Andrew Goddard
"Goddard 2 Goddard" contents page
13th December 2007
Dear Giles,
Thanks for yours on 2nd December – let’s see if we can start to “perform” even if it means moving to Neptune to do so. I want to pick up your renewed invitation – in the light of the third of my four questions - to “try to engage…in the task of beginning to try to define exactly what the moral disciplines of these relationships of love might be…to try to develop an ethic of relationship which is appropriate and supportive for people outside marriage as well as within, for people seeking long-term commitment as well as those within it”. I’m purposefully going to try to focus on areas I think and hope we can largely agree on and to express them in a way that they can gain a wide consensus rather than starting with areas I know we are going to find more difficult to address though I’m sure we’ll come to those.
My starting point is Genesis 2.18 – “The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone"” – and the belief that, made in the image of the Triune God, all human beings are made for relationships. Of course in the text God goes on to say, “I will make a helper suitable for him” and we have the story of the creation of the woman which ends “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (v24). I would not, however, want to say that this means everyone should marry – how could any Christian suggest that in the light of the life lived by the one we say is truly human, the (to use the title of Dale Martin’s book that we might discuss at some point) “Single Savior”? You are right to warn that - perhaps particularly in certain evangelical circles – “it feels, at times, as though marriage has been exalted above almost everything else” (although “as a criterion for membership of the church” is perhaps a little too strong in my view). That narrative does, though, highlight the importance and significance of the distinction between men and women and I would say also points to the - in some sense - privileged status of marriage among our various loving relationships. Here there is the divinely ordained and instituted relationship between a man and a woman in which there is a total self-giving in intention life-long. This is particularly symbolised and embodied in their sexual union (‘becoming one flesh’) that is by God’s creative purpose the means of the miracle of the gift of new life and thus the creation of a totally new relationship. Marriage is a central part of God’s response to our universal need for relationship to counter the lack of being alone. It also, in the rest of Scripture, becomes a symbol (or even perhaps sacrament) of God’s gracious covenantal love and his determination not to be alone but to be for us and in relationship with us.
That linking between God’s relationship to us and our relationships with each other is not, however, restricted to marriage. It means, I believe, that all our relationships are called to be relationships of love - “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 Jn 4.11) - even relationships with our enemies! In practice of course none of our relationships – not even our best marriages or best relationships with fellow Christians - are pure love. They are instead a mix of self-giving love for the good of others and sinful attitudes and behaviour driven by self-interest, self-preservation, self-aggrandisement, self-delusion etc. The challenge in all our relationships is to cultivate and encourage and bless and honour that which is Christ-like and displaying the fruit of the Spirit and to put to death and resist all the powers that twist and distort relationships away from that pattern. What I think we are learning at present is that there are aspects of same-sex relationships that fall into the former category and to which the church has often been blind but we continue to disagree about how to encourage, bless and honour these in large part because we disagree as to what aspects of such relationships fall into the latter category and how determinative that is in moral evaluation of the relationship.
Alongside these general and universal features which I think should be part of an ethic for any relationship, there is also the fact that the forms and shape that love does and should take will vary depending on the nature of the relationship – I am called to love my students, my employer, my wife, my children, my fellow Christians, my neighbour – but what, in practice, it means for me to fulfil that call varies in each relationship. The obligations of love to each person vary and what is an action of love in one such relationship might be quite the opposite if done in another relationship. Or how we love and express love in one relationship may be destructive of love in another relationship by failing to recognise and respect it and the person in it – hence the problem of various forms of unfaithfulness or controlling/all-consuming relationships that damage other relationships.
Our actions are, of course, always physical because love (and of course all our denials and distortions of love) is expressed in and through our bodies – by our lips in how we speak and kiss, our hands in how we touch, our ears in how we listen, our eyes in how we look etc. And our bodies are, as Christians, not our own – “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?... Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your body” (1 Cor 6.15, 19-20).
That means, of course, that we are not ultimately the ones to decide what it is right for us to do with our bodies – Jesus is Lord. Therefore what it means for us to express love in our relationships is not simply for us to determine on the basis of our own desires, reasoning, emotions or self-understanding. We need to be taught what it really means to love. We are – all of us, in all our relationships – disciples who are learning to love.
