ViaMedia

Category: Does the Bible Really Say?

  • 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.

     

     

  • No First Reading – Four Circumcisions Instead

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk

    Yesterday morning at church, we had four circumcisions. Plus a weird growth on a ligament. This all happened where the first reading should have been.

    It didn’t matter who was there. Young families. First time visitors. People who had been coming for a month or two. Gen Z students who expect trigger warnings. Suddenly, without warning, there it was: four circumcisions and a weird growth on a ligament. There was all manner of weird physiological stuff following on from the four circumcisions, actually. In an ordinary church, on an ordinary Sunday morning.

    They weren’t actual circumcisions, obviously. Just a polite elderly reader at the lectern who might as well have gone to the lectern and said ‘penis’, ‘foreskin’, and ‘ritual genital mutilation’. Four times. With no context and without warning. Why do we put up with this?

    I have spent so long in the SSRA lectionary and translation (Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk) that I have forgotten how simply dreadful, and unfit for purpose, are the Common Worship (CW) lectionary, and the regular translations (in this case NRSV), compared to the enormous (and almost universally untapped) potential that the three-year Sunday lectionary actually holds.

    A small percentage of churchgoers may be so used to the word ‘circumcised’ that they only heard ‘Hebrew as opposed to Gentile’ when they heard it yesterday; or perhaps 75% of them are so bored by the standard of the public reading of scripture in their church that they can be relied upon not to be listening at all. But it’s no excuse. This will not do. We should not be using this word in public worship any more than we should be using the words penis, foreskin, or ritual genital mutilation in regular Sunday worship. There is no excuse. SSRA is not the first scripture translation to euphemise this word; and the precedent of avoiding passages that address the first-century Christian circumcision controversy directly in contemporary lectionaries has already been set (you will not find any version of the Sunday three-year cycle that includes Saint Paul’s frustrated wish that circumcision enthusiasts recircumcise themselves and accidentally castrate themselves in the process [Galatians 5.12]). The question of whether the ritual surgical removal of the foreskin from the penis is necessary for Christian salvation is not one that was worrying people in the pews of the average Church of England church yesterday morning; neither does the unnecessary surgical removal of the foreskin from the penis serve effectively, for most contemporary listeners, as a touchingly beautiful metaphor for salvation in Christ. It is time to select a different passage of scripture for the lectionary – there are only so many slots available – or find a different way of translating this one. As for preaching about the first-century controversy around keeping the Mosaic law: the controversy was also expressed around the food laws, also well-documented in the lectionary, and these are surely a more appropriate example for use on a Sunday morning. In 2025, you need to prepare well when approaching the circumcision texts even for a small bible study session; you don’t know what personal issues people bring, what surgical history or personal trauma surrounds the specific issue, that you just don’t know about – and why is the penis suddenly a legitimate subject for discussion anyway, and can we move on quickly now please, before I call the safeguarding officer. Seriously.

    If you want to remind yourself just how dreadful yesterday’s reading was, it’s here. I still can’t easily parse verse 15, ending in ‘it’, or verse 17 (what substance?). I know I could if I tried, but this was supposed to be a text read aloud from the lectern to a mixed congregation, not a written comprehension exercise for a year 11 class.

    Circumcision made a brief appearance three weeks ago, when the original catholic version of the three-year lectionary (Lectionary for Mass, LFM) hinted at Saint Paul’s frustration, by saying that circumcision is irrelevant (Gal 6.14-18). Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), and the CW lectionary based on RCL, demanded the whole explicit chapter. SSRA opted to start Colossians a week early instead.

    This juggling of epistles is not unusual. RCL/CW epistle and Old Testament readings are quite typically two or three times the length of the equivalent LFM readings. As a consequence, the RCL/CW epistle is often a week or two out of sync with the LFM epistle. And as another consequence – an unintended consequence – almost all RCL/CW churches choose to have only two readings instead of three. The RCL editors had hoped that, by making the readings longer, they would ensure that people heard more scripture; the actual consequence is that people in RCL/CW churches have a much poorer diet of scripture than they would have had otherwise. SSRA corrects that error, with a classically Anglican approach, taking the best of the catholic original and the best of the RCL (protestant) adaptations – far too many details to list here – but click through the last two or three weeks (start at https://ssra.uk/?20250727) and you find readings from Colossians, that instead of sounding culturally alien and incomprehensible (or even offensive or triggering), are as attractive and accessible to readers and hearers alike as any that you will find anywhere in scripture. It’s just a case of paying attention to the context.

    “Where other translations are offered primarily as study texts, or to be read alone at home, the SSRA translation is offered specifically for reading aloud… [The hearer should be] drawn in by the reading – without needing a printed text – even on first hearing. …aims to deliver the full meaning of each passage in language which is clear, timeless, dignified, and, where appropriate, even poetic.”

    And the original listed aims: “encourages more confident participation in the public reading of scripture by more readers; encourages a greater appreciation of the public reading of scripture by more hearers; offers all three readings, to establish familiarity with more than 400 key passages of scripture across a three-year cycle, for an investment of just five minutes of the Sunday gathering each week; compatible with thousands of lectionary-based resources in print and online for sermons, prayers, children’s work and more; a complete Sunday lectionary solution for busy clergy and lay-led congregations; ideal for ordinary local churches on ordinary Sunday mornings; takes all the hard work out of finding, choosing, printing and distributing the Sunday morning scripture readings.”

    There has been a nagging condemnation of SSRA’s inclusive language policy on the Church Times letters page for the last few weeks, specifically the way SSRA avoids calling the Holy Spirit ‘he’. A writer this week asserts that while the Holy Spirit is indeed not male, unless we continue to refer to the Holy Spirit as ‘he’, we all risk committing the heresy of representing the Holy Spirit as a mere impersonal force, so apparently the pronoun ‘he’ for the Holy Spirit must remain in consistent use regardless. I stand corrected! But there will always be a reason not to change. There will always be a reason to do nothing, a reason to turn down the invitation to the banquet, a reason to pass by on the other side, a reason to say that doing nothing is somehow safer, wiser, more sensible, less trouble. But sometimes, the time has come to do something; the time has come to make things better. The church is in a mess in so many ways. I just thought: let’s at least get the bible readings sorted out. I had the right mix, at the right time, of pastoral experience, technical skills, opportunity, motivation, and academic background (psychology, philosophy, linguistics, theology), and here’s the result. Click, share, use.

    The three-year print editions of SSRA were released this spring. The Home Paperback edition is already in its third printing. All three editions are now available on Amazon, but it is cheaper to buy direct at ssra.uk/shop. You can see SSRA in use at Llandaff Cathedral here: https://www.youtube.com/live/gPHxNLZqG0k?t=1615s

     

     

  • We used to Have Liturgy: Now we Have Bureaucracy

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk

    From the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, the Church of England was a church defined by its liturgy.

    The legislative arguments over PLF continue as though that’s still the case. But it isn’t.

    We are no longer a church defined by liturgy. Out in the real world – in the parishes – we haven’t had a common liturgy for years.

    What dominates the life of the parishes – and makes us all Anglicans – is not a shared liturgy, but a shared bureaucracy.

    For hundreds of years, the Book of Common Prayer defined the Church of England. You could hold it in your hand (less than one inch thick, less than A6 in size) and know that you had the entire Church of England right there, in your hand: the catechism, the calendar, morning and evening prayer, the eucharist, baptism, confirmation, marriage, ordination (bishops, priests and deacons), the burial of the dead, the 39 Articles, the full text of the readings for the Sunday eucharist, and even oddments like prayers for use at sea, and for the anniversary of the accession of the sovereign; the entire church, in one small book.

