I am using extensive quotations from chapter four, Resurrection and Goodness, of Harry Williams’1972 book, True Resurrection, to describe what I think the implications are of Changing Attitude England’s campaign to give content to the radical new LGBTIQ+ (because that’s what it primarily has to be about) Christian inclusion advocated by the Archbishops. I’m quoting Harry Williams’ argument at length. I might be able to make the same arguments in my own words, but I would be attacked for doing so. Those who dismiss people like Harry Williams as a heretic will still dismiss the argument of this blog, but in doing so, they will dismiss a person of deep spirituality, wisdom and great integrity.
The Church of England hinders personal development
“There can come a point when the society which has so far given us life may hinder our further development by preventing us from growing out of the role it has assigned to us and passing beyond it.”
I am very clear that both for myself and for Changing Attitude England’s campaign for the full equality of LGBTIQ+ people in the Church of England, this point has been reached. It is time for us pass beyond the role assigned to us by the Church of England in general and specifically by the Living in Love and Faith process.
“For what societies tend to require of us is that we should be satisfactory members of them. If we are not satisfactory members, or our growth as persons has made us less so than we once were, the society will exercise various pressure to make us conform to type. When this happens the societies become the gaolers of what we shall call the dead (or undead) past.”
I am also clear that the Church of England has become an institution (compared with what it was like twenty and more years ago) that is the gaoler inhibiting my growth and the growth of my most significant Christian friends and colleagues, gay and straight.
“The worst off are those unaware of their bondage because with them living has been completely identified with playing a part. Instead of living to create, they exist to conform. They have been conditioned by emotional pressures to feel guilty at the very suggestion that they should break out of their role and be themselves instead.”
I identify very strongly with that statement by Harry.
“This is the archetypal murder committed by all societies in so far as their main concern is to constrict us within the limits of their being satisfactory members. It can occur within any of the communities in which we are caught up. Its results are always the same – obedience to the demand for conformity so that, instead of being and becoming ourselves, we remain adequate performers of the role assigned to us.”
I see this being enacted at every level of the Church and the LLF process, as much with LGBTIQ+ organisations as in the institution in general. I see it in myself. I am still having conversations with friends about whether I am ‘allowed’ to be fully myself as a passionate, active campaigner for the full, radical inclusion of myself as a married gay priest in the Church of England. I see every LGBTIQ+ Anglican organisation struggle in one way or another with the same question.
Freedom from enslaving chains of guilt
“To indulge in ecstasies of guilt and sorrow for sin (as we have been led to believe good Christians should) is not merely irrelevant. It is the final trick the past plays on us to keep us its slaves. For it diverts us from our real task of unloosing our chains by actually changing the situation, Of course the conventional Christian apologist will answer that our guilt-laden sorrow is not for original but actual or personal sin – not for the state of affairs into which we were born but for what we ourselves do or fail to do. The distinction is neat enough in theory. But how as conditioned beings do we in practice distinguish between the two? Guilt is most often aroused by not conforming to the predetermined patterns in which the past enslaves us.”
Oh, that feeling still haunts me, reminded as I am repeatedly by the Church of England Evangelical Council, Anglican Mainstream, and others caught in their supposedly Biblical foundations (and that includes all of us to some degree) that to be gay and sexually active is forbidden by a “clear reading of Scripture.” It still takes wilfully disobedient courage to say “that’s crap.”
“We have to distinguish between the past as life-giving and the past as death-dealing. Salvation cannot be by way of conformity. We cannot find ourselves by playing a part. The tragedy of religion as organised in the Christian Church is that in practice this is precisely what it often asks us to do. In theory it is held that if there is a conflict between the dictates of private conscience and those of ecclesiastical authority, then we must follow our own conscience. The trouble is that the churches seldom build up personal identity enough for this conflict to occur.”
We LGBTIQ+ people are not going to achieve the goal for which we long, and have been waiting, some of us, for decades, unless we find ever greater courage and confidence to follow our own conscience. I note that building up our personal identity is something the church has very little understanding of. The idea that our identity is found ‘in Christ’ is, I think, dangerous, given that the content of the Christ’s identity is something we Christians disagree about radically.
“The churches, for instance, hold in esteem as a person of faith not somebody (like Jesus upon the cross) racked by the pain of tormenting doubt yet somehow still holding on, but the person who lives happily at ease with whatever are the contemporary official doctrinal formulations. And they esteem as a person of goodness not somebody (like Jesus) who challenges the ethical values and standards accepted as normative, but the person whose moral vision is confined within their limits, and who thus extols and advertises them. For all the talk about conscience, loyalty to truth and so on, what in fact the churches usually want to make people into is satisfactory conforming members of their society. The freedom of the individual to discover and grow into their own inalienable identity and thus to live and do the truth is generally paid no more than lip-service.”
I fear that this is true of the Living in Love and Faith process, however much the book and material that have resulted from the dedicated work of many people is vastly better than anything previously published. But it doesn’t create the space for the inalienable right of LGBTIQ+ people to claim our own identity an truth.
“The church puts before us the example of men and women who have grown to their full stature by living and being the truth they have discovered. It proclaims a gospel of resurrection confronting us with the possibility of dying to our dead past so that we may live in freedom, open to the fulfilling potentialities of the future. At the same time, however, the church remains the instrument of that same dead past from which it offers to deliver us. Goodness is confused with conformity and evil with the failure or refusal to conform. In the last resort we are being asked to enact a role, to play a part, to be satisfactory members of society – at the cost of failing to find life, let alone have it more abundantly.”
We LGBTIQ+ people, drawn to become involved with the Living in Love and Faith process, devised by and in the end under the control of the bishops (the Next Steps group), are called to push for life more abundant if we are to transform both ourselves and the whole church into a place where divine potentialities are to be fulfilled.
Agents of resurrection
“The essence of human life is to be creative. To say that we are made in the image of God is to say that we share with our creator in the work of creation. Living goodness must be the result of renewed creativity, and it will manifest itself not in terms of realising values which exist already in some changeless ideal realm above and beyond humankind, but in terms of actually creating values which are new. ‘The task of ethics is not to draw up a list of traditional moral norms, but to have the daring to make creative valuations’ [D.L. Mumby, in Lambeth Essays on Faith, S.P.C.K., 1969]. This creation of new values means that for us to enter eternity and be given eternal life is not to be raised up to the vision of some static state of changeless perfection, but to participate more and more actively in the creative process we find all around us here and now. To be raised from the dead by the creative call of the Eternal Word is to find that we are ourselves agents of resurrection. Goodness, in other words, is the expression of superabundant life. It is our way of becoming more and more of what we are, so that other people are enabled to do so also.”
Agents of resurrection are what all people are called to become, and agents of resurrection are what LGBTIQ+ people are called to become in the process of transformation implicit in Living in Love and Faith. I hope to God we find the vision and courage to embody this process over the next sixteen months leading up to the General Synod meeting in November 2022.