Tim Goode is a residentiary canon in York Minster, having previously spent all his time since ordination in 2009 in parish ministry in Southwark Diocese. Tim was elected to General Synod in 2015, and joined the Archbishops’ Council in 2021, where I got to know him. He is a charming man, and we have always got on well, finding common cause on a range of issues. He has been a consistent campaigner on disability issues in the Church of England.
Two weeks ago, following the General Synod debate about the end of the LLF process, Tim posted a long comment on Facebook, setting out his views on sexuality and marriage. We had quite a long exchange about it, and one person observing commented:
This is just the sort of well-reasoned, calm and rational theological debate that has been sorely lacking in the Synod chamber for the past five years!
Tim’s comment was welcomed by many (in comments on the post) and has been quite widely shared, and it articulates a reasoned view which I have heard repeated in the debate a number of times. So I here reproduced his comment, and offer my own response, including the comments I made to him in our interaction, though not in the same order.
I am no longer on General Synod and so listened with dismay to the LLF debate from a distance, but I offer my own reflection in the hope that it may be of assistance.
A Christian argument for the blessing of same-sex relationships must begin not with culture but with Scripture’s own witness to God’s purposes for humanity, covenant, and love. The biblical story opens with humanity created in the image of God and declared “not good” when alone (Genesis 2.18). The concern expressed here is not the preservation of an abstract social pattern, but the healing of isolation through faithful companionship. Scripture consistently presents covenantal love, one which is steadfast, mutual, and life-giving, as a tangible sign of God’s own faithfulness.
Yet Scripture itself teaches us that interpretation is never neutral. We do not come to the text as detached observers. We bring to scripture our lives, our longings, our fears, our wounds, and our hopes. These in turn shape what we notice, what troubles us, and what we hear and interpret as God’s voice. The Bible is revealed not as a static object but as a living encounter, a profound relationship between writer, reader, and the Spirit who continues to lead the Church into truth. The history of interpretation within Scripture itself shows this movement: laws are re-read by prophets, prophets re-read by Christ, and Christ re-read by the early Church as it wrestles with new realities. Faithfulness has always involved discerning how the eternal purposes of God are heard within changing human contexts.
Throughout the Old Testament, covenant is measured less by conformity to social expectation than by fidelity, justice, and mercy. The love of Ruth and Naomi, marked by loyalty stronger than death, is a witness to such covenantal devotion. The prophets continually shift holiness away from boundary maintenance toward restored relationship: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ (Hosea 6.6).
When it comes to our desire, including, but not exclusively focused on, our sexual desire, the Song of Songs also present us with a striking witness to this same truth: desire is celebrated as part of God’s good creation, not erased but honoured, disciplined by mutuality and delight. Biblical faith does not seek the extinction of desire but its transformation, so that longing becomes a movement toward covenant rather than possession, reflecting the self-giving love that in turn reflects God’s own fidelity.
In the Gospels, Jesus reorients moral vision toward fruitfulness rather than exclusion. Relationships are known by what they bear: ‘You will know them by their fruits’ (Matthew 7.16). Where love produces patience, kindness, faithfulness, and self-giving, the very qualities Paul names as the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5.22–23), the Church is invited to recognise grace already at work.
Paul’s great hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13 places love itself at the centre of Christian ethics. The question becomes not whether a relationship conforms to inherited assumptions, but whether it reflects Christ’s self-giving life. The inclusion of Gentiles in Acts offers a crucial precedent: the Church discovered the Spirit at work beyond previously imagined boundaries and learned to reread Scripture in light of that grace. ‘Who was I that I could hinder God?’ (Acts 11.17).
To bless same-sex couples, then, is not to set Scripture aside but to take Scripture profoundly seriously as living testimony, one that calls the Church to recognise covenantal love wherever it finds it reflecting the faithfulness of God. In offering such blessings, the Church affirms that the image of God is not limited by orientation, gender, or ability and that where love bears the marks of Christ’s own life, the proper response is gratitude, prayer, and blessing.
First, it is important to say that I agree with a lot of what Tim says here. The argument in the Church of England does indeed need to begin with Scripture, and what the scriptural texts teach us about sex, sexuality, intimacy, and marriage. Underlying that, we need to understand what Scripture says about our sexed bodies, since it is the sex binary of humanity, created in the image of God, which underlies all this—which is why I wrote my Grove booklet on precisely this question. It underlies all the others.
I also agree with Tim about the importance of faithful, covenantal, love in relationships. But all through his comments, Tim separates the qualities of relationships from the form that they take, and this becomes critical in his argument.
I will address each of the issues that he raises in turn.
Not good to be alone
After the repeated declaration that ‘it is good…it is good…it is very good’ about God’s creation in Genesis 1, it is startling to read ‘It is not good…’ in Gen 2.18. Tim reads this as a comment on what appears to be the ‘earth creature’ (the meaning of adam, the one form from the dust of the earth, the adama) having an existential sense of loneliness and lack of companionship. I think for many years I read it in this way, and this is a common approach.
However, to read it like this is to separate Gen 2 from Gen 1. The adam is not in fact alone, in two respects; first, he has the company of God; and secondly, he has the company of all the other creatures. Why are these not ‘good’ for him? The answer comes both from the context of Gen 1, and the question that is posed in the narrative that follows.
What God has declared ‘good’ and ‘very good’ is his fruitful creation. The pinnacle of the creation narrative in Gen 1.27–28 is God’s creation of humanity ‘male and female’ so that they might be ‘fruitful and multiply’, filling the earth and ‘subduing’ it, that is, exercising the delegated dominion of God over it. The reason why it is ‘not good’ that the adam is alone is that, without another who is different from him in some essential sense, he cannot ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ And the continuity with this idea is expressed in the central issue in the account of Gen 2: who will be a ‘suitable companion’ for him? The phrase here etzer kenegdo means someone who is both his equal and his opposite; the NET version uses the phrase ‘a companion for him who corresponds to him’. The animals are companions, but they do not correspond; forming another adam from the ground (why does God not simply do that?) will provide someone who corresponds, but is not the kind of opposite partner with whom he will be fruitful.
In other words, this phrase ‘not good’ points back and forwards to the creation of humanity in a sex binary—and forms the basis of Hebrew believe in marriage as exclusively something between a man and a woman, rejecting other forms of sexual relationship that existed in the ancient Near East.
Light and dark
Tim responded to my initial comments with this response:
I agree that Scripture teaches desire can be rightly ordered or misdirected, and that Jesus affirms the goodness of creation, including male and female. But to ask whether that naming exhausts every possible form of covenantal faithfulness is not to take “scissors” to Scripture; it is to read it attentively. When God creates light and dark, he names the poles—yet lived creation includes dawn, dusk, and every shade between. Genesis celebrates embodied partnership, but it does not explicitly claim to catalogue every covenantal expression of self-giving love. In Matthew 19, Jesus appeals to creation in the context of challenging divorce and protecting covenantal fidelity, not constructing an exhaustive relational grid. The question, then, is not whether desire needs form—it does—but whether the form that best reflects Christ is defined solely by complementarity, or by the deeper pattern of faithful, sacrificial, lifelong love.
The claim here is that ‘light and dark, land and water’ in Gen 1 are merisms which include everything in between—similar to the way we might use ‘rich and poor’ to mean everyone, whatever their economic status.
But that is not how these terms function in Gen 1. In the beginning, everything is a chaotic, deep, darkness, over which the Spirit of God hovers. As God speaks, light and darkness are separated from one another, and it is this separation, contrasted with the confusion, which brings both order and life. When what God separates are mixed up again, the narrative of Scripture tells us, there is confusion and death, not order and life.
This is pertinent in its cultural context. Ask anyone who lives on a coastline whether it matters that there is a boundary between the sea and the land! And in the Near East, when there is confusion between water and land, the resulting marshes are breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes, which were endemic in the area. The distinction of humanity into male and female—something surprising for the image of a God who is not sexed—not only corresponds with biological reality, but is the central separation which is needed for fruitfulness.
Reading Scripture
Tim is quite right that we all read scripture from our own perspective, and bring our own presuppositions. To read well, we need to allow scripture to ask questions of us, at least as much as we ask questions of it. So what questions does Scripture ask of Tim’s presuppositions, his ‘longings, fears, wounds, and hopes’? Does he allow it to challenge his assumptions about same-sex sexual relationships?
