We don’t know who coined the phrase: “Whoever was first to discover water, it wasn’t the fish.”
But Einstein liked it enough to borrow it: “Of what is significant in one’s own existence one is hardly aware, and it certainly should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?”
Why is this important? Because the Church of England is involved in a life or spiritual death struggle to choose between Christian culture and secular culture; and in legitimising gay blessings in Church, it has chosen secular culture.
It may be helpful to ask questions about the water in which the present generation has been swimming in order to try to understand why the decision went that way.
Certainly, when it came to swapping competing epistemologies, the “progressives” gave much more weight to the expectations of culture – the water we swim in – than the more usual sources of authority.
The members of this Synod have been, for the whole of their adult lives, bombarded with the cultural belief that the fulfilment of our humanity lies in finding another person to fall in love with and have sex with.
Hollywood, music, lyrics, novels, the advertising machine, all have kept up a relentless bombardment, and the result is that many people today have been brainwashed by this. It has become the cultural water we all swim in.
Christians might be thought to possess a degree of immunity to these hedonistic and self-referential values; but the immunity is wearing thin in some places. And perhaps it is not so surprising that a church that has dual loyalties, one to God and the other to country, might succumb.
Even if the demands of the homosexual and bi-sexual community to receive the degree of affirmation for their amorous arrangements that these prayers represent did derive from cultural expectations, what about the other factors? This decision involves serious contradictions, and more serious consequences. All ethical decisions have consequences.
One of the first, both consequence and contradiction, was the accusation of hypocrisy.
These new prayers set “pastoral practice” at odds with Church doctrine which remains traditional and biblical. A great deal of energy was put into suggesting that pastoral practice could be at odds with church doctrine without the contradiction and this caused undue difficulty.
The real reason was not a flexibility of intellectual imagination because everyone knows that in the next generation of the Synod the progressives will have gathered enough votes to constitute the two thirds majority they currently just lack and will immediately change Church doctrine, legitimise gay marriage and end the inconsistency.
Some progressives pretended that the present pastoral provision took the church as far as ethical revisionism needed to go, but this was a pretence in order not to frighten the horses. Others with steadier nerves not only warned Anglicans of what was to come, but promised it.
But might there be consequences for Church unity?
Here the progressives were more ebullient and confident. “There is no need to leave,” they cheerfully reassured the traditional dissidents. The conservatives were not so easily convinced. What would happen, they asked, when a gay couple asked a vicar for a blessing and he declines on the grounds of conscience and biblical commitment? Could he rely on his bishop to defend him? The bishops appeared to think that making such a blanket commitment to biblical fidelity might impose duties on the discharge of their episcopal responsibilities which could prove unsustainable. They have gone away to think about it.
As the potential ripples of the Synod’s decision-making spread beyond the debating chamber the question was asked of what effect it will have on other communities beyond the Church of England.
Addressing this was Archbishop Angelous of the Coptic Orthodox Church, an ecumenical observer at the General Synod. He was invited to give a speech during the debate. He gave one that I had heard other ecumenical observers give during my own 20-year membership of the Synod. “Be careful what you say and what you decide. It will have effects beyond your own boundaries.”
At the most obvious level this usually was a warning about the damage to ecumenical conversations. But I don’t remember any domestic decisions being restrained by such considerations.
However, with the experience of the Coptic Christian community in mind, some will remember seeing Egyptian Copts standing bloodied but unbowed in the streets of Egypt singing the Creed in defiant response to having their churches blown up during the holy liturgy. Such was the bloodshed they endured that had his listeners remembered those images they might have considered weighing his words more carefully than they did.
This is because he was talking not only about the near genocidal damage the Copts have experienced at the hands of the Islamists in Egypt, but he would also have had in mind the endless stream of deaths of Christians in Sudan, form where Archbishop Welby had just returned.
Indeed, Archbishop Welby of all people knows what the link is between Islamic violence and the Christian church’s validation of homosexuality.
He acknowledged it in the same debate when he said: “The differences we have here are small compared to many of those round the Communion. This is not just about listening to the rest of the world, it is about caring. It’s about people who will die, women who will be raped, children who will be tortured. So when we vote we need to think of that. This is not just about what people say, it is what they will suffer.”
In 2014 the Guardian painted an even more graphic picture at Welby’s behest, which it concluded that “African Christians will be killed if the Church of England accepts gay marriage, the archbishop of Canterbury has suggested”.
Speaking on an LBC phone in, Justin Welby said he had stood by a mass grave in Nigeria of 330 Christians who had been massacred by neighbours who had justified the atrocity by saying: “If we leave a Christian community here we will all be made to become homosexual and so we will kill all the Christians”.
“I have stood by gravesides in Africa of a group of Christians who had been attacked because of something that had happened in America. We have to listen to that. We have to be aware of the fact,” Welby said. If the Church of England celebrated gay marriages, he added, “the impact of that on Christians far from here, in South Sudan, Pakistan, Nigeria and other places would be absolutely catastrophic. Everything we say here goes round the world”.
You don’t have to be a conservative or traditionalist to find the inexorable lobbying for gay blessings and gay marriages problematic when they come at such a high price to your neighbour, even if he or she does live in Africa.
Not even the prospect of more vulnerable Christians paying such a price for these blessings did not distract the Synod from its determination to validate same-sex blessings.
“Love is love” is a clumsy mantra. All the more clumsy for valuing gay sex above the teaching of Jesus, the authority of the Bible, the universal witness of holiness, the unity of the Church and the lives of non-European women and children. What did they put in the water?
(Gay campaigner Peter Tatchell and the Most Rev Justin Welby PA)
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