    It needed updating. 1928 was a wrong turn: archaic language, too internally political, too verbose. But the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965) set a new tone, internationally and ecumenically. The 1973 English-language Roman missal gave us a fresh new language for liturgy, and the foundations for the Church of England’s experimental services Series 3, published the same year. After many years of careful real-life testing and feedback, and supplemented by pieces commissioned from actual poets that are still amongst the best-loved pieces of poetic liturgy today (“Father of all, we give you thanks and praise…”), ASB 1980 replicated the high ambitions of BCP 1662: the entire Church of England, defined by its liturgy, renewed, in one book. The pages were slightly larger, the book was now thicker, but the layout and the language were fresh and accessible, and everything was there, from the complete text of the Sunday lectionary to the ordination of bishops, priests and deacons, via the eucharist for every season, baptism for every context, and morning prayer, evening prayer and eucharist for every day of the year; the entire Church of England, in one small book. Anyone could hold it in their hand. It belonged to all of us, to everyone. Hundreds of thousands of copies were bought by the parishes. Gold-edged copies, bound in white leather, were presented at baptisms and confirmations. A church, defined by its liturgy.

    How we got to where we are today is a story for another day; write your own version. But look at us now. Common Worship is not a book, or even a bookshelf, or even a bookshop, but a boundary-less concept, consisting of mismatched publications in different formats, corrections and revisions and supplements to those publications only ever issued as General Synod documents, some in PDF format, others in DOCX or HTML, plus various sections of different websites, apps, annual publications, and more besides if you want to try Google. Fine, if you have the time to spare. What are lay people, or enquirers on the brink of coming to faith, supposed to make of it all? We used to have liturgy; now we have bureaucracy. On Sunday at church, expect a photocopied leaflet; or possibly no liturgy at all. Even bishops don’t know where it begins and ends. Churchwardens haven’t a hope.

    But it’s more than just the loss of our liturgy. Where liturgy once held the Church of England together, something else holds the Church of England together instead; and that’s a huge bureaucracy. For every two-and-a-half full-time parish clergy, there’s a full-time-equivalent diocesan post: someone beavering away doing something at the regional office. All these huge, enormously expensive diocesan operations have emerged from nowhere over the last sixty years. Perhaps they are all doing valuable Christian work by some definition, but they are often hugely partisan, and only very weakly related – if at all – to a church once defined by its parishes and its liturgy. And having emerged from nowhere, these powerful partisan bureaucracies, linked to the national institutions, are now the only thing holding us together.

    At the end of the year 2000 – as the authorisation of ASB 1980 expired – the Church Times carried a cartoon, presumably intended to mock the Prayer Book Society, or at least to mock the idea of nostalgia in general. The caption ran: In 2295AD, the annual meeting of the ASB Society was held on one of Jupiter’s moons. But I think that’s me. Because ASB was replaced by nothing, nothing at all. Someone in clergy chapter pointed out at the time that ASB morning and evening prayer had technically become unauthorised without being replaced, so legally BCP was the only option (or perhaps Patterns for Worship?). I thought of him as a pedant; he was actually the canary in the mine, warning of a future where nobody in authority, or anywhere else, cared about common liturgy any more. Four and a half centuries of a church defined by its liturgy were over. They were over that day – the day that ASB’s authorisation expired – and he was the only one that both noticed and cared.

    Amongst the many losses, when ASB 1980 expired, was the use of adventurous bible translations. The set readings for Sunday’s Holy Communion, printed out in full in ASB, included readings from translations like The Jerusalem Bible, The New English Bible, and The Good News Bible (credited as TEV, Today’s English Version) – whichever the compilers thought best for the particular passage. Common Worship provides no texts and gives no guidance. Two editions of Common Worship’s adaptation of the widely-adopted Three-Year Lectionary were published independently, one in NRSV and one in NIV, both rather clunky study translations compared to JB, NEB and TEV, neither of them always ideal for reading out-loud at length from the lectern. Both the NRSV edition and the NIV edition are now long out-of-print. And the English language moves on: just as ASB 1980 was behind the times in terms of appropriate inclusive language for the human race almost as soon as it was published, so even the latest revised editions of NRSV and NIV are behind the times in terms of appropriate inclusive language for the divine. We are left with no common liturgy, and not even a decent bible. Sign me up for the team to work on ASB 2030. We’ll include a marriage service that works without reference to the gender of the partners. And choose which of these versions of this coming Trinity Sunday’s Gospel reading we might prefer (Year C, John 16.12-15):

    ‘I still have many things to say to you – more than you can know. But the Spirit of Truth will come to you, and guide you into all truth; honouring me, by taking what is mine, and making it known to you; disclosing to you the things that are to come. All that the Father has is mine; and the Spirit of Truth will take what is mine, and make it known to you.’ [ssra.uk]

    ‘I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.’ [NIV – 11 male pronouns]

    ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’ [NRSV – 8 male pronouns]

    (For reference, the word pneuma here, in the original Greek, translated Spirit, has no gender.)

    Meanwhile, the battle over PLF continues, using bureaucratic legislation as if we were still a church defined by liturgy. But take a look around, out in the real world, in the parishes. We haven’t been a church with a common liturgy for the whole of this century. And the PLF texts themselves are unworthy: there are better ones already in use in Wales, or available from scratch in seconds on ChatGPT. So the argument is not even about liturgy, in reality; the argument is about who can control that huge bureaucracy.

    If we can step back from the ongoing argument, the real question is: who are we, really? That’s the energy that’s powering the argument. I have spent my entire ministry, from ordination at the age of 24 to early retirement at 54, under the ‘promise’ that the recognition and blessing of same-sex relationships in the Church of England was/is effectively just months away. A report, commissioned by the House of Bishops, recommending exactly that, was suppressed by the same House of Bishops that commissioned it, while I was at theological college. That’s effectively my entire adult life. The real argument isn’t about authorising a few dreadful unusable prayers; it’s about ‘who we are, really’. That’s why my personal choice has been to devote my early retirement not to fighting the bureaucracy, but to crafting good liturgy; and to beginning at the very heart of it, with scripture. In standing back to take a breath, I realise that in the SSRA Complete Three-Year Lectionary, newly (beautifully) printed and published, we have something we haven’t had since ASB 1980: a complete lectionary with texts, printed out in full, specifically intended for reading aloud; except that this time they are also well laid out on the page, and of course in a properly inclusive-language translation – unlike even the very latest versions of NIV and NRSV. Our bureaucratic church hasn’t paid attention to such things for 45 years. The grand short-lived renewal schemes that come out of our regional and national bureaucracies with seasonal regularity tragically have this one thing in common: they never have anything to say about Sunday liturgy, which is still where ordinary Christian people (remarkably, and perhaps defiantly!) commit, week by week, to learning and growing in faith.

    So maybe I’m quietly working on an ASB 2030 just because nobody else is, and having SSRA in print and online is a major start. You might want to use its Gospel reading on Trinity Sunday. And then why not stick with it for the summer and beyond. Good Sunday liturgies, good words, even well-printed books: they matter. Once they’re in place, they’re just there, dependable and reliable. And they dependably and reliably both welcome and sustain.

     

    (Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud: The Complete Three Year Lectionary is available in three print editions, and free online, here)

     

  • Common Worship and our Gender-neutral God

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early-retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk

    Thirty years ago, in making the move from ASB to Common Worship, the Church of England took the decision to vastly reduce the use of he/him pronouns for God.

    This was an incredibly bold and progressive decision for a church traditionally defined by its liturgy.

    That this decision really matters is seen not least in the open wounds that continue to grieve the contemporary church: institutionalised sexism, the abuse crisis, LLF. The role and the nature of gender is a common thread through these three – especially, inevitably, the role and nature of masculinity, and toxic masculinity. If we constantly reinforce the image of God as exclusively male, we just throw more fuel on these three fires.

