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
If the scriptural argument for same sex marriage is so strong, why was it unheard of for 2000 years?
Well, that is also the question I asked in our conversation—which was even longer than this article!
If the Biblical argument for abolition of slavery were so strong why did it take 1,000 years for Archbishop Anselm to mention it?
It didn’t. Paul undermined slavery by calling masters to treat their slaves ‘with equality’ in Gal 4.1.
Gregory of Nyssa condemned it as intrinsically evil in his Homilies on Ecclesiastes 4 in 379. John Chrysostom said slavery was the consequence of human sin, not part of creation. Basil of Caesarea condemned exploitation. Ambrose of Milan said that it was an offence against human liberty.
Uncomfortable as it may be to admit, the Biblical argument for abolition of slavery is not particularly strong. Nowhere near as strong, on the face of it, as the argument against same-sex ‘marriage’.
Whereas the Biblical argument for a large shift in attitude to slavery within the Biblical period is unassailable, and that must, unavoidably, be factored into your position.
I’m not sure I quite follow your line of argument?
I’m saying that a huge datum is that over and over again (Gal 3.28 and its two parallels; Gal 4.1ff, Philemon, Rev 18.13, and so on) the NT sees slaves and nonslaves as equals from the perspective of the kingdom of God, which is the only correct perspective.
This, further, is *very* different from the OT position.
That is central, yet does not come across in the summary you gave.
William: you seem to miss the point that nowhere does the NT speak of slavery as a desirable condition but instead says that if a slave can obtain his freedom, he should: 1 Corinthians 7.21 . ‘Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.’ Paul goes on to say that a Christian slave is not ‘second class’ as far as God is concerned. Nowhere does the NT speak of slavery as being a positive condition willed by God.
Thank you for your response.
You make an important and salient distinction but, to my eyes, it remains the case that Abolitionism can only be received as a distinctly Second-Order inference, in Biblical terms.
I believe even Wilberforce conceded as much and never claimed that the Bible directly condmens or prohibits Slavery.
The argument for same sex marriage ought to be understood in the context of antinomianism and libertinism. The idea that Grace frees a Christian from the Moral Law.
In that sense it is as old as the Church itself. It is the tendency which turns “the grace of our God into lasciviousness”.
We are, all of us, tempted of it. When we pass over our own intemperances, bad habits, vices and settled sins.
“God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.”
We should pray for our brethren so sorely tempted but continue to speak the Truth in love.
And pray God we are not put to the test on ground we might be found wanting on.
SSSR is already taken as an acronym, being the Russian acronym for the USSR founded at the end of the civil war which followed the Russian Revolution: Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik.
CCCP
That’s SSSR in the Cyrillic/Russian alphabet. I remember asking my parents about it when I saw ‘CCCP’ on the uniforms of Russian astronauts on TV in the 1960s.
I think that Christian Marriage is Male and Female, life long and so on. The traditional view. Beautiful.
But love is powerful and fruitful in other ways too…to quote Tim “ when we encounter loving, exclusive, lifelong same-sex relationships marked by sacrifice, spiritual fruit, stability, and holiness of life”. I’ve seen that too. I don’t like the same sex part…but recognize that love has found a way.
Perhaps the same sex couples like that I’ve come across have never had Christian teaching. Some of them are adoptive parents or foster parents. They love their children. The fruit of their lives is good. I can’t see them as being in rebellion against God. Instead, I see God working in the reality of their lives.
But should it surprise us that God is at work in the lives of sinners? Is that what is needed for all of us?
But in what sense does that validate the pattern of life of those in whom God is at work? Was Jesus mistaken in his teaching?
Your first paragraph. I agree.
Your second. The love is good, it’s fruit good too. What if they now become aware that Jesus loves them and they want to join a church, worship and pray? Would saying that they should separate improve it?
Exactly Dave. What are we asking SSM people to do, if they are exploring the faith? Separate/divorce and breakup a family if there are children? Is that really the way forward?
I suspect many churches would rather not be confronted by this and prefer SSM people would quietly go away.
You seem to assume that a sexual relationship is the only way of expressing love.
That is the problem.
I am grateful to both you, Ian, and to Tim for making this discourse available. It is a discussion that has been so lacking in General Synod debates – and, I suspect, in the endless groups and forums set up to address the issue of sexuality. It is a shame that Tim is no longer on General Synod as his tone and clarity of explanation – an explanation with which I cannot agree, however! They would have made the discussions a lot more gracious than the emotive and accusatory attitudes taken by many in the chamber. It would be interesting to hear Tim’s opinion of proposals for differentiation in the Church of England.
I came across the idea of “etzer kenegdo” quite recently in the writings of Preston Sprinkle, a writer who also shows a large degree of compassion and understanding for those with whom he disagrees.
The term is just the Hebrew phrase, and has been discussed a lot in the literature.
It does not surface in this debate very often—since it is inconvenient to the cause of those who want to see change!
People talk about seeing ‘change’, but what they mean is something different: namely, seeing the one very specific change that, out of all the 1000s of possible changes, *they* themselves have in mind.
In addition, this change just so happens to correspond to their preferences. Not suspicious at all.
Did Jesus seek courteous debate with the moneychangers in the Temple court? Did Paul with the superapostles? And why are we even having this debate inside the church when application of church discipline and selection a generation ago would have meant it was a debate between the church and the world? God’s attitude to what goes on is clear in Leviticus and God is “the same yesterday, today and forever”. When it can be settled in so few words, why extensive debate instead of a call to purify the church? Without that, the debate will either go on endlessly or be lost.
There are some denominations that now agree with Tim Goode that marriage can be between a same sex couple, the Methodists and URC, most Lutherans, the Church of Scotland and the Quakers for example plus the Scottish Episcopal Church and the US Episcopalian Church in the Anglican Communion. The Church of England and the Roman Catholic church recognise the companionship aspect of same sex couples by allowing prayers for them now while still reserving marriage for one man and one woman ideally for life.
Other denominations though like the Orthodox, Baptist and Pentecostal churches generally reject any recognition of same sex couples at all and take the teachings of the likes of Leviticus and Paul as absolute
No, they take the teaching of Jesus and the authority of Scripture as absolute.
And all those denominations that you mention, who agree with Tim, are in catastrophic decline.
Well they don’t, as most of them except the Roman Catholic church breach Mark and Luke by allowing divorce for example, if you allow female priests then St Paul also forbids that (though to be fair the Roman Catholic church forbids that too). If you want scriptural absolution on everything the Vatican is closer than any other denomination
That is not what Mark and Luke teach.
That is not what Paul teaches.
So I am not sure what point you are making.
It is what Mark and Luke teach, they both forbid divorce. It is also what Paul teaches, a woman cannot have authority over a man, you just choose not to be that concerned about those bits of scripture but very concerned about anti same sex relationship bits of scripture
Simon, please stop making false claims.
In the gospels, as I have demonstrated, Jesus takes the side of Shammai against Hillel in the ‘any reason’ divorce debate. Neither of these positions believed divorce was impossible; Hillel believed a man could divorce a woman ‘for any reason’; Shammai said that it had to be a serious, not a trivial cause. Jesus’ language shows he sides with Shammai.
If you don’t understand that, then you are misreading this passage.
Paul does not say a woman ‘cannot have authority over a man’, since the Greek term authentein does not mean ‘have authority over’, as Linda Belleville and others have demonstrated from contemporary examples of the word.
If you want to disagree, please cite the authorities which disprove her case.
There is nothing false about it. In Matthew Jesus allows divorce for spousal adultery, in Mark and Luke he doesn’t even allow it for that.
Autentein at least means exercise power over, so again you can spin that in the direction you wish. As your abiding ideological view of scripture in terms of what it prohibits is an anti same sex relationship one and you will interpret scripture to accord with your ideology on that above all
Simon, it is bizarre that you keep merely asserting that I am wrong, when I have cited views and written articles on this, and you cite nothing.
How do you know what authentein (sp…!) means? I am not offering ‘ideology’; I am pointing to scholarship and evidence.
Where’s yours?
I have cited articles before to you and you dismiss them, as you cite articles which support your ideological view but see below.
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/why-cant-women-be-priests
https://northamanglican.com/why-womens-ordination-cannot-be-tolerated/
https://www.biblicaleldership.com/women-priests-ministers/
In any case even if you took authentein to mean what you still have the statement that a woman is forbidden to teach a man.
I am not anti female priests or bishops myself but if you say scripture must be followed on everything, even that not relating to what Jesus directly preached, then you should oppose female clergy and bishops in my view
Although Jesus was far from being obligated to be under the thumb of either Hillel or Shammai, or to have either of them set the terms of his debate. More characteristically he would return to first principles (cf E.g. ‘Render to Caesar’), thus turning the tables on interlocutors by refusing the parameters they had imposed. Now, not only is Mk 10 a classic example of just that, the return to first principles, but also the ‘for any cause’ framing appears first in a later gospel, Matthew.
Simon
You cite a Catholic article which says that Jesus chose male apostles, and that the Tradition of the Church cannot be changed. Not a very compelling argument.
You then cite two fundamentalist arguments, which engage not at all with any of the actual debate, but, like you, simply state texts from 1 Cor 14 and 1 Tim 2, as if there were no issues with them.
In all these articles, there is zero engagement with the questions of:
a. what do these texts actually mean?
b. what are the text critical issues around 1 Cor 14?
c. how do we reconcile these with Paul applauding women as teachers, leaders, and apostles?
d. how do we make sense of the fact that the gifts of the Spirit, which convey authority to minister, are distributed without any regard to sex?
For you to claim that ‘this shows what the New Testament means’ is rather unconvincing!
In effect, Simon, what you have said is ‘Someone, somewhere, for some reason or other, thinks that is what the text means, so that is what the texts means’. It is odd.
I’ll likely revisit this conversation – but my initial reaction is that we actually need to be more positive about same-sex relationships which are NOT sexual. I have an impression formed from being a hyperlexic and a voracious reader that in the UK and USA there was somehing of a moral panic about homosexuality from the mid- to late-Victorian era and on into the 20thC which also stifled natural same-sex love and its expression, with people like fictional Holmes and Watson clearly deeply mutually affectionate but struggling to express it much beyond stiff and stilted handshakes. That needs a rebalance ….
Also a few years ago I came across ‘enfreremenr’ – ‘inbrothering’ – in France quite long ago, in which two men – usually widowers – would for convenience enter into a non-sexual civil partnership. In our complex modern society such partnerships could be very useful.
Yes, you are right. Wesley Hill writes on this a lot, and his blog is called Spiritual Friendship.
But it is a wider problem. With the general sexualisation of relationships, women and especially men are finding genuine friendship more and more elusive in our culture, it seems.
Friendship is not difficult to find in most cultures. The only few cultures where it is hard to find are those that are particularly sick.
Where there are local church communities, there will be plenty of friendship. In the small island of the UK, for example, there are many many thousand local church communities.
I think many would disagree with you when it comes to making real friendships in the church.
Thank you for posting this very helpful conversation Ian. It won’t surprise you to know that I am entirely in agreement with Tim Goode and especially this section of your conversation.
“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”
However we still have to concede that the text(s) being referred to are scant when it comes to what Jesus actually says. It is too easy to read back Paul onto Jesus, and it is too easy to read back a 20th century western understanding of marriage and family back on to both Paul and Jesus. But it is not possible to do that. Marriage in scripture is nothing like marriage in the here and now.
Jesus, says Tim, stands within first century Jewish moral assumptions on this matter. I agree, but also think the evidence for what the Christ of Faith stands within is much wider than that. And so Tim can go on to speak of the Church’s discernment. And our discernment must include scripture and the various points Tim – and others – make about how scripture includes those who were morally outcast by Jewish faith and life in the 1st century. And our discernment must also recognise that strands of Judaism have become inclusive on the matter of same sex sexual relationships. I don’t think we can rule out, on the basis of scripture alone, the possibility that Jesus – the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith – might have become inclusive on this issue. His ancient people – in many cases – have made that move. Added to which Jesus makes no condemnation and is never actually witnessed discussing the matter. He is in favour of male and female as one flesh. So am I and every person I know who supports same sex marriage. It isn’t either/or, but both and.
…except that you are ignoring:
a. Jesus’ teaching against porneia, which certainly included SSSR
b. the continuity between Paul and Jesus (if you doubt that, the burden of proof is on you)
c. the universality not only of Jewish though, but early Christian thought on this too
d. the fact that marriage being between a man and a woman on the basis of creation of humanity male and female excludes SSSR, and has been understood in that way for 2,000 years
e. the idea that the Spirit is somehow now teaching the opposite of Jesus, just at a time when culture has been secularised and sexualised, and the Spirit is weirdly aligned with this culture.
f. that every reputable scholar thinks your claim about Jesus’s views is completely implausible.
Apart from that, I see no problems with your comment…!
A. The porneia comment isn’t by any means clear. We don’t know if Jesus even used the word and the evidence for that is inconclusive. Porneia will include oral sex and anal sex with a spouse, sex on Saturday, sex when a legitimate spouse is menstruating, or when the only real objective is to fulfill sexual desire. See Bart Ehrman, a reputable NT scholar.
B. The continuity between Jesus and Paul is only read with the benefit of post resurrection spectacles. Paul’s style is totally different to the style of Jesus in the Gospel of John. Paul was writing for specific situations at a specific time. We don’t live in those situations and times.
C. Clearly Jewish thought on this is *not* universal. It has changed.
D. Marriage now isn’t at all like marriage was 2000 years ago.
E. Culture now is fleeting. Yes. But so was culture 2000 years ago in that case.
F. I thought you were saying Tim was reputable, but that you disagree with him. But I’m sure you put all the points to him!
a. Porneia in Jesus’ teaching must have referred to things prohibited in the OT. What is the evidence otherwise? I think you will find the Ehrman disagrees with you on the view of the NT.
b. What does ‘different style’ have to do with it? Paul wrote earlier than the gospels. We don’t live in Jesus’ context either. So we don’t have to follow his teaching either?
c. Jewish first century thought was universal. And you know that is what I was referring to.
e. Culture is fleeting. So it is implausible to believe that the Spirit is telling us to be more like our culture.
f. Tim is a nice man. He is not a world authority on biblical studies, unlike LT Johnson, Bill Loader, EP Sanders, Tom Wright, or Douglas Campbell.
A. Porneia is just a catch all term that we don’t even know if Jesus used. You are making it do a lot of work in your argument.
B. Different style has everything to do with it. And no, we don’t live in a first century Jewish culture, and we certainly don’t live according to it! You don’t really think we do, surely?
C. Jewish first century thought was universal but has definitely not remained that way, and that’s the point you don’t address.
D. You keep ignoring that point too. Marriage is nothing like Jesus knew it to be.
E. In 2000 years time we will look back at our culture and say it was fleeting as well. That’s the point. First century culture was fleeting. We can’t base what we do now on the way thing were 2000 years ago. Changes happen. They will happen again.
F. Biblical scholarship isn’t the only thing.
AG’s argument is that the present fashion is always the best to follow today(!)
Since fashions are obviously sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful, this point falls immediately.
AG is not making that point at all Christopher.
Well, Andrew, I am unclear what point you are making.
You appear to be claiming that Jesus ‘might have been inclusive’ on the basis of zero evidence for this claim, and a heap of evidence against it.
Where Tim is spot on is saying that any decent argument must begin with scripture—and you come along and say that you personal experience trumps the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament.
It is not a strong argument!
Ian you appear to be rather twisting things I have said so let me try to repeat and clarify briefly.
Jesus said nothing directly abut being exclusive on this issue and lots about including those who were outcast by the culture of his own day.
Being bound to any culture in any age is fraught with problems. So let’s not pretend the culture of 1st century Judaism is any less fraught than our own. The gospel has to be something above and beyond culture, but also has to be adaptable to culture. We call it inculturation .
Personal experience doesn’t trump scripture. But scripture isn’t the only thing. That is exactly the point Jesus makes to those who wanted to have a wooden and rigid approach to the scriptures we now call the OT.
Andrew, I am not twisting anything.
‘Jesus said nothing directly abut being exclusive on this issue and lots about including those who were outcast by the culture of his own day.’
This is all untrue, and demonstrably so. You impose your own agenda by inserting the term ‘inclusive.
Jesus taught that marriage was between a man and a woman, because of the creation account in Genesis.
Every single jew before and after Jesus rejected SSSR. In fact, it was one of the four key distinctives of Judaism (along with sabbath, food laws, and circumcision).
The idea that Jesus rejected the teaching of Torah, rejected the position of every other Jew in the first century, and that this rejection left absolutely no trace either in the gospels, or in the teaching of Paul, or in the Fathers, is completely implausible.
Jesus spent time with those on the margins to tell them they were spiritually sick, that God loved them, and that therefore they needed to repent and change. ‘Go and sin no more’.
“e. Culture is fleeting. So it is implausible to believe that the Spirit is telling us to be more like our culture.”
I fail to see why not.
Take the Roman Catholic Church. It is far behind the frontline of social cultural change on women. The Church of England was too. Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797, and then there were many non-Christians who championed changing views on women’s roles in the 19th Century, and the suffragettes (including my great aunt) in the early 20th Century who were not professing Christians.
If that can work with women, and the Spirit speaking to our God-given consciences, then She may be working on the consciences about the sacred nature of gay people’s love and its intimacy too. Half the Church of England would align with ‘culture’ on this issue, and that could be the Spirit moving on the issue, just as She moved on women in the Church.
