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Category: Doctrine

  • ‘Evangelical and Inclusive’ – Renewing the Heart of the Tradition

    by David Runcorn, a convenor of the Inclusive Evangelical network and the author of Love means Love – same-sex relationships and the Bible (2020).

    A collection of studies and stories about evangelical faith and belief will be published on 28 April. Evangelical and Inclusive – a future and a hope is significant because it is written by evangelicals who support the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people and their relationships in the life of the church. Their purpose is more than a revisiting of the familiar arguments. For the Inclusive Evangelicals (IE) network the present conflicts are laying bare the need for a renewal of evangelical belief and identity and set the debates within the wider picture of evangelical history and its development.

    The book is not a manifesto, campaign statement or systematic study of faith and doctrine. It is telling a story that is still in the making. The approach is broad. Chapters trace the history and development of this tradition, including its global context. The relationship of faith, culture and mission is explored. Issues of scripture and doctrine are illustrated, for example, through a discussion of the theology of the atonement – so central to evangelical faith.

    ‘But are they really evangelical?’

     The book starts with a very familiar question in the evangelical world. ‘If there’s one thing that defines evangelicals’, writes Mark Vasey Saunders, ‘it’s holding strong opinions over who is and isn’t an evangelical!’ This has painful relevance for the growing number of evangelicals who hold inclusive convictions. We are often told we are not (or are no longer) real evangelicals.

    The evangelical wing of the church has grown remarkably over the last fifty years. In the Church of England its influence now extends to all aspects of its life and leadership. There are good gifts in this. However, over the same period, the oversight of its extensive organizations, networks and resources has increasingly fallen under the leadership of its more conservative wing. That is why, in the current debates, the loudest voices from this part of the church have been strongly conservative ones. This gives a misleading impression of what has always been a diverse and developing faith.

    The Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) was founded by John Stott in 1960 to represent and co-ordinate the varied expressions of Anglican evangelicalism. However, in 2014 the CEEC changed its constitution to require members to specifically affirm male-female marriage as God’s ‘unchangeable standard’. The evangelical group on the Church of England’s General Synod and Diocesan Evangelical Fellowships fell in line, along with other groups and organisations. This immediately excluded many who call themselves evangelicals by any historic understanding of the name, but who hold inclusive convictions on sexuality. Theological discussion became narrowed. As well as drawing in the boundaries of membership, the change made a certain belief on human sexuality the test of Christian orthodoxy – something completely unknown in the Bible and the historic creeds and councils of the church. We have now reached the point where the deciding factor in almost every decision or appointment in the church is being determined by declared views on this issue.

    The rapid growth of the IE network after its launch two years ago made clear what we already knew – that there is a significant presence within evangelical churches of those with more open convictions, a desire for more exploratory understanding, and a more hospitable and open expression of a faith which had become too centred on the hard binary lines of evangelical/liberal, biblical/unbiblical, right/wrong.

    All of which means that the CEEC (and the related ‘Alliance’ network) cannot claim to be faithfully representing this historic tradition and its life in today’s church. 

    Evangelicals and the Bible

    The debates over sexuality have been challenging evangelicals to re-visit their understanding of how the Bible speaks to us today. The commitment to the scriptures as our unique authority and guide does not mean that views have never changed, nor that our understanding of what is taught there has not developed. Within our tradition, the unsettling process of re-examining, repenting and re-interpreting even long-unquestioned Biblical convictions, under the compelling of the Spirit and in the light of contemporary questions, is a familiar task. Indeed, our own understanding of scripture requires it. Unless we are willing to do this, we risk only reading the Bible in a kind of ancient time warp. Faith becomes inflexible, dogmatic and unable to respond to new contexts.

    Our twenty-first-century church is facing this challenge as we explore the gift of human identity and relationships. Specifically, we need a hermeneutic with which to translate ancient texts, conditions and concepts into the challenges faced in contemporary life. An example is the repeated claim made by those arguing for a traditional understanding of marriage, that the creation story in Genesis chapter two is a ‘definition of marriage’. This imposes on the text of a richly poetic, ancient wisdom story a very modern and quite literal meaning. To claim we read here God’s definite, eternal, universal ordering of human belonging and relating is to fail to attend to the literature before us, and therefore prevents us from faithfully discerning what story is actually being told, then and now.

    Women and Men

    The evangelical world has yet to become a place where women are fully respected and treated unambiguously as equals. ‘The distrust of women’s voices is hard baked into many women’s experience of evangelicalism’, writes Kate Massey in her chapter, Being a woman and evangelical. By contrast, inclusive evangelicals are committed to offering spaces of mutual welcome where, as Kate writes, ‘we practise and develop more equal ways of engaging with one another, thus hearing and better appreciating one another’s struggles and receiving one another’s wisdom’.  (1)

    In his careful critique of the issues raised by the recent abuse scandals that have unsettled the evangelical world (and beyond), Paul Roberts outlines important challenges to male identity and approaches to leadership in what remains a heavily man-centred tradition. He is concerned at the non-consultative style that presently characterises the leadership of parts of this tradition. By contrast, IEs ‘affirm modes of Christian leadership and management of power based on a New Testament model, that is collegial, consultative, diverse and accountable. The inclusion of a diversity of leadership voices, irrespective of sex or sexuality, is crucial in expressing this model in the present day in order to make the church a safer place.’

    Unity and Conflict

    Simon Butler came out fully as gay in a speech in General Synod. For some years he held one of the most senior roles there – an election he accepted ‘to try to keep the Church of England honest about its sexuality in its senior places’. The sexuality debates there changed him. ‘While evangelicals were arguing about ‘first order’ and ‘second order’ issues,’ he writes, ‘I found myself believing more and more that the unity of the church was the central biblical issue at stake. To deny that unity, to refuse to accept a fellow disciple, is a fundamental and grievous sin’. Nikki Groarke agrees. She describes her experience of managing deep conflicts in Synod and in her ministry as an Archdeacon. She challenges the language of ‘fighting for a cause rather than collaboration’, and the extensive use of emotive videos, letter campaigns and threats to withhold money. She calls her present position ‘optimism with a broken heart’ (Nick Cave). The pain of standing in the midst of this disagreement is deep and costly. Inclusive Evangelicals have a high view of unity. We seek to walk alongside, not apart from, those who disagree with us. The gospel teaches us this is not an issue over which to divide.

    Good fruit

    The most significant, challenging and hopeful voices in the book are from those within the LGBTQ+ community.

    A number of writers share their journeys as gay, lesbian or transgender Christians in the evangelical church. The stories of shaming, excluding and harming make for painful and challenging reading, but their message contains remarkable calls to faith.  

    Baptist minister Rachel Humphrey calls her chapter, How being Gay made me a better evangelical. She insists that LGBTQ+ Christians have grown in faith even through adversity and exclusion. ‘When banned from the worship group, or from praying in public, we continued to worship and in that process we discovered that God was with us in this place too, and thus our faith has continued to grow and develop and mature. My faith isn’t the same as it used to be before I came out. It’s better. By every measure people might use – integrity, confidence, mental well-being, effectiveness in getting things done – it’s more meaningful, more honest, more scriptural, and – more evangelical.’ She insists that evangelical churches are the poorer for excluding the gifts, wisdom and faith of these fellow disciples of Christ. Of course this is so, for in the body of Christ ‘the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you!”’ (1 Corinthians 12.21).

     In Good Fruit Alex Huzzey shares stories of inclusive churches that are growing and flourishing despite opposition and without the benefit of the support and resources readily available within (conservative-led) evangelical networks. ‘In the last few years, a new generation of LGBTQ+ inclusive churches has emerged, retaining recognizably evangelical and charismatic approaches to scripture, worship and evangelism, and most importantly thriving on it.’

    Here is a vision for the renewal of a gifted but much conflicted tradition in the church. This book is written for Christians within the evangelical world who want to understand their own historic tradition better. We have written for those seeking to engage further with the theological and biblical basis for inclusive faith. Evangelical and Inclusive is offered in respect and friendship to evangelicals who, though disagreeing to varying degrees, are open to continuing the conversation. It is offered to those in the wider church who wish to understand better this creative, often perplexingly intransigent, yet life-giving tradition.

    It is offered in faith – for a future and a hope.

    Notes

    1. The issues are explored further in : https://www.inclusiveevangelicals.com/post/male-and-female-he-made-them-celebrating-one-humanity-equal-and-different

     

     

  • Marriage, Sabbath, Creation and Resurrection: A Response to Martin Davie on Marriage, Creation, and Fulfilment

    by the Revd Robert Thompson, Vicar St Mary’s, Kilburn & St James’, West Hampstead; host of Open Table, London; member of General Synod

    This essay is offered as a response to a critique by Martin Davie of my earlier piece, Marriage, Sabbath, Creation, and Jesus’s Embodiment of Justice. I am grateful for the seriousness with which Martin has engaged with the argument. His response is careful, rooted in Scripture, and motivated by a concern for theological coherence. The disagreement between us, however, is not primarily about whether marriage is good, creational, or worthy of honour. It concerns how creation itself is to be understood in the light of Jesus Christ, and how far appeals to “creation” can bear the theological weight being placed upon them.

    Methodological Clarification

    Before turning to the specific points of disagreement, it may be helpful to clarify the theological method at work in what follows. My argument does not proceed by setting Scripture against tradition, nor by privileging contemporary experience over biblical witness. Rather, it reads Scripture canonically and christologically, attending to how creation, law, and human institutions are interpreted and fulfilled in the teaching and practice of Jesus himself. Creation is therefore understood teleologically rather than statically: its meaning is disclosed not only at its origin in Genesis, but in its fulfilment in resurrection and new creation. Within this framework, the goods of creation — including marriage, Sabbath, and sacrament — are affirmed as real and holy, while also recognised as provisional in form. Discernment, on this account, is not a departure from faithfulness but an intrinsic feature of a living tradition shaped by Scripture, oriented toward Christ, and attentive to the Spirit’s work in the Church.

    Creation, Genesis, and the Shape of Human Life

    Martin Davie argues that Genesis 1–2 establishes marriage as a fixed creational institution, such that later Christian discernment must conform to that original pattern. Genesis certainly presents sexual difference, relationality, and companionship as part of God’s good creation (Genesis 1:27; 2:18–24). The question, however, is whether Genesis functions as an institutional charter for marriage in the strong sense being claimed.

    Jewish interpretation itself cautions against reading Genesis so rigidly. Rabbinic traditions preserve interpretations in which the first human (ha-adam) is understood as an undifferentiated or androgynous being, later divided into differentiated bodies (Genesis Rabbah 8.1; Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 61a). Whether or not one accepts these readings, their existence matters: they show that Genesis has not historically been read as offering a single, metaphysical definition of marriage. Rather, marriage emerges within Jewish thought as a covenantal and social ordering of life, shaped by commandment and community rather than ontology alone (Satlow, 2001).

    Appeals to “creation” that treat marriage as fixed, exhaustive, and self-interpreting therefore risk pressing Genesis more rigidly than the interpretive tradition from which Jesus himself emerges.

    Sabbath, Law, and Jesus’s Hermeneutic

    Martin Davie resists the analogy between Sabbath and marriage, arguing that Jesus does not relativise Sabbath law but restores its true meaning. On this point there is significant agreement. Jesus does not abolish Sabbath. But he does refuse to absolutise its form.

    “The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). This is not merely a repetition of existing law but a hermeneutical claim about how divine commands function in relation to human flourishing. Jesus repeatedly authorises acts of healing and restoration on the Sabbath (Mark 3:1–6; Luke 13:10–17), insisting that the purpose of the law is disclosed in mercy and life rather than in rigid preservation of form (Sanders, 1985).

    The analogy with marriage does not rest on their equivalence, but on the shared theological logic: both are creational goods whose meaning is disclosed in fulfilment, not frozen at origin. If Sabbath can be both creational and subject to radical reinterpretation in the light of God’s redemptive purposes, then appeals to creation alone cannot foreclose discernment about marriage.

    Marriage and the Resurrection

    This becomes unmistakable when we attend to Jesus’s explicit teaching about marriage and the life to come. In response to a question about resurrection, Jesus states plainly: “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:35).

    This is not a marginal aside. It is a direct claim about the structures of human life before God. Whatever marriage is, it does not belong to the final form of redeemed life. Marriage, on Jesus’s own account, is good but provisional. It orders desire, fidelity, and care under the conditions of finitude and mortality. In the resurrection, those conditions no longer obtain (Wright, 2007).

