Category Archives: TBLA

TBLA(6): Pecca Fortiter

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One of the key theological insights that I hang on to, which came to me from Bonhoeffer (articulating the Lutheran tradition) is ‘Pecca Fortiter’ – ‘sin boldly’. There is, I think, a right way to understand this, and a wrong.

The wrong is the one that Bonhoeffer chastises in ‘Cost of Discipleship’, which is ‘cheap grace’. This way of understanding the phrase effectively means – do what you like because you’re covered by grace anyway. It becomes an antinomianism only half a breath removed from a complete licentiousness. One of my favourite quotations of Wittgenstein: ‘If what we do now makes no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.’ What we do matters in the long run and this way of understanding the action of grace seems to me to do away with all sense of better and worse, all that speaks to us of quality, or excellence, or holiness.

In contrast to this I would argue for a way of understanding ‘pecca fortiter’ which is centred upon relieving us of our burden of guilt and sense of failure. It is true that we cannot earn our way to heaven; it is also true that everything that we do is going to be tainted by our sin and failures. What this phrase means in this context is that we should not let the fear of failure prevent us from seeking to grow in faith. Of course, what we do might be a fearsome failure, a spectacular example of what not to do – but there is no place where we can go that will take us away from the love of God revealed in Christ. So long as we are constantly seeking him, constantly seeking to grow closer to him, then we can trust that he will hold on to us and no matter what sort of mess we find ourselves in, he will be able to pull us out of it. So I take ‘pecca fortiter’ to be a realistic maxim of encouragement. We have the authority to judge the angels, yet we will not be able to exercise such judgement unless we have grown in maturity ourselves. It is through being set free from the fear of failure that we will learn and develop that capacity for judgement. We are rather like toddlers learning to walk – we have to try and fail many, many times before we can start making strides.

In other words, if a group of Christians, after a great deal of prayer and reflection, come to the conclusion that a radical change in behaviour is led by the Spirit – then a fear of the consequences (or a reference to keeping the rules) is not enough to say that it is wrong. That group of Christians themselves have the authority and the right to test that particular spirit and to see if the changes tend towards holiness and righteousness or otherwise. This, after all, is what happened in the first-century debates about circumcision and kosher food laws. I think the same applies to our struggles over sexuality today. Put simply, we need to trust the baptism of our brothers and sisters.

TBLA(5): radical non-judgement

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One of the most salient teachings of Jesus – and one of the very hardest to follow – is ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’. I see this as the expression of a core spiritual truth; that if we live as ones who are forgiven, not from merit but from grace, that we are enabled to share that mercy and forgiveness and grace with others. It is about the divine love overflowing through us. To judge – and I take that in the sense of ‘to condemn’ – is to separate ourselves out from that overflowing grace and thereby to invoke a solemn judgement upon ourselves. “The measure that you give will be the measure that you receive”; “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” – these are expressions of the same core spiritual law. I do sometimes wonder whether this is the only thing that needs to be known and lived in order to be a Christian.

However, for my purposes in this sequence, the conclusion that I draw is that if a Christian brother or sister has prayed through a situation and come to a particular discernment then it is not for any other Christian to stand in judgement and condemnation over them. To start denouncing a fellow Christian as a sinner is a) to state the obvious, but b) more importantly, to demonstrate a failure to understand the gospel, and thus, to exclude oneself from the Kingdom.

This is not to say that all discrimination is abandoned, that ‘anything goes’ – it is simply to affirm the profound spiritual respect which we are called to offer one another as fellow baptised Christians. We are all sinners, and we do not get to heaven through our own merit. Possibly a divergence of view will lead to a failure of shared communion – ‘let them be to you as a gentile and a tax collector’ and so on – but that can be done in a Christian spirit or in a judgemental spirit. Only one of those is Holy.

So this is absolutely key to the discussion about marriage. That is, if we are to truly and mutually discern what is God’s will for our community today, we need to be able to listen with holy ears to things that might otherwise shock us. I do not believe we need to be afraid of this.

TBLA(4): The question of truth

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One of the corollaries of my last post is: given that the church has the authority to decide what is right and what is not right (the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven) – how are we to do make such a determination?

This is simply ‘the question of truth’ – that is, the truth shall set us free, nothing that is true is foreign to Jesus, so the pursuit of truth is something that necessarily leads us into the light. This does not mean that ‘truth’ as a construct can be placed in an antagonistic relationship to the gospel, in order that one must be defeated. It is more a question of humility and willingness to be challenged.

One of the most ignored instructions from the infamous Lambeth Conference of 1998 was surely the injunction to listen to the homosexual Christian community about their understandings and experience. It is not possible to listen in the relevant sense if there is an irrevocable commitment to “you are a sinner”. However, if listening is genuinely entered into, then so does the Holy Spirit – and together, the truth of a situation becomes discernible.

