Charlie Bell’s notion, “Why Waiting is Not Neutral”, takes me back (decades here) to the struggle for equality and ordination for women. It’s a well know strategy for continuing comfort for the comfortable. What I find interesting in reading him, hearing him lecture and preach, is that his theology is much more ‘traditional’ than mine ( dare I say more ‘conservative?). So much for the false and falsifying dichotomy between full inclusion and ‘orthodoxy’. Anyway, as a theologian and medical specialist his is an expertise the C of E should covet and utilize. Frankly, I don’t know how he stands… Read more »
There is that kind of political stonewalling for sure . What it says to change agents seeking equity is that they will need to wait because their demands for equity are judged not as important nor their constituency as powerful and preferential as the dominant privileged cohort in the status quo.
To be honest looking at it from a different perspective the constant flow of articles demanding change now feels like a strategy to exhaust those who hold a different point of view and Charlie Bell’s article is a case in point. As a medic and one who isn’t a trained theologian but one who has read the bible throughout each year for 30 years+, I would just like to say I completely disagree with him but I still respect his right to be able to voice what he feels to be true. Many if not most of those standing in… Read more »
Can I press you on this? Something more than respecting someones ‘right to voice what he feels to be true’ is needed here. Can ask if you would be willing to live alongside those in the church who ‘hold sincerely to a different theological view’ to yours?
Thank you, David and of course you can press me, To answer your question directly I would still take communion with Charlie Bell even though we hold very divergent views on LLF PLF etc and our theological outlook would be very different. The whole church has as long as I have been a member held very diverse and conflicting positions on a number of issues. There are those who doubt the divinity of Jesus, those who don’t believe in a physical resurrection, those who don’t believe the Holy Spirit is at work producing fruit and gifts in people’s lives today… Read more »
The function of any political system is that which is actually does
Openmind
28 days ago
‘Those of us in the process know that Archbishop Justin’s comments on sex being for marriage do indeed reflect the general position of the House and College.’ asserts Charlie Bell.
Would it be nicer (more courteous? appropriate? Christian? professional?) if those of us in the pews could be told about this directly and officially, rather than via an Alistair Campbell podcast, or the privileged claim of an insider? Aren’t we all ‘in the process’?
Hooker’s ‘scripture, tradition and reason’ approach to theology seems to be the process being used both by Welby and Bell to find that God now agrees them and the House of Bishops. A formal announcement from God to the rest of us is on hold while they work on the details.
Did you wanted to include ‘lived experience’, the modish addition to Hooker’s threefold cord? It seems to be the preeminent source in the thought of Colin Coward, for example.
Is that a bad thing? Reflecting on your experience of life in the light of scripture and tradition with the use of reason (and I guess reflecting on scripture and tradition in the light of your experience of life, again with the use of reason) doesn’t sound like a bad approach to reflection on life, meaning etc.
I think it’s rarely that simple. If I support equal marriage it is because I have experienced same-sex couples holding and loving and cherishing one another – and parents, children, families, friends and communities – come what may. But my seeing the world – including relationships – in a way that seeks (and judges things) through the prism of love as gift (grace) is itself the result of my nurture in Christian scripture and tradition. Likewise my seeking understanding of the world through the voices of those marginalised by religious and social power (LGBT + people, by no means exclusively… Read more »
Quite right, Rob Hall. Our discernment is a complex, cyclical, ongoing, long term synthesis of all these ‘sources of authority’. For example, one can come back to Scripture years later and understand it differently if one’s underlying hermeneutic has changed, which itself can be the result of deep reflection, which itself may well be informed (as you say) by Scriptural values. And so on, and on. To speak of one of the ‘quadrilateral’ having preeminence (as Wesley did actually) seems to me not quite to fit with this reality. Yes, Scripture is the only place where we learn about Jesus,… Read more »
‘Lived experience’ isn’t a phrase Hooker would know, but like, what is tradition if not that? Good tradition isn’t just doing the same old stuff because you’ve always done it like that, but giving something worth inheriting to the next generation.
I don’t think “Hooker would know” anything whatsoever about a single reference he made, now morphed into some kind of ‘anglican identifier thing’ — and which nowhere is so cited until the mid 20th century. He nowhere deploys it as a hermeneutic in Laws. “Reason” is more aligned for him, in any rate, with Natural Law and the Doctrine of Creation set forth in scripture. Dragging the Laws’ world kicking and screaming into the 21st century is the worst kind of poor historical thinking.
Diarmaid MacCulloch in reviewing a book by Bart Ehrman in 2014 writes: “There are many who seek to claim their full place within the Christian tradition, while their own understanding of scripture, reason and tradition, forces them to repudiate ill founded Christian dogma and all the harm it has done over the centuries.” Bravo! (link). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n03/diarmaid-macculloch/faking-the-canon Now even though using the familiar Hooker phrase positively in that context, MacCulloch has a critical carefully formed historical evaluation of the uses of Hooker in Anglicanism. In a reply to me (Archdeacon Gillis) here on TA in May 2023, Froghole noted: “Prof. MacCulloch,… Read more »
My sense is that appeal to ‘lived experience’ as a specific phrase has increased markedly in frequency recently. I started studying theology in the 1980s but don’t recall hearing it until recently. In the context of 2000 years of Christian theology, 300 is quite few, actually. Of course we theologise within our lived experience. We’d be dead if we didn’t. The question is whether we judge our lived experience in the light of scripture or vice versa.
