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  • Marriage and the Bible: It’s Complicated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • When Doctrine Meets Dinosaurs

    by Revd David Runcorn, a convenor of the Inclusive Evangelicals network

    An edited version of the keynote address given at the recent ‘Radical Love: being an inclusive evangelical’ conference, hosted by the churches of St James and Emmanuel, Didsbury, Manchester, September 2024.

     

    It began on the beach. Two children sifting the shoreline for shells and fossils to sell – everything helps for a family always on the edge of poverty. That day they stumble on something extraordinary. Buried in the sand is the large, fossilised skull of a creature with huge eyes, powerful jaws and dozens of sharp teeth. It had fallen from the cliffs above. The boy leaves. His twelve year old sister begins a long search for the rest of the fossil in the cliffs. At last she uncovers it. It was seventeen feet long. The local newspaper called it a crocodile, but it was clear this was a creature that no one had ever seen before. It was eventually named Ichthyosaurus (‘fish lizard’), a marine reptile that we now know lived around 200 million years ago. It caused a sensation far and wide. Even the Madras Courier reported it.

    The year is 1812. This is Lyme Bay, Dorset. The girl’s name was Mary Anning. It was the first of a series of discoveries she made. She became a widely sought out, self-taught, expert on fossils and palaeontology, though the public credit was routinely claimed by men. In March, over 200 years later, on International Women’s Day, the Royal Mail produced stamps to commemorate her – only slightly slower in arriving, I observe, than first class post these days.

    Though fossil finds were not new, the nineteenth century discoveries triggered the development of the first properly scientific theories to explain them. They asked wholly new questions about the world. Worryingly, for Christians of that time the answers appeared to contradict what the bible was thought to teach.

    Previous centuries had all contained discoveries that overturned inherited beliefs and understandings. In 1492 Columbus simply sailed off the edge of the known maps of his day. Europe then had no idea of the true size of the planet or even that any land existed south of the equator. The impact of the stories of new worlds he returned with was immense. It was one of the triggers for the imaginative transformation that was The Renaissance. The response was exploratory, adventurous, outward looking.

    Other findings met with fierce opposition though. In the 1600’s when the scientist and astronomer Galileo challenged the ‘orthodox’ belief that the sun and stars revolved around the earth he was excommunicated for contradicting the Bible and the teachings of the church. He spent the latter part of his life under house arrest.

    Now, nineteenth century Britain found itself faced with discoveries that triggered a similar mix of excitement, anxiety, and often fierce opposition by the Christian world. Those unearthing these ‘impossible monsters’ (as local Dorset novelist and clergyman, Charles Kingsley, called them) quickly learned to be very cautious about where they shared their findings. Once under suspicion the consequences could be dire. Patrons withdrew funding. Publishers were threatened with prison. Teaching careers were terminated. Charles Darwin is one of the best known in that era, sailing on the Beagle in 1831 and publishing the Origin of the Species in 1859. But he kept his most controversial theories hidden in a secret diary for twenty years.

    Why was there such resistance? We look back rather baffled, for what they were uncovering has long since become so much common knowledge.

    It centres on what it means to be biblical.

    Nineteenth century Britain was a devoutly Christian nation. The Bible was the authority at its foundations. All claims to human understanding and knowledge must conform to the holy texts and be judged by them.

    Anning’s discovery was problematic because her findings appeared to contradict the creation stories in Genesis, which were believed to be literal accounts.

    Genesis chapter one clearly states that God separated land from water on day three. Creatures were not created until day five. So what is a marine mammal doing on dry land at all? And why is it deep under the ground and not lying on the surface?

    Furthermore, these creatures were no longer in existence. But did not God tell Noah to bring two of every kind into the ark to survive the flood (and marine mammals would have been untroubled by water anyway). Extinction was a hitherto unknown possibility. The very idea seemed to be a blasphemous denial of God’s creating work and the Biblical record.

    The Genesis account states that God made all creatures ‘according to their kinds’. This was understood to mean each species was distinct and fixed. The emerging theories of transmutation or evolution of species – particularly of primates into humans – shocked faithful believers.

    One further factor was the belief about the age of the earth. In 1650 Archbishop Ussher had published his life’s work using the bible record to date creation back to its very beginning. His conclusion was that world began on the night of October 22nd/23rd, 4004 BC. The King James Bible versions began to incorporated Ussher’s chronology into the margins alongside the bible text. This chronology became part of ‘orthodox’ belief everywhere. To challenge it was to question biblical revelation itself and attack the very faith of the church.

    Here was society and church facing amazing new discoveries about the world but with an understanding of the scripture texts that meant the emerging conclusions  had to be resisted as attacks on the Bible and Christian civilisation as a whole. One of Charles Darwin’s most public supporters was nicknamed the ‘devil’s disciple’.

    Faced with the evidence of these discoveries nineteenth century believers reacted in different ways. Philip Gosse was a leading naturalist in his day. Darwin consulted him. He agreed that the visible evidence pointed to evolutionary processes and a world of great age. But, for him, the bible was a higher authority. He believed it taught that God made the world complete, in a moment, but with all the appearance of age – such as rock strata, tree rings and even a navel for Adam. He decided God must be testing our faith by making it look otherwise.

    Others felt they could no longer believe the bible in the light of what they were uncovering. Surely the bible was wrong? What they were rejecting though was not the bible so much as a certain way of reading it – perhaps the only one on offer to them. This may have contributed to Darwin’s personal loss of faith. Only very slowly and unevenly did the necessary discussions begin about whether the bible was ever actually doing history, and pronouncing factually, on these issues in the way so long believed. But by time he died in 1882, the agnostic, Charles Darwin, was granted a final resting place in Westminster Abbey, just around the corner from Archbishop Ussher. Four thousand years is now four thousand million years and counting.

