners then I think most people are aware of that. I'm still not aware of any "wife beating lobby" or "alcohol abuse lobby" or even "divorce lobby" who is asking the church to bless this behaviour or say it is a good thing. Actually, I'm not sure how people can consistently oppose these behaviours on more than utilitarian grounds if they are also trying to argue that extra-marital sex (including between people of the same gender) is good.
Posted by: KiloCharlie
Friday 31 July 2009 - 01:09pm
Hooray for Tom Wright's astute, comprehensive and pastorally sensitive reflections on the ABC statement. Here are words that offer a genuine way ahead - words with guts.
I would tend to agree with a former contributor to the debate that the idea of a two track communion is something of a contradiction, and maybe we just need to draw a line in the sand that indicates you are with us or not. Hopefully the reality on the ground of the forthcoming Covenant will do just that.
I don't pretend to understand all the ecclesiastical shinnanigans, or rich multi-layered language used in these discussions, but my own reading of the ABC response was initially encouraging until the voice of the diplomat began to displace the voice of the prophet. By the end of the piece I was not a happy bunny! The final phrase “the beginning of a new era of mission and spiritual growth for all who value the Anglican name and heritage”, with a two track approach in mind, and with all the complex interaction and support that this lame communion would then need, almost made me despair. Sadly it seems to me that the ABC is saying that TEC simply move onto a second track and somehow we have to work out how to continue sharing ministry with them. So the net effect of all this heart searching, theological reflection, costly discussion, agony and pain for all concerned is simply this:
TEC has acted with impunity, it simply does its own thing without any serious regard for what it means to be in a global communion; as for those faithful Anglicans within TEC and those forced to take refuge in other bodies?
suspended and excluded faithful gospel ministers remain so
churches evicted from buildings remain evicted
practising homosexual clergy and bishops remain in office
dioceses offering alternative oversight are still regarded as doing the real harm
‘Evil prospers as good men do nothing’. TEC have acted with impunity, unless action is now taken swiftly to hand them over to the cultus of the world they are now seeking to sanctify and the faithful and orthodox Global Anglican Church can get on with the business of its calling to go and make disciples of all nations.
Chris
Posted by: WATERANGEL
Friday 31 July 2009 - 09:47am
Wow thats a lot of writing to clarify some simple points...in my simlpistic way which i dont mind if you laugh at me for
1 it is imperitive that the human rights of Women and homosexuals are acknowledged and that each with their INDIVIDUAL identiy are accepted.
2 Surely it is impossible to have a TWO Tier Communion as this is a contradiction in terms..
3 Should we not be able to know exactly who we are and where we stand on these issues in our own country before we complicate it with another..Though i do accept that there are no borders when it comes to christianity..
4 I think same sex union people can represent the marginalized in society because they are marginalized.
5 ecumenical credibility is not reliant on the human beings who give or take it as we have all fallen short of the glory of God not one of us can take communion having got it right.If the credibility of communion is affected by Homosexuals why are there wife batterers divorcees alchoholics and other people who struggle in society on the PCCs or Diaconates or Elder commitees in this country if i were looking at it from another country and possibly culture i would not understand or be able to reconcile this dichotomy..
Waterangel
Lord enable us in our debates to have compassion and understanding. Give us wisdom and enable us to use it so that we have a society motivated by love and care for one another preferring each others needs before our own Amen..
Posted by: Deleted user 974
Friday 31 July 2009 - 09:21am
Tom's theological reflection might improve if people stopped constantly referring to him as "bishop Tom"--he's human, fallible, and why water the seeds of hubris ? Ordination to any of the 3 or more 'orders' of the C of E does not confer infallibility ! And ordination as bishop seems to induce loss of straightforwardness and honesty --cause for concern. John Robinson and Gene Robinson being noitable and honourable exceptions --is the name I wonder ?
How does Tom relate to gay flk in the diocese ? Or does he avoid them ?
I would be so glad to see the abolition of bishops in the present form at least. They need to live on council estates and connect with people on the ground. Cf message of Jesus.
Posted by: Deleted user 1543
Friday 31 July 2009 - 08:10am
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Bishop Tom has a lot to say about Archbishop Rowan’s recent reflection. There is very much of it which deserves comment – I want to focus on one area alone, that of gay identity. Here is the relevant para.
