It’s not the doctrine of marriage that needs our primary attention, It’s the doctrine of God. That’s why I keep asking the question – what kind of God? I won’t stop asking the question. I believe it is fundamental to what we seek and that by which we are drawn – the mystery of love – what this mystery of love is and why we fall into it.
How the heck do we get to the end of LLF? Something is required that is more than simply defusing the Sexuality Debate and the Anglican Culture War that we are living with. In my spiritual life, it became more and more obvious to me that I had to do the work myself, to work on myself. Resolving the Church of England’s conflicts over sexuality and gender is still going to take a long time because we are not sufficiently investing in ourselves and developing the conceptual, prophetic, visionary, emotional, theological and spiritual resources necessary for our mutual cosmic salvation.
A Sunday morning energised and enlivened by a new book by Diarmaid MacCulloch providing ammunition for someone campaigning for a healthy, fully inclusive church. Diarmaid MacCulloch has provided us, LGBTQIA+ people and allies, and the Church itself, with a new resource, a resource that is almost certainly more authoritative and healthy than the Living in Love and Faith book, an egregious book that panders to conservative evangelicals, he says. Diarmaid and the book, Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, are the subjects of an article in today’s Observer Review where it is described as “an incendiary new book that challenges centuries of fakery, abuse and homophobia.”
Recent comments on the Thinking Anglicans website made very dogmatic assertions about doctrine in the Church of England. There is another, entirely different basis on which faith can be formed, a path that subtly infused my consciousness, creating freedom. Love is the essence. God is love. Love changes everything. St John got it. Jesus got it. The Christian teachers and writers and theologians who inspired and enthused and infused me got it.
If the Church of England is unable to recognise God as manifested in the life of Jesus to be the presence of unconditional, infinite, intimate love in creation and evolution, a presence that all human beings are able to experience through the presence woven into creation of what Christianity identifies as the Holy Spirit, then the Church needs to reflect on what, from the Biblical witness to the life and teaching of Jesus in a twenty-first century understanding of reality, God might look like and where the Church has got God wrong.
In an article in the current issue of the Spectator Theo Hobson thinks this might be the year in which the Church of England sorts out its deep divisions over homosexuality. He wants to assert the centrality of liberal Anglo-Catholicism in the Church and this means treating evangelicalism with a bit less respect. Diversity must be allowed: liberal parishes must be free to conduct gay weddings, evangelical parishes must be allowed to refuse to. I disagree. The pragmatic arrangements made to tolerate dissent on the ordination of women have enshrined an utterly unchristian intolerance and prejudice in the life of the Church.
The Iwerne Trust produced many of the most prominent Evangelical Christian leaders, people associated with Reformed theology in the Church of England over the past 40 years. At the heart of the Iwerne philosophy was a brand of wholehearted, sacrificial, masculine Christianity maintained by a detailed programme of supervision. Its origins lie in the toxic culture created by the founder of the Iwerne network, Eric Nash. John Smyth’s regime of abuse continues to affect the culture of today’s Church of England. The powerful theology and culture of the movement is being leveraged in contemporary debates on gender and sexuality. It is abusive.
My transgender Christian friends are furious about the news that three senior bishops responsible for the Living in Love and faith process recently met a delegation of conservative catholics and evangelicals who had demanded a meeting to talk about the transgender guidance issued by the House of Bishops. Conservative Anglicans are exerting extreme pressure on the Living in Love and Faith project to ensure that the outcome absolutely does not respond to the expectations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people that our God-given identities are finally recognised and granted equality by a revision of Church teaching and practice about human gender and sexuality.
Classical Anglican teaching is held to be rooted in the three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason based on Richard Hooker’s teaching in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. More recently, some have argued for the addition of a fourth leg, that of experience. Conservatives opposed to the full inclusion of LGBTI people in the church rely primarily on Scripture, arguing that the other two legs are utterly dependent on this. They deny that experience can be legitimately added as a fourth leg. We live in a society where experience is accepted as a given, an essential component of life. Conservative Christians argue against this cultural change.
Conservative evangelicals are most afraid of people making a connection between their theology and John Smyth’s beating of the children in his care. Yet the connection is obvious – and at the very core of the evangelical story: that God the father violently punishes his son for the salvation of the human race. The bkishops are never going to achieve” a fresh tone and culture of welcome and support” until they confront the dogmatic requirements of the conservative evangelical lobby and rid themselves of the abusive ideas they want to impose on the church.