    This does not diminish marriage; it situates it within a teleological account of creation. Creation is not denied but fulfilled. Fulfilment, however, involves transformation rather than mere preservation. Any theological argument that treats marriage as eschatologically final risks standing in tension with Jesus’s own teaching on precisely this point.

    Creation Read from the End, Not Only from the Beginning

    Martin Davie’s account of creation proceeds largely from Genesis forwards. Christian theology, however, has consistently insisted that creation must be read from resurrection backwards. The Christian hope is not the restoration of Edenic arrangements, but new creation (Romans 8:18–25; Revelation 21–22). As Paul insists, “the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31).

    Creation’s meaning is therefore disclosed not only at its origin, but at its fulfilment in Christ. Marriage belongs to the ordering of life in this age. Its goodness is real and its disciplines are serious, but its form is not ultimate (O’Donovan, 1986).

    Sabbath, Sacrament, and Provisional Holiness

    The same eschatological logic applies to Sabbath, Church, and sacrament. Sabbath is creational, yet Jewish tradition has long described it as a foretaste of the world to come rather than its final form (Heschel, 1951). In the resurrection, Sabbath is not abolished but universalised: what was once a regulated interruption of labour becomes the permanent condition of life lived wholly within God’s rest.

    Likewise, the sacraments belong to the time of pilgrimage. The Eucharist is a real participation in Christ now (1 Corinthians 10:16), but it mediates a presence that, in the life to come, is no longer mediated. Classical Christian theology has consistently held that the sacraments cease not because they are false, but because they have accomplished their purpose (Augustine, City of God XXII).

    Marriage belongs within this same theological pattern: real, holy, and necessary within this age, yet provisional in form. To recognise this is not to weaken marriage, but to take fulfilment seriously.

    Discernment and Ecclesial Responsibility

    Martin Davie suggests that claims of harm only have force if one already accepts the moral legitimacy of same-sex relationships. I disagree. Exclusion, lack of recognition, and enforced invisibility within the Body of Christ constitute real forms of harm regardless of one’s prior moral conclusions. Christian discernment has always involved holding doctrine and lived experience together, rather than allowing appeals to creation to foreclose the process in advance (Williams, 1989).

    Conclusion

    The disagreement between us is not about whether marriage is good, creational, or worthy of honour. It is about whether creation is static or teleological; whether Jesus fulfils creation by preserving its forms unchanged, or by bringing them to their true end.

    Jesus does not deny creation. He fulfils it — and in doing so, he relativises what is provisional without emptying it of meaning. Marriage, Sabbath, and sacrament all belong within that movement from gift to fulfilment. To treat any one of them as eschatologically final is not fidelity to creation, but a failure to take resurrection seriously enough.

     

     

    Bibliography

    • Augustine. The City of God. Book XXII.
    • Davie, Martin. 2026. “A Response to Robert Thompson: Marriage, Sabbath, Creation, and Jesus’s Embodiment of Justice.”

    A response to Robert Thompson, ‘Marriage, Sabbath, Creation and Jesus’s Embodiment of Justice’

    • Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951.
    • O’Donovan, Oliver. Resurrection and Moral Order. Leicester: IVP, 1986.
    • Sanders, E.P. Jesus and Judaism. London: SCM Press, 1985.
    • Satlow, Michael L. Jewish Marriage in Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
    • Williams, Rowan. “The Body’s Grace.” Theology and Sexuality 2 (1989): 7–28.
    • Wright, N.T. Surprised by Hope. London: SPCK, 2007.

     

     

  • Marriage, Sabbath, Creation and Jesus’s Embodiment of Justice

    by the Revd Robert Thompson, Vicar St Mary’s, Kilburn & St James’, West Hampstead; host of Open Table, London; member of General Synod

    Like many, my deep disappointment at yesterday’s statement from the House of Bishops on the ending of the Living in Love and Faith process is charged with much anger too. The bishops have confirmed that no proposals will come to February’s General Synod on standalone services of blessing for same-sex couples, nor on permitting clergy or ordinands to enter same-sex civil marriages without canonical penalty. Once again, this position is presented as embodying the need for prudence, pastoral care, and church unity. But delay is never neutral. It is a decision, and this decision has a human cost.

    In the Church of England, we have already acknowledged the hurt caused to LGBTQIA + people by our teaching and practice. We have recognised that faithful same-sex relationships can bear the fruits of love, fidelity, patience, and self-giving. We have commended Prayers of Love and Faith as a sign that something has shifted. And yet, when it comes to equality that is visible, embodied, and trusted, equality that can stand on its own, we hesitate.

    Prayers may be offered, but only when embedded discreetly within other services. Love may be recognised, but not sufficiently to shape worship in its own right. Relationships may be affirmed, but not enough to allow those who live them to represent the Church publicly as priests. This is not full inclusion. It is calculated containment.

    Marriage and Creation

    Defenders of the status quo in our debates have often appealed to “creation” to justify this restraint. Marriage, we are told, is a gift of God given in creation and therefore cannot be changed. Doctrine, it is claimed, does not develop but is merely preserved. To alter the Church’s practice in relation to marriage or ministry would therefore be to abandon biblical faithfulness. But this appeal to creation is far less secure, biblically and theologically, than is often assumed.

    In the Genesis narratives, humanity is indeed created for relationship. It is “not good that the human should be alone” (Genesis 2.18), and human beings are created for mutuality and companionship (Genesis 1.26–28). Yet Adam and Eve are never described as being married. There is no ritual, no vow, no covenantal form, and no divine command instituting marriage as a fixed social or sacramental institution within the act of creation itself. Marriage, as a recognisable human institution, emerges later, shaped by kinship systems, law, property, and culture.

    The oft-quoted line that “a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife” (Genesis 2.24) is not spoken by God but offered by the narrator, already presupposing settled social arrangements beyond Eden. Genesis gives us anthropology, an account of human relationality, not canon law.

    Sabbath and Creation

    By contrast, there is something in the creation narrative that is explicitly named, blessed, and sanctified by God: the Sabbath. Genesis tells us that God rests on the seventh day, blesses it, and makes it holy (Genesis 2.2–3). If anything can be said to be unambiguously “given in creation”, it is the Sabbath.

    This comparison and distinction matters profoundly. Because when Jesus encounters the Sabbath, not as a vague symbol but as a divinely instituted, creation-grounded command, he does not freeze it in place. Nor does he treat its creational status as a reason to resist reinterpretation. Instead, he makes a striking claim: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2.27).

    Jesus does not deny the holiness of the Sabbath. He fulfils it by re-articulating its purpose. A creation-given institution is revealed to exist for life, mercy, and human flourishing. When it is used to wound, exclude, or constrain, it has been misunderstood and is not honoured. This instinct lay at the heart of the teaching of the Hebrew prophets: the preservation of life takes precedence over rigid application of law.

    This pattern runs consistently through the Gospels. Jesus heals on the Sabbath (Matthew 12.1–14; Luke 13.10–17; Luke 14.1–6), restoring dignity where religious anxiety would have preferred restraint. He insists that mercy, not sacrifice, reveals the heart of God (Hosea 6.6; Matthew 9.13). Law is not abolished, but fulfilled, and fulfilment in biblical terms does not mean repetition, but faithful interpretation ordered towards life.

    Jesus’s and the Apostles’ hermeneutic of Justice

    Jesus’s way of reading Scripture is not an innovation imposed from outside Israel’s faith, but stands squarely within the prophetic tradition of Judaism, in which God’s commands are continually re-heard in the light of suffering, historical change, and the demands of justice. His teaching does not replace the law; it discloses its purpose.

    The same authority is evident when Jesus contrasts inherited teaching with his own words: “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you” (Matthew 5.21–48). This is not a rejection of Scripture, but a claim about how Scripture is to be read faithfully. Doctrine, in the deepest sense, is already dynamic here, not because truth is unstable, but because truth is encountered afresh as God’s purposes come into clearer view.

    The early Church understood this instinctively. Faced with the inclusion of Gentiles, the apostles did not cling rigidly to scriptural commands about circumcision. They observed the Spirit’s work among those once excluded, and concluded, “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15.28). Scripture was not abandoned, but re-read in the light of lived faith.

    To deny the possibility of doctrinal development, then, is not conservative in any serious theological sense. The Scriptures of Israel themselves witness to a living tradition of interpretation, argument, and moral discernment, shaped by the conviction that God’s will is known most truly where life and dignity are upheld. Jesus stands within this tradition, intensifying its demands rather than abandoning its methods.

    If doctrine could not develop, the Incarnation would not deepen Israel’s story, the Resurrection would not widen the horizon of hope, and Pentecost would not mark an expansion of God’s life among God’s people. Christ would be reduced to a guardian of settled meanings, rather than the one in whom God’s purposes are brought into sharper focus and fuller light. In short, Christianity would not have come into being.

    Processing our Anger

    This brings us back to the present moment. The Church is being asked to believe that a same-sex relationship may be holy enough to be prayed for, but not holy enough to shape worship on its own terms. That a same-sex marriage may be lived faithfully by lay people, but becomes incompatible with holiness the moment a vocation to priesthood is discerned. That baptism incorporates all equally into Christ, yet ministry must still be rationed according to categories of suspicion. This is not theological coherence. It is a hierarchy of dignity.

    Appeals to unity and process cannot disguise this reality. Unity that depends on inequality is not Christian unity; it is institutional calm purchased at the expense of a minority’s flourishing. Acknowledging hurt while leaving intact the structures that cause it is not repentance; it is recognition without conversion.

    It is here that I locate the anger that charges my sadness. Like many colleagues I am now left in a place where I need to assess how best to respond to episcopal decision-making. Anger because I feel as if I been nothing but a faithful, committed and deeply-engaged Anglican for the entirety of my life and this feels like a resounding slap in the face. Like many I am now asking: at which point does active dissent to this decision-making become both morally and theologically essential and what forms should dissent take?

    There is a clear distinction between dissent born of impatience and resistance demanded by conscience. Ecclesial disobedience is not justified simply because progress is slow, a vote has been lost, or a desired outcome deferred. But there does comes a point when continued compliance itself also ceases to be morally neutral. It seems to me that this threshold is now met because of the convergence of four conditions:

    First, the harm must be real, ongoing, and acknowledged. In this case, the bishops themselves have named the hurt experienced by queer Christians. This is not speculative damage, nor the complaint of a disgruntled minority.

    Second, authority must know the harm and nevertheless maintain the policy that causes it. That border has also now been crossed. Delay is no longer inadvertent or provisional; it is conscious and defended.

    Third, the harm must fall disproportionately on a vulnerable group. Here it is borne most acutely by LGBTQIA+ Christians, particularly clergy and ordinands, whose vocations, livelihoods, and integrity are placed under sustained pressure.

    Fourth, appeals to unity or process must have become mechanisms of avoidance rather than means of discernment. That is now clearly the case here. Many of us have experienced this process as one that has led nowhere. When Procedure ceases to serve justice and instead becomes a way of deferring it the process itself loses any moral authority.

    When these four conditions are present, as they are now, obedience itself becomes ethically charged. Continued compliance is no longer a neutral act of loyalty; it is a decision that participates, however reluctantly, in the maintenance of actual structural harm.

    At this point, then, faithfulness may require something more demanding than patience. It may require acting as though the Church we proclaim already exists and accepting the cost of doing so. As Marika Rose, very much echoing Jesus on the Sabbath, writes in Theology for the End of the World: “Christian faithfulness is not about managing the world as it is, but about refusing to give ultimate authority to arrangements that deny life.” When ecclesial structures become arrangements that deny dignity, the call of the Gospel is not quiet endurance but truthful disruption.

    Jesus’s call to embody Justice

    The issue before the Church today is clear: it is whether we are willing to allow mercy, dignity, and life to be the criteria by which our doctrine and practice are shaped or whether we will continue to defend inherited forms even when they wound the very people in whom the fruits of the Spirit are already evident.

    That is not a question about sexuality alone. It is a question about what kind of Church we are becoming and whether we truly believe that Christ is alive enough to lead us somewhere we have not yet fully understood.

    Will we follow Jesus on the Sabbath? Will we with Christ embody God’s justice?

