Working Group on Human Sexuality

The House of Bishops

Working Group on human sexuality

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Report of the House of Bishops

Working Group on human sexuality

November 2013

Church House Publishing Church House Great Smith Street London
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Unless otherwise indicated, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
GS 1929 Published 2013 for the House of Bishops of the General Synod of the Church of England by Church House Publishing.

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Contents

Foreword

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Prologue ‘Living with holiness and desire’ by the Revd Dr Jessica Martin

Part 1 Introduction

The establishment, membership and work of the group
A rapidly changing context
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10 15 23 28
Listening to each other – and continuing to do so
The obligations of belonging to the Anglican Communion
The current teaching of the Church of England

Part 2 Summarizing the evidence

Sexuality, culture and Christian ethics
Sexuality and social trends
Homophobia
39 47 54 59 67 75
Arguments about science Arguments about Scripture
Perspectives from two theologians

Part 3 Reflecting on the evidence

Christian ethics – the Anglican tradition
Scripture and theology
83 90
Countering prejudice and homophobia
Science, society and demographics A process for listening to each other
94 97
103

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Contents

The Church’s practice

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119

A Dissenting Statement by the Bishop of Birkenhead

Part 4 Findings and recommendations

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Appendices

Appendix 1 Members of the Working Group Appendix 2 Evidence received by the group
Appendix 3 Keith Sinclair, Bishop of Birkenhead,
‘Scripture and same sex relationships’
153 154

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Appendix 4 David Runcorn, ‘Evangelicals, Scripture and same sex relationships –

an ‘Including Evangelical’ perspective’

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Notes

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Foreword

None of us involved with the work of this group was unaware of how difficult a subject we were asked to tackle when the work began. Our expectation that it would be – in management jargon – challenging has been met. In the end we have not been able to achieve a unanimous report. But the experience has left us feeling more positive than we might have expected. It has been a privilege to listen to deeply personal accounts of Christian lives lived with same sex attraction. We have all learned and been changed by the experience and by other aspects of the group’s work. We have been conscious of large numbers of people praying for us and for our work.

The subject is more divisive than just two perspectives might suggest. I doubt if there are any two of us who agree in every detail on the ground we have covered. Against that background, it is encouraging that our meetings have been marked by honesty and openness and by love and respect. Our disagreements have been explored in the warmth of a shared faith. To that extent, prayers have been answered and we are grateful to God.

We have relied heavily on the staff team throughout. All of them had other heavy commitments but they have been unstinting in serving us. Malcolm Brown and Martin Davie attended all our meetings, took minutes, wrote papers and drafted much the greater part of the report. Lauren Fenn, and then Caroline Kim, have made all the arrangements for our meetings with unfailing efficiency and good humour.

We decided at our first meeting to ask three people to be our advisers. From the second meeting onwards they have taken a full part in the work and the members of the group cannot imagine how we would have managed without them. The group decided that the best way to reflect the way we have worked was to ask our advisers to sign the report. They graciously agreed.

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Foreword

One of our advisers, Jessica Martin, challenged us to think about human sexuality more widely than most of our evidence was leading us to do. We asked her to write a paper which now forms the prologue to the report. We wanted to give others a chance to read it and reflect on it and we feared that, if we tried to integrate it into the main body of the report, much would be lost.

Joe Pilling

Chair of the Working Group

November 2013

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Prologue

Living with holiness and desire

The Revd Dr Jessica Martin

The beginning

Desire begins and ends with God. We who are creatures recognize our incompleteness, through desiring when we do not possess – and we

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yearn towards the holy when we hope for what we cannot see. The created universe we inhabit is filled with promise, and our human lives

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with promises, both human and divine. Everything we are and everything we do has a holy thread of promise running through it, and we do not

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know yet what we shall be. But, whatever it is, through God’s grace, that we may become, we have some distance yet to get there. Sin, death and damage are fundamental to the world into which we are born, and they make us darker and more sorrowful entities than any innocent creature looking trustfully towards its

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maker for fulfilment. We are violently separated from the source of our being. Why we have this tragic inheritance is beyond our understanding, but something of its meaning speaks in the narrative of the Fall with

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which the Scriptures begin. That’s one true thing. But at the same time there is another true thing about our humanity, which is that here and now, in our mortal bodies

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and particular histories, God is with us. God breathes within the human condition in the person and history of Jesus. Because of his birth every birth is a fulfilment as well as a nascent hope, every moment has a completion as well as a potential, the promise of every relationship is holy

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as well as local and mortal. Because of Jesus’ bitter suffering unto death and because he was raised from death, every piece of degrading damage may be transformed and redeemed, every sin forgiven, every death made

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the occasion of new life. It is holy to be human because everything about being human, its loss and its splendour, is saturated with God.

