Sex, Culture and the Church (23 January 2011)

The Revd Dr Teresa Morgan, Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Oriel and a regular preacher  in the Chapel, gave an important sermon at last Sunday's Choral Evensong tackling the vexed issue of our biblical inheritance in relation to our diverse understandings of sexuality.  Do have a look.

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Last Thursday and Friday I went to a conference about human sexuality. It was meant to be an interdisciplinary meeting to talk about biology, psychology, history, politics, art, religion, and so on, and I was there to talk about the Greeks and Romans. But the whole meeting turned into a discussion about religion, and specifically about attitudes to homosexuality, with particular reference to the Anglican Church.

For those of you who have been spared this debate so far, there is sharp disagreement at the moment between Anglicans who think that homosexuality is wrong and those who think it’s just a fact. And in the middle of this conference, somebody raised their voice in despair, and said, ‘Here we all are wrangling about texts and doctrines, but what are we saying to the world? What are we saying to the young?’ And I thought, blimey, I’m preaching in College on Sunday. So I scrapped the sermon I was going to preach on St. Paul, and decided it was time to talk about sex.

To sketch in a bit of the background: there are various reasons why some people think homosexuality is wrong, but the one Christians usually cite is that the Bible says so. Specifically, the Book of Leviticus and St. Paul say so. Even if we leave out Leviticus, which is part of the Jewish Law, which Christians don’t keep, there are still three references in Paul which are widely discussed. The most substantial one is a passage towards the beginning of the Letter to the Romans. Paul is criticizing gentiles for not honouring the one true God. They’ve always known about God, he says; they just chose not to worship him. So God punished them in various ways, including: ‘Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameful acts with men, and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.’ (1:26-7)

The other two references are briefer and both occur in lists of wrongdoers, in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy.[1] 1 Corinthians 6:9 mentions malakoi, soft or effeminate men, and arsenokoitoi, men who have sex with men. 1 Timothy 1:10 just mentions arsenokoitoi.

I’m not going to rehearse the debate these passages have generated in any detail. But broadly, what one might call the ‘anti-gay’ position is quite straightforward: it is that Paul doesn’t approve of same-sex sex (which is true).

What one might broadly call the ‘pro-gay’ position is a bit more complicated. Some people say, yes, Paul disapproves of same-sex sex. But he speaks a Jew who keeps the Law. And he repeatedly tells his new Christian communities that they don’t need to keep the Law, so his comments as an observant Jew are irrelevant to them.

Others say, that’s not the whole story, because there are things in the Law that Paul thinks Christians should do - like not murdering people - even though they don’t keep the Law as such. But Paul is also, morally, a product of his time and place, and though some of his views - like the one about murder - we still share, others we don’t. For example, Paul (and indeed the whole Bible) has no problem with slavery, but now we do, so when it comes to slavery, we know we have to look beyond the Bible for guidance, and the same is true of sexuality.

Others again say that Paul’s ideas are not helpful for us, because at the most he’s talking about same-sex sex - not about sexuality as a given and stable orientation - because the world he lived in didn’t have that concept of sexuality (which is true). But now we do, so we can’t use Paul as a guide.

Meanwhile, some people point out that talking endlessly about male-male sex or male-female sex is so far behind the curve it’s absurd. What about bisexuality, intersexuality, transexuality, queer, lesbian separatism, metrosexuality, polyandry... There’s a lot going on out there, as I’m sure you know.

I could go on, but you get the idea. There is always room for debate about the meaning of biblical texts. And there is always room for debate about the role particular texts play in modern ethics. All Christians accept that: I doubt that anyone who believes that we have to follow Paul’s views on sex, believes we have to follow his views on slavery.

And Anglican tradition - like most Christian traditions - allows for this. We depend for our ideas not only on the Bible, but also on tradition - the accumulated experience and reflection of 2000 years - and on our own reflection and experience here and now.

Which brings us back to the here and now, and the question: given the state of Christian debate about sex and sexuality, is it worth even trying to say something that might speak to all sides?

I hope it is. And I would begin, not from three disputed biblical texts, but from somewhere else entirely. Somewhere much more fundamental.

The whole meaning of life for Christians is life itself. Life which is so incredibly beautiful and infinitely precious. Life which is endlessly interconnected, because it all arises from one inexhaustible source which we call God. Life which is holy in every part of itself because God is in every part of it.

It seems that the God who forms, and informs and reforms the world, loves pouring life into finite material beings. So every created thing, with all our limitations, embodies something divine, and the meaning of every life is the meaning of everything. And God is always involved in our shared life, even when we can’t feel it - even when we are determined to ignore it and do our own thing our own way.

God is always looking for ways to remind us of our shared life - through everything from our desire to procreate to the discoveries of particle physics. Above all, through the life of Jesus Christ. ‘In him was life,’ says St. John’s gospel, ‘and this life was the light of humanity…’ And ‘I came that they should have life, and have it more abundantly.’ (1:4, 10:10)

That involvement of the divine in our shared life, that insistence on reminding us of it, is what we call love - a very parental kind of love, but also a lover’s love - which says, we belong together; we are part of one another. Live that truth and you will live most abundantly.

There seem to be almost infinitely many ways that life can work - as chemicals or organisms or communities. But experience also tells us - at least for human beings - that some ways of conducting our lives tend to work better than others. For instance: being greedy, aggressive, arrogant, or indifferent to other people, doesn’t tend to enhance life. Being faithful, generous, honest, open to ideas and relationships, tends to work better.

But while those things may tell us something about how to live, they don’t tell us much about specific actions. So, do I think I know what specifically God wants us to do - for instance in our sex lives - or who to do it with? No, I don’t.

But I do think that what we need to ask ourselves is,

‘Am I prepared for this relationship - this action - to mean everything, because it’s part of the interconnectedness of all life?’

‘Am I prepared for this action or relationship to be holy?’

‘Am I prepared for God to be part of this - and perhaps to use it, in his infinite creativity, to take my life in directions I never dreamt of?’

Well, all human societies are complex, and people will never agree about everything, including sexual behaviour or sexuality. That’s not a disaster.

What is a disaster is if we can’t sustain communities where everyone can live life to the full. One of my favourite passages from Matthew’s gospel sums it up perfectly: ‘You have heard it said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your father in Heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.’ (5:43-5)

Whatever we think of our neighbours, we belong together. We must find ways to live together, in such a way that everyone can flourish, because we are - every single one of us - one holy creation. And it’s only when we live that truth that we have life, and have it most abundantly.

Amen

Oriel College Chapel 23/1/11

copryright. Teresa Morgan 2011

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[1]1 Cor. 6:9-10, 1 Tim. 1:8-11.

Edward Watson's Homily (20 January 2011)

Check out Ed Watson's thought-provoking homily, delivered last night at the College Eucharist:

The theme that ran through the sermons of last term was the relationship between change and tradition.  The debate over the balance we should strike between the two is important: without change we become stymied, without tradition we forget what it was we were trying to do in the first place.  It is a discussion I wish to carry forward into this service.

Most who know me know that in such debates I tend to come down on the side of change.  I love finding new things to do, and new ways of doing old things, perhaps to a fault.  I am no different when it comes to religion: I believe not only that Christianity should change, but that it must change. I believe that the changes it needs to undergo are so fundamental that when it emerges on the other side many will question whether it is indeed still Christianity in any meaningful sense. 

I am going to briefly outline both the motivation and the matter of these changes.  I am then going to try and argue that the product of these changes would remain a branch of Christianity, because it would still embody Christianity's essential tradition.  My argument as presented here is not intended to convince, lacking as it is in important detail: it is merely designed to provide a sketch of a wider theological project.

Much has been made in recent times of the advances of science at the cost of Christianity.  I think the dialectic set up by the new atheists between modern mainstream Christianity and science is a false dialectic. Einstein once said that science could not give us the flavour of soup: by the same principle, neither can it give us an account of the moral content of the world.  Nor do I think it should try, any more than Christianity should try to provide a grand unified theory of physics.  But even though I do not think mainstream Christianity and science are in genuine competition, I do think there are many lessons that religions of all stripes can learn from science.  The most important of these lessons is that progress is only possible through challenging, and sometimes abandoning, assumptions that are at the time thought unassailable.

According to Thomas Kuhn, the greatest leaps in scientific progress come not through the process of building upon past theory, but through paradigm shifts, in which the entire edifice of past theory is torn down and restructured, foundations included.  It is through such paradigm shifts that we discovered that the sun doesn't orbit the earth, and it is from such paradigm shifts that the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics emerged.  These discoveries were possible only because scientists were willing to reject the assumptions of their peers, and because a sufficient number of those peers were willing to listen to them.  Because of them, science over the centuries has proved a dynamic discipline, ever adapting to new challenges, and ever providing new answers to old questions.

In Christianity, there are no such paradigm shifts.  Certainly, there have been changes, and the reformation is evidence enough that it is far from a static entity, but these changes have not been paradigm shifts: they have been shifts within a single paradigm.  Because of this, modern Christianity is stuck in a conceptual scheme two thousand years old, a conceptual scheme that cannot engage with the world today in many respects.  Modern Christians have to respond to their critics with answers that are based upon reasoning constructed in a world without the internet, without chemistry or advanced medical knowledge, a world without even the concept of a Large Hadron Collider. 

This is not, perhaps, surprising: Christianity is far from the ideal vehicle for change.  Indeed, over the centuries it has often proved itself a perfect nest of intolerance and the human lust for certainty.  Perhaps this is a natural consequence of the claims that many Christians wish to make: when your evidence is supposed to be gifted to you by the supreme being, then how could your answer be anything other than the only answer, eternal and unchanging?

This is not to say Christian thought is uncritical: indeed, the most penetrating criticisms of the Church tend come from within.  But though through such criticism there has been an acceptance of human fallibility within the Church, there has not, to my knowledge, been an acceptance within mainstream Christianity itself that this fallibility extends its corrupting influence right down to the Church's core tenets.

If, however, one does accept that this is the case, then the game changes: if our most fundamental beliefs could be based upon the products of human error, then even in this land of idols nothing is sacrosanct: we can thus look for new ways to answer old questions, and thus attain the freedom to free ourselves of the dead weight which keeps Christianity bound to a dogma two thousand years old.

I can think of no better example of such dead weight than the authority accorded to the Bible.  I was in Durham at the beginning of the Christmas holidays, and became engaged in a debate with a friend over whether or not the Church of England should have female bishops.  My friend is a kind, gentle and loving human being, but at the same time he believes that women should not be bishops.  What was the root of his reasoning?  That the idea of female bishops is unbiblical.  Anyone with a passing knowledge of 1 Timothy, Chapter 2, verse 12, will know that he is quite right, and I'm not sure there is any amount of exegetical interpretation or demythologising that could lead us to convincingly claim otherwise.

Of course, this is but one example of one verse which does not accord with modern sensibilities.  Even if there were many more like it, which I believe there are, one could not step from this to the wholesale rejection of the scripture: but then wholesale rejection of the scripture is not what I wish to advocate.  I wish to advocate the rejection of the authority of the Scripture.  I don't believe that we should root our faith in the letters of a misogynist and the fragmented accounts of unknown men.  Of course, I do not claim there is no truth to be found in the Bible: I simply claim that what truth there is is not enough to justify the Bible's status as the 'the source of all saving truth and moral teaching,' and thus the foundation of Christian faith.

The appeal to reject the authority of the Scripture is far from unprecedented, nor necessarily controversial or original: indeed, it could perhaps be said to follow naturally from the work of Tillich and Bultmann, given certain other assumptions.  However, it is still the case that serious doctrinal issues would, and do, arise from such a rejection.  There is the question of how we can know the life of Christ with any certainty: there is the question of what exactly we are to found our faith upon instead, such that we might be certain in our beliefs. 

My response to these questions is to say that they are not important: as I said last Trinity, I believe that faith is in fact inimical to such certainty as some seek in Scripture.   For me the more important question is this: from whence do we actually derive our faith?  I want to give an example from my own experience as a possible answer: I once spent two weeks in a bed and breakfast on the Moray Firth.  On my last day I was walking along the coast when I decided to sit down and look over the sea.  Just as I sat, the Andante of Mahler's 6th came on my iPod and the sun hit that strange angle at which daylight ends and sunset begins.  For sixteen perfect minutes I sat in absolute peace, watching the sun descend over the sea.

I believe that it is simply from such subjective experiences of peace, from the very existence of beauty, kindness and love, that we derive our faith.  I also believe that that faith is the same faith that forms the pure heart of Christian tradition, the heart that has sustained itself across millennia.  It is in this living faith, and not in dusty old tomes, that we find what it means to be Christian, that without which Christianity could not be.  I do not believe that Christianity is essentially a collection of dogmatic rituals and creeds (though that is not to say that such rituals and creeds are worthless): I believe that it is the simple acceptance of faith.  Perhaps the best elucidation of this belief can be drawn from the fact that faith, like mankind, seeks greater understanding of itself: thus it manifests itself as an active quest for God, the ineffable force that speaks in that still small voice of calm, 'inexplicable and uncanny.'  It is through their commitment to this active quest for humanity's 'ultimate concern' that Christians find their identity: as in all walks of life, it is the answers they seek, not the answers they give, that define them.

St Hilary of Poitiers

Today we celebrate St Hilary of Poitiers, who was sometimes known as the 'Hammer of the Arians' (Malleus Arianorum).  To me, this makes him sound a little bit like a pro wrestler.  

Happy New Year

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