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Being a Body

This picture hasn't got anything to do with anything. I took it when we were camped recently in Surat Bay.

This last weekend I was in Auckland for the last of the hermeneutical hui that the Anglican Church has been holding over the past 4 years to address issues of Biblical interpretation as they apply to matters of sexuality. I hadn't been to any of the others, so didn't know quite what to expect. We met in Auckland's Holy Trinity cathedral, a quite lovely building that is, oddly, designed so that the best view in the place is the one from behind the altar. In other words, it doesn't draw the eye in toward the altar so much as lead it out, through the stained glass to the city beyond,  which is an interesting theo-architectural statement, and perhaps for the hui, a profound one.

The past hui had addressed themselves to the usual Biblical texts used by those seeking divine authority for their views on sexuality. The arguments over those passages have all been fairly well rehearsed, and I don't intend to add to the pile of ash already obscuring a fairly dimly glowing ember by saying here what has already been said by many others. After three hui, we in the Anglican church realised that we were at an impasse; and it was one we weren't going to find our way out of by exegesis. All of us bring to the Bible our own particular set of predispositions. We are culturally, familialy, biologically, genetically preprogrammed to see everything, the Bible included, according to our own particular lights; so while we all read the same book, we are going to find there quite incompatible messages  and we will continue to do so for just as long as we continue to be human.

The question then becomes not one of refining and increasing our Biblical knowledge, but of recognising our differences and finding ways in which we might live together in one communion despite those differences. The hui did fairly well at that. We had several superb presentations, the two most outstanding, from my point of view,  being that from Dr. James Harding Scripture and the Theology of Sexuality: A Question of Discipline and from Bishop Victoria Matthews, Marriage.

James' paper was 43 pages long, far too lengthy for the half hour slot he was allocated, so he gave us a Reader's Digest Condensed version. I had read the complete paper on the flight on the way North. I idly flicked through it, intending to browse enough to get the gist of his argument but found myself riveted, reading 40 pages on the plane and rushing to my hotel room as quickly as possible to finish it off. He argues that the key relationship for us Christians is not actually the one with our partner, but the one we have with God. We are disciples of Jesus Christ and all our behaviour should spring from that central reality. After a thorough examination of Old and New Testament passages relating to human relationships, he suggests Romans 14 and 15 (where Paul gives advice on how to deal with a controversy contemporary to him, that of eating meat offered as sacrifices in pagan temples) as a place to start looking for principles to  guide us through our current controversy.

Bishop Matthews examined marriage as an act of worship (worth-ship) and again located the marriage relationship securely within the wider Christian context of  our relationship with God. As, within a marriage the partners express the worth of each other, the life they are called to is also an expression of the worth of God. She acknowledged her work as a preliminary examination and begged the church to do its theology before making drastic changes.

The small group discussions and the informal conversations over meals reinforced to me the intractability of  opinions on the many sides of the debate on sexuality; but gave me hope that the Anglican Church could live together with integrity despite the different and apparently mutually exclusive views of some of its members. As Bishop Jim White pointed out, we do this already on such issues as Pacifism, which could be argued to lie closer to the real heart of the Christian Gospel than the issue of ordination of people in same sex relationships.

We are usually pretty good at spotting the biases in worldview which lead others to hold the opinions that they do. What we are not so good at is recognising the biases in ourselves which lead us to formulate and cling tenaciously to our own versions of the truth. As in so many things, perhaps a little more self knowledge would go a long way towards  helping us live together despite, or even because of, our differences.
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Anonymous said…
What a mess. Your church is divided on race and now you will likely divide it again on sexual orientation.
5 February 2013 at 12:12
Father Ron Smith said…
'Anonymous (quoted here) is obviously not an Anglican, so, therefore looking from the outside in - not a position calculated to shed much light on our domestic Church situation. I think that the ACANXP is courageously tackling a subject that has too often been kept under covers in other parts of the Communion. By opening up on this particular subject - human sexuality - our Church is using its god-given gifts of discernment, in hoping to find some sort of a way of relating to one another, en Christo - at the best possible level, applying the gift of reason to bear on a common human problem.
5 February 2013 at 13:37
Anonymous said…
Where I struggle is on the issue of exegesis. Yes I admit that I will have a framework that will predispose me towards one particular interpretation and others will do the same from different frameworks but that aside are we saying that scripture is all relative. That it is impossible through good solid exegesis to come to a place where we can say with reasonable confidence this is what is being said here. For myself while I come to the text with a particular framework I try very hard to allow scripture to interorgate me and I have at times changed my view based on a better understanding of the text. My fear is that not everyone allows scripture to shape them and their values but rather allows their values to reframe and reshape scripture to say what it doesn't. I do not accept that there are many interpretations especially when considered in the light of the wider meta narrative of scripture and when goood exegetical tools are used honestly.
8 February 2013 at 23:29
Kelvin Wright said…
There is a general problem; that is, with a text written in an iron age context from sources already centuries old at the time of the first iteration, then being read in 2013: how possible is it to ever know "what is being said"?

And there is a specific problem with the particular texts dragged into the debate on sexuality; and that is that even the most erudite and skilled of commentators cannot agree on what is being said. I am thinking here, particularly, of 1 Cor. 11 with regard to gender issues, on which I have done some reading of late. In reading many of the main commentators, I was struck time and again with the extent to which their own predispositions seemed to form a "baseline" of truth, a (to them) neutral standpoint from which to assess the meaning of the passage and to critique the interpretations of others.

I think that everyone, you and me included, reads the Bible in the light of the values that have been formed in us by our biology, our culture and our experience;values that are, unless we are particularly self perceptive, invisible to us. That is, we ALL reframe and reshape scripture.

This is only a problem though, if we read the Bible in a particular way, that is, to use Karen Armstrong's helpful analysis, reading it as Logos rather than as Mythos. And it is the increasingly prevalent inability of Western people (including Western Christians) to distinguish the two that leads us to both fundamentalism and thewidespread rejection of any scriptural relevance at all
9 February 2013 at 15:44
Barbara Harris said…
Absolutely, yes, Logos and Mythos,
and that photo is so very beautiful.
13 February 2013 at 22:00
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