This is an article from

Theology Wales:
the Church and Homosexuality

 

 

Full contents:

Guest Editor's Introduction
- Rev Jenny Wigley

Presidential Address
- Archbishop Barry Morgan

Same-sex relationships
- Bishop Richard Harries

The freeing of Anglican identities - Rev Dr Lorraine Cavanagh

Facing up to our differences
- Rev Jean Mayland

Same-sex unions
- Rev Dr Will Strange

Homosexuality - the biblical evidence
- Rev Prof DP Davies

Engaging with the scriptures
- Canon Robert Paterson

A view from the pews
- Tim Heywood

 

SAME-SEX UNIONS: Personal experience, social convention and scriptural witness

Rev Dr Will Strange

Will is Vicar of St Peter's, Carmarthen. Before coming to this parish he has been engaged in theological education as well as in parochial work. He has published three books and a number of articles, which have been in the field of biblical studies and church history.

'Getting real' over gay relationships

Archbishop Carnley, retiring Primate of Australia, recently called on the church to 'get real' over gay relationships. His case, as quoted in the church press, was:

Whilst some heterosexual people might say that those relationships are unnatural, if you talk to the gay people themselves they'll say that what is unnatural to them is a heterosexual relationship, so you can't appeal to a kind of natural law to solve this problem (1).

It is a neat summary of some of the strongest and most persistent arguments currently being proposed to revise Christian attitudes to same sex relationships. The church, it is said, has to listen to the stories of gay and lesbian people. Their experience can be - and indeed ought to be - the guide for the church to find an appropriate ethic of same-sex relationship. It is urged that the moral directions which Christians in the past have perceived in natural law or in scriptural witness must take second place to the pressing need to hear these stories and to acknowledge this experience with an authentically Christian compassion and wisdom.

This is the kind of argument which, in a more elaborated form, we can find in Jeffrey John's 'Permanent, Faithful, Stable': Christian Same-Sex Partnerships (2). In this short but significant book it is coupled with the supporting argument that because the essential features of heterosexual relationship (permanence, faithfulness, stability) are equally to be found in same-sex relationships, then the gender identity of the partners is insignificant. But John's argument clearly begins with - and frequently refers back to - the experience of gay and lesbian people. A person attracted to people of the same sex has particular needs, and it is recognition of these needs which justifies and drives John's argument. Or, to take a more elaborated argument still, Rowan Williams in his 1988 address to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement,' The Body's Grace ', had already argued that the harmful experience of heterosexual relationships should make us question what he called 'conventional heterosexist ethics': many marriages 'are a framework for violence and human destructiveness on a disturbing scale'. Conversely, same-sex love brings us up against the far more constructive possibility of 'joy whose material "production" is an embodied person aware of grace'. Nine years later, in ' Knowing Myself in Christ ', Williams returned to the theme of the experience of same-sex love and asked more directly whether:

a description of 'homosexual behaviour' and desire centred around Romans 1 can be given a privileged position over, let us say, a conscientious self-description by a homosexual person in terms of his or her longing to live a life in which their sexual desire, like other aspects of their identity, can come to image the love and justice of Christ (3).

Rowan Williams appears to imply that a homosexual person's conscientious self-description could (or even should) be given a privileged position over a description based upon the witness of scripture. Experience is foundational.

So a case is made for the revision of the church's traditional understanding of same-sex relationships: the experience of lesbian and gay people, together with their interpretation of that experience, demands a positive response; everything that is essential in traditional marriage can be true of same-sex relationships; therefore the case for recognising same-sex relationships is overwhelming.The obstacles to this case, in the form of natural law arguments and scriptural witness, can either be demolished (the texts do not mean what they have traditionally been understood to mean) or if not demolished, then sidestepped (whose nature dictates 'natural law'?).

These arguments have an obvious importance and appeal to those who themselves are attracted to members of their own sex.The arguments derive their wider power and appeal from the fact that today most heterosexual Christians will know lesbian and gay people whom they like and respect.

One of the consequences of the increased openness of lesbian and gay people in the past generation or so is that the discussion is no longer about a faceless and anonymous 'them'. It concerns a person with a face, a story and perhaps a pain.The introduction of a human element into reflection about homosexuality is an undoubted gain, and it makes discussion more complex.

It is an uncomfortable feeling for a heterosexual Christian to think that a loved relative or respected friend might not be permitted by the church to express their need for sexual love and acceptance.The secular world seems to be a good deal more accepting and tolerant on this issue than parts of the Christian church, and that also is an uncomfortable feeling.