“the process being used to find that God now agrees with them” This sort of comment exposes the lack of respect for people who hold views different from your own. This is what is so damaging today’s church- not the sexuality disagreement itself, which we could work on respectfully together as brothers and sisters in Christ. The PLF process is bending over backwards to continue to respect those who hold the traditional position. This is becoming increasingly difficult- not because we disagree on the sexuality question but because liberals’ faith and integrity are treated with contempt by (some) traditionalists. Added… Read more »
That’s a straw (wo)man. To suggest that Canon Law should be obeyed by (all) those who have made vows is not to say that the current Canon Law is somehow infallible or unchangeable.
I understood Adrian’s comment that to mean that a campaign to change canon involved disrespect for canon law. I cannot see that Nigel’s comment, to which Adrian was responding, showed any disrespect for canon law, or any encouragement to disobey it.
“A mature faith prioritises kindness, not enforcing dogma, let alone trying to impose your dogma upon others.”
When I read the Old Testament one of the unattractive aspects of the then Jewish faith was how women were seen as unclean during their period or after childbirth. It’s something I hope no modern Christian would suggest but instead people who are in same sex relationships (and even those who ordain them) are instead seen as unclean. I find it shocking.
Men incurred impurity too for wet dreams etc. And these were days before tampons and modern hygiene. Bleeding in the desert will attract all sorts of unpleasant animals. Trying not to spread it all over the place was wise.
Even priests became impure when performing certain sacrifices.
Whether there were practical reasons behind the concept of impurity is rather besides the point which is that essentially the same concept of impurity is now being applied to gay and lesbian clergy and, indeed, still women in behaviours like refusal to accept the ministry of certain bishops because they have ordained women or allowed the use of PLF.
‘Many liberals used to be more conservative evangelicals and have been on a journey: the reverse is not the case.’ I’d be interested to know how you’d substantiate this perhaps sweeping statement. Is this ‘in my experience’, or a wider claim?
Anecdotally, I know of at least a few people who’ve drifted from a nice but shallow open evangelicalism to North London anglo-catholicism. I mean, that’s maybe like four or five people, but there is a pipeline that way too. A faith journey is often about finding something that your cradle-tradition lacks.
No, I was making the point that ‘Liberals’ for want of a better term, sometimes seem to be DEFINITIVELY CERTAIN that ‘Conservatives’ (for want of a better term) are WRONG to be so DEFINITIVELY CERTAIN about the things they are so DEFINITIVELY CERTAIN about. Which is, intellectually, confusing. Liberals sometimes don’t seem to be liberal enough to grant that the definitive certainties of Conservatives may be correct, while their liberal ‘There must be two ways of looking at this, with equal value’, might actually be wrong. An absolute commitment to ‘diversity of thought’ inevitably excludes those who don’t accept unfettered… Read more »
It’s not so much a self-contradiction as a self-limitation, one which liberal Western governments have been struggling against for some time now in relation to religious fundamentalisms — usually Islamic, but now we have a Christian variety that seems set on pitting the national church against the nation’s values, as enshrined in equality legislation. How do you suppose that will end? (If you bother to think it through.)
And with the gradual persecution of the beliefs, culture and attitudes of historic late Christendom. Individual freedom, the centrality of the family, property rights (can’t wait for the budget), sex within permanent marriage, recognition of male and female createdness, freedom of speech, the limitation of state power etc etc. Read Tom Holland if you don’t think these are Christendom legacies. But secular technocratic statism can’t abide rivals. Which is why Christians who resist its tide rather than following it, will face increasing marginalisation, perhaps to the glee of progressives.
Persecution? I thought you wanted us to remember the history of Christendom! You are the beneficiary of hard won liberal freedoms whether you appreciate them or not. Although it is only very recently that the *actual* persecution of LGBTQ+ people has legally abated in this country (outside the church at least)
Liberal, free societies depended on a Christian basis to their cultures. Shorn from the dignity afforded to people by a vision of humans as the creations of a just, loving, sovereign God, the secular state steps into the space vacated by the divine. Under a guise of enforcing equality, it ends up marginalizing and punishing those who don’t accept its authority to define the vision of truth by which we must all live. The failure of earlier societies to live by their claimed ideals doesn’t falsify or justify the increasing ideological heft claimed and enforced by secular government.
