What the Archbishop of Westminster really said…

The top news story on several UK sites on Christmas morning ran as follows: the Archbishop of Westminster, knowing that his midnight Christmas mass homily would be widely reported,  had used the opportunity given to him to attack the government’s plans to introduce same-sex marriage. Christian comment on (those bits that I see of) FB and Twitter was highly critical, suggesting that – even if he happened to be right about equal marriage, which most people who took the trouble to comment seemed to think he wasn’t – to make this the central message of Christmas was totally inappropriate. All this was rather predictable; also rather predictable was the fact that the media reports were at least highly misleading, if not actually inaccurate, and that the Archbishop was not guilty of any of the things he was charged with by social media commentators. The full text of Vincent Nichols’s homily is available here; his central point is that the fact of incarnation brings earth and heaven together, a fact which means the apparently-mundane activities of daily life are charged with eternal significance. He offered three examples: our daily work is a sharing in divine creativity; love expressed in human life is an expression of the love of God; and – combining these two points – the particular love expressed in marriage is a uniquely creative act, bringing into being a new human soul. He went on to suggest that each of these points is capable of distortion by sin: work can become exploitative, and a ‘corrosive disrespect can fashion the culture of a business and put it in need of refashioning’; charity can be motivated by self-interest, not genuine love; and marriage can be distorted: the Archbishop said: Sometimes sexual expression can be without the public bond of the faithfulness of marriage and its ordering to new life. Even governments mistakenly promote such patterns of sexual intimacy as objectively to be approved and even encouraged among the young. (This was, to be clear, the complete content of his statement on marriage; there was nothing else.) Now, it is fair to say that underlying this is an assumption that marriage is ordered to procreation, and so that same-sex relationships can never be ‘marriages’, but it is not news that a Roman Catholic prelate believes this, and it is left as an underlying assumption, not a point argued for or highlighted. The direct criticism here concerns sexual activity outside of marriage, and governments are criticised for approving of and promoting that. If one wanted to link the Archbishop’s comments to a current news story, the criticism of corporate culture, particularly in the context of corporate tax avoidance and the LIBOR fixing scandal, would surely have been the obvious place to go; equal marriage just was not on his agenda. So, whence the stories of attacks and quotes about the plans being ‘shambolic’? The Archbishop gave an interview to the BBC – presumably on Christmas Eve, although this was not made explicit in any of the reports. In the interview, he was asked about the government’s plans for same-sex marriage and responded; he said, as far as I can determine, nothing that has not been said repeatedly previously by Roman Catholic – and Anglican, and Evangelical, and Muslim – leaders; the press stories that appeared on Christmas Day conflated comments made in this interview with his homily to give the impression that the theme of the homily had been criticism of government plans concerning equal marriage. The BBC story, here, leads with the interview comments, but the story focuses sufficiently on Christmas sermons to give the impression that this was the context for the comments. At one point there is a quotation in a headline ‘”Shambolic” Process’ which is immediately followed by the line, ‘Speaking in his sermon at Westminster Cathedral…’; the word ‘shambolic’ came in the interview, but this arrangement of words appears almost designed to confuse and conflate the two comments. The Guardian similarly located the interview comments within a story that discussed the content of Christmas sermons, and so invited, perhaps encouraged, readers to confuse the two. Does this matter? Yes; it was clear from my FB/Twitter feeds that people I know to be intelligent and thoughtful were misled by such reporting, which surely makes it bad reporting. A festival sermon and a press interview are very different contexts, and to imply that something said in one was in fact said in another is to mislead readers badly. It would be possible to imagine intent in all this: the press were trying to paint the Archbishop in the worst possible light; I am sure...

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Gay relationships in the Bible?

