Andrew Goddard writes: Yesterday, the latest proposal as to the way forward in relation to Living in Love and Faith (LLF) appeared in the form of GS 2358, to be added to all the previous General Synod papers since January 2023. This 31-page paper provides the motion (p. 17) the House of Bishops will be proposing at the July General Synod and supporting paperwork for it. What follows offers a brief overview of its main proposals and the issues they raise with much more detailed analysis and supporting argument in this longer article: GS 2346 Synod July 2024.
The proposal – explicitly still an “emerging proposal” – comes from the LLF Programme Board chaired by the Archbishop of York with a preface from Martyn Snow, the Bishop of Leicester as Lead Bishop. Behind it lies the work of 3 working groups, particularly at a residential in Leicester (10th to 12th May) and discussions at the College and House and Bishops, most recently on 12th June.
What is being sought?: From “three spaces in one Church” back to “a generous space” for a new “period of discernment”
It is clear that not all of these contributors are quite on the same page from the fact that the language of “three spaces” which Bishop Martyn introduced only two weeks ago (and I explored and Ian Paul has critiqued) has been withdrawn late in the process (para 10, p. 4). Instead we have simply returned to the language of “a generous space where all can thrive and where different theological convictions are honoured, recognising also that there are many congregations where a diversity of views of held” (para 4, p. 1). Despite having questions about how “three spaces” was being used, this is I think a retrograde step as it risks avoiding the need to face the deep doctrinal divisions we are facing and their implications for the nature of our unity.
The first part of the proposed Synod motion is a commitment “to support the overall proposal and timetable set out in GS 2358”. Given the fluid and provisional nature of the proposal it is not quite clear what such overall support means but one of the central new features of the paper is that there now be
a three-year period of discernment in the life of the church to enable the exploration of differing developments and practice while holding together as one church (para 15, p. 5).
Although it is immediately stated that “This is intended to be ‘discernment’ and not ‘reception’” the distinction between these two is never clarified or defended.
This clearly has significant implications for the timetable and it does appear that part of the facing up to the reality that is happening is that this whole process is going to take a lot longer than the bishops originally said. There now appear to be two stages: the shaping of this emerging proposal over the next year (July 2024-July 2025) and then a three-year period of discernment (2025-2028) leading to a report in 2029. During this period there will be new General Synod elections in 2026.
For those wanting change this is all likely to appear to be yet more “kicking into the long grass” whereas for those concerned about change this is likely to appear to be authorising “facts on the ground” under the guise of “a period of discernment”. Some of those “facts on the ground” are set out in the other parts of the motion
Prayers of Love and Faith: B2 or Not B2?
In what the paper describes as
possibly the greatest potential difference between the current proposal and previous proposals (especially the LLF motion as amended at the November 2023 General Synod) around the route of standalone service of PLF (para 33, p. 9)
the Synod motion proposes that Synod
request that the House of Bishops, with the advice of the LLF working groups…revise the Pastoral Guidance to remove restrictions on the use of PLF in ‘standalone’ services alongside the introduction of an arrangement to register for Pastoral Reassurance.
The argument (focussed in paras 18-19, p. 6 and 32-35, p. 9) is that we need to enter a “discernment period of trial usage” (para 18) of at least three years and only at the end of that decide whether “there are wider doctrinal and liturgical questions to be addressed” (which already clearly there are) and so whether “it might be appropriate at that stage to use the Canon B2 route for the formal approval of forms of service” (para 35). It therefore simply “allows for the option of a B2 vote following the discernment process, were this desired” (para 19). It appears that registration for such services would not happen until the first half of next year (p. 15).
As explained in more detail in the longer paper setting out eight concerns (here: GS 2346 Synod July 2024), this raises a host of very significant questions (several of which I began to explore here, and more fully, here at pp. 12-17). These relate to the disregarding of both the February and November General Synod motions, the overturning of the established consensus on the importance of using Canon B2, how the Church of England understands liturgical development, adherence to canons and the Worship and Doctrine Measure, and the role of the House of Bishops.
In short, this part of the motion asks Synod to request that the House of Bishops (which has no canonical standing on its own in relation to liturgy) to provide a new contentious rite, indicative of a departure from doctrine, thereby revoking earlier repeated Pastoral Statements, rejecting the Cornes amendment, reversing the Canon B2 route previously agreed by College, House and Synod. The development is clearly lacking the necessary 2/3 support in Synod required under Canon B2 and is so deeply opposed by large number in the Church of England and Communion that it threatens the unity of the church. What is more the House would be introducing this by a novel process (“commendation for a trial period”) which has no canonical basis, has never been used before in the Church of England, and looks like it is either meaningless or unlawful.
In relation to paying attention to episcopal power, the centrality and integration of liturgy and doctrine in Anglicanism, the importance of common worship but with freedom for local variations at discretion of clergy, respect for established constitutional, Synodical and canonical processes, and the need to guard and work for the unity of the church and defend its doctrine, that seems quite a major step to take. This is especially so as it appears to be an unexplained “policy decision” on the basis of a weekend in Leicester just over a month ago and a misreading of a Synod amendment (which simply asked the House “to consider” something alongside Canon B2) which was passed by a majority of one in the House of Laity while crucial legal advice relating to these matters was being withheld at the time from both bishops and Synod.
Pastoral Reassurance: How reassuring for those needing it?
The motion requests the bishops to remove restrictions on standalone services “alongside the introduction of an arrangement to register for Pastoral Reassurance”. This is another new and contentious development (see particularly paras 24-29, pp. 7-8). The nature of that reassurance is then set out:
Synod request that the House of Bishops, with the advice of the LLF working groups, establish the basis for the provision of Pastoral Reassurance through a House of Bishops’ Statement and Code of Practice which provides for the delegation of some specific and defined episcopal ministry, and which is overseen by an Independent Review Panel.
Synod agree for the arrangements for Pastoral Reassurance to be regularly monitored over a period of at least three years before being formally reviewed by General Synod.
As always here the devil is going to be in the detail but at present some of the parameters appear to be clear:
- The basis of the reassurance will be a House of Bishops’ Statement and Code of Practice (discussed in paras 51-55, pp. 12-13) which “would not require legislation but would be strengthened by some level of legislative underpinning” (para 26, p. 7)
- Whatever episcopal ministry is provided (and this, according to Appendix A, pp. 18-19) could range from very little to everything short of what is reserved to the ordinary – here it does feel like Synod is being asked to sign a blank cheque) is to be secured by “delegation” and it is not clear whether this will be required or discretionary.
- There will be an Independent Review Panel (Annex B, pp. 20-26 gives more details here) and monitoring for “at least three years”, an open-ended duration.
- This will – following a commitment to “symmetry” which itself raises some important questions – be offered across different views where there is a desire for “care from a bishop whose ministry they are in conscience able to receive” (para 2, p. 1)
It is clear that many – including many bishops – still have grave concerns about this (as noted in para 27, p. 8) and that it needs much more work. Sadly, all I have seen and heard suggests that for most of those unhappy with PLF this is too little: it falls significantly short of what is needed and certainly will not be sufficient should same-sex married clergy be introduced. It is therefore disappointing that although this has been clearly and repeatedly communicated back, for example in stakeholder meetings, these concerns have apparently fallen on deaf ears. This is most likely because even what is offered here is still too much provision for many. Those concerns will make it very hard, I suspect, for those who have been explaining their need for such provision, to be able to support the proposal in its current form or to have sufficient confidence in the processes that will develop the proposal further if the motion is passed in its current form.
One problem here is that while the different perspectives in Synod are being urged that they need to give up something if there is to be a settlement, the bishops who urge this are seemingly unwilling to give up anything significant themselves. In particular, many of them have apparently focussed their self-understanding on being “a focus of unity” in a manner which is divorced from their call to uphold doctrine and is even consistent with pressing for changes in doctrine.
The deeper problem, though, remains that differentiated provision is an ecclesial consequence of differentiated doctrine. The short-lived attempt to frame how we maintain as high a degree of unity as possible in terms of 3 spaces began to recognise that fact but its vanishing act (not unconnected it would seem to its consequences for provision) means there is now no clear ecclesiological rationale. In fact, we risk being left simply with a power struggle between competing parties (including, perhaps especially, bishops in relation to their own power and authority) seeking either maximal or minimal (or at least limited) provision.
Departure from doctrine or development of doctrine?
Clause (b)(iii) of the motion (supported by paras 36-46, pp. 9-11) reads that the Synod
request that the House of Bishops, with the advice of the LLF working groups, report to this Synod at its February 2025 group of sessions on the further theological work carried out under the auspices of the Faith and Order Commission around the nature of doctrine, particularly as it relates to the doctrine of marriage and the question of clergy in same-sex civil marriages.
This highlights the welcome development that the bishops are recognising the doctrinal significance of this process but also implicitly acknowledges that it is no longer possible simply to keep stating that the doctrine of marriage remains unchanged given the developments now under consideration. The commissioning of more work from within FAOC (there is already work nearing completion but unlikely to appear until after Synod meets) is welcome but the timeframe is once again very tight given the complexity and weight of issues involved.
All this raises the question as to whether it would not be best to pause and only proceed further with decisions on any further developments when the doctrinal questions can be properly examined. This would also mean that – as in the Archbishop of York’s promise to Synod in February 2023 (“I won’t be able to support commending these prayers until we have the pastoral guidance and pastoral provision”) and the draft commitments proposed to Synod in February 2024 (“This includes completing the Pastoral Guidance and Pastoral Reassurance work before enabling the use of the standalone PLF”) which were reaffirmed as the intention in various meeting since then – it would be possible for the 3 different areas to be developed together and evaluated, with theological input, as a coherent package.
Pastoral Guidance: Seeking the end of the rainbow?
What is noteworthy about the motion and the paperwork supporting it is how little attention is given to the question of the Pastoral Guidance to replace Issues in Human Sexuality. The short discussion of this (paras 20-23, pp. 6-7) appears to favour the approach of “disapplying discipline” but notes the challenges with this while suggesting it might be able to happen “during a period of discernment”. Having originally promised the new Pastoral Guidance for a year ago (Synod in July 2023) it is now “envisaged” that the theological work will be completed within a timeframe “to enable the House of Bishops consider decisions [on the question of the removal of restrictions on clergy entering same-sex civil marriage] by January 2025” (para 44, pp. 10-11). Reference is also made to the need for a statement from the House of Bishops and “Interim Ministry Guidance” which will be “clear on Church of England doctrine” and set out “the foundational requirements of sexual and other relationships required of clergy” (para 22, pp. 6-7) although this is not mentioned in the motion which proposes that Synod
Agree that taken together the Pastoral Guidance, the Bishop’s Statement [presumably Bishops’] and Code of Practice for pastoral provision will replace Issues in Human Sexuality.
Here the “pig in a poke” problem with much of the current proposal reaches its heights: the Pastoral Guidance exists but is now in need of quite significant revision if standalone services are commended rather than authorised; the Bishops’ Statement and the Code of Practice (paras 51-55, pp. 12-13 and Annex A, pp. 18-19) are currently threadbare to non-existent. What is more, for some reason there is no reference in the motion to the Interim Ministry Guidance discussed and of great importance in the paper. It is also far from clear that any of these various documents will include a significant theological rationale (which formed the majority of Issues in Human Sexuality) or whether they will replace the various Pastoral Statements subsequent to Issues in Human Sexuality.
There is the real risk that passing this will simply enable the bishops to claim to have replaced Issues without any further scrutiny from General Synod.
Legal Advice
A repeated problem throughout this process has been the lack of transparency about legal advice given to the bishops. Annex C (pp. 27-31) says “there has been no change in the legal advice” (para 1, p. 27) relating to PLF but does not address the implications of the Legal Office’s clear statement in January 2023 in GS Misc 1339 that “In reaching a final view on the legal position the Legal Office will need to see both the final draft of the Prayers and the replacement pastoral guidance”. (para 10, italics added).
It is also unclear whether any written legal advice has been provided since February and the Annex largely reproduces previous summaries of past unpublished legal advice. Despite being very far from full disclosure and transparency these pages do merit careful reading as to what they say and the unstated implications of what they say concerning the legal issues raised by the proposal.
Conclusion
It is less than 24 hours since the relevant paper for General Synod appeared and it contains a lot to process. As this account makes clear, in some areas much has been done but in many areas there is much still to be done and several serious questions about what is being proposed. What has been done has been done, like so much in this process, at great speed. There is still a sense that we are finding ourselves in the situation described by Richard Hooker his discussion of “the dire consequences of radicalism”:
when the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded that it is the will of God for them to do those things they fancy, their opinions are as thorns in their sides, not allowing them to rest until they have put their speculations into practice (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Preface, 8.12).
The aim since February 2024 has been to find a consensus for a settlement. The process that has been used, although it has yielded some good fruit, not least in Synod members engaging well and not being forced (as they now will be again in July) into a confrontational debate, has struggled. This is due to the pace forced on it and the request to achieve certain outcomes (erroneously described as “building on previous work and decisions taken by the General Synod and the House of Bishops” (para 1, p. 1) despite clearly disregarding and misinterpreting many of those decisions) which clearly require much more work especially on doctrine and ecclesiology. In addition there have clearly been significant challenges of connecting up the mind of the working groups, the mind of the Programme Board, the mind of the College, the mind of the House, and now the mind of Synod.
I know that there is little enthusiasm for the proposals among most evangelicals who have been unhappy with the PLF/LLF process. I suspect that many wishing for change will also be frustrated and concerned about aspects of them. That, in one sense, is baked into seeking a settlement where nobody can get everything they want. The question is whether the proposal is sufficiently baked and sufficiently appetising for Synod.
It may be that enough people vote for it or abstain in a final vote for a new outcome to be generated in this Synod. Alternatively, we are likely to be back to the very close votes in February and November 2023 (where changes in Synod membership alone let alone changes in the minds of Synod members could make a difference) or a rerun of February 2024 with agreement across the Synod that it would be better not to vote but rather adjourn the debate or move once again to next business.
In approaching General Synod yet another passage from Hooker, relating to these questions of doctrine and church government with which we are now more explicitly wrestling, may be a helpful guide:
Some things are plain, such as basic Christian doctrine, while other things are more difficult, such as church government, and we should only be as convinced as reason, guided by the Holy Spirit, permits. Therefore, it is not how passionately someone is convinced, but how soundly they argue, that should persuade us that their views genuinely come from the Holy Spirit, and not from the deceit of that evil spirit, so strong even in his illusions (Laws, Preface, 3.10)
Revd Dr Andrew Goddard is Assistant Minister, St James the Less, Pimlico, Tutor in Christian Ethics, Westminster Theological Centre (WTC) and Tutor in Ethics at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. He is a member of the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) and was a member of the Co-Ordinating Group of LLF and the subgroup looking at Pastoral Guidance.
Buy me a Coffee
Synod voted by majority for prayers of blessing for same sex couples within services under PLF and already such services are taking place in liberal Catholic and liberal Evangelical C of E churches across England. There may be some period of discernment over standalone services but they are still ultimately coming through on an experimental basis too given all 3 Houses of Synod voted by majority for them.
There has been no change in doctrine anyway, Synod also made clear by majority holy matrimony is reserved for heterosexual couples ideally in lifelong unions
Count the things that are zero percent anything to do with Jesus:
(1) ‘liberal’
(2) Synod voting
(3) ideally
(4) vagueness of ‘period of discernment’
etc.
Those things are very important to the C of E, Jesus is relevant to Roman Catholics, Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists, Lutherans, Quakers, he is even a prophet for Muslims.