The world is not all bad. God may work through atheists or people of other faiths as well as through Christians, some of whom may be resistant to change, even though the Holy Spirit is eternally dynamic.
So I don’t believe it is always “implausible to believe that the Spirit is telling us to be more like our culture”.
Practice changing and thought changing are two completely different things. Practice often changes because people want short term pleasure. That is obviously not a moral foundation.
Where it is a matter of animal instinct, the rule of thumb is that *thought* will be in short supply.
Some of this is ‘two wrongs make a right’, so falls 180 degrees. A wrong and a right are as different from one another as it is possible to be.
I mean, the idea that Jesus should affirm SSSR, against every single Jew and early Christian, and not leave a single trace of this view in any of the eyewitness testimony about him, and against every single Christian tradition for 2,000 years, but in a way which just happens to align with secular post-Christian values, is a tad…improbable…!
The fact that a man would rise from the dead is rather improbable. It just happens to be a cornerstone of the Christian faith.
And the Virgin Birth, don’t forget.
…because there are reliable eyewitnesses whose accounts report it. Those same eyewitnesses rob your claim of any credibility.
Reliable eyewitnesses attest the goodness of same sex relationships. We can’t ignore reliable eyewitnesses.
…only if you think ‘experience’ is a greater authority than the teaching of Jesus.
What does ‘same sex relationships’ mean? It is a meaningless term that pretends that two completely different things (‘same sex sexual relationships’, and ‘same sex friendships’) are one and the same.
Christopher Shell:
No, it doesn’t pretend that they are one and the same. People don’t normally refer to same-sex non-sexual friendships as “same-sex relationships”, any more than they refer to mixed-sex non-sexual friendships as “mixed-sex relationships”.
So then the kidnapping of the most vague and anodyne word conceivable (‘relationship’), in order to smuggle in yet more sex under the cover of that vagueness, just compounds pan-sexualisation with cynical underhandness. Just what we have been saying all along.
Ian to Andrew:
“…only if you think ‘experience’ is a greater authority than the teaching of Jesus.”
There IS no teaching of Jesus on marriage between two men. Not a word. Zilch.
Partly because it would not have arisen in discussions on marriage, because marriage in his listeners’ understanding and religious culture was about the cultural status quo.
I would agree that subsequent (and earlier) Bible authors express cultural views against man-man sex. I have conceded that before.
But Jesus says not a word.
It is entirely reasonable and conceivable that the Holy Spirit may have worked to open and expand marriage to gay and lesbian couples, through culture and the slow recognition of the good lives and lived experience that Andrew mentions.
Jesus addressed his listeners’ concept of marriage as enough for them to take on board in their time and their culture. It was primarily about fidelity when He spoke.
If He had spoken about computers it would have been the wrong time. If he had spoken explicitly about women priests it would have been the wrong time. God works patiently through history. Doubtless Jesus knew that.
Today, we have many many gay and lesbian couples who testify from live experience on the blessings, the gift, the fulfilment and flourishing of lives given to each other (with costly love)… and society has come to understand that better.
So I think Andrew is probably justified to take seriously the experiences of gay and lesbian people themselves.
Perhaps Jesus would have too, if He lived today, because today the culture and society is ready to understand it and evolve.
Anyway, we have no record of Jesus ever mentioning man-man sex. Not once. I think He would have been far more concerned by the fidelity of such couples. I really don’t think he would have been fussed about the gender or sex of the partners. He would have looked to the love.
Susannah ‘There IS no teaching of Jesus on marriage between two men. Not a word. Zilch.’
Sorry, that is nonsense—and antisemitic nonsense at that.
Jesus was a first-century Jew. He repeatedly warns against porneia. For every first-century Jew, that included SSSR—just as it included incest. If you think Jesus is permissive of SSSR, you must by the same measure think that he permits incest.
of course, he permits neither. The idea that Jesus contradicted Torah on this (when he keeps affirming it all through his teaching), contradicted every other Jew, contradicted Paul, and contradicted what every single early follower of his believed—and did so without leaving a single trace of this—is history-denying fantasy.
Antisemitic? Really? Wow.
Yes, indeed: antisemitic. Markus Bockmuehl notes this in his academic article ‘The Trouble with the Inclusive Jesus’.
many of these revisionist readings of Jesus only work because they strip from Jesus his historic, Jewish identity. And in doing so, they are dependant on German 19thC scholarship, which has now been recognised as antisemitic at a very deep level.
In common parlance, we find it in the caricature ‘Look at those nasty religious people, all obsessed with law and doctrine, and look at lovely inclusive Jesus.’ If you don’t believe me, a diocesan bishop said that almost word for word to her diocese last week. And of course orthodox Anglicans were like those nasty religious, and she is enlightened and liberal like Jesus.
Those ‘nasty religious’ people are of course Jews, and lovely Jesus is (apparently) not very Jewish, and rather Christian. And liberal at that.
The whole idea that Jesus was a secret inclusive, pro-gay, liberal Christian is deeply antisemitic, because it denies his Jewishness, and paints Judaism as nasty, intolerant, and exclusive.
It wasn’t improbable it was impossible. Hence why it is a miracle.
Ian, I really appreciate you sharing this, and would value how you might answer this hypothetical situation: If a same sex couple came to you – honestly and humbly – saying I want to remain celibate in our same-sex sexual relationship, but we’ve found we can’t because of the hardness of my heart makes the temptation (for us) too great to resist, even though I know it would be more of a blessing if we could abstain (as I’ve seen other same sex couples who are celibate). And since Jesus allowed divorce because of the hardness of our sinful hearts, as a reluctant second-best option, would you not be able to bless our same sex relationship on the same grounds?
You seem to have mixed up Jesus with Moses. Try again.
You seem to have mixed up Jesus with Moses. Try again.
Jesus taught that marriage is a sacred, permanent union created by God. This is the ideal. But I understand that Jesus (Matthew 19:8) is agreeing with Moses’ concession which he explains was made because of our hardness of heart. Are you saying (more pertinently, is Jesus saying) that Moses was mistaken to permit this concession? If so, I agree my hypothetical question falls apart.
The concept of ‘ideal’ is frequent in Synod and non-existent in the teaching of Jesus.
There is quite a percentage difference between frequent and non-existent.
Jesus’s ‘but’ after referring to the teaching of Moses is all the evidence we need.
Jesus allowed divorce *and remarriage* (without remarriage, in the first century divorce is meaningless), because people sin and so their marriages fail.
Jesus then invites repentance and restoration, so that the two parties might once more enter into an exclusive, lifelong, union.
I am unclear how entering what Jesus would call an immoral relationship is in any sense a parallel situation?
I have lots of same-sex relationships. They are friendships with other men. You seem to be talking about some sort of distinct, exclusive, quasi-marriage relationship? I sense that is where the problem might lie.
Have I misunderstood you?
It is all about the plea to our hardness of heart, and how far we can be permitted to go with that. I am trying to imagine if there is any scenario, where it is conceivable, scripturally, for this new concept of same-sex marriage to be endorsed, not as an ideal, but by making appeal to the hardness of our hearts, in that particular area of our lives. The Bible is clear on putting sexual boundaries around man-woman marriage, but since the concession ‘to hardness of heart’ has already been made for man-woman divorce and remarriage, though ‘it was not this way from the beginning’, could not a similar concession be argued to support a new concept of same sex ‘marriage’ which was also ‘not this way from the beginning’?
Jesus says the exact opposite. He prioritises the way it was from the beginning over Moses’s concession. You confuse this into his prioritising the second of these over the first! 180 degrees different.
Precisely!
I tend to agree with Simon that the only legitimate reason Jesus gives for divorce is adultery. There seems to be an assumption that Jesus took a ‘side’ in the debate at the time but why should that be so? Was he not his own man, if anyone ever was? He made it clear he had his own authority.
In context, Jesus, while acknowledging that Moses permitted divorce, goes on to say, “From the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” As on the Sermon on the Mount (e.g. Matt 5:28), he was making the Law stricter.
Your argument falls: (i) Jesus was acknowledging but not endorsing Moses’ concession, (ii) the discussion was about breaking a relationship which Jesus considered good, being part of the created order, not forming a relationship which was not good and not part of the created order.
To read into the passage the idea that Jesus, recognising the hardness of the human heart, was prepared to excuse all manner of sin because of man’s hard-heartedness is extraordinary.
Why not advise them to avoid the temptation by splitting up?
But Jesus didn’t allow divorce because of hardness of heart, he referred to that being the reason why Moses allowed previously. Jesus then said as far as God is concerned adultery is the only grounds for divorce, logically as the oneness has now been split apart. I find your hypothetical situation and argument bizarre.
This argument is interesting to follow. Some of the issues seem unaddressed. The starting point in a debate type argument is definitions of terms. I don’t see that yet. Some of what I read seems to be arguments based upon non-agreed definitions of terms or assumptions.
As someone who is happily married for nearly 46 years to one woman… someone who has never been attracted to anyone male… someone who has lived in three countries and worked in 30+ and thus seen many cultures within and outside what we call ‘the church’, many of whom will not allow female people to minister in ‘the church’… it’s not something that affects me personally.
This does seem the first time we have seen the debate centred around Scripture. Yet there too we have not seen definitions made or assumptions expressed clearly. I strongly affirm the Gospel, my core is to be Christocentric while accepting too the rest of what we call Scripture. Yet, I read assumption after assumption from both sides in how they read the Scriptures without logical or coherent support or explanation. This debate/argument is better than it has been but still very poor.
‘Some of the issues are unaddressed’. That is because this is a blog post, not a book.
Which books have you read Richard?
I’ve read numerous books on the subject, all of which are centred around Scripture and examining the relevant cultures.
Yes, yes, all this is constantly being rehearsed and usually by the same protagonists, the pot kept boiling but no suggestion of a solution in alternate posts.
Little evidence of the “fear of the Lord”.
Scant reference to the Sovereignty of God
and His Christ.
Perhaps Joel chapter 2 might give an indication
of solutions and recovery that leads to the windows of Heaven being opened in answer to Isaiah’s cry
Isa 64:1 Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence.
As Joel says if we follow the prescription laid down
Maybe Joel 2:14 Who knoweth if he will return and repent, and leave a blessing behind him;
Shalom.
The question of scriptural argument for this would not arise, would not be a thing, unless people were actively looking for it and seeing how much they could push boundaries and get away with.
If the intent were to get two men sleeping together regarded as sanctified, then what you would see is what we in fact are seeing.
Therefore the intent is to get two men sleeping together regarded as sanctified. To this end they labour, repeating 1000s of times, over decades, the same points, without much overall progress in argumentation being noted; and omitting 1000s of times to digest or acknowledge the points that are simply made against that.
Be very wary of ‘We are unlikely to change each other’s minds.’.
(1) It is rarely honest.
(2) It can be an attempt to shut down discussion.
(3) It allows preferences to rule over evidence, and so falls at the first hurdle.
(4) It usually rears its head after only about 1% of the necessary discussion has taken place.
(5) It is based on the false premise of pluralism – all positions are on a level, and all are admissible. Neither, of course, is remotely true.
Soimetimes a debate is conducted not to sway the other but to sway the audience.
In order to appeal to groupthink or the madness of crowds?
Neither. You obviously adopt a different tone in an explicit public debate and in a private discussion with the person you are disagreeing with. That is not intellectually dishonest.
As always, the real question is “what do we mean by marriage?”
The 1st century Near East was agrarian, clannish, and an honour/shame culture.
21st century Europe and North America are post-industrial, individualist, and a guilt/innocence culture.
Marriage in the ancient world was primarily an economic alliance between two extended families, often arranged early in life, for the purpose of producing children to inherit the family’s wealth.
Romantic love had little to no relationship with marriage. In fact, loving your spouse too much was often discouraged.
The Nuclear Family is a peculiarly Northwestern European social arrangement.
Modern marriage is a personal contract between two individuals, often occurring in the late 20-s to mid 30’s, for the purposes of companionship and personal fulfillment.
Louise Perry sums it up rather well:
“Before the mid-nineteenth century, the challenge of day-to-day survival, particularly for rural people, meant that assistance with food production, shelter, and protection from violence were what most people prioritised in a spouse. Later, urbanisation and industrialisation led to greater prosperity, and couples had the luxury in their marriages of placing more emphasis on love and companionship. Then, in the affluent 1960s, we entered the era of what Finkel refers to as the ‘self-expressive marriage’, in which self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth became the key markers of a marriage’s success.
Where once marriage was all about reproduction and the pooling of resources, it is now more often understood as a means of sexual and emotional fulfilment – ‘your relationship with your Number One person’, as the philosopher John Corvino has put it”.
When we read Paul or other biblical writers, we are reading documents from an entirely alien culture (at least when it comes to views on marriage and family).
Paul would look at modern marriage practices and not even recognize them as marriages.
We should probably use an entirely different term than “marriage” to denote the biblical institution that bears no resemblance to what marriage is now conceptualized as. It is too confusing otherwise.
Thanks for commenting. But I do find this kind of chronological snobbery very strange.
‘Romantic love had little to no relationship with marriage.’ Seriously? You’ve not read Song of Songs then?
Paul would recognise a lifelong, exclusive union of one man and one woman as marriage. Why wouldn’t he?
Yes, I think he would, though we have to be cautious when it comes to being certain what a writer really intended so long ago. We can’t get inside their mind or ask them the questions that arise from our contexts. What remains true is that the term ‘marriage’ in the Bible was embedded in and expressed cultural values, some of which were mentioned above. Paul may have had those in mind, too, as part of his understanding of marriage.
Song of Songs is an erotic love poem. It doesn’t mention marriage. And it is not romantic. Most marriages were arranged or utilitarian until relatively modern times (ca. end of 18thC). Still are for Orthodox Jews and some Muslims. Contemporary Western understandings of marriage would be alien to the writers of the NT or the early Church Fathers and Mothers.
I don’t think the basics of marriage, a loving and exclusive life-long sexual relationship between a man and woman has changed much.
The argument they usually try o deploy depends on the fact that marriage has many aspects or component parts. The argument is essentially, non central aspect A changed in one specific way over time, therefore I can change central aspect B in any way I please.
Search me where the logic lies but it was never about logic, it was about getting what they wanted, as is the norm in modern politics.
It isn’t Chronological snobbery, it’s the recognition that “the past is a foreign country”. The objective facts are that the traditional concept of marriage is completely different and almost horrifyingly incomprehensible to the modern person. How many modern stories are all about rejecting Economic Marriage in favour of Romantic Marriage? “But father, I don’t WANT to marry the rich older man!”
How many books have you read about the differences between modern and traditional marriage?
If romantic love developed after marriage then was was considered desirable but it was not considered necessary for a successful marriage. Song of Songs is an idealized poem about likely fictional characters. It does not reflect the loved reality for most people of that time period.
Technological developments always bring social changes with them. The industrial revolution changed the family structure and lead to the replacement of Economic Marriage with Romantic marriage.
Someone once observed that “the conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values”.
We can’t de-industrialize and (in reference to the Sexual Revolution as a whole; not just gay marriage) you can’t un-invent The Pill.
Polyamory is never mutually equitable. Even in cases where it appears to be agreeable to all parties there is always (almost always) coercion. If a truly mutual self-giving polyamory could exist, there may well be no moral arguments against it. I would suggest that there would still be practical problems for this kind of relationship.
Sorry, this wasn’t meant to be copied here.
I was going to agree with Eric. You can’t map contemporary understandings of marriage in the Global North back onto definitions of marriage in either of the Testaments.
One word, I alighted on used by Tim Goode, was ‘reception’.
It seems to be employed, not only by Tim Goode, to reject as being on the wrong side of history, of how we are now, the biblical anthropology, as a malfunctional.
Simply, we know better now don’t we.
Yet again, it functions as an illustration of C. S. Lewis’s, ‘Chronological Snobbery’. And is the opposite of Lewis’s encouragement to ‘keep the clean seat breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds’.
It is also an inversion of the argumentation by Francis Shaeffer in ‘How Should We Then Live – the Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture ‘. Live Biblically or Culturally?
He emphasises the humanistic interpretion of Bible and Culture, overwhelmingly opposed to God, disintegrating, cut from any ability to make transcendent judgements; seen as a ‘liberation from ancient but persistent religious beliefs’
Our ‘worldview’ inevitably determines our moral judgments and understanding of morality (Mohler 2016 a short essay on the book’s burdon years after publication and books continuing contemporary critique).
“People have presuppositions and they will live more consistently on the basis of those presuppositions than even they themselves may realize.” Shaeffer
The word ‘received’ used above by Tim Goode in context, seems to be little more than an attempt to seek ‘ liberation from ancient but persistent religious beliefs.’
It also seems that the residual influence of liberal Southwark continues to spread. A local diocese has been denued and in severe decline under leadership from its alumi.
Your comment about opening the door to polyamory is something I asked in a blog post last year, and no one has responded with biblical/scriptural arguments that support SSSR while rejecting polyamorous ones. As I note:
“However, when I asked an earlier version of the following questions at a Facebook theology forum, the respondents said they didn’t think it possible to both scripturally affirm same-sex marriages and scripturally reject polygamous and/or polyamorous relationships.”
Maybe your readers here can respond. Here is the blog post with my questions:
https://theoblogoumena.blogspot.com/2025/11/will-blessing-same-sex-marriages-lead.html?m=1
We were making the same point in 2012-13.