He makes the assumption that whatever development he sees within the canon of scripture is continued by the Spirit who ‘continues to lead the Church into truth’. But that ignores the closure of the canon—which itself is tied to Jesus as God’s final revelation to us (Heb 1.1). Could the Spirit of God teach us things contrary to the teaching of Jesus? What does that imply about the Trinity, or indeed the statement that ‘Jesus is Lord’ (1 Cor 12.3)? And what ‘development’ is there through scripture in relation to the specific issue of same-sex sexual relationships? The creation narrative appears to reject them outright; Leviticus agrees, as do other parts of the Old Testament; Jesus reaffirms marriage is between one man and one woman, appealing to Gen 2 and Gen 1 in Matt 19; and Paul takes Jesus’ teaching into his gentile context in Romans 1, 1 Cor 6.9, and 1 Tim 1.10. Even Revelation appears to make reference to this with its mention of ‘dogs’ outside the city in Rev 22.15.
Why would we expect the Spirit to now say something different from this consistent message?
Tim is right that the examples of Ruth and Naomi (and of course David and Jonathan) witness to ‘covenantal devotion’. But of course this is a non-exclusive relationship, since Ruth goes on to marry Boaz, and there is not the slightest hint that this relationship was sexual. The same applies to David and Jonathan—see this very helpful study on their relationship. To see either of these examples as having any bearing on the question of sexuality and marriage is indeed to impose our own ‘longings, fears, wounds, and hopes’ on the text, rather than allowing the text to question us.
Song of Songs celebrates sexual desire—but does so in a specific context, between a man and a woman. This text cannot be taken, in its biblical context, as a valorisation of desire as an end in itself, or in any particular context—not least because of its long history of interpretation as a metaphor for the relationship of God and his people, in parallel with Paul’s use of the marriage metaphor in Ephesians 5. In fact, this calls us to pay closer attention to its context, not to ignore it.
Yes, Paul talks of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5.22–23, but he contrasts this with the ‘works of the flesh’, which includes ‘sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality’ (Gal 5.19), which for Paul certainly included same-sex sexual relationships, or indeed the kind of valorisation of sexual desire as a good in itself.
And Tim then quotes 1 Cor 13, where of course the term is agape and not eros; the idea that ‘love’ here is about sexual relationships (despite its use in weddings) is again to impose our own, sexualised, agenda on the text.
The teaching of Jesus
Appeal is often made to the ‘inclusive’ nature of the teaching of Jesus—he is someone who spent time on the margins, and included those whom the respectable and the religious leaders rejected. This is both true and striking. But what is equally striking is that he goes to the margins, to the ‘tax-collectors and sinners’, not to affirm who and where they are, but to call them to change and to holiness:
Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance (Luke 5.31–32).
Jesus is unambiguous: these people are spiritually sick and in need of a great physician; they are sinners who need to repent—as are we all. And this makes his reaffirmation of the teaching of the Old Testament about marriage equally striking. As I commented in our exchange, Jesus himself affirms that marriage is between one man and one woman, because of the creation of humanity male and female. It is Jesus himself, as a first-century Jew, who is our good shepherd and teaches us what is right and good. If we do want to appeal to scripture (as we should) then we need to take account of this central fact, as has the church in all other places, times, and traditions. To isolate the affirmation of desire from the forms that Jesus himself affirms is to deny his teaching.
Tim responded here:
I do agree that Genesis 1 emphasises separation as God’s ordering work, and that both Jewish and Christian traditions have consistently understood marriage as male–female. I am not denying the weight of that reception, nor that Jesus stands within first-century Jewish moral assumptions. Where we differ is not over what the text says, but over how it functions theologically within the canon and the Church’s discernment.
I think Tim is unusual here in granting that Jesus did indeed, like all other Jews in the first century, reject the possibility of same-sex sexual relationships. He does still raise the possibility of us re-reading these texts, as he believes that we have done on other issues.
The key question here is: what is the ground of Jesus’ (and Paul’s, and the OT’s) rejection of same-sex sexual relationships (SSSR)? It is notable that none of these texts pay any attention to the kind of SSSR or its qualities; so there is no argument that ‘such relationships are unfaithful’ or ‘they are abusive’, even though we do find such arguments in the Fathers and later writing.The grounds for their rejection is very consistent: SSSR constitute a rejection of our bodily forms as male and female, as expressed in Gen 1 and 2. We can see this in Leviticus 18 and 20, since they mention ‘males’ and not men, echoing the creation language of ‘male and female’; and we see it explicitly in Romans 1, as Paul moves from rejection of the creator by rejecting the creation and then onto SSSR.
Thus to set aside this prohibition, we need to reject bodily form as the determiner of sexual identity, and instead see patterns of sexual attraction as identity-forming. But this not only rejects all the reasoning of Scripture (including Jesus); it more widely rejects biblical anthropology, which sees us as body-soul unities, where our sexed bodies are important as part of God’s creation intention.
Thus Bill Loader (a liberal) rejects Tim’s argument on exactly these grounds:
It is very possible that Paul knew of views which claimed some people had what we would call a homosexual orientation, though we cannot know for sure and certainly should not read our modern theories back into his world. If he did, it is more likely that, like other Jews, he would have rejected them out of hand….He would have stood more strongly under the influence of Jewish creation tradition which declares human beings male and female, to which may well even be alluding in 1.26-27, and so seen same-sex sexual acts by people (all of whom he deemed heterosexual in our terms) as flouting divine order’ (William Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality pp 323–4).
And gay historian Louis Crompton also sees this argument as unpersuasive:
According to [one] interpretation, Paul’s words were not directed at “bona fide” homosexuals in committed relationships. But such a reading, however well-intentioned, seems strained and unhistorical. Nowhere does Paul or any other Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of same-sex relations under any circumstance. The idea that homosexuals might be redeemed by mutual devotion would have been wholly foreign to Paul or any other Jew or early Christian. Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, 2003), 114.
And of course we need to recognise that, in fact, just about every form of SSSR was known in the ancient world. We are not as unique as we like to think!
Qualities and forms: polyamory and incest
The last major issue on which Tim and I engaged occurred when I raised the question of other possible forms of ‘faithful, covenant’ relationships. I pointed out that, throughout the conversation, and with Tim’s focus on qualities of relationship rather than the (bodily, physical) forms that they took, all his arguments could easily be used to justify both polyamorous and adult, consenting, incestuous relationships.
Tim reacted strongly against that, including the comment:
Scripture repeatedly and clearly rules out incest. It repeatedly and clearly condemns divided sexual loyalty. It does not, with the same structural clarity, articulate male-female complementarity as an ontological absolute in the same way it articulates exclusivity and kinship boundary.
The difficulty here is that Scripture also ‘repeatedly and clearly rules out’ same-sex sexual relationships! It does indeed ‘articulate male-female complementarity as an ontological absolute’ in the creation accounts and their subsequent reception.
What is really awkward for Tim’s argument here is that ‘covenant faithfulness’ in relationships need not be exclusive—as the examples of Ruth and Naomi show above. And many would argue that the model for human love is the love found between the persons of the Trinity—which is not a binary. Gay campaigner Brandon Robertson has specifically used this as an argument for the affirmation of polyamorous relationships.
Incestuous relationships were a big deal in the ancient world. Tutankhamen was the offspring of an incestuous relationship, which explains his deformities, and Cleopatra married both her brothers, Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV, to maintain her throne. Incest was a way to preserve the purity of a royal bloodline.
In Scripture, incest is primarily prohibited by the texts in Leviticus 18 and 20, which form the basis of British legal prohibitions—and of course also explicitly prohibit same-sex sexual relationships.
Changing our minds
Tim commented near the end of our exchange that ‘we are unlikely to change each other’s mind’. Actually, I feel quite open to having my mind changed—if there are good arguments. What was striking was final place where the discussion ended:
And when we encounter loving, exclusive, lifelong same-sex relationships marked by sacrifice, spiritual fruit, stability, and holiness of life, we are not looking at the erosion of Christian marriage — we may be looking at its faithful expression in a form the biblical writers did not explicitly imagine.
Ultimately, then, Tim is looking to his own experience and the meaning he construes from that, and not in fact the witness of Scripture that he began with.
Buy me a Coffee
Suzannah,
From what you have written about your conversion, how do you consider it was genuine?
Against what do you measure it?
My conversion to Jesus resulted in the whole of scripture being from God, for all times, by a Supernatural God who could and did make it happen reliably through fallible human beings.
Surely after your experience, such a God could and did make it happen.
