Dave Tomlinson

Nothing polarises the church quite like the debate over homosexuality. But amid the destructive rhetoric that pits liberalism against orthodoxy, are we missing the point?
DAVE TOMLINSON goes in search of that elusive, inclusive Third Way.

I ONCE worked for a year or so as the chaplain of Mildmay Hospital in London, which treats people with HIV and AIDS. In my first week there I met with a man who we’ll call Brian. He was a beautiful guy, a camp Noel Coward type, probably in his early fifties. I liked him very much as I sat and talked with him, but he was in a state of great depression and despair, and his despair was linked to religion. He’d long since abandoned his Catholic background, but somehow it had never quite abandoned him. The guilt had never been resolved and it was tormenting him deeply. I tried my best to offer him other perspectives, to reason my way through it, but it was clear that this sort of thing was going on at a much deeper level that I didn’t feel equipped to reach. He was about to go home for a short spell, so before the car came to pick him up we made an arrangement to meet the following Wednesday when he returned to the hospital. When I arrived at work on Monday morning I was told that Brian had committed suicide.

I was deeply distressed about it, and felt a great sense of failure. At his funeral the following week, we were scattering his ashes on the roof garden of the hospital, when his mother screamed out in the middle of this little service. She was essentially screaming at the Church. ‘Why have you done this to my son?’ she asked, with an agony and pain that went deep into my own soul. ‘Why have you persecuted him? He was a beautiful, beautiful man, why did you have to drive him to this?’

In the recent debate over gay ordination I have often found myself thinking about Brian. We have heard passionate rhetoric from all sides, but it has been accompanied by an uncomfortable sense that all our theorising is not getting us any closer to showing Christ’s love to those at the fringes. ‘I wonder,’ asked Jane Shilling, the Times’ newspaper columnist recently, ‘if the Church of England has any idea of how ugly and how unfit to offer moral guidance for the rest of us it’s making itself look with its present divisions over homosexuality and the priesthood.’ Is it really true that the debate represents a fundamental divide between those who, as the Archbishop of Nigeria suggests, are faithful to scripture and those who aren’t? Between those who remain true to the gospel of Jesus Christ and those who do not? Between those who remain committed to the Church and her traditions and those who are abandoning historic Christianity in favour of some liberal secular agenda?

In this article I would like to avoid these reductionist assumptions – that all evangelicals are homophobes, or that everyone who supports gay relationships is automatically a liberal – and ask a different question: How can we find a spirituality that is true to orthodox faith, committed to the Church and faithful to scripture – and inclusive to people like Brian?

OLD LABELS

Both liberal and orthodox are increasingly inadequate labels. The liberal Christian tradition has a long and honourable history within the Christian Church, offering at its best an intellectual and spiritual openness, an honesty and rigour essential to critical approaches – qualities vital to the future as well as the past. However there is also a form of popular liberalism which often lacks that honesty and rigour. It is characterised more by a lack of conviction, maybe even unbelief. It exalts tolerance as the chief virtue, which can sometimes amount to a kind of intellectual sloppiness – a laziness to grapple properly with the issues. So while there’s nothing wrong with liberalism, many of us don’t really wear that label comfortably. We embrace the honesty and the intellectual rigour of the liberal method, but we also have a faith that is shaped by orthodox beliefs.

The problem with orthodoxy, however, is that it tends to suggest rigidity and regression, much like the word ‘fundamentalist’. In ‘What is Catholic Orthodoxy?’, an essay written some years ago, Rowan Williams identified two contrasting approaches to orthodoxy. The first is a closed system. It is pre-packaged, determined, watertight, a comprehensive ideology – a meta-narrative, to use a bit of postmodern jargon. This sort of orthodoxy stifles thought and distorts perception. It allows no real conversation. It is a monologue, and selfscrutiny is excluded. There is no conversation because actually everything has already been said and all that’s left to do is repeat it again and again and again ad nauseum. Interpretation is not an issue because truth is seen as self-evident.

Instead, I would like to focus on Williams’ second category, what we might call open or progressive orthodoxy. It should be seen as a tradition of shared speech, of shared symbols, a living community of revelation and discourse, a tradition that makes critical engagement possible. Conversation isn’t only allowed, it’s positively generated out of this sort of orthodoxy. Interpretation is taken as an absolute essential. What we have are perspectives on truth rather than claiming to possess The Truth. Tradition is not a static but a dynamic force, not stifling but liberating. Progressive orthodoxy therefore encourages a dialectical relationship between the received tradition on the one hand and contemporary insights and struggles on the other.

FLAT PACK OR MECCANO?

There’s a lovely line in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, by the brother of a young woman who is trying to break free from her patriarchal Greek background, who tells his sister: ‘Don’t let the past define who you are, but let it be part of who you become’. It’s a pretty good definition of the kind of orthodoxy I’m advocating – it’s being deeply rooted in the originating sources of the Christian faith, while recognising that we are moving forward.

