Northeast SEAD Response To “Let the Reader Understand: Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20040201234305/http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.org:80/neresponse-lru.htm |
||||
We appreciate the publication of Let the Reader Understand: Principles of Scriptural Interpretation (hereafter LRU) and we find significant common ground with the authors of this document. With them, we believe the Holy Scriptures to be “an instrument of the Church’s shared communion with Jesus Christ, the living Word of God” (¶2). With them, we accept the principle that scripture should be read from an interpretative center which has the mighty saving deeds of God culminating in the life, death and resurrection of the Savior, Jesus Christ, as its focus. With them, we accept that scripture must be read within an authoritative tradition of interpretation and within the continuing life of the Church. LRU rejects contextless proof-texting as a method of scriptural interpretation for Anglicans, as do we. However, it is our view that the conclusions that LRU reaches regarding the morality of same-sex sexual behavior in the light of the Bible do not proceed from the principles of biblical interpretation which are outlined in the document, but from a method of biblical interpretation which makes contemporary personal and cultural “experience” the ultimate authority and in essence a new source of revelation which surpasses the authority of the scriptures. |
Let the Reader Understand can be found on the Episcopal Diocese of New York website (www.dioceseny.org) in the About Us section under Info for priests, deacons, & laity. |
|||
Using the principles of biblical interpretation outlined in LRU we find ourselves in agreement with the 1998 Lambeth resolution on sexuality. We find the overwhelming consensus of biblical scholars, whatever their private views on the issues of sexuality, agrees that the scriptures plainly teach fidelity in marriage between a man and woman and chastity in singleness as the scriptural norm. The problem before us is not the interpretation of scripture but the authority of scripture, that is, when the teaching of scripture should be set aside. LRU appears to us to argue that because of the cultural context in which the scripture arises and the cultural context in which the scripture must be applied, the plain teaching of the scripture in the area of sexual practice does not apply with regard to homosexuality. Rather than a difference of interpretation, this appears to us as a straightforward rejection of the authority of scripture based on the conviction that in light of current American cultural understandings of sexuality the clear teaching of scripture favored by the whole history of the tradition and the overwhelming consensus of the contemporary world-wide Church is wrong. A more detailed critique of LRU follows. We look forward to continuing dialogue on this important topic. |
13th Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops (1998), Resolution 1.10. |
|||
Society for Ecumenical Anglican Doctrine (SEAD) / Northeast Chapter The Rev. Jason A. Catania SSC, Diocese of Albany |
||||
|
||||
1. |
The Hermeneutics Study Group in the Diocese of New York is to be commended for its publication of Let the Reader Understand because it sets the dispute over the morality of homoerotic activity within the context of the Church’s submission to the authority of scripture. The question before us is not a question as to the value and infinite worth of persons who identify themselves as gay or lesbian, but is rather a question—as has been stated in the final report from the International Anglican Conversations on Human Sexuality (2002)—as to what constitutes the “[h]oliness, that we all understand ourselves bound through Christ to grow into, to encourage, and to teach.” |
|||
2. |
The Study Group is further to be commended for its desire to explore what the Anglican churches mean when we say that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation. The interpretation of the scriptures is a matter of the highest importance precisely because in them we receive from Jesus Christ the promise and message of our salvation. |
The VI Article of Religion, 1979 Book of Common Prayer, pp. 868-69. |
||
3. |
Nonetheless LRU violates basic principles of Anglican theology and ecclesiology. The vast majority of Anglican theologians have always understood themselves to be bound to the dogmatic and moral principles endorsed by the entire Christian tradition. Their theological appeal has been, and is, to the clear authority of scripture as interpreted by the universal witness of the first centuries of the undivided Church. The autonomy of national churches endorsed by the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer allows for differences in matters of discipline—worship and canons—but not in matters of faith and morals. The LRU writers suggest, against all precedent, that national churches have the competence to issue judgments on such issues as homosexual activity in a manner that would have authority only within those national churches—and which, moreover, would be contrary to the plain word of scripture, as well as the consensus of the major Christian bodies and the mind of the Anglican Communion as expressed at the last Lambeth Conference. |
Preface, 1979 Book of Common Prayer, p. 9. |
||
4. |
