I’m going to say something about an ‘Anglican matter’, the publication late last year, of a ‘discussion document’ from the House of Bishops, Some issues in human sexuality: A guide to the debate. Of course, the sooner this document is forgotten, the better: so why am I drawing attention to it? It is a classic piece in the literature of evasion, already hailed as ‘excellent’ by the Church of England Newspaper ¹. I have two reasons: 1) I think it will quickly become authoritative and it is important to attempt to slow down its passage into Anglican hagiography; and 2) its theological treatment of sex is relevant to all Christians, because it makes use of universal arguments, and makes assumptions, which, if unchallenged, will make the further integration of sexual minorities into the church of Christ more difficult.

But first I’m going to say something brief and theological about civil partnerships. There is a real debate going on about these! 

2.   Marriage and Civil Partnerships
In my work on marriage I like to draw attention to the many changes that that institution has undergone within Christianity over 2000 years. These changes, of course, require a searching of tradition, and an understanding of the dynamics of doctrinal and moral change in the light of questions asked by every new generation of Christians. The changes include the scrapping of betrothal as early as 7, marriage at 14 or 12, several alterations to the purposes of marriage (e.g., the dropping of fornication-avoidance and the insertion of love – mutual love - even), the remarkable acceptance of the chosen childlessness of fertile couples, and judgements about whether marriages can end. One current transition is from patriarchal to ‘equal-regard’ marriages that Christian theology finds very difficult. Since Calvin in the 16th century, and Vatican II in the 20th, marriages have been conceptualised as covenants. One particular, and neglected, strand of marital theology, which will help in the extension of marriage to lesbian and gay people is that of a consortium omnis vitae, or ‘partnership of the whole of life’. [Because of the interest shown in this idea at the AGM on Feb.24th, 2004, and in response to several requests, an extended footnote has been added here.] ²

A promising way forward is to understand ourselves as tradition-makers, not simply Bible-receivers and readers. The point about calling marriages covenants is that they are not contracts; they are between equal persons; they are sealed by vows where God is witness, and between Christians they express the values of fidelity, permanence and love. The churches need to be shown that sexual ethics can still be linked with marriage provided that their understanding of marriage continues to be more inclusive and accommodating. The long-term theological goal must be for the covenant of marriage to include same-sex covenants.

The point that has been lost in the churches in arguments over marriage is how very flexible marriage is. In the light of the developing, open, marital, covenant, tradition, several suggestions about registered partnerships follow. 1st, and in its own right, the proposed registered partnerships are legally a marriage in most things except in name. A quick glance at the proposed legislation reveals identical procedures regarding, e.g., the use of registrars, the notification of partnerships and possible objections to them; waiting periods; the rules on impediments and prohibited degrees; parental consent for minors; endings on death, dissolution or annulment, and so on. The main difference to the glancing, untrained eye is that while marriages in all churches are welcomed, registered partnerships in churches are precluded. 

Second, the theological task is to indicate that registered partnerships are well within the spiral of the developing marital tradition. If they are icons of faithfulness, mutual non-possessive devotion, till death do them part, if partners vow to love each other as Christ loves the church, how are they not marriages? Add to this that all the Protestant churches (as far as I know) allow childless marriages to straight, fertile couples, and that same-sex partners can adopt children, the notion of covenant marriage is well able to accommodate them. Extended arguments for this position can be found in my Marriage After Modernity ^3.

Third, while registered partnerships may be second best, they are a lot better than nothing. Perhaps LGCM should welcome them, while continuing to strive for the theological recognition of their partnerships as icons of Christ’s love for the church, i.e., as marriages. That is not to say, of course, that all relationships among lesbigay people should fall under that rubric. 

3. What ‘Guide’? What ‘Debate’?
The importance of marriage for all sexual ethics, the developing understanding of it in the Christian tradition, especially in the 20th century, and the advocacy of each generation of Christians as tradition-makers, would have provided a promising way forward through the mine-field of issues about sex that the churches are presently fleeing from. Instead, Anglicans get the portentous and aloof Some Issues in Human Sexuality: A guide to the debate. 

First, I’m unconvinced by talk about ‘debates’, not least because that is a glib and non-specific characterization of what is actually going on. When the articulate bourgeoisie or Oxbridge student unions operate their debating societies, they operate according to rules. What rules are being used in this so-called ‘debate’?

