Has Christmas Failed Us?
December 22, 2020
Christianity was progressive long before secularism was invented
January 2, 2021
St Helen’s Bishopsgate, a large London church, has made a public Statement criticising the Church of England’s Living in Love and Faith for not opposing same-sex partnerships more strongly.
Part of me wants to ignore it; but what it says has been said so often, for so long, and with such devastating consequences, that I think it’s worth spelling out what is wrong with it.
The Statement announces that St Helen’s is in ‘a state of broken partnership with the House of Bishops of the Church of England’. The reason is the usual mantra: the bible forbids same-sex partnerships so the bishops should forbid them too.
To those unfamiliar with the debate this may seem straightforward, but it contains three flaws. Any one of them would be fatal to their position.
Flaw 1: selectivity
The Statement says St Helen’s and other churches have
called for and prayed for Bishops, as the denomination’s senior leaders, to uphold their vows to teach what the Bible says, including in the area of sex and marriage, and to deny false teaching and practice.
For ‘including’ read ‘only’. The number of commands in the Pentateuch is usually calculated at 613. I don’t know how many there are in the whole bible, but however they are counted the figure must be well over a thousand. The number condemning gay sex is seven at the most, more realistically five. Of the others many are regularly flouted today, such as cooking and farming regulations. St Helen’s is not noted for campaigning against men shaving their beards (Leviticus 19:27) or tattoos (Leviticus 19:28) or interest on loans (passim) which the Catholic Church forbade until the seventeenth century. It does not demand the death penalty for adulterers (Leviticus 20:10). Its insistence on obedience to the Bible’s commands is concentrated on the sexual activities of gays and lesbians.
This concentration is a recent development. Church leaders have often condemned gay sex in the past, but only in the last fifty years have they singled it out as the defining issue for Christians.
Why pick out this one? I have noted before that it began as a calculated decision. Because Conservative Evangelicals disagree with each other about so many biblical texts, their churches have a history of falling out. Focusing on one issue where most of them can agree has proved politically successful. Otherwise, neither the bible nor the history of Christianity provides any justification for singling out same-sex partnerships as especially wicked.
Flaw 2: Clarity
The Statement criticises the recent Church of England publication Living in Love and Faith for demonstrating
the division in the House of Bishops with some sections setting out the orthodox biblical teaching but others erroneous alternative views. The overall effect suggests that the clear biblical teaching on sex and marriage is not clear.
This two-page document repeats that the Bible’s teaching is ‘clear’ no fewer than seven times! We are left in no doubt that Scripture’s clarity is central to the case being made. Meanwhile, anybody who takes the trouble to read the Bible will soon notice that a great deal of it is far from clear.
Most people read it in translation. The Greek word arsenokoitai, which appears in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10, is often translated something like ‘homosexuals’ or ‘sodomites’, but this is only a best guess by translators. The precise meaning is not known. Recently some Hebrew scholars have argued that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 have been mistranslated: what is forbidden to men is not lying with any man, but lying with particular classes of men (forthcoming publication by the Wijngaards Institute ).
The theory of the bible’s clarity is a product of the early Reformation. Catholics and Protestants agreed that the bible was God’s revelation to Christians, but Catholics added that God had also given the Church authority to interpret it. The first Protestants, lacking a rival church, denied that Scripture needed interpretation. They therefore argued that everything in it was ‘clear’ and ‘plain’. The theory didn’t last long because it didn’t work in practice, but its rhetoric has recently been revived by churches like St Helen’s. The ‘clarity’ to which the Statement appeals has never existed.
Flaw 3: Authority
Even if there was good reason for singling out the ban on same-sex coupling, and even if the meaning of the relevant texts was absolutely clear, the case against gay sex would still be incomplete. It would still need to be shown that what the bible commands is obligatory for all Christians at all times. The Statement does not argue for this claim. It just takes it for granted – for all the world, as though it was so self-evident that it didn’t need spelling out.
When it is spelt out we can see how indefensible it is. I Corinthians was written by Paul to the church at Corinth, with an eye to what was going on in Corinth in the middle of the first century. He didn’t need to explain arsenokoitai: the folk at Corinth knew what was going on, even though we don’t.
Similarly the relevant Leviticus texts appear in a section which was designed to stress how Jewish practice differed from the practices of neighbouring peoples. It was never intended to apply to 21st century Europeans.
When single sentences are lifted out of the bible without any regard for context, their meanings can easily be altered. To take one example, Leviticus 20:13 (NRSV) runs:
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.
For decades I have been asking Conservative Evangelicals why they are so committed to the first half of this verse but not the second half. Never once has any of them provided an answer.
The search for an explanation
Thus the Statement’s case against same-sex partnerships suffers from three glaring weaknesses. Any one of them would be enough to demolish the argument.
