Category Archives: TBLA

A new synthesis on gender

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Latest Courier article – bit philosophical.

Our former Archbishop Rowan, for whom I retain a great deal of admiration and affection, was often criticised for being unclear. In part this may well simply have been the natural consequence of someone with a world-class intellect trying to explain something complicated, but I don’t see this as the whole reason. After all, when he needed to – as with some of his marvellous shorter books – Rowan could be incredibly compelling and lucid. I believe that part of his perceived ‘lack of clarity’ was actually rooted in a particular intellectual stance that he held and believed in strongly, and it is something that has its roots in the thinking of the German philosopher Hegel.

I would summarise one of Hegel’s key notions like this: there is a ‘thesis’ – a particular way of thinking or living, possibly expressible in some sort of philosophical maxim or aphorism, such as ‘men should be head of the household’. Over time, this thesis will collide with reality and human nature in such a way that it will develop tensions and contradictions, out of which will come an ‘antithesis’, which is again expressible – say ‘women deserve equal rights and responsibilities’. The thesis and the antithesis will inevitably conflict, and in human culture this will take time, and often have very visible form, such as when a suffragette chains herself to railings. Hegel labelled this conflict ‘dialectic’, taking over that term from its original use in Greek philosophy. Furthermore, as this dialectic continued, it would eventually settle in a new understanding and cultural form which took elements from both the original thesis, and the antagonistic antithesis, and combined them into a new synthesis. This synthesis would then itself become a ‘thesis’ of its own, and the cycle would continue. These repeated cycles of thesis – antithesis – synthesis formed, according to Hegel, the way in which a culture moved forward and progressed. Hegel’s thought was very influential, especially on Marx – Marxism can be seen as a type of ‘applied Hegelianism’ – and it underlies a very great deal of contemporary political thought, especially what is considered to be ‘progressive’ – that very term revealing the link.

Rowan is undoubtedly a Hegelian, and was always very conscious of the way in which any particular argument called forward an antagonistic response. Where many in the church wanted Rowan to give a strong, clear and principled lead – in other words, to nail his colours to the mast of one particular ‘thesis’ – Rowan wished, instead, to preserve the ongoing dialectic between thesis and antithesis, in pursuit of a new synthesis. Most crucially, in church terms, Rowan refused to place any of the various contenders for thesis or antithesis outside of the boundaries of the church. He insisted that every member of the group mattered, and he did not wish to see any group scapegoated (whether he succeeded in that desire is, in my view, something of an open question). In other words, the reason why Rowan was often criticised as being ‘unclear’ was because he went out of his way to include references to, and respect for, positions that contradicted each other. He did this not because he was himself intellectually confused but because he was himself seeking a new synthesis, and not wanting to be tied down to a thesis or antithesis which was politically convenient for whichever political group was pressuring him at the time. I do believe that history will be much kinder in its assessment of his leadership than his contemporaries have been.

Rowan’s time was marked – scarred! – by disagreements about sexuality and gender, specifically the questions around women’s ministry and homosexual clergy and marriage. This is a good example of the Hegelian process. The original theses, still most clearly expressed in official Roman Catholic teaching, had the following elements: sexuality is solely for the purpose of procreation; any form of sexuality which is not open to procreation is inherently sinful (and homosexuality falls into that category, along with other forms of sexuality, eg the use of contraception). In addition, human gender relations are ordered ‘by nature’ in such a way that men and women have distinct and different roles. This is best expressed and visualised in terms of a marriage which is open to procreation and the raising of children, within which a man will be the provider (which is about authority and direction as much as giving resources) and the woman will be the principal nurturer and carer.

At present in our society that thesis has been largely rejected and, as a dominant cultural form, effectively been abandoned. The antithesis, in so far as it can be articulated, would assert that: sexuality is not just (or even primarily) about procreation, but is most fundamentally about self-expression within the context of human relating, that is, it is one of the principal ways in which we as human beings bond with one another. Hence, any form of sexuality which accords with that aim is good. Marriage is the celebration of that bond and exhaustively defined by it. Where the bond of love breaks down, the marriage itself comes to an end (in other words, the marriage is no longer any form of contract). Children will fit in and cope with these arrangements as determined by the extended families.