    Let us give thanks to the Lord our God

                It is right to give (him) thanks and praise

    It happened at the millennium. After twenty-seven years, we would have to start omitting the word ‘him’. It makes the rhythm of the line completely different. To practice, we chanted, before the service, ‘Right! Thanks! Praise!’

    Other provinces and denominations had made the change more clumsily. The lazy default is to replace every male pronoun for God with the word God; hence, in many provinces: ‘It is right to give God thanks and praise’. It is factually accurate – you could sign it in a legal document – but it lacks all poetry: that double-g is ugly and awkward, and placing the word God on a down-beat is somehow just wrong. So others chose to say, ‘It is right to give our thanks and praise’. It is a more poetic line – but it makes it all about us.

    The Common Worship solution is altogether better. It considers the line in its context. A look at the previous line reveals that the two suggestions for replacing the word ‘him’ (namely ‘God’ and ‘our’) are both redundant, as they are already specified in the previous line: it is ‘us’ giving thanks, ‘to the Lord our God’. The response in Common Worship – which simply omits the word ‘him’ – is sufficient, and far more poetic. ‘Right! Thanks! Praise!’

    And of course no he/him: no endless reinforcement of the false image of a masculine God.

    But somehow we didn’t manage to follow through on this incredibly bold and progressive decision, made thirty years ago. The bombardment of masculine pronouns continues unabated, not only in the traditional texts still in use (and in some other legacy texts brought forward), but in our preaching, in our conversations, in our parish magazine articles, on our diocesan websites – and of course, in our bible translations.

    I have actually made a point of avoiding he/him pronouns for God throughout my ministry – for more than thirty years. It takes a little time to develop the habit, and still the occasional pause to re?phrase a sentence before speaking – but pausing before making an assertion about God usually does no harm. And as a general principle, it seems appropriate not to make so many assertions about God in quick succession that pronouns become necessary. It seems appropriate not to reduce God to a pronoun at all, rather than arguing about which pronoun to use.

    Late in the pandemic, I was seven years into ministry in a four-parish benefice, and it came about that the time was right to invite four different lay people each to take their first turn at providing a homily at the Parish Communion. Each brought their own unique gifts and experience to their contribution, and each was a delight. But this was interesting: one of the four had decades of faith history, and spoke of God as he/him; the other three had walked much of their faith journey in the previous few years, and they did not use pronouns for God at all; I had the impression that they would no more have referred to God as he/him than referred to God as ‘it’.

    This is surely the future we need: a future without the false deification of masculinity, toxic or otherwise; indeed a future without the deification of either gender over the other; a future with God as naturally without gender, just as God is without height, weight, or race.

    God’s pronouns are not he/him. And a tidy and universally uncontroversial solution is not to reduce God to a pronoun at all. We can all adopt this approach, in our preaching, in our conversations, in our parish magazine articles, on our websites; and in our liturgy, thanks to Common Worship, if we’re just slightly selective about what we use; and now, for the first time, in our bible readings as well.

    Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud uses he/him pronouns for Father, for Son, and for Jesus. But God, Lord, the Holy Spirit, the eternal Word, and the eternal Christ, take no pronouns. And as with ‘Right! Thanks! Praise!’, the solution is always poetic. The first priority of the SSRA translation was that it should work well for reading aloud, in ordinary churches on ordinary Sundays. But inclusive language was just part of the translator’s DNA. So as the project reaches the milestone of publication as a perpetual print edition, it has yet another reason to be called remarkable, timely and necessary: it is the only lectionary translation in which God does not take he/him pronouns. It is done so subtly that you would not even notice unless it was pointed out. And yet the potential is a generation who would no more refer to God as he/him than refer to God as ‘it’; a generation who would simply choose not to reduce God to a pronoun at all, because that’s not how you speak about God.

    So yes, the SSRA Complete Three-Year Lectionary is in print: the Luxury Hardback Edition, the Standard Lectern Edition, the Home Paperback Edition, all supported by the live website. In another surprise, I find that it also appears to be the only version of the Three-Year Sunday Lectionary in print in the UK at all, apart from the much-criticised new catholic edition in ESV. This does not speak well of our prioritisation and valuing of scripture, as a church.

    One of the true joys of the last three years has been spending so much time in scripture. And one of many things I have learned is that we gain nothing from endlessly interrupting the flow of the lectionary with our special themed Sundays, with readings chosen ‘to fit the theme’. Those Sundays mirror the approach taken by our opponents: they risk presenting a false God that we have cobbled together in our own image. In stark contrast, if we just read steadily, ploddingly even, through the Gospels and Epistles for the year, as set for the Thirty-Four Sundays in Ordinary Time (given a muddle of different names in Common Worship), we hear a gospel of love and grace, and liberation from the law, condemning those who would condemn us, doggedly, week after week after week, making a mockery of those conservatives who claim to be ‘bible-believing Christians’ (and indeed of those liberals who think the solution is to respond to them by saying ‘the bible doesn’t matter any more’). What we need is a bible translation that re-engages us with the scriptures, that has us on the edge of our seats with anticipation as the readings are about to begin, that makes the reading of the scriptures a highlight of the Sunday gathering.

    Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud aims for all of this and more. Take a click around, in time for the start of a new three-year cycle this Advent – or even in time for this Sunday – here.

    Previous Via Media News blogs on SSRA are here and here

     

  • Marriage and the Bible: It’s Complicated

    A Response to the Part Report of the Episcopal Reference Group on the Doctrine of Marriage

    by Johanna Stiebert, Professor of Hebrew Bible (University of Leeds) and co-director of The Shiloh Project

    I have been married for twenty years and have co-authored a book on marriage – but I am still awestruck at the sheer amount of preoccupation and nitty-gritty theological advice on marriage that is to be found in “A Part Report of the Episcopal Reference Group of the Faith and Order Commission: Living in Love and Faith and the Doctrine of Marriage, February 2025.”

    This interim report condenses a great deal of information into nine theses. Still, it is 16 pages long and refers and links to yet another 316-page (!) document, which is also in a state of ongoing development, namely “The Church of England’s Doctrine of Marriage: A Compendium of Sources.” Say what you like: there is no shortage of effort, consultation, discussion, or verbosity on display here.[1]

    The upshot of this word-mass, however, is, ultimately, rather underwhelming: it can be summarised as “regarding marriage, there has been continuity over a long period of time and there has been change, too. Some change has been accepted, other change has been considered, resisted and rejected.” This is not especially enlightening as far as upshots go.

    While it is admirable and important to listen and to talk about human relationships and marriage, has this exercise really been productive? Is there appetite for getting serious about inclusion? And, for all the extensive and ongoing consultation and discussion, is there still “stuff” that has not been discussed, or discussed openly, frankly, and fully enough?

    Let me, an ongoing studier of the Hebrew Bible, give my own responses in the form of nine theses – adding yet more verbiage on the matter!

