Abstract
Faced with divisive moral questions, the habit of the churches in the past century has been to set up a working party or commission. It is not a self-evident thing to do. An older practice would have left responsibility with the Bishops or governing Assemblies—those who guarded the church’s doctrine. Our new way of seeking ‘the unity of the Spirit’ by commissioned discussion, however, has the advantage that it allows a moral question to be treated distinctly from a doctrinal one, and admits attention to the conscientious reflections of the wider Christian community and the first-hand experience of those who are closest to the problems. The two publications before us, in which representatives of the two major Protestant churches of Great Britain seek to clarify their churches’ pastoral position in relation to gay members and clergy, enable us to think not only about the material questions but about the serviceability of this means of seeking practical wisdom. It goes without saying that they are hardly typical of the educative and stimulating works that usually engage the review columns of this journal! Their considerations will have an over-familiar ring to anyone who has followed a wearing and intemperate debate over two or three decades, and I can commend neither of them for pleasurable reading. But as examples of how the representative task may be conceived and carried out, they have something to teach us.
It is common coin, worn too smooth, perhaps, by airy repetition, that decisions on such questions must be approached prayerfully, listening to the voice of the Spirit in the worldwide Christian community, and in considered faithfulness to its profession of faith in Christ. But what form does that considered faithfulness before moral challenges take? There is a range of substantive theological answers to the question, all of which can be true: faithfulness to mission, faithfulness to Scripture, faithfulness to the Spirit of Jesus, etc. But there is also a formal answer, which derives from the underlying shape of all practical reasoning. Considered faithfulness must involve deliberation on possible courses of action, and it must involve reflection on the shape and practical implications of the truths the church believes. Practical thinking has to discern a course of action that can witness, as completely as possible, to the light those truths shed on the practical situation we face—sometimes indirectly (as in the support for a just war, or tighter banking regulation) and sometimes directly (as in opposition to state-sponsored torture or euthanasia). The two moments of deliberation and reflection are coordinated, but they are also distinct and have different logics: deliberation narrowing the range of possibilities to one; and reflection holding together a multitude of relevant truths in a coherent pattern and order. A commission that hopes to do this thinking representatively must therefore embody both the catholicity and the unity of the church: casting its net widely enough to learn from the Scriptures, church traditions and the voices of other contemporary churches; and narrowing its attention to practical possibilities that actually present themselves. Consideration can fail in either respect: by excluding truths that ought always to be present to Christian minds or by including options that make no sense in relation to one another.
A body may be primarily deliberative or primarily reflective. It may be charged with recommending a course of action, summing up the practical situation, weighing alternative possibilities, implications, modes of implementation, difficulties etc., or with reflecting on how the truths of the faith shed light on a new practical question, gathering the interpretative yield from the work of theologians, listening to those who reflect on it in the course of their lives and ministry, and synthesising it in a form that can facilitate deliberation. The churches have unfortunately seen commissions and working parties that have focused on neither of those tasks. Some have simply gathered information, returning to their commissioning body with a mound of statistics and scattered information with no serious reflection done on it. Some have seen themselves as negotiators, charged with forging compromises between rival programmes. The churches have not usually been persuaded in either case that the voice of the Holy Spirit has been listened to.
The difference between the two possible emphases was interestingly illustrated by the process followed in the Church of Scotland, so let us take the Scottish story first. There were two commissions, and both of their reports are included in the volume under review. In 2009 a Special Commission was asked to advise on the moratorium on ordinations of persons in same-sex partnerships, and in 2011 a Theological Commission was appointed to explore the thinking that might support lifting it. The Special Commission, expertly chaired by Lord Hodge of the Scottish Court of Session, offered the 2011 General Assembly alternative ways forward: it could sustain the moratorium indefinitely while committing itself to further discernment and engagement at the reflective level, or it could move towards lifting the moratorium by undertaking a theological process with a view to a common understanding of what was involved. Some complained that this hardly settled anything. True, but it took the matter a clear step forward. The Special Commission did what deliberation ought to do, which is to clarify the decision to be made by the decision-making body, filling out what must be involved either way. But when, after the General Assembly resolved to explore the second path, the Theological Commission—finding itself unable to reach an agreed statement of principles—came back with yet another alternative, two rival theologies (the ‘revisionist’ version complete with a liturgy), the matter was quite different.
