A Letter to Jay
Neil Macdonald, 19/9/2002
The announcement that Dr Rowan Williams, the present Archbishop of Wales, is to become Archbishop of Canterbury, has been widely reported. Those who have met him – including several from the congregation here at St Wilfrid’s - have been impressed by both his wisdom and his humility. They have also seen him as prophetic. Yet it has been his views on homosexuality that have made the headlines. My newspaper reports him as saying: "If we are looking for a sexual ethic that can be seriously informed by our Bible, there is a good deal to steer us away from assuming that reproductive sex is a norm, however important and theologically significant it may be". He is also reported as stating that if physical sex is about human bonding, as much as about procreation, there is a good case for concluding that same sex relationships may also be legitimate in God's eyes - always providing that they are stable and faithful.
It must be said – always assuming that the report is accurate - that this is a minority view within the Church of England, and also within the wider Anglican Communion. Indeed there are many who fear that its promotion is likely to bring ever more serious confrontation, and may even lead to schism. Yet the fact that such a view is held by someone of Dr Williams’ evident stature and scholarship is to some extent a marker of where the tide of opinion on this matter has reached. It is hard to use the term “liberal” to describe it, since faithfulness and stability in human partnerships are often very hard to achieve.
Whilst it is impossible to do justice to the issues that are at stake in this complex theological and ethical debate in the space of one letter, there are perhaps some conclusions that can be drawn about how we, as Christians, might try to look forward with hope. For the sad fact is that this is a debate that has frequently generated more heat than light. Protagonists on both sides have often come over as rather dark and unhappy people with unresolved issues of their own, rather than committed seekers after truth. Perhaps this is inevitable with something that touches so many emotions, nerves and fears, but if we are to be effective in discerning where God’s will for us really does lie, we are going to have to try to lay aside the personal and psychological – even tribal - baggage that all of us have accumulated, and work and pray together. As Anglicans, we have a long tradition of trying to reach a compromise, and we should take some heart from this.
Too often the response of individual Christians to the issues has been made into a kind of litmus test as to whether they are serious about Scripture. Phrases like “Bible-believing” tend to be used rather indiscriminately. In fact, most Christians do honour the Bible, but in this instance there is more than one way of interpreting it, and that is perhaps the main reason why there is a debate at all. There is, however, much that we can agree on. We would, I think, accept that all real relationships are about love, commitment, faithfulness, and responsibility. That in itself represents a powerful challenge to much that occurs in contemporary society. Where there is disagreement, it is about the form such relationships might take. Dr Williams is looking at them in terms of the underlying spiritual dispositions rather than their outward appearances. As Christians, we should perhaps be sensitive to this, for it is the World that judges by the trappings.
Traditionally the Church has urged celibacy for those not called to marriage. In the Anglican Communion, this was upheld as recently as the Lambeth Conference of 1998. Celibacy is commended by Jesus (Matt 19:12) as a most effective way of bringing his love and healing power to as many people as possible, without the ties that having a partner and family might bring. It should not be confused with the kind of bitchy abstinence that may try to pass for it, especially when that is imposed. Again, it is the quality, rather than the structure, of the relationships that is at stake. Our sexuality is very much part of us, for better or for worse, and we have to come to terms with it. We all have our wild beasts and our angels: our faith is that the angels will prevail, but as with Jesus in the wilderness – and in Gethsemane – we must learn to live with both.
Jesus’ said of the Scribes and Pharisees that “they tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them” (Matt 23:4), and the tension between the Spirit and the law has been evident since the earliest days of the church. The council of Jerusalem was concerned with the question of whether Gentiles who were converted to Christianity should have to take on board the requirements of the Jewish Law. After much discussion, St Peter got up and said: "Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear? (Acts 15:7-10).
Although St Paul’s words to the Corinthians (1 Cor 6:9) are often used to justify the traditional stance, he was seen by many of his contemporaries as a theological liberal. The test for him was whether people were “sanctified” (1 Cor 6:11): filled with that Spirit from which the “fruit” of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control would issue in abundance. There would have been many who would have seen the chaos in the Corinthian church as ample evidence of the error of this approach, and it may be that the robustness of Paul’s writings to the Christians within it was, in part at least, a response to this criticism. Yet it is clear that many in Corinth had departed completely from the Way of Jesus: some even thought it acceptable to have prostitutes (1 Cor 6:16), while others were clearly both drunk and unruly at Mass (1 Cor 11:18-21). This is a very long way indeed from relationships of faithfulness and stability.
Perhaps there is a need for all of us to recognise that the process of discerning God’s will, and remaining obedient to it, is the work of a lifetime. We do indeed “see through a glass darkly”. Whether it is those, like myself, who are inclined to see things as Dr Williams does, or others who take a more traditional view, there must remain the humility to accept that God’s ways are not our ways, and that his thoughts are not our thoughts. We are always liable to get it wrong. Yet we must also be open to the possibility that there may be more than one way for people to gain purity of heart. We should never fear being called to new life and new relationships, whilst being conscious of the need to test our responses to this against the evidence of Scripture and tradition.
St Paul had observed how people of different backgrounds had been united through obedience to God, and this had led him to see the body of Christ as an entity quite distinct from any formal organisation as well as from the world around it. It was – and is - a group of men and women – a community of disciples - bound to one another in the friendship of Jesus, and sanctified by his Spirit. His hope – and that of St Peter - found a heartfelt echo in the words of a letter that was written in 1656 by the Quakers of Balby to their “brethren in the north”: “Dearly beloved Friends, these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by, but that all, with the measure of light that is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not from the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life”.