But all the values I list are increasingly under threat, don’t you think? Smoking proposed to be banned, parental consent obviated from some medical procedures for minors, increasing tax take to fund a bloating state which tries and fails to do and control ever more. Even the terms under which we can die, or maybe feel obliged to die, might be set soon by the State. Gender critical views silenced in universities, divorce legislation loosened and marriage corroded as a societal institution. A secular turn away from the norms of the historic Christian tradition, and not one which helps us… Read more »
The freedom to smoke transgresses on the freedom of non-smokers to breathe clean air. The state has recently re-asserted the need for parental consent for some medical procedures on minors, following the state-commissioned Cass Report. The first Christians in Jerusalem willingly shared all their worldly goods with each other, so that all were equal. The terms under which we can die – or not die, even if we want to – have been set by the state for centuries. The freedom to escape an abusive husband has led to the flourishing of many women and their children. The picture is… Read more »
What I find interesting is that many of the values you cite as being central to “historic late Christendom” do not match my recollection of the teachings of Jesus or those around him.
The family was certainly not central in Jesus’ preaching (one’s membership of the religious group came first) and the early church held their property in common. And Jesus, being a good Jewish boy, would teach that individual freedom was constrained by one’s duty to family and community.
The values you cite may be late Christian values, but I am not sure they are Gospel values.
“…Thus making ‘Liberalism’ self-contradictory, if you bother to think it through.” Ah! So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all this time: I just hadn’t bothered to think it through! I mean honestly. It’s insulting and disrespectful of those with whom you disagree. I don’t mind that, but it is. “Liberals sometimes don’t seem to be liberal enough to grant that the definitive certainties of Conservatives may be correct…” Wrong. I DO “grant that the definitive certainties of Conservatives may be correct…” (e.g. maybe God DOES condemn all homosexual activity), but what I do not accept is the legitimacy of… Read more »
OK, but the church was certain about naming same sex sexual activity as falling short of the glory of God until recently, much of it still is certain about that, and it’s the C of E teaching. What changed, and who is the arbiter declaring that everyone must respect views that some Christians see as catastrophically corrosive of the architecture of Christian thought. We’re clearly on the same page in the sense that you think my views are badly misguided and wrong, as do I yours. Therein lies the incommensurability lying at the heart of the C of Es discontents.… Read more »
If God ‘maybe does condemn all homosexual activity’, it would be then be a reckless church that blessed homosexuals in an active sexual relationship, wouldn’t it? Only a church certain that same sex sexual activity was bless- able ought to permit it. If liberals really do think that same sex sex might be condemned by God, they really haven’t thought through the implication of that assertion.
But maybe God condemns all sexual activity, as the Shakers taught. Or maybe God condemns all alcohol consumption, as the Mormons and Muslims believe. Or meat, as many Sikhs and Hindus believe. At what point does the precautionary principle become a burden rather than the liberation promised by the Gospel? There is no neutral option. Given the choice between celebrating love and denouncing it I know what I choose because I believe that’s what Christ would choose. I also trust that the Spirit can convict us of sin, that in our own lives it has a feeling, a taste that… Read more »
“Only a church certain that same sex sexual activity was bless- able ought to permit it.” No, because we cannot even be certain that there is a God. Certainty is not something often available to us. I allow the logical possibility that God “maybe does condemn all homosexual activity” but it is also possible that the opposite is true and God rejoices in every form of love. I can see no reason to believe the former and every reason to believe the latter. So you can see why I think your statement is quite wrong: “Only a church certain that… Read more »
Oh brother. “Paradox of Tolerance”, comprende? The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that, if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Shorter: No, we “Liberals” don’t have to tolerate Conservative intolerance! See re Simon Eyre: I would just like to say I completely disagree with him but I still respect his right to be able to voice what he feels to be true. Many if not most of those standing in opposition to LLF aren’t doing it out of… Read more »
That’s a good an important question. I am absolutely certain that Nicky (and we all) MIGHT be wrong on this (and on all manner of things) and i have enough respect for him to believe that he would admit the same. The reality of human fallibility is one of the few things of which we can be absolutely certain. There’s sadly no shortage of evidence, nay proof, of this. I also BELIEVE that he IS wrong on a number of things, but here i can only claim confidence, not certainty. But that’s all obvious, isn’t it?
It seems to me that reverse the received ethics of the church, and declare something to be blessable which hitherto had been declared sinful, requires certainty. Not just ‘we’re confident but being good liberals we know we’re fallible and could be wrong’. In any case Charlie Bell doesn’t sound for a moment like he thinks he could be wrong on this. Which makes me suspect that SOME progressivism is far from liberal. There was a SOMETIMES in my earlier comment which I think you missed.
It’s not just ‘good liberals’ who should know they’re fallible and might be wrong, but any thinking person.
“To declare something to be blessable which hitherto had been declared sinful requires certainty.”
Well, actually, no. Certainty is an impossibly high bar for just about anything. But what we can do is consider the potential harm done by the two options, to continue to condemn, or not. Whereas we know that harm is done by condemning homosexuality, the concern that harm is done by celebrating it seems to be based on rather obscure beliefs about judgment and the afterlife.
David Runcorn
28 days ago
I am grateful to Colin Coward for flagging up Mark Vasey-Saunders’ excellent book, Defusing the Sexuallity Debate: The Anglican Evangelical Culture War. It is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand why the conservative corner of this diverse tradition is behaving as it is right now. Behind all the public pronouncements about, and fierce resistance to, the sexuality debates, lie historic anxieties about identity and authority. These are the real drivers.
