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

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

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

    Methodological Clarification

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

    Creation, Genesis, and the Shape of Human Life

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

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

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

    Sabbath, Law, and Jesus’s Hermeneutic

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

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

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

    Marriage and the Resurrection

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

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

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

    Creation Read from the End, Not Only from the Beginning

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

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

    Sabbath, Sacrament, and Provisional Holiness

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

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

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

    Discernment and Ecclesial Responsibility

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

    Conclusion

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

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

     

     

    Bibliography

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

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

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

     

     

  • The House of Bishops on Clergy and Same-Sex Marriage – Further Personal Reflections

    by Peter Collier KC, retired Senior Circuit Judge and former Vicar-General of the Province of York

    Further to my recent reflections on the House of Bishops’ October statement on the future use of the Prayers of Love and Faith, I have now also reflected on their statement about the future of clergy and same sex marriage.

    Again, they say they have been influenced by the legal advice they have received and the papers provided by the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC).

    My reflections, as one who until not so long ago was engaged in the practice of the law, begin in a different place. I begin by looking at what marriage is generally seen to be in cultures across the world and then consider how, in England, the relationship between Church and State has played out over the centuries in changing attitudes to marriage in both Church and State.

    Family, Household, Marriage and Law

    I am no anthropologist, but as I understand it the basic units from which societies have been formed are tribe, and family. In most cultures there is a social group that broadly accords with what we would describe as the family. The core may be two people or, in cultures recognising polygamy or polyandry, more than two people. In some cultures, the wider household grouping plays a significant role.

    It is usually in the context of such groupings that children are born and brought up. The core couple relationship in such groups is commonly called a “marriage”.  How a “marriage” takes place, with what degrees of social customs, or required formalities, varies from society to society. Many of us will have had some exposure to different customs through attending Muslim or Sikh weddings in this country.

    As societies become more complex and sophisticated, the regulation of any particular society through a system of law will inevitably develop. The law may require preliminaries and formalities if a marriage is to be recognised as such, and to regulate both initiating and ending such a relationship.

    More complex societies will accord different consequences as a result of a marriage being recognised, treating the two (or more) people as a unit to be dealt with differently from those same people as individuals. This can have an impact on taxes required to be paid or on monetary or other benefits that the state may provide. In our society there is also a significant amount of law about the place of children and how they are to be dealt with if a marriage breaks down.

    As a young Christian, I was taught that marriage is a creation ordinance – it was God’s intention that people would find a helpmeet with whom they would share their life and they would together bring up children. And so this unit has always been the bedrock of a society. Of course, that has traditionally been interpreted as showing that marriage is between a man and a woman and only between a man and a woman. But additionally Genesis can be said to speak of permanence and in Matt 19 we have Jesus using the Genesis phraseology when asked about adultery. That led to the Matthean exception about which volumes have been written; and we will come to remarriage after divorce in due course. I would add that the church that taught me about creation ordinances also taught me that the world was made in 7 days; an article I wrote in the school 6th Form magazine (in 1965) advancing that cause led  my Headmaster to write on my report that term: “his Philistine attitude to science will be recorded on his UCCA form”.

    Since then, I have learned how to accommodate my interpretation of the Genesis account of creation to a growing understanding of what science shows us. Similarly, I have learned how to accommodate my understanding of what the Bible teaches about marriage, based not only on what science has shown us, but also and perhaps more significantly from getting to know some same sex couples and seeing the fruit of the Spirit in their lives. As my wife often reminds me, just as in our encounters with Christ, “conversion is in the meeting”.

    Whose Law?

    Throughout much of Europe, and in this country for nigh on a thousand years, the way marriages were initiated and thereafter controlled was governed exclusively by the Church. As the Christian church developed so did its Canon law through various synods and councils. In relation to marriage, perhaps the most significant of those was the 4th Lateran Council (1215). Its published Canons about marriage included Canon 50, prohibiting marriage in the 2nd and 3rd degrees of affinity, and Canon 51, forbidding clandestine marriages and priests witnessing such marriages, and providing that all marriages must be announced publicly by the priest in church so that legitimate impediments might be made known and the priest could investigate whether any impediment existed. That same duty and very similar phraseology remain in our own Canons today, over eight hundred years later – see Canon B33 (Of the duty of the minister to inquire as to impediments).

    The Church was able to impose its view of marriage – what it was and how it was to be solemnised and regulated – on the whole of English society. Consequently, for several hundred years the church and the state views about marriage were one and the same. Church courts had exclusive jurisdiction in enforcing the Church’s view of marriage. It was therefore the Canon law that was applied in all circumstances. It was only in church and in accordance with the rites and ceremonies of the church that anyone could enter into a marriage in England.

    The theology of marriage as understood by the reformers is set out in the introduction to the ‘Form of Solemnization of Matrimony’ in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) – a man and woman come together in the sight of God and the face of the congregation to be joined in holy Matrimony; they declare (by their silence) that there is no impediment to their marriage; they then make various vows of lifelong commitment to one another; they are then blessed. In medieval times the making of vows had often happened in the churchyard or in the entrance to the church and the couple then came into the church for the blessing.

    However, there is nothing in the 39 Articles about marriage, apart from it being lawful for bishops, priests and deacons to marry (Art 32).  The wording of Art 32 is very interesting: “… therefore it is lawful for them … to marry at their own discretion, as they shall judge the same to serve better to godliness”. I think that many who are wanting to enter into a same-sex marriage would claim those words for themselves. The Canons of 1603/4 had no statement about what Holy Matrimony was, just details about its preliminaries, and the permitted place and time of marriage (Art 42); who can grant licences to marry, and other details about licences (Arts 101, 102 & 103); and finally various provisions about divorce (Arts 105,106 & 107).

