MetaCatholic

Michael expresses his surprise at a Sydney Morning Herald article on Christian Sex Guides. I’m not quite sure why, since evangelical Christians (the only sort who would buy a separate “Christian” guide) seem to me to have bought fully into a late modern Western hedonistic relational pleasure-giving-and-receiving understanding of sex as a necessary means of human fulfilment – only adding the proviso that it really ought to happen only in marriage (straight of course!) whether it’s your first, second, third or more.

If the SMH article surprised Michael, he should take a look at this site, where you will find advice on the proper place of anal sex, oral sex, rimming, spanking and more. In case you were wondering, the proper place is marriage. While they think divorce ought to be avoided, their argument, if I have them right is that refusing to have sex with your spouse is “porneia” and so included in the Matthean exception as a reason for divorce.

The site says above the menu: “Got Jesus? Please donate.” It does rather make him sound like a disease looking for a research cure.

(Note: this is the second in a series, following this post. The same requests for courtesy and careful argument apply.)

There is a whole range of texts which we ought to discuss with special care, that include those that have been used to justify or inspire violence against women, against Jews, against children and against gay people. That does not mean that we should make them say something other than what they do say. It only means we should handle them with care, knowing that past users of these texts have been complicit in a range of abusive, threatening, violent and (literally) murderous behaviour not unrelated to their use of the texts. The two texts I want to address in this post are among them. (And yes, dear reader, I know there are other texts, but one post at a time, please!)

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. (Leviticus 18:22)
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them. (Leviticus 20:13)

Curiously, the first of these texts was quoted today in a letter in the Church Times. (Sadly, I can’t link to it, since the CT doesn’t quite get the internet or indeed the general principle of subscription – bizarrely it costs more to subscribe than it does to buy it weekly in a newsagent.) There a certain Felicity Crow writes from rural Gloucestershire:

Christ came to remove not one jot or tittle of the Law. The Law says a man shall not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is an abomination. This is not a question of opinion.

Those who teach or preach otherwise … should be stark staring terrified. … To those who go against him and pollute his teaching Christ is totally terrifying.

That is one point of view (he says drily) and I’ll come back to it in a moment. (I hope questioning is allowed as Jesus readies the thunderbolts.) Ironically it is printed next to a very different letter, from someone whose name and address have been withheld.

I have been a worshipping Christian my entire life, but where I once found solace and friendship at church, it is true to say that I now feel like the enemy – a second class citizen … I spent many years coming to terms with my sexuality, and had a nervous breakdown in doing so.

This illustrates, I think, exactly why I am pleading for care. Let us assume for a moment that the end result of all these explorations will be a defence of the traditional position. Then I would note that Jesus was able to say to the woman caught in adultery “Go and sin no more” because he had first become her rescuer and protector. We can, I think, hear hard things from those we know love us, but if we never hear anything but hard things, it leaves us feeling very doubtful that we’re loved at all. Why would anyone want to know, far less trust and obey, a Jesus who sets out to terrify?

At one level, it seems to me that we can have some agreement about these texts themselves. They say pretty much the same thing, although the second elaborates and adds the punishment. It seems most likely that “lie with a male as with a woman” primarily refers to anal sex, although the euphemism is wide enough to embrace the possibility of other activities. It seems clear that it is specific actions that are being spoken about. It is worth noting that, unlike a fairly common view of the Roman world, both the penetrator and the penetrated are equally guilty. The implication, although rarely noticed, is also that, since this is a matter of purity, anal rape of an unwilling partner would still lead to the death penalty for both rapist and raped alike.

