Andrew Goddard writes: The full interview of Archbishop Justin by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart for their The Rest is Politics: Leading podcast was released on Monday including the Archbishop’s answer on “gay sex” which was released (in a very slightly different edit) on TikTok over a week in advance and which I have argued was seriously misleading. Particularly troubling in that was the claim that
Where we’ve come to is to say that all sexual activity should be within a committed relationship and whether it’s straight or gay.
On Wednesday, Lambeth Palace issued a statement relating to that part of the interview. What follows (with sections linked to a more fully documented argument here, which includes full quotations from the relevant sources) notes four concerning elements in that statement and considers two analogous thought-experiments. It then explores the important positive step these developments represent in terms of truth-telling but the potentially damaging effect this has in relation to trust and the PLF process. Before those details, however, it is important briefly to recall why this matters.
Why does this matter? (PDF)
There are at least three reasons why the Archbishop’s answer and this subsequent statement clarifying but not amending it are so significant.
- The Archbishop has redefined the Christian sexual ethic.
- In so doing he has expressed a view contrary to the teaching of the Church of England and wider historic, ecumenical consensus understood to derive from Scripture and gone back on his own repeated statements affirming that teaching in the past.
- He has thereby undermined the apparent legal basis for the prayers and the claim that though indicative of a departure from the church’s teaching he and other bishops can competently judge whether or not this departure is in any essential matter.
The Lambeth Palace Statement: Four Concerns (PDF)
The first concern relates to the Statement’s claim that the position he commended as set out above is held by “many other bishops” but that in the interview he “was giving a personal view”. This misrepresents the interview. It was much stronger than that:
- There was no disclaimer that this was simply “a personal view”.
- There was in fact an explicit claim that “the bishops, by a majority” have “come to….say that all sexual activity should be within a committed relationship and whether it’s straight or gay”.
- This clearly implied this was now the stance of the bishops and therefore presumably the Church of England.
While the Statement’s clarification that “His answer does not indicate a changing of teaching from the House of Bishops” is welcome, it is regrettable that there is no apology for this serious misrepresentation and no clarification as to the content of the “teaching from the House of Bishops” or sign of respect for it.
The second concern relates to the focus being given to the Archbishop’s “personal view”. If we are “paying attention to power” then it is likely that the stated view of the Archbishop of Canterbury has significant weight and presumed to have a degree of authority because of his position. This is particularly the case if it is not explicitly qualified as simply a personal view, claims to reflect that of the other Archbishop and “many other bishops” or even “a majority” of bishops, and no reference is made to the actual teaching of the church which takes a different view.
This leads to the third concern. The ordination vows are emphatic on the importance of doctrine for at least two practical reasons:
- The danger of bishops (and indeed clergy generally) simply stating their own “personal views” and effectively passing these off as having wider authority; and
- The damage done to the church of God when its leaders believe they can unilaterally revise the church’s teaching or state their own views as if they were the church’s teaching,
They read:
- Bishops: Will you teach the doctrine of Christ as the Church of England has received it, will you refute error (Titus 1:9) and will you hand on entire the faith that is entrusted to you?
- Priests: Will you faithfully minister the doctrine and sacraments of Christ as the Church of England has received them, so that the people committed to your charge may be defended against error and flourish in the faith?
- Deacons: Do you believe the doctrine of the Christian faith as the Church of England has received it, and in your ministry will you expound and teach it?
To each of these all those ordained to these offices will have replied “By the help of God, I will” or “I believe it and will so do”.
These vows are particularly important in relation to a bishop as “it appertains to his office to teach and to uphold sound and wholesome doctrine, and to banish and drive away all erroneous and strange opinions” (Canon C18.1). It is noteworthy given the language of “the doctrine of Christ” in the vows that the Canon relating to marriage (Canon B30) states that what the Church of England affirms about marriage is “according to our Lord’s teaching” and that this includes that marriage is “for the hallowing and right direction of the natural instincts and affections”.
In the light of this a fourth and final concern is the extraordinary fact the Archbishop felt it necessary to state that those who “hold a traditional view” (presumably even if they also seek to expound and teach it, hand it on entire, and defend it against error) have “a full and undoubted place in the Church of England” whose teaching they, in contrast to him, continue to believe.
Two Thought-Experiments (PDF)
In order to try to minimise the influence of different responses on the specific question of sexual ethics it might be helpful to consider two analogous areas which raise questions about the place of personal views in relation to corporate convictions and about the teaching of the church.
In the world of politics, imagine a Cabinet minister in an interview on an area known to be of high political controversy claimed the support of “a majority of” (or even simply “many”) colleagues for a view which was clearly contrary to the agreed stance of the government. It is not hard to imagine what Alastair Campbell’s reaction would be or how he would advise the Prime Minister to respond. The minister’s defence that this was simply “a personal view”, particularly if not connected to a recognition of, and respect for, the collective position, would be unlikely to be viewed as an adequate clarification and resolution of the matter.
In relation to another issue, what if Archbishop Justin (like his predecessor George Carey) found that he now supported assisted suicide because, to quote the Lambeth Statement, “his thinking has evolved over the years through much prayer and theological reflection…and he now holds this view sincerely”? Would it then be acceptable to answer a question on assisted suicide in the manner in which he answered that on “gay sex” or to issue something like the Lambeth Palace Statement explaining it?
The Lambeth Palace Statement: Truth and Trust (PDF)
What marks out the interview and Lambeth Palace Statement is apparent adherence to the Pastoral Principle of “speak into silence” and a decision that the Archbishop needs to be “honest that his thinking has evolved over the years”. Sadly, though, there is no explanation as to “why now?” and, more seriously – as with the House of Bishops more widely in relation to PLF – no attempt to answer the question of “what is the biblical or theological rationale for this change?”. The nearest answer is the statement that his new view
reflects his commitment to continuing to welcome, love and include LGBTQ+ people more fully in the life of the Church
This echoes the recently published book by Richard Hays and Christopher Hays (The Widening of God’s Mercy) which might explain the timing of the statement. However, there is no explanation why in order “to welcome, love and include LGBTQ+ people more fully in the life of the Church” it is either right or necessary to rewrite the church’s sexual ethic.
This line of argument also risks implying that the church’s teaching, and those who believe it and seek to order their lives and the life of the church in accordance with it, are inherently unable to (or at least severely limited in their ability to) “welcome, love and include LGBTQ+ people”. This might be an area where, in order to find a way forward, there needs to be some even more painful truth-telling by those seeking change about how they view church teaching.
This “honesty”, is something that must surely be welcomed despite all the problems with the Archbishop’s interview and statement. The danger is that it unless it is extended further and factored into the ongoing PLF/LLF process, it will simply make that process even more difficult.
For many people, this truth-telling is also sadly and seriously trust-eroding. It confirms suspicions that the last two years of episcopal discernment has involved—despite the valiant efforts of a good number of bishops (for example in their statement on marriage and dissent from decisions of the House of Bishops just over a year ago)—the two Archbishops and “many other bishops” who no longer believe the church’s teaching pushing forward changes that undermine and depart from that teaching, with weak legal and theological arguments, while claiming not to change that teaching, even reissuing it.
What the Archbishop’s comments have done is uncover a fundamental root of the problem with the whole process. This explains why so many believe that what has been engineered is a dishonest de facto change of doctrine without following the proper due process of doctrinal discernment in relation to our liturgy. It was, it seems, thought that somehow this was necessary and justifiable, as a means to the end of preserving our unity as much as possible given our disagreements. In fact, as is now becoming increasingly clear, it has, predictably, done the opposite as further evidenced by the latest letter this week from The Alliance.
In finding a way forward it may be helpful to return to the 2017 Campbell interview where, in relation to the need to reconcile “Ugandan bishops and the liberals who believe something very different”, the Archbishop uttered the—for him—surprising words:
It is irreconcilable.
The whole approach thus far with PLF has appeared to assume that, within the Church of England, this is not the case. There have been
- multiple attempts to “square the circle”,
- rather than face our differences honestly and theologically,
- constantly changing positions and explanations, and
- until now a certain unclarity about the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
This is one major reason why the whole process has proved particularly difficult and painful and eroded so much trust.
Although for me the recent interview and now the Lambeth Palace Statement are deeply disappointing, this dark cloud might have the proverbial silver lining if there is more truth-telling going forward. At the heart of this is that the bishops need to do what they have currently seemingly failed to do: honestly address the conflict between the official teaching of the church and the view which the Archbishops and many other bishops “hold…sincerely”. There are at least two competing and, yes, “irreconcilable” visions for holiness and faithful Christian discipleship. These differences stem largely from different approaches to Scripture which God has given us “to call the whole world into holiness” (LLF book, p 275).
The current PLF approach has been for the bishops:
- to restate the received teaching as still the church’s teaching;
- but for individual bishops and now the Archbishop of Canterbury publicly to dissent from this and offer an alternative teaching; and
- for the House and College to drive forward changes which practically everyone who believes the received teaching cannot accept;
- and have previously been held to be incompatible with current law and doctrine;
- through processes which bypass the proper procedures to reach a common mind on liturgical developments.
The new “honesty” of the Archbishop now places us in a situation where:
- either that approach is continued at the risk of those who hold the church’s teaching losing whatever remains of their trust in, and respect for, the church’s senior leaders who do not hold that teaching;
- or there is more honesty and truth-telling about where we stand and a way found to re-order our common life to recognise the implications of
- many bishops having found that their “thinking has evolved over the years through much prayer and theological reflection – particularly through the Living in Love and Faith process”
- but the teaching of the church not having evolved in the same way
- and many in the church being unable to accept episcopal ministry from those who teach their “personal view” and order the church on the basis of that rather than on the church’s teaching in line with their ordination vows.
Revd Dr Andrew Goddard is Assistant Minister, St James the Less, Pimlico, Tutor in Christian Ethics, Westminster Theological Centre (WTC) and Tutor in Ethics at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. He is a member of the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) and was a member of the Co-Ordinating Group of LLF and the 2023 subgroup looking at Pastoral Guidance.
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His views have evolved over many years through much prayer and theological reflection?
?
1. Why would that matter unless he were a leading thinker in this area?
2. By purest coincidence (?) these ‘views’ not only ended up following the graph of cultural conformity to the highly specific (and eccentric) time and culture to which the Archbishop belongs?
3 And, further, also assuming the distinctive (but again eccentric) thought frameworks and specific vocabulary, which alone could even implant such eventualities in anyone’s mind in the first place.
4 The denomination having diverted multiple millions of pounds and hours over countless years from more profitable use, when anyone could see it was a case of pressure groups and impossible circle squaring, we then get this statement with no analysis and no footnoting.
It is just awful. Indescribable.
The idea that the Holy Spirit is miraculously leading the Church to agree with culture at just the time when the culture has radically changed and sexualised is entirely implausible.
David Cameron’s idea that Christians should ‘get with the programme’ was utterly chilling:
(a) a programme does not gain any merit from being the current programme, but only from its morality and coherence etc.;
(b) sounds like ‘might is right’ – imposition without rationale by those in power;
(c) whoever said there was such a thing as ‘the programme’?
(d) it is therefore interesting that he senses that there is. it must be there in order for him to sense it. What is it therefore that he is sensing? Probably the inexorable critical mass of people wanting the chance to indulge their selfish desires?
(e) This kind of imposed uniformity is Maoist.
(f) Not least in that it sidelines the very ones who should LEAST be sidelined – the academics and those who can provide a rationale.
(g) It is bullying. It is basically saying you have to belong to gang A rather than gang B, without the slightest reason being provided for that.
(h) Which is all the worse in the light of the fact that those whom they wish to pressgang are precisely those who are too honest and too intelligent to hold a position without being able to justify it.
(i) So they ‘must’ submit to those who merely sense a word on the streets.
(j) I.e. those who are not even strong enough to resist the pull of a perceived majority.
(k) and are, irrationally, neophiliacs.
(l) And if there is indeed a word on the streets, spiritually where does that come from?
What has David Cameron to do with the present case?
My point is that the present case is worse. David Cameron said – submit to the tide of history (or to what ‘WE’ say the tide of history is, which bears a remarkable resemblance to, of all things, self indulgence). The Christian equivalent here is ‘submit to the new thing that the Spirit is doing’. My point is that the latter is clearly the worse of the two, because it makes the Spirit in ‘our’ image and a self indulgent image at that. It is knowingly saying something that it cannot possibly know (the mind of the Spirit). It is treating the Spirit as a puppet.
And – finally – what is the difference between this and the sin against the HS which is centrally the misrepresentation of the Holy Spirit, moreover a misrepresentation that depicts him as the opposite of what he is?
(This deals with the cliche of the HS doing a new thing in our day, not with any words said by the Archbishop[s], who doubtless did not refer to the HS at all in what was said.)
It is, of course, the world that should get with the Christian program, not vice-versa.
Before the 2010 general election David Cameron said he had no plans for gay marriage, and his manifesto was silent about it. In 2011 as Prime Minister he threatened to withhold aid from countries that did not grant gay rights. After leaving Downing Street he wrote in his memoir ‘For the Record’ that overseeing State recognition of gay marriage was one of his proudest acts. Evidently he believes that the State outranks God.
To be fair to Cameron it was the Tory-Liberal coalition government he ended up with that pushed through same sex marriage as there was no Conservative majority in the 2010 election. Most Tory MPs opposed same sex marriage in the parliamentary vote on it yet the vast majority of LD and Labour MPs supported it and their combined votes with backing from a minority of Tories were enough to pass it
Cameron chose what would be put to Parliament, T1.
Anton
As I understand it David Cameron’s wife has a family member who is gay and that’s the reason he got same sex marriage legalized.
It’s the case that people who have a friend or family member who is gay are more likely to support rights for gay people than those who don’t have any gay people amongst those they care about
Peter,
If you are talking about Samantha Cameron’s brother Rob Sheffield, he has been a transvestite but split up late last year with the mother of his child.
Anton
Unlikely because same sex marriage doesn’t really benefit trans people
The mind of the Spirit can be known. That the Spirit has changed mind is simultaneously (a) a priori unlikely, and (b) something that you would want to ask how people could know.
The culture has radically sexualised? Divorce rates are down, people are waiting longer to have sex, having less sex, less prostitution, less tolerance of cheating, and we live in the age of the MeToo movement. The culture is more open about sex, and more willing to talk about it, but that doesn’t mean there’s more sex or it’s more hedonistic.
Perhaps divorce rates are down because you can only divorce if you are married, and many people just shack up without getting married in the present century.
Anton, I think that is correct – divorce rates are down because fewer people are getting married, while ever more children are born out of wedlock.
I suspect also that some people ending one relationship to start another don’t bother getting divorced either.
I think AJB is probably wrong to say there is less tolerance of cheating. More people are indifferent, especially about people in public life like MPs ‘changing partners’. There is no scandal about these things today.
I wonder how much the change in divorce rates reflects the increasing proportion of Muslims in the UK. I don’t think they have a lot of divorce, and the girls at least, are less likely to be having sex before marriage. I may be wrong of course, but it’s just something I’ve wondered.
One could argue the very existence of a MeToo movement shows how sexualised society has become, with it clearly being common place for women to be sexually harassed on a daily basis.
MeToo typically just argues for the normal Christian way of doing things as a remedy, as though that way of doing things had never been heard of before.
People do make things roundabout and complicated for themelves.
If you think no one was sexually harassed before the 1960s I have a bridge to sell you.
“Why would that matter unless he were a leading thinker in this area?”
He is a leading thinker in this area. He’s the Archbishop of Canterbury and therefore the primus inter pares of the CofE and rhe Anglican Communion which is where this thinking is actually happening.
We know you disagree with his thinking and we know exactly why Christopher so there is no need to restate your reasons. We know too, from what you have said here before that you believe homosexual activity should be illegal in this country. You have said that such people need to be reprogrammed until they find such activity too disgusting to contemplate any longer. Others here have implicitly stated their support for the death penalty to be imposed for those who engage in homosexual activity.
You pretend – I think – to be a leading thinker on the matter yourself. But you doubt that the archbishop is….
Oh right, so you become a leading thinker when you become Archbishop of Canterbury. Just like those 18th century names whose theology we still discuss intensively today such as William Wake, John Potter, Thomas Herring, Matthew Hutton, Thomas Secker and Frederick Cornwallis.
There may be some honesty now but it appears to be partial. It does not admit of the processes which Andrew Goddard has forensically brought into the light, cumulatively, in his many articles, and continues.
There seems to be unacknowledged, underlying subscription to Open/Process Theology as with Richard B Hays.
It is important to discern the foundational theology Bible scholars, based on…The Whole Counsel of God: both systematic and whole canon biblical, set alongside the much neglected, Attributes of the Triune Person of God. (The primacy of the Doctrine of God from which the doctrine of humanity then comes.
Like so much in Christianity today we invert, developing the doctrine of God, from our doctrine of humanity).
Excellent as always. It would be interesting to read a review of The Widening of God’s Mercy, I hope you’re planning to write one.
Yes, there will be a review posted next week.
Here is an earlier review by Rebeca McLaughlin.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/widening-gods-mercy/
I think that on the same site there is a discussion between RMc and someone whose name I forget.
Thanks Andrew; clear, lucid and right on the money, as usual.
If Welby had any honesty then he would resign and say that his beliefs are no longer consistent with the doctrine of the Church of England which itself derives from holy scripture. Instead, he seeks to change doctrine to match his beliefs. This puts me in mind of John 8:44.
Should the Bishops and clergy who voted to approve women’s ordination (and thereby changed doctrine on that point) have resigned once they realised they believed in women’s ordination (which by definition they must have done before they voted in the change)?
That can be discussed after they have repented of it. In the present case, Welby hasn’t repented of his counterscriptural views – quite the opposite.
God extends his mercy to any believer in his Son who is repentant of their sins. So we come straight back to what actions are sinful and which are not. You do not hundreds of pages and thousands of words to decide that. The Bible is clear. This is about its authority.
Well done Andrew Goddard for providing the scriptural tarbaby to which Welby is becoming ever more stuck.
Anton
The trouble with applying Romans 1 to my generation of gay men is that all (well maybe a few exceptions possibly) were not idolators as small children. We grew up with exclusive attractions to men which schools, the church, the media and the politicians were all saying was just about the worst thing you could possibly be. Of course we all tried not to be gay!
Romans 1 starts with a rejection of God and ends with “homosexuality” (but nothing like our experience of homosexuality). Our lives near started with being homosexual and many of us spent decades sincerely trying to repent from something we didn’t want in the first place. Unfortunately the church’s attitudes to us have meant many have left the church (or been thrown out!) and some have lost their faith.
Is this the theology of a loving God who randomly punishes 8, 10, 13 year old boys with lifelong and potentially eternal damnation? I think that theology is must be wrong because it makes God out to be horrendously abusive.
It’s not to do with that.
It’s to do with the fact that the creation excites awe that points to the creator. To wallow in the creation itself (of which idols are the personifications), as though no awe or humility or modesty were required, and the creation was to be taken for granted, was no more than our right, and after all we can choose between this universe and several others round the corner anyway, is not true to reality. Hence the logical connection between the three themes (a) the fact that creator is manifestly apparent to all from creation, (b) acknowledging this with reverence, (c) idolatry as the name of where b fails to happen.
In fact in gay/camp subculture and comedy, triviality (the most inappropriate stance the face of this awesome universe) is to the fore; reverence by contrast is notable by its absence. Not that it appears in much other comedy either.
The passage is not saying that rebellion is always bowing down to wood and stone – though it is bowing down to those realities which were formerly captured in wood and stone (personifications of sex, wine, unbridled power and so on, i.e. pagan gods). It is saying that rebellion is going against what is known to be true: that the world is gratuitous, points beyond itself, and therefore invites reverence.
The fact that reverence has never been more lacking is a clue to where western culture is at. It’s not a coincidence.
for ‘stance the face of’ read ‘stance in the face of…’
Christopher
I’m not sure how you can claim that 30+ years of trying to repent of being gay is “wallowing in the creation itself”?!
Many gay men of my generation spent decades in repentance from a very young age. That’s the complete opposite of the people described in Romans 1
The question, Peter, is whether sexual desire for someone of the same sex is part of how God created humanity, or a consequence of the events described in Genesis 3 and which are propagated as decribed in Romans 5. How could that question be answered?
Anton
That’s a different question to “Is Romans 1 about (the modern category of) gay people?”
What practical difference does it make if homosexuality is part of God’s plan or if it is akin to painful childbirth? People who are gay have to live with it either way
I never mentioned Romans 1. You did. What is your answer to my question: how to answer whether sexual desire for someone of the same sex is part of how God created humanity, or a consequence of the events described in Genesis 3 and which are propagated as described in Romans 5?
Anton
I’m sorry I think I originally replied to the wrong post. The thread structure is not easy to see on my phone
I don’t know if homosexuality as part of human diversity is part of God’s plan or not. I do know that we exist. I can see a benefit to having some non heterosexuals in the population, for example care of children who don’t have surviving heterosexual parents, but that’s a very Darwinian way of thinking.
Nor do I know what the reference to 8-13 year olds is about. That age (or 12 to 13 onwards anyway) is an age of flux, unsettled, and if you are trying to say that anything can be said in a settled way about people of that age, then that runs against what everyone has always known about the unsettledness (by definition) of adolescence and also strongly against the science (Diamond; Savin-Williams and Ream). Of course, the more that society gives them that inaccurate message, the more it will inform people’s thinking, making them confused where they do not need to be.
“That age (or 12 to 13 onwards anyway) is an age of flux, unsettled, and if you are trying to say that anything can be said in a settled way about people of that age, then that runs against what everyone has always known about the unsettledness (by definition) of adolescence”
Yet of course in the cultures into which Jesus was born that is the exact age when young women and men became sexual and got married.
Good thing too. Because not only
(1) is that in tune with biology, but also
(2) people with no immaturity in their surrounds will be mature and of good character at that age, as very many 12 year olds indeed are.
(3) Teenagers did not appear till the 1950s so they are not exactly something that fell from the sky at creation.
(4) If you say to people, there is now going to be an immature period in your life, then guess what will then happen.
(5) These are, or at least ought to be and can be, some of the most productive and positive times in anyone’s life, as the number of top child/teen epics featuring such an age bears witness.
(6) But it is made so difficult by people around pressing the message of (4). The hormone changes are bad enough without being exacerbated by (4).
(7) Things have got worse by people now adding to this and saying that the 20s etc are also a mandated time of irresponsibility before settling down. So people fall in line and are irresponsible. Which suits those who want to maximise their own sexual pool and destroy the smooth development of others’ lives.
(8) Hormones cause trouble but they will cause less trouble in people who are contented/married than in those whose biological function is allowed no outlet and in those whose biological function gets only chaotic outlets.
(9) What you say about Jesus’s cultures specifically is not true at all. Rather it is a truth of 99% of cultures that there have ever been. Ours is highly eccentric.
(10) The happiest path is marrying the girl or boy next door, or similar, as proven by the generation that married up until mid 1900s, with their average combination of happiness and duration in marriage. (Succeeding pattern, not failing pattern.) This allows organic smooth development and blossoming without any disruption or complication. So much easier to be actually one flesh (inseparable) with someone the longer they have been integral to one’s life.
(11) These days we get irrelevant lies about expensive weddings – they are as cheap as you like.
Let me just check I have understood you correctly Christopher.
You think the ideal is that 12 and 13 year olds should marry and have children? And that the West has departed from this ideal?
Presumably these marriages would also be arranged by the families?
And were you mature enough aged 12 or 13 to enter into a marriage and sexual relationship? And ready to be a father?
Not remotely. And of course prospective couples would need to be mutually desirous anyway. But that is because I was brought up in this 1% minority eccentric society and age that thinks it is fine and normal for people to regress massively in maturity level after they are 12, in some cases never to regain their former level. Before any of us realised what was happening, we had already done that, and had been semi derailed.
Arranged by families? That is internationally and historically highly normal, so are you one of those who says that everyone who does not belong to your own highly individual age and culture is backward? Most who say that (present company excepted) are so intelligent they scarcely know much about any other culture or age anyway.
One thing is for sure. Civilised marriages are always marriages of two families as well as of two individuals. And abundantly the richer for it.
A second thing is for sure. Civilised individuals take a pan-family picture and are not out just for themselves.
Together with this we need to be very mindful of any data that says there are ages before which people are physically too immature to marry and physical problems could result. Beginning to mature and maturing fully are two quite different things. (Height increases till 21, brain matures till 25.) And the same applies to an extent mentally, except in that case it is heavily culture-relative.
If people are 25 they are mature in all ways. If they are well brought up, they should not at all worry about getting married considerably earlier than that, but see previous para.
Christopher I think you have been rather general and avoid answering a quite specific question. Let me put it again.
You think the ideal is that 12 and 13 year olds should marry and have children? And that the West has departed from this ideal?
For ‘mature in all ways’, ‘mature in all physical ways’
I already answered this, and you seem to be of the school that thinks the less detail in an answer the better (!) On the contrary, you are 180 degrees wrong. The more detail the better, for then we are being more precise in the answer.
The ideal we have departed from is the smooth maturation of people. The wrong idea (and teenagers are a new phenomenon, by that name) is that people should mature, then become immature later. The idea is a non starter, but it is widely held. So of course we should not have anything to do with that idea.
Those who are 12 or 13 can look forward actively to a lifetime of marriage not of chaos or unplannedness or self indulgence. All that is obvious from Christian principles.
