22.v.2001.
Dear L*****,
Thankyou so much for
your letter, and for taking the trouble to write. You will forgive me
for the familiarity of my form of address to you: no marital or sexual (!)
status is apparent to me even from carefully studying your envelope.
You will see that I am
sending you quite a wodge of paper. It includes the original Preface to my
little article penned when it went to the CSR
in 1997; Holy Trinity Vancouver’s official letter to our Diocesan after
Synod 1998; the set of questions which I prepared for the ‘Gay and Lesbian
Voices’; the (fictionalised) Foreword to the (fictionalised) autobiography
which I have been writing the past few months; and a transcription with some
tidying-up of the very long and often-segmented dialogue which I have been
conducting with Hugh D******* on the NWnet. The last is printed with Red for
Hugh, Blue for me, Plain for initiative material and
Italic for responsive. None of this material is confidential, but it should be
shared only with discretion and only among people whose faith is strong. It
would probably be best if you read all of this before getting any further into
this reply. That will save me a lot of repetition.
I shall answer you in an
interlinear way, printing out your letter in Purple, my reply in Green.
I have acted as a facilitator for the Dialogues on Same-sex Unions
established by Bishop Michael Ingham. As a facilitator, I received a copy of
your paper entitled Biblical texts relevant to sexual orientation and practice:
notes on philology and interpretation. I have read this paper with interest,
although I must admit that knowing neither classical Greek (actually there is only post-Classical Greek involved) nor Hebrew, much of the erudition escaped me. However, I feel that your
method and conclusions need challenging.
If you will look again at the paper, you will see that I stated and
implied some very tight limitations to my argument in the subtitle and the
introductory paragraph. The assumptions are scholarly and classically Anglican.
The method is severely philological, that is to say that it confines itself to
an attempt to establish basic meaning (as opposed to ‘meaning for us’) as it
may be derived from the linguistic, literary, cultural and historical contexts.
I use the standard tools in the universally accepted way. I hint at exegesis
and application (‘meaning for us’) only at the end, and here and there in
footnotes. I feel bound to say that you are not in a
position to quarrel with me about method.
As to the conclusions,
you may not like them much, but in order to challenge them you will need to be
similarly equipped to me. I do not know how old you are, but you will need to
catch up on several decades of immersion in the study of the ancient world. I
wrote British A-Levels in 1956 in Latin, Greek and Ancient History, and hold
degrees in Classics, Theology, Old Testament Studies and Septuagint.
In your covering note you hypothesize that with the appropriate
exegetical methods you could readily prove the rightness of female genital
mutilation and the goodness of rape-murder of tiny children. I have not tested
your hypothesis but to me it seems plausible and I will take it as correct.
What I actually said was, given that I was reeling from the
extraordinarily shoddy and dishonest methods of a paper wrongly circulated one
evening in our Twinning Meetings (the product of some now-defunct National
Unit), that, using THOSE methods in THAT paper, absolutely any abhorrent
practice could be proved to be good and beautiful. I have not said for about 40
years that anything at all could be so proved using any old method. That would
be the “Scripture is a wax nose” position of Luther’s opponents. The Early
Fathers and the Reformers certainly worked out much more sophisticated methods
long ago; we need to learn from them all that is there, before we start
re-inventing the exegetical wheel.
It is in particular not
sufficient to skate all round all the explicit references to a topic while
manufacturing others which do not exist.
At various times in the past the Scriptures have been used to prove that
the universe was created in six days and that the earth stood at its center.
Yes. Most of the time until the mid-Nineteenth Century
they were not so used, but understood to contain a phenomenological world-view
which was neither professedly scientific nor primitive. Have a look, for
instance, at D. Kidner on Genesis 1 (Tyndale O.T. Commentary).
The Scriptures state quite categorically that the ratio between the
circumference of a circle and its diameter equals 3, “proving” (?) the value of
Pi.
Huh?
Actually such arithmetic
would not be that far out.
If you will undertake to
do your daily Bible-reading with Cranmer’s lectionary (found in the BCP) for
the next two years, you will read all the N.T. twice and the O.T. once. At the
end of that time I will if still living talk with you again about this.
the Scriptures have
been used to justify slavery, male domination of women, settlement of
international disputes by war, subjugation of non-white people by Europeans,
prohibition of contraception, capital punishment, and many other positions and
practices that we no longer find acceptable.
That is quite a list. They have never been used to justify abortion or
cruelty to animals. Apart from the fact that “used” is in several cases obviously
the operative word, I am not opposed to all these
things. If my country had not sought to settle its dispute with the Third Reich
by war, it is extremely doubtful that you and I would now be free to have this
civilised discussion, and not only because I should have been exterminated
quite young. We must never forget that Nazism was violently anti-Christian, was
steeped in the occult, and that Hitler, who almost certainly hated the Jews
because Jesus was one, intended once he had won the War to “solve the religious
problem too”. Bonhoeffer and Co., principled Christian pacifists when younger,
had to abandon pacifism and find it in their hearts to plot to kill a foul
tyrant, as the lesser of two great evils.
I find nothing the
matter with capital punishment, if one could be certain in a given case that a
ghastly irrevocable error was not being made. All but the last generation are going to die sometime, when all’s said and
done. “It is better to suffer than to do injustice”, said Plato: I take the
view that unjust executions are like frivolous abortions, i.e. the killing is
infinitely more serious than the dying.
It does not require a knowledge of Hebrew to see
that the Scriptures could readily be used to justify polygamy, not to mention
ethnic cleansing. In a different vein, there are texts in Genesis that support
the idea that Christians should all be vegetarians.
