The Church of England falls apart

I'm no preacher, but ...

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s primacy has been de-recognised by a significant section of the worldwide Anglican church. The immediate issue is the decision by the Church of England’s Synod to permit the blessing of same-sex marriages.

But the implications are wide and deep. Not only must we question the foundation of the Church’s moral authority, but also how we can resolve conflicts between conscience and State power.

As to the second, following the resignation of the Scottish National Party’s leader Nicola Sturgeon one of the contenders to replace her, Kate Forbes, gave interviews in which she honestly stated her (conservative) personal beliefs on social-sexual matters as a member of the Free Church of Scotland. This put her out of the running.

It must be difficult to reconcile strongly-held religious beliefs with the decision-making one has to do in public office. Perhaps that is why we get Government ministers who seem not to believe in anything much.

Yet even ministers of religion are becoming flexible on matters of principle. Three days ago, the Reverend Richard Coles tweeted:

I don’t think the question for politicians is how you live out your faith and play a part in public life; it is why should faith make discriminating against LGBT people legitimate?

The Reverend will know why. It does not necessarily have to spring from unconsidered prejudice, personal dislike or meanness of spirit, but relates to what one believes is right or wrong. People who are convinced that they know the answers will then become rigid and that is where the judgmentalism comes in.

Coles, a gay man and an Anglican priest since 2005, ostensibly toed the Christian line on homosexual acts when he got together with his partner in 2007 ‘in an asserted celibate relationship’, though after the latter’s death he ‘said that the relationship was not celibate, but he had to promise celibacy in order to maintain his job as a vicar.’

The reason is that Christians are people of the Book. The Bible is a collection of texts; one of them is what we call Leviticus but Wiki tells us

in Hebrew the book is called Vayikra (Hebrew: וַיִּקְרָא), from the opening of the book, va-yikra "And He [God] called."

In this, God Himself spoke to Moses while the Jews were in Sinai, on their way to the Promised Land, and gave out the laws they were to follow if they wished to retain His protection and remain in Israel once they got there.

Chapter 18 is detailed and specific about forbidden sexual relations. One (verse 22, English Standard Version) says:

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

A modern commentator has tried to interpret that as only a prohibition against doing that with a ‘close male relative’; most ingenious but clearly even the Reverend Coles could not think it meant that! Besides, Leviticus 20:13 repeats the general ban, with a bloody punishment for transgressors.

However the rules are about acts rather than tendencies and feelings - love and close friendship are not forbidden. In fact there could be a quibble about what physical acts between men (and the guidance is focused on men) might be allowable.

This legalistic approach to religion may seem restrictive, but it is also liberating: whatever is not forbidden or compulsory, is permitted. By contrast, our current social world is intolerably cramping, laying down the law on our very opinions.

But how pliable can one be about laws issuing directly from the Creator?

Some say Jesus was accommodating, but he emphatically denied this:

until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

There might be exceptional circumstances; but when he saved the adultress from a stoning he not only shamed the crowd with knowledge of their own sins, but told the woman to sin no more. Even though there is forgiveness, the Law is the Law.

There is a later tradition that quotes St Augustine: ‘Love and do what you will.’ I don’t think that can possibly mean ‘everything is permitted’ - surely it implies that if you love God you will follow His laws in the spirit as well as to the letter.

Nevertheless there have been those who feel that they are in touch with the divine and so are at liberty to interpret the Law as suits them and to give orders as if authorised by God. The dangers are obvious - think of John of Leiden and his two years of autocratic theocratic misrule in sixteenth-century Münster.

At the extreme we get to the mediaeval ‘Free Spirits’ described in Norman Cohn’s ‘The Pursuit of the Millennium, chapter 8:

The core of the heresy of the Free Spirit lay in the adept’s attitude towards himself: he believed that he had attained a perfection so absolute that he was incapable of sin.

This meant he could do anything at all, right up to theft and murder. To avoid punishment, he would deceive, outwardly obeying conventional secular and religious rules, saying the right and pious things, until he (or she) saw an opportunity; utterly dangerous.

Now you may not be a Christian - though the social teachings of other religions are similar - but if you are, the teachings are clear and you have to be an exemplar. As Chaucer says:

Cristes loore, and Hise apostles twelve
He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.

Returning to Archbishop Welby, his bending to the winds of wokery has led him to talk about regendering references to God. Any sane person will understand that God is not a man, but rewriting the Scriptures and the wording of prayers and services is just not on. Surely he must have better things to discuss, such as the fundamental beliefs of the Church.

Having said that, early in the Old Testament God is represented as a visible being - Moses saw him from behind on Sinai (Exodus 33:18-23); to see Him face to face would have meant death; so the concept of God has changed over time. In Islam there is no such difficulty: for them, Allah is unknowable and certainly not human (so Jesus cannot be His son); the Prophet received all his communications via a third party, the Angel Gabriel.

And Christianity itself has changed, from a Jewish sect to a global community that Saint Paul extended to non-Jews through his teaching on circumcision as a spiritual rite rather than a physical one.

But once Christian leaders start playing with the teachings to ‘move with the times’, the house that was on rock has been relocated to stand on sand, and cracks will appear.

As is happening now.