This is a blog in two halves – you’ll find out as you read on.
Is there only one way to construct and assess Christian faith?
This first half of the blog is about my understanding of the way in which the Christian scriptures and the life and teaching of Jesus have authority for our lives. It is very specifically that – a focus on the primacy of Jesus’ life, teaching and example. It is not based on what followed Jesus’ death – the development of an institution and the dogmas, rules and doctrines that gradually evolved, some of them reflecting and embodying the essence of his life and teaching and some of them not. My understanding is rooted in the Gospels and in my conviction that God’s essence is unconditional, infinite, intimate love. It is a very Johannine focus.
Jesus and the Gospels
The people who told the story of Jesus after he died, the people who began to weave their stories into the narratives we read today in the Gospels were the followers of Jesus, the disciples and the characters who feature in those stories. The followers had only semi-understood what Jesus was about. The twelve didn’t easily grasp him or his teaching. The Jesus they came to know and talk about is in a significant way their construction, influenced by their Jewish, Roman and Greek cultural backgrounds. My reading of Jesus is that he was teaching and encouraging people by his example to become aware of the unconditional, infinite, intimate love of God. He was taking the ultimate risk in his life of not knowing what was going to happen, how the story would end, trusting that the Father, God, was the loving energy and presence within all creation. Unconditional love was the path to follow.
The writers of the four gospels are not the same people as those first followers. They are people who edited oral stories about Jesus, editing them according to their own understanding. The Synoptic gospels, let alone John, do not attempt to present a biography of Jesus, nor do they attempt to describe his personality. Their aim is to report the words and works of Jesus and the impression he made on those who encountered him.
Kermode and Carroll
Frank Kermode (1979 The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative) and John Carroll (2007 The Existential Jesus) have written about the gospels as works of literature whose authors were subject to the same influences as affect any human being setting out to write a narrative text. Kermode and Carroll see the Gospels as collections of stories written in order that we may learn from them rather than articles of accurate history or dogmatic truth.
Archetypes – characters in a story
Carroll argues that Jesus and the key personalities in the Gospels can be understood as characters in the Story, as archetypes of human persons, with whom and from whom we can learn about ourselves and God. The characters are personality types with whom we may identify. Mark and John in particular developed the characters in their gospels into teaching instruments that helped to dramatise and particularise in human dynamics the wisdom teaching and practice of Jesus. The Gospel narratives provide clues for us, and we who follow can find insight and wisdom for our personal identity in the Teachings told through the Story. The Gospel personalities show people who to varying degrees did and didn’t understand Jesus. We can identify with how they performed and what they did in reaction to their encounter with Jesus. Peter didn’t really get the Message. Judas got the Message and betrayed it. Mary Magdalene got the Message, but she was the only insider who really understood Jesus. Pilate was close to getting the Message, seeking truth.
Jesus the archetype works to change people. Everyone who becomes absorbed in the Jesus story is drawn into trying to make their own sense of it. As we become immersed in the story and identify with the characters we are forced into the position again and again of asking Who am I? Who do I identify with? What are the implications for me? Different answers appear. It is as if the story’s method is to possess the reader through its characters in order to provide a range of mirrors reflecting truth back onto ourselves. The characters and the questions that arise are universal, applicable to all cultures and religions and ways of understanding human life. They are applicable to every individual, evoking a search for the core Self.
Seeking our truth or the truth?
What the early Church came to create over the following centuries was a version of Jesus’ Message designed to fit with and support the institution, underpinning its authority, dogma, teaching, hierarchy, and establishment. What the church became looks very little like what Jesus lived and taught. Peter, who didn’t understand the Message, is the archetype of what the Church became. Less an organisation helping us find OUR TRUTH than an institution seeking THE TRUTH.
The Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit is continuously, subtly at work in this process, undermining the institutional agenda, using the intuition and unconscious minds of human beings to evolve awareness and inspire the energy of our innate spiritual life. The work of the Spirit that evolved in Jesus continued to evolve in the disciples, in those who followed him, those who told of their memories, those who wrote them down, those who compiled the gospel narratives, and in us, who read them and are inspired by them today. The Holy Spirit is continuously at work in us, intuitively, innately, seamlessly. But also involved in this evolutionary process are the forces of the institution and the representatives of the church whose normal human character flaws corrupt and distort the narrative – as do our flaws. We read the Gospels and the life and teaching of Jesus through our western Christian lens, distorted by our western addiction to dualism and concrete, factual literalism. We are unaware that our lens is distorted, that all written history is in part a personal interpretation.
A complex variety of elements are at work in Jesus, in the creation of the Biblical narrative and in our reading of, reception of, and use and abuse of the narrative: there is divine inspiration (the Holy Spirit), human imagination and intuition, the unconscious, the work of myth and archetype, narrative and character development, and the continuous and continuing process of creation and evolution. The Gospels, the book of Acts and the Epistles were written as works in process and they continue to be processed anew by every reader. Jesus’ life is part of a seamless whole from the Big Bang through evolution to the present moment, the present moment being the always elusive but only moment of reality we who are alive now have.
Part 2 - Sexuality and gender in the CofE
My ‘cosmic’, evolutionary perspective, from the Big Bang until now, and the creation of archetypes from human experience in the Gospels, seem to be remote from the Church of England and the framework within which it asses human sexuality and gender. We have learnt so much about the universe, evolution, physics, the human mind, our planet, and in recent decades, the effect the human species is having on our planet, that it seems really strange, not to say bizarre and perverse, that the conversation in the Church through the Living in Love and Faith process, is restricted to such a limited, naive canvas. And that’s not for want of people like Helen King and Tina Beardsley and others who tried to expand the frame in the early days of LLF.
