One of the most unsettling features of the Bishops’ v-logs is the uncertainty they exhibit in handling the Bible. Again and again we are left with the sense that interpreting the Bible is an amibguous and hazardous process, and one that we can engage only with hesitancy, and certainly not with confidence.
This is a common ‘myth’ and I summarised the Bishops’ position like this in the last blog:
‘…that those texts were authored in a fog of first century cultural context and prejudice. They almost certainly weren’t dealing with the kind of stable, faithful, relationships we see same sex Christian couples enjoying in our own day and age. They represent the authors’ best guess at the time, and were never meant to be representative of a timeless morality.
There are at least two fundamental contentions in this statement, both of which I disagree with. The first is to do with the nature of the Bible. We’ve been working on this at DTP throughout this term, so we should be fairly familiar with what the Bible is, and how it functions in Christian life and worship. We have seen over and over again how the Prophets and Apostles were fully aware of their involvment in the inspiration of Scripture, and that they joyfully submitted to a glorious tyranny of the Spirit. And that their preaching, teachings and writings that resulted from that process were immediately recognised as Scripture by the Church. Their teaching formed a ‘canon’, a measuring rod against which all other teachings were measured, and were to be rejected to the extent that they deviated from the foundational teaching of the Apostles. Their proclamation was as counter-cultural in the first century as it was in the twenty-first century, and it is simply inaccurate to imagine they wrote in a way that was blinded by their own cultural prejudice, as if that served to justify rejecting the binding nature of their teaching for our own time.
This much is unambiguous, and known by all disicples of Jesus who take the time to read the Apostles’ account of their own experience. It is clear to the point of self-evident. The idea that the Apostles were unaware of their being inspired by the Spirit, or that they were able to (inadvertently) contaminate the Bible they were invovled in producing with their own uninspired thinking, or that the wider Church could hardly be expected to appreciate what was happening is patently unBiblical and simply a fictional re-writing of history. It is woefully out of step with the Church of England’s own teaching, and the testimony of the Church throughout the centuries. This much is simply rehearsing what we have been reflecting on at DTP this term, but I include briefly for the sake of completeness.
What the Bishops are proposing is in fact a kind of Arianism, re-invented and re-focussed not on the Person of Christ, but on the work of the Spirit in inspiring Scripture. Arius was so sure that he knew what it meant to be human that he couldn’t conceive that in Christ all the fulness of Deity could dwell in bodily form. He ended up ‘degrading’ Christ from His Deity so that He would fit into Arius’ sense of what might be possible and plausible. A Jesus (thought Arius) who has integrity as a human being cannot be God. The position deployed by revisionists makes the same move in regard to the Scriptures. In order for Scripture to be ‘fully human’ documents, we cannot conceive how they can also be ‘fully Divine’. And Arian-like, we sacrifice the reality that this is fully the work of the Spirit on the altar of what we assume it must mean to recognise the full human-ness of the text.
But the other part of the argument is every bit as dubious. The idea that human sexual experience was so fundamentally different in the first century that anything said about it cannot have relevance to our own cultural norms. This is at best a red-herring. It certainly sows confusion in the debate… and in my more cynical moments my suspicion is that is precisely what it is designed to do. For irrespective of whether stable, faithful sexual relationships (of any kind) were formed apart from and outside of Christ’s vision for marriage - and surely they were - the fact remains that all such sexual activity is forbidden by Scripture. Which is not to say - of course - that it didn’t happen anyway, both within and without the Church. But imposing anachronistically our concepts of sexuality on what may or may not have been the cultural norms of any given context is (ironically) the very kind of intellectual imperialism of which the Bishops are accusing those who hold to the traditional teaching and discipline of the Church. We stand by that teaching and discipline, which has been held (albeit usually imperfectly) by the Church throughout the centuries and in every cultural context. And the idea that in our western, liberal, secular, humanist culture we have finally reached a place in our understanding that allows us to properly understand things in a way that has never been done before is as arrogant as it is problematic.
Does this mean that only those who enter into ‘holy matrimony’ are destined to know fulfilment? Listening to our Bishops you could be forgiven for thinking so. Is witholding ‘Holy Matrimony’ from same-sex couples a kind of oppression, meaning they need to forego the ‘goods of marriage’? Is reminding oruselves that the Bible excludes all sexual activity outside of Holy Matrimony tantamount to harming people, condemning them to a perpetual lack of fulfilling their God-given potential? This will be the subject of our next post.
