Giles Goddard
"Goddard 2 Goddard" contents page
24th Jan 2008
Dear Andrew
Thank you very much for your letter dated 13th December. I hope your Christmas and New Year were hopeful and filled with joy and that you look forward to 2008 after what was in many ways (for both of us) quite a depressing 2007.
In response to yours, I’d like, if I may, to cut to the chase and take your last question as the key issue. That 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’s very clear to me that you and I would be able to, if you like, agree a checklist of things which we would be able to identify in relationships which reflect a common Christian vision of human flourish. Permanence, stability, faithfulness, trust, honesty, mutual care and support, being outwardlooking, challenging and yet loyal - all of those things and more. The marks of a good relationship are those things which in some way reflect the constant relationship of love between God and God’s people; clearly those things which do not reflect that are not conducive to human flourishing. I think, therefore, we can agree that we are both against sin!
But all of those factors can equally well be present in some of the other forms of relationship you mention – friendship, or family relationships, or even colleagues, and the Church doesn’t have a problem with any of those. So we have to start engaging with the more crunchy issue, which is, of course, the place of sexual expression of love within same-gender relationships. I take absolutely your points about the physicality of all relationships and the corrosive nature of some modern practice (in both the straight and the LGBT worlds), but in that case it’s even more important that we engage seriously with the place of sexual expression. I’m sure that we can both point to examples of people in same-gender relationships who reflect the love of God between themselves and in their relations with the world, but I think at the moment the place that I part company with the Church is that whereas I see their sexual expression as integral to the relationship’s godliness the Church sees it as inimical.
I want to make two points and try to extrapolate from that what the place of sexual expression in loving relationships might be. First, I’m glad that you express so well the complexities of knowing what the loving thing to do is. “We are all human beings learning to love” - amen to that. Richard Burridge in his new book “Imitating Jesus” quotes Richard Hays, who is apparently concerned that love is “easily debased in popular discourse ... a cover for all manner of vapid self-indulgence.” (quote on page 108 of Imitating Jesus). The Church’s struggles at the moment are very precisely the result of the fact that we do not want love to be used as a cover for “all manner of vapid self-indulgence” and to argue from such a fear to a position where we cannot use love as a guiding principle is hardly Christian, given that Jesus teaches us that there are only two commandments – to love God and love our neighbours as ourselves. It’s the complexity of knowing what the loving thing to do is which explains why the Church cannot as yet come to a new mind on these questions.
But second, and I guess this is the heart of this particular letter (and maybe of our correspondence), I think that there is an assumption underlying your argument which explains why you see movement on this issue as so difficult. It’s contained within the sentences “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” and “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.”
The ten thousand million dollar question is – what are God’s commandments? I hear two, from Jesus; love God and love your neighbour; I learn from this that “Christ is the end of the law.” I find no commandments - simply some references whose meaning and implications are disputed - about the place of sex in same-gender relationships; rather, I find myself challenged to understand the place of sex in same-gender relationships in the context of the two great commandments we find in the Gospels.
As you know, I take seriously the notion of the Anglican theological method – the “milking stool” of the three strands of Scripture, Reason and Tradition whose complex interplay enables us continually to reflect on what we learn from scripture in the light of tradition using our reason. I deliberately do not include Experience as a fourth leg, not just because it spoils the milking stool analogy but because I do not believe that it is possible to separate our experience from the other three. The notion that we can come at scripture unaffected by our cultural, our social, our political and our personal context is not a notion that is sustainable. We understand tradition in the light of our experience; the way in which, for instance, we view the history of the place of women in society is inextricable from the place we believe women should now have. And reason and experience are bound up together; cultural context and intellectual reflection are locked in a sometimes virtuous and sometimes vicious circle. The exclusion of black people was thought, by impeccably reasonable people, to be intellectually justifiable for three hundred years (from the sixteenth to the mid twentieth century) but as the experience and voices of black people have begun to be heard in a less imperialist world, the same impeccably reasonable people have realised how unsustainable exclusion is.