    I find here a parable for faith and church today, facing new questions of its own around issues of human identity, relationships and belonging. The lessons to be learned are very similar. So are the consequences of resisting them.

    The Church of England regularly affirms its mission as being to ‘proclaim afresh in each generation’. This is not simply finding ever new ways of communicating inherited beliefs, though. That is where the nineteenth century church was stuck.  Faith must engage with the challenges of fresh questions and discoveries around us. Unless we are willing to do this it we will end up trapped like our Victorian forebears. The questioning is mutual.

    So what happens with doctrine means dinosaurs? Or to put it another way, how does the Christian church, in any age, in every tradition and expression within it, avoid such defensiveness, using the bible to barricade faith, rather than be trustingly and adventurously open to the new?

    For St Paul biblical faith was always something unfinished and incomplete. ‘Now we see in part’, said Paul – partially, imperfectly. ‘Now we see dimly’, he continued – obscurely (1Cor 13.9-12). Biblical faith does not yet see all this clearly or in its completeness. It never has. Being biblical involves a trusting not knowing. Christian faith is forward looking. There is always more to learn, to discover. This means the unsettling process of allowing the inherited boundaries of faith and understanding to be tested and challenged afresh. Christians need to be very careful about claiming certainty when it comes to the bible text.

    The Living in Love and Faith project reflected this in its quite new way of exploring faith and understanding. It replaced the blocks of theological knowing, of inherited faith and its outworkings, with an 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’. (1)

    Being biblical requires the work of ‘double listening’.  

    The great evangelical teacher John Stott constantly urged this. What we need, he said, are Christian minds that are humbly “shaped by the truths of historic, biblical Christianity and also fully immersed in the realities of the contemporary world.” (2). They must meet and talk to each other and be willing to learn from each other. Neither can say of the other, `I have no need of you’.

    We have long had a developing understanding of scripture, in fact. The process of re-visiting previously unquestioned biblical convictions in the light of new questions, is not unfamiliar to us. Often fiercely resisted at first, on the basis of what ‘the bible says’, the list includes creation/evolution, cosmology, science, biology, race, women and men, and divorce and re-marriage.

    • if we don’t call divorced and remarried people adulterers and stone them.
    • if we do not expect women to be silent in church and to learn theology from their husbands at home.
    • if we borrow and lend money on interest.
    • if disabled people are not excluded from worship or ministry.
    • if we think slavery is evil.
    • if we use artificial contraception and make love without intending to conceive life …

    we have already moved significantly beyond what the bible teaches, even commands – and never revokes. Not denying divine revelation, but asking afresh what kind of revelation it is. Not denying its authority, but discerning the nature of its authority, and therefore how it speaks and guides us into the new challenges we are encountering. Each challenge requiring the faithful to revisit their understanding of scripture.

    The revered evangelical theologian, I Howard Marshall urged the need to move beyond scripture, that is, beyond the immediate surface reading of the texts. He knew there were risks involved in this, but he was clear the greater risk was being misled by only reading the Bible in an ancient time warp and refusing to go beyond the letter of scripture (3). When this happens, faith becomes inflexible and fossilized. The nineteenth church offers an example of this. Our twenty-first century church is facing similar challenges as we explore the holy mystery of human identity and belonging.

    Being biblical requires us to read the bible responsibly.

    Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes there are 613 commands in the Torah but ancient Hebrew had no word for ‘obey’. Modern Hebrew had to create a word for absolute obedience. The Hebrew words shema and lishmoa express a call to hear, listen, attend, understand. ‘Hear O Israel’. Sacks suggests, therefore, that God seeks something more from us than just obedience in the face of the commands – more than just submission and compliance. He seeks our responsibility (4). To discern what ‘following’ and ‘obeying’ means we must first hear, listen, attend and understand. English translations miss this by nearly always translating those words ‘obey’.

    Being biblical means engaging responsibly in careful discussion and dialogue with the text, with God, with our world and with each other – a work of continuing, communal discernment. When the Living in Love and Faith process put story and dialogue at the centre of its approach it could not be more biblical.

    This dialogue is found within scripture itself. For example, the way the wisdom tradition challenges the confident certainties of the dominant Deuteronomic voices – ‘Do good and you will be blessed, do bad and it will go bad’. Excuse me, says Job and others, life is not that simple. Bad things happen to good people and many evil people seem to live a long time with their health and wealth intact! Another example would be the way the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles offer very contrasting and sometimes contradictory assessments on the same era of Israel’s history. A critically discerning conversation or even argument is going on. Whenever the New Testament quotes from or alludes to Old Testament texts they are changed, conceptually or literally, in nearly every case. Jesus reading and preaching from Isaiah at Nazareth is a striking example of this.

    Here is a continuing revelation, in and through the scriptures, under the Lordship of Christ and the compelling of the Spirit, engaged with this emerging world. The scriptures reflect the character of the God who inspired them.  Karen Keen called her book about the inspiration and authority of the bible – ‘The Word of a Humble God’ (5). A humble God speaks a humble word to us.

    ‘The Bible says ….’

    The argument for inclusion and welcome from scripture is an accumulative one. There are no explicit texts and examples on offer. ‘Show me one text’. ‘Give me one example of blessed gay couples in scripture’. There aren’t any. It means on social media and elsewhere we can quickly sound hopelessly vague and attempting to avoid the plain meaning of the text – what ‘the bible says’. ‘Did God say?’  But this is not actually how scripture reveals, teaches and guides.

    To state the obvious – the bible is not a divine encyclopaedia with a text and example for every life question – so if ‘Blessed Gay Couples’ are not found in the index, well, they are obviously not biblical.