Belief in Jesus as Messiah does not make the C of E distinctive, the votes of Synod and what it decides and the King being its Supreme Governor, its senior Bishops in the Lords and the BCP are what makes the C of E distinctive
Firstly you are treating denominations (regiments) as of supreme importance, but the actual church (army) as of no importance. But what are denominations without the church, anyway? Can you confirm that, as your answers so regularly show, you regard denominations OF the church as much more central than the actual church as a whole?
Second, did Jesus agree or disagree with you there?
Third, you seem to be under the illusion that people just select whatever tickles their fancy, regardless of which way the evidence points. They just join a denomination that they ‘like’. But liking something will, as you obviously know, not mean it is either good or correct. Can you confirm that you are prioritising personal preference above truth here?
Fourth, if people do indeed surround themselves with like minded people, then can you confirm that this is the worst possible situation for their ever advancing in understanding by being exposed to challenges to their positions? So why are you advocating something that is the worst possible?
It would be so much simpler if we just went with the people who have obviously devoted so much more thought to these matters and do not have positions riddled with inconsistencies. Where else would airtime be given to positions that had so many inconsistencies?
In terms of the C of E yes its being a distinct denomination governed by Synod and under the supreme governorship of the King is vital to its existence as the English established church. Otherwise half of it may as well go off an become Roman Catholic and the other half go off and become Baptist, Pentecostal or join an independent evangelical church.
But my question was: according to what principle did you ever select one of these groups in the first place? Was it or was it not nothing but personal preference, regardless of truth or accuracy?
T1
And just two of those, English King as Supreme Governor and Bishops in the Lords, make the CofE distinctive by defying the teaching of Jesus (= God) and the apostles. And as they clrearly didn’t come from the Bible, and therefore are not from heaven, where exactly did those two ideas come from??
On what basis? The first Pope, Peter, was an apostle and even C of E Bishops derive in apostolic succession from him. The Church of England was just established precisely to ensure the King rather than Pope was its Supreme Governor.
If your interpretation of the Bible has no place for Bishops, Popes or Kings, then obviously you should not be in a church of Bishops of apostolic succession like the Lutherans and RCs and Orthodox as well as we Anglicans. If you reject the role of the Pope or the King in the Church then you shouldn’t be Roman Catholic or Anglican. There are plenty of Baptist or Presbyterian churches or independent evangelical churches you can join with no Bishops, no Kings as their supreme governors and which reject the authority of the Pope over them
What a bizarre comment. I do wonder what kind of church you think you belong to. Article XX says:
THE Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of holy Writ, yet, as it ought not to decree any thing against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation.
I cannot think of any verse i scripture which demands a Pope or says the king of a nation ‘rules’ the Church. So your claim is contrary to the doctrine of the C of E.
No, Canon A6 of the Church of England says ‘The government of the Church of England under His Majesty, by archbishops, bishops, deans, archdeacons, and the rest of the clergy and of the laity that bear office in the same, is not repugnant to the Word of God.’
Canon A7 says ‘We acknowledge that His excellent Majesty, acting according to the laws of the realm, is the highest power under God in this kingdom, and has supreme authority over all persons in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil.’
So how the Word of God is interpreted in the C of E is down to the majority of its Bishops, clergy and laity. The King in turn has supreme authority over the Church of England
Lol. The majority of bishops, clergy and laity cannot even *read* the Bible, having no Hebrew nor Greek. They can read only attempted translations of it.
So it is clear that we should exalt their contribution above that of trained Bible scholars.
Sounds a bit like ‘It’s my ball, so I say I win the match.’.
Some do. Reverend Marcus Walker for example is well versed in Latin and ancient Greek and supports PLF
Christopher
So the ability to read Greek and Hebrew takes you to the authoritative, limpid mind of God?
No. Rather it gives people a particularly notable head start And secondly there are so many people in the world who can read those languages that there is no time to listen to those who cannot, given that we would naturally prioritise those many who can.
Christopher
We could prioritise them if we could be absolutely certain that they would not translate these languages into an ideological version like the ESV.
Unfortunately, being able to read Greek, He tew and Aramaic doesn’t stop people having ideological convictions which shape their beliefs and interpretations
No but it makes it one step less likely. And every little helps. And they would remain more worth consulting, considerably so, than those who did not know the languages. Which was my only point anyway.
No, your point was that “The majority of bishops, clergy and laity cannot even *read* the Bible, having no Hebrew nor Greek. “
You are making a number of ridiculous claims here.
1. That none of the English translations of the bible available are accurate.
2. That the majority aren’t aware of assistance given by, for example, an interlinear version.
3. That ordinands have not studied Greek and Hebrew.
1. No translation is accurate in the nature of the case, but they do their very best.
2. Yes – but this involves looking up individual words to see their semantic range, and the majority of which I spoke is the same majority that by and large has never done that.
3. Ordinands, yes – but you included laity. By the blandness of many episcopal pronouncements and their busy schedules I deduce that many bishops and clergy have done very little first hand Greek study since their seminary days. And for Hebrew it would always have been a small minority.
I didn’t include laity. It was you who did so. Let me remind you
“The majority of bishops, clergy and laity cannot even *read* the Bible, having no Hebrew nor Greek. They can read only attempted translations of it.”
You are basically saying that the whole Reformation idea of giving the laity the bible in their own language wasn’t important and that laity have to rely on scholars to explain it for them. And toy are also implying that those scholars who have attempted to translate the bible didn’t do a very good job of it..,
Your original comment is ridiculous.
Simon T1 the C of E doesn’t claim to be distinctive. It claims to be a true part of the church catholic since it is Protestant and Reformed thus true to the scriptures which testify to the birth of the people of God.
“a generous space where all can thrive and where different theological convictions are honoured, recognising also that there are many congregations where a diversity of views of held”
Hmm – Much the same kind of situation that Paul was addressing in Corinth.
???Convictions. Why don’t they just admit that they claim that absolutely everyone, however little they have studied and however little they have ventured from the safe space of their own subculture, and however young they are, has not only bona fide convictions, but bona fide convictions of EQUAL value to those of everyone else?
Andrew Goddard is an irenic and gracious commentator.
It is clear even his patience has now been exhausted by the nonsense being imposed on us by the bishops.
The level of incompetence, theological ignorance and sheer stupidity is beyond comprehension.
A bunch of people coughing up their confusion in a Leicester Conference centre over a weekend.
Seriously ?
The level of incompetence, theological ignorance and sheer stupidity is beyond comprehension.
You are being too kind. It all stems from the level of their unbelief and their arrogance.
Indeed.
There is a scene in Heath Ledger’s final film, playing a diabolical rendering of the Joker, in which Batman asks the question “why” in the face the chaos caused by the Joker.
Batman’s assistant (played to perfection by Michael Caine) makes the observation “some men just want to see the world burn”.
A modern take on Goethe’s terrible and prophetic Mephistophelian utterance “everything that exists deserves to perish”.
This dark spirit now directs the Church of England.
Yes because allowing prayers of blessing, not even marriage, for same sex couples in monogamous unions and married in UK civil law really is close to apocalyptic isn’t it?
It may or may not be apocalyptic – like you, I have no idea when Jesus will return.
I do know what blasphemy looks like, and that is certainly what the bishops of the Church of England have in mind.
In that case I assume you also oppose divorce, women priests or even eating shellfish, all of which also have verses in the Bible against them?
T1, you need to learn to read your Bible. All Christians are priests according to – ironically – St Peter himself (I’ll leave the reference as an exercise for the reader), the shellfish ban applied only in ancient Israel, and who is in favour of divorce? In those days you did not ask the authorities for a divorce, you informed them.
Simon, you are priceless. ‘You oppose divorce’, you say. Jesus was the most famous person in the world who opposed divorce. But something called Synod doesn’t, on a majority, so hey-
Just admit it. Can you give a straight answer to this? Have you sidelined Jesus in favour of something called Synod? Yes or no?
I don’t oppose divorce although I would prefer it is allowed only for spousal adultery as Jesus said it should be reserved for. Of course even after Synod allowed remarriage of divorcees in church some priests still won’t remarry divorcees on a conscience basis
So you would ‘prefer’ if Jesus’s teaching was followed, but it does not have to be?
What is the thing that is more important than Jesus’s protective teaching which HAS to be followed in preference to Jesus’s teaching, then?
“Overall, this proposal seeks to encourage those who hold different views with integrity to thrive and continue to relate together well in our common life. Part of this requires the recognising by all that different views are held with integrity, and the need for purposeful commitment to practical and ongoing engagement across our differences. As such, the outline of areas for inclusion in a Code of Practice for Pastoral Provision includes how this might frame and shape practice for all; laity, clergy, bishops and parishes.”
-Para 16, p5
I think this small paragraph near the start is indicative of the the whole project/proposal’s direction. The rationale seems obvious from the outset. Agreement, or consensus, is explicitly not the end goal, if it ever were; and these proposals recognise that it simply cannot be achieved. Instead, the highest hope is for continued *engagement* across those differences, meaning an acknowledgment that they exist while doing nothing about them. The ecclesial equivalent of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. This is what it means to “move forward as one church”, a phrase I immediately disliked as it sounds like phoney political sloganeering.
Everything else that follows reads to me like an attempt at pre-emptive damage control. Alternate provision and oversight for people who disagree, room for conscientious opt-in and opt-out, proper processes for complaints and disciple…
What does it even mean to consider alternate views are held with integrity? I am quite happy to accept that Muslims for example hold their view with integrity. I wouldn’t worship with or fund them.
I don’t consider liberals to be working with good intent or integrity within the Anglican formularies. I would have more respect for them if they left and formed their own churches. But they are trying to upend the bible believing reformed Protestant church that I was baptised into and now minister in. And I will resist that with every bit of my will and every scrap of power I have until they force me out or I force them out. Bring it on.
I would have more respect for conservative evangelicals if they had the courage of their convictions and left the CoE.
Many don’t hold an Anglican ecclesiology and surely the rich churches could provide buildings and pensions. If they are so successful, as they claim, they’ll flourish.
But they want the C of E national church to be properly Christian not apostate. SHould they be wanting it to be apostate not Christian?? Also secondly, if they left there would be no numbers nor money nor most importantly long-term commitment, and the most glorious institution and infrastructure we have (the parish system) would crumble. It has – in the context of said apostasy – already begun to do so.
Ah i see you are now changing your tune from your statement on the previous thread. You do think there is something superior about the Church of England.
It’s the Gamaliel principle.
Personally, I would rather not share an ecclesiology with St Helen’s and some HTB plants. But I’m not a Donatist. It’s up to them. But if they would just stop whining and blackmailing that would be good.
You are taking it as though this was a single question, when it is several.
(1) The parish and buildings structure is far, far superior to any group.
(2) The community involvement is also at the top of the comparative scale.
(3) The sense of heritage is much higher than average, and that is precisely what our society needs.
(4) The ethos is below average.
(5) The origins were below average.
(6) The present leadership is below average.
(7) The cultural compliance is at a very disappointing level.
So as it is far more than one question, there is far more than one answer.
Ah Christopher of course it’s several. So why did you treat it as a single thing before.
And what on earth does ‘below average’ mean when applied to leadership? Please give an objective definition of leadership.
Your level of waffle is very much below average
Anything at all can have holes picked in it. But debate takes place on the basis of content, e.g. the 7 points I just made. Leadership means not meekly following but pioneering and initiating.
And also inspiring and being followed.
Your ‘Ah Christopher’ sayings make you simultaneously embrace with both hands the role of Disney villain, and also enact that by pretending to be terribly wise and patient.
Debate takes place on the basis of answering questions and not waffling. You don’t answer questions and you spend countless words pretending to be wise when in fact its pure waffle.
“Leadership means not meekly following but pioneering and initiating.”
By that definition Nigel Farage and Adolf Hitler would make good leaders.
Nigel Farage and Adolf Hitler ”would” make good leaders. Untrue for loads of reasons as there always are when Andrew, as usual, does not read what is said.
(1) He knows I did not define a good leader but a leader.
(2) Why ”would” Hitler make a leader hypothetically? He already has. It is not a future matter. Same applies to Nigel Farage.
(3) The abilities to awaken inspiration, attract followers, pioneer and initiate are obviously neutral, depending entirely on whether it is good or bad things that are being modelled and followed.
(4) You cannot seriously think that people follow only good people, or that only good people lead. Where have you been?
(5) You then compound that by trivialising the holocaust by putting A Hitler in second place to N Farage. Bedfellows indeed in entirely comparable felony. But at least you get brownie points from the generation who has no idea of the horrors of the holocaust, which is the main thing.
Ahh I see. Forage and Hitler are just ‘below average’ leaders then?
I asked for an objective definition of leadership. Turns out you can’t actually provide one. What a surprise.
That’s a coincidence as I also missed your definition.
It cannot surely be that you are restricting your activities to picking holes in what others say without ever providing anything better yourself that would give you authority to do the former.
If you missed my definition, search harder. It had to do with pioneering, inspiration, initiation, followers.
Where on earth did I say Forage and Hitler were below-average leaders? Where does this quotation derive from?
First of all, I did not mention Forage at all, nor do I know who he is.
Second, Hitler is an anti-leader or malign leader, not a mediocre one.
Christopher you have a serious problem following an argument! You introduced the phrase ‘below average leader’ earlier in the thread. So I asked you to provide an objective definition of leadership so that we could determine what was below and what was above average.
Of course you can’t provide an objective definition as there isn’t one. And therefore we can’t make any judgement about being below or above average. Your phrase ‘below average’ is just a subjective judgement about something you don’t like. As usual. It is no wonder you can’t be taken seriously.
It is clearly not subjective but objective. Numbers following have gone down. In what sense are numbers (of all things) subjective (of all things)? That is something that even you cannot believe.
Your sentence was ‘Please give an objective definition of leadership.’. Which I did. Levels of leadership can be gauged by numbers of followers. So far so good. That does not define good leadership; that is an ambiguous phrase. If we mean effective leadership, that is what we define by numbers of followers. If we mean wholesome leadership, that exists where it is wholesome qualities that are being followed. I said the C of E was below average in that respect because the values espoused are below averagely good (in their propensity for spreading good things like health, happiness and success) for a Christian organisation. Health, happiness and success are tied to stronger (not diminishing) attendance and to a stronger (not diminishing) marriage-culture.
Now watch, everyone, as Andrew picks holes (negatively) and offers no alternative or improvement (which would be a positive thing).
Who is ‘we’ in your overlong post(s) Christopher?
We don’t do anything. You make pronouncements as if they were fact. Whereas they are just your opinions.
Trying to actually get you to follow an argument, or use language in the way others use it, or answer any question is clearly futile. Come back and have the last word, by all means. ‘We’ all know you need to have it. ‘We’ can also predict what it will be. Be ‘our’ guest. 🙂
My posts are longer than yours because I am giving more detailed arguments than you give.
Which is exactly why when it comes to ‘facts not pronouncements’ then it is short posts that are put into question, not longer posts that involve proper argument can see more facets and aspects.
Yes, you agree you cannot answer or gainsay.
However, as to the last word – I wish. I often advance things further than the previous state – but that only produces the last word SO FAR. The last word would be when an issue was conclusively solved for all time. My trajectory is to get as close to that point as possible, by a process of refinement. If, unaccountably, anyone does *not want to get as close to truth as possible, then they are neither interested in truth (boo) nor apt to partake in debate.
For ‘things’, read ‘a 2- or 3-person discussion’.
The C of E has £8 billion in investments in the stock market and lots of lucrative assets it rents out in central London. It would survive regardless of what conservative evangelicals do, though personally I am fine with them staying with their conscience opt out from PLF as long as they accept most churches will follow the Synod vote and have prayers for same sex couples
Surely all their rich congregants would follow them?
