Bishop N.T. Wright (Durham, England) is a person I respect and whose books have informed much of my own thinking. Even the esteemed Bishop Wright, however, is not right about everything.
He published an editorial in the Times (UK) on Wednesday in which he is clearly worked up over the actions of the Episcopal Church (USA) to allow for the to allow the appointment, to all orders of ministry, of persons in active same-sex relationships. He writes:
Of course, matters didn’t begin with the consecration of Gene Robinson. The floodgates opened several years before, particularly in 1996 when a church court acquitted a bishop who had ordained active homosexuals. Many in TEC have long embraced a theology in which chastity, as universally understood by the wider Christian tradition, has been optional.
One wonders: Does that supposed "chastity" include Henry VIII, the first head of the Anglican church, who had multiple affairs, six wives, and who broke with Rome over his divorce to Ann Boleyn?
That wider tradition always was counter-cultural as well as counter-intuitive. Our supposedly selfish genes crave a variety of sexual possibilities. But Jewish, Christian and Muslim teachers have always insisted that lifelong man-plus-woman marriage is the proper context for sexual intercourse. This is not (as is frequently suggested) an arbitrary rule, dualistic in overtone and killjoy in intention. It is a deep structural reflection of the belief in a creator God who has entered into covenant both with his creation and with his people (who carry forward his purposes for that creation).
The "wider tradition" has always been "counter-cultural"? Pray tell, in what way has the church been "counter-cultural"? Even since Constantine made Christianity legit, the Christian heirarchy has bent over backwards to promote the culture of the various empires in which it was situated. Ever since the 5th century, the Christian heirarchy has been not "counter-cultural," but "enthusiastically cultural."
Wright says that the monotheistic religions have always promoted an Ozzie-and-Harriet model of marriage when that is clearly not so. Solomon reportedly had 1000 wives, Mohammed at least eleven. Much of the Bible, for example, assumes a world in which polygamy is the norm--Ozzie and Harriet and Harriet and Harriet, you might say.
Even if it were the case that marriage practices have been unchanged for the past 2000 years, and that Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders "have always insisted" on heterosexual marriage, doesn't that argument basically boil down to this: "We've always done it that way."
One notes, too, Wright's reference to "lifelong man-plus-woman marriage." Take a man, append a woman, and you have a marriage. This is not the language of equality, but rather the language of patriarchy. One suspects that Wright penned that description without thinking very much about it, unwittingly revealing that he operates from a default "male-headship" model.
Wright's says that it is "deep structural reflection"--whatever that is--on God's work in creation and God's entering into "covenant" with his people that informs the church's insistence on "man-plus-woman marriage."
He appears to be referring to Genesis 1-2 in which God said to the people, "Be fruitful and multiply" (1:28), and "therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh" (2:38). As God created the universe in the first place, human beings are to participate in God's creative work by generating offspring.
Well and good. "Be fruitful and multiply" is the one command from God we've done fairly well at observing. Note that the texts themselves do not use the word "marriage," and the plain sense of the texts would be to assert God's blessing on sexuality and procreation. For God to bless heterosexual procreation is not, ipso facto, a condemnation of homosexuality.
Moreover, isn't it rather cheeky for a Bishop of the Anglican Church to get the vapors over gay bishops. The Anglican Church has historically had tons of gay priests and several gay bishops. This was all right, however, as long as they agreed to be dishonest about their sexual identity and practice. To their credit, they no longer wish to be dishonest, although some in the Anglican communion prefer to go on being hypocritical.
