The Church of England’s exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage

Matthew Simpkins

Since the first civil same-sex marriage ceremonies took place in England on 19 March 2014 there has existed a fundamental and unprecedented split between what established Church and state consider constitutes a ‘marriage’. Same-sex couples are excluded from marriage in the Church of England, which has presented a case proceeding not from any scriptural prohibitions of same-sex acts but rather from claims about universal ‘natural marriage’. Consequently, the Church has not merely argued that it should be permitted to operate its own definition of marriage, but has claimed exclusively heterosexual marriage to be a universal institution. It has not proposed, as did C. S. Lewis when writing on divorce, that ‘There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members’, but has argued that the state has overstepped its proper concern with the ‘regulation of formalities’ to redefine the institution itself. ¹ By taking this stance and claiming that its understanding of marriage should apply across society, irrespective of any democratic mandate, the onus rests on the Church of England to demonstrate that it is justified in excluding same-sex couples. So, as ‘facilitated discussions’ continue within the Church, this article seeks to contribute a fuller understanding and critique of the Church’s statements in order to evaluate whether its arguments adequately justify excluding same-sex couples from marriage. We begin by observing that Oliver O’Donovan’s arguments are the major influence upon the Church’s publications on the issue, in particular Men and Women in Marriage which presents a ‘rationale for the doctrine of the Church of England on marriage’. ² While O’Donovan’s name does not appear on this document, he is a member of the Faith & Order Commission under whose auspices it was published, and it is reported that he was a major contributor. ³ We proceed by offering a critique of Men and Women where ‘gaps’ in its reasoning identified by Nigel Biggar are filled by the fuller arguments of O’Donovan. ⁴

The three goods of marriage

The Church of England’s doctrine, contained within its liturgies and canons, is that marriage between a man and a woman is an institution that honours three ‘goods’: procreation, fidelity and permanent mutuality. ⁵ The more recent Common Worship liturgy maintains these, but omits the term ‘procreation’, preferring to describe marriage as ‘the foundation of family life in which children are [born and] nurtured’. ⁶ The square brackets and emphasis on nurture implies that procreation is not necessary for a valid marriage: rather procreation is honoured in the sense that marriage provides the only proper context for procreation. This clarification, taken with the Pilling Report’s acknowledgement that homosexual relationships ‘often embody genuine mutuality and fidelity’, indicates that none of the three goods is intrinsically incompatible with same-sex unions. ⁷

The Church’s secondary documents such as Men and Women in Marriage, however, argue that the three goods are intrinsically and exclusively heterosexual. The case is made that marriage is the ‘ought’ rooted in the ‘is’ of the two biological sexes: male and female. As a ‘creation ordinance’, marriage is a ‘natural’ institution (and therefore universal rather than exclusively Christian) conforming to the created moral order that is confirmed by Scripture and evident across cultures. This argument is typical of O’Donovan whose other writings illuminate Men and Women and allow for a fuller understanding of its claims. ⁸

Oliver O’Donovan’s ethic

Underpinning O’Donovan’s ethic is the observation that God created the world and saw that it was good and complete. Though the creation is subject to the fall, the moral order given in creation remains and is real. Christ’s resurrection reaffirms the creation and its goods, and hence the moral order. The ‘eschatological triumph … fulfils and vindicates the primal order in a way that was always implied’, therefore the ‘way the universe is determines how man ought to behave himself in it’. ⁹ Though our ability to know this moral order in creation is impaired by the epistemological effects of the fall, Christians can – with the help of revelation – still read it in creation.

