Defusing the Sexuality Debate

Mark Vasey-Saunders

Description

As debates around sexuality rumble on within certain sections of the church, and become increasingly entrenched and embittered, there is an increasing need from non-evangelicals and evangelicals alike to grasp the historical and cultural context in which current debates about sexuality are happening. Offering a detailed examination of the development, consolidation and fracturing of an evangelical anglican consensus on the sexuality, Defusing the Sexuality Debate seeks to explain why current disagreements are so intractible and offer some suggestions as to how all sides could facilitate a more constructive conversation. Building on an exploration of the development of tradition and biblical scholarship in evangelical anglicanism during the twentieth century, the book makes the case that conflicts over sexuality are symbolic of deeper disagreements over the place of christianity in the modern world.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334063568
• Langue: English

Extrait

Defusing the Sexuality Debate
Anglican Evangelicals in Conflict
Mark Vasey-Saunders






© Mark Vasey-Saunders 2023
Published in 2023 by SCM Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978-0-334-06354-4
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd




Contents
Introduction

1. Evangelicals talking about sexuality: The creation of the consensus position
2. Evangelicals talking about scripture
3. Evangelicals talking to evangelicals
4. Evangelicals talking about modernity: The question behind the question
5. Advice to a divided church

Appendix: A timeline for evangelicalism and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
Further reading




Introduction
The sexuality debate has become a battlefield. Armies of progressives and conservatives shell each other constantly from entrenched positions. Behind the lines of each side they tell each other stories of the atrocities the other side has committed and the glorious victory they seek to achieve in order to keep up the morale of the exhausted troops on the front line. And in between the two is the minefield of the debate itself – an inhospitable middle ground, where every contour has been carefully mapped out, every approach carefully plotted and turned into a deathtrap. To go over the top into the debate itself is to constantly risk treading on a mine through a careless turn of phrase or unconsidered scriptural reference. Authenticity is called for, but rarely rewarded. Expressing your convictions honestly can open you to attack from the other side. Expressing your doubts honestly can lead to an over-zealous sniper from your own side taking a shot at you. So debate becomes guarded, performative, and settles into the predictable contours of stalemate. A few well-known figures periodically emerge from each side to rehearse well-known views. The intent is more to reassure their own side that their truth is being spoken than it is to enter into genuine dialogue with anyone else. At times the statements are so disconnected from each other it is hard to be sure the two sides are even fighting the same battle. Most prefer to stay huddled in the security of their own side, keeping their certainties or their doubts to themselves, not risking poking a head above the parapet. The war grinds on. Both sides fear they are constantly on the edge of defeat and cannot risk giving the slightest ground. Both fear that no victory will be sustainable that falls short of complete destruction of the enemy, meaning that the next phase of the war will be even worse than this trench warfare. Although both say they want nothing more than to stop fighting, they every day entrench themselves further.
Although a little fanciful, I don’t think the above is too far off the mark in naming the experience of the church’s debate over sexuality. It has become destructive, and exerts a profoundly negative influence on all areas of church life, leaving casualties in its wake on both sides. Some have been persecuted. Some have been excluded from communities in which they were once welcomed and accepted. Some have been driven to despair and have left the church.
Given all of this, the question: ‘Why write yet another book about sexuality?’ is an obvious one. It might be helpful to first clarify what I am and am not seeking to do. I do not try to propose an answer to the debate itself. You will not find anywhere in these pages an argument for or against the Church of England’s current settlement on sexuality. In many ways this book represents nothing more than exploring the ground on which the debate is occurring: a setting out of what might be involved in attempting to answer the question. The reason for this is that I have become convinced that at present we don’t even agree on what the question is. As Oliver O’Donovan was to write perceptively of the sexuality debate over a decade ago: ‘Everything is something other than what it is, everything is charged with borrowed significations … A patient work of interpretation is needed. To try to handle the question peremptorily is to deny what it is we face.’ 1 I seek to help defuse a debate that has become corrosive to the spiritual health of all those caught up in it, on both sides, by trying to unpick exactly what it is we are arguing about and why it has aroused such passionate intensity. I write as an evangelical Anglican, largely about evangelical Anglicans (though I hope much of what I write may be of benefit to those who are neither). For this reason much of my focus is on the rights and wrongs of evangelical Anglicans, though, because of the transatlantic nature of the sexuality debate, many of the evangelical writers with whom I engage are not Anglican. I do not doubt that a similar book could be written about the rights and wrongs of liberal understandings to the sexuality debate, but my concern is primarily to remove the plank in my own eye, before making any attempt to remove the speck in the eye of my brothers and sisters.
It is my conviction, then, that the sexuality debate has become destructive and intractable in part because it is rooted in some commonly held misconceptions and myths. I want to examine four areas, four ways in which we have allowed ourselves to misunderstand what is really at stake. The first two of these are misunderstandings about what I call the evangelical ‘consensus position’ – the understanding that the only permissible patterns of sexual life for gay or straight people are heterosexual marriage or abstinence, and the pattern of biblical interpretation underlying it. In Chapter 1 I explore where the consensus position as it is now stated comes from, and whether it is helpful or accurate to describe it as the tradition of the church. In Chapter 2 I trace some of the history of interpretation of the key biblical passages behind the consensus position and consider whether it is helpful or accurate to describe the interpretation offered as the clear sense of scripture. Having examined some of the history of the establishment of the consensus position, I then turn to examine the sexuality debate itself from two different perspectives. In Chapter 3 I explore the politicized nature of the debate, tracing the history of how it has become as destructive and intractable as I suggest above. Finally in Chapter 4 I explore the extent to which the sexuality debate is really a proxy war for a deeper conflict over the interpretation of modernity itself. In Chapter 5 I briefly reflect on this understanding of the debate and offer some suggestions to those of us caught up in it.
It will quickly become obvious that much of what I am attempting here will effectively act to undermine a key position defended by conservative evangelicals: the conviction that adherence to the consensus position represents a first order issue of faith, where disagreement represents unfaithfulness to the gospel. This is deliberate. I believe that this conviction is a major contributor to the current destructive state of debate, preventing genuine engagement with the issues ostensibly being discussed. For both sides the debate has become a nil sum game where they either win or they leave. This in itself would be a good pragmatic reason for challenging it, but I want to make the case that it is also fundamentally mistaken. None of the arguments commonly advanced as to why adherence to the consensus position should be considered a first order issue are compelling, in large part because they all represent a rush to judgement. At present I’m not convinced we even know what it is we are taking a stand to protect or to prevent. Similarly, I believe that the pattern of biblical interpretation on which the consensus position is based is far newer, and far less certain than much rhetoric would suggest, and that the passages on which it is based are considerably more complex to understand than is generally admitted.
None of this means that coming to an understanding of what scripture is saying to us is impossible, or that we do not have the obligation to sit under its judgement. It does not even mean that the consensus position itself is wrong – it may be the best attempt we can make at coming to the truth of scriptural witness. It simply means that discerning what the word of God is saying at this time is difficult, the more so when we may not properly understand the choice before us, and are actively seeking to invalidate the perspectives of those we do not agree with. As O’Donovan reminds us: ‘The most mysterious question anyone has to face is not, what does Scripture mean? But, what does the situation I am facing mean?’ 2 This is the task before us, and requires a careful act of discernment drawing on the wisdom of the whole church across our differences of opinion, but at present reaching across the divides to do this seems impossible. We find ourselves in the midst of an intractable