by Revd Ray Gaston, Team Vicar, S Chad & S Mark, Parish of Central Wolverhampton; Interfaith Advisor, Diocese of Lichfield; Associate Tutor, Ripon College, Cuddesdon
In response to a recent Ad Clerum from the episcopal team in the Diocese of Lichfield (the diocesan is presently on Sabbatical) concerning LGBT+ chaplaincies, I wrote to the bishops about the use of the term ‘orthodox’ for the non-affirming position in relation to Equal Marriage. Like others, the diocese has set up these chaplaincies with the blurb on the diocesan website saying
Chaplains available include those from an ‘affirming perspective’ and an ‘orthodox perspective’.
In my letter to the bishops, I objected to the term ‘orthodox’ being exclusively appropriated for a position that is not required for creedal orthodoxy. I argued that the two positions are more correctly termed ‘affirming’ and ’non-affirming’, as that describes accurately how each position believes the church should respond to those Lesbian and Gay Christians who wish to express their sexuality within a loving monogamous relationship and seek the church’s blessing of that in a marriage rite. I explained that, as I saw myself as being both affirmative of equal marriage and the classic creeds, I didn’t see the two as mutually exclusive.
I have yet to receive a response from them.
But when I shared my letter publicly, I received hundreds of responses in support from both within and beyond the diocese. Alongside these came push back from those who argued that they were ‘orthodox’ and we weren’t. When pushed, some of these argued for an understanding of ‘orthodoxy’ that appeared to me to be at odds with classical Anglican understandings of the term and that would return us to Reformation debates about understandings of scripture between defenders of the Elizabethan Settlement and its Puritan critics. The Biblical scholar John Barton (1) has argued that although these differences – seen to be represented in the debates between the Puritans and the primary theological defender of the Elizabethan Settlement, Richard Hooker – were often framed around church order (i.e. episcopal vs presbyterian forms of order), they also rested on serious differences in the understanding of Scripture and the role it plays in determining the boundaries of faith.
At my ordination to the priesthood of the Church of England I affirmed several things necessary for the ordering of my calling as understood within the Church of England
- I took the oath of allegiance to the Sovereign affirming my acceptance of the church’s ‘national’ as well as Catholic character and its freedom from the authority of the Bishop of Rome
- I affirmed my canonical obedience to the Bishop of my diocese, accepting therefore the episcopal form of Church government agreed at the Elizabethan Settlement
- Finally I affirmed and declared my belief in ‘the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England bear witness’.
It’s this final point which is important for determining ‘orthodoxy’: ‘the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the Catholic Creeds’. Those two aspects need to be seen together. The faith revealed in the Bible and set forth in the catholic creeds is the story of God’s creative, redemptive and sustaining threefold presence and nature amongst us – it is the story of God we hold in our liturgy. The Bible is a testimony to that story and the creeds present that story and wrestle with interpretations of it. The Apostles’ Creed is a summary of the story and the economy of salvation. The Nicene Creed is a setting of the boundaries for exploration of an understanding of God’s work, particularly in Jesus, and how we understand that. It also concentrates on the boundaries of understanding the immanent Trinity – the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. The Athanasian creed acts as a form of via negativa – via positiva dialogue in helping us understand the trinitarian nature of God, the incarnation of Jesus Christ and what that means and does NOT mean.
The Bible, according to Article 6 of the Church of England’s 39 Articles, ‘containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation’. This is very important as it says that nothing that is not in the Bible may be demanded to be held to as determining faith. It does not mean that everything in the Bible and everything the Bible commands is necessary for faith. What is necessary for faith is trust in God and the story of salvation as presented in the creeds.
In addition to that caveat, the Church of England also holds to the doctrine of Prima Scriptura not Sola Scriptura. This means that scripture is the primary source for our faith but not the only source, as alongside it there is also tradition and reason: what became known as the ‘Three Legged Stool’.
The Creeds determine what we can read from scripture about the nature of God, God’s work in Jesus Christ and doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Creedal Orthodoxy does not allow Biblical Unitarianism or Christadelphianism, both of which are heterodox because of what they say or don’t say about Incarnation and the Trinity, although both would also claim to be deriving that from the Bible and the Bible alone. Our incarnational understanding of Jesus and trinitarian understanding of the nature of God are derived from scripture but are formed in the creeds through the dialogue of scripture with tradition and reason in the patristic church. The creeds are essential to setting the parameters of our understanding of the work of God given to us in the story of the Bible and restrict how scripture can be interpreted in this. Therefore the creeds are dealing with first order matters – how we understand the work of God in Jesus Christ and the nature of God as Trinity. The boundaries are set for our exploration of these matters and these are non-negotiable because they lie at the root of how we understand God at work in the world.
Second order matters are related both to polity – how we should govern the church – and to ethics. These matters are debatable within the broad parameters of Christian Orthodoxy according to the classical Anglicanism that draws from Hooker. And this is where the debate on the doctrine of marriage should reside. There are different positions deriving from the dialogue of scripture, tradition and reason. The attempt to deny this by the non-affirming tradition is similar to the Puritans’ denial of Hooker’s argument that the Bible does not determine a particular church order over their assertion that it does. It is possible to explore marriage in this way and allow space for the expression of both affirming and non-affirming positions, seeing both as sitting within an orthodox Christological and trinitarian doctrine. In fact, some of the best arguments for equal marriage have been made by people drawing upon tradition and scripture and bringing them into dialogue with contemporary understandings of sexuality, to critique both liberal permissiveness and conservative exclusiveness for a renewed theological understanding of monogamous relationship as one path to holiness (2).
The insistence that only the non-affirming position is ‘orthodox’ develops out of an understanding of orthodoxy that resides more within the Puritan strands of Christianity than classical Anglicanism. Defeated in the English Reformation, this Puritan strand then won out at the time of the commonwealth, only to be defeated again at the Restoration. In the modern world, it has been given a new lease of life with Fundamentalism, a form of reading scripture derived in North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a push-back against Biblical criticism. It seeks to narrow the more generous orthodoxy of the classical creeds by instituting new doctrinal bases (3) that go against the grain of centuries of diverse interpretive trends and understandings of exploring the Bible and instead flatten its meaning. It is a form of interpretation that denies swathes of tradition and interpretative frameworks for a cold and rigid reading of scripture that cannot hold up to serious scrutiny. If this becomes known as the true ‘orthodox’ approach, then we not only continue to marginalise our LGBT+ siblings in Christ but begin to move along the road of destroying our rich theological and interpretive heritage.
References
(1) John Barton, ‘Richard Hooker and Puritans: Of sundry things, in the light of reason’, Church Times 14 September 2014
(2) See Eugene Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God (Blackwell 1999)
(3) See for instance UCCF Doctrinal Basis and Evangelical Alliance Statement of Faith
Any thoughts?