At the moment we are in a position with regard to gender and sexuality of waiting for a new synthesis to be formed and adopted. I suspect this will only come when both sides, thesis and antithesis, are exhausted. Both sides to the argument have some merit, both have significant flaws and it was one of Rowan’s great strengths that he held on to that tension in the hope that a new resolution would eventually come forward, which would allow the best preservation of the good things whilst eliminating or reducing all the bad. From my point of view I believe that this synthesis has to begin with placing our created human nature first, rather than thinking in terms of ‘men’ and ‘women’. If we ask what will enable one particular human being to flourish, I believe that we will get further than if we start by wondering what will enable these particular ‘members of class X’ to flourish – whatever category X might be, of gender, race, orientation or otherwise.

TBLA (extra): Why I am not a feminist

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I want to try and describe one of my fundamental convictions – one that is both spiritual and political. This is a bit of a rant…

I believe that all human beings are the expression of divine creativity. That is what I understand being made in the image of God to mean. We are each words of God – different words – called to express a particular incarnation of the divine Word. We are each unique, irreplaceable, miraculous.

It is due to the inheritance of Sin that we are prevented from expressing the particular image of God that we were created to be. We each have a calling, a vocation, to express a particular facet of God (think of diamonds with infinite facets). It is the task of the human community to progressively remove all the barriers to the expression of individual creativity, that is what Christians call ‘the Kingdom of God’. We are often neck deep in crap in this our present world, but, in that case, pace Oscar Wilde, sometimes the most important thing is to testify to the existence of the stars even whilst trapped in the gutter.

In other words, for me, the principal value and orienting affirmation is about what it means to be human (hence the title of the book which I have written). We are first of all human beings, only secondarily are we male or female, gay or straight or trans, black or white or yellow, rich or poor or bourgeois. In so far as it lies within me, this is what I wish to teach and to live out in all the decisions of my life.

I would want to draw a distinction between egalitarian feminism and gender feminism, and draw the distinction in this way: egalitarian feminism is the fruit of the political enlightenment, which is all about the fundamental political equality and worth of all human beings, no matter what their background or station. It is because I accept this that I accept, inter alia, the wrongness of both abortion and capital punishment. This has its origin in the 18th century – there or thereabouts. In contrast to this, I see ‘gender feminism’. This I see as the product of particular post-war circumstances, an excess of affluence combined with a failure of nerve. Rather than seeing men and women as primarily human beings, and only secondarily male or female, gender feminism, in my view, a) sees the gender orientation as primary, and b) (crucially) sees a higher value deservedly bestowed upon the female rather than the male. In other words, the male is by definition the oppressor, and the woman is by definition the victim – even though the woman is the only oppressed class in history to have a longer life expectancy than the oppressor.

The reason why I do not wish to class myself as a feminist is because of this latter development. I do not accept that men are inherently oppressive. I do not accept that boys are incipient rapists. I do not accept that being a man means that you have to accept a place as a second class citizen, responsible for all the bad things of history and none of the good.

More crucially, I reject the anthropology of ‘gender feminism’. Most of it seems to me to be (to speak in Marxist terms temporarily) an expression of ‘false consciousness’. It is an ideology born from economic imperatives, a way of ensuring that the Leviathan can have the cheapest pool of labour available to it, irrespective of human cost. In other words, if a particular individual woman believes that the expression of her individual vocation means that she is a ‘stay at home mum’ then all the ideology that declares she is ‘letting down the sisterhood’ and ‘being dependent on the patriarchy’ and all the other self-righteous nonsense can get stuffed. Who is this person as a human being? Not as a woman, or as an economic unit, but who is this particular person called to be in her own idiosyncratic specificity? DO NOT PUT HER IN A BOX!

I do see contemporary gender feminism as mostly evil. I have a profound commitment to and belief in the individual, in what might enable them to flourish as a specific and particular human being, not simply as a member of a type or expression of a class. What I hate, absolutely detest about much modern feminism is that it seems to have abandoned the root principles from which modern feminism sprang (ie the political enlightenment) and has instead become captured by the secular powers, and been put to use as a ‘useful idiot’, the practical implications of its teaching simply being that vast multinationals can make an extra percentage point on their profit figures.

The principal value that I am committed to is what will most enable someone to become the sort of person that God has called them to be. There is no ideology that can tell me the answer to that – the only answer will come from a slow and patient attention to the sort of human being that they are, and loving them no matter what.

Everyone deserves the same. EVERYONE. I want each individual person to be themselves, and not try to distort themselves to fit into anybody else’s box. Where they fit on the different spectra of male/female, intelligent/simple, black/white, gay/straight, all the rest of it – all of this is SECONDARY.

