I have had some interaction with Pastor Rommel Weekly of the Gay Christian Fellowship at
http://www.gaychristianfellowship.com/
In round one, he helped me very much with a how the concept of 'one flesh' might be interpreted in the context of gay christian relationships.
In round two, he flummaxed me on my interpretation of Romans 1.
I had been following through on my idea that Leviticus is Temple Prostitution, ergo so is Corinthians, ergo so is Romans (please see my previous posts for a fuller description). BUt Pastor Weekly goes with a more traditional view that in Romans Paul is indeed refering to homosexuality in a more general sense, seeing it as a symptom of paganism. Pastor Weekly seems to assert that although Paul was right to see it that way at the time it can't be extended to a universal condemnation of homosexuality. Something to do with the word 'natural' in Romans 1 being the same as the word 'natural' in the context of the length of men's hair, the requirement for men to have short hair being rarely preached on these says! Pastor Weekly claims to believe in the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture. Now I have broken off my correspondence with him, because I couldn't put into words why I have trouble with his view of Romans 1. PArtly it's coz it looks like an excuse and its just to convoluted and far fetched. Partly its because if you make this kind of argument here, where does it stop? Which other scriptures can you disregard? And partly its because I'm looking for reasoning that will stand up to rigorous assault by skeptical conservatives. But as time has passed and I've let it cook in my head, I'm beginning to see where he's coming from.
Pastor Weekly: if you read this, please accept my apologies for not coming back to you direct and for quoting (or misquoting?) you on the web without consent. I can only recommend that my readers go to your site and check it out for themselves.
Thanks for this, I have read several of your posts on this subject and it is interesting to see someone approach this divisive subject from the more humble point of view – of ‘I don’t know...’
ReplyDeleteFor many years I was an Evangelical Christian and then by degrees (fed up of insularity and self-congratulatory smugness of much Evangelical thinking) I began to take an interest in wider Christianity – particularly patristic theology, Orthodoxy and the Spanish mystics. In turn this led me to the contemplative monastic life. After two years in the cloister it didn’t work out, but for the best part of a decade I oscillated between ‘the world’ and the cloister. I was set to return in 2003 but I came to the decision that what I really wanted and needed was a committed and monogamous relationship. This happened seven years ago and I am very grateful for it.
What has surprised me – besides the fact, at the tender age of 45, I am truly happy for the first time in my adult life – was how many of my more conservative Christian friends have been more than supportive. I actually thought I would lose some friends because of my decision, but, seeing the considerable change in me as person (happier, much more together and (I regret to say) nicer to be around) I think my own little ‘Road To Damascus’ has also changed their own views on homosexuality. As two are Anglican priests (as are their wives) in positions of some influence I can only see this as a serendipitous bonus.
What I would caution, when looking at the subject, is that it is best to take no notice of people who become disproportionately interested in the subject. It is sad that many Christians become apoplectic with rage concerning the subject, when in reality it affects a tiny proportion of any congregation. I have christened this ‘Cheap Morality’ – i.e. spending considerable time and effort concerned with the morality of a minority is an easy way to accrue symbolic capital – in terms of perceived moral fibre – with no cost to the heterosexual majority. An example that springs to mind is a sermon preached at St Helen’s Bishopsgate at the time of the Jeffrey John debacle. The Rector spent half his sermon in the anal area and yet there was no mention of whether it is biblically permissible to give your wife one up the chuff or whether oral sex is permissible between a man and woman. Marriage gives the green light to sex, but there is little, if any discussion, about what that sex should entail. Yet gay men are subject to prescription of what they can and can’t do (and the emphasis is on the latter). I read the sermon on line, but I could imagine the congregation nodding sagely at the ‘wisdom’ of condemning the queers, while at the same time not having to apply the same scrutiny to their own lives. In this sense gays are a godsend.
Enough rambling – there is discussion of the matter in my own blog – I won’t bore you any more here!
Again thanks for this, it needs to be said that there are no clear cut answers.
Regards:
S.
Thank you, S, for your comment and for sharing your story.