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The Scriptures speak of God reaching out towards his separated creatures and bringing them back into intimacy with him: ‘the kingdom of

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God has come near’. This is a gift of love. Sometimes it is imagined as

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the relation of parent and child (adopted or natural ), sometimes as

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the relation of spouse with spouse, sometimes of sibling with sibling,

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sometimes of friend with friend. These are incomplete analogies, the analogies of promise, and like all rich comparisons they are fruitful and alive exactly because they are incomplete. Each expresses a human bond in which a promise meets a gift (or, at any rate, the nearest we humans can come to a gift). No real relationship, and no particular kind of relationship, is fully identified with our divine bond – or fully separated from it either. In every human encounter where a promise meets a gift,

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there is God, offering to change its meaning with his presence. The promise of God which is our hope, and the promises which found and direct our living in time and society are intimately joined together. When

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we make the promises of human relationship we are also on holy ground.

Here and now

Augustine of Hippo (whose influence upon modern Western understandings of fallenness and desire is difficult to overstate) sees in the restless longing heart an impulse which might in the end toss us

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towards the divine embrace. His famous insight sees desire as the place of possibility – a creative place, perhaps a place under pressure, but not one of gratification. It is the space which always changes, which joins the past to the future. It cannot be an end in itself. Were it to become so we would be forced to worship craving.

The world of late modernity is where we live. Its commercial drive, the global capitalism which drives its macro-relationships, is founded very largely upon making desire an end in itself (though it is, fortunately, not completely successful in this, or we would already be living in hell). Its effects are particularly acute in countries where basic needs – food, water, shelter – are no longer the visible impulse for the empire of buying and selling. The market in the developed world operates in the gap between what you’ve got and what you think you ought to have to be happy; it is reliant upon the endless retreat of happiness into a consumer future which never arrives.

This has profound effects upon all kinds of human well-being but it is particularly destructive in its effect on relationships. It does not help that,

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while human desire is much more diverse than just the sexual, for various reasons sexual desire has become a primary cultural medium for all the other kinds, and therefore a normal currency for selling the commodities designed to generate want. So sexual desire has become deeply linked to a cycle reliant on dissatisfaction and disappointment for its continuance.

At the same time (especially but not exclusively in Europe and North America) the last half-century or so has seen the growth of a perception of sexuality as the ultimate place of freedom and gift. In its purest and crudest form, such a philosophy argues that there are no other conditions attached to sexual encounter apart from those of the shared delight of the moment; that the experience of desire is its own sufficient reason for sexual encounter, and that sexual intercourse is always fully

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private and has no necessary social outworkings. This is a seductive vision. It has seduced several generations so far (though later generations have had to notice that there are many situations in which sexual encounter has a noticeable social impact). Its normative mutterings are still the loudest of our assumptions about what makes a relationship valuable. Nothing may openly challenge the sovereignty of desire, which is explicitly and mistakenly linked to the primacy of self-fulfilment (mistakenly because, as any parent knows, wanting things and then getting them is not a reliable route to happiness and security). So, as a philosophy for living – deliberate or accidental – desire is not serving us well.

When you idolize the ecstatic experience of the moment, you sever your past from your future. The present doesn’t necessarily inform how you live in time, because within the logic of the moment you can only find out what to do next by being overmastered by another desire. Meanwhile the severed past is allowed, even encouraged, to die. In multiple sexual relationships great swathes of people’s intimate histories become meaningless, unshared, unspoken, beyond response. The now stretches out and out, behind and before. It is a kind of refusal to live within time and its consequences, but it saves no one from ageing or from death. It is, in the end, lonely. Living for oneself alone is a wish

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which isolates as it gratifies, and it is merciful that many people see through it sooner or later.

The idolization of desire is intimately connected to abuse, because an overriding desire tends to be selfish rather than generous. It doesn’t offer

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Prologue

the space to consider the particularity of another person – their own needs and wants, their history, even their own experience of the moment. So you won’t be well placed to decide upon a sacrificial or self-denying stance in relation to a person whose vulnerabilities you haven’t had time to discover. Other factors will determine what happens – factors you probably never meant to be decisive, to do with the balance of power between you and your partner and determined by age, gender, income, status or beauty.

The long-term effects of impulse are working their way now through our law courts in a series of sexual abuse scandals which expose our profound confusion about the limits of liberation. We are discovering, painfully, that what we thought was a philosophy of generous mutuality is too often reliant upon the acquiescence of the powerless – usually, but not only, women and children – in the driven fantasies of the powerful.