Glad to hear Drenched in Grace went so well and thanks for making so much of it available online. I have to say I was delighted (particularly after Giles Fraser’s recent critique of the ‘new Puritans’ he thought he’d found among conservative Anglicans in the US!) that the title apparently had its source in a Puritan writer. As you know, the Inclusive Church newsletter noted
We've found where the title "Drenched in Grace" comes from! Not a moment too soon, you might think. It's found in a sermon title "The Way of Life" by John Cotton, English Puritan divine, 1585—1652…Here's the passage in which the phrase appears: (with apologies for the exclusive language) “There is such a measure of grace as a man may swim as fish in the water. ... He runs the way of God’s Commandments, whatever he is to do or to suffer he is ready for all, so every way drenched in grace.”
While being wary in my interpretation - without knowing its wider context - it does seem that this captures what I’m trying to say – that far from there being a contradiction between grace and obedience we are ‘drenched in grace’ when running the way of God’s Commandments. In other words, to know what is and is not a true expression of love in a relationship we need to refer to and to heed God’s commandments. We cannot simply appeal to ‘love’ as if its meanings and implications for our actions were self-evident or a matter of personal preference.
Furthermore, because we are inherently relational and part of a network of relationships I think that if love is to flourish we need to have some common mind about the proper structure of different relationships and the patterns of love which are fitting for them. Like me I guess you can think of times when misunderstandings here have created difficult and embarrassing situations. It may be that what was intended as a gesture of love and care was received as an inappropriate advance or that I expected that phone call or email from someone given the nature of our relationship or that something was said that revealed a different perception of the nature of the relationship – the first time I made clear to Lis what I thought the nature of our relationship had become was when I asked her if she thought many people knew we were going out!
I think one of the real challenges in much of Western society is that there is so little agreement on these areas. We privilege the right of every person to define the terms of their personal relationships and reject the idea that there are clear standards of what the obligations of love mean in various relationships. That of course is often particularly evident in relation to sexual expression in loving relationships – which, because it is so significant at every level (physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically) can be particularly damaging - but it goes much wider. It leads to confusion both within relationships (with different and perhaps conflicting understandings of what love means in this relationship) and on the part of those who relate to those in special relationships (who may be left unclear as to how, in their relationship with James, they honour and nourish the pattern of love that exists between James and Sam). That is, to my mind, one of the problems in the widespread practice and acceptance of co-habitation.
As those called to be the true humanity and to express in all our relationships the love of God in a manner that runs the way of God’s commandments and is drenched in grace it is, I think, particularly important that the community of Jesus’ followers does not fall prey to this corrosive element in Western society. That is, I think, another reason why some of us find unacceptable some of what appears to be part of “full inclusion” (for example the conclusions in Changing Attitude’s publication with the Clergy Consultation entitled “Sexual Ethics”). It is partly why I stressed in my question that it was a problem that “the moral disciplines of these relationships of love between people of the same gender have never been clearly stated and agreed even within those local churches taking this path”. To appear to be saying things like ‘we need to accept and celebrate the diversity of loving relationships’ or ‘we can agree to differ on this as Christians’ to my mind not only denies God’s revealed will in relation to just and loving relationships but fuels rather than challenges this dangerous tendency of a sort of ‘privatisation’ of moral judgment and relationship definition.
I guess my big questions as we start this next stage in our now extra-planetary correspondence is whether I’ve been right to see what I’ve written as largely common ground, how you see “full inclusion” fitting with this task of discerning and commending a common Christian vision of human flourishing in loving relationships that has a definite and biblical content (and so critiquing and rejecting alternatives), and what that content looks like.
It may well now be the New Year before we correspond again. I hope you continue to have a hope-filled Advent (whatever Rowan’s Advent letter says, to come back to Earth from Neptune) and a Christmas filled with joy and peace. I hope and pray that our conversation will continue and maybe find new forms of expression in the course of 2008.
Yours in Christ,
Andrew.