Second, in real debates there is agreement about procedures. Speakers are expected to produce arguments which can be weighed against each other, enabling participants to make decisions about which ones, on balance, are the more convincing. There is agreement that reason is to be used in establishing and probing arguments, and not for masking fear and prejudice. There is a proper detachment about this process. 

Third, real debates are about motions which are eventually passed or defeated. There is no motion in this ‘debate’: just ‘some issues’. Fourth, the question how the sex lives of Christians are brought more into conformity with God’s will, is not adequately addressed by the notion of a debate, for what is needed is dialogue between all parties. Once again lesbigay Christians have become that fearful ‘other’ about whom straight Christians exercise opinions at a distance, opinions designed more to bolster idolatrous uses of scripture and to conceal the shakey edifice of heterosexuality, than to understand and love better their gay neighbours in the pew. Imagine if the church continued to conduct its relations with the great world faiths in this way!

So I don’t see any debate. That is a bourgeois notion that masks the remarkable lack of the love of neighbour that is the very sine qua non of the faith. There is a series of quarrels going on about sex, in every church in the world, and these quarrels expose extraordinary and oppressive uses of scripture by some Christians, and an extraordinary fear of sexual difference. This is what needs to be addressed. Two regrettable features of historic Christianity have now returned to haunt it in the present: the first is the over-reliance on the Bible in Protestant Christianity that is a consequence both of the rejection of Catholic substance and sacramentality, and of the further neglect of reason, of tradition and of experience; and the second is an extensive discomfort regarding anything to do with sexuality and the body. 

Neither is Some Issues a ‘guide’ even to these quarrels. A guide is supposed to show you the main features of a landscape, tourist attraction, etc. This Guide omits the very features we most need to visit. For example, there is almost no mention of homophobia (even in the index), and so not even a hint of a connection between Christian doctrine, Bible use, and anti-gay attitudes. There is no mention of the history of oppressive readings of scripture, such as the cursing of Canaan’s children (Gen.9/20-9): the charge of deicide levelled at Jews: the support for slavery, for the subordination of women, or for despotic evil regimes. There is a long tradition of oppressive readings, and the possibility is not allowed into the ‘debate’ (lest the consciences of evangelicals be not spared!) whether the reading of homosexuality by many Christians belongs to this tradition. That is not even to say that it does so belong: only that the basic, painful issue is deftly circumvented.

There is a long section on the Trinity, yet the creative use of this doctrine by theologians writing about sexuality, is ignored. The most profound Trinitarian categories, of communion, equality, unity-in-difference, relation and person, all of which transcend gender and orientation, have been deftly prevented from contributing to the more creative side of the so-called debate. Almost no attention is paid to the riches that abound in contemporary theology.

In one section, ‘Some recent rereadings of the Christian tradition,’ (3.6) the views of three (from very many) modern theologians who have written about homosexuality, are considered. All three (one of them is Rowan Williams) are said to be ‘rethinking… faithful gay and lesbian relationships within the Christian tradition on what they see as orthodox theological grounds’ (3.6.12). The critical question addressed to the three chosen authors is ‘what we are to make of their arguments for the legitimacy of same-sex sexual relationships in the light of the general biblical picture concerning Christian discipleship and human sexuality that we have looked at in this chapter’ (3.6.37). And that question is entirely, yes entirely, evaded.

4. The Bible as a Guidebook
The Guide (2.1) sets out two views of the Bible, both of which it advocates. Christians generally are said to see the Bible ‘as providing normative guidance for their sexual conduct’ (2.1.1). They see it this way because of the status they give ‘to the Bible as a whole as pointing to Christ, through whom God has revealed to his people what he is like, what he has done for them, and how they should respond to him’. (2.1.2) Later in the chapter these views are formally separated. The first view regards the Bible as ‘a guide to Christian discipleship’ (2.6). The second regards it ‘as a witness to the grace of God’ (2.5). 

