BLESSING: A Scriptural and Theological Reflection (Part V)
by Ephraim Radner,
8. Aspects of Same-Sex Partnerships Bound to the Good and to the Extension of Life
What concrete recognizable goods might there be in homosexual relationships? Here are four possibilities that I have not only heard offered, but been forced to consider personally:
a. the long history of life-long homosexual partnerships, which have evidenced real virtues like devotion and fidelity analogous in some respects to marriage partnerships; such partnerships may not be the norm nor have been the norm among homosexuals, but they indubitably have existed and continue to do so in many cases.
b. the more recent history of heroic and sacrificial love gay partners have offered their companions in the midst of need, particularly during the AIDS epidemic; many virtues demonstrated here bear a strong resemblance to a number of highly valued (and rare) Christian virtues.
c. the particularly long history of discreet social supports given to civil society indirectly through the relationships that have nourished major and prominent gay contributors to civic life; this includes not only the genre of “famous gay men and women in history,” but more pertinently, the countless other gay people we have all known who have been devotedly serving their (and our) commonwealths through service, while being given (usually) hidden support through their homosexual partners; the goods offered to society here are more within the natural order, but they are hardly negligible.
d. a gay couple adopts a special-needs child that has languished in state care, because no one else will take it and gay couples are allowed such crumbs in the adoption industry; they raise that child with tenderness, love, and dignity.
First, one ought to discuss if there are, in fact, any goods to be found in such a list and others like it. Second, if one agrees that there may be some goods here, one must ask whether and how the Church ought to recognize them. Should or can one, for instance, “bless” these elements? Can one do so prospectively, that is, by either giving thanks that God has in fact promised to enable these things or as a prayer that God do so according to his promises (something we have seen that blessing has entailed)?
Speaking personally, I feel compelled to acknowledge the kinds of goods just listed; and I also must admit to a certain confusion in their face, in that such goods seem also to me worthy of commendation somehow (this, despite theological worries noted below). Yet I cannot at the same time find a place within the order of blessing that Scripture, tradition, and the reasoning about these two and about society provide. The procreative impulse of the creation of human beings as male and female, so clearly marked in Scripture, law and tradition, and which clearly and singularly receives the judgment of “goodness” by God that constitutes his “blessing,” has no real place for same-sex couplings. As we know, where these latter are mentioned in Scripture and tradition, they are rejected precisely in the context of fruitfulness that upholds the Scriptural claims about and character of blessing (as, for example, in Leviticus chapters 18-19; Romans 1).
This presents a problem when it comes to “blessing”: God “talks” in Scripture about marriage – in the sense of its intrinsic male-female union – with an exclusivity that is disconcerting to present preoccupations. Homosexual relationships are, quantitatively, abnormal from a social perspective; they are “odd” and “strange“ to the society of the Body in which God has called us as we understand and experience our corporate existences – minority outliers. And, thereby, they are also somehow “foreign” to its origins and meanings, even religiously. God simply has not given us the tools, conceptually and spiritually, to take the phenomenon of homosexual relationships and to distill them into some set of least-common denominator principles. The “Claiming the Blessing” movement and similar efforts want to do just that. They write, in one key paragraph the following: “Just what are we blessing when we bless a same-sex relationship? We are blessing the persons in relationship to one another and the world in which they live. We are blessing the ongoing promise of fidelity and mutuality. We are neither blessing orientation or ‘lifestyle,’ nor blessing particular sexual behaviors. ‘Orientation‘ and ‘lifestyle‘ are theoretical constructs that cannot possibly be descriptive of any couple’s commitment to one another.” “Persons,” “relationship,” “fidelity,” “mutuality” – these are all, of course, abstract “goods.” But can they actually be abstracted from the lived network of engagements, socially and ecclesially, that constitute sexual culture and the larger culture of marriage and its obstacles within the context of God’s Church? Any “blessing” we offer to such goods as “sacrifice” and “mutuality” and so on in general will be based on our own contestable arguments about whether this or that “fits,” and how it fits, with some larger life-extending dynamic of God’s will that is nonetheless not articulated clearly in Scripture or the tradition.
In other words, if Christians are to recognize these kinds of “goods” as goods to be prayed over positively, they will do so privately at best, on the basis of individual judgments that cannot by definition be affirmed publicly by the Church at large. So this leads to a further question: are there other “analogous” social phenomena which may well contain privately recognizable goods for which the Church, nonetheless, cannot offer public affirmation, but which the Church does not stand in the way of having recognized privately. Here are a few possible examples:
a. War: Under certain circumstances, it is possible to see some good in warfare. But – despite the Church’s repeated contradiction of this principle – it is hard to accept war, any war, as somehow intrinsically “benedictable” by the Church. (The whole realm of violence is one, I think, that is worth contemplating in the present debate – more so than slavery, etc. – as a prod to humility in articulating certainties about the Church’s faithfulness to Scripture: we have had, in the Church’s history, some wild swings of conviction on this score, and Scripture’s own witness has been interpreted with a gestural freedom equivalent to its application in these changes.) But if war does not and cannot merit the Church’s liturgical blessing, might not one pray to God on one’s own that one side or another “win” – or not? The point is, pacifism is not mandated by the Church, even though many Christians are pacifists on account of their Christian faith, and nothing else!
b. Aspects of other non-Christian religions: For example, some forms of Buddhist “compassion” may be seen as commendable “goods” in God’s eyes (this is debatable, but so is the present issue). Despite clear Scriptural condemnations of pagan religions in certain forms, God’s purposes in other religions are not obvious even in Scripture’s own terms. Still, even if we felt that something was “of God” in another religion, it is not clear how the Church ought or even could sensibly “bless” such elements in a public way.