Anyone who understands the difference between the deliberative and reflective tasks will understand why it was right for the Special Commission to define an alternative and wrong for the Theological Commission to do so. To look at alternative possibilities for acting is one thing; to look at alternative possibilities for believing is something else. In deliberation we take a view of alternative courses of action; in reflection we formulate our belief coherently and comprehensively. In order to pursue its alternative structures of belief to best advantage, the Theological Commission divided itself, in effect, into two Commissions working apart, each coming up with a comprehensive statement. As a result it said a great deal separately that it could perfectly well have said together. This subverted from the outset the possibility of the church’s acting as one, and struck at the root of the Church of Scotland’s catholicity. The General Assembly of 2013 was offered a choice—an exclusive one—of two ways of ceasing to be a church and becoming a sect. And it needs to be said that this was the result of a collusion between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘revisionists’, who joined forces to insist that the matter must be settled now—before, in other words, there was an agreed basis of belief for settling it! Their exhaustion with the issue, with which it is hard not to feel sympathy, became the chief obstacle to the church’s will to be the church. In the light of this there is more than a little irony about the pages they devoted to expounding (together) the Church of Scotland’s historic ecclesiology—the only thing they could agree on, apparently, and yet wholly ineffective in shaping their proceedings!
The principle on which a small and informal group offered the churches the St Andrew’s Day Statement eighteen years ago was that the only basis for constructive disagreement in church life is constructive agreement. The ‘mixed-economy church’ (to borrow the expression favoured in Scotland) requires a strongly built mixing bowl. This was already, of course, an accepted principle of the ecumenical movement. A good revision in practice cannot be supported by a ‘revisionist’ theology—on the contrary, it needs a thoroughly catholic and orthodox foundation. By articulating carefully everything theological that two sides in a practical disagreement can say together, we can get the scope of the disagreement in proper perspective, and may open the way to agreement on experiments which have a chance of commending themselves in practice. So long as proposals for experiment come with the label of ‘revisionism’, on the other hand, no church with concerns for its catholicity can embrace them. It seems to me that this elementary wisdom has never been seriously put to the test in the gay issue. The path followed by the Scottish Church’s Theological Commission was exactly the opposite, to draw back into self-contained communities of discourse that no longer communicate, and so to widen the gulf irreparably. The Church of Scotland itself pulled back—whether far enough to preserve itself from the schismatic tendency of its theologians remains to be seen.
The Church of England also followed a two-track approach to the problem, but much less strategically defined. In 2011 a working group was set up to review the Bishops’ 2005 Pastoral Statement on Civil Partnerships, and was instructed to take into account ‘biblical, historical and ecumenical’ perspectives derived from the Listening Process originating in the Lambeth Conference of 1998. This task was entrusted to a working group of four bishops with a civil servant, Sir Joseph Pilling, in the chair, subsequently reinforced by three clerical and theological advisers. In the next year, faced with the need to respond to the government’s rushed initiative over same-sex marriage, the House commissioned a theological document on marriage, Men and Women in Marriage, published in March 2013, to be followed in spring 2014 by a Pastoral Statement from the Bishops. The line of demarcation between the two initiatives (sexuality on the one side and marriage on the other) followed a political rather than an intellectual strategy; the Bishops were preparing to group their defensive forces around the doctrine of marriage. But it was, to say the least, not calculated to improve the reflective coherence of the thinking done on either side of the line.
But most of the difficulties people are likely to find with the Pilling Report (under review here) go back to the terms it was given, which attempted to wrap up in one endeavour a focused question about the pastoral practice defined by Issues in Human Sexuality in 1991 with a reflective absorption of the Listening Process. ‘Biblical, historical and ecumenical’ (p. 1) was an invitation to the working group to do theology—though the word itself was missing—but the theme for their theology was to be tilted in the direction of the experience of sexuality, and the sources weighted by a process set up specifically to attend to that experience. This is not the way that churches in the catholic tradition have thought theology should be done. The working group took its listening brief very seriously. If the House of Bishops had thought that the process was more or less complete, and what remained was simply to garner its findings, the group set out on a programme of more listening and, chief among its recommendations, urges the church to do more and yet more listening. Before, in a numbed-down mood, we give a reflex assent to that, should we not ask both who ‘we’ are and who ‘we’ are supposed to be listening to: to the voice of the Spirit in the church as a whole; to certain well-established consensual groups that are in contention for greater power and influence; and to others with other experiences (a failure to listen, as Issues in Human Sexuality failed to listen, to bisexual experience has been a charge already levelled against the group)?
