ON ANGLICANS AND HOMOSEXUALITY


August 15th 1998


The next issue, Number 27, will appear on September 15th 1998.





The Lambeth Conference of the world's Anglican bishops has just ruled that homosexuality - or at least its practice - is contrary to Biblical teaching. What does this ruling tell us about Anglicans; what may we think, both generally and having the ruling in mind, about homosexuality and about the Bible?

About Anglicans, the ruling tells us that they think we cannot read. After all, the Bible is explicit in saying that homosexuality is an abomination; we hardly need a conference to tell us that the Bible says what, plainly, it does say.

Moreover, since there was a less than unanimous vote on the ruling, it tells us EITHER ..... that some Anglicans choose to read into the Bible the very opposite of what is actually there OR ..... that some Anglicans are content simply to disregard bits of the Bible at will - to treat scripture as though it were just another anthology of human writings.

About homosexuality, what the ruling tells us depends upon the general credibility, literal or otherwise, that we attribute to the Bible.

The two main claims being made in this AT 26 are 1) that homosexual practices per se are not an abomination and 2) that the Bible, BOTH on internal evidence AND on checking it against the world external to it, can be shown to be undependable. (Undependable meaning 'not wholly sound' rather than 'wholly unsound').



Homosexuality has been a perennial minority feature of the human scene for as far back as records go and it is also a known feature of animal life generally. These facts do not, in themselves, exclude the possibility of homosexuality being abominable; cruelty has always been a feature of human life and cruelty is indeed abominable. The done thing is not necessarily the right thing.

What we can say is that homosexuals show themselves, and always have shown themselves, to be otherwise quite typical human beings - quite similar to the hetero majority both in personal qualities and in accomplishments. We all know virtuous and talented homosexuals - history furnishes many examples too - and there are also less admirable people, despicable people even, in the homo minority of humankind as there are in the hetero majority.

Rather than representing the distilled wisdom of ages, Biblical homophobia seems, prima facie, to be like the cruel 'picking upon' of people who are 'different' that we find in ill-brought-up or immature children. 'Picking upon' is more to be associated with raw unfinished childhood than with adult attitudes.

To sustain this serious charge against Biblical homophobia, the phrase "seems, prima facie" is not enough; the Bible has to be shown to be faulty in many significant ways if its credibility on this one subject - homosexuality - is reasonably to be doubted.

Faulting the Bible is easy in several connections - inconsistency, untruth by omission, bad ethics both by omission and by commission and, also, just plain silliness.

Whole books have been written on Biblical self-contradiction .... and even more books have been written to explain away these inconsistencies - on the premise that chalk is simply a different kind of cheese and that these two everyday words can be used interchangeably according to the whims of writer and reader.

It is sufficient to compare "Thou shalt not kill" with "There is a time to kill and a time to heal". The two sides of the euthanasia debate might be said to flow, respectively, from these two mutually exclusive Biblical precepts.

Again, if you seek Biblical authority in trying to ascertain the last words of Jesus, you can choose either of two quite disparate reports: Luke has Jesus saying extraordinarily noble last words; Matthew and Mark have him articulating the self-pitying sentiments of a cruelly disillusioned man. John reports nothing of the words of the dying Jesus - from which we are perhaps entitled to infer that, at the end, he said nothing worthy of report.

Untruth by significant omission is exemplified by the total absence of any mention of micro-organisms in the Book of Genesis. In fact these are the most numerous, most varied and most fundamentally important of all the life-forms we know of. To simply not mention them is to be grossly misleading in what purports to be general view of the living world. It is especially notable that it is precisely micro-organisms that, by virtue of their rapid reproductive turnover, show most clearly that natural selection actually happens. In one human lifetime, anti-biotics have decimated particular species of micro-organisms which have, in naturally selective response, evolved in many generations into species resistant to the anti-biotic that killed so many of their ancestors.

Significant moral omission is apparent in the Decalogue; the only sexual offence mentioned therein is adultery. Sexual exploitation of minors, rape and casual promiscuity - which are at least as harmful as, and often more objectionable than, adultery - are not even mentioned.

As for the explicit propagation of moral wrong (if wrong be judged at least in part by consequences) it is hard to teach worse than Exodus 22, 18 "You shall not allow a witch to live." This is not merely poppycock; its application led to horrible suffering being inflicted on many innocent men, women and children over a period of several centuries.

As for the merely silly, it is hard to beat Leviticus 19, 19 " .... You shall not plant your field with two kinds of seed ..... ". This is merely harmless poppycock - ask any farmer!

One can very easily accumulate texts that show up the Bible in a bad light but there are also many passages of great positive value. For example: Exodus 22, 21 "You should not wrong an alien or be hard upon him; you were yourselves aliens in Egypt." This is a noble precept; if we all lived by it the world would be transformed for the better.

So there is quite enough in the Bible to warrant great scepticism as to its special authority. It comes over as indeed a very human anthology of writings of very varying value - from the evil .... to the nonsensical ..... to the wise and noble.

So we certainly cannot infer that homosexuality is an abomination merely because the Bible says it is. Experience of life, rather than of mere Bible reading, shows homosexuality - and indeed heterosexuality - to be neither more nor less abominable than the people who practice this or that variant of human behaviour.

The 'liberals' are quite right to assess - severally to reject or to accept - the teachings of the Bible. What else can any intellectually honest person do?

The pity of it is that liberal Christians, while being intellectually honest about flawed bits of the Bible, are so coy about its very status. They ought, on their openly admitted 'pick and choose' basis, to claim that the Bible is not divinely inspired. If they think it is so inspired then they would have to suppose God to be sometimes deceptive, sometimes silly, sometimes ethically astray and sometimes simply evil.

Many of us feel more comfortable with no god than with a god like that.





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