     

     

     

     

  • The Wholly Unnecessary Split in the Anglican Communion: A View from ‘Down Under’

    by Revd Dr Keith Mascord, a Canadian-born Australian. He is retired – most recently from managing the NSW multi-faith prison chaplaincy team. He is an Anglican priest assisting at St John’s Anglican Parish in Taree, in country NSW, and an academic who taught philosophy and pastoral theology at Moore Theological College in Sydney. He is an advocate, and a co-founder of the LGBTIQ+ support group – Equal Voices Australia. He traces his intellectual and spiritual journey in a now completed set of three books: A Restless Faith (2012), Faith without Fear (2016) and An Honest Faith (2025)

    It was a deeply disturbing moment when, on 16 October 2025, a communiqué was posted by Gafcon (the Global Anglican Futures movement) which declared, ‘The future has arrived.’ In what, effectively, was an attempted coup, the Anglican Communion – founded as a fellowship of independent dioceses in 1867 – was declared to have been overtaken by Gafcon. In its own words, ‘We have not left the Anglican Communion. We are [my emphasis] the Anglican Communion.’ ‘Gafcon is [now] leading the Global Anglican Communion.’

    These are audacious claims. The argument of the communiqué was that the formerly constituted Anglican Communion had ‘failed to uphold the doctrine and discipline of the Anglican Communion,’ and, as a result, its four instruments of communion (the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates Meeting) were being replaced by just one – the Bible.

    My discomfort with this news was heightened by discovering where this communiqué had been penned – in Sydney – and by whom. Though signed by Rwanda’s Archbishop Dr Laurent Mbanda, its wording was, I’m informed, a combined effort by a number of the movement’s leaders and ‘founding fathers’ including the former Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen. Peter was my Archbishop during his tenure. Before that, he was my employer, principal and colleague at Moore Theological College where I taught for fifteen years all up. I thus have more than a little interest in what is happening, along with a degree of insider/outsider perspective.

    Hermeneutics

    A few things stood out for me in the communique. The first was the critical role of hermeneutics, which is the science or art of interpretation. The communiqué cites the abandonment of the inerrant Scriptures as the reason for earlier calls for repentance, and for now withdrawing from communion with ‘revisionist’ Anglicans.

    The more I think about it, the more startled I am by this. When I was a student and, later, a lecturer at Moore, only some of the faculty subscribed to inerrancy, with most preferring infallibility or trustworthiness. Not all of the current faculty at Moore adhere to inerrancy. The same applies at the similarly conservative Ridley College in Melbourne.

    Some years ago, at a School of Theology at Moore College, a student publicly asked Archbishop Peter, ‘Don’t you think it is time we gave up on inerrancy?’ Peter’s reply: ‘No, we must not give up on it because of what it safeguards.’ It is a telling reply, which implies an acknowledgement of inerrancy’s weakness as a position. It certainly is that. On the one hand, inerrancy is an unprovable and un-Biblical faith position, especially in the absence of the Bible’s original documents (the autographs), if indeed there ever were such. On the other hand, inerrancy is easy enough to disprove. Anyone who has read and studied the Bible for any length of time, with even a little knowledge of Biblical scholarship, is likely to have encountered inaccuracies, contradictions, anachronisms, contrasting and revising theologies, remnants of polytheism, doubtful claims to authorship, and much more.

    Not so plain sense

    Exacerbating this hermeneutical hurdle is Gafcon’s insistence on a ‘plain sense’ reading of the Bible. The communique is insistent that the Holy Bible must be ‘translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.’ Neither the communiqué, nor the Jerusalem Declaration from which it draws, explains the meaning of these terms. With respect to a plain sense reading, one could well ask, ‘Whose plain sense reading?’ Is it the plain sense reading of an ancient reader, for example, someone well versed in the mythology of those days and of the Bible, and thus not likely to be differentiating between the mythical and the literal? Or is it what seems to be the plain sense to a 21st century reader influenced by modernist and, before that, Lutheran tendencies to read the Biblical stories as straightforwardly factual – including the Adam and Eve, Noah, Patriarchal, Exodus and Conquest stories, which we’ve good reason to believe are mythical and/or legendary.

    Returning to the notion of inerrancy, and yoking it to a plain sense approach, what might a Gafcon Anglican make of St Paul’s apparently plain sense understanding of Genesis 1-3, where an initially deathless and vegetarian creation (Gen 1:26, 27) has death introduced to it by the sins of Adam and Eve? If, as I surmise, ‘canonical’ has been added to ‘plain sense’ to prioritise the interpretation of Scripture by Scripture, this doesn’t help. In fact, it sharpens the conundrum. A plain sense, canonical reading of Romans 5:12-19, which also takes account of how these verses have been understood historically/consensually, flies in the face of current scientific understandings of human and animal origins.

    These are hard and important questions to ask of Gafcon’s hermeneutic. It is questions like these that sent me on a quest to find a hermeneutic that might more helpfully and honestly illuminate the Scriptures. In time, this led me to a hermeneutic, which perhaps surprisingly is not dissimilar to the Second Temple Judaic hermeneutic employed by Jesus and the authors of the New Testament, a way of appropriating Biblical texts, which, in principle, is responsive to new information and experience. I spell this out in detail in Faith without Fear (2016) and An Honest Faith (2025).

    Hard lessons still to be learnt

    Looking back, I am not aware of having been guilty of intellectual or moral failings in this long quest to find improved ways of reading and understanding the Bible. Nor do I think that increasing numbers of evangelical scholars have been irrational or immoral in employing or revising their hermeneutic to arrive at what they consider better conclusions about same-sex marriage. There is therefore no need, I believe, for repentance on their or my part.

    There is, however, more than enough reason for repentance for the two and more millennia-long misunderstanding and mistreatment of our precious LGBTIQ+ siblings. And, tellingly, it is hermeneutics or Biblical interpretation which has been a significant culprit in this abuse. Almost all of the great theologians of the church have, in one way or another, accepted what they took to be plainly taught in the Bible. They have allowed Scripture to interpret Scripture. They have come to similar, now historic, and apparently consensual conclusions. In doing this they have reasoned that women are inferior to men (Luther), that women are ‘defective and misbegotten’ (Aquinas), that they have been ‘born to obey’ and not to lead, with the leadership of women ‘an unnatural monstrosity’ (Calvin). They have, moreover, interpreted Leviticus and St Paul to imply that homosexuality condemns those who rebelliously choose it to be given over to passions that are satanic and to lives that are diabolic, such that they are worse than murderers (Chrysostom), with a vice believed to be ‘an un-paralleled enormity’ (Luther), so unnatural and so evil that they deserve to be banished ‘from all shelter of the church’ (Tertullian). And that is just a sampling of historic Christianity’s vitriol.

    Sadly, some of these ideas linger in dioceses aligned with Gafcon, with Sydney Anglicans still stubbornly restricting the ministry of women, and some African dioceses perpetuating views not dissimilar to those mentioned above. Happily, however, views like this are in retreat with most Anglicans, certainly here in Australia, and including Gafconites. They may not be willing to admit it, but their revised understandings have not been solely guided by their espoused hermeneutic. They have, in fact, had their readings and understandings modified by encounters with equally capable female leaders and preachers and by the thoroughly natural and healthy lives of our LGBTIQ+ fellow citizens. They’ve seen that the children of gay parents are doing as well psychologically and socially as children brought up more traditionally. They’ve witnessed the joy experienced by same sex couples when mutual love can come to full flowering in the blessing of marriage. They’ve seen the deep piety and strong faith of their LGBTIQ+ fellow Christians. They know that arguments against same-sex marriage are weakening, that Moses probably didn’t write Leviticus, that the exegesis of key Pauline passages is contested, that the hermeneutic they’ve relied upon ‘because of what it protects’ is fragile. They know all this, or should. And, deep down perhaps, they know or suspect that their ‘you must repent’ rhetoric is a log in their own eyes preventing them from seeing that it is they who need to repent, at the very least for the disrespect and hubris involved in failing to acknowledge the integrity, love and sincerity of those with whom they differ.

    In writing this article, I reached out to a number of the high profile leaders of the Gafcon movement, including the board of Gafcon-Australia, all but one of whom had taught, worked, or been trained at Moore Theological College. The exception was trained at Ridley. I sought to engage them with the ideas that are now expressed in this article. I was seeking to better understand their movement. Sadly, not one was willing to engage. Was it fear? Was it pride? Was I being cancelled? I don’t know. I will keep trying. My hope and prayer is that Gafcon’s attempted takeover will fail, that the resultant disunity, suspicion and silencing will cease, and that true and humble Christian fellowship will return, strengthened by a willingness to keep learning together.

     

     

  • Cries of Suffering: A Response to ‘The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God’

    by Mike Higton, Professor of Theology and Ministry at Durham University

    The Faith and Order Commission’s recent document on ‘The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God’ (GS Misc 1429) is not, in my judgment, a particularly helpful contribution to the endless Living in Love and Faith process. I fear that, however good the intentions behind it, it will

    • perpetuate the strange detachment from the history of theological and ethical debate in the church that seems to characterise the current LLF process;
    • encourage the House of Bishops to misconstrue their role in that process and to misunderstand the key questions that face them;
    • encourage them once again to downplay the centrality that LGBTQ+ voices should have for them in this context; and so
    • prolong the harm that the whole process continues to do to LGBTQ+ people.

    It also happens to be a document in which my own name appears, several times. It was only when a friend emailed me about it last week that I discovered I had been presented as one of a chorus of theologians whose work supposedly confirmed the document’s account of doctrine, and of the role of the bishops in maintaining it – but that I had been made part of that chorus only by way of a selective and, to my eye, somewhat misleading reading of my work.

    Measured against the real harms being done to LGBTQ+ people by the stalled LLF process, this misappropriation of my work is of course an entirely trivial matter, and wouldn’t by itself warrant a lengthy public response. It does, however, present me with a particular angle from which to assess the limitations of the document, and an opportunity to caution others to take it with a pinch of salt.

    What is this document?

    Back in June 2024, the ‘LLF: Moving Forward as One Church’ document (GS 2358) posed some questions on behalf of the House of Bishops to ‘the Theological Adviser(s) to the House of Bishops and the Faith and Order Commission Episcopal Reference Group (FAOC ERG)’ (§43), asking

    how do we, as a church, develop or change our doctrine? Is it possible to hold multiple doctrines simultaneously, in order to respond in the most gracious and pastoral way possible, even when this is messy or incoherent? Is it possible for there to be a range of interpretations of one doctrine? (§41)

    GS Misc 1429 is a response to that request: it says that ‘It is the product of work by the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC) and the Episcopal Reference Group (ERG), with support from the theological advisers to the House of Bishops. It is shared with the House of Bishops in the name of FAOC’ (§3). (I should acknowledge, by the way, that I served on FAOC myself from 2010 to 2022, and was vice-chair from 2016.)

    The conclusion that the document draws about the nature of doctrine, presented as a summary of the work of numerous theologians (including me), is that ‘doctrine is true knowledge about God consonant with Holy Scripture that is communally authorised and communally regulative’ (from the Executive Summary).

    The document does not, however, simply present this argument in the abstract. Rather, it argues for it in order to say something about the role of bishops in decisions about doctrine in the church. It argues that the bishops

    are given the task outlined … by theologians from Hooker to Higton, and so many in between, to discern whether anything put forward as wholesome doctrine is either ‘grounded in the Holy Scriptures’ or … ‘agreeable to said Scriptures’. (§158)

    The proper exercise of this role will, to be sure, involve ‘a dialogical process between the House of Bishops and the General Synod’ (§162) and so be ‘a process of communal discernment that leads to an agreement about what the community authorises as sacred doctrine’ (§163, my emphasis). In other words, although ‘the House of Bishops play a special role in doctrinal formulation owing to their function as teachers of the faith … they hold that role in dialogue with the other houses of the General Synod’ (§164). Nevertheless, within this communal and dialogical process, the bishops have ‘a central role in discerning the faithfulness to Scripture of any doctrinal formulation’ (§160, my emphasis). And the document’s final sentence sets out more fully the nature of this role:

    Careful discernment about which parts and themes of Scripture are most pertinent to the issue being addressed and which reading of those texts best expresses the mind of Christ in the Church is required, so that the Church remains faithful to what it has received … while it proclaims the faith afresh in each generation. (§174)

    FAOC’s reply to the House of Bishops leads up, therefore, to this account of the bishops’ role. Faced with a development that may amount to a change of doctrine (or may not – the document provides little help in deciding what does or does not count as doctrine), the bishops are to test that development against Scripture – and the heart of that testing will involve both a determination of which ‘parts and themes’ of Scripture are most relevant, and a determination (carried out, it seems, by securing a majority in Synod) of which interpretations represent ‘the mind of Christ in the Church’.