    Recognition of marriages

    It is perhaps reasonably well known that how countries deal with other countries’ systems of marriage forms a very complex area of law; not all forms of foreign marriage are recognised in this country as valid. Currently, the government is considering how to enable humanist weddings, and those performed in accordance with other religious traditions such as Islam, to be equally recognised as those carried out in accordance with English law.

    But what is perhaps not quite so well-known is the origin of that non-recognition of forms of marriage other than those carried out in accordance with the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England. There were exceptions for Jews and Quakers, provided it could be proved that the marriage had been carried out according to the practices of either of those two distinct groups. However, the theological (and therefore the legal) position was that a couple were not married by a priest, but they married each other by the exchange of promises. The priest’s role was to register and to bless the marriage.

    So, there grew up the practice of “clandestine marriages”. These were marriages conducted secretly without following the legal formalities required. In England that meant they had not gone through any of the necessary Canonical preliminaries and had not been performed in accordance with the BCP service for the solemnisation of Matrimony. They were sometimes referred to as Fleet Marriages as many of them were conducted in the Fleet Prison or nearby. By 1740 it is estimated that half of London weddings took place there. Such marriages were often witnessed by a priest.

    The beginning of state intervention

    With the intention of bringing the practice of such unsatisfactory marriages to an end, the Clandestine Marriages Act 1753 (Lord Hardwicke’s Act) was passed. It put all English Canon Law about weddings on to a statutory basis. It made invalid all marriages that were not performed in accordance with its provisions, unless performed according to Jewish or Quaker rites. So, those apart, a marriage had to be carried out in church after the publication of banns, or the obtaining of a licence from the ecclesiastical authorities (i.e. in accordance with the Canons). This Act was significant because it was the first time that the state law makers made laws about marriage, even if the law they made was simply adopting the church law.

    With the growth of non-conformity, members of other religious denominations and groups also wished to be able to be married other than in and by the Church of England. In particular, Unitarians were very unhappy about the Trinitarian language of the marriage service. This was eventually resolved by the Marriage Act 1836. I have referred to this in my earlier paper and noted the Bishop of Exeter’s distress at this invention of “civil marriage”. I also referred there to the removal of any religious service from civil weddings in Register Offices in 1856, bringing about the difference between religious and secular marriages.

     Some other state-led changes in our attitude towards marriage

    The relationship of a husband and wife within a marriage was again shaped by the ecclesiastical law which was based on scripture, as then understood. Some of that understanding remains to some extent among those who hold to “complementarian headship principles”.

    The tradition developed that a woman was given by her father to her husband – passing from the control of one man to the control of another. For a long time, a married woman had no right to own her own property and on marriage her husband gained control of all her property. That did not change until parliament intervened and the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 gradually gave married women the right to own property, wages and investments separately from their husbands, and eventually to enter into contracts and lawsuits in their own names.

    Another ecclesiastical court action was for the restitution of conjugal rights. It was transferred to the court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes when that was created at the end of the 19th century.  By such an action, founded on Paul’s argument set out in 1 Cor 7, a spouse whose partner had left them and was living away from them could obtain an order that they be required to resume cohabitation. This was not abolished until the Matrimonial Proceedings and Property Act 1970 came into force.

    The 1991 case of R v R [1991] UKHL 12 is a landmark UK House of Lords ruling that made marital rape a crime by overturning the centuries-old legal exemption for husbands raping their wives. The court’s decision established that a husband can be convicted of rape, thus dismantling the legal principle that a wife’s consent to sexual intercourse became irrevocable upon marriage.

    More recent changes – (i) Civil Partnerships

    A more recent and significant change has been the introduction of Civil Partnerships in 2004. This did not change marriage but introduced a new state-recognised relationship alongside marriage. If two people (who initially had to be of the same sex, but since 2019 can be of the opposite sex) register such a partnership in front of a registrar and two witnesses, they are accorded almost all the same rights and responsibilities as if they were married. The few that do not carry over have no particular significance from a religious perspective, being chiefly around survivor benefits in occupational health schemes. Many people regarded this as introducing same-sex marriage in all but name.

    Civil partnerships proved very successful. By 2014 there had been 60,000 partnerships registered, three times as many as the government had anticipated when introducing them. For some they were preferable to marriage as they carried none of the stains of patriarchal marriage traditions. But for others they continued the stigma associated with gay relationships. Such Civil unions, as contrasted with marriage, are also available in many other European and former Commonwealth countries.

    All that can be said about what a civil partnership is that it is the registration of a legal relationship between two people that produces a number of rights and responsibilities for them. There is no reference anywhere to what the relationship of the partners involves or does not involve behaviourally, particularly in the realm of sexual intimacy. Because it is silent in this area, the Bishops found it difficult to say that couples, including a couple where one was a cleric, should not enter such a partnership as there was nothing about it that was inconsistent with an exemplary way of life as per the Canons.

    But it has been the practice that if someone who presented for ordination was in such a partnership they were asked (by some, but not all, bishops) to confirm that they accepted the church’s teaching in relation to matters sexual. It used to be the case that the document “Issues in Human Sexuality” was referred to in that context, but that has now been withdrawn and potential ordinands as an interim measure are to be asked to confirm that they will live consistently with the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of the Clergy. That document at para 10.2 states “The House of Bishops’ Marriage: A Teaching Document (1999) clearly affirms, ‘Sexual intercourse, as an expression of faithful intimacy, properly belongs within marriage exclusively.’” Further pastoral guidance on this issue has been promised and is awaited.

    More recent changes – (ii) Same-sex marriage

    It was the pressure for real equality rather than a civil partnership (which could potentially be seen as a second-class relationship) that led to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. This introduced same-sex marriage. Nearly 40 other countries make same-sex marriage available. Between March 2014 and the end of 2022, 55,613 same-sex marriages were registered in the UK. In 2022, 7,800 same-sex marriages were registered, 4,896 being female couples and 2,904 male couples.