    Nor do we literally obey every place in the bible where there are explicit texts and examples. There are no bible texts anywhere condemning slavery, or any condemnation of polygyny, and not one example of a blessed slave-free church in the New Testament. But we would claim our opposition to slavery today is utterly scriptural. There are no examples in the bible of artificial contraception and family planning. There are no stories anywhere in the bible of blessed couples who are divorced and re-married. But in our lifetime the church has believed all this to be consistent with scripture. We have moved beyond the text of scripture believing this to be a faithful, pastoral development of orthodox, biblical doctrine.

    Finally, the church has never been a place where people all believe the same thing – least of all my own evangelical tradition. It has always been a place where there are strong differences and debates going on. It was so in the New Testament where Jew/Gentile divisions run through church life like an unresolved fault line. It was their version of our sexuality debates.

    The christian church is on a journey of understanding, and we are all in different places on the way. In 1997 Richard Hays, published The Moral Vision of the New Testament. He was already a widely respected and influential theologian. The book included a chapter on homosexuality that quickly became the definitive statement for conservative believers about the bible’s opposition to same sex relationships.

    In April this year he announced his understanding had changed and he had written a book explaining why and saying sorry. This sent shock waves through the evangelical world. Within a week two long reviews had appeared explaining why he was wrong. This was quite an achievement in itself because the book was still six months from being published at all. ‘The widening of God’s mercy’ was published last month (6). God’s mercy is always wide but here was a man humbly confessing that on this subject it is wider than he ever knew. We, like Hays, have yet to reach the end of it.

    The challenge to faith in every age is to be open to the new. To walk humbly with our God in this emerging world. For now, we see in part.

     

    It is a journey of understanding in which

    doctrine must meet dinosaurs

    texts must be tested afresh

    certainties must be questioned anew

    where bibles are no longer barricades

     

    It is a journey of faith together,

    from anxiety to adventure,

    beyond entrenchment to transformation,

    from regression to renewal

    from hostility to hospitality

     

    as we explore the ever widening revelation of God’s creating life and love.

     

    It is a biblical journey. This is Orthodox faith. Most gloriously of all, it is where we meet Christ, in the ever-widening community of his radical love.

     

    1. https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/gs-2328-llf-nov-2023.pdf. Annex H p4.
    2. quoted in https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/crucial-reminder-double-listening/
    3. I. Howard Marshall, Beyond the bible – Moving from Scripture to Theology STL. 2004. p78.
    1. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Genesis, the Book of Beginnings, OUP, 2010, p45.
    2. Karen Keen, Eerdmans. 2023.
    3. Richard B Hays. The widening of God’s mercy – Sexuality Within the Biblical Story. Yale. 2024.

     

    David Runcorn is the author of  Love means love – same-sex relationships and the bible (SPCK) and the forthcoming Playing in the dust – a pilgrimage with the creation stories (Canterbury).

     

     

  • How the Church of England Accidentally Abolished The Sermon on the Mount (and Nobody Even Noticed)

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

    We know from LLF (and the ordination of women, and the safeguarding crisis, and countless other examples) that the Church of England, especially in Synod, is very good at pursuing secondary details, to the point of absurdity or worse, and very bad at seeing the bigger picture, very bad at seeing the perspective of the people actually affected, very bad at seeing the perspective of the ordinary faithful lay person in the pew, and very bad indeed at seeing the perspective of the ordinary person walking past outside.

    Reading the Bible from the lectern, during the main Sunday morning service of the week, is something the Church of England really should be able to manage. But somehow, in 1997, the Church of England managed to accidentally abolish The Sermon on the Mount.

    Churches all over the world have been adopting the same universal Sunday lectionary since it was first published as Lectionary for Mass (LFM) in 1969 – because it’s superb, not least in its clarity and simplicity. The main programme for the year runs from 7 January to 26 November, reading through one gospel and a series of epistles each year, on a three-year cycle. An Old Testament reading each Sunday helps illustrate the gospel reading for the day. The main programme pauses for a fifteen-week Easter series from Lent 1 to Trinity Sunday, which includes themed readings through Lent, and after Easter has readings from Acts, Revelation, and more epistles. John is read in sections during the Year of Mark, and during the Easter series. A Christmas series, from Advent Sunday to The Epiphany, completes the programme. The Church of England was late to the party in only adopting this Sunday lectionary in 1997 – long after most of the rest of the Anglican Communion, and the other main denominations in the UK and across the world.

    As more and more denominations adopted what is essentially the same Sunday lectionary, each one enriched it with their own variations and additional options. The “common” in Common Lectionary (1983) and in Revised Common Lectionary (RCL, 1992) means “common” amongst protestants (attempting to bring increasing diversity back together), not “in common” with the catholic original; even so, very few denominations use “pure” RCL as published. But none deviates as far from “pure” RCL as the Church of England. The Church of England tinkered with RCL so much that it actually managed to abolish the Sermon on the Mount.

    Year A of the three year cycle is the year of Matthew. Chapters 3 to 25 are read in sequence on the Sundays from 7 January to 26 November. The Sermon on the Mount is the vital, fundamental context for all that follows in the gospel for the year. As Matthew chapters 5 to 7, it is read on the six Sundays beginning 28 January, known as Sundays 4 to 9 of the main programme, or Sundays 4 to 9 in Ordinary Time, or Sundays 4 to 9 after Epiphany.

    For every possible date of Easter, the Beatitudes are read before Lent intervenes. For every actual date of Easter for the rest of this century, we shall hear the next reading as well: salt and light, the law and the prophets (not abolished but fulfilled), and a call to a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees. And in the next two occurrences of Year A – 2026 and 2029 – we shall also hear the introduction to the great theme, “you have heard it said – but I say to you”: in 2026, and in 2029, there will be three readings from Matthew 5 before Lent.

    But in the Church of England, in 2026, and in 2029, there will be none.

    In fact, there will be no readings at all from Matthew 5 before Lent in the Church of England until 2038 – fourteen years from now.