    To explain why I think this is an unhelpfully limited account (and why I do not think my own work supports it) I need to explore in more detail the argument of the document, noting along the way some of the things that strike me as strange about it.

    Is your journey really necessary?

    The first odd thing to note about this paper is simply that its authors felt that, in response to the Bishops’ request, the thing they most needed to do was to argue at considerable length that doctrine should be ‘consonant with’, ‘grounded in’ or ‘agreeable to’ Scripture.

    That would make sense, of course, were this point hotly disputed, so that it was worth devoting extended labour to securing it before moving on – but that is not the case, as the document acknowledges. The authors insist that

    It is crucial to reiterate that the present disagreement about the content and use of the [Prayers of Love and Faith] is not over whether or not Holy Scripture plays the determinative role in doctrinal formulation expounded above, but how it does so. (§168, emphases added)

    And this is a point that has been made numerous times before in the debate. Right back in 2020, for instance, the initial Living in Love and Faith book discussed at some length the way in which the church’s disagreements were shaped by differing attitudes to Scripture, but within a shared commitment to Scripture’s authority.

    (The book can be found on the LLF website, for which a free account is needed; once logged in, the whole thing is available for download. I was part of the group that produced this book, and that I was, in particular, part of the group that initially worked on the material that became Part Four, including the chapter on the Bible.)

    At one point (pp. 295–297), Living in Love and Faith sets out seven different ways of thinking about Scripture that are identifiable in the church’s disagreements about sexuality and marriage (and it is worth noting that the differences between them go much deeper than their selection of different ‘parts or themes’ to prioritise). The book argues that two of them (one at each extreme of the spectrum it has painted) are ‘beyond the mainstream of the church’s conversation about the Bible’s authority and purpose’ (p. 298), but that the remaining five (which between them could cover many people on all sides in the debate) share a number of features, including:

    • a commitment to the diligent reading of the Bible as God’s instrument for training in holiness and love, and instructing us for salvation;
    • a determination to attend to the way the words of the Bible run;
    • a desire to have their consciences formed by the dynamics of those words;
    • a conviction that Christ stands at the centre of the Bible; and
    • a belief that the Bible’s deep purpose is to unite us with Christ
    • and to draw us into Christlike love for God and neighbour. (p. 298)

    Now, there is obviously material here for considerable ongoing controversy. People occupying any one of the ‘voices’ that the LLF book lays out might not regard those occupying some of the other voices as having a plausible or acceptable account of what consonance with Scripture involves. But the book argues that

    All of them are determined to be obedient to God’s purposes in giving us the Bible, as they understand those purposes. They can’t simply be divided up into those who are trying to be obedient to God’s voice and those who are not. (p. 299)

    All of them, in other words, are already committed to the idea that the church’s teaching should be ‘consonant with’, ‘grounded in’ or ‘agreeable to’ Scripture. Disagreement has arisen not because they dispute that, but because they understand that consonance, grounding, or agreement in different and incompatible ways. (And for more on this, see my 2020 paper on ‘Disagreement about the Bible’, available in the online ‘LLF library’, which explores further the nature of our disagreements about the ‘how’ of Biblical authority.)

    In the light of all this, however, there is something distinctly odd about the present FAOC document saying so little about how Scripture can or should play a determinative role in the formulation and doctrine, and so much about whether it should play such a role.

    And that brings me to my second point.

    Balance or imbalance?

    The second oddity about the document is the way in which its attempts at balance falter.

    There are clear indications (such as the sentence quoted earlier from §168, about all sides agreeing that ‘Holy Scripture plays the determinative role in doctrinal formulation’) that the document’s analysis is meant to provide even-handed background assistance to the bishops rather than taking sides on the issue at hand. In particular, the description of the nature of doctrine that the document offers is meant to work for all sides.

    There are, however, a few ways in which that attempt at balance slips.

    The first is a tiny point, which only becomes telling in view of the larger examples that follow. In the course of a discussion of Brooke Foss Westcott, the authors say

    Rowan Williams, reflecting on Westcott’s contribution, comments that Westcott, despite frequent labelling of him as ‘liberal’, is fully committed to the Scriptures as the source of faith and doctrine. (§76)

    Notice that little word ‘despite’. The impression a reader might get from that one word is that the authors either endorse or do not see the need to avoid the idea that being ‘liberal’ does not normally go with being ‘committed to the Scriptures as the source of faith and doctrine’. Yet they are quoting from Williams’ chapter on Westcott in Anglican Identities (London: DLT, 2014), in which Williams is both

    pleading for a recognition on all sides that the word ‘liberalism’ is complex and slippery, and that, despite the angry polemic of the right, there is no single ‘liberal agenda’ to be written off as apostasy

    and arguing positively that Westcott’s form of liberalism is entirely bound up with his ‘endlessly patient attention to the detail of Scripture’. It would be fairer to say that Westcott is the kind of liberal he is, in Williams’ account, because of his commitment to Scripture.

    There’s a second point later on, almost as small, but similarly telling in the light of the broader shape of the document. When, in §140, the authors summarise what all the theologians they have covered (including me) are supposed to have said about doctrine, they say, ‘Holy Scripture is the repository of God’s revelation of that truth, and thus the foundation of all doctrine.’ Here, it is that word ‘repository’ that snags. It has not appeared in any of the discussion before that point in the document, but it is used here to nail in place the account of Scripture that has (supposedly) emerged from the whole foregoing discussion. And it is a word that, at least to my ear, echoes ways of talking about Scripture that are much more common amongst conservatives than amongst liberals or progressives (to use those familiar but inadequate labels). I’ll say some more about this below.

    It is, however, a passage very close to the end of the document that gives me most concern on this question of balance. The authors of the FAOC document sketch the position of some (indeed, they say ‘many’) in the debate who believe that Scripture clearly rules out the proposed changes to the doctrine of marriage, and who believe that arguments to the contrary necessarily involve rejecting ‘the perspicuity of Scripture: the conviction that those things a Christian is required to know, believe, and observe are available to all in their reading of Scripture’ (§172).

    The authors give the whole of §§171 and 172 and a significant part of §173 over to expounding the view of these ‘many’. Those who disagree with them (who are, note, not described as ‘many’) are then granted only a sentence, and no part of that sentence sets out what forms their own commitment to the authority of Scripture might take, or what response they might offer to the claim that they reject Scripture’s ‘perspicuity’. The implicit suggestion is not that people in this latter group have their own firm commitment to the authority of Scripture but different understandings of the way in which that authority works; it is, rather, that they don’t have much at all to say on the matter. Once again, the impression is subtly given that the authors of the FAOC document know what to say about conservative commitment to the Bible, but are somewhat nonplussed when it comes to speaking authentically about other sides in the debate.

    It is in that context that we might think again about the apparently unnecessary effort that this document expends on establishing that doctrine should be consonant with Scripture. That effort reinforces the impression that, whatever might be said explicitly to indicate otherwise, the question of whether Scripture is determinative for doctrine really is the point at issue – and that the bishops’ task might be to hold fast against changes championed by people who aren’t really serious about the Bible. That impression may well be inadvertent – I rather suspect that it is – but it seems to me quite palpable.

    I want to reiterate, therefore, what the document itself says, even if it later manages to undermine itself: ‘the present disagreement … is not over whether or not Holy Scripture plays the determinative role in doctrinal formulation’. I say that as someone very firmly on the affirming or progressive side of this debate – someone who wants not just stand-alone services of blessing for same-sex couples, but equal marriage, and much else besides. And I am convinced that this is what the church is required to do by the gospel of Jesus Christ, as that gospel is revealed to us in Scripture. I believe that the refusal to take this path is disobedient to the gospel and disobedient to Scripture. And I believe that those on the conservative side who oppose these moves misread Scripture and misunderstand the nature of its authority.

    I might of course be wrong about any or all of that, but if you want to convince me that I am wrong, you would be foolish to spend any time at all trying to establish that our teaching as a church should be consonant with Scripture, because I already agree with you about that. Much better to save your breath for a conversation – likely to be much richer and much more complex – about how Scripture’s authority is to be understood. And that is a topic on which no story of a neat consensus stretching down the centuries, and no neat delineation of the task before the bishops, is going to work.

    (For a little more on all this, see a blog post I wrote a couple of years back on ‘Disagreement, conscience and harm’.)

    Consensus on the nature of doctrine?

    The bulk of the FAOC document (§§7–146) consists of summaries of the work of a variety of theologians: Aquinas, Hooker, Newman, Westcott and Ramsey, and a selection of more recent figures from Kevin Vanhoozer to me. We are brought in as witnesses who are all, together, presented as giving our support to a particular account of doctrine and its relation to Scripture:

    doctrine is true knowledge about God that is revealed by God. Holy Scripture is the repository of God’s revelation of that truth, and thus the foundation of all doctrine. (§140)

    I for one, however, do not recognise my own work on doctrine in this formulation.

    The authors of the document draw on my book The Life of Christian Doctrine (Bloomsbury, 2020). I explain in the introduction to that book that it was written while I was myself heavily involved in the Living in Love and Faith process (p. 9); I describe myself as ‘someone hoping and working for the Church to change its stance towards people in same-sex relationships, and for it to confirm the unreserved inclusion of trans people in all areas of its life.’ (p. 9), and explain that the book was written, in part, to explore some of the background issues about doctrine that the LLF debates about those matters had thrown up.

    I explain:

    These debates are, for instance, often framed as taking place between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘revisionists’, but I explore in this book an account of the doctrinal tradition in which that distinction doesn’t make sense – or at least an account in which it can’t be of primary importance. More generally, I ask what work doctrinal theology can contribute in a situation in which there is little agreement about what constitutes a good doctrinal argument – little agreement about the kinds of evidence that should be appealed to, about the weight that those appeals should have or about the forms of argument that might be telling. This book is in part an attempt to understand how to argue well in such a context, and what good – if any – such argument might be capable of doing. (p. 10)

    There are several divergences between the account I offer in the book and the ‘consensus’ that I am supposed to support. I can only offer brief indications of those divergences here, leaving out the case I build for my claims by engaging with Scripture, tradition, and reason, and the arguments I offer against alternative accounts – but I hope it will be enough to explain why I can’t endorse the FAOC document’s summary.

    I have already mentioned my discomfort at describing Scripture as the ‘repository’ of revelation. I make the case in my book that doctrine does not simply summarise or articulate the truths that can be found lying ready to hand in Scripture. I therefore do not think that the key hermeneutical differences involved in our present debates are simply disagreements about ‘which parts and themes of Scripture are most pertinent’. The ways in which Christians read – on all sides of the debate – are much more deeply entangled with and shaped by the patterns of their imagination and practice, and by their deep construals of the nature and plot of scripture, and so are much more deeply various, than such formulations suggest.

    I would also find it difficult, without some serious qualification, to describe doctrine as ‘knowledge about God’. I argue in the book the more apophatic claim that

    For Christians to grow in knowledge [of God] is for them to grow together in their imagination of the love of God for them – their grasp of its breadth and length and height and depth. It is for them to grow in knowledge of the God-imaging love to which they are called, discovering the wisdom that will enable them to live that love out in the midst of all the relationships – local, political and cosmic – in which they find themselves. Knowledge of God consists in this deepening knowledge of love, and any supposed knowledge of God that does not take this form is simply fatuous. (p. 104)

    Doctrinal statements and doctrinal theology can, I argue, play an important role in guiding and supporting this knowledge, but that doesn’t mean I can say that doctrine itself is ‘knowledge about God’.

    But perhaps my biggest difficulty with the summary I am supposed to support is its blunt assertion that doctrine is ‘true knowledge of God’ – and not just that but true knowledge ‘revealed by God’. Perhaps the most obvious difference between my work and the FAOC document is that I write with a much stronger sense of the fallibility and failures of the church, and I extend that to my estimate of the church’s doctrinal inheritance. I write that

    Doctrinal theology … is involved in the reproduction of the life of the church. Yet the life of the church is always broken, always distorted, always sinful. Whatever true knowledge of God is embodied in the life that any Christian community lives, it is always mixed with ignorance, with misunderstanding and with the deliberate refusal of knowledge. The life of the church is a series of always failing experiments in the knowledge of God. If doctrinal theology helps to reproduce the life of the church, it will be helping to reproduce all of this failure – all of the exclusions and imbalances of power, all of the forms of harm that mar the church’s response to God’s love. (p. 4)

    The authors of the FAOC document do briefly notice this aspect of my account (see the second paragraph that they quote in §136), but it quickly vanishes from sight. A large part of my book is, however, devoted to exploring how the Spirit works to convict the church of its sin (including those sins woven into its doctrinal theology), and to teach the church to know more of the truth. It is an account of the necessity of ongoing penitent change in the church’s doctrinal teaching.