    1. First, the sheer amount of ink spilled might imply that the Bible (the main source of authoritative reference for Christians) refers to “marriage” in ways copious and clear. Not so. In the Hebrew Bible (the by far larger part of the biblical canon), there is not even a word that captures English “marriage.” Instead, there is – usually rather fleeting – reference to men “taking” or “lying with” or “going in to” women. There is little about, let alone clarity concerning, marriage ritual or ceremony (i.e. weddings), or anything much either descriptive or prescriptive – that is, about what “being married” is or should be. There is nothing about marriageable age, very little that suggests consent, and consequently, very little evidence for what might pass as a “stable core to the doctrine of marriage” (p.5). It is important to be frank about what is not there in the Bible.
    1. Second, what is there, or what can be puzzled together about unions between men and women (Thesis 1), is often acutely violent. Men take women[2] following wars (e.g. Deuteronomy 21:10-14 and Judges 21:10-12, 20-23). If this is marriage, it is also rape, rather than “sexual intimacy” or “friendship” (Theses 6-7). In the Hebrew Bible husbands also get a pass for accusing their wives[3] of infidelity, in the absence of proof, and for submitting them to what looks like a gruelling public humiliation (Numbers 5:11-31). Surely, this kind of conduct in marriage would not pass as “honourable” (Thesis 3); this kind of conduct, while prescribed in the Bible, should be resisted and should fall into the category of “a need for change that has been accepted.”[4] There is blatant association in the Bible between violence and marriage. This needs to be acknowledged and resisted. 
    1. Third, marriage is idealised as “a sign of the relationship between Christ and the Church” (Thesis 4), and as “God’s explicit sanction and endorsement as a holy vocation and whole-life calling in which to serve God and neighbour, not only in creation but in the Christian dispensation also” (p.8). It is good to be aspirational and to go into a relationship, especially one aimed at joining families and raising children (Thesis 5), with resolve to be friends and loyal (Theses 7 and 9). A text like Ephesians 5:21-33, as much as it clearly suggests hierarchy in marriage (vv.23-24), and as much as this text more than any other is cited by Christian abusers in cases of spousal violence, could be made right: a Christ-like husband is not abusive but loves his wife; obedience to a Christ-like husband does not involve submission to domestic violence; marriage constitutes mutual reverence.

    Most folk, however, as much as we might aspire to high ideals, such as “permanent and lifelong” (Thesis 9) union reflecting Christ’s relationship with the Church (Thesis 4), fall short. Any one person is complicated, and two people together long-term, against the backdrop of life, with its invariable serpentines and complexities, are yet more complicated still. Many of the ideals expressed by Jesus – parting with all our wealth (Matthew 19:21), loving our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48) – are noble and wonderful but nigh to impossible to live out. This pertains to ideals of marriage, too. How many among us who are married have never committed adultery, if we include there adultery in thought or in fantasy (Matthew 5:27-29)? Indeed, existing research strongly suggests that Christian marriages are as likely to end in divorce or to feature domestic violence and abuse as marriages in the general, non-Christian population: high ideals or norms do not transpire reliably in high (or even higher) conduct. Frank acknowledgement that the report idealises Christian marriage would be welcome.

    1. Fourth: several of the theses allude to the early chapters of Genesis – most notably, Thesis 1, with its reference to one man, one woman, and one flesh, but also Thesis 2, with its reference to marriage being a “gift in creation,” and (to a lesser extent) Theses 5 and 6, which refer to children (cf. Genesis 1:28) and sexual intimacy (cf. Genesis 2:24). The report asserts that what is prescribed is “specifically exclusive, monogamous marriage that was given in creation, such that other forms of marriage – several of which are contained in the Old Testament – are a falling short of or twisting of God’s original design and good gift” (p.6).[5]

    I, for one, find it rather extraordinary and bizarre that the early Genesis chapters are used so adamantly to justify heterosexual, monogamous, sexually exclusive marriage to the exclusion of all other kinds of marriage.[6] In the end, this – albeit wonderful – text is clearly a myth, complete with a talking snake and magical trees, where a human is made from dust and a woman, after all the animals, from a rib. It is a story, moreover, that departs rather sharply from the creation story that immediately precedes it (where humans are created together, after the animals). The story of Adam and Eve is the one that, more than any other biblical text, is used to drive home what marriage is and should be.

    The report, furthermore, firmly lays claim to this story. On the one hand, there is mention that the Church of England “has always recognised the marriages not only of Christian believers but of everyone,” yet on the other, it states that “Christians, however, by virtue of divine revelation, see in the same institution of marriage more than non-Christians see: most especially the ‘one flesh’ union and the sacramental signification of Christ’s relationship with his Church” (p.7). The Jewish text from the Hebrew Bible is firmly folded into a doctrine that makes Christian marriage superior (“more than”). This teeters on the brink of supersessionism. Above all, however, the mythological text is over-invested with profundity.

    Meanwhile, other texts of the Hebrew Bible – including legal texts prescribing that raped women marry their rapists (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), or the aforementioned texts linking violence and marriage, are not mentioned much. Maybe they are simply part of the change that has been accepted? Still, more honesty about how ideology drives the selection of biblical texts that construct the marriage ideal would be desirable.

    1. Now, we all hold ideologies; moreover, interpreting the Bible in ways that speak to life and how to live it will almost invariably (consciously or unconsciously) involve ideologically-motivated selection of texts. It is entirely possible to select biblical texts that provide and emphasise quite different recommendations for marriage than those of the report’s nine theses. It is entirely possible to construct recommendations that designate the married state inferior to the single and celibate state, or that permit divorce, same-sex marriage, polyamory, or unions without children – be this by choice, or not.[7] The report mentions that the State’s definition of marriage (subsequent to marriage equality of 2014) is distinct from the definition of marriage of the Church of England. The first thesis emphasises that in the Church of England marriage is between one man and one woman. Again, their becoming “one flesh” is stressed. It is acknowledged that this one-flesh-ness can be understood “sexually, socially, and even in some sense spiritually or mystically” (p.5). Yet even if two people of the same sex join sexually, socially, spiritually and mystically, this cannot, apparently, be a marriage, or God’s gift (Thesis 2), or “an honourable estate” (Thesis 3), or a sign of Christ’s relationship with the Church (Thesis 4), or “proper” sexual intimacy (Thesis 6).

    Exactly why this might be remains unclear to me. Friendship, even intimate friendship, in the Bible can be between members of the same sex – indeed, the bond between David and Jonathan, or the devotion of Ruth to Naomi, where there are also words of promise (1 Samuel 20:42; Ruth 1:16-17; cf. Thesis 9), stand out, as does the love of Jesus for his disciple (possibly, John the son of Zebedee). Indeed, these descriptions are far more suggestive of friendship than the account of Adam and Eve (or any other man and woman of the Bible, for that matter). The report refers to friendship as “the bedrock” (p.9) of marriage. Why can’t a relationship between persons of the same sex that is one of friendship, loving, intimate, consenting, and bonded by words of promise, ever be a marriage, while Adam and Eve are paradigms of marriage even though notions of friendship or consent are not exactly explicit? There is some consideration of this in the report, some mention of narrowing the “conceptual distance” between different- and same-sex unions (p.13) but this is not reflected in the nine theses. It is, ultimately, nebulous why there is a requirement for marriage to consist of one man and one woman only.

    1. The report acknowledges both change with regard to marriage, and some degree of “ambiguity and flexibility” (p.11). It says that doctrine can “develop or change” (p.2); that (albeit modest) changes have been made to the report (p.4), and that (much more significantly) there has been “pastoral accommodation” to permit divorce and remarriage in some cases (p.10), including on account of “differing interpretations” of biblical texts (p.11). There is also mention of change towards “a more egalitarian understanding” (p.12), and to permit contraception so that a married couple can “in good conscience” delay conception by artificial means (p.13). Moreover, the report asserts a shift in emphasis towards regarding sex in marriage less in terms of preventing fornication and more in terms of mutual enjoyment (p.16). It strikes me as right and good that changes and accommodation are made as knowledge (e.g. about safe forms of contraception) is gained; it strikes me as right and good to promote egalitarian marriage and to resist unfair rigidity (e.g. concerning divorce in situations where a relationship has broken down or is damaging to one or both partners).

    Moreover, there is precedent for changing doctrine within the Bible – not only in terms of how Jesus interprets Hebrew Bible doctrine but also internal to the Hebrew Bible. Hence, in the Ten Commandments, God promises to visit the guilt of parents on their children and subsequent generations (Exodus 20:5) but in both the books of Jeremiah (31:29-30) and Ezekiel (18:2-20) there is a retraction of this, stating that people will be responsible for their own sin, not for another’s. This strikes me as a progressive change within the Bible.