We can safely assume that if the nettle has not been grasped in the intervening 13 years, it cannot be.
Which ought to lead to the collapse of their position. But honesty is not their main trait.
Polyamory is of course allowed in the Jewish Scriptures. Most of the patriarchs were polyamorous and had several wives and concubines, just not women who belonged to other men.
Bathsheba belonged to another man!
Polyamory involves infidelity ( morally, even if it is ‘legal’).
Simples.
How is it ‘infidelity’ when it is mutually permissible?
In the voluntarist world, the human will makes all things ‘moral’.
Polyamorists are being faithful to their own ‘truth’.
I think you still have the ghost of Catholic divine will ethics haunting your post-modern mind!
Polyamory is never mutually equitable. Even in cases where it appears to be agreeable to all parties there is always (almost always) coercion. If a truly mutual self-giving polyamory could exist, there may well be no moral arguments against it. I would suggest that there would still be practical problems for this kind of relationship.
Of course it doesn’t “work” – but that doesn’t stop human beings bending and breaking God’s law and making excuses for it. The whole LGBT+ movement is posited upon this theoretical idea.
Whole sociology departments are based on the absurd notion that human beings can be sexually ‘free’ without consequences – ‘one night stands’, for example. The insanity of the Frankfurt School and French atheist existentialists has travelled far in the popular mind.
And this is so not just for homosexual persons. Many, perhaps most people today will have some consensual sexual relationships with others before settling down (if they do) with another. They tell themselves that this extra-marital sex doesn’t affect their subsequent life, but things are never as simple as that.
Love is jealous as the grave, as the Song of Solomon tells us.
I find this a bizarre argument. Are your arguments against polygamy so weak that they rest solely on St Paul believing in 1 Timothy that people only had one spouse, when he was in a legal context that only allowed people to have one spouse?
If you really think that allowing same-sex marriage opens the door to polygamy, would allowing polygamy open the door to same-sex marriage? I ask because when we look around the world, the cultures that actually practice polygamy (conservative and elite parts of Islam particularly in the Arab world, traditional African communities, and breakaway traditionalist Mormons in the US) are amongst those who are the most hostile to gay people and furthest away from having any recognition of same-sex marriage.
The guiding text for married relationships is arguably 1 Corinthians 7 which paints a picture of (for it’s time) quite radical equality – you should be concerned about the needs of your spouse (including sexual) and both the wife and husband have yielded authority over their bodies to each other. If you’re married you’re not a free agent (and the concept of having authority is somewhat stronger than mere consent) so you’re not free to engage in polygamy. Secondly, the husband may have authority over his wives, but how can his wives each have authority over their mutual husband? The inherent equality is broken.
Finally, any discussion on consensual non-monoagmy or polygamy puts me in mind of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar in Genesis 16. Sarah is concerned that Abraham needs to father children, so she took her slave Hagar to him. What was originally meant to be a solution to her relationship problem (no children) worked exactly how Sarah intended (Hagar fell pregnant) but swiftly unravelled into a disaster. Sarah grew jealous, despised and mistreated Hagar. It’s a potent warning, not least because it sets up the conflict between their children – Isaac and Ishmael.
If we go back to the fulfillment of the law – love your neighbour, and remember love does no harm (Romans 13) – then we have to ask whether a polygamous marriage is loving or harmful. The Scriptural experience suggests harmful.
Adam, what do you know about the first century Greco-Roman world? Polygamy was a lot more common than you may be aware of, and divorce, at least for men, was very easy. Are you aware how pervasive prostitution was? Or the sexual rights a master had over slaves – male and female? Plenty of rich men kept pretty boys for a time. It’s all in Petronius’s ‘Satyricon’, from the AD 60s, contemporaneous with 1 Timothy.
James, the 1 Timothy argument is taken from Eric’s blog, and I’m saying (quite clearly I think) that it’s a really weak argument.
Indeed! “Chronological snobbery was one of the obstacles that CS Lewis had to overcome on his road to believing in Christianity. According to him, chronological snobbery is “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”
In essence, then, it’s the assumption that a 2,000 year old religion had nothing to say to a 20th century man. That kind of faith was a relic; it’s gone out of style as men have progressed in their thinking, knowledge and attitudes. Underlying chronological snobbery is the idea that old is bad. New is good. Because we are always evolving and discovering and becoming more and more sophisticated”. @ .experiencerooted.com/blogs/articles/the-danger-of-chronological-snobbery-in-discipleship#:~:text=
Jer 6:16 Thus saith the LORD, “ Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.”
Jeremiah 18:15 Because my people hath forgotten me, they have burned incense to vanity, and they have caused them to stumble in their ways from the ancient paths, to walk in paths, in a way not cast up;
John 5:46-47
For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?
Isaiah 28:12
To whom he said, This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing: yet they would not hear.
Is there any mileage in debating with the perversely
Deaf?
As with Lewis only Christ can mercifully open
ears, understanding and hearts .
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_snobbery. Lewis, Indeed! “Chronological snobbery was one of the obstacles that CS Lewis had to overcome on his road to believing in Christianity. According to him, chronological snobbery is “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”
In essence, then, it’s the assumption that a 2,000 year old religion had nothing to say to a 20th century man. That kind of faith was a relic; it’s gone out of style as men have progressed in their thinking, knowledge and attitudes. Underlying chronological snobbery is the idea that old is bad. New is good. Because we are always evolving and discovering and becoming more and more sophisticated”. @ .experiencerooted.com/blogs/articles/the-danger-of-chronological-snobbery-in-discipleship#:~:text=
Jer 6:16 Thus saith the LORD, “ Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.”
Jeremiah 18:15 Because my people hath forgotten me, they have burned incense to vanity, and they have caused them to stumble in their ways from the ancient paths, to walk in paths, in a way not cast up;
John 5:46-47
For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?
Isaiah 28:12
To whom he said, This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing: yet they would not hear.
Is there any mileage in debating with the perversely Deaf?
As with Lewis only Christ can mercifully open
ears, understanding and hearts .
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_snobbery. Shalom.
For some unknown reason my last post was double reproduced on
submiting [?]
Did Tim Goode play some part in the form of an unauthorized, (misrepresentative of marriage) ss service? In contravention of Synod?
It would be good to know that he hadn’t. And that it wasn’t condoned by the ABoY.
Why would that be good to know?
Because there is a sense that few care about the common good or individual formation sufficiently to rebuke anyone for anything (apart from for racism or misogyny, real or imputed). Just as people get away with more shoplifting and fare dodging than ever before, because few care for those people ‘s souls enough to rebuke them; and just as many want to have separate jurisdictions because few care for the errorists, and seemingly would prefer to consign them to perdition than actively warn or come alongside them.
Scripture “repeatedly and clearly condemns divided sexual loyalty”? And this remarkable statement raised no objection, given the realities of patriarchal polygamy in Genesis and Solomon’s, er, extended family? Certainly it is not advocated but “repeatedly and clearly condemned” it is not. Unless I’m missing something.
Depends on what condemnation (God’s judgement) looks like, according (and in opposition) to God’s good purposes.
‘Many would argue that the model for human love is the love found between the persons of the Trinity—which is not a binary. … Brandon Robertson has specifically used this as an argument for the affirmation of polyamorous relationships.’
Accept that the New Testament, in contrast to the Old, teaches that God is three and the argument has some logic, even if the threesome is not a marriage relationship. But the New Testament does not present the godhead as a trinity. It reiterates that God is one, and that Jesus Christ is not God but the Son of God. He can’t be both (though, being the Son of God, he has the same divine nature as his father, just as, as Son of Man, he shares in our human nature). The Holy Spirit proceeds from/ is sent by the Father and the Son. He is not an independent person, and nowhere does scripture speak of a love relationship between the Father or the Son and the Holy Spirit, just as there is no scripture showing that the Holy Spirit is to be worshipped alongside the other two. It’s all in people’s heads.
Until we are honest about what Scripture says and does not say in these matters, how can we appeal to Scripture as the final arbiter in other matters? People pick and choose, according to the presuppositions they have inherited from tradition and absorbed from surrounding culture.
Jesus was celibate and single. His relationship with God was exclusively a filial one, and he modelled it as one of total love and total obedience.
We know your view on the Trinity. I would argue it is the inevitable conclusion to draw from the whole of the NT. Indeed I would also argue that the reason why ‘God IS love’ is precisely because there is relationship within God, as love requires a recipient.
You don’t argue, you assert. That God is love is not in question, and is manifested in his love towards his beloved son, and in him towards all humanity.
The question is not does God love, but why is He love itself, as in ‘God IS love’. He is eternally love because of the eternal relationships within God.
Thank you for your very helpful analysis. I have noticed that often discussions around this issue includes an apology to same sex people for the “pain and hurt that the church has caused.”
While undoubtedly there is an element of truth to such a charge, I wonder if an apology should really be owed by same sex people to the church for the confusion, misunderstanding and the way people have been misled by false interpretations of Scripture that has happened to the church at large over this issue. How we need biblical scholars like you, Ian Paul, to explain and keep on explaining. Tim’s arguments are enticing but false. God’s order and design for humanity is good and we undermine it at our peril. Developing doctrine as we go along is to reject God’s word and plan.
Thank you. Someone on FB complained that I keep making these points. I replied that the problem is that other people keep making these false arguments!
“Developing doctrine as we go along is to reject God’s word and plan.”
I’m afraid this just doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny at all. Christian Doctrine has been a developing thing for the last 2000 years. Doctrines about God have been developing for thousands of years more. They will go on developing. We need to recognise that what we know about God is a tiny dark reflection of what is actually the case.
If we hadn’t been developing doctrine we wouldn’t have the Nicene Creed. Which is just one example of the Church working with scripture creatively and imaginatively.
Penny, if you think the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed contradicts the New Testament, you should say so and why. ‘Development’ can have different meanings. One sense is to explain and understand better what we already believe (e.g. some developments in molecular and organic chemistry since the 19th century, compared to what we believed in the 19th century). Another sense means the abandonment of old ideas (e.g. medicine giving up the four humours theory).
Penny, if you think the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed contradicts the New Testament, you should say so and why. ‘Development’ can have different meanings. One sense is to explain and understand better what we already believe (e.g. some developments in molecular and organic chemistry since the 19th century, compared to what we believed in the 19th century). Another sense means the abandonment of old ideas (e.g. medicine giving up the four humours theory).
Where did I say that it contradicts the NT?
Development does not imply contradiction. Doctrines clearly develop. To ignore this is to be ignorant of church history.
Penny,
You may have missed the ‘if’ in my opening sentence. Sometimes ‘development’ means ‘understanding better what you have always if implicitly believed’. That’s what it means in Newman’s ‘Development of Christian Doctrine’. Sometimes it means ‘leaving behind wrong ideas the more I think about something’. That’s what it means in the 1976 C of E report ‘Christian Believing’. A kitten that becomes a cat is the first kind of development. One that evolves into a different animal is another matter.
I may be wrong, but (continuing my zoological metaphors), sometimes I think you want to ride both horses. Or having a loose and protean sense of revelation, you want to build a house without foundations.
No. I was pointing out in very simple terms that beliefs like the doctrine of the Trinity are not a reiteration of scriptural understandings of God, but a particular development of biblical suggestions.
Ditto Christology and pneumatology which have both moved way beyond scripture, even where they are derived from biblical traditions.
Penny:
If the doctrines of Trinity, Christology and pneumatology “have moved beyond Scripture”, then they are false.
The Cappadocian Fathers were very clear about this. Gregory Nazianzen’s work on the Holy Spirit has over 700 Scriptural citations. He was utterly determined to ground his argument in Scripture, not ‘beyond’ it.
Of course they have moved beyond scripture. There is no doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible. 700 references to the Holy Spirit which are not a fully formed Christian pneumatology.
Not so Penny. Doctrine is about systematising the narrative of Scripture, not about developing it.
As I believe Richard Bauckham has said, the doctrine of the Trinity is what you need to make sense of the data of Scripture—especially the Book of Revelation.
Christian pneumatology developed from scripture (and contemporary philosophical understandings of deity) so, of course, it cites 700 references.
Ian
We may have to agree to disagree on this. I think my development and your systematisation might be much the same.
The Father calls the Son “beloved,”
A“Beloved” in the Bible signifies far more than a casual endearment. It is rooted in God’s holy affection and covenant faithfulness, evident in both the Old and New Testaments. The Father calls the Son “beloved,” and through Christ’s redemptive work, believers share in that privileged designation. This fosters a transformative understanding of identity, community, and the abiding love that holds God’s people secure, “rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17).
{Bible Hub Questions and Answers}
Consider the “Beloved” motif throughout Scripture
Mat 3:17 And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
Mat 12:18 Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased: I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall shew judgment to the Gentiles.
Mat 17:5 While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.
Luke 20:13 Then said the lord of the vineyard, What shall I do? I will send my beloved son: it may be they will reverence him when they see him.
Eph 1:6 To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved; this does not say Jesus loves the Father but visa versa.
And of coarse Sof S numerous mentions.
Hi Paul, while I have not been following the debate in recent years, I can’t help leaving a comment. You mention at various points that the sex binary of humanity is a biological reality. Yet, the ancients thought more in terms of a spectrum than a binary. Also, isn’t it an over-simplification to talk about a binary, since our brains are part of our biology?
I thought the binary was based on a firmer and more quantifiable class of data, namely 2 gametes (no 3rd, and secondly what could the 3rd be even if there were one?) and XX/XY. Any variation is upon the basis of that blueprint just like any variation in nos of fingers etc is upon the basis of a blueprint. All of which the ancients did not yet know about.
That’s an important point. It means that discoveries is a range of modern disciplines e.g. genetics, biology, anthropology, history, need to shape the debate and our conclusions and may lead us to differ from previous generations. And that give a degree of provisionality to the conclusions we reach today. Any of us may, in other words, need to revise our conclusions, however apparently certain. Thanks.
However, what “is” is not necessarily “good”. To make the move from “is” to “good” is to fall into the naturalistic fallacy.
A simple example might be violence. There is a significant genetic marker which is linked to violent behaviour in some. Does this make violence inherently good?
Or, closer to home, if there is a genetic link to a man having sexual desires for pre-pubescent girls, does that make that desire good, and to be affirmed?
Are you absolutely certain about that? Buying into a post-modern fallacy, self -refuting, it seems.
Is it an important point? It is an obvious point that has been obvious for centuries.
Tim,
What discoveries about genetics and specifically X and Y chromosomes do you think still lie ahead of us? Which parts of our current understanding of gametes and fertilisation do you think will likely be rejected in the coming decades? Why should we be ‘provisional’ in our understanding about this?
Richard,
The ‘ancients’ (a large, heterogeneous bunch!) thought a lot of things about biology, much of it nonsense. Are you thinking about some of the sillier myths recounted in Plato’s Symposium? Not having microscopes or knowing anything about genetics is a bit of a disadvantage, don’t you think?
By definition future discoveries aren’t yet known so no one could possibly answer your question. And I’m thinking of the long term, not just the next 10 or 20 years. And not just in genetics but other disciplines, too, including biblical studies which continues to develop. I take it that the discovery of new/deeper understanding is one of the things that makes learning so exciting. So a degree of modesty in our claims in our claims of certainty might be wise.
Some scientists argue that the SRY gene is disintegrating and may, in the very distant future, disappear. We have slso learned that this male determining gene can appear on the X as well as on the Y chromosome. So, both our biology and our understanding of it are always developing.
Tim: in that case, you should constantly DEFER any doctrine or any ethical pronouncement on the grounds that in 100 or 500 years people will think differently.
You are perfectly entitled to your extreme agnosticism.
But you have also disqualified yourself from saying anything at all.
This is of course the very opposite of what Christ the Lord told his Church: ‘You will know the truth and the truth will set you free’ (John 8.32). You are saying: ‘You won’t know the truth and your ignorance will keep you undecided.’
That is fine for the followers of Sextus Empiricus but it is not what Jesus promised his Church.
There are species which have more than two sexes. I recall listening to the radio in the car a number of years ago when there was a program about “why sexual reproduction?”. They described a slime mould which has 13 sexes, or perhaps, rather, 13 different types of gamete. The key distinguishing factor between them is which type passes on mitochondria to the resulting fertilised cell. As a result. two cells of the same type cannot combine. However, this is very rare and is confined to moulds and fungi, I think. Having two types of gamete seems to be optimal.
Individuals of some creatures produce gametes of both types. Some produce one type early in their life, and the other later. However, for creatures where there is ‘processing’ of the fertilised cell following combination, the bodily structures for this are associated with gamete type, which is defined as ‘female’. This is the case for human beings.
Hi Richard. I think you are right (do you have any references?). I am pretty sure that Gagnon notes this in his bog book.
But what he also notes is that this makes the OT material very striking ,in rejecting such a construal of sex and sexual relationships. He says that the OT is the *only* ANE text which categorically rejects any form of SSSR.
What’s a ‘ bog book ‘?
Sorry, I do not remember the references, but I know that Jennifer Knust has done some good work on this.
‘The ancients thought more in terms of a spectrum than a binary.’ This asssertion is untrue, and even if it were true, as Christians we get our understanding of human nature – and of God, in whose image we are made – from revelation, not from ‘the ancients’. We don’t get from them our understanding of right and wrong. According to the New Testament, their foolish hearts were darkened. They needed God’s light just as much as we do.
