The Shenfield Lectures

A Church in Crisis? (1)

Lecture given by Rt Revd John Gladwin, Bishop of Chelmsford, on 18 October 2005 at St Mary’s Church, Shenfield, Essex

Gender and Sexuality

There are two things which are always at work in the church’s engagement with matters to do with our sexuality and personal relationships.

First, however well or otherwise it has done the task, it has always sought to hold faithfully to the teaching of Scripture and to the exposition of the doctrine of the Gospel. So wrestling with the text of Scripture and interpreting the basic doctrines of the faith are a consistent characteristic of the church’s work on these moral questions.

Second, things are always changing. Nothing remains the same. That second characteristic of the moral reasoning of the church is not a contradiction of the first. What it means is that the task of wrestling with the text and interpreting the doctrine has to persist because our human condition and experience and the issues so raised are always on the move.

At its best the church has resisted, therefore, two tendencies in facing up to these moral challenges. First, simply baptising what happens to be the culture and choices of the time. One has only to read St Paul’s letters to the Corinthians to understand that this has never been a feature of genuine Christian work. Second, the church has not given in to those voices down the centuries which seem to suggest that there is nothing to discuss – the Bible is clear – all we have to do is repeat the truths from the past irrespective of the context we are living in. The church has always been suspicious of these extremes.

If we hold our nerve and continue the historic task of serious engagement with the issues in the light of the given character of our faith then both our theology and our moral thinking will have a dynamic quality and one that attracts people seeking serious and substantial answers. So there are important questions of process before we can begin to look at the issues.

Let us take, for example, the Christian doctrine of marriage. This has manifestly developed in the history of the church in the face both of challenge and of cultural change. But the church believes that the language it uses on marriage in our time is consonant with Scripture and a powerful outworking of our understanding of God and of human life made in God’s image. There is a seamless line of truth between the core texts in the Genesis story of the creation of Adam and Eve, through the experience of the Old Testament including polygamy, into the Gospels and the teaching of Jesus, on to the early church and the attitudes to which the apostles had to respond and on into the history of Christian response across the centuries.

You can see this process going on in the Bible. Reading the Old Testament you could not come to the conclusion that polygamy – having many wives - was disapproved of. Nevertheless, Jesus’ exposition of the Genesis texts leaves no room for it. It cannot be made to fit with the story of the creation of man and woman in the image of God and the complementarities of that.

Let me further illustrate how things change by pointing to two historic sets of attitudes and their impact upon the public understanding of marriage. How do we understand the difference between men and women? There have been long periods of our history, particularly in early medieval times, where it has been seriously thought that a woman is really a second class man. That goes quite easily with a public understanding of marriage in which the wife is seen to be the property of her husband. The woman is to be given away by her father to another man. Not an understanding which goes down too well with many today. It may surprise you to know that an important step in moving away from such ideas is the Prayer Book Service for Holy Matrimony which included in the reasons for marriage, “It was ordained for the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity”.

That is the first step to the character of the contemporary service (see the Preface to Common Worship Marriage).

Let me point to an even more radical shift over the centuries. Let me remind you of the words of St Paul.

“To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practising self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” 1 Cor 7:8-9.

In the context of the early years of the church that led to the widespread view that the highest spiritual state was singleness and chastity. If you really want to travel the road of holiness you had to stay single. I guess our culture is changing again but most of us have been brought up in an environment of belief that the best thing to do is to get married and that singleness is distinctly second best. The early years of monasticism are testimony to another view. That lingers on to a measure in the singleness of Catholic clergy and of Orthodox bishops. To be really holy you should not be married.

Whilst St Augustine can be credited with starting to reverse that view and see in marriage a stability for people that is God given he also has contributed to our history in the popular understanding of his view that it is through the sexual act that our fallen nature is carried across the whole human race – thus encouraging a culture of seeing sex as somehow dirty. I guess that is lurking in the back ground of some of our difficulties.

I do not think that a responsible understanding of the doctrine of the Gospel – of the image of God in human life – as consonant with a view that women are second class men, that wives are their husbands property, that marriage is second best and that sex is dirty.

I guess the Christian understanding of marriage today would go something like this.

Marriage is a lifelong exclusive relationship of love between a man and a woman who are both of an age to be able equally to give their consent and who make promises to this effect. It is a relationship in which they are joined in bodily union and from which they are open to the gift of children where that is possible and appropriate.