I already said that 12 or 13 is the start of adult maturation not its completion. However, biology (and graphs of desire levels) show us what we are designed for.
You must know that whether the West has departed from something is an historical question. It is not something decided by you or me.
12 or 13 is a time to be marriageable; people get well brought up so that their desires are not awakened too early because they have so much family love anyway; and then they would normally marry at those ages counselled by biology as safe. I do not know exactly when that is, unfortunately. Maybe people should normally marry 18-26 sort of thing?
It is only after that unpacking that we can give the short answer. You had two questions. The first is a no and the second is therefore a non-applicable. But the graphs of marriageability (preparation for eventual marriage) and of physical maturation go hand in hand.
Christopher you seem very confused here. One minute you are saying 12-13 is a marriageable age. Then the next paragraph you are saying 18-26!
I don’t find any of your argument here at all persuasive. It will be interesting to see if others agree with you.
‘Marriageable’ in the sense of being future-spouse-directed in one’s development and decisions. Of course, maturation is maturation for a sexual/marital purpose. As it is a process, so is the preparation for marriage a process. The more integrated the better, so let us call them one and the same process. Then as soon as we reach the age where there are no childbirth-dangers (is that 18-early 20s approx?) that is the time to be ready for marriage, and that readiness is achieved precisely by having prepared for it over this precise period of years. These days it is often not achieved because people are not encouraged to be marriageable and consequently are not. From when should people prepare to be marriageable? Earlier and in an organic way. Because to derail and rerail later is difficult and will rarely be achieved. These days people are so much older and more complicated and more used to individualism when they marry it is obvious that they will gel less easily. Regress.
In Jesus’s society, and in most societies, it is obviously seen as eccentric to dissociate biological development from biological purpose.
Future spouse directed? So not an unsettled age of flux after all?
You are viewing this from a modern cultural perspective. Puberty happens around 12 to 14 years and was classified as reaching adulthood. My father was born in 1910 and went out to work at 13 years old, my mother was born in 1914 and went to work at 14 years old. We now know that the human brain does not reach adulthood until the early 20’s.
The advent of the Pill in the 1960’s was a game changer. Before this girls were much less likely to engage in a sexual relationship before marriage. What has followed has been disastrous for young people as multiple partners has destroyed the marriage bond.
Just an aside – I’d be cautious about assuming our ancestors have all been getting married and sexually active from 13. They knew their biology, and a 13 year old girl getting pregnant is spectacularly dangerous. Whilst there are periods of history where the aristocracy were marrying their daughters (and to a lesser extent their sons) off very young – Middle Ages to 18th century – that did not mean they were having sex. The marriages were about business and security, and consummation could wait. Sarah Cadogan, the future Duchess of Richmond, was married in 1719 at the age of 14: as soon as the wedding was over she was sent back upstairs and her husband was packed off to Europe for 3 years. When Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was found to have consummated her marriage at 13 (i.e. raped by her husband) it was an absolute scandal amongst the English aristocracy of the day (indeed, Henry’s birth prevented her from having any more children).
AJB I think you have been misunderstanding what I have been saying. What I have been saying is that the teenager was only invented in the 1950s. But people were that age before that? So what was invented? Regressing to irresponsibility was invented. And boo to that. That is largely why we see all the unsettledness, because the smoother path to full maturity is mucked up by this way of doing things.
Provided we adopt the majority and sensible path of expecting increased responsibility as one gets older (cf. the ages for bar/bat mitzvah, and for confirmation) then the negatives of teen years can be cut and (with good upbringing) minimised. (Minimised. Can one fully remove the results of raging hormones? Not remotely.) This means that physical maturing is, in an integrated way, a cue to prepare progressively for eventual marriage, and to develop one’s character accordingly.
Christopher
It’s a timeline that’s inconsistent with the events depicted in Romans 1. The inconsistency between real gay people and R1 is evidence that R1 is not about gay people.
I agree some kids are confused about their feelings, but so what? If a 13 year thinks they are gay but realize it’s just confusion then that also doesn’t fit the passage
All adolescents are in flux by definition and therefore to that significant extent they are unsettled. But they are ripe for poaching by predators if they are encouraged to think that their transient desires are somehow the very opposite: fixed identity markers. Which of course was the course of events that the predators plotted all along. Together with also later saying- you have now indulged with someone of the same sex, ergo you are gay. It is all about expanding their own pool.
As for anyone listening to a random person’s thoughts on Romans above that of commentators and qualified, no-one will. Everyone who forsakes the masterpiece of creation as given (of which humanity and human procreation is the very apex) and thinks they can invent an alternative from scratch without showing the slightest awe or reverence for that which already exists and most deserves that awe and reverence – that is a description that applies equally to those whom Paul speaks of and to those who do that today.
As St John Chrysostom wrote in his original homily on Romans 1 – the people being described cannot say they were hindered of legitimate intercourse or that it was from having no means to fulfill their desire. That doesn’t sound like he’s talking about gay people.
AJ
The text itself says the people were in heterosexual relationships before they were given over to lust – the text itself says they are not gay, but social conservatives don’t want to listen.
Geoff, I have read the quotation from Christopher Hays (cited from his article by Rebecca McLaughlin) . In his analysis of Ezekiel 20:25. Hays follows the translation of ESV: “I gave them statutes that were not good.” However, I believe the NIV translation to be more accurate:” I also *gave them over* to statutes that were not good….”.
This tallies with Psalm 81,11and 12 : “But my people would not listen to me; Israel would not submit to me. So I gave them *over* to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices.”
If we translate this into NT terms, I would suggest we look no further than Romans1; to an expression that occurs 3 times. I quote the first occasion (v24): “For this reason (vv 21 – 23) therefore God gave them *up*.”
That makes perfect sense. These are the additions to the written laws of Moses which Jesus complained about in Luke 11:46: “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” The original passage (Ezekiel 20:21-26) explicitly contrasts additional ungodly laws with the original written godly laws of Moses.
Agreed, Colin.
Romans I represents God’s present, (continuous) giving over in judgement.
I recall, at a lecture by Mike Ovey, him confirming that in response to my question.
As it represents idolatry.
But, I may add, this is not mine, but, primarily from people I consider to be reliable guides, across denominations.
More could be written.
and has been on what idolatry is, and its manifestations today.
I’m afraid linguistically that will not work. The verb in Ezekiel 20 is the regular verb ‘give’, and any principled translation must therefore so render it. The verb in Psalm 81, where the sense does seem to be to ‘give over’, is a different one – the one that God would have used had he wished to mean ‘gave over’. One must determine what God said before interpreting what he meant.
Here ‘good’ seems to be expanded by the next phrase, ‘rules which they could not live by’. God was saying that the law had the effect of resulting in abominable behaviour. Paul’s argument in Romans, esp. Rom 7:7ff, is much the same and may have had Ezek 20:25 in mind.
So where in the OT are these evil laws that God supposedly gave to Israel? You’d expect them to be there if He did, wouldn’t you?
Steven R – The fact that you acknowledge that Psalm 81 gives what you see as a “different translation” only highlights that Ezekiel 20 requires an exegesis that is consistent with the mind of God rather than one, which on your terms, in one instance, is rigidly interpreted (‘give’) while the term *good* “seems to be expanded by the next phrase “? A case of the pot calling the kettle black!
Secondly having declaimed that “God was saying [therefore] that The law had the effect of resulting in abominable behaviour” you then proceed to apply the same logic to Romans 7:7 ff? I actually referred to the expression “God gave them up” in Romans 1. If you take time to read vv 18 and following (especially v 20) you will see that here, as with much OT material, the issue was SIN. You have taken the passage from Romans 7 out of the above context!
I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand what you are angrily accusing me of or objecting to.
Sorry Steven if you think I was being angry. Perhaps you also witnessed the “anger” in Anton’s criticism of your arguments . I was simply trying to do the same thing, while at the same time providing biblical input to back up my case. It was not in anger, but a responsive challenge to your criticism of mine!
For the avoidance of any misunderstanding: I was not angry with anybody in this subthread except perhaps Justin Welby.
Here’s a great, brief overviews by Darrin W. Snyder Belousek of this tortuous “debate”:
Changing Minds about Same-Sex Union: A Critical Analysis of The Widening of God’s Mercy by Christopher Hays and Richard Hays
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/10/96228/
The Hay’s, Methodists, I believe, “reread” Scripture and “revision” God’s intention for same sex unions. Their thesis is that “sexual minorities who seek to follow Jesus should be welcomed gladly in the church and offered full access to the means of grace available to all God’s people: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, ordination, and the blessing of covenanted unions, with the same expectations as for heterosexuals.” Essentially, they conclude you either agree with our biblical interpretation and accept our claims – or you must repent from, a “narrow, fearful vision” of God and God’s mercy.
The article is well worth a read as it addresses all the all too familiar arguments now being presented for approving the blessings of same sex relationships and marriage. It demonstrates these lack any substantive theological or exegetical basis.
AmazonUK’s website features a summary of the book and several critical reviews, all worth reading. Based on this material, the root claim is that “God is doing a new thing” (as if he would contradict himself over matters of morality – human nature has not changed!) and the book does not give any exegesis of the relevant scriptures. It is not hard to guess why not.
“God is on a learning curve”… Doesn’t quite have a ring of truth does it?
HJ
The timing also may be of significance. Hays has changed his mind after the Methodist changed, following their change
Having had some experience of Methodism in the UK, supporting a friend through ministry training, one substantial criticism of Methodism, is that it’s theology is thin, and ultimately it is founded on Pelagianism, Arminianism.
British Methodism is very close to disappearing now. It looks like it will go the way of the Swedenborgians.
Ah, blame John Wesley, the greatest Englishman of the last thousand years – the man who almost singlehandedly turned round the lax and cynical amorality of 18th century England!
If you simply do what the New Testament says, you will never get stuck in the Calvinism vs Arminianism debate. Methodism is only slightly ahead of the Church of England in letting secular doctrines into itself – so don’t throw stones – and the reason for this is probably more to do with Methodism’s concentration in the cities (which go secular fastest) than its theology.
I don’t blame Wesley. at all. In my experience Wesley was undermined by preachers, particularly in relation to atonement, though it is acknowledged that his theology was thin.
A book that goes into some historical detail of a controversy played out in Wales is commended by MLJ (which may not ne any commendation to you) The Atonement Controversy by Owen Thomas.
Charles Wesley, certainly knew His God and Ours. And Can it Be, is only one that comes to mind.
I’m no expert in Methodism, but Wesley’s collect book of sermons (which I have) and his diary may come close to providing his driving Theology and evangelism.
His American barren ministry was transformed through contact with the Moravians.
It is well known that he parted ways with former Holy Club fellowish member, George Whitefield over theology.
It seems to me that our Triune God engaged both in extending his Kingdom of God.
But, while I was a member of the Methodist Church starting, Local Preaching, at that time 90’s – early 2020’s the backbone theology was the “Four Alls”. Not sure if that has been extented to 5 Alls. It is at here where I think Methodism jas gone off the raild and in the adage of many a member that it was ‘Born in Song’
There was an distinct evangelical arm of Methodism, which I think remains, but is an outlier within the mainstream.
(Sure the Class – education- system developed in Methodism is recognised by historians as bringing in widespread social change.)
Wesley’s theology was thin? What does that even mean? The Calvin vs Arminius spat concerning which he fell out with Whitefield (who traded in slaves to support his ministry) is an irrelevance. I do disagree with Wesley that the Christian can reach can reach perfection in this life (see 1 John 1:8), but when I have converted as many men as Wesley I might feel able to criticise his person.
After he received the Holy Spirit soon after he twigged that something was missing, following his fear of drowning on a transatlantic ship and seeing the Moravians unafraid, his ministry was transformed. His preaching brought thousands of nominal Christians to Jesus Christ and, in an era of institutional Christianity, his work lies behind the Church of England’s influential evangelical wing in the 19th century. The impetus to abolish slavery, help for the poor in industrialising England, and many missionary movements are all indebted to John Wesley. He abhored slavery.
His brother Charles’s best hymns are magnificent, yes!
Anton,
As set kut in the parameters of my comment, if you don’t know what I meant by thin theology, I don’t think I can or want to press it futher. More information critiquing Wesley’s theology can be found on line.
A friend who was Methodist thhrough sand through and a one-time national Local Preacher’s lead agreed the criticism that there was a paucity of good extant scriptural theological teaching in Methodism.
Where and why did it start to go wrong, to sour.
A key point I made was the substantial dismissal or underming of Wesley by Methodist ministers and Local Preacher and the foundationdal dooctrine of ‘Alls’ which may have morphed into universalism.
Indeed on a course at the Methodist, then well known as Evangelical College, Cliff Colege, a friend and I were dismayed at the leaders dismissal of God’s judgement.
There is a plaque on a building in a market town I know, a tribute to Primitive Methodist Ranters eho met there.
There remain ranters on both sides of the divide forstered in media meeting places.
Geoff: I’m sorry but to criticise someone’s theology using the very general word ‘thin’, and then decline to explain on request, is bordering on slander of a fellow Christian – and one whom I suspect has converted many more than you and I have put together. I am aware of the usual criticism of JW as Arminian and am uninterested in that dispute. I agree with criticisms of JW’s view that some Christians can reach perfection in this life. But I have read the hundred pages or so about Wesley in volume 5 of Nick Needhams’ church history, “2000 Years of Christ’s Power”, so I am not totally ignorant.
Iam talking specifically about John Wesley, not later Methodist leaders – although if you believe that JW’s weaknesses were manifest in later Methodism then please feel free to expand on that theme.
Jim Packer’s opinion was that Wesley was essentially a Calvinist but reacting against people of his time who were ‘hyper-Calvinist’.
Stephen,
That is a distinction which is not known, or rarely made.
We had a laugh when I asked Welsh, preacher I know, who thinks highly of MLJ, about the five points and he said he was 4.5!
I’m unsure Whitefield would have been persuaded by Packer.
From memory, in the Atonement Controversy book. Wesley himself wasn’t often referred to, but there was bitter and public media denouncementd by national methodist leaders.
Even today the controversy has trundled along, perhaps with different emphases, and heated peaks, with N T Wright’s New Perspectives and counter rebuff by Theologians of different and same denomination.
I think the key to resolution is in our. Triune God and
believers Union with Christ.
Probably, the first to alert me to this was Anglican Dr Michael Reeves in talks a writings. And union is something Calvin wrote about. (I know next to nothing of Calvin’s first hand writings and I don’t know how much of this point, if any, was made in Calvin’s response to Arminius.
But this is too much , too late in life for me to look further and it will make no difference to the extant Christian theological landscape.
Reeves, and others gets it right, theologically and scripturally, it seems to me. That and the writings of Messianic Jews as they expound the Messianic Feasts/Festivals of the OT, fulfilled in Christ Jesus.
Stephen/Geoff
I’ve found this from Spurgeon helpful:
“And then, to come to more modern times, there is the great exception, that wondrous revival under Mr. Wesley, in which the Wesleyan Methodists had so large a share; but permit me to say, that the strength of the doctrine of Wesleyan Methodism lay in its Calvinism. The great body of the Methodists disclaimed Palagianism, in whole and in part. They contended for man’s entire depravity, the necessity of the direct agency of the Holy Spirit, and that the first step in the change proceeds not from the sinner, but from God. They denied at the time that they were Pelagians. Does not the Methodist hold as firmly as ever we do, that man is saved by the operation of the holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost alone? And are not many of Mr. Wesley’s sermons full of that great truth, that the Holy Ghost is necessary to regeneration? Whatever mistakes he may have made, he continually preached the absolute necessity of the new birth by the Holy Ghost, and there are some other points of exceedingly close agreement; for instance, even that of human inability. It matters not how some may abuse us, when we say man could not of himself repent or believe; yet, the old Arminian standards said the same. True, they affirm that God has given grace to every man, but they do not dispute the fact, that apart from that grace there was no ability in man to do that which was good in his own salvation.”
https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/exposition-of-the-doctrines-of-grace/#flipbook/
Sam
Geoff, please try and find out when and where Calvin responded to Arminius. Maybe also read some Arminius?
Not sure that’s a valid historical judgment these days, though it was certainly what Halevy thought many years ago. Modern historiography is rather kinder to the C18 Church of England than earlier generations of historians and sees Wesley as having less of an impact than used to be thought. The membership of the Methodist societies at Wesley’s death was quite small; the great expansion of Methodism happened in the C19 led by figures such as Jabez Bunting and, at the end of the century, Hugh Price Hughes. In fact Whitefield (who by the way promoted the introduction of slavery in Georgia, a previously non-slave state) was a more effective and powerful preacher than Wesley. I say this as a former Methodist who has a huge respect for both of the Wesley brothers but their impact has been somewhat exaggerated.
This is a response to Anton’s comments above, not to Stephen, Geoff or Sam, but it’s been displaced somehow. Methinks Spurgeon has got hold of the wrong end of the stick if he claims Wesley as a Calvinist!
Tim,
Thanks for your comments. You clearly know more than I on matters I had problable only passing interest in, when a member of the Methodist church , but which consumed a number of members.
You comment shows a necessary balance.
I came away as I could not vow to preach/ teach against the churches teaching, after starting to do substantial self directed study, which included arminianism and so called Calvinism.
No one I knew wanted to touch the matter with a barge pole.
The study, though informal, was at the same level as needed to obtain a law degree and professional qualifications as a solicitor in practice.
What I find difficult is the format of comments. There is so much information to weigh on the internet these days, though my study was a combination of books and theologians writings on the internet. Questions asked in the comments already have reliable writings interlocutors online, and the topics are beyond the scope of our host’s blog, and comments format.
As it happens, after coming away from Methodism, I was asked to go through the TULIP ancronism by someone who had come away from years as a JW. Over about two years, 2hrs a week, we spent studying and discussing from both side, pros, cons to seek to know each side as well as the other. Age and priorites have moved me passed that. Others can do the digging for themselves.
As a slight aside, and to bring in Anton. I have been tempted to buy all of Nick Needham’s books on Church history having sat in on some of his travelling lectures.
One in particular was on Count Zinzendorf and the Morvavian ‘class’ or meeting system, and their Piety. Needham read out one of Z’s prayers used a theitr meetings. I’ve not been able to find it since, but it resulted in some uncomfortable shufflingv questions from known reformed presbyterians.
It led to me asking about Edwards, Religious Affections, which I have, but he steered me onto buying his own book on Religious Affections.
Anyway this leads into this linked article about Wesley and Aldersgate and a scholarly disection.
https://evangelicalarminians.org/mark-k-olson-wesleys-warmed-heart-at-aldersgate-what-really-happened/
Perhaps it could be entitled, ‘O for a Thousand Scholars to Sing’ after Wesley C’s own heart.
But, to close a bracket I do think J Wesley prior encounter with the Morvains needs to be brought into the mix of scholarly understanding of Aldersgate.
And to fully close the brackets, What’s Richard B Hays base line Methodist theology (and membership?) if it can indeed be abstracted, got to do with his about turn, theological ‘jibe -turn -change of direction in todays cultural whirlwind?
I hugely recommend Needham’s church history series. It is excellent.
Among the many thing I learnt from it is just what a magnificent Christian Zinzendorf was. The core of his theology was that Jesus is all – the gateway to the Trinity for human beings, the source of our salvation.
Get fixated on God the Father and you will feel condemnation. Get fixated on the Holy Spirit and you will end up at the shallow end of the charismatic movement. Get fixated on Jesus and you get the lot in balance.
Geoff, I’m not sure, but are you maintaining that Calvin responded to Arminius?
Interesting, certainly. Great? I’m not so sure.
I’m currently ploughing through the Hays and Hays book, so I’ll resist a blow by blow response. But, this part of Belousek’s critique shouldn’t pass without comment:
One of the Hays’s arguments is a more detailed take on Karen Keen’s observation about Mark 2 (the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath). Hays (and Keen) make that point that Jesus tells us to consider the true point of the Sabbath, rather than stick to a rigid legalistic take. Belousek’s counter is that he believes that the real point being made by Jesus was that technically the law did not specifically prohibit healing on the Sabbath, so therefore healing was actually ok. That seems to be quite a twist on the text.
To me what’s worst about this is that the story is that Justin Welby lied to a massive audience about his church’s teaching on LGBT people and the story is not that he also said something along the lines of “there must always be a place in the church for people who want homosexuality to carry the death sentence”. This is the same person who assured gay Christians that “nobody is a problem”.
The problem is thar it’s not just Justin Welby, but that it’s become commonplace/expected for church leaders to outright lie in public statements, especially on the topic of homosexuality. It’s an ends justifying the means mentality.
The church system elevates the holy and the liars and punishes the sinners and the truth tellers. That’s why same sex marriage is so abhorrent to church leaders – it’s not just “sinning”. It’s honesty.
If a youth leader forces attractive male interns to wrestle him in his underwear then that’s OK as long as he’s not honest about it in public. If a gay reader gets married them he can no longer be a reader because it’s honest. If a celibate gay violinist starts dating another celibate gay person he can no longer play music in church services because that’s honest. If a youth leader comes out as gay he must be punished with a fake exorcism and then when that doesn’t work kick him out of the church because the church cannot afford honesty.
All was well until your last paragraph.
The first sentence refers, obviously, to Mike Pilavachi. I believe the problem is not anybody’s failure to whistleblow on someone they are certain is abusing, but uncertainty that the man is actually abusing in conjunction with the wish not to make allegations that might be false. If you cannot name one person (other than a victim) who knew what Pilavachi was doing and covered it up, you should not write sentences like that. Could you name such a person?
I think you are right to point out the ambiguous or uncertain character of Pilavachi’s wrestling. Lots of teenage boys engage in wrestling and they can be tactile with each other without any erotic overtones because male sports have always been ritualised forms of warfare. Pilavachi evidently exceeded those boundaries but I haven’t seen evidence of actual criminal behaviour. (Maybe it is there.) Many years ago, it was common for male teachers to be more tactile in dealing with adolescent boys (hand on shoulder or arm) but that contact, however innocent, would get you into trouble today.
As far as I can see, Pilavachi’s real offences were emotional mistreatment and exclusion of some young men, conduct that was quite unpastoral.
Actually I wasn’t questioning the meaning of abuse and that is a further ambiguity. I was assuming it *was* improper abuse, and I meant that one can have suspicions but be far from certain. That is a comment about the general case.
Concerning Pilavachi, regardless of whether his actions were illegal, they warrant removal frm a church position.
Regarding the word ‘abuse’ which refers often to dreadful things, it is also bandied around as a catch all by those with limited vocabulary. It is axiomatic that if one can be more precise one should be and it would invite suspicion (the baby/bathwater and Trojan Horse type of suspicion) if one were not.
For example, it is generalised, not at all inaccurately, that John Smyth abused many. But this vague splicing together could be prevented by saying precisely: that in England he groomed and flogged; that in Zimbabwe he administered (and encouraged and maximised) corporal punishment; and that in South Africa he took it upon himself to show pastoral concern for the psychosexual development of potential future leaders, however un/aware or un/concerned he was for changing norms and cultures (which in principle are morally neutral anyway). So – perhaps by design – people come away with the idea that in all 3 countries he treated young men the same, instead of differently. And the mental image will be of the worst treatment of the three. Easily avoided by applying more honesty and more precision. But this topic we should not dwell on, because there will be enough of it soon.
Anton
Multiple victims, including Matt and Beth Redman, said they reported his abuse at the time and were basically told to buck themselves up and put up with it
Internships would be customarily a couple of years, no doubt. Only a small proportion of people could be kept on staff after that. That is the nature of internships. As too for UCCF, assuming their way of doing things was similar.
So it is a question of whether what we have is nothing but that, or whether it is more of a Benjamin Britten case of his dropping favourites and moving onto another as soon as the earlier one reached a certain age. Which is a selfcentred pattern.
Wrestling, like massage to an extent, would be socially acceptable at some times in history and not others. So the trick is for the vindictive to wait until it is not, and then say that of course it is obvious that all cultures and times should have adhered to the present norms (which in our intelligence are the only ones that we are aware of in the first place), and shame on them if they could not see into the future to our enlightened time.
Anyone who had grown up in an all boys school or the army would regard any such as quite trivial. Which is why those who analyse it should not be exclusively female.
Then there is the mandate to show that Christians can have the most fun possible without actually breaking the rules. A noble framework, and one that one sees in these cases (being completely misunderstood) time and again.
It seems to be precisely those who in other circumstances believe in a sexual free for all that suddenly and illogically get absurdly prurient regarding minor forms of physical contact. Maybe this is because a checkered sexual history automatically makes people prickly and touchy (as opposed to touchy-feely) – what is sometimes called chippy. Anyone who grows up in a healthy family would not even notice, and the overarching issue is how the sexual revolution has decimated healthy families.
Yes, that’s pretty much what I was saying about wrestling. Fathers traditionally wrestle with their young sons (and boys with each other) because that is a way children discover their strength. The chorus of condemnation of Pilavachi for the wrestling in underwear has come in large measure from the liberals on ‘Thinking Anglicans’ who nevertheless are often happy with a gay sexual free-for-all for adolescent boys (‘discovering our true feelings etc’).
It goes without saying that Pilavachi’s conduct here was at the very least foolish and potentially exploitative and if other adults knew of it, they should have rebuked and corrected him.