    And even then, in 2038, the Church of England’s selection will not include the Beatitudes.

    The Beatitudes are not set to be read before Lent in the Church of England, even as an option, ever.

    The Church of England has managed to adopt the principle of reading through Matthew, in sequence, every three years, but almost never with any part of the Sermon on the Mount included in the right place, and absolutely never with the Beatitudes included in the right place.

    For what it’s worth, the Beatitudes are permitted as an alternative in early November, for those who choose to interrupt the systematic reading of the gospel again, for All Saints Sunday – the Beatitudes there, of course, demoted from being a revolutionary challenge to the living at the beginning of the year, to being a sweet eulogy for the departed at the end – and even then only as an option.

    It is a quirk of the LFM original that there is provision for 55 Sundays each year instead of 53 – and most years can only accommodate 52. Every extra option that is added then threatens to squeeze out yet another ‘ordinary’ Sunday. And no church has added more options than the Church of England – which has also made many of them compulsory. They all do violence to the fundamental principles of the universal lectionary, but none more so than those which combine to abolish the Sermon on the Mount. First, the Transfiguration is moved out of Lent, presumably for being insufficiently gloomy, and placed on the last Sunday before Lent instead. Then Creation Sunday (remembered fondly from ASB’s quirky Ninth Sunday before Christmas) is placed, for no particular reason at all, on the Second Sunday before Lent. In the 1990s there was a brief obsession with Candlemas that we daren’t let go, so there goes the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany; or for those who choose not to mark Candlemas in Year A (it is made compulsory only in Year C), we insist again, in Year A, on the Wedding at Cana, even though the Church of England alone has already insisted on having it on slightly different Epiphany Sundays in both Year B and Year C. And that completes the great offence: by squeezing three additional Sundays out of the variable gap between The Epiphany and Lent, for truly ‘secondary’ reasons, the Church of England has abolished the Sermon on the Mount completely until 2038, and the Beatitudes for ever.

    And this is what happens when you don’t keep your eye on the main thing that actually matters, while being distracted by secondary details; when you lose sight of the bigger picture, when you forget the perspective of the ordinary faithful lay person in the pew, when you become distracted by clerical obsessions and forget, however briefly, about the millions of people out there in the rain who need to hear the truth spoken by Jesus of Nazareth on a windy hillside in Palestine: for the sake of secondary details, however worthy, you accidentally abolish the Sermon on the Mount.

    And more than a quarter of a century later, I’m not convinced that anybody has actually noticed.

    2025 is the year of Luke, Year C. Easter is late: there will be eight Sundays – almost two months – between The Epiphany and Lent, presenting an excellent opportunity to enter into the themes of the gospel for the year. Across those eight Sundays, there’s the opportunity to read, in sequence, from Luke chapters 2 to 6, of the prophecy spoken over the infant Christ by Simeon; of the 12-year-old Jesus confounding the teachers in temple; of Jesus reading from Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth, and being rejected there; of the call of the first disciples; and then three readings from the Sermon on The Plain.

    You could look at the various options offered in the Common Worship Principal Service Lectionary – the one that abolished the Sermon on the Mount – and eventually work out that the maximum number of readings permitted from the above selection is just four, and not even in the right order. Alternatively, you could use a little bit of the local discretion that the Church of England surely still allows, and revert instead to the core principles of the universal lectionary. Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, which will still give you the Sermon on the Mount in 2026, and 2029, will also give you that eight-week series from Luke between The Epiphany and Lent in 2025. It’s about being focussed, without secondary distraction, on the task of reading the scriptures from the lectern during the main Sunday morning service of the week. It’s about being in harmony with the global church. It’s about ordinary Christianity, for ordinary churches, on the ordinary Sundays of the year.

    In a church which can’t do LLF, or safeguarding, or the ordination of women, properly, we might at least use a Sunday lectionary that “prioritises the systematic reading of the gospels and epistles for the year, reducing interruptions and omissions to a minimum” – and doesn’t accidentally abolish the Sermon on the Mount.

    The SSRA lectionary and all associated resources are available free online at ssra.uk

  • Celibacy and Conscience

    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

    The question of how Christians understand celibacy has not gone away. Recent debates over Living and Love and Faith (LLF) in the July 2024 sessions of the General Synod of the Church of England show that. But this time, the issue of celibacy seemed to me to be tied to the question of the protection of conscience. It’s this connection I want to unpick here.

    In our General Synod debates, I continue to be moved by the testimonies of those who speak about their conviction that they are called to a life of celibacy. (These have, so far as I recall, all been speakers who have also stated they are sexually attracted to those of the same sex.[1] I would love also to hear testimony about the vocation of celibacy from heterosexual Christians!) I do not think that I am in position to question their sense of vocation. In good conscience, that is not my call to make. As a heterosexual woman in a long, happy and fulfilling marriage, which began with a ceremony in my parish church, there is especially an imperative on me not to be too quick in my judgment.

    Where I baulk, however, is when I hear some claim that their conscience should determine not just their own, but other people’s behaviour. There are two related ideas here. First, there is the idea that a conscientious restraint on one person’s part should be universalised to a demand for restraint by all who find themselves in a similar position – in this case, the idea that all lesbian and gay Christians should commit to celibacy. But, as I argued in an earlier blog, the church’s consistent, scriptural and traditional teaching (i.e. doctrine) of celibacy is that it should be a freely willed response to God’s call, not a demand placed on all. Second, there is the idea – put forward notably by the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) – that the consciences of those who hold the conservative position should be protected by the provision of “a permanent structural rearrangement resulting in visible differentiation” from the rest of the Church of England.[2]

    But this second idea seems to me to involve the unexamined movement between several related positions:

    (a) In good conscience, person x believes that they can neither have an active sexual relationship outside heterosexual marriage, nor take positive steps which would condone or welcome such relationships (e.g. like offering the Prayers of Love and Faith for same-sex couples);

    (b) The conscience of x is troubled by those in their church who do have an active sexual relationship outside heterosexual marriage, or who take positive steps which would condone or welcome such relationships;

    (c) Person x has the right for their conscience to be protected from being troubled in this way.