That is certainly the doctrine of marriage held in English law and the church holds that consonant with Christian doctrine.

I want, just briefly, to deal with the question of interpreting Scripture. Let’s take the issue of divorce.

Allow me to read to you Mark 10:1-12 and Matthew19:3-9.

There is a debate between the Gospel writers – Matthew is interpreting, as I guess Mark was as well. Add to them St Paul trying to make sense of Christian life for the Corinthians and you will see that the church cannot escape the task of having to interpret the Gospel and the text.

Let me move on and say that it is not surprising that the church finds some of the issues facing it today quite a struggle.

The 20th century has seen the struggle for establishing the equal status of women with men at all levels of social experience. Disadvantages have been removed, discrimination outlawed and positive moves to bring that equality into reality taken on board. This has both been in response to and formative of changing patterns of social, cultural and economic life.
The 20th century has seen the introduction of safe artificial contraceptive practice and this has brought about a sexual revolution. People no longer see sex as potentially dangerous if steps are taken to make it safe. Lest we think this is not all pervasive it is worth noting that the nation with the lowest birth rate in Europe is Italy.

The 20th century, in its first 60 years, saw the rise of the popularity of marriage and couples getting married early in their adult life. The last part of the 20th century has seen this trend reversed. First the rise, in post war years and then in the ’60s onwards of divorce, has led to much reconstruction of family and household experience. Second, there is a caution about taking on marriage – so a massive rise in cohabitation and in the birth of children to such relationships. I doubt if there is a priest whose requests for marriage today are not from couples giving the same address.

The 20th century has seen the demand for equal civil rights for people from many ethnic and religious cultures and latterly from people who wish to live in same sex relationships. There is a growing universal expectation that public institutions and bodies in receipt of public funds practice effective equal opportunity policies.

Finally the late 20th century has seen the rise of what we call a post modern culture in which we accept and encourage diversity and are deeply suspicious of universal ideas and solutions being imposed upon people. Choice is the order of the day.

Of course, we must not simply baptise all of this. We need to be in Christian and critical engagement with it.

In that respect the Church of England has a very honourable history. Let me illustrate.

Take the issue of divorce. We, with the New Testament, share in the debate about understanding the meaning of the Genesis story and Jesus’ teaching on it.

There are three positions held by Anglicans.

Divorce and remarriage are allowed in Christian life in certain circumstances
Divorce but not remarriage is allowed in certain circumstances
Divorce is impossible because a marriage is by its nature indissoluble.

In the Reformation Canons were drawn up in Edward VI’s time to allow divorce and remarriage. The arrival of Mary Tudor to the throne brought an end to that. In the early 17th century Archbishop Whitgift and others produced new Canons for the Church which did recognise divorce but not further marriage.

In the Victorian era Parliament returned to the issue and the Marriage Act of the 1870s effectively reintroduced the Reformation principle and clergy were to be obliged to marry divorcees in church.

That was modified in 1932 to give clergy the choice. Acts of Convocation in the 1950s tried to stop all remarriage of divorcees in church. Latterly, after much difficulty, the church has made provision recognising that the Act of Convocation was probably unlawful.

Take secondly the question of contraception.

The Lambeth Conference of 1920 opposed it. That of 1930 recognised that Christians were doing it but the Bishops did not much like it. The 1948/58 Conferences came to support contraception having seen that it did not necessarily damage the Christian tradition of the unity between union and procreation. Those conferences saw the mature development of Anglican teaching on the family (“The Family in Contemporary Society”).

So Anglican theology develops. It does not seek to deny the tradition. But it does accept the need to revisit, restate and in that process develop. So it is the case that Anglicans take a different view from the official teaching of the Roman Church on these matters.

It is in that context that Anglicans, along with Christians of all traditions, are wrestling with the pastoral and theological issues raised by same sex relationships. Again, we have an honourable history of work on these matters.

It began, in the post war world, with our coming to terms with the movement to decriminalise homosexual acts. Behind the scenes key Anglican moral theologians – people like Gordon Dunstan and others, who had worked on the report on the Family and helped get the Bishops out of a theological hole on contraception, had been working on the principle of the question. In the method of the time they took the professional understanding of the condition of homosexuality as essential to the forming of a moral framework of understanding. That issue remains – are we talking about nature, nurture or culture – or a mixture of all three. That work encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, to support the 1967 Act which began process of taking decriminalising homosexual acts. There was much opposition in the church to this move. My own view is that the process of removing discriminatory laws was completed in the last Parliament and that the further step of providing for Civil Partnerships – whilst that provision is not just for Gay and Lesbian people – completes the legal cycle of establishing equity for people of the same sex who share life together.