Where we differ and diverge is in the results of conversion, a total life transformation, a renewed mind and new direction and desires: a deeper understanding of sin and self, of counterfeit Gods of status, self, money, sex, career, over worship and devotion to the one true God as imperfect as that may be.
New creation is what believers are, adopted children, inheritors.
With a mutual indwelling of God in Jesus, I repeat, a sexual joinder of believers in sinful, unauthorized, sex outside, m+f marriage?
That is the principle behind I Corinthians 6: 16-20
DEAR IAN
I am really sorry to have misrepresented you. The two assertions I attributed to you were what I remembered from our discussion, but clearly they were inaccurate.
The first one (gay people whouls eter heterposexdual marriage) reflects our discussion when I said that our modern understanding of homosexuality must male a difference to the way we read and apply scripture. I said something to the effect that, since we now know that people with an exclusively omosexual orientation cannot change, gao people should not be advised to enter heterosexual arrange, a course that is likely to result in much unhappiness. As I remember itm your view is that modern knowledge makes no difference. (I still find this very problematic.) But I see that your approach is more flexible in dealing with individuals.
The second point concerns what I have called your dispensational view of celibacy. I still find your approach to what I call ordinary celibacy (as distinct from consecrated celibacy) baffling. What I mean is staying unmarried for reasons of temperament, personal inclination ot in response to circumstances (e.g. in order to care for sick or disabled relatives). I gave some specific examples that you surely cannot call selfish. If the person is a Christian, then of course they will seek God’s guidance. But life course they choose is an ordinary human possibility, like the prayerful choice of a career. Becoming a doctor or a plumber is an ordinary human possibility. It could make no sense, surely, to think of such things as available only after Jesus. (There are many more different careers available now but that has nothing to do with divine dispensations.)
I know that the idea of the single life as a kind of eschataological sign anticipating the life of the age to come, has featured in the monastic tradition. I can make some sense of that because celibacy is there part of a distinctive way of life. But I do not know what it would mean to think of the singleness mof (to take two wellknown examples) Edward Heath or Cliff Richard as an eschatological sign. In a pre-modern society they might well have been pressured into marriage, but it is not because they live after Jesus that they were able to choose the lifestyle for which they were evidently suited by temperament. I have often been deeply thankful to have lived in a society in which I have not been pressured into marriage.
Only a minority of people are naturally suited to the unmarried life, but only a minority of people are naturally suited to becoming concert pianists or Olympic athletes. People are very different, something which traditional societies found it hard to recognize because they depended so much on slotting everyone into a narrow range of assigned roles.
it doesn’t really matter to me whether Elijah was a widower or a lifelong celibate, though traditional societies often tolerate divergence from social norms in prophetic figures. I cannot believe no one at all remained unmarried in ancient Israel, if only because there is always an imbalance of the sexes in a small society. The unattractive daughter who never found a husband but was an invaluable member of her father’s household is not likely to show up in literature like the OT. But it doesn’t matter because this aspect of ancient Israelite society is never pointed out as a normative example to follow. Like polygamy, it is just how that society was. It cannot mean that the ofinary human possibility of ordinary celibacy was not a possibility until somehow created by Jesus and Paul. (Of coutse, I am not denying that they created consecrated celibacy, which changed ancient society quite a lot, though Pythagoreans and Essenes seem to have prectised it.)
Dear Richard
What do we know that the ancient world did not? It cannot be that ‘orientation cannot change’ for two reasons. First, it is clear from various examples that ancients *did* indeed know that there were people with a settled attraction to people of the same sex.
But the second reason is that this is not true. The research evidence says that our ‘orientation’ is contextually formed, and that it is *not* settled, especially in women. All details here: https://www.psephizo.com/sexuality-2/are-we-born-straight-or-gay/
So I am unclear what is this thing that we know that the ancients didn’t which changes anything.
I am unclear why you are taking specific examples (Cliff Richard etc) in response to my observations about cultural trends. To say that we have become more selfish and self-obsessed as a culture is hardly contentious. But it says nothing about particular instances.
But the reality is, in a pre-modern age, the kind of casual singleness that you mention simply would not be a possibility. What is really striking about the singleness of Jesus and the coming of the kingdom is that it opens us the structural, theologically justified, basis for singleness within the community of faith. This is not about a specific religious vocation, but about patterns of life in community.
The idea that we each choose our path of life in light of our own temperament seems to me to be a modern, individualistic, assumption. You might find it hard to imagine—but I just don’t see any evidence of this approach in pre-modern cultures, in particular in Scripture. The examples are just not there.
Your comment here appears to be agreeing with me! ‘People are very different, something which traditional societies found it hard to recognize because they depended so much on slotting everyone into a narrow range of assigned roles.’
You are right about the imbalance of sex numbers—but that was surely taken up by small instances of polygamy.
All this is very interesting—but I don’t see how it has any impact on the main subject of my article. So, I ask again: of my responses to Tim’s claims about Scripture, where do you think I have gone wrong? Where are my observations about how we read scripture mistaken?
Well, om selfishness. Couples can also be very selfish as couples. I think in fact that there is a special form of coupe-selfishness in which partners limit their generosity and even sacrificial love to each other. Parenthood can also be very selfish. A friend once told me without apology that she looked for self-fulfilment in her children.
But I think you are using that feature of contemporary society as a distraction from taking seriously what I am trying to say about ordinary celibacy. When i mentioned the examples I had given I didn;t mean Cliff Richard and Edward Heath, though it is good to root one’s thinking in specific persons, but the examples I gave in a much earlier post about why people might and do remain unmarried. I can’t be bothered to scroll all that way back and find it.
So are you simply saying that what I call ordinary celibacy is nothing but an expression of modern individualism? Do you men that deciding on a career (something scarcely available in ancient Israel) should not take account of an individual’s temperament and aptitude and so on? Do you want our parents or government to assign careers to us? The fact is that modern society, largely because of the economy, provides a vastly greater range of choice in all sorts of ways than was possible in any traditional society. We can’t avoid making choices, but we can try to make them with divine guidance and with a view to the best ways in which we can serve others.
Victorian society was much less individualistic than ours and valued the family much more than our society does. Sexual infidelity and promiscuity were strongly disapproved. But pressure to marry was less than in traditional societies and lots of people remained unmarried. Maiden aunts were common. People who preferred to be single often lived as part of an extended family. Siblings often formed households. Admittedly, the maiden aunts and “spinsters” were often pitied, but I guess most of them were very happy with their lot. I think it was an era in which ordinary celibacy had a place that corresponded with the fact that a minority of people are naturally suited to singleness. I rather think your judgment would be that it would have been much better for those people to have been pressured into marriage. Someone should driven all the happy bachelors out of their London clubs and matched them with the maiden aunts, telling them that it was their duty to society to marry and produce children.(But the population was booling.)
I really can’t grasp what you think about ordinary celibacy. And you do not seem to be able to see that the socio-economic structures of ancient Israel, which made unmarried people very rare, cannot just be equated with God’s will for humanity.
I have to conclude that your dispensational view of celibacy really does rule out what I call ordinary celibacy. You think the only form of celibacy approved by God is that of the follower of Jesus who thinks: I am going to dedicate myself to the service of the kingdom, which I can do best by remaining single, and this has nothing to do with natural gifts or aptitudes I may have. Everyone else shoulld marry.
Is that really what you think? It seems abhorrently inhuman to me. If I thought it was the CofE’s doctrine of marriage I would leave the church tomorrow.
When I say that ordinary celibacy is an ordinary human possibility I do not mean that it was available to most people in ancient societies. When marriage is regarded as primarily a matter of economic necessity and of continuing the family line, I guess there was scope for those not much suited to marriage to lead a more lonesome life than average. As a shepherd, for example. But in more modern societies marriage has become no longer an economic necessity and not at all about continuing the family line. So for those more suited to a single life it became more available. (In the middle ages, I imagine a lot of people not suited to married life, as well as a lot of gay people, joined monasteries, and probably that still happens in Buddhist societies.)
You want to get me onto more familiar exegetical ground, but we tried that in emails and I know you have all the arguments to hand (that is not a criticism: I recognize why you have an “impregnable fortress” – because you have read and thought the widely on the subject). But your lack of a theological way to allow for ordinary celibacy is a serious weakness of your overall construction of a theology of sexulaity and marriage. I dislike many aspects of contemporary society, but not the fact that people are relatively free to live in very different ways that are all compatible with Christian ideals and morality. There are so many very good things that you could not do in ancient Israel. Don’t you care about that?
