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Tag: change

  • Essential Doctrines, Essential Hierarchies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Collateral Damage: How Unjust Treatment of LGBTQIA+ People Harms the Church

    by Ruth Harley, curate in the Watling Valley Ecumenical Partnership

    All names and some details have been changed to protect the identity of those whose stories are told in this article.

    Let me tell you about Mary. She’s a woman in her 80s, widowed several years ago. She has come faithfully to church every Sunday for her entire life. She organises the flower rota, and volunteers at the parent and toddler group. She makes the tea, and notices when the tea towels need washing. She comes to the Lent course and makes thoughtful contributions, and apologises that she can no longer help stack the chairs afterwards. She has many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and loves to talk about them. In short, Mary is a very ordinary Anglican. She is the sort of person without whom the church simply wouldn’t function, the sort of person who is part of the backbone of the C of E. She is also the sort of person who seems a million miles removed from LLF, General Synod, and conversations about sexuality and relationships. But she isn’t.

    When my partner and I got engaged, 7 years ago, Mary was among the first and most enthusiastic to congratulate me. “Oh, that’s wonderful!” she said, “Do you have a date for the wedding? And can I do the flowers? Please?” She had, naturally enough, assumed that we would get married in church. And so I had to gently break it to her that not only could we, as a lesbian couple, not get married in the church which Mary and I both loved and served, but also that for clergy marrying a same-sex partner at all was not an option. “But I do believe it will change,” I said. Mary looked me in the eye, and said, “But I won’t be here to see it.” It was the first time I cried about not being able to marry the woman I love.

    I think of Mary whenever people say of the conversation around the place of LGBTQIA+ people in the church: “But that’s not relevant here.” Usually they’re talking about a very ordinary parish church, typically middle-of-the-road with a predominantly older congregation: a congregation full of people like Mary. And I want to tell them – sometimes I do tell them – they’re wrong. It is relevant to Mary, and all the many faithful Anglicans like her, in ways which go far beyond flower arranging.

    Mary and I had many conversations after her initial shock at learning that the church she loved wouldn’t allow the people she loved to marry. Her dismay went far beyond the realisation that she would never do the flowers for our wedding. It was a profoundly destabilising realisation for her: the church to which she had given so much, which had been such a bedrock of her life, such a place of encounter with God, was not what she thought it was. She went on arranging the flowers, reading stories to the toddlers and washing the tea towels, praying each morning and evening and attending church each week, but something fundamental had shifted. The church which she had believed to be a place of abundant love and affirmation – a reflection of God’s unending love for all people – had revealed itself to be… not that.

    And it’s not just Mary, of course. There’s Brian, who invited his friend at work to something at church, and was shocked when his friend asked: “Will it be OK for me to come, as a gay man?” Brian had never considered that question before, but he suddenly realised he wasn’t sure of the answer. There’s Iris, who talks so proudly about her grandson George, but when she participated in her deanery’s LLF course (wondering what all the fuss was about) the couple next to her said quite casually “of course, being gay’s a sin” and she didn’t know how to tell them they were talking about her George. There’s Jean and Steve who struggled to support their daughter through the breakdown of her marriage, and weren’t sure what response they would get if they asked their vicar or their friends at church to pray for their daughter and daughter-in-law. So they kept quiet and struggled on alone. And there are so many more stories I could tell.

    There are people like Mary, Brian, Iris, Jean and Steve in every congregation. There is no part of the church which is untouched by how we treat LGBTQIA+ folks, either directly or indirectly. It is right, of course, that our conversations should centre the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people, who are most directly harmed by the church’s current policies and practices. But we shouldn’t forget the ‘ripple effect’ that harm has on others too. And nobody in church leadership should be claiming that it “isn’t relevant” in their context. It will be. It might just be that the Marys in your congregation don’t feel able to share their stories.

    That ‘ripple effect’ of harm to people who seem far beyond the scope of the questions raised by LLF should not come as a surprise. As Paul says: “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Corinthians 12.26). The church’s unjust and unloving treatment of LGBTQIA+ people is not only a cause of pain for those of us most closely affected, it is painful and damaging to the whole body. For someone like Mary, that pain is not only vicarious – the pain she feels because she see that I am treated unjustly – it is also the pain of realising that the body of which she is a part is damaged in ways she had not previously seen. Unjust treatment of LGBTQIA+ people damages the whole church, the whole body of Christ. It distorts the image of God which we present to the world. It is not just an issue for us and our allies, but for the whole church.

    Paul goes on, of course, to say: “if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it”. There will come a time when our suffering turns to rejoicing. When and how is still unclear, but that is the direction in which the Spirit is surely moving the church, however painfully slowly. I do still believe what I told Mary: that change will come, that my beloved and I will marry. But Mary won’t be there to do the flowers.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • 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.