This has crucial implications for our understanding of scripture. I seek to base my entire faith on a rigorous understanding of what we learn from the Bible as the key text in the interpretation of the central event in Christianity - the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
But we, as readers of scripture, do not come to it like blank sheets of paper waiting to be written on. We bring our cultural background, our language, our expectations, our preconceptions. We understand the past through the lens of the present, and we interpret scripture through the lens of our faith and of our world. What is happening, when we read the scriptures, is that we are entering into a relationship with the text which is before us, and behind that with the almost always anonymous authors of the text; the past meets the future in the present, and we as readers are shaped by and shape our understandings of the words we read.
In short, we are graced, by the Holy Spirit, with our desires, our reasoning, our emotions and our self-understanding. All of these are inextricably bound up with our past and our present, with reason and tradition. It is the interplay between all these which gives faith in Jesus Christ its dynamic tension. So “to heed God’s commandments” is indeed what we must do, but we can’t do that in isolation from our sitz-im-leben, our position in life.
Of course our desires, our reasoning, our emotions and our self-understanding can be in error and distorted, and so can relationships. For the avoidance of doubt, I do not believe that “full inclusion” means that “anything goes.” I am absolutely clear that some sexual behaviour is deeply destructive and soulless and does long lasting damage. And we have the guidance of tradition to assist us in deciding what’s right and what’s wrong. But tradition is our guide, not our dictator. And I also think that the church is culpable in this area because it has so totally failed to develop a pastoral theology for lesbian and gay people; it has been left to the Government to create a legal position which, while deliberately not mentioning sexuality, enables gay and lesbian people to have their relationships affirmed by society. The church remains, appallingly, opposed.
I am absolutely clear too that close and committed relationships are, very often, immeasurably enriched by the physical expression of the love within them. You and I were both present at the General Synod debate last February in which Stephen Coles made a speech which I quote in full because it seems very relevant:
“One thing that the registering of civil partnerships is making more possible is the revealing of relationships that have lasted for many years. Julian Litten has already referred to his of 31 years. Quite a few are over 40. Those relationships have survived despite the absence of any support from Church or State, and they challenge a situation in which many heterosexual relationships fail to survive despite considerable support from both Church and State. In those relationships sexual intimacy has usually played its part in helping a couple of very different human beings to express their feelings for one another and so to grow in love. So, like this morning, I am going to leave the Synod with a question. How many of you here who are happily enough married can honestly say that if you had never been allowed to express your feelings for your spouse physically your relationship would have the depth it has now?”
I think this: that love is the beginning and end of the law, and a loving response to lesbian and gay Christians is not one which simply indulges. Instead, it calls them as it calls all people to the higher and more difficult way of commitment and covenant to God and to one another. As Dale Martin says, “The appeal to love will not solve all our problems or settle all our disagreements. But demanding that interpreters demonstrate that their condemnations of lesbian and gay Christians are “the loving thing to do” is at least preferable to the simple statement that something is true just because “the Bible says so” or because it is “the will of God.”” (Page 168 of “Sex and the Single Savior”)
I want to turn the conversation round, really. I remain intrigued by your indication in an earlier letter that you substantially agree with Oliver O’Donovan on not ruling out a development in tradition in this matter – otherwise, of course, what would be the point of a listening process?
In that context (and in a Socratic way to answer a question with a question): if you acknowledge that a same-gender relationship may have integrity – which I take to mean a sexually active relationship, otherwise the possibility of any development must be meaningless – without the Church’s formal authorisation, what would a valid form of witness to Christian discipleship and holiness look like, which might allow the Church to be more accommodating and broaden its understanding of tradition on this matter? In other words, what would you consider reason enough for the Church to consider it an acceptable alternative to either celibacy or marriage in this case, given that you do not rule out the possibility of a development?
I hope I’ve gone some way to answering your question, and look forward to hearing from you -
With regards as ever
Giles