A primary source of confusion in the Guide and in the churches is the conflation of these two views. Since the Bible points to Christ, it is clearly right to speak of it as a ‘witness’ to him. Because Jesus is God, Jesus is God’s revelation, and the Bible, like John the Baptist, is a witness to that. (Witnesses to crimes are not criminals, but witnesses!) But when the Bible is thought to provide ‘normative guidance’ for the conduct of Christians, it may then cease to be the witness to God’s revelation, and become the revelation instead. The Guide is right to emphasise the status of the Bible as a witness to Christ. However the status of Christ over the Bible should also be emphasised. The ‘normative guidance’ view endangers this. Why? Because it endorses the supposition that Christians should follow the Bible, instead of following the One to whom the Bible is a witness.

The bishops claim there are ‘two answers’ (2.2.7) to the question how the church should respond to the pluralistic context of reading. The first is to ‘stick to the belief that these texts do have specific meanings… bearing the inspiration and authority of God’ (2.2.8): the second is ‘to realize that the meaning of a text is created as a particular group of people reads the text in the light of its own particular traditions and beliefs… (2.2.9). 

But there are more than two ‘answers’ to the ‘problem’ of biblical interpretation, as the term ‘pluralism’ in any case suggests. No sooner than the plurality of ‘answers’ has been reduced to two, than one of them is misdescribed. The sole example of this ‘answer’ in practice just happens to be Rom.1:26-7. According to position one, the text has a specific meaning. ‘It means this and not that’ (2.2.10). But according to position two ‘the meaning of the text is the way we choose to read it’. But there are scores of scholarly interpreters who do not recognise these stark alternatives, whether on Rom.1:26-7 or any other passage. This innocent-looking bifurcation first lends weight to the view that biblical texts have fixed meanings, and then misrepresents alternative views as willfully subjective. This poor move determines how the Bible will be [mis-?]used in subsequent sections. The normative guidance view has already supplanted the witness view. 

5. Guidance from Genesis
One of the most embarrassing features of the Guide is what it attempts to do with Genesis 1. The New Testament is said to point us ‘back to the creation narratives… as providing the proper framework for understanding what it means for us to be male and female before God and to relate together as such’ (3.4.8). God made us as men and women so we could have children (3.4.20) and so we should not exist in solitude (3.4.23). The bishops agree ‘with the continuing Roman Catholic emphasis on the fact that procreation is a central part of what the sexual act is about, and that, therefore, any form of sexual activity that is by its very nature closed to the possibility of procreation is theologically problematic’ (3.4.20). They cite developments in ‘the Anglican tradition’ about contraception as a ‘development’ of this position (3.4.21). 

The God-given need for relationship’ (3.4.27) can be met also by friendship. The writings of Aelred and Anselm on friendship are cited approvingly, and ‘the Church needs to consider… how it can give public recognition’ to friendship (3.4.39). The bishops want to ‘recover both in Church and society… the concept that there can be appropriate physical expressions of love that are not a prelude to, or an expression of, a relationship that involves sexual intercourse’ (3.4.48). The main reason for the exclusion of sexual intercourse to the married is ‘because, if we follow the Genesis narrative, we find that it depicts full sexual intercourse as taking place within a permanent and exclusive bond between two people of the opposite sex’ (3.4.49).

The ‘fixed meanings’ view, the ‘normative guidance’ view and the ‘guidebook’ views of the Bible are now put to work, and Gen.1 and 2 are required to bear an impossible weight of interpretation. The argument seems to be: 1) the New Testament uses these narratives in a particular way. Therefore, 2) we must use these narratives in the particular way that the New Testament does. But these premises are overstated. Jesus refers to marriage in the creation narratives in the context of criticising the excessive practice of husbands divorcing wives. The New Testament does not say the Hebrew scriptures give us a theory of sexuality. The New Testament interprets the Hebrew scriptures Christocentrically. To say Genesis provides a ‘framework for understanding what it means for us to be male and female before God’ is already to offer interpretation well beyond what the text itself is able to authorise. There need be no objection to such interpretations, of course, provided that they are understood as the outcome of the engagement of some readers with the text. But the bishops want far more than this. They are able to derive ‘what it means’ to be male and female, and just from this text! This is a classic example of the very type of biblical interpretation that attracts just criticism, viz., that passages of scripture have single, fixed meanings, and experts, either godly or academic or episcopal, can tell us what those privileged yet elusive meanings are. 