I have been reading the new edition of Jeffrey John’s book, now titled Permanent, Faithful, Stable, Christian Same-sex Marriage,in preparation for writing a couple of pieces on human sexuality. In the course of his discussion, Canon John makes brief reference to the miracle of the healing of the Centurion’s servant in Lk. 7:1-10 // Mt. 8:5-13, and draws on Theissen and others to suggest that ‘[a]ny Jew … would almost certainly have assumed they were gay lovers.’ (p. 14) On this basis, and because ‘the possibility that the relationship was homosexual would not have escaped Jesus, Matthew or Luke’ (15), Canon John argues that ‘it is a real question whether we are intended to see Jesus deliberately including a gay couple here as yet another category of the despised and rejected…’ (15) I had heard this line before, of course, although the argument that it fitted a pattern in the healing miracles of extending grace to the excluded was new to me. It occurred to me, though, that it was not a text commonly considered in the literature on theological accounts of human sexuality, and a quick search confirmed that: Stan Grenz noted that the argument had been made in Welcoming but not Affirming; beyond that, as far as I could determine, silence. The text is not even treated in Robert Gagnon’s compendious The Bible and Homosexual Practice (except for a note about God-fearers amongst the Gentiles, with the intervention of the elders in Luke’s version being held up as evidence.) This story seems to play extensively – along with the relationship of David and Jonathan (which gets a bit more discussion – see both Grenz and Gagnon, or Eugene Rogers, Sexuality & the Christian Body, e.g.) – in ‘semi-popular’ defences of the acceptance of faithful same-sex marriage in the church, at least in my hearing; given that, the silence of serious sources – from any side of the debate – is unfortunate. It does seem clear, however, that neither account will stand up as a Biblical defence of faithful same-sex marriage. This is not because of the silence as to the precise relationship – Grenz’s point about the centurion, and Gagnon’s point about David and Jonathan – but because, even if we were to accept that the relationships were actively sexual, neither gets us anywhere near a picture of ‘faithful same-sex marriage’. Holding up David as an exemplar of any account of sexual ethics seems to me to be rather ambitious, given the details of his career; it is surely really very obvious that he was not someone who experienced exclusively same-sex erotic attraction and who was seeking a faithful and exclusive sexual relationship with another man… As for the centurion, it is very plausible that a Roman centurion would engage in sexual intercourse with his slaves, both male and female; it was a standard way for a slave owner to assert control over his possessions. (There is an extensive literature on this.) Raping a slave to assert ownership and control is some distance from any  ideals of Christian marriage I know of, however. Even if we hypothesise some sort of unusually affectionate relationship (Luke has the slave as ‘precious’ – entimos – to his master), we have to insist that a properly loving relationship can never occur in the context of ownership – we open the door to all sorts of horrific ethical possibilities otherwise. This is not the end of the argument of course – hardly even the beginning (Oliver O’Donovan entitled his book on the debates within the Anglican Communion A Conversation Waiting to Begin…). An intelligent discussion proceeds by testing and weeding out bad arguments, however, and these arguments are just...

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Catholic Bishops, Baptist pastors, and same-sex marriage

It seems fairly likely that we in Scotland will see the extension of marriage to same-sex couples before the rest of the UK, probably in the next 2-3 years. The government has proposed this, and a consultation on the proposal has just closed. How should a Christian commentator respond to this idea? The theology here is actually quite interesting, if we can catch enough breath to step back from the polemics. The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland has gone on the offensive, suggesting that same-sex marriage is, roughly, a logical impossibility. Oddly enough, supporters of the government proposal have found this suggestion both offensive and unhappy, but it was both predictable and inevitable to anyone who understands Roman Catholic theology. Catholic ethics assume – in part – a ‘natural law’ position. This is the idea that all people, if they are thinking clearly, have been granted enough information to come to right conclusions on certain issues. The over-riding sanctity of human life, including human life in utero, is assumed to be a position demonstrable by natural law, as is the nature of marriage as the union of one man and one woman in faithful, lifelong, and exclusive sexual companionship. For the Roman Catholic tradition, natural law also demands the inalienable rights of all human beings, economic justice, and various other things. When the Pope visited Britain last year, his speech in Westminster Hall was entirely predicated on a natural law tradition – as he put it, ‘[t]he Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason…’. On this basis, the Church and a secular state could and should share a commitment to human rights and justice and other things because both were pursuing the same natural law. A more traditionally Reformed account of ethics is rather less happy with this. Christian life is necessarily gospel-shaped, and so is profoundly and irreconcilably odd, judged by the canons of any secular society. Christian marriage, to take the case in point, is (as Augustine taught) a profoundly ascetic practice, devoted mainly towards the disciplining of ‘natural’ desires in order to direct the lived life in ways that manifest the gospel and not alien values. (I have commented elsewhere on this blog on the possibility of extending such an understanding to gay and lesbian relationships.) In the extreme form of this view (made popular by Barth…) there is no ‘natural law’; there is the gospel, with its peremptory demands, and there are ways of life that are ignorant of the gospel, and so inevitably in some measure inimical to the gospel. How, then, do we deal with a state proposal to extend the legal definition of ‘marriage’ to include same-sex couples? For someone who is (properly) Roman Catholic, they examine the given definitions and expositions of natural law, and note that they assert, inter alia, that ‘marriage’ is the union of one woman and one man. The idea of gay/lesbian couples ‘marrying,’ therefore, is not so much wrong as incomprehensible and impossible. This is not a denial of the human rights of gay/lesbian couples – as a matter of fact, in British/Scottish law, there is no human right granted by the marriage relationship that is not also granted by being in a civil partnership – so much as a belief that it is intrinsic to the definition of the word ‘marriage’ that those entering into the state are of opposite sex. ‘Same-sex marriage’ on this view is a phrase like ‘four-sided triangle’; not something that should not be done, but something that logically cannot be done. Thus, Archbishop Conti was being faithfully Catholic when he said, ‘Governments do not have the authority to say what marriage is or to change its nature or to decree that people of the same sex can marry.’ (Could a natural law argument that extended the meaning of marriage to embrace same-sex couples be offered? It is certainly not impossible, but the argument needs to be made with, in the case in point, deep attention to the Roman Catholic tradition: how is a position embraced within natural law? Can gay and/or lesbian relationships, under certain limitations (inter alia, presumably, permanence, faithfulness and exclusivity), be adequately and meaningfully narrated within this tradition? I see some major difficulties in constructing the argument, and also some potential ways around them, but, thus far, as far as I know, the argument has not been attempted.) The Roman Catholic hierarchy of Scotland clearly generally believes that the natural law argument cannot be extended to same-sex relations; we could dismiss this as homophobia, or we could acknowledge that, within the tradition...