Yes, at the time they should have done so. And I believe some did. And I also believe a position of power dissuades others from doing so. And I believe in the obverse-reverse hazards are the flip side of strengths theory, often.
But it is more delicious from the prurient’s point of view to wait until memories are more faded and imprecise and unfalsifiable, and then and only then have a huge scandal unearthing the (often exaggerated, for such is the typical tendency of tittle tattle) skeletons of the past.
A further tendency which gives away the fact that a lot of this is supplying the need for some gossip is that young men will as often as possible be described as minors or children, and likewise boxer shorts etc will as often as possible be described as underwear. Not that the latter are absent in either case.
“And I believe in the obverse-reverse hazards are the flip side of strengths theory, often.”
You will have to explain this one for me, Christopher.
I believe people’s strengths are indeed often the flip side of the things people find tiresome about them.
Apologias for sexual abuse yet again what a surprise!!
‘Liberals’ may enthusiastically support same sex relationships – equal, consensual ones – not semi-naked wrestling with teenagers or beating them until their bottoms bleed!
And you think we are effete and deviant?
There is no “apologia” for sexual abuse here and you are falsely conflating John Smyth’s criminal assaults (which nobody mentioned here) with Pilavachi’s wrestling (in boxers?) which wasn’t crinunal (the police have saud so) but at the very least was unwise, and have repeatedly said he should not have done, to avoid any appearance of inpropriety. The basic “Billy Graham rule” I followed in teaching and ministry – avoid unnecessary physical contact, try to avoid being alone with a child or a member of the opposite sex (not always possible ptofessionally) – has served me well. The charismatic culture I knew in my youth valourised hugs, emotional expression and intimate confessions as “authentic signs of the Spirit”, which I believed then but I rather think now it had more to do with California youth culture.
It is certainly true that liberals (without scare quotes) have traditionally been happy for teenagers to be sexually active provided they have contraception or ready access to abortion. This is probably the worst thing that happened to western society in the past 60 years and is the principal reason death of Christianity (including nominal Christianity) in the west. Abortion is the principal “guarantor” of extra-marital sex. That is why it must be destigmatised by liberals. But conscience has a way of taking revenge on us.
This false conflation is a common tactic and is dishonest, thus marking its perpetrators as dishonest. Call it out when you see it.
Unwise James? I think you ought to read what his victims think and Natalie Collin’s absolutely excellent blogs on Pilavachi’s abuse before dismissing his behaviour as ‘unwise’.
I am not in the least interested in whether it was criminal or not. Gaslighting and sexual abuse don’t need to be criminal to be evil.
Moreover James, there is a vast difference between consensual sex between teenagers (whatever you think of its wisdom or maturity) and sexual abuse perpetrated by older men and women on minors.
It’s a cheap and nasty trick to conflate the two. And you are quite right that ‘liberals’ can condone one and not the other. That’s because we are not apologists for rape and abuse.
Once again Penelope falls into error. First, she conflates Smyth with Pilavachi and implies Smyth had defenders here – which is completely libellous. She hasn’t apologised for this fallacious conflation yet. Second, it is certainly relevant to the police whether Pilavachi broke any law, and in their judgment he didn’t (unlike Smyth). Third, I never defended Pilavachi’s wrestling behaviour, which wasn’t evil per se – but if the man had homoerotic tendencies (and I honestly don’t know if he does – does Penny?), then it could easily lead to sexual assault. AFAIK, there have been no complaints of sexual abuse – but that doesn’t stop the behaviour being unwise and unbecoming of an adult. (I speak as a former teacher and a minister.) Penelope implies that Pilavachi sexually abused young people, but there is no evidence of this happening. If it had, the police would certainly be involved, as they were with Bishop Peter Ball. I gather that he did use emotional abuse toward some persons, and others, like Matt Redman, found him manipulative and excluding – which noone here would defend. If Penelope had bothered to read me carefully, she would know I called his conduct “foolish and potentially exploitative”, which is a strong condemnation. Fourth, although Penelope and her fellow secular liberals are quite happy for teenagers to be sexually active – provided girls have access to contraception and abortion – Christians actually have higher standards and believe that chastity and sexuality purity before marriage are Christ’s will for his church. Penelope doesn’t understand the meaning of Christian chastity or the sanctity of human life, so she struggles with these concepts and rejects them, but we are constrained by Christ’s teaching. Lives are harmed by sexual inmorality, including “one night stands”. (And I’m sure that Penelope understands that teenagers are quite capable of sexually exploiting other teenagers. You don’t have to have an age difference for this to happen. Nevertheless, Pilavachi was not accused of sexual abuse but misusing his pastoral role and emotional mistreatment of younger people, which is a different matter.)
James
Christopher has defended Smyth’s conduct, so you should take it up with him.
I see you’re still making excuses for Pilavachi, so I shall say no more about that, except to urge you to read Natalie Collins.
Of course teenagers can exploit other teenagers, but you are again misrepresenting my views. I mentioned consensual sex. Nor did I give a view on the morality of such relationships. I contended that they aren’t abusive. And with good sex education, they don’t end in unwanted pregnancy, as the statistics show.
It really is a cheap trick to conflate pre marital sexual activity with sexual abuse of minors by predatory priests.
And read above Penny to discover that Christopher thinks that 12/13 is actually the ideal age for people to get married, become sexual, and bear children. It’s just that the West doesn’t understand that ideal and has subverted it. Apparently.
Again Penelope slanders me without apology. Nowhere have I “made excuses for Pilavachi”, but neither have I blamed him for things he has not done. Nobody has accused Pilavachi of sexual molestation but Penelope has called him a “sexual abuser”. This is false. The charge against him is of “spiritual abuse” which is a serious pastoral issue but not a criminal matter. Compare and contrast with Bishop Peter Ball who committed both spiritual abuse and sexual molestation of teenage boys. Or the Rev Chris Brain, who was having it off with numerous young women. No human law was broken – but the Law of Christ was.
And Penelope has confirmed that she does not believe in Christian sexual purity and chastity before marriage. As one who has affirmed “one night stands” (casual sex) she is entitled to her secular views in a post-Christian world but she does not have the mind of Christ and could never be a teacher in the Church of Christ.
Andrew Godsall, do not break your vow not to engage here with people who don’t meet your own editorial standard of giving you their full name.
I said you wouldn’t keep your word and you haven’t.
James I am responding to Penny, and not you, as my post makes clear.
Andrew Godsall: if you want your posts to be “clear”, you should try using commas in your comments because this looks as if addressed to me:
“And read above Penny to discover that Christopher thinks that 12/13 is actually the ideal age for people to get married, become sexual, and bear children.”
Andrew Godsall: what Christopher Shell actually wrote above was not what you said but this:
“12 or 13 is a time to be marriageable; people get well brought up so that their desires are not awakened too early because they have so much family love anyway; and then they would normally marry at those ages counselled by biology as safe. I do not know exactly when that is, unfortunately. Maybe people should normally marry 18-26 sort of thing?”
Christopher has his own (sometimes telegraphic) way of expressing himself, and I am not sure what he means in the first clause by “marriageable”. Christopher can correct me if I am wrong, but I took him to mean “a time to turn one’s thoughts to that end” (corresponding to the usual beginning of puberty in girls); not actually getting married then (as still happens to girls in some more primitive cultures), as he goes on to mention 18-26 as the normal recommended age.
Andrew, you should read people carefully and charitably, even if their individual style may be unclear and they express viewpoints you don’t like.
No need to respond to this; I want you to keep your vow.
Penelope writes:
“James
Christopher has defended Smyth’s conduct, so you should take it up with him.”
That is completely false and slanderous. Nowhere did Christopher Shell defend Smyth’s conduct, any more than I ‘made excuses for Pilavachi’.
What he said was that some critics of Smyth have conflated different complaints about Smyth from England, Zimbabwe and South Africa and implied they were all the same.
Read carefully what someone is saying, not what you want him to say.
James you are very accurate in your interpretation. I use/d ‘marriageable’ in the sense of being at a time to turn one’s thoughts to that end and look to becoming someone who would be an excellent spouse.
This instead of the absurd modern west way of doing things – ‘having progressively matured beautifully up till 12, now spoil and destroy that whole smooth progress by reverting to immaturity, never to emerge from it till 18 / till 30 / till 50 / ever’.
This prevents our biology being seen as separate, even as schizophrenically separated. We develop smoothly in a way that obviously integrates all-important biology rather than failing to do so. It is not as though people before a certain age or people of a certain level of maturity need to be TOLD to be integrated. It would not occur to them to be otherwise. So if we are developing towards being able to have children from a certain age, that is what our whole self is developing towards (integratedly).
Also important is the distinction between having begun to mature and having matured. Having begun to mature is a time to make a sensible foresighted and longterm life plan, in family context of course. Maturing is a time to marry.
People should not actually marry in my view and that of most at a time when they are not fully mature, as that could easily cause childbirth problems.
Should they wish to get engaged – great. So what? What could be better?
Yes, I am telegraphic often.
James
There is no slander. Several people have accused Pilavachi of sexual abuse. Your references to other cases of sexual abuse within the church don’t mitigate Pilavachi’s behaviour. Or are you suggesting that i don’t consider other abuse equally evil?
Christopher has often defended Smyth. Many of Ian’s blogs contain Christopher’s apologias for Smyth’s behaviour and his admiration for the Iwerne ethos which protected Smyth and Fletcher.
You, however, are being slanderous when you state that I support one-night stands. You know this is untrue.
Andrew Godsall was replying to my comment and asking if I had seen Christopher’s comment on marriageable age. I had. I found it utterly repellent. But I decided not to engage with it since it is unsurprising from that source. Christopher has blocked me on Twitter because i pointed out a thread where he was being a rape apologist. Anyone can check the thread. Unless he has deleted it of course.
However Andrew, good for you for providing the rope.
Thank you Penny.
Christopher’s explanation about the age of marriage in the ANE and other cultures is confused and confusing. He keeps saying that adolescence is no time to be making any decisions but then saying how important it really is to decide from 12/13 that marriage is the way.
And ignoring the original point I made that it was actually at age 12/13 that the ‘biblical’ marriages that are held up by conservatives were marriages in which the young woman was 12 or 13.
Quite astonishing…..and now he is back pedalling furiously of course.
Penelope writes:
“There is no slander. Several people have accused Pilavachi of sexual abuse.”
I don’t doubt that some people have (not that I have read any of these). I think you have said the same.
But what is “sexual abuse”? For one like me who cares about the law (and not just the law), the term is a little too subjective and slippery and doesn’t meet the legal standard of indecent assault, i.e. forced kissing and touching the genitals or the bottom of another for sexual pleasure. If Pilavachi had done any of these and a complaint had been made to the police, you can be darn sure he would be facing criminal charges.
Do you know what the police have said?
It is time to stop using vague terms like ‘sexual abuse’ and specify actual indecent assault or rape if these occurred.
And to reiterate for the last time: I have NEVER made excuses for him. I have made it very clear that a grown man wrestling with boys is foolish behaviour that can easily lead to trouble, and if I had been his bishop and known of this, I would have sacked him.
That was the point of my reference to the ‘Billy Graham rule’. But I knew this simple principle many years ago when I was a teacher, when it was more acceptable for teachers to be tactile with pupils. I even knew one older male teacher who was in the habit of putting his arm around teenage girls (paternally, he no doubt imagined) and I privately complained about this. I wasn’t surprised to learn that he was also communicating with them, and he was later disciplined by the GTC.
Our Lord and his apostles set the standard of sexual purity and chastity for the Church. If the western world had followed this, it would not have experience ‘repression’ as Freud imagined, but would have avoided 60% or more of the calamities of life, which arise from sexual disobedience.
James
Just because something doesn’t fit the criterion for criminality doesn’t mean it isn’t sexual abuse. An adult engaging in semi naked wrestling with teenagers is sexual abuse. It’s far more evil than consensual teenage sex. Regard Our Lord’s words on millstones. Pilavachi gaslit and abused minors. Listen to the voices of the victims, not what reaches the bar of criminality. Read Natalie Collins. There are always respectable people who will defend abusers: JJohn, Nicky Gumbel, King Charles …
And stop talking to me in the third person. It’s rude and silly.
Penny ‘An adult engaging in semi naked wrestling with teenagers is sexual abuse.’ No it isn’t, unless you live in a completely sexualised world. None of the victims here have used this language, and your use of it both demonises Mike P and trivialises actual sexual abuse.
Penelope writes:
“Just because something doesn’t fit the criterion for criminality doesn’t mean it isn’t sexual abuse.”
– It doesn’t mean it is, either. So it’s better to stick to the law and not be subjective.
“An adult engaging in semi naked wrestling with teenagers is sexual abuse.”
No, not necessarily. It depends on whether the adult did it for sexual kicks or not. I really don’t know if that was the case. Does Penny know about Pilavachi’s desires? I don’t. Ancient Greek and Roman men wrestled naked all the time. People didn’t think that was sexual. And boxers today ply their sport “semi-naked”. Not all physical abuse is sexual. That doesn’t stop it being stupid behaviour that crossed the parent/child boundary that youth work is supposed to observe.
I preface my comments with words like ‘Penny writes’ to clarify in a long chain which remarks I’m referring to.
Penny should not be scolding others for what she thinks is rudeness.
Ian
Why are you trivialising Pilavachi’s sexual abuse? Please read Natalie Collins. What really shocks me is that if gay teenagers were engaged in this behaviour, consensually, you, James, Stephen et al would be condemnatory.
Penny ‘Why are you trivialising Pilavachi’s sexual abuse?’ You exaggerated it and sexualise it, against the testimony of the victims. When I point out your error, you claim I am ‘trivialising’ it.
I am not. But when language no longer matters to you, so we cannot talk accurately of different kinds of abuse, then we are lost.
James
You tortuous reasoning gets sillier. Two grown men or women boxing in satin shorts, in public, within defined rules, is manifestly different from a man wrestling semi naked, or massaging, a minor. Why you can’t admit that Pilavachi was a nasty predator (like Smyth, Fletcher, Ball et al) and, like them, protected by respectable figures, I cannot imagine.
His abuse might seem less harmful to us, but tell that to gis victims.
Consensual sexual activity can be blameless or harmful.
Predatory sexual behaviour is always harmful – and evil.
And your 3rd person stuff still looks silly and patronising.
Penny ‘His abuse might seem less harmful to us, but tell that to his victims’. Except you are not listening to them. Unlike Smyth, Fletcher, Ball, none of them described the abuse as ‘sexual’. It is odd that you claim to know what happened better than them.
Ian
Sorry, forgot to add that MP has deserves the demonic description, despite being supported by J John and Gumbel. Good people don’t abuse teenagers.
Ian
A further thought.
Many of your commenters appear to live in a highly sexualised world, since they cannot conceive of two gay men living together without inevitably indulging in buggery.
‘they cannot conceive of two gay men living together without inevitably indulging in buggery’. That is not a reflection of their world; it is the testimony of those concerned, and the conclusion of research.
Ian
We are, indeed, which is why I suggested that you read Natalie Collins.
Ian
Could you cite the research which shows that most male gay couples engage in anal sex.
Perhaps there is further research on how many married gay couples engage in as.
Thank you.
James
MPs actions may not have been criminal (although I wonder if the police wouldsay differently if it was heterosexual), but if you ask anyone outside the church if a middle aged gay man forcing young straight men to wrestle him in their underwear is sexual abuse and I guarantee most will say that it absolutely is.
The church’s fear of gay people has led to a woefully inadequate understanding of the abuse that went on here.
You will find that what AG and PCD say that I say is almost never accurate, but almost always the closest slanderous stereotype.
This of course says nothing good about their integrity.
But it’s fine, because as I always say, one only needs to give chapter and verse. So always ask them to do that.
I think what they are probably enacting is that when people get accused of things they become seen as the devil incarnate who cannot do anything right. The very ground they step on is cursed. I merely do a bit of corrective surgery in the interests of accuracy, so as to include both the good and the bad and what lies in between. As soon as any accused is said to have even one good thing about them (and over many decades they will certainly have one or two such) then the knives come out.
I have given details.
They are not pleasant.
I will repeat them.
Smyth beat young white men until they bled and were scarred.
Smyth beat black boys. One died. There may not be a connection but, because he was never charged, we shall never know.
Pilavachi wrestled with and massaged semi naked young men. He also gaslit his followers – male and female.
Is that enough detail for you?
I don’t really care if they were kind to cats or their auntie Ada. That doesn’t excuse their abuse. Nor does it excuse the deliberate cover ups by the CoE.
Why would anyone need details on a case or cases they were known to be aware of?
The good people do is good; the bad is bad; the cases I was referring to were those that were exaggerated in their badness because the individual has already been identified (doubtless correctly) as a bad apple so people start (sometimes wrongly) seeing bad even in their most trivial actions.
PCD writes: ‘Christopher has blocked me on twitter because I pointed out a thread where he was being a r**e apologist.’.
All she knows is that she was blocked. The remainder is her invention, which she combines with the factual element in her usual way.
She says I may delete things on twitter. I have no idea even how to do so. Everything I write you can see, but what she describes is (as you may have guessed based on her former modus operandi) something you will not see.
She would perhaps even consider someone saying ‘crying r**e 40 years later when people have forgotten the details is not always accurate’ to be the same as being an apologist for r**e. She would perhaps, secondly, give a husband being suddenly and unexpectedly rebuffed by a wife for the first time the same classification.
The overall picture is desperation to entrap – aiming to libel or slander on the flimsiest pretext. A pattern of behaviour you will see over and over if you look.
Penelope writes:
‘Christopher has often defended Smyth’.
Tactically and not honestly, she fudges together two different things: (a) defending something in general and (b) defending a particular thing about them (for example, one trait which those who make unnuanced single blanket condemnations without much thought may have criticised without adequate analysis).
Worse, she implies that I have done (a), which is a flat out lie, as she must have known in advance. As I always say, discern the pattern in this tactic. The pattern is to take a half truth (”preferably” a condemnatory one), treat it as a truth, and then universalise it across the board, in the hope that no-one will check chapter and verse. And while you are about it, treat the nuanced as makers of sledgehammer generalisations.
Anton
The victims have publicly named several people who knew he was sexually abusing young adult men and mentally abusing both young men and young women and the Scolding report specifically names Graham Cray (then Bishop of Maidstone) as knowing about the abuse and allowing it to continue.
There can be no full investigation because 1 the things he did are all lawful and 2 because the CofE isn’t interested in having a full independent review. MP has been allowed to quietly retire with many church leaders treating the situation as if he is the victim.
As someone who went to Soul Survivor camps as a young man and was encouraged to treat MP as a seriously holy man by ther church leaders, I want to know what Justin Welby knew and what Steven Croft knew, but we will never be told that. We have to trust in divine justice because his victims won’t get justice in this life
If Pilavachi didn’t break the law then it’s a church matter and, as soon as a bishop was told, that bishop should have investigated it urgently then, on the truth emerging, removed Pilavachi from all roles within the denomination.
The trouble is that senior management aka bishops hope to hush it up in order to minimise perceived reputational damage. It’s an inevitable problem of hierarchy; it happened in Ireland when Catholic bishops merely shuffled abusing priests around their dioceses. It’s another reason why I’m against church hierarchy. It’s not just useless, it’s worse than that.
Anton
I agree entirely.
Unfortunately church leaders didn’t just hush it up, they deliberately encouraged hundreds of thousands of young people to attend his events, ordained him and gave him an award.
What is the meaning of the term “gay”? Is it same sex attraction? Or is it cultivating, nurturing and acting on this morally disordered desire?
Same sex desire isn’t a sin – encouraging, developing, justifying and then acting on this desire is sinful.
It’s the same with all sin. It starts with the eyes, with temptation, with the tendency to sin we all have. When the will becomes corrupted, sin is justified. False teachers deceive and prepare the will for corruption.
It’s all in Genesis!
Personally, I have no issue with “gay” people being members of the church, just as I have no issue with serial adulterers or fraudsters being members of the church, or those attracted to children – we are all sinners. What matters is recognising our sin and forming the intention to resist, and seeking the grace and spiritual discipline necessary to do overcome. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, people are dishonest in their sin – that’s what sin does; it makes us “hide” in the dark and, in so doing, it grows, festers, and overcomes us. This is why we need spiritual advisers in our lives and regular personal confession. It also means robust safeguarding measures are needed to protect the innocent and the vulnerable.
People struggling with serious sexual sin that might directly harm another’s faith or lead them into sin, shouldn’t be in ministry or positions of church leadership. And this includes those promoting and/or justifying and/or minimising sinful lifestyles. Period.
Enough with the ambiguity and double-speak. Welby’s dishonesty doesn’t serve Christ or His Church.
It’s exclusive same-sex attraction. This really isn’t that hard.
If you have pedophiles in your congregation you need (to say the least) a very robust safeguarding plan. What is the parallel supposed to be with gay people? Are you suggesting we also need a safeguarding plan? Who are you setting out to protect?
I think you are setting up a number of straw men, Peter.
We do agree on the question of honesty, truth.
‘Elevating the holy and the liars…and punishing sinners and truth tellers..’
is an interesting comment, with much underpinning theology to unpack. In short, it is confused and confuses error, it seems to me. It shows little the Good News of our Triune God revealed in and through the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension and return of Jesus our Saviour.
Nor does it consider, but by-passes matters of justification/righteousness and sanctification/ holiness.
Geoff
I’m saying it’s easier to get to be a bishop by lying than it is by telling the truth.
Do you at least agree that lying is a sin?
Except yet again it was not just the Bishops and Welby who supported PLF, it was all 3 houses of Synod. The House of Clergy, the House of Laity they both voted by majority for PLF too. Conservative evangelicals also yet again ignore liberals like Ozanne who have left the C of E and Synod, in her case for the Methodists, as PLF does not go far enough and offer the full same sex marriages in church she wants and the Methodists, for example, do.
If we are going to want strict adherence to Church of England doctrine can we also have that on the need for support of infant baptism and the role of our King as our church’s supreme governor too strictly enforced at ordination?
” the Methodists, for example, do.”
In the interests of accuracy “some”.
Ian
There’s nobody in the CofE that wants more than what the Methodists have – local decisions/individual belief. You won’t find anyone who wants Ian Paul or Justin Welby to be forced to marry gay couples even though they believe it to be a sin
Peter…
All I was doing was commenting on T1s faulty assertion “Methodists, for example, do.” Nothing else was meant by my posting…and would be to take the thread further off the topic of the ABofC.
Ian
That’s fine, but it’s not accurate to suggest anyone in the cofe is pressing for enforced inclusion
I feel somewhat sorry for Archbishop Justin. I suspect this might be the first time when his personal belief is at odds with Church teaching, but the nonetheless lives under the teaching. In his defence it actually seems to be quite rare, at least in the CofE, for this to be the case. Most of the time it seems that people simply don’t abide by the teachings they disagree with. He personally thinks same-sex relationships should be faithful and committed (i.e. like marriages), but he won’t get involved in blessing any of them to avoid upsetting those who oppose the idea.
It’s also important to understand what is happening with PLF. The PLF process has not attempted to forge a new consensus. There is little to no attempt to change minds on what we think about the issues at hand. Rather, it’s a proposal about trying to hold the different views together in the church, which is why we keep getting theological arguments about church unity rather than human sexuality. And so, those who favour same-sex marriages are to hope that prayers in a service are enough of a concession, and those who are against same-sex marriages avoid any compulsion in this, and we all skirt over the sex question by not mentioning it one way or the other. It’s a political answer to a theological and ethical question. But then so is the work of CEEC and the Alliance in their efforts to say that PLF would be just fine as long as it was accompanied by giving them a new province and a separate financial structure.
One of the most disappointing and corrosive aspects of this debate, and amid the accusations of losing trust, has been to see the gameplaying at work. The changes between drafts of PLF on celibate friendships are a case in point, where a potential point of compromise has been subject to poison pill amendments – in this case insertions to make clear that such friendships are not monogamous in any way (going so far as to say you can enter them if you’re already married). Likewise the Alliance writing that they wanted to honour the Synod vote in favour of PLF was startlingly disingenuous. Too many have lost sight of the fact that they’re playing and pointscoring with the lives of their fellow Christians.
Some things flow from this:
1) Those who want a provincial split shouldn’t expect to do one on the basis of PLF. The PLF is a compromise for unity. If there’s no unity, then people will split on what they actually think and want to see. On one side, that might mean something much more like what Archbishop Justin said he favours. We don’t know what the 3rd Province advocates actually want their teaching to be, (other than we know it won’t be Issues) and they haven’t agreed or formally proposed anything
2) There’s a problem for those who complain about lack of transparency in the deliberations of the House of Bishops. If you don’t want to know when Bishops question things or are changing their minds, then discussions must be secret. If you want to know, then don’t be surprised to hear some people say things that you disagree with, and they stick to a collective view you know they don’t hold personally.
3) The only way around point (2) is to change what we think we’re doing. Political decisions will always be compromises where personal views may differ, and what people think privately is unlikely to change. We could alternatively embark on processes which are to discover where we agree, how far we can take that agreement, and to expect to change minds.
AJB,
Too many have lost sight of the fact that they’re playing and pointscoring with the lives of their fellow Christians.
Now that I agree with. I want open spiritual warfare, not sneaky stuff.
Archbishop Justin… personally thinks same-sex relationships should be faithful and committed (i.e. like marriages), but he won’t get involved in blessing any of them to avoid upsetting those who oppose the idea.