What attracted me to your dialogue with Tim was its possible adumbration of peace making beyond disagreement. I think I have said before that I am more convinced that this issue should not divide the church than I am of anything I may think about the issue itself. I do not want to engage in the exegetical debate beyond occasional interventions because I have not read much of the literature, which is huge, and I have other things to do that I think I myself can more usefully do.
Thank you for your kind words about my work, and I am so glad it is helpful to you. As you know, I think your blog (though perhaps not always the comments) is a great service for preachers and others.
Dear Ian
I have been awake half the night thinking about this because I am so shocked by what I think you are actually saying about single people. I had thought that your dispensational view of celibacy was an incoherent way of validating ordinary celibacy (along with consecrated celibacy). I realise that was not your intention. You really do not think that staying unmarried on grounds of temperament or aptitude or personal inclination or response to specific circumstances is within God’s will for human life, even if you will not say it is “wrong.” You think it stems from selfish individualism.
I was also puzzled that you were so insistent that absoluyely no one in ancient Israel stayed unmarried. This interests me only as a historical issue, and you are well aware one cannot prove a negative. But for you this is dogma, because you think that God designed Israel as a society in which everyone married. I think that is ridiculous. But at the same time you seem to agree that Israel was simplu in that respect typical of traditional societies in which marriage is tied up with socio-economic structures that make marriage an economic necessary and an essential means of continuing the family line. This is how you maintain the view that what Gen 1-2 says about marriage and procreation is a general rule to which there are no exceptions. So the only exceptions are the kind envisage by Jesus and Paul when they recommend celibacy. This sort of celibacy, which anticipates the angel-like life in the age to come has nothing to do with personal temperament or inclinations.
I think this is a punch in the face to many single people in Anglican churches, and perhaps this is why you seem a bit hesitant to come clean about it. It shocks me because it is such a brutal failure to attend to the diversity of human personalities. traditional societies like ancient Israel could not easily provide for that diversity, but don’t most of us, including Christians, now think that since we can do better (modern socio-economic strucyures make it possible) we should. This is not capitulating to degenerate individualism. It is making scope for the diversity of human nature as God has made it.
In earlier posts I said you thought things that you explicitly deny. If I am doing so here, then please claridy carefully why I have misunderstood you. I think you owe it to readers of this blog to be really clear about this.
If I am right then a lot of single people in churches will be saying you confirm the prejudice against single people that they have so often felt in churches.
Richard, I don’t think you need to lose any sleep!
1. I do not claim ‘no people in ancient Israel were single’. I point out that chosen singleness was barely possible in premodern societies, that the idea of choosing whether or not to marry ‘based on individual preferences and temperament’ is a modern individualist construct, unknown in the ancient world, and as a matter of fact there are no examples of this in the OT. I don’t think any of this is contested.
2. I actually think that the teaching of Jesus *changes* this, so that people who are single who have an honoured place in the community of faith.
3. I would also note that the rise in both singleness and marriage with no children is a modern Western phenomenon which has been created by our obsession with ourselves. That does not mean any particular single person can be called selfish, but the common justification for both these states is about the self. And this is killing our society.
4. What is odd here is that, as far as I can see, it is the *revisionists* who are excluding ‘ordinary celibacy’, not me. I believe that Jesus calls us to one of two states: other-sex marriage; or single celibacy. Revisionists like Tim reject this, saying that *all* should marry whatever their attractions, and Tim actually argues that without a sexual relationship people are condemned to loneliness, frustration, and an unfruitful life. I think this is terrible, and it is the consequence of our sexualised culture which frames this debate.
best
Thank you for these really helpful responses. Your discussion of singleness provides a really useful way into our understanding of relationships today and how radically they differ in some respects from those in ancient Israel. It highlights for me two crucial points.
1. When we use a term such as ‘marriage’ it’s not a fixed, unchanging entity that can be read off the Old Testament experience and applied in every context, culture and age. Something similar applies to a word like ‘king’. William I, Louis XIV, George III and Charles III were/are all kings, but the actual reality of what they and others understand by that word is radically different. We can’t argue that true kingship is defined by one and so all the others aren’t proper kings. Kingship, like marriage, is a varied range of relationships influenced by the world around us sometimes in good ways sometimes in harmful ways..
2. Economic and cultural context shapes social relationships in fundamental ways. I have friends in other parts of the world who have arranged their children’s marriages on lines that are quite similar to Old Testament patterns, with the fathers being the key players in each family. It seems to work well. But it would be utterly unrealistic to require that in the UK today because it is the biblical pattern. We’re in danger of filleting the biblical material and selecting the aspects of family and marriage life we approve of and saying they are immutable, whilst dispensing with those we disapprove of and saying they were for that time only. Or we can say we should adopt it all. Thanks again for your insights and eirenic approach to this discussion..
Thanks Tim. But I think you are in danger of misrepresenting the discussion.
1. Yes, kings function in different ways. But here we are not simply doing an exercise in the phenomenology of marriage. If we believe that Scripture offers us an insight into God’s intention, then we need to do at least two things: a. prioritise what the *teaching* of scripture seems to be, and b. discern that, noting the difference between what Scripture describes and what it prescribes.
It clearly describes a whole range of things about marriage, which no reputable commentator things are set out as patterns to follow. But the one thing which is a constant, and which is given theological centrality, is the exclusive, lifelong union of a man and a woman, clarified in moving from the Hebrew OT to the Greek OT as *one* man with *one* woman.
2. Arranged marriages are not the same as forced marriages. But arrangement still happens in our culture, though in different and less formal ways.
But why is discerning between what scripture *describes* (eg arranged marriages, patriarchy, economic priorities) and what it *prescribes* (one man and one woman) ‘in danger of filleting’? How else should we read this collection of texts?
I do agree with you that it is good to be eirenic. But the pressure for change coming from revisionists makes that hard, and I thought Tim’s original engagement and approach were refreshing—and sadly rare.
Dear Tim
This just repeats an unthinking thing that is often said.
The truth is that certain aspects of marriage are true always. And other aspects are not. You are saying the latter is the case and the former is not. In that, you are wrong.
This perspective has been misused to ‘argue’ that because secondary features of marriage have often changed, it ‘follows’ that we can pick whichever primary feature we want to change and then change it in whichever one of the possible ways that we choose.
youre easily shocked lol
Ian,
Maybe we have different understandings of what it means to have a calling. I’ve always considered it to be something special, with particular purpose, and requiring discernment to hear God speaking in your life – e.g. if you’re going to be ordained, it’s because you’re called to it, but my job is a not a calling it’s just my job. Likewise I can definitely see that some people are called to celibacy for a purpose (either because they’re called to something that involves celibacy like women becoming nuns, or because celibacy makes doing a thing they’re being called to easier). But you I think are arguing that anyone who happens to be single is, by definition, called to it. And anyone who happens to be married is, by definition, called to it. That’s very different.
‘Maybe we have different understandings of what it means to have a calling. I’ve always considered it to be something special’
We might have special vocations to particular ministry. But the first vocation of all is to repent and follow Jesus in obedience to his teaching.
And I think his teaching is that we can be other-sex married, or we can be single and celibate. That is the sense of calling that Paul is using in 1 Cor 7.
Richard,
We should be careful about having a rose-tinted view of the past. Victorian society may have strongly disapproved of flaunting sexual infidelity (no official mistresses for royalty or noblemen unlike their 18th century grandfathers) but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t rampant infidelity and promiscuity. There was no shortage of prostitutes, and by the 1860s we were passing laws to combat venereal disease because the situation was so out of hand.
That’s not ‘the past’; it is hardly any of the past since it covers one society at one time in history, thus excluding 99% of the past.
I was responding to a specific point Richard was making about Victorian society.
Does the Church of England ever wonder why it makes no converts from Islam compared to other churches? What does it think Muslims make of senior churchmen advocating that men can marry men?
Do you have any statistics on that?
Jesus seems to be converting directly, through dreams and visions.
Thank you, Ian once again for hosting the discussions here. Very much enjoyed reading about your initial conversation with Tim and it was especially good to understand how eirenic that could be. Also very good to have Richard Bauckham’s comments here and to see that exchange. I do think Richard’s point about you having a kind of fortress of argument that is impregnable is very true. And it definitely changes the nature of discussion, as he points out. It is not a dialogical approach.
I have once or twice sensed that you might be open to some kind of settlement within the Church of England. It is now clear from your comments here that you are not at all open to that, and that you think people like Tim, and me, and countless others – I suspect well over 50% of clergy – should leave the Church of England and be in another denomination. It seems clear that you don’t think a settlement is at all possible.