    Now, just as there now exists safe contraception, and just as there is more understanding and accommodation regarding divorce (which is condemned in some biblical passages), so understanding of gender and sexuality has been transformed, particularly in recent decades. There is much fuller understanding of gender and sex as being a spectrum rather than a binary and of human sexuality as much more complex than straightforwardly heterosexual, either by “natural order” (p.7) or divine design.[8] Why, if there is understanding that some humans are emotionally, psychologically, sexually, and spiritually fulfilled loving someone of the same sex, can same-sex marriage not be among the changes?

    1. Let me develop this point further. The report states firmly that “The Church of England has always believed and taught that sex is for marriage, and marriage is for sex” (p.9). Denying same-sex loving Christians a same-sex marriage, would also then deny them sex.

    This, of course, is the crux, the point of greatest division, and it is around this that much of the report circles. Same-sex marriage and homosexuality have drawn what journalist Mark Gevisser evocatively calls a dividing “pink line” – in multiple religious traditions, in marriage and sexuality debates, right around the globe. Indeed, the Bible could legitimate both same-sex inclusion and non-binary gender – because it is a dextrous text. Hence, creation of “male and female” could refer not to either/or but to male, female and everything in between – just as “old and young” and “great and small” can refer to a spectrum of ages or statures. Queer interpretations indeed offer a myriad of inclusive readings, which celebrate eunuchs as genderqueer, and the same-sex love of David and Jonathan, the Centurion and his servant, Ruth and Naomi.

    And openness to change need not mean “anything goes.” Of course, there are bounds – one such bound must be an insistence on informed consent for sex and for marriage, for instance. For this reason, I have been among those who welcomed a recent change in UK marriage law, which raised the age for marriage to at least 18 years in every case – in recognition of the magnified scope for exploitation and compromised consent of someone even younger marrying or entering civil partnership, even with parental consent.[9] Of course, ongoing discussion, including in the light of fuller understanding and growing knowledge, is important. But the reasons for resisting change in the face of new knowledge and understanding (e.g. knowledge about the nuances of human gender and sexuality) should be strongly interrogated, lest they rely on discrimination or prejudice. After all, there are biblical texts that refer to the “holy seed” and which express strong objection to marriage between different people groups (Ezra 9:1-4; Nehemiah 13:23-27), yet prohibition of miscegenation is nowadays considered straight-out racist (and in the USA, unconstitutional). Is resistance to same-sex marriage not straight-out homophobic? And if not, why not?

    1. Ultimately, the report concludes very little. It speaks (at length) of whether the “envelope” of the Church can or should be enlarged, or whether more inclusion would tear up a “God-given institution” (p.16). This is how the report ends. The report expounds and proffers possibilities for change and inclusion – and then retracts and dashes them.
    2. This blog is called “Via Media,” “the middle road,” referring to a path between extremes. Perhaps my alternative theses seem too strident, too extreme, for a middle road. My reply would be that right now, when very many minoritized groups, including queer and same-sex loving members of the human family, are ever more vulnerable in a world where sinister political forces are emboldening the weaponization of biblical texts while efforts to advance equity, diversity and inclusion are under attack, those of us who can speak out and can (or could) marry in the Church of England, have to speak out for those who cannot.

     

    Professor Stiebert has now published a further piece on the response to this blog post, on https://shilohproject.blog/a-response-to-a-response-to-a-response-yep-its-marriage-again/ 

    [Many aspects alluded to in this piece are developed more fully in Saima Afzal and Johanna Stiebert, Marriage, Bible, Violence: Intersections and Impacts (Routledge, 2024)]

    [1] All my references to theses and pages pertain to the report.

    [2]  In Numbers 31 men take little girls (v.18) in a war depicted as divinely sanctioned (31:1-3). Surely such sexual enslavement marriage is not what Thesis 2 has in mind when referring to marriage as “God’s gift.”

    [3] In Hebrew, there is one word for woman/wife and for man/husband. Context and/or translators’ choices determine which English word is used.

    [4] Numbers 5, while one of the longest legal texts about a scenario in a marriage and how it ought to be resolved, rarely features in discussions of marriage in the Bible. I could not find reference to the passage in either the compendium or the report. To be fair, the sources cited favour Christian texts, which is fair enough. Genesis 1-3 features very prominently in the compendium in particular.

    [5] Why these other forms of marriage fall short, or why later Hebrew Bible narratives tend not to make any such deficiency explicit, is not clarified in the report.

    [6] The story of Adam and Eve is also used to condemn homosexuality, non-binary gender, transgender, polygamy, polyamory, and divorce. Preoccupation with the story and with its reference to “one flesh” is already in evidence in the New Testament (e.g. Mark 10:8; Ephesians 5:31).

    [7] The report makes clear that children are not required for marriage to be valid or meaningful. It explains that marriage is the proper context for raising children, not that raising children is the purpose of marriage (p.13).

    [8] The report refers to “men and women being ‘diverse in their emotional, mental and spiritual lives, their way of experiencing and responding to reality’” – which difference it believes is instantiated in marriage to the benefit of society. It is the core argument made in the submission to the government consultation on equal marriage in 2014: “The uniqueness of marriage – and a further aspect of its virtuous nature – is that it embodies the underlying, objective, distinctiveness of men and women” (p.14). This emphasises a binary distinction that can be and has been plausibly questioned – as is acknowledged in the report, too (p.15).

    [9] This is in reference to the UK Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022.

  • Power Games: Redemptive Violence or Redemptive Love?

    by Simon Friend, a property developer and lay member of General Synod and part of HTB/New Wine churches for the last 40 years; he is one of the conveners of The Evangelical Forum on General Synod

    The latest response from the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) to the latest set of proposals put forward to General Synod for the July 2024 sessions in York repeats a familiar tone from them that has echoed round the Synod chamber and the endless days of meetings many of us have been involved with, really ever since Shared Conversations in 2015. The message is No… No…. No…. No. The proposals and letters from various Bishops published just recently in Premier Christianity and by The Society of St Wilfred and St Hilda make the same, and now rather tiring suggestion, that we “need more time”. But I certainly get the feeling that no matter how much time we spend on this – the answer will still be No….. No…. No.

    Let me take just one point from CEEC’s June 21st statement: “…we do not believe this is an ‘agree to disagree’ issue – because the bible is clear that you cannot bless a sexually active relationship outside of male/female marriage.”

    So let’s be clear. This is about who is having sex with whom and who has the right to judge what is biblical in these matters. Many of us have been highlighting that this is the core issue we need to debate. Is sex outside of marriage of one man with one woman a ‘first order’ or as some would call it, a ‘salvation’ issue? I addressed this in my speech during the LLF debate in February this year. Here is what I said:

    “It’s clear that this drive for structural provision has at the root of it the doctrinal question: ‘Is sex outside of marriage of one man and one woman a 1st order salvation issue?’

    I am wondering what it is about this one particular aspect of the purity code, which has now become some sort of boundary marker of true faith; whereas justice, poverty, war, or the environment don’t seem to generate anything like the heat they should for us as Christians.

    Personally, I blame the doctrine of Original Sin. The Augustinian view of Original Sin that bound Adam and Eve’s action into a narrative of sexual shame intimately involved with The Fall. As John Gibson wrote back in 1981: “It’s high time that the doctrine of original sin in the sense of a sexually transmitted guilt going back to a primal guilty pair was abandoned” (John C. L. Gibson, Genesis, Volume 1, 1981, p.178).

    Original Sin wasn’t about sex. Nor should who’s having sex with whom in 2024 be cast as a ‘first order’ issue; something to tear the church apart over by making ‘structural provision’.

    The original sin was eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

    Funny isn’t it, that the one thing God asked us not to do – we can’t help but do, even all these millennia later. To know good and evil – well, that’s power, isn’t it? Something that elevates us to the status of gods, giving us mastery over mere mortals. And we are called to pay attention to power. Especially the use of the power of what we think is right or wrong.