And, may I suggest, fear of change, given the absolute certainty that they, and only they are right? I’ve noticed this over a good many years, and is showing up again in the ‘assisted dieing bill’ debate. Conservative Christianity instinctively reacts negatively to anything new or challenges their way of doing things and thinking. We saw it a lot in the early years of the renewal movement indeed, still do – in Sunday trading, equality rights, post-empire reparations, you name it. My wife’s re-reading ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’; she says what a sad picture it paints of CofE attitudes then.… Read more »
There was a bit more to the Sunday Trading argument than just sabbatarian resistance. The shop workers’ union, USDAW, also opposed it on the grounds it would be destructive to the family lives of shop workers. As it has been.
I’m a former shop worker myself (albeit in a Christian bookshop which was definitely not going to open on Sundays), and was discussing this recently with the former political head of USDAW.
There often is more to an issue than outsiders, reliant on public media for information, may know. I’ve learned to be circumspect about such campaigns. Indeed, I was unhappy about the Sunday trading affair – it was tantamount to anarchy by the big DIY and other ‘sheds’ who could afford to defy the law until they forced the change they wanted. The issue caused chaos for the church I belonged to at the time, introducing such legal complications that it effectively ended the church bookstall! From press reports it also proved embarrassing for some cathedral souvenir shops as well. Change… Read more »
Folowing a fall, which prompted a modest brain heamorage, I am in dire need of sustaining company.
This site is a lifeline – last night was very much the soul’s long, dark night of complete despair.
If I say that yes, I believe in the active presence of the Holy Spirit, but have increasingly serious doubts about popular charismatic propaganda, I think you will understand…….
Apparently it’s convenient for conservatives that God agrees with British early 20th century western values. Both “the spirit of this age” and “the spirit of the previous age” are seductive traps.
Did you ever come across the book ‘Is God Still an Englishman?” (Cole Morton) which is still available from Amazon? I found it a sad account of one man’s disillusionment with charismatic Christianity, one with which I could still identify quite readily albeit more positively, and quite pertinent with regard to a lot of current issues. (Safeguarding and amateur exorcisms not least among them.)
And God, of course, is bound to be conservative. Has he not said ‘I don’t change’?
Remember the jingle, ‘Like a mighty tortoise moves the church of God?’ There’s a lot of truth in it!
Depends which country you’re in. Does the same hold true of other nations? It certainly seems to do in the US and those nations where the church’s opinions still count heavily, but what about those where it doesn’t? “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate’ was very prevalent back in the 19th century. I suspect a similar attitude still undergirds a lot of thinking, shall we say, on for example, post empire reparations? Convenient for us, perhaps, but how do the people for whom it… Read more »
The Guardian reports today that “an Anglican priest and the CEO of a Christian pressure group working with senior conservative figures in the Church of England” has just been speaking at the Traditional Britain Group conference which had at least three delegates/activists from the far right Homeland Party. As David rightly points out there’s a lot more going on here than the debates on human sexuality, vitally important as they are. What alarms me most is the creeping influence of far right ideologies into conservative expressions of Christian faith in the Church of England, which only seems to be strengthened… Read more »
This has been a recurrent theme in church history. The propensity for conservative Christian leaders to seek a mutually beneficial relationship with authoritarian politicians and statesmen is nothing new.
Just look at the first couple of hundred years after Constantine.
Sadly every occurrence/recurrence has been bad news for LGBTQIA+ people.
And for a great many other people who, in one way or another, didn’t fit in. Religious dictatorships in 17th century New England, Jews in 1920’s/30’s Germany, etc etc.
And, to be fair, the Christian church doesn’t have an exclusive monopoly on intolerance of the ‘outsider’; some Muslims, Hindus and atheists, etc are just as bad if given the chance.
It seems an inbuilt part of the human condition, I’m afraid.
Those of us in the USA have been living with this reality for decades.
Rory Gillis
25 days ago
Reading through Charlie Bell’s, Queer Redemption, I’ve had to pause a bit to do some research on the fly on the history and philosophy of the notion of Queer in the sense in which Bell is writing about it. I have not found the few comments here to be a particularly substantive help; but perhaps that is because folks here are streets ahead of me with regard to familiarity with both Bell and the issues he raises. For anyone interested, I am attaching links to a couple of short book reviews I found helpful. (1) Queer Redemption, review by The… Read more »
Charlie Bell’s notion, “Why Waiting is Not Neutral”, takes me back (decades here) to the struggle for equality and ordination for women. It’s a well know strategy for continuing comfort for the comfortable. What I find interesting in reading him, hearing him lecture and preach, is that his theology is much more ‘traditional’ than mine ( dare I say more ‘conservative?). So much for the false and falsifying dichotomy between full inclusion and ‘orthodoxy’. Anyway, as a theologian and medical specialist his is an expertise the C of E should covet and utilize. Frankly, I don’t know how he stands… Read more »
I sometimes wonder if it is part of a a deliberate strategy to so exhaust those pushing for change that they give up.