That work in the late 1950s and the Act of 1967 together with the manifest reality that there had been and continued to be a significant number of Gay people in the life and ministry of the church led to the Church of England starting a process of serious theological reflection. That began with the Bishop of Gloucester’s Report which the Synod debated, found difficult and did not vote on. It continued with the working party under the Chairing of the present Dean of Salisbury, June Osborne. I was Secretary of that. The Bishops found it too hot to handle and so it was never published! That eventually led to the House of Bishops own Statement on Issues in Human Sexuality which, whilst a discussion document has shaped the policy the Bishops follow especially in relation to Ordination.

Alongside that has gone various debates in the Synod and Lambeth Conference leading to the 1987 motion which states the traditional understanding of sex and the Lambeth Conference of 1998 which did the same but requires the church to listen to homosexual people and especially its own Christian members.

More recent activity in North America and throughout the Anglican Communion has added to the angst. I will come to the character of Anglicanism in these respects next week.

Lest we are too critical of what the church has done we should note that it is sound and right for the church to hold to the language it knows and understands as the proper teaching of the Bible and of Christian doctrine until such time as there is a widespread recognition that the tradition is open to wider and fresh understandings. The 1987 resolution and the Lambeth 1998 resolution properly state the formal position of the church.

What those resolutions both imply in themselves and state openly in some cases is that there is a debate going on. Anglicanism, as we have seen, has a vital characteristic of encouraging open theological debate. So we must resist those who on the one hand think the debate means we are about to change our doctrine – there are no proposals to do so – and those who think the various resolutions mean there is nothing to talk about and no basis for continuing theological engagement.

That will not do because, when we stand back from the heat of the debate, we all know that the Bible says very little about the issue and that many of its texts do not directly apply to the questions we face. Tackling this moral challenge inevitably involves persistent wrestling with the meaning of the text.

But I want, finally, to suggest that important though these issues are the real challenges of our time and culture in personal relationships lie elsewhere. The question of same sex relationships is part of the agenda but not at the heart of it.

We face a real crisis around marriage.

The institution and culture of marriage is not proving as attractive as once it was. People are choosing to live together rather than get tied by the obligations of marriage and all the potential difficulties of undoing it if it goes wrong.

What has been lost?

The lifelong character of marriage for many people
The bond between sexual union and the bond of love in marriage
The expectation of producing children.

In the past there was, of course, break down in marriages even if people did not seek divorce. There has always been a lot of sex outside marriage. Not all marriages produce children. But there has been a cultural shift.

Divorce is a trauma for people but not socially disapproved of. Parents may have some anxieties about their children living with their partners before even contemplating marriage but huge numbers now live that way and the younger generation think nothing of it. A mixture of late marriage and the economic and social demands on young people mean that many wait before they have children until it becomes more difficult.

That contributes to the widespread attitudes that wonder why the church is getting in such a fuss about people of the same sex living together. Should we not be celebrating stability and commitment in human relationships when there is so much instability all round the circle? Provided people are responsible about sex – namely that it is safe – why the fuss?

I guess those attitudes are inside the church as well as outside. So we are all involved. The issue is not just about them – gay and lesbian people – it is about us. It concerns our attitudes and expectations surrounding our personal relationships.

There are some serious downsides to our culture. We saw on Sunday night the growing and alarming rates of the rise of sexual disease. Free sex is still dangerous and sex with a wide range of partners is not as safe as people think.

Whilst I am not opposed to the provision of divorce the impact upon our culture and on people is rather larger than we think. I have not known a divorce which has not diminished all the parties. What message about stability and durability in relationships is being given to the next generation?

So we are driven back to some very basic and core truths.

The character of love and its obligations.

The duties that go with liberties and rights.

The need for commitment if relationships are to work

The mutual and interdependent character of Christian love.

So we are driven back to marriage as a bond in love that brings two people together into a relationship that unites them. The Biblical and Christian emphasis on the joy and the grace given in such mutual commitment and on the obligations that comes with the gift.

We have to say that stability and strength in this relationship – in marriage which two people make with each other – is the basic building block of social peace and stability.

