The Commission’s Key Questions 1(b) and 2(b)
It is never wrong to love
another human being; but we all know that particular expressions of that love
may be wrong, and that the wrongness is independent of the depth, intensity and
permanence of love. That some kinds of genital
expression, for instance between parent and child, two siblings, close friends
of the same or different sex, are displeasing to God is the united witness of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Old Greek
version (which adds an allusion to lesbian relations in Ez. 16), the
Intertestamental literature, the Fathers, the Reformers and all Jewish and
Christian ethicists until perhaps thirty years ago. The differentium
of same-sex ‘unions’ and of Gene Robinson’s relationship with his close friend
is a case in point. In biblical Greek and language derived from it (for
instance in Philo) such kinds of physical expression are frequently called πορνεία: at least twice in the Lord’s teaching according to
Matthew, in I Cor. 6-7 and in Gal. 5 (where it stands at the head of the list
of the ‘Works of the Flesh’) it is made clear that πορνεία
in all its forms is gross sin, persistence in which has transcendental and
eternal consequences. Abstention from mild forms of it, probably transgressions
of stricter Jewish conceptions of prohibited degrees, was at issue at the
Council of Jerusalem; incest at
Absolutely pivotal are Our
Lord’s own teaching and example. That the Lord both
taught and lived fully within the Old Testament sexual ethic is certain. We
may indeed know His attitude to same-sex genital relations. No case can be made for the modern notion that there was or could have
been any Dominical silence or ambiguity about them. His
attitude is actually quite plain from the πορνεία references in Matthew, where His
teaching is represented by the Evangelist as Jesus-Torah, and Himself as the
new Moses. If anyone in His time and place had had the temerity to produce a
challenge to Him as teacher along the lines of that about divorce, He would
most certainly have replied, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”.
By analogy, He would if anything have sharpened the moral demand for His
disciples. There would have been no qualifications at all, no mention of
pastoral provision for failure, there being none in Leviticus or elsewhere.
This was a closed question: it is not open to us to attribute to Him
historically impossible attitudes.
Not only is the
language unambiguous, we must also come to terms with Jesus as our
pattern, here as elsewhere. Any compromise on His part would have produced an
immediate challenge to the validity of His ministry, and that challenge must
have left some trace in the record. Some want to ignore Him as example of
perfect First Century Jewish sex-ethics, while using Him as a stick to beat the
rest of us into other more fashionable attitudes. The idea of Him as the best
of husbands and fathers, even (just about) as the best of wives and mothers, is
possible; but not the idea of Him curled up in bed with John the Beloved
Disciple at any stage. The man in
Many things may be Christian but not Anglican. But unless something may
be Anglican which is not Christian, we must understand that to call right what
the Lord Himself called wrong, and to do what appalled Him, is to part company
with essential Anglicanism, endangering not only the souls of those who teach
this untruth and wickedness, but in many cases the very lives of little
children, young girls, young men, women and all the sexually weak and
vulnerable wherever they may be, now and for the foreseeable future. It is to
say that the right to the physical expression of love trumps all the obedience
we may owe to the one we call Lord. As ethicists we know that there is no human
right to orgasm at any cost. We need to hold onto the subtler truth, that there
is no Christian right to redefine love in the face of the God Who commands and
supplies it.[*]
This
brief comes from Professor C.J.G. (BA, MA, PhD
[*] For
corroboration of this whole argument reference may be made to:–
Robert A.J. Gagnon The
Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (
http://www.robgagnon.net/ArticlesOnline.htm
http://nwnet.org/~prisca/HomotextUnicode.htm