    It might be asked why a same-sex couple, perhaps already in a civil partnership, would want to convert it, as they can, to a same-sex marriage (note that you cannot convert a heterosexual civil partnership into a heterosexual marriage). The answer is perhaps because it has more of a sense of commitment, perhaps associated with the traditional attitude to and words around marriage ceremonies. The socialisation of marriage, which we learn about from the cradle onwards, would seem to carry a lot of weight.

    In a civil partnership, you apply to register it and do so before the registrar, but no words are spoken, no promises are made or exchanged. If you have a same-sex marriage then the same words are used as in a heterosexual marriage, where each person says that there is no impediment / reason in law why they should not marry and that they (call upon those present to witness that they) take the other to be their lawful wedded husband / wife. So there is a level of contracted commitment (about which more later) that is not present in a civil partnership. But it is obvious that those words fall far short of the exchange of vows made in a church service.

    The government recognised that some religious organisations hold a different view of marriage. The fact sheet published by the government in April 2014 said: “Many religious organisations believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, and the Act explicitly recognises this. The civil understanding of marriage has always been broader than that of many religious organisations. Marriage has evolved over the years, for example to enable Catholics, atheists, Baptists and many others to marry outside the Anglican Church, and to recognise married women as equal to married men before the law.”

    There are however some interesting features of the legislation in relation to matters of sexual intimacy. Unlike in opposite-sex marriages, non-consummation is not a ground for voiding a same-sex marriage. Furthermore, you can only bring a divorce relying on adultery if the offending partner has had sex with a person of the opposite sex. I am uncertain what to make of these matters, but it does seem to me to raise the question as to whether there is any underlying assumption, in either a same-sex civil marriage or in a same-sex civil partnership, that there must be sexual intimacy. Clearly, although it is possible for a same-sex couple to adopt a child or for one of a female couple to bear a child, the underlying assumption about procreation (the first of the Augustinian “goods”, as spelled out in the BCP introduction to the service) is simply not there as it would be in an opposite-sex marriage.

    The modern contract of marriage – as seen by the state

    A well-known legal definition of marriage was provided by Lord Penzance in the case of Hyde v Hyde  [L.R.] 1 P. & D. 130, decided in 1866. He defines marriage as understood in Christendom and in English law as: “the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”.

    The case itself is very instructive. Hyde was an Englishman who had converted to Mormonism. He met a young woman, also a Mormon, and in due course they went to Utah where they were married by Brigham Young in Salt Lake City. The male petitioner later renounced the Mormon faith but she did not. They separated and he returned to the UK. She then married again. Again her marriage was according to the Mormon form. The man then sued in England for divorce on the grounds of her adultery. The court refused his petition on the basis that it did not recognise his Mormon “marriage” as a marriage. The reason was that the marriage in Utah was potentially polygamous and English courts cannot recognise polygamous marriages. Lord Penzance, the judge, also said in that case, “Different incidents of minor importance attach to the contract of marriage in different countries in Christendom, but in all countries in Christendom the parties to that contract agree to cohabit with each other alone. It is inconsistent with marriage as understood in Christendom, that the husband should have more than one wife.”

    Lord Penzance’s definition of “the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others” has come under some criticism in recent years. Rebecca Probert in Child and Family Law Quarterly, Vol 19, No 2, 2007 said that a new definition was needed.

    The President of the Family Division had in fact provided such a definition in the case of Bellinger v Bellinger [2001] EWCA Civ 1140 [2002] Fam 150; [2002] 2 WLR 411.2005.

    In that case the issue was the validity of a marriage contracted between the appellant (born a man but who had undergone transgender surgery) and the respondent (a man). There were a number of arguments to be addressed, one of which was that “The relationship called marriage is and always has been recognised as the union of a man and woman.” (para 124).

    Thorpe P quoted the above passage from Hyde v Hyde and said at para 128:

    “But the world that engendered those classic definitions has long since gone. We live in a multi-racial, multi-faith society. The intervening 130 years have seen huge social and scientific changes. Adults live longer, infant mortality has been largely conquered, effective contraception is available to men and women as is sterilisation for men and women within marriage. Illegitimacy with its stigma has been legislated away: gone is any social condemnation of cohabitation in advance of or in place of marriage. Then marriage was terminated by death: for the vast majority of the population divorce was not an option. For those within whose reach it lay, it carried a considerable social stigma that did not evaporate until relatively recent times. Now more marriages are terminated by divorce than death. Divorce could be said without undue cynicism to be available on demand. These last changes are all reflected in the statistics establishing the relative decline in marriage and consequentially in the number of children born within marriage. Marriage has become a state into which and from which people choose to enter and exit. Thus I would now redefine marriage as a contract for which the parties elect but which is regulated by the state, both in its formation and in its termination by divorce, because it affects status upon which depend a variety of entitlements, benefits and obligations.”

    That judgment was given before the introduction of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage. It now needs to be updated to refer to and include those in its modern definition of what is meant by marriage in the law of England and Wales.

    The advice from FAOC seems to me to be provided almost as if we were still in a position where they believe that the Church is shaping the law of marriage for England and Wales, as it did in the 18th century. It does not grapple with any of the issues created by the evolutionary development of marriage law by the state which I have been describing, nor with how the church responds to the external realities with which it is confronted. It is very much speaking within its own bubble.

    As we have seen in relation to marriages in other denominations, before 1836 not everything that purported to be marriage was recognised by the church as such. And, whilst the church ran the show, the state went along with its views. Little by little the state asserted itself and the two views diverged. The 2013 Act recognised that the Church has a different view about marriage from that which is now the official state position.

