I have a second kind of 'in-tuition', in that I am a layman with no formal tuition in any theological discipline. So I hope you will make allowances for that as I offer you some reflections on the document Christian Holiness and Human Sexuality recently issued by the group known as The Chicago Consultation, which may be found at: http://www.chicagoconsultation.org/site/1/docs/Human_Sexuality_study_guide_final.pdf

This document may have had some influence in the decisions taken at Anaheim, but I feel that it probably just expresses the thinking that the majority of delegates to the Convention already held in any case.

The following thoughts are some initial comments on reading the document. I have limited myself to the three sections of the report which focus on the vital question of how we engage with holy scripture. The remaining three chapters, on Tradition, Ethics and Ritual are outside the scope of this letter.

You may not agree with some of my comments, but I hope that in the spirit of 'listening' you will find in them some degree of illumination as to the thought processes of someone whose point of view is different from your own.

Introduction - Gary Hall

Gary Hall sets the document in context when, in the introduction, he looks back over "5,000 years of Judaeo-Christian history". I find it hard to relate to this timeframe because it goes back to long before Abraham. But his point is that issues of sexuality "did not concern our forebears nearly as much as they do us." He invites us to "search the creeds" and we will not find anything about sex in them. No, indeed, but their purpose is to tell us about God, not about how we should live our lives. For example, we find nothing about the Ten Commandments in the creeds, but that does not mean that they are optional for us.

Dr Hall believes that our forebears didn't worry too much about sexual issues. He also describes Christian marriage as an "evolving notion" over the sweep of our history. Now, I agree that many characters in the Old Testament lived sexual lives that were far beyond what the Christian church has traditionally allowed. Part of my answer to this is that people such as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob lived before God revealed the Ten Commandments to Moses, so we must judge them against different standards. Another part of the answer is that even in the lives of people whom God has used in his service, sinful behaviours are common. But we are not intended to emulate them - for example, Abraham's sinful action in telling Pharoah that Sarah was his sister rather than his wife is something that we should repudiate rather than copy. And it would be rash to assume that Rahab's inclusion in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5) implies that God approved of her lifestyle.

Particularly important too, it seems to me, is that when Jesus came on the scene he sharply criticised both his forebears and his contemporaries who twisted the interpretation of God's commandments to suit their own preferences. For example, he said that sexual lust was a kind of adultery.

Dr Hall's suggestion that the reason Jesus' followers didn't debate whether marriage was between two same-sex partners or between a man and a woman was because it was of little importance to them, misses the point. It was a matter of Christian holiness (the very subject of this report). If anyone had proposed same-sex marriage to first-century Jews or Christians the idea would have been rejected immediately as contrary to the holiness of living that God expects from his people. John the Baptist is an example of a Jew who - far from being disinterested in sexual morality - took a very strong stand on it, even to the point of being killed for it. The reason we spend so much time discussing sex today is that much of western society (and even the church) is unwilling to be bound by the traditional teaching of the church, and has raised the issue to crescendo level.

Dr Hall sees full inclusion as a "justice" issue. This makes it equivalent to the question of race. But I don't see it that way. Being black or white has no implications for behaviour, but engaging in same-sex relationships does. It raises profound questions as to the configuration of sexual partnerships (do we include polyamory and polygamy; what implications are there for the raising of children; etc).

We should not discriminate against those with a homosexual orientation any more than we should against people who have a skin colour different from our own, but it is simply a category error to extend this logic to behaviours. This flawed assumption appears to underlie the overall approach of the document. Unless it is acknowledged and addressed I don't think there can be any meaningful engagement between the two opposing points of view.

Scripture and Marriage - Katherine Grieb

Katherine Grieb focuses on Genesis 1:27-28, with its commands to "be fruitful and multiply" and to "have dominion" over the earth. She is surely right that it is important to interpret the word "dominion" in terms of responsible stewardship rather than "rape" of our planet.