Our combined, inconsistent perception of sexuality as both innocently free and essentially commodified is being particularly hard on the undefended and the vulnerable: upon children, the poor and the disenfranchised. Commodified sex, in its fully business-dominated forms of trafficking, prostitution and pornography, privileges consumer demand and minimizes personal encounter. It invites its users to believe that the fact of the transaction frees them from the constraints of seeing a person as a person. In reality, even the most distanced and virtual form of pornography relies on a residual idea of the imagined encounter as personal – though it also betrays it when the user discovers that, after all, he (and, increasingly, she) is alone. Pornography addiction is a basic modern problem, a cheap and quick way to discover that the god of craving will endlessly escalate his demands, shifting ground from imagined and malleable mutuality to more explicitly dehumanized scenarios of power and violence. It is a deathly terrain and dominated by the fear of death itself.

These extreme consequences of commodification are now very widespread, because of the internet and because physical travel between richer and poorer countries is easy and cheap. But we live with the ordinary, everyday outcomes of our confusions as well. Anyone who accepts uncritically the cultural invitation to live as if yesterday’s promises could be endlessly revised by the sovereign demands of new desires is settling for disappointment. ‘Choice’ is central for almost every public context, from the trivia of shopping to the life choices of conception, birth

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Prologue

and death. But its representation (perhaps because the demands of the market have infiltrated our welfare systems along with everything else is often deliberately deceptive in focusing on the moment before a decision is made.

This is the moment of desire, and it’s not the most important thing about choice. The most important thing about choice is that it excludes all other possibilities; you decide not to do a far wider set of things than the one you have actually opted for. So choices exist not in the moment of making them but in the living out of their consequences through good and ill. Our human failures to live out our choices are more complicated to characterize than their fully commodified counterparts, because few people actually live according to the pure logic of desire (love being the resilient and persistent condition it is, no matter how impoverished our philosophy) and therefore most shared lives are a mixture of generosity and selfishness about which it would be presumptuous to generalize.

But we are under pressure. We perceive, rightly, that our children need protection, a safe space to grow up in at their own pace; but we acquiesce in their early covert sexualization at the same time – in, for example, the pressure we put upon them to conform to particular impossible body shapes and sexualized ideals of beauty, all themselves shaped by the profit motive. The commercially-driven images of the perfect and beautiful family are also not, on the whole, replicated in the modern consequences of serial monogamy and widespread divorce and relationship break up (circumstances which also have observable economic consequences for the state, incidentally, in the pressure they bring upon services for the old as well as the young. They are becoming very anxious, our children, and many of them are pinched as they grow up by a variety of different sorts of poverty, from the economic to the emotional and spiritual.

So this is our everyday reality. Most of us manage – since the grace of God is larger than we imagine it to be – to maintain generously conceived private lives in some form or other; but we struggle daily with a constant cultural nudging of our human interactions towards a consumer relationship which conceives of the self as selfishly lonely and constantly hungry. It is harder to stay with a past promise when we are constantly impelled towards the endless horizon of a new one; hard to be satisfied with the actual families we are dealt in the face of the better ones we might acquire. In the circumstances, it’s very striking that we manage as

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much faithfulness as we do – and suggests a healthy, even life-saving scepticism about advertising culture. We want to get married. We want to grow old together. We want to nourish our children. Their flourishing matters to us very much.

Is this a set of circumstances into which an Anglican bishops’ ’Working Group on human sexuality‘, born out of a very specific set of anxieties about same sex relationships, can offer much? In looking at this one aspect of human sexuality we have discerned two basics. First, that we cannot talk about same sex relationships in isolation. Culturally the whole issue is being made to bear more freight than it can or should possibly carry. Second, that we cannot say anything about human sexuality without speaking first of our sense of the body and bodily relationships as holy. Christianity is incarnational: God and body come together in Christ. Anything Christians might think about same sex relationships (especially as we have not discerned how to speak with a single voice on this topic) has no value except as part of this larger vision of all our human relationships; and for this reason the vision itself comes first, before we ever start talking about single-issue specifics.

Living with promise and gift

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Christ is the centre of everything. God and man; heaven and earth in

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little space; particular time spreading backwards and forwards to join the promises of God to the gift of himself. Jesus the gift offers himself all the way from first breath to last, a choice lived sacrificially, generously, in and through each successive moment. From conception to death to resurrection, a life where gift meets promise, healing through touch and word, proclaiming the presence of God with human beings. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus contemplates what is asked of him and keeps

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choosing to face towards love’s sacrifice. He allows his body to be

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broken and given away to nourish others. Through his living in time, and the gift of his body, he joins God to humanity, death to life, the unfinished to the complete.

The two great commandments Christ brings out from Leviticus and Deuteronomyare the foundation of living well: to love God and

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neighbour. This radical command to love cuts across the usual confines of kin, tribe, gender and nation; Jesus is someone for whom all humanity

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is ’my brother, and my sister, and my mother’. He is properly cautious about where sexual desire belongs in the radical command to love – they are not straightforwardly aligned. He declares that sexual desire in its

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