There is that kind of political stonewalling for sure . What it says to change agents seeking equity is that they will need to wait because their demands for equity are judged not as important nor their constituency as powerful and preferential as the dominant privileged cohort in the status quo.
To be honest looking at it from a different perspective the constant flow of articles demanding change now feels like a strategy to exhaust those who hold a different point of view and Charlie Bell’s article is a case in point. As a medic and one who isn’t a trained theologian but one who has read the bible throughout each year for 30 years+, I would just like to say I completely disagree with him but I still respect his right to be able to voice what he feels to be true. Many if not most of those standing in… Read more »
Can I press you on this? Something more than respecting someones ‘right to voice what he feels to be true’ is needed here. Can ask if you would be willing to live alongside those in the church who ‘hold sincerely to a different theological view’ to yours?
Thank you, David and of course you can press me, To answer your question directly I would still take communion with Charlie Bell even though we hold very divergent views on LLF PLF etc and our theological outlook would be very different. The whole church has as long as I have been a member held very diverse and conflicting positions on a number of issues. There are those who doubt the divinity of Jesus, those who don’t believe in a physical resurrection, those who don’t believe the Holy Spirit is at work producing fruit and gifts in people’s lives today… Read more »
The function of any political system is that which is actually does
‘Those of us in the process know that Archbishop Justin’s comments on sex being for marriage do indeed reflect the general position of the House and College.’ asserts Charlie Bell.
Would it be nicer (more courteous? appropriate? Christian? professional?) if those of us in the pews could be told about this directly and officially, rather than via an Alistair Campbell podcast, or the privileged claim of an insider? Aren’t we all ‘in the process’?
Hooker’s ‘scripture, tradition and reason’ approach to theology seems to be the process being used both by Welby and Bell to find that God now agrees them and the House of Bishops. A formal announcement from God to the rest of us is on hold while they work on the details.
Did you wanted to include ‘lived experience’, the modish addition to Hooker’s threefold cord? It seems to be the preeminent source in the thought of Colin Coward, for example.
Is that a bad thing? Reflecting on your experience of life in the light of scripture and tradition with the use of reason (and I guess reflecting on scripture and tradition in the light of your experience of life, again with the use of reason) doesn’t sound like a bad approach to reflection on life, meaning etc.
Not when “lived experience “ trumps everything else.
I think it’s rarely that simple. If I support equal marriage it is because I have experienced same-sex couples holding and loving and cherishing one another – and parents, children, families, friends and communities – come what may. But my seeing the world – including relationships – in a way that seeks (and judges things) through the prism of love as gift (grace) is itself the result of my nurture in Christian scripture and tradition. Likewise my seeking understanding of the world through the voices of those marginalised by religious and social power (LGBT + people, by no means exclusively… Read more »
Quite right, Rob Hall. Our discernment is a complex, cyclical, ongoing, long term synthesis of all these ‘sources of authority’. For example, one can come back to Scripture years later and understand it differently if one’s underlying hermeneutic has changed, which itself can be the result of deep reflection, which itself may well be informed (as you say) by Scriptural values. And so on, and on. To speak of one of the ‘quadrilateral’ having preeminence (as Wesley did actually) seems to me not quite to fit with this reality. Yes, Scripture is the only place where we learn about Jesus,… Read more »
Modish? I thought it was Methodist?
‘Lived experience’ isn’t a phrase Hooker would know, but like, what is tradition if not that? Good tradition isn’t just doing the same old stuff because you’ve always done it like that, but giving something worth inheriting to the next generation.
I don’t think “Hooker would know” anything whatsoever about a single reference he made, now morphed into some kind of ‘anglican identifier thing’ — and which nowhere is so cited until the mid 20th century. He nowhere deploys it as a hermeneutic in Laws. “Reason” is more aligned for him, in any rate, with Natural Law and the Doctrine of Creation set forth in scripture. Dragging the Laws’ world kicking and screaming into the 21st century is the worst kind of poor historical thinking.
Diarmaid MacCulloch in reviewing a book by Bart Ehrman in 2014 writes: “There are many who seek to claim their full place within the Christian tradition, while their own understanding of scripture, reason and tradition, forces them to repudiate ill founded Christian dogma and all the harm it has done over the centuries.” Bravo! (link). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n03/diarmaid-macculloch/faking-the-canon Now even though using the familiar Hooker phrase positively in that context, MacCulloch has a critical carefully formed historical evaluation of the uses of Hooker in Anglicanism. In a reply to me (Archdeacon Gillis) here on TA in May 2023, Froghole noted: “Prof. MacCulloch,… Read more »
The “Wesley Quadrilateral” includes experience, in addition to the items in Hooker’s “three-legged stool.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesleyan_Quadrilateral
So that’s almost 300 years ago — perhaps a stretch of the word “modish.”
Look it took place after the end of the medieval period which means it look place in the modern period!
My sense is that appeal to ‘lived experience’ as a specific phrase has increased markedly in frequency recently. I started studying theology in the 1980s but don’t recall hearing it until recently. In the context of 2000 years of Christian theology, 300 is quite few, actually. Of course we theologise within our lived experience. We’d be dead if we didn’t. The question is whether we judge our lived experience in the light of scripture or vice versa.