“They are trying to upend the bible believing reformed Protestant church that I was baptised into and now minister in. And I will resist that with every bit of my will and every scrap of power I have until they force me out or I force them out. Bring it on.”
There is nothing of Christ in this post. Nothing Christian at all….
So you claim. I reject your claim on exactly the same amount of evidence.
Nothing that you recognise?
Well, exactly.
This has it’s origins in the rejection of the Pilling Report. That led (eventually) to LLF being started, but the proposed Prayers that came from it were largely a re-hash of Pilling. When the Bishops were pressed for the theological basis of what they were proposing, we got an essay on Church unity in disagreement, not ethics of sexuality.
The Bishops however are not the only guilty party in this. Throughout CEEC and related voices have been agitating for a re-structure of the Church and declaring that this means we need a third province etc.. Much like the Bishops they’ve been extremely reluctant to get into the question of what Church teaching for gay people ought to be.
It’s all quite bizarre.
Indeed. Nor is there any theology of sexuality and embodiment emerging. Although much of the ground has already been laid in the LLF resource materials.
The search for a kind of spurious unity or consensus is fruitless. Pilling and it’s aftermath demonstrated that.
Though I don’t believe another schism with impossible guiding principles will be either effective or holy. The quest for a pure church is always bloody.
I do wonder if there’s more agreement in the pews that people are prepared to test or admit. The ‘conservatives’ are very shy about what they really think the teaching to gay people is. We’ve heard not a peep of encouragement for the suggested work on celibacy. No one has suggested amending the proposed prayers for covenanted friendship to be clear this is the option for celibate partnerships. There are no speeches from the Synod floor declaring that sexual orientation is a social construct to be ignored, or that gay people should be encouraged into straight marriages. Nor is there any ask that we reverse the allowance for civil partnerships (if celibate). Nor is there a push to say that your sexual orientation can be changed or ‘cured’. There has been no attempt to even consider what the Church should say to a gay couple who come to faith after they’ve got married.
Conservatives, i.e., those faithful to biblical teaching, are not at all shy about what the bible says (and have said it on this blog). But we don’t shout it from the rooftops without taking care to phrase it carefully, because of iniquitous laws against free speech that people holding your view got enacted. And then you complain that we don’t fall into your trap. You are no friend of God’s word and in practice are indistinguishable from secular.
“But we don’t shout it from the rooftops without taking care to phrase it carefully”
I think you mean obfuscate, avoid, skirt round, and hand-wave.
Where are the suggestions in Synod to amend the PLF for covenanted friendships?
Where are the statements encouraging the Bishops to work on celibacy?
Where are the speeches declaring sexual orientation is a social construct, or that gay people should be encouraged into straight marriages?
Where is the demand that we reverse the allowance for civil partnerships or that the much-asked for third province be allowed to do that?
Where is the effort to even consider whether gay couples should divorce?
Twenty years ago Andrew Goddard wrote:
“Will we really seek to understand gay people? Will we create Christian communities in which our vision becomes reality and so is not a harsh law but embodied as the gospel of grace? Will we establish a Church where recognition and support to single people and chaste loving friendships and it is demonstrably no longer the case that gay Christians can legitimately say ‘you have offered me in my life no viable strategy for ordering my life’?”
The answer you’ve given to that is “no”.
Oh, you mean where are the discussions about those things at the level in the Church of England that makes decisions, i.e. the bishops. It might have saved us time if you had said what you meant. I wouldn’t look to the bishops for anything. You could always talk to some evangelical Anglican laymen, or nonconformists, or (whisper it) read the Bible.
Oh dear. Synod is a lot more than the Bishops Anton. You know this. Stop pretending otherwise. Likewise, pretending that I was unclear when I decried the lack of “speeches from the Synod floor” is disingenuous in the extreme. As for reading the Bible, I did. You can tell because when I answer these questions, I actually cite the Scriptures I’m using in the argument. That stands in contrast to you of course, who claims to answer, but doesn’t actually answer, then says you daren’t answer or at least can’t answer clearly, but won’t remind anyone of your answers because you say you don’t want to repeat yourself. It’s all very unimpressive and pretty transparent.
I have given scripturally referenced answers to those questions before on this blog and you know it.
The bishops decide what gets put to synod.
I have to say that I admire Andrew Goddard’s patience in continuing to trall through all this stuff. I’m quite sure that most of the C of E stopped paying attention to all this a long time ago, and yet the process grinds on. How much is all this costing?
I have a very specific concern about pastoral provision. The Code of Practice is intended ‘so that those … who feel they require it, can request care from a bishop whose ministry they are in conscience able to receive’. However, Annex A makes it clear that ‘Cathedrals would be exempted from arrangements for extended episcopal care’.
It follows that, unlike other clergy, ‘symmetry’ is not to be extended to those who minister in cathedrals. Does this mean that, in order to ‘flourish’, we will either have to go with the flow, or leave?
Edward Feser in his blog makes this comment on Roger Scruton on tradition which is very applicable to the discussion in hand and indicates how far off beam the Church of England bishops have become:
“Scruton points out that the liberal in politics who tosses aside traditional practices and principles naively and arrogantly supposes that he can do better, when in fact his novelties are grounded in a far more short-sighted view of things than is embodied in tradition. He often ends up generating chaos, and the tradition he has undermined cannot easily be revived. (To borrow a famous analogy of Wittgenstein’s, restoring the common sense embodied in tradition after it has been lost is like trying to repair a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers.)
Something similar is true in theology – indeed, it is more true in theology, since the credibility of any claim to represent the deliverances of divine revelation crucially depends on consistency with what that revelation has always been understood to say. For modern churchmen to imply by their words and actions that even two millennia of consistent traditional teaching cannot be trusted can only generate skepticism about the trustworthiness of these churchmen themselves. In theology as in politics, those who undermine tradition saw off the branch on which they are themselves sitting.”
Trying to reconfigure the nature of Christian marriage only ends up distorting the nature of parenthood and indeed the nature of our embodiment as male and female. The rise of transgenderism in the past handful of years is no accident but comes precisely as a consequence of forgetting the whole creational purpose of the complementarity of the sexes.
You are assuming that parenthood is intrinsic to marriage. It is not.
You are assuming that there is something called ‘the whole creational purpose of the complementarity of the sexes’. That is a very modern belief.
You are assuming that embodiment as male and female itself proscribes same-sex relationships. There is no evidence – natural nor biblical – that it does.
How very modern Jesus was in Matt 19 when he states that a man shall leave his father and mother and take a wife and the two shall become one flesh. Consummation leading to procreation. A same sex couple cannot consummate or procreate without a third party involvement. Now that is a modern invention!
Tricia
A fifth of same sex couples are raising children. Mostly these are biological children of one of them or adopted.
The CofE has not thought about these families at all. How should they be treated if they attend church? Do you want the kids in Sunday School being told their family shouldn’t exist? Does the vicar tell the parents they need to divorce and put the kids into care?
The fact that there’s be no discussion of these basic issues shows that the church leaders have never taken this topic seriously on any side of the discussions
Jesus doesn’t mention children at all in Matthew 19. He’s talking about sexual desire and intimate companionship.
Another five years. Great! THAT should be long enough for the evangelicals – faithful but sluggish – to organise against their deceitful bishops.
Andrew, you are absolutely right that the devil is in the details. I’m sure you meant that…
A key question for all Christians in the CoE, particularly those who are in stipendiary ministry, who are all called to come under authority of their Bishop, are they to remain under apostate Bishops, Bishops who have defacto renounced, played fast and loose with their ordination vows, let alone those who may be known to be atheists, in their walk of unbelief, from one degree of unbelief to another.
Are they to be restrained and retained by what Ian Paul has coined as, golden handcuffs?
Is that where known, strong evangelical churches such as St Helens, Bishopgate, and All Souls, Langham Place find themselves- financially cuffed?
John Stott got it wrong at this point.
A question specifically to T1 along these lines: would you come under the authority of any Bishop who was openly known to be a confessed atheist? Or is the CoE your counterfeit god to worship?
Anglican ministers only come under the authority of their bishop within the context of things “lawful and honest”. And it’s not to the Bishop in person but to the office he/she holds…. and is (or should be) constrained by the Holy Scriptures, Creeds, formularies etc. The clergy oath of obedience is NOT to the person of the bishop but to the historic office.
If the bishop doesn’t uphold the historic faith that’s their problem. Anglican clergy are not the bishops servants… nor does the CofE belong to them.
Anglican ministers only come under the authority of their bishop within the context of things “lawful and honest”. And it’s not to the Bishop in person but to the office he/she holds…. and is (or should be) constrained by the Holy Scriptures, Creeds, formularies etc. The clergy oath of obedience is NOT to the person of the bishop but to the historic office.
If the bishop doesn’t uphold the historic faith that’s their problem. Anglican clergy are not the bishops servants… nor does the CofE belong to Bishops .
Absolutely spot on Ian! Bishops are not mini-popes in their dioceses!
But some of them act that way – especially the insecure ones.
Thanks for the information, Ian.
In all your years of experience, is that not a distinction, (office/office holder) without a difference in all fields of practice, ministry, as it seems to be to me.
Is it possible for a parish (minister and/or wardens/ church council) to be out of communion with the diocese Bishop?
Surely this is where conflicts of interests can/will manifest with intensity, destructively so? And in the context of the article where (legal and theological) pastoral guidance is duty bound to be issued.
As a former solicitor, the idea mentioned above by Andrew Goddard in the article where the suggestion that “Pastoral reassurance would not require legislation but would be underpinned by legislation” would have the effect of delegated legislation – that is a legal requirement, no doubt supported by disciplinary sanctions.
And as such, the trap door has been uncovered, made visible.
BTW, can anyone say what is happening with the theological advisors appointed to assist Bishop Martyn, which caused the Bisop of Newcastle to withdraw.
Have they formulated any advice and has it been published?
You cannot be a Bishop and openly atheist so the point is not relevant
Who do you believe is known to be an atheist Geoff? That’s quite an accusation to throw around.
It still remains that the big argument by which ‘the gays’ are winning the argument in the wider world, and scaring people off opposing them, is the idea they have put about that ‘being gay’ is the same kind of thing as ‘being black’, and that therefore opposing the gays is the same kind of sin and crime as racism.
However that is, well, a lie; ‘being gay’ is in a different category and in that category things are open to challenge and critique. Arguments on other foundations like Anglican laws will not help to deal with that one – you have to tackle that argument directly itself. Fail to counter that gay claim and the case will be lost.
Stephen, as sleep wont come, though Lewis on the tv isn’t too bad with nods to the outworking of Nietzsche’s philosophy creating our own morality in the absence of God, he being dead):
That false equivalence you mention has been countered. Arguments have moved to oppressed, excluded, minority groupings ( even if the groups contend with each other) and equal rights spawning grievances.
A commonality is it all being rooted in Critical Theory which includes the Frankfurt School, Queer theory and Foucault, and more.
None of this is new to the comments section here, over the years.
Rearrange: after the has closing bolted door horse stable.
One who was not asleep at the wheel was rev. Melvin Tinker, (who was not part of the of the CoE hierarchy) who was prevented from speaking at Derby Cathedral.
See his book, That Hideous Strength, How the West Was Lost.
Geoff
But Melvin Tinker bizarrely thought all gay people were Marxist.
Did he, indeed? Then you will be able to provide a quotation that shows this.
Sadly they aren’t. There are some really conservative gay men around!
Sadly?
Risible.
Yes, sadly.
PJ’s comment about Melvin Tinker is risible.
The cascade of comments, especially if viewed on my phone may not make that clear.
I trust it is now clear that risible refers to PJ schoolground comment.
If it is remembered correctly, some while ago now PJ had no to little knowledge if Critical Theory.
And it is doubted that Tinker’s introductory book has been read by him, but he has merely trotted out knee -jerk social media hearsay.
I stand to be corrected.
Geoff
In fairness I don’t know because I haven’t read it, but I thought the crux of his argument in his book was that everything he didn’t like, including homosexuality, was “cultural Marxism”?
I’m happy to be corrected.
Also thank you for the compliment, but I’m actually in my 40s
Stephen
In some ways being gay is more challenging than being an ethnic minority because most gay people don’t have gay parents so, even if the parents aren’t hostile, there isn’t parental support/understanding.
The church of England has avoided answering if they teach that being gay is a natural part of human diversity, like skin color,or if it is a delusion that it’s not the natural state of the individual.
Almost all gay people would say the former which is why political campaigning mirrors campaigning for racial equality
Stephen Langton:
“the idea they have put about” – Who exactly are “they”? If you mean gays in general, that is simply trash: gays are no more a uniform category with one single opinion than straights are.
“that ‘being gay’ is the same kind of thing as ‘being black'” – It is you who keep banging on about that notion. No, it is not the same kind of thing as being black, since it is not a skin colour but a sexual orientation, like being straight, and like the latter is not choice, although the sexual BEHAVIOUR of both straight and gay people is a choice, a reality which no sensible person disputes.
It is not clear what you mean by ‘opposing the gays’. If you mean harassing or bullying people because they are gay, or discriminating against them, e.g. by trying to deprive them of their livelihood, then that is indeed a sin – and a particularly serious and shameful one at that. Thank God that such discrimination here in the UK, and in many other civilised countries, is now illegal.
He meant that the one is innate; observable – even by a medical person; incapable of being lied about; and the other is not apparent till many years after birth, by which time many circumstances and experiences have gone under the bridge.
So why do you support suppressing the gays but not the straights?
I don’t. I have never agreed on the coherence of such categories in the first place, as you knew. And secondly I do not agree with others trying to impose them as mandatory. And thirdly those others know very well that such categorisation is in a very small minority internationally and historically.
Penelope
As I’ve explained more than a few times, as an Anabaptist I believe in ‘freedom of religious/philosophical belief’ and I allow people to disagree with me. At the same time, that does include my freedom and the Church’s freedom to disagree with other religions/philosophies and to reject their ideas within the Church, basically because the Bible disagrees with them. Obviously it was wrong (and one of the things now coming back to bite the CofE) that England among other ‘Christian’ states criminalised other beliefs and other practices like gay sex. We were and are ideally supposed to deal with such issues by persuasion, not worldly legal coercive power.
Christopher
I never had a choice, my husband never had a choice. Indeed we both spent decades doing everything we could to try to make us straight
You have not read what I said. Avoiding sexual desires is very hard but it is a lot harder if there is no societal taboo. With societal taboo today massive amounts of SDs are not fed nor acted on, simply because of the taboo.
Nor does what you say make your desire innate to you, only to what you later became.
Christopher
In both our experiences there was huge societal taboo and huge societal cost in simply admitting attraction to the same sex (both of us have family members who don’t talk to us, both of us had to leave our churches, both of us lost friends). There was no cost at all in pretending to be straight
I know. But forgoing your sexual desire is also a massive ask, right. And secondly, it is a far MORE massive ask in a society where the taboo against that is not present.
Christopher
I don’t think it’s a massive ask, no.
The bigger problem is that gay people who follow that teaching still aren’t being treated well in the church.
I have friends who are gay priests in non sexual relationships. Their ministry is only accepted in liberal churches. They are treated worse than adulterers by a lot of church leaders and under suspicion by the rest.
Christopher
As everything associated with puberty
Christopher:
Yes, that is another reason why being gay, like being straight, is not an analogous category to being black. The only important similarity is that people’s sexual orientation, like their skin colour (and unlike their sexual behaviour), is not a choice.
On what authority are you disallowing those people from existing who begin with it being a choice and then later have it as a compulsion once/because they have first made that choice? Those for whom it is a 2 stage process in other words. AN initial plumping for one course of action rather than another can never create an orientation? Even though our lives are known to get oriented by our formative experiences and choices??