But the methods are bad, and take no account of the teaching and practice
of the Lord Jesus Who is the centre of the Scriptures.
Clearly, the Scriptures can be used, if one has a mind to it, to justify
(or conversely, prohibit) virtually any practice that one may care to consider.
In facing any current moral dilemma we are compelled, therefore, to refer to
criteria other than Scriptural exegesis. This is far from saying that
Scriptural exegesis is in any way irrelevant.
How can it be, unless the Spirit is to be thought of as teaching contrary
to the Word?
It is, however, saying that it is obviously not enough.
The key proviso is “if one has a mind to it”. That is a far cry from the
obedient and reverent attitude which seeks to let itself be
formed by the teaching of Scripture however uncongenial.
In my view, decisions about what is morally acceptable or unacceptable
depend ultimately on contemporary movements of the Spirit. I realize that this
is very contentious statement because what one person sees as a movement of the
Spirit another sees as a conforming to the spirit of the world. I admit that it
is often difficult, at first sight, to distinguish between the two.
It is not difficult, it is impossible, without importing some values from
outside both Scripture and society. Some churches have exalted Tradition to the
point of ultimate authority; this has the merit of avoiding the worst
chronological snobbery; but Tradition itself only in the end represents
Christian thinking, sound or unsound, grounded in that same old Bible. Where
are we to get these independent values from? Nazism was a “contemporary movement
of the Spirit”; now we know exactly how far the wrong kind of spirituality was
involved.
That is why the kind of dialogue promoted by Bishop Michael is so
important and necessary.
I am so glad that you did not say “the kind of dialogue which we have actually
had”.
It is sometimes easier to make the distinction in retrospect.
Which is far too late to be at all useful. Meanwhile the experiment may well have been terribly
costly, and on a world scale.
When we discuss current issues surrounding homosexuality I often recall
discussions and debates we had 40 years ago over the matter of divorce. We
agonised over questions of whether the Church should permit divorce and whether
divorced persons (let alone divorced persons who had re-married) should be
admitted to Communion.
Judaism and Christianity always have so agonised. We have known what the
ideal is, and agonise over how to deal pastorally with declensions from it.
Now, I wonder what much of the fuss was about. This is not to say that
the questions were unimportant or that divorce is a matter of indifference.
I think that you are a little ambivalent here. You are surely not saying
that there should be no marriage-discipline at all? We still do have some in
connection with remarriage after divorce. We do not expect God to bless serial
polygamy.
I have to accept that if
I had done what I came near to doing in early 1971, namely deserted my spouse
and our first little girl for a second try with an old suitor, it would have
represented the most dreadful personal failure, either to hear God’s voice and
live by His grace the first time (incidentally making our baby a mistake!), or
to hear His voice and live by His grace the second time. I don’t think that I
should even have wanted, let alone expected, my Christian friends to take it
all more lightly than I should have done.
It is to say, however, that perhaps we did not handle the debate very
well.
We tend to fall into legalism or licence, healing nothing. A very dear friend
of mine in Church of England orders has never been beneficed since the 1970s,
when he divorced his wife, also a friend of mine, to stop her from killing one
or more of their children. This was without his remarriage…
Nowadays our church is
mercifully much more careful whom it marries for the first time. It used to be
quite careless, and then come down hard and heavy on selfish and immature
people who had made a mess of things. I wish that church weddings were not
legal weddings, then we wouldn’t have so many scandals
on our hands.
Will the same be said 40 years hence of our debate of homosexuality?
We are not actually debating homosexuality.
If it WERE said, the grounds might be different. The
analogy, however, does not hold: it would only obtain if people who marry in
church were promising to have a divorce, however amicable and civilised, as an
integral part of being married. Homosexual ‘unions’ contain within themselves
by definition the intention of going home and having physical homosexual relations:
that is the essential difference.
In the meantime, we must decide carefully and compassionately how to
integrate homosexuals into the Church.
Homosexuals are and always have been fully integrated into Anglicanism.
The history of the Church (as the Scriptures clearly confirm) has been a
history of breaking down barriers to inclusivity
‘Inclusivity’ is a bit of a sociological term: how does God’s call come
into that idea? Must we not repent and believe to be included? To put it
another way, do all respond, and show by a changed life and character that they
have done so? Are there house-rules in God’s house? Do we make those rules, or
does He?
and the opening up of fellowship to
persons who, perhaps for good reason (at least in the eyes of those who
maintained the barrier), were considered unacceptable, beginning with the
barrier that excluded the uncircumcised and continuing more recently to those
that excluded women from positions of authority and influence.
The barriers you mention were all done away in principle in the New
Covenant, and their demolition promised under the Old.
I have very definite
views on the woman-question, as you will have seen. I was once very militant
for women’s ordination. I am still for it, but not as a political act. I have
come to understand over the years that women and men always have as much
authority and influence as they really want, but that ordination does not
confer it, on either sex. One is asked to minister in particular ways when one
is ready for it. One learns to preach, for instance, by years of hearing and
obeying.
I believe that one more barrier is under strain.
The parallel is simply not there, in my view.
We cannot avoid the problem by compounding one iniquity by another, as
Again there is no parallel. The only violence being done, apart from that
to women, children, and young males in anal so-called intercourse, is to those
with convictions which are not tidily left-liberal. That violence is real.
I should be only too
pleased to talk to you in due course; perhaps lunch or something in my house? I
do not drive. I live near what used to be a bus-route!
Yours sincerely,