Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College, Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England.
At the beginning of May, Mark Chapman wrote a piece for this blog about how theological understandings of natural law have shaped the church’s view of sexuality far more than readings of biblical texts and provided valuable historical context as to why that is significant to our present debates. Like Mark, I served on the History Work Stream of Living in Love and Faith and agree with his assessment that, in the end, the discipline of history has largely been marginalized from the LLF final material. There is much that is good about LLF, but there remains an underlying assumption concerning the continuity of Christian belief about human sexuality until, well, this thing called Modernity happened and disrupted the common doctrinal framework. As Helen King, another colleague from that History Work Stream commented on the Shared Conversations process which preceded LLF, “it was clear that history only began in the 1960s”.
The History Work Stream was a diverse group in terms of our views, but we all agreed historical contexts matter and set ourselves an initial task of writing short papers exploring case studies of when “the church changed its mind” about something “big”. As a historian of the English Long Reformation, I chose clerical marriage. What might surprise some readers is that, after the Reformation, church and state continued to maintain that celibacy was the “ideal” state for the clergy. Clerical marriage was not a positive good, but pragmatic because some clergy just couldn’t keep their cassocks on; it was better to let them marry in order to regulate their sexual urges. To many Tudors, clergy marriage, as it said now of same sex partnerships, fell short of the “ideal”. (You can find my fuller argument on the LLF Hub.)
Let’s take another case – surely one of greater moral consequence than marriage: is it moral for the state, after a judicial process, to take a life? We don’t know how this question would break down among current members of the General Synod, but anyone upholding “traditional Christian teaching” would, by that reasoning, favour its re-introduction in the UK. Christian thinkers as diverse as St Paul, Aquinas and Calvin can be enlisted in its defence. Article 37 of the 39 Articles of the Church of England (1563), to which all ordained ministers of the Established Church assent, states that “the Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences”. Anglicans were not alone. In 1566 the Council of Trent of the Roman Catholic Church reaffirmed the morality of the death penalty: “the just use of this power [capital punishment], far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to Commandment which prohibits murder”. In the hothouse of sixteenth-century Europe, on this issue at least, there was consensus between the mega-churches, although even then there were voices of dissent amongst radical Protestants, which only united Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestants in persecuting them. Looking back, it is a pretty uncomfortable example of ecumenical convergence.
In the twentieth century, a substantial sea change for Anglicans and other Christians occurred. In 1958, the General Convention of the American Episcopal Church passed a resolution urging its abolition – a moral question that is still dreadfully live for Episcopalians over sixty years later. Three decades later the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference also voted for abolition; given the number of countries in the world which still retain capital punishment, a Lambeth Conference might want to revisit the question. In 1995, John Paul II hedged his bets and rather than declaring an absolute ban argued that execution should only be used “in cases of absolute necessity”, maintaining (optimistically) that because of the progress in penal systems, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent”. However, in 2018, Pope Francis pronounced an absolute prohibition on capital punishment as a violation of the dignity of the human person in Catholic teaching, putting him at odds with countries such as the US, China, and Nigeria as well as with laity and clergy of his own church.
In Britain, as with the abolition of the trade in human beings, non-conformist Christians led the charge against hanging. But even the bishops of the Established Church could be converted and play a part via their seats in the House of Lords. In 1948, only one bishop, George Bell of Chichester, clearly supported abolition in the Lords; in 1956 eight bishops voted for suspension and one against. In the 1960s, nineteen bishops voted for abolition and only one against. How do we account for this episcopal “change of mind” on such a “big” moral question? In his essay “God and the Gallows” (2004), the distinguished historian Hugh McLeod suggested that the twentieth century saw a move away from a theology of salvation based on understanding the cross as punishment for sin to an incarnational emphasis on God becoming human in Christ. It strengthened the view that all human life was sacred, and by the 1960s this soteriology was reflected on the episcopal bench. In other words, punishment was no longer key to the narrative of human salvation. McLeod also argues that British Christians who considered all parts of the Bible ‘equally authoritative’ and took a literalist approach displayed the strongest support for the death penalty prior to its abolition in 1965.
2025 will be only the sixtieth anniversary of the abolition of capital punishment in Britain – less than a lifetime ago. It was a momentous moral achievement in which the leaders of the Church of England, by and large, followed from behind rather than led from the front. Sound familiar?
Any thoughts?