One of the best books that I have read on this subject is Gareth Moore’s “A Question of Truth”. He makes the argument there that it is not good enough to appeal to authority. If we believe – as Christians have always maintained that they do believe – in a God of order and reason, then that reason and order is open to an appreciation by the community. This is what drives the theological question. In his book, Moore slowly takes apart the standard Roman Catholic dogma and simply points out that ‘this is not true’.

So for my purposes, this is another foundational plank in the overall argument. If we are to come to a proper understanding of the nature of Christian marriage, appeals to authority are insufficient, however important the authority may be (and it is not an accident that I began this sequence with Jesus’ own teaching). We must be able to demonstrate the truth of our position.

To that end, I will in due course be drawing on contemporary scientific research about sexuality. If anyone wants a hint as to what sort of thing I’ll be using, have a look at this book.

TBLA(3): the third foundational teaching of Jesus

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This one is from Matthew 16:

13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’ 14 They replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ 15 ‘But what about you?’ he asked. ‘Who do you say I am?’ 16 Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ 17 Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter,[b] and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades[c] will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be[d] bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be[e] loosed in heaven.’

I take verse 19 to be a delegation of authority from Jesus to Peter (and hence to the church as a whole, the consensus fidelium) on all ethical and moral matters. In other words, the church has the capacity to decide for itself what sort of “social apparatus” to adopt, in the sense that I described earlier.

I see this as underlying decisions like that of the Jerusalem council about whether circumcision was necessary, or keeping the kosher food laws. Those are questions of “social apparatus”, and are not matters of salvation. Similarly I believe that the church has the authority to declare gay marriage legitimate, if it so chooses. Underlying this is, of course, an understanding of the authority of Scripture – for a more detailed explanation of my views, see this post.

A teaching of St Paul’s is relevant here: “‘I have the right to do anything,’ you say – but not everything is beneficial.” In other words, the authority of the church to determine questions of morality is distinct from licentiousness – it still matters what we do, and some things destroy life, other give it. What needs to be attended to are the fruits of the Spirit; or, as is described in Acts, whatever ‘seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us’. In order to determine this, there is a right process to be followed, in two parts: the question of truth, and the question of non-judgement, which are the subject of my next two posts.

TBLA(2): the second foundational teaching of Jesus

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This one I’m going to take from Mark 10, for reasons I shall explain:

“Jesus then left that place and went into the region of Judea and across the Jordan. Again crowds of people came to him, and as was his custom, he taught them. 2 Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ 3 ‘What did Moses command you?’ he replied. 4 They said, ‘Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.’ 5 ‘It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,’ Jesus replied. 6 ‘But at the beginning of creation God “made them male and female”.[a] 7 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife,[b] 8 and the two will become one flesh.”[c] So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’ 10 When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. 11 He answered, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. 12 And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.’”

The reason for quoting the Markan passage rather than the Matthean parallel is because I believe the significant change in the Matthew passage – ie the exception for adultery – to be an addition to what Jesus himself taught. That is, I believe that a major thrust of Jesus’ teaching on marriage to be a prohibition on divorce in all circumstances. To put that differently, I do not believe that Jesus allowed adultery to be a reason for divorce; I think that this is a Matthean addition brought in because Jesus’ teaching was too hard for the community to accept – in other words, that the ‘hardness of heart’ Jesus refers to was still present in the early Christian community.

More significant, however, is the context for that teaching about divorce, which is the ‘one flesh’ reference back to Genesis. I want to spend a lot of time thinking through this passage – much more than I plan to incorporate in a single post – but for now I simply want to register that this passage, in the Markan form, is the second foundational text for my explorations.

TBLA(1b): a bit more on Matthew 22

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The best thing about writing on a blog is the chance for instant feedback and analysis, which means that misconceptions have a chance (a chance, not a certainty) of being cleared up before going further. So this is primarily a response to John’s comment.

Matthew 22 is undoubtedly a teaching about the resurrection; Jesus is refuting the Sadducees as John articulates. Yet I don’t think that this exhausts the meaning or importance of the passage itself. Firstly, the assumption being made by the Sadducees is to do with the Mosaic law about inheritance, about keeping a name alive in the land. That is the context which generates the perceived absurdity – the absurdity being that a woman cannot belong (be given) to more than one man. Jesus rebukes this by rejecting the idea that there is any ‘belonging’ in the resurrection, in the sense assumed by the Sadducees. He is therefore, I am arguing, rejecting the “social apparatus” of marriage as it existed in his time, ie the whole panoply of property law and inheritance obligations. The point that I was stumbling towards is that there is a distinction between this “social apparatus” – which is transient – and those elements of a relationship which do partake of the eternal, especially in so far as they embody agape.

The interesting bit – interesting for me, that is – is going to be working out precisely how this difference works out for us in this life, and how far things like the raising of children, or the ‘mutual love and affection’ of a gay partnership, are affected by this distinction. My sense is that the raising of children requires exactly a “social apparatus”; whereas something like a gay relationship doesn’t so much. Which is why I expect to argue that marriage – which is very much a “social apparatus” – is different from something like a civil partnership, even when that civil partnership is equally (if not more) capable of being a vehicle for the incarnation of agape love.