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(i) First, the supposed modern and scientific discovery of a personal ‘identity’ characterised by sexual preference, which then generates a set of ‘rights’. The Archbishop has commented on ‘rights’ in this connection. Without entering into discussion of the scientific evidence, it must be said that the Christian notion of personal identity has never before been supposed to be rooted in desires of whatever sort. Indeed, desires are routinely brought under the constraints of ‘being in Christ’. This quite new notion of an ‘identity’ found not only within oneself but within one’s emotional and physical desires needs to be articulated on the basis of scripture and tradition, and this to my mind has not been done.
It seems to me that so much hangs on how people decide they are going to interpret this whole area, and whether or not they want to allow for such a thing within a Christian understanding of what it is to be human. I am not ignoring the ecclesiological questions, but these seem to me to have much less significance than the question of whether there is any possibility of the church speaking to and for the whole nation any more. Make no mistake about it, a gay-denying church looks increasingly ridiculous and irrelevant to more and more people in Britain.
Bishop Tom is scornful about the notion of any such thing as a “gay” identity. He is entirely wrong, of course, when (and it is his emphasis) he calls it as an “’identity’ characterised by sexual preference”. Gay identity is much more holistic than that, and pervades the whole way that gay people live, think, act, feel, desire, and, in the context in which all this controversy is taking place, pray and minister. It is not at all reducible to the sexual. But it is, indeed, an identity in which the sexual elements of personality are discovered to be oriented to the same gender as oneself, and without any sense of shame or struggle. So I want to assert that there is (and I am well aware that this does not prejudge discussion about such an identity is to be lived) a felt naturalness about it.
There are of course as many ways of being gay as there are of being heterosexual – and indeed, one of the fruits of having a society where this way of being is increasingly accepted as simply being normal for a minority of the population is that it now opens the way for ‘normal’ gay living (in the sense of the building of same-gender households contributing to their communities and living among everybody else) to become, well, the norm. Of course exaggeratedly camp personae will go on existing, but most gay people are more interested in getting on with the rest of life than making statements.
Reading what Bishop Tom has written is an odd and disturbing feeling. He doesn’t want to admit any such thing as ‘gay’ identity, and so wants to reduce it to a “sexual preference”. I want to suggest that it is a much more rounded and complex and diverse thing than that. Of course, because he is heterosexual he doesn’t get the point about the significance of gay identity, because he never has to think about his own sexual identity – or indeed struggle to be able to live in it comfortably. It is just one of the givens of his life, and will provide a background that is sometimes comforting (within the context of a marriage, say) and sometimes disturbing (as when he finds his sexual desires aroused, and is therefore subject to temptation). But the disturbing bits are set within a whole structure of living within him and without him that, if you like, goes with the grain of who he is.
While the aetiology of homosexuality is still unclear, there is enough science around to suggest a mix of nature and nurture (rather as with a lot of the things that go to make us up); in accepting this to be the case we are allowing, as a society, an intellectual and cultural space for people who share this orientation to discover what it means to live with it and to explore their own identities. The remarkable thing about the Pride march I shared in some ten days ago, was how very many ordinary couples were present there. Of course there were the drag queens and some boys in very tight shorts, but it was far from being a sexualized event. It was, and felt like, an event that celebrated people’s ability publicly to be the people they were made to be. The overwhelmingly friendly reception of the very largely straight bystanders who waved and clapped as we passed suggests that they understood this too. What gay people might become is another thing entirely, and it is in the business of redemption and transformation that the church offers a way of living.
From a Christian perspective, we want ourselves fully to be brought under the lordship of Christ and to discover what it means to be and to live in him. But Bishop Tom, consciously or not, will have brought his straight, white, public school male self to Jesus, and I have brought my queer, white, public school male self to Jesus. Pretending that gay identity is simply one huge social construct and 21C con trick is no way to deal with this issue. Apart from anything else, he needs to understand that being gay is not something assumed, it is not something manufactured, it simply is part of who I am. To pretend it doesn’t exist is to ask me not to be me in a very profound way. All it is, but it is this, is naming who I am. I am not ready to go back to being nameless, and therefore finding that I, in a very profound way, don’t fit in life at all.