That people within the Church should be making such suggestions, and that man’s hardness of heart, the ‘lusts of his heart’, should be reason to give up on God’s command that we live holy lives shows that we – very probably the majority – have completely lost their plot. Churches are no longer teaching Christ.
The arguments from Scripture will only ever get us so far. We need to have a dialogical approach, the kind of work done by Luke Bretherton and others. To speak of truth when is comes to God and human beings means encounter and relationships – Christian and non-Christian as well as human and God. The scriptures bear witness to that but aren’t the end of that story. It’s an ongoing piece of work. Scripture isn’t the only thing.
Truth is not a set of abstract dogmas or empirical facts, or formulations. Truth is a worked out in relationship. relational and participatory. It involves listening to others.
We also need to recognise that Jesus takes an approach to marriage that is provisional. There is no giving and receiving in marriage in the kingdom of God. Luke 20:34-36 and parallels. So we need to recognise that same sex marriage is a provisional thing, as is so much of life in this realm.
Truth is more than subjective. There is and objective absolute truth. It emanates from the Person of God, who is the Truth. Who speaks the truth, who is the Way, the Truth, the Life, the Spirit of Truth. There is a logical correspondence aspect to objective Truth.
Some have bought into the postmodern idea of Truth, which is self-refuting. And it is so on the wrong side of history-old hat.
Geoff I’m afraid this is just plainly misunderstanding the nature of truth when it comes to God. We simply don’t know the truth. We know bits of it. Even St Paul is quite clear about that.
But that isn’t subjective truth. It’s partial truth. If you think you know the complete truth about God then you make yourself like God. And that’s a much worse heresy than anything you have hitherto considered heresy.
The doctrine of God, the doctrine revelation and the doctrine of scripture are of a piece in Christianity.
Knowing God. The God of Christianity is known and knowable, as is fellowship/communion with God, in Triunity, and the Glory of God in Jesus, fully God, fully man.
Known only in part. St Paul is quite clear about that. Orthodox Christianity is quite clear about that.
PCD, @ 11:27 am
It would reveal something of his character and integrity, not only in relation to Synod, but to ordination vows; trustworthyness, consistency, in doctrine, in office.
Or do we buy into the modern, secular, compartmentalize of character, attributes, which seems to be a driving collective philosophy of the Bishops and revisionionists, which is outside of New Testament character of believers, disciples of Jesus, of Christians down the ages up to and including today.
And it may be a step in the direction of doctrines of heterodoxy, in which you reside, in a drive to perpetual and hyper- accelerating progressivism.
It is a drive which saw the Methodist church in the UK promote the doctrine of Mother God, in one of their authorized Communion Services in the 1990’s.
And why do you want to know that?
A vested interest!
Andrew G,
The God of Christianity is Known and knowable so far as determined, revealed by God. Not us.
Scripture is clear. That God is knowable, the Glory of God, the Person of God in Trinity in Union with Christ, a mutual indwelling, to be known in reality. Born from above, conversion. It is eternal life, now. There is no other Way. Orthodox Christianity, scripture, is more than clear about that!
Do you know Him? Seems not, sadly?
We cannot know everything about God.
But that doesn’t mean we cannot know anything about God, or even that we cannot know anything about God for certain.
Andrew Godsall seems to be taking the true fact that we cannot know everything about God, and extrapolating from that the idea that all our knowledge about God is provisional and subjective.
But the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Yes, our knowledge of God is partial. That is true. It means that we cannot know everything about God. But these things are also true:
a. There are some things about God that we can know.
b. There are some things about God that we can know for certain.
c. Even the things about God that we cannot know are objective facts; that is, a statement about God is objectively either true or false, and this is the case even if we cannot ever know which of the two is the case.
Now, people can legitimately is agree over whether a particular fact about God is one of those which is knowable, or unknowable.
But what you cannot do, logically, is take the Andrew Godsall line and say that because we cannot know everything about God, that means we cannot know anything about God for certain. The logic there doesn’t work.
As far as I understand it S is not permitted to comment here.
Clearly neither S nor Geoff have ever heard of Apophatic theology. Totally Orthodox.
And clearly neither have read 1 Cor chapter 13.
S is already defending apophatic theology by saying there are some things we do not know, whereas AG’s position sounds absolutist, unnuanced, vague and in precise: the idea that we know nothing at all.
One can cavalierly jettison the Bible other than 1 Cor 13 and the saying ‘God is love’. One can even do so having put in no thought at all, though there are 1000s of people one would listen to above those who put in no thought at all. But love is the answer only to the relevant questions. 1000s of other questions exist.
Where was Cana?
Love is the answer.
Discuss Job’s creation theology?
It is love.
‘imprecise’
Indeed.
I Corinthians 13 does not stand alone, in the NT nor does it stand in opposition to the rest of the New Testament, including the indicative of Ephesians 1-3, Galatians, Colossians, let alone the Gospel of John, including John 17, and I John chapters 4 +5.
Eternal life is knowing God in union with Christ?
Do you know Him Andrew? Your continued responses evidence a negative answer. Sadly so.
We can know God through the fellowship of His Spirit and through His Word. “‘Who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16).
Both theologies are true.
It’s telling when Tim defends his position he generalises about what Scripture says, but when challenged on the possibility of incest which he disagrees with, he suddenly argues Scripture is quite specific.
Ian – there have always been Scriptural arguments, it’s just people are often unwilling to engage. I can only presume it’s because it’s easier to lecture than discuss.
“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”
This is an argument that dismisses sexual orientation from the outset, when it is actually what we’re supposed to be discussing.
As you say in your Grove booklet, Christians are supposed to live with integrity: we cannot be people “…who act one part in public whilst actually playing a different part in the privacy of our own hearts.”. However, I fail to see how you can expect integrity whilst saying this is all about bodies not orientation.
Christians ethics is not a construction of a list of forbidden actions, where as long as it’s not forbidden you’re ok. When we confess we have sins of commission and sins of omission. We are required to think about what we ought to do. And in any case, St Paul tells in 1 Corinthians 10 and Galatians 5 that we are free. The test, he reminds us, is not compliance with a forbidden list but what is required to love our neighbour. This gets spelt out in Romans 13 where St Paul tells us that love is the fulfilling of the law (as Jesus taught us) because love does no harm to a neighbour, and things like theft and adultery are harmful to our neighbour.
The question that confronts gay people is not, are same-sex sexual relationships forbidden or not, but rather what are we to do about ordering our lives. Some people argue that you are as free as anyone else to marry someone of the opposite sex, but this overlooks the requirement to live with integrity. And it seems to rely on placing an importance of procreation that is wholly lacking in the New Testament and at best inconsistent in the Old Testament (see Abraham’s unwillingness to divorce Sarah despite her infertility). Some people argue that if you’re gay you are required to live a life of celibacy, but that overlooks both Jesus and Paul’s warnings against constructing celibacy rules for each other (Matthew 19, 1 Corinthians 7, and 1 Timothy 5). So what about a gay relationship? The harm test in Romans 13 isn’t violated (assuming we’re talking about two otherwise single people). Genesis 2 and Ecclesiastes 4 give an emphasis to the importance of intimate union. St Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 worries greatly about people committing to celibacy when they shouldn’t, and argues that they are right to marry.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.”
Ecclesiastes 4
No wonder the concept of sexual orientation is a recent (and therefore non necessary and non ubiquitous) one.
All that was said is that biology is firmer ground than SO.
One cannot think of any ways that SO is firmer ground than biology.
But biology is the firmer of the two in numerous ways:
1 It is inborn, unlikely the other (babies experience no SO).
2 It is inescapable, unlikely the other.
3 It is intrinsically unchanging, unlikely the other.
4 It cannot be lied about, unlike the other.
5 One cannot be mistaken about it, as with the other.
6 It is objective and can be ascertained on medical examination, unlike the other.
If we compare times taken to ascertain, even by an expert, the one is 1 second as compared with the other which is never. The biggest difference possible. So what are you on about?
Adam, Christians who believe in the historic reading of Scripture on marriage have always engaged. On my blog you can find engagement with just about every major revisionist case—so much so that people accuse me of being ‘obsessed’. How can I be ‘obsessed’ yet apparently not engaging?
My argument does not ‘dismiss’ sexual orientation. It notes (as many others have done) that biblical anthropology refuses to give weight to patterns of desire, and instead understands human identity to be rooted in our sexed bodies as reflecting God’s creation intention. For you to give weight to orientation as determinative is to that extent to reject Scriptures anthropology.
‘Christians ethics is not a construction of a list of forbidden actions.’ Indeed; it is about understanding ourselves in the light of God’s creation of us, our sin, God’s redemption, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and eschatology. That is precisely what I track in my booklet. But out of that narrative comes boundaries between what is good and holy, and what is not. Hence both in Jesus and Paul we find lists of virtues and vices that reflect this.
Paul says we are free–set free by the Spirit from the law of sin and death to live in willing obedience to God. Paul is not an antinomian. Love is the fulfilling of the law—and to love is to will the best for the other, in this case that they should hear and receive the offer of life in Jesus which includes obedience to his teaching.
That is why many gay Christians joyfully accept Jesus’ teaching here—and I included some of their speeches in the Synod debate.
I don’t know why you are reducing Paul’s teaching to ‘the harm test’. Like Jesus, Paul clearly rejects the possibility of SSSR for those in the kingdom of God. So do you think Paul was ignorant of his own gospel? Or reality? Paul’s alternative to unwilling celibacy is male-female marriage; he does not offer any third option.
Yes, two are better than one—and the tragedy of this issue is that the sexualisation of our culture has made people *more* lonely, not less, as there is less and less room for friendship, especially between men.
Ian,
I wasn’t thinking particularly of you, but as Richard Bauckham has said further down there is a difference between good faith engagement and merely bringing out “the appropriate weapons out of your armoury”. The Beautiful Story video from CEEC, to me, epitomised the bad engagement approach in this topic.
It’s a bit of a sleight of hand to suggest that I shouldn’t say your argument is dimissing sexual orientation, and this is just biblical anthropology and nothing to do with you. It’s your argument using your view of biblical anthropology and how you read the Scriptures to make your case. But this does, I think, touch on the central point. To me the basic question is what should gay people do to order their lives? But you seem to be saying that’s a nonsense because (in your view) biblical anthropology is dismissive of orientation and only recognises that there are men and women and that’s the end of it, ie there aren’t really any gay men or straight men, there are only men.
Perhaps a thought experiment might clarify things. Imagine a gay men could, miraculously, have his homosexual orientation removed. What would his sexuality then be? I would say he would be without a sexuality, and in the modern parlance essentially an asexual person attracted to neither sex. I suspect you might suggest he has, absent his homosexuality, essentially become a straight man and as free as anyone else to enter a straight marriage. Am I correct?
Adam, I nowhere deny that we all have patterns of desire.
What I note is that biblical anthropology does not credit these patterns of desire as defining who we are as humanity, male and female, created in the image of God.
Thus some of my gay friends have shifted in their understanding of themselves, and happen to have met and fallen in love with a woman, and married and had children—all quite happily. One describes himself as ‘post gay’, because he has moved beyond defining himself in this way.
Other gay friends of mine have recognised Jesus’ call to either marry someone of the opposite sex, or remain single, and they have remained single, living rich and fruitful lives. Our sexualised culture which diminishes the importance of friendship has sometimes made that challenging for them, but they are drawn into the family of God’s people, and find their home there.
Sigh. Nobody said you were denying we all have patterns of desire. You are however dismissive of orientation as being important, let alone central, to what we’re talking about.
Yes, I am relatively dismissive of ‘orientation’, since
a. it is a relatively modern invention
b. it is in danger of valorising desire
c. it now is used to constitute identity
d. this use denies the phenomenology of desire; as Lisa Diamond and others have shown, ‘orientation’ is unstable, especially amongst women, so as a category it should be abandoned.
e. Scripture sets it aside.
A shame you never took those arguments to Synod.
I have no idea what your comment here means.
Moses is quite clear about ss relations.
In John 5 v 45 Christ says….
“Do not think that I [am the One who] will accuse you before the Father. There [already] is one who accuses you: Moses…….46For if you believed and relied on [the Scriptures written by] Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me [personally]. 47But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”
Berean Standard Bible Deut.18 v 15
The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers. You must listen to him. There is an agreement between Moses and Christ; Christ is the end of the law of Moses, and in him is the accomplishment of his writings
Hebrews shows that disbelieving Christ, was disbelieving Moses; who therefore would be an accuser of them, and a witness against them.
Thus, the discourse ends with a question implying hopelessness.
The Law and the Gospel cannot be separated.
Without the Law, explain to me ,
what is the point or purpose of Grace?
Fascinating from Andrew Godsall.
Appophatic Theology let loose, liberated:
the scaffolding and structure of decon structionism; the academe of apostasy: the launchpad of liberalism, the palace of postmodernism; the pinnicle of progressivism; the reservoir and river of revisionism; home of humanistic hermeneutics
In the Beginning God v not God.
God is v God is not
I AM v I am not
Jesus is v Jesus is not
Holy Spirit is v Holy Spirit is not
God is Good v God is not good
God is truth v God is not truth
God is Love v God is not love
God is omniscient v God is unknowing
And more….
Or double apophatic theology: God is not unchangeable, immutable
Maybe there is a need to discuss this with a new Anglican, Matthew Barrett, author of ‘None Greater- the undomesticated attributes of God’.
I am in a same-sex marriage. I also hold the view that the Bible authors did not endorse same-sex intimacy, and I’m fairly sure that 1st Century Christians were not okay about it.
However, hermeneutics may lead to divergent ways of approaching scripture. And that, when it comes down to it, is the fundamental issue, beyond the debate over same-sex intimacy itself, which is just a manifestation of a deeper and primary divergence.
Thank you for your honesty, in stating that your patterns of relationship are contrary to the teaching of Jesus, contrary to the teaching of Scripture, contrary to the early church.
I would also not that you are living contrary to the consensus view of the church catholic, and contrary to the doctrine of the C of E.
I think your position is much more honest than the position of those who say that Scripture supports SSSR. Your testimony agrees that it clearly does not.
What I said was that the Bible authors seem to me to have been clearly against it.
As for what we can draw from scripture as a whole, beyond its authors’ specific culture-context comments: we may come to recognise that God seeks to open our minds to the absolute priority of compassion, in the context of which all individual verses need to be read. This compassion of God operates dynamically through our God-given minds and consciences… and may open and expand our insights to situations in our own time and cultural conscience.
To be plain, I believe that the overall reading of scripture – rather than hinging on the isolated comments and beliefs of its authors (who are fallible) – can lead us to expect revisions of assumptions which we may judge by the fruits of love and goodness. Because God’s Love is the absolute priority.
As for what Jesus said about men having devoted sexual relationships with other men… as I have said elsewhere on this page… He said nothing. So to be clear, I am not stating that same=sex relationships are contrary to the teaching of Jesus.
Jesus was perfectly capable of referencing some expressions of porneia without condemning others like man-man sex for all time. You seem to assume that he must have been rigid about them all. We don’t know that at all. What we do know (if the authors’ accounts are accurate representations) is that Jesus believed in the importance of fidelity.
Fidelity is a feature of gay relationships too. So the direction of travel may be seen to be towards encouraging fidelity in gay marriages sometime in the future when they became culturally normative. None of that diminishes the lovely blessings of heterosexual marriage. It just broadens and expands the concept of marriage, if that’s what the Holy Spirit leads us to recognise in conscience in our time.
I perfectly well believe God – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – see the potential and grace of devoted and costly gay relationships and intimacy… to be models of fidelity that reflect the fidelity of God.
I expressly used the words ‘Bible authors did not endorse’ as opposed to scripture when read as a whole, taking account of author contexts, prejudices, and limited world views of how the Holy Spirit might work 2000 years later.
Their comments (culturally prejudiced) on man-man sex are not for all time. They are the cultural assumptions of their own time.
Finally, Jesus saying one man and one woman about marriage was referencing marriage as His listeners understood it at their time and in their culture. He was focussing on fidelity. If marriage was later to open up and be expanded to affirm gay relationships too, then that was a matter for the Holy Spirit to address in people’s hearts and consciences. It was not a helpful matter to address to listeners when he was speaking of marriage as they understood it then.
But the primacy of Love (through which all scripture should be read and interpreted, discerned and contextualised) would lead half the Church of England today to believe that the tender and sacrificial goodness of gay relationships… their care and fidelity and grace at their best… so much good and also gift to communities and families (maybe including your own)…
…that primacy and imperative of Love would be such blessing to people’s lives (not just gay people’s themselves) as to be seen as fruitful in Spirit and reflective of the covenant fidelity of God.
So yes, I believe the Bible authors were prejudiced by their own culture and condemned man-man sex. I don’t want to go into contortions over that, trying to imply that they didn’t. It seems glaringly obvious to me that religious society at the time (Judaism, first century Christians and for countless centuries after) shared your views.
But the Holy Spirit does new things, and opens minds at different times in history (take evolving views on other issues). So I believe God affirms faithful gay relationships, and I believe Jesus would as well if He came today (which He does through the Holy Spirit).
I believe scripture read as a whole affirms the compassion and grace involved in opening our consciences today, even if the original Bible authors were strapped into their own time and culture. Some things take time.
Thank you for your generosity in accommodating diverse views on your site. Thank you your skills as a Bible teacher and your devotion to God. I know you prefer shorter posts but take my comments as a parting farewell (unless I meet you in Synod in the autumn). And by the way, contrary to something you once posted, I never called you evil. I believe you are ardent. Grace and peace (and love of course).