Because Christopher, there are gay nuns and celibate priests, who have never acted on their sexual desires, but those desires are still for members of the same sex.
William
The point here is that ‘being black’ or similar really is just about ‘being’. A sexual ‘orientation’ involves urges and desires whether or not those urges and desires are acted out/lived out. Humans have all kinds of urges and desires not all of which are good. And they may well interpret these urges and desires as ‘not a choice’. When considering sinful urges and desires the point is that ‘because sin’ many aspects of human life are disordered and part of the disorder is a loss of control, which Paul refers to as a kind of ‘captivity’ or enslavement to sin. It is not an innocent ‘being’ like skin or hair colour. We are all as sinners called on to recognise the bad urges and desires as sinful, and to understand that our ‘not a choice’ is part of the disorder resulting from sin and from which we need to be freed, with God’s help precisely because as sinners we have lost self-control.
Relevance?
Christopher Shell:
Sexual orientation, unlike sexual behaviour, is not a choice. The heterosexual majority do not choose to be erotically attracted to people of the other sex; they just are, whether they express that attraction in sexual behaviour or not. Likewise, the homosexual minority do not choose to be erotically attracted to people of the same sex; they just are, whether they express that attraction in sexual behaviour or not.
William
I agree with you, but I think three other key similarities are that
1. people in Western culture generally see both Black people and gay as inferior, which leads to endless debates about our place in society and the church. Historically this has been far worse in the US than in the UK, but social media is importing a lot of it from the US.
2. This has led to legislative differences between Black and white and gay and straight. Its no coincidence that in the 50s and 60s in the US Black men couldnt legally marry a Black man *or* a white woman.
3. This has also led to selective enforcement of the law. You may have heard of Ahmaud Arberry who was a victim of a racially motivated murder in the US in 2020. Even though the murderers were known, there would not have been a prosecution, but for public pressure because law enforcement didn’t really register this as a crime. But likewise this year there was a murder of a man because he was gay this year (John Walter Lay) and again it was only due to public pressure that law enforcement agreed to prosecute his murderer.
In the 50s and 60s gay and trans people noticed these similarities and the success the civil rights movement had achieved and so copied the tactics of the civil rights movement. The reason there are Pride marches is largely because the march on Washington was so successful for Black peoples rights.
William, you are repeating the same point I already answered. Namely, that no-one at all exists who falls into the category ‘I made a choice, a life-changing decision, and my subsequent orientation, which did not exist before that point, is as a result of that.’.
To summarise: Those who feel no choice but only compulsion now, may have felt choice at one time in the past. Moreover, making one choice rather than another may have solidified their identity in that direction rather than the other. Denying that very live possibility is not rational.
Christopher
But what’s your evidence that pretty well every gay person had a choice at some point, but has now forgotten that they ever did?
Pretty well every???
Where did you get those words from?
When you have answered that, you could proceed to this:
Everyone makes formative choices without which their life and their self would have turned out different. (Those choices then solidify a certain inner self which would have been different had the choices been different.) Binary thinking that pretends there are only 2 options (and opposite ones at that!) skates over this. But it is very obvious.
If you find even one person who has not had formative experiences / made formative choices, please let me know.
Christopher
Im not asking what your opinion is, Im asking what evidence you have for forming that opinion
Christopher
You have “answered” that point merely by positing the existence, for which you cite no evidence, of people who did not have a homosexual orientation but who acquired one by choosing, for some reason or other, to engage in homosexual behaviour. One can equally posit the existence of people who did not have a heterosexual orientation but who acquired one by choosing, for some reason or other, to engage in heterosexual behaviour. Comprehensive denials are seldom wise, if ever, so I cannot assert with certainty that no-one exists who falls into either of those categories – or indeed into a number of other similarly hypothetical categories which I can think up.
What I can say with reasonable assurance is that, by and large, that is simply not how sexual orientation works.
Stephen
I cannot understand why you keep on labouring points that no-one on here has disputed, and with which I have explicitly agreed. Yes, we know perfectly well that a sexual orientation, unlike being black, involves urges and desires, whether or not those urges and desires are “acted out/lived out”, as you put it. That is as true of a homosexual orientation as it is of a heterosexual one. And yes, we know perfectly well that humans have all kinds of urges and desires, some of which are not good, and therefore should not be acted on.
The question here is this: is the urge or desire to form a sexual relationship with a person of the same sex of itself in that category? Your answer is clearly “Yes.” Mine is “No.”
“They” who have put about the ‘being gay is like being black’ idea is maybe not gays in general – but it is one heck of a lot of people most of whom are gays or their supporters, and way too many people are believing it…. Not so long ago I was on what used to be an interesting Christian forum but has now become essentially an intolerant bigoted echo chamber of the ‘politically correct’ and a discussion of this basically turned into me facing wall to wall “It’s like being black/blond-haired/blue-eyed/ etc, etc, etc” for pages. Mindless repetition with brains clearly not in gear….
By conceding that sexual behaviour is a choice you have essentially admitted that it isn’t and can’t be in the ‘just being’ category. But an ‘orientation’ which is related to doing things and the urges and desires to do is also in a rather different moral category. The gay claim amounts to “We have these urges and desires and ipso facto they are natural and it is OK to live them out”.
Problem is that while the ‘urges and desires’ category ( a far wider category than just the sexual) includes the saintly, it also includes a great deal that nobody in their right mind would want to be on the receiving end of. And even the basically good can still be complex. Fancying a woman, fine – taking that fancy to adultery, no so much. So a claim based on having ‘urges and desires’ is not automatically OK, far more discussion may be required.
BY ‘opposing the gays’ I mean simply that; believing and saying they are wrong. Bear in mind I’m an Anabaptist, don’t believe in established churches which legally enforce their doctrines and conduct in society at large on those of other beliefs. I would discriminate within the Christian community in the same kind of sense in which a football club is likely to refuse a place on the team and possibly within the club to someone who vociferously makes clear he doesn’t intend to follow the offside or other rules of football. So-called gay people refuse to follow Christian teaching, on what basis can they claim a place in the church??
‘So-called gay people refuse to follow Christian teaching, on what basis can they claim a place in the church??’
Using your analogy, the rules of the game have changed, at least in some quarters, that is why.
PC1
Some people are trying to change the rules in some quarters. In the sporting analogy, fair enough, an artificial human construct like the rules of football can be changed. But if Christianity is true, the ‘rules’ are not an artificial human construct but a divine matter going back to the creation; and so attempted changes by humans would be much more important and much less likely to be legitimate….
Stephen Langton:
As I have just said to Christopher Shell, being gay, – like being straight – although not really an analogous category to skin colour, is like being black/blond-haired/blue-eyed etc. in just one important respect, viz. that it is not a choice.
I have never disputed the distinction between sexual orientation, which is indeed in the “just being” category, and sexual behaviour, which obviously is not.
The question here is whether it is ever morally legitimate for gay people to “live out” – as you put it – their sexual orientation, as straight people tend to “live out” theirs. I’m well aware that there are many people who believe that it is not, and they are perfectly entitled to say so – but not to try to impose their view on everyone else. I am among those who believe that it is.
It is only church-goers who are being imposed upon because the church has, at least historically, believed same-sex sexual behaviour is not appropriate, ie sinful. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.
But it is a bit rich calling for such views not to be imposed on others when it seems to be those with the same view as you who want to impose their view on everyone, to the extent same-sex ‘marriage’ is now legal and currently churches are the only places not required to recognise and perform such ceremonies. And dont start me on the whole trans issue when it comes to imposition.
But Im not saying you personally are wanting to impose your views on others.
Views are not of equal worth. Their worth is proportional to the evidence supporting them.
I do wish people who call themselves Christian would stop using ‘the gays’ or ‘gays’ when referring to people who are gay/same-sex attracted. One of the key criticisms from Christians is that people should not define themselves by their sexuality, yet here again is a ‘Christian’ doing just that about others. Do you call black people ‘the blacks’? I doubt it.
As for categories, the reason why many gay people view it in a similar way as racism is simply because they have only ever experienced same sex attraction and not to the opposite sex, from as long as they remember, so it’s understandable if many believe they were ‘born’ gay. I disagree with that view, but it’s understandable.
PC1
See where you’re coming from there – but I’ve been in a lot of discussions where ‘the gays’ refer to themselves in that way. And if like me you remember the time when many of us from sympathy and respect tried really hard to avoid calling black people ‘black’ because it was considered disrespectful, only to be completely blindsided when the blacks decided to be proud of blackness and call themselves ‘black’…. Maybe in my case it’s a bit of autistic naivety but I wouldn’t be saying ‘the blacks’ in a derogatory intent. ‘Gay’ on the other hand is a grotesque misuse of what used to be a beautiful word and I guess when I do use it in the stunted modern sense I’m slightly protesting about that misuse.
I’m hoping to say more about this as the discussion goes on but ‘gayness/sexuality’ is an area where different presuppositions/worldviews lead to different answers.
Start with ‘There is no God and the world just purposelessly happens’ and you get one set of answers; superficially those answers appear to favour the gay case, but I’d submit that a deeper examination of the logic of atheism leads to very problematic positions.
Start with even generically “there is a God” and you’re likely to come up with different answers; start specifically with “The God of Christianity IS” and there are some decidedly specific different answers.
I understand some gay people refer to themselves and others in that way, but that’s their choice not yours. I would ask again you refrain from using that term, because as a Christian you should not be defining people by their sexuality which that term does.
As for your last sentence, the basic problem is that a significant number of supposedly Bible-believing Christians now interpret Scripture quite differently than before. I personally think they have closed their ears to wise instruction and understanding, but they will continue to claim my understanding is incorrect whilst I am convinced theirs is. Unfortunately Ive seen how their arguments can seem quite persuasive to those who havent actually studied the subject. Thankfully there are people like Ian who keep speaking the truth, the reality of what God says and continues to say to the churches.
What if Church of England Archbishops and Bishops suddenly switched back to an ENTIRELY evangelical approach – even discipling and separating from those who persisted in their views?
It wouldn’t make their decades of inappropriate behaviour disappear. People cannot submit to their leadership – no matter how they act now – they have disqualified themselves. What they plan to next is therefore irrelevant.
I agree. It is why I would have supported the Donatists!
The problem with supporting the Donatists is that all God’s work in this world is performed through sinful humans (except that greatest work of the cross, of course). True repentance should be honoured.
The issue is that true repentance by a leader, of a serious error, should be accompanied by stepping aside from that leadership at least for a time: how would the person know that they had only been in serious error in one thing? Some serious time of reflection would surely be required.
Maybe God would lift them to leadership again, after some time. But the idea of the same people continuing as if nothing had changed except their admission of error is wrong.
The congregation leaders who betrayed their flocks to the authorities, during a bout of mortal persecution under Diocletian, should have been permitted back into the church if they professed repentance, but NOT as leaders. Had they been serious as penitents then they would not have sought to resume as leaders, and I would not have consented to be led by them; I’d have been part of a breakaway and the persecution could not have been worse under Constantine than under Diocletian. Nicaea got the Trinity right but concerning the Donatists it was grotesquely political and entirely wrong. It is said that the winners write history, but the church should not adopt the world’s criteria for who wins and who loses. By the world’s criteria we are losers, but we prefer God’s criteria. Please forget the standard church histories and consider what it would have been like to have been there.
Anton
To be fair I think the Donatists initially got it wrong too, but it led them to the realisation expressed in the question “Quis est Imperator cum ecclesiae?/Since when is the Church the Emperor’s business”. Things were further complicated by a nationalistic element with to some extent outsiders from Rome trying to reimpose the ‘traditor’ leaders over locally chosen replacements. Some Donatist supporters were inappropriately willing to physically fight for their case. But yes, ultimately the Donatists won the argument but lost out to imperial force. Um “Quis erat Henricus VIII cum ecclesiae?” Not to mention “Quis est Carolus III cum ecclesiae?”
An actual heresy…
I am really enjoying the irony of being described as a heretic for having some fairly revisionist ideas on sexuality while being surrounded by real heretics. You couldn’t make it up. But they do 🙂
Since moving to the US I’ve had three experiences that I think are relevant here.
Firstly, in the same year I moved to the US, the United Methodist Church voted to ban all gay people, regardless of sexual activities, from ministry and put in severe sanctions for any minister presiding over a same sex marriage. Now what has happened is an effective split where people who have strong views against gay people have formed their own denomination and these rules have been dropped.
Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak contested the Tory leadership. Truss won by offering a fantasy that quickly fell apart and Sunak ended up being Prime Minister.
Our local town voted to reject the school budget, but then because of all the staff they had to cut also rejected the cuts and then ended up voting back in the original budget.
These are all examples of when democracy tries to push against inevitability. Really the CofE only has two options – significantly improve treatment of gay people in some way (doesn’t actually have to be anything to do with marriage) or delay again. But staying the same forever on this is not an option. You will have to be changed.
Yes, but who decides what is inevitable?
People might produce propaganda saying that something was inevitable. They are probably doing that because they claim with no evidence that history (which has pendulum swings) can go in one direction only.
And if you want things that are inevitable not things that are right, that means you must be an immoral person.
That sounds like you don’t approve of democracy Christopher. Which would not surprise me one little bit
(1) Arguments for democracy focus on the things that it is better than – which we all know.
(2) To say it is the best available means you have thought of all possible options. Right – you have thought of all possible options. Of course you have.
(3) Democracy puts experts on a level with novices and those who did not understand the question. Not smart. That downgrading of expertise is the sort of thing you approve?
(4) People think they are making personal choices, but they are only choosing from the options the media has presented to them. No-one can ‘choose’ unless they know what ALL the options are and have considered these.
(5) In voting, people do not distinguish between what is right; what benefits most people; what benefits oneself. A better system would rank the first two above the third.
And so on. You cannot tell me that you have already decided which polity is best BEFORE you have seen all options and arguments. Any such ‘decision’ is no decision at all, but is purely provisional.
3. Lack of democracy doesn’t necessarily put experts in charge. The bishops, in fact, seem particularly ignorant of LGB people
Of course lack of democracy does not put experts in charge, and of course I did not say it did. What I said was that democracy inevitably means they are not in charge within their expert areas, which is a bad thing. You are confusing necessary and sufficient conditions.
Writes the person who endorses a ‘pro life’ candidate.
You’re pro death, I take it? Nobody else would think life itself was a bad thing. But people still hang onto it, whatever they say.
When I encounter secularists, they often try to get the topic as close to death as they can in the fewest possible moves.
At least with democracy leaders can be voted out if they ignore expert advice
No. I’m not ‘pro life’ and I wouldn’t dream of supporting a parliamentary candidate on a single issue.
I prefer evidence of thoughtfulness on a range of ethical issues. Most intelligent voters do.
So you are quite happy to repeat a disavowal of being in favour of life, but when I ask if you are in favour of death, answer comes there none. Sounds like the more negative a thing is the more you gravitate towards it, and the more positive it is the more you are keen to advertise your disavowal of it? Evil, be thou my good?
Inevitable events aren’t up to people, that’s my point. Cnut couldn’t turn back the waves, with or without the support of the bishops
Yes – but you think you are an infallible judge of what is inevitable?
Also – your example is a very bad one. The tides have done as they do for millions of years. Whereas tides and trends of history swing like pendulums. They very rarely go in straight lines.
And the people they say they do are either propagandists or not very well informed.
I’m not infallible, but I do think change is inevitable for the church. I don’t necessarily know what that change will be – independent enforcement of anti abuse policies, disestablishment, official approval for local tolerance of gay people etc – but it’s inevitable. People don’t want to attend churches that are constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons
Nor do people weant to attend churches that are following the world downhill rather than leading it uphill.