So the Christian church cannot go down the secular and libertarian road of simply going with the flow that anything goes. It does not. Even if we need to be welcoming of every sign of love and stability in our personal lives and accept that there is a mystery about everyone’s life that will make us reticent of being too absolutist in our attitudes – the church will be a voice for holding firmly to the pivotal gift of God for the flourishing of our personal and domestic lives in marriage. The cultures and practice that surrounds that will vary and keep changing with the shifts of human experience. What remains is this gift which God has given. How it is experienced and shaped will be a source of debate and even argument among Christians – but then it always has been like that.

So perhaps we need a little less anxiety about the challenges and little more reflection and readiness to grow in understanding as the journey moves on.

A Church in Crisis? (2)

Lecture given by Rt Revd John Gladwin, Bishop of Chelmsford, on 25 October 2005 at St Mary’s Church, Shenfield, Essex

Traditionalist and Progressive

I am preparing this lecture to the sound of Louis Armstrong. It is incredible to think that his grandmother was a slave in the Southern States of America and that he played on a club boat on the Mississippi River in the 1920s. That boat was not desegregated until 1967. How the world has changed in our own time!

We live, without doubt, in interesting times. As I shared with you last week when thinking through marriage and personal relationships there have been huge shifts in our culture and in public understanding and practice even in the last 20 years.

In looking at the challenges facing Anglicanism today we have to come to terms with a paradox. Two things are happening at the same time.

First, there is a growing acceptance of and commitment to the diversity of human life. The culture emphasises difference. Let me read to you that paragraph from the Archbishop’s reflection at the end of the new Biography of Trevor Huddlestone by Piers McGrandle:-

The liberal assumption that ‘treating everyone alike’ is the answer rests on a view of human nature which is deeply problematic. It assumes that there is a basic ‘inner’ humanity, beyond flesh and skin pigmentation and history and conflict, which is the same for all people. But human existence is precisely life that is lived in speech and relation, and so in history: what we share as humans is not a human ‘essence’ outside history, but a common involvement in the limits and relativities of history. The only humanity we have is one bound up in difference, in the encounter of physical and linguistic strangers….When great stress is laid upon our oneness ‘under the skin’, there is always the risk of rendering that as ‘this stranger is really the same as me’ – which subtly reinforces the dominant group’s assumption of the right to define. p216

Living well with difference is a key challenge to the church today.

Second, alongside this goes the remorseless drive to globalisation. It is possible some of you will remember travelling abroad in the years after the War. You were only allowed to take £25 with you in cash. Now just think of the change that has happened. We don’t take cash – we take cards and get money wherever we are. You book a flight to go on holiday – it may well be processed in Bangalore. You go to Harwich and look across at the great Container Port at Felixstowe and you see these huge container ships brining in goods from China. So companies based here are producing their goods in Asia and companies based in Asia are producing goods here. By contemporary means of communication finance can flow around the world in seconds and design can be transferred to wherever it is needed. So Africa and America and Asia are inevitably locked together – we cannot do without each other.

That too is becoming a problem for the modern church. The impact of globalisation is affecting all our relationships across the world and affecting the expectations of people as they now know what is available elsewhere.

The globalisation of our economic and social life and the process of liberalising the world economy are raising questions about power. A world that is open to all is especially open to the influence of the powerful. So there is resistance as well. Part of the issue in Islam is resistance to western and American domination. That issue is not totally absent from the problems we face in the Anglican Communion. I wonder whether, for example, the appointment of a Gay Bishop in the Episcopal Church in Scotland would have had the same impact as we have seen following the decision to do this in the USA? There are questions about power. Our African brothers and sisters are flexing muscles – saying they are not prepared to live under the dominance in the church – let alone society – of Western mores and power.

There is something else we need to bear in mind. Post September 11th and July 7th we cannot avoid the important question about the role of religion. Gone are the secular days when it could be assumed that religion was a sort of private matter and had little to do with public life. Those planes that brought down the twin towers were being flown by devout Muslims who were probably saying their prayers as they committed this terrible act. Suddenly religion has become important. What we believe and how we express it matters – see the Religious Hatred Bill passing through Parliament at this time.

So we live in one world.
We live in a world where we have to come to terms with human diversity.
We live in a world in confusion about faith.

It is not surprising, therefore, to find the church struggling with how to respond and how to make the Gospel visible in such a world.

I know the Anglican Communion has got itself into a difficult state over the issues raised by the consecration of an openly Gay Man in the USA and the blessing of same sex relationships in Canada. I will comment on the way the Communion needs to move ahead in a moment. But we have tackled some issues well.