c. The Nation of Islam’s efforts at encouraging self-respect and economic autonomy among poor African-American youths: Who hasn’t felt some sense of contradiction in confronting these and similar social phenomena – admiring the goal and even some of the practice, and also being repulsed by accompanying schemes. A Christian might admire – might even aid in certain circumstances; but there are grave reasons why the Church cannot bless.
d. Usury as a means of generating wealth for the sake of the larger commonwealth: This may be a tricky topic considering today’s economic turmoil. But the fact remains that somewhere in the 17th and 18th centuries only, the charging of interest as a consistent and legal principle and means of wealth-production began to be formally accepted by Christian churches, without thereby reneging on the Scriptural and traditional prohibition of usury. Today, vast elements of our economic system are based on this principle, from credit cards to mortgages to credit unions to micro-credit programs in developing nations funded by churches. The fact that Christian leaders over the past year have spoken out against the essential value of the principle – from the Archbishop of Canterbury to (just recently) the Pope – points up the fact that the Church is willing to accept the social goods from the system without canonizing or, shall we say, “blessing” the system or principle itself – something, frankly, it cannot do on the basis simply of Scriptural tradition (from Exodus 22:25 on, throughout the Old Testament, both Law and Prophets).
But here is the point: Although it has happened, obviously, most of us would not agree that wars should be “blessed” (and would be aghast at the formal application of benedictions to wars); we would not provide Christian blessings to Buddhist monasteries; nor would we to Black Muslim bakeries (they would not seek such blessings either!). The idea of blessing credit cards or credit card companies would seem ludicrous to us, though I for one have had in my parish people who made their living working for such companies and serving their families and churches through the fruit of that work. And, of course, churches make money by investing in interest-bearing economic instruments.
Many of these kinds of analogies share a certain common feature: they are all based on the congruence of various kinds of “works” with Christian “fruits,” valued in themselves by Jesus. The notion of “congruence” itself has a long history of debate in Christian theology, however. One might note for instance that the strong Augustinian perspective informing the Anglican Articles of Religion explicitly rejects any notion of a possible “congruence” among Christian and non-Christian “goods” (or good works), the latter of which – “works before Justification,” in Article 13 – are viewed as “[having] the nature of sin.” One might go further and wonder whether it makes sense at all to speak of “goods” as associated with “works” to be somehow “commended,” for (Article 14), “Christ saith plainly, When ye have done all that are commanded to you, say, We are unprofitable servants.”
But even granting that some of the elements I have listed above are indeed “goods,” none of them is conformable to the Gospel in its integrity, let alone in its fullness, because they spring from varying motivations, cohere in various larger worldviews, and are linked to a variety of other elements that are extraneous, and perhaps even contradictory, to the Christian message. In other words, none of these analogies represent, in their partiality, the fullness of God’s truth in Christ Jesus. The so-called “Logos Theology” of some of the Fathers, which was willing to speak of “good pagans” before Christ, could not deny these limitations. The “goods” in question cannot be ordered within this framework with any certainty. And if, as virtually all Anglicans of all theological stripes are agreed (from the Lambeth Quadrilateral), Scripture (explicitly including the Old Testament) is for our Christian lives the “rule and ultimate standard” of our faith, and if we cannot find a clear way to have Scripture act as a “rule” in this case – and all admit that we have not found such a clear “ruling” – then we have indeed admitted as well that at best we are confused, and at worst perhaps even deeply mistaken.
And for this reason, these elements, perceived as “goods” by some, are not “benedictable,” I would argue, because they are goods perceived and explicitly received apart from the grace given in the Scripturally regulated particularity of God’s Incarnation, death, and resurrection in Jesus as commonly understood by the Church. All these goods fall into areas where private conscience alone can and ought to order Christian prayer, much as it does much of the time in our life in any case.
I am not of the opinion, then, that churches or dioceses or synods should order the “pastoral response” of individuals to gay relationships, precisely because I believe these are intrinsically individual discernments and internal matters of private conscience and should be treated as such. What our thought experiment here brings out is, finally, this aspect regarding blessing that perhaps needs most clearly to be stated in the midst of contested aspects of the action: To bless is a resolutely corporate and public thing to do, because it is at base a confessional thing to do, that is bound to a particular claim about who God is and what God does. And “confession” – homologia – is something that we do before the world, clear about who God is and what God has done in Jesus Christ, the truth upon which we stake our lives: “Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. In the presence of God who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ”(1 Timothy 6:11-13). It is interesting that in this discussion of public witness, Paul does indeed link the central profession of faith precisely with God’s “life-giving” reality – who gives life to all things – even as this is given in Christ Jesus’ own redemptive form. One blesses what one confesses before the world and for which one gives away one’s life. Nothing less.
This gets us back to the original notion of blessing as barak, God’s blessing as God’s giving himself away before us, out of love – creating, sustaining, redeeming. Blessing is at the heart of God, and therefore admits of no uncertainties.
Some Further
Jeal, Roy R. (ed.), Human Sexuality and the Nuptial Mystery (
Sider-Hamilton, Catherine (ed.), In Spirit and in Truth: The Challenge of Discernment for Canadian Anglicans Today (
Radner, Ephraim, Leviticus (
Goddard, Andrew and
Claiming the Blessing, at http://www.claimingtheblessing.org/publications.html, with several references
Ephraim Radner is a priest in the Episcopal Church,
The Revd Prof Ephraim Radner is Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto and senior fellow of the Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.