Living with Disagreement

Disagreement about the teaching of marriage and sexual intimacy is arguably more serious than, e.g., the disagreements between Presbyterians and Anglicans. It is therefore not one more disagreement which we can add to the list of secondary matters on which we "agree to disagree" and move on. If a revised understanding of what it means to be chaste is embedded in pastoral guidance and/or official prayers, it cannot but do substantial harm to our unity. 

The Bishop of London believes that God is calling us to live with our current disagreements. The reasoning she offered to General Synod in February for having reached this conclusion seemed specious to me but here I want to make the point that believing that God calls us to live with our disagreements does not yet resolve the question how we are to live with these disagreements. There are perhaps three options for the moment, none of whom especially attractive:

(1) continuing as before, namely tolerating the revisionist teaching and (unofficial) practice of blessing same-sex couples without changing our doctrine or the prayers we commend or the moral requirements we put on clergy and others,

(2) creating structural space for "two integrities" with different approaches to Scripture and different understandings of sin and repentance, the Gospel and the Christian life,

(3) welcoming revisionist views as consonant with Anglican teaching and making liturgical space for these new understandings of living out our sexuality while keeping, for now, the marriage canon in place in the hope that the relevant parties are prepared to make the required sacrifices (revisionists foregoing "marriage equality" for now, traditionalists accepting that revisionism is properly Anglican too).

Sarah Mullally favours the last option but this is deeply problematic because very many who hold to the traditional view of marriage feel unable to bring the sacrifice asked of them. My preference is for the second option in the form of creating a separate legal space for those who want to promote a changed understanding of marriage and sexuality. This would be challenging because numerous legal issues would need to be resolved but it has the advantage of preserving integrity. It is not a refusal to live with our current disagreements but rather a (better) way to live with them. Alas, the discussion seems to be cut short by the insinuation that being called to live with our disagreements necessarily means to walk in the way the Bishops lead us, abandoning the normativity of previous teaching.

LLF and London Synod

The London Diocesan Synod on Wednesday 22 March 2023, with a dedicated session on Living in Love and Faith (LLF). The report is sobering. It perpetuates the mischaracterisation of those who are compelled to resist the new teaching as purists who cannot bear disagreement:

There are those who believe that our unity as Christians depends on our agreement on certain doctrinal issues, including those around sex and sexuality. Then there are those who believe that unity is possible and desirable even if we disagree.

But surely ALL of us believe that our unity as Christians depends on our agreement on certain doctrinal issues. The question is whether these doctrinal issues include teaching around marriage and sexual intimacy. And surely ALL of us believe that unity is possible and desirable even if we disagree. The question is whether our disagreements around marriage and sexual intimacy fall in the category of disagreements which we can accommodate or in the category of disagreements that cannot be reconciled within the same structures.  

The Church of England does not ordain Presbyterians or Baptists, even if we do not deny that they are fellow members of the body of Christ. We thereby acknowledge that there are disagreements which lead to structural differentiation. The mischaracterisation of the situation is very discouraging because it reveals a failure to listen and to ask the right questions.

Other statements made suggest serious deficiencies in understanding church history. Every heresy within the church has been argued from scripture. The statement that “both of these approaches can be argued from scripture” is therefore vacuous.

The claim that “the Church of England has always been an intentionally and uniquely broad church” sits uneasily with the fact that close to 2,500 clergy were expelled from the Church of England following the 1662 Act of Uniformity. It is only in modern times that we begun to abandon the principle that what we believe and how we worship must conform to a canonical standard and even then nonconformity is tolerated in some areas but not in others.

The observation that clergy will be free to choose whether or not to use the prayers is not at all reassuring because this freedom of conscience treats the question what it means to be chaste as one of indifference when it comes to being a loyal Anglican. It is not only a further step towards the privatisation of religion but a rejection of the belief that the revisionist teaching about marriage and sexual intimacy is not in agreement with Scripture and not consonant with Anglican teaching and tradition. 

Agreeing and Disagreeing with Angus Ritchie, Part Two

This is the second post reflecting on agreeing to disagree within the Church of England by exploring a contribution by Canon Dr Angus Ritchie. (The first responds to a published in 2015.) His recent piece commends itself not least because Ritchie recognises flaws in Martyn Percy’s reasoning which to those on the other side of the argument are patently obvious which is why it is all the more remarkable that so few of those who like Percy’s conclusions show embarrassment about the way he got there.

Ritchie’s own piece, however, seems to suffer from a conflation of two different questions. One question is how one goes about deciding about remarriage after divorce, the ordination of women, or the blessing of same-sex relationships. The other is how one goes about deciding on which of these controversies one is able to agree to disagree and which are fellowship-breaking. 