“the process being used to find that God now agrees with them” This sort of comment exposes the lack of respect for people who hold views different from your own. This is what is so damaging today’s church- not the sexuality disagreement itself, which we could work on respectfully together as brothers and sisters in Christ. The PLF process is bending over backwards to continue to respect those who hold the traditional position. This is becoming increasingly difficult- not because we disagree on the sexuality question but because liberals’ faith and integrity are treated with contempt by (some) traditionalists. Added… Read more »
The lack of respect is for canon law.
Do you think that canon law is like the law of the Medes and Persians, and can never be changed? Or questioned, or challenged?
That’s a straw (wo)man. To suggest that Canon Law should be obeyed by (all) those who have made vows is not to say that the current Canon Law is somehow infallible or unchangeable.
Evangelical clergy have flouted canon law for decades with regard to the liturgy, vestments, and the sacraments.
I understood Adrian’s comment that to mean that a campaign to change canon involved disrespect for canon law. I cannot see that Nigel’s comment, to which Adrian was responding, showed any disrespect for canon law, or any encouragement to disobey it.
Campaigning to change Canon Law respects it because it suggests it can’t simply be ignored.
“A mature faith prioritises kindness, not enforcing dogma, let alone trying to impose your dogma upon others.”
When I read the Old Testament one of the unattractive aspects of the then Jewish faith was how women were seen as unclean during their period or after childbirth. It’s something I hope no modern Christian would suggest but instead people who are in same sex relationships (and even those who ordain them) are instead seen as unclean. I find it shocking.
“Jewish faith”? Judaism is a post-biblical term.
Unclean is a terrible translation of teme’ah, Kate. It just means ritually impure.
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-laws-of-niddah/
Men incurred impurity too for wet dreams etc. And these were days before tampons and modern hygiene. Bleeding in the desert will attract all sorts of unpleasant animals. Trying not to spread it all over the place was wise.
Even priests became impure when performing certain sacrifices.
Whether there were practical reasons behind the concept of impurity is rather besides the point which is that essentially the same concept of impurity is now being applied to gay and lesbian clergy and, indeed, still women in behaviours like refusal to accept the ministry of certain bishops because they have ordained women or allowed the use of PLF.
‘Many liberals used to be more conservative evangelicals and have been on a journey: the reverse is not the case.’
I’d be interested to know how you’d substantiate this perhaps sweeping statement. Is this ‘in my experience’, or a wider claim?
Anecdotally, I know of at least a few people who’ve drifted from a nice but shallow open evangelicalism to North London anglo-catholicism. I mean, that’s maybe like four or five people, but there is a pipeline that way too. A faith journey is often about finding something that your cradle-tradition lacks.
Might you be wrong about the assertion that Nicky Gumbel might be wrong here, or are you absolutely certain that you must be right in this conviction?
Are you suggesting that it’s impossible for Nicky Gumbel to be wrong?
No, I was making the point that ‘Liberals’ for want of a better term, sometimes seem to be DEFINITIVELY CERTAIN that ‘Conservatives’ (for want of a better term) are WRONG to be so DEFINITIVELY CERTAIN about the things they are so DEFINITIVELY CERTAIN about. Which is, intellectually, confusing. Liberals sometimes don’t seem to be liberal enough to grant that the definitive certainties of Conservatives may be correct, while their liberal ‘There must be two ways of looking at this, with equal value’, might actually be wrong. An absolute commitment to ‘diversity of thought’ inevitably excludes those who don’t accept unfettered… Read more »
It’s not so much a self-contradiction as a self-limitation, one which liberal Western governments have been struggling against for some time now in relation to religious fundamentalisms — usually Islamic, but now we have a Christian variety that seems set on pitting the national church against the nation’s values, as enshrined in equality legislation. How do you suppose that will end? (If you bother to think it through.)
It is ending in the self deification of the secular state.
And with the gradual persecution of the beliefs, culture and attitudes of historic late Christendom. Individual freedom, the centrality of the family, property rights (can’t wait for the budget), sex within permanent marriage, recognition of male and female createdness, freedom of speech, the limitation of state power etc etc. Read Tom Holland if you don’t think these are Christendom legacies. But secular technocratic statism can’t abide rivals. Which is why Christians who resist its tide rather than following it, will face increasing marginalisation, perhaps to the glee of progressives.
Persecution? I thought you wanted us to remember the history of Christendom! You are the beneficiary of hard won liberal freedoms whether you appreciate them or not. Although it is only very recently that the *actual* persecution of LGBTQ+ people has legally abated in this country (outside the church at least)
Liberal, free societies depended on a Christian basis to their cultures. Shorn from the dignity afforded to people by a vision of humans as the creations of a just, loving, sovereign God, the secular state steps into the space vacated by the divine. Under a guise of enforcing equality, it ends up marginalizing and punishing those who don’t accept its authority to define the vision of truth by which we must all live. The failure of earlier societies to live by their claimed ideals doesn’t falsify or justify the increasing ideological heft claimed and enforced by secular government.