    I wonder why God said – don’t eat this fruit. You will surely die.

    As Brueggemann writes: “No one dies in this text. This is not a reflection on death but a troubled, anxiety-ridden life. That is a greater problem than death.” (Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, 1982, p.252).

    We’ve been suffering this sort of living death ever since; devising mechanisms like scapegoating where we conveniently project the corruptness within our own hearts onto whoever we suppose to be more sinful over there; and banish them to the ‘structurally differentiated’ desert (or, as others would put it, the ‘pastorally provisioned desert!). And that makes us feel so much better. Doesn’t it?

    Sex isn’t the Original Sin. The use of the power of knowledge of good and evil to judge, split, condemn, and cast out the other – that’s Original Sin.”

    When I said this at Synod, it was around this point that I crashed into my 3 minute warning. I’d been intending to go on to say:

    “As Christians we believe that Jesus made himself the final scapegoat so that this cycle of shaming would end. So why can’t we let go? Why do we cling on to Redemptive Violence like a survival instinct – convinced it’s our prerogative and role to be the arbiters of right and wrong?

    When Jesus came, he resisted constantly this basic human need to judge and shame the other. He showed us the way of Redemptive Love intentionally drawing in those on the margins of society – the outsiders.

    It’s time we addressed this “sex and who is having sex” as a ‘first order’ salvation issue.

    I urge you to resist this amendment for structural provision.”

    And where are we now, in July? What has changed? If we just keep hearing the language of No…. No…. No… after all these years in which many people have put in huge amounts of effort to produce endless resources and workshops and endless group discussions … then really I think we need to ask the hard question: “How are we going to end this cycle of shaming and scapegoating if people keep using language which assumes a position of knowledge of what is right and wrong to judge, split and condemn – even cast others into some structurally differentiated part of the church?”

    So, I challenge the CEEC to ponder on this original sin and ask some self-reflective questions about how they, and indeed all of us, use a ‘knowledge of right and wrong’ when God clearly sets out from the beginning that that is precisely what we should not do. I challenge CEEC and The Alliance to reflect on how using their position of power in the Church of England, which they clearly have, is morally acceptable when it comes to the latest threat expressed in The Alliance letter of 26th June: “We will have no choice but rapidly to establish what would in effect be a new de facto ‘parallel Province’ within the Church of England and to seek pastoral oversight from bishops who remain faithful to orthodox teaching on marriage and sexuality.”

    When we play these power games based on a perceived knowledge of good and evil – then I think we abuse the power we hold. And theologically I would say it is a form of Redemptive Violence. Reasoning, that somehow believes that splitting the church makes the church a better bride of Christ. We have centuries of church splits to show that doesn’t lead anywhere positive. Some parishes in my diocese have already used their power over Common Fund to divert payments to The Ephesian Fund set up by CEEC, though I note that the moral imperative driving them does not stretch to giving back their houses, stipends or pension to the diocese from which they feel they simply have to ‘separate’ themselves.  No doubt The Alliance wants to take the Church Commissioners’ pot of funds into their new Province also. They have already benefited from vast swathes of it through SDF Funding.  At least now their behind-the-scenes planning is out in the open.  The Alliance letter states: “We will encourage all church leaders who are in sympathy with The Alliance to join the parallel Province.”

    Jesus clearly picks up the theme of Genesis 2 and how use of the power of knowledge of good and evil can lead to wrongly judging others, leading us away from considering the planks in our own eyes. He constantly berates the religious elites for judging and excluding and scapegoating the vulnerable and marginalised. Surely, it’s obvious, isn’t it? And I can hear the conservatives saying right now…. “But he told the woman caught in adultery to leave her life of sin…”. For me, even leaving aside the fact that the story was about unfaithfulness and this debate is about affirming faithful same sex partnerships, that is to completely miss the point of the story, which is that Jesus, the sinless one, should have fulfilled the law and stoned the woman himself… but instead he radically and transformatively, for himself and for the woman, said…”I do not condemn you.” That’s the point of the story, isn’t it? He is not going to condemn and judge her against a purity code and neither is he going to send her off hopeless. He gives her hope and says to her, like he says to all of us, “go and live a better life”.  Perhaps that was what Jesus was silently saying to the men who slunk away after his challenge to them.  They too needed to go and “live a better life”.

    I am sorry to say I am really, really tired of CEEC’s pronouncements. Like many others I have given up days and days to sit in group discussions with them and nothing changes.  But I still don’t want them to leave.  I still count them as my brothers and sisters in Christ.

    I want to say Yes….. Yes….. Yes…. to Jesus’ grace, love, intentional non-judgement, inclusion and acceptance. Redemptive Love, not a sort of redemptive violence.  Those of us on the affirming side of this debate have to keep believing that Redemptive Love will win and come to fruition in the end.

     

     

  • Slouching Towards Synod*

    by Helen King, member of General Synod, editor

    Usually things start to settle down in the week before General Synod meets. The agenda is out, Questions are submitted and the written answers awaited, and people read through the various papers and start to think about whether they have something they’d like to contribute to the debates.

    But, in this particularly troubled Synod, where safeguarding, Living in Love and Faith, and governance are all coming together and overlapping in a disturbing way, nothing feels settled at all. That wasn’t helped this morning by an unexpected letter ‘To all General Synod Members’, from the one remaining LLF Lead Bishop. There is still no sign of anyone having been identified to take over Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley’s role as the ‘inclusive’ Lead Bishop; or perhaps nobody so identified has been willing to take this on.

    In the letter, Bishop Martyn Snow assures us that the list of ‘commitments’ being brought by him to Synod are not really the commitments. They are ‘intended as an illustration of the sort of commitments that might form the basis of an agreement’.

    Yes, the underlining/bold face combination is in the letter.

    We are further asked not to ‘pick apart’ the wording of the commitments, or to discuss whether we agree with the details. It’s not clear what we are allowed to do.

    Is that it? Or are any more documents likely to land between now and Friday?

    In these circumstances, rather than offer any new reflections, Via Media News is instead offering you a reminder of some of the pieces published already here, and which speak into aspects if our current situation. No.10 of the commitments in GS2346 – commitments which are not really commitments – concerns communion: the search for the ‘highest possible degree’ of communion and the idea of ‘degrees of unity’. Is this about impaired communion? Ah, but we are not supposed to ‘pick apart’ the wording.

    So, let’s think about sacraments, and impaired sacraments. On Via Media, back in 2019, we featured a piece on our common baptism, from Bishop David Gillett, picking up cases where a minister had refused to baptise the child of a same-sex couple: ‘Does the Bible really say … that baptism should be withheld from some people?’ David looked at the sorts of “Oh my goodness how do we do this??” practical questions, like how to fill in the register when there are two mothers, or two fathers, and reminding us of Canon B22: No minister shall refuse or, save for the purpose of preparing or instructing the parents or guardians or godparents, delay to baptise any infant within his cure that is brought to the church to be baptized.

    He wrote “Meanwhile we are in the ironic situation where baptism, the foundation sacrament within the Church, is open to all whereas lawfully married same sex couples are barred from both a church marriage and the possibility of ordination.”

    Last year, Fr Thomas Sharp wrote about breaking, or remaining in, communion, when communion “flows from our baptism”. “To declare then that communion is broken is, simply, to make a fundamental statement too about baptism, that the sacrament, too, has in some way been broken.” He concluded, “I am tempted, when I disagree with them and any number of my fellow members of the Church, to declare us ‘out of communion’, to insult and write them off. But then the Spirit’s voice accuses me: ‘How dare you forsake your baptism?’”