Unless I have misread it, the structure of Ritchie’s argument appears to assume two parallel lines, a “traditionalist” one (refusing to contemplate remarriage after divorce, the ordination of women to the priesthood, or the blessing of same-sex relationships) and a “progressive” one (affirming all three). To the latter, the argument suggests “you progressed on the first two, there is no reason not to do so on the third”. To the former, it suggests “you tolerate disagreement on the first two, there is no reason not to do so on the third (because the hermeneutics involved are the same).” The other, probably more fundamental and fatal, mistake is the assumption that the hermeneutics which lead Ritchie (and others) to affirm or tolerate, e.g., remarriage after divorce are the same across the board within the Church of England. But just as Ritchie can come to roughly the same conclusion as Martyn Percy but through a different route, so many who would agree with Ritchie on one or the other of these questions do so for fundamentally different reasons from his.

The problem is crystallized in the claim that “the ethical perspective, and the hermeneutic of Scripture, which the Anglican Communion has accepted in the case of remarrying divorcees and of ordaining women to the priesthood and episcopate would itself seem to lead towards the acceptability of the blessing of LGBT Christians’ relationships.” The use of the direct article and the singular, as if there was only one ethical perspective and one hermeneutic of Scripture even among Anglicans who accept the remarriage of divorcees and the ordination of women to the priesthood, marks the critical error which deconstructs pretty much all that follows.

Ritchie contrasts two approaches to “how the Scriptures are to be read,” the concordance approach (bad) and the contextualized approach (good, and allegedly what most Anglicans have adopted).

Over the years I have come to know a diverse range of readers of the Scriptures, given a good amount of thought to hermeneutics, and encountered a number of hermeneutical approaches, including the two Angus Ritchie outlines.

I see two problems: (1) The opponents to remarriage after divorce and to the ordination of women that I know by and large do not follow “the concordance approach,” even allowing that Ritchie’s characterisation is an over-simplification. To be fair, Ritchie does not necessarily assume that because “the concordance approach” (in his view) invariably leads to a traditionalist  position, therefore whoever holds a traditionalist position must follow “the concordance approach” but given that he argues that his “contextualized” approach should lead to a progressive take on these issues, it remains unclear whether he knows that there are (a great many) people who with a more sophisticated hermeneutical approach nevertheless fail to come to his preferred conclusions.

(2) While it is likely true that what Ritchie describes as “the contextualized approach” is widespread among Anglicans, it is not the approach of many of the Anglicans I know who come to the same conclusions as Ritchie on one or two (or even three) of these questions, including Ian Paul (mentioned in the essay) and myself.

Ritchie apparently believes that, short of making it up as you go along and setting aside Scripture as and when desired, there is only one conceivable way to get from “there” (past prohibitions on remarriage after divorce, restriction of the priesthood to me) to “here” (accepting or at least tolerating remarriage after divorce and the ordination of women to the priesthood), namely “a deeper understanding of the practice being condemned” and “a prayerful exploration of the contemporary issue” (with experience, reason and tradition as sources [!] of authority).

I do not know of a single, evangelical defence of remarriage after divorce which works from the assumption that while Jesus condemned remarriage we should lift this condemnation because the practice of divorce is different today. No, not one. See http://www.divorce-remarriage.com/.

Actually, the key issue here is not different practices of divorce (first century versus today) but different understandings of marriage. While the church in East and West has agreed for two millennia that marriage is “between a man and a woman in faithful, lifelong union,” the belief developed within the West (only) that the marriage bond cannot be broken other than through death. It is this latter belief which is not warranted from the Scriptures and indeed faces serious obstacles within Scripture (e.g., 1 Corinthians 7:15). Anglicans who affirm that marriage is lifelong but allow for remarriage after divorce in exceptional circumstances may do so for the reasons outlined by Angus Ritchie but alternatively they may simply have come to accept that the Eastern understanding of marriage is correct.

Similarly, it may be obvious to Ritchie that to ordain women “goes directly against a New Testament injunction,” as it is probably obvious to many who belong to Reform, but I rather doubt that it is to any of the GAFCON Primates who allow for the ordination of women, which is to say that I would be surprised if many of the GAFCON Primates in favour of the ordination of women to the priesthood got to this conclusion via the same route on which Ritchie travels. Why is this important? Because it allows us to see that the agreeing to disagree among members of GAFCON  has a different basis from the one Ritchie alleges. It is the failure to see these distinctions which leaves Ritchie unable to see why Anglicans may be able to agree to disagree on this issue without being logically committed to agree to disagree about accepting the blessing of same-sex partnerships.