    And this account of sin, conviction and repentance shapes what I say about the role that bishops might play in processes of doctrinal change – giving my account a tenor rather different (it seems to me) from that of the FAOC document.

    That document does, admittedly (in §138), quote substantial parts of a paragraph from The Life of Christian Doctrine that, in full, reads as follows:

    As with all other forms of doctrinal theology, however, this episcopal work of encouraging, amplifying and resourcing [a summary of the description I had just set out of the teaching role of bishops] cannot be undertaken alone – and that is especially true in relation to the work of challenging erroneous teaching. As with all other forms of doctrinal theology, the work of bishops needs to be embedded within processes of ongoing listening and re-construal, in which there is a real possibility of their being led to see differently by the challenge of others. Bishops are enabled to play their role as teachers by being members of communities of conversation and exploration that can encourage them, resource them and challenge them – and especially by being members of communities that can read scripture with them, and inspire them to read it differently. In particular, their ability to ‘uphold sound and wholesome doctrine’ will be directly proportional to their ability to hear the call of God in cries, encounters and improvisations – because those are the means that the Spirit characteristically uses to draw the church deeper in to the sources of its faith. (p. 238)

    And it is true that my point in this paragraph was in part, as the FAOC document suggests, to acknowledge that bishops are indeed granted a role in our polity as gatekeepers of doctrinal change – but it was also to point to the conditions under which that role can properly be exercised. And what I say here, if read in the context of my wider argument, does not simply amount to saying that they should be in dialogue with the wider church as represented by the other houses of General Synod, seeking some kind of majority or consensus, and it does not let me rest content with the descriptions that the FAOC document gives of the bishops’ proper recourse to Scripture.

    The line in the paragraph quoted above about ‘cries, encounters and improvisations’ refers back to, and summarises, a lengthier discussion earlier in the book. In this context I want to draw particular attention to what I say about ‘cries’:

    God’s call reaches this church through cries…. Most sharply, the call reaches the church through cries of suffering – cries from those injured, marginalized, erased, ignored or forced into passivity by the existing patterns of this church’s speech and action. These may be the cries of those who are already visibly part of the life of this church; they may be the cries of those on or beyond what are currently thought of as its edges – but wherever they come from, these cries break in on the church’s present life, posing questions and demanding re-evaluation. Can they do justice to the lives from which these cries emerge? (p. 223)

    Crucially, attending to such cries – and learning to walk with those whose cries they are – can and should transform how we read Scripture. I had earlier said that

    The reading practices to which the church is called, and which doctrinal theologians are to accompany, are practices of reading while walking. That is, they are practices of re-reading in the light of the new situations, the new encounters and the new relationships into which the Spirit leads scripture’s readers. Above all, they are practices of re-reading in the company of those who suffer and are oppressed, those who are marginalized and excluded, those who are harmed by the church’s present settlements. They are practices in which those in positions of hermeneutical power and privilege sit at the feet of those who read from the margins, to listen, to learn, to accompany and in time to converse. The Spirit can open the eyes and ears of readers more fully to scripture, and enable them to hear, see and dwell in the word of God more richly, by means of these situations, encounters, relationships and conversations. If doctrinal theology is to play a role here, it will be by keeping the church to this kind of reading and walking, by holding open space for the conversations that emerge, and by exploring the challenges and suggestions that are generated by those conversations. (p. 169, emphasis added)

    I am not trying to intervene here in some zero-sum game between attention to Scripture and attention to experience. I argue at length in the book that this does not make any sense at all as a way of describing our hermeneutical options. My argument is, rather, that the heart of Scripture is opened for us only as together we journey with Christ in the power of the Spirit, and in no other way – and that we should turn away from any account of Scripture’s meaning, of its ‘parts and themes’, or of the proper approaches to its reading, that can be offered in abstraction from that journeying.

    In other words: I don’t want it supposed that I give my support to a picture of the bishops’ role in guarding the doctrinal teaching of the church that has them testing what they hear from the wider church against a Bible that they already know how to read quite well enough, having learnt to read it outside the company of those whose lives, whose relationships, and whose futures they are discussing. I don’t think that any such picture can do justice to the nature of the journey on which we are called together into the knowledge of God; I don’t think it does justice to the nature of the Scriptures that we have been given by God to accompany us on that journey; and I don’t think it does justice to the nature of doctrine.

    Is it possible to hold multiple doctrines simultaneously?

    I say all this not because I expect to change anybody’s mind – though I hope, of course, that I might. I offer in its favour various arguments, exegeses of scripture, and readings of a range of ancient and modern theologians, but I know that all of those arguments, exegeses and readings are contested. I therefore don’t necessarily expect the authors of the FAOC document to agree with me, but I do want to establish that the supposed consensus marshalled in that document is not quite as neat as it is made out to be. And whilst I accept that I’ve only spoken about my own case, I’m fairly sure that closer attention to several of the other figures covered would indicate that they, too, don’t sing in perfect unison on these matters.

    In particular, the voices gathered in the document don’t all say the same things about the authority of Scripture, and neither do Anglicans more generally. I’m not sure how to distinguish between ‘dogma’, ‘doctrine’ and ‘teaching’ (a point on which the document declines to pronounce – §51), but I suppose you could say, without too much danger of misunderstanding, that there are indeed different doctrines of Scripture in circulation amongst us, and that this has long been the case. Some might resemble the views outlined at the end of the FAOC document, with their focus on the perspicuity of Scripture; others might resemble mine; others will be different again – but whatever their precise character, there is no doubt that the church is and has long been marked by deep and intractable difference in this area.

    But that brings me to the final oddity that I find in this document. The bishops asked whether it is possible for the church to hold multiple doctrines simultaneously – and yet that is a question that this document doesn’t even attempt to answer. The authors could have got somewhat further, however, had they dug back, not into general accounts of the nature of doctrine like mine or those of the other theologians they have mustered, but into earlier formal discussions of this very question by Church of England bodies, including discussions carried out by the commissions to which FAOC is a successor. I find it odd that this report is so detached from that earlier history of Anglican discussion.

    The authors could, for instance, have looked back to the 1938 report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Doctrine, Doctrine in the Church of England – a report commissioned precisely ‘because the tensions between different schools of thought in the Church of England were imperilling its unity and impairing its effectiveness’ (William Temple, ‘Chairman’s Introduction’, p. 4), and so long in the making that even the LLF process looks short by comparison. They could have looked at the succession of documents that the re-formed Doctrine Commission produced from the 1970s to the 1990s – including Christian Believing: The Nature of the Christian Faith and its Expression in Holy Scripture and Creeds (1976), Believing in the Church: The Corporate Nature of Faith (1981), We Believe in God (1987) and many more – all of which deal with questions of doctrine, and explore the nature and limits of difference in the church.

    Perhaps most pertinently, however, they could have looked back to the 1968 report on Subscription and Assent to the 39 Articles, produced by the then newly re-established Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine – and in that report they would have found the question about the permissibility of deep differences in Anglican approaches to Scripture already posed and discussed. The report describes those deep differences unflinchingly, but argues that this variety can indeed be held within the life of the church. And this wasn’t one of those reports that vanished from view the moment it was published; it initiated the revision of the Declaration of Assent made by all deacons, priests and bishops, which ensured that the promises they all made would leave room open for this variety to persist in the church. It is not the least strange aspect of the current debate that we seem to have lost touch so completely with even quite recent episodes in our history.

    It is not that I think there are easy answers to find in this history, or any insight that will suddenly cut through all the tangles that we face. Greater attentiveness might, however, help protect us from the temptation to deceptive neatness – a neatness that irons out difference, flattens out history, and somehow always manages to squeeze out the voices of those already marginalised within the life of our church as it is. I fear that FAOC, in its desire to provide assistance to the bishops, has slipped into purveying precisely that kind of neatness.

  • A Response to “The Exercise of Discipline and Clergy Exemplarity in the Church of England: The Case of Same-Sex Civil Marriages: A Report of the Faith and Order Commission” (GS Misc 1431)

    Fr Thomas Sharp is a priest theologian based in the South East of England and is also Provincial Secretary of the Society of Catholic Priests

    This was the third report which briefed the House of Bishops before they made their decisions in October about Living in Love and Faith (LLF). It purports to explore theological issues relating to three possible ways by which clergy in a marriage to a person of the same sex might be licensed in the Church of England. It also purports to explore what it means that clergy are called to an exemplary life, and what implications there might be for licensing married people who currently would need a civil partnership in order to be licensed.

    The Report claims to do all this whilst ‘not endeavour[ing] to resolve those differences, either finding for one side or making clear a previously unknown path to consensus’ (§214). It does this by almost entirely sidelining the views and voices of LGBTQIA+ people, presenting a viewpoint significantly informed by North American Evangelicalism as if it were a balanced presentation of Anglican variety. Of the 24 modern theologians engaged with in this report (Gregory Nazianzen and George Herbert are the other two theologians included):

    • 100% are white
    • 96% are white men
    • 83% are straight or in opposite sex marriages
    • 46% are North American
    • 12% are ex-gay / same-sex-attracted identifying evangelicals
    • Only one person, at 4% of the whole, is an affirming gay Anglican with a partner.

    The one affirming gay Anglican contribution cited is from Jeffrey John, in a book which was published in 1993 when I was two years old.

    This report does not meaningfully engage with the theology produced by or read by LGBTQIA+ Anglicans, or people who hold an inclusive theology. Simply directing us to the LLF Resources does not constitute theological engagement (§100). This report is not balanced or representative. It should not have represented itself as being such.

    However, it is lengthy and technical, and gives a very good sense of being comprehensive, even whilst it utterly fails to present or even really take into account the voices of those most affected by its subject matter. This is a shamefully inadequate Report whose omissions (wilful or otherwise) have potential to mislead its readers.

    In order to make this meandering and confusing report more intelligible, my response to it comes under six headings:

    1. Make doctrine a moving target
    2. “Communal regulation”, discipline and toxic theologies of power
    3. Are the clergy a special case?
    4. Leading us to think we are talking about sex whenever marriage is mentioned
    5. Despite divorce, we really do still hold to the traditional doctrine of marriage
    6. Disempower the Bishops

    This is a report which overwhelms by the sheer variety of arguments it includes. Here, I cannot deal with them all, particularly the biblical section and its lack of meaningful engagement with LGBTQIA+ readings of important texts.

     

    1 – Make doctrine a moving target

    The FAOC Report on Doctrine defined doctrine as: ‘true knowledge about God that is communally authorised by warrant in the Holy Scriptures and is, therefore, communally regulative’ (GS Misc 1429, §146). However, in this report, that simple definition varies. Early on, ‘authorised by warrant in the Holy scriptures’ is watered down and communal regulation does not appear: ‘Doctrine… is true knowledge about the living God, grounded in or agreeable to the Holy Scriptures, that the Church of England determines by a process of communal authorisation’ (§8).

    Later, elements of both are mixed as doctrine is ‘true knowledge about the living God that is communally authorised and communally regulative’ (§84 & §212). But the scriptures seem to have vanished. On one level this might be a symptom of speedy or sloppy drafting. However, on another, it could be understood as an attempt to give an impression of a clear definition of what doctrine is and how it operates in these arguments, without being willing to be pinned down to any actually clear definition. This sort of slipperiness and unclarity of meaning runs throughout the report.

     

     2 – “Communal regulation”, discipline and toxic theologies of power

    A theological high point comes in §§12-17, when the heresy of Donatism is dealt with and it is concluded that individuals and the wider church can have confidence in the sacramental ministry of a minister, even if they err in doctrine. However, as the report proceeds to outline a theology of discipline, it is unnervingly one-way, authoritarian and entirely lacking in awareness of the operative theologies of power which have led to both the abuse crisis in the worldwide Church and the failure of the Church of England itself to respond meaningfully to abuse.

    The report links discipline with discipleship, and it is established with reference to The Homilies that ‘it is imperative to think of discipline in both its proactive, formative sense and also its reformative and punitive senses in order to understand it fully’ (§17). This is good, but the formative is not really considered. It is the reformative and punitive senses of discipline with which this report is interested, i.e. what sledge-hammers the bishops can hit us with, whether it be for our benefit or to teach us a lesson.