O’Donovan’s ethic is therefore inherently conservative – Christ’s resurrection does not create or reject goods, or alter existing goods. O’Donovan’s disagreements with Robert Merrihew Adams are informative here. To Adams the ‘good’ ‘faithfully images God’ and Christ ‘calls us, not above all to stand by a primeval order of human life, but to embrace a reign of God in which all things are made new’. ¹⁰ To O’Donovan, Adams construes ‘God’s purposes in a purely voluntarist and arbitrary sense’ and his approach amounts to shifting the moral ‘content of creation … to eschatology’ and a ‘denial of … beginnings’. ¹¹ But Adams does not abandon creation, he proposes that ‘Christian thought about … sexual relations, should focus as much on eschatology as on creation.’ ¹² O’Donovan suggests that we must choose between a coherent ethic based on creation and an incoherent one based on eschatology. But this is a false dichotomy underwritten by his choice to emphasize the epistemological implications of the fall but not the ontological implications. (That is, the fall impairs our ability to know the moral order, but did not affect the created order itself.) Yet it is an orthodox position to suggest that creation itself was affected by the fall (Genesis 3.17) and that this renders God’s purposes yet more difficult to read from nature. In other words, if the fall affected the workings of creation and ‘nature’ then to question the link between the post-fall ‘is’ and moral ‘ought’ is not – as O’Donovan suggests – to undermine the goodness of pre-fall creation. O’Donovan rejects the notion that Christ (and the resurrection) might reveal a pre-fall or eschatological order, a rejection which should be considered as much ideologically conservative as theologically orthodox.

O’Donovan’s ethic is also ‘naturalistic’ insofar as he holds that we can perceive God’s purposes by looking at nature, though we need Scripture to guide us. He ensures that his is not a ‘natural law’ ethic, however, by laying down a governing requirement that any ‘natural’ moral claim (any ethical statement based on observing creation) is admissible only if confirmed by Scripture: any ethic that is ‘“natural”, in … that its contents are simply known to all, has to face dauntingly high barriers’ which can only be overcome through ‘God’s own disclosure of himself and of his works’. ¹³

Reading Scripture: Natural marriage and procreation

O’Donovan and Men and Women begin from Scripture, therefore. From Genesis, Men and Women emphasizes that God created two sexes, and that God told man and woman to procreate: ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (1.27–28). Significantly these passages are taken together – they are synthesized – to describe ‘marriage’, a term absent from Genesis. While we read that procreation is a good ordained by God, and while there is a description of faithful relationship and mutuality between ‘husband/man’ and ‘wife/woman’ (2.18–25), Genesis explicitly links neither procreation and marriage, nor procreation and faithful relationship.

By O’Donovan’s own governing requirement this synthesis requires confirmation from Scripture, which is claimed using Matthew 19.4–5. Here, argues O’Donovan, Jesus combines an ‘interest in marriage as relationship [Gen. 2.24] … [with an] interest in sexual differentiation as creational order [Gen. 1.27]’. ¹⁴ This is presented as Jesus’ affirmation of the essential connection between marriage and procreation. But Biggar observes that in Matthew (and parallels) Jesus is speaking about divorce and is arguing for fidelity – procreation isn’t mentioned; consequently, the clause, ‘“and the two shall become one flesh” is most naturally taken to refer to a relationship of intimate fidelity’ which, if it alludes to procreation, ‘presents it as a symptom of the union’. We cannot infer from this passage that ‘all marriages must express themselves in procreation’, nor that ‘marriage must be heterosexual’, because the passage does not assert, but ‘merely assumes that marriage is heterosexual’. ¹⁵

Such an assumption may be more significant than Biggar implies, however. The norm of heterosexual marriage may have been considered so obvious that it did not need asserting. Yet even this limits the passage’s contribution to the silent confirmation of a natural norm.

So the goods and ordinances associated with creation in Genesis and Matthew are synthesized by Men and Women and O’Donovan into a concept of marriage that goes beyond what can be derived reasonably from those passages alone. The strongest that can be asserted is that a natural norm of exclusively heterosexual marriage is assumed. This seemingly falls short of O’Donovan’s governing requirement.