    The current contract of marriage is very far removed from the contract underlying the BCP service with its threefold Augustinian goods of procreation, faithfulness and permanence.

    It also seems to be the case that entering into a contract of marriage adds hardly anything to the registration of a civil partnership, other than at an emotional level.

    In those circumstances, and having regard to the absence of any reference to, let alone requirement for, sexual intimacy in a same-sex marriage, and having said that entering a civil partnership is not of itself inconsistent with leading an exemplary life, it seems to me that there is no good reason why the Bishops should not say that entering into such a “marriage” is also not in and of itself an ecclesiastical offence.

    Legal advice to the House

    I turn now to the legal advice tendered to the bishops on this topic. The Advice tells us that the Chief Legal Adviser to the Archbishops’ Council and the General Synod was asked “to consider two specific possibilities for legislative change to accommodate clergy who enter into same-sex (civil) marriages.”  Those two possibilities were (i) changing Canon B 30 and (ii) the creation of a power to grant a canonical dispensation to individual clergy that would permit them to be civilly married to a person of the same sex.

    Changing Canon B 30 (Of Holy Matrimony)

    It is noted that General Synod has previously resolved that current doctrine should not be departed from and so this route is not considered in any detail. It is however said that it would require more than a change in the Canons, because the doctrine is set out in other places also. This means that it would require a Measure to carry out further changes. Although it would be Article 7 business, it would only require a simple majority vote (presumably in each House) to carry that change into law.

    Canonical Dispensation

    The other option considered is granting a canonical dispensation. The similarity is drawn with the Canon C 4.5 process whereby faculties are granted to allow the ordination of those who have remarried whilst their former spouse is still alive. The Chief Legal Adviser considers whether there could be a similar faculty to allow an ordinand or cleric to be civilly married to a person of the same sex.

    He draws a distinction between that option and Canon C 4.5 on the basis that, when that was permitted, it was on the basis that when B 30 speaks about marriage being “in its nature a union permanent and lifelong” those words encompassed a marriage that was “entered into with the intention that it be permanent and lifelong (my italics)”. Thus, the legal advice at the time said that matters could proceed along the proposed route without compromising the church’s doctrine of marriage. I have always found that to be a rather specious piece of “special pleading” and a convenient way round the difficulty created by the doctrine as traditionally espoused. When the Measure was before Parliament assurances were given that this approach would be exceptional and only granted in exceptional circumstances. But it is certainly no longer the case that these situations can be seen as “exceptional circumstances”. Between 1993 and 2023, 2449 such faculties were granted; and it is estimated that one in six ordinations now follows the grant of such a faculty. And it is also the case that a number of clergy still refuse to remarry those who are divorced as they regard the vow as absolute and not conditional on best intention.

    As is well known, the Roman Catholic church does not recognise divorce, viewing marriage as a lifelong and indissoluble covenant. A civil divorce does not end the marriage in the church’s eyes and a divorced Catholic who remarries without an annulment is not permitted to receive communion. Their way round this is for the church’s marriage tribunal to grant annulments, i.e. saying that the marriage never really existed as a real marriage in the first place.

    But the advice to the Bishops goes further and says that powers of canonical dispensation “do not permit the doing of things which are contrary to the Church’s doctrine; they permit doing things which are not normally permitted as being contrary to good order or that otherwise require regulation. To provide for a power of dispensation to permit the doing of something that was contrary to doctrine would be a novel departure in the canon law of the Church of England.”

    Some historical canonical dispensations

    That last statement seems to me to pass over what happened in the nineteenth century amid all the controversies over ritualistic practices. The church was as divided then over ritualistic issues as it is now over sexuality issues. Again the law was clear and many of the matters in dispute were doctrinal. There were prosecutions of those who breached the law, some priests going to prison for the sake of their consciences. In 1881, the bishops in the Upper House of the Convocation for Canterbury reached a decision together that they would no longer prosecute people for breaching various rules of liturgical practice. This followed a decision of the House of Lords in a case against the Bishop of Oxford seeking to compel him to issue proceedings when a complaint was laid about unlawful practices, when it was held that his approach could not be criticised. Such dispensations granted by the bishops permitted the continued breaking of the ecclesiastical law.

    And that was not the only occasion when the bishops, for the sake of the good of the church as a whole, decided to act outside the law. The efforts to overcome the ritualism controversies led to the production of revised Prayer Books in 1927 and 1928. These were twice rejected by Parliament. Notwithstanding that, Convocation resolved to press on with its use. Bishop Hensley Henson said that bishops “found themselves compelled to act outside the law because the aid of the law, which was indispensable to the healthy progress of the church, had been refused to them.”

    A possible way forward

    This would seem to be a more accurate reflection of the law of dispensation (or “economy” as it is known in the Eastern church). Of course it is always easier to allow an episcopal dispensation if there is authority for doing so. And so the introduction of some form of canonical authority would undoubtedly be of assistance to bishops generally in this regard. This would be achieved by amending the Canons, which requires a simple majority (although I would expect there to be a vote by Houses and so a majority in each House would be required).

    One approach might be to add to Canon C 26 (On the manner of life of clerks in Holy Orders) a further paragraph at C 26.3 which might read as follows:

    The fact that a deacon or priest has entered into a same-sex civil marriage by virtue of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013, shall not in and of itself be regarded as indicating a life other than one that is a wholesome example and pattern to the flock of Christ.

    A similar provision could also be added to Canon C 4 (Of the quality of such as are to be ordained deacons or priests):

    No person shall be refused ordination as a deacon or priest solely on the ground that they have entered into a same-sex civil partnership of same-sex marriage by virtue of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013.

    It may be that there will be other and better ways of phrasing such dispensatory provision in the Canons, but I offer this as a starting point for moving forwards.