    Points (a) and (b) are statements of fact; point (c) makes an ethical demand. In brief, I certainly think that the church and its members should acknowledge (a) by ensuring that no-one has to act against their conscience with respect either to their own intimate relationships or in offering prayers of blessing for others (and the current proposals are emphatic on this point). I also think that it would be wise for those like me to recognise the depth of feeling surrounding point (b): I may disagree with the conservative position, but I need to acknowledge the way these questions are bound up with profound aspects of faith like the interpretation of Scripture and understandings of holiness. I can acknowledge the depth of hurt, while considering its cause to rest on a misunderstanding of the gospel. Nevertheless, it is possible to recognise point (b), without conceding the demand in (c). The question is: precisely what purchase should troubled consciences have on the rest of the church? 

    It might be helpful here to reflect briefly on the role of conscience in theological ethics.[3] Broadly speaking, the Reformed tradition has been cautious about the role of conscience seen as a natural faculty because conscience, like other faculties, has been impaired by the fall. My conscience is subject to distortion by pride, selfishness and lack of attention to the other, especially those others who are vulnerable. At best my conscience can skew my moral judgment; far worse, it can become an instrument of ‘godless self-justification’ as I put my ‘personal innocence’ above my responsibility for my neighbour.[4] For this reason, theologians in the Reformed tradition see conscience not so much as a natural faculty but as that point of encounter between God and myself in the time and place I find myself in, in the world. Conscience then becomes the recognition, through grace, of God’s demand on me – or, to put it another way, the discernment of God’s call to be who God wants me to be right here and right now. This call might be addressed to me as an individual or to a community – the church.

    But what if we disagree? This question is sharp because the possession of a troubled conscience is not unique to those holding the conservative position on LLF. My conscience is deeply troubled by the fact that I am not just part of, but I am a priest in a church which I believe not to be including LGBTQIA+ people as I believe it ought. My conscience is troubled by the church’s treatment of people who are very dear to me. My conscience is troubled by the fact that, as a married heterosexual priest, I am part of a system which treats me better than it treats many LGBTQIA+ priests.

    So where might we look to resolve our disagreement on conscience? Reference is sometimes made by conservative evangelicals to Romans 14:14-15 and 1 Corinthians 8, where Paul insists that the conscience of ‘weaker’ believers to be protected. I am not sure that reference to this passage is helpful for our current disagreements. The issue in Romans and 1 Corinthians concerns beliefs circulating about the effects of eating certain kinds of food: some believers thought that eating food sacrificed to idols (or food which might be thought to have been sacrificed to idols) would imperil their salvation. But Paul is clear that he thinks that these ‘weaker brethren’ are wrong in their belief: ‘Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “no idol in the world really exists” and that “there is no God but one.” …. “It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled’ (1 Cor. 8:4-7). So any use of these passages to urge the protection of one’s position as a weaker sibling is implicitly acknowledging that one might be wrong, whilst also placing a demand on oneself to protect the conscience of those whom one believes to be wrong. Secondly, these passages are about what kinds of food are permissible, which is very different from questions of how to treat our LGBTQIA+ sisters and brothers. Thirdly, Paul begins Romans 14 with an absolutely explicit call for mutual compassion: ‘Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat, for God has welcomed them.’ Fourthly, Paul seems to be addressing issues in local communities, not making pronouncements for the whole church. In essence, the current proposals from the House of Bishops already allow for our ‘weaker’ siblings, in that they clearly allow priests and communities who do not wish to use the Prayers of Love and Faith not to use them.

    Where else might we look to learn about conscience? Because the term ‘conscience’ (suneid?sis) does not appear in the gospels we are perhaps in danger of leaving Jesus out of our accounts. If conscience is understood in God’s call to me, perhaps I should reflect on the way in which Jesus’ words frequently jolt his hearers’ out of their comfortable assumptions about their own virtue (the rich young man, those bringing the woman accused of adultery) or highlight the ever-present danger of hypocrisy and pride (the Sermon on the Mount). (I deliberately use ‘I’ here, for the danger of self-righteousness lies on both ‘sides’ of the debate.) Such encounters explain why theologians in the Reformed tradition write of conscience not as a natural faculty, but as the discernment of God’s demand on us. Conscience in this sense does not come ready-packaged; rather ‘individual moral judgement requires moulding by the believing community and its educative, pastoral, sacramental, disciplinary and therapeutic practices’.[5] This includes our reading and reflection on Scripture and a prayerful deepening of our understanding of the world. On this understanding, conscience cannot be something to be protected; rather, we are called to expose our consciences – to the gospel, to Jesus’ uncomfortable call on us, and to the messy realities of our complicated world.

    By contrast, I am hearing calls from conservative evangelicals for their consciences to be protected. These calls amount in some cases to the demand to be protected from being in full communion with those who are using PLF or who are in same-sex marriages – as if being in full communion places too great a strain on their conscience. This seems to me to be in danger of treating conscience the wrong way. Far from being the place of encounter with the call of Jesus Christ on my life, this view of conscience seems to treat it as a thing of holiness to be polished and protected. This could be understood in two ways (and I suspect that both are in play). First, conscience is understood as a pure thing to be saved from taint. Underlying this are ideas of impurity, which so often creep into Christian discussions of sex – especially when it’s women or LGBTQIA+ people whose sexual activity we are discussing. Does the idea of protecting one’s conscience (‘keeping one’s conscience clean’) presume that in fact all sexual activity, and especially sexual pleasure, is dirty – which is why it must be contained in (heterosexual) marriage and, if at all possible, redeemed by the birth of children? Second, conscience is understood as a fortress to be defended from attack, ‘that inmost citadel of the personality, where the self is… king of its own castle, uncorrupted by the compromises and pressures of the crowd’.[6] On this understanding, the exposure of the self to the ‘crowd’ imperils its very identity.