Reading nature: The purposes and goals of biology

O’Donovan might retort that Scripture assumes a norm which is also available to us by looking at the workings of our bodies. In ‘Transsexualism and Christian Marriage’, he argues that ‘biological opposition of the sexes is essential’ to marriage and its goods. ¹⁶ Here O’Donovan makes a crucial distinction between what he calls ‘sexual dimorphism’ (that is, male/female biological sexual opposition) and a subsequent layer of masculinity and femininity which depends on this male/female biology. Unlike biological sex, which is an either/or (male/female), masculinity and femininity are poles between which is a spectrum. Humanity’s sexual dimorphism reveals a natural orientation to our physiology – the male body is ‘structurally ordered to loving union with a female body and vice versa’. ¹⁷ In other words, God intended that male should be in loving union with female – and we can tell this from our genitals and what we can do with them. Consequently, same-sex union is disordered and unnatural.

It is the purposes of male/female human physiology that tell O’Donovan what is ‘natural’. Other elements of our identity (such as masculinity and femininity) are constructed on top of this. So even if homosexual attraction is ‘given’ (that is, neither chosen nor forced on us), this can never render it ‘natural’ because the determining factor is the ‘non-negotiable biological datum of sexual opposition’. ¹⁸ We just are male or female; to be male is to be ordered towards loving union with female, to be female is to be ordered towards loving union with the male. This is the natural order that God created and with which we should work. Scripture details two and only two sexual vocations: heterosexual marriage and singleness. Because ‘someone who is not called to the one is called to the other’, homosexual attraction can only be a call to celibacy. ¹⁹

But O’Donovan’s argument only holds if the institution of marriage can be shown to be exclusively heterosexual. He attempts this by proposing that the goods of marriage are the purpose and fulfilment of physiological sexual opposition.

Procreation or physiology?

There have always been valid marriages that have not resulted in procreation. Men and Women acknowledges this by arguing not for procreation as being essential to marriage, but for the necessity of being ‘open in principle to procreation’. ²⁰

Two objections can be raised against this. The first is that this idea depends on a ‘moralistic fallacy’ which derives an ‘is’ from an ‘ought’: it tells us the way the universe is, on the basis of how we ought to behave. It moves backwards from the statement that heterosexual marriage provides the only proper context for procreation to the ‘fact’ that procreation can only occur between a man and a woman. But, as Biggar argues, artificial insemination and surrogacy demonstrate that sexual acts between a man and a woman are no longer the only means for procreation. ²¹ However, neither Men and Women nor O’Donovan use ‘procreation’ to mean successful, literal reproduction. What they mean is ‘natural procreation’: a valid marriage must be open to natural procreation. O’Donovan defines ‘natural’ procreation in contrast to ‘technological’ procreation. Natural procreation is procreation ‘with the grain’ of the created order, without any un-natural scientific or technological intervention: i.e. between a man and a woman. ²² So when ‘openness to procreation’ is clarified as ‘openness to natural procreation’, then, our first objection is overcome: homosexual couples simply cannot – by O’Donovan’s definition – conceive naturally.

A second objection concerns logic. In his response to Men and Women, Biggar argues that sexual unions may only be described as ‘open in principle’ to procreation, if procreation is actually possible. ²³ But illuminated by O’Donovan’s writings it becomes apparent that what Men and Women argues is that homosexual intercourse is ‘necessarily rather than contingently, childless’. ²⁴ Homosexual intercourse has never resulted in natural (technologically unaided) childbirth. Infertile heterosexual intercourse is not necessarily closed to procreation; it is only contingently closed. In other words, if heterosexual bodies were in their intended pre-fall fully healthy condition then their union would result in procreation.

So we may clarify Men and Women’s argument as: ‘valid marriages may be “contingently closed” but must not be “necessarily closed” to procreation’. And by rejecting the category ‘actually closed to procreation’ (that is, literally unable to procreate), in favour of opposing ‘actually open or contingently closed to procreation’ to ‘necessarily closed to procreation’, the second objection appears to fall.

Yet in fact it does not. The argument takes this form:

A: All valid marriages are open or contingently closed to natural procreation.

B: No homosexual unions are open or contingently closed to natural procreation.

Therefore, C: No valid marriages are homosexual.