Clearly the issue that has pushed you that far is to do with same-sex marriage and the acceptance of clergy in same-sex relationships. But I suspect that if all those that you think should leave the Church of England did leave, then there would be other issues that you would find objectionable. For example, I am sure that your doctrine of the Eucharist is very different to many within the Church of England. You will of course – because of the fortress like arguments that Richard notes – want to say that your way of understanding the Eucharist and the doctrine surrounding it is the only true way within the Church of England. You will say that the broad church that we have inherited over the last two centuries is not really what the Church of England is about. You will say that all those churches and Cathedrals – I think all the Cathedrals – that reserve the sacrament in a chapel as a focus of devotion are going against the doctrine of the Church of England. How long, I wonder before you suggest that those who hold a different doctrine of the Eucharist to you should leave the Church of England as well.
All of this is intriguing because I think the Alliance are keen to find a settlement, and so you find yourself very much at odds with them. You are also at odds with many of your conservative evangelical colleagues over the ordination of women. They will see that your understanding of that matter is not biblical, but you will defend that with a fortress like mentality as well.
I’m not sure how the Church of England will survive and I have said this before. Just at the moment I don’t think it deserves to survive. I note that the Anglican mission in Europe – although of course it is not part of the Anglican communion – want to belong to GAFCON. I know that other conservatives have decided to leave the Church of England because they consider that GAFCON has a better claim to being Anglican.
I don’t now see any future in the type of Church of England that you espouse. It will become a tiny narrow sect and deserves that fate.
I have always been grateful for the breadth of views you have welcomed here. I sense that is changing. And that is a pity.
Richard agreed above that the fortress was impregnable precisely because of the years of thought Ian has put in.
Christopher many of us have put years of thought in to this and come to a different conclusion about the outcome of that thought. Nearly 50 years of thought in my case.
Richard made the point Ian’s approach changed the way dialogue happens – and that is what I was referring to.
But the exchange of Ian and Richard is an exchange of scholars.
Over the 50 years you have not done nothing else, so it is a case of periodically.
Whatever you have learnt over 50 years, it is not Greek and it is not social-studies statistical findings – the two most relevant things.
Thank you Christopher. But yes I have studied those two things.
This is another part of the problem. The assumption that ‘you can’t have studied it properly otherwise you would not have reached that conclusion’.
Of course you have studied them. And that is the problem. You are treating all degrees of having studied them as the same degree, rather than a huge spectrum of amounts.
Christopher I am quite sure that over 50 years Ian and Richard have done other things than study Greek and some social studies statistical findings. Please stop making vast generalisations. You do it a great deal and it never helps.
Whichever the topic, we prioritise those who have studied that particular topic more, as you agree.
And that is why I tend to look to those who have studied ethics a great deal Christopher. Luke Bretherton is one such. And I tend to look to those who are well versed in Church History. Diarmaid MacCulloch.
And of course both have studied the New Testament as well.
And it is why I am also interested in the fact that Jewish scholars and ethicists from most branches of Judaism have moved to be in favour of same sex relationships.
Andrew, Diarmaid MacCulloch seems very clear what Scripture says. I think he is also clear that it is simply wrong.
When it comes to NT we access those who have studied most. Those you name are way down the list.
Ditto social science findings.
On this topic these are the main dimensions.
Nope. They are part of the story. Ethics is a very very significant factor. So is Church History. If you can’t see the relevance of those two, then I’m afraid your contribution must be discounted
Quite the contrary. Each takes pride of place wherever it is the main topic. They are not alternatives but simultaneous dimensions.
Which part of my multifarious contribution should be discounted, says who and on what credentials? All of it?
I am glad you now seem to agree that Ethics, Church History AND NT studies are simultaneously important in assessing this important matter. It is good that you have recognised that.
We do need to find a scholar who understands Judaism to help us with the question as to why so many of that faith have revised their thinking about same sex sexual relationships, despite the seeming clarity of Leviticus.
Quite a few modern Jews are atheists. Not sure that is going to help us much.
Quite a few are theists and think that Leviticus no longer applies.
On what basis? Stating a belief without its basis is worse than useless. Christians think much of Leviticus does not apply after Christ, on the basis of the Acts revelations. The sexual ethics apply except more strongly than before, Mk 10, Mt 5. Thus when the council of Jerusalem met to see which things were nonnegotiables, sexual ethics made it to the top few of the list. Plenty of people WANT them abrogated, as though that counted as being an argument, just like the apocryphal Moses’s ‘ I got Him down to ten, but the bad news is adultery’s still in’. The revisionists are unserious because firstly it is all about ‘got Him down to’ (how much can we get away with?) and secondly they prioritise their short term pleasures.
Christopher your mistake is to think of God as if God were some fierce headmaster of a public school who will beat you if you don’t abide by the rules.
Many branches of Judaism have come to realise that the way to approach Leviticus is to ask the very important question – ‘what did they believe then that made them express themselves in the way that they did?’.
Note that even some parts of the Orthodox tradition are now becoming accepting of same sex relationships
We have been over the basis on which faithful religious people have changed their minds on this matter so many times before. We get that you don’t accept their reasons. Let’s not just repeat it all over again. It gets very tedious. Mutual respect is much more important.
Great strategy for getting unresearched congenial ideologies through the back door!
Andrew, where on earth do you get the idea that the simultaneous importance of different disciplines (some more than others in any given case) is a new revelation I have suddenly had?
Or your headmaster revelation- equally random?
Andrew, but what is interesting is that, even though a scholar, Richard has not offered a single corrective to my reading of Scripture.
So we have had a good exchange, but my case remains, unchanged—not for lack of openness on my part, but for a lack of good alternative arguments.
Ian:
And none of it touches upon ‘same sex marriage’.
For the Christian who chooses singleness (or is unable to get married for other reasons) should not be sexually active.
So what does the whole discussion add to the SSM debate?
As for leaving the denomination, since denominations are a secondary matter, that is not a large issue. If someone analyses thus, and that seems to follow logically, then are you saying that they are forbidden from analysing thus? They aren’t.
As for seeing breadth as a virtue rather than neutral, that is a logical misstep.
Nonsense, Andrew. We all think we are right, or else we would change our views, and any man worth his salt learns how to defend his views. To call that a fortress-like mentality is just a rhetorical attack. Every conservative evangelical thinks that of every liberal and vice-versa. Nor is Ian less welcoming of other views while disagreeing with them, otherwise this essay and thread would not exist.
This is a dispute about the definition of sin, unlike the other things you mention, and sin pollutes the church. Neither side has any confidence that the other would not ultimately abrogate any settlement if it gains the CoE’s levers of power. That is why this cannot be other than a fight to the death.
One of the tactics is to say that there has to be plurality of opinion. It is very unclear logically why that would to be the case (it wouldn’t have to be, though often it would be).
By this means, all kinds of unevidenced positions can then get a place at the table.
And then they claim legitimacy by virtue of being a position. Anything at all is a position. It is a position to say the moon is made of green cheese.
I’m afraid that is nonsense. Most revisionists (for want of a better term) are entirely happy with the idea of ‘good disagreement’ and believe that conducting or participating in same-sex blessings/marriages should be left entirely up to personal conscience.
It is the conservatives who want to plant a hedge around the law and who cannot allow people to live according to their consciences this side of the eschaton (although, of course, they are ready to live with other differences in doctrine and practice).
If a gay man or woman chooses celibacy because that is their own reading of scripture, how could I possibly object?
They are not only happy with good disagreement, they are ecstatic with it. On it depends their chance of having a place at the table at all. The fact that academic standards have to be jettisoned for this to happen is secondary.
The fact that the idea of good disagreement as the chief ideal never figured, or was allowed to figure, in any of the previous controversies; and the fact that when it did figure it was coincidentally on a topic that had occasioned no Christian disagreement at all until ‘yesterday’ (and a culturally popular and ubiquitous one at that) these too are secondary.
‘They’ already have a place at the table. It’s not up to you to invite ‘them’.
And, no, many revisionists hate the idea of ‘good disagreement’, but they probably won’t excommunicate you for your singular beliefs.
Who *doesn’t* have a place at the scholarly table, IYHO?
I don’t ‘need’ to do anything Christopher. People need to refrain from cheap caricatures.
In terms of demonstrating whether the point you make is true or not, you (like all the rest of us) ‘need’ to give evidence, otherwise what you say is unsupported assertion.
Penny ‘conducting or participating in same-sex blessings/marriages should be left entirely up to personal conscience’.