In short, there are those who affirm the normative role of Scripture and that Scripture needs to be read reasonably (with attention to language and context among other things) and with the help of tradition. Their hermeneutic demands that any text of Scripture is read in the light of the whole of Scripture and that no part is read in a way which would contradict another part. Disagreements in this group are exegetical more than hermeneutical and this is why they are often able to agree to disagree, at least as long as they have confidence that the disagreement really is about the exegesis of specific texts rather than more fundamental. They would find it hard to agree to disagree with people who claim that a practice “goes directly against a New Testament injunction” but may be accepted or even promoted anyway in the light of other sources of authority. 

Agreeing and Disagreeing with Angus Ritchie

This is probably the first of two posts reflecting on living with disagreements within the Church of England with the help of Canon Dr Angus Ritchie.

Canon Dr Angus Ritchie observes that “the depth of disagreement flows from the different narratives that Christians use to interpret history,” the narrative of disobedience (the story of human rebellion against God) and the narrative of liberation (the work of God to free people from unjust oppression). He notes

“The last few decades have seen changes Christians of all traditions are rightly resisting – towards an increasingly consumerist and hedonistic society, where the values of faithfulness and obedience are eroded by a ‘me-first’ attitude to both economics and to sex (both of which are key areas of biblical teaching). For some, any move to allow sexual relationships outside of heterosexual marriage is seen as part of that erosion of biblical values. They see the push to accept same-sex relationships as a further unfolding of the narrative of disobedience, as Britain becomes a more secular nation. Likewise, Christians from across the theological spectrum acknowledge the presence and power of God in the fight against slavery and segregation, apartheid and other forms of racism – despite the misuse of Scripture to justify these practices. For some, equality for women in the church and for same-sex couples represents a further unfolding of that same narrative of liberation... Each group believes its position to be the one most faithful to the Gospel – to its call to counter-cultural obedience and to the liberation of the oppressed.”

The remainder of this piece published in April 2015 in effect argues that the CofE has no other choice but to accept two integrities on the question of non-celibate gay relationships because there is no chance that we will come to a common mind on this question and no chance of the CofE enforcing its current rules. And our living with disagreements on the remarriage of divorcees and on the ordination of women to the priesthood proves that we can do it. (The appeal to 1 Corinthians 8 is misplaced, as the solution there is abstinence.)

“The challenge for opponents of such a settlement on same-sex relationship – wherever they stand on the substantive issue – is twofold. Firstly, they have to explain why we can live together amid disagreement on both the remarriage of divorcees and the ordination of women to the episcopate, but not on the blessing of same-sex relationships. From the point of view of faithfulness to Scripture and the Catholic faith, it is very hard to see why the first two issues are ones where we can cope with diversity and the issue of same-sex relationships is not. But, secondly, they have to map a realistic path from the current situation to their preferred outcome.”

A first response: These are helpful observations and thoughts but they overlook the issue of trust (and breakdown of trust) and assume too readily that our settlements on remarriage after divorce and on the ordination of women are a success. The jury seems to be still out on this and many opponents of a settlement on same-sex relationships could point out how hard it is to oppose one or the other without being vilified. The slippery slope argument is usually no argument at all but the fear that respecting the traditional view moves quickly towards tolerating, then marginalising, vilifying and finally excluding the traditional view is not altogether without basis. Indeed, even today the traditional call to sexual abstinence outside diverse-sex marriage is considered intrinsically homophobic by most proponents of same-sex partnerships or marriages and it seems therefore unlikely that any agreeing to disagree on their part would be anything other than short-term political rather than principled.

So, as for the challenge. Firstly,  some opponents may feel that they had their fingers burned enough and that having to live with a damaged hand and a broken foot is not reason enough to accept a chest infection as well. I would not really want to put it like that but that there are disagreements which we know we must tolerate and others which we feel we cannot is obvious. If that were not the case, we would be either forming our own independent church in which we all agree or belong to the Roman Catholic church because no disagreement was or is worth splitting away from the main body. 

Would tolerating the blessing of sexual activity outside marriage as traditionally understood fall in a different category from tolerating remarriage after divorce or the ordination of women to the priesthood? I am not best placed to address this, being on the “progressive” side here. I can live with the former two settlements because I can respect the “conservative” view as an expression of Christian discipleship. Being on the “conservative” side on the third question, I would find it much harder to accept the “progressive” view as a genuine, even if misguided, expression of Christian discipleship. This is related to the fact that unlike sexual activity outside marriage I do not see remarriage after divorce or the ordination of women prohibited for Christians in Scripture. Angus Ritchie seems to believe that what is prohibited in Scripture in all three cases is not what we encounter today. If that were the case, he would be right to query why one can disagree on two but not the third of those questions. What he overlooks is that those who accept or at least tolerate the current settlements on remarriage after divorce and on the ordination of women to the priesthood do not necessarily do so for his reasons and following his hermeneutic.