Anton
But the problems with the church aren’t because is avoiding sexual scandal, but embracing it. They aren’t rejecting the bad ways of the world, but behaving worse than the average atheist and then expecting everyone to treat them as a moral authority. One if the real unfairly treated classes in this, that’s often overlooked, are the good honest vocals who have devoted their lives trying to help others only to find out that the institution they work for is corrupted with sleaze and dishonesty
Lol, so the church behaves worse than society at large sexually. Very likely, when said behaviour is part of societal culture and not remotely part of church culture. Where is your evidence for that?
Surely you are not one of these people who groups with those who set the bar low and shout disparagingly at those who set the bar high for ‘hypocritically’ failing to clear their high bar, while all the time not lifting a finger to make their own bar higher.
Christopher
Endless sexual abuse scandals, cover up of sexual abuse, refusal to acknowledge that the abuse or the cover up are serious moral issues, dishonesty, corruption, greed, lack of care for individuals health (and even lives in some cases) and lack of interest in the truth.
Christopher
I want equal treatment for LGBT people, but particularly I want an end to abuse of LGBT people and others, which the bishops seem resistant even to acknowledge
Then you will have to stop imposing categories like ‘LGBT people’ on those who do not accept the coherence of such categories.
And secondly to stop imposing categories which for the vast majority of history and also in the vast majority of cultures have been on no-one’s radar. I am talking about words here not realities.
Christopher
Unless you are going to choose to “come out”, it’s none of your business how LGBT people choose to identify
Re the T in LGBT, the dictionary is not private property.
??
So it is none of my business if people want to promulgate confused or incoherent thinking and so deceive some others? Am I not meant to care about them? Am I meant to care only for myself?
Christopher
When a person says they are gay they usually mean they experience lifelong exclusive attraction to the same sex. What’s the deception?
Did I not know that?
It does not make sense, and there are lots of ways it does not make sense.
(1) Lifelong exclusive – but they have not even lived lifelong yet. They have lived only a portion of their life.
(2) That portion began with a time they have no recollection of.
(3) That time was without sexual attraction anyway.
(4) As was the time that came directly after it.
(5) The first time that DID include sexual attraction will often have been [connected to] puberty – a time of unparalleled confusion. We trust that??
(6) They are unquestioning about the lifelong exclusive things – not questioning whether or not it stands to reason that formative experiences will always be a central part of who we are.
You see that this tiny saying of yours has 6 things in it that do not add up. Not a good ratio.
Christopher,
How worried are you that you’re going to develop exclusive sexual attraction to other men?
That sort of shallow comment breaks, I am sure, guidelines on most platforms: however, it usefully identifies shallowness in the speaker for future reference.
But address the 6 questions: your avoidance too is suspicious.
Christopher
What on earth are you talking about? I don’t even understand what you mean!
I know, Peter. Several times we have seen the same thing. I have used simple English words. There is always a 50% chance that we/you will be talking to people who have analysed things more than we have – so this happens several times daily. This is one of those times. So the average person should expect diminished understanding in approx 50% of their conversations.
That’s a pretty pathetic response Christopher.
You argued that Peter couldn’t say he, or anyone else, experienced lifelong attractions because they hadn’t lived lifelong. I was testing whether you applied any of this supposed logic to yourself. Apparently you don’t. What a surprise.
I didn’t say anything of the sort. Rather I made 6 points not 1, and you cite the least important of the 6.
AJ
Thank you for your translation.
Christopher – there’s lots of dead gay people who experienced lifelong attraction to the same sex.
Ive had 40 something years of it, so has my husband. We have had lifelong exclusive attraction to the same sex *so far* and both of us spent decades trying everything we could to be attracted to women.
They are not God given identities, but solely recent God denying- God excluding human self-glorifying constructs based on sexual desire- attraction, functional God replacement, God supplanting Idolatry.
And straight sexual desire is not god denying nor idolatrous?
Queer desire is as holy and god given and god honouring and graced as straight desire. Your refusal to see this is a you problem.
PCD,
I did not say anything of the sort.
Your eisegis is erroneous.
Of course it can be idolatrous even within marriage.
Penelope:
Calling a desire “queer” does not suggest to ordinary people that it is in any way holy, god [sic] given, god [sic] honouring, or graced. Quite the contrary. Your refusal to see this, and your obstinate persistence in spewing out the language of vicious anti-gay hatred, are very much a you problem.
William
I know you don’t like the term. Many gay and bi people do and write about queer holiness and queer redemption.
So, it’s not a me problem. I am honouring their theological work.
Geoff
OK and no conservative Christian ever started their profile by saying they are ” happily married to Catherine with children Bonny, Wilson and Abigail. They enjoy walking in the country and film”?
Because that’s every bit as much someone identifying themselves by their orientation
Penelope
Well, I don’t like the term. As far as I’m concerned, those gay and bi people who have allowed themselves to be persuaded to adopt the language used by their enemies, probably since my grandparents were children if not still earlier, to make crystal clear to the world their deep hatred and utter contempt for gay men especially, have merely proved themselves to be capable of crass stupidity. Those who refuse to allow “TQ+” cranks to lead us by the nose need to tell the latter precisely what they can do with their “queer” claptrap.
William
Fine. But turning terms of contempt has a long history. Look at Jesus adopting the slur ‘eunuch’ in Matthew.
Who on earth would want to be called ‘weird’?
It’s the same thing.
Christopher
Weird people might.
You do understand Jesus’ repurposing of the term eunuch?
You do understand why people adopt words like queer, wicked, slut etc. to take away their toxicity?
You do understand that language changes?
And the very point about change is that obviously some change is good and some change is bad.
Or else you are a relativist and have given up intellectual standards altogether.
E.g. anyone who calls themselves a sl*t – well, it is a horrific thought that any daughter could ever do such a thing. These are precious people, loved and cherished by parents, grandparents, everyone. It is ugly that you even see such a thing as neutral and doubly ugly that you approve it.
Case in point to our last ‘exchange’, Christopher.
Penny’s comment was about language change — linguistics, right?
Your comment if it is meant to be about _language change_ is simply silly!
Penelope: There is a celebration of straight sexual desire in the Song of Songs, and you might be surprised how bowdlerised most English translations are.
Well, if it is silly, you will be able to point out what is silly *about* it.
Of course you could be dogmatic and say that there is only one sentence that anyone needs to learn (‘usage is all’) and then they know everything. Does it seem likely that no other considerations exist?
Some hypothetical examples of what you are leaving out, and questions potentially ignored (as though ignoring them were superior to addressing them):
-Usage can reflect an incoherent worldview, and at other times a coherent one. These 2 eventualities are equally good? Or is this a good/bad free zone? (Says who?) It would certainly mean that less actual thought had to take place if it were.
-Usage can be mass-media-led and reflect a misunderstanding of what thinking lies behind a coined word; scholars, on the other hand, perpetuate a correct understanding; and then you come in with the facile ‘Usage is all’?
-As people become poorer in concepts (supposing that they do) then they will have to match up existing words with the fewer concepts that they have. This is progress or regress?
-People can take hold of the dictionary for political reasons. Then they control usage. See Tom Wright on Nazi vocab; Orwell warned against just this re communist contexts.
And so on. Proper discourse consists of bringing the maximum number of dimensions of study to bear; discourse that brings just one (that brings just lingustics, for example) is the poorest of all.
On PCD’s point:
You can say Jesus (or Matthew) repurposed ‘eunuch’; another (and an economical) possibility is that no existing vocab existed for some of the 3 phenomena described, so it made sense to group together the 3 phenomena under one head, the word ‘eunuch’ being clearly the most convenient possibility here – without prejudicing future usage.
Christopher, my observation of silliness is about people insisting that language change is described as EITHER ‘good’ or ‘bad’ OR that their conversation partners are relativists. (I am not shouting I am trying to lay out the alternatives you gave).
Language changes.
So, was the ‘Great English Vowel Shift’ good or bad? Was it ‘approved’ by the intelligentsia or not?
If we go to the butcher and ask for ‘beef’ ‘mutton’ and ‘venison’, is that better or worse than asking for ‘bull’, ‘sheep’ and ‘deer’? (At one time we might have been making a ‘political statement’ 🙂 )
If something is _said to be_ ‘wicked’ how is that good or bad?
Doesn’t how ‘wicked’ is interpreted and understood depend wholly on context?
If we do not take questions such as these into account, that is what I mean by observations about language as ‘silly’
PS and I’m not sure Christopher how _adding_ LGBTQIA+ into our stock of English words means we have ‘fewer’ concepts. Rather, the opposite isn’t it?
These points are agreed on, but what is their relevance? I was simply saying that removing any single-ownership word/concept from the most prevalent realities is suspicious: as it is. And secondly that we are richer if we have dictionary definitions than if we don’t: as we are. That is setting the bar pretty low – I’m just stating the self-evident.
Nor, as you know, did I ever mention the word LGBTQWERTY. However, it is more a matter of those who are caught up in that vortex constantly returning to the same 3 or 4 topics exclusively – hence, yes, their vocabulary shrinks.
Geoff
If God didn’t make me gay then who did?
Peter
I want equal treatment for LGBT+ people. So logically I want a change in the very unequal situation in which they bigotedly and intolerantly sue and prosecute people on the basis of a false claim that being gay is like being black and that therefore opposing gays is a sin/crime comparable to racism. On that basis they are giving unequal treatment to the rest of society by falsely claiming an improperly privileged position effectively beyond challenge and criticism. If the LGBT+ want equality it had better start with them practising equality themselves…..
Preaching or shouting homophobia can now see you arrested in the UK for breach of the Public Order Act
https://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2022/february/man-charged-following-hate-crime-at-merseyside-derby/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9521123/Moment-police-arrest-elderly-preacher-71-street-quoting-homophobic-statements-Bible.html
Stephen
Who is being prosecuted?
How are LGBT people privileged over non LGBT people?
In both the UK and the US its still legal to take and torture a gay young person without their consent as long as you claim you are trying to make them straight.
In the UK there have been a few gay cabinet secretaries and one deputy prime minister. In the US only one cabinet secretary. In both countries all heads of government and heads of state have been straight.
So how are LGBT people privileged or powerful?
‘In both the UK and the US it’s still legal to take and torture a gay young person without their consent.’ That is nonsense. Peter, I am not very interested in having the comments here filled with fantastical claims that you keep making.
Stephen:
While I applaud your support for equal treatment, I must point out once more, as I frequently have to do, that there are no such entities as “LGBT+” people. Neither that ridiculous initialism, which has been foisted onto the public simply through relentless, loud repetition, nor any of its equally tiresome extensions, stands for any genuine, logical category of persons. It is simply a device for trying to con gay, lesbian and bisexual people into accepting that they are somehow in the same category as people with the transgender delusion, and are therefore obliged to support the pernicious ideology and crackpot demands of “TQ+” activists. I need hardly add that we are not.
Ian
Conversion therapy is torture even if it is just talking therapy. Its aim is to increase anxiety around sexuality. If you’ve never experienced extreme anxiety yourself then count yourself lucky!
Why do you think campaigners in both countries have been trying so hard to get this practice banned??!!
I have no idea. Because the only type known to exist is actively and freely sought, and what sort of monsters (are they in the recruiting business?) would try and ban that?
Christopher
About 50% of conversion therapy is practiced on U18s who have not consented.
I have an acquaintance who was forced into it as a young adult by a church of England church about a decade ago and he’s spent the last decade campaigning for the church to even acknowledge it happened. He would be counted as “consented” because on paper he did (as I understand it he had to do it to keep his role in youth leadership), but he was not told the horrendous impact it would have on his mental health or that it wouldn’t work!
Peter, you seem to have no idea how greatly the ‘wouldn’t work’ thing changes depending whether there is or is not a societal taboo. That change is simply massive, as shown by the discrepancy between internet search figures and actual sordid crimes.
A lot of this ‘wise after the event’ stuff is extremely wicked. Someone wants only good for you, is sorry to see you estranged from yourself in a way that you were not at all when younger, and therefore aims to help. You consent at the time, and later say ‘Oh, actually retrospectively I did not consent.’. How to frame good and kind people.
Christopher
There is nobody in the world that is even claiming that conversion therapy worked for them.
Penelope,
I’m sorry, that silly trick won’t work. The word “eunuch” meant simply a person who was incapable of procreating. Even if eunuchs were regarded by many with pity and even with contempt, the term itself is a purely factual one – like the term “homosexual”. There is no reason to suppose that it was adopted for the purpose of expressing bitter hatred, contempt and spite. “Queer”, on the other hand, was, and still is, used by anti-gay bullies and abusers for that very purpose. The other group of people who now use that word are the ones who are peddling pernicious, anti-factual theories about “gender”. Those are two reasons why I repudiate the term.
As I have said, that is your choice. It is also the choice of many LGBTIQA people to use the term queer. And of course it has more resonance as a verb than as a noun.
My observations about Jesus repurposing the slur eunuch are from Halvor Moxnes’ work on Matthew 19 where Jesus situated himself and his followers in a queer space. Simply brilliant.
Penelope:
There are no such entities as “LGBTIQA” people – or any variation on that ridiculous, illogical initialism. To pretend that people who are sexually attracted to other people of the same sex or of both sexes, people who have the delusion that their natal sex is the “wrong” one and needs to be changed to the other one (a biological impossibility), people with various anomalies of physical sex development, and people with no sexual attraction to anyone, form together a single category is manifestly stupid.
The fictional “LGBT(+)” category, together with its equally tiresome extensions, is simply an invention to try to deceive gay, lesbian and bisexual people into thinking that they are somehow obliged to support the “trans” delusion and the crackpot ideology and demands peddled by “trans” activists. We are not. The more recent addition of the I is an attempt to play the same trick on so-called “intersex” people. I gather that many of them resent it – and rightly so.
The word “eunuch” is not and was not a slur. Despising eunuchs did not turn the word into a slur, any more than despising homosexuals turns the word “homosexual” into a slur.
“…where Jesus situated himself and his followers in a queer space.” Simply fatuous trash.
PCD,
Queer desire, holy and god given?
Mere assertion without scriptural corroboration, or any understanding of Holiness as God is Holy.
Indeed, how is sin holy.
Which God are you referring to?
Your doctrine of God seems to be substantially heretical.
And PCD your use of your identitarian term, queer, proves the point I originally made: purely a recent human construct with atheistic roots.
Thank you.
All words are human constructs Geoff.
“All words are human constructs Geoff.”
– and therein lies the evidence of your Feuerbachian understanding of religion as the projection of human consciousness and ideas.
The total inverse of what the Bible and Christ claim:
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
“And GOD said ….”
“And the word of the LORD came to me …”
Which is why we don’t take your Feuerbachian deconstruction of Christianity seriously. A bad tree con only produce bad fruit.
You do know the difference between words – a human construct – and the eternal Word, the exegesis of God?
And you know the difference between ‘ALL words’ and ‘the Word of God’?
Human beings are rational because God is rational. Rationality means (at the very least) the use of language.
There is a meta-language of meaning and denotation that undergirds all human languages. This universal capacity is implanted by God. Aristotle, Plato and St Augustine all understood this point. Augustine took it further and spoke of the ‘rationes aeternae’ in the mind of God as the ordering blueprint of creation.
(Personally, I would like to think the language of heaven is Hebrew. That’s a joke by the way. I used to tell congregations, ‘If you don’t know Hebrew, your first two years in heaven will be a bit rough.’)
Words are ‘human constructs’ insofar as we are constrained by the 44 or so phonemes that the human speech apparatus can produce (maybe more if we include Khoisan clicks and Chinese and Vietnamese tones). But God isn’t constrained.