    This raises questions around the stated objectives of the Church of England Evangelical Council, as stated in their document ‘Securing evangelical witness’. In the non-geographic dioceses envisaged here, people will be “able to express the view that others in the C of E are preaching a different gospel and are false teachers”; not that we disagree, but that one group of us are false teachers and the others aren’t. One baptism? Apparently not. Sharing communion? It doesn’t sound like it.

    Evidence for that comes from another 2019 piece published here, on ‘impaired communion’, where Dr David Ison challenged the January 2019 Letter from Concerned Anglicans in the Oxford Diocese, which took issue with the Oxford Bishops because they were insisting that all could be baptised and could receive communion: the Concerned wrote ‘in supporting the formulation first produced by the Bishops of Lichfield, [your Ad Clerum] Letter makes specific reference to nobody being excluded or discouraged from receiving the sacraments of baptism or the Lord’s Supper” and argued that what they called ‘such indiscriminate participation’ was actually unbiblical because, the Concerned Anglicans observed, ‘the Apostle Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 11: 27-29 clearly discourages participation in the Lord’s Supper for those who have not examined themselves.’

    So, for some within the wider, and diverse, evangelical constituency, some cannot be baptised, while some cannot accept the invitation to the Lord’s Table if the person presiding there has stated that they will bless people in committed same-sex relationships. This of course already happens – although, I think, less than it did – if the person presiding is female. David responded to all this was that “It’s ironic, and worse, that Paul’s confronting of corporate division and contempt is used by one part of Christ’s body as a stick with which to beat and exclude another part of Christ’s body – when Paul is telling his hearers to take a good look at themselves, not others.” Examining oneself seems rather different from labelling others as automatically excluded.

    And that brings us back to the big question: when Christians in the same Church refuse to take communion from, or with, other Christians in that Church: are they still in the same Church, or is that schism?

     

    *The title of this blog post is of course a reference to Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming. Make of that what you will.

  • Two-Edged Scripture: Taking the Bible Seriously

    by Sophie Grace Chappell, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University. Her two most recent books are Songs For Winter Rain, a poetry collection, and Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience.

     

    Hebrews 4.12: Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

     

    Here are 5 bits from the Bible:

    In childbirth the woman will have pain (Genesis 3.16)

    Male and female created he them (Genesis 1.27)

    God hates shrimp (Leviticus 11.9-12)

    Homosexuality is an abomination (Leviticus 18.22)

    The she-bears (2 Kings 2)

    Evangelicals sometimes call the Bible “God’s instruction manual for life” or similar. This struck me as odd even when I was an evangelical myself (from about 1980 to about 1990), because on the face of it the Bible is nothing like an instruction manual. Rather, it’s a library of all kinds of different books: love poetry, hymns of praise, history books, origin myths and foundation tales, allegorical poems, philosophical reflections, proverbs, political tracts, forewarnings of judgement and apocalypse, shaggy-dog stories, and then the Gospels and the Epistles and Acts are each of them something different again. And in this library of books we see all sorts of things going on: shady dealings with goats in Genesis 29, religious genocide in Joshua 1 and 1 Samuel 15, rape and incest and murder in lots of places, hunger-strikes and dirty protests in Ezekiel, political debate in the books of Samuel, shipwrecks and trials and what we now call evangelism in Acts, straight theology in Hebrews and Romans, very strange eschatology in Revelation… and lots and lots of other things too.

    But here’s the thing: there is no obvious non-supernatural sense in which any of the writers of the books of the Bible thought that they were addressing us. When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans his intended audience was, well, the Romans—the Christian church in Rome in maybe 60 AD. When James wrote his Epistle he was addressing church communities of that time, communities that he’d lived in or visited, or had some pastoral responsibility for. The authors of Kings and Samuel and Chronicles thought they were writing the history of Israel, for the people of Israel in their own time. The author of Genesis, from where we get the lines about childbirth and about “male and female created he them”, were writing a foundation myth the point of which is to explain that things are the way they are because God made them that way. The authors of Leviticus, who give us the passages about shrimp and about homosexuality, were laying down a code of behaviour for a nomadic tribe which later (after the eye-wateringly violent conquest of the land of Israel by war, mass murder, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing) settled down as a pastoral people.

    So even the bits of the Bible which are most like instruction manuals were not, in any non-supernatural sense, written as instruction manuals for us. (I don’t by the way have any problem at all with the notion of the supernatural. Not at all, unless it counts as a problem that I don’t think any “naturalist” yet has ever given a remotely plausible account of what “the natural” is.) Exodus tells us that the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law were given by God, via Moses, to the people of Israel in the wilderness in maybe 1000 BC. Matthew tells us that the Sermon on the Mount was teaching given by Jesus in maybe 27 AD to his twelve disciples and other followers at the time. In Romans and Corinthians and Ephesians we can see the moral and religious and spiritual teaching that Paul gave to those churches then, in maybe 55 or 60 AD. But none of it is, directly and immediately, directed at us.

    So how do we know when the Bible is stating a divine command that applies to us here and now?

    If some of the observations about the foundation of our world are to be taken as not just parts of the narrative, but also instructions for us, like the bits in Genesis about women having to suffer in childbirth and about humans being made both male and female, then how do we know which of these observations give us rules, and which don’t?

    And how do they give us rules? Is the fact that women suffer in childbirth something to preserve, as in nineteenth-century resistance to using new forms of pain relief? Or to remove, or mitigate? Is “male and female created he them” something that tells us that there are no transgender people? Or that there shouldn’t be? Or that everyone has a bit of male and a bit of female in them? Rebracket it and see how it looks then!

    It is not for nothing that our Hebrews text calls Scripture two-edged.

    Or take Leviticus: if some rules apply now (e.g. be merciful to the widow and the stranger), but other rules don’t (e.g. the ideas that menstruating women are unclean or that God hates shrimp), then how do we know which rules apply and which don’t?

    If some of the examples of behaviour that the Bible gives us are examples to imitate (e.g. David repenting of his murder and adultery when Nathan challenges him), and other are not (e.g. Solomon taking a thousand wives), then how do we know which examples we are commanded to follow and which we are not?

    And this is where we come to the last of my five bits, the she-bears. Because some evangelicals apparently think that Elisha’s action in using supernatural powers to massacre dozens of young people for mocking him sets an example that we should at any rate admire—maybe even imitate, if we can. And I couldn’t disagree more strongly about that if I tried.

    It’s not all right for spiritual leaders who, like Elisha, have been entrusted with prophetic powers by God, to use those powers to massacre 42 (or however many; it’s a suspiciously numerological number) troublesome youngsters. It’s REALLY not all right. To suggest that it is, is to endorse millennia of pointless and tragic religious murderousness, from the allegedly divinely-sanctioned religious genocide of Joshua 1, to the actions of the IDF against the Palestinians.

    If we want to talk about “taking scripture literally”, well—there is nothing in 2 Kings 2 that forces a preacher to read it as an endorsement of Elisha’s violence against the troublesome youth of Bethel. It could be read as “God gave Elisha this power as successor to Elijah—and the first thing he did with that God-given spiritual power, tragically, was abuse it—just as the Apostles did when they were confronted by Ananias and Sapphira.”

    I don’t want religion/ faith (especially not my own religion/ faith, Christianity) to be what it so often has been, a way of normalising and institutionalising and even ritualising individual or church or state violence. (We do the ethnic cleansing, then we get together and sing some happy-clappy worship songs, and then we feel okay about those nasty scenes we witnessed this morning in the killing fields.)

    That is the norm for homo sapiens: that we use religion to sanitise and legitimate what is ABSOLUTELY NOT okay, what actually cries out to heaven for vengeance. But for my part, I don’t want the Christian church to be like that. I want Christians to do what Jesus did, and renounce the whole awful cycle of human violence and human self-hypnotism that it’s okay to be like this. In which cycle, religion plays a prominent and deeply ugly part. Because it isn’t okay, it really really isn’t, and we have to stand against it, even if that means we end up on the Cross.