Indeed he won’t bless them at present, and for that reason; but what you don’t say is that he is doing his utmost to get the CoE to let its vicars bless them in church services, which would be a huge change.
It’s also important to understand what is happening with PLF. The PLF process has not attempted to forge a new consensus. There is little to no attempt to change minds on what we think about the issues at hand. Rather, it’s a proposal about trying to hold the different views together in the church
I disagree. It is the latest attempt to wear down those who hold to the biblical line.
‘It’s a political answer to a theological and ethical question. But then so is the work of CEEC and the Alliance in their efforts to say that PLF would be just fine as long as it was accompanied by giving them a new province and a separate financial structure… One of the most disappointing and corrosive aspects of this debate, and amid the accusations of losing trust, has been to see the gameplaying at work… Likewise the Alliance writing that they wanted to honour the Synod vote in favour of PLF was startlingly disingenuous.’ As I’m not involved with any of the campaign groups (E.g. Together for the Church of England, The Alliance, CEEC, Inclusive Evangelicals, the Society) nor am I on any synod I have no idea if this is the kind of thing that’s been going on behind the scenes; so it would be helpful to have Andrew Goddard’s critical analysis of the roles these groups are playing in the same way that he has analysed the role of the bishops. He could begin with the two recent letters to the House of Bishops, the language they use and what it really means. They are clearly aiming to exert power and influence our Bishops; does the seemingly moderate language hide less generous intentions? Why are statistics used as they are, how reliable are they, what do they signify? What comes across is that entirely inflexible and uncompromising positions have been adopted but that may not be the case and that there is actually room for compromise and mutual acceptance.
Thank you Tim (and AJB). How language is used is fascinating but also deadly serious — I seem to remember James (the brother of our Lord) saying something about the ‘tongue’.
The hearer/reader is the one _responsible_ for the implicatures (inferences) they draw from what is said in a text. Forensically _analysing_ a text possibly won’t tell us what they _meant_.
Sorry, my second paragraph had ‘begin hobby-horse’ and ‘end’ in wedges at the beginning and end but the wedges were treated ‘literally’ 🙂
No evangelical should be contemplating a new province. The aim should be to force out the heretics and the deceivers.
Much easier said than done. Most of us don’t have much taste for that kind of warfare. Better just to pull out our money and get on with gospel work. The truth is hundreds of liberal parishes are only 3 to 5 years away from closing. Friends in Canterbury diocese, for example, tell me that post-covid children’s and youth work has collapsed outside the evangelical parishes. There is no future in liberalism, it has no power to convert or build a lively spiritual life. Let it fade.
Yes but hang on until grassroots evangelicals have enough financial clout to dictate to their heretical liberal bishops. Don’t go for a separate province.
Anton: much better to dissociate from the heretics now. If evangelicals pulled out of existing dioceses, besides the financial blow, most of the children’s and youth work in those dioceses would disappear overnight. Bishops depend for their power on little empires of staff created by dioceses. These little empires are one of the main reasons for the financial crisis sweeping the dioceses.
James: If evangelicals fight and lose, they will learn that God is calling time on the structure of the Church of England, because God cannot lose spiritual battles on this earth when his people fight. But if evangelicals don’t fight, they won’t know what God is saying.
Andrew Goddard gives a link to the audio of this interview with Welby. It is worth looking at his face as he speaks these deceptive words. You can see him in the first three minutes of this analysis of what he said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owiEFofrHIg
Reposting this which was a late contribution to the last thread around this topic and I’m not sure even Peter Jermey to whom it was a response has read it – he hadn’t replied within that thread…..
“Peter
Took me a while to track down the Welby interview.
1) The BIBLICAL position is and always has been (and so always will be!) that people are meant to love people and indeed that love/affection and its expression for same-sex people can and should be pretty intense – see David and Jonathan….
However it is also clear that sex has been created as a thing for men to do with women and same-sex sex – or rather a somewhat parodistic attempt at sex by same-sex couples – is always inappropriate and is disrespectful to both God and Humanity. Faithful Christians will trust God about this and will not do such sexual activity.
2) There are no ‘gay people’, at least not in the way that the gay movement understands it, of gayness being a similar situation to being black. God is not so cruel or inconsistent as to in effect make people something he has forbidden. And in fact ‘gayness’ is very unlike being black in the simple fact that the problem isn’t about something people ‘just are’, it’s about something people do and choose to do, namely the sexual acts. That puts ‘gay’ in an entirely different category to things like ethnic differences.
What ‘gay people’ in a sense ‘are’ is not a simple and morally neutral thing like skin colour, but is a matter of urges and desires and temptations to do the questionable acts. While it is true that ‘doing because urges and desires’ is a very wide category – in effect all ‘moral activity’ from the decidedly saintly to the decidedly satanic, ipso facto it is not possible to simply say “I have these urges, it must be OK to act them out”. Urges and desires are not necessarily and automatically good or appropriate. In Christian terms we have the bad and inappropriate desires as part of the general disruption of human life resulting from the ‘Fall’. When God has told us that a particular urge or desire, and the acts it leads to, are wrong, the Christian response is to repent and resist temptation in that area.
3) The death penalty – Anglican thinking in this area has always been defective because of the unbiblical link between church and state, a link also found with variations in other churches. Believing in such a link had the effect that ‘Christian’ states legally enforced Christian morality by secular punishments including the death penalty.
However, under the new covenant such ‘Christianised’ rather than truly Christian states are not meant to exist. The NT picture is of the Church itself as “God’s holy nation” on earth, operating internationally and independently of secular states. Christian faith is voluntary and our mission is not to impose superficial conformity on the world, but to call people out of the world and into the supranational Church. The Church has no authority to inflict death penalties itself, nor should it be expecting ‘the world’ to do it on the Church’s behalf. There is nevertheless a very real ‘death penalty’ which is part of the general fact that sin leads to spritual death – of being so opposed to God that as John says shortly after the famous John 3; 16, people choose darkness. Those who deliberately disobey God about ‘gay sex’ risk inflicting that kind of death penalty on themselves.”
And in addition for the current thread
1) In a related Facebook response Ian Paul asked “How did we end up here?” or words to that effect. The CofE has ended up here because it was founded on an unbiblical basis in terms of church/world/state relations as a result of which the boundaries between church and world are confused and the world therefore gets too much say in the affairs of the church. The world is trying to ‘squeeze (the church) into its own mould’ and is dangerously near to succeeding – the only cure for this is disestablishment.
2) In the same FB thread in a different response Ian referred to certain things about the CofE being stated in ‘law’ – trouble being not God’s law but English law. English law has no authority to impose such things on the church. The things in question were actually in effect
God’s rules too, but the English law aspect is – or should be – basically irrelevant and shouldn’t even be there anyway….
3) Ian is probably right in thinking that the English government woud not attempt to dictate the church’s beliefs – but I am quite certain that if church and surrounding society were sufficiently at odds on something, the secular government could well decide that they don’t want that church in the position of the national religion. A church rejecting same-sex marriage will not long remain established…..
Rubbish, even the likes of Wes Streeting have said the government and parliament should not impose same sex marriage on the C of E. However Synod has voted for prayers within services for same sex couples married in English civil law and those are now staying permanently as is right for the established church to do for its same sex parishioners
T1
Even if the government does not impose same-sex marriage, I doubt if they will ignore it if the church refuses to go that road; I think disestablishment would then be sooner rather than later – much sooner….
Biblically it is wrong for there to be an established church anyway so they do not have the obligation you suggest towards ‘parishioners’.
Why? Same sex sex marriage is a secular law, there is no need to impose it on churches of the established church. Had PLF and the prayers of blessing been rejected that might have been different but they weren’t. No minister, even of this Labour government, us suggesting that. Of course I know as a Baptist you have little interest in anyone who doesn’t attend your Baptist church every week but the C of E as a church with Parish responsibilities is different,
However taking you on your own argument of course a Labour government which would be the most in favour of same sex marriage wouldn’t disestablish the church. Why would they and leave it at risk of falling into the hands of conservative evangelicals? No they would take over the state church entirely and ensure as established church it would just be the religious branch of the civil service. It would take control of the church’s estate and assets and investments and use them to fund the church as the profits of the crown estate fund the monarchy. Plus occasionally funding some taxpayer subsidised church repairs. In return they would also just impose same sex marriage on every C of E church, sack any conservative evangelical priest who disagreed and strip them of their ministry and replace them with a left liberal cleric. Leaving a fully left liberal state established church in the Labour mould.
T1
reluctant to brag but our Baptist church (and others nearby) are quite active in the community, running foodbanks and help for the homeless and refugees/asylum seekers among other things.
Do even you think ” a fully left liberal state established church in the Labour mould” would be a good idea or that it would actually work?
Maybe but most of the local community will not be homeless, will not need to use foodbanks and will not be asylum seekers either. The C of E does all that too but also is involved in village fetes, concerts, carol singing on the green, Remembrance Sunday parades etc. As well as offering weddings or funerals to all their parishioners who want them.
I think the established church works as now and am a Tory not a Labour supporter. However if I was a Labour supporter who wanted to use an established church for its own ends that would be the way to do it, make it an arm of the civil service compliant with the same EDI requirements
Stephen
In the interview Justin Welby makes an unsolicited point that there are Christians in the communion that want gay people put to death and said, again unsolicited, that he wants to make sure those people are always included in the church.
We are a good moral farm that nurtures sheep, but we must make sure we are always making room for the wolves because we can’t take any moral position on whether sheep should be allowed to live or not
Peter
I’m also appalled by Welby’s comments there. They – and indeed those he refers to in those comments -are in effect part of the distortions that have resulted from the bad idea of ‘Christian states’ and as I think you know I fight that idea – but try to do so with understanding.
You’ve probably seen me saying this before but I broadly think that for those who are not professing Christians, their consensual sexual activities will need to be pretty OTT to be the biggest problem between them and God. Christians who support or do same-sex sex are taking a rather bigger risk with their spiritual lives, and therefore with their eternal destiny; but in the current situation I would accept that many are at any rate confused rather than evil. A church that formally accepts such conduct is however in effect telling God to “Go jump, we know better!” and that surely can’t be a good move….
For the record since I clarified my ideas on church and state in the late 1960s, I have always said it was wrong that Britain criminalised homosexuality, and wrong that churches supported that; for Christianity to be a matter of voluntary faith as the NT teaches we should not have been acting that way. At the same time gay sex is still wrong in Christian terms and for Christians and the CofE should not accept it, while accepting the right of those outside the church to disagree with us.
You think we should be breaking communion with the Church of Uganda and the Church of Ghana?
Stephen
I haven’t seen you say that although you think gay sex is wrong that it’s not the worst sin.
I think if there was that attitude amongst evangelicals/conservative Catholics in the CofE then that could really lead to some good compromises instead of PLF which gives gay people nothing that they didn’t already have and upsets conservatives
Not the worst sin?
(1) Idolatry is often seen as logically the worst sin (or pride, which is related to it?) and homosexual pracxtice is chosen by Paul as the best exemplification of idolatry – rejection of or disparagement of the way the beyond-amazing creation design points beyond itself, and the resultant requirement of awe, humility, modesty, and gratitude.
(2) Not the worst is merely a comparative consideration. Maybe Hitler was not as bad as Stalin, or vice versa. Comparative is totally irrelevant to the consideration of how bad anything is in an absolute sense.
(3) However bad it is, the fact that it remains unrepented in both theory and practice changes everything. This central fact you ignore.
You don’t half talk some rot sometimes Christopher.
The best exemplification of idolatory in the 1st century eastern Mediterranean? You mean apart from all those temples filled with great big statues of gods and goddesses, and shrines in the homes, and public festivals etc.?
Very interesting comment from Anglican Futures – itself a very conservative organisation – here:
https://www.anglicanfutures.org/post/welby-and-wambunya-a-warning-for-the-alliance
Nic Tall is rather good on the Alliance’s inflation of supporting clergy/churches, numbers.
AF supports Orthodox Anglicanism outside the CoE structure doesn’t it?
The article itself draws attention to what is happening on reality, which is/was reasonably foreseeable based on the evidence of the processes set out in Andrew Goddards article.
But based mainly on articles on this blog it seems that not matter how well ‘pleaded’ by Andrew Goddard, it is unblushing high handedly ignored.
No matter how commentators may look for further common ground, and see political ploys on both sides, there is no level playing field, mo even-handedness, balance of weight of power, control and influence.
That condign discrimination is already in evidence, is writing on the Wall writ large.
It seems to be a speedy and effective method to isolate, one by one dissenters.
Unless there is a critical mass of dissenters who are willing to put their lives and calling on the line, a sufficient number to bring about a signficant ‘ public’ outcry, CDM’s are likely to continue, even multiply.
Stats are of no consequence when only £bn money counts and when there is an easy and effective, management restraint manacle of golden handcuffs recognised by both parties, ‘management and staff’.
Two examples to my person knowledge may illustrate existing reality.
1 Young family, orthodox newly accepted for ordination but decided to withdraw.
2 Young family recently ordained, who acknowledge the weight of golden handcuffs who remain, to date.
It is not rocket science, not high brow intellect;
It is Writing on the Wall, writ large.
Maybe in the mame of restitution snd restorative justice ++Welby would ne sensitive and swayed persuaded into peformative action remedy to return assests to the orthodox protestan heirs of CoE founders, and their doctrines creeds, documents etc. retained falsely by misrepresention requiring renunciation and discontinuence.
After all, he is lately, in high public profile, more acutely aware, perhaps more than ever of benefits accrued from his forefathers. Sins of the father…..?
Given most C of E property and assets originally came from Rome and Catholic monasteries etc before the Reformation I would have thought the Vatican would have a greater claim. Anything post 16th century only and their investments is purely C of E
Why not? Gavin Ashendon has long made that point.
And the Articles, Creeds, BCP doctrines, formularies , vows etc to be by declaration nationally, publicly, openly, renounced and returned to the inheritors.
(Not in some small compliant online corner.)
A oint which neglects the fact that those churches were built by English hands, paid for by English taxes, on land donated by Englishmen. That’s why not.
Indeed, Anton.
Title deeds. That is term usually applied to land , but a few years ago it was used by Andrew Goodall in relation to the Arts and CoE foundational documents. They need to renounced and returned.
It also appears from some comments here that in some quarters it is maximally nationalistic in its ecclesiology, a paradox of the drivers of right – wing liberal socialism.
On that basis all C of E cathedrals and churches pre 16th century would be returned to the Vatican with portraits of the Pope replacing the King again. Churches and cathedrals post 16th century though would remain C of E as they were never Catholic in the first place, so the King’s portrait would remain in place
T1
Is it correct to be able to discern an underlying substantial right-wing- nationalism in your ecclesiology?
No, I am not a member of the Reform Party. Most rightwing nationalists in the West are either ultra evangelical, Russian Orthodox, Orthodox Jews or near pagan atheists
But “RC money” didn’t come from Rome… It stopped going from England’s population to Rome at the Reformation.
Or unless there is an extremely High Profile, volunteer, Scapegoat drive outside ‘camp’.
Believers know the, their One True, Azazel. Scapegoat
If this continues on a trajectory reported by AF, and if it were employment law prima facie cases may be made out for unfair dismissal, unfair in accordance with the law and unfair in the process itself. Or a case for constructive dismissal, maybe even a collective action.
Geoff
actually in the current workings of employment law opposition to gays would likely be regarded as a case of fair and justified dismissal – see Aaron Edwards recently dismissed from a Methodist bible college. Such a case will likely only be winnable if a significant dent can be put in the idea that ‘gay is like being black’ and therefore anti-gay conduct an evil equivalent to racism….
Don’t agree. It is not at that stage in the CoE. There is supposed to be a choice, and ssm is not doctrine. It is not the same.
Neither is it employment law!
But there would be an outcry by liberal Bishops if they were to witness similar behaviour in the workplace of a national employer. It would represent high hypocrisy in their own management.
But they would be operating from an abuse of a privileged position, outside national employment law and outside the laws of natural justice, that apply within the legal systems in England and Wales, it is suggested.
I’ve just watched the Archbishop’s interview which Andrew Goddard comments on. I was, frankly, amazed on two counts. 1. The Archbishop speaks warmly and personally about his life, upbringing, journey to personal faith, about a wide range of important topics (e.g. reconciliation, politics, the Queen’s funeral, the coronation and more) and yet none gets a mention above. Where’s the recognition of his contribution to national life and his faith? Continual negative criticism of him looks unkind and ungenerous, not to say simply unbalanced. 2. The section about LLF/SSM/sexuality occupied less than 10% of the interview. It included a lot of honest words about how divided we are as brothers and sisters and I think he was seeing to be even handed, if at some points he was too loose in his phraseology. We risk looking as though this debate is the most important thing in the life of the church when clearly there are far more important things for us to be concerned about. We have to resist giving in to the agendas set by the various pressure/campaign groups which are well organised and highly vocal, but which may not be as representative as they think they are.
Im amazed that you’re amazed. Why would the rest of the interview be referred to when that isnt the subject of this article?
As others have said ad nauseum, the only reason there have been a substantial number of articles on this subject is because of the bizarre way the ‘pro-gay’ agenda is being forced in the CoE, and the dishonesty with which it is being forced.
But the article could have been more wide ranging or at least referred to the other topics mentioned and been more positive as a result. Why home in so unerringly on one small section when there were many others that could have been included? It gives the impression that we actively focus on contentious issues. Something similar happens when the national media choose a small section of a speech or interview to promote their agenda, ignoring the uncontroversial parts. I think that’s unhelpful.
Welby is leading division, pursuing disunity an irretrievable breakdown.
Is he aware of what has been reported in the linked Anglican Futures article? If not, why not?
There is no truth nor reconciliation to be sought or found in his stance.
In divorce law in England and Wales in the question of ‘ancillary relief’ (determination of apportioning and distribution of financial assets between the parties after divorce) the principle that the courts were to apply (used to be – don’t know if it still is) is to place “both parties” in the same financial position, as if the divorce had never happened.
Now do likewise, CoE.
It is not the same as divorce as the C of E owns all the assets. Any church leaving the C of E would not get a penny and would have to give up the building too. Just as the Episcopal church kept all the assets in the US when some Anglican church in North America churches left
Thank you Tim. It’s interesting that sometimes we insist on ‘context’ (maybe as in some of the comments below) but other times we even ignore the text that surrounds the text we focus on. Not really very consistent, is it? Just maybe we need to have a better understanding of ‘context’. Oh, wait, people have already been thinking about some of this — they called it ‘pragmatics’.
Bruce, you are not the only person who has read a book on socio-linguistics. Heck, some of us have even taught languages.
We correctly discerned what Welby believed about homosexuality some years ago, long before he came out and made it explicit.
We know why he lost the confidence of most Anglicans in the world.
Do you?
James, yes, you do know much more about the current situation than I do. But as you know my interest is in language in communication. So, thank you for confirming that your understanding of what Justin Welby said in the interview was formed ‘some years ago’ (sorry, sarcasm).
You do confirm, though, how large a part inference (and not just the words of the text itself) plays in interpreting/understanding a text . You may well be right that anyone who has ‘taught languages’ has always understood bits of this, maybe, from thinking ‘sociolinguistics’. But please look at pragmatics.
Bruce, I was reading about ‘pragmatics’ more than 30 years ago. It isn’t that interesting or deep to anyone who has read Aristotle on rhetoric, let alone the welter of stuff on language that began with Saussure.
If you have paid any attention to Welby since 2012, you would be in no doubt about what he actually believed, from his refusal to answer simple questions to the carefully scripted way he speaks.
And if any public figure complains he has been ‘taken out of context’ or misrepresented, it is very, very, very easy to rectify that today: a simple tweet on X, saying precisely what he meant.
But you never see these.
Why? Because Welby traded for years in ambiguity, saying one thing to gay groups in the C of E, another to African bishops. When the Africans learnt about this (chiefly through the reporting of ‘Anglican Unscripted’), they were furious because they immediately recognised Welby’s hypocrisy. As anyone paying attention would.
That is why Welby hates the presenters of ‘Anglican Unscripted’, George Conger and Kevil Kallsen: because they have relentlessly exposed the different ‘scripts’ that Welby has used since 2012.
Bruce I think you will discover that Anglican Unscripted has a readership of about half a dozen who log on several thousand times a day.
The standard of journalism is what was once termed ‘truthiness’. Charles Raven loves it of course and no doubt is said to represent Africans.
But please keep on calling out the dubious use of language by some here. It is quite incredible
Hope you are well!
Andrew Godsall may be confusing ‘Anglican Unscripted’ with ‘Anglican Ink’. AU is a weekly youtube channel with 10.3 thousand subscribers, which is very small by youtube standards, but pretty large in the tiny world of Anglican news.
More important than the number of viewers is its reach into African Anglicanism because it is watched by most Anglican church leaders in West and East Africa, as well as in the US and England.
‘Anglican Unscripted’ (as well as its web companion ‘Anglican Ink’) has a long history of uncovering shenanigans in the Anglican world. Most recently it has focused on the awful farrago in Scotland over Bishop Anne Dyer and the investigation of her bullying, but before that it has brought to light financial corruption by a bishop in the Church of South India (selling places in a medical school), and before that it was first to reveal the adulterous conduct of the former Archbishop of Uganda (an evangelical). So it punches well above its weight. (Even Andrew watches sometimes.)
Justin Welby knows Conger and Kallsen and now refuses to speak to them because he knows they are not party hacks, and it was they who revealed to African bishops his ‘double-dealing’.
Thanks Andrew.
James, I’m not quite sure how you reconcile your claim of understanding pragmatics for so long (nearly as long as I’ve been teaching linguistics) with your statement ‘it is very, very, very easy to rectify that today: a simple tweet on X, saying precisely what he meant’, because that is exactly what cannot be done when so much in communication is expected to be achieved through inference. Simple tweets cannot say precisely what we mean!!
You mentioned Justin Welby using different ‘scripts’. Are you using ‘scripts’ here in a technical sense? If so, then what would you expect him to do differently? You mentioned Aristotle and Saussure. How are they relevant?
Because this article was not a review or commentary on the interview, but rather what he specifically said regards the ‘gay issue’ when it was raised.
As a gay man myself, I can see Welby has genuine compassion on others, something that is often lacking in others. But I still think he is wrong in his apparent view of same-sex sexual relationships and is going against God’s will. Not a good thing for an Archbishop to do!
Tim
As PC1 points out, the rest of that podcast isn’t very controversial, at least within the CofE, though non-conformists like me would have issues with some of it. Whereas the short bit on the sexuality issues basically comes down to the church telling its God to “Go jump, we know better on that subject!” and that is mega-controversial.
His contribution is likely to be splitting the church he leads because of his determination to trample on the Bible over this matter. How can one be even-handed between that which follows the Bible and that which contradicts it?
If you followed every passage of the bible rigidly, Old Testament as well as New there would be no women priests, no eating shellfish and no divorce except for spousal adultery either.
T1
When we follow the Bible AS A WHOLE we find that certain parts of the OT were clearly temporary, preparatory for what comes later with Jesus. The entire OT sacrificial system, for example, is no longer needed as an actual practice because Jesus’ own sacrifice ‘fulfils’ it, completes its purpose. It still remains useful to know the OT stuff to help deepest possible understanding of Jesus’ achievement. Likewise because the ‘new covenant’ in the NT widens the ‘ekklesia’ to include believing Gentiles the dietary laws and some other rules are no longer needed.
T1,
Now this is an ad nauseam repition that reveals little understanding of the scriptures, of God’s covenants in particular, has little theological biblical understanding, seemingly locked into false teaching to which you are welded in furtherance of your own cause. Nor a desire to think and learn Biblically, through the whole canon.
But maybe that is a reflection of what seems to be something of a present day Biblical theological void at the heart of the CoE notwithstanding the dominion of doctorates.
Did Jesus expressly forbid monogomaus same sex relationships? Did the Ten Commandments? No in both cases. So clearly what passages of the Bible you seek to emphasise often depends on your prior ideological view
T1.
What prior ideological view do I have?
1 Of God as an atheist?
2 …as a convert to Christ?
3. Of scripture, as an atheist?
4. Of scripture as a convert?
5 In either instance as untaught/taught, in ignorance or knowledge?
You have no idea.
Your assertion is misconceived without an evidential base in an absence of knowledge.
5.What is the Good News of Jesus and why? Where, when and how?
6 Which God do you believe and why?
7 What is scripture?
7.1 Why?
7.2 How?
8 Do your accept the words of Jesus as truth, that he actually said those things?
What about his command, a ‘must’ to be born again/from above? Have you obeyed? Why, where, when, how?
Do you oppose women priests, do you oppose divorce except for spousal adultery, do you not eat shellfish? If you do you can claim to be genuinely biblical, if not you are clearly in your terms just a pick and choose follower of biblical scripture
Simon,T1, it is again frustrating that you trot out these simplistic and wooden readings of scripture which have little credibility as a way of seeming to score points in the discussion.
Are you genuinely ignorant of the reasons why your points here don’t work?
Please stop this pointless point-scoring. It doesn’t help anyone.
Simon, you seem to think that the three things you mentioned are chief controversies. None of them is even a controversy at all.
(1) Biblical scholars neither oppose nor support ‘women priests’ on biblical grounds because priesthood was abrogated in the NT apart from Jesus’s high priesthood and the priesthood of all believers.