Further, since Jesus is God Incarnate, his acts and words are acts and words of God. Incarnation means thar human speech can also by divine speech.
Human beings are of course prone to deceiving and being deceived. One form of deception is reification.
Oh, I absolutely agree that the language of Heaven is Hebrew.
But all languages are human constructd and words mean what societies/cultures determine they mean. Which is why definitions are so slippery. They define what words have meant and what the denote now. But that is never, as it were, set in stone.
This doesn’t mean that humankind doesn’t possess rationality. Nor that the Word of God (which is itself a slippery term for Logos) isn’t the exegete of God.
“we are constrained by the 44 or so phonemes that the human speech apparatus can produce (maybe more if we include Khoisan clicks and Chinese and Vietnamese tones). But God isn’t constrained.”
Interesting argument, James. Are you sure about this?
Bruce, yes, I am sure that God is not constrained other than by his own perfect nature.
As for phonemes, yes, there is an upper limit to the number of discrete sounds the human voice can make into regular repeatable phonemes that can be used in making words. English with 44 is at the upper limit. Some say Hindi and Danish have a larger range. The Romance languages have a smaller range than English. Partly it depends on one’s definition of ‘phoneme’.
My philosophical point about the nature of language divine and human is parallel to the way I have come to think about mathematics and abstract objects. For example, the number seven is not ‘7’ or ‘VII’ or ‘sieben’ or ‘siete’ etc. These are representations of seven. So where does seven/7/VII etc ‘exist’? In the mind of God (the ‘rationes aeternae’ of Augustine). I don’t accept the implications of Penelope’s Feierbachian Sprachskepsis. The Word became flesh, after all.
On ‘phonemes’, James, where is your information coming from? You might be interested in the WALS website, especially
https://wals.info/feature/1A#2/19.3/152.8 showing various consonant inventories. There is a similar map for vowels.
English seems to be ‘average’.
Because … it’s not sinful. Queer people are a gift to the church.
Cite me any scripture which describes covenanted same sex desire as not holy.
I’ll wait …
Penelope
At a pedantic level you’ll wait a long time because the scripture does not recognise such ‘covenanted’ relationships and so of course does not mention them. It does however pretty clearly mention simply same-sex relationships as unholy, and a human ‘covenant’ isn’t going to make the unholy somehow be holy….
Scripture doesn’t mention same sex ‘relationships’.
Penelope
“Scripture doesn’t mention same sex ‘relationships’”.
May not use our modern terminology – definitely mentions the thing, and with disapproval. You are just playing word games which disrespect everybody from God down, even your own intelligence.
Stephen
Its nothing to do with modern terminology. None of the people spoken of in scripture are in same sex relationships (unless you count David and Jonathan?)
Stephen
The ‘thing’ is one male/male act. Nowhere are women mentioned.
Nowhere are relationships mentioned.
You are just reading your ideological commitments into texts which aren’t concerned with your preoccupations.
That’s playing word games.
That is because Scripture uses precise, not impossibly vague, terms.
This example of vaguery, the word ‘relationships’, even leaves out information on the most key aspect of all: namely, sexual or non-sexual.
That is because certain unprincipled people want to sneak ‘sexual’ in under the radar and/or treat it as a matter of indifference.
Christopher
Straight relationships in the Bible would include
Adam and Eve
Jacob and Rachel and Leah and Bilhah and Zilpah.
Mary and Joseph
Peter and “Peters wife”
“That is because Scripture uses precise, not impossibly vague, terms.”
Christopher are you really serious? You know that ‘scripture’ is not one thing but a whole library of books with several different genres.
Poetry is precise language – really?
The creation narrative is precise language – seriously?
Noah’s ark narrative is precise language – what?!!!
Well – exactly. But you have missed two points:
(1) If there is a library of 66 or 73 books, there are *some things that are invariably true of the entire library. You are saying there are no such things at all? Out of the thousands that there could potentially be? Zero?
(2) Poetry and Noah’s Ark by virtue of being non literal do not suddenly become vague, now do they? You are imagining that there is some commonality between poetry and vagueness. So far as I can see the very opposite is true. When people write poetry they really search out and select each exquisite individual word.
And, Pete, the sex with slaves wasn’t relationship. It was rape. Which the text doesn’t condemn.
“You are saying there are no such things at all? Out of the thousands that there could potentially be? Zero?”
No, I am not saying that. Where do I even imply it?
I am saying that precision is not a word that is common to all the books of the library we call scripture.
If you think poetry uses precise language you will need to define the way you use the word precise. Poetry frequently seeks to describe things that can not be precisely described. Oh..like relationships for example.
And if the narrative used for Noah’s Ark is precise does it mean there was an ark made of gopher wood? And that it was so many cubits deep and wide? Please tell me what precision means in this context.
My point is the avoidance of vagueness.
Differeent genres stay true to their own genre. But – as in all good writing – where do you find the vagueness anywhere?
Christopher, another linguistic argument 🙂
And one showing yet again misunderstanding of how language seems to work!
Christopher – yet again you avoid answering direct questions to you.
Is the language used to describe Noah’s Ark vague or precise?
And do you actually know the difference between the two terms. …..
Or is it something else altogether…
So if there is misunderstanding, Bruce, show wherein the misunderstanding lies, and secondly remove it or clarify matters.
When that is done, do respond to the points I just made. Thanks.
Andrew, you didn’t read properly. If I say vagueness is in short supply in the Biblical writings taken as a whole, it will scarcely be found in a part-mathematical section of all places. About genre-awareness, I have already spoken.
Nor have you shown grasp of the point that poetry is something quite different to and practically opposite to vagueness.
I see. Yet again you refuse to answer a clear question.
This is yet another instance demonstrating why discussion with you is futile Christopher.
Please do not say untrue things. If poetry is the opposite of vagueness, you already knew that it follows that vagueness was not present if it was poetry we were dealing with.
Secondly you also know that I have never shown a hint that anything you so far have referred to is vague. So we can safely assume that I classify such as not-vague.
Futile – yes, very possibly. I also, like everyone else, find it futile to try and engage with anyone who has done more thinking than I have on a topic; my time is better spent boning up on the subject.
Christopher you are so full of yourself and how supposedly intelligent you are. It is amazing that you even fit in the room.
I never mentioned how intelligent I was (though on this present point I seem to have more understanding than you). And for two reasons:
(1) What I said was that on a given topic by the law of averages 50% of the time participant A will know more and 50% of the time participant B will know more. Of course that is an approximation / a convention, and will sometimes be very inaccurate.
(2) When one is the one who knows less, why be surprised that one does not understand? My experience when I am the one who knows less (e.g., on astrophysics) is that not understanding is exactly what is to be expected.
As to qualifications, of course we should pay attention to whether people are qualified to speak on a given topic. Otherwise it is a time wasting free for all. And of course, secondly, we should prioritise by *how qualified they are to speak.
Further, because there are so many topics and so many conversations, each person is likely to know more than their conversation partner on many occasions. Your proposal is that they tell lies about this, and claim it is not so. That is an awful lot of lies when even one lie for a Christian is too many.
And as though that were not enough, you add to it an illogical tendency to treat accumulated knowledge as something to be ashamed of, rather than the very opposite: something to celebrate.
And finally it is self-centred to disown any expertise one has oneself while simultaneously acclaiming it in others. That is treating oneself as though one belonged to a separate category.
Good Lord deliver us….
As you don’t say why, your comment has to await explanation before anyone can comment on it. It should be simple for you to articulate the flaw[s] in what I have said given that you already react as though there were [a] flaw[s].
Going against convention is one thing, flaws are another. That is because convention is sometimes explicable and justifiable, sometimes not.
OK Christopher, are you going to ‘define’ ‘*precise’ or not?
Please illustrate how your definition of ‘*precise’ contributes to interpreting and understanding the utterance ‘The Lord is my shepherd’.
PS it is almost *impossible to find where to reply to your comment here Christopher. Just sayin’
Cite me any scripture which describes (or even mentions) ‘covenanted same sex desire’.
/crickets
Ah, didn’t see your comment, Stephen. Quite so.
I have yet to see any scripture condemn covenanted other-sex paedophilia. Must be OK, then, under that basic principle of theology ‘nulla poena sine lege’. Or is that the Lotus Principle of international law? So easy to confuse.
Well James, not having studied international law, I briefly looked up the Lotus case was amused to learn it concerned the question of whether the arrest of S.S. Lotus captain Mr Demons, was lawful, within the jurisdiction of the court.!
Is the execution of judgement within God’s sovereign jurisdiction?
Yes, unusually the French wanted the Turks to cast out Demons.
Meanwhile, the Bishops of the Church of England have become Lotus-eaters, sleeping in apathy and forgetting our actual journey home.
The burden of proof is yours.
I hear your avoidances of my substantive questions speak, shout out heresy.
Scripture speaks only sex within covenanted m+female marriage. Anything other is sin.
You support and promote an unholy covenant of sin. Heresy.
Ooh, nice swerve Geoff. I thought you wouldn’t have an answer:-)
Risible.
But returning to Andrew Goddard’s article and after Richard Hooker:
CoE, LLF + PLF + Ordination vows = industrial scale production of weasel words and sophistry.
Also vast waste of resources and time that does nothing to bring the Gospel to Britain.
Indeed James.
We want unity? We’ve got it.
We want unity in diversity?
We’ve got it.
We want equality?
We’got it.
We are All Sinners.
We want generosity?
We’ve got it.
But do we get it.
The overwhelming electrifying, new life generosity of God giving Himself, as Father, Son and Spirit. By grace only.
Do we truly get it?
Have we got Him, in union, in unity in diversity, dwelling in Him and He in us? From death to new Life in Him.
There is no other way. There is non Greater. Unsurpassed, unity, union. Unsurpassed generosity. Into eternity.
Our way? Or his? Chose you today?
Geoff
All are sinners, but some are more sinful than others seems to be how the CofE operates. If you are a leader then you are immediately forgiven for anything you get caught doing. If you are a pew dweller it depends on your income.
‘If you are a leader then you are immediately forgiven for anything you get caught doing.’ Sorry, that is nonsense.
O Peter, Peter, Peter,
After all your years of association with Christianity, you really don’t get it, don’t get the cost to Christ for (y)our forgiveness for (y)our redemption, salvation.
Nor the weight of God’s judgement on unrepented sin.
Your comment betrays your state of belief.
Unless you turn to Christ, repent, you are truly lost never to be found. You can not hide from Him.
Are you beyond redemption?
Have you turned your whole life over to Him as Lord of your life, above all others?
And I am getting personal, speaking the truth in love, unless you do so there will only be hell.
Not all are saved. Are you? Turn to Jesus.
This is no laughing, mocking matter, no matter for flippancy, some smart- alec facile comment.
It is a matter of eternity.
There is no laughter or mockery in Hell.
I implore you Peter. Chose you today who you will serve, who you will worship.
Peter
You wrote above
“Its nothing to do with modern terminology. None of the people spoken of in scripture are in same sex relationships (unless you count David and Jonathan?)”
Being really exact – quite a few people in scripture are in same-sex relationships; just none, including David and Jonathan, are in same-sex SEXUAL relationships, and that is because God made it rather clear right through to Paul in Romans 1 that ‘sex’ is inappropriate to relationships between people of the same sex.
Peter, consider this.
It is still the case, I think, that if you are divorced and remarried, and you previous spouse is still alive, that in order to be considered as a candidate for ordination you have to seek a Canon C4 dispensation from the archbishop lest the circumstance of the divorce and remarriage were to be a “scandal”. There is quite an intrusive process for this.
However, back in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” days, gay clergy were often able to have a lover living in the vicarage. Someone told me that when he was an ordinand, his fellow gay students said that it was alright to have a lover in the college, because “we are faithful to our partners”. (Which seems to be an implied comment by gay men on the normal promiscuity of gay men.)
Peter,
I’m not seeking to win an argument, but to leave behind the caccaphony of comments.
“Upward I look and see Him there…”
With your Methodist involvement look up and see Jesus hanging on the cross –
You put him there, I put him there, we all put him there, and contemplate, ponder, pray the words of Charles Wesley’s hymn,
Romans 5:8
“And can it be…”
Or even, “All I once held dear built my life upon….” by Kendrick
Yours in Christ,
Geoff
Geoff
I’m talking about how the church treats people, not how God treats people
Ian
Let us know when Mike Pilavachi or Jonathan Fletcher are required to undergo exorcism…or are ostracized from the church or face any serious consequences beyond a quiet retirement
David
I know a lot of gay couples and most of them don’t have sex with other people.
In my younger years I shared houses with other 40 straight people and most of them had various boy/girlfriends who they slept with.
The former are unacceptable according to current core teaching and practice. The latter face no penalty, indeed many of them got married in the cofe.
This is the discrimination of the church hidden in plain sight!
Geoff
I spent literally decades of my life trying to be straight, praying to God to make me straight, the whole shebang. I’m not gay because I once attended a Methodist church, ok?
David, I think the process could be called intrusive in the sense that it is very probing, but how could this possibly be avoided in the circumstances?
Peter, all I know about you is from your contributions here (if true, the impression you I had was your significant involvement in the Methodist church) and whatever the very real turmoil over sexuality you have been through (that you have just described) it seems that your sexuality is your first love, the master of your destiny, your be all and end all.
Indeed your comments here have been almost exclusive about sexuality, with little to none over the the discussions on scripture, except when it has been so well rehearsed over question of sexually
– such as your recent shabby and deperate reference to King David and Jonathan. If sexuality is your true master. So be it.
Stephen
None are in same sex romantic relationships.
Geoff
The reason you don’t know much about me is that my posts are about LLF.
Pretty much none of your responses engage with my posts, but instead are personal attacks on me. When you don’t know anything really about me
David Wilson
I’m not in favor of “don’t ask don’t tell” because it privileges people who are willing and able to lie over people who tell the truth.
I remember a gay priest who married complaining he was disciplined by a bishop whose boyfriend was in the house while it happened.
This is not the church going easy on gays. This is the church behaving with deep hypocrisy
Nonsense, Peter – you are saying two wrongs make a right. That they are not is extremely basic.
Secondly, you are showing you do not care about standards of good behaviour.
Christopher
You don’t even know me to claim I don’t care about behavior.
Actually I do. I’m aghast that the CofE is still claiming moral leadership while displaying dishonesty, abuse and corruption amongst its senior leadership
Thanks Geoff et al
Many perceptive insights on this thread.
I fear that the tin-eared and one stringed harpists
will not hear the music of heaven.
The State of the Church of England after all this:
GS 1384 provides the following overview of the current state of the C of E:
Church attendance figures are down 19% since the pandemic (Statistics for
Mission, early look 2023), and 29% below 2015
• In real terms, parish incomes are down 14% on pre-pandemic levels (Parish
Finance Statistics 2022).
• The number of regular givers has fallen from 538,000 in 2015 to 480,000 in
2019 and just over 400,000 today; and for the first time in 2022, the average
amount given by regular givers has fallen in real terms
• Parish share is down 9% since pre-pandemic (closer to 30% in real terms).
• Vocations have fallen by 40% since 2019, with fewer than 350 ordinands
beginning training in 2024 compared with an original aspiration of 650
• Most dioceses are now in a structural deficit position with 30 dioceses
reporting underlying operating deficits in 2022, and 35 expecting to report a
deficit in 2023 and beyond.
See what happens in the next three years as hundreds of clergy retire and there are few if any replacements for them.
James these are really key questions and thank you drawing them out from that GS paper.
The CofE – along with almost every other church in the West – is going to have find a very different way of doing things.