Fidelity and mutuality

The remaining goods of fidelity and permanent mutuality fall under a category O’Donovan calls ‘relational’. He proposes two connections between relational goods and sexual opposition.

First, relational goods follow from dimorphism. That is, sexual opposition is ‘a positive foundation for the full relationship of persons in marriage’ and its goodness is disclosed by its ‘fulfilment in personal relationship’. This is because intrinsic to male/female biology is a structural ‘orientation to permanent heterosexual union’. ²⁵ It is unclear, however, how the good of permanent and faithful union necessarily follows from, or is intrinsic to reproductive biology. What about our bodies demonstrates that long-term, stable relationships are the proper purpose of male/female biology? A man is capable of impregnating several hundred women during his lifetime, what biological feature suggests that this is not the proper purpose? The suggestion that relational goods flow necessarily from male/female biology is unconvincing.

Second, O’Donovan argues that ‘procreative’ and ‘relational’ goods cannot be realized independently: each is ‘threatened by the loss of the other’. ²⁶ To O’Donovan, homosexual unions (incapable of natural procreation) necessarily split these goods. This argument faces the above objection that O’Donovan reduces ‘procreation’ to physiology: therefore, his argument is that relational goods cannot be realized independently from physiological sexual opposition – an argument already found unpersuasive.

O’Donovan’s reading of nature fails to convincingly demonstrate, therefore, that permanent mutuality and fidelity are goods of marriage which same-sex relationships are unable to honour.

Conclusion

Permanent and faithful homosexual relationships are not inherently incompatible with the goods of the Church of England’s primary expressions of marriage doctrine. Its case for exclusion resides in secondary documents, such as Men and Women, which employ a distilled version of O’Donovan’s naturalistic arguments. We have identified a number of problems with these arguments:

O’Donovan’s ethic is inherently conservative. His requirement that the resurrection neither adds to, abrogates or alters goods is as much ideologically conservative as it is theologically orthodox.

Thus these arguments boil down to the statement: ‘Marriage must be between a woman and a man’ repeated in complex terminology in propositions that fail to draw persuasive supporting evidence from Scripture, physiology or reproductive biology despite their appeal to these authorities. Consequently, the Church of England’s arguments fail to justify the exclusion of same-sex couples from ‘church’ marriage, let alone from marriage in broader society.

Furthermore, while it claims and appeals to a theological orthodoxy, the Church of England fails to make explicit the significant influence of a single figure, Oliver O’Donovan or to acknowledge the ideological conservatism implicit in his ethic. Those who question documents such as Men and Women in Marriage are not in fact challenging brute orthodoxy, but a particular ethical system. As the facilitated discussions on same-sex marriage continue, perhaps the air of authority, universality and orthodoxy surrounding documents such as Men and Women in Marriage should be replaced by an acknowledgement of the contingency of the ethical system and the ideological commitments assumed behind them, both of which should very much be up for debate.

Oliver O’Donovan

The claims made by Matthew Simpkins for my influence upon the Church of England are very great – so great as to be quite flattering to anyone with aspirations to pose as a Rasputin. But I lack the necessary self-dramatizing flair for the role. Men and Women in Marriage was written, as it says, to enlarge on the summary statement on marriage in the House of Bishops statement on Civil Partnerships of 2005, ²⁷ which in turn was founded on Canon B30. It is a plain fact – make of it what one will – that I had no hand at all in shaping the 2005 statement. Any attempt to interpret the Faith and Order document must weigh its prehistory carefully, and must take note of the House of Bishops’ strategy of commissioning two documents in parallel, the Faith and Order document and the Pilling Report, with different foci of attention for each.