Moving beyond that to further interpretation is far from straightforward, however. At the most basic level, there is little obvious historical context. The development of the legal materials, the possibility of a separate Holiness Code (Lev 17-26) being incorporated into (later?) P material, the dating of earlier and final recensions all leave much of this lacking a clear cultural context within which to understand it. One possibility might well be pagan temple prostitution, or other cultic sexual activity. But it might not have that kind of connection at all. It may, as with so many other features of the priestly writings, be concerned with a particular construction of what is order, and therefore safe, and what chaos, and therefore dangerous. It could be held that there is a quite rational emphasis on the maintenance of sex for procreation, and procreation alone, at a time when mortality rates made this a matter of elementary survival and the common good. Non-procreative sex threatens the well-being of the community of Israel.

It seems to me impossible to adjudicate between these possible interpretations, and quite likely that there are elements of all three. In every case, the text is implicated in a particular context. The third context is one that some parts of the world can still identify with, and it also raises some awkward questions for heterosexual people, and the ways in which the modern West (at least outside the Roman Catholic Magisterium) conceptualises sex. The second possibility may lead to some of the more interesting and fruitful questions in cross-cultural interpretation. Order and chaos are primal categories, theologically, culturally, politically and psychologically. Saying the text needs interpretation is not the same as immediately kissing it goodbye.

The other issue that confronts and confuses the interpreter however, is one of selection. I go back for a moment to Ms Crow’s letter. Note that she has selected Lev 18:22 over Lev 20:13. In saying that not a jot or tittle in the Law are altered, she has nonetheless chosen the verse that omits the death penalty. Everyone selects, and so everyone interprets. These troubling verses are surrounded (staying within the boundaries of the so-called Holiness Code)by some very different ones. It includes laws that are reinforced in the New Testament and are regarded effectively as universal moral laws, such as “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). It includes laws that no Christian even begins to think might be applicable today, such as “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard.” (Leviticus 19:27).

It contains laws that the Church now regards as incompatible with its understanding of the will of God: “As for the male and female slaves whom you may have, it is from the nations around you that you may acquire male and female slaves.” (Leviticus 25:44). Nonetheless, for a large part of Christian history, tradition saw this law as perfectly acceptable. It contains laws that the Church, or modern society, has effectively sidelined, and which are rarely debated: “Do not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them, but fear your God; let them live with you. You shall not lend them your money at interest taken in advance, or provide them food at a profit.” (Leviticus 25:36-37). By contrast with the law on slaves, for the larger part of Christian history, the church thought this law was of ongoing significance, and revealed the will of God for Christian society.

Laws dealing with sex are mixed up with laws dealing with sacrifice, conduct for priests, general ethical behaviour, and other matters. The question of interpretation is not a cop-out, nor a way of avoiding difficulties. It is a necessary response to the nature of the text and in particular to the reading of Leviticus, where the selective and variable nature of Christian interpretation is perhaps at its most obvious. We Christians, at least, do select, and our selections appear to change. The question is “have we made the right selections?” Are our selections truly refracted through the gospel?

The broader themes of order and chaos, and the place of the communal good offering a context in which to think about sexual behaviour that seem to relate to the specifics of these texts will be important ideas to return to in placing one cultural reading in tension with another. But the whole must be related to the Christ who enters the ultimate undoing in death of God’s created order in order to recreate it, and the one who creates a new community reordered around the pattern of his faithfulness, rather than Torah-obedience.

This may be a bigger task than I intended to take on (or indeed am capable of).

I have (with considerable trepidation) decided to offer some periodic posts on some of the ways Anglicans (okay – and others) are reading, are not reading, could be reading and should be reading their Bibles about same-sex relationships. This is partly in honour of the Lambeth Conference, where these texts and their readings are the ghost at the feast. But it is also because I have reached that point of irritation with both the lack of rigour in so many arguments, and the lack of love in so many comments. Those are, incidentally, criticisms I would aim fairly indiscriminately at some on all sides.

What’s the point to this exercise? If you’re asking that question, believe me that I am too. It does, however, seem to me to be worth considering that one or more of us may have got something to learn from going back to these texts and asking questions rather than necessarily finding answers. It is too much to hope that any significant new meaning might be found in texts as well quarried as these. It may not (I think) be too much to hope that we might see one another as having some integrity and being serious about engagement with the texts.