‘What I said was that the Bible authors seem to me to have been clearly against it.
As for what we can draw from scripture as a whole, beyond its authors’ specific culture-context comments: we may come to recognise that God seeks to open our minds to the absolute priority of compassion’.
The problem here is that Jesus must surely be the measure of compassion. And, contrary to your claims, Jesus clearly believed marriage was between one man and one woman, as did every first century Jew, every reader of Torah, every follower of Jesus for the last 1,900 years.
If you think that Scripture is merely the fallible record of fallible people, then you are a. contradicting Jesus b. contradicting Paul and c. contradicting the doctrine of the C of E (which might be ok if you are not an Anglican).
But this also means that you believe we simply cannot know what Jesus said, did, or taught, if you think the gospels are fallible attempts to understand him. Which means there is really very little we can agree on at all. I don’t really see how your position is now any different from humanism. Or perhaps Buddhism, in your seeking of ‘enlightenment’.
Susannah:
1. There can be fidelity in polygamous marriages as well. Fidelity is not the sum of the marital relationships and is not even its centrally defining characteristics.
2. Your Jesus is a figment of your imagination. Your Jesus is not anchored in history or in responsible biblical studies.
3. Your view of the nature of the Bible, while common among liberal Protestants, is self-defeating and logically ends in scepticism about the past. You don’t work with a historically orthodox view of revelation (how could you, as an emotional subjectivist?), but as a post-modern who prioritises certain beliefs and values over others. This is probably a hangover from your evangelical formation (just as Pietismus continued to influence 19th century liberal Protestants like Schleiermacher).
3. You are not in a same-sex marriage. You might wish to be, but you are not.
Of course she is in a same-sex marriage. You do not get to define reality. You are free uphold your beliefs and to try to convince others of their truth and efficacy. You do not get to impose your ideology on Susannah or on UK society. If you want a jurisdiction which would allow you to do that, other countries are available.
‘You do not get to define reality.’ So who does?
Agreed Susannah,
This is goes much deeper than ss, which is a culturally presenting matter.
It is interesting to know your hermeneuticd used to come to your scriptural conclusion, which you nevertheless pragmatically, culturally reject.
Cultural hermeneutics can be seen as the progeny of Open and Process theology.
And, if recalled correctly, you have been substantially influenced by a stream of Roman Catholicism.
Geoff, on the catholicism thing… like many Christians I have found myself influenced and helped by many different traditions in the Church. I regard myself as an evangelical, because I had a ‘born again’ experience after a serious car accident and subsequent repentance. I have led evangelism courses and worked on evangelism crusades. I believe we have a gospel of Christ – the way of the Cross and the devotion of our lives – to share with other people. I am also what people call a ‘charismatic’ because I speak and pray in tongues, and believe in the supernatural aspects of the Holy Spirit. Then, as my Christian journey has continued, I have witnessed tireless and devoted lives of some Christians and ministers living out what I would call a ‘social gospel’ of serving the pitiful needs of their secular communities. That has taught me things about devotion and love. And yes, I have also found catholic spirituality (notably Carmelite contemplative spirituality) very helpful indeed. I don’t think, as Christians, we all have to belong to just one expression of Christianity.
But thank you, Geoff, for taking sufficient interest of that aspect of my faith, which I certainly hold precious.
I would be interested in your own background too. I don’t disrespect you. I respect the fact that you seek to love God, and give yourself to God, and sincerely want to do God’s Will. I applaud that (not that it’s my place to – that would be patronising) but I would want to acknowledge your desire to please God. I can’t recall at this moment who wrote it, but it’s surely true: that “the desire to please God, pleases God.”
So I honestly wish you well, pray you live in grace, and know the amazing, tender, merciful, compassionate Jesus Christ who gives Himself to us to the point of no turning back… no turning back, even on a Cross… and calls us in turn to take up the cross and follow and open day to day to the Flow of God’s great Love. For God is three persons, one all Holy God, very Love in all eternity. So I pray God bless you.
Thank you Geoff,
I don’t accept fundamentalist literalism, where the Bible is taken to be literally true at surface level, as an ossified script, correct and unchanging for all time, like a kind of text message dictated word for word by God.
I regard the Bible as a collection of fallible efforts by fallible humans to sincerely try to make sense of encounters they have had with the Holy and Divine. Like you or like me, they were human beings, without omniscience, and subject to their own contexts, cultural assumptions, writing within the limits and parameters of their scientific knowledge, including the psychological, geological, and sociological. They may have had no reason to doubt the account of Noah’s Ark as fact, for example, or the claim that the first human pair had no parents, and so on – because they would not know about evolutionary theories.
In reading the Bible, I try to understand the context within which they write. I then try to look for the key ways in which their statements might (or might not) be applied in the absolutely primary commandment of Love, in the context of which the entire Bible must be subordinated. For example, I repudiate the assertion that God commanded the slaughter of the Canaanite children, understanding it as cultural and nationalist propaganda of the victors, claiming mandate from God to do terrible things.
Overall, I see the Bible not as the exact and final word on all things, but rather, a conduit through reading which we ourselves may open our hearts to encounter with God and encounter with Love. The inspiration comes, not through the precision of words written down, but through the way (when we read about the encounters fallibly reported by fallible human beings though they were still often profound) we ourselves may open to encounter with God as we read, and be inspired by the Holt Spirit to open to the flow of Love in our own lives.
In the case of marriage, I see this as primarily and most importantly to be about the way we give ourselves to another, and the importance of fidelity. The fundamentalist charge will be that Jesus only mentioned marriage between a man and a woman. That is true. But the context of those words if reported correctly was an audience that only accommodated ‘straight’ marriage socially. There was no other option in their own religious culture. But the key thing Jesus was homing in on was fidelity and the goodness of marriage as a context of… love, companionship, and (in some cases) children. At no point in that discourse did Jesus refer to gay marriage because it was not a current topic of concern. (He had sufficient concern with the infidelities of straight marriage. Marriage between two men wasn’t mentioned. Moreover, the Bible authors, with their inbuilt assumptions, only reported about heterosexual marriage because that was all that was relevant in their religious culture at that time. Had Jesus been addressing people who ran dogs’ homes, He might well have said ‘Dog homes must always be run with great care for the animals.’ But that wouldn’t mean that in a far off country or time, elephants should not also be protected and cared for.
Jesus simply wasn’t addressing gay marriage or sex. His listeners were listening about how they should behave in the marriages that were culturally and religiously accepted in their immediate society then. That was the topic at hand.
Later, still within cultural contexts of disapproval of men who had sex with men, the Bible authors used man-man sex as an illustration of lack of holiness, because of their cultural assumptions… but actually the topic of that passage was all about the importance of holiness. In our present day and age we can see that gay men or women may lead better lives and holier lives than some straight people. And the holiness – the opening to God and our opening to God’s Love for others – is the key issue. The same-sex thing is cultural and not centrally what the passage was about.
We shall not agree on this, because we have hermeneutical differences about how to understand and apply the Bible, and how it works. And that is the main point I’m making. I’m trying to explain the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ divide. I believe, in the overwhelming priority of opening to loving, caring lives, that gay couples can have devoted, decent lives – including intimate love – and be a blessing to their church communities, their relatives, their colleagues… and the world does not come tumbling down. Very large numbers of people in the Church of England today have come to recognise, in all faith and sincerity, that the lives of their gay children, or their neighbours, or colleagues, can be decent and good. They are okay with gay sexuality. Within the Church of England there are two (divergent) views on human sexuality. It’s a de facto reality. We don’t believe just one thing. This is why LLF hasn’t ended in reality, but is simply a continuing process under a different guise and names. Because the issue is about devoted love of couples, and the benefits of fidelity within a framework of marriage. That was the main thing that mattered to Jesus as well.
Susannah
As I’ve pointed out a few times, in biblical interpretation the concept ‘literal’ did not originally mean a ‘dumb wooden’ literalism but an approach more or less of ‘read it like an ordinary book’, making full allowance for and indeed rejoicing in all kinds of figures of speech and other literary devices. This was in contrast to other ‘senses’ in the medieval “Fourfold Sense” interpretation scheme. Back in the time of the Reformation this was made clear by the translator William Tyndale, and I append a link to a blog piece in which I discussed his views. As I point out there, the original “Fundamentalists” in the early 20th century basically had Tyndale’s view – only later in the 1920s and -30s did a more dumbly literal idea become prevalent.
https://stevesfreechurchblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/a-brief-word-on-biblical-interpretation/
Thank you, Stephen. I think I understand your point. I used the term ‘fundamentalist’ to point to one extreme version – but there are many others who I would ‘term ‘quasi- fundamentalist’ in that they still subscribe to a sense of the Bible somehow being a precisely intended text with authority as if somehow God’s directive and that, while there may be subtlety of interpretation within even that concept, it remains resistant to any challenge that the text is not what is inspired, but the attempts at explanation by the authors may in some way open the reader to a similar ‘encounter with God’ which is where the inspiration operates. If you like, the fallible attempts to make sense of profound encounters by the original (fallible) authors may *spark* an opening in the heart of the reader to their own actual encounter through the Holy Spirit with God.
In other words, the Bible is a human conduit… a fallible, chipped pipeline, through which the living Word of God – not the written words – may operate in a dynamic way, opening up the reader to the ‘inspiration’.
In this sense, scripture can be inspirational… as a function, not necessarily as an infallible-for-all-times edict from God, word by word, or passage with passage. We need to seek the Holy Spirit to discern where the imperative of love is in a text, and what content is very contextual and not for all times to be implemented… and what content absolutely spills over with the Love of God to open our hearts to that divine Love.
I believe some people (both those in favour of gay sexuality and those opposed) still hold onto the idea of the Bible somehow being an entity in itself which is always right, even if they interpret in different ways to some others. A kind of Reformation mindset, with an elevated view of the authority of the Bible’s content. Before the Enlightenment, that was an understandable position to believe and to take… after that, less so.
The Bible may say man-man sex is sinful – I’ve already concede it does – but however understandable that view was in the context of the authors’ time, I believe in stating that, the Bible is wrong. And I say that as someone who thinks the Bible is the most amazing writing in the world, and has read it over and over.
But where people differ in Christian faith, their imperative remains the same – to be compassionate, to love kindly, to care, and to pray. We all sin. But to judge what is sin, we need to let the Holy Spirit speak to our God-given consciences. The Bible is a valued source of revelation but it is not the only one. The Bible, as I think you imply, needs to be read with great discretion. Where it clashes with conscience, we may need to question ourselves, but ultimately look for the love and the grace.
Gay couples can, in their love, we channels of much grace and love of God.
If you like, the fallible attempts to make sense of profound encounters by the original (fallible) authors may *spark* an opening in the heart of the reader to their own actual encounter through the Holy Spirit with God.
That’s not Christianity. That’s Quakerism.
typo: ‘we channels’ >>> ‘be channels’ of much grace and love of God.
In short, gay couples are in grace in the action of their intimately-expressed love, while like all people also suffering from selfishness and sin. But the act of love is not the sin.
Frankly, when there is so much suffering and pitiful need in the world, and where practical love matters so much, I really don’t think Jesus is fussed about whether the people in a marriage are male or female, or in what combination. God just wants those couples to be loving, caring, protective, and faithful to each other.
I really don’t think Jesus cares about the combinations of sex or gender in a marriage. He just wants their relationships to be decent and have integrity. It’s arguably meddling people who seek to make a taboo of something which can be so beautiful, so caring, and which can bring so much blessing to others. Which it does.
Faithfulness in relationships, Susannah?
Well, what about this: Christian men who leave their marriages because their sexual feelings (and sometimes their ‘gender feelings’) mean they no longer want to stay married to their wives, and the mothers of their children.
They want a different kind of sexual relationship with another person.
Where is the faithfulness and “integrity” in this?
What would you say to a man I have known for 25 or so years who recently left his disabled Christian wife (after 20+ years of marriage) to begin a homosexual relationship with a younger man? Is that “integrity” or sinfulness?
Your view of human beings looks romantic and unreal to me.
It is certainly very sad, James. Though I’d point out that infidelity also occurs in huge numbers in heterosexual couples as well. So it’s not an argument against gay couples as such. And then also: there are millions of young gay and lesbian couples all over the world and in the UK who have known from an early stage in their sexuality that they are attracted to people of the same sex, and enter relationships with them. My prayer for them is that same fidelity that Jesus talks of for heterosexual couples. And marriage for them would be a platform upon which to dedicate their lives, before each other, and the congregation, and before God. I know your views differ on that point for reasons I can respect.
I don’t believe I am unreal and romantic. My working life over more than 40 years consisted of work in prisons, work in education with teenagers, and work as a nurse in some very challenging roles. Nurses tend to be pretty realistic and commonsense people on the whole. In prison I ran one of the national centres for 110 of the worst sex offenders, and know full well that humanity can at times sink to terrible depths of depravity.
I believe I am a realist.
On your examples, I leave judgment to God. We will all be judged. But as a generality, many many gay and lesbian couples devote themselves to each other, free of other obligations, in costly love. And their fidelity should be encouraged and affirmed in my opinion, and to frame their devotion in marriage is to draw their love – for that is what it is – into God. I believe to God, their devotion is as sacred as any heterosexual couple’s.
I know we don’t agree with one another on this. I still pray God bless you, and I would want to honour and respect your ardent desire to love God and obey God. I can’t say very much more I suspect, because – with different views on how to understand and apply scripture, we would just be going round and round in an attritional circle of arguments and counter-arguments.
Infidelity would only be an equal issue among ‘heterosexuals’ and homosexuals if these two large categories had identical or similar rates of infidelity.
In fact the former has vastly increased in the time of the sexual revolution, and the SR is bound up with the normalisation of the latter, meaning that the former infidelity could partly be a result of the preexisting latter infidelity acting as a normaliser.
Well James, for one thing it should probably give everyone pause for thought before encouraging gay people to enter straight marriages.
Adam, *everyone should pause for thought before entering marriage!
I am glad I never followed the hormone-driven fantasies I had as a nineteen-year old.
But I am disturbed thinking of that man I have known for many years (someone always on the questioning edge of the church, as I recall) leaving his disabled Christian wife after more than 20 years to begin a homosexual relationship with a younger man.
How did he get to that point, I ask myself. What was the ‘backstory’, as we say. I don’t think these things happen just suddenly.
Why do some such marriages succeed and others fail? Is it fed by a private world of pornography and occasional forays into infidelity?
And how does it happen that some women – in middle age, with teenage or older children – seem suddenly to fall into lesbian relationships?
There seems to be a clear difference in patterns of male and female homosexuality or bisexuality.
Adam, *everyone should pause for thought before entering marriage!
I am glad I never followed the hormone-driven fantasies I had as a nineteen-year old.
But I am disturbed thinking of that man I have known for many years (someone always on the questioning edge of the church, as I recall) leaving his disabled Christian wife after more than 20 years to begin a homosexual relationship with a younger man.
How did he get to that point, I ask myself. What was the ‘backstory’, as we say. I don’t think these things happen just suddenly.
Why do some such marriages succeed and others fail? Is it fed by a private world of pornography and occasional forays into infidelity?
And how does it happen that some women – in middle age, with teenage or older children – seem suddenly to fall into lesbian relationships?
There seems to be a clear difference in patterns of male and female homosexuality or bisexuality.
James, everyone should take their marriages seriously (and therefore the decision to enter it), but my point was about those who encourage gay people to enter straight marriages. You’ve observed that such marriages can end terribly. And if I’ve understood you correctly that’s not a rare occurance, but might be the norm. To that I would add the disastrous experience of the ex-gay movement that produced many marriages which similarly collapsed. I worry that there are people in this debate who are flippant about that and far too casually say gay people can and should enter straight marriages, and that misses what’s actually going on.
It’s hard to speak about marriages about people I don’t know, but I would offer this reflection. I think from what you’ve previously said you interpret what’s going on as meaning nearly all gay men are in fact bisexual. You may need to release yourself from that assumption. It’s possible for people to behave outside their orientation (e.g. the old stories of sailors at sea, men in prison, etc.), but it is very hard to sustain that over time. One of the points Ian makes in his Grove booklet is the importance of living with integrity – that’s good for you spiritually and mentally. But it also means that failing to live with integrity, particularly if you’re failing in a very stark way, risks being destructive for you spiritually and mentally. Maybe it doesn’t help for those people to see more acceptance of gay people and gay relationships, and that a life with integrity looks more achievable than it did, because it makes their lack of integrity more burdensome. But I don’t see that the solution is to encourage more lives that fall short on integrity. If integrity is good, that’s what we should encourage.
Just an aside – you didn’t follow the hormone-driven fantasies you had at 19; I didn’t follow mine either. It didn’t stop me being gay, or open the possibility of me being straight. I’d been staring down the barrel of a life of enforced celibacy since I was a teenager. I stuck with that for many years. I prayed intensely about it, almost to destruction. I cut myself off from the possibility of a relationship, to my regret. I take some small comfort that I never made the error of trying to get married to a woman. I always considered that to be (for me at least) selfish, cruel and deceptive.
Adam, I don’t want to respond to any of the substance of your comment here.
I just want to pause to honour your own self disclosure here. It is a vital reminder of the deeply personal nature of this discussion.
I hope that I do not forget this, in all the conversation about meanings, and texts, and doctrine. But I beg for your forgiveness if I have expressed myself in articles or discussion here which fails to honour that, and fails to honour your contributions here.