None of the three points are rocket science. They are all pretty obvious when you think about it. But St Helen’s is not alone. A great many people agree with them. Why? It would be lazy to write them off as stupid. There must be a reason.
My attempt to give a reason is based on my experience as a parish priest and university chaplain. Others will have other stories to tell, but this is mine.
Early in its history the post-1970s Evangelical revival positioned itself as a counter-cultural movement with respect to other Christians. This can be psychologically attractive; adherents can then think of themselves as members of a superior elite. Sociologically, one effect was to create ghettoes of the like-minded. Evangelicals who played cricket felt the need to distinguish themselves from other cricketers; Christians In Sport provided a distinct identity. Evangelical teachers created the Association of Christian Teachers. And so on.
Within bubbles like these groups of Evangelicals have created their own theories of God and Christianity. Members are to accept the bible’s ‘clear’ teaching and should therefore believe exactly the same things as each other. The result is a strict hierarchy. Leaders do the teaching; the rest meekly accept what they are told, while being warned against the demonic influence of the big bad world outside.
Over the decades these bubbles have produced communities of Evangelicals so schooled in their own teachings that today they can be genuinely surprised to discover Christians with different beliefs.
For Evangelicals trained like this it must seem absolutely outrageous that a bishop in the Church of England should refuse to denounce same-sex partnerships. It may seem that such a bishop cannot be a true Christian. From that perspective there are only two possible responses. One is to demand the bishop’s repentance and submission on pain of expulsion. The other is denounce the whole church and create a rival one.
St Helen’s and the Church of England
If I am right about this, it explains the emphatically intolerant mood of the Statement. It is as though St Helen’s is giving the Church of England a good and proper telling off. In future they are to do as they are told. We read statements like the following:
The House of Bishops has responsibility for spiritual leadership in the Church of England – teaching the truth, correcting error and exercising discipline. Their failure of leadership over many years is responsible for the confusion that the Church of England now finds itself in…
The House of Bishops get their bottoms spanked:
In good conscience, St Helen’s is no longer able to remain in gospel partnership with the House of Bishops until they again speak and act consistently in accordance with the plain reading and plain teaching of scripture on sex and marriage…
Okay, we could reply. Off you go then. But then we get:
St Helen’s is not leaving the Church of England and will remain a member of its Deanery and Diocesan structures for the most part. However St Helen’s will be withdrawing from those activities which indicate full spiritual partnership.
For all its faults the Church of England is episcopally led. Plenty of other people don’t accept the authority of the bishops either, but don’t then claim to be part of the Church of England. St Helen’s, it seems, wants to have its cake and eat it, like a man telling his wife ‘I’m leaving you for another woman but I still expect you to do what I tell you’.
How to respond?
On the one hand St Helen’s knows exactly what every church leader should teach, and refuses to acknowledge the authority of anyone who teaches something different. It is a demand for uniformity.
On the other hand the Church of England has traditionally been the church of the nation, comfortable with diversity of belief and therefore willing to accommodate churches like St Helen’s.
How should it respond now? To my mind due procedure would be that as an inclusive church it can include excluders; but only on the basis that the excluders accept that their voice is one of many. Once excluders set out to undermine the Church’s inclusiveness they are acting out of order. Their options are to either accept the Church’s diversity or leave. To stay in while deliberately undermining its nature is not acceptable.
Sadly I doubt whether church leaders will rise to the challenge any time soon. The excluders have found a technique – threatening schism – which has succeeded for decades. But it won’t succeed for ever. One day, I keep hoping, the Church of England – and other churches – will rediscover the God of love who created us humans in all our diversity – straight, gay, trans, etc – and longs for us all to flourish in our different ways.
9 Comments
Thank you, Jonathan, for a truly excellent analysis.
Hi Jonathan,
Sorry I don’t really agree with any of your three points, although I have considerable sympathy for your overall position.
1) It is true that many Old Testament commands (e.g. in Leviticus) are not followed by any Christians today. But the point is: same-sex relationships are condemned in the New Testament, not only the Old Testament.
The Church has surely always taught that same sex relationships are wrong and sinful, before modern times. Hence it is wrong to present the conservative Evangelical position as some kind of modern development. The reason why this has become such a central issue for conservative Evangelicals today can easily be explained: it’s because for the first time society and the Church is seriously questioning this traditional position.
2) I don’t think there is any serious difficulty or lack of clarity in the New Testament texts on same-sex relationships – arsenokoitai obviously means ‘men who bed with men’, as Anthony Thiselton argued. Sorry I think the New Testament is rather clear on this point!
3) Furthermore, I think conservative Evangelicals are quite consistent when they say that the death penalty is no longer applicable as stated in Leviticus, as they say the penalties were only applicable in the time of the Law and not in the time of the Gospel after Christ came.