I believe in human beings. I don’t want to put anyone into a box, and I don’t want to be put into a box for myself. I think that each of us has a path, and it is the sacred duty of all of the rest of us to do what we can to ensure that every single last one of us is enabled to be all that he or she can be. We won’t always succeed, but it is in the effort that we find our own transcendence.

TBLA: Covenants and Parenting Bonds

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I believe that there are two forms of relationship (not mutually exclusive) that can each be vehicles for the holy, and worthy of being blessed by the church.

The first is a Covenant, entered into for the mutual affection, aid and support of the parties concerned. This can be male and female, gay and straight, short and tall, of all different sorts. The important point is the nature of the relationship to be affirmed, which is for the relevant parties to decide, and that they wish the relationship to be affirmed and given support and substance by God.

The second is a Parenting Bond – that is, when two people come together and wish to form a family. This is (in origin) something which is only available to a male/female couple even where, for all sorts of other reasons, there are now other forms of parenting. I believe that the wider society has a strong and legitimate claim to be involved in this form of relationship, given the consequences of poor parenting upon that wider society, and that this form of relationship is therefore distinctly different to the first.

I believe that the wider conversations on this topic are bedevilled by a failure to distinguish between these two forms of relationship. It doesn’t matter to me which one gets called by the ‘m’ word, although I suspect a lot of hassle could be saved by keeping it for the second. That’s not a theological point though.

TBLA(9): the idolatry of romantic love (i)

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This is slightly out of my intended sequence, but it is prompted by something I found here which I think is extremely well-expressed: “What nearly all modern Christians have done is place romantic love above marriage. Instead of seeing marriage as the moral context to pursue romantic love and sex, romantic love is now seen as the moral place to experience sex and marriage. This inversion is subtle enough that no one seems to have noticed, but if you look for it you will see it everywhere. Lifetime marriage, with separate defined roles for husband and wife and true commitment is what makes sex and romantic love moral in the biblical view. In our new view, romantic love makes sex moral, and the purpose of marriage is to publicly declare that you are experiencing the highest form of romantic love.”

This is why we have become so snagged on the arguments around gay marriage. If we take it that pair-bonding romantically is the esse of a marriage, then there is no substantial reason to deny marriage to gay couples. It is simply a matter for individual choice. If, in contrast, marriage in its esse involves the raising of children, then the structuring of the marriage bond has to reflect that. That is the traditional Christian and biblical view (of which Dalrock is an exponent).

What the idolatry of romantic love has done is to distort all our values on this subject. Romantic infatuation is well known to be fleeting, and the neuroscience involved is becoming increasingly well understood. The effects of this value shift – structuring our understandings of marriage around romance – are all around us, in the form of divorce and shattered families and all the havoc that has followed.

This is not to say that romance doesn’t have its place, it is to say that we cannot structure a society on the basis of something so shallow. Life, and most especially the raising and forming of new life, is too important to be left to that.

TBLA(8): Biology and theology

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John Richardson left a comment on an earlier post which I’ve been meaning to respond to – and now Bishop Alan has written on a related topic. It’s unusual to disagree with John and +Alan on the same grounds, but there you go!

John writes: “I would have thought it was biology, rather than theology, that keep sex and procreation together, but this should affect our thinking about ‘sexual relationships’, especially where, in effect, they are not.” +Alan writes: “Concepts of “natural” and “un-natural” are very fundamental to where people position themselves about homosexuality. There seem to be two basic perceptions from which everything else flows. As clearly and charitably as I can put it Either Homosexuality is a phenomenon against nature, and defies Creation and/or evolution Or Homosexuality is a phenomenon within nature, and thus part of Creation and/or evolution”.

It seems to me that a properly Christian pattern of thinking needs to be careful about importing secular assumptions unnoticed when discussing certain scientific conclusions. That is, from a theological point of view, there is no neutral ‘biology’ from which we then draw theological conclusions; nor is there any mileage in the word ‘natural’. Put differently, a properly theological perspective has the capacity (not the necessity) of construing the biological or the natural in a way that runs against any particular scientific consensus about ‘facts’ and, sometimes, it is obliged to do so. (This is essentially Milbank’s point in Theology and Social Theory, although I think Wittgenstein got there first.)