    A survey then follows of reformative discipline as described in the liturgies of ordination of deacons, priests and bishops in Common Worship and the BCP. It entirely lacks any meaningful awareness of the fact that the power to discipline can be incredibly dangerous, despite the liturgy enjoining the bishop to use their authority: ‘not to destruction, but to salvation; not to hurt, but to help’ (§24). The vocation of a bishop ‘to minister discipline, but with compassion’ leads to a reminder that even a compassionate bishop may also need to punish: ‘it may be that such a response is the compassionate one’ (§27). But there is no awareness in the report that hurt and destruction, i.e. abuse, may result from such episcopal behaviour.

    The rather odd concept of “communal regulation”, which I explored (and we were all no doubt confused by) in the liturgical context with reference to the report on Doctrine, reappears. Apparently, the vow made by bishops to ‘accept the discipline of this Church, exercising authority with justice, courtesy and love’ (§29) is when a bishop puts themselves under “communal regulation”. What is entirely overlooked is the significance of justice, courtesy and love in the exercise of that ministry by any individual bishop, or the College or House of Bishops as a whole.

    The same blinkered focus is apparent in the report’s reading of the latter part of the consecration prayer:

    Further on the Archbishop prays, ‘Give him humility, that he may use his authority to heal, not to hurt; to build up, not to destroy’, a reference to 2 Cor 10:8 and 13:10. The emphasis, like in the rephrased declaration, is on the corrective and reformative aspects of discipline.

    It takes deliberate one-track thinking to fail to spot the critique of punitive authoritarian power in this prayer. Punitive authority is the focus of this report. That seems to be what “communal regulation” actually means.

    This disturbing theology of power in the report comes out strongly when clergy families are considered. Canon C26’s injunction to the minister to order their life and their family’s lives in a manner ‘that provides a wholesome example and pattern to the community’ (§36) is presented uncritically. Though the duty to order our family members’ lives is ameliorated since the phrase ‘as much as in him lies’ is interpreted to remind us of ‘the limitations of any individual to determine the behaviour of other family members in all times and places’ (§37). But it is crystal clear that “communal regulation” should be exercised in the home as well, mostly I imagine over wives and children, but over clergy husbands and extended family as well. This is not a theology of power which a responsible theologian simply states uncritically.

    There is a hint that this dangerous and toxic theology of power might be applicable in wider discipleship (“heavy discipling” is one euphemism for spiritual abuse and grooming, after all). The report notes, again uncritically, the linguistic or etymological links between spiritual discipline, church discipline and discipleship: ‘The complementary relationship between spiritual discipline and church discipline would indicate the broad range between the proactive, formative and the condemnatory, punitive ideas that inhere in the single word discipline’ (§43). Tellingly, throughout this passage, the role of the ‘authority figure’ as the exerciser of discipline in its various forms is emphasised.

    Finally, the image of a doctor prescribing medicine from Gregory Nazianzen’s second Oration is used to support this broader deployment of discipline (§46). This is particularly unfortunate and ironic. Gregory wrote his second Oration shortly after his ordination, having fled his post because he did not think he was able to bear the weight of the pastoral duty imposed upon him. He writes in a manner which emphasises the importance and weightiness of pastoral care, almost to an absurd extent. This is an apologia for his belief that he should not be entrusted with such authority to discipline. It is not a suggestion that every bishop and priest should start prescribing punitive medicine.

    This isn’t a funny theological blooper. Rather, it reveals just how far the compilers of the report were not aware of the issues of power underlying the texts with which they engage. Bishops might well read Selina Stone’s A Heavy Yoke: Theology, Power and Abuse in the Church (London: SCM Press, 2025) before they decide that this is the sort of power in relation to God’s people which they want to define themselves as having. If they do, they need to deploy it in all areas of their episcopal ministry and equally on all people in the church, not just LGBTQIA+ people. Gregory, given the choice, ran away from it.

     

    3 – Are the Clergy a Special Case?

    In order to answer this question, the report presents a bewildering array of arguments, many of which are specious or based in unreality. I shall try here to present this torrent of uncompleted ideas in a way which is moderately digestible.

    First, the report argues that ‘The broadest possible jurisdiction one can conceive for church discipline includes baptised Christians on an electoral roll in the Church of England’ (§48). You might think we were about to get a sense of how “communal regulation” applies in the community of the baptised. But this is passed over, moving on to a discussion of Lay Ministers (§49). It seems simply to be accepted that discipline is not something which touches the baptised who are not licensed. This is unsatisfactory and inconsistent with the theology of discipline presented thus far.

    This gap in the argument means that the next argument, that clergy are held to a ‘higher moral bar’ than the laity (§50), seems to arise solely by virtue of ordination. No argument is offered to justify the statement that due to the ‘exceptional nature of holy orders’ the church ‘expects a public transparency about many aspects of life, including areas in which lay Christians are afforded the ease of privacy’ (§50). This is an unreasoned distinction from the privacy afforded to the laity which is presented as self-evident. And should then the bishop, as even more exceptional than the priest, be required for example to publish their bank statements on the diocesan website? There is no theological substance here.

    A strange argument is presented about the call for clergy ‘to witness by example against the norms of the culture in which they sojourn’ (§53). It is not stated directly, but we are used to this sort of homophobic gaslighting, which argues that we are not to be in ‘normative alignment with the shifting sands of cultural values’ (§52), those shifting values being a fictional secular society which is a nirvana of inclusion for LGBTQIA+ people. That secular inclusive society against which the church is called to witness is fiction and a foil. Society is deeply homophobic, even as it is deeply misogynistic and racist still. Homophobia in the Church is in lockstep with the homophobic abuse and discrimination we experience in the secular world every day. It’s not countercultural, it isn’t cool, and it isn’t a witness.

    The distinctive witness of clergy to procure the good conduct of children and their spouses is considered again in the context of this cultural witness. This is passed off masterfully with the sentence: ‘Modern assumptions about the alignment of private, domestic space with public order differ significantly from the assumptions in [the pastoral epistles]’ (§59). It is odd that the report should accept women’s lib and contemporary appreciation of children’s dignity and autonomy so easily after all the handwringing about being counter-cultural. If applied to LGBTQIA+ people, it is simply not clear why the same counter-cultural discipline would not be applicable to women, children and those in clergy households, and no arguments are made.

    The report advances an argument that the vocation to ordained ministry is a ‘whole-life dedication’ which makes it ‘difficult, if not impossible, to separate the moral from the exemplary imperative in a life conceived as a form of witness’ (§64). This is an extraordinary argument for an Anglican to advance, especially as it is essentially the root of the argument for clerical celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church. If ordination is ‘whole-life dedication’ to God, then heterosexual marriage and dedication to another person also should be inappropriate for the clergy.

    Then the report argues that we must take particular account of the perceptions of outsiders.

    The pastoral epistles… even specify that the exemplar ‘must be well thought of by outsiders’ (1 Timothy 3:7). It behoves us to consider the same in the 21st century just as it was commended in the 1st century. In practice, it is inescapable.

    This is blunt application. And it is hard to see why this argument for not ordaining or licensing those in same-sex marriages would not also hold for women, immigrants, disabled people and people who are racialised. Their ordination, as they will tell you, also prompts push-back and elicits ableist, racist and misogynistic abuse and even scandal. And yet again there is no considered argument in the report about why this problem of perception should only apply to LGBTQIA+ people.

    There then is yet another strange argument: that allowing clergy to marry their same-sex partner would ‘alter the context in which Christian exemplary witness is offered and point to the fragmentation within wider society of a consensus on the nature of marriage and sexual intimacy.’ This is simply delusional. There is no fragmentation in secular society on the issue of sexual intimacy. Rather, there is general agreement in secular society that the place of sexual intimacy is no longer anything to do with marriage. Indeed, for even the majority of conservatives in the Church (at the level of operative theology rather than theory) the question is really about what sexual intimacies you enjoy before marriage and which ones you save for your spouse. Again, cultural witness is set up as a straw man, in which resistance to LGBTQIA+ people is supposedly the keystone holding up the Church’s moral witness.

     

    4 – Leading us to think we are talking about sex whenever marriage is mentioned

    In §68 the report acknowledges that clergy households where a couple are in a civil partnership can be exemplary, but it is not clear why those in a same-sex marriage would not be. And in §70 the report acknowledges that things are hard for Christian couples in civil partnerships, but there is no sense that the writers of the report are aware of how the Church’s approach following the 2005 pastoral statement also impacts the broader Christian family gathered around the couple.

    At the heart of the problem here is that the report refuses to say plainly that a same-sex marriage has no more presumption of sexual activity than a civil partnership. The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 inserts s.12(1-2) of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, which disapplies the requirement that same-sex couples consummate their union in order to have a valid marriage. In law, there is no expectation that a gay couple who are married will be having sex, any more than there is for a civil partnership.

    The failure to acknowledge this amidst all the handwringing is one of the largest and most uncomfortable omissions of this discussion of “clergy exemplarity”. The readers of the report are left with the false impression that marriages mean gay sex while civil partnerships mean gay celibacy. This is a false impression. If clergy can be exemplary as civil partners, living a sexually sacrificial life for the Church, there is no reason why they could not also do the same as a married couple. There is no difference in terms of sexual activity between civil partnership and same-sex marriage.

    Indeed, the report stresses that ‘none of what follows intends to draw into question the current provision’ for clergy in civil partnerships. ‘It is nonetheless notable that if a pastoral accommodation is agreed [to enable the same clergy to get married] this may mean that provision [of episcopal guidance] for same-sex civil marriages and same-sex civil partnerships are different from one another’ (§93). However, given that neither involve sex, it is not at all obvious why this should be the case. Yet again, a spectre of something completely new and different is created without specifying any real difference, theological or otherwise.

     

    5 – Despite divorce, we really do still hold to the traditional doctrine of marriage

    The report twists logic to the point of breaking in order to advance two arguments: (i) that the bending of the doctrine of marriage which took place in order to enable the marriage of divorcees with a spouse still living is not analogous to any bending of doctrine required to enable same-sex couples in a civil marriage to be licensed; and (ii) that in any case, despite permitting the marriage of divorcees, we do actually still hold to the traditional doctrine of marriage, that it is between a man and a woman for life. Fair warning: your head will hurt trying to follow this meandering thread.

    We are told that same-sex marriage is in no way the same kind of thing as the marriage of divorcees. ‘While there are clearly similarities between the two, an argument that they are identical does not seem sustainable. Therefore, the logic used to support adding Canon C 4.5 [enabling the licensing of clergy in a second marriage] cannot be a precedent’ (§96). But no reason is given for this judgment that the two are not identical. Indeed, both marriages are a statement of the traditional doctrine, except for one thing: either the gender of the parties, or the “one man and one woman for life” bit.

    Perhaps an analogy could be constructed instead. We are told that ‘Theological reflection should always begin with scripture’ (§99), a statement which will come as a surprise to anyone versed in theological reflection as practiced in Church of England theological colleges. After this we are told that:

    It is true that Holy Scripture does not include explicit precedent for a faithful, stable, permanent same-sex relationship. Similarly, one might observe that ‘Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality is sparse and ambiguous and it is highly questionable to what extent we can derive from it any application to the ethical issue of gay relationships as it faces us today. (§99)

    This is not an argument routinely advanced by LGBTQIA+ people today, who find precedent for our relationships and identities throughout scripture. But the report entirely ignores our love for and valuing of scripture, referencing a group of mostly American straight Evangelicals talking about LGBTQIA+ people (and also referencing Jeffrey John). Unlike divorce, which does exist in scripture, LGBTQIA+ people’s lives and relationships are portrayed in the report as absent from scripture, so without precedent, so without theological existence.

    The report then charts the progress, from the Lichfield Report (1978) to the early 2000s, of the idea that a marriage can end such that a person can marry someone else. This includes: (i) the rejection of sacramental understandings of marriage and (ii) doctrinal clarifications (or developments) that marriage’s being for life was not an essential part of a marriage’s nature, only an ideal (§§111-118).

    We supposedly have arrived at a relatively straightforward conclusion: there cannot be ‘a complete analogy’ (§118) with the marriage of divorcees. However, the argument continues, now in the context of divorce and in what sense clerics’ lives are meant to be exemplary.