    Those who would wish to argue against this, as I know some will, have really got to grasp two things. First, the absence of any assumptions about sexual intimacy in same-sex marriages. Second, given that the society in which we live has redefined what it means by marriage, how do we as a church relate to those who have entered into civil marriages, whether same-sex or opposite-sex, which are now both very different forms of social contract from that of Holy Matrimony as set out in the BCP? These are two quite different contracts, and it will not do to rely on the fact that the section 1(3) of the 2013 Act preserved the church’s different understanding of what a marriage is, without working out what the consequences of that different understanding mean in practical terms.

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    1 – Make doctrine a moving target

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    3 – Are the Clergy a Special Case?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    6 – Disempower the Bishops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Essential Doctrines, Essential Hierarchies

    by David W. Congdon, senior editor at the University Press of Kansas. His most recent book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, is available now from Cambridge University Press.

    For outsiders like me trying to make sense of the Church of England’s recent Synod debates over Living in Love and Faith (LLF), the official church resources on identity, sexuality, relationships, and marriage, and the corresponding Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) that are seeking to make the church a more inclusive space without changing canon law, the last half-year has been rather bewildering. With another General Synod coming up on 5–9 July, the bishops are once again preparing for another round of debates over the church’s relationship to LGBTQ+ persons.

    The conversations are of interest to me as an American, not only because of my affiliation with the Episcopal Church, but because I wrote about the Church of England’s views on trans identity in my recent book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024). I devoted one section of my book to the way Anglican theologians—especially Oliver O’Donovan and N. T. Wright—connected trans identity to gnosticism, showing how their rhetoric has influenced, however unintentionally, American evangelicals and far-right conservative activists. I argue that conservative Anglicans and American conservatives form a “discourse coalition,” meaning they participate in a shared discourse that associates transgender persons (and LGBTQ+ persons more generally) with heresy.

    O’Donovan’s views were given official sanction in the 2003 Church of England document, Some Issues in Human Sexuality, and one significant aspect of the LLF materials is the effort to replace the theological certainty of the old guidelines with a new approach “marked by provisionality and humility, recognising that we are in a time of corporate not-knowing, where mystery remains as to our humanity and how we are to live our lives in a world that we do not always understand, and where God often acts in surprising ways” (GS2328, LLF Annex H, 4). This in itself is something worth celebrating—but many internal tensions remain.

    While the attempted association of trans identity with gnosticism was problematic for a number of reasons—including a misunderstanding of both gnosticism and gender dysphoria, among other things—I was most interested in the way it assumed an ahistorical and timeless understanding of doctrine and ecclesial identity. Gnosticism, if such a term has any meaning, referred to various ancient sects that understood God to be so transcendent that a demiurge was necessary to bridge the infinite Most High with the finite cosmos. Once unmoored from its original historical setting, with its corresponding metaphysics, a term like “gnosticism” quickly becomes a rhetorical weapon that one can use against almost anyone and anything that one wishes to brand as “anti-Christian.” And that is precisely what has happened in North America, and especially the United States.

    The conservative political theorist Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) claimed that gnosticism is “the essence of modernity,” while the Canadian Presbyterian pastor Philip J. Lee asserted in his Against the Protestant Gnostics (1987) that gnosticism is essential to American Protestantism. In 1992 the conservative Presbyterian scholar Peter R. Jones published The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age, where he blamed gnosticism for environmentalism, feminism, and homosexuality. More recently, American evangelical theologian Peter Leithart warned of “invasive Gnosticism” in the government prohibitions against transgender discrimination. The Catholic natural law theorist and Princeton University professor Robert P. George declared in 2016 that all modern social liberalism stems from gnosticism. The atheist and right-wing activist James Lindsay attributes all “woke” identity politics, especially LGBTQ+ identity, to gnosticism. This past week, conservative evangelical radio host Erick Erickson published his new book, You Shall Be as Gods: Pagans, Progressives, and the Rise of the Woke Gnostic Left.

    While Church of England leaders no doubt want nothing to do with this bigoted, antiliberal rhetoric, my concern here is, in part, to highlight the danger of letting our theological concepts run free of any historical context. Moreover, it is not enough to keep our “heresies” grounded in history; we also need to keep our “orthodoxies” historically rooted as well. And this is where the current LLF runs into trouble.

    The supplementary annexes for GS2328 include explanations of the thought process behind the new guidelines, including the theological rationale. A consistent theme throughout is demonstrating how the new PLF remains consistent with Canon B5’s requirement that “all variations in forms of service and all forms of service used under this Canon shall be reverent and seemly and shall be neither contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter” (emphasis mine). If the definition of “essential matter” seems impossibly vague, the bishops and clergy readily acknowledge as much. Annex A points out that the words “in any essential matter” were included in the Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure 1974 (No. 3, Section 4), and that there was a proposal to omit these words on the grounds that they “seemed otiose and it would be difficult to decide what matters were essential.” Indeed! In response, the Revision Committee for the Measure retained the phrase on the grounds that “if they were omitted it became equally difficult to determine what issues were or were not contrary to or indicative of any departure from the doctrine of the Church of England” (Annex A, #19). This makes little sense, however, since the mere word “essential” hardly gives any guidance on what doctrines count as essential. It only empowers those in the church to fight about it. A further explanation stated that these words “enable the Synod to make small changes in matters which are regarded as doctrinal, provided that the essential doctrines of the Church of England are safeguarded” (Annex A, #20)—a circular claim if there ever was one.