If Genesis miraculously provides us with such a framework, we cannot innocently bracket out that we now live at a time when 500 years of science and nearly 200 years of biblical criticism has hugely expanded our understanding of the various subjects treated in the creation narratives. They have required ‘revisionism’ of all of us if we are to continue (as Christians must) to take Genesis seriously. But why, then, should it be thought that the Genesis material about the creation of men and women is to be protected, and exempted, from a similar revisionary understanding?

It is in any case impossible to avoid a revisionist interpretation of the creation narratives. The history of the reception of this text, even in the previous century, leads to the discovery of at least three abandoned views. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ was made a premise in the argument against the use of contraception, even within marriage. All Protestant Christians are now apparently revisionists on contraception, even though no Christian church was prepared to sanction their use until the Lambeth Conference of 1930. ‘That is why a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife’ (Gen.2:24) is no longer used as a premise in the argument that ‘further marriages’ are always contrary to God’s will. All Protestant denominations now sanction intentionally childless marriages between fertile couples, and no-one even notices. Yet this is clearly contrary to the mainstream understanding of ‘Be fruitful and multiply’, and contrary to the link between sex and procreation that the Guide rightly makes.

Yet revisionism, tolerated in so many areas of the Genesis narratives, is apparently not tolerated when it is suggested that Gen.1:26-8, even when literally interpreted, may not quite give us a divinely sanctioned statement about normative heterosexuality after all. The claim that ‘the author of Genesis [which one?] was enabled by God to transcend the limitations of his culture in a way that enabled him to catch a glimpse of God’s original intention for the relationship between men and women,’ (3.4.56) while possibly true, extends far beyond what the text can by itself support. What has happened, of course, is that Anglicans do not have the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law, which would say what the bishops wanted to say more directly. On this view, nature teaches that penises belong only in vaginas, and the church supplements nature in affirming that the owners of both must be married to each other. Because this would not be a Protestant way of arguing, even further, dubious meanings are to be wrung out of the Genesis text.

Even so, let us for the sake of charity assume that, reading themselves into the text, this is the reading that the bishops wish to commend. Isn’t there a further, missing premise that would need to be inserted into their argument, i.e., that the text offers simple universals that admit of no, absolutely no, exceptions? From ‘male and female he created them’, and from ‘Be fruitful and multiply’, it is assumed that all males will always desire only females, and conversely; that no one might desire both, and that they will all have children. But the procreative purpose (remember it is OK to be a revisionist about this) is not thwarted if a few, or even some, people of either sex use sex for other reasons than procreation. Most heterosexual couples do this almost every time they have sex. The very existence of men and women who don’t fit this convenient pattern should be enough to indicate that the traditional understanding of these texts requires exceptions. (And celibate people are a further exception.)

There are good arguments against fertile heterosexual friends avoiding sexual intercourse, and some of them are based on the possibility of conceiving unwanted children. But these particular arguments logically cannot and do not apply to same-sex friendships. Once the genuine differences are acknowledged between the intimacies shared between heterosexual, and between homosexual, couples, it should also be acknowledged that different considerations may apply to each. Lesbian and gay Christians will be well aware of biblical and theological teaching about the evil of promiscuity, about the holiness of the body, about the symbolic meanings of intimacy, and so on. But they are unlikely to be swayed by the amazing claim that ‘if we follow the Genesis narrative, we find that it depicts full sexual intercourse as taking place within a permanent and exclusive bond between two people of the opposite sex’ (3.4.49). 

There is much more that must be said about this Guide, but that’s enough for the moment. I have concentrated on a particular biblical text in order to show over-readings are normative. It is so, throughout. The failure to engage with theology, or to do any; the evasion and omission; the excessive cautiousness; the devotion to scripture at the expense of devotion to Christ; the unwillingness even to admit the connection between Bible use and homophobic violence; these are all sad features of the quarrels that beset us and are reflected in this Guide. Lesbian and gay Christians and theologians need to expose these ills, and to seek to check the authority that this document may yet acquire.

©Adrian Thatcher
April 2004

'Adrian Thatcher is Professor of Applied Theology at the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, UK. He is an Anglican, and author of many books and articles, including The Daily Telegraph Guide to Christian Marriage (Continuum, 2003), Living Together and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2002) and Marriage after Modernity (Sheffield, 1999).'