ReplyDeleteYou are certainly right that most people who get hot under the collar about it will never be affected personally by it. Myself included - I am as straight as you can get - and I often wonder why I pay so much attention to the issue. I suppose it's because in speaking to friends and colleagues about my faith I am often asked about it. The world's first impression of Christianity's message is homophobia, not the forgivenes and salvation it is supposed to be. So I wan't to give answers that are correct. If GOd is indeed opposed to homosexuality, then I will take the flak and call myself a martyr. But I don't want to go through all of that if God does not oppose it. I don't want to back the wrong horse!
But perhaps more than that, I do see myself seeking ordination in the Anglican church at some stage in the future, and I will no doubt have to deal with it pastorally, and in that context it is essential that I speak God's mind and not my own. So that is why I want God to reveal it to me once and for all.
My heart is now 100% in favour of Gay Christian Marriage. But if I am going to go down that road I need to be able to back this up with watertight theology and I'm not there yet.
The danger is force-fitting my theology to what I want, which is backwards. I should align my desire with my theology.
But then why should gay people suffer just 'coz I can't get my head through the theology?
And so, as you will have seen from my previuos posts, my muddle continues.
I wasn't completely clear from your story if you would still consider yourself to be a Christian or if in leaving the cloister you left the faith too? I don't think God is worried about our denominational affiliations but I hope that you still trust Him.
Many thanks for your comment.
Simon
Gay marriage – gosh that is jumping in at the deep end! Oddly enough this is not something I am very keen on, simply because marriage (like it or not) has not really been about love – it is a legal or cultural creation for the well-being of the family unit; love is just something of an added bonus. As civil partnership happily provides this for same sex couples I can’t really see the point of ‘marriage’. My partner and I haven’t even gone for a civil partnership – I suppose we’ll get round to it one day, but when we bought our house our solicitor ensured it is joint owned and when one of us dies it passes immediately to the surviving partner, so I can’t really see what the point of having a civil partnership would be.
ReplyDeleteYou might be interested in this blog: http://changingattitude-england.blogspot.com which deals with some of these issues.
Personally I hate all the fuss on both sides of the fence. Militant gay politics – especially when enacted by liberal Christians – does little to cheer me up. I just want to be treated like everyone else, I don’t want to be regarded as anything different and therefore I am happy to eschew the preciousness that goes with ‘minority’ status.
It’s funny you should ask about whether or not I am a Christian, as someone asked me the same question today and then, when they heard my answer, suggested I’d make a good Buddhist!! The answer is I am an agnostic with Christian leanings. Until last year I still attended my local church in north London, but I must confess much of the reason for this was because I also sing tenor and it had a good choir. When we moved recently, I dropped choir and church. Tho’ given I wrote the following to a priest friend only yesterday, you can see this is not an easy state of affairs:
“Self-doubt is one of the biggest hurdles you traverse in writing a PhD thesis. I suppose in some ways I crave the certainty that belief in exclusive religion afforded me. Now this is no longer there – and I can’t see any way of recapturing it – I do feel somewhat at sea sometimes.”
You see I can’t get it out of my head that much of what we believe is faith is just conceit. Religious belief can be seen as a species of narcissism – ‘I am so sinful only God can save’ (inverted pride) ‘I am so special, God died for me’ (overt pride). As a contemplative monk I spent HOURS in personal prayer – besides five hours a day in chapel and what was it really? Me, me, me. I thought about sins, my unworthiness along with the chatter in my head I called prayer but was just a pious means of self-obsession. A great deal of effort of your average Christian (or Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Jew etc.) goes into making the self feel better about the self. See http://problemwithrelgion.blogspot.com/2010/03/road-to-damascus.html on my blog for a fuller discussion of issues that divorced me from faith in exclusive Christianity.
I note you mention TFT on your blog – hence you might find this post interesting too...
http://problemwithrelgion.blogspot.com/2010/03/tft-taking-cure-or-take-on-cure.html
I’d be interested to know how your plans for ordination go... Nearly went down that road myself, but I don’t really think I am cut out for it...
Regards:
S.
Hi S
ReplyDelete(This comes as two comments owing to character number limits)
Thank you for sharing more of your story with me. I managed to follow one of the links above, but strangely depsite being unemployed I fnd I have less time to do what I personally want than ever before. I sometimes feel like my wife's slave. But that's another story.