Indeed. They don’t think we should be constrained either by the doctrine of the Church or the teaching of Jesus.
Penelope’s notion of ‘conscience’ isn’t the biblical meaning of the word not how the word has been used in the history of Christian ethical reflection. Conscience is not the infallible voice of the Holy Spirit, bypassing all the normal ways we learn the truth. Conscience is an internalised understanding of right and wrong, and in Catholic and evangelical theology it should normally be followed. But it always comes with the caveat that the conscience needs to be enlarged and corrected from without. Quakerism and extreme Pietism place the locus of truth in the individual. This has more to do with Romanticism than Christianity.
Yes of course they should. The doctrine of the Church may change. It has before. Jesus’ teaching does not change, but readings of it have changed over the centuries.
I don’t think so. Please name me one doctrine of the C of E that has changed.
James
You have absolutely no idea what my idea of conscience is but by all means waste your time making up crude caricatures.
And, of course, conducting same-sex blessings within services is entirely licit 🙂
PCD, all you need to do is say what your idea of conscience *is*.
Andrew, Richard made clear what he means by ‘fortress’: that I have been engaging a long time with this, and have good answers to questions, none of which are new. And he has been invited to offer any more than once.
(If you don’t like this kind of ‘fortress’, do tell me where you think you are wrong to prove you are not one…)
A settlement is not possible—because it is not logically possible, not because people are unwilling. We cannot agree that black is white—not due to unwillingness, but due to its impossibility.
What prevents the C of E changing its doctrine of marriage is its own constitution, the commitment of the C of E to take Scripture as its authority, and as the church established by law, the demand that its doctrine is internally coherent.
If the C of E split into two, with a ‘liberal’ half, and a ‘conservative’ half, then the latter would continue with the Formularies, the ordination vows, the declaration of assent, and the liturgy exactly as it is. What would the ‘liberal’ half do? It would have to dispense with all that to get what it wants. And then in what sense would it be ‘the Church of England’?
‘you think people like Tim, and me, and countless others – I suspect well over 50% of clergy – should leave the Church of England and be in another denomination.’
No I don’t, and (unlike revisionists who have told me I should leave), and have never asked you or anyone else to do so. What I ask is that you fulfil your ordination vows, believe the doctrine of the Church, teach and uphold it, and end the relentless and damaging pressure to do something which simply is not possible.
It is bizarre, in a discussion with 336 comments, that you claim I am becoming narrow minded.
The future of the Church that I espouse is one in which we all have the integrity to uphold our vows, and believe and following the doctrine of the Church ‘according to the teaching of our Lord.’ If you find that difficult to envisage, then you need a renewal of your imagination!
And I have such integrity and am quite content that I abide by the teaching of our Lord, thanks Ian.
Thanks Andrew. It is just that no reputable scholar recognises what you claim as the actual teaching of the Jesus we meet in the gospels.
They do. We’ve been here before.
Agree with Christopher and Anthony, re the description of our hosts comprehensive scholarly preparation with a conclusion that can not be gaisaid in what in reality is an adversarial methodology by revisionist, who have the burden of proof and to reach the required standard of proof.
It seems that the academe is more concerned with methodology than correct conclusions, judgments decisions, but is at ease with multiple choice answers of equal weight, or nuances that ‘square the circle’.
A Fortress that is impregnable admits that really there is no reply that meets the burden not standards of proof, so far as it relates to Church Doctrine, to believers, to the body of Christ, not the secular, unbelieving world.
I think it’s completely unfair to Ian to describe his position as a ‘fortress of impregnable arguments’. It’s a well-thought out, researched and reasoned view, which many like myself, a gay Christian, agree with.
It says more about those using such language about Ian than it does Ian.
Thanks. And I remain sad that so few on the ‘other side’ of the argument recognise that many gay Christians have an orthodox view of marriage.
I don’t know where you get that from. The whole Side A – Side B dynamic was a recognition of exactly that. What remains baffling to me is the constant refusal from the ‘other side’ to acknowledge that the ex-gay movement happened. It was a real effort to push the narrative of you don’t have to be gay if you don’t want, encouraged gay people into straight marriages etc., and was a disaster that imploded around 2013. There seems to be a determined effort to simply airbrush it from history.
I get that from listening to the Synod debate.
Revisionists spoke as though all gay people agreed with them—even when they were following a gay person who didn’t.
The ‘LGBTQI+ community’ is an ideological fiction.
Although oddly enough the only people I hear describe themselves as “an LGBTQI+ person” are from your side of the aisle.
Just checking though: you remember the ex-gay movement, right?When folks like Jeremy Marks and Martin Hallett were touring churches and youth groups? And it’s collapse here, in the US, and around the world in the 2010s?
It is surprising that habits are hard to change after age 25? But that is something we already knew.
Secondly, it is surprising that habits are harder to change the more the culture is against that? No – that is exactly what one would expect.
Christopher
Once again, you are wrong. I have drunk alcohol all my life and very much enjoyed it. I have now given it up because of the medication I take. This was not hard. Millions of people do it every year – as they also give up cigarettes and other drugs. And, although cigarettes and some drugs are not culturally acceptable, drinking alcohol is almost compulsory.
Compulsory? So everyone has to conform socially? Only weak people feel any need to conform socially.
The most accurate way of disproving large scale trends is to examine the life and doings of PCD (one random person being as small scale a trend as is possible).
Christopher
So a) you don’t understand the word ‘millions’, and
b) you don’t understand social pressures to conform – odd, I thought that was one of your hobby horses.
Ah well, we’re off topic, so I have nothing further to add.
Peter. Richard uses the image of an impregnable fortress firstly as a compliment – that Ian is someone who has thought through his beliefs very thoroughly and can, and does, defend them against all comers. He respects that and so do I. But Richard also notes that an impregnable fortress is a place that exists to keep things out. It is closed to ‘outsiders’, on its own terms. He offers that to Ian as a (possible) criticism and challenge.
But how do you make it less impregnable, if it is already agreed to be impregnable? Why would you want it to be less impregnable if it was already excellently robust?
It is unlikely that someone would have dual motivation: both ‘Seek the truth’ and ‘Keep ’em out!’.
Not only are these motivations one pure and one impure, but they are opposed to one another, so unlikely to coexist.
A truth researcher and truth promoter is actually motivated by petty and shallow things like keeping people out?
Unlikely.
Two different explanations of an impregnable position are not required. One suffices.
This is an example of the way that mature people concentrate on ideas and less mature concentrate on personal slights. Debate, like all mature discourse, is about the former.
Yes, David, thanks. He clarified that this is a compliment.
And in response to the challenge element, I have repeated in each of my comments the invitation to respond to my response to Tim: ‘do please show me where I am misreading Scripture’. My impregnable fortress has its doors and windows flung wide open!
And I repeat the invitation to you…
David:
As a tourist I have been inside many fortresses. I entered by the front gate, having paid the requisite entry fee (if applicable) and having assured the security that I wasn’t going to cause any harm once inside. Impregnable fortresses exist only to keep insurrectionists and terrorists out. All my visits have been peaceful and enjoyable.
The Church is called ‘the pillar and bulwark of truth’ in 1 Tim 3.15. A bulwark (hedraioma) is a rampart or strong defence against attack. A fortress without ‘the rampart of truth’ is not a fortress but a weakness.
If Protestantism thinks the Church is basically a debating society where the question of truth is constantly unclear or ‘deferred’ , it has basically crumbled.
This is my last contribution. Ian, you have put me back to thinking your position on ordinary celibacy incoherent. I see how the coming of Jesus inaugurates consecrated celibacy. But how can something that is rooted in the diversity of human nature become possible or legitimate only with the coming of Jesus? If it was hardly possible in ancient Israel, what made it a more practicable reality in the early modern period were changes in the economic structures of society, not the coming of Jesus. So I am still baffled by your position.it might help a bit if you explain whether or not the commands in Gen 1-2 allow exceptions. Actually I think that is where our email discussion petered (or paused) out.
Thanks. Whether economics allows it or not, if a culture does not reproduce, it will die. That has not changed.
Is that your answer to whether Gen 1 -2 allows exceptions?
No, it is a separate, real-life, observation.
Thanks, Richard, for introducing a helpful tone to the discussion.