Ian, when I read the discussion between you and Tim, my reaction is that, when we observe such a respectful and charitable debate between proponents of different positions who are both credally orthodox and seek to be faithful to scripture, must we not say that this is not an issue that should divide Christians? Must the church not make space for both convictions? I do not know how that is to be done, but doesn’t it have to be the desirable state, at this juncture of our church’s history? Can you not move from this debate to making peace?
I think that is so wise, Richard.
We should acknowledge that there are good and decent Christians with divergent views on this matter: in the Church of England, it is fair to say that half the Church believes that gay sexuality is fine (indeed blessed) and half the Church that believes that gay sexuality is sin. The mind of the Church is divided down the middle (give or take a few percentage points. The Church of England, in its members, believes two things.
At that point, the greater test is ‘Can we love one another?’ The issue of ‘Who is right?’ is trapped in a logjam. The status quo is unsatisfactory.
Therefore people on either ‘side’ of the debate should be given the right – at parish level – to decide whether to bless (or later, marry) gay couples or not. Respect for the other person’s right of conscience over this matter.
If a priest or PCC decide they oppose gay blessing services (or later, maybe marriages)… then they should have right of conscience NOT to bless them.
If a priest or PCC decide they support these services… then they should have right of conscience TO bless them.
That way people are not being dominated.
And those who STILL don’t like that should exercise their freedom to look for a Church tradition that they would rather align with.
Such an arrangement would reflect the de facto reality in the Church of England today.
And then perhaps we could get on with all the other work we have as Christians, visiting the sick, befriending the lonely, comforting the bereaved, and all the other works of love which so many people in parish life just want to get on with.
Thank you, Susannah
As I understand it, that is the situation in the Scottish Episcopal Church. I wonder I’d General Synod has ever thought to look across the border and get a report on how that has worked there?
What has to happen is work towards a consensus that goo d disagreement is the right way forward. One reason it is right is, as you say, there are more important things to be done.
We have looked across the border, and we have found a church that is collapsing in attendance and mired in corruption about appointments, sadly.
Thanks Richard.
I believe the Scottish Episcopal Church has set an example of ‘good disagreement’ by affording its priests/ministers ‘right of conscience’ on the issue of gay sexuality.
No-one is forced to affirm gay relationships against their conscience.
No-one is forced to submit, against conscience, to the domination by others if they believe in good conscience that gay relationships can be full of grace.
In this way TWO differing views of human sexuality exist in the SEC, and the rest boils down to love and respect for conscience.
The same exists in the Church of England today. Two differing views of human sexuality exist within the Church. That is just de facto reality.
But unlike in Scotland, we have one group dominating the consciences of the other half (or more) of the C of E, by using the 2/3rds rule in Synod to hold the whole Church hostage so that a status quo they want to impose on everyone else gets perpetuated.
I suggest that as Christians we should live and let live, and allow respect for other people’s conscience, and love one another. The best way is to give each priest and member choice to follow their conscience. Even if that means the Church believes TWO different things. That would be intellectual honesty, because it is the reality of what the Church already, in people’s faith, conscience and lives, actually believes.
SEC has demonstrated that with love and generosity of Spirit this can be done.
After all, though we may have all kinds of different views on things, we are all ONE in CHRIST. Our unity is in the love and grace of Christ, not in an imposed uniformity.
The fundamental priority is for us, even with differing views, and maybe especially because we have differing views, to LOVE each other and bear with one another.
No-one should be forced to marry or bless a gay couple against their conscience. No-one should be forced NOT to marry or bless a gay couple against their conscience. Especially when the affirming conviction, in sincerity of faith and compassion, is held by a huge number of people.
I think the time has come to stop policing one another on matters of conscience over gay sex, and to accept as reality that in order to get on with all the rest of the pastoral care of the Church and people’s often pitiful needs, we need to live and let live.
The SEC will not exist in 10 years.
Thank you for your wise and hopeful words.
I completely echo that. Thank you Richard. Such a helpful contribution. It would be good to have Ian’s response
One response would be to point out that Susannah Clarke has rather undermined Susannah Clarke’s own case for the issue of same-sex marriage being a ‘thing indifferent’ of which Christians can reasonably disagree, by being explicit that Susannah Clarke agrees that the Bible is 100% against same-sex marriage but that Susannah Clarke sees the Bible as being ‘wrong’ on this matter because the Bible is merely ‘the fallible attempts to make sense of profound encounters by the original (fallible) authors’.
(In this thanks are due to Susannah Clarke for ‘saying the quiet bit out loud’: proponents of same-sex marriage in the Church often take pains to hide that this is their view of the Bible, but Susannah Clarke has come out and been explicit about that, which is good).
Because while it may have been possible to have proponent and opponents of same-sex marriage in the same denomination provided both had the same view of the Bible (in the way it is possible for Calvinists and Arminians to share a denomination), it is impossible for a Christian church to include people who think the Bible is just a collection of fallible human writings by people trying to make sense of their encounters with the divine.
That is, quite simply, not a view which can be accommodated within Christianity. Anyone who has that view should leave the Christian Church forthwith and become a Quaker (which is what the original Quakers had the intellectual honesty to do).
That’s why the same-sex marriage debate cannot be just something on which people ‘agree to disagree’: because it’s not just a matter of ‘who can get married in a church’. It’s downstream of a totally incompatible view of what Christianity even is as a religion: is it one way among many in which people seek encounters with the divine? Or is it a propositional faith which makes claims about the world which are objectively true or false?
S,
Your summary of Susannah Clark’s view of the Bible is indeed an accurate view of how liberals see the Bible: a fallible human record of God’s encounter with man in which much is indeed true, but error is also admixed with the faithful account.
Protestant Liberalism, at least since Philip Spener in the 18th century, has seen the task of theology to conduct a ‘Sachkritik’ on Scripture, separating the wheat from the chaff, using various criteria for this task. Immanuel Kant, a near-contemporary of Spener, gave an early sketch of this programme in his ‘Religion within the Limits of Reason alone’ (“true religion = ethics”), while Schleiermacher charted another course based on religious feelings.
Andrew Godsall’s speculations about what Jesus *might have said, if he had the benefits of a modern education, put me in mind of the famous meeting with the bishop in hell in Lewis’s ‘The Great Divorce’. The bishop explains, in a paper he is going to present to the local theological society, that Jesus was a young man when he died and if he had only lived a bit longer, he would have matured in some of his views. This seems to me to be pretty close to what Andrew believes about Jesus’s relationship to first century Judaism.
When Steve Chalke was a young Baptist pastor, his abstinent colleagues were Revs Beer and Corke. The story goes that his sermon on Cana was criticised by one of these who protested that Jesus was a teetotaller – the problem was that ‘he was very young at the time’.
S, you must use a name and a real email address.
Please do that, even if you feel you need to use a pseudonym. My blog, my rules.
Dear Richard, thanks for your observation. It is good to have such an irenic discussion. But I don’t think that disguises the fact that I am unclear that Tim’s argument stands up to scrutiny as a biblical argument.
I think it does mean that we can respect each other across, say, a demoninational boundary.
But the Church of England is committed to taking Scripture as its authority, and Scripture not only does not support Tim’s argument, it does not support the idea that this could be a ‘thing indifferent’.
Besides, there is the logical problem: it is simply not possible for any denomination to say that a particular pattern of relationship is both holy and blessed, and sinful and calling for repentance at one and the same time.
Of course it isn’t. It’s completely incoherent. I’m surprised Richard Bauckham doesn’t see this.
I say this as a great fan of Richard’s exegetical work.
Of course, Ian, I expected this sort of reply. You have built up an apparently impregnable fortress of argument around this. Any such discussion is merely an opportunity for you to bring the appropriate weapons out of your armoury. So I take it that, while you respect Tim as a person, you have no respect for the concerns or the insights he brings to this discussion. Some of us who have been on more than one side in this debate experience it as a discussion with oneself. I think that makes a difference to how one sees the situation in the church.
When I say that it is not an issue that should divide Christians, I don’t think I mean that it is a thing indifferent in the traditional sense. I am thinking more on the lines of the RC idea of a hierarchy of doctrines. It is not on the same level as the central doctrines of the creeds.
During our own email discussions I discovered that you think Scrioture clearly teaches that every one should marry (OT), with the exception only of those called to consecrated celibacy NT). I found it scarcely credible that therefore (1) you think gay people should enter heterosexual marriages, and (2) that it is wrong for people to remain unmarried other than because of a special religious calling. As far as i am concerned, your impregnable fortress falls with those two preposterous assertions. Are they part of the doctrine of marriage to which you think the CofE is committed? Or are they matters of legitimate disagreement?
Dear Richard, I think it could be a matter of there being, on analysis, only the two possible alternatives. Celibacy is either willing and intentional or unwilling. If it is unwilling, then it cannot be what we wish for anyone. Noncelibacy can only be marital because if it is anything else it falls into the porneia category, which causes its own significant problems. So I suppose that is the logic.
Although there seem to be only these two alternatives, things are not necessarily so simple, because there is the third category of people who are willing to be either celibate or noncelibate depending on whether the opportunity for a suitable marriage arises or not. I categorised into two rather than into three simply because the majority of this putative third category is imagined by me (correctly or not) to be unintentionally celibate, on which see para 1.
Intentional celibacy has two categories. There are those whogoryotcaer choose it because of a divine calling to Christian service, like Paul. And there are those who choose it. Whether or not they are Christian’s for quire ordinary reasons (see my reply to Ian below). My problem with Ian’s view is that.people in the latter category are disobeying the divine command to all people to marry and have children.
Yes, you’re right. Ian also makes clear that there are certain celibate lives that are every bit as good as married. Our Lord, preeminently. Paul had a high view of it. Marriage remains normative (in the absence of eschatological constraints, at least) because of: design; inclination; and correlation with healthier societies.
Celibacy is either willing and intentional or unwilling. If it is unwilling, then it cannot be what we wish for anyone.
And yet a good number of people in the Church do wish it for their gay brothers and sisters…
You’re defining celibacy differently.
Richard, I am finding your interaction here odd. I have not said that ‘it is a divine command that all must marry’.
I have noted that the OT narrative assumes that this is the norm, and that in it we find no examples of ‘casual’ singleness. Do please point out where in the text you think I am wrong on this.
How so, Christopher?
Dear Richard, thank you for your reply. I am not in the least interested in ‘building an impregnable fortress’; as I have said repeatedly, I am only interested in a plausible reading of Scripture, and am very happy to be shown a more plausible reading than that which the church catholic has held for 2,000 years, if there is one. I am a Protestant; scripture is my authority, not tradition. If you think my responses here look ‘impregnable’, that is interesting!
I do indeed have concern and insights for what he brings. I have many gay friends; the person who was my best friend in theological college came out to me. I have trans people in my own family. This is not an argument about straight v gay; as many gay people spoke in the Synod debate wanting to uphold the Church’s current teaching as straight. (They were dismissed and ignored by revisionists.)
I would be very interested to hear where you think my reading is wrong. In Genesis, do you agree with Tim that light and dark, land and water, male and female are merisms rather than things separated by God’s ordering grace? Do you think that Jesus would have affirmed an exclusive faithful gay sexual partnership? If so, where do you think Bill Loader and Louis Crompton and others have gone wrong on this? Do you think Douglas Campbell is mistaken to think that Paul in 1 Cor 6.9 has failed to understand his own gospel?
In relation to our correspondence, yes, I think the Old Testament teaches that all should marry and have children. I cannot think of any examples at all in the OT of people living approved, single lives. Can you? I don’t think this is surprising; this is the norm in all pre-modern cultures that I am aware of. Without social security and pensions, how would the old live except with the provision of their children?
Of course, the NT brings in a whole other dimension of being fruitful in another way, apart from literal marriage and childbirth—the fruitfulness of having spiritual offspring. hence Paul is pregnant and in the pains of childbirth as a metaphor for his longing for the Galatians to full come to new birth in Gal 4.19.
Indeed, I would consider your life to have been immensely fruitful, in the way you have shaped so many to read Scripture well. I would consider you a spiritual/exegetical/hermeneutical father to me, since your work has shaped my reading of scripture so much. I don’t think a week goes by when I do not mention your name to someone or other.
I have never once said that people can only not marry if they have a special religious calling. In the partially realised eschatology of the kingdom, we either marry and have children (in this age) or we are single and celibate (anticipating the age to come). The calling of Jesus on us is to obedience to his teaching. That means we are all called to one or other of these states; this is the meaning of Paul’s teaching in 1 Cor 7.
Given that the vast majority of scholarship is clear that this is what Jesus and the scriptures teach, the reason why this cannot be a lower category is that endorsing SSSR would mean rejecting the teaching of Jesus on an issue that is one of the cultural pressure points of our day, and cutting ourselves off from the teaching of the church catholic in every age, every tradition, every branch, and every cultural context.
I don’t see how this can be unimportant.
The sense in which you have built an impregnable fortress is that you have already a well considered answer to any argument that could be put on the other side of the debate. I cannot imagine you finding that, in the light of something raised in such a discussion you must think again. This is not necessarily a criticism, but it affects the kind of discussion you are likely to have.
My point about people choosing to remain unmarried is that, in modern society at least, some people, Christian or not, choose not to marry for reasons of personal aptitude or inclination , not divine calling. E.g. some people, mostly women, choose to be full time carers for sick and elderly parents. (In Victorian times, this was often expected of an unmarried daughter,) Some people find a demanding and rewarding career a sufficiently fulfilling focus of their life. They may not want children or think they would be good parents (especially now when we do not approve the sort of father who leaves everything to do with the children to wife and nanny.) There ate people who find it hard to find a partner and also find they are quite happy without one. There are many reasons and combinations of reasons why people choose to stay single. Surely you know such people. But you are saying they are disobeying the divine requirement that everyone should marry.
In biblical societies such people were uncommon, as they are in many traditional societies, for the sort of socio-economic reasons you point to. But there are many possibilities of life that are now available but were not in biblical societies. It would surely be absurd to say that we should all outdo the Amish in attempts to be biblical.
In ancient society chosen singleness was rare but surely not unknown. It could be practicable if one had sufficient inherited wealth to employ slaves/ servants. I’m sure one could find some examples in GrecoRoman societies.
There are a very large number of biblical people whose marital status we don’t know. But a couple of possibilities: The Bethany family look like household of siblings. In Rom 16 Paul greets Tryphena and Tryphisa, who were likely twins (twins were often given similar names). Maybe two unmarried sisters living together (as was quite common in Victorian times.)
But this doesn’t matter much to the question whether it is wrong for people to choose not to marry. Genesis provides a general rules often admit exceptions.
Richard,
I am surprised to read again your claim that Ian has said that people who don’t marry are disobeying God straight after him denying that he has ever said that.
It is surely obvious that some (perhaps many) Christians just don’t have the opportunity of making a decent Christian marriage and the Apostle warns against being unequally yoked.
It is also the case that some people discern that they are not psychologically equipped for marriage – and it’s a sad truth that some marriages fail not because of infidelity or cruelty but because one or both of the parties are not up to the emotional and social demands of the relationship. It’s not that these persons have a divine calling to singleness for the sake of the Kingdom (though that may come), it’s just that they haven’t achieved the psychological maturity that marriage requires. You may have granted this position. Other people will have health or disability issues that makes marriage a difficult prospect.
So we arrive at the general conclusion that it is indeed the will of God that most people should be married – but there are plenty of exceptions, including people who would like to be married but the opportunity doesn’t exist. But for every Christian the possibility of living a God-pleasing life is always there. I don’t read Ian as saying anything other than that.
The sense in which you have built an impregnable fortress is that you have already a well considered answer to any argument that could be put on the other side of the debate. I cannot imagine you finding that, in the light of something raised in such a discussion you must think again.
Is that not just because those on the revisionist side of the debate keep making the same arguments over and over again?
Obviously there isn’t going to be a need for a new response until someone on the revisionist side puts forward a new argument. But when was the last time that actually happened?
(I think a problem is that people on the revisionist side keep coming up with arguments that are new to them , not realising that those on the other side have heard them a hundred times before. Then they get a well-rehearsed answer — because it ought to be well-rehearsed after the hundredth time — and they feel they have been given short shrift. But it’s not that, it’s just they are not saying anything new, even though they think they are because they just came up with it so it is new to them .)
I cannot imagine you finding that, in the light of something raised in such a discussion you must think again.
And of course another question is: can you imagine yourself finding that, in the light of something raised by the anti-revisionist side, you must think again?
Richard, you comment:
‘The sense in which you have built an impregnable fortress is that you have already a well considered answer to any argument that could be put on the other side of the debate’
The reason for that is that I have been thinking about this for 48 years now, and actively engaging in the debate for 30. And in fact none of the arguments presented here are new. Almost all are recycled from Boswell and Countryman in the 1980s.
Yes, many people choose to remain unmarried. I think that, in our culture, many (not all) people do this from selfishness. They note that having children is costly and inconvenient, and they would much rather have a bigger house and longer holidays. As a result, Western culture is literally dying.
The UK fertility rate (the number of children per woman on average) is now 1.4. That means that 100 people today will have 70 children, and 49 grandchildren. We will halve in size in two generations! That is going to bring social collapse and all kinds of problems.
I cannot think of a single example of chosen singleness of this kind in the OT. The examples you give are likely to be widows, given life expectancy, and the age gap between men and women in marriage in the first century.