    The report notes (referring to St Paul and St Augustine) that marriage was itself a pastoral accommodation in the first place to the ideal of celibacy. It suggests that, when considering making pastoral provision for same-sex couples in marriages, ‘one might contend that such an approach has parallels – though inexact ones’ (§120) with the Pauline and Augustinian accommodation of marriage. However, again, it is not clear why these parallels would not be exact. A thing is not the ideal for sexual ethics, but we make accommodation for it. Why the distinction?

    The section §§122-128 duplicates the arguments of §§52-60, sometimes verbatim, about culture and exemplarity. Again, this feels like an attempt to create an illusion of a coherent argument by repeating material rather than referencing it. On the other hand, it could simply be a drafting oversight.

    The argument seems to be that the pastoral epistles are contextual and culturally referential. They represent an attempt to work out what conduct should be required of the clergy in their own day, in order to be an example of godly life (§124). And so, scripture requires us to consider what holy life looks like today.

    Insofar as the Church of England aims to support and assist those who enter holy orders with the long work of forming and fashion their lives for a visible, grounded holiness, it can only deal in the on-the-ground realities of living as an ordained person in the contemporary culture in which they sojourn. This approach follows the scriptural lead: Paul’s example in the Holy Scriptures indicates it is impossible to think about the exemplary call without considering the context in which Christian witness occurs. (§126)

    A rare, positive conclusion is reached: that it might be possible to think about exemplarity in a way which refers to shifts in understandings of what being exemplary might mean, and in a way which is also biblical.

    Therefore, the argument that clergy in a same-sex marriage may be exemplary invokes cultural context – not in any way omitting theological rigour in preference for an appeal to contemporary culture, but as a move necessitated by Holy Scripture. (§127)

    However, the argument quickly moves off again in another direction, this time truly mind-boggling. The authors of the report wish to underline that the ‘call to celibacy’ may lead ‘same-sex attracted persons’ to opt for a ‘covenanted friendship[] or celibate civil partnership’. By analogy, we are reminded that ‘similar options have always been available to anyone who is divorced with a living spouse’ (§133).  Some choose to remain celibate after a divorce ‘since their remarriage would be a stumbling block to those holding to indissolubility for marriage’ (§133). An argument is being made that because some divorced people decide to remain celibate, that is an option open to LGBTQIA+ people too.

    The report then asks why many opt instead for further marriage. ‘There are surely a number of reasons – but it is hard to escape the conclusion that one reason will be because the church teaches sexual intimacy belongs within marriage and they wish to respect that’ (§134). This is frankly bizarre. On one level it is hard to believe that anyone has ever seriously made this argument. People who are divorced remarry because they want to remarry. The serial monogamist is not making a prophetic declaration that the place for sexual intimacy (with each of their sexual partners) is within marriage. This is utterly bizarre. However, this is advanced as an example of an argument in which an analogy might be possible for extending marriage to same-sex couples who are having sex, in order to affirm the church’s teaching that the place for sex is within marriage.

    However, this argument is so preposterous that it is hard to believe that it would ever be made by anyone who actually wanted to convince the reader that same sex marriage might be a good thing. The analogy with divorce makes it absurd. If the report was seriously offering a positive argument for marriage equality, it would simply argue that the place for sex should be within lifelong marriage. And that would be an argument that many LGBTQIA+ people do actually make.

    That positive argument is finally made, almost in passing, along with an equally easily missed reference to the possibility that same-sex couples who are married might not necessarily actually be having sex:

    While it is true that a same-sex marriage – which one cannot be certain is sexually active, but for those who want to affirm same-sex relationships offers a faithful, stable, and permanent context for sexual intimacy – does present challenges to the church’s teaching on sexual intimacy, which restricts it to heterosexual marriage, there is a case that a same-sex marriage offers a model that is exemplary in our society. (§138)

    But you could have been forgiven for missing those significant points as they flew past.

     

    6 – Disempower the Bishops

    In my response to GS Misc 1430 on marriage, I noted the high emotional tone of some of the language, which seemed aimed at making the episcopal readers less inclined to exercise their episcopal prerogative. We have seen how this report might well have the same effect, but by mystifying the reader in a barrage of confusingly arrayed arguments.

    However, the sections considering the possibility that the bishops might permit clergy, who currently need to be in civil partnerships in order to receive a license, to simply get married, and that they might just decide not discipline them, do sow fear. They do this by foretelling legal uncertainty and legal challenge in a manner that suggests the bishops would be taking a course of action which could be described as courageous.

    The ideal, surely, for all of us, is that we might come to one mind, with sufficient majorities to pass legislation which pleases everyone. However, if this is not possible, the report acknowledges that it is possible ‘for the diocesan bishops to exercise their discretion in responding to a situation that raises such questions about doctrine and practice being in tension’ (§82). This is a very odd way to frame episcopal discretion which arises from the tortured logic of ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’ (§84) which is rehearsed again. Far more sensible would have been a simple statement of the long-established episcopal discretion which exists for a bishop to administer their diocese as they see fit. A survey of the legal and historical as well as ecclesiological grounding for this would have been particularly interesting. But I suspect it would have shattered the illusion of a church held together by its ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’.

    The report notes that the House of Bishops could decide to relax discipline across the Church of England. ‘This would constitute a form of communal regulation – but only of one constituent house of the General Synod’ (§190). The argument is framed to evaluate every option for episcopal action through the lens of the ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’. Since that concept presumes that only maximum agreement can be acceptably communally regulative, this essentially paralyses the bishop from acting in their diocese.

    It is a masterful, if strangled, conceptual power grab. So the House of Bishops as a whole cannot act because they are only one house of Synod (§190). The bishop in their diocese cannot act because this ‘would also put the approach in tension with the idea that discipline operates on a communally [sic] regulative manner’ (§192).

    Indeed, with the concept of ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’, the bishop is rendered powerless, and the bishops as a House are disempowered utterly. They are responsible for discipline. But they cannot exercise their prerogative when it comes to discipline. Which begs the question, what is the point of a bishop? It is a line of reasoning which only works if you remain committed to the ‘communally regulative understanding of doctrine’ and wilfully ignore 2000 years of ecclesiological theology on the role of the bishop in their diocese.

    But, lest the bishops assert their prerogative, we are told that individual bishops inhabiting their role ‘carries the greatest risk for discipline to depart from doctrine, potentially resulting in legal challenges and increased confusion over such matters’ (§197). This argument is repeated in §213 as the last paragraph of the report, just to make sure the bishops were left with a dose of panic. Peter Collier KC has taken the teeth out of this legal threat pretty convincingly. Like many of the arguments advanced in this report, it is not real.

    The bishops should not be afraid to lead, to minister and to administer. Conservative bishops have done so, interpreting doctrine more tightly in some areas and more loosely in others as fits their own beliefs about what it means to be a shepherd of Christ’s flock in their diocese. Inclusive bishops should be similarly empowered. And the House of Bishops as a whole should not let its freedom to act be utterly dissolved into communal regulation. The bishops are not merely an upper rubber-stamping chamber for the secretariat and the Synod as a whole. For this reason, above all the others, this report must not become enshrined in Church of England thinking. What it risks is a functional Presbyterianism, a synodality which is not Anglican, and a House of Bishops who are ordained and consecrated to be shepherds of Christ’s flock, but who find themselves powerless to do anything meaningful in fulfilment of that calling.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • A Response to “The Doctrine of Marriage and the Prayers of Love and Faith: Texts and Contexts: a Report of the Faith and Order Commission” (GS Misc 1430)

    Fr Thomas Sharp is a priest theologian based in the South East of England and is also Provincial Secretary of the Society of Catholic Priests

    This was the second report which briefed the House of Bishops before they made their decisions in October about Living in Love and Faith (LLF). This is another extraordinary document, with which I imagine many of the members of the Faith and Order Commission will not have been entirely content. At least, I hope they would not be.

    Its purpose is to determine ‘whether and how the Church’s public use of these prayers coheres with, realises new boundaries for, or departs from its established teaching on marriage’ (§1). It does not do this, as we shall see. But it does present a case, or perhaps more accurately talk around the assumption, that the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) (let alone equal marriage) would constitute a departure from the traditional doctrine of marriage. It does this around four general themes:

    1. public perception and theological significance of the PLF;
    2. ecclesial condoning of “life choices”;
    3. disagreement and liturgical diversity;
    4. the Church’s traditional teaching on marriage.

    1) Public Perception and Theological Significance

    The primary concern is not theological. It is about what we are seen to do. In §5 a distinction is established, between private prayers and public prayers, which is ‘not merely practical but theologically significant’. What is meant by this is that private prayers are less likely to be misinterpreted as condoning or blessing something which we actually think is bad and do not think should be blessed or condoned. Whereas, ‘In the setting of public worship, it is impossible to escape the reality that the use of the PLF is liable to be received, however unintentionally, as ecclesial endorsement of the relationship being blessed’ (§14, cf.§24). The primary problem is public perception, that people should misunderstand us and think we are blessing and approve of queer people, when in fact we are not and do not. This is not in fact a theological consideration, but a practical one of public perception.

    The argument gets stranger. A distinction is drawn between regular services and occasional ones. ‘Regular services,’ we are told, ‘carry a high presumption of normativity and significance.’ Yet ‘Bespoke services,… by their out-of-the-ordinary nature will also suggest a high level of normativity’ (§15). So it is hard to see what distinction is being drawn here.

    The essential point of the first section of the Report is that, whatever liturgical provision is offered for same-sex couples, it will be interpreted as a marriage by people at those services and by the Anglican Communion and wider society (§§26,28). Although ‘Many would maintain that audience perception does not in itself determine doctrine’ (§32), ‘The weight of audience reception, then, may tip the balance from pastoral care into apparent [doctrinal] contradiction’ (§30). And we are reminded twice that ‘lex orandi, lex credendi’ (§§29,34). In other words, liturgy should mean what we say it does, but it doesn’t, and in fact it does mean what people attending the liturgy or talking about it on ‘social media responses or press headlines’ think it does (§32). This argument is repeated in §§66-68 in the context of a discussion of the importance of published liturgy.

    There is much concern also in §27 about the clergy and lay leaders who will be affected by the ‘symbolic resonance and precedent of a prominent public LLF service’. It is not made clear what that means. It is a strangely evasive paragraph. Presumably a gay bishop and their partner using the prayers. But, of course, that would never happen, would it.

    2) Ecclesial Condoning of “Life Choices”

    After concerns about whether we might be seen to be blessing same-sex relationships, next is the question of whether the Church is condoning same-sex couples and their ‘life choice/s’. This overtly homophobic phrase of long standing is used at both §11 and §14.  We are told that there is agreement ‘that God’s blessing may be prayed for over persons and intentions without necessarily affirming all aspects of a relationship or life choice’ (§11). It is apparently entirely possible to bless a same-sex couple without blessing in any way any part of their life together. If this seems strange, we are reassured that, ‘The Church has long provided public prayers in circumstances of moral or pastoral ambiguity’ (§19). Here, you might be forgiven for thinking that a door was maybe being opened to permitting a liturgy which also allowed for moral ambiguity (however much it feels unreal to suggest that this aspect of my life and identity might be any more morally ambiguous than a straight person’s). But that door is rapidly slammed shut.

    The Report gives short paragraphs to deal with the supposed arguments of unidentified and unreferenced ‘supporters of the PLF’ in a way which suggests that they/we may not have been in the room at the time. These supporters ‘point to analogous liturgical acts which mark without enacting and bless without endorsing every moral dimension of the context’, like civic services and memorials (§33). If we bless at civic services and memorials without being seen to condone every aspect of what we are blessing, can we do the same here? Computer says no. ‘In these contexts, there are some fairly set cultural expectations within which the Church can navigate at such commemorative events’ (§33). Apparently, we are meant to understand that that could not possibly also be true for using the PLF, although that is not worked out for us. Indeed, so prone to confusion with marriage must the PLF be that clear differentiation from marriage would require ‘clarity of liturgical differentiation’ and ‘the willingness of Church leaders to undertake sustained theological communication’ (§35). Now, I enjoy a public lecture as much as the next theologian, but even I think that would be overkill before a church service.