    Both understandings of why the conscience needs to be protected – a holy thing to be preserved from taint, a fortress to be protected from attack – help explain why feelings are so raw. But neither seem to me to reflect a good theological understanding of conscience as that point of encounter between God and myself. If attention to conscience means responding to Christ’s call on us, I don’t think that God wants us to focus on preserving our holiness – at least, not holiness understood in this narrow sense of protection from taint. God’s holiness does not withdraw from the reality of the world but is immersed in it. Neither do I believe that we need to preserve our identity from attack, for our identity has a sure foundation in our baptism in Jesus Christ.

    God’s call to holiness, it seems to me, calls on us to step into that crowd outside the castle walls, that place where Jesus walked and talked and prayed and ate. Sometimes that means we have to eat with people who disagree with us on issues so painful that our hearts are raw. But if my conscience is found in my encounter with Christ, it is formed precisely in my encounter with all those whom he came to love.

     

    Notes

    [1] I am trying to echo the language they themselves have used in recognition that, while many are happy to identify as LGBTQIA+, for others this is difficult.

    [2] See https://ceec.info/keepingfaith/: “What does the CEEC suggest as a way forward? CEEC remains committed to the highest degree of unity possible within the truth and doctrine of the Church of England. However, we believe that the current proposals will prevent us from walking together and promote disunity, even schism. It is clear that the strength of feeling amongst parties with differing convictions indicates that we have to find a better way forward. CEEC will continue to advocate a settlement, without theological compromise, based on a permanent structural rearrangement resulting in visible differentiation.”

    [3] I approach this topic from the perspective of the Reformed tradition, because that is where the most vocal defenders of the conservative position seem to be speaking from. The issue is treated somewhat differently by ethicists in other traditions. The authors I cite on the topic of conscience should not be assumed to agree with my position on sexual ethics.

    [4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 278, 276.

    [5] John Webster, ‘God and Conscience’, in The Doctrine of God and Theological Ethics, ed. Alan J. Torrance and Michael Banner (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2006), 152.

    [6] Henry Chadwick, Some Reflections on Conscience: Greek, Jewish and Christian (London: Council of Christians and Jews, 1968), p. 5, quoted by Webster, 152.

  • Power Games: Redemptive Violence or Redemptive Love?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

  • ‘That Which He Has Not Assumed Is Not Redeemed’: Jesus, Sexuality and GS2328

    by John Seymour, a priest in the Diocese of London who recently completed doctoral studies in practical theology and education at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society

    Jesus of Nazareth: fully human, fully God?

    I want to start with what, for many of us, may be an uncomfortable question. It’s one which we gloss over in our affirmations of the full humanity of Jesus. Did he have something which we would today call a sexuality? It may feel awkward or irreligious to imagine the God-man Jesus getting a spontaneous erection, masturbating for pleasure or relief, or indulging a sexual fantasy, but it is difficult to make sense of some of his encounters without Jesus being a human being with a sexuality.

    Many women had a strong affection for him, such that they provided for his material needs (Luke 8.1-3). He was able to understand the power dynamics at work in the life of the woman caught in adultery (John 8.2-11). Taken in context, it is interesting to ponder what kind of metaphor might be at work in the Samaritan woman’s retort, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep” (John 4.11). It is difficult for me at least not to suppose a sexual dimension to the intimacy of the beloved disciple reclining on Jesus’ breast (John 13.23) and the only disciple for whom Jesus cried was Lazarus: “see how he loved him!” (John 11.35).

    If human sexuality is to be redeemed then, on a Patristic understanding, Christ must have had a human sexuality. The quotation which starts this blog is taken from a letter from Gregory of Nazianzus to Cledonius, a priest he had oversight of. Gregory is addressing the Apollinarian controversy, and the suggestion that rather than having his own intellect, Jesus’ mind was replaced by the Godhead or Logos. Gregory’s humour is incisive:

    “If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed, but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.” (Epistle 101)

    That which is united to the Godhead is saved. In the sacrament of baptism, the believer is joined to Christ (Galatians 3.27; Romans 6.3-6), body, mind, soul (to use Gregory’s term), and with these, his / her / their sexuality, whatever that sexuality may be (and it seems to me that the spectrum represented by asexuality is included here). Sexuality is, then, a salvation issue. If our sexuality is not assumed it is not healed; and if we are not joined with Christ in every part of our humanity, we are not saved.

    The red lines of GS2328

    What does this say to our current debates? In the press conference of 20 January 2023 ahead of February’s synod, the Archbishop of York said, “We’re saying this is a good place to be where we can live together with our disagreements and fully acknowledge and welcome into our church LGBTQI+ people.” The implication was that the salvation issue had been addressed for LGBTQIA+ people: with the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF), the Church of England had created a sufficiently generous theological space in which we could enjoy the fulness of life as Christians that comes with integration of body, mind, soul and sexuality within the church’s understanding of what it means to be human.

    However, with the release of GS2328 and the events that led to that paper, the Church of England now really is not in a “good place” in relation to the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people. In its theology and the practical inferences drawn from it, the House of Bishops is communicating the same homophobic bias which led to the defeat of GS2055 in February 2017. It is painful to see that the investment made by many in the LLF process over six years, one that was costly, sacrificial, and often altruistically motivated, has borne so little fruit: the Church of England has moved backward in its inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people.