It has to be said that the cultures who marry are correlated with those
that are happy. Likewise, those who have children in marriage. (So much for seeking illusory or short term happiness by the opposite route.) So if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
But this is just the same point as the earlier one that altruism, community/family mindedness and shunning selfishness are what adult maturity is.
Richard, can I add one more observation: I have invited you to offer any response to the specific comments I make in the article, where I think I demonstrate that Tim’s reading of Scripture simply will not work.
I am interested in the content of the debate, and not merely reflection on the nature of the debate.
So I welcome any challenge or correction from you on my reading of the texts.
Whatever happened to sin?
There are also counterfeit gifts and spirits. Discernment is necessary.
I was converted on an Alpha Course as. 47 year old lawyer. Whose teenage and young adult years were through the times permissive society, sexual revolution, and as I studied for an LLB.
The time of conversion was during the Toronto Blessing outporing in the UK, during which it was necessary to discern the counterfeit.
Conversion is life transformative, with different desires and motivations It is not a continuation of pre conversion life a flourishing. It is to repent, continually so and turn from sin to holiness, not through self effort but the help of the indwelling Holy Spirit not dishonoring God by perpetuating sin. It has been truly said that it is not until everything has been stripped away can it but said that Jesus is all you need until He is all you have.
I do not see the Glory of Christ, as set out in John Owen’s book, The Glory of Christ’ being manifest in sss, where Christ is subjugated and subsumed by desires in the wrong direction.
And if Christ is in you ss is becomes joinder a union in sin which is anathema.
I am deeply wary of some biblical scholarship, which is all intellect, a little like a continuation of Form and Higher criticism, but in contemporary guise, and of a course followed through by Richard B Hays, some of which for goes morality, and systematics.
Thank you Geoff. I am grateful to you for self-disclosure about parts of your journey. It is nice to get glimpses of people as human beings, rather than just conveyors of dogma or ideology. I agree with you that discernment is needed over the exercise of spiritual gifts, not least because there are Christian cultures where emotions are pumped up toward hysteria, and participation in the signs can become an ‘experience’ people go to enjoy. without enough ‘quiet spirit’ and trust at its core. Spiritual signs can be real blessing, but there is always a danger if people seek the signs, rather than the person (God) which the signs are meant to point to.
So I am cautious about manipulated emotionalism. Equally, I don’t buy into a cold, intellectual faith, and share the concern that some biblical scholarship is all intellect. Relationship with God is not all intellect at all. We should seek grace to love God with our hearts as well as our minds. Relationship with God is a highly personal – indeed passionate – affair. We are so much loved.
Susannah,
What about churchgoing Christian men who leave their Christian wives (the mothers of their children) to follow their strong desires to have a homosexual relationship? I have known about four cases of this. And a couple of cases of Christian women who left their marriages to pursue lesbian partnerships.
What do you say about them? Are they being led by God or by ungodly desires?
What should they have done?
I asked you this question above but you didn’t answer.
I was typing a reply when you re-posted this. Please see above, in reply to your original post, James. I can’t give opinion on these specific cases, because I do not know the people and the complexities of their situations. But I affirm the general importance of fidelity, whether gay or heterosexual. Mostly in these cases, I would say the harm is great and it’s terribly sad.
Susannah:
Don’t you understand this from your own life , which you have freely and openly discussed, both on your website and often on “Thinking Anglicans “?
A man leaving his wife and children because he has entered a love affair with another man or because he strongly desires a homosexual relationship is the same as a man abandoning his wife for another woman.
The last person we are able to be honest with is usually ourselves. You exegete from personal experience – but you don’t seem to recognise that fallenness includes our sexual feelings as well as our “gender identity”, to use the modern parlance.
To affirm this conduct is to say that we are saved by sex or by another human being, which is obviously a denial of the Gospel. Same-sex desire is not a manifestation of God’s will for humans, although you subjectively claim it is. It’s part of fallenness, like gender dysphoria. Those are painful words to hear but Jesus never taught that following him was ever pain free.
James,
We are discussing same sex marriage here. I won’t answer your questions on my private life, beyond saying that my orientation is and has always been attraction to women, so it is coherent to me that my relationships have always been with women and never with men. Nor did I go off seeking another partner when I transitioned (not the topic of Ian’s post). I did not want to ‘go off’ anywhere. Privacies prevent me saying any more on that. Initially I explored becoming a nun. That in itself was and has led to huge blessing in my life. I don’t want to be questioned by you on anything else private – mainly to protect other people’s privacy on a public forum. So please show me a basic respect on that.
I think you may be conflating sexual attraction with gender identity issues over transition. In my experience people often think that a man seen as male at birth ‘chooses’ to change gender because they are attracted to men. That is the last thing I’d want because (no offence) I find the idea of sex with a man totally repellent. Transition wasn’t driven by desire for sex whatsoever, but by bodily dysphoria.
I politely request you stick to the topic of same sex marriage, as initiated by Ian’s post, and (to coin the phrase) we ‘play the ball and not the man (or woman)’. As to my own self-knowledge, we can all be victims of self-deception. I have certainly experienced heavy judgment from God over things I have done wrong, some of which I can never put right. I don’t know about you and don’t wish to. It’s private. I leave your life between you and God. I pray God bless you and always grant you mercy and conviction.
I am ending this conversation here. You may not believe it, but it is to protect other people. In that I can only appeal to your compassion, but I won’t be answering you further, though I do wish you blessing.
I politely request […] we ‘play the ball and not the man (or woman)’
How can this possibly be compatible with
I am grateful to you for self-disclosure about parts of your journey. It is nice to get glimpses of people as human beings, rather than just conveyors of dogma or ideology. […] Equally, I don’t buy into a cold, intellectual faith, and share the concern that some biblical scholarship is all intellect. Relationship with God is not all intellect at all.
Either the discussion is about truth and ideas, in which case it is correct to ‘play the ball’; but in that case it is inappropriate to bring personal feelings into it.
Or the discussion is about personal feelings, not ‘intellectualism’; but in that case you don’t get to declare some personal issues off-limits just because they are uncomfortable to you.
You must be consistent; you can’t say that the debate must include personal issues and not be just about intellectual matters when that suits you, but then when that doesn’t suit you declare that only ‘playing the ball’ (ie, talking about intellectual ideas) is appropriate.
Susannah,
As S correctly says, you want to change the rules when it suits you. You talk freely here, on your own blog and on “Thinking Anglicans” about your own life as if it were a reliable exegesis of Scripture (on which you have a fairly standard liberal Protestant view), but when challenged if your self-exegesis is correct , you suddenly declare these matters as not for discussion and insist “we are talking about same-sex marriage”. But you’re not in a same-sex marriage, and what you call “bodily dysphoria” isn’t about the body but the mind. Gender dysphoria is a state of mind, not a body problem.
You also plead concern for the “privacy” of others – yet frequently talk about your family. Some odd contradiction here.
Professing to be wiser than God, we become intellectual twits, it seems
The sin of which I was convicted, was ignoring God all my life (1st commandments) and as I was slain in the Spirit, in the bathroom at home, at the same time sobbing inviting Holy Spirit to come, and to take over my life, there was an overflow of peace beyond understanding and an in- pouring of the love of God.
On the floor, zonked out, I heard the driveway gate being closed, my wife returning after walking the dogs. I crawled to the bedroom, hauled self onto the bed. What’s happening and in explanation, I said I had to put God first, in our lives. My wife agreed.
That is some of the bare-bones of my conversion. There is more, of God’s supernatural interventions, before and after, but that is enough.
Last, I’m reminded of a story about Charles Spurgeon. He was asked to comment on a sermon he’d just heard. He was complimentary on the presentation, diction and personality, but he said of its content, my Saviour has been removed and taken away, and I don’t know what has been done with him.
How much more so in this current debacle, this Spiritual battle, for that is what it is, which words of a good irenic disagreement can not camouflage.
Turn to him, look to Him, our life eternal, with a mutual indwelling, known and being known.
Justified and sanctified by Jesus, yet to be glorified.
Sinless perfection? Certainly not. Don’t be daft.
Yours in Christ Jesus,
Geoff
Thank you so much for this post, Geoff.
It’s so obvious your conversion was real. Thanks be to God because you were born again.
No-one has sinless perfection. Only God is perfect. We will fall short in selfishness every day, again and again and again.
But God remains faithful, and asks us to open our hearts to God’s holy Love. Day by day.
And as you say, to let Jesus in, by the Holy Spirit.
Your born again experienced moved and resonated with me. It is a real moment when everything changes. Nothing is the same again.
People come to faith in different experiences. Since you have disclosed something personal about your journey with God, I will offer you mine:
I became a Christian after a disastrous night of drinking and a car crash which left me in an overturned wrecked car filling with water. At that moment I had confronted death and assumed this was simply my turn to die. There had been a chaotic tumble of headlights, then the rolling and rolling, and then utter darkness. And in that darkness and submerged going under I seemed to be led by an inexplicable hand through a hole in the undercarriage where my feet had been, and I emerged from the water alive on a lonely lane as thick sea-fog prevented me seeing anything more than a few yards in front of me. The Bible says: “The Light shines on in the darkness and the darkness will never overwhelm it.” The crash made me confront the life I was leading, and where it was leading, and there followed wholly unexpected tears – crying as I had not done since I was a child – followed by a sleep, from which I awoke in a lonely room to an experience of light, the whole room seemingly bathed in light, and a person present who I had no doubt whatsoever was Jesus Christ, and He told me so deep in my heart.
I did not know the gospel in those days – no-one had ever told me it – but I phoned a local minister and, trembling, told him: “I think I have become a Christian.” And from there I was drawn into the Christian community. That was 1979. Today I have three children, all of them committed Christians. One is in ministry, another set up a children’s centre in slums in Africa and has worked there ten years. The third is my son, and I am so proud of his goodness and grace. We all love each other dearly.
I think my life would have been so different if God had not intervened and taken the initiative. I think it would have been worse, and ultimately empty.
Conversion is not the end of the journey. But it is the time God intervenes with grace. Yours reminded me how supernatural and powerful and compassionate God is, and thank you for that.
Susannah
In my reading , Leviticus chapter 21 v23, says” Furthermore, you should not follow the customs of the nation which I’m going to drive out before you because they did all these things therefore I have felt disgust for them”
The nations that God is referring to practiced the worship of false gods, and many immoral acts which God has deemed as defilers. Some of these acts are part of the same sex marriage that’s being advocated here.
God is immutable, therefore the opinions He states do not change. To think that because you have looked at scripture at such a angle to be blinded into seeing a truth that you want is unfortunate. I’m a gentile not a Jew, and I understand that all the old laws don’t still apply because of Jesus, He replaced all the need for sacrificial atonement. But this does not change the moral laws that God has set forward for us. No matter how much a man loves another man… to lay with him as a woman is to defile himself before God. Please know that you risk your eternal salvation with this choice, I invite you to read carefully Hebrews 6:4-6. God bless you all
Yes, it’s important because however obvious it doesn’t occur to all people. As George Orwell pointed out, telling people what’s in front of their eyes (or it might have been faces) is important.
THIS IS A REPLY TO JAMES THOMSON’S response to my last post addressed to Ian.
Ian has a kind of dispensational view of celibacy.He thinks that before Jesus God required everyone to marry. (I assume that people unable to marry were excepted.) After Jesus we live between the ages. As far as marriage goes, some continue to marry and have children like everyone else. But others are called to celibacy, which is living like the angels in heaven. It anticipates the kingdom.
This seems to rule out what I call ordinary celibacy (as distinguished from consecrated celibacy). This is when people choose not to marry for reasons of personal inclination or aptitude. I gave examples. It makes no sense to say that this ordinary celibacy is permitted only after Jesus. It is an option that arises from ordinary human life and, even if socio+economic circumstances made it rare in traditional societies, it was always an option for some. It is more common now because families no longer have the economic role they used to have.
Ian told me in an email that he thinks it wrong to stay unmarried for reasons of personal preference. I am not clear that he has changed his mind or can do so without retracting his claim that before Jesus marriage was an obligation for all.
Thank you for your very helpful comments on this thread. I think you were right to say previously that the way in which opinions are expressed ‘affects the kind of discussion you are likely to have.’ The tone of the ‘discussion’ then becomes very significant because any hint of an alternative approach is viewed as an argument in favour of SSM, when it may just be questioning the 100% certainty of the view expressed. To raise a question is not automatically to advocate SSM but is to create a space where the kind of disagreement in fellowship you suggest might be an option. All of us are in the business of ‘thinking again’ on many topics during our lives. Thanks for introducing a different tone to the discussion.
Well said.
Sorry, Ian, you did not say “wrong.” I looked back at our rather extensive email discussion. I think your dispensational approach doesn’t attend to the realities of human life. If there have not always been people who are suited to a single life, how could there begin to be after Jesus? Some people would say that it becomes possible through a charismatic gift. But you don’t seem to want to say that. What I call ordinary celibacy, based on temperament or natural preference, must always have been something that was possible for some humans. So Gen 1-2 must always have been setting out a norm for human life to which there have always been legitimate exceptions. If you agree, I think your fortress becomes a bit shaky.
I think: the more scholarly, the finer the distinctions. Because it is a case of two scholars discussing, they class as significant certain distinctions which to most people seem small. Because they are in the business of precision. I think you both agree entirely that marriage is the norm and that there have always been highly honourable and admirable exceptions.
Richard,
I am not party to your email conversation with Ian, so I cannot comment on it.
I will only say that the Old Testament clearly knows of prophets and others who were called to a single life, something that wasn’t necessarily easy for them. Elijah and Jeremiah were two such examples. John the Baptist was also a single man who forewent marriage for his calling. So celibacy didn’t begin with the Church.
The basic teaching of the Old Testament is that “it is not good for a man to be alone”, for the furtherance and wellbeing of the human race, and the best upbringing of children.
None of this has any bearing on homosexual relationships, for which there is not a scintilla of support in the Bible.
What I call Ian”s dispensations view of celibacy is clearly stated in his post above. You are right that such OT examples of celibacy have no bearing on SSR. But I think Ian’s construction of a biblical theology of marriage relies heavily on reading Gen 2-3 as prescribing marriage and children for all people without exception. Then he can say that the only exceptions in the biblical view are consequent on the coming of Jesus and detailed in Matt 22 and 1 Cor 7. But why should we read Gen 2-3 as a norm without exceptions rather than a norm to which there may well be exceptions, some of which the Bible leaves us to work out for ourselves from reason and experience, as it does many other things? Maybe the Bible is our major guide to life but not a comprehensive textbook?
Richard, as you note below on at least one point, you misrepresent me.
As I state in a comment replying to you above: I cannot think of a single example of chosen singleness of this kind in the OT. The examples you give are likely to be widows, given life expectancy, and the age gap between men and women in marriage in the first century.
I have never said ‘God commands all people to be married’. I have noted that the OT assumes that this is the norm, and any examples to the contrary are scant or invisible. The examples of Jesus and Paul being single were not completely unknown, but their were highly unusual. And introducing the idea that it was part of God’s plan, and not merely an element of being in a fallen world, that people might be single and fruitful in anticipation of the age to come, was a real change and innovation. It is not ‘dispensationalist’ as you call it (in a slightly derogatory way?), but a real change with the breaking in of the new age of the kingdom of God.
Yes, many people choose to remain unmarried. I think that, in our culture, many (not all) people do this from selfishness. They note that having children is costly and inconvenient, and they would much rather have a bigger house and longer holidays. As a result, Western culture is literally dying.
The UK fertility rate (the number of children per woman on average) is now 1.4. That means that 100 people today will have 70 children, and 49 grandchildren. We will halve in size in two generations! That is going to bring social collapse and all kinds of problems.
In my pastoral experience l have come across many cases of marriages where people have wed because they felt pressured that ought to or because they (or someone else) thought that God told them to. If the marriage does not end in divorce then more often than not, they have a realtionship which is perfunctory at best and miserable at worst.
I understand the pressure from other people, but the correct reply to “God told me to tell you to marry X” is: “I think he’d have told me first.” That, or “OK, let’s find other prophets in the congregation and see what they think, after the manner of 1 Corinthians 14:29-32. Do you remember the penalty for false prophecy was in ancient Israel? What do you think the New Testament analogue should be?”
I do not know of any church that has introduced stoning. What do you think it should be?
I would say that l have seen more cases of people put under pressure either overtly or subtly to get married in churches.
It rarely ends well.
I’m not sure what the spiritual analogue of stoning is. I’m not hiding my opinion behind a rhetorical question as perhaps you think.
I’ve seen this too and am seriously suggesting a way of preventing it.
the fact that Paul says words from prophets need to be weighed/tested shows he did not view them as inerrant. Yet he doesnt go on to say if they got it wrong, at least in part, they should not be viewed as prophets. It is however difficult to understand precisely what Paul meant by ‘testing’. Or indeed if it was other prophets who should do the testing or the gathering as a whole. The impression I get today is that most ‘testing’ is done by the person receiving the word, as in if it ‘rings’ with them or not.
As for stoning, no but perhaps further training (like the fanning into flame of gifts which Paul refers to?). If a consistent pattern is observed that the individual is getting it wrong, then the wisest conclusion to draw is that he/she does not have that particular gift and they should cease.
Sadly in the US, a number of ‘prophets’ are being outed as false and the personal damage they have wrought is coming to light. Caution should therefore always be advised. But again, this does not mean the prophetic is not real today.