    Apparently, just telling people that it isn’t a legal wedding, as clergy I know have done who have used PLF so far, would still leave everyone confused. I am unconvinced. LGBTQIA+ people know that the Church is ambivalent towards us, and if we don’t know anything we assume that the Church is actively hostile. But these arguments are rehearsed again in §§81-83 and §86, just to make sure you heard them if you happened to be reading quickly before a meeting. The “theological question” is then summed up in terms which appear entirely out of the blue, unconnected as they are to the argument in the rest of the Report:

    Theologically, the question posed by the public use of the PLF is not primarily about whether God’s grace is available to all. It is about how the Church responds lovingly to the hope of those who come before God and desire to show forth their praise in thanksgiving for what God has given them. (§88)

    Is it? It hasn’t felt like that’s the theological question in this theological briefing. There’s nothing about the hope of those who come before God to give thanks to God. Perhaps they left that bit out. And if we are morally ambiguous and not-to-be-condoned then it is hard in any case to see what there is to give thanks for to God in Church. Our evil ways? What a strange thing to say.

    3) Disagreement and Liturgical Diversity

    The Report deals in some depth with how liturgical diversity has been handled in the Church of England in the past. The liturgical text is not a ‘narrow prescription’ but rather ‘a framework capable of bearing diverse theological interpretations’ (§42). This is presented as maybe a good thing, though in that section on how the public received liturgy it seemed to be a bad thing. There is a delightfully idealistic statement that Canons A5 and B5 ‘protect the liturgy from becoming an instrument of theological partisanship and ensure its function as a shared act of worship grounded in common faith’ (§43). Perhaps the authors are wilfully unaware of the many parishes and network churches in the Church of England which never or almost never use authorised liturgy, even if technically they perhaps do something which could be defended as a Service of the Word. The Catholicisation of the liturgy in Common Worship has not been accepted throughout the Church of England, and A5 and B5 have not ensured liturgical unity. Why would we expect them to now? Comments commending the ‘structured plurality’ of ‘theological sensibilities and liturgical styles’ in the deployment of different Eucharistic prayers (§45) and reminding us that prayers are not ‘neutral containers into which new meanings may simply be poured’ (§47) do not accord with the reality of the breadth of theological positions on the eucharist which are now accommodated by Common Worship’s diversity of prayers (if Common Worship or the Book of Common Prayer are used at all in a parish or network church).

    There is then a rather confusing but impressive argument about the Ritual Controversy and the tension between ‘prescription, rubric, and enactment’ (§§50-57). It seems to be strongly implied that, unlike other times when there have been debates and movements for change, we are somehow walking into this without proper discernment. But if the gruelling process of LLF which has lasted for the entirety of my training and ordained ministry was not discernment, I don’t know what discernment would look like.

    Suddenly the Report raises the tone, almost comically, warning us:

    Episcopal guidance becomes critical: without clear episcopal teaching and supervision, the national coherence of liturgical practice – and the doctrinal witness it sustains – may be compromised. (§60)

    It is precisely in the act of translating these prayers into public worship that the theological and doctrinal stakes become most acute. (§85)

    I think that we are intended to hear the warning that the national coherence of liturgical practice may be compromised with the same concern as a warning that the hull of our submarine might be compromised. However, this is not how it lands. It is hard to get upset about the stable door needing shutting when the horse is galloping gaily away over the horizon.

    And the Report is quite direct that this is in fact the reality:

    The Church’s embrace of liturgical diversity has hitherto been sustained by theological agreement on the central matters of faith. Where disagreement has existed – on baptism, the Eucharist, or the nature of ordination – it has generally been held within a framework of authorised texts and common structures. (§63)

    This is an extraordinary admission, given the picture presented that the PLF risked tearing up a unified doctrinal-liturgical fabric. In fact, on minor and unimportant issues, not at all central in any way, like baptism, the Eucharist or Holy Orders, we already disagree. And that is apparently fine. However, we are reminded, lest again a door towards living with disagreement be opened to us, that:

    If liturgical practice is allowed to diverge from doctrinal principle, then the Church’s claim to be a confessing body – one that worships according to what it believes may be placed in jeopardy. (§64)

    Jeopardy. Well, as much as I would like everyone to be of one mind, the Report has already said that disagreement and divergence has happened over central issues, and the Church is still one body with one head, however many times we have disagreed, done different things, or even gone our separate ways. This just reads strangely, along with the warning that suddenly liturgical difference is something about which we should now be terrified into inaction, now that LGBTQIA+ people are involved. This aspect of the report reads like an attempt to create panic where no panic is necessary. Or, if it was necessary, it was probably necessary over the past 40 years, when our present liturgical divergence was taking root.

    (4) The Church’s Traditional Teaching on Marriage

    Do you remember that the purpose of this Report was meant to be to work out whether the PLF departed from the Church of England’s doctrine of marriage? You could be forgiven for having forgotten, having worked through all of this. The so-called “traditional doctrine of marriage” is first stated at §38, though this is only to establish how much this conflicts with the PLF which ‘suggests at least a degree of ecclesial affirmation of the relationship’ (§37). That the authors believe that the PLF constitute a departure from the “traditional doctrine of marriage” is not explored, only the implications of this finding.

    The unchallenged assumption that the unchanging doctrine of marriage in the Church of England is and has always been that it be between one man and one woman for life runs throughout the Report. At §22 and in footnote 9, a reference is made to GS Misc 1407, which was the Episcopal Reference Group’s paper on marriage and its accompanying compendium of sources. The compendium is interesting in that it gives a useful overview of the ways in which the Church of England’s doctrine of marriage and human sexuality has changed a lot, even as the Church has professed not to change our teaching or doctrine, only our pastoral practice. This change is now normal.

    We do not actually believe (as a Church) that marriage is between one man and one woman, or if we do we certainly have not believed that unchangingly or traditionally. The Lambeth Conferences of 1888 and 1988 came to exactly opposing conclusions about polygamy. We also do not actually believe (as a Church) that marriage is for life, given that remarriage of divorcees is now routine in the Church of England, and not reserved to the ‘exceptional circumstances’ envisaged by Marriage in the Church After Divorce (2003). It now seems only in really exceptional circumstances that marriage of heterosexual couples after divorce is ever denied.

    I certainly have never heard of public penance being done by heterosexual divorcees to make clear that the Church does not condone their remarriage before their service of thanksgiving. But the Report uses divorce as an example of another ‘morally ambiguous’ situation which the church does not bless (§19). It is made clear in the liturgy, apparently, that what is offered to divorcees is not a blessing. But I have never known that service to be referred to in any terms other than as a ‘wedding blessing’.

    Conclusion

    This Report is frustrating, and disturbing. It presents the PLF as something of a worst-case scenario, with the potential to detonate the hitherto integral liturgical unity of the Church of England. However, it is not balanced. It is not theologically consistent. And its arguments are at times obfuscatory and self-referential. It does not evaluate whether the PLF are consistent with the Church of England’s doctrine of marriage(s). But it does make it appear as fait accompli that the PLF are inconsistent in a way that suggests that the House of Bishops has no freedom to exercise their episcopal prerogative to authorise them. As such, this was a confusing and at times needlessly offensive Report to read.

  • A Response to “The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God: a Report of the Faith and Order Commission” (GS Misc 1429)

    Fr Thomas Sharp is a priest theologian based in the South East of England and is also Provincial Secretary of the Society of Catholic Priests

    We can now see the legal advice and theological briefing which the House of Bishops was given before making their October decisions on Living in Love and Faith (LLF). One of these, the report of the Faith and Order Commission entitled The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God (GS Misc 1429), surveys Anglican understandings of the development of doctrine and the role theology has to play in the life of the Church. Putting it succinctly, the report makes it pretty clear that support for the Prayers of Love and Faith (not even for equal marriage) would probably constitute a “change” of doctrine which would also constitute an unacceptable change in our understanding of what scripture is, who God is, and who we are as created beings.

    Church reports are never as satisfying in theological terms as a good academic paper or book. They have different purposes and different standards for the arguments they make. And we also do not know which members of the Faith and Order Commission really contributed to it, and how, and to what extent its membership would agree with all the arguments made. I suspect that they don’t all feel excellent about this report. But we do not know any of this any more than we know whether any of the bishops have dissented from recent decisions and why. So we are left to evaluate the Report on its own terms, and to ask generous questions of those who may or may not have written the arguments it makes.

    It must be said from the outset that it is a strange document. It does have a few bloopers, as all reports do. The comment in §4 of the extended summary that ‘As the greatest of the medieval scholastics, Aquinas is representative of the thinking of the church catholic’ is certainly entertaining. It presents Aquinas’ thought as settled and established, ignoring the fact that the turmoil in the Roman Catholic church over the past 200 years has largely been caused by fundamental disagreement about what Thomas Aquinas meant, and whether the Aquinas we are talking about is his direct writings or the tens of generations of his interpreters who came after.

    As a scholar of catholic theology, a blooper like this does make my eyes roll involuntarily. But more problematically, it represents an attempt in this Report to present doctrine as something generally static, generally serene, a quiet lake in which even its dynamism is limited to the occasional wave breaking on the shoreline of its boundaries.

    But this is theological and historical make-believe. The theology of Paul was a seismic shock to the world. The emergence of the urban episcopate had monks and citizens rioting in the streets of the Mediterranean. The theology of Augustine was a genuine shock to the Church. Even the theology of Thomas Aquinas, with his startling new Aristotelian approach, was shocking and new, and was not and is not uncritically accepted in the church catholic.

    The doctrine of the church has never been worked out calmly and quietly. That isn’t how people work, especially not when we believe things dearly and love fervently the God about whom we are trying to speak and teach. Any portrayal of doctrine as settled and serene is fantasy. Well argued fantasy. But fantasy nevertheless.

    Section III of the report attempts to construct an Anglican sense of what doctrine is and where its limits are. It does this with a very eminent group of white theologians from the UK and North America, 22% of which are women. But it seems to pretend that the rest of the Anglican Communion and humanity has nothing to offer. They are or were all (John Henry Newman probably aside) either straight or in heterosexual marriages. Apparently nobody who would be directly affected by the Prayers of Love and Faith has ever thought about doctrine. Certainly never in the global south. There are people, even LGBTQIA+ people, South of the equator and East of Suffolk.

    In section III a degree of complexity is dealt with. But this is jettisoned in its summary synthesis §139-146 where a seductively unclear conclusion is presented:

    The nature of doctrine might be summarised as true knowledge about God that is communally authorised by warrant in the Holy Scriptures and is, therefore, communally regulative. (§146)

    What does “Communally Regulative” actually mean? Does it have a conservative meaning of establishing the bare minimum of precepts which a person must accept in order to be confident of their salvation, in the sense of Article VI of the Articles of Religion? Or does it have a broader, more liberal application, in the sense that ‘those things a Christian is required to know, believe, and observe are available to all in their reading of Scripture’ (§172) and that whatever lies outside this is not to be permitted. The Report acknowledges that the latter approach ‘is not expressed in the Church of England’s historical formularies per se’ (fn. 154).

    The former, more conservative approach, might fit better the doctrine of the scriptures found in the Book of Common Prayer and the historic formularies of the Church of England. English Anglicanism, at least in its formularies, is conservative about what it considers to be a “first order” issue. If anything ever mentioned in scripture becomes a “first order” issue, simply by virtue of the fact that it is mentioned in scripture, doctrine will simply cease to function as a useful means by which the Church teaches God’s people what their salvation is, and where their hope should be. Just because we feel very strongly about something at the moment, on either side, does not make it a first order issue.

    The knots a more liberal and expansive approach to what is a “first order” issue can get us into are clear in §171 of the conclusion. To pull at one thread of the great edifice of “first order” doctrine which has been built up seems to threaten to unravel the whole.

    For many, the doctrine of marriage as it has been articulated historically foregrounds a clearly defined set of biblical texts. Furthermore, those advancing that argument maintain those texts are decisive in their teaching that only relationship between one man and one woman may be offered a form of divine authorisation in a marriage service, blessing, or prayer. To argue otherwise – as those in support of the PLF do – appears to constitute a simultaneous challenge to the doctrine of marriage, the doctrines that marriage refers to (such as creation and redemption), and also the doctrine of Scripture. (§171)

    The illusion of a near eternally settled body of doctrine which peacefully and unchangeably has taught and guided God’s people is both a historical fantasy, and also dangerous, as our theology becomes so simply overconnected that everything is raised to being a “first order” issue. Such theology is not strong. It is brittle. It is magisterial. It is expansive, regulatory and tends towards the authoritarian. It moves us ever closer to the next divisive issue and the next schism. It makes “windows into men’s souls” beyond what is necessary to assure them of their salvation. In that sense, it is deeply un-anglican.