Such collectively authored documents, commissioned and authorized by a formally constituted church body, do not represent the views of any one person. No doubt, each member of the group that works on them will feel that he or she would have written something rather different acting alone. What we write for ourselves has the virtue of expressing just what we think, with whatever coherence we have been able to think it; the collective document can say only what all those involved can agree to say. Yet the collective document has its merits, too. It is something done together, drawing on more than one person’s ideas; it speaks for a community. In the Church, which dares to conceive itself as the body of Christ, collectively authored documents have always played a major role and, no doubt, will continue to do so. We must therefore learn how to read them. If source criticism is to be brought to bear on a collective document, all possible sources must be considered: the ideas of all the participants, to the extent that they are known, and also the orientation of the institutional context in which they are working. Of course, a collective document will have ‘gaps’, and it may be a constructive response to point them out and to reflect on various ways in which they can be made good. But it is certainly a false move to fill them in by direct reference to a single participant’s thought. The very fact that the gaps are there when one might have expected something further to be said, is actually an indication, not that that something was implied, but that it was something the collective author was not ready to say.

What, then, of Simpkins’s other interpretative aim, which is to give an account of my own views on the question of same-sex relationships? Here he suffers from an unfortunate limitation: he has left out of consideration the attempts I have made in writing to address this question directly. If Matthew Simpkins judged my views worth charting at all, there are three essays that should have had a central place. ²⁸ Without them he has reconstructed my opinions from texts written to address related but different questions, with results that might be expected. From an article I wrote back in 1982 on sex-reassignment surgery (a topic which demands that something be said about sexual physiology) he reaches the general judgement that ‘it is the purposes of male/female physiology that tell O’Donovan what is “natural”.’ From my Conversation Waiting to Begin, primarily about the way the Church handled the debate though it offered some indications of my views on the substance, he has noticed only a critique of R. M. Adams’s polemical essay on ‘Nature’, which he misrepresents as directed against that author’s fine work of moral philosophy, Finite and Infinite Goods (on which I have made some comments in Finding and Seeking).

If I may be allowed a more general word about the debate at large, it must be this. Our thought must be able to move from the tradition to our present pastoral needs in a way that we can give a convincing account of. The point of the famous Anglican ‘tripod’ (open to criticism as it may be) was that responsible thinking had to be rather more than a determined imposition of patterns upon evidence. It required a dialectical movement between fact and task, between past, present and future, between authority in belief and freedom to decide. Rightly or wrongly, Anglicans have claimed that a scripturally responsible reasonableness was central to their identity among the Christian churches, and though a claim to a monopoly on reasonableness is pretentious, there can certainly be nothing to be said in favour of an Anglican identity without it. But an identity of unreasoning action is increasingly the only Anglican identity we have, and the argument on same-sex marriage risks putting an end to our one-time boast once and for all. Consider, for example, the discussions of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which, in adopting a plan earlier this year to open the way to same-sex marriage, was guided by a ‘theological’ paper (essentially managerial, in fact) which ought to attract some comment for the way it proceeds. ²⁹ Having drawn its substantive arguments largely from the basis of that Church’s own recent marriage liturgy of 2007 (of which most lay members will have had no experience), it then proceeds to engage with some things I wrote in Conversation about the Anglican tripod. Taking note of my anxiety that the search for understanding is stalled by a peremptory selectivity in handling Scripture and tradition (of which this paper, at least, was innocent, since it made no use of either!) it then adds the warning: ‘a call for more time to reason can sometimes be a way of stalling a process’. ³⁰ That objection seems to me to articulate precisely where we have come to. What process?

Not a process of theological thinking, evidently! And not a process of pastoral response to the needs of gay people, for that response could have gone ahead much faster than it has, were it not perpetually weighed down by the heavy baggage of doctrinal revisionism. It is a bureaucratic and managerial process which wants to tidy up an embarrassing gap between Christian and public social thinking. And the question we face is whether the question of marriage will be resolved in the end by the consensus fidelium or the church managers. The managers believe that if they cut their way decisively through the bush, the consensus fidelium will dutifully follow, adding a suitable doctrinal paving to the path later on. Either we believe theological reflection matters in guiding the Church’s life, or we do not. If we do, let us give it the time it takes, which is the time it takes to find the consensus fidelium. If a general consensus fidelium does not matter, let us cease the pretence of seeking it, and let the managers manage. But then the Church will be a different kind of body, with much less claim upon our loyalty and service.