• How do you respond to those changes that Will describes - do they make you uncomfortable ?
• Is it a help or a hindrance to be so aware of "a face, a story and perhaps a pain"?

The most common Christian arguments in favour of recognition and celebration of samesex unions build up to proposals which alleviate this discomfort by arguing for something reassuringly familiar, something comparable to samesex marriage: stable monogamous unions which apparently preserve the social landscape by doing no more than ask us to extend the existing concept of marriage to include a hitherto excluded group. To many it seems nothing more than the next step in the justice agenda, and to others the only path to a truly inclusive church. Either way, it seems to give lesbian and gay people what they legitimately demand, and enables heterosexual Christians to feel more at ease with their lesbian and gay friends and less exposed to criticism from a censorious society.

Obstacles to the case for revision

Most arguments which question or oppose the case for Christian recognition of same-sex unions concentrate on setting out the full force of the obstacles - the natural law and scriptural evidence which has to be taken into account in the debate. In the opening stages of the debate on same-sex unions the revisionist scholars effectively reshaped discussion on these issues. By introducing novel and unanticipated arguments they exposed some unexamined assumptions and built up a strong position for believing that the conventional view was no more than that, a matter of social convention without solid foundations either in the scriptural witness or in an informed contemporary understanding of humanity.

In the past ten years, however, a number of significant studies have in their turn called some of the revisionist arguments into question and have reinforced the case for maintaining the traditional approach.The 'obstacles' in the path of the revisionist argument are a good deal more substantial now than they were when, for instance, Pittenger (4) or Boswell (5) first attempted to clear them out of the way. The restated and more sophisticated explorations of the scriptural evidence by, for example, Gagnon (6) or Webb, (7) and of natural law considerations by Schmidt (8) or Hilborn (9) need to be countered with equal care and commitment.

These studies have changed the landscape of debate during the past ten years - at least for those who are willing to discuss the issues in detail. The scriptural witness and the natural law arguments have been so thoroughly set out elsewhere that there seems little point in rehearsing them here (10). Instead this article will look again at the starting-point of the revisionist argument in the 'conscientious self-description by a homosexual person'. The article will ask: what are the consequences of taking people's self-description as the base of our ethical debate? From this starting-point, we will explore the question of whether the proposals for legitimising same-sex unions are coherent and can sustain their promised commitment to the virtues of traditional marriage.

What else is 'natural'?

To return to Archbishop Carnley: as well as affirming the 'naturalness' of same-sex relationships, the Archbishop went on, as reported, to express dismay at the frivolous nature of proceedings at the recent issuing of marriage licences to gay couples in San Francisco. Perhaps not all the participants regarded their licences as the kind of solemn commitment which the Archbishop thought they ought to be entering into. But why should they? It is after all their experience which is being affirmed, and they quite understandably choose whether to be frivolous (we might say in post-modern parlance, 'playful') or serious, committed or experimental. Bishop Spong has had a similar difficulty: when speaking to lesbian and gay people about the new look in Christian sexual ethics which recognises homosexual experience and offers the church's blessing to monogamous unions, the riposte has sometimes been 'What right do you have to impose your monogamous ethics on us?'.

It is a good question. Jeffrey John was very aware of it when writing 'Permanent, Faithful, Stable'. In that manifesto, he devotes almost as much attention to protecting his case against criticism from the 'left' as he does from the 'right'. He has to defend himself as much from the arguments of Elizabeth Stuart (and we might now add Marcella Althaus-Reid) as from the arguments of what he describes as 'difficult evangelicals'. It is vital for his case to establish that it is 'natural' for same-sex relationships to be 'permanent, faithful and stable', and not 'natural' for them to be transient, open and experimental.

John is right to concentrate on this issue. He wants to maintain that the transience of many same-sex relationships has more to do with social pressure than with anything inherent in them. Create the framework for more stable relationships, and stability will flourish. However, if we begin our argument by appealing to a homosexual person's 'conscientious selfdescription', then we are free to renegotiate all moral and social frameworks. Elizabeth Stuart has argued that acts of physical intimacy carry only the meaning we decide to attach to them, so that any form of sexual experimentation, whether in a committed relationship or not, is legitimate as long as the participants have negotiated the terms (11). Starting with the experience of lesbian and gay people leads Marcella Althaus-Reid to affirm that this experience breaks apart the patriarchal, power-fixated God of traditional theology, and puts in its place the 'Queer God', an image of God which affirms the experience of marginalized, oppressed and 'perverted' people. Part of that oppression is the insistence on 'mono-loving' (12).