    Annex A seeks to reassure the conservative wing by stating in a matter-of-fact manner: “We consider that the essential doctrines of the Church of England are safeguarded” (Annex A, #25). What counts as an “essential doctrine”? The question naturally follows from the wording of the Worship and Doctrine Measure, and yet we look in vain for any guidance. The LLF documents all assume that the “doctrine of marriage” is one of these essential doctrines, but the grounds for this assumption remain opaque. The Theological Rationale in Annex H acknowledges that some in the General Synod view marriage as “a secondary matter, because it does not touch essential beliefs as reflected in the creeds,” but then responds to this by saying, “we disagree.” If asked about which doctrines are essential, the average Anglican would almost certainly point to the Nicene Creed, where of course we will find nothing pertaining to marriage and sexuality. Even the Thirty-Nine Articles mention marriage only in the context of stating that priests are permitted to marry (Art. 32). So on what basis do the other bishops and clergy make marriage as essential to the church as the doctrine of incarnation?

    Even if we allow for marriage to be an essential doctrine, the alterations and adjustments to this doctrine make it difficult to sustain the conviction that the essence has not changed. Annex H provides a rather remarkable history of the ways the “doctrine of marriage” has been modified, in what it says are admittedly “significant” ways. These include accommodating divorce and remarriage, removing the claim that marriage is a “remedy for sin,” embracing the use of contraception, and allowing for couples to live together in sexual union before committing to marriage. Perhaps most important is “the move away from the primacy of procreation and increasingly making room for the expression of sexuality as a good” (Annex H, 7). Procreation is one of the three “goods” of marriage as defined by Augustine of Hippo in his famous treatise on the matter. If this does not count as an essential change in the doctrine of marriage, it is hard to know what does. Another significant change is the ethical requirement of “consent, both to the marriage and within marriage,” which broke with the patriarchal paradigm of marriage as a property transaction toward a recognition of both spouses as equal agents. As a result, “marital rape is now recognised and condemned, in law and in the church, which again marks a significant change in how sexuality, marriage, and gender relationships are conceived of” (Annex H, 8). Significant, but apparently not essential.

    The authors of Annex H correctly observe that “teaching on marriage does not just reflect theology and Scripture, but the interaction of theology and liturgy with wider cultural mores, whether consciously, or not” (Annex H, 8). This recognition that culture and history play an indispensable role in constructing and interpreting the teachings of the church sits in uneasy tension with the notion of “essential doctrine.” Even the most essential doctrines, like incarnation and trinity, are not immune to cultural and historical changes. The metaphysical assumptions of even the most conservative Anglicans today are radically different from those held by the bishops who gathered at Nicaea in the fourth century. Our creeds and doctrines give the illusion of being in unchanged continuity with the past because we say the same words (though even this is not technically true, since we are working in translation), when the reality is that the historical context, including our assumptions about divinity and our mental picture of the cosmos, gives these words a substantially different meaning.

    To their credit, the authors of Annex H acknowledge the problem I am raising here: “Some have asked, quite appropriately, whether routine accommodation/provision then becomes a de facto change in doctrine. The challenge has some weight: doctrine is not simply produced by official pronouncements but in an iterative process of dialogue between conceptual formulation and embodiment in practice.” Their response to this question is to claim that “pastoral accommodation” has always been part of the church, and—here is the crucial point—they do not want to give up “on the idea of a proper or fuller configuration of relationships altogether” (Annex H, 17).

    Put another way, the Church of England leadership still wants to say there is a normative way to be human—a “proper” or “full” form of life that is superior to other forms that deviate from this norm. Without saying so, the bishops still hold on to a moral hierarchy, much like Augustine and others throughout church history. The only difference is they have switched out who is at the top of the hierarchy. For Augustine and most everyone in the ancient church, unmarried celibate Christian men were at the pinnacle of the moral ladder. Today’s Church of England places straight monogamous married Christians at the top. The ladder is a lot longer now and accommodates many more people in the higher rungs than it used to, but there is still a ladder.

    We are now in a position to understand what is essential about essential doctrines. The essence is not any particular doctrine or interpretation of doctrine. As we have seen, these can change in quite drastic ways without apparently violating the “essence.” Instead, the essence is the normative hierarchy itself that places some Christians closer to the divine rule than others. If there is a universal truth to be found here, it is this: whenever churches talk about “essential doctrines” or “essential matters,” they are constructing the rhetorical framework for reinforcing social hierarchies.

    “At the beginning of the twentieth century,” according to the Living in Love and Faith book, “the Church of England still had a clear, global hierarchical structure that stretched across much of the world” (Chapter 7, 147). Much has changed since then. But if the emphasis on “essential doctrine” is any indication, a certain nostalgia for “a clear, global hierarchical structure” remains.

    Living in Love and Faith represents genuine progress in the Church of England. But if the goal is to create the conditions for a more just and equitable commonwealth, then it is not enough to change the church’s essential doctrines. The church needs to rethink its adherence to the essence itself.

  • Love Came Down at Christmas – For Some

    by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford; his book Sex and the Church: a History, is scheduled for publication in Autumn 2024

    Picture credit: Barry Jones

    Western society’s acceptance of homosexuality as one accepted variant in social relationships has been a breathtakingly fast process in comparison with most societal changes: it has been contained within my still not excessively venerable lifetime. Not surprisingly, the transformation has left some folk behind, for a variety of reasons, particularly those Christians for whom it disturbs particular views of biblical or ecclesiastical authority. It is easy for those who have got beyond such preoccupations to mock or belittle them, without realising the unexpressed depths of such negative feelings. Often that is because we (and they) do not know enough about the Christian past and what it contains. Here is one little story about the history of the Christian West and its homophobia.

    ‘Homosexuality’ is a very recently-coined word, the invention of a mid-nineteenth German/Hungarian journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny to describe what he regarded as a medically-defined behavioural disorder (another such disorder he named ‘heterosexuality’). While Kertbeny’s science now looks, well, mid-nineteenth century, his coinages have persisted to our own time when other nineteenth-century attempted word-inventions have fallen by the wayside; they have become central to some of the most bitterly-fought disputes in Christian Churches.