I think we’re standing at a point where, in the light of all our knowledge, it seems reasonable to ask whether this is one of those occasions for the church to engage in the kind of drastic re-reading of texts we thought we knew. This is the relevance of, for example, the admission of Gentiles, or the banning of slavery. In those debates, which were as divisive and acrimonious as the present one, what won the day for the overturning of traditional readings of scripture was the conviction that other readings of scripture were truer both to the overall reading, and to the core of the gospel. That is, even if it remains the case that specific texts and the traditional reading of them did support the exclusion of the Gentiles, or the owning of slaves, they were texts that needed to be placed in the tradition’s archives in the light of reading the text as a Christocentric, salvific and truly life-giving whole.

It does not seem to me that those seeking such a drastic re-reading of the texts have yet made a fully-convincing case, far less a compelling one. Some have simply seen no need to do so. That does not mean that others will never do so. I personally hope they will. Equally, while I think that absent such compelling arguments, the traditional readings need respecting, I have to say that the venom and desperation of some, together with some dubious arguments, suggest to me that the traditional reading not only has its weaknesses, but that it produces some very sour fruit. It is possible, of course, like 1066 and All That’s roundheads and cavaliers, to be respectively right but repulsive, and wrong but romantic. But as Jesus might well have said: “It shall not be so among you.” Repulsiveness is not a Christian virtue.

The answers we get are of course shaped by the questions we ask. It seems that the question many are asking is “Does the Bible condemn same-sex practices?” Apart from the dubious idea that the Bible says or condemns anything, I think this is the wrong question, because it is focussed on an abstracted behaviour, not on people. What matters, it seems to me, are the questions about how we can love one another, share God’s love with and for each other, and seek to respond as faithfully as we can to God’s calling. In that light the questions are perhaps better framed as “How do we (given that some of us are gay and others straight) follow Christ faithfully”? and “How do we (given that some of us are straight and others gay) love our brothers and sisters and help them follow Christ faithfully?” The parenthetical part of those questions could easily be omitted (or written vice versa) without significantly affecting most of the answers.

When framed in those terms, it is quite clear that 90% (at least) of the answers we get from our reading of scripture will be just the same in relation to both gay and straight people. Questions of sexuality are a small (but significant) subset about the ways in which we love God and our neighbour. We are not talking two headed Martians but fellow disciples and fellow creatures, alike the favoured recipients of God’s love and vocation. Any attempts to read or re-read scripture that seem to forget or disregard that common graced humanity will not take us very far. There may be better questions than the ones I suggest here, but they’re the best I’ve come up with, and the ones I intend to take forward on this effort at reading.

I request all commenters to commend their arguments by grace, charity, reason and restraint.

Apparently the Lord Chief Justice has now come out in support of Rowan Williams’ earlier controversial (and in my view poorly presented, and wilfully misunderstood) remarks about Sharia and UK law. The bit of the Telegraph’s report that got my attention, however, was this:

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster and leader of Britain’s Catholics, said that people should live under the laws of the UK.
His spokesman said: “As the Cardinal has consistently said and indeed said earlier this year, was that Britons should abide by and be subject to the law of the land.”

And where, precisely does this leave the whole apparatus of Canon Law and marriage tribunals, which refuse to recognise as valid at least any second wedding (if not any first secular wedding) contracted by the state, and likewise refuse to recognise the state’s divorce law as ending a marriage, unless a couple have also followed the Church’s annulment procedures? This is, it seems to me, exactly an example of a religious community adjudicating certain practices by a a separate and different code of law to that which is enshrined in the law of the land.

The Sunday Telegraph is almost certainly the most right-wing of all the British broadsheets. It also seems to be the Bishop of Rochester’s favoured vehicle, first for announcing the presence of Muslim run no-go areas in this country (no-go areas no-one else has managed to actually evidence), and now for telling the world he isn’t going to accept his invitation to the Lambeth conference. It is also, of course, the second time that he’s announced this.