Sorry as I would so much like to agree with you!
Thanks for taking the trouble to respond. I appreciate this, because the internet is all too often used to read what people agree with, without hearing the other side. We need more meetings of minds like this.
Here are my responses.
1a) Same-sex relationships condemned in the New Testament as well as the Old. I find this a slippery argument. No doubt some conservative evangelicals are careful in their use of language, but what I hear often begins with rhetoric about the whole Bible being the Word of God, and then slides into being only the New Testament, or specific passages as interpreted in a particular way. If the anti-gay lobby was consistent in appealing to the authority of the New Testament but not the Old Testament, I’d feel happier about your point. As it is, you have driven a coach and horses through the divine authority of the Old Testament: you are positively disagreeing with one statement in it.
1b) On The Church having always taught that same-sex relationships are wrong. My point is that in the overwhelming majority of Church history, same-sex relationships weren’t picked out as especially wrong. As far as I’m aware, until the 5th century the disapproval of same-sex partnerships was just part of the disapproval of sex in general: for example, in 3rd Century Syria you couldn’t get baptised at all unless you renounced all sex for life. After that, the medieval penitentials disapproved of all sorts: sex in Lent and Advent, while the woman is mentruating, etc. I’m dating the Evangelical focus on same-sex partnerships from around the 1970s, i.e. as soon as the controversy over contraception died down.
1c) It being wrong because society is questioning it for the first time now. Within the context of 20th century western church culture I guess you are right about this. It’s true more generally of ‘conservative’ church culture: before then they disapproved of contraception, before then divorce… marriage to deceased wife’s sister (a major 19th century controversy) and other stuff too, like the abolition of capital punishment.
2) Arsenos = man – definitely male. Koite is a bed. So an arsenokoites is probably a man who beds you or someone who beds a man. But that’s as far as we can go. Modern languages have a far wider vocabulary than ancient languages, except for sex acts. The reason is that the ancients talked more openly about sexual activities. It’s quite possible that arsenokoitai, malakoi and porne had more precise meanings. We’re not dealing with the Bible being ‘clear’ even to scholars of New Testament Greek. We’re dealing with best guesses by leading experts.
3) Old Testament penalties only applicable to ‘the time of the Law’. Really? Where does the Bible say that? We still have laws! I guess you are thinking of Paul’s talk of freedom from law. But that was about Christians not being constrained by the food and Sabbath laws and circumcision: i.e. the traditional Jewish laws that set them apart from non-Jews. He wasn’t against laws in general – he laid down more of them than any other New Testament writer. Anyway, in his day there is no evidence that anyone was being put to death for gay sex. In effect, your argument here seems to me to be one more method for burying the divine authority of the Old Testament.
Do reply further if you want to.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks very much for your reply, I found it really helpful and thought provoking. It could be we have more in common than I first realised.
(a) In terms of evaluating the conservative Evangelical interpretation of the Old Testament and its continuing validity – I try to look for consistency. The conservative position is that the Old Testament laws were addressed to people of the time and to a specific situation or dispensation, i.e. to the people of Israel in Old Testament times. And therefore individual laws are not applicable to our own time. I think you make a good point that this is not necessarily implied by Paul’s doctrine of freedom of the Law in his dispute with the Judaizers (which concerns circumcision, calendar observance and food laws). So perhaps your point about ‘selectivity’ stands. But my real issue with conservative Evangelicals is as follows: if they believe in the moral infallibility of the whole Bible, then they must at least believe that the Old Testament commands were morally right at the time they were given (even if they are not applicable today). Yet many Old Testament commands seem to contradict moral principles which should surely hold universally for all times (e.g. human rights principles against genocide, ethnic cleansing and in particular the killing of children). It is here where conservative biblical interpretation is stretched to breaking point, either contradicting human rights or distorting the plain sense of OT texts (or some uneasy combination of the two).
(b) I think perhaps you do have a valid point about the novelty of many conservative Evangelicals rallying around the issue of same sex relationships. However, your point about ancient Syrian Christianity doesn’t seem very strong; celibacy being required of all Christians is an extreme case and hardly typical. Also, even if the Church placed certain restrictions on sex within heterosexual marriage – it still remains the case that the Church has always taught sex is permitted between one man and one woman within marriage (or at least betrothal?) – by contrast same sex relationships have always been completely forbidden. On the other hand, the current conservative position is perhaps distinctive in that they have departed from the traditional view re contraception and they accept a far more positive role of sex in terms of enriching a personal relationship – and yet they still anachronistically appeal to the traditional view linking sex to procreation so they can argue against same sex relationships. Furthermore, there seems to be a new alliance amongst Evangelicals fixing on the issue of same-sex relationships but allowing for non-traditional views on female ordination and divorce (e.g. the strange case of the CEEC video which repeatedly appeals to the ‘faith once delivered to all the saints’, whilst also appealing to a female bishop!) So it does seem the current position of conservative Evangelicals is both novel and rather unstable.