(2) It is agreed, not disagreed, that spousal adultery or wider porneia is the only mentioned circumstance attributed to Jesus in any NT source that can lead to divorce.
(3) By comparison with shellfish, homosexual sexual activity is not only condemned in the NT (whereas there is Peter’s vision for the shellfish etc, and Mark 7 Jesus confirms all foods clean) but used as a/the paradigmatic gentile sin. Sexual activity is always prominent in the vice lists.
This is the level of your NT knowledge, and yet you would rather comment in ignorance than read even the primary source of 200pp.
St Paul is clear on women priests ‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” First letter to Timothy
Clearly you at least agree that ‘porneia’ is the only grounds to allow divorce at least.
While you can find passages in the Bible opposing gay sex (though lesbian sex is not mentioned in the same way ironically) Jesus never mentioned it
T1, your answer is almost crazy.
On the first point, you make as though to quote Paul about priests and then quote him saying nothing whatsoever about any group of people called ‘priests’. Where does ‘priest’ appear in the passage you said? On this one you need to restart.
On the second point, I do not agree that porneia is a ground for divorce according to what we know of Jesus. It is a surmise by Matthew and a logical one. If it had been known to be said by Jesus, Mark or Paul would more likely than not mention it, as it is an important point in that it destroys a blanket ban.
On the third point, you are grasping at straws.
-Point one: of all the millions of topics Jesus could have mentioned he mentioned 1 per cent.
-Point two: Porneia (Mark 7) has its nature laid out in the relevant Levitical passages.
-Point three: Jesus is in a culture so sexually modest that they have no public nudity or anything like, even despite the surrounding culture.
-Point four: Two men actually sleeping with one another is aeons away from Jesus’s system and that of the system of Judaism of the time.
St Paul made quite clear no woman could teach ie preach a sermon or assume any authority ie as an ordained minister over a man. If you reject that you are rejecting a passage of the bible. Now Jesus said nothing against women priests and made use of Mary Magdalane but if you want to be a biblical purist you have to take note of much more than just what Jesus said.
If you take the Mark or Paul approach to divorce then you support an outright ban on remarriage after divorce. So the C of E already breached that biblical view of scripture long ago.
On your last point not even Leviticus forbids lesbianism only male sexual relations between each other
Simon ‘St Paul made quite clear no woman could teach ie preach a sermon or assume any authority ie as an ordained minister over a man.’ sorry, that is nonsense. Are you completely ignorant of the debate on this? You give every sign of being so! Paul encouraged women to pray and prophesy in the assembly (1 Cor 11); he assumed all the gifts of the Spirit were open to women and men equally; he calls Junia ‘an apostle’ and entrusts his letter and its interpretation to the Romans to Phoebe, a church leader. He worked with Priscilla who was a teacher, evangelist, and church planter.
The C of E also breached the preachings of St Paul by allowing women priests and bishops in its churches unlike say the Roman Catholic, Orthodox or some evangelical churches
T1, it is good that you address issue directly, and it will be good too if you address these issues directly.
(1) Paul did permit women to teach (Priscilla, Ac 18) and of course 1 Tim may well be written a little later to round off the Paulines (and Acts too). It makes much use of (relies on in a secondary way) 1 Cor, where it has been noted that this prohibition is once found in a different part of the text, suggesting that there may have been a time in transmission when it was mere marginalia (given that he nearby assumes women pray and prophesy publicly in the assembly; in the related case of head covering he appeals to custom and general coherence). Paul knew about distinctive maleness and femaleness (it is only moderns that don’t, but even that is from nothing but ideology, since who could research the sexes’ relative suitability in every single ministry?) and it is unlikely in the extreme that he would counsel identical ranges of ministry for both the sexes. Not only may men be more rock-like than women by biology, women appreciate this rocklikeness almost more than they appreciate anything else (longterm) because their biology compels them on average to be more emotional than men on the logic-emotion spectrum. A healthy community is one that gives free rein to all existing gifts and has positive and distinctive and different visions of manhood and womanhood. Both men and women can be affected by moods, but there is a difference: women’s are inbuilt to their biology, which (as any woman will tell you) makes not only a difference but a massive one. Any proposal that that be ignored as though it were nothing is treating something large as nothing, and therefore not being truthful. And as we go on we can mention several average differences between the sexes, which would be ignored in their implications only by ideologues, i.e. those who have no researched or reasoned grounding.
On your second point, you seem to find it significant (Molesworth: advanced, forthright and significant) what the C of E, the world’s 3rd largest denomination thinks and does. Why would anyone get so precious about that of all things? They do whatever they vote for, and are affected by cultural norms. Why pay any attention?
As for your 3rd point, if it is only women that are not mentioned here, then that means men are; and what is said about them??
Again and again you say Jesus said XYZ, but after all The C of E does not, and that is so much more important….
It is??????
Christopher thank you for this:
“I do not agree that porneia is a ground for divorce according to what we know of Jesus. It is a surmise by Matthew and a logical one. If it had been known to be said by Jesus, Mark or Paul would more likely than not mention it, as it is an important point in that it destroys a blanket ban.”
I also think it highly unlikely that Jesus said what is attributed to him by Matthew.
No. I know quite clearly those who are ideologically opposed to recognition of same sex relationships but ideologically supportive of women priests will interpret scripture accordingly. Hence why Forward in Faith for example oppose both.
1 Cor 11 is about how every ‘woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved’. So merely about ensuring women cover their head when praying, not that they can become priests which Paul clearly rejected in his first letter to Timothy
Simon T1 ‘not that they can become priests which Paul clearly rejected in his first letter to Timothy’. Again, you keep using these silly proof texts pulled out of context.
The C of E having women in leadership over 30 years provides an excellent test case. Doubts arise specifically in the area of doctrine, not so much elsewhere. Averagely men are more objective, able to dissociate from personal/community interests.. Less concerned not to offend. Less in the generosity/hospitality matrix. Happier to be unpopular. More concerned with truth in the abstract.
It is precisely in disregard for the integrity of doctrine (truth matters) that the C of E has gone backwards in the last 30 years. And most women leaders would call themselves liberal, and appear to be so. That term is of course riddled with problems of definition and possibly deliberate vagueness, and problems surrounding why it should be considered a thoughtful position rather than a psychologically founded one.
In the last 30 years, objective doctrine is precisely what has back pedalled, and people pleasing – not at all a Christian virtue – has
Yes. If truth does not matter to you, you should not be teaching. That is almost a tautology.
People pleasing has advanced.
The other point is women’s being on average more inclined to follow social trends than men are. Less tolerance of social deviance. Sometimes compliance will also be a factor.
Christopher your stereotyping of male/female is ludicrous and shameful. We should all distance ourselves from it. Not only would you like to re criminalise homosexuality but presumably campaign for a woman’s place being solely in the home. It’s little wonder you think women aged 12/13 should be getting married and having babies.
Note two things here, not for the first time. Andrew is highly inaccurate. And the way he pitches his inaccuracy is to try and make my position sound as extreme as he can – accuracy be blowed.
What sort of person is it that is so opposed to truth and accuracy. If they oppose these things, what must it be that they love?
(1) Your ‘presumably’ says it all. You tar me with something that even you say that I have not said. As for the home, it is the best place there is. To you, it is a place of horror? As for women being more attached to it than men, they are more attached to babies than men are and vice versa (breastfeeding), and the only alternative is a totally exhausting stop-start between work and home. But someone is still looking after the child; so make it the best person rather than, in a backward step, an inferior alternative. You would approve of a nanny going ‘out’ to work (in terms of travel, a non economical solution) but not of a parent staying in with the child, and preventing that unnecessary complication? I know which one the child prefers. Does that matter? The govt wants a lot of tax hence they aim to get the max number of adults working, and tire them out at the expense of family life in the process in an age of labour saving devices.
(2) You knowingly told an untruth about the age 12-13, when you yourself had already quoted me saying 18-26. The 12-13 was the age when people should start thinking about what sort of person they should be, planning ahead for their eventual marriage. Becoming marriageable or marriage minded.
(3) A second untruth, perhaps a lazy one, was to say I associated this age with females, when in fact I never differentiated between the sexes here. Your attitude is a passive acceptance of the trend (essentially sexist) that the same thing for a female is much more significant than the same thing for a male. You are conforming to the letter to the culture forced upon you in this one highly specific culture and time, with no critical spirit.
Anyway, I am puzzled about what it is that ties women to the home Mon to Fri when children are older. Homemaking and child rearing is the noblest of pursuits, and strength to any who pursues it, though it was not part of my original presentation.
Christopher:
Let’s deal with 12/13 issue.
I mentioned the age 12/13 as being the age of marrying in the culture of Jesus and your response was this:
“Good thing too. Because not only
(1) is that in tune with biology, but also
(2) people with no immaturity in their surrounds will be mature and of good character at that age, as very many 12 year olds indeed are.”
You then went on in further comments to say that it was just one percent of society-our society-that was out of step with the norm. The norm for most societies was marrying and having babies aged 12/13.
I had asked you to clarify this a number of times and you simply didn’t do so except to say that 1213/ was the age that people should start beginning thinking about marriage and that somewhere between 18 and 26 might be the time to marry. In other words your comments were very vague and anybody can look this up. Just scroll up the page.
You repeated several times your point about just one percent of society being unusual-our society-somehow ignoring that the whole of the western world does not permit 12 or 13-year-olds to be marrying.
Quite bizarre.
Christopher
Let me see if i have got this right.
It’s good for a 12 or 13 year old to be concerned with their marriageability and what sort of partner they might find in four years.
But, at the same time, as adolescents, they are subject to hormonal fluxes and not at all capable of deciding on their sexuality until maturity. Which happens when?
Penelope
No it’s only the gay (and bi) 12 year olds who are confused. The straight children need to be married off quick before they have a chance to become confused
Certainly anyone associated with what you call ‘gay’ and ‘bi’ manifests more confusion than others in that there is an element of being out of kilter with biology which is not present in the others.
Andrew, the ‘good thing too’ was directed at the idea that when physical maturation merely begins, the whole person should be integrated with that (rather than being schizophrenic) and consider themselves on the road to marriage, something to be accomplished when physical maturation ends. The alternative is the familiar nonstarter of people who have hitherto matured being encouraged to be immature all of a sudden. So (given that they are precious people) it is a good thing that they avoid this odd alternative path.
Not only did I clarify at the time, but I will always at any time clarify anything people want merely by being asked. As I often say. Test me.
The 1% is cross culturally and across historical periods.
As to hormonal fluxes, at this time in life they happen worst at the very start of the maturation process, at the jolting transition from child to adolescent. Which is well before marriage-suitable levels of maturity.
As to when maturation actually completes, I am repeating what I said before. In brain, c25. In growth/height, c21. So long as people are well brought up they will be essentially mature by that time or even slightly earlier.
Andrew, can you explain how any presentation that repeats the word ‘averagely’ is stereotyping?
(1) The two cannot coexist;
(2) The word ‘averagely’ would not be able to be used unless data existed anyway. So you are anti data?
Christopher: you express yourself in such convoluted and long winded ways (and then call them telegraphic) that it is often impossible to actually know what you are saying. It is why I asked for clarification at least twice on this thread alone.
You aim to sound like you are being specific but actually just make vast generalisations which get nobody anywhere.
I’m not anti data. I’m anti ignoring context. I’m pro ignoring data that doesn’t actually address real situations. And I’m anti self righteous flanneling.
p.s. you can drown in an average of 6inches of water. Averages in the way you use them are useless. Stick to real life.
Andrew
1
Something can be convoluted in that it has many words and also simultaneously telegraphic in that the words that it has are succinct.
You said there was a contradiction here. Read the previous para and see that there is none.
2
You say that the only reason for not understanding is that the saying is opaque. That is because you have not thought of the other possible reason: deficit in understanding-levels.
3
Data has to be in context. But (a) statistical studies are some of the highest level and most precise studies there are and (b) They almost never have a great deal of context for individual cases. Because when you are dealing with thousands of cases, and doing so with precision to boot, you are not working on a broad enough canvas for that. The precision advances our knowledge.
4
Averages are what most statistics are about, and what much information gathering is about. Almost everything in our life depends on information gathering. Information gathering and study are much the same thing.
Your proposed alternative is that there should be none at all? But then we are reduced to looking at a tiny number of samples in context, which gives us no information because those samples may be atypical.
Christopher
Being out of kilter with biology.
In what way?
Christopher:
1. The words in your earlier posts are anything but succinct. They are confused and confusing.
2. How do you know I have not thought of that possibility and several others as well? I most certainly have.
3. Precision is exactly what I am asking for, hence my 9 questions that you are not able to answer. The answers will advance our knowledge in this excruciating case. I suspect you have no interest in the answers because it will mean the collapse of your noise of cards.
4. No, I am proposing collecting precise statistics rather than focussing on worst case scenarios designed to ‘reprogramme’ people once they have been criminalised for their same sex activity – which is what you propose. I guess it’s of some small comfort that you don’t propose the death penalty, like some other commenters here and some provinces in the Anglican Communion.
4.
Why was there ever any such thing as biology at all? After all, reproduction is a recondite side-issue.
So, Christopher, what you claim as ‘biology’ is important because the only telos of sexual activity is reproduction?
Only straight couples who reproduce successfully fulfill their biological telos?
More Darwinian than Christian 🙂
You would think it would rightly be Darwinian if it addresses the question ‘Where did biology come from?’. So answer that question.
Indeed and Welby didn’t even allow same sex marriage in C of E churches, only prayers in services for same sex couples. Hence the likes of Ozanne left the C of E for the Methodists who do allow same sex marriages in their churches now
Do you think God recognises same-sex marriage certificates? Please include a clear Yes or No in any answer.
And T1,
Your :ideology’ assertion is based on a premise that is erroneous; ideology is static, unchanging. The whole revision programme is a self-refutation based, as it is propounded on changing cultural ideology, as admited by its advocates, and pressure groups.
T1
“Did Jesus expressly forbid monogamous same sex relationships? Did the Ten Commandments? No in both cases.”
Are you seriously suggesting that anything is OK that Jesus and the Commandments didn’t ‘expressly forbid’?
Actually Jesus strongly taught the authority of the Bible – so presumably he would approve the Levitical texts on the subject, which forbid all same-sex sex in or out of marriage. And an argument for it to change to be OK in the new covenant is rather ruled out by Paul in Romans 1. And Jesus in Mark 10/Matt 19 very much portrays sex and marriage as heterosexual ….
There’s also a rather large question as to IF same-sex sex/marriage is OK, why is there no text anywhere in scripture that says so? At least there are actual texts against the practice ….
Having been increasingly liberal for decades, Methodism has basically walked out of Christianity by accepting ssm – and that the decision attracts the likes of Ozanne is hardly a recommendation….
Prayers to bless what God has forbidden – doesn’t sound like a good move for people who are supposed to believe in God ….
The Torah forbids penetrative sex between males, not ‘all same-sex sex in or out of marriage.’ It does not preoccupy itself with sexual orientation, feelings etc. and says absolutely nothing of sex between two women. You on the other hand are adding to the commandments, which is forbidden: Dt 4.2. And yes, Mr Langton there is a minority of people who are exclusively attracted to the same-sex, whether they act upon it or not, that’s what society galls gay people. It’s not a concept.
It is a theme of Holiness, sanctification following God’s salvation, redemptive Passover, exodus of his people.
Salvation, always precedes sanctification.
Silence, of itself is not an argument for approval or permission. Genesis is sufficient Torah continuity for God’s ground rules for human sexuality for God’s people you know God’s purposes, intentions, with continued emphasis in Romans 1, along with other aspects of Holiness laid out there. There is a whole canon continuity in this matter.
Holiness is matter of God’s health and safety, loving care and concern for his redeemed people.
Ultimately it is to change us ever more into the likeness of Jesus.
And my o my how much more is that needed in my evermore realisation of my sin. I’m done for without Him, for it only ever by His union and indwelling that any of us has life, life evermore, in him, with him.
Geoff, you may very well believe that everything is forbidden unless explicitly allowed in Scripture but that makes you much stricter than ultra-orthodox Jews on the matter.
https://outorah.org/p/5914/
You are right; Torah does not preoccupy itself with orientation, because of its theological anthropology, which Paul takes up in Romans 1, which sees the most important thing about us as our bodily forms, created male and female in the image of God, and not our psycho-social dispositions or ‘orientations’.
But it is widely agreed that the prohibition is on all forms of same-sex sexual activity, and the Second Temple reading of the phrase was taken to apply to women as well as to men. Again, Paul’s language in Romans 1 is typical of this, not exceptional to it.
The idea that one’s orientation is a founding elements of one’s identity is indeed a way of conceiving human identity, and it is one which many Christians who are same-sex attracted reject.
Lorenzo,
I did not say nor imply that.
The order of salvation is key. It can not be inverted, no matter how much we may lapse into it.
It is a question of covenantal holiness and a one of continuity and discontinuity across the whole canon of Christian scripture. There is a consistent, developing theme, coherent and cogent, It is one of many.
It relates first and foremost to
1 The doctrine of God in Triunity
2 The consequent doctrine of humanity.
3 The resulting interlinking, intertwined relationship (into Resurrection eternity, or not).
I don’t think so, Ian. Even as late as the Mishna and the Amoraim, Lesbianism is tentatively forbidden under the ‘practices of the Canaanites and Egyptians.’ I have yet to read anything in Jewish tradition about Torah deriving its logic from our bodily forms. Whenever it ventures an explanation for the prohibition (and many rabbis consider the commandment to be a hok) it puts it in terms of ‘spilling the seed’. Paul’s language does not sound at all typical to me. He begins by asserting that homosexuality is a divine punishment visited upon the gentiles because of their idolatry, something that most contemporary rabbis would have agreed with (see Kiddushin 82a that “Jews are not suspected of [engaging] in homosexual intercourse”) only to turn on them by saying “therefore you have no excuse when you judge because … you are doing the very same things.” That is the crux of his argument
Besides, I fail to see how homosexuality is a consequence of idolatry. It has existed in all societies, whatever their beliefs.
The written laws of Moses actually forbid ‘man lying with man as with woman’, which means for sexual gratification, which means intent to orgasm. That can occur through more diverse means than anal sex.
I agree that one should neither subtract from nor add to divine moral law.
Lorenzo
“And yes, Mr Langton there is a minority of people who are exclusively attracted to the same-sex, whether they act upon it or not, that’s what society galls gay people. It’s not a concept.”
See my later response to Ian on this….
Lorenzo
You comment “Besides, I fail to see how homosexuality is a consequence of idolatry. It has existed in all societies, whatever their beliefs.”
That is not how Paul expresses it. In Romans 1 he points out how rejecting God leads to idolatry/false gods because, well, humans aren’t really able to be our own gods. It is also rejecting God, rather than idolatry, which leads to homosexuality.
So nothing against a woman lying with a woman then
Not in the OT, no. It was unheard of in ancient Israel and God does not forbid things that never enter people’s mind, so as not to tempt them. You can find it mentioned negatively in Romans 1.
The NT explicitly condemns sex between women. I assume you dont hold the view that if something is explicitly condemned in the NT but not explicitly in the OT we can ignore it?
Even in Romans 1 it says ‘Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.’ Which could be women sleeping with men not their husbands or engaging in sexual conduct not specifically for procreation. It does not specifically mention lesbian sexual activity as Leviticus mentions male same sex activity
Anton
It certainly wasn’t unheard of 🙂
Penelope,
I said it was unheard of in ancient Israel. I’m well aware of Sappho.
Anton
Not in Israel either. Which is a part of ancient Western Asia.
Anton
We are now getting into territory of claiming that homosexuality was so shocking and unheard of in the Roman provinces of Nazareth, Samaria and Judea that Jesus didn’t need to explicitly teach against it, but so well understood in the neighboring provinces that when Paul mentioned it by name everyone knew that he was including monogamous relationships between people who have only ever been attracted to the same sex.
Context is allowed for divorce, tattoos and women in leadership, but not gay people
Peter, we are talking specifically about lesbianism, not male-male homosexuality. Please read the thread more carefully.
Anton
My point stands. Judea was a Roman province. It’s hard to believe that the people of Judea didn’t know lesbianism at all, but the people of Roman had a excellent understanding of it.
Peter, to say “my point stands” is as good an argument as saying “but I’m right”. Ancient Israel had a totally different culture from the rest of the ANE, as both the Jews and the Romans affirmed.
Anton
It didn’t. Ever heard of Hellenism? Philo? Josephus? The apostle Paul?
Why, Penelope, did the Jews start the Maccabean wars against the helleniser Antiochus Epiphanes IV? The dominant party afterwards was the Pharisees. They started well.
T1
At 540 I pointed out that the Bible itself clearly abrogates the dietary rules that forbid earing shellfish; and at 1100, you’re still suggesting that modern readers who eat shellfish are “just pick and choose followers of biblical scripture”. In that case at least we are in fact clearly following the scripture….
Please pay attention….
So even then you also accept biblical purity requires rejection of women priests and bishops and rejection of divorce except for spousal adultery then. As well as your rejection of same sex relationships as you can find biblical passages for all of that with no clear refutation elsewhere
Not quite again, Stephen, you’re supposed to abstain from meat that has not been slaughtered the kosher way (pigs for instance, are gassed, which counts as strangled) or drained of its blood, and of blood itself (Acts 15.20, 28). It’s a unanimous apostolic decision (15.25) a part of the covenant with Noah that was supposed to be binding on the gentiles too and that the church quite happily disregards. The Bible itself does not ‘clearly abrogates the dietary rules.’ No chorizo or black pudding for you, no game, no pork, no rare steaks.
Indeed, hence Orthodox Jews do not eat pork and non kosher food
Lorenzo
As I understand it the definitive texts here are probably Acts 10; 9ff, Peter’s vision, and Mk 7; 14-23. The Acts 15 decision is more about easing things between Gentiles and Jews in the early period of including said Gentiles, when Gentiles might upset Jewish believers with a freedom that the Jews would still be struggling with a bit.
Definitive texts? Only because you choose to side with Paul against the unanimous decision of all the other apostles.
Tim
For gay listeners that was the most important part of the interview because it governs how welcome they will be in their parish church and whether they can marry and still be fully welcome. He lied to us about that to get out of a tricky question for him. So we have a national church telling gay people it’s a massive sin for them to get married, while the leader of the church blatantly lies.
Worse was the unsolicited claim that he wants to make people who want gay people dead remain welcome in the church
Peter
1) There are no ‘gay people’ as homosexuals want to have that concept.
2) ‘Gay sex’ is a sin, people who positively want to do it should not be welcome in a church. As with other sins, the repentant are welcome in the church, though they may still be subject to occasional temptation.
3) I think Welby is a mess rather than evil; and a major part of that mess is the conflicting pressures of the established church with its attempt, in defiance of Jesus himself, to ‘serve two masters’. He is trying to hold together things that can’t coherently be so held. In the end the church will only be acceptable as the established religion if it accepts same-sex marriage. But to do that will be to let the world squeeze the church into the world’s mould (Romans 12; 2, Phillips); choosing the world as master and rejecting God. So long as the church remains established there will be a ‘lose/lose’ situation…..
Stephen ‘There are no ‘gay people’ as homosexuals want to have that concept’. I think that is quite an unhelpful way of expressing your view, since it is easily construed to mean you don’t think gay people exist, or you don’t think anyone has a settled attraction to the same sex. Both are evidently true.
You appear to be objecting to the idea of defining identity by means of settled patterns of sexual attraction, and you would not be alone in that, but this is a better way of expressing it.
Indeed. People at a point in time and over a period of time most certainly come to have settled attraction to the same sex. The difficulty with describing these as ‘gay people’ is we are not here talking about ‘people’ as such, only about people at a point of time and over a particular more limited period of time. A bit like, for example, there are Mozart aficionados or smokers, and by now they are settled in that state, but they are not in that category either in essence or lifelong.
Even ‘people who are now gay / have become gay’ (let alone ‘gay people’) cannot be applied to anyone of baby/toddler age, for obvious reasons.
It cannot be applied to children because of asexuality or latency.
It cannot be applied to teenagers because nothing is stable there.
It can be applied later on, but by now a substantial portion of life is already under the bridge.
And, more importantly, there is by now ample scope for life-changing experiences and milieux to have moulded people in a contingent direction that could easily have been otherwise. Most of their life-changing and formative experiences will have already happened by the time they leave unsettled adolescence.
And it is in unsettled adolescence that most of the unwisest choices get made, too. So how can we trust the said choices?
Ian
I’ve discussed this in wider terms frequently on this blog and elsewhere. As I’ve explained, the point is that ‘gay’ is not, as some would have it, the same kind of ‘being’ as, say, being ethnically different. The reason it’s not the same is that ‘gay’ very much involves not just being something, but doing – and so CHOOSING TO DO – certain acts, the ‘gay sex’. When things are done by choice, the uderlying ‘being’ is not a simple morally neutral matter like say skin colour, but is a matter of urges and desires – and simply having urges and desires to do something doesn’t make those things right.
Things done/chosen because urges/desires is actually pretty much all moral and immoral acts. And ipso facto further discussion is needed as to whether the deeds are right or wrong. In Christian terms the urges and desires underlying ‘gay’ are very real – in that sense ‘gay people’ do exist – but it is not simplistically OK to act on and live out those urges; they are part of the disorder brought into human life by ‘the Fall’ and are to be resisted and repented of. And in Christian terms that disorder includes a degree of ‘slavery’ to the sinful urges – sinful men rather than getting to be like God have actually significantly lost control even of their selves.