I entirely agree. That is why Ian’s view that gay people should enter heterosexual marriages is very misguided. It could be disastrous. My memory is that that advice used to be part of American ministries that claimed to cure homosexuality and it did prove a v ery bad idea.
I think heterosexual marriage is an option for some. I know of a number of gay men who went on to marry a woman, and lead fulfilled lives though they would still feel sexually attracted to some other men. I myself am gay and a Christian, and fully agree with Ian and others that God does not approve of same-sex sexual relationships, and that’s after looking at the question over a number of decades. I have never felt marriage was for me, and so am celibate. Yes it can be lonely, though if Im honest that is probably more to do with me than simply because Im gay and celibate.
Richard,
I think it depends on the individuals, how far they experience same-sex desire and how far they are bisexual. The Living Out Movement, for example, features a number of Christian men who have same-sex attraction, yet have wives and children and certainly seem to love their wives. I know personally a couple like this. I also know of three other couples with children where one party has left the marriage (after quite a few years) to pursue a homosexual relationship. Why this happens for some but not for others is not immediately clear. There is a backstory there that is rarely admitted, just as with heterosexual infidelity.
There is also the odd fact that lesbian relationships can arise in middle age for married women with children.
Have you any idea why this happens?
My impression is that most male homosexuals are somewhere on the bisexual spectrum.
James, I don’t have the expertise tomanswer these questions. I do think that whatever we think about gay relationships, fidelity and responsibility for children ought to be higher priorities than our culture tends to think. People used to “stay together for the sake of the children.” Not such a bad idea.
Although it could be taken as intrinsically an unnecessarily negative attitude when it would have been equally easy but 10000 times better to take a positive one. Negative seeds grow into negative trees, and positive likewise. My suspicion is that many who take the ‘make the best of a bad job’ attitude are self centred, because if they were altruistic they would realise that the job is as good or bad as you make it. And mature people, i.e. marriageable adults, become thus through love and self giving. It is only an infantilising or adolescent culture that produces widespread spoilt dissatisfaction, which is a self centred thing. Every time you complain you could hug or compliment instead.
It is hard to cure any habit at all after age 20-25, although habits range from highly beneficial to highly harmful. By that age any activity or trait will be internalised as core identity, including both helpful and harmful ones. Caveat emptor.
The question of “habit” and identity is a very interesting one, not least because positively it is central to the Aristotelean-Thomistic concept of virtue and character formation.
Good habits are by definition difficult to form because they go against the grain of self-pleasing, while potentially harmful acts that give us an endorphin ‘kick’ cry out for repetition, with more acts needed to achieve the same intensity of pleasure. It is also an interesting, if sometimes elusive, question why some people become obese, alcoholic or drug addicts, while others develop mental pathologies about their bodies, e.g. anorexia. Are these things fixed in a person’s ‘core identity” by 25? Cultivating good habits (and mental attitudes) and resisting easeful alternatives is not just for the young.
At the very least, the woman must be fully informed about her fiance’s sexuality. Otherwise it is incredibly unfair to her.
Richard, I have nowhere ever said ‘Gay people should enter other-sex marraiges’. It would help if you retract that claim.
As I note in a reply to Adam: In the light of biblical anthropology, some of my gay friends have shifted in their understanding of themselves, and happen to have met and fallen in love with a woman, and married and had children—all quite happily. One describes himself as ‘post gay’, because he has moved beyond defining himself in this way.
Other gay friends of mine have recognised Jesus’ call to either marry someone of the opposite sex, or remain single, and they have remained single, living rich and fruitful lives. Our sexualised culture which diminishes the importance of friendship has sometimes made that challenging for them, but they are drawn into the family of God’s people, and find their home there.
Thank you so much to Richard Bauckham for attempting, at least, to bring a dialogical approach to this prickly issue. As I have commented before, the arguments from Scripture will only ever get us so far. We NEED to have a dialogical approach, the kind of work done by Luke Bretherton and others. To speak of truth when is comes to God and human beings means encounter and relationships – Christian and non-Christian as well as human and God. The scriptures bear witness to that but aren’t the end of that story. It’s an ongoing piece of work. Scripture isn’t the only thing.
Truth is not a set of abstract dogmas or empirical facts, or formulations. Truth is a worked out in relationship. relational and participatory. It involves listening to others.
And when it comes to marriage, we have to recognise that Jesus takes an approach to marriage that is provisional. There is no giving and receiving in marriage in the kingdom of God. Luke 20:34-36 and parallels. So we need to recognise that same sex marriage, like all marriage, is a provisional thing, as is so much of life in this realm. And I understand that to mean that any doctrine of marriage is provisional and not of the same magnitude as credal doctrines.
Ian has said himself marriage is temporary, and will not continue into the next age. But that is quite different from saying that same-sex sexual relationships should be viewed in the same way.
Andrew;
Jesus never said that marriage (which could only be between a man and woman) was for everyone. He said some were ‘eunuchs for the Kingdom’. Some people, said Jesus, were not for marriage. They does not make them any less members of the Kingdom. A eunuch spiritually speaking means one is not in any sexual relationship. Do it shock you that Jesus said this?
Your last sentence is theologically confused. It is not the *doctrine of marriage that is provisional (as if we were to discover in 50 years’time that group marriage or temporary marriage or polyamory was actually “God’s will” as revisionists imagine) but the * institution, which is for this pre-resurrection life only.
This is one of the dishonest sleights of hand employed by synod revisionists. It is obvious that their bias is always to the end of getting the result that they want, rather than the one that is beneficial or will please God.
Other sleights of hand that recur include: secondary features of marriage have sometimes differed, ‘therefore’ I can make any primary changes I choose. It is disappointing that people seem so bad at seeing where trajectories of arguments are geared towards getting the desired results, and exposing that.
Truth is not a set of abstract dogmas or empirical facts
Wrong. Truth is a set of objective facts (some of which are empirical, like ‘the Earth is a rough oblate spheroid, and some of which are analytic, like ‘the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides’).
That is what truth means: facts that are true.
And that is just as much the case for people. Things that are true about people include, ‘Michael is six feet six inches tall’, ‘Harold is guilty of murder’, ‘Tony is cheating on his wife’, ‘Rachael loves her husband.’
All important truths about people. All objective facts.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘truth’ that isn’t a set of objective facts, but it can’t be anything like what normal people mean when they ask, ‘Is that true?’
Perhaps you could give examples of these things you think are true but aren’t objective facts?
Oh and by the way that applies to God as well. Things that are true about God are also objective facts. I can give you a few: ‘God created the universe’. ‘God is three in one.’ ‘God sent His son to die in our place.’ ‘God was incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who was conceived miraculously of a virgin in contravention of the laws of nature.’
S if you confirm, with the relevant details, that you are now permitted to comment here, I will consider my reply.
Decent of you, Andrew. As I recall you were banished from here some weeks ago but managed a comeback.
Poacher turned gamekeeper. There but for the grace etc.
I can confirm that matter was dealt with. I await that confirmation from S
It is up to Ian to decide whether to tolerate ‘S’ declining his requests for fuller identification. That Ian currently does so means that you discuss with S as an equal here. All that your refusal to engage with S achieves is make it appear you have no answers.
It’s off topic. I will gladly, as Ian suggests, debate with S via e mail.
You are no more Ian’s policeman about S’s offtopic comments than about his anonymity. It’s not my problem if you appear to have no reply.
‘the arguments from Scripture will only ever get us so far’
They will get us to discern the mind of God, expressed in the person of Jesus and the God-breathed scriptures.
This is only unsatisfactory if you want to go somewhere other than where God leads us.
That’s fine if you take a sola scriptura approach. I most certainly do not and neither does the Church of England. And that’s another discussion we have had countless times before.
It is still interesting to me that whole strands of Judaism have concluded that their scriptures are not the only way to discern the mind of God.
That’s fine if you take a sola scriptura approach
It’s not really about sola scriptura. It’s about whether the Bible is regarded as the written Word of God in which he reveals Himself to us; or whether it is regarded as merely the error-prone writings of fallible humans who were trying to record their encounters with the divine to the best of their ability.
The former view there is the Christian view; the latter is not Christian and those who hold it should leave the Church.
For example, the Roman denomination does not hold to sola scriptura, but it most emphatically does hold the Bible to be the written Word of God, and not just the writings of fallible human beings (see https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PP.HTM )
Christ is the Word of God.
Christ is the Word of God.
No. Christ is the Word, and Christ is God.
But Christ is not the Word of God.
Christ, the eternal Word of the living God
To quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church that you pointed us to.
To quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church that you pointed us to.
The Romans are wrong about a lot of things (and right about some things too).
Did you not read the bit of the Catechism you so confidently pointed us to?
It seems you’ve taken a Muslim belief about the Koran, and decided to apply it to the Bible. I don’t understand why.
Did you not read the bit of the Catechism you so confidently pointed us to?
Of course I did. I used it specifically as an example of how even denominations which do not accept sola scriptura still see the Bible as the Word of God and not just a collection of writings by fallible humans.
It seems you’ve taken a Muslim belief about the Koran, and decided to apply it to the Bible. I don’t understand why
TheMuslim belief about the Koran is that it was dictated word-by-word by God to an illiterate orphan. That is not and never has been the Christian view of the Bible; it’s not my view nor is it the view of the Roman catechism I gave as an example.
(The problem with calling Christ ‘the Word of God’ is that it suggests at least modalism, if not full partialism.)
I thought Christ was called the Word of God in Rev 19.
S, the Catechism does not say that the Bible is the Word of God. It very explicitly says Christ is. In does so in the section of the Catechism you pointed everyone to.
And Christopher raises an important point. When we see references to the Word of God in the Bible, are they ever referring to Scripture? Not in John 1 where “the Word became flesh”…
That is not what I said. What about Mark 7.13? Both the OT and Jesus are referred to in that way. What is the logic behind treating it as an either/or?
You are saying Jesus is referred to in Heb 4.12?
No Christopher, but I am saying Hebrews 4 isn’t talking about the Bible.
When we do see references to the Word of God in Scripture, it’s talking about God’s creative force (e.g. see Psalm 33) or direct revelation and message, which in the Gospel is embodied in Christ (John 14). So if you read the Bible you may hear and see the Word of God, because it is a lot of words about the Word, but the Bible itself is not the Word of God. In Hebrews 4 it’s talking about God’s active participation in the world and our lives, similar perhaps to Ephesians 6 which says the Spirit is the word of God.
Adam, I think you are both contradicting Jesus and creating a false dichotomy.
Of course, the word of God is what God has spoken. But Scripture repeatedly claims to record those words, and Jesus famously refers to the Scriptures as ‘what God has said’.
So Heb 4.12 is referring to more than the Scriptures, but it is not referring to less than them.
And the words of Jesus in the gospels are the words of the Word of God, which surely is also the word of God.
In 2 Tim 3.16, Paul uses the metaphor of God’s breathing out carrying the Scriptures to us, which is nothing less than the metaphor of God’s speech to us.
Ian’s perspective is right, but the living Word of which we are speaking is, so far as the Hebrews 4.12 author (Silas?) is concerned, inseparable from the scriptural text.
So the quotations at 4.3, 5.5-6 are something that ‘God has said’. The three at 2.12-13 are the OT words of Jesus. 3.7-11 is something that ‘the Holy Spirit says’.
Andrew: ‘the arguments from Scripture will only ever get us so far…’
There is also the dynamic work of the Holy Spirit speaking to our minds and consciences to help us discern which parts of scripture are culturally temporary and which parts are absolutely central (such as dying to self, following the way of the cross in daily life, and opening to the flow of love in our lives).
When you think about whether the earlier parts of the scriptures were provisional or in need of deeper spiritual understanding and expansion, Jesus’s comments (for example on the fulfilment of the Sabbath) referenced scripture but recognised there was more to unpack, in the context of God’s Holy Love. In some ways, Jesus was a ‘revisionist’. Which is not the same as refuting the wisdom to be found in many parts of scripture.
Scripture says (as propaganda) that God commanded people to slaughter the Canaanite children. That was in scripture too. But Jesus said ‘Let the children come to me.’
We are created with God-given consciences and these are part of the way God opens our minds to love. Scripture varies in applicability, and we have to reflect on the contexts of the authors (and their limitations) and seek in prayer to discern what to draw from other (fallible) people’s experiences and views.
In the end, the entire Bible has to be interpreted – with conscience – within the context of the greatest commandments of Love. Again and again, we need to look for the Love, and many people see the love and grace and goodness, the sacrifice and devotion, in same sex relationships.
If the entire scripture was to be enforced today, as if we were living in the first century, it would be an ossified faith. But the Spirit of God is dynamic. The scriptures can open us to inspiration: other people’s profound encounters with God inspiring our own.
But the Bible is not watertight for-all-time dictat. We are not automatons. We are God-created with conscience to live in relationship with a living God and a dynamic Holy Spirit. We should not be afraid of some parts of the Bible not being watertight, or even wrong if we apply it to our day.
Some parts are so clear and central. The heart of the gospel can be understood even by little children: love God and love one another, because love is the greatest commandment. And in loving God, open to kindness in our lives, and try to think of others which is what Jesus essentially did.
Other parts need to be seen as provisional, and expressions of people’s attitudes in their day as they tried to make sense of things. Same sex marriage wasn’t even a thing in their religious culture. It didn’t exist. That didn’t mean it would be wrong forever, and Jesus blessed marriage as it stood, but that doesn’t mean he was against the way it might one day develop and expand.
Just quoting scripture and assuming that’s enough may be a very impoverished and ossified spirituality, though within scripture there are also amazing insights and profound thoughts as well. We need the Holy Spirit – informing our conscience and capacity to love – to discern which parts of scripture are for all time, and which parts are coloured by the authors’ contexts of culture, or scientific ignorance, or containment within a world that is now 2000 years older with fresh challenges and fresh contexts.
Same-sex marriage is a fresh potential for love and grace and goodness in the community.
Other parts need to be seen as provisional
Only insofar as they point forward to Jesus. After Jesus nothing is provisional because after God Himself has become incarnate in the world there is no further revelation to come. How could there be? What else could top the single most important event in all of universal history, the source and author of all there is lowering Himself to dwell within His creation, in the form of one man, in one country, in one century? What else could there possibly be to wait for, or to change things, after that, save His return at the end of time?
But that’s besides the point, which is that you’ve already said you think the Bible is merely the writings of fallible human beings trying to make sense of their encounters with the divine.
This is an anti-Christian view so obviously you are never going to agree with any Christian who takes the Christian view that the Bible is the revelatory Word of God.
There exists a religion for people with your view. It is called Quakerism. You should stop pretending to be a Christian and join the Quakers, where your views will fit in perfectly.
Yes, but if there are reasons for thinking the Quakers are wrong in their worldview, why would you send people in that direction?
why would you send people in that direction?
I’m not sending people in any direction, just pointing out where people already are.
How will people ever find their way if they don’t know where it is they are starting from?
(In which case the injunction should be – right now you are Quaker; Quakers are wrong for reasons XYZ; so best to rectify that by coming in direction A.)
Andrew, the Church of England does indeed take a ‘sola scriptura’ approach. Scripture is our defining authority.
I think you might confuse that with a ‘nuda scriptura’ approach, which says that scripture is the only source.
But in the C of E, tradition and reason are hermeneutical lenses which help us to read scripture, which remains our only authority. That was the view of Hooker, and that is precisely how Richard Harries introduced the debate in Synod on Some Issues in Human Sexuality in 2005.
Truth is a word that is broadly used sometimes. But accuracy to reality is always a thing. S is right and AG is wrong in their attitude to whether accuracy to reality (which could not be more central to the activity of debating) is something we should turn our minds to at all.
Says Christopher who recently was yakking on about good and bad truths.
I suggest you take up your point, such as it is, with theologians like Luke Bretherton who seem to have a much clearer understanding of the matter than you or ‘S’ does.
How did you calculate that it was better, and how are you other than an unlikely candidate to stand above the three of us and dictate that?
From what you say, I am wrong to believe there are good truths and bad truths. Well then, it follows that we have a totalitarian situation: either all truths are beneficial or all truths are harmful.
Which one is it?
Ahh so you are now saying that truths aren’t simply objective entities but have a moral dimension?
Certainly not. What they are is objective realities (not entities). The moral dimension is not what they are. But they could scarcely avoid having that dimension.
New Anglican Matthew Barrett, has an excellent book, ‘God’s Word Alone – the Authority of Scripture, published as part of the Five Solas Series.
Simply, scripture is from the Mouth of God.
Without getting into a siding, could an infallible God, communicate reliably and for all time, through fallible and inconsistent, and transient human beings?
Of course such a God could, the Triune God of Christianity! How big is your God? Who is the God of the CoE?
BTW, as with Ian Paul’s comment so with Matthew Barrett; it is not nuda scriptura.
Who is this God?
The Most Important Question.
The Nature of God.
Yesterday the short podcast, with transcript, touched on apophatic theology but moves on, today, to who God is. Bringing much needed ballast, weight and light to the quarrel at hand: a starting point, perhaps?
https://learn.ligonier.org/podcasts/things-unseen-with-sinclair-ferguson/i-am-who-i-am
With foresight, and far from being historically redundant and with continued contemporary relevance to this topic and more, particularly the liberal- illiberal, pluralistic mindset, is the book, ‘The Gagging of God – Christianity confronts Pluralism’ by DA Carson, with a review here: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/the-gagging-of-god-christianity-confronts-pluralism/