I’ll talk about the ‘natural’ first. The major problem with use of the word ‘natural’ in any discussion like this is that it cannot be given any substantive content. That is, human beings are themselves part of any ‘natural’ order – and so anything which human beings do is therefore ‘natural’ and the word loses any distinctive purchase. Alternatively, the distinction is drawn between the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’, in which case nothing ‘human’ is ‘natural’, and again the word loses its distinctive purchase. What use of the word ‘natural’ tends to be employed for is some sense of ‘this pattern of activity aligns with this purpose’ – that is, the substantive content of the word ‘natural’ when used in an argument derives entirely from the underlying aim envisioned for the human being, and it is at that level that the debate needs to engage. So, in matters of sexuality, one position envisions human sexuality as being entirely about procreation – this is what gets privileged as ‘natural’ – and therefore anything which is not procreative is proscribed as ‘unnatural’. Alternatively, human sexuality is envisioned as being about pair-bonding and mutual affection etc, and therefore a much larger variety of sexual expression is ‘natural’.

One way of progressing the debate might therefore be to enquire as to what is the actual ‘biological’ truth – is it the case that human sexuality is entirely about procreation, or not? Is it the case that, as John infers, it is ‘biology’ that keeps sex and procreation together? Where this aspect starts to break down, for me, is that it ignores the cosmic dimension of the Fall. That is, in Christian thinking, there is a distinction between the world that God originally made, and the world that we now inhabit. The latter is a broken or impaired form of the former, one that is slowly being redeemed and healed as we head towards the Kingdom. To say that it is biology that keeps sex and procreation together – if it is to do anything more than simply point out that (so far) conception is a biological process – does not advance our understanding very far. To return to the question of gay relationships, it is perfectly possible to say that homosexual attraction is a part of the evolved order in which we find ourselves, but to describe that as being part of the cosmic Fall. In other words, it doesn’t actually advance the case in favour of gay relationships to point out all the ways in which there are gay relationships elsewhere in the existing order. It is perfectly possible for someone to say ‘yes, that’s true, but that’s just evidence of our brokenness – it is not part of God’s original intention and one day it will pass away’. (This relates to the ethical question about how to proceed if there was a ‘cure’ for homosexuality.)

There seems to be a distinction, therefore, between how something might be ‘as God intends’ and how things presently are – and from those to how we are to behave within our present context. I don’t believe that appeals to ‘biology’ or what is ‘natural’ actually progress the discussion in a more Christian direction. What would do so, I believe, is if Christians began by pondering the rest of +Alan’s post, most especially the shocking vitriol hurled at him for putting his head above the parapet on one side. If it is by their fruits that we will know them, then that is probably a much more certain place to start our considerations than any questions of biology or naturalness.

TBLA(7): choices in a broken world

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I take it as axiomatic for the Christian that we live within a Fallen world – in other words, a world that is broken, within which good things happen to bad people and the reverse, and in which we are often placed within a situation where there is no clearly right way forward. The expression ‘choosing the lesser of two evils’ is one that is, I believe, thoroughly appropriate for exploring our situation. There is, however, a clear distinction to be drawn between how a Christian responds to the choice of evils, and how a secular perspective might see things, and that is what I want to tease out.

In my house group the other day, we were considering a story of two soldiers in the Far East in World War 2 who were being pursued by Japanese forces. One of the soldiers was injured and impeding their retreat. He realised that unless his fellow soldier was able to go ahead without him, they would both be captured and tortured. Yet he didn’t want to be captured and tortured himself, and so he asked his fellow soldier to shoot him dead.

Here is a classic instance of having to choose between evils. The evil of killing a friend, the evil of allowing the friend to be captured and tortured, the evil of both soldiers being captured and tortured. What is the right way forward?

I suspect that there is no necessarily ‘right’ answer – we do the best that we can, and we live with the consequences. We are all compromised, none of us have clean hands. Which is why the gospel makes such sense, and why it is liberating to be washed in the blood of the lamb – it means something.

What I want to insist on, however, is the difference between a Christian perspective upon a situation like this, and one that derives from utilitarianism (which is the ideology underlying most modern management and ethical thinking). The Christian perspective insists that there is a difference between the right choice from available options, and that choice being in some sense actually right. That is, it is perfectly possible – more than that, it is the normal human condition – for an act to be the right action in a situation and yet still be inherently sinful – and therefore, in an important sense, ‘wrong’. To a utilitarian perspective – the right action is the action which maximises the available benefit (utility) – this is incoherent. It is not possible for an action to be the right action whilst also being in some sense wrong.