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‘Biblical’ family life

(I was preaching in our university chapel yesterday, where we didn’t make much of the celebration of Mothering Sunday, but the fact that it was that day prompted me to finish off this post, which I have had sitting around in draft since mid-January.) I read something today – it doesn’t matter what; it was a denominational statement from overseas, and so not very relevant – that made a fairly familiar gesture demanding support for ‘Biblical’ patterns of family life which, in this case, included support for the vocation of motherhood and a resistance to cultural pressures that encouraged mothers to go out to work, an encouragement not to limit numbers of children borne within the nuclear family, and a claim that, within the nuclear family, there was a proper leadership to be exercised by the husband and accepted by the wife. Now, any or all of these points may be good ethical advice (although allow me to express some serious doubts…). Any or all of them may even be demanded by the gospel (although allow me to express some profound disagreements…). But to describe them as ‘Biblical’ is clearly ridiculous, and probably sinister. Why ‘ridiculous’? Well, between them, they assume a normative situation of a nuclear family (i.e., a cohabiting unit of mother and father with their birth-children, and nobody else) which has easy access to safe and reliable contraception and which is economically productive only away from the home. A family living in this situation cannot possibly be living according to ‘Biblical’ patterns, simply because every facet of the situation highlighted in the previous sentence is a modern Western reality, unknown to the Bible (and indeed to much of history since, and to much of the world today). Why ‘sinister’? Well, the document I was reading was a contribution to a debate over church discipline; by invoking the rhetorical device of describing these unhappy and unpleasant ideas as ‘Biblical’ a move was being made to remove mission support and ecclesial legitimacy from honest and faithful people.  ‘Sinister’ does not seem too strong. Unfortunately, this rhetorical device is becoming common, and is in danger of gaining a spurious legitimacy on the basis of nothing but repetition. There have, it is true, been attempts to argue for it rather than simply assert it, but none has been remotely credible. The classic, still apparently taken seriously by some people, was a collection of essays entitled Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a book so poor that when I first encountered a chapter of it as a pdf I concluded that it was a cleverly-constructed spoof – surely no-one could have published arguments that bad?! Unfortunately, much of the book has a veneer of plausibility, since a basic knowledge of Greek and Hebrew is necessary to spot the more glaring errors. In case any reader who lacks Biblical languages is minded to take it seriously, however, let me give one example of just how astonishingly poor, and misleading, the arguments in the book generally are. Considering Junia, ‘outstanding amongst the apostles’ in Rom 16:7: the editors  face the standard question: is Junia a woman, or is it ‘Junias’, an otherwise-unknown male name? Their answer goes like this (pp. 72-3 of my edition): ‘We did a complete search of all the Greek writings from Homer (b.c. ninth century?) into the fifth century a.d. [using the TLG] … The result of our computer search is this: Besides the one instance in Romans 16:7 there were three others [these are described]. So there is no way to be dogmatic about what the form of the name signifies. It could be feminine, or it could be masculine. Certainly no one should claim that Junia was a common woman’s name in the Greek speaking world, since there are only these three known examples….’ Presumably everyone has spotted the basic error here already, but just to spell it out: Junia was an inhabitant of Rome, not Athens. In Rome, they spoke Latin, not Greek. The evidence presented is about as interesting as saying that early modern Spanish literature contains very few men named Hans. More directly, no-one is claiming ‘that Junia was a common woman’s name in the Greek speaking world’; most of the recent commentators on Romans claim that it was a common Latin name, citing such standard sources as CIL, Solin, and Lampe, which show upwards of 250 uses, compared to no attestations at all for the masculine ‘Junias’. It is difficult to know what to make of this. The ignoring of standard, and widely published, evidence, and the presentation of spurious but perhaps convincing-sounding arguments instead, could convey an unfortunate...