The working group was aware of the need to involve the voice of the church in the worldwide Anglican communion (though it has no proposal for doing so over its own practical recommendation) and it was aware (surely we must be grateful for this) that science has something relevant to say, too. Its treatment of Scripture, on the other hand, is somewhat despairing. One of the things the group reckoned it had learned from its listening process was that at the root of the stubborn disagreement about sexuality there lay incompatible understandings of the doctrine and use of Scripture. What understandings? It is true that there are in currency certain well-entrenched pettifogging ways of handling certain texts, yet the wider discussions of hermeneutic principle over the past half-century have come a long way towards convergence: everybody understands that reading Scripture involves encountering a historical situation that is not our own; nobody thinks that our contemporary experience is irrelevant to what we draw from that encounter; nobody thinks it can simply dictate what we draw from it. Why does this convergence not soften the radical hermeneutical opposition that is supposed to bedevil the area of sexuality? And why does that opposition only show up in this area? We would be frankly surprised to be told that disagreements about capitalism and socialism, nationalism and internationalism, truth-telling and lying, and so on, all sprang from disagreements about the meaning and use of Scripture. It is, I am afraid, something of a displacement myth, current among those who, in disagreeing deeply about sexuality, would like to find some more dignified grounds for doing so.
A minority report by the Bishop of Birkenhead (which benefits, as minority reports often do, from the added coherence of being written by one person, as well as from the sharply focused attention with which its author identifies agreements as well as problems) finds fault, above all, with the way the working group did its theology: propounding a ‘big picture’ of Scripture on sexuality while ignoring the obvious. The majority report tells its readers it abides by the church’s teaching, while giving them no reasons for believing that teaching to be true. It avoids any affirmation of the marriage doctrine the bishops are currently committed to, namely, that marriage is between one man and one woman, and yet does not observe the territorial boundary set between it and the Marriage Report when there is a chance of hinting at an alternative. In other words, here is another arbitrary anthology of favourite theological thoughts without a theological structure.
The practical recommendations of the Pilling Report are (wisely) presented so as not to look radical: the pastoral authority of a priest to have private prayers with a couple entering a relationship as he or she deems appropriate, confirmed in the bishops’ guidance on civil partnerships in 2005, should extend, it suggests, to holding a public service. This is still to be understood as a pastoral accommodation, not a statement of the church’s doctrine, and for that reason it should not imply an authorised liturgy (p. 118). Further discussion of this proposal is bound to turn on how large this small further step really is, and whether the working group has shown that there is actually any ground to stand on. The term ‘pastoral accommodation’ cannot simply be invoked, just to take the sting out of a proposal. Its use has to be proved by an effective design which promises to strike the balance required of it. In the case of the remarriage of divorced people this was to be done by a carefully conceived set of guidelines for pastoral enquiry. Here we are confronting a more radical departure, because the public prayers proposed will be more or less without precedent in the Church of England. Can there be a ‘public’ service in an Anglican church to which the church as a whole is not committed? Can a ‘public’ service occur without a liturgy of some sort, and if the service is authorised but no liturgy is authorised, does that mean that any liturgy is authorised? The bishops are invited to consider issuing guidelines. Would a liturgy that conformed to these guidelines be an ‘authorised’ liturgy? If a liturgy that conformed to the bishops’ guidelines were to include, as a public declaration, ‘Whatever your unique mix and measure of sexuality, be very glad; to be a human sexual [sic] is fundamental and ordinary and exceptional’ (p. 195), ought it to satisfy the consciences of those who had no idea what those words were supposed to mean, that nobody had authorised them as such, and that nobody was going to be required to pronounce them?
This is the line of questioning that ought to proceed out of the Pilling recommendation. I sound sceptical, and perhaps I am, a little. But to be sceptical is merely one way of having questions, and, because it really is time that this semi-authorised option were properly explored, I should be genuinely glad if these questions were aired and the clearest answers available to them given. If this happens, we shall have reason to be grateful to the Pilling Report; I could wish simply that it had itself identified and exposed these questions more clearly.