TBLA (1): the first foundational teaching of Jesus

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From Matthew 22:

23 That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 24 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. 25 Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. 26 The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. 27 Finally, the woman died. 28 Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?” 29 Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. 30 At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. 31 But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, 32 ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’[b]? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

What does it mean to say that “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven”?

I take it to mean that marriage is part and parcel of this world, the fallen world, that it is not an essential part of the life to come. In other words, the implication of this teaching of Jesus is that marriage is not of eternal importance, and this teaching therefore acts as a bulwark against all attempts to make marriage into a totem or idol. It does not mean that marriage is of no importance at all – hardly that – it simply places a marker down against raising it up to be more than it is.

And what is it? Well, one of the key assumptions in this passage (as set out by Countryman) is that marriage is an economic arrangement. In other words, the question being asked by the Sadducees is a question of property law; it is not a question about the nature of the relationship, in a way that a modern ear might expect to hear.

So is it simply as an economic arrangement that marriage does not share in the eternal? I suspect that it is – but working out all the implications of that is what this series of posts is going to be about. After all, we are assured repeatedly that God is love, and that love is eternal – so in so far as marriage partakes of love, then surely it is also something that has implications beyond the resurrection. I suspect that, in so far as we learn to embody the divine love (agape) in our relationships, so too will we be sharing in something which lasts forever.

To be like angelsAspects of marriage, gay, straight and other

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I want to start a sequence of posts – it might eventually become a book! – talking about some elements (not all) of the marriage debate. I believe that some very central things are being missed, and I want to challenge some of the assumptions that seem to underlie the argument, especially with respect to gay marriage. Part of my thinking was hinted at in this previous post but at that point my thinking had not properly coalesced. It has now – or, perhaps more accurately, it has now got to the point that some public thinking and writing on the topic would help me to firm up my views. The Hobo’s comment here has made me realise that the time is ripe (I should also add that the Courier article linked was one that had been asked for by the editor.)

I expect to argue for the following:
– that marriage is an earthly arrangement, and not a heavenly one, and what this means
– that the church has the power to decide what constitutes marriage
– that the church has an obligation to explain and justify its understanding of marriage
– that an essential element of marriage is procreative, ie the presence of children (not the potential presence of children, so not the Roman Catholic view)
– that non-procreative unions (civil partnerships, whether gay or straight) can also be bearers of the holy, but differently to the procreative
– that the key hallmark of the ‘biblical view of marriage’ is not the Adam/Eve companionship element, but the ‘one flesh’ prohibition of divorce
– that our present arrangements are radically unjust, especially to children and to men
– that our cultural understandings, especially with regard to ‘romantic love’ and self-fulfilment, are idolatrous
– that if the justice issues are addressed, there is no necessary incompatibility between Christian faith and alternative marriage arrangements (eg gay relationships, polygamy and so on).

I expect this will take some time to explore, but the above is the direction and sequence that I plan to follow.

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Index of posts:
1. The first foundational teaching of Jesus – resurrection, and supplemental post
2. The second foundational teaching of Jesus
3. The third foundational teaching of Jesus
4. The question of truth
5. Radical non-judgement
6. Pecca Fortiter
7. Choices in a broken world.

Additional posts:
It’s not just about ‘choice’
Gay marriage as a spandrelThe separation of sex from the procreation of children (link to an Andrew Brown article)

One very important question hovering behind the sequence.

A brief question about marriage

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Just thinking out loud here: is Christianity tied to any particular view of marriage? That is, if the social patterns of marriage changed drastically from what is conventionally acceptable today, and the Church blessed the process, would anything essential to Christianity be lost?

A handful of points:
– Jesus tells us that marriage is an earthly arrangement, not a heavenly one;
– Scripture witnesses to a variety of marriage styles, especially polygamy;
– on the other hand, Scripture also often portrays the heterosexual bond as normative (eg Mt 19.4-6);
– it’s probably the particular virtues involved (fidelity, honesty etc) that are crucial for Christian life;
– in Christian history there have been times (eg medieval era) when marriage was restricted to those who were comparatively wealthy, eg with property, so marriage as such is not a universal;
– more recently, polygamy still seems to be tacitly accepted in some Christian areas, the argument being that monogamy owes more to Roman culture than to Scripture (although there are good scientific arguments for monogamy too).

With this I’m just trying to get clear about what is at stake in the discussion about the blessing of civil unions, and what it would mean if they were called ‘marriage’, and, more broadly, what would happen if a wider culture embraced or accepted a wide variety of “alternative” lifestyles.

My suspicion is that the answers to my opening questions are both ‘No’ and that Christianity can function, flourish and ‘be itself’ in all sorts of diverse contexts.