The fact that the Church has erred cannot release the Church from its responsibility to instruct her members in the truth. Indeed, the recognition of the errors of the Church arises as a result of the Church’s own clearer reception and articulation of truths found in scripture. Anglicans cannot demur from stating the truth as it is found in scripture on the grounds that we might be in error. |
The XIX Article of Religion, 1979 Book of Common Prayer, p. 871. |
||
5. |
LRU argues that the scriptures are unclear about the acceptability of same-sex sexual activity for practicing Christian men and women. Its writers do not claim that there is doubt about the views of the biblical writers themselves on this matter; rather, they deny the applicability of those writers’ views to our life in Christ today. (¶7). LRU identifies this breakdown of clarity between the letter of scripture and its application today as a problem of interpretation. It is to be noted that interpretation as it is normally used in theology refers to the matter of what the text actually means (its sense), while exposition or application is normally used to refer to the appropriate response of believers to the interpreted text. |
|||
6. |
If the scriptures do not speak authoritatively in regards to homosexual activity (as LRU claims), then Anglicans must re-examine whether scripture does contain “all things necessary to salvation.” As Anglicans, we have affirmed and continue to affirm that whatever cannot be found in scripture, or proven from it, may not be required as an article of faith or morals. |
The VI Article of Religion, 1979 Book of Common Prayer, pp. 868-69. |
||
7. |
While we do not believe that we are saved by our performance of righteousness, it is the nature of God’s grace in Christ Jesus to save us for a righteousness that includes sexual chastity. We cannot argue that our moral lives are something separate from our salvation. Such a position is at odds with the prophets of Israel and with the preaching of John the Baptist and Jesus who tell us to repent at the coming of the kingdom of God. If the scriptures are unable to instruct the faithful as to sexual behavior, then they do not contain all things necessary for salvation. |
|||
8. |
If there is a doctrine of salvation implicit in LRU, it consists in “enlarg[ing] the sphere of human liberty.” (¶13) Unfortunately, LRU seems to confuse freedom from moral truth with the freedom of the Gospel. Evangelical freedom is the freedom to desire what God desires, free from the constraints of sinful desires. Although LRU speaks frequently of God’s plan of salvation and uses the terms “redeem,” and “transform” in relation to our salvation, there is no mention of sin, repentance or the kingdom of God. LRU fails to explain from what we are being redeemed and into what we are being transformed. This is especially troublesome since LRU repeatedly encourages the Church to interpret and apply the scriptures in accordance with the whole economy of salvation. |
|||
9. |
By asserting that God “seeks one end” through history, LRU empties the present age of its moral seriousness. It invites us to subject all questions of morality to a test of relativity. This would require Christians to evaluate what seems good in the present in light of the possibility that it may be replaced later by a different good, and so on ad infinitum. The orthodox Christian teaching, as expressed by Irenaeus, is that God reveals his will to us in definite, objective ways throughout human history. Our obedience to this revelation is an essential component of our salvation. LRU is right to assert (¶5) that all things must be re-evaluated through the lens of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. If, however, we posit further revelations beyond the saving work of our Lord, we depart from the common teaching of Christianity and begin to invent a new religion. A recent example of this trend is the continuing development of revelation and doctrine within Mormonism; this trend has placed that body well outside the boundaries of creedal Christianity. |
See Appendix II below. |
||
10. |
Scripture teaches in a consistent way that it is the world which must be adapted and conformed to Christ, and not vice versa. The Second Person of the Trinity does, for our sake, condescend in love to our weakness by becoming incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary. Nonetheless, Jesus’ Lordship continues to require Christians to assent to his teaching about marriage and sexual conduct. |
Romans 12:1-2. |
||
11. |
The issue we face is whether certain commandments found in scripture may be classed as ritual, ceremonial or civil, on the one hand, and therefore non-binding, or, on the other hand, moral and therefore immutable inasmuch as they reveal an aspect of God’s perfect kingdom of righteousness and peace. This distinction is raised not only by our Articles of Religion and Richard Hooker but also Irenaeus and by the scriptures themselves. |
The VII Article of Religion, 1979 Book of Common Prayer, p. 869; Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 3.10.4; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.13, 15-16. |
||
12. |
The Jerusalem Council of Acts 15, together with the reception of its decrees by St. Paul and his co-workers, is evidence of the resolution in the first-century Church regarding which commandments belong to rite, ceremony and civil law (and are therefore mutable) and which to the moral law (and are therefore immutable). One element of this resolution was that avoidance of porneia, sexual immorality, belonged to the immutable moral law. The united witness of the New Testament is that sexual chastity is one of the constituents of our transformation into the image of Christ. It is therefore an integral component of our salvation. |