Viewing the world as broken, as a result of the fall, and yet also as being progressively redeemed, with the Kingdom breaking in, means that a Christian can actively sin even whilst pursuing the good to the best of their ability. This is spiritually hard work, but it is the nature of an honest discipleship. The difference comes in the vision held before us. Are we simply making short-term tactical decisions, or is there a direction in which we are travelling, and a destination that we are hoping to reach? With utilitarianism there isn’t; with Christianity there is.

To bring this back to my TBLA theme, I want to talk about two social shifts that took place primarily through the late 1960s, and consider the consequences. The first is abortion. The justification of abortion is principally through what might be termed ‘hard stories’ – in which is is transparently obvious that the right conclusion to reach, which no morally sensitive person could avoid reaching, is that, in a particular case, an abortion should be procured. Such should therefore be allowable in law. Yet I do not believe for one moment that those who devised and enacted the change in the law ever anticipated that this shift would lead to the holocaust that has followed. As the change in the law effectively said to society that ‘abortion is [a/the] right choice’ it has become something seen as not morally significant – and this detachment from moral moorings has led us into a very dark place. A Christian perspective might well agree than an abortion in a particular case was morally defensible – but it would also insist that it remained an inherently sinful act – and it is that insistence which, I believe, stands as a bulwark against ongoing moral degradation.

In a similar fashion, there were hard stories that justified the change in the divorce law – cases where, clearly, a divorce would be the lesser of the available evils. Yet the same thing has happened. In the absence of a sense that a divorce is still inherently sinful – in the absence of a vision or ideal of what human marriage might be – the consequences of the change in the law, have, I believe, gone a very great distance beyond what was envisaged by those who changed the law, with consequent havoc and human misery following in its wake.

What I am wanting to describe is a situation in which something may be tolerated and accepted whilst still being seen as sinful and requiring of repentance. So, for example, in the Middle Ages, a knight returning from a Crusade, who had shed blood, would be required to sit in the porch of a church for a year before being readmitted to communion. There was a whole ritual space which recognised both the necessity of what the knight had to do and also the inherent sinfulness of it. Put differently, this was an understanding of the world which recognised the tragic nature of human existence, and put mechanisms in place to enable fragile human beings to navigate their way within it. It is this framework that has been lost, to our very great cost.

Two last points to round off this post. The first is that there is a picture of the world that lies behind the Roman Catholic view (and the pacifist view) which I view as consistent and honourable but which I cannot bring myself to share. This is the view that says some things are never justifiable. So, in the first example of the soldiers, the option of one soldier killing his fellow soldier is simply unjustifiable – it is murder – and so those soldiers should have evaded capture for as long as possible, and then simply been captured, tortured or shot. To act from a pacifist basis is to see nobody as beyond the reach of love, and the refusal to act on the basis that the enemy is unloving is actually the path of holiness. More specifically, it is the path of redemptive suffering, as demonstrated by Christ on the cross, and which all Christians are required to follow. A similar analysis is applied to issues about abortion or divorce, so, for example, a virtuous wife is enjoined to suffer the depredations of a vicious husband in order to, for example, convert him by her example. As I say, I see this as being honourable and coherent, but I don’t agree with it. I simply note that here; it deserves a post – or a book! – all of its own in order to explain why.

Secondly, in so far as this sequence is going to be exploring issues around human sexuality, this distinction between what is ideal (or what is of the Kingdom) and what is a pragmatically right choice in the present is one that is central to what I expect to be arguing for. So, for example, I’m expecting to argue that polygamy is one possible permissible social arrangement for a Christian community, but I would see that as a pragmatic concession ‘for your hardness of heart’ rather than something which is reflective of God’s original intentions.

TBLA(extra): "the separation of sex from the procreation and nurture of children"

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This is just a link to Andrew Brown’s latest article, as he – as so often – ‘gets it’: “If they were prepared to argue in favour of properly recognised, blessed and celebrated civil partnerships, there would be a much stronger case for keeping traditional marriage separate. But that would require the social approval and even the sanctification of some sexual relations outside marriage. This, in turn, requires the separation of sex from the procreation and nurture of children. Catholics can’t do that, at least for the next couple of centuries, because they have been committed to the position that God planned the plumbing. But Anglicans, or Protestants generally, can take a broader view of sex. They can see it is something which is a good in itself, within permanent, faithful, stable relationships. This is a conservative position, but it is not necessarily hostile to gay people.”