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An exegetical puzzle in Eph. 5

I have been looking again at Yoder’s Politics of Jesus in preparation for teaching; he writes a chapter on ‘revolutionary submission,’ picking up on the Haustafeln of Eph. 5:21ff., Col. 3:18ff., 1Pet. 2:13ff., &c. He gives cogent reasons for reading these texts as collisions between the radically liberating ethic of Jesus and the patriarchal assumptions of the culture, and so decries both an unthinking assertion of gender equivalence that simply ignores the texts, and a wooden reading that extracts the text from its social context as some timeless normative principle that will guide modern Western egalitarian and nuclear marriages just as effectively as it did the older ones. Yoder’s point was not particularly exegetical, but it, and the memory of some particularly awful sermons on Christian marriage, sent me back to the texts to look more closely. Let me take Eph. 5 as a case study. Read quickly, the text says ‘wives submit to your husbands; husbands love your wives…’ and the debate in Evangelical circles plays on whether we read this as normative, finding different but complementary gender roles in marriage, or whether we take a more Yoderian reading which stresses the astonishing decision to address a wife (and a child, and a slave) as a morally capable being, and so sees a push towards gender equality in the text which is then, unfortunately, tempered by cultural considerations no longer operative. But if we look carefully at the text, it seems to me that both positions are rather obviously wrong. As Yoder points out elsewhere, submission is a basic and universal Christian stance. Christians are to submit themselves to the state (Rom. 13:1; 1Pet 2:13); to each other (Eph. 5:21); to God’s law (Rom 8:7); to God’s righteousness (Rom. 10:3); to God (Jam. 4:7); Christian wives to their husbands (1Pet 3:1); Christian children to their parents (Heb. 12:8); younger Christians to older Christians (1Pet. 5:5); more recent converts to longer-standing converts (1Cor. 16:16)… Equally, love is a basic and universal Christian stance–I won’t give the long list of texts, but ‘love one another’ is a fairly general Christian ethic. In Ephesians, this point is made very obvious, to anyone without an NIV Bible. The text of Eph. 5:21-22 reads Υποστασσόμενοι ἀλλήλοις ἐν φόβω Χριστο (22) αἰ γυναῖκες τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὡς τῶ κυρίω (apologies for the lack of iota-subscripts; I’m still struggling with this Greek thing…): ‘Submit to one another out of fear of Christ, wives to your husbands as to the Lord…’ There is some uncertainty over the reading, and most of the (many) variant texts do put a main verb in v.22, but even so, it is a deliberate and conscious echo of the verb in v.21. (The NIV decision to put a major section break, complete with editorial sub-heading, between v.21 and v.22 is merely bizarre, grammatically impossible on the UBS4/NA27 majority reading, and making no sense of the variants.) Again, the entire parenetic section has begun in vv.1-2 with a mutual and general command to live in love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us–language consciously and precisely echoed in v.25, the command to husbands. (Eph. 5:2: καὶ περιπατεῖτε ἐν ἀγάπη καθὼς καὶ ὁ Χριστὸς ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς καὶ παρέδωκεν ἑαυτὸν ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν …; Eph. 5:25: Οἱ ἄνδρες ἀγαπᾶτε τὰς γυναῖκας καθὼς καὶ ὁ Χπριστὸς ἠγάπησεν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν καὶ ἑαυτὸν παρέδωκεν ὑπὲρ αὐτης.) The text, then, is a puzzle: every member of the church is to love every other member as Christ first loved, and every member of the church is to submit to every other member. My wife is a member of the same church as I am–a not-uncommon situation, even in Ephesus, or so I presume; we are already under general ethical injunctions here in Ephesians to submit to one another and to love as Christ loved. Why, then, should the same chapter particularise these injunctions on gender lines within the marriage relationship? Obviously, not because somehow she is to be more submissive to me than I am to her, or because I am to be more loving to her than she is to me; the text will not permit such a reading unless we excise Eph. 5:2 and 21 from the chapter. Every Christian relationship is to be marked by both revolutionary submission and by Christ-like love, not just some marked by one of them for reasons of gender. Nor is it some sort of cultural accommodation: the text is deliberately echoing already-established universal ethical commands, binding in all Christian relationships. Every Christian relationship is to be marked by both revolutionary submission and by Christ-like love, not just some marked by one of...

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