These alternatives to the position adopted by Jeffrey John might view his case (and Rowan Williams') as a bourgeois compromise. Having accepted the premise that we build our theology on the 'conscientious self-description by a homosexual person', John and Williams refuse to recognise the conclusions to which their premise leads them.They start with the experience of the gay and lesbian person, but will not follow where it leads, choosing to cling instead to (at least some) of the conventions of traditional heterosexist Christian society.

Neither Jeffrey John nor Rowan Williams believes that their case in favour of same-sex unions opens the door to promiscuity, whatever conclusions more radical thinkers might reach from very similar starting-points. Neither writer believes that their case has implications for other forms of sexual expression, and especially not for paedophilia, which both writers explicitly criticise. But can that line of demarcation be drawn with conviction? Have the more radical voices in fact discerned more clearly where the argument inevitably leads?

To take paedophilia as an instructive parallel: Thomas Schmidt demonstrated very persuasively that all the arguments used to support the recognition of same-sex unions can be deployed to support adult-child sex. For instance: the concept of an 'age of consent' is arbitrary; adult-child sex is accepted in some societies; there is evidence that children are not harmed by sexual encounters with adults (13); this form of sexual expression is 'natural' for the paedophile; paedophiles are a persecuted minority, made to feel bad about themselves by a prejudiced and hostile society. In the case of adult-child sex, critics sometimes argue that it is morally questionable because there is an imbalance of power between the two parties. Not so, the paedophile might say, because the child who offers sex has power over the adult who wants it (14).

This is no mere debating point. An issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2002 was devoted to discussing whether paedophilia should be removed from the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association (15). Most of the considerations mentioned by Schmidt in 1995 were in fact brought forward as supporting arguments in 2002, as Schmidt surmised that they would eventually be.The contributors added one more argument which mirrors the homosexuality debate: the negative view of paedophilia in contemporary Western society is the legacy of a Judaeo-Christian tradition which has restricted and stigmatised 'natural' childhood sexuality.

The author of the opening article in the 2002 symposium was Richard Green, who in 1973 had taken a significant role in the debate which removed homosexuality from the APA diagnostic manual. In a subsequent debate in the American Psychiatric Association (May, 2003) on the 'paraphilias' (unusual sexual interests, which include paedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism), the parallel with the debate on homosexuality was made explicit by the keynote speakers, Charles Moser of San Francisco's Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa in their statement that, "The situation of the paraphilias at present parallels that of homosexuality in the early 1970's. (16) "

Recognition of same-sex unions can be seen as the next item on the justice agenda. But the discussion of the APA makes us ask: why stop there? There are other groups marginalized on account of their sexuality, and where is the justice for the exhibitionist or the paedophile? (17) Equally, the church may want to bless permanent, faithful and stable same-sex unions. But Stuart and Althaus-Reid pose the question: why privilege these qualities over, say, experimentation, spontaneity and the life of the free spirit?

What, apart from the residual, bourgeois liberal adherence to heterosexist ethical norms, makes permanence, faithfulness and stability things that we ought to value? In fact, once we have begun our debate by affirming our own experience and self-knowledge as valid, how can we bring an 'ought' into the argument at all?

• How do you respond to the parallels Will draws with other types of sexually marginalized people?
• Is there a difference, or is it a fair comparison?
• Why?

Finding an ethical base for stability, permanence and faithfulness

So, is there an ethical base for affirming same-sex unions which exhibit the characteristics of traditional marriage, while drawing a line at that point, and denying the same recognition to other forms of sexual expression?

Jeffrey John's defence against the conservative 'right' is of a familiar type. He atomises texts in scripture, and belittles Leviticus in particular (though if we followed his argument consistently we would also have to set aside 'love your neighbour as yourself' since it comes from Lev 19:18). He argues that Paul was not aware of the concept of orientation and was thinking in Romans 1 of individuals acting against their own nature. In any case, and really whatever the Bible says, the traditional view causes so much unhappiness that it cannot be right. His defence against the radical 'left', though, is interesting and instructive. Arguing against Elizabeth Stuart's case for open-ended or casual sexual encounters, John wrote:

Observation of 'what happens' both on the 'gay scene' and on the 'straight scene', leads me to believe very strongly that the Church's wisdom in advising men and women to confine sexual activity to permanent, faithful relationships remains as wise as ever it was (18).

His subsequent discussion draws from pastoral experience to conclude that anonymous or recreational sex is never unproblematic or irrelevant to a person's emotional or spiritual health. As pastoral observation and as advice this is undoubtedly sensible. But it is a piece of prudential advice and not strictly an ethical statement at all. John does not say exactly that casual or anonymous sex is wrong , merely that it is unwise , and this is not the same thing at all.