As I’ve said before, people are meant to love people and same-sex love can be intense; but for Christians sex – or more accurately pseudo-sex – is an inappropriate expression of such relationships.
Homosexual desire was not brought into human life by ‘the Fall’. When was it not present? it is evidenced even among animals. How did it enter humankind, where?
Lorenzo,
What is the source of that assertion? Is it Judaism that doesn’t subscribe to a Biblical/ scriptural theology doctrine of the ‘fall” of humanity, sin -banished from the presence of God, from the ”heights’ of Eden.
Lorenzo
As regards the ‘Fall’ I do not necessarily take a simplistic literal approach to interpreting Genesis 1. I’m fairly happy with the idea that the account is true and helpful in important ways without being straightforward history – in the kind of way that Orwell’s “Animal Farm” tells us important things about the Russian Revolution in a genre other than literal history.
Paul in Romans 1 giving an analysis from a slightly different angle is nevertheless clear that homosexuality in humans is a result of the fractured relations between God and humanity resulting from sin.
The identity red herring again?
All a gay identity means is “settled patterns of sexual attraction” – something I cannot change about myself. It’s not a separate concept.
No Geoff, Judaism does not believe in original sin. The question remains to be answered: how does same-sex desire arise in teenagers who have not rejected G-d? You’re coming very close to saying that it’s just the way they were created.
AJ Bell, no-one has settled patterns of sexual attraction. They merely have this for a proportion of their life and even then there are variations.
ANd when is this portion of their life? Precisely the portion when everything else is also settled.
Often people speak as though the world were populated by mid life adults, and cosmopolitan metrosexual ones at that.
Christopher, I am not persuaded that we can only talk about “x people” if “x” is observably congenital. It’s an absurd position that (rather transparently) seeks to prevent rather illuminate discussion.
As for: “there is by now ample scope for life-changing experiences and milieux to have moulded people in a contingent direction that could easily have been otherwise”
That rather begs the question of what experiences and milieux you think are needed to stop people growing up gay. And if you’re right and this can be laid at the door of “life-changing experiences”, i.e. a trauma, quite why the ex-gay movement has been such a spectacular failure at turning people straight despite decades of work trying to do so?
AJB
1. On the congenital – limiting things to the congenital prevents the highly-hopeful lie and category-error ‘sex, colour, sexuality’.
2-3. What experiences and milieux are needed to stop people growing up gay? You see this the wrong way round. I doubt the possibility would arise in the first place in many cases if there were a healthy culture and milieu which had awe for the natural order. This is demonstrated by different rates at different times and in different cultures (more in troubled cultures, less in untroubled). Broken families are a hellish reality of the post sexual revolution period, but were much more avoided earlier, i.e. a succeeding culture was succeeded by a failing one. People respond to their broken family by manifesting the appropriate estrangement and disaffection. Frisch and Hviid 2006 find broken families to be almost the best predictor, because of course if smooth development is taken away from you very early on, you can either pretend it does not matter (when it matters intensely) or can manifest in some way to express how much it matters.
The same applies to molestation rates. Why do you think molestation rates when young are so notably higher among those who now call themselves gay?
And so on. Early sexual experience. Rates of pregnancy and impregnation.
Is your proposal to dispense with post birth experience altogether in our analysis? But all of our experience is post birth.
4. No, the rates of people reverting from gay self-identifying will change depending on how mainstream gayness is in a culture. Whatever the topic, reversion will fall when we are talking of mainstream things because the mainstream is by its nature hard to break away from.
There are more ex gays than gays by a substantial number (Savin-Williams and Ream).
Fine, your objection to “gay people “is just rhetorical pointscoring. The strangest part is that simply saying “x people” does not, in itself, require “x” to be a permanent feature. We have no problem talking about blonde people even though hair colour is very changeable, nor American people even though people can and do change their nationality.
As for your 20 year old studies Frisch and Hviid didn’t look at orientation, they looked at marriages specifically, which is quite different (see Blanchard). Savin-Williams and Ream themselves didn’t think they were capturing orientation properly. In your keeness to jump on child abuse statistics (which you don’t actually cite) you overlook a key statistical point: children aren’t abused at random, they’re targeted by predators. But this is besides the point. If you were right and this can be ascribed to childhood trauma of family breakdown or child abuse, then shouldn’t the ex-gay movement at some point had some success? Even your favourite Core Issues Trust is very careful to avoid saying it turn someone straight. After decades of this shouldn’t they show some success? When the failure has been this total, shouldn’t we conclude that it’s junk?
Christopher
Hang on … I thought you were all in favour of early sexual activity and impregnation.
Stephen/Ian
How can the church have top level debates on gay people when it continues to pretend not to understand what “gay” means.
No it does not mean MSM that’s why doctors use MSM rather than gay.
No, it’s not a choice.
You wouldnt take your car in for a service at a garage where they didn’t know what a catalytic converter was. How then can you expect gay people to trust that you are accurate in your moral arbitration about us when you apparently don’t know even the basics about us?
This isn’t new terminology – it’s been round all of my life and I’m 42.
The “Gay Libertarian Front” was formed in the 1960s so there was at least some understanding of it then.
PCD’s comment is on the silly side, because the early sexual activity I am in favour of, or the late for that matter, would not be earlier than marriage, nor than a suitable marriage age. Nor would it be of the form of molestation. Nor, thirdly, would it be same-sex. She knows very well that she knew those 3 points even before making her comment. Hence one can see the motivation behind her comment.
AJB-
1
Frisch and Hviid did not look at orientation? Orientation can be defined only by self-assessment (which could include lies) or by behaviour, which can be measured in a way that orientation cannot.
Their study was massive and national, having implications in multiple directions, quite unlike your portrayal of it.
2
Savin-Williams and Ream (whose findings you entirely avoid addressing) cannot have addressed orientation, because one cannot address things that have vague definitions. They addressed behaviour and self-assessment, which can be measured. And as to orientation, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
3
Child-abuse stats uncited? The citation is complex – see my chapter 11 in What Are They Teaching The Children? where I do indeed cite multiple studies, all the larger-scale ones I could find, which however point very clearly the same way as one another.
4
Core Issues Trust is my favourite? Where do I say it is my favourite? You have lost me here.
5
I already addressed conversion rates. I am a strong believer in organic development in all that I say. Once something has entered in, it is part of a person’s identity, and the earlier it does so, the more of a core part of their identity it is. But he point I just made you ignore. Namely: that the more mainstream anything is in a culture, the harder it is to break away from it. You are taking a synchronic view – all times of history see the same sorts of findings on conversion levels? They do?? All times of history are the same here? They are?? So much more likely that people can turn away more easily from things when those things are seen as socially deviant than they can at another date when those things are seen as socially mainstream. How can you disagree with that?
But PJ I see ‘being gay [not innately but for a portion of one’s life later on in life]’ as neither MSM nor a choice. If it were MSM then exceptions would be easy to cite (the celibate, the molested, the bohemian or individual without boundaries). If it were a choice – do we either (a) choose our family circumstances that can make or break us or (b) choose our life history and formative experiences? No – these things are to a large degree thrust upon us, particularly the former.
Nor do you help yourself by going with the cliche ‘a choice’ without distinguishing between (a) initial choices that could have been otherwise, and (b) a later inability to choose because something has by now become ingrained. (a) and (b) are quite different, so how can you say there is just one thing called ‘a choice’?
Christopher
So, it’s OK to groom unsettled adolescents into straight relationships?
Note PCD for her almost constant intent to put words in people’s mouths. And for the complete inability of anyone to find anywhere where those people actually said any such thing, or anything close.
Absolutely desperate to incriminate. Evidence be d*d.
Christopher
I don’t understand why you think orientation can’t be measured? Or that behavior is a good indicator of orientation?
It’s probably still the case that globally the most common form of same sex sex is rape of one heterosexual by another. If you go by behavior alone you are measuring something other than orientation.
Christopher
Directing children’s (age 12 or 13) sexuality is grooming. Anyone who claims it is not is a safeguarding risk.
What evidence do you need?
PJ says that the most common kind of r**e is of one heterosexual by another.
Well, it had better be considering that there are 9 times as many of them as there are of anyone else. Otherwise other grouping[s] would be off the scale in their activity.
The issue is, of course, not aggregate but average. Think again, because if your thinking is of a level to make such basic errors as that, you are still at a preliminary stage, not the sort of stage where you can debate effectively.
It is certainly both grooming and questionable to put the words ‘children’ and ‘sexuality’ in the same sentence. But by definition they have none: they just have male and female biology. The word ‘sexuality’ (not a pleasant word nor one that most cultures have felt any need for, so therefore a rather bullying imposition by those who assume everyone’must’ accept it as a bona fide coherent concept) can only refer to a settled state, and that can come only with maturity. Logically, and according to the science too.
The Church of England was set up to be the established church, that is the whole point of it. Otherwise it might as well become Roman Catholic again and revert to the authority of the Pope and Vatican while the evangelicals go off and become Baptists or Pentecostals.
Though of course the prayers for same sex couples married in English law is fine. Just as it was fine for the King and Queen to have a blessing after their remarriage in a C of E chapel but for the marriage itself to only take place in a civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall
Simon,
That is a very odd and unhistorical view of the Church of England. When Henry VIII broke with the pope, he had no intention of being a Protestant. He imagined he had simply taken over the Catholic Church in England. It was only Cranmer and his followers who made in Protestant. The story was very complex.
You should learn about the actual history, not the cartoon version you seem to believe.
Indeed, so as I said were the C of E to cease to exist most of it and certainly all its pre 16th century churches and cathedrals would return to the ownership of the Roman Catholic church, the Pope and the Vatican.
Those who take a more evangelical line within the Church of England and would have followed Cramner would by contrast become Baptist, Pentecostal or form or join an independent evangelical church
As soon as the C of E rejected the authority of the Pope and made the King its Supreme Governor the Vatican of course no longer recognised it as a Catholic church
T1
“The Church of England was set up to be the established church, that is the whole point of it.”
So it is ‘the whole point’ of the CofE to be disobedient to God by defying scripture teaching on church/state relations – no wonder they’ve ended up in trouble…!!
Who says it was fine for the remarriage to be in a C of E chapel?
Just like was said, you believe in the infallibility of the C of E and its decisions. That is a fundamentalism.
It wasn’t, the blessing was there after a civil ceremony in Windsor Guildhall
My slip. The *blessing after the remarriage was viewed by you as positive because, after all, the C of E did it.
And the C of E is widely known to be infallible.
Prizes for guessing the logic flaw.
Peter, thanks for adding this perspective which is very helpful. I stand corrected. It puts some of the other comments here in a very different perspective and reminds me how much our personal perspective matters.
I still think that the original article could have included some more positive reflections on other topics the Archbishop spoke about, often very movingly. Thanks again.
Tim,
Could it be suggested that ‘perspectivism’ is the postmodern spoiled-self-absorbed-referential- child of modernism as a subjective measure of all things.
To employ camera lens analogy telephoto/zoom/wide angle/ depth of field/focus.
Neither does the elephant analogy effectively support postmodernism as it depends on the view of the whole elephant!
Thanks, Geoff. I think my point was that none of us can avoid a perspective to see, think and speak from, so to learn from another’s perspective can very often be helpful in avoiding the illusion of a purely objective standpoint. As it happens I do not believe in postmodernism or postmodernity. So Peter’s comment about how the Archbishop’s comments might come across to gay people was helpful to me. Thanks.
I think that to call our Archbishop a liar or say that he lied is offensive. Your point may be that what he is saying is inconsistent with the church’s teaching. Your point may be that you believe it is inconsistent with what the bible says. Those points are something very different. Justin Welby is being very honest and open about his opinions.
Please can we learn to use more respectful language and perhaps learn to “disagree well’. Remember John 13:34-35, if the world sees us a people who bicker and disrespect each other then how are they to know that we are disciples?.
Thanks very much,Nick. You make a very important point that we ignore at our peril. Gentleness, patience and kindness need to make a comeback if we are to disagree well.
Tim, you are so wrong in speaking of ‘disagreeing well’. Does it not occur to you that most disagreements happen because A has researched the issue more than B, or because B has studied critical thinking and A has not, or because A is more able to think outside the culture than B?
You are throwing away all the research and just saying that everyone has a valid point of view and all that matters is style not substance?
How could everyone’s point of view be equally valid? We listen to those who have studied and analysed most. Otherwise, unscrupulous ideologues will happily gain a place at the table, even an equal place at the table, and can set about bringing in their own preferred scenario and agenda even when no thought or research or evidence or analysis backs it up.
And anyway, why has good disagreement suddenly become a thing with this particular topic (where the evidence is not even finely balanced)? It never was with other topics previously.
Christopher disagreeing well has always been a thing. Always. Especially in the Church where the command to love is described as the best way of all.
There will be some matters where A has researched something more than B etc, as you say. But there will be other matters where both have researched the matter equally and arrive at different conclusions. The CofE has decided that in the case of the ordination of women it is possible to accept both conclusions.
In the question of a piece of art, should not people who find Beethoven somewhat limited in his harmonic expression at times be allowed to hold such a point of view? He could be sublime but I find so much of his melodic content to be scales and arpeggios and it does nothing for me.
Likewise there are those who swear by analogue sound recordings and others who prefer the digital masters that are more present nowadays, for a variety of reasons.
Surely in both these cases – as well as many others – people must disagree well?
Entirely matters of indifference (above).
As a former high-fi buff, vinyl has descernible qualities that aren’t there in digital, vice-versa.
It is not a ‘hill to die on”. It is not a moral or ethical matter, of eternal consequence.
Am I to be pleased, that you have indicated that you will not engage with anonymous comments?
You are treating style and substance as though they were the same thing. Trying to answer a point on substance by making a universally agreed point on style.
There is always a reason why people employ diversionary tactics – but how will their integrity be regarded by others when they do so?
Thanks , Christopher. I was responding to Nick’s comment above , ‘Please can we learn to use more respectful language.’ I don’t see how anyone can disagree with that. Whatever the topic disagreeing well matters otherwise we can easily find ourselves in a battle of mutual accusations but with this topic at the moment the tone quickly becomes combative. I agree that we daren’t give in to unscrupulous ideologues, including those who may agree with our current view. Ideologues can be found in more than one place. Nowhere do I say (and I don’t think) that every view is equally valid, but every person is worthy of respect and courtesy. But it is simply the case that people who have devoted equal amounts of time, critical thinking and skill (not to say prayer) have come to differing views. That is profoundly uncomfortable and I wish it weren’t the case, but it is, just as it is on many ethical/theological topics, and we have to find a way to respond that bears witness to our shared membership of the body of Christ. That is currently very, very difficult and it’s very tempting to walk away and divide. But surely it’s just as difficult when we disagree about more fundamental topics such as election, atonement, heaven and hell, judgement, the Trinity, etc but somehow we manage to stick together and don’t become so fractious. Thanks again.
Every person is worthy of respect and courtesy? This totally depends on how they are behaving. IIt is an unthought through generalisation. If they are being manipulative, or selfish, or proposing sin, or saying research does not count, or saying they have not read any research but still their opinion is worth the same as another person’s who has read it……
Life throws up many different contexts. Kindness is not a point. We have all believed in and appreciated kindness since infancy. How are the above points connected to or covered by that?
Andrew thinks morality is a matter of taste, maybe?
According to what he says above, he certainly thinks it is a matter of taste whether arguments are sound and coherent or not.
I don’t know why academics bother. Theur hard earned conclusions are worth no more than a random spouting. It is purely a matter of taste whether one goes with the evidence or ignores it.
Most people talking on most topics have not yet reached the point of knowing what constitutes strong evidence or a strong argument in the first place.
Merely a matter of taste? The precise topic of Oliver O’Donovan’s talks 41 years ago which I heard.
Andrew does definitely not think morality is a matter of taste. I thought that was your approach actually Christopher. Your distaste and personal disgust at male same sex behaviour seems to be your only factor in this debate.
The opposite of good disagreement is what we see in the Middle East – war and human catastrophe on a scale that ought never to be possible. That situation presents a moral issue that makes our debates about human sexuality look shameful. Ridiculous. Yet the voices in this echo chamber wish to have war about the matter rather than good disagreement.
The ministry of Jesus makes plain what morality is. A preference for the poor, the outcast, the sick. A clear condemnation of self righteous war mongers. Nothing about homosexuality.
If you do not compare all this to taste, then why mention Beethoven and vinyl? They are irrelevant unless to a discussion about taste.
But you did mention them, and made them the main point.
What I say applies to verbal debate. On actual war I of course agree. The two situations are different.
‘Your distaste and personal disgust at same sex male behaviour seems to be your only factor in this debate.’ – A factor which in thousands of words you cannot cite one time I have even mentioned. Not truthful.
You do know however that I write often on, and have published on, statistics related to this. I think anyone considering that would know what my main factor is. The worst of it is that you alrteady have known for nearly a decade that I am in to the statistics of all this (i.e. precise and accurate information) and yet decide to pretend you do not know that even a little bit.
“What I say applies to verbal debate. On actual war I of course agree. The two situations are different.”
No. They are identical. The verbal debate within the CofE has become a war. It will be a fight to the death, as that is what conservatives have decided it will be. They have decided there can be no good disagreement and the only alternative is war.
Your selective statistics are driven by your personal disgust and distaste and I have pointed that out many times before. It is very obvious. And the fact that you aren’t even aware of your own prejudices makes your claim of precision laughable.
First of all, the statistics cited in What Are They Teaching The Children? ae many and selected on the basis of how large scale they are.
Secondly, you make the charge of selectivity. Can you substantiate that, please.
Thirdly, it is fine, since if I am being selective you can point out which equally good or superior studies I left out. (Knowing which is the only way you could make the charge of selectivity anyway.)
So, shoot.
You have ‘pointed out’ that I am motivated by distaste? No, you have asserted it. Do you think merely asserting it makes it true??
Second, do you think you know the contents of my brain and motivations better than I know them myself?
Third, I mentioned before that if I were indeed motivated by that, I would have mentioned it. The reality is that I mention stats often and that not at all. So, please show me evidence that I mention it as a motivation. Otherwise, who can believe what you say?
Rational people are not driven by emotions and superficials anyway.
What would you say to all the academics who disagree with your analysis?
Christopher: the nature of your many posts here suggest you are not entirely rational.
You have zero awareness of your own bias, and that point has been addressed by me and others before.
Your ridiculous assertions earlier in this thread about the characteristics of women as opposed to men are just one area that is cause for extreme concern. Follow those assertions to their logical conclusions and we would say that women are not capable of being medics, or lawyers, Judges, journalists etc…
And your ongoing defence of Iwerne and that whole regime of abuse is quite worrying too. See Penny’s comments above as further evidence of that.
The stats from the self published book What are they teaching the children? have been addressed here many times before. No need to repeat.
Christopher: As a further thought on the statistics what we need to know if you are clear that your own stance is backed up by stats is answers to a series of relevant questions. They are:
1. What proportion of sexually active homosexual Christian men practise anal sex?
2. What proportion of sexually active heterosexual Christian couples practise anal sex?
3. What proportion of sexually active homosexual Christian men practise oral sex?
4. What proportion of sexually active heterosexual Christian couples practise oral sex?
5. What proportion of the clergy in same sex couples are sexually active?
6. What proportion of the clergy in same sex couples are faithful to their partners in sexual activity?
7. What is the balance of lesbian to gay clergy who are in same sex couples?
8. What are the rates of STI amongst lesbian sexually active partnered clergy?
9. What are the rates of STI amongst gay sexually active partnered clergy?
Your sources would be useful to know as well please.
I realise these are 9 questions but as you have all of the relevant data at your finger tips I hope it would not take long to answer them.
PCD, it is not possible to ‘disagree’ tout court with an analysis that is in itself multi pronged. You would obviously deal with the subpoints singly.
Your analysis is that men and women are averagely the same at every point, or are there any points where they are not?
Andrew, you lied that the stats from said book have been addressed many times, at least you did so unless you can link to said discussions which name and address the studies cited – on many subtopics.
Quite the contrary (and do prove me wrong directly) I very much doubt you can even do something as basic as name one of the many publications cited therein, or know what any of the statistics are. Do tell me about some of them, so as to let me know whether you actually know which studies were cited.
And as with PCD, the findings of the studies cited, and on many subtopics to boot, would need to be assessed.
What was self-published?
The questions you ask (for the second time) are I believe things that have never been studied statistically, and it would be difficult to do so. But this section of my chapters was not concerned with anything so small-town as specific denominational people groups but rather with populations as a whole.
Christopher: the questions I ask are the ones that are applicable in the current debate. Confusing them with general questions about hypothetical situations won’t help us.
If you can’t actually answer these questions then there is no further point in discussing the matter. Be specific or let’s be quiet.
Andrew
As usual … Crickets ….
Andrew, you said that the stats from What Are We Teaching The Children? chs 10-11 (which are very many on very many topics; but if we confine ourselves to homosexuality, again very many on numerous subtopics) have been much discussed and dealt with on this forum already. That was an untruth. Can you admit it, please – in the sense that in order to discuss something one must at least be able to do the most preliminary thing of all: name papers and their conclusions and the way they arrived at those conclusions.
You have – unbelievably – done none of the three. Please do so, or your assertion (and perhaps your modus operandi too) will be seen to be lacking in truth. Thank you.
Christopher:
I’m not scrolling through years and years of posts looking for this I’m afraid.
Your obsession with the dangers of anal sex is well known and I don’t propose to give it further thought.
Lol. You do surprise me in your inability to back up your accusation.
But that was not even what I was saying. I was asking you to say now what was flawed about any of the papers I cited in WATTTC? and to give the alternative papers that I ought to have considered and did not.
At a minimum, to name the authors or titles, or conclusions or evidence behind the conclusions.
This requires no trawling, since that data is not on psephizo in the first place. You criticised my chapters and hence must have read them (if you have the slightest honesty. Are we to take it that you have not?)
Read quite some years ago Christopher when you were promoting it heavily on here but I’m afraid I didn’t keep the book, so utterly unpleasant, biased, and homophobic did I find it. Not surprising given the stable it comes from.
My point was that the statistics you reference in your chapters in that book had been quoted on this website by you and challenged-I cannot recall by who-for their bias. As I say, I am not prepared to trawl through the website to find that challenge.
Andrew
I think A.J. Bell (amongst others) has pointed out that the research does not demonstrate what Christopher claims it demonstrates.
I (and others) have pointed out that research on the prevalence of STIs among promiscuous gay men, has no relevance whatsoever to the practice of faithful, stable, permanent gay relationships (i.e. marriage), and even less relevance (if that is possible) to lesbians.
I still have a copy of the book, but, as i have pointed out to Christopher before, one reading was enough to persuade me of its vacuous pretensions. I have no desire to waste any more time on its rebarbative ideology.
Thanks very much Penny, that rings bells.
And of course the reasons I asked my 9 questions are because what you say is absolutely correct. And I suspect the reason Christopher dismisses the questions is because he knows he would not care for the answers.
Well, they can’t have been, can they, Andrew, since I reference over 100 statistical studies, I would have thought, in those 2 chapters. And probably 50 on homosexuality.
It is the height of unintelligence to lump all of these studies done at different times by different individuals and each involving hundreds of hours of work into one as though any generalisation could be made about all of them together.
You did not check out either what I said or what any critic of mine said for yourself. You perhaps assumed a critic of what I said about one or two studied must be right and I must be wrong. You yourself are still not at the point of being able to know what the studies even were, who wrote them, what they concluded and how they arrived at their conclusions.
PCD, what do you mean by ‘the research’?
A – Even in the section on homosexuality there were about 20-30 subtopics. ‘The research’ on *which* of these? And what about the other 19-29 subtopics?
B- If any research is faulty in any way, that is the fault of the researcher[s]so don’t shoot the messenger. Isolate what the faults are, if any, and tell me what they are and how they can be rectified.
It is not as though I quote studies different from the ones usually quoted. Studies are selected for how large scale they are. If you think of any I left out, then tell me what those were. Shoot.
STIs among the promiscuous has no relevance to the ‘faithful’. But that is true by definition, so trivial. And point to where I denied it. One of the things you will find is the proportional prevalence of faithful visavis pomiscuous. To take a parallel example, I am sure AIDS was no bother to those who did not catch it nor put themselves in a position to catch it. So therefore AIDS was OK, by your reasoning.
It gets worse.
“It is the height of unintelligence to lump all of these studies done at different times by different individuals and each involving hundreds of hours of work into one as though any generalisation could be made about all of them together.”
Exactly so. Yet you generalise about it all endlessly.
Please…Be specific. And answer the questions that are actually relevant to the discussion the CofE is engaged in.
On homosexuality alone, the subtopics for which I cited at least one paper were:
-Homosexuality in animals
-Genetics/intrauterine vs environment: general
-Urban environment
-College environment
-Comparative rates of molestation when young
-Effect of cultural change more widely
-Misleading nature of term ‘lesbian’
-Degree of fluidity of self-designation ‘homosexual’
-Home environment, influence of upbringing by lesbians
-Identical twins
-Measuring overlap or not with pederasty/pedophilia
-Comparative promiscuity
-Mental health
-STI contraction
-Types of sexual practice
-Life expectancy.
I make this 16 not 19-29 which was what I had estimated.