(I do occasionally wonder if he reads my blog…)

Is there a stable place to rest at the end of the progressive path?

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This is related to the TBLA thread, but I think it deserves to be kept apart from that series, at least for now.

Western society has embarked upon a radical restructuring of its cultural life in three inter-related issues, to do with homosexuality, marriage and divorce, and the economic role of women. The classical understanding of the church, that sexuality is only to be expressed within a heterosexual marriage, has been widely abandoned. The development of effective means of contraception, the abolition of traditional marriage, the massive economic empowerment of women – all of these together are utterly revolutionary. The church has been caught up in this cultural change and is now at risk of opprobrium and worse if it does not, in David Cameron’s ill-chosen words, ‘get with the programme’. It seems to me that there is a coherent position that is taken in opposition to this radical restructuring – the Roman Catholic stance is the most fully-worked out and potentially long-lasting form of opposition to the progressive path (I don’t see the conservative evangelical opposition as similarly substantial, despite its merits). The question I want to ask is: where is the progressive path going?

The RC stance is one that is deeply rooted in both Scripture and Tradition, and one which has proven workable for thousands of years. That is, the civilisation that we have inherited is, in large part, a product of a culture which adopted certain norms about the place and role of women and homosexuals. Clearly, power and influence were concentrated on men, and there were consequent injustices and exploitations. However, no human society is without injustices this side of the kingdom, and our present arrangements are certainly not without injustices either. The RC stance is one that is dominant in world Christianity and very unlikely to go away; it is more likely that there will continue to develop a deeper split between the traditionalist (majority) Christian faith and the progressive (post-Protestant) forms of Christianity. Does the progressive, secular, post-Protestant form of Christianity have a destination? Is it simply a reactive product of the social changes in the wider society? Or can it legitimately claim that there is a movement of the Spirit behind it?

Supporters of the progressive path will point to better treatment of women and minorities as a result of these changes. Opponents will concede (some of) this, but have a coherent case to say that the costs involved are not worth it. For example, in response to talking about the improved economic and social autonomy given to women, opponents can reference the rise in frivolous divorce, the misery passed on to children, the diminution of options for working class men and so on. I don’t want here to engage in a weighing up of this evidence, just to indicate that the progressive path is not without its (non-prejudiced) critics. More substantially, the critics of the progressive path are able to draw, not just on those economic arguments, but also on the fairly uniform voice of Scripture and Tradition. I am quite familiar with the arguments on this score – and, indeed, I have used the progressive arguments myself on repeated occasions. Yet one of the conservative evangelical criticisms of the progressive path does seem to be to be a true one – that it is not possible to maintain a commitment to the authority of Scripture, as understood in the evangelical tradition, if we accept the progressive developments (NB I don’t accept the authority of Scripture in that way).

What I am pondering is that the present ‘status quo’ of the progressive path is not stable. To bring this out, I want to ask: ‘what is wrong with polygamy?’ Once the move away from accepting the authority of Scripture and Tradition has been made – and, thus, there develops a primacy for personal autonomy and choice – what is to stop those who wish to pursue a polygamous marriage from doing so? There are many churches in the world where polygamy is at least tacitly accepted, as it still fits in with the local cultural context. In addition, a reasonably good argument can be made that it is not anti-Scriptural (a much stronger argument, in my view, than the equivalent one for homosexual relationships – and I’m sold on that). Yet I’m not sure that those who pursue the progressive path are fully aware that this is one of the destinations that their path is leading to, or what the implications of this path are.

What I’m really asking is: what are the fundamental principles from which a stable, progressive understanding of human sexuality and gender relationships might be formed? One of the best aspects of the traditional position is that it is rooted in a ‘theology of biology’; that is, there is an understanding of what it means to be male, and what it means to be female, which lies behind the more worked out and specific ethical teachings. The progressive understanding does not (yet) have that. One of the elements of the women bishops debate that has most strongly been borne in on me is an awareness that a) the conservative position is much more substantial and coherent than the progressives can countenance, and b) that the progressives do not know what it is that they are rejecting. In other words, they (we!) do not yet have anything that can take the place of the conservative understanding, and in consequence, we literally do not know what we are doing.