But then she sets out to rethink "the doctrine of male and female (heterosexual) marriage" which, she says, has usually been built on "the duty to procreate (be fruitful and multiply)" as found in this Genesis text. She proposes that "if this text were placed in conversation with other biblical texts, we might read it somewhat differently."

But I don't believe that the text imposes a "duty to procreate" (which, until our own generation, has underpinned the need for a male and a female). I observe that just six verses earlier the birds and fishes are likewise told to be fruitful and multiply. I don't see these words as being a moral command in either case - God does not hold the birds and fishes morally responsible for the duty to multiply. Surely the words are by way of expressing God's blessing on the procreation of birds and fishes, and of humankind? Indeed those are the very words of the verse: "And God blessed them, saying, be fruitful and multiply". And nature contains some extraordinary sexual practices, particularly in marine life, where God's blessing extends far beyond committed lifetime male/ female partnership. So our moral teaching regarding human sexuality needs to come from somewhere other than this text - and indeed it does.

In Matthew 19 Jesus said, "Haven't you read that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore, what God has joined together, let man not separate.

Let me try to unpack what Jesus is saying (and not saying) here: i) his authority is scripture - "Haven't you read?" ii) he refers to the Genesis 1 text, but omits the "being fruitful and multiply" part of it, basing his teaching instead on the "male and female" part - the very aspect that Dr Grieb seeks to deny iii) to this "male and female" Genesis 1 text he adds the Genesis 2 text (a man leaves his parents and cleaves to his wife) iv) he expounds his two texts as forming the basis for marriage as a creation ordinance, saying that God has joined the man and woman together in a relationship that should not be broken.

It is this teaching of Jesus, not a duty of procreation, which underlies the Christian doctrine of marriage, defined as between male and female.

This, indeed, coheres with the fact that modern Anglican liturgical texts do not put procreation at the top of the list of reasons for marriage in the way that the church traditionally did.

It is not plausible that a scholar of Dr Grieb's standing does not know this teaching of Jesus on marriage as being between male and female. She seeks to evade it by selecting the 'wrong' ("be fruitful and multiply" rather than "male and female") part of the Genesis 1 passage, and then searching for other texts to bring into "conversation partnership" with that text so as to undermine the "male and female" aspect of marriage.

But what are we to make of her additional texts?

First, she suggests that although Jacob stole the blessing that should rightfully have gone to Esau, their father Isaac did in fact give a blessing to Esau when he found out that he had been tricked. This, she suggests, raises the question: "is there only the possibility of the one blessing to the exclusion of the other or can the church bless both kinds of marriage [homosexual and heterosexual]?" Sadly, all I can say to this is that there is no "conversation" at all between this passage and "be fruitful and multiply". There is no common ground between them.

Dr Grieb's second choice of intertextual conversation is with the theme of God's blessing of eunuchs quite apart from their having biological children, and also the theme of having children by adoption. In my view both of these approaches are redundant and ultimately unproductive, because it is not necessary to prove that God blesses those who don't have biological children. And to suggest that such thinking as this could be the basis for overturning scripture and the universally held teaching of the Jews in Jesus' day, and of the church after him, on the matter of same-sex marriage, seems to me to be just an exercise in creative imagination rather than Christian theology.

It saddens me to think that TEC may have absorbed into its theological DNA a way of reading scripture which deliberately evades the teaching of Jesus.

Scripture: Sexuality and Sexual Orientation - Wil Gafney

This chapter helpfully defines some key terms. For Dr Gafney, "sexual orientation" is "internal awareness of the specific gender(s) of those with whom a person desires" intimacy. The definition seems to imply fixety - one's orientation is what it is. By contrast, "gender" is not defined solely by the "two iterations, male and female"; people may "self-identify a gender that is distinct from their physical gender".

But for me, both of these definitions are back to front. Sexual orientation has been shown in many studies to be changeable rather than inevitably fixed; it is not uncommon for people to change their orientation during their lifetime. And the word "gender" is an artificial substitute for "sex", the latter being biologically determined and not changeable.