Ian, I don’t think the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive statements is as easy to apply as you suggest, but it is extremely useful as it can allow us to include in the former what we want to discard/ignore whilst retaining in the latter the things we wish to keep. It leads to a core of essential, timeless cross-cultural truths that are 100% certain for all people in all contexts and express God’s will. These can be defended absolutely because to reject them is to reject God. On the other side is a disposable shell of culturally and historically conditioned ones that we can locate within human intentions and which are not regarded as God’s will. Helpful, but perhaps too neat? And the history of the church suggest that what is regarded as in the 100% certain category can sometimes move into the optional one.
Anyway, this will be my final contribution to this thread. Thanks.
Tim, thanks, but I think you are critiquing a parody. Your picture is of an onion, and you peel off the outers layers to find the core. That is not what is involved.
This is about theological interpretation of Scripture.
But without making this distinction, a text with an historical context cannot make claims about anything other than contingent truths.
If you believe that, then you believe that it is not possible for the eternal God to enter space and time in the form of a finite human being.
I think that might give you a basic problem with Christian faith.
Ian, although I said I would not contribute again I will, briefly. Please look at the language I used. It is more nuanced than you recognise: ‘I don’t think the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive statements is as easy to apply as you suggest.’ It’s, ‘Perhaps too neat?’ That’s not a 100% rejection of the distinction but only that I find the way it’s used in this case not wholly convincing. So your absolute statement doesn’t apply to what I have actually written which is not to dismiss the distinction completely, though I still think it can lead us to make the error I outlined.
It remains the case that ‘the history of the church suggest that what is regarded as in the 100% certain and never-changing category can sometimes move into the optional one.’ We cannot know if this issue will be one of those in say 100 years, so 100% certainty might be unwise. The same applies to those advocating SSM with total certainty. If both sides recognised that, the position Richard Bauckham advocated would be possible. That’s why his approach is so refreshing and welcome. Finis!
Thanks. I am not sure that I said it was easy, but I do think that, in some form or other, it is essential.
I think it is difficult to rule out rethinking on any particular issue.
The tricky thing is that, on this issue, *every* tradition, in *every* age, in *every* culture, in *every* branch of the church catholic has been in 100% agreement that Scripture teaches that marriage is an exclusive covenant between one man and one woman.
And *every* reputable critical scholar even in the West agrees that that is what Scripture teaches. (They think it is wrong).
And I have repeatedly here invited scholars, and people who have written on the subject to show me where my response to Tim is mistaken as a reliable reading of scripture.
Not one person has highlighted a single error.
In the light of that, perhaps there is some tiny chance that we might rethink this, but it looks to me like about a 0.1% chance or less.
So here’s the question: why are the revisionist lobby relentlessly campaigning on this, wasting time and energy, creating division and damage to the Church, and in the case of *every* single Western denomination that has changed its doctrine of marriage, denominational collapse.
Figures are just out for TEC, and David Goodhew points out that they have dropped in attendance by 25% since 2019. At the rate they will only exist for another 19 years.
So why are we continuing to have this futile debate which is destroying the Church that Christ gave his life for?
This has been described as “tending to God’s spreadsheet”.
I dont think his tone is helpful at all.
Looks like Japan has now reached the state that Ian describes.
https://www.pensionpolicyinternational.com/japans-births-hit-record-low-for-10th-year-as-demographic-crisis-outpaces-government-forecasts/
Japan is seriously overcrowded. You get on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto and wonder when you will leave the built-up area for open countryside… you never do. It will remain a major power if its population goes down by 20% and the overall quality of life wil improve. But there will be some economic changes that developed nations have not yet faced and need to work out how to respond to.
Total numbers is only part of the issue.
The problem is the demographic profile. When you slash the number of young people, then it means your age profile quickly becomes top heavy, and there is no-one to care for the elderly, pay their pensions—or even maintain roads.
Great novel on this which many people missed is The Children of Men by P D James.
That’s what I meant by economic changes!
South Korea is actually the worst.
Yes – I think it can only mean political chaos in the next decade as the economic burden becomes unsustainable. These East Asian countries have AFAIK) resisted immigration as we know it in the west, so have stayed socially quite homogeneous. Will that remain?
And trying to turn things around with a pro-natalist policy is much harder than people think. It doesn’t seem to be working in China, whose population now seems to be falling.
Russia’s population is also in freefall, and sending hundreds of thousands of young men to their deaths in Ukraine is not such a good idea either.
And then there is Iran, where the birthrate has also cratered.
The human race is in for a rocky decade or so.
Doesn’t anyone care about leaving space for the rest of Go’s creation? The destruction of nature in the UK alone in the last century has been massive. I would very much welcome population decline.
The problem of old and young is exaggerated because as people live longer they also remain active and able to work longer. Consider Okinawa.
A bid problem is the retirement culture that my generation has created (it didn’t exist before). People expect many years of active leisure, going on cruises and so forth. If one wants to regard biblical societies as normative, one could point out that no one retired. Old people helped on the family small holding for as long as they could. But I don’t go in for that sort of argument.
But it is true that my generation, most of whom had children, who created most of the problems faced by young people today. It is hypocritical for my generation to lambast the young for reluctance to have children. We were mostly able to own nice family homes and had secure jobs. We thought you needed those things to be responsible parents. If young people worry about climate catastrophe and AI replacing huge numbers of jobs, whose fault is that? I deplore the consumer individualism of our society, but my generation created it.
Thinking about what the future skill be like, I am relieved to think I will not be alive much longer. If I were young, I might well decide not to have children who will inherit all the mess we are leaving to them. Having to support the elderly might be the least of their troubles.
Lots to agree with here.
But you also name a central truth: cultural childlessness is a sign of despair and loss of hope in the future.
Only the good news of Jesus can counter such nihilism.
I am not sure that is true, culturally. And it’s certainly not true eschatologically. I agree that the low birth rate is a worrying demographic for older generations, but it might otherwise be morally neutral, or even a good. We would have to live much more lightly on the planet which would be devilishly difficult. But a bad thing?
I certainly agree. I said something if the soft in my recent article in Church Times.
It was an excellent article. Thank you for it.
Richard, I would also note that declining childbearing disproportionately affects women rather than men.
In the West, it is women who would like to be married and have children much more than men, so they bear the major share of disappointment.
Surveys show the women in the West consistently have fewer children than they would like to.
It’s easy to blame a previous generation for the ills of the current. Many young people may declare worries about climate change, but how many actually live lives that have little impact on the climate? I would suggest very few – they still want their cars (often petrol), their foreign holidays involving many hours of plane travel, their wide variety of foods having to be transported many miles from abroad, are happy to live in gas or oil heated homes. The list goes on.
Richard,
We have had population decline before. It was called the Irish Potato Famine, and before that, the Black Death. Not a great time to be alive for many, and enormous dislocation for everyone.
Half or more of our political and social problems today are due to the fact that the indigenous population of Europe has given up reproducing but still expects to live in comfort and security, in control of its own destiny. This has never happened before. Look at Yehud in Ezra-Nehemiah.
The economic and social impact of the Black Death is fascinating.
Labourers were fewer, so in demand, which meant rapid rise in wages. Food was plentiful, so life expectancy of those who survived grew.
And because demand for labour outstripped supply, workers became mobile. This broke social structures, and IIRC destroyed the feudal system and ended serfdom.
(Worth also remembering that the ecological crisis we are facing is primarily a crisis for humanity. If we all die out, nature will recover!)
(And fascinating how, when we talk about sex, a whole range of others issues is affected…!)
Ian writes: “(And fascinating how, when we talk about sex, a whole range of other issues is affected…!)”
Be careful, Ian, your childhood Catholicism may come back with a vengeance.
(* For the avoidance of doubt, I mean Catholic teaching on natural law, the purpose and meaning of sex – in particular, reproduction – the ethical nature of contraception, the ubiquity of abortion today, and feminism – all factors linked withe the collapse of the birth rate. It was very interesting listening to an interview with Carrie Gress, Catholic anti-feminist philosopher who calls feminism ‘the new secular church’ and abortion its sacrament. How bizarre that American Christians were the main target in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ when what that book described is really Afghanistan under the Taliban.)
What is being described are some US States under Trump. Prophetic book.
Prophetic of the Taliban, not the United States. Canada’s population is immigration-driven. The indigenous seem to have given up on having children and left that task to the Indians, Chinese and Africans. The future belongs to those who show up for it.
Americans are free to move wherever they wish. The population switch seems to be currently towards the red states. Blue states have a rich upper crust and lots of poor dependent people. The middle class have been looking elsewhere.
As Carrie Gress puts it, the basic thesis of feminism is that women should become like men. The result is a lot fewer children and a lot more immigration. And lots of abortion. Interesting to think what impact this has on the soul of womankind.