Having said all that, I remain quite open to the idea that the Spirit is genuinely behind all these developments – and, indeed, it may well be that proper work has been done on these matters that I’m not familiar with – and I certainly can’t see our society reversing many of them. Yet, as I also see our society as heading down the tubes with great rapidity, I don’t see that latter point as bearing much theological weight. I genuinely don’t know the answer to this, but it is what I am thinking about.

TBLA(extra): gay marriage as a spandrel

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bls commented: “people who don’t want children CAN marry, and the grammar is “marriage.” There is, literally, no difference whatever between the marriages of elderly couples and those who are planning families; they are exactly the same in law and in fact”. I want to engage with this a bit more formally, at the risk of completely compromising the order in which I wanted to address things (!)

I have long believed that the situation that we are in now is a result of changes in our society triggered by the advent of easily available and reliable contraception. The consequences of the development are complex and many-faceted, but one is the recognition and affirmation that there are at least two key facets to sexuality – one “for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity”, and one for the procreation of children (I’m ignoring, for now, the ‘remedy against fornication’ aspect which seems to me to be more puritan than Christian).

The legacy that we have, however, comes from a time when those two elements were understood to be united, and, moreover, combined with questions of inheritance and honour. So a marriage was often not simply about the union of two individuals (for whatever motive) as about the union or explicit political alliance of two families. The raising of children was (legally) kept within the bounds of marriage, with significant consequences for both the mothers and children of those born ‘out of wedlock’. In many cultures that remains the case of course.

Given this, the only way in which an affectionate union could be legally sanctioned was through marriage; and when such a union was so sanctioned, the approval carried a vast array of social weight. It seems to me that THIS is what the proponents of ‘equal marriage’ are seeking; in other words, it is all the weight of social approval embodied in the word ‘marriage’, as accumulated through history. It would represent, perhaps, a culmination of the ‘coming out’ process. In so far as this is what it means then I am wholly in favour of it.

However, this is where we get snagged upon semantics. For it seems to me that this aspect of marriage functions rather in the way that Stephen Jay Gould talked about ‘spandrels’. That is, the primary purpose of the social institution of marriage – and, I would argue, the reason why it has been regulated so closely – is the raising of children within a particular framework. That is the ‘core’ element of marriage, as understood. However, as the institution has developed, other elements have gone alongside it – elements that ‘came with the package’ where the union was reproductive, but which developed independent status as social goods in their own right. These ‘exaptations’ now need to be given their own autonomous social place.

So much of the opposition to gay marriage is rooted in an opposition to homosexuality as such. I am not part of that; in so far as the gay marriage agenda is about giving wholehearted social approval to gay relationships, that is (obviously) a good thing. Yet it seems to me that by insisting that non-reproductive unions ARE ‘marriage’ (which, as bls rightly points out, non-reproductive heterosexual unions have been so treated thus far) the difference between the two key facets – and, most especially, the fact that society has a significant greater interest in the raising of children than in the mutual society of a couple – is being eclipsed. That is the essence of my unease with what is happening. I think that a significant good – all the social apparatus around the raising of children – is at risk of being dismantled in favour of another good – the social approbation of gay relationships.

Where I disagree with bls is that I think that there is a major difference (in fact if not in law) between a couple that are procreative and a couple that are not. Indeed, to insist otherwise is to obliterate the pain of childless couples – for if there is no difference, why do they mourn? And I believe that the wider society (and God) takes a different view of the two forms of relationship. We have not yet worked out how to navigate this difference (doing so is the purpose of my TBLA sequence) and it may well be that, simply as a result of our biology, it makes no sense to separate the two. Or, it may be that we need to develop two new institutions to replace the old one of marriage – call the first ‘covenant relationship’ and the second ‘coparent relationship’ perhaps? I think that there is a difference between these two forms of relationship. Can both be adequately described as ‘marriage’? Possibly, but I just don’t think the case has properly been made yet.

Oh yes, and, for what it’s worth, I think that the CofE being prohibited from carrying out gay weddings is the worst of all possible worlds. Cameron is such a plonker.

TBLA(extra): it’s not just about "choice"

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This is an ‘excursus’ to the TBLA sequence; it most naturally belongs at the end, but it’s on my mind. I wanted to say a bit more about the gay marriage debate going on at the moment. My views are still evolving, and I want to make explicit what my concern is about the particular nature of the present conversation. As it is a ‘work-in-progress’ it’s still quite clunky, especially in the reliance on barbarous acronyms – sorry.