But all the values I list are increasingly under threat, don’t you think? Smoking proposed to be banned, parental consent obviated from some medical procedures for minors, increasing tax take to fund a bloating state which tries and fails to do and control ever more. Even the terms under which we can die, or maybe feel obliged to die, might be set soon by the State. Gender critical views silenced in universities, divorce legislation loosened and marriage corroded as a societal institution. A secular turn away from the norms of the historic Christian tradition, and not one which helps us… Read more »
The freedom to smoke transgresses on the freedom of non-smokers to breathe clean air. The state has recently re-asserted the need for parental consent for some medical procedures on minors, following the state-commissioned Cass Report. The first Christians in Jerusalem willingly shared all their worldly goods with each other, so that all were equal. The terms under which we can die – or not die, even if we want to – have been set by the state for centuries. The freedom to escape an abusive husband has led to the flourishing of many women and their children. The picture is… Read more »
What I find interesting is that many of the values you cite as being central to “historic late Christendom” do not match my recollection of the teachings of Jesus or those around him.
The family was certainly not central in Jesus’ preaching (one’s membership of the religious group came first) and the early church held their property in common. And Jesus, being a good Jewish boy, would teach that individual freedom was constrained by one’s duty to family and community.
The values you cite may be late Christian values, but I am not sure they are Gospel values.
“…Thus making ‘Liberalism’ self-contradictory, if you bother to think it through.” Ah! So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all this time: I just hadn’t bothered to think it through! I mean honestly. It’s insulting and disrespectful of those with whom you disagree. I don’t mind that, but it is. “Liberals sometimes don’t seem to be liberal enough to grant that the definitive certainties of Conservatives may be correct…” Wrong. I DO “grant that the definitive certainties of Conservatives may be correct…” (e.g. maybe God DOES condemn all homosexual activity), but what I do not accept is the legitimacy of… Read more »
OK, but the church was certain about naming same sex sexual activity as falling short of the glory of God until recently, much of it still is certain about that, and it’s the C of E teaching. What changed, and who is the arbiter declaring that everyone must respect views that some Christians see as catastrophically corrosive of the architecture of Christian thought. We’re clearly on the same page in the sense that you think my views are badly misguided and wrong, as do I yours. Therein lies the incommensurability lying at the heart of the C of Es discontents.… Read more »
If God ‘maybe does condemn all homosexual activity’, it would be then be a reckless church that blessed homosexuals in an active sexual relationship, wouldn’t it? Only a church certain that same sex sexual activity was bless- able ought to permit it. If liberals really do think that same sex sex might be condemned by God, they really haven’t thought through the implication of that assertion.
But maybe God condemns all sexual activity, as the Shakers taught. Or maybe God condemns all alcohol consumption, as the Mormons and Muslims believe. Or meat, as many Sikhs and Hindus believe. At what point does the precautionary principle become a burden rather than the liberation promised by the Gospel? There is no neutral option. Given the choice between celebrating love and denouncing it I know what I choose because I believe that’s what Christ would choose. I also trust that the Spirit can convict us of sin, that in our own lives it has a feeling, a taste that… Read more »
“Only a church certain that same sex sexual activity was bless- able ought to permit it.” No, because we cannot even be certain that there is a God. Certainty is not something often available to us. I allow the logical possibility that God “maybe does condemn all homosexual activity” but it is also possible that the opposite is true and God rejoices in every form of love. I can see no reason to believe the former and every reason to believe the latter. So you can see why I think your statement is quite wrong: “Only a church certain that… Read more »
Oh brother. “Paradox of Tolerance”, comprende? The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that, if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Shorter: No, we “Liberals” don’t have to tolerate Conservative intolerance! See re Simon Eyre: I would just like to say I completely disagree with him but I still respect his right to be able to voice what he feels to be true. Many if not most of those standing in opposition to LLF aren’t doing it out of… Read more »
That’s a good an important question. I am absolutely certain that Nicky (and we all) MIGHT be wrong on this (and on all manner of things) and i have enough respect for him to believe that he would admit the same. The reality of human fallibility is one of the few things of which we can be absolutely certain. There’s sadly no shortage of evidence, nay proof, of this. I also BELIEVE that he IS wrong on a number of things, but here i can only claim confidence, not certainty. But that’s all obvious, isn’t it?
It seems to me that reverse the received ethics of the church, and declare something to be blessable which hitherto had been declared sinful, requires certainty. Not just ‘we’re confident but being good liberals we know we’re fallible and could be wrong’. In any case Charlie Bell doesn’t sound for a moment like he thinks he could be wrong on this. Which makes me suspect that SOME progressivism is far from liberal. There was a SOMETIMES in my earlier comment which I think you missed.
It’s not just ‘good liberals’ who should know they’re fallible and might be wrong, but any thinking person.
“To declare something to be blessable which hitherto had been declared sinful requires certainty.”
Well, actually, no. Certainty is an impossibly high bar for just about anything. But what we can do is consider the potential harm done by the two options, to continue to condemn, or not. Whereas we know that harm is done by condemning homosexuality, the concern that harm is done by celebrating it seems to be based on rather obscure beliefs about judgment and the afterlife.
