Steve Croft’s Together in Love and Faith observes that ‘resistance to changing the position of the Church of England on sexually active same-sex partnerships is principally focused on the prohibition, in biblical texts, on sexual activity between two people of the same gender.’ This seems to be true, if by ‘gender’ we mean ‘sex’ (it is doubtful that within Scripture we can speak of ‘gender’ as a category distinct from biological sex) and understand ‘prohibition’ as broad enough to include New Testament censures of sexual intimacy outside (diverse-sex) marriage. The Bishop of Oxford appears to address this ‘roadblock’ in a twofold manner: by cancelling the prohibitions and by postulating a trajectory which allows for a re-shaping of biblical morality.
A rhetorical question sums up the argument: ‘how many other commandments and regulations in Leviticus does the Church keep and teach today?’ Croft appears to suggest that we need not pay any attention to perhaps different ways in which various commandments and regulations function within Leviticus, nor to the way in which the church throughout the ages has differentiated between them. We must treat all the commandments and regulations the same – either they are all binding on us or none of them are. This impression is reinforced by the citation of the ‘powerful moment’ in The West Wing in which President Bartlet replies to a Christian fundamentalist who quotes Leviticus 18:22 at him [*] by pointing out that we ignore, among other things, the injunctions against planting two kinds of seed in the same field and against wearing garments made from two kinds of materials (Lev 19:19), implying that we are therefore free to ignore what Leviticus says about sexual morality.
We can ignore all these commandments, according to Croft, because ‘the view of ethics and morality set out in Leviticus has been revised and adapted within the Biblical period and beyond it, in the light of the incarnation, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because of these truths, everything has changed.’ To me this sounds rather different from what the Thirty-Nine Articles claim about the Old Testament:
THE Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man, being both God and Man. Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign that the old Fathers did look only for transitory promises. Although the Law given from God by Moses, as touching Ceremonies and Rites, do not bind Christian men, nor the Civil precepts thereof ought of necessity to be received in any commonwealth; yet notwithstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral.
Note that the Bishop of Oxford does not suggest here that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 should be re-interpreted as civil law which need not be received in our society but he seems to dispense with the threefold division of the law itself (cf. later: ‘Gentile Christians are not to be bound by the law of Moses’). Sorting commandments into three boxes labelled ‘ceremonial’, ‘civil’ and ‘moral’ can indeed be problematic but failure to distinguish between the different functions of the law which translate into different ways in which individual commandments might be considered binding on Christians is a different matter altogether. ‘Not uniquely Eastern or Western; Roman Catholic or Protestant; conservative or liberal; Patristic or Puritan; Thomist, Calvinist, or anything else; the threefold division of the law is catholic doctrine.’ (Phillip S. Ross, cited from an article by Nicholas J. Mattai). We may agree that (non-Jewish, and I would suggest Jewish) Christians are not legally bound to the Sinai law but we are arguably morally bound to commandments which reflect the character of God and his universal purposes.
Croft is somewhat less cavalier in his treatment of NT texts such as 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. He is right to note that the full list covers the majority of us and that the emphasis falls on the conclusion ‘And some of you used to be like this. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God’ (verse 11). The verses should not be used to victimise others. But we are warned not to be deceived (verse 9): sexual activity in same-sex relationships is listed alongside idolatry, adultery and other forms of sexual immorality, theft and robbery, greed, drunkenness, verbal abuse and fraud as activities from which we need to be cleansed in order to inherit the kingdom of God. Croft acknowledges that if the relevant Greek terms do not refer exclusively to abusive relationships but to all sexual activity in same-sex relationships, this ‘would support no change in the present position of the Church.’ Alas, he provides no reference or justification for why the Church should commit to the alternative view that this only refers to abusive relationships, even though the Living in Love and Faith book notes the obvious point that ‘there were common Greek terms used to describe these practices, not used here by Paul’ (292).
Croft suggests that ‘the apostles are very careful not to define “porneia” closely in their letter[s]’, as if they went out of their way to keep matters open for ‘a modest redrawing of the boundaries of what constitutes…sexual morality’ by later Christians. But I know of no example of the church re-defining sexual morality in the first nearly two thousand years of its history and can see nothing to suggest an effort on the apostles’ part to keep the definition of sexual morality vague. It seems more obvious that they left porneia undefined because sexual immorality had already been defined in the OT and they saw no need for boundaries to be redrawn by themselves or later Christians. Joshua Pendock observes in his open letter to Steven Croft
It is not difficult to imagine the early Church looking at the wicked examples of pederasty in Greek culture and arguing, ‘there are holier ways of practising same-sex love’. Examples could easily have been given of loving same-sex couples in the Greek world. Furthermore, the argument could easily have been made that considering the eschatological non-procreational issues of sexuality raised by Jesus’ reference to being ‘like the angels’, early Christian theologians could have Christianised same-sex activity through notions of faithfulness and covenant. Considering the strangeness of Christian practice in comparison to the Mediterranean world as witnessed to by the contextually bizarre practices of virginity and celibate marriages, notions of same-sex blessing and even marriage could easily have developed in such an environment. It may even have helped with evangelising many a Greek man.
But they did not. Steven Croft’s assumption that the apostles did not know about loving same-sex relationships and his conviction that our modern knowledge of sexual identity and orientation puts us at such an advantage over Moses at Sinai, Jesus in Galilee and Judah and Paul in the Greco-Roman world that we can now formulate a better, more just sexual ethics than they were able to do, has to carry a lot of weight. Put in the balance it seems to allow him to make light of biblical commandments and prohibitions.
When the Church previously declared that a specific injunction was no longer directly applicable to God’s people, we were still able to affirm that the law was good and right and just for the time and place for which it was given – God's commandments were not suspended on the grounds that people back then were ignorant about things of which we are now cognisant. To say that at the right time a greater high priest inaugurated a new covenant by his supreme sacrifice which takes away the animal sacrifices under the old covenant is one thing; to say that we no longer bring animal sacrifices because we now know that animals have feelings too and must not be killed would be an altogether different thing. Analogically, Croft’s argument seems a lot closer to the latter than the former.
[*] This is how Croft presents the scene, not entirely accurately. The President actually opens the verbal confrontation.