Any possible consensus is bound to fall into a certain shape, focused on two poles. There will be agreement, historically and exegetically based, on what the established doctrine of marriage in the Church is and has been; there will be agreement on the kind of innovatory action the circumstances of our times and the authorization of the Holy Spirit allows and requires in faithfulness to Scripture and tradition. If the logic of this shape is not appreciated, disagreement will be, as it has been, tactically spread from the second of these poles, where it is the reality we start from, to the first, where there is no need for disagreement at all. By creating confusion over what the faith of the Church is and has been, as the Scottish document does, management proceeds to undermine the whole idea of a consensus fidelium. The test of a responsibly Anglican approach, I believe, will be that it can be aware of the polar tension between the two questions, sense the delicacy of the task of moving between them and focus its attention on understanding what we really need to understand, which is not to be found in our canons and liturgies, namely what gay Christians of our time, with a serious lifelong desire to follow Christ, see as the certainties and the trials of their faith, and discuss those. My complaint from the beginning has been that the managerial voice (which the Scottish Episcopalians do not like me describing as ‘liberal’) drowns out the voice that constitutes our real task of understanding.

Matthew Simpkins

I am grateful to Professor O’Donovan for his generosity in responding to my article.

I consider him no Rasputin, but among the most significant contemporary ethicists, and his important voice should be attended to. I certainly assumed that the thought of such a major figure would leave some imprint on any collective document to which he contributed directly and was therefore frustrated that any influence was not acknowledged openly. I sought to present an interpretation of Men and Women that addressed Biggar’s criticisms by drawing on the insights of a key contributor who elsewhere had presented arguments concerning the areas Biggar found lacking. This ‘false move’ was made with charitable intentions. Though it seems remarkable that O’Donovan’s thought should not significantly influence Men and Women, he has clarified the modesty of his contribution.

Regarding my exposition of his own arguments, O’Donovan is correct that I do not refer to the articles he mentions. Why? Because in a short article I sought to present the fundamentals of his ethic, and his key presuppositions and arguments about the ontology of sex and of marriage and of the relationship between the two, which are of critical importance. I had found these core – not merely related – ideas neither superseded nor refuted in O’Donovan’s later articles (where they are drawn into broader conversation), and I encourage readers to examine these documents and decide if my conclusion is fair. It seems, however, that aside from my comparison with Adams (illustrating a potential confusion between the ‘orthodox’ and the ideologically conservative), my concerns and questions remain unaddressed.

Returning to Men and Women and its ‘gaps’, a problem arises. This document describes itself as a ‘rationale’ for the Church’s doctrine found in its liturgies and canons. Yet, if I read O’Donovan correctly, it is fitting that this rationale’s reasoning has gaps. So what elements of the Church’s position are to be explored during the ‘shared conversations’ facilitated discussions? The trouble appears to be not simply that there ‘was something the collective author was not ready to say’, but that the collective author of a ‘rationale’ said some very significant things without offering reasons. O’Donovan implies that discussion may establish reasons which fill these gaps. Yet what if the underlying statement ‘marriage is between a man and a woman’ itself requires discussion?

I too seek ‘scripturally responsible reasonableness’, hence my concern that the ‘tripod’ seems rickety. The reason ‘leg’ has acknowledged holes in it. Out of respect for Scripture, I put forward questions about the scriptural integrity of particular selective appeals to the Bible. This leaves tradition, which O’Donovan’s account of the relationship between House of Bishops’ statements, canons and Men and Women suggests is the soundest ‘leg’.

I trust I am not shouting, but questioning respectfully in order to enhance the conversation. O’Donovan is right: we must ‘reason’ together, not shout. I hope he writes further on this issue, therefore. We have waited long enough for the conversation (or ‘shared conversations’, at least) to begin – it is vital to this conversation that we hear O’Donovan’s reasons and position clearly.