Time Immortal

As if Chris Johnson’s ongoing chronicle of the various ways in which the Episcopal Church (the American branch of global Anglicanism) has parted ways with Christ wasn’t enough, certain bishops of the Anglican Church in Canada have now seen fit to cast their lot with secular society’s occasionally twisted notion of rights.

TORONTO - Some leaders and theologians in the Anglican Church of Canada have welcomed calls by the bishop of New Westminster to reexamine the church’s theological understanding of sexuality.

Some feel Right Rev. Michael Ingham went too far, however, when he singled out historical Christian objections to masturbation, birth control, abortion and homosexuality as the result of deeply flawed interpretations of the Bible and theology.

Too far?

I’m glad we have learned men like Michael Ingham to correct the silly assertion of ignoramuses like the Pope regarding the issue of a Scripturally-consistent Christian view of sexuality. Here, in my ignorance, I had thought that teachings about the immorality of man laying with man as with woman, corroborated by St. Paul in the letter to the Romans, and reinforced by his teachings in his letters to the Corinthians about marriage being the only proper context within which sexual activity ought to occur, actually meant what they said at face value. Furthermore, in my stupidity, I evidently thought that when Jesus preached the primacy of marriage, as defined in Scripture as being between one man and one woman until the death of one or both partners, he was laying the groundwork for just the sorts of doctrines we have in place today in the Christian churches regarding marriage and sex.

And do I need to start in on my complete misunderstanding of “thou shalt not kill”? How did I ever miss that it was clearly never intended to extend its scope and meaning to include the unborn?

The bishop’s comments point to the continued slide of North American Anglicanism into obscurity and religious relativism. Let us be clear, O Reader: the sexually immoral are just as welcome in the Christian church as is any other sinner, or at least they should be. But in making that remark, please notice the implicit responsibility that is placed upon each and every sinner who enters the Church, sexually immoral or otherwise — the admission of one’s sin, the offering of repentance for one’s sin, and the reception of absolution for one’s sins through Christ. It should go without saying that the sexually immoral should be as welcome in a church as any other sinner…just as it should go without saying that just like any other sinner, the sexually immoral should repent of their sins with humble and contrite hearts.

Make sense so far?

The problem with what Bishop Ingham is saying is not that he’s advocating for greater “inclusiveness” in the Church, but that he is advocating for a re-definition of what is sinful and what is not. The Bishop is, in essence, stating that we should not regard things like masturbation, abortion, homosexuality, and the use of artificial methods of birth control (pills, interdictive barriers, etc.) as being sinful acts.

This is not, then, a case of someone saying that the sexually immoral should be as welcome as any other sinner…this is a case of someone saying that the sexually immoral should not be regarded as sinners at all. And that’s where he goes wrong.

Mind you, his mistakes are indicative of the growing trend toward theological error and misunderstanding that permeates modern Anglicanism in North America and a few other countries around the world. The Anglican Church on the North American continent also ordains women to the priesthood and the ranks of the bishops, which is a theologically dubious thing to observe in what is nominally a sacramental church that sometimes labels itself as being “capital-C” Catholic, at least as far as its founding nature goes. And both the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada have seen individual churches perform “blessings” of homosexual “marriages”, and have not undertaken disciplinary actions against most of these.

That’s shaky ground to be on to begin with. This latest round of theological error doesn’t add to one’s confidence as far as the life expectancy and vibrancy of the Anglican Church is thus concerned.

Bishop Ingham argued at a conference Wednesday that the church has been wrong for centuries on the notion that sex exists only for the purpose of procreation, and he said it has misunderstood references to homosexuality in the Bible.

“He is largely correct in his claim that theological work, by and large, on the nature of human sexuality has been largely underwhelming in its scope and that such work is urgently but prudentially needed,” said Dr. Darren Marks, a professor of theology at Huron University College, University of Western Ontario, in London, Ont.

“However … it seems prudent that, before moving to particulars, the academy and broadest church find the ‘common places’ from which such work can begin.”