At one level, we have to recognise Nazir Ali has a consistency of views here. Eight years ago he made headlines by condemning married couples that could but choose not to have children.

In an age of excessive self-regard and encouragement on every side to the new religion of the `me’, it is very important for the Church to continue saying that having children and their nurture is a basic good of marriage and not an optional extra.

This idea, that a moral sexual relationship is one that is also open to children, is one step back from the Roman Catholic view that every sexual act must be open to the possibility of having children, but fundamentally coming out of the same theological tradition. Holding such a position means that the Bishop of Rochester is consistent in his views on heterosexual and homosexual relationships alike.

However, as far as I know, in the last eight years he has never repeated his remarks about married couples needing to keep their relationships open to procreation. Over the same time period he has been increasingly vociferous about condemning homosexual behaviour. The first proved deeply unpopular all round, the second has rallied many of those who oppose Rowan Williams to him.

It is this mismatch that leaves me deeply suspicious of his motives. He believes both are wrong, but spends all his time attacking (what he sees as) the gay error, while falling silent on the (what he sees as) the straight one. I’m not sure whether this smacks of homophobia, conservative populism, or the deeply frustrated ambition that has left him embittered that he never got Canterbury, and determined to do all he can to destabilise the man who did.

African leadership comes with some heavy ambiguities. Iain Dale draws attention to this simple political ad which has been banned in Zimbabwe, no doubt because like all-criticism of Mugabe it is pro-British and therefore oh-so-gay.

At the same time the so-called leaders of Anglican orthodoxy are meeting in Jerusalem. Prominent among them is Emmanuel Kolini, archbishop of Rwanda and competitor with Peter Akinola for the mantle of new Anglican pope.

Hmm. Rwanda. Morality. Well, I suppose that while there are a couple of disapproving references to same-sex activity in the Old Testament, there are an awful lot more approving references to God-commanded genocide.

Rwandan Christianity … leading the way back to biblical morality.

The complete confusion we have about the beginning of life in our society has been forcefully brought home to me today. Last night the UK Parliament voted to keep the legal limit for abortion at 24 weeks. This morning I buried with appropriate prayers the remains of a miscarried foetus which terminated spontaneously at 19 weeks. The family were distraught, not least because he looked so like a baby when he was stillborn (I hesitated at the pronouns in that sentence, having unthinkingly first written “it”.) Their grief this morning was that of parents who have lost a child, and that is how they thought of it. How long, however, can we, as a society, live with this kind of moral and emotional double-mindedness about where life begins?

Actually, my title for this post may be misleading, since I don’t actually know for certain what Chris Dillow’s views are, except that they’re usually worth engaging with. But this post is a refreshing change from the usual contributions on both sides of the debate. There are a whole raft of arguments that are not normally considered when the question is asked, because too many people are following well-worn scripts.

One question that, to my mind, is often overlooked, is why women should have to consider an invasive procedure on their body (chemical or surgical), just because men are unwilling to wear a rubber. There are, I think, occasions when a “woman’s right to choose” is used to excuse a man’s responsibility for where and how he sticks his dick. And how feminist is that?!

In a comment Stephen continues to make his point about post-modernism based on the ethics of torture. I haven’t got time right now to offer a major argument on the whole post-modern debate. But I do want to point up what I see as the problem with Stephen’s position as I understand it.

(Note: I am aware that there are some people who try to argue that water-boarding and the like are not torture. I think that’s rubbish – proving just how un-post-modern I am by such a blanket statement. As far as I can see, Stephen and I agree with the premise that the US Government is engaged in torture.)

