Andrew Cameron on Homophobia

beyond homophobia

I have been waiting a long time for someone to say this, and to say it so well.

Rowan Williams on Scripture

A few days ago Rowan Williams gave an intriguing lecture on Scripture in Canada. In the middle of the lecture he made an intriguing comment about Romans 1, the text at the centre of debates about homosexuality and the church:

Paul in the first chapter of Romans famously uses same-sex relationships as an illustration of human depravity – along with other ‘unnatural’ behaviours such as scandal, disobedience to parents and lack of pity. It is, for the majority of modern readers the most important single text in Scripture on the subject of homosexuality, and has understandably been the focus of an enormous amount of exegetical attention.
What is Paul’s argument? And, once again, what is the movement that the text seeks to facilitate? The answer is in the opening of chapter 2: we have been listing examples of the barefaced perversity of those who cannot see the requirements of the natural order in front of their noses; well, it is precisely the same perversity that affects those who have received the revelation of God and persist in self-seeking and self-deceit. The change envisaged is from confidence in having received divine revelation to an awareness of universal sinfulness and need. Once again, there is a paradox in reading Romans 1 as a foundation for identifying in others a level of sin that is not found in the chosen community.
Now this gives little comfort to either party in the current culture wars in the Church. It is not helpful for a ‘liberal’ or revisionist case, since the whole point of Paul’s rhetorical gambit is that everyone in his imagined readership agrees in thinking the same-sex relations of the culture around them to be as obviously immoral as idol-worship or disobedience to parents. It is not very helpful to the conservative either, though, because Paul insists on shifting the focus away from the objects of moral disapprobation in chapter 1 to the reading /hearing subject who has been up to this point happily identifying with Paul’s castigation of someone else. The complex and interesting argument of chapter 1 about certain forms of sin beginning by the ‘exchange’ of true for false perception and natural for unnatural desire stands, but now has to be applied not to the pagan world alone but to the ‘insiders’ of the chosen community. Paul is making a primary point not about homosexuality but about the delusions of the supposedly law-abiding.

The intriguing thing for me is that he is absolutely right - but that no-one taking the conservative position would ever deny that he was right. Of course Paul's rhetorical point in Rom 1 and 2 is meant to ambush the self-righteous. But as Williams himself appears to concede here, there is no question but that Paul and his readers would have agreed that same-sex sex was part of the distortion of the created order in the same way that idolatry and disobedience to parents is. The question is I suppose: what authority has that agreement between Paul and his readers? Can we really just sift it out as a mistake - and still claim any semblance of orthodoxy? Honestly now?

O'Donovan on the gay issue: a daring hope?

Oliver O'Donovan has caused some huffiness amongst conservatives because of this paragraph:

The old-style liberalism that used to preside over the church’s dilemmas in a confident spirit of practical compromise began from the assumption that everyone was divided from everyone else by recalcitrant disagreements. The Lord, the liberals prophets announced, had sent a perpetual famine of his word. We should stop asking questions of one another and hoping for answers, and eat the dry bread of commonsense compromises. Those who remember Pentecost may reasonably doubt that this was ever the wisest counsel for the church. But at the very least we cannot know whether and how much of a famine of the word there is in any disagreement until we submit it to the disciplines of patient common enquiry. No disagreement refuses to be analysed, and its constituent elements sorted out according to size and shape. No disagreement does not lure us on with the hope, however distant, of a genuine resolution. Can we promise ourselves, then, that if the churches would only discuss homosexuality long and fully and widely enough, they would end up agreeing? Well, we are not entitled to rule out that possibility. But suppose it were not true; suppose that after careful exploration and a search for common ground, there was an agreement-resistant core at the centre of the issue – a problem about how modernity is viewed, for example, or about the ontological status of self-consciousness - it might still be possible to set the residual disagreement in what the ecumenists like to call “a new context”, and (who knows?) learn how to live with it. We have a parallel in the difference between indissolubilist and non-indissolubilist views of marriage, a traditional point of tension between Catholic and Protestant. That disagreement has not gone away; but if today it bulks less threateningly than it once did, that is because we are so much more clear about the extent of the agreed ground all around it – God’s intentions for marriage, the pastoral desiderata in dealing with broken marriage etc etc. It no longer evokes threatening resonances. It is a problem reduced to its true shape and size.

Is it possible to imagine this? I don't think that O'Donovan is himself making the gay issue a second-order issue as is claimed by the Anglican Mainstream commentator. O'Donovan is rather standing against the liberal belief in the famine of God's word, which means that true reconcilation is impossible...

Oliver O'Donovan on 'Good News for Gay Christians'

Here is Oliver O'Donovan's last in his series on contemporary issues.

It asks a great question: in what sense is the gospel good news for gay christians?

Jerry Springer the Opera and Taking Offence

Christians and other religious people seem to be known for their willingness to take offence. That's what religious people are, by and large: people who get offended about cartoons in newspapers on behalf of their divinities.

Recently in the UK there has been a stage show produced called Jerry Springer the Opera. It is a vile piece and not really that good - I saw some of it when it was shown on the BBC. It has a gay Jesus among other things, and some incredibly bad language. It has some satirical component to it I suppose, but it isn't that funny and it isn't that clever. Of course, with a piece like this which religious people are offended about, the liberal commentators blather on about what a great work of art it is, and how important it is that it be shown etc. The issue of censorship is bandied about as if it is the greatest cause in the universe etc. Of course, the possibility of SELF-censorship on the grounds of offending a large number of people and whether that might be a good thing to freely choose to do is never discussed, because we only discuss these things in terms of LAW (it is worse in the UK even than OZ in this area).

But is the right Christian response to get outraged and to protest? Certainly that is the right Muslim response, it seems... But Christians are not those who assert their rights in this way. Surely we don't want to participate in the protest/victimhood discourse that is so harmful to our community? Surely we can speak about the hurt and the (more to the point) the terrible danger of blasphemy without using the same gestures that people use to get a public hearing these days? I think it actually damages the cause of the gospel when we pose as another protest group in society that is making noise for its own space...