    Let me explain. I didn’t believe that the draft Prayers of Love and Faith presented in February 2023 provided for the welcome of LGB people, as the prayers did not affirm same-sex relationships through offering a blessing of a marriage or civil partnership, or indeed, of the substance of a relationship for a same sex couple.

    The ‘goods’ GS2328 claims it wishes to affirm arise from a motivation which derives at least in part from sexual attraction. Rather than accept and affirm this, GS2328 attempts to dissect sexual attraction from an innate, abstract sexuality by separating same-sex sex from the goods of same-sex relationships. There is continuity here with the tendency to affirm Jesus’ humanity whilst glossing over his sexuality as something real: GS2328 wants to recognise the goods of this category of relationship while erasing the actual part that human sexuality plays in producing them. In doing so, GS2328 simply betrays a homophobic theology. Any prayer which takes as its starting point separation of being human from being sexual communicates a commitment that is at odds with belief in the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ and is consequently hostile to LGB identity and to LGBTQIA+ people.

    That theological ‘red line’ drawn between being human and having a sexuality has now changed and moved. Arguably, in the February 2023 proposals, the red line was brought to synod intentionally blurred, with the prospect of that blurred line being affirmed at the November 2023 synod. Examples of this blurring include synod in February choosing (contra Higton 1987) not to assert that sexual intimacy could only take place in marriage, and not to assert that relationships outside of marriage could not be blessed (both of these were the subject of amendments that failed). Despite this, what has returned to synod in November with GS2328 is a well-defined red line. Whatever else that line might be, it is a dividing line between being human and being sexual. The prospect now is of that line becoming fixed in 2025. The line makes a false division between what is assumed by Christ and what is not.

    The Canon B2 route and a choice between homophobic theologies

    In the press release relating to the papers for synod, bishop Sarah is quoted as saying, “a majority of people would like to see a change in the Church of England’s approach to same-sex relationships. Based on what the Church has told us, no change is not an option.” Yet the last-minute adoption of a Canon B2 process for approval of PLF as a stand-alone service has proven to be enabling of a minority position. As a result of the intervention in the House of Bishops’ process, there are two outcomes that are possible in 2025:

    • The least negative for LGBTQIA+ people is that the Canon B2 process, with reference to the dioceses and then a vote in Synod requiring a two-thirds majority in each house, affirms the proposed PLF and underlying rationale. With this, a homophobic theology (articulated in the Pastoral Guidance and reflected in PLF) would be formally adopted by the CofE as the basis for ‘affirming’ the relationships of LGB people.
    • The other possibility that opens up – and this seems quite likely as an outcome with the current composition of synod – is that, whatever the dioceses say, PLF are felt to have significant doctrinal implications which synod is not minded to affirm. With this, not only the stand-alone PLF but also the PLF prayers due to be commended for use in existing services would fall, as being incompatible with Church of England doctrine.

    Whilst inadequate, the proposals of February 2023 offered a route to an incarnational faith which is saving for LGBTQIA+ people. In contrast, GS2328 offers options between theologies for LGBTQIA+ people, both of which deny the gospel of God incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.

    It seems to me that GS2328 therefore heralds something of a pastoral crisis, as it tells me and my LGBTQIA+ siblings that the Church of England is not a safe place for us and that we are not welcome. It is also the occasion of a crisis in what the church is willing to transmit by way of salvation. With the decision to pursue a Canon B2 route, synod is set to determine whether or not LGBTQIA+ identities and lives may be joined with Christ’s and with this, to make a judgement on whether or not we may be saved. With the current politics of the Church of England, it looks like we are going to be damned to hell.

    Perhaps as they gaze over that precipice, the bishops might reconsider how closely they are willing to draw the line around who is saved and who is not. Synod has said that the bishops are not constrained by a doctrinal issue. In light of that, they need our prayers as they weigh their decision, as their own souls may be at risk in their judgment.

  • Doing A New Thing? The Ordination of Women and Same-Sex Love

    by Evan McWilliams; brought up in conservative evangelical non-conformity, he is now Associate Vicar at St Mary Abbots in Kensington

    I was thirty-two years old and a deacon when it first occurred to me that the creation story in Genesis might be a myth. Raised on a heady mixture of evangelical piety and Reformed biblical interpretation, the idea that the biblical text might be something other, or indeed something more, than merely a pure historical account took a while to form itself in my mind. Similarly, the thought that the well-known phrase ‘for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife’ should be that of a later commentator and not of a contemporaneous narrator took some time to percolate.

    English evangelicals by and large seem unflustered by the mythological character of the creation narrative, and their embracing of the ordination of women suggests a certain freedom in interpreting the nature of the male/female relationship in Genesis where, for someone of my background, woman could only ever be ‘helpmeet’ to her dominant, if complementary, husband.

    Likewise, the epistolary injunctions that women should ‘remain silent’, ‘not exercise authority over a man’, and that church leaders should be ‘husband of one wife’ and, therefore, implicitly male, have been taken with a pinch of salt. These hermeneutical moves have opened the way to an impressive range of female evangelical clergy, respected writers, and authorities of all kinds in the Church of England. The blessing of their presence is readily apparent.

    For this reason, I find it strange that so many mainstream evangelicals remain opposed to the acceptance of same-sex relationships and the prospect of same-sex marriage in church. The necessary work of reinterpretation and re-application has already been done. Genesis’s transformation from a historical text, ostensibly proclaiming an immutable cosmic order of masterful husband and subservient-though-cherished ‘bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh’, to a wise human origin story outlining the complexity of lived relationships with which we are all familiar is now a commonplace. It is rare to hear of the wedding in which a blushing bride promises ‘to love, cherish, and obey’ her husband, despite what St Paul might have written to the church at Ephesus.

