In the slow-moving train crash of international Anglicanism, a decision taken
in California has finally brought a large coach off the rails altogether.
The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United States has
voted decisively to allow in principle the appointment, to all orders of
ministry, of persons in active same-sex relationships. This marks a clear
break with the rest of the Anglican Communion.
Both the bishops and deputies (lay and clergy) of TEC knew exactly what they
were doing. They were telling the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other
“instruments of communion” that they were ignoring their plea for a
moratorium on consecrating practising homosexuals as bishops. They were
rejecting the two things the Archbishop of Canterbury has named as the
pathway to the future — the Windsor Report (2004) and the proposed Covenant
(whose aim is to provide a modus operandi for the Anglican Communion). They
were formalising the schism they initiated six years ago when they
consecrated as bishop a divorced man in an active same-sex relationship,
against the Primates’ unanimous statement that this would “tear the fabric
of the Communion at its deepest level”. In Windsor’s language, they have
chosen to “walk apart”.
Granted, the TEC resolution indicates a strong willingness to remain within
the Anglican Communion. But saying “we want to stay in, but we insist on
rewriting the rules” is cynical double-think. We should not be fooled.
Of course, matters didn’t begin with the consecration of Gene Robinson. The
floodgates opened several years before, particularly in 1996 when a church
court acquitted a bishop who had ordained active homosexuals. Many in TEC
have long embraced a theology in which chastity, as universally understood
by the wider Christian tradition, has been optional.
That wider tradition always was counter-cultural as well as counter-intuitive.
Our supposedly selfish genes crave a variety of sexual possibilities. But
Jewish, Christian and Muslim teachers have always insisted that lifelong
man-plus-woman marriage is the proper context for sexual intercourse. This
is not (as is frequently suggested) an arbitrary rule, dualistic in overtone
and killjoy in intention. It is a deep structural reflection of the belief
in a creator God who has entered into covenant both with his creation and
with his people (who carry forward his purposes for that creation).
Paganism ancient and modern has always found this ethic, and this belief,
ridiculous and incredible. But the biblical witness is scarcely confined, as
the shrill leader in yesterday’s Times suggests, to a few
verses in St Paul. Jesus’s own stern denunciation of sexual immorality would
certainly have carried, to his hearers, a clear implied rejection of all
sexual behaviour outside heterosexual monogamy. This isn’t a matter of
“private response to Scripture” but of the uniform teaching of the whole
Bible, of Jesus himself, and of the entire Christian tradition.
The appeal to justice as a way of cutting the ethical knot in favour of
including active homosexuals in Christian ministry simply begs the question.
Nobody has a right to be ordained: it is always a gift of sheer and
unmerited grace. The appeal also seriously misrepresents the notion of
justice itself, not just in the Christian tradition of Augustine, Aquinas
and others, but in the wider philosophical discussion from Aristotle to John
Rawls. Justice never means “treating everybody the same way”, but “treating
people appropriately”, which involves making distinctions between different
people and situations. Justice has never meant “the right to give active
expression to any and every sexual desire”.
Such a novel usage would also raise the further question of identity. It is a
very recent innovation to consider sexual preferences as a marker of
“identity” parallel to, say, being male or female, English or African, rich
or poor. Within the “gay community” much postmodern reflection has turned
away from “identity” as a modernist fiction. We simply “construct” ourselves
from day to day.
We must insist, too, on the distinction between inclination and desire on the
one hand and activity on the other — a distinction regularly obscured by
references to “homosexual clergy” and so on. We all have all kinds of
deep-rooted inclinations and desires. The question is, what shall we do with
them? One of the great Prayer Book collects asks God that we may “love the
thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise”. That
is always tough, for all of us. Much easier to ask God to command what we
already love, and promise what we already desire. But much less like the
challenge of the Gospel.
The question then presses: who, in the US, is now in communion with the great
majority of the Anglican world? It would be too hasty to answer, the newly
formed “province” of the “Anglican Church in North America”. One can
sympathise with some of the motivations of these breakaway Episcopalians.
But we should not forget the Episcopalian bishops, who, doggedly loyal to
their own Church, and to the expressed mind of the wider Communion, voted
against the current resolution. Nor should we forget the many parishes and
worshippers who take the same stance. There are many American Episcopalians,
inside and outside the present TEC, who are eager to sign the proposed
Covenant. That aspiration must be honoured.
Contrary to some who have recently adopted the phrase, there is already a
“fellowship of confessing Anglicans”. It is called the Anglican Communion.
The Episcopal Church is now distancing itself from that fellowship. Ways
must be found for all in America who want to be loyal to it, and to
scripture, tradition and Jesus, to have that loyalty recognised and affirmed
at the highest level.
Tom Wright is Bishop of Durham