    Previously, the main Western Latin word for a variety of unusual sexual activities, some of which were between people of the same sex, was ‘sodomy’, a medieval coinage with an Old Testament reference. The word sodomia was popularised in the eleventh century by the reforming monk Peter Damian in his polemic ‘Book of Gomorrah’ (Liber Gomorrhianus). It was an inescapably negative theological term, on the analogy of the older Latin word blasphemia; thus Peter paired ‘sodomy’ with the sin of denying God, in the process ‘thinning and condensing’ the wrongdoing of the ill-fated biblical city of Sodom from malpractices that were originally much more various.

    Ivo Bishop of Chartres, Damian’s contemporary and the major influence on Western Christian canon law in his time, evolved the concept of ‘sins against nature’, in which same-sex acts were ‘always unlawful and beyond doubt more shameful than to sin by a natural use in fornication and adultery’; at least fornication and adultery were not active obstacles to the continuation of the species. All this marched in step with the developing Western Christian doctrine that marriage must necessarily involve the potential for reproductive sex. Any obstacle to reproduction was ‘against nature’, so the same acts committed between men and women, or solo masturbation, fell into the same category of sodomy.

    Most bizarre and extra-biblical of Western Christian claims about ‘sodomy’ was that the baby Jesus killed all sodomites, simply by being born in Bethlehem; he would not come into a world where there were people doing things ‘against nature’. This story is to be found in a couple of standard texts read or heard by the devout throughout the medieval West, and medieval England in particular. First was the thirteenth-century Latin anthology of saints’ lives by Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine known as The Golden Legend. Second was the Festial, a fourteenth-century compilation of vernacular sermons for English parish priests to use throughout the liturgical year, by an Augustinian Canon John Mirk, who drew much of his material from de Voragine. They cited authorities from the Early Church for their malevolent fable – Jerome and Augustine of Hippo – which is good evidence that it started life in learned and clerical circles before moving out to instruct the wider public.

    Distorting a remark in a sermon attributed to Augustine of Hippo, de Voragine and those echoing him claimed that at the birth of Christ all the ‘sodomites’ in the world had suddenly died, as committing ‘sins against kind’ [nature]. Christ delayed entering the world till they had all gone. Yet evidently this mass Christmas extinction proved not to be permanent, needing continuing vigilance from all right-thinking people. As I have explored the history of sex, gender and the family over two millennia of Christian history, I have noticed how casually medieval Westerners would allude to the Christmas sodomite massacre in writing about other spiritual matters. Moreover, the story has not been forgotten. The more unpleasant corners of the Internet persist in gleefully reminding the right-thinking of medieval Christ’s view of sodomy by repeating the tale, though anachronistically relating it to that nineteenth-century word ‘homosexuals’. I will not dignify such Internet sites by naming them, but if you want to try it for yourself, have a go at Googling ‘Christmas all sodomites died’.

    This is what modern Christians are up against as we struggle to come to a balanced view of how to deal with developments in sexuality over the last three hundred years: a background of fear and hatred based on clerical paranoia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. We can do better than that, surely? Or we may have to order a new set of Christmas card designs.

     

    Further reading: M.D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997), from whom comes that useful phrase ‘thinning and condensing’. For the original texts: R.W. Granger (ed. and tr.), Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: readings on the saints (Princeton NJ, 2012), legend no. 6. The Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ), citing Jerome as well as Augustine; S. Powell (ed.), John Mirk’s Festial (Early English Text Society 334-35, 2009, 2011), sermon no. 6, Nativity of Christ, citing Augustine.

     

  • Giving Up Sex? What Macrina Tells Us About Choosing Celibacy

    by Professor Morwenna Ludlow, a historian, theologian and priest, specialising in historical theology. She is Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Exeter and Canon Theologian at Exeter Cathedral

    On 19 July, Anglicans remember Macrina and Gregory of Nyssa. Their family story reminds us of the richness and complexity of early Christian practices of marriage and celibacy. Gregory’s biography of his sister Macrina tells that she was engaged in her early teens. When her fiancé died before they could be married, Macrina promptly declared herself a ‘widow’ and dedicated her life to celibacy—first on her own, but eventually turning her whole household into a community for celibate women. This community included her mother Emmelia who, we are told, would have preferred to be a nun herself but agreed to the marriage arranged for her. She had ten children. Macrina was the eldest; the second child, Basil of Caesarea, lived for a while as a celibate in a small community of men in the grounds of the family estate. Basil later founded an important monastery at Caesarea (where he was Bishop) and his monastic “Rule” was an important influence on both eastern and western monasticism (via Cassian and Benedict). Macrina and Basil’s younger brother Gregory married, but was a widower by the time he was elected Bishop of Nyssa. He was supportive of his siblings’ monastic projects and several of his writings address the spiritual graces and challenges of a life of voluntary celibacy.

    Why do I think that we need to reflect on celibacy now? First, because it was celibacy, not marriage, that was counter-cultural in the early church. An arranged marriage was the way those with property ensured its orderly transfer to the next generation. Aristocratic, wealthy or middling families (whether Christian or not) married their daughters off at the age of around 12 to 14. The marriages of Christians were frequently blessed by a priest, but a Christian marriage service was very slow to emerge, especially in the west. To judge from grumpy sermons on the subject, Christians’ weddings would have been difficult to distinguish from others’. We have many stories of Christian women and men rejecting their families’ expectations to marry, instead taking up a life of celibacy dedicated to prayer and service of God. Those who chose to reject marriage in this way could easily paint themselves as taking up a Christian stance against their society—even if it was a society in which most people were Christian. Their decision to choose celibacy was frequently met with incomprehension and suspicion, not least because it often diverted wealth away from influential families to the church.