Advice is usually kindly meant. But what is a gay person to make of this advice? As a grown-up individual I will want to make my own decision about the advice I follow. If I have sufficient personal autonomy to follow what is 'natural' to me, then I must surely be free to reject advice which does not commend itself to me.The 'Church's wisdom' is just as culturally bound as the Bible's injunctions.The Church has a pretty poor record, I might think, on oppression and curtailing freedom, and I may very well conclude that this advice is just one more instance - even if wrapped up in an apparently pro-gay message - of the Church's inability to cope with real dissent or difference.The Church will let gays and lesbians go so far, then tweak the reins to bring them back into its own approved categories. It will affirm their self-description up to a point (attraction to people of the same sex), but in other respects (exercising the freedom to be committed or not) will turn around to tell them that their self-description is not valid.

Jeffrey John is attempting to say 'yes' to stable same-sex unions, but 'no' to promiscuity.This attempt is undermined by the fact that he is trying to tell people what they ought to do, but bases this ' ought ' on the ' is ' of observed experience.

Experience is a helpful guide to the soundness or otherwise of ethical principles established on other grounds, but as the only basis it will take us no further than advice to follow our own true selfinterest as the advisor perceives it.

A case for same-sex unions which is based on the fundamental principle of following what is 'natural' for the individual, but then draws limits to that behaviour, limits based on considerations of prudence and expediency, is inherently untenable. The fundamental principle will, once accepted, easily push aside the restraining arguments because these rest on nothing more than a subjective vision of wise conduct.

Finding an ethical base to reject other forms of sexual expression

What, then, of the attempt to say 'yes' to same-sex unions, but 'no' to unusual forms of sexual interest?

We have already noted that some professionals in the field consider that nothing more than an outdated and prejudiced adherence to Judaeo- Christian ethics prevents us from recognising these 'paraphilias' as legitimate forms of sexual expression.While some Christian advocates see the recognition of same-sex unions as the endpoint of a process of liberation, opinion-formers elsewhere are already well at work on making this recognition into the starting-point for further liberation.

Rowan Williams frames a response to this problem by reference to the work of Thomas Nagel (19). From Nagel,Williams formulates the notion that authentic sexual encounter entails being 'perceived from beyond myself in a way that changes my self-awareness'. This notion then becomes a yardstick against which to measure sexual experience. Nagel makes, in passing, a number of interesting observations on sexual encounters that either allow no "exposed spontaneity" (p 50) because they are bound to specific methods of sexual arousal - like sadomasochism - or permit only a limited awareness of the embodiment of the other (p 49) because there is an unbalance in the relation such that the desire of the other for me is irrelevant or minimal - rape, paedophilia, bestiality.

These "asymmetrical" sexual practices have some claim to be called perverse in that they leave one agent in effective control of the situation - one agent, that is, who doesn't have to wait upon the desire of the other (20).

It is an interesting case, and in contrast to Jeffery John, it is building a genuinely ethical basis for what it has to say. But it seems to privilege the experience of sensitive and well-adjusted people and to make this the norm by which others are judged. Yet why should they be the norm? Perhaps I find 'exposed spontaneity' important, but how or why can I then say from my own subjective point of reference that there is something inadequate in the experience of the sadomasochist (or any other 'paraphile') because he or she does not match a yardstick I have created to describe the way I perceive matters? If we listen to the experience of the sadomasochist, to their 'conscientious self-description', they would presumably tell the rest of us that they find their sexual encounters satisfying and pleasurable. Indeed, if they were obliged to engage in sexual encounters of a different type, they might well feel that they were acting contrary to 'their nature'.You could substitute the word 'sadomasochist' in place of the word 'gay' in Archbishop Carnley's statement with which this article began, and the same point would still be made.

An American commentator, Russell R. Reno, has argued very persuasively that the welcome given to prudent homosexual practice by the leadership of the American Anglican church is more indicative of the 'Bourgeois Bohemian' nature of the (Episcopal) church's leadership than of any substantial theological commitment: '[homosexuality] symbolizes the Bourgeois Bohemian confidence that liberated sexual practices can be prudently and wisely absorbed into a socially respectable way of life'. However, Episcopalian revisionists are arguing mainly from their own experience of sensible and cautious social relationships and are ignoring the raw and edgy realities of a wider society, where crudity and violence are more frequent concomitants of sexual behaviour:

Our stunning complacency about the power and perversion of human sexual impulses is, I think, unique to those of us who have the good fortune to be socialized into the benevolent repressions of well-off suburban life.We think we can tuck new sexual freedoms into the traditional patterns of career and civic responsibility (21).