    To one raised to conceive of theology as systematic in nature and the scriptures as containing a discernible and cohesive structure for human flourishing, this feels like something of a fudge. Either one is obedient to the clear words of scripture or one is not. But perhaps something more significant has happened here than betrayal of an inherited theological system. Perhaps evangelical theology and practice has discovered what was there all along, hidden beneath the surface of societally-constructed, and historically contingent, relationships between men and women.

    That a new thing to us may well be what the Holy Spirit of God intended all along is what the Church of England proclaimed when it finally freed women to make an equal contribution to the life of the church as ordained priests in 1994. This being so, I find something missing in the evangelical response to the prospect of same-sex marriage. What I find missing is not so much theological consistency, but a willingness to consider that the God who does new things might be doing so again. And this in the face of profound personal and collective evidence that the word of God is something greater than the sum total of the words on the page.

    If one can discover, woven through the scriptural language of male headship, the fundamental equality of women in both the home and the Church, can it really be that difficult to discern the potential goodness of lasting same-sex support, love, and affection? Whatever St Paul may have said about his age’s conception of homosexual activity, might we find in, around, and under his words a greater spiritual word able to shape and transform what was conceived of as abusive and imbalanced into something gentle and edifying?

    Now that the helper for Adam has become his equal and, increasingly often in the Church of England, his bishop, is it entirely unreasonable to hope that those who find themselves inexorably drawn to love someone of the same gender might at last find public solace in the words of the Prayer Book Marriage Service which proudly proclaims one central purpose of marriage to be the ‘mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity’?

    It was not easy for many in the Church of England to accept a new interpretation of familiar texts. And some still do not do so. But the lesson we have all learned is that to stand still and do nothing when the ground is shifting under our feet risks confusion, disunity, and falling behind the plan that God has for the Church. Furthermore, refusing to acknowledge that change of a theological nature has already occurred, and to pretend that we have not begun to read the scriptures in a different way, comes across as simply churlish when what is asked for by so many faithful Christians is simply what has already been given to others.

    It is laudable to want to preserve inviolate the institutions one has inherited, and the Institutional Church is truly a mystery not lightly altered. But to make so great a change as ordaining women to its highest offices and then to refuse to use the same theological processes to enable same-sex love to flourish within the bounds of Holy Matrimony feels not only hypocritical but deeply ungenerous.

  • Two-Edged Scripture: Taking the Bible Seriously

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

     

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

     

    Here are 5 bits from the Bible:

    In childbirth the woman will have pain (Genesis 3.16)

    Male and female created he them (Genesis 1.27)

    God hates shrimp (Leviticus 11.9-12)

    Homosexuality is an abomination (Leviticus 18.22)

    The she-bears (2 Kings 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

  • Being Syrophoenician: Eating the Crumbs?

    by the Very Revd Dr Mandy Ford, Dean of Bristol

    There is a terrible irony for gay clergy preaching this Sunday; for those of us observing the Third Sunday of Epiphany, the lectionary invites us to reflect on the presence of Jesus at a wedding in Cana. It is a story of God’s generosity, and a foretaste of the banquet when earth and heaven are united at the end of time – a feast to which both Jews and Gentiles will be welcome. I can see the gospel in the gospel, the good news in the good news, but I’m struggling to see this gospel at work in the Church of England just at the moment.

    Having read the House of Bishop’s proposed Prayers of Love and Faith, and the legal advice that shaped them, I feel like the Syrophoenician woman, whose entreaty for help Jesus turned away with the words “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. It is rare occasion when we are taken aback by the violence of the language used by Jesus.

    Yet, despite being horribly insulted, the woman stood her ground and reproached him with self-deprecating humour, “even the dogs may eat the children’s crumbs”.

    So here we are, a crowd of Syrophoenicians, standing at the door of the wedding feast, asking for a share and being thrown the crumbs.

    And for the avoidance of doubt, these really are crumbs. While, should these prayers pass through General Synod and gain acceptance, I will be using them as creatively as I can to bless couples and celebrate their permanent, faithful and committed relationships, I will do so in the knowledge that these prayers are a very poor substitute for the sacramental, covenantal, liturgical resources offered by the Church of England for those who can enter what is now distinguished as “holy matrimony”.

    There will be many people who throw the crumbs back in the face of those who offer them and walk away. I’m not going to judge them.

    But I am going to reluctantly stand at the door and refuse to leave.

    The courage of the Syrophoenician woman and her challenge to Jesus was enough to make him repent and change his mind. She was no longer a “bitch”, a gentile “other”, to whom the doors of the Kingdom were closed, she was a beloved child of God, fully human and deserving of the flourishing that God longs to give all his children.

    There is a very real danger that some of us will read the legal advice shared with General Synod, and feel less than human. It is difficult not to do this when you are apparently being denied access to one of God’s gifts in creation, a gift given to enable us to flourish in our full humanity.

    But as a baptised child of God, I refuse to have my humanity denied by the institution I serve. I continue to believe that Jesus was as present on the day of my civil partnership as he is at every wedding to which he is invited. And I find myself, unexpectedly, strengthened in the conviction that the full sacramental riches of marriage should be generously shared with all who seek it from a Church which still wants to convince itself that it serves the whole of England.

    The story of the Syrophoenician woman is an enacted parable of the love of God which is expansive enough to include the once despised Gentiles. In responding to her request, Jesus is signposting the future of a community of great diversity who will all be invited to share in the heavenly wedding feast.

    Institutionally, we have not reached the place where we can say this unequivocally. Pragmatically, some terrible sophistry has been used in order to gather up enough crumbs to throw to the dogs. Pastorally, it will be challenging to encourage gay couples to come to church for blessing when we long to offer so much more. Politically the space in which, as a gay person I am standing, feels more toxic than at almost any time I can remember.

    So, I’m praying for the faith, the resilience and the humour of the Syrophoenician woman because Syrophoenician lives matter.

  • EvangelicAlly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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