    Secondly, this decision in favour of a life of celibacy was not understood narrowly as ‘giving up sex’. Voluntarily celibate men and women saw themselves as following a calling to dedicate their whole lives to God. Whether they pursued this alone, in small groups or a larger community, they were dedicated to a life ordered by regular prayer and the singing of the psalms. Their lives were marked by simplicity in food and dress. For Macrina, this certainly meant giving up the comforts of her aristocratic upbringing. For the orphans she took into her community, or the homeless men who were trained in Basil ’s monastery, it meant a more stable life and a better diet. Many monks and nuns took up a life of regular work as well as prayer, working either for their community (growing vegetables, making clothes and so on) or serving the poor and sick who came to them.

    To be clear, there was a very strong strain of early church theology which was suspicious of the body, fearful of sexual desire and keen on the strict preservation of sexual purity (especially for women). But this was never the whole story and many monks and nuns were sexually experienced. Some were widows/widowers. Some married couples individually joined celibate communities after producing ‘an heir and a spare’. Very many people were sexually active outside marriage and some of these later turned to voluntary celibacy. Augustine of Hippo wrote about his concubine and son with great affection. This was not a period of his life which he repudiated in any straightforward sense; his relationship was even condoned by his pious Christian mother until such a time as she had found him a suitably aristocratic wife.

    Thirdly, and most importantly, this kind of celibate life was voluntary. Holy men and women were praised for their choice—a choice often made against the wishes of their families and friends. Macrina is a good example of this. It is true that these men and women often felt their calling as a kind of compulsion. Many, like Augustine, undertook it after deep and long struggles. Those called to ministry today might recognise that grappling in response to a calling. In time, celibacy was expected of priests and bishops (in the west) and bishops (in the east). But even if celibacy was experienced as a challenging call imposed by God and connected with a call to ministry, it was never required by the church of certain sets of people simply because of the way they were born. Indeed, there is clear evidence of rules designed to prevent certain people being pressurised into celibacy. Families were not to send a young girl off to a nunnery against her will. Husbands or wives could leave a marriage to pursue a life of celibacy, but only with the agreement of their spouse; if they did leave their marriage, they could not force their husband or wife to join a community of celibates too. This is not of course to say that these rules weren’t broken. The hierarchical society meant that women and slaves were vulnerable to cooption (and there were rules forbidding slaves to join communities without their masters’ permission). But the point is that the Christian doctrine of celibacy clearly taught that it was a voluntary dedication of one’s whole self and one’s whole life to God and a rejection of society’s pressure to accumulate wealth, improve one’s status and pass both down to the next generation.

    So was this just a fourth-century development in response to the coming together of Christianity and the Roman Empire? Ordered patterns of voluntary celibacy clearly predate Constantine. The earliest texts of Christianity witness to two kinds of leaders: the settled hosts of ‘house churches’ and others, like Paul and the disciples who travelled with Jesus, who were itinerant preachers and teachers. These wandering apostles were probably the first Christian voluntary celibates. Out of their practice grew more formalised traditions, like the wandering pairs of celibate men and women in the Syriac tradition (some scholars argue that very early narratives like the Acts of Paul and Thecla preserve a folk memory of this). In other words, the earliest evidence of consistent forms of Christian voluntary celibacy come from outside, or on the fringes of, the Roman Empire, well before the Empire was Christianised.

    A common Protestant narrative sees the Constantinian period as beginning all kinds of decline in the church and the Protestant Reformation did indeed criticise the corruption of monastic institutions and reverse the expectation of priestly celibacy. But those following Protestant tradition today have to grapple with the fact that Paul declared that it was ‘well’ for the unmarried and widows to remain unmarried as he was and that voluntary celibacy was one ‘particular gift’ among others (1 Cor. 7:7-8, 25). Early Christians reflected deeply on Scripture when teaching about voluntary celibacy. Works like Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity are heavily indebted to 1 Cor. 7, advocating integrity in whatever life is chosen. Arguably, the early church’s favouring of celibacy is more Pauline and more biblical than the Reformation’s declaration that celibacy and marriage were of equal value. In any case, early Christian celibates constantly expressed their calling in biblical terms, most vividly the idea that celibacy was a marriage with the heavenly bridegroom: just as each Christian was held to be the uniquely-loved adoptive son and heir of God through baptism, so each voluntary celibate—whether a man or woman—became the uniquely loved bride of Christ. They expressed this relationship using imagery from the Song of Songs, the parable of the ten bridesmaids (Matthew 25:1-13) and other New Testament texts (e.g. Matt. 9:15/Mk 2:19/Luke 5:34; John 3:29; 2 Cor. 11:2-4; Eph. 5). In other words, the biblical use of marriage as a symbol for salvation was not just used to validate earthly marriage; it was also—and I would argue was more emphatically and regularly used—as a model for the relationship of each celibate to their heavenly spouse.

    Early forms of Christian celibacy were varied. They were adapted to suit individual settings and cultural contexts. But they were united by a strong sense of a voluntary, permanent setting aside of one’s Iife for God, a commitment which was symbolised for women and men as a wife’s devotion to her heavenly husband. Just as marriage was based in both Jewish and Roman law on consent, celibacy was grounded on a voluntary commitment.

    Those modern Christians who demand celibacy for same sex couples may think they are defending the Christian doctrine of marriage. In fact, they are ignoring the doctrine of celibacy. Their position is unchristian, it is unbiblical, and it is unkind.

     

    Sources/further reading
    Brock, Sebastian P and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, eds., Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, paperback (Berkeley (CA); Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1998).
    Brock, Sebastian, The Luminous Eye.  The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Cistercian Studies Series 124 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992).
    Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
    Clark, Gillian. Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Life-Styles. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).
    Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
    Ludlow, Morwenna. The Early Church. (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009).