Rowan Williams' argument is, of course, articulate and nuanced, but it runs into the same problem as Jeffrey John's attempt to close the door on promiscuity. Because it begins with an account of experience (being 'perceived from beyond myself in a way that changes my selfawareness') as a test of authentic sexual relationship, it has to explain why this account of experience rather than any other is the test of authenticity. Like all experience, it is rooted in a particular social and historical environment. Is it, in the end, simply an expression of 'bourgeois bohemianism'?

Conclusion

The case for 'getting real on gay relationships' seems a strong one.The adjustment needed to accept same-sex relationships on an equal footing with heterosexual marriages seems a small one: the same category (marriage, or something like it), but with a different group included within it.

In fact, though, what looks like a small step is huge shift, the magnitude of which is obscured by the articulate arguments of its proponents. It is revealed by the more consistent arguments put forward by those willing to take their principles to a conclusion.An ethic based on what is 'natural' for me as an individual is totally different from an ethic based on scripture, tradition and reason. It is even rather different from an ethic based on what is 'natural' for humanity as a whole.

• How would you summarise the "huge shift" that Will has been outlining here?
• Is there any way to hold together "natural" and scripture, reason and tradition?

Once we accept some individuals' experience as the basis for our ethical formulation, there is no point at which we can consistently settle until we have accepted all individuals' experience as the basis for our ethics, and until we can say with Professor Charles Moser that,'Any sexual interest can be healthy and life-enhancing.'

We can build our ethical reflection on the 'ought' of scriptural witness. Or we can build our reflection with the 'is' of people's experience.What we cannot do, if we want to create an ethical framework which is stable and coherent, is to build on people's experience and then constrain the ethical process by introducing an 'ought' from elsewhere - especially when we have a suspicion that this 'ought' has been conjured out of the reassuring respectabilities of middle-class bourgeois conventions.

It is neither comfortable nor easy for a heterosexual Christian to say to any gay or lesbian person that the expression of their sexuality is not something that God can bless. But it is at least more consistent, and in an odd way more respectful, than saying:'We affirm your experience and your conscientious self-description - but we will tell you how you ought to express it'.

 

1. Quoted in the Church of England Newspaper, 4.3.2004

2. London, DLT, 1993

3. R Williams, 'Knowing myself in Christ', in T. Bradshaw (ed.), The Way Forward? Christian Voices on Homosexuality and the Church, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1997, p. 17

4. N.Pittenger, Time for consent: a Christian's approach to homosexuality , London, SCM, 1st ed 1970.

5. J.Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality , Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980; Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe , New York,Villard, 1994.

6. R.A.J.Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice:Texts andHermeneutics, Nashville, Abingdon, 2001.

7. W.J.Webb, Slaves,Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis , Downers Grove, IVP, 2001.

8. T.E. Schmidt, Straight and Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexuality Debate , Leicester, IVP, 1995.

9. D.Hilborn,'Homosexuality, Covenant and Grace in the Writings of Rowan Williams:An Evangelical Response', Anvil 20:4 (2003), pp.263-75.

10. The arguments are helpfully set out in the paper commissioned by the Archbishop of the West Indies:A.Goddard and P.Walker, True Union in the Body? A contribution to the discussion within the Anglican Communion concerning the public blessing of same-sex unions , Cambridge, Grove Books, 2003; and available on the internet at: http://www.acinw.org/articles/true-union.pdf

11. Stuart, Just Good Friends: towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of Relationships , London, Mowbray, 1995, p.224.

12. M.Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, London, Routledge, 2003.

13. The most significant study to reach this apparently surprising conclusion is: B.Rind, P.Tromovitch, & R.Bauserman,'A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples', Psychological Bulletin, 124 (1998), pp.22-53.

14. Schmidt, Straight and Narrow? , pp.60-62.

15. "Special Section: Pedophilia: Concepts and Controversy," in Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 31, No. 6, December 2002, p. 465-510

16. Moser, Charles and Peggy J. Kleinplatz,"DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias:An Argument for Removal," paper presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual conference, San Francisco, California, May 19, 2003.

17. A recent Channel 4 documentary (2004) gave air time to exhibitionists who argued the legitimacy of their preferred mode of sexual expression and proposed a vindication of their human right to act in the way which they find 'natural'.

18. John, 'Permanent, Faithful, Stable' , p.36.

19. T. Nagel, Mortal Questions , Cambridge, 1979.

20. Williams,'The Body's Grace', p.313.

21. R.R.Reno, In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity, Grand Rapids MI, Brazos Press, 2002: and online