Three further features of the Pilling Report deserve comment, and invite some reflection on the value of the working-party model as a whole for church deliberations. This report is extended to something like twice its natural length by including a range of individual submissions presented under single-author names (including my own, I should mention). The case for this, I suppose, is to illustrate the range of opinions; but is this what the church needs a commission to do—to produce what Seamus Heaney might call a ‘rattle bag’? Furthermore, the text of the Report itself is full of demurrals and qualifications entered on the part of ‘some of us’, as though nothing could be said without recording everybody’s preferred form of words. Is this what the church needs a commission to do? Thirdly, in a quite unusual step, the working group places a sermon about desire by one of its advisers, Dr Jessica Martin, not in an Appendix but at the head of its proceedings. It is a good sermon, and I am glad to have read it; but its prominence announces from the outset an approach to the task which quite evidently will not be shared by the whole church. Even if it were possible to approach this topic from the question of desire (which is surely controversial), and even were it possible to talk about desire solely in relation to this topic without discussing other desires (for money, for fame, for power, for peace etc.), which is absurd, the question remains: is this what the church needs a commission to do?
A commission is set up to practise reflection and deliberation representatively, on the whole church’s behalf. Its success, then, stands or falls on its members being able and willing to subordinate their personal approaches, however interesting on their own terms, to search for an approach that they can all sign up to in good conscience. Simply to highlight this aim it would be preferable for reports to contain no private papers at all, unless there is a minority report, which, after all, is essentially a statement on the part of the commission as a whole of the reasons for its failure to agree. (I would even argue, as the author of more than one minority report myself, that such a dissenting note should not be signed, but should be incorporated into the body of the report as a fair statement of the minority perspective on the responsibility of all the members.) Everything has to work towards a concerted, agreed statement, which must go just as far as the members find they can go, and will be content to go no further. It is worth adding that the shorter and more focused a statement is, the better the chance that all members sign up to it without feeling they have to throw in their own two penn’orth at every turn.
But if a commission is to reach a representative agreement, it must be well constituted with appropriate membership and appropriate instructions. The assumption that such bodies must be composed of known advocates for opposed positions, and must invite evidence from other known advocates of opposed positions, is generally a destructive one. The political attractions of the ‘balanced’ body must surely be outweighed by such matters as competent understanding, relevant experience and the ability to communicate it well, and readiness to engage in a dialectical exploration of all sides of a question. Nobody is equipped to serve on such a body who is not capable of making a clear distinction between what can tolerably be allowed to be said, and what he or she will go down fighting for. And then there is the vexed matter of deadlines. Take half a dozen people of strong and conflicting views who have never met, put them together in a room a handful of times, set them such a tight deadline so that they have to start planning the sections and chapters of their report before they have even explored one another’s minds, and you get what you ask for: stalemate. A better option would often be a standing committee, whose members had prior understanding of where one another’s convictions and anxieties lay, and had had experience of finding routes for leading these towards points of common agreement.
And then there is the question of evidence: who gives it, and about what? I was invited to present evidence to two out of the three bodies whose reports are reviewed here. I tried to do the job that belongs to a moral theologian, and help those entrusted with the churches’ deliberations appreciate the shape of the questions they had to think about. My approach was greeted with courtesy and attention, and yet a certain undertone in the discussions suggested a different logic in the way evidence was received. An unspoken expectation that a weight on one side required a weight on the other to offset it left me, once I had overcome a frisson of piqued pride at the apparent affront to the intellectual discipline of moral theology, with an appalled sense of the desperate position of commission members, reduced to impotence by being expected to perform an intellectual task on essentially hydrodynamic lines. They will not have much time for evidence that tells them things they need to know if they are all the time having to hear evidence that tells them what their conclusions should be.
I heard a bishop say the other day, ‘We have got to find a different way of solving problems than shutting six incompatible people in a room and letting them tear one another apart!’ I cannot disagree. It might be objected that the gay issue is hardly a fair test because it’s insoluble. But why is it insoluble, and how do we know, other than that we have not solved it? I suspect that it has become more and more insoluble as the means taken to solve it have consistently encouraged and rewarded heightened opposition and hobbled attempts to find consensus. In 1997 some of us thought we saw a way forward. Were we simply deluded? Or is it simply that nobody wanted to take the time to follow a slower, more exploratory path?