Our society is deeply confused about sexuality, and this leads into so many other problems. I want to indicate a broad framework for how I see what is happening, and introduce two barbarous acronyms: ‘PEG’, standing for ‘personal enjoyment and growth’, and ‘PROC’, standing for ‘procreation and raising of children’. Much of the confusion about sexuality in our culture stems, I believe, from a lack of discrimination between those two types of relationship, and to try and apply the rules, regulations and expectations with regard to the one straight on to the other, without regard to the differences inherent between them.

Partly this is a fact of history. The raising of children is something in which we as human beings biologically, and any community seeking to sustain itself socially, have a very great and serious interest. It is because of this that sexuality has always been tightly regulated. If children are raised poorly then they do not flourish, they cause havoc, and society suffers. Similarly, on questions of sexual behaviour, something like adultery can cause extreme violence between the adults, causing the breach of the peace and everything up to and including a community breakdown or war – think of Helen of Troy. So the dominant form and understanding of sexuality has been the PROC form. This is what lies behind all the ‘traditional’ marriage values, which regulate the expression of sexuality, which are strict about legitimacy, and which emphasise that rightly-ordered sexuality is principally about procreation. This is the official Roman Catholic teaching for example – so any form of sexuality which is not open to procreation is inherently sinful.

Yet this is a reductive and, I would argue, non-Scriptural view of human sexuality. Human beings do not engage with each other sexually purely for the purposes of procreation, but also for the purposes of human bonding and deepening of relationships – see the Song of Songs for the clearest Biblical expression of this. This, I believe, has always been the case. For example, ponder the fact that, unlike other primates, the human female does not overtly signal when she is fertile, and she engages in sexual behaviour even when she is not fertile. Human sexuality is expressed in all sorts of contexts and for all sorts of reasons, and this, I believe, underlies the PEG form of sexuality. Our relationships enable us to grow as human beings, and, sometimes, this involves engaging with another person as profoundly as a sexual relationship makes possible.

The spiritual truth is, I believe, that the PROC relationships are called to include the PEG elements as well. This is how the Church of England understands marriage, and that is why the preamble for weddings is written in the way that it is. The trouble with our present society is that, in responding to things like the development of (generally!) reliable contraceptive technology, and embracing all the ideas around personal growth and so on – ‘the sixties’ as popularly understood – we have allowed such PEG relationships to eclipse our understanding of PROC relationships. This has had terrible consequences. Society has had a stake in PROC relationships for a very good reason; how children are raised is tremendously important, and a stable and loving home environment is an overwhelmingly strong indicator of psychological health in children, and their flourishing in later life. Sadly, because we have elevated PEG relationships into an idol, we have a culture that practices serial monogamy and easy divorce – perfectly understandable and acceptable from a PEG point of view, but anathema to the PROC.

This is why I’m not convinced that there can be such a thing as gay marriage – it is inherently non-procreative, and therefore will always be fundamentally a PEG, not a PROC – and it is PROC-including-PEG that is holy matrimony, as I understand it. (I’m ignoring, for now, the difficult questions around adoption etc, as ‘hard cases make bad law’.) Both PEG and PROC can, I believe, be vehicles of holiness, but in different ways. A PEG can work ‘under its own steam’, because the momentum of personal growth and discovery is so strong. With a PROC it is different – even if the PROC would normally start out as a PEG. I believe that a promise of commitment, such as the vows, open up a space wherein we can learn to become more truly human, one with another. When this is simply between two people, that can be wonderful and life-enhancing purely in its own terms (that is how I understand civil partnership). Where this happens in a procreative context, then God is doing something even more remarkable through it, and it is more essential that the couple preserve the union (and it is more God’s will).

The trouble is that much of this discussion is about semantics – what is meant by a particular word. We’re in an environment where previously-held assumptions have broken down, and we’re still working out what to do with our present situation. What most troubles me about Cameron’s agenda is that he is elevating ‘choice’ to be the key criterion in working out whether gay marriage is the right way forward or not. To my mind that misses some of the most important elements of what has made marriage be what it is in our society – that is, it is an institution which subordinates individual choice to a wider social and human good. That’s what I fear is being recklessly cast aside in his haste to appear acceptable to progressive opinion. We must not make ‘choice’ into an idol – if we do then we are simply joining in with our culture’s worship of Mammon and treating everything in our human and social life as if it is a product in our supermarket for our discriminating delectation. Marriage is more important than this.