Bishop Tom suggests that wholly new theological work would need to be done on the basis of Scripture and tradition for any general acceptance by the Church of gay identity. I suggest that he is simply barking up the wrong tree. The resources for theologically understanding gay people and their place in the world and the Kingdom are the resources of Christian anthropology, developed to take account of this element of difference in the whole picture of human experience. They don’t need special treatment; they don’t need telling that their sins are not sins, nor that the positive ethical qualitities of their relationships are not good, either. What won’t do is to pretend that gay people somehow don’t really exist.
Posted by: Art
Friday 31 July 2009 - 01:19am
One of the key things that perhaps (good) folk like Pluralist will never quite agree with is the premise of the ABC’s ecclesiology. It is no coincidence that his doctoral thesis concerned Eastern Orthodoxy. For two things derived from this rich stream (NOT track!) of Christian Tradition are to the fore: sobornost (for which perhaps see the very last chapter of Jaroslav Pelikan’s magnum opus on The Christian Tradition, vol 5, or for one liners, see now Rowan’s Rule, pp.65-66); and a fulsome experience and understanding of the Triune God, as this impacts the life of the Church and Christians.
Western Christians of course find these kinds of things awkward, for a host of reasons, even as we are trying to engage in a necessary exercise in cross-fertilization via notably ecumenical dialogues and revamped talk of “communion theology’, as well as Karl Barth’s legacy. For all that, the modernist doctrine (though some would like to invoke postmodernity too with all its plasticity) of pluralism is a thin, pale reflection of genuine difference-cum-catholicity. While it might manage the likes of a cross channel flight in reproduction retro aircraft, it will indeed not fly globally in an authentic Anglican Communion. Nor should it: it is quite simply too gruel like! For at root, what has the modern idea of nation states to do with the Household of God which was always an ecumenical commonwealth and whose polity was always transnational, with “citizenship” being “in heaven”.
All this leading into Bp Wright’s own reflections of the ABC’s Reflections, at one key point, the shift from “two tier” talk derived from Challenge and Hope (2006) to now “two tracks”. The name change from PECUSA to TEC, with the sixteen (I think that was the number) of flags decking the scenery in GC 2006 already signalled the desire for the Americans to head up an alternative view of the world. And we may safely suggest now that with these Reflections of the ABC and Wright’s analysis, say, another 4-6 flags might in the middle distance be added to their backdrop. The ethos of the ‘land of religious lib-er-ty’ has infected the Anglican Communion at a very deep level; and ironically, it might very well be the Covenant that becomes the means.
Yet, also in the middle distance and certainly in the longer term, all that this apparent confusion across the old Anglican scene will prompt is for St Paul’s saying of 1 Cor 11:19 to become realised: the genuine will become clear indeed! Amen; so be it! even as we pray for the Lord to continue to have mercy ...
Posted by: Deleted user 1222
Thursday 30 July 2009 - 09:45pm
Here is my viewpoint. It won't fly.
Posted by: Simon Cawdell
Thursday 30 July 2009 - 09:33pm
Stuart,
Yes, we had a technical hitch which is now fixed. Do not adjust your set...
Posted by: Stuart
Thursday 30 July 2009 - 09:13pm
Great contribution from +Tom, definitely helps illuminate the situation. This may just be some vast technical incompetence on my part, but it looks as if the article is cut off mid sentence (in fact mid word). Is there a bit missing?
Posted by: nersenpaul
Thursday 30 July 2009 - 08:55pm
A very positive statement from +Tom .....the recognition that we need not and should not wait months for the Covenant before addressing the concerns of the Communion Partners and ACNA is very important and must be a great encouragement to those groups in the US which desire to remain in Communion and have not walked apart. Thank you +Tom. This is the kind of leadership we need.....reaching out to the CPs and ACNA, honouring their desire to be in the AC, building unity.
Posted by: Rev River
Thursday 30 July 2009 - 08:15pm
As the dust settles even if only for a while, it's good to see the gold catch the sun and shine. Too long the pandering to loud shrill voices. Maybe the voice of wisdom will be heard and the dross burnt up: we will see. Bishop Tom supports his friend in Canterbury well, as a friend should.
Posted by: Stephen Kuhrt
Thursday 30 July 2009 - 07:39pm
Fulcrum has just published Rowan’s Reflections: Unpacking the Archbishop’s Statement by the Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright
Add your comments on the Fulcrum Forum
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