So here we are, two weeks away from another key meeting of General Synod, with Synod papers published, and the material proving yet again to be grossly, totally inadequate to the task when seen from a contemporary progressive perspective, a perspective that has come to understand how worship of an Omni-God creates a Church culture and theology that is prejudiced, abusive and immature.
The Seven Conservative Bishops
Let’s start with the letter from seven conservative bishops. My faith and the ideas that underpin my faith and spirituality are fundamentally different from the theological vision on Christian life and discipleship offered by these bishops. Their affirmations are offered as an invitation to ongoing conversation, but after thirty years of conversation, theirs isn’t the one I am interested in.
“They seek to present a concise but broad vision of Christian life and discipleship, to bring greater clarity to our points of convergence and divergence, and to encourage and equip those who remain committed to the Church’s inherited teaching.”
Their four concise elements are: Credal Orthodoxy, Universal Church, Supernatural Faith and Sacrificial Discipleship.
Credal orthodoxy requires an exclusive Christology. My Christology is inclusive.
A commitment to hold to the Church’s historic faith and moral teaching. This is clearly designed to exclude people like me.
An understanding of supernatural faith we might in theory share, except that theirs somehow only allows sex in the context of male and female marriage. LGB people are required to remain single as “a positive declaration of the ultimate sufficiency of our eternal union with God in Christ.” I’m not even going to give it a try.
Sacrificial discipleship requires us to seek joy and peace through sacrifice and self-denial, not self-fulfilment or self-expression. No thanks!
Living in Love, Faith, and Reconciliation, GS 2346
Then there’s GS 2346, Living in Love, Faith and Reconciliation, and Reconciliation helpfully underlined in case we hadn’t noticed that this new, extra dimension has been added to the LLF project at this, what some of us expected to be, late stage of the process to achieve a radical new Christian inclusion. Reconciliation is a big word for “how do we hold this show together, in England, in the Communion, nearly 27 years after the Kuala Lumpur Global South Conference in 1997 fired the torpedo that holed the 1998 Lambeth Conference below the waterline. Ever since then, the Anglican Communion and the Church of England have been trying to repair a hole that simply keeps getting bigger. And these pesky LGBTQIA+ people keep sabotaging all attempts to repair the damage. Not only will they not go away and allow orthodox traditionalists to resume worship of God in a way unchanged since Jesus, but they keep adding new letters to their acronym.
Reconciliation – unity - has become the primary goal for the Church of England after seven decades of researching into and reporting on and formulating processes for addressing the place of LGBTQIA+ people in the the Christian Church.
To the rescue comes the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, Bishop of Leicester and Co-Lead Bishop for Living in Love and Faith with an exhaustingly tedious twenty-page Synod document in which he “outlines ten draft commitments through which the whole Church can continue to pursue the implementation of the motions previously passed by Synod on Living in Love and Faith.” Their “brevity and realism are intended to help reset the debate and steer this work.” Brevity and realism?!
“Undergirding all of this is a commitment to a process that seeks to carefully listen - even here we disagree - to the many voices, holding a variety of positions, in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, including those of LGBTQI+ and GMH people.”
So we haven’t really moved from square one, from Lambeth 1.10 or the Windsor Report, or several Primates’ meetings and ACC meetings and countless General Synods, or the Pilling Report and the Shared Conversations – you would have thought this would have been enough to put the gay equality seekers off by now – and indeed, many LGBTQIA+ people have abandoned the Church – or never joined in the first place. It’s only because I’m an arrogant masochistic activist (under the sheep’s clothing of being a contemplative) that I’m still here,
The yearning of the middle ground
Bishop Martyn’s introduction “acknowledges that there remains profound disagreement.” He also recognises “that implementation of the areas of work around the commendation and authorisation of the Prayers of Love and Faith is not straightforward.” He says “the time has come to find a “settlement” which allows people at both ends of the spectrum to continue within the Church of England. It is “the yearning of the ‘middle ground’ – the vast majority of people in the Church of England who yearn for LGBTQI+ people to be accepted, loved and valued for who they are.” (p2 of Living in Love, Faith , and Reconciliation, GS 2346).
I’m sure Bishop Martyn is right. The middle ground, the vast majority of members of the Church of England yearn for the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people, and equal marriage for all, lay and ordained. The vast majority of LGBTQIA+ people have been yearning to be accepted, loved and fully and equally valued for who we are for over half a century, decades before the Global South Conservatives sabotaged the direction of travel by imposing Lambeth 1.10.
The energy of conservatives is poured into defending their idea of God and the Gospel of Jesus against what they interpret as wilful disobedience against their Omni-God’s will as “clearly expressed in Scripture.”
We have to find a way of pouring the energy of the groups campaigning for justice and equality for all in the progressive coalition and in the lives and energies of individual LGBTQIA+ people and our allies into the parishes and congregations, churches and cathedrals, where the Mystery of unconditional, infinite, intimate divine love manifest in the life and teaching of Jesus is celebrated despite the years of attrition.
Breaking the deadlock
How can the deadlock be broken when conservatives want both to have their cake and eat it – to worship the Omni-God fuelling abuse, discrimination and prejudice in the Church by creating an uncontaminated tribal enclave, at the same time holding on to the privileges and financial benefits of being part of the Church of England?