    To be clear, I don’t think this “How can we tell when Scripture is giving us a command?” question is unanswerable.

    My answer is this: I think that the church today has to trust itself to be what it is, the continuation of the very same story that the Bible tells, the story of a people whom God is calling to be like his son Jesus. Since we by God’s grace are part of that same story, we have the same right to disagree with the Biblical authors as we have to disagree with each other in the church today. If someone in the Bible sets an example or issues a command that our best and most careful moral reflection tells us is just wrong, then we are free to disagree with it. After all, “We have the Holy Spirit too”. God is at work in us today just as he was at work in the people who wrote the scriptures. What they say is always for us to reflect on, and we can often learn from it too: the Bible can and does change our moral viewpoint, and improve it. But sometimes—Joshua 1’s apparent presentation of religious genocide as God’s will—it is not just that we are right to disagree; it would be abominable not to disagree.

    Now it’s not just me saying this. I actually think that this is what everybody does, even evangelicals. Martin Luther does this. Calvin does this. But I think conservative evangelicals typically have a false self-understanding. They claim to be “simply obeying just what it says in the Scriptures”. My point is that they do no such thing. Nobody could, because there is no such thing as “just what it says in the Scriptures”. Nor is it a matter, as I’ve heard some say, of “letting the Scriptures interpret themselves”; they don’t, we have to apply our understanding and our powers of interpretation to them.

    So forget about “taking the Bible literally”. Think instead about taking the Bible seriously, and reading it reverently and attentively and intelligently. The first step in that is to look closely at what kind of text we’re actually dealing with in reading any book of the Bible. In almost every case, what we are dealing with is not an instruction manual. And even when it is, the instruction manual was not originally written for us.

    That doesn’t mean we can’t get instruction from the Bible. Of course we can. But we get it not by literalism, but by serious and careful thought and reflection.

    Above all, perhaps, it means this: we have to try and read the scriptures with Jesus, to read them as he reads them. So with the she-bears, we could point out the contrast between Elisha (and the Apostles in their treatment of Ananias and Sapphira) on the one side, and Jesus on the other: how in the whole of his prophetic career the sole casualties were one fig tree, some money changers’ tables, maybe a herd of pigs, and Jesus himself. Jesus was an extremely radical and an extremely unorthodox reader of the scriptures: witness his constant clashes with the Pharisees, “today this scripture is fulfilled in your sight”, “the stone that the builders rejected…”, and many other points where he presents a completely subversive reading of a well-known text.

    And in fact there is a place in the Bible where Jesus gives us an example which he seems to have intended to be set alongside Elisha’s example, and to demonstrate how it is possible to respond to mockery or criticism of what you take to be your prophetic role completely differently from how Elisha responds. The passage I’m thinking of here is Luke 9.51-56:

    And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elijah did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.

    Martin Luther famously said that “We go to Scripture as the wise men went to the manger: to find Jesus in it.” I think that’s right. I think it’s also right that we can go to Scripture in Jesus’ company: and try to learn to read it, and to act on it—or against it—as Jesus did.

     

    (based on a sermon preached at All Souls’ Church Invergowrie)

     

  • EvangelicAlly

    by the Revd Jody Stowell, Vicar of St Michael and All Angels, Harrow Weald and member of General Synod

    I became a Christian in the proper evangelical ‘prayed the prayer’ type way when I was 14. And although, looking back, I know that God was not absent for the first 13 years of my life (I always believed in a God, always prayed), that moment was really important in my life with God. In recalling it, I have often said that the story I was told on that night, about salvation and sacrifice and choosing to follow Jesus, was one that I already knew, that resonated with the story already within my soul, and so I said ‘Yes!’

    I didn’t know then that I was not just a Christian, but an Evangelical Christian. Only in my twenties did I start to become aware of the tribal nature of the Church of England, and to meet some Liberal Christians. Contrary to what I’d been led to expect, I discovered that they were, in fact, Christian! I also began my theology degree at Spurgeon’s College as an independent student, with tutors from many denominations. One of my modules was on Spirituality, and it was here that I discovered the wonderful length and breadth of Christian Tradition. Within this tradition, it was clear that I was an Evangelical and that this was part of a whole multi-faceted history.

    Obviously within my Evangelical roots was the idea that ‘homosexuality was wrong.’ I wanted to be a good Christian so, whilst slightly uncomfortable with this idea, I admit that I simply went with it. It didn’t seem to make much of a difference to my own life, so I didn’t have to think about it. As I grew up and as my world expanded, that changed. I needed to connect my theology with my knowledge of who God is and what God is like, and the reality that this affected real people.

    However, at that time exploring the theology of men and women was my priority, as it affected me personally, in my own call to ordination. I found it painful to be ousted from my clan, to be told I wasn’t an Evangelical, to find myself without a home and to feel like I didn’t belong. This still hurts, although with much less sting than it used to, but the experience helps me to understand the emotional processes that are going on, for those who are in the Evangelical tribe, when they even begin to think about standing out for Same-Sex Marriage.  Yes, it is an excuse, but if we do not accept that this is a strong attachment, then we will never be able to have the conversations that encourage and enable people to publicly change their mind.

    It was my exploration of the biblical arguments regarding men and women which took me to places where the conversation was about humanity and our relationships more broadly. There were those in the Evangelical world who closed themselves to the conversation on the ordination of women because they said it was the ‘thin end of the wedge’, calling into question the place of headship in marriage, which is for them, absolute in Scripture. If this could be questioned, then the next thing on the table would be … homosexuality.

    That emotional response to having to think about a possible change in mindset over LGBT+ inclusion sometimes lay at the root of saying ‘no’ to a change of mind on women’s ordination. The argument for women as bishops was often regressed to the question about women’s ordination in its entirety. And, in a way, I understood this anxiety. As I listened to ordained women argue for their place, I often wondered how we could ever be closed to the question of LGBT+ inclusion. It would always be possible for a biblical perspective to be presented that was persuasive. The possibility would never be closed. And this is, of course, the posture of the Christian faith – we are people of revelation and it is really uncomfortable!  In every generation, we must do the wrestling of working out what is good and true and of God and what is ephemera.  But to choose not to wrestle is, I’m afraid, not an option.

    It wasn’t just the reality of revelation and the possibility of persuasive biblical argument that I discovered in exploring a theology of men and women; it was a different reading of an actual biblical story about human relationships, Genesis 2.  My understanding of this story was fundamentally changed by, for example, Phyllis Trible’s God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978).

    Where previously this had been delivered as a story of difference, I began to see the meaning as lying in the expression of shared humanity: ‘bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh’. The focus here is on the sameness. Of course, there is also difference. The Human who lies down to sleep is not the same as the human who wakes up: the Dustling (ha’adam) lies down and becomes the man (iysh) and the other human, the woman (ishshah).

    But this particular difference only frames the focus of the story, which is that men and women have the same humanity. It is understandable that the story uses men and women to illustrate the ultimate difference, but this is about making the point about shared humanity more powerful. It does not necessarily create a defining doctrine regarding who can be in relationship with each other in marriage. We are all ‘bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.’ When I stare into the eyes of another human, I must be able to say this; to see in them, myself, and to recognise the image of God in the other. Every other human being is different to me, not just those who are not my biological sex; every human being is, in some sense, ‘other’ to me. This story tells me that I must see myself in the woman in the hijab, the boy with the braids, the enby wheelchair user.

    This story has reframed for me all the other stories in Scripture in which the relationship between men and women is at the forefront. It has given me a basis on which to stand in anyone’s company and be their equal, and them, mine.

    It has meant that, in terms of my own humanity, I am assured of my value and my place. And it has given me the lens through which I see my LGBT+ siblings and niblings: ‘bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.’