I have recently read a very remarkable book by a Czech RC Priest and scholar which addresses the issues of doing things very differently head on, and looks at the reasons we are in this situation. I commend it to all readers here.
https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268207472/the-afternoon-of-christianity/
Thanks for this link. He sounds like a thought-provoking figure. Underneath (alongside?) the LLF process and debates there are clearly some other bigger, more significant and longer theological/social/cultural processes at work, but only time will tell which really matter. There’s an interesting interview with Halik at:
https://undpress.nd.edu/blog/2024/02/28/an-interview-with-tomas-halik-author-of-the-afternoon-of-christianity/ I was especially struck by the ecumenical and historical range of writers he cited as key influences on him.
There’s another, longer, interview with him at: https://www.reform-magazine.co.uk/2014/03/tomas-halik-interview-churches-need-thinkers/
Thanks Tim. Those are two great links to interesting interviews.
As I read the book I was really impressed by the range of material that he assimilated into his own writing.
I think LLF – and our failure to resolve it – is a symptom of something much more fundamental going on. And the book explores that. Whichever way LLF is resolved, the CofE will continue to die in its present form.
Doubt isn’t the enemy of faith but her sister. Unchecked doubt leads to militant secularism, but unchecked faith leads to religious fundamentalism. Like sisters faith and doubt need each other and support each other.
I suppose heaven will be a place of religious fundamentalism and therefore of little use to Halik and others like him?
Anton I am thinking that if God really loved the kind of Church that you like, then the Anglican Mission in England would really be thriving now. And it has, what, 25 Parishes since it started 10 years ago? I wonder why it isn’t growing.
Maybe it is because, as Tomáš Halík suggests, we need to approach things differently.
The regular CoE congregation I am in *is* thriving, and it preaches the gospel without compromise. That’s how I would like to see the CoE approach things differently.
You miss the point. Why isn’t the AMiE thriving do you think? they are clearly doing all the things you wish other CofE churches were doing?
I don’t think God is very interested in denominations but mainly in congregations (although there is a correlation). I would need to attend several AMiE congregations for some time to give a competent answer to your question.
I can give an answer that is both full and sincere only by widening the subject. I rather think that God is calling time on institutional Christianity – politicised, hierarchical, and with priestly ordination that confuses the falsely so-called laity into an unhealthy dependence. Like God, I take a congregational view. That the best congregation near me is nevertheless CoE despite those unscriptural features is a testament to the faith and the powers of leadership of its vicar. But persecution is coming and it will be Jesus Christ cleansing his bride, not sleeping on the job.
“ I rather think that God is calling time on institutional Christianity – politicised, hierarchical, and with priestly ordination that confuses the falsely so-called laity into an unhealthy dependence.”
Well if you read Halik’s book, you will find that is exactly what he is saying. Hence I recommended the book.
Well, that’s good and I have not claimed to read the book. I would not have guessed he took that line given that he is a Catholic priest! He does sound like a deep thinker, but that comment of his about faith and doubt makes me believe he has the wisdom of this world (using Paul’s categories in 1 Corinthians chs.1,2).
Why isn’t the AMiE “thriving”? I suppose Andrew hasn’t had any experience of starting a church, much less one without money, building or inherited congregation? If you have invested years of your life into a fellowship and thousands of pounds into church plant, it is not easy to walk away from a lifetime commitment.
And yet some of the AMiE churches are doing pretty well. Trinity Church in Scarborough seems to be thriving while the parish churches are struggling – including broadly evangelical ones. The Co-Mission churches in Southwark are also formally part of the Diocese of Southwark but are self-supporting and are thriving.
If parish churches were able to leave with their buildings and vicarages, I think about 2000 parishes would leave the Church of England tomorrow. These churches are the net givers to the C of E. Of the parish churches in the C of E with 200 or more uSa, almost all of these are evangelical. They are also where almost all the youth work in the C of E happens.
In the US, thousands of churches have left the United Methodist Church over sexual revisionism, even though it costs the departing churches many thousands of dollars to leave. The C of E will have to do the same.
Anton
depends what you mean by ‘fundamentalism’ – the original early 1900 ‘Fundamentals’ booklets actually represented a similar approach to the Reformers, which included the proposition that the Bible is not ‘dumb wooden literal’ but rather is written like ordinary books in the sense that it includes figures of speech, different genres and other literary devices which people should use their brains to interpret. It was later literalists in the 1920s -30s who gave ‘fundamentalism’ its modern anti-intellectual reputation (for example in the Dayton Tennessee ‘monkey trial’).
Yes, I do agree. But my main point was about Halík’s foolish comments about doubt. Most of us have it from time to time as our flesh (sarx) fools us, but it is no good thing.
Local(ish) gospel congregation Anton. Agreed.
Aimie thriving?
Isn’t it? How long has it been on the go, firmly established? How long does church growth and planting take?
What about FIEC? New Frontiers.
What are the contrasting demographics of moribund decline, a withering away, neing cut off from the vine, who is Christ, compared to funding of, gospel-growth and planting.?
Who is primarily responsible for church decline, withering, within the churches ( as opposed to external indifferent or hostile or pluralistic, secular culture and what are their beliefs?
Foolishness.
If the Church is the new Israel, it’s perhaps worth remembering what the old, original meaning of Israel was: he who struggles with God (see Genesis 32).
The church is NOT the ‘new Israel’ and the New Testament nowhere uses that phrase. “The Israel of God” is the nearest and it is by no means a reference to churches in gentile lands.
Anton
Surely in the NT the Church is not the ‘New Israel’ but the continuity of Israel in NT terms under the Messiah/King of the Jews Jesus, with Gentiles faithful to Jesus adopted into the family of Abraham. And contrary to what is implied by the CofE, there should be no ‘Christian nations’ other than the inter/supranational Church itself. The Church is God’s holy nation in NT terms (see I Peter) and the secular nations ought to be clearly ‘the world’ out of which people are called into the Church.
Stephen: you speak of ‘the continuity’ but this is ambiguous unless you specify what is being continued.
Today, Christ’s church (still a mix of Jew and gentile, albeit dominated numerically by the latter) is the continuity of the faithful. But the Jewish people represent the continuity of the Abrahamic covenant, which is unconditional – and God keeps his word, even if man does not. That is why the Jews retained a cultural identity in 18 centuries without any land over which they exercised political hegemony. Other dispossessed peoples fade away as they are killed or marry out. And God still has plans for the Jewish people: they regained their ancient land in 1948, fulfilling Isaiah 11:11-12 which can refer to nothing else. There, more Jews are turning to their Messiah in a movement which began from virtually nothing – for most Jewish believers in Jesus in Mandatory Palestine accepted an offer of ship to England in May 1948 as Arab armies gathered on the borders. Today there are tens of thousands in a growing movement unheard of for 20 centuries. Hallel-u-Yah! Someday Israel’s national leaders will recognise Christ and cry out to him in repentance and distress, and He will return in glory to the Mount of Olives.
Andrew Godsall
I’d suggest that the AMiE is doing pretty well under the circumstances.
I’d also suggest that one of the reasons for the CofE’s current problems is that God is finally calling time on the idea of established churches, Christian nations, etc and wanting his people to go back to the way the Bible says Church and ‘surrounding world’ (not just ‘the state’) should be related. A disestablished CofE would be much better able to deal with the other current problems….
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think Andrew has ever tried to start a church from scratch without buildings, money or a congregation.
AFAIK, the CofE has started only one new parish in the past few years, while the population has increased about 10% or so since 2010.
Some of the AMiE church plants are doing pretty well – the Scarborough church in particular.
The way ahead will be to allow the evangelical parishes to leave with their property. They are basically self-supporting and I don’t think there is any shortage of evangelical ministers in training.
OTOH, a crisis is now affecting the ministry of the C of E with a 40% reduction in numbers in training in 5 years, while hundreds are set to retire in the next three years. This will overwhelmingly affect central and liberal congregations. Training numbers at liberal colleges are very low at present.
Israel: Son of God. Jacob’s name ( obtaining a blessing, inheritance, by trickery and deceit) which marked out bis character, was changed by God in his life transforming encounter (it was more than his nose that was put out of joint) with God, and subsequent walk with God.
Jesus is the true Son and believers (sons) are inheritors in Jesus.
Synod meets July 5-9 and LLF next steps are to be discussed in the afternoon of Monday July 8th. The Telegraph reports that more than 25 priests and persons sitting in the lower two houses of Synod have signed a letter prepared by a group called The Alliance, which describes itself as an informal partnership of leaders from networks in the Church supported by 2,000 clergy. The letter includes the following text:
What is proposed is clearly indicative of a departure from the doctrine of the Church of England in an essential matter… We have… seen the proposed agenda for General Synod… and note the intention of the House of Bishops to proceed with plans that are clearly contrary to the canons and doctrine of the Church of England… issues they raise in terms of… unlawfulness (failing to follow the canons of the Church of England which are designed to preserve unity)… If the further departure from the Church’s doctrine suggested by the Synod papers does go ahead, we will have no choice but rapidly to establish what would in effect be a new de facto ‘parallel province’ within the Church of England and to seek pastoral oversight from bishops who remain faithful to orthodox teaching on marriage and sexuality. We will encourage all church leaders who are in sympathy with The Alliance to join the parallel Province.
This letter follows a statement on Wednesday by eleven bishops who urged for the process to be reconsidered, saying, “Many bishops are already concerned about the impact on the coherence of the Church’s life of moving ahead in a way that will create fundamental fragmentations at parish, diocesan and national levels.”
Never mind – time can be wasted, and resources and money diverted, and souls neglected, by chatter, which was the infernal purpose all along.
The Alliance need to get on with and establish the Third Province now.
1. Stop paying your diocese.
2. Notify your bishop you are recognising new orthodox leadership.
3. Start meeting and praying in the new arrangement. Don’t waste any more time.
I predict that the liberal archepiscopal response would be to inform a new and even more secular Labour government that the CoE no longer needs its parish priests to have a legal opt-out from conducting gay marriages. Then a provocateur gay couple in every parish would demand a church wedding.
For this reason intense spiritual battle needs to take place within each diocese – not detachment from the battle, which will led to yet more outflanking.
In the end, so long as the CofE remains an ‘established’ church the result is inevitable. On the statistic that matters most, reasonably regular attendance, the CofE is a very small percentage of the population. Almost all politicians of the major parties are committed to same sex marriage. How long do you think they will allow the supposed national church to be out of line with the political majority?
‘In the end, so long as the CofE remains an ‘established’ church the result is inevitable. ‘ Why? Being established didn’t prevent previous generations of Protestant Anglicans from being faithful. Why should it now?
presses ‘Like’.
Immediately stop theft of time from the tasks of the Church and the ministries of Christians.
Who is that new “orthodox” leadership? Would it include, for example, Jill Duff?
And the new commissioning of ‘overseers’ isn’t a breach of Canon Law?
But don’t anyone dare suggest they’ve been hankering for a schism…
Yes, it would have been better if the heretics and hypocrites had been expelled well before they began ascending the greasy pole.
You read pieces like the latest one by Giles Goddard linked on ‘Thinking Anglicans’ and you have to ask, ‘Who would want to be part of such an unhappy setup?’ What do these churches exist for , except to provide a performance site for choirs and orchestras? One doesn’t read of any great joy in being a Christian there or much certainty about the faith, either. It all sounds quite depressing.
That’s an interesting perspective, but not how it came across to me at all. Ministry in many places throughout history has been deeply challenging, not always joyful and often lacking in visible results. Yes there are moments of joy and celebration but also a lot of heartbreak and uncertainty. Part of the current cultural world we’re in is the emphasis on visible success, triumphant and joyful ministry. Just look at lots of church websites that proclaim that their church is vibrant or thriving or transforming their city or even the whole region. But there’s often little or no evidence that this is happening. How many large, thriving evangelical church are there in tough inner city contexts or on run down estates? Very few, they’re nearly all in affluent city centres or comfortable suburbs.
And don’t forget the deeply despairing thoughts of many of the great saints of the Church e.g. Luther, Wesley, Cowper, not to mention St Paul’s in some sections of 2 Corinthians. We need places where the negative stuff can be spoken of as well as the victories.
I predict that the liberal archiepiscopate will do nothing to remove these schismatics from the CoE, will allow them to flout Canon Law, and may even continue to support them financially with monies that are now being squirrelled away in dodgy funds.
Stop training them, stop resourcing them, remove all support. They are welcome back when they repent.
Bishop Ludwig Mueller agrees.
Always interesting to see what does and doesn’t constitute a breach of the comments policy.
‘Flout canon law’?? The people who are flouting canon law are bishops like Steven Croft, John Inge, and Stephen Cottrell! Are you keen we should hold them to account?
Synod is passing ultra vires motions? And no-one’s noticed?
You have read the rules for consecrating bishops aka overseers?
AJB,
Of course it has been noticed, but it has been denied or ignored. Legal advice, opinion has defiantly not been published in a spirit of unaccountablity.
The fact that it may or may have been “passed” doesn’t make it any less ultra vires.
Don’t anyone sugggest that revisionist are schismatic regressives with a liberal blend of neo-Marcionism- Gnosticism (of a different religous sect- to paraphrase Machen).
Anton
How can there ever be meaningful discussions on treatment of LGBT people when even the suggestion of giving a gay couple a formal blessing for their (non sexual?) relationship in parishes that want to do so is an excuse for schism?
The scary thing is that I dont think there is any doubt that churches where there are serious problems with safeguarding are over-represented in this faction. Are they wanting to break away to remain theologically “pure” or are they wanting to break away so they can continue to avoid scrutiny of bullying, spiritual abuse or worse?
Your attempt to divert into safeguarding is transparent.
What do you mean by a gay ‘couple’? Answer that and I’ll respond to your first question.
The whole LLF process has been a way to distract the church from the topic of abuse. The leaders don’t want to talk about abusive priests. Legitimizing same sex relationships makes it hard to abuse people for being gay.
Gay couple – a couple composed of two gay people
You ducked my question. What is meant by ‘couple’ in this context? What is the difference between two random gay people (of the same sex) and a gay couple?
Anton
Erm like the normal meaning of “a couple” – romantically associated
Quite. And we are supposed to believe they are not having sex or planning to?
Peter, that is thoroughly inadequate.
A given man/woman may say – they feel a 68% attachment to person A, a 90% attachment simultaneously to person B, and so on. ow do you get a ‘couple’ here. ‘Romantic attachment’ can be measured neither in scientific reality nor in law. Even if it could be, there is no reason at all why there should be couples and not throuples or larger groups.
Anton
That’s a big part of the problem with treatment of LGBT people by the CofE.
CofE says the only issue with gay people is sexual activity, but then in practice assumes all gay people are having sex
Why should I not assume that a ‘gay couple’ (your own phrase) is having sex?
Ian – you responded to me above
“‘In the end, so long as the CofE remains an ‘established’ church the result is inevitable. ‘ Why? Being established didn’t prevent previous generations of Protestant Anglicans from being faithful. Why should it now?
Establishment still doesn’t ‘prevent’ Anglicans from being faithful ( well, in every respect other than the unbiblical establishment itself!!). The problem is that even if 100% of Anglicans reject same-sex marriage, being ‘by law established’ means that the legislators can overrule the Church. As Cornelius Fudge says in Harry Potter, “Laws can be changed”. I repeat – how long do you think our legislators will allow a supposedly national church to be so out of line with a nation in which said church is realistically a very small minority?
I would expect that said legislators would either disestablish the church or would change the rules to impose same-sex marriage upon it if it is to remain the national church.