I am grateful to Colin Coward for flagging up Mark Vasey-Saunders’ excellent book, Defusing the Sexuallity Debate: The Anglican Evangelical Culture War. It is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand why the conservative corner of this diverse tradition is behaving as it is right now. Behind all the public pronouncements about, and fierce resistance to, the sexuality debates, lie historic anxieties about identity and authority. These are the real drivers.
And, may I suggest, fear of change, given the absolute certainty that they, and only they are right? I’ve noticed this over a good many years, and is showing up again in the ‘assisted dieing bill’ debate. Conservative Christianity instinctively reacts negatively to anything new or challenges their way of doing things and thinking. We saw it a lot in the early years of the renewal movement indeed, still do – in Sunday trading, equality rights, post-empire reparations, you name it. My wife’s re-reading ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’; she says what a sad picture it paints of CofE attitudes then.… Read more »
There was a bit more to the Sunday Trading argument than just sabbatarian resistance. The shop workers’ union, USDAW, also opposed it on the grounds it would be destructive to the family lives of shop workers. As it has been.
I’m a former shop worker myself (albeit in a Christian bookshop which was definitely not going to open on Sundays), and was discussing this recently with the former political head of USDAW.
There often is more to an issue than outsiders, reliant on public media for information, may know. I’ve learned to be circumspect about such campaigns. Indeed, I was unhappy about the Sunday trading affair – it was tantamount to anarchy by the big DIY and other ‘sheds’ who could afford to defy the law until they forced the change they wanted. The issue caused chaos for the church I belonged to at the time, introducing such legal complications that it effectively ended the church bookstall! From press reports it also proved embarrassing for some cathedral souvenir shops as well. Change… Read more »
And also with you, John.
Thanks, Janet
Folowing a fall, which prompted a modest brain heamorage, I am in dire need of sustaining company.
This site is a lifeline – last night was very much the soul’s long, dark night of complete despair.
If I say that yes, I believe in the active presence of the Holy Spirit, but have increasingly serious doubts about popular charismatic propaganda, I think you will understand…….
Was this a recent fall, John? I am very sorry to hear this.
Of course God happens to agree with British C21st western values, how convenient.
Apparently it’s convenient for conservatives that God agrees with British early 20th century western values. Both “the spirit of this age” and “the spirit of the previous age” are seductive traps.
I’ve noticed that God also conveniently agrees with conservative evangelical values.
Did you ever come across the book ‘Is God Still an Englishman?” (Cole Morton) which is still available from Amazon? I found it a sad account of one man’s disillusionment with charismatic Christianity, one with which I could still identify quite readily albeit more positively, and quite pertinent with regard to a lot of current issues. (Safeguarding and amateur exorcisms not least among them.)
And God, of course, is bound to be conservative. Has he not said ‘I don’t change’?
Remember the jingle, ‘Like a mighty tortoise moves the church of God?’ There’s a lot of truth in it!
God also said, ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing.’
I haven’t run across Morton’s book, I’ll look it up.
It is worth reading, albeit sad. The ‘new thing’ certainly went very sour for him.
Depends which country you’re in. Does the same hold true of other nations? It certainly seems to do in the US and those nations where the church’s opinions still count heavily, but what about those where it doesn’t? “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate’ was very prevalent back in the 19th century. I suspect a similar attitude still undergirds a lot of thinking, shall we say, on for example, post empire reparations? Convenient for us, perhaps, but how do the people for whom it… Read more »
The Guardian reports today that “an Anglican priest and the CEO of a Christian pressure group working with senior conservative figures in the Church of England” has just been speaking at the Traditional Britain Group conference which had at least three delegates/activists from the far right Homeland Party. As David rightly points out there’s a lot more going on here than the debates on human sexuality, vitally important as they are. What alarms me most is the creeping influence of far right ideologies into conservative expressions of Christian faith in the Church of England, which only seems to be strengthened… Read more »
This has been a recurrent theme in church history. The propensity for conservative Christian leaders to seek a mutually beneficial relationship with authoritarian politicians and statesmen is nothing new.
Just look at the first couple of hundred years after Constantine.
Sadly every occurrence/recurrence has been bad news for LGBTQIA+ people.
And for a great many other people who, in one way or another, didn’t fit in. Religious dictatorships in 17th century New England, Jews in 1920’s/30’s Germany, etc etc.
And, to be fair, the Christian church doesn’t have an exclusive monopoly on intolerance of the ‘outsider’; some Muslims, Hindus and atheists, etc are just as bad if given the chance.
It seems an inbuilt part of the human condition, I’m afraid.
Those of us in the USA have been living with this reality for decades.
Reading through Charlie Bell’s, Queer Redemption, I’ve had to pause a bit to do some research on the fly on the history and philosophy of the notion of Queer in the sense in which Bell is writing about it. I have not found the few comments here to be a particularly substantive help; but perhaps that is because folks here are streets ahead of me with regard to familiarity with both Bell and the issues he raises. For anyone interested, I am attaching links to a couple of short book reviews I found helpful. (1) Queer Redemption, review by The… Read more »