Acts 15:19-20. |
||
13. |
As Anglicans who affirm “the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God,” we confess that those scriptures clearly describe that glorious liberty of the children of God that consists in dying to sin and rising to the new life of righteousness by the power of the Holy Spirit. |
The Ordination of a Bishop, Priest, Deacon, 1979 Book of Common Prayer, pp. 513, 526, 538; Rom. 8:21. |
||
|
||||
Appendix I: Representative Contemporary Biblical Scholarship on Same-Sex Relations Note that the scholars cited below do not necessarily agree with the Bible’s teaching. Some reject it, or suggest it be modified. Nor are they universally “conservative” in their theological stances. They represent the contemporary consensus of scholarship (both liberal and conservative, from a variety of confessional traditions) about what the Bible actually teaches about same-sex sexual activity. “The few biblical texts that do address the topic of homosexual behavior . . . are unambiguously and unremittingly negative in their judgment . . . Paul’s use of the term [arsenokoitai] presupposes and reaffirms the holiness code’s condemnation of homosexual acts. This is not a controversial point in Paul’s argument. . . .. Paul simply assumes that his readers will share his conviction that those who indulge in homosexual activity are ‘wrongdoers’ . . .. Paul’s choice of homosexuality as an illustration of human depravity is not merely random: it serves his rhetorical purposes by providing a vivid image of humanity’s primal rejection of the sovereignty of God the Creator. . . . Though only a few biblical texts speak of homoerotic activity, all that do mention it express unqualified disapproval. Thus, on this issue, there is no synthetic problem for New Testament ethics. In this respect, the issue of homosexuality differs significantly from such matters as slavery or the subordination of women, concerning which the Bible contains internal tensions and counterposed witnesses. The biblical witness against homosexual practices is univocal.” Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarpeSanFrancisco, 1996), 381, 382-383, 385, 389. |
||||
|
||||
Appendix II: Irenaeus on the Economy of Salvation Commentary 2 of LRU argues that in Irenaeus’ Against the Heresies “there is a certain relativism” implicit in God’s economy or oikonomia(which is called here God’s “household management” of the cosmos), “and hence different circumstances may call for changed modes of obedience to the Word.” In the case of LRU the different circumstances would appear to be the rejection of biblical sexual norms by current American culture, and the different obedience would entail developing a sexual ethic that departs from the biblical norm of fidelity in marriage between a man and woman or chastity in singleness: i.e. rites to bless same-gender sexual relationships and “committed” but non-married heterosexual relationships. |
||||
The argument is that the orthodox apologists against second-century Gnosticism recognized that God the Word, the revealer of the Father to the cosmos, had spoken different things to Abraham, Moses, and then through Jesus in the progressive revelation of God’s “New Thing” in Jesus Christ. LRU takes Irenaeus’ Five Books against the Heresies as the best example of this apologetic, pointing out that the Gnostics rejected the Old Testament and its God by arguing that certain texts in Paul and the Gospels “contrasted the teachings of Jesus and his apostles with those of the Mosaic dispensation . . . .” LRU does not point out that some Gnostics also issued their own versions of a Christian canon of scripture in which what they did not like in the Gospels and Paul was simply excised, a supreme example of “if you don’t like it, simply ignore it.” Clearly, Irenaeus does show that certain aspects of the covenant between God and Moses, for example, have been transformed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Torah’s dietary codes have been transformed by the teaching of Jesus himself and the vision of Peter recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. The Torah’s provisions for the cult of sacrifice in the tabernacle and later the temple are utterly transformed by their fulfilment in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and his resurrection, a recognition already apparent in the epistle to the Hebrews (cf., for example, Against the Heresies 4:17 and 18). The transformation of these cultic commandments in the Torah are explicated as the Word’s fulfilment in his incarnation of the Torah, not as contradicting it. Thus the moral commandments of the Decalogue as expounded by the rest of the Torah not only remain in force for Irenaeus, but in fact he repeatedly stresses that Christians are expected to follow a higher moral law than that in the Torah, i.e. as taught by Jesus and his apostles. Nowhere in Irenaeus have we found any example of that apologist arguing that the sexual ethic of the Torah has been lessened by the new covenant in Jesus Christ, even though some Gnostics departed from that ethic and the Roman world in which Irenaeus wrote was notorious for sexual immorality. Instead, Irenaeus’ Against the Heresies is a long, complicated appeal to the texts of the Old Testament to show how they are