This linguistic distortion of reality would allow me to dethrone God and put myself in charge of my life. Did God "make them male and female"? Well, I decline to be constrained by my biological sex, which is changeable if I wish. Did God command me not to engage in certain behaviours? Well, I am not constrained by that because God gave me the orientation that I have and it is not changeable. This kind of thinking enables a person to manipulate the title of the document, Christian Holiness and Human Sexuality. True holiness should imply in the words of Jesus, "not what I want, but your will be done". This new construction, however, enables one to say, "not what you want, but my will be done". I hope it may not be considered unfriendly of me to suggest that this maverick theological approach is a factor in the split that is taking place between TEC and the majority in the Anglican Communion.

Dr Gafney proceeds to claim that in the first two verses of Genesis, God "self-identifies as both masculine and feminine." He, God, created, and she, the Spirit of God, was hovering. Now I don't want to impose crude male/ female stereotypes on the persons of the Holy Trinity - God made both male and female in his own image. But the female pronoun used to describe God's Spirit in Genesis 1:2 is surely a matter of grammatical usage rather than a description of God's sex or gender. It carries no more significance than the fact that in French the hand is "la main" (feminine) while the foot is "le pied" (masculine). By contrast, the credal statement that Jesus was "incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary" is a most profound theological definition grounded in holy scripture, and not compatible with the Holy Spirit being defined as female. By comparison, the assertion that "god is both male and female in God's own articulation in the scriptures" is very unconvincing and seems totally contrived - at least to a layman.

It is helpful to be told that there is "a rich interpretive tradition in Judaism and Christianity that regards the first human creature as a single being possessing both genders who is separated into two genders in Genesis 2:21-22", and that the word mistranslated "rib" means "side". But Dr Gafney doesn't contrast this as she should with the competing Greek tradition attributed to Aristophanes, which said that originally there were three human forms each with four arms, four legs etc. They locomoted by doing cartwheels. One was male/ male, one female/ female and one male/ female. They were each split in two by Zeus, and so every human being today is looking for their 'other half', who will either be same sex or opposite sex as the case may be. These ideas were peremptorily dismissed by Philo, a Jewish contemporary of the apostle Paul, who said, "the disciples of Moses trained from their earliest years to love the truth regard them with supreme contempt and continue undeceived." The Judaeo-Christian tradition robustly opposed these pagan notions; the Adam and Eve story clearly mandated an opposite-sex 'other half'.

Dr Gafney says that it is clear from the Jewish scriptures that "the biblical authors did not interpret the Eve-Adam pairing as formulaic". Their conjugal relationship is not described as marriage in Hebrew, and the words "wife" and "husband" are "artifacts of translation." But it must be clear from the earlier discussion that in Matthew 19 Jesus himself regards the Eve-Adam pairing as formulaic, and takes the words wife and husband to be "what God has joined together" in holy matrimony. Once again we find the teaching of Jesus being subverted.

Dr Gafney then gives examples of Old Testament characters whose sexual lives were far from simple husband-and-wife monogamy and says, "God never requires that any individual or community in the scriptures imitate the domestic partnership of Eve and Adam in order to benefit from God's blessings, promises, or covenant." The Pharisees in Matthew 19 used a comparable argument, but Jesus brought them up short with the haunting words, "but from the beginning it was not so". God tolerated so many things in the behaviour of his people in the Old Testament, but they were not what he intended. They were not compatible with Christian holiness.

Dr Gafney's exposition leaves me bewildered when she says that the instruction in Leviticus that "with a male you shall not lie down the lying-down of a woman" is "not terribly clear" because "men cannot have vaginal intercourse with other men." I really don't know what to say about this. Perhaps best just to suggest that this line of argument is unlikely to persuade many in the worldwide Anglican Communion today, or to have done so in the church over past centuries.