I hope this isn’t a caricature, but it seems to me the argument goes a little like this:

1. Torture is wrong (initially as a strong objective statement)
2. When the US starts engaging in torture, many Christians not only fail to condemn it, but actually condone it.
3. There is no agreement among Christians on what seem such clear matters of right and wrong.
4. Therefore there are no clear matters of right and wrong, since those who claim to have the truth show they can’t agree.
5. Therefore, torture isn’t objectively wrong and Christianity isn’t objectively true.

I am baffled by this argument, since I can see several different options for stages 3 and 4 (combined), such as:

• Some Christians are seriously wrong, and need to be persuaded of the truth.
• Some people are inadequately Christian, because they give a higher allegiance to the State than Christ.
• Torture is always sinful, but there are some cases where it is the lesser of two evils, and this is a practical and political judgement as well as an ethical one. (I think there may be extreme cases where that possibility could be entertained. I don’t think the present circumstances even come close.)

I can’t see how or why disagreement among those who call themselves Christian automatically leads to an acceptance of post-modernism.

A private email has made me aware that the recent discussion on metaphors has included language which some people are uncomfortable with. I would not have regarded any of the language I’d used or read in that category, but I am (now) aware that others do. This also touches on issues raised by Paul’s use of the S word. So I should warn you now that this post for the purposes of discussion contains some words some people will find offensive.

It seems to me that this could seem like a natural case for applying Paul’s principle about not causing the weaker in faith to stumble. The problem, of course, is that we’re not entirely agreed about who the strong and weak were, and how much these were cultural issues between Greek and Judaean, and how much social issues between rich and poor. If the former then we do have a scriptural text to ponder in this regard, but if the latter then it’s a bit more opaque.

The social unacceptability of certain words and phrases varies tremendously from one cultural group to another. In mainstream English culture “bloody” was once a fairly strong word, whereas it now carries very little taboo or intensive force. Certain words, most noticeably “fuck” and its variants were never spoken in front of women and vicars without an apology. Now they are printed in quotations in at least some national newspapers, though never in the ones read by those for whom “fucking” is the only intensifying adjective they use. Ironically those who most employ the adjective are left under the misapprehension that it is spelt “f*@%ing.

There is a perception that swearing and religion shouldn’t mix. An atheist friend of mine was assumed to be “religious” by workmates, simply because he rarely swore. This perception perhaps has more to do with constructions of religion as feminine and middle-class than with ideas about the morality of language, and it is verging on obsolescence. Another irony is that people will still sometimes apologise to a minister for saying “fuck” but virtually never for saying “Christ”. Other cultures are no doubt significantly different about taboos and acceptability.

In the wired world it is probably impossible genuinely to deal with all the issues of linguistic sensitivity around taboos. It so happens I’m of the opinion that it’s not particularly big or clever to show how many naughty words I know. At the same time, I don’t worry overmuch about their occasional use. I am aware that others feel differently, and I hope that we can across our cultures, histories and personalities be sensitive to each other.

In part, however, I cannot help but feel that too narrow a focus on the use or non-use of swearwords misses the point. From time to time I have dropped in on an Anglican blog discussing one or other of the many evils of gay sex and bishops. (It’s too depressing to read them regularly.) The language on the liberal blogs sometimes uses a rude word. The language on the conservative blogs rarely does. Yet I am amazed at just how much sheer anger and hatred is expressed in the name of defending Christ by people who want to insist that they are the only true Christians left in the world (or at least the Episcopal Church). In the most recent one I looked at, one commenter suggested that getting beaten up for being gay was the person’s own fault for being so stupid as to be gay in Nigeria. Another said that it was strange to complain about straight people beating up gays while saying nothing about gay men giving each other diseases. No-one seemed to think there was anything to take exception to in these remarks. No-one suggested that the lack of charity (to put it no more strongly) in these remarks might be sinful. Rather it seems that each commenter was urging the next one on to a yet more outrageous condemnation of someone else.

I would suggest that being careful about how we use words in the multi-sensitive and worldwide web that embraces so many different cultures is an ethical matter. I see the issue of swearing as a very minor component of that discussion.