These two approaches to orthodoxy actually represent quite different sorts of Christianity and it’s for that reason that many people are talking about a split within the Anglican Communion. On the one hand we have flat pack Christianity, in which your cardboard box of bits and pieces fit together in a preordained way, which you discover by reading the supposedly simple instructions. On the other hand there is Meccano set Christianity – also a box with lots of bits and pieces which you put together, but with many different possibilities outlined in a little book. If you’re really clever and imaginative (which I never was) you can make things up that are not even in the book at all. I believe the Bible calls for the Meccano set rather than the flat pack approach. What we find in the Bible isn’t a monolithic image of what religion of Christianity is about, but at times clashing perspectives which are can be hard to reconcile with one another – unless you already have a flat pack drawing which you can simply impose over the whole thing.
You may say that the Meccano approach sounds completely relativistic, that you just build whatever you want – but that’s not completely true. There remain certain governing factors with the bits of a Meccano set: you’re not supposed to bend them, for example, or integrate them with Lego. Similarly, in progressive orthodoxy there are governing factors. It involves the interaction between scripture, tradition, reason and experience, in deciding what might be truly Christian and what in fact constitutes an abandoning of historic Christianity. As a friend, Maggie Dawn, has put it, ‘you have to change to stay the same’. Cultural and historical factors are changing all the time and thischange demands constant reinterpretation, constant reconfiguration. Or to use a different image from photography, when your subject moves, as history moves, you need to refocus carefully, until the two sides of the circle realign like the split ring inside a camera. That is how I see the hermeneutical process, the process of interpretation of the Christian tradition including the bible.
COMMITTED WRESTLING
I grew up with a respect for scripture bred into me by my brethren church in Liverpool. My relationship with the Bible has progressed over the years much like my relationship with my wife. I’ve fallen in love with it on occasions, I’ve also fallen very firmly out of love with it; I’ve got angry with it, I’ve walked away from it. I’ve put it on a shelf and thought I’ve had enough of it. I’ve come back and looked again. It’s a relationship, and I’ve carried on wrestling. For this reason that I get intensely annoyed when people stand up and tell me that I’ve thrown the Bible away. The Bible is as much a part of my life today as it ever has been. I read it everyday following the lectionary pattern of readings; its storytelling, poetry, its literary beauty especially of the Old Testament I have to say enchants me deeply. The Bible makes God real to me in lots of different ways. It also constantly challenges me. It instructs my faith.
And of course the Bible has influenced humanity profoundly in many ways. In 380AD for instance it inspired the great teacher, Gregory of Nyssa to condemn slavery. In the nineteenth century it lead evangelical believers to abolish or lead to the abolition of the slave trade. It led them to fight poverty and injustice, to contend for greater equality between the sexes. In our own day it’s inspired movement for justice and liberation. Within society at large the Bible has had some profoundly positive effects. Yet we have to face the fact that for others it has been a complete and utter disaster. For fourteen hundred years it was used to portray Africans as cursed by God, and to justify their enslavement. It was used to sanction medieval witchhunts. South African apartheid was firmly based (in the minds of many, many people) on the teachings of the Bible. It has led to the oppression of women, to gay and lesbian persecution, to environmental destruction. And the fact is the Bible does appear to countenance slavery. It does appear to advocate the subordination of women to men. It does seem to condemn homosexual relationships.
COMPETING INTERPRETATIONS

The issue, then, is not whether one throws the bible away or whether one is faithful to it, but how one reads it and how one goes about the process of interpreting it. The truth is that every reading of the Bible is a hermeneutical reading, it’s an interpretation. It doesn’t matter how much that you believe you are reading it exactly as it stands on the page, it is an interpretation, and that is all we have. Not long ago, the US talk radio personality Dr. Laura Schlesinger, an orthodox Jew, informed a caller to her show that, in accordance to the clear teaching of Leviticus 18: 22, homosexuality was an abomination and could not be condoned in any circumstance. The following open letter, posted on the internet by J. Kent Ashcraft in response, is
worth quoting in full:

Dear Dr. Laura,
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the
homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination.
End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.
a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify?
Why can’t I own Canadians?
e) I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?
g) Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses.
Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27. How should they die?
i) I know from Lev 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24:10-16) Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people
who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14) I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.

UPDATING THE RULES
Are we really being faithful to scripture when we read it literally or in a rigid way? I find it interesting that those who hold to the first type of orthodoxy talk constantly about recovering New Testament Christianity, trying to get back to the way things were. But the New Testament itself gives at least one example of how you have to change to stay the same. In Acts 10 and 11, Peter falls into a trance and sees a great sheet float down with all kinds of animals in it, and the voice of God commands him:
‘Rise up, kill and eat’. Peter reminds God that the sheet is full of unclean animals proscribed by the Law, and that therefore he can’t eat them. And God says, ‘Do not call anything unclean that I have made clean’.

Interestingly, Peter was actually being true to scripture. He was being a ‘biblical Christian’ and yet God was apparently saying: ‘Listen, I’ve got something fresh to say to you’. Don’t call anything clean unclean that I have called clean. By the same measure, God calls women clean, equal to men. Few would argue that he also calls people clean regardless of their colour or race. All are equal in God’s sight. Surely then, God also calls loving, caring, committed relationships between people of the same sex clean and acceptable – not on a basis of wishy-washy tolerance but on the basis of their humanity, of the inherent nature of their sexuality. Nowhere does the bible condemn loving, committed, co-equal, gay relationships as we see them
emerging in our world amongst people today. Even those passages which seem to refer to homosexuality per se can be interpreted convincingly as referring to abusive relationships, temple prostitution, pederastic relationships or heterosexuals engaging
in homosexual acts – all methods of exerting male power over others. It is therefore possible to honour scripture without needing to condemn the sort of relationships many of us today cherish and honour and would wish to affirm.
Just as there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, I am convinced that there is no longer gay or straight in Christ Jesus. I joined the Church of England in part because I was deeply attracted by the comprehensiveness, the inclusiveness of its spirituality that it incorporated many different perspectives, many different traditions. I felt there was a lot of wiggle room in it. But there’s no reason why that should be a purely Anglican aspiration. I’m for an inclusive church, not on the basis
of tolerance but on the foundation of an open progressive orthodoxy rooted in and committed to scripture, tradition, reason and experience – and committed most of all to Jesus Christ who I believe stands with his arms wide open to Brian, open to
the world.