The problem that arises, when progressive-minded folk speak of finding common ground, is that it’s code-speak. The meaning behind such open-ended offers is often far more bleak than the wording would let on, because typically the outcome of such “work that is urgently needed” is that liberal Christians will expect us bigoted traditionalists to leave behind our uneducated, blindly-held doctrines in favour of some new enlightened stance on issues of morality. We’ll be expected to “see the movement of the Spirit” (or some such) even as we are asked to no longer condemn the killing of the unborn, or decry as sinful the marriage of two people of the same gender.

It’s a starting point for what ultimately becomes an attempt to shift the thinking of the Church to be more in line with the errors of secularism.

Has there really been a lack of good theological work on the subject of sex? I suppose Theology of the Body and its considerable wealth of source texts is regarded by these people as being nothing more than a short essay that the previous pope wrote in high school and received a ‘C’ grade on, then? I suppose the considerable wealth of writings that St. Augustine made on his struggles with lust and the theological learnings his trials brought him doesn’t count for much either? This in spite of the fact that Augustine was one of the first theologians to formally stipulate that the experience of being raped does not strip away one’s chastity or virtue (contrast that with Islam’s take on the same issue and the way in which rape claims all too easily can become adultery trials against the victim).

What is meant when it is said that there has been an “underwhelming” scope and amount of theological research devoted to sexual morality is that the fairly large body of works that do exist do not…er…have a very permissive air about them and are, in plain point of fact, a bit on the restrictive side. What is meant is that none of the work that has been done so far allows homosexuals to marry, or allows women to receive abortions, at least not without such conduct being considered immoral.

It’s code-speak again.

Right Rev. Barry Clarke, bishop of the Diocese of Montreal, said he has long admired Bishop Ingham’s forthrightness and agrees “wholeheartedly” with his concerns about the church’s understanding of sexuality. But he cautioned any debate must avoid the trap of “discussing only genital sexuality.”

“The church has a responsibility to uphold sexuality as a gift and to help people discover their sexuality in ways that are nurturing and life giving, as opposed to life denying,” he said.

Life-giving, eh? Life-giving like saline burns, vacuum pumps, and the mutilated carcasses of unborn babies prematurely ripped from the mother’s womb? Life-giving like the much higher risk of disease transmission that accompanies anal sex, owing to the ease with which skin in the anus is torn by penetrative actions?

Bishop Clarke is right that sexuality is a gift and should be discovered and explored in ways that are life-giving. Why, though, do liberal Christians pretend as though these life-giving ways are as-yet not fully known? Christ and the apostles have revealed, in Scripture, a very full and complete understanding of exactly those ways in which sexuality is life-giving, and in which contexts (and under what circumstances) sexuality should be expressed so that it can be maximally so. That is to say, sexuality finds its fullest, sinless expression in the unity of man and woman in the sacramental bond of marriage, in which the two become one flesh according to God’s good design. It is its most life-giving when it is the complete giving of one’s self to exactly one other person, for the rest of the lives of either or both partners — and included in the definition of “complete giving” is the giving of one’s procreative ability fully apart from any artificial barriers or artificially-diminished fertility.

As Globe and Mail writer Michael Valpy noted on Thursday, Bishop Ingham’s address on sexuality is without precedent in the Canadian Anglican church. It puts him at odds not only with much of the Anglican Communion, but also with Roman Catholicism, most Protestant sects and the Orthodox church.

The Bishop’s words may be without precedent in Canadian Anglicanism in the sense that they have not been so directly and forcefully articulated (it’s Michael Valpy doing the writing, so we have to allow for a certain…er…”fudge” factor), but certainly the courses of action being endorsed have precedents that can be found, most notably as concerns homosexuality and the blessing in some Canadian Anglican churches of homosexual unions.

Fortunately, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and most branches of global Protestantism (we make allowances here for the exclusion of certain arms of the United Church of Canada, and for a few strains of Lutheranism), have not been taken in by this erroneous thinking which Bishops Ingham and Clarke give voice to.

May it continue to be thus.