(c) Finally, on the question of the New Testament condemnation of same-sex relationships. I would admit that there is difficulty in determining the exact range of behaviour Paul had in mind in that historical and cultural context, when he used words like arsenokoitai or malakoi. But attempts by affirming Christians to get a fix on this historical context have been rather unconvincing. I think Jeffrey John said that Paul would have been mainly aware the ‘abusive’ context of pederasty. But then why does Paul mention gay sex between women? And why condemn the ‘soft’ or passive ‘malakoi’, who would surely have been the victims of the abuse? On the other hand, it does seem to me that Paul thought of gay sex in terms of unbridled lust, as exceeding the bounds of ‘natural’ heterosexual sex, so it’s unlikely he thought in terms of a fixed sexual orientation, or same sex partners who showed the sexual restraint of one-partner fidelity. Conservatives argue that Paul did think in terms of orientation because he talked about ‘desire’, or because contemporary writers did know about it – but here they go beyond the evidence. Still, in general I think conservatives have the stronger case; I think Paul believed that all same-sex activity was wrong.
Hope that makes sense – I hope there is more scope for agreement between us than I first thought!
Thank you.
I don’t think I have much to add now.
On the Old Testament laws being for ‘a specific situation or dispensation’. I see this position as being a step back from the more extreme position that all its laws are mandatory for all times and places. However I would want to take further steps in the same direction. The Pentateuch has three main sets of laws. The Covenant Code in Exodus is usually dated to Hezekiah, c. 700 BCE. Deuteronomy is usually dated to the Exile. The Holiness Code in Leviticus is usually dated to the Persian period. So there is more than one ‘dispensation’, each written by particular people believing they were expressing God’s laws but capable of getting it wrong. So however you carve up the Old Testament, there remains the question of how much authority we attribute to it.
On Syrians banning all sex. Yes, to us it’s an extreme position. But it’s worth reading Peter Brown’s The Body and Society. For a while it was a very common position. My main point here is that Christian teaching has changed through the ages. The ‘conservative evangelical’ lobby has revived the early Reformation assumption, common in the 16th century, that societies don’t change over time. They do.
On whether Paul disapproved of all same-sex relationships. I don’t know, and to be honest I don’t much care. I’m happy to disagree with him!
I’m being summoned for lunch so must go now. Thanks for the conversation.
Thank you Jonathan – I find this a really helpful analysis. My understanding of the teaching in Paul (and I have to admit it is second hand as sadly I don’t read Greek) is that what Paul is condemning primarily is the abuse of a powerful position (e.g. as master over slave, teacher over pupil) for sexual gratification – something which the whole church today condemns too.
Yep thanks – wouldn’t disagree with any of that! – Thanks again for the interesting article and really helpful conversation.
Regarding St Helen’s, the CofE and conservative evangelicalism:
This is a group of conservative evangelical clergy who have sacrificially devoted their whole lives to ministry focussed on Bible teaching. They are able, dynamic individuals who could have ‘succeeded’ in other careers. They have a lot of feeling invested here, and they do have very hard calls to make.
They genuinely believe their job is to ‘hold fast’ to what they perceive to be the correct interpretation of the Bible. But it seems they’re confusing their own Biblical interpretation with actually ‘being right’; confusing not listening with ‘holding fast’; and resisting the need – humbly – to accept rebuke from their sisters and brothers in light of the bad fruit of some of their teaching.
Please will they humbly listen, and accept that perhaps the Holy Spirit is leading the Church into a new phase? Please will they allow that the Church moves forward in history through God’s guidance, including in areas of equality, human rights and justice? For example, the global church no longer endorses slavery. We see we have progressed, thank God.
By bad fruit I refer primarily to the terrible emotional and life harm done to those who differ on sexuality; the ‘quietness’ that functions like secretiveness about their Male Headship theology and resulting control of women’s lives and vocation opportunities; the ‘quietness’ about the purposes and use of financial trusts; the ‘quietness’ about the purpose and nature of their ministry training opportunities, the ‘quietness’ about aims and outcomes in the exercise of patronage.
These are all elephants that have been crowding the room for years. Many good souls are uncomfortable about it all. Let’s openly discuss what’s going on instead of continuing to look the other way. It seems the only Godly option.
This article raises lots of thoughts and questions for me. There is pastoral fall out from a place like St Helens. Those who don’t tow the theological line, those who find it hard to fit or don’t fit the mould; leave. And it hurts to leave a church. The message St Helen’s is sending to the C of E Bishops is the same message they send to each one of their congregation. With the issues arising with John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher perhaps there needs to be a little more humility before they throw the Bishops out with the bath water.