SL
The incoming Labour government are timid when it comes to rocking the establishment boat. I dont think they would do anything to pressure the CofE over same sex blessings. I do, however, think they won’t be as tolerant of the CofE over abuse as the Tories were and I think this could lead to disestablishment or the CofE losing the right to police themselves.
Peter
See what you mean – but this issue is not just on party lines. Large numbers in all three major parties are on the same side, and many in the lesser parties too.
Maybe so but it’s difficult to get bills passed without government support
You have read the rules for consecrating bishops aka overseers?
AJB,
Of course it has been noticed, but it has been denied or ignored. Legal advice, opinion has defiantly not been published in a spirit of unaccountablity.
The fact that it may have been “passed” doesn’t make it any less ultra vires.
Claim for ssm, not proved, scripturally, theologically. Case dismissed.
Claim for ssb, not proved scripturally, theologically. Case dismissed.
Geoff
Problem here is that ‘scripturally, theologically’ is probably not enough, for two reasons
1) An awful lot of the professed Christians in this issue are not exactly doing their theology scripturally
2) As the national established church, the CofE needs to significantly justify itself in secular terms, especially on an issue like this where non-Christians also marry etc.
And despite your earlier comment about stable doors, as far as I can see the idea is still alive and well and regularly quoted that ‘being gay’ is the same kind of thing as ‘being black’ or having blue eyes or similar, with the corollary that any opppposition to or criticism of ‘gayness’ is the same kind of sin/crime as racism. I’d regard it as unlikely the evangelicals will win this argument unless we can put a very serious public dent in that false idea. Ideally
by a recognition at Supreme Court level that ‘gayness’ does indeed belong in a different category because of how much it is about things people DO, and therefore CHOOSE, and that the urges and desires underlying those choices are not as automatically ‘beyond criticism or challenge’ as ethnic differences and eye colour etc…
Demonstrate that and Biblical teaching and ‘gayness’ will be on a level playing field; fail to show it, and not many people are going to be listening to us; not to mention we will be vulnerable to all kinds of legal action….
SL
I agree with you that homophobia is largely seen as similar to racism and this poses a problem for any church seeking to be anything more influential than a small extremist sect.
The big problem for Anglican evangelicals is that the official teaching of the Anglican communion has opposed homophobia since the 1990s. Many evangelicals don’t want to be seen as homophobic and there’s no agreement on treatment of gay people among evangelicals.
For example one evangelical church may have an openly gay (abstinent) vicar and the next not allow gay people even to play in the band.
This goes further into my continual complaint that the church has squandered the opportunity to actually address key questions about gay people and instead is facing schism over a teaching that’s pointless thin and ineffective
Peter
I have to agree with you that the CofE is a mess on this issue.
You may have gathered that I think a major part of the mess is the anomaly of ‘establishment’, which tangles the church with the state in a way that puts it under the pressures of ‘serving two masters’, the purposes of God on the one hand and the worldly power and purposes of the state on the other. As a national body imposed originally by the king for his own purposes it coerced both theological belief and moral conduct, including that it criminalised homosexuality. As now, as a minority hanging on to the rags of that former influence, it faces temptation to compromise with the world around it.
On the other side gays are claiming a dubious privileged position based on the idea that ‘gayness’ is the same kind of thing as ethnic differences; and that simply isn’t true but too much of the church has thoughtlessly gone along with that and accepted it, creating legal confusion which in society at large effectively has ‘gays’ improperly legally persecuting those who disagree with them. That’s also a mess that needs sorting out. I’m saying a bit more about this in a reply to AJ Bell below….
Stephen,
The secularists in the church are seeking to build a social construct in place of “called-out ones.
Our church is going out on the streets with the gospel of Luke, door knocking chatting to people in the local environs, inviting them to come and see what’s going on.
Not on one occasion has sexuality been mentioned as a reason to not attend.
One young man, who didn’t believe in God, knew nothing of Jesus, took the gospel, and said, this place needs it!
One older man said he’d been baptised in the church 81, years ago.
There is a community memory, and new comers, such as a man who had arrived from Hong Kong who showed some interest, having found a methodist church in the city centre. No one has been hostile.
Some of islam have wanted to engage in conversation, to convert us, but again no hostility.
Geoff
Has this exercise led to any engagement with gay couples or families? If so what were they told?
“Ideally by a recognition at Supreme Court level that ‘gayness’ does indeed belong in a different category because of how much it is about things people DO, and therefore CHOOSE”
I can’t see how the Supreme Court is going to be able to strike down the Equality Act. That’s not how our courts work. But I think you also need to recognise that the protected characteristics under the Equality Act are not limited simply to race and sexual orientation. There are some very obvious “do” things that people have “chosen” where you probably don’t want to strip away people’s rights and protections: being pregnant or on maternity leave; being married; and of course religion or belief.
As I understand it, it is part of the Supreme Court’s job to strike down inappropriate laws. In this case it is not so much ‘striking down the law’ as making sure that it is properly applied. Religion or belief does of course deserve *some* protection; and at the same time some limits on its ability to coerce those who disagree with the religion in question.
What is needed in this case is an understanding that ‘gayness’ is NOT the same kind of thing as an ethnic difference, and that therefore it requires a different level of protection – it is indeed much more like a religion than like the simplicities of skin or hair colour, and like a religion is, or should be, open to critique and question. That is what the Supreme Court needs to sort out. As things currently stand many gays are acting as if even the slightest criticism is by definition ‘hate speech’ or a ‘hate crime’ – and no, it ain’t necessarily so. We need a true ‘gay equality’ in place of what has become unwarranted privilege for gays.
The US Supreme Court and the UK Supreme Court are different bodies with different powers. And it’s far from obvious how the Equality Act is being improperly applied (as opposed to just being something you personally don’t agree with).
By the way, which religious freedom protections are you hoping to do away with?
AJB
Yes I am aware that the UK and US Supreme Courts are different. In some ways a judgement on this in the US Court would be better – it’s the kind of issue where I think UK lawyers would pay attention to a US decision.
The issue not just for the courts but generally/philosophically/religiously is whether ‘gayness’ is an appropriate characteristic to receive similar protection to ethnic differences. That protection is a step up from the normal because of certain features of racism, and ipso facto something lawyers would tell you should not easily be extended to other areas.
The point is very simple – ethnic differences are about simple ‘being’, things that are not only ‘no choice’ but actually cannot meaningfully be either done or chosen. Whereas it is rather the point of the sexuality issues that people are doing or wanting to do, certain acts, and are often choosing to do them. As with other sins, any ‘being’ involved is about ‘urges and desires to do’ whatever, and even when people feel ‘no choice’ in their urges and desires, 1) there usually is a clear degree of choice in actually living out the urges etc., and 2) urges and desires do run all the way from the saintly to the satanic. “I have such-and-such desires so it must be OK to live them out” is not really practical, not just guaranteed to be acceptable. This is a far wider consideration than just sexual issues. The comparison with race does not hold up, and in the other category in which sexuality clearly does belong, lots of other considerations apply.
Why would I be doing away with religious freedoms? The one change I want in that area is to finally do away with the remnants of the time when the CofE denied religious freedom to others.
Your plan is to remove sexual orientation from the list of protected characteristics because you don’t think it’s similar enough to race.
If you succeeded in that argument, it would also apply to religion and belief (not to mention a host of other protected characteristics such as being married). So I’m curious why you’d want to do that. Or is it that the only protected characteristic you want to remove from the Equality Act and you want to keep all the others, including religion and belief, despite them being different to race?
You regard laws as remarkably authoritative, given what they actually are. They just reproduce the presuppositions of a culture or elite with all the failings and virtues of those presuppositions.
The religion and belief one is certainly an odd one. Belief can mean all sorts of different things. Religion may be held to because only one option has ever been presented to you. Or because it tickles your fancy and you have never investigated the evidence.
Stephen, at Constitional law, there is a separation of powers, the Executive, the Legislature, the independent Judiciary. The Supreme Court has no power to * strike down* properly constituted legislation, under the concept of the *Sovereignty of Parliament*.
Historically, there has been a battle between the Courts and Parliament.
A question of Constitional law arose during Brexit, when the Supreme Court was petitioned to consider the question of prerogation of Parliament.
The Courts can and do interpret legislation, using recognised “canons of construction”. Such interpretation may form a precendent, in itself, known as Common law. That in itself may cause Parliament to seek a change in legisaltion, such as with migrants.
Of course, in practice, in reality, there are many political pressures and ideologies at play.
And the question of how truly independent the Judiciary is ebbs and flows with the intensity of the prosecution of their claim by the vested interest groups.
Geoff
I think when the point here is properly presented to the Supreme Court they will have to point out to the government that the current position is deeply anomalous in terms of normal legal thinking, and that ‘gayness’ is seriously not in the same category as ethnic differences. And indeed that treating it that way is a threat to other people’s civil liberties.
Stephen,
Who and when is this presentation going to take place?
The question of (group) locus standi would have to be determined first.
Here is some essay teaching, which post dates and updates my law degree which included Constitutional and Administrative law.
https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/administrative-law/basic-idea-of-locus-standi.php
Geoff
It will have to arise in the normal course of events from a case in a lower court. But I also think there will need to be some ‘preparing of the ground’ in discussion outside the courts while awaiting such a case arising. And that will include discussion in the church to clarify the principles involved; and particularly in the CofE which tends to take some things for granted because of that established status, an understanding that they need to put an argument that stands on general principles that should be acceptable to many non-Christians. Biblical arguments will only convince Bible-believers.
I do have a law degree myself, though health problems of various kinds including autism at a level that couldn’t be diagnosed properly back in the 1970s meant I was unable to turn the degree into a career.
You misunderstand. I don’t want to completely remove sexual orientation from the Equality Act. I simply want it to be clear that ‘gayness’ cannot claim the same status in that context as race, because unlike race it is not a simple ‘being so’ issue. On the contrary sexuality definitely involves issues about ‘doing’ things in a way totally inapplicable to ethnicity issues, and therefore of choosing to do those things. And such element of ‘being’ as there is involves the much more ambiguous and complex business of ‘urges and desires’ which as I’ve pointed out is a whole spectrum of stuff from the decidedly good to things you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of!! Consequently unlike skin or eye colour etc., merely having urges and desires can’t reliably mean they are OK to live out, and far more complex issues are involved.
It is often not realised that the protection given on grounds of race is actually somewhat exceptional; and I am simply suggesting that sexual orientation issues are not entitled to that exceptional status, but a more qualified status similar to though not exactly like the protection afforded to religious beliefs.
It’s not often realised that the protection given on grounds of race is exceptional, because it’s not. Race is one of a list of protected characteristics under the Equality Act. The others are: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, religion and belief, sex, and sexual orientation.
If you don’t want to remove sexual orientation what do you want? Legally, sexual orientation is only “like race” because it is another protected characteristic. Are you proposing a new status of almost-protected characteristic? What would that be? Or, are you seeking to replace sexual orientation with sexual behaviour as a protected characteristic (because that’s how you prefer to define “gayness” irrespective of what those of us who actually are gay might think)? That sounds like it might be replete with unintended consequences.
AJ Bell
And following on from that last comment….
If sexuality is in that different category then it is totally legitimate for a religion to argue that it is a sin, and to say so would not be ‘hate speech’. Rather it would be similar to the way in which to be a Christian is a sin in Muslim terms, and to be a Muslim a sin in Christian terms. Religious equality would on the one hand protect the rights of each religion to believe the other wrong/sinful, but also protect each religion from having the other’s beliefs imposed on them. ‘Gayness’ should have a similar status….
And in the CofE I suspect a lot of the problem is that many, probably most, on the pro-SSM side are accepting the idea that ‘gayness is just like being black etc’ and so are giving ‘gayness’ an inappropriate standing. Clarify the legal status of ‘gayness’ so that it doesn’t have the somewhat special position accorded to ethnicity, and the argument within the church becomes a rather different kind of issue.
I get it Stephen. You’re excited by the prospect of being able to label sexual orientation sin, and then turn around and say you only meant to be talking about behaviour, because the sexual orientation isn’t (in your view) a real thing.
Muslims are free to believe (and say) that Christianity is a false religion that endorses sinful behaviour and condemns that which is justified (or similar). Of course they may well receive a decent amount of challenge and pushback on that. They would not however be free to refuse to serve a Christian at their business, refuse a Christian to stay at their B&B, decide not to hire a worker because they were a Christian, no matter how detestable they thought Christianity was etc..
AJB
No, you don’t get it! Sexual orientation really really really isn’t in the same moral category as ethnicity, and it really really really makes a difference – including that treating sexual orientation on that level both puts gays in not an equal but an improperly privileged position, and threatens the civil liberties of others to challenge the gays.
You refer to how Muslims “…may well receive a decent amount of challenge and pushback on…” saying Christianity is a false religion. Exactly. They can be pushed back at precisely because religion, though somewhat protected, is not on the same level as the straightforward ‘being’ of ethnicity. Treating sexuality as equivalent to ethnicity means that they are legally protected from such pushback – but improperly so because that equivalence is a misrepresentation. And while that misrepresentation persists it is impossible to work out where it is or isn’t appropriate to treat gays differently. And their differences in ideas and conduct may well mean there are cases where it is appropriate.
And do note that the differences in ideas/wordview/conduct on the gay side are the kind of things that are/can be relevant in relation to religion when not so in the wider world. Things they should not be allowed to impose on or demand of a church any more than I should be allowed to demand a bacon butty in a kosher Jewish eatery.
This is more tedious than usual.
You can’t demand to buy a bacon butty from a kosher bakery because they don’t have them for sale for anyone. Just like you can’t demand to buy a car from a shoe shop. However, a kosher bakery cannot refuse to sell you one of their bagels just because you don’t happen to be Jewish.
So you would compel people to participate in what they understand/analyse to be evil or wrong?
Are you also one of the people who would force midwives who love babies – and have a vocation to help deliver them – to kill other babies?
Also ‘being gay’ (a way of phrasing things which is ontological whereas in this instance behavioural would make more sense) is not a solid category. And for numerous different reasons.
-It is not guaranteed to be stable.
-It is not an aspect of innate nature.
-It is capable of being lied about though generally is not.
-It cannot be seen. It cannot even be identified by a doctor.
That is its level of objective reality. There are thousands and thousands of things with a higher level of objective reality which get none of the preferential treatment.
AJB
No time for a fuller answer right now – but whatever way you go round this, ‘gayness’ is not objectively in the same category as ethnicity or eye colour, and definitely is in a different category where different rules apply.
Of course, if we’re talking about the Equality Act it’s worth noting that eye colour is not one of the protected characteristics…
AJB,
Being more tedious…in deliberately being dull and egregiously miscategorising.? Eye colour and skin colour are of one, physically observed, inherited category in; the modern identitarian category of gayness is not, is not of the same category.
It is a falacious error of category which is not conjoined or overcome by type or degrees of responses therto.
And living our lives out with inherited skin colour or eye colour, ( the practice of skin colour, or of eye colour!) per se can never be sinful.
You sound like a legal fundamentalist. All laws are perfect as they are; and also they have always existed and must, in the nature of things, always be as they now are.
AJBell
I mention eye colour because it is one of the regular examples cited by the pro-gay lobby in the attempt to pretend that ‘being gay’ is “the same kind of thing” as being black. And like all such examples it’s basically irrelevant because ‘gay’ unlike ethnicity involves things people do/want to do/are tempted to do as a result of urges and desires which are way more morally complex than things like eye colour.
The gay ‘case’ on this does just about hold up on the presupposition of atheism; but then if you really follow atheism through logically it creates some considerable moral and epistemological problems. Thing is “there are other presuppositions/worldviews” and last time I checked the atheists aren’t supposed to have a monopoly…..