Women and Holy Orders is a case in point. The Communion has agreed that the Provinces of the Anglican Communion can make their own decisions on these matters. So those Provinces that believed it right, for the sake of the Gospel, to proceed to ordain women were free to do so. The basic communion of Anglicanism was not affected – even if the ministry of women is not universally recognised across the Anglican Communion. We agreed that difference here did not have to divide us.

All Provinces of the Communion live within the agreed framework. That is the framework provided by what we call the Lambeth Quadrilateral.

There are four principles to it.

a.The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the revealed Word of God
b.The Nicene Creed as a sufficient statement of the Christian faith
c.The two sacraments, Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, ministered with unfailing use of Christ’s words of institution and of the elements ordained by Him.
d.The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the unity of His Church.

That is it. That is what has, theologically, held the Communion together – a classic Anglican statement of that which is essential. Bible, Creed, Sacraments, Bishops. Lacking these things means you cannot be in full communion with Anglicanism.

It is manifest that the ordaining of women is not thought to have broken any of those principles. It is accepted that it is open to members of the Anglican Church to hold to the ordination of women and, in good faith, believe they are being faithful to Anglican teaching and order.

The diversity of Anglicanism on this issue reflects the fact that the Christian church is not agreed on this matter. The Roman and Orthodox Churches do not accept the validity of women in orders even if some of their members would welcome it. Protestant churches almost universally welcome it even if some of their members have doubts. The Church of England is in full communion with churches that have women as Bishops. Whilst those women may not exercise their office in England because we have not yet accepted women into the episcopate there is no question of the lawfulness of the decisions made by these churches to accept women into the episcopate.

As, therefore, the Church of England begins to face up to this issue we cannot hold that this raises a fundamental principle which might break the unity of the Anglican Church. Even if we accept that there are doctrinal and ecclesiological issues at stake – they are not of the order to call into question the integrity of our Anglican identity.

In the setting of our culture and in the face of the Biblical call to recognise the image of God equally in women and men I see no reason not to proceed with this and every reason to do so. As has been said elsewhere ‘if you can baptise women you must, in principle, be able to ordain them.’ The ministry of the church arises by the grace of God from the life of the whole baptised community.

Of course, we need to continue to proceed in ways which recognise the diversity of our world, our understandings and of our own opinions. So we must do all we can, without compromising the character of episcopal life, to respect the consciences of those who do not agree and keep the church open to all.

The present difficulties in the Anglican Communion arose because of the action in the USA and Canada. There, what was in the life of those churches recognised to be lawful decisions were seen in the Communion as unilateral decisions paying no attention to the need to keep faith with the rest of the Anglican Church. The Windsor Report, which I commend to you not least for some magnificent work on how to handle Scripture and on the meaning of Communion, sought to begin the process of getting us out of a mess. That is work is in progress.

It is clear to me that the church needs its international life. Africans and American Christians need to be in communion with one another. Unless we are in communion with one another we are going to continue hurting one another. The significance for mission for our African brothers and sisters of seeming to suggest that homosexual conduct is morally acceptable was not understood. The struggle of Christianity with Islam in Africa is real. Our African colleagues felt their mission was being undermined by decisions taken in North America about which they had not had a chance to speak and contribute.

But underneath we all face the same challenge. Africa also faces the challenge of change and diversity. Not the same as ours but nevertheless real.

The HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa raises a multitude of questions for us all about our global world, about the difficulties of libertarianism, about sex and marriage and family. We need to talk to one another.

Then again, the multi faith character of our world invades all our lives. As we know in this diocese – we are a colourful community of many faiths and cultures. So are Africa and Asia and South America. Again, that sharing of experience, mutual listening and help are vital to understanding how, in our different contexts we are all to be faithful to Jesus Christ.

Behind them are big issues about power. We do need our American brothers and sisters to help with how we respond to the global village, to war, poverty, economic change and the liberalisation of the economic order. What happens in American, Asia and Europe has deep implications for the poorest nations on earth. It is unthinkable and irresponsible for any to divide the church further at this time. Now is when we need each other.

So in the pattern of Biblical life we need to respect the consciences of those with whom we disagree, avoid actions which are going to offend and accept the disciplines of a commitment to live in communion however different our life experience might be. After all it is the one God who is known in the one Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit who holds us together in the bond of eternal love.

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