Marriage: The trend in society is to dismiss the importance of the ceremony and the bit of paper. To be fair many cultures have different methods of entering marriage and even in the UK in times past co-habitation equalled marriage. However, in the UK, we do have a legal framework for marriage. And it's quite simple to get it done without fuss at the registry office. So why not??? To not do it seems to me to insult your partner. It says 'I love you enough to use for the time being, but when I get bored I'm going'. In this sense I am grateful to the gay community for insisting on the right to marry (and I'm not going to split hairs by calling it civil union). They have told the world that there IS a difference between cohabitation and a committed relationship. I saw a TV drama of a civil union where one of the men was saying "this is not just a bit of paper. It says that John loves me and wants to live with me for ever". I don't agree that a joint mortgage is the same thing. I make all these arguments form a secular point of view, before starting on a theological basis for marriage.
...continued
ReplyDeleteI respect TFT in that they provide support to people in conservative churches where other more liberal groups would not have access. BUt I have moved on from TFT for two main reasons. 1) They derive much theoogy from John Paul II's Humanae Vitae, and the papacy is not somewhere I look for reliable theology 2) They seemed to take the view that homosexuality results from a bad relationship with your father. I'm not ruling this out as a possible cause for some people, but I very much doubt that it is the general rule and it places a lot of guilt on innocent dads.
I have picked up bits of your story - the avalanche - that took you away from convinced faith. The parts I have picked up tend to imply that you have been let down by the hypocrisy of the church. When our suffragan bishop retired recenty he was asked if he had any regrets, and he said "all the people who have lost faith becasue of me". And it is true that in his wisdom God has chosen the most unreliable representatives he coud possibly have. Personally, having been brought up in the strictest Evangelical sects and moved on to a broader view, I still hold to the primary doctrine by which I consider myself evangelical, that my salvation (whatever that is) derives from the work of God, not from the work of man. In particular, it derives from Jesus dying in my place. And yes, I go for the unfashionable penal substitution theory because none of the other atonement theories make sense to me. And the fact of the death of this man looms higher in my mind than all the failings of the church. I suppose what I am getting round to is that I worry you will throw out the baby with the bathwater - chuck out the trash and chuck out the hidden diamond with it. But our stories are not yet complete, and so like all good movies I hope that after the period of doubt the hero wil win through in the end.
I notice as well your feeling that reigion is all 'me, me, me', and even in my church some people object to modern worship songs that talk about my relationship with God, this putting self and not GOd on the throne. There was one time at New Wine when the speaker spent a whole sermon on this topic, then handed over to the band who proceded with their pre-planned playlist of 'me' songs and clearly missed the point of the sermon. I went along with this theory for a while. But then I read the psalms, and found that in most of them the psalmist is indeed talking about his relationship with God. I don't believe that GOd created us to forget us or be disinterested in his creation. And so that side of things is important. BUt Tom Wright in his theory of Justification is good in that he points out that me and my relationship with God - the evangelical obsession - is just an entry point to the real purpose which is to work with God in serving the creation. Fully grasped, this theology allows a proper place for self while focusing outwards. And I think this achieves the correct balance.
My ordination plans are on hold - "the stipend is not for clearing old debts" so I will have to wait till my inheritance comes in and it's illegal to hasten one's aged parent's deaths
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ReplyDeleteThanks for this, interesting, but I am afraid I am a firm believer that religion tends to ape the society of which it is a part (i know many argue otherwise), but religion does tend to reflect the systems, thinking and 'view of self' of society and as we live in a society where the individual is king, it seems hardly surprising we have a 'me, me, me' trend in Evangelical Christianity, but also in wider Xianity and other faiths, in the UK.
ReplyDeleteYes, I remember Bp Kemp (Chichester) once saying if clergy get into difficulties it is usually money, sex or alcohol! So I can see why there is an imepdiement to going forward for ordination at present!!
Personally I long for the disestablishment of the Church and then your local community could elect you for ordination and support you. It would take the church back to its roots and remove some of its self importance...
Regards:
S.