PCD and AG lump all these, some of which have evoked multiple different studies, together as though they were all one, and dismiss any analysis with a single wave of the hand: ‘larfably easy’ in Molesworth’s terms.
Larfable.
Andrew, what if the largest-scale studies on a given subtopic (and this is true of many of the subtopics) point not only in the same direction as one another but quite clearly so?
To that extent one could rightly generalise. But any generalisation can be elaborated anyway.
As I have pointed out, time and again, it matters not one whit whether the research you cite is reproduced accurately or not.
None of these statistical, scientific, or social scientific studies has anything to say to the queer partnerships lived and loved faithfully and exclusively.
The research you cite is irrelevant, tedious and insolent to holy men and women living out God’s purposes in love and charity with each other and with the communities which they grace. I doubt that they are interested in your prurient obsession with disease and promiscuity. Like others’ obsession with anal sex, it says a great deal more about your inner lives than it does about theirs.
So it is prurient or offensive or both to have any concern for the norms of any society, even that society which one is living in and tending?
Well odd. Altruism is out then.
Tim,
It is suggested that the key to understanding of issues and revelance and weighing evidence and opinion is the starting point tracing forwards to the present, or in a different way of putting it, recording and following a ‘paper trail’.
In the matters raised in this present article, the cumulative total of Andrew Goddard’s articles presents a weight of evidence that has not been countered by anyone who may support Welby and revisionist tactics and represents a chosen starting point.
‘Disagreeing well’ – where does that idea come from, what does it even mean? Suspdending decisions, judgements?
In what is or isn’t a matter of indiference. How is it determined, by whom?
Where when why and how did Jesus engage in what you seek, ‘disagreeing well’ and when why where and how didn’t he, if he is held up to be an exemplar?
What is a matter of eternity?
Seeking Truth and Reconcilliation may not hug but may see parting of ways, an acknowledgement, agreement of an irretrievable breakdown. ( See earlier comment relating to divorce, and sncillary relief above?)
It only takes one party reach a conclusion, decision, that there is an irretreviable breakdown and there is a one.
What does disagreeing well mean?
It means being polite and showing respect for the other person while disagreeing with them.
I suggest that it would be biblical when ‘speaking the truth in love’ to somehow show humility (Read Eph 4:15 in context with Eph 4:2). Even accepting the possibility that perhaps it might be you that is wrong not the other person.
As an example Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland
“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”
And how so Jesus, how did He speak the truth in love, if he is to be our exemplar?
Ephesians 4:3-14 is the wider context.
Interesting that has not been included?
Is not the wider context apt in this present matter, Nick?
And can not a text without a context, be a pretext. Your comment seems to confirm it can.
Thanks, Nick. You put it far more succinctly than I did!
Tim did you read the context of Ephesians. Really?
All of that is old hat and has already been taken on board. It does not even address the fact that if all opinions are to be respected, people can concoct the most selfish unevidenced socalled opinions possible in order to get their own way. You are saying that even these should be respected. Total nonsense.
Also you are saying that research conclusions are to appear on a level with, at the same table with, selfish desires. A second piece of total nonsense.
We can speak kindly from beinning to end, but when we point out these facts, we will be accused of being unkind. So truth is unkind?
Style is merely a surface matter. People use it to divert attention from substance.
I do not believe you have thought these separate points through. What you are saying just repeats a trope. Is accuracy important to you?
And alsom wht have good disagreement specifically on this non controversial issue?
And also, wht is kindness presented as though it were a new idea?
There is so much wrong here.
Regardless of the present case, you are saying that it is more important to avoid being offensive than to speak the truth as one sees it.
You are also implying that no-one ever in fact lies. What world is that?
Those who do lie, and I am not speaking of the present case, will be licking their lips at the way you propose to treat them as scrupulous when they are not.
But the very passage in Ephesians 4 that includes a call to ‘speak the truth in love’ starts with a command to be humble. And since when has being offensive counted as being loving?
Nick
He said church teaching was now that same sex sex isn’t a sin if it’s in the context of a marriage or civil partnership.
That’s a very clear lie about church teaching and the victims will be gay people who hear that and believe themselves no fully welcome in CofE churches. Some parish churches will let them down gently others will hurl the fires of hell at them, but none are going to be fully inclusive because the bishops don’t allow them to be.
I have just listened to the interview again. And no he did not say that it was the church’s teaching. He said it was a proposal. It might become the Church’s teaching, but it is not that yet.
There seems to be a mission to revoke doctrine of marriage by hook or by crook!
Anton 3 or so years ago cited something of Welby’s (commitment?) given to his daughter in connection with her friend Vicky….
I clearly stand to be corrected here and Anton may be able to help out, if still in the room and still is unwearied with it all.
Honesty, trust is evidence based, as is the opposite, with the intention, express or implied, to misrepresent, obfuscate.
Can two walk together without agree where to go. Amos 3:3 The expected answer in context is, No.
If that was the case Synod would have voted for full same sex marriage in its churches
Not so. A different methodology is in evidence, being employed. You have read and understood all of Andrew Goddards articles, haven’t you. (A rhetorical question) Other we questions of Gospel substance you steadfast ignore.
I don’t think that was me. Geoff. I am aware of former evangelical songwriter Vicky Beeching’s coming-out, but I didn’t know that she was a friend of one of Welby’s daughters, and I think it’s something I’d not have forgotten as it’s an interesting connection in the current context.
Thanks Anton. I’m almost certain it was put up on this site in the comments when VB’s book was openly and heatedly discussed.
I don’t keep a ‘paper-trail’ of evidence as in my working life. My concern for reliability of reports remains.
If I look at
psephizo dot com/tag/vicky-beeching/
then I find four mentions of Vicky Beeching. Three of those are ten years old and the fourth, which is about her book published in 2018, is from the July 9th thread that year. I am not a contributor to the associated thread, however. Nor does that thread mention any connection between Vickey Beeching and a daughter of Justin Welby (although one of his daughters is mentioned fleetingly).
It is possible that this was discussed at that time on the Archbishop Cranmer blog, where I made many comments. The Wayback Machine has preserved the blog articles but not the associated threads, I believe. But, as I said, I have no menory of knowing of this connection before today.
It may have been on the WeeFlea blog, or ThinkTheology
( less likely) or Christian today, maybe even Premier, but it was something of sufficient significant and relevant note, (if correct) for me to recall.
I’ve read the Wee Flea but never written on any thread on those blogs.
May not have been you Anton ( see my last comment on this below).
I’ve been unable to retrieve anything that goes as far as my recollection so I’ll withdraw it. Here is an article which includes more on the relationship between the two women.
https://www.christiantoday.com/article/katharine.welby.roberts.my.mental.health.has.deteriorated.but.im.stronger.in.myself/41516.htm
T1 – in your response above re Romans 1, you should note the next verse ,’In the same way…’ That’s a rather big clue as to what Paul was also referring to in his words about women.
So the Bible is against both male-male and female-female sexual relations. If you reject this youre simply choosing to believe what you want to believe.
Yet it was not explicit even by Paul, in fact less so than his clear refutation of women priests in 1 Timothy. In any case the C of E already approved women priests and bishops long ago well before PLF so unlike the Roman Catholic church has never taken all teachings of Paul as absolute. Paul after all was not Christ nor even one of his original apostles
It is explicit. Why are you saying it is not explicit> He not only states it but a;sp says ‘in the same way’, meaning the female and male cases are equivalent.
You seem not to read what is there, but only to see and test how much you can get away with. This is the only female-female reference and it is negative.Just as one would expect from the male-male. Are you also going to say that the NT is quite happy for us to steal and lie?
No that is just your interpretation of it. It could equally be an unnatural act with a male, he does not specifically say a woman should not lie with a woman.
The Old Testament forbids stealing and lying but does not mention lesbianism. You can only argue Paul might forbid it but then Paul forbids women priests too which the C of E have had for decades. As I said the C of E has never laid as much emphasis on Paul as the Vatican
Simon T1, have you read any commentary on these texts?
Paul is using ‘unnatural’ in Romans 1 in the same way as Philo (and other Jews) do, and as his argument makes clear. God has created humanity in a certain way, as male and female, and pagans have shown their rejection of God by going against the nature with which he created them.
That is his meaning of ‘unnatural’ here. And in reading the prohibitions in Lev 18 and 20 as applying equally to women, he is following precisely the line of Jewish interpretation of these texts—for the simply reason that they too are drawing on the creation of humanity as male and female.
This is by no means the consensus view. Many scholars think it far more likely that Paul is referring to something considered really filthy in ancient Western Asia, such as the woman being on top in a mixed sex act.
Males left the natural use of the female and were inflamed with desire for one another (literally).
This says what they left behind and also secondly what they replaced it with.
Thirdly, you say that Paul chose as his paradigmatic Gentile sin of all something to do with specific choreography which moreover never appears elsewhere (this, of all things, is what he gets more indignant about than anything else) rather than anything broader.
Not very likely. Who are these ‘many’ scholars (many means surely at least ten, right?), and are they independent of one another in what they say?
Christopher
I’m referring to Romans 1.26.
So ‘in the same way’ would have to be overcome.
Secondly, you are making the passage jump about from theme to theme – choreography to partner gender. Rather than being unified.
Third, choreography is on your reading the initial point. An issue that nothing remotely resembles in all the other NT discussion suddenly assumes pride of place.
Fourth, if you are going to be speaking of a paradigmatic gentile sin that best exemplifies idolatry or worship of the created world, you are going to use a sin that has occupied you elsewhere, i.e. one major or serious enough. Not a subset. Nor anything recondite.
There is no point trying to jump all these hurdles when an interpretation exists that is simple and has none of them. It has none of them because it is right.
And the last 40 years have seen oh so many ingenious ways of making the text not say what it seems to. All because people WANT it not to say what it seems to. Whereas what it does seem to say is culturally unsurprising.
Fourth,
Christopher
Yeah, you want it to condemn lesbianism.
On a plain reading, it most probably doesn’t.
Whereas analyses thousands of times fuller than a brisk assertion (and of course common sense too) say different.
Christopher, you said:
“Secondly, you are making the passage jump about from theme to theme – choreography to partner gender. Rather than being unified.”
To my mind the interpretation of Romans 1 in most commentaries relies on the text jumping from from theme to theme.
To my mind the only commentary that does not is the explanation by Dr Jonathan Tallon.
The command in Leviticus are much clearer that Romans.
Nick, you say that the only commentary that fails to dot about here is Tallon.
1. Which is very far from being a full critical commentary of the sort used in universities
2. The only way you would know this was the only one would be by being familiar with all the others too.
3 Have you got any idea of how many commentaries on Romans there are? Plus many more on this specific passage.
4 Among all these, it is unlikely in the extreme that universities would use Tallon as any kind of priority. They would use Jewett, Cranfield, Fitzmyer, Schreiner, Dunn, Wright, Byrne, Moo, Gaventa etc..
5 If you are on the topic of Jonathan Tallon, I have asked him at least five times why he irrationally assumed Turban et al and Blosnich et al in their respective papers meant negative psychological states described as ‘lifetime’ (deriving from any part of one’s life) were largely or entirely post-therapy. Especially given that they would be the sort of thing to occasion the need for therapy in the first place. Answer has come there none.
Conservative Catholic commentary you mean which is clear St Paul prohibits women priests and same sex relationships? Or certain evangelical commentary which interprets him as permitting the former but not the latter?
You are simply interpreting Paul as opposing lesbian sexual relationships, nowhere does he state that explicitly. Nowhere else in the Bible are lesbian sexual relationships even mentioned
T1 this is crazy. Denmominations are package deals. Scholars on the other hand are superior because they analyse point by point without swallowing any package whole.
To be round a NT scholarly table is to be in a place where no-one talks about denominations nor cares for them unless as means to a higher end.
To be stuck in denominational thinking is a preliminary stage, and the discussion takes place between those who have moved beyond that.
I mentioned before that Paul is explicit where you say he is not explicit. Why should we listen? What do the critical university commentaries say?
You will find most theological scholars are either liberal or conservative, Catholic or Evangelical. They will interpret scripture accordingly
What do you mean, ‘You will find’? I am a biblical scholar and have been for 30 years.
Hence what I have found is far more than you have found.
The critical commentaries are almost all evangelical (not in terms of conclusions but in terms of close attention to the text) or historical/denominationally eclectic. A few are catholic, but largely from the immediately post Vatican II generation where catholic and evangelical were close. Very few are liberal, as anyone will confirm, because liberals in general do not have the staying power (hence, they write for stream of consciousness / wordprocessor publishers) and their system is so ill defined and potentially slippery that it cannot be the basis for study. I speak of NT not OT here.
T1
” Paul after all was not Christ nor even one of his original apostles”.
He was however rather specially appointed and commissioned by Jesus to teach in His name (which is what ‘apostle’ basically means. And I am quite happy to trust that Jesus knew what he was doing with that appointment; you should also be happy with it.
There go half the New Testament books. And its most visionary and intellectually gifted writer.
Christopher
Many scholars say what I have said above.
Women being on top in mixed sex intercourse was considered far more filthy in ancient Western Asia (including Judaism) than lesbianism.
Zzzz. Just snoozed off. One of the benefits of older age, that is, a certain fullness of years.
As you often say. Reference (including demonstration that this is the cultural view rather than one writer’s view)?
Bernadette Brooten, for one.
Really? Which part of ancient Israel did she live in?
I don’t believe it, anyway. When husband and wife wish to make love and she is considerably pregnant, it is obvious what to do – even if philosophers waffle to the contrary.
So, you don’t agree with Ian and Christopher Shell on consulting leading scholars?
As for having sex while your wife is pregnant, you would have been drummed out of the church for that!!
If you are going to make assertions about what went on in the ancient world then I want references to (and summaries of) relevant ancient manuscripts.
That would be a church tainted by Greek asceticism. What the church leader doesn’t know wouldn’t harm him.
Anton
I would hardly claim that the woman being on top in ancient Western Asia was considered especially filthy and sex workers charge more for it, if it weren’t true.
It’s not my place or desire to educate you. Read Brooten and Helen King and Diarmaid MacCulloch. They all have bibliographies for further reading.
So you won’t maintain the standard of scholarly discourse when asked for a primary reference.
I haven’t read the primary sources. Neither my Hebrew nor Greek is adequate to the task. Which is why i read scholars. I expect the same is true of many commentators here.
I am willing to accept references from the ancient world against woman-on-top sex that you take from the modern scholars you have read without you having personally verified those references for yourself. I might get scholars whom I know to check. So feel free.
Which is a topic I never mentioned.
Here is Vaughan Roberts, a vicar who is attracted sexually to other men and who remains celibate out of his love of Christ, commenting on Welby’s deplorable comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FbQOsYNmwg
PLF was voted for by majority in all 3 houses of Synod, Welby had majority support for it.
If Roberts is so anti same sex couples I suggest he joins another denomination, a Pentecostal or Baptist church
I’m expect he would be most grateful for your suggestion.
By flocking together with birds of a feather he would suffer the same fate as all who do that – (a) thinking everyone is like them! (b) never having the chance to advance this thinking by associating with those who disagree; (c) stunting thereby the progress of the whole debate.
The only person who can propose a ‘remedy’ like that is someone who either does not value the pursuit of truth (! which is pretty startling) or, worse, does not believe in truth.
Fascinating.
On criminalisation and the death penalty Roberts is against it (to be precise he rather weakly says he’s not in favour, before remembering to correct himself), he says we shouldn’t wade in without sensitivity, and he loves being in a communion with those who advocate for it, conversations need to be respectful, and we need to recognise we don’t have all the answers. Quite the contrast with his views on Bishops like Steven Croft where Roberts says communion is impaired, because the differences there are first order.
Roberts says he’s thinking about the younger version of himself, but he’s turning his back on him. Further evidence that the 3rd Province advocates can’t be trusted about what they’ll actually teach until they formally make it clear.
So, gay folk expressing their conjugal love sexually is first order and the death penalty isn’t?
Interesting.
Penelope
Actually the death penalty is ‘first order’ in the sense that gay sex deserves death and may well receive spiritual death because the person disobeying God that much is ‘choosing the darkness’ and cutting themselves off from the Life.
However the point is that for Christians in the new covenant we are not trying to run earthly states and use the state’s authority to penalise people. In the current age our only authority is to excommunicate those who unrepentantly disobey God. Because Anglicanism is based on the idea of being a national church it is inevitably confused on that….
You clearly just want Christianity to be a cult, removing the impure, the emphasis on which biblical passage is broken decided by you. Thankfully most Anglicans preach love not hate
T1
You write that I “… clearly just want Christianity to be a cult, removing the impure, the emphasis on which biblical passage is broken decided by you. Thankfully most Anglicans preach love not hate”
Ironic that, given that one of the early acts of Henry VIII’s Anglicanism was to burn some Anabaptist Christians at the stake, and the church continued outright persecution for centuries and petty discrimination a lot longer in the name of the unbiblical (and therefore unChristian) idea of establishment.
I want Christianity to be its biblical self – ‘catholic’ in the sense of ‘open to all’ but not in the medieval and Henry’s sense as a totalitarian tyranny. We should strike a balance between purity which the Bible in fact commands and reality that we are all still sinners – it is not ‘love’ to approve of sin and encourage people to do it.
I certainly don’t set myself up as a Pope-like arbiter of scripture – I put forth the best interpretation I can mnage and try to explain the reasons for my interpretation. It is up to others to judge if I’ve got it right – particularly the ‘church’ in the sense of the ‘ekklesia’, the congregation, not some hierarchic authority imposing their views on the basis of a supposed ‘succession’ to apostles who they actually disregard (in the current case, disregard about sexuality).
Frankly what you want looks much more like a ‘cult’…..
Perhaps the different congregations could be organised into a sort of Synod to consider these questions. Oh wait…
AJB
The ‘ekklesia’ is the Church as a whole, in succession (not supersession) of the ‘congregation’ of Israel (also ‘ekklesia’ in the Greek LXX). Arguably an association of local groups represents that better than the idea of a ‘top-down’ authority dictating interpretations.
AJB
And further – if Christianity is voluntary (and the NT does present it as such) then we have to persuade people to join, we have to persuade them that our ‘arguments’ are sound. We don’t have authority to make them believe. That also applies within the Church – nobody has an ‘ex officio’ authority to interpret scripture, we all have to persuade and show good reason; and the conclusions we come to are always subject to scripture – while rejecting scripture steps outside the church anyway…..
Arguably an association of local groups represents that better than the idea of a ‘top-down’ authority dictating interpretations. That is by definition a congregationalist or Reformist Calvinist Church not an Anglican Church of Apostolic Succession
T1
You wrote (quoting and replying to me)
“Arguably an association of local groups represents that better than the idea of a ‘top-down’ authority dictating interpretations. That is by definition a congregationalist or Reformist Calvinist Church not an Anglican Church of Apostolic Succession”
I guess you’re kind of right there – but you still haven’t answered my question of what use is the “Apostolic Succession” when those in the succession cleaarly reject apostolic doctrine?
I think you’re being rather generous Penny. Blessing celibate same-sex partnerships is a first order disagreement that requires communion to be impaired, whilst calling for gay people to be killed is a disagreement where we ought to have a culturally sensitive and respectful conversation recognising that those of us opposed to killing gay people don’t have all the answers. Apparently.
Yeah. Cultural superiority innit?
Penelope
Honestly I think (senior) church leaders are stuck in bubbles where saying that gay people should face the death penalty is a reasonable position and it’s no wonder there’s such a gulf with the majority of the population.
Peter Jermey
The death penalty for gay sex goes back of course to the OT. And essentially God was saying to his people under the old covenant that this was conduct he disapproved of and did not want it to be endemic among his people as it was among the surrounding pagans. One should also note that there is essentially nothing in the entire Bible which approves of gay sex – an amazing gap if any form of it could be right. And it isn’t a case of an OT purity thing to be changed in the New Testament either, because Paul in Romans 1 also condemns the practice and specifically indicates it is – like other sins – part of the disorder which follows human rebellion against God.
Having said that as I understand it the actual carrying out of the penalty would be rare for various reasons including strict rules of evidence which would rarely be met for a normally private act.
Though Paul reasserts that this sin deserves death, things change in the NT basically because Jesus as Messiah doesn’t fulfil that role by military conquest as many Jews had expected, but fulfilled it in terms of a kingdom not of/from this world, whereby the Church does not seek to formally Christianise earthly states, but rather to call people out of ‘the world’ which those states represent and into a rather different kind of kingdom based on voluntary faith and operating somewhat after the pattern of the Jewish ‘Diaspora’, converts becoming ‘citizens of the kingdom of heaven living abroad’, in a way ‘resident aliens’ even in their native land. Such a ‘diaspora’ people doesn’t enforce its rules by secular power; rather the disobedient are ‘excommunicated’.
Unfortunately this changed in the late 300sCE, when the Roman Empire ‘hijacked’ Christianity to replace paganism as the imperial religion. It seemed natural that ‘surely God must want…” Christian states which enforced Christian rules, and thus there were executions for heresy, holy wars against non-Christian religions and Christian heretics, and enforcement of Christian morality including the death penalty for gay sex. Anglicanism unfortunately is part of that ‘state church’ attitude and so criminalised homosexuality, and some want to go back to that….
On your other point that “Gay people are people who have lifelong exclusive attraction to the same sex. It’s not a choice or a behavior.”
1) Actually performing the ‘gay sex’ is rather definitely both a choice and a behaviour.
2) People are meant to love people and for same-sex couples this can be intense – see David and Jonathan. But sex is not always the appropriate way to express love; it isn’t appropriate when it’s someone else’s husband or wife, or with a child – or with a person of the same sex, no matter how strong the temptation.
AJ
What frustrates me is that conservatives including Justin Welby are willing to ignore the bits of Lambeth 1.10 that provide more inclusion of gay people (such as not trying to have them killed), but then think the “never have sex” part can’t be revisited else it will destroy the communion. If calling fir the execution of other Anglican Christians isn’t destroying the communion then I don’t see how permitting full gay relationships does.
Actually what they end up saying is that gay people are less human/Christian than the people who want them executed
Welby at least can say he wants to keep everyone in the communion. When it comes to Roberts et al, I really struggle to understand the wild inconsistency of their position. There’s a real lack of integrity.
Stephen
Quite apart from your egregious homophobia, your belief that being gay is an action rather than an identity is laughably ignorant and an insult to the gay men who comment here and are quite clear about their orientation, but choose, in obedience to their reading of scripture and tradition, to be sexually abstinent.
You are ignorant and insolent.
Peter (and AJ)
To save everybody scrolling back to Oct 28 at 1020am, my response to Ian there
“I’ve discussed this in wider terms frequently on this blog and elsewhere. As I’ve explained, the point is that ‘gay’ is not, as some would have it, the same kind of ‘being’ as, say, being ethnically different. The reason it’s not the same is that ‘gay’ very much involves not just being something, but doing – and so CHOOSING TO DO – certain acts, the ‘gay sex’. When things are done by choice, the uderlying ‘being’ is not a simple morally neutral matter like say skin colour, but is a matter of urges and desires – and simply having urges and desires to do something doesn’t make those things right.
Things done/chosen because urges/desires is actually pretty much all moral and immoral acts. And ipso facto further discussion is needed as to whether the deeds are right or wrong. In Christian terms the urges and desires underlying ‘gay’ are very real – in that sense ‘gay people’ do exist – but it is not simplistically OK to act on and live out those urges; they are part of the disorder brought into human life by ‘the Fall’ and are to be resisted and repented of. And in Christian terms that disorder includes a degree of ‘slavery’ to the sinful urges – sinful men rather than getting to be like God have actually significantly lost control even of their selves.
As I’ve said before, people are meant to love people and same-sex love can be intense; but for Christians sex – or more accurately pseudo-sex – is an inappropriate expression of such relationships.”
There are no ‘gay people’ as the gays themselves wish to interpret the situation. God doesn’t make ‘gay people’ any more than he makes others who disobey him and sin.
As regards executing gay people, the relations of church and state as taught in the NT mean that Christians don’t run earthly states or expect distinctive Christian beliefs and practices to be enforced by secular punishment. The various churches which have been improperly entangled in the state are of course likely to disregard that. Its entanglement with the state till now is one of the reasons the CofE is in the current mess and either the church should seek disestablishment or those who want to believe the Bible should leave.
At the same time, like other sinners of all kinds, those who deliberately do ‘gay sex’ are disobeying God, ‘choosing darkness’ and risk spiritual death; and it would be very far from love for Christians to encourage practices that can lead to spiritual death!! Therefore churches should not accept those practices and should reject the idea of same-sex marriages; and we should be trying to persuade those who perform such acts to repent of them and resist doing them.
Ian
Are you OK with these homophobic rants on your blog?
Penelope
The point I made back on Oct 28 is not a mere rant; it is a very serious moral and legal point about why ‘gayness’ is not like racism and is not entitled to similar protection. The difference between things that ‘just are’ like skin colour, and things which people choose and do because urges and desires is a really key issue. By confusing these two categories the ‘gays’ have for msny years now been improperly bullying and intimidating those who disagree with them, including expensive legal persecution, and far from the equality they claim, they have been claiming the right to be put up on a pedestal beyond challenge and criticism. You need to answer that point properly, not just scream ‘homophobia’ as if merely using that word settled everything. I fully stand for equal rights for gays – but not for them to have undeserved privilege based on, frankly, an untruth.
‘Rant’ is a silly word anyway. It is a cosmetic surface word that covers all style and no substance.
In debate, by contrast, substance is the thing. Obviously.
Anything that spoke passionately as though things were important would be labelled a rant. Trouble is, many things actually are important. Many of them very important indeed. The proposal is that we act as though nothing really mattered. That is not Christ: it is appalling dark 1970s pop music.
Stephen
Gay people are people who have lifelong exclusive attraction to the same sex. It’s not a choice or a behavior.
Stephen
I have responded above.
Peter, what you say is incredibly offensive. First of all, where do fluid people fit in your system? But most of all, ‘lifelong’ means from birth on. That is a highly distasteful thing to say. And also obviously very untrue.
Penelope
1) “A phobia is an anxiety disorder, defined by an irrational, unrealistic, persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation.” So I don’t in fact suffer from ‘homophobia’.
2) You wrote “… your belief that being gay is an action rather than an identity is laughably ignorant and an insult to the gay men who comment here and are quite clear about their orientation, but choose, in obedience to their reading of scripture and tradition, to be sexually abstinent.”
Funny that – I’m actually agreeing with and approving of those people, why would they think I’m insulting them?? Maybe you missed a key point in my response to Ian earlier, when I wrote ….
“In Christian terms the urges and desires underlying ‘gay’ are very real – in that sense ‘gay people’ do exist – but it is not simplistically OK to act on and live out those urges; they are part of the disorder brought into human life by ‘the Fall’ and are to be resisted and repented of.”
… which is essentially the position of such celibate homosexuals ….
And the distinction I make between things which ‘just are’ like ethnicity, and things like gay sex which involve ‘doing because urges and desires’ remains important to moral discussion. If you don’t have an answer to the point …???
What frustrates me is that what Roberts call the majority churches have flouted Lambeth 1.10 for thirty years and their nasty bigotry has been glossed over.
Bruce –
Helpful news for you! “Anglican Unscripted” no. 888 – the Youtube channel which Andrew Godsall confused above in conversation with you with the website “Anglican Ink” – is now available on youtube and it discusses the precise issue of this posting and thread.
You can hear George Conger and Kevin Kallsen discussing Welby’s interview and how he has spoken ambiguously to different groups over the years.
Andrew also watches “Anglican Unscripted” so he will find this helpful too.
Thanks James. Yes, it is helpful, but I wonder if George and Kevin checked with Justin Welby that the implicatures they were drawing from what he _said in the interview_ (my emphasis) were the implicatures that he intended. So I wonder if its ‘helpfulness’ is in demonstrating (yet again) how important what pragmatics (a la Sperber and Wilson) has added to our understanding of human communication in the last 40 years?
Did you actually watch the the programme, Bruce?
If you had, you would know that Welby’s implicatures are clearly dissected at 29 and 32 minutes with a recursive take at 41 minutes.
Here are two good biblical principles on implicatures that everyone, including archbishops, should follow:
1. ‘Not everyone that calls me “Lord, Lord” shall enter the Kingdom of heaven but he that does the will of my Father in heaven.” In other words, you judge a person by his actions not by his words. (Churchill said something very similar.)
2. ‘Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything else comes from the devil.’ In other words, do not trade in ambiguity or evasion because it will then appear that you are hiding something.
Those of us who have observed Welby for the past ten years or so – looking at his pattern of appointments of partnered gay bishops (one a man, the other a woman) and the partnered Dean of Canterbury, his refusal to answer simple questions and the different answers he gave to African bishops compared to British gay groups (Anglican Unscripted first revealed this, do Welby refused to talk to them), and the LLF “process” – from all of this we drew the correct conclusion about where he was headed. Were you paying attention then yourself?
Christian leaders are supposed to act with clarity, consistency and fidelity to the Word of God.
This is all basic human wisdom that every observant person has known for millennia, long before Austin, Grice etc started analysing the boringly obvious.
James, as I said before, you know much more about Justin Welby than I do. I am interested about language use in communication.
Could you please explain what your ‘two good biblical principles on implicatures’ have to do with implicatures?
If pragmatics is so ‘boringly obvious’ why is it that we still find silly statements being made (even by commenters here) about words and language and communication? Why are there discussions about the relative ‘merits’ of ‘literal’ vs ‘meaning-based’ approaches to translating the Bible? Why was I taught NT Greek through vocabulary, morphology and syntax? When did interest in discourse analysis come into biblical studies and why is it still so often ignored in ‘critical’ commentaries? And so on…
PS I didn’t wonder about George and Kevin dissecting implicatures but about checking them with the speaker.
Interesting article on AF today which IMV is a pretty accurate assessment of the current state of progress (or lack of it).
https://www.anglicanfutures.org/post/call-my-bluff
The Bishops (or most of them) have absolutely no intention of giving CEEC a third Province. It would seem that they think that CEEC has no real leverage. I think that AF has been quite prescient in seeing the whole LLF as a travelator process.
My guess is that Orthodox?CEs will need to rethink their tactics and some hard decisions will need to be made by individuals.
Thanks for the link to this article Chris. I think AF’s recent articles on the LLF process have been much better than others I have read in assessing what is happening. Maybe because they are no longer so emotionally involved.
I think they overestimate what ACNA has become – it’s pretty patchy and has actually shrunk in some places. But for reasons they carefully point out, a similar approach isn’t going to happen in England.
The invitation to negotiate by ‘The Alliance’ isn’t an invitation, as the AF article points out.
And so the declaration of war continues.
ACNA of course had all its buildings and assets confiscated by the Epsicopal church if its members tried to leave
That went well… Not… they left anyway.
ACNA has 1000 churches and 128,000 people…. Presumably in buildings…
Episcopal church has 1.5 million people and more assets and buildings too
It was never going to happen that the Bishops would supinely accept the formation of a new province because nobody likes giving up power.
The real pressure will be felt as the money dries up, as the Ephesians Trust movement spreads through the C of E, diverting parish share money away from the dioceses.
Second, the Alliance will organise its own confirmation services, excluding bishops from their churches.
Here’s a link to ‘Anglican Unscripted no. 888’ (which Andrew confused elsewhere with the website ‘Anglican Ink’) on moves against Welby – also a comment near the end on a very strange thing Welby said about the ancestor of his biological father (the man with whom Welby’s mother had an affair, not her husband, who brought him up). Also a disturbing report on the latest about Bishop Anne Dyer.
The youtube channel is watched by most of the Anglican bishops in Africa (and in Britain).
https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwe-AlGz3HM&list=PL7p2AAcz9AHjy1NxCjdTpL1uPhtgA40Be&index=1
The C of E legally owns all its churches and cathedrals and vicarages and any Ephesian PCC which refuses to pay parish share will in turn not get any funds for a priest from the diocese and the vicarage rented out.
Any C of E church which refuses Bishops confirmation and ordination services involvement would also be expelled from the C of E as no longer being willing to be a part of a church of apostolic succession.
Simon T1, you don’t appear to understand the first thing about the C of E. I am really surprised.
All churches and vicarages are vested in the incumbent by means of freehold or common tenure. They are not centrally owned assets.
I have no idea where you get these strange ideas from.
Of course churches cannot be ‘expelled.’ The notion simply does not exist.
No clearly you don’t on this. Most vicarages are now not freehold but belong the diocese now with the vicar as tenant and churches belong to the Parish and Diocese, the incumbent just is licensed minister while in office there.
Churches which do not pay parish share have their vicar removed by the diocese
‘churches belong to the Parish and Diocese’. Could you point me to the legislation which enacted this massive change?
T1,
Removal of vicar? Really? If it is a PCC decision to not pay.
And would replacement result in payment or guarantee a fracture.
Where is your understanding of human relationships within any organisation system and structure.
If I were a lay a member financial subscriber to the Parish, and what you describe happened, I certainly wouldn’t continue to do so. And would leave.
Yes, no Parish share payments then the Diocese refuses to pay for a vicar and rents out the vicarage.
Parish share is a voluntary contribution. Paying stipends is a legal obligation, and is a provision that is national, not local. So that won’t work.
T1,
What s great result you’ve come up with following through on your comments.
A closed local CoE church and a shredded beloved Parish system , on your watch in the application of your foresight.
Well done successful-in -failure servant.
Ian I think you will find that in cases where there is a vacancy in a parish and parish share has not been paid in full, a number of dioceses are delaying the appointment of a new parish priest until parish is paid in full. Seems quite fair to me. And I understand is quite legal.
Andrew,
No problem, just keep holding services in the church building, lay led if necessary. Once the congregation realises that their prayer life was unhindered and they aren’t going to be thunderbolted on passing through the lych gate – the kind of nonsense that cowed mediaeval Catholics during the interdict of 1208 – then it will come down to access to the building.
In reality it isn’t now. Dioceses regularly leave stipendiary priest posts unfilled if the Parish where they would go is not paying Parish share
Andrew – Correct
If you really think members of the congregation want to write sermons and deliver services twice a week or more unpaid and with no house for it you are day dreaming. They might do it once a month on rotation, that is it
I used to preach most weeks, play keyboard every week, generally twice on Sunday, and run the Sunday School and youth club. I never even thought about money, and got none.
If you are retired and religion is the most important part of your life maybe. Those with families and careers and wages to earn aren’t going to preach and lead services every week for free
T1
You write
“If you really think members of the congregation want to write sermons and deliver services twice a week or more unpaid and with no house for it you are day dreaming. They might do it once a month on rotation, that is it”.
Strange, this is pretty exactly how Brethren and many Baptist and independent churches work -with plural ‘eldership’ rather than a single ‘priest’ – and often seem to work better than the CofE…..
Most Baptist churches have a paid minister and a house provided for them with their job too
T1
You wrote
“Most Baptist churches have a paid minister and a house provided for them with their job too”.
True, which is why I worded my comment as ‘many’ Baptist churches. As it happens the church I currently attend does have a paid minister – albeit after a significanr gap with part-timers; and yes he gets a house – after quite a period when we have let it out as the part-timers didn’t need it.
It is also true that Brethren and many other independent churches have a plural ‘lay’ eldership, and that is increasingly seen among Baptists as well. The single minister is a convenience – but not a necessity and indeed he is likely to struggle unless he is well supported by assorted lay ministry and a pastoral team.
I was retired when I was 25-38??
On formation of a new province there is a practical issue. There was a move for a separate province over women bishops, but there are those who support women bishops but disagree on this. So you would need two separate provinces. What will be the next issue that leads to call for a separate province? It wouldn’t be long before we had more provinces than diocese in either of the two existing provinces. The arrangement of alternative episcopal oversight may not be ideal , but it is much more practical.
I think that AF has been quite prescient in seeing the whole LLF as a travelator process.
To many of us this was obvious from the day it was published.
The problem is that biblically based Anglicans have not been prepared to speak with directness to the bishops. Whether from obeisance or fear, they have been respectful.
Your first para. for believers outside the CoE and aware of current cultural drivers after Civil ssm, was apparent, as a secular trajectory and those activists saw the CoE as a target, to open up ssm as secular reach into the established church,, which was seen as Christianity itself. That and the swathers of liberals, deists, pluralist in charge, in the driving seat.
The same pressure doesn’t seem to have been brought to RC at the same time, as the the corridors of theological power reside outside the UK.
As far as delayed appointments, it is wonder whether there is an absolute or conditional discretion.
Even Pope Francis has suggested the RC church could offer prayers for same sex couples similar to PLF
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/19/pope-francis-bless-gay-marriages-catholic-church#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIt%20will%20be%20possible%20to,signify%20approval%20of%20the%20union%E2%80%9D.
What Andrew Godsall’s comment reveals to me is that far from ‘good disagreement’, this a planned, including legal advice, intensification of manipilative abuse of power to press this through; institutional, systemic bullying.
Otherwise known as Synodical governance
Heard on the radio today: a letter from Prince Charles, as then was, has to to light admonishing the CoE for its political correctness.
If then, how much more so today.
Prince Charles praised the Greek Orthodox church, as seen by the Orthodox music at his coronation
How is that remotely pertinent to him criticising the CoE for being Politically Correct? It isn’t.
Prince Philip had a lot of time for the Greek Orthodox church – the main reading at his funeral was from Ecclesiasticus – as befits the son of an Orthodox nun.
Irrelevant to the politically correct point, not logically probative.
Welby’s comments are nothing short of disgraceful. Neither he nor Cottrell nor any bishop or cleric who is pushing this agenda has any integrity, because they are wilfully and unrepentantly breaking their ordination and consecration vows. But it turns out Welby’s revisionism isn’t new. He gave a similar answer to Alastair Campbell in a 2017 interview. Glen Scrivener has done an excellent video about it, which I heartily recommend: https://youtu.be/vwi2M1XifG0?si=bZTLaIgFLlKVLDDd
The ‘teaching of the Church’ has always been changeable over time. The doctrine of the trinity which is now considered as a basic belief was only accepted as the teaching of the church around 300. If teaching is changeable then church leaders must be allowed to express their views if they think that church teaching should change.
If it is not changeable then were previous changes valid? and how far should we go back?
By this test, if every priest had upheld their ordination vows we wouldn’t have had the reformation.
Would you rather that our senior leaders held their views in private and acted as if they agreed with teachings that they disagree with? Where would be the integrity in that?
Or should any dissenting priest resign their ordination? If so I believe we would loose a large proportion of our clergy.
And what about the integrity of ordination vows? They are akin courtroom vows of truth. Any none adherence to the vow, is false witness testimony, is subject to it being not only rejected as inadmissible but rendering the witness liable to perjury.
Vows are not matters of indifference.
As far as the Trinity is concerned there were open and prolonged divisions and separations (and still are): no ‘two walking together’; no good disagreement.
Ultimately, as HJ points out, this is ultimately about the Person of God. the doctrine of God.
…
Wait minute, here comes Welby…
So you are of the view that the teaching of the church cannot change ever are you?
The teaching of the church change on the ordination of women. Were those who campaigned for that breaking their ordination vows?
Nick, ‘Were those who campaigned for that breaking their ordination vows?’
No. Because there has never been a doctrine of the C of E that men only can be ordained. It has been its administration, but not its doctrine. Whether you agree with that or not, that was its own conclusion in 1978, which open the possibility of the ordination of women.
People on both sides of this debate agree that using the term ‘marriage’ to apply to a same-sex couple would indeed be a change of the Church’s doctrine, which currently is ‘according to the teaching of Jesus’.
I guess it is part of ordination vows to believe that the scripture is the final doctrinal authority. It presumably therefore doesn’t break the vow to realise that an interpretation of scripture has been wrong/mistaken and to correct it.
To change your interpretation in a way that clearly rejects scripture, on the other hand…..
Thanks for the link. Clear, with no beating about the bush.
Why is it not possible that the legal advice given to the Bishops as to whether PLF constitutes a change in doctrine not available for all to see?
Because, despite repeated requests, the House of Bishops has decided not to share it, and no-one has felt able to whistle blow.
Is there no one with locus standi to seek
judicial disclosure?
Would have thought so. The question of confidentiality between lawyer and client, may have to be determined, ruled upon first.
I’m really not certain why legal advice on such a cause of action has not been sought by those in opposition revision.
As a former lawyer court proceedings should be considered as a last resort but before the implementation of the cause of action.
Is that not the present position for the cohort opposing change, not that I’d suggest that be openly made known on any public forum.
It is not the place to serve a notice of intention to litigate.
It is hard – perhaps impossible – to see what basis the Archbishop has for his personal Christian faith if he does not hold to the basic truth of scripture, which Jesus clearly expounded and which the New Testament repeatedly affirms – that all sex outside of a marriage relationship between one man and one woman is sinful. It is important that the Church is not seen to be making a statement in relation to the LGBT community, but affirming the Christian sexual ethic as taught in scripture.
The recent statement must be particlarly hard for same sex attracted Christians who have sought to live Godly celibate lives for Christ.
John 8 v 9 applies of course – it is not surprising that the movement in the crowd the day that Grace confronted sexual failure started amongst the ‘older ones first’; The Lord of Heaven (in contrast with the Archbishop) was not afraid to recognise the failed sexual practice as ‘sin’ (v 7) and older people look at their own failures – sin – with sadness. But sin it is, and repentance from sin is a basic requirement for those who wish to follow Christ.
I imagine the Archbishop bases his faith on the reality of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, God’s grace, and Christ’s resurrection, as expressed in the creeds. Just a guess.
But (with apologies), there is confusion here. Of course, your observation may be correct, and it is not for me to judge in respect of anyone’s personal status before a Holy God. But Rms 10 9 is clear, that ’if you confess with your mouth that ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved’. Acknowledging ‘Jesus is Lord’ surely means accepting his words, his truth, and the implications this has for my life, living, and thinking. Nick (above, 2 Nov) suggests that some basic truths are interpretations of Scripture, changeable over time. Indeed, ‘the creeds’ you refer to, perhaps as authoritative, are themselves additions to Scripture and not authoritative in their own right – just stick to the truth of Scripture with no summaries or precis needed. If I’m free to reinterpret or summarise for my own ends the clear and authoritative teaching of Scripture, affirmed by Christ himself in respect of this or any other issue, then it is unclear that I can indeed call myself a ‘Christian’.
Are you John Lorimer Campbell of Carlisle whose excellent YouTube channel I have followed closely concerning the pandemic? If so, thank you very much indeed for it. I knew you were a believer in Jesus Christ from a science-and-religion talk on the website of the church you attend, and I was looking without success for an email address for you recently regarding your recent comments on the Shroud of Turin, with which I courteously disagree. The textiles expert Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, who performed conservation work on the Shroud in 2002, confirmed that the samples used for the radiocarbon dating were from the authentic original cloth of this shroud. (See ‘The Invisible Mending of the Shroud in Theory and in Reality’, in the June 2007 newsletter of the British Society for the Turin Shroud.) She is willing to doubt the radiocarbon dating results, but on other grounds – contamination. Yet the samples that were dated had been cleaned rigorously prior to the dating tests.The Oxford group divided the precleaned samples into three. Each subsample was treated with 1M HCl (80 °C for 2 h), 1M NaOH (80 °C for 2 h) and again in acid, with rinsing in between. Two of the three samples were then bleached in NaOCl (2.5% at pH-3 for 30 min). That would suffice to remove the accreted material you argue for. Details of the cleaning protocol are supplementary to the main paper and are online. The dating results show an origin after 1000AD to several standard deviations and match calibrations.
What of biblical accounts? Isaiah prophesied many details about a ‘suffering servant’, whom Christians understand to be Jesus in view of the close match. As well as being flogged, this man would have his beard pulled out (Isaiah 50:6). The figure on the Shroud has a beard – and a forked beard, although forks would be the obvious thing to tug. The gospel of John (19:1-20:7) indicates that Jesus was stripped of clothing and crucified naked after being flogged. After that, pieces of cloth (the Greek is plural) were used to wrap his body, together with spices to inhibit decay, and a separate cloth was placed over his head. It is hard to reconcile John’s account with the claim that the Shroud was placed over Jesus’ entire body and head, from which it picked up an imprint. A first century tomb in Jerusalem with surviving burial cloths was discovered in 2009, and the body had been tightly wound with the material (which survived because it was subsequently covered in plaster); there was a separate facecloth, just as John describes in Jesus’ case. The large quantity of crushed spices mentioned by John would separate the body from the cloth and grossly distort any image.
Even if the Shroud is mediaeval, it might have been made without guile. Charles Freeman (‘The Origins of the Shroud of Turin’, in History Today vol. 64, 11th November 2014) suggests that the Shroud is a 14th century painting on linen, created to represent Christ’s gravecloth at mediaeval Easter liturgical dramas, most likely the Quem Quaeritis re-enactment of the Resurrection tale (“whom do you seek?”). Such dramatisations were common in Eastern Orthodox liturgy, in which a representation on cloth of the dead Christ is known as an epitaphios. Freeman suggests that the paint has since crumbled off the Shroud due to regular unfolding and refolding for the pageant. Representations from the counter-Reformation era exist of Easter pageants in which this Shroud was held up; they show a much stronger image, as the drama would require. Freeman finds many problems with the speculative journey of the shroud from Edessa (‘The Shroud of Turin and the Image of Edessa: A Misguided Journey’, in: Free Inquiry, 24th May 2012).
In the summer of 1389 Bishop Pierre d’Arcis of Troyes, in France, drafted a letter to the man he viewed as the Pope, in Avignon. D’Arcis’ letter reported an investigation in Lirey (in his diocese) about 35 years earlier by a previous Bishop of Troyes, Henri de Poitiers, who had been installed in 1354. D’Arcis states that the shroud in question was a forgery to which the artist had admitted. Here, translated from Latin, is part of what Bishop d’Arcis wrote:
The Dean of… Lirey… not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and the front, falsely declaring that this was the actual shroud in which our saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb… and further to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrung from them, pretended miracles were worked…after diligent enquiry and examination [Bishop Henri] discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought.
Two copies of d’Arcis’ memorandum exist (in the Champagne region collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, vol. 154, folios 137 & 138, a polished version and a rough one respectively).
Well, you seemed pretty have to judge someone’s personal status before God on November 4th.
If you’re chucking out the creeds, and saying that acknowledging “Jesus is Lord” actually means a lot more than that and specifically means “stick to the truth of Scripture with no summaries or precis needed” and no reinterpretation permitted, it does compel me to ask when did your unchangeable interpretation of Scripture get arrived at? Was it the immediate followers of Paul even though they couldn’t see the letters he wrote to other Churches? Was it in the first centuries, even thought the canon of Scripture hadn’t actually been settled? Was it the medieval Church even though we had to have the reformation to correct errors in their teaching? Was it with Luther and Calvin, although that was more than 1500 years after Christ walked the earth? Was it the 1860s when American evangelicals were ferociously defending slavery and arguing that anything else was unBiblical? Was in the 1970s as the work of people like John Stott spread through English evangelicalism? And whichever it was, does that mean no one before then was a Christian because their truth of Scripture must have been wrong?
You are having a discussion about a discussion. That’s futile. Just discuss the relevant scriptures.
Was it the 1860s when American evangelicals were ferociously defending slavery and arguing that anything else was unBiblical?
Not in the northern states they weren’t. Those northern evangelicals pointed out that Jesus’ words, “Do unto others as you would hve them do unto you”, suffice to rule out slavery, and no good reply ever came from the south.
Sorry. This is not about my (or anyone else’s) interpretation of scripture. It’s about Scripture itself in it’s original language and form – the 66 Books recognised in the Canon of Scripture. Full stop. Of course we may discuss what is meant using traditional approaches – drawing on language, and internal corroboration of scripture to examine consistency of messaging. But let’s not add complication such as you suggest in some sort of hierarchy of authority. Just stick to the Bible itself.
Thanks Anton; what potential for confusion!!! I am John Lennox Campbell (Exeter) – a clinical academic medic (https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/2845-john-campbell @profjcampbell), recently retired from Uni of Exeter. But I have, indeed, spoken on science/religion as a committed Christian believer and had the opportunity to contribute in my local anglican fellowship (Trinity , Exeter) where I am a member.
I too have benefited from John Campbell (Carlisle) who has provided a thorough, helpful, and thoughtful commentary through the pandemic and beyond. But I have published primary research on COVID eg https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2212616 – hence the potential confusion.
As far as I know, I haven’t commented on any shroud-related issues, but I’m interested in your post and will have a look!!
I’m a theoretical physicist, but I’ve read plenty about biology since Covid began and I’m impressed that you have a publication in New England Journal of Medicine! Thank you for the ID clarification, and I could say more about the Shroud but it’s far offtopic here.
Today (November 7th) the Makin Review of abuse committed by John Smyth of boys he groomed at Iwerne summer camps was published. A link to the review is included in this concise Guardian summary:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/07/church-of-england-covered-up-attacks-serial-abuser-john-smyth-review
Here is a paragraph from p221 of the review:
At one point in the interview, Justin Welby suggests that he would have definitely been “more active” had he known of the seriousness of the offences in 2013. The evidence contained in this review suggests enough was known to have raised concerns upon being informed in 2013. He was also aware of John Smyth through various contacts, as has been detailed earlier in this report – at Iwerne in the 1970s and being warned off John Smyth in Paris in 1981. On the balance of probabilities, it is the opinion of the Reviewers that it was unlikely that Justin Welby would have had no knowledge of the concerns regarding John Smyth in the 1980s in the UK. He may not have known of the extreme seriousness of the abuse, but it is most probable that he would have had at least a level of knowledge that John Smyth was of some concern. Justin Welby [stated] that “we were in rapid touch with the survivors”. This is not correct. There was a very considerable delay in establishing any contacts and in setting up a helpline as described in the earlier analysis of this period.
Welby says he considered resigning but isn’t going to. Victim Mark Stibbe says (on Channel Four) that he should.
By far the worst behaviour by churchmen in this sorry tale is by those who were senior in Iwerne in 1982, who received a report from Rev Mark Ruston detailing the abuse, and declined to take any action except to let Smyth emigrate to South Africa, where he continued such activities. But I presume those men are all gone now.
Sorry AJ. This is not about my (or anyone else’s) interpretation of scripture. It’s about Scripture itself in it’s original language and form – the 66 Books recognised in the Canon of Scripture. Full stop. Of course we may discuss what is meant using traditional approaches – drawing on language, and internal corroboration of scripture to examine consistency of messaging. But let’s not add complication such as you suggest in some sort of hierarchy of authority. Just stick to the Bible itself.