Prophetic of the Taliban, not the United States. Canada’s population is immigration-driven. The indigenous seem to have given up on having children and left that task to the Indians, Chinese and Africans. The future belongs to those who show up for it.
Americans are free to move wherever they wish. The population switch seems to be currently towards the red states. Blue states have a rich upper crust and lots of poor dependent people. The middle class have been looking elsewhere.
As Carrie Gress puts it, the basic thesis of feminism is that women should become like men. The result is a lot fewer children and a lot more immigration. And lots of abortion. Interesting to think what impact this has on the soul of womankind.
James
Well, Carrie Gress is very wrong. And the Christofascism of some US States is fast approaching Gilead.
Penelope locuta, causa finita est.
Always good to get an authoritative answer. But who would have thought that third-wave feminism would actually cause a civilizational crisis? I thought her interview with John Gillam was quite fascinating. It was also interesting what she revealed about the religious (and atheist) motives of earlier feminism. Maybe Ian will do a post on this one day.
James
Hardly. And she’s another fauxminist who argues that women’s place is in the home whilst travelling everywhere peddling her threadbare ‘philosophy’.
An irrelevance.
‘Fauxminist’ – a good one but not as good as ‘feminazi’. I don’t know that she calls herself a feminist, though – I thought she disavow ed the term. Actually I had never heard of her until literally yesterday. I understand she does have five children, so her outlook on life is no doubt very much shaped by that fact. Having a large family and possibly grandchildren on the way does give one a distinctive view of the home and the future, as well as a mother-centred understanding of womanhood. As a Catholic philosopher that seems to be the lens through which she understands the world.
It was interesting for me to hear her (in the interview with John Gillam) describe the basic tenet of feminism that women should become like men, principally by renouncing motherhood. Hence the quasi-sacramental character of abortion in modern feminism.
But that is not the basic tenet of feminism. So you and she misunderstand feminism, which has nothing to do with striving to become men. How utterly absurd. Feminism is essentially about two things: equity and the dismantling of patriarchy. It is perfectly possible to be a mother, grandmother, and a good Catholic feminist.
Feminism almost never believes sex is tied to marriage, so it thoroughly (and unnecessarily and very harmfully) undermines motherhood and grandmotherhood, and stable family life in general.
Christopher and James demonstrating their ignorance of feminism. Such fun!
So long as women accelerate by 1000s of percent their initiation of divorces, why not laugh along?
James
There is not enough difference between the Christian nationalism of the USA and the Islamic nationalism which Muhammad instituted. And it is one of the ongoing implications of Anglicanism that it was founded as in effect an extreme case of Christian nationalism, on the one hand a former totalitarian and persecutory body, and a very minor minority in England desperately willing to compromise Christian fundamentals to hang on to what rags of influence it stll has……
Quick aside – Margaret Atwood was drawing on the experience of Iran when writing The Handmaid’s Tale (a society that was changed dramatically by a religious revolution). She did not see the extreme Christian fundamentalists of the US as being that far removed from the ayatollahs of Iran, and of course to make the dramatic point if you set that sort of story in North America the religious revolution will be Christian-inspired.
The 2024 pre election Saturday Night Live deals hilariously with the idea that the modern USA is halfway to the Handmaid’s Tale.
Atwood has always been deluded. Her anti-Christian animus was pretty obvious. The strange but telling truth is that leftist atheists like Atwood are really terrified of Islam but unable to express their fear and hatred because it cuts across theit hierarchy of victimhood as well as their oikophobia. The recent by-election illustrates the dilemma of the secular left. Further, because the right is anti-Islam and anti-immigrant, the oikophobic secular left has to pretend to be pro-Islam (who are not yet hanging gays in Britain).
James
Atwood is an utterly splendid writer. A lot of folks have an anti Christian animus and, given the state of contemporary Christianity, it’s hardly surprising. Some of its harshest critics are, of course, Christians themselves.
Yes, and what is generally expected is not just maintaining the same standard of living, but for it constantly to improve. People in the past never expected that. It is, of course, destroying the planet.
Indeed. Some say that consumerism and global capital are the beast in our age.
Nature will recover in some form, but probably with a greatly depleted range of species. In the climate catastrophes of the geological past, sometimes life barely survived. The natural world we have now is a uniquely rich and diverse one. Perhaps it represents the pinnacle of God’s creative work (along with us if we could only live harmoniously with it. The God who saw that it was very good (Gen 1) is like a great artist watching his finest creations being destroyed.
You might notice that this subject engages me much more passionately than same-sex relationships do. Hence u rejoined the discussion!
“A uniquely rich and diverse one”? – Richard, I am not so sure. The latest list I have (2017) notes 454 species of butterfly in Europe. My best guess is that 20 million years ago there were somewhere around … 400-500 species of butterfly in Europe, just different ones. And if humanity is eliminated, we can expect perhaps a temporarily depleted range of species, but diversity would soon recover.
Unless. Unless we believe that the return of Jesus will bring to an end, not just human life on earth as we know it, but an evolutionary process that has revolved in circles for several hundred million years or more. And I use the term “revolved in circles” intentionally. Diversity recovered remarkably well after the end-Permian extinction – 96% of species lost – and the other only slightly less drastic mass extinctions we know about – https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions
We have witnessed even in UK gardens in the last 50 years a halving of animal biodiversity, at best estimate. It is awful to think about, and is fruit of ingratitude and inward looking short termism.
I think there are bound to bs huge political and social disruption s anyway. It is going to cost an increasingly vast amount to counter the effects of climate changer: rising temperatures and rising sea levels. Standards of living will fall, something that no modern electorate will tolerate. Who knows what AI will do to employment? Then there are the prospects of war, also something my generation has not had to face, uniquely in British history since 1914.
Our stratospheric standards of living are the biggest plus we have. Yet their improvement is also the biggest priority for politicians and often-ungrateful people. In that anomaly lies the problem in a nutshell.
Yes, and what is generally expected is not just maintaining the same standard of living, but for it constantly to improve. People in the past never expected that. It is, of course, destroying the planet.
Married believers having children is a seed-bed of church growth, discipleship and eternal life in Christ Jesus.
Increase in abortion is anathema, a measure of godless secularity.
Yet God is Father to the fatherless generations.
Im not so sure. What percentage of the children of believers (not just church-goers) are believers as adults? My parents werent believers and I know of others whose parents were and they are not as adults.
That’s an interesting one Peter. Church setting and children’s ministry teaching is also important. No sure there will be stats.
The church we are with has more children and youngsters that the whole of the diosece combined. A couple of weeks ago there were seven baptisms with profession of faith plus one baby baptism.
My parents and I weren’t church goers, not even at a time, when church attendance was seen as something of a step up the social ladder.
BTW, thank you for your clear, open, contributions on this site, which swim against the revisionist tide, in real life, not merely propositional, but life-lived doctrine, that seemingly so many others seek to oppose, deny, decry. Thanks. It is encouraging.
Thank you, Ian.
On your final point (polyamory/ ie. thruples, etc.) the 81st TEC General Convention (2024) urged bishops to exercise “pastoral compassion” and commissioned a ‘Task Force to Study Household and Relationship Diversity’ in this area.
A number of TEC priests (most recently-resigned) are arguing for the church to allow people like them to be/remain in polyamorous relationships – see https://livingchurch.org/news/news-episcopal-church/is-there-room-in-the-church-for-polyamorous-priests/ – which includes a ‘progressive’ former senior TEC priest referring to God as “the Great Polyamorist themself!”
20 years ago the question was whether clergy could be/remain in same-sex relationships – rather as the CofE has been considering recently.
Pretty much a textbook example of the inevitable slippery slope…
And a textbook example of how our predictions were right. Those who make accurate predictions have cracked it, and are the ones to listen to.
Thanks for highlighting this. Indeed.
I think it was very interesting when Tim reacted to the connection I made. But it is perfectly logical.
Where does the argument that God created us male and female and we have marriage so that we can multiply and fill the earth leave those who are barren?
Do they not have a right to marry or should they be left on the shelf?
If, despite creation being marred in them, they are free to marry why cannot those who, for other reasons, are unable to fill the earth, be free to marry those whom they love?
That’s a good question—and I think you have answered your own question.
There is all the difference in the world between people born male and female in whom ‘creation is marred’. Some people call this a ‘disability’.
That is entirely different from two people who, not being marred, cannot have children because God’s creation intention is not for them to be sexually intimate.