Goddard2Goddard Letter 6 part 1: Andrew to Giles

11th February 2007

Dear Giles,

It was great to meet up when I was in London last week even if only for an hour or so and to talk face-to-face as well as by these letters. You've packed a lot into your latest in explaining why you think my position is 'unsustainable' and I want to try and reply to each of those areas but first there is the crucial question we touched on and with which you open - 'are we condemned to an endless restatement without resolution?'. I also hope that is not so and believe that dialogues such as ours will - however slowly and surreptitiously - make some difference but exactly what and whether it will ever be 'resolution' I just don't know. My question is increasingly that given it is indeed 'unlikely that either of us will leave the church' what does it mean for us to be able to live together as the church, getting on with the sort of tasks you describe - teaching, worship, prayer, outreach, having our lives changed etc. What shape do such disciplines as love of neighbour, self-denial, bearing one another's burdens etc take?

Our fellowship group here at Wycliffe recently shared in a corporate lectio divina of Galatians 5 and among the verses I was struck by for their relevance to the Church of England and the Anglican Communion were the frightening verses - "You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: \"Love your neighbour as yourself.\" If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other”.

As I think I said over our drinks on Wednesday, I see the situation as one in which the challenge to me and those who share my views is how - given we believe that what is being proposed for the church is wrong and amounts to asking her to bless and commend what God has declared wrong - we share the gospel and minister with people like John and Mark, teach our views and uphold church discipline graciously while being open to correction ourselves. The challenge I see for you and IC is how to express your dissent as holders of a minority view and engage with the church while acknowledging its authority and respecting its mind, even though you believe it has indeed erred. It is a slight caricature but it sometimes seems there are those who wish simply to silence and excommunicate and those who wish simply to do what they personally believe is right with no regard for the wider church.

As we work more on that - which I'm sure Tanzania and General Synod will bring us back to - there does remain the substantive question and I don't think we can simply put that to the side especially as we each apparently think the other's position (though taking care to see the nuances and avoiding caricature) is unsustainable in some rather fundamental ways. I liked your four-fold categorisation so will reply using it.

Biblically, we could spend much time on specific texts but I understand you may not want to go down that path in detail. I guess my question is at a more general level: Given that it is undeniable that every biblical text referring to same-sex sexual acts speaks of them in terms that fit with a call for repentance (there is no parallel negative univocality in any of the other allegedly comparable issues you cite), on what biblical basis can the church not only refuse to issue that call but even do the opposite and commend contexts for such acts and say that the view such acts are wrong is biblically unsustainable?

Your argument here seems to be that it is on the same basis that I was content to hear my wife preach this morning despite 1 Tim 2.12 and so if I was consistent I would either refuse to attend such services or be as happy to bless a civil partnership as I am to hear a woman preach. I have to confess I don't see the logic here. Precisely because, as you say, 'the issues are different', applying the same method will likely lead to different conclusions. I wish to take each issue in its own right and be consistent in how I read and apply the Scriptures - as a whole and in their specific discussions of each issue. You appear somehow to know even before looking at the texts in detail that because your method leads to a particular view on women's ministry it must lead to a certain view on same-gender relationships and you therefore assume that I am inconsistent, unlike Mario Bergner or some of my more conservative evangelical friends in Reform.

So, I am not arguing that 'this question is methodologically separate from all the other questions of which we are both aware'. Rather I am trying to apply the same method - careful exegesis of biblical texts, in their context, faithful to the canonical witness as a whole and integrated into a biblical theology - and have been led to the conclusions I hold (on sexuality the same as Some Issues in Human Sexuality and Richard Hays in his Moral Vision of the New Testament) with varying degrees of confidence and tenativeness. My suspicion is that you are working with a different interpretive method to me. It seems to be one which privileges a certain understanding of 'inclusion' and 'love' as the heremenutical key to Scripture and heart of the gospel and then combines this with a particular understanding of sexuality and a framework that categorises such disparate issues as divorce, usury, slavery and women's ordination together. The result is you do not really need to do detailed exegetical work on Romans 1 or 1 Corinthians 6 in order to know the answers to the questions we face today about homosexuality. All this means that I'm afraid therefore that I simply cannot agree with what you hold to be beyond doubt - 'that a far stronger scriptural justification for the subordination of women to men can be made than any justification for the continued rejection of same-gender relationships'.

Theologically, there is I think more agreement between us. I too want clearly to say that any language here about being sinful must be universal and that we must start with our common humanity as those made in the image of God. I'd love to explore this more as I know that what I say and write is often heard as telling gay and lesbian people that they are 'existentially, ontologically sinful' in a uniquely depraved way. If that is indeed what I am saying then I agree with you that it is theologically flawed and unsustainable. I think however that the gap here is often more to do with different interpretations of sexual attraction and orientation and varied understandings of personal identity than to do with competing theologies of creation and fall in general. I am though intrigued as to how your understanding of sexual identity is related to your doctrine of creation. Is the biblical witness that we are made male and female now shown to be inadequate for understanding ourselves as sexual beings? Does it need to be complemented with further distinctions within created order on the basis of sexual orientation - gay male, straight male etc - for a Christian ethic?

I'm afraid I your critique relating to living in a provisional world and the wheat and the tares lost me. I think we are all agreed that there are patterns of behaviour inconsistent with Christian discipleship and that this is particularly important in relation to Christian leaders. As a result the church has certain teaching and discipline. But this is surely not to say that those who disagree with the teaching (in theory and in practice) or even those who are subject to church discipline are simply 'gathered up with the tares and cast into the outer darkness'.

[ For part 2 of this letter, please click on www.inclusivechurch.net/article/details.html

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