She proceeds to say that the assumption "that same-gender intimacy is proscribed in the Bible because it is not procreative is not valid because non-procreative (oral, anal, digital) sex between women and men is not proscribed." This is more detail than I think I need. Further to my earlier comments on procreation, I am content to say simply that Leviticus proscribes many sexual relationships, both potentially procreative (man with sister, aunt, daughter etc) and non-procreative (eg same-sex). I agree that procreativity is not the issue –holiness of living is.

Another of Dr Gafney's arguments is that the letter to the Romans is not scripture. It "did not function as scripture when it was produced and indeed, may have never been intended to do so. The Christian Second Testament is very clear that the scriptures are those of Israel". I don't have Dr Gafney's competence in the field of the formation of the canon of scripture, but is it not significant that 2 Peter 3:16 says that Paul's letters "contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction"? Here Paul's letters are included along with "the other Scriptures" of the Old Testament. Furthermore, to cast doubt on Romans as scripture is to depart from the universal tradition of the church.

Next we have a further argument - that Paul "did not know that there was such a thing as a same-gender sexual orientation". This assumes that he did not know Aristophanes' myth of human origins, described above. But is it not more likely that, having had a first class Greek education, Paul both knew and rejected this view that same-sex orientation is innate? On what grounds should we deny to Paul what we know is true of Philo?

Dr Gafney identifies the word "natural" in Romans 1 as "the key interpretive issue for this text." For her, Paul's belief on this matter "reflects a Greek philosophical aversion to changing the natural condition of created things, extending to warming bath water". Well perhaps it is possible that Paul never took a hot bath or cooked a meal, but I am more persuaded by the judgement of CEB Cranfield that for Paul the word "natural" meant that which is "in accordance with the intention of the Creator". In Paul's eyes, gay sex does not have God's approval, no matter how we try to get round it.

Finally, Dr Gafney offers us once again the category of eunuch, extending it to include "those in the process of having their gender surgically altered ... who are born with an indeterminate gender or who have been injured - burn patients often lose all of their extremities including their genitalia - quadriplegics, paraplegics, and infertile women and couples". Her shorthand summary of these disparate groups is that they are "social and sexual outsiders whether born or made". Again, this is more detail than I need, but treats as equivalent two very disparate categories - those who find themselves involuntarily infertile and those who reject and mutilate their God-given birth sex. Her description of the Ethiopian eunuch as a 'queer person' is seriously inadequate in this context.

Conclusion

The report on the Bible issued by the 1958 Lambeth Conference said, "The Church is not "over" the Holy Scriptures, but "under" them, in the sense that the process of canonization was not one whereby the Church conferred authority on the books but one whereby the Church acknowledged them to possess authority. And why? The books were recognized as giving the witness of the Apostles to the life, teaching, death and resurrection of the Lord and the interpretation by the Apostles of these events. To that apostolic authority the Church must ever bow." [The Lambeth Conference 1958, SPCK, part 2, p.5].

I find the spirit of Christian Holiness and Human Sexuality to be different from this Lambeth statement. I have tried to engage with its scriptural arguments and, to be honest, I have been disappointed. The authors seem to want to find ways of avoiding the teaching of Jesus, and their arguments are unconvincing. The pro-gay scholar Walter Wink was more straightforward when he wrote, "efforts to twist the text to mean what it clearly does not say are deplorable. Simply put, the Bible is negative toward same-sex behavior, and there is no getting around it".

I hope, dear friends in TEC, that you will accept what I have written in the loving spirit in which it is offered. I have benefited greatly from wrestling with scripture in the light of arguments from those who disagree with me; may you be similarly blessed. It saddens me, however, to see the way your church is going - the more so if your leaders are content with the expositions of scripture set out in this report.

Finally, I do hope that you will understand that I seek to extend the love of God to people of all sexual orientations.

Yours sincerely in Christ

Dermot O'Callaghan

Dermot O'Callaghan is a lay member of the Church of Ireland General Synod (representing the diocese of Down) for more than thirty years. He formerly served on Synod's Liturgical Advisory Committee for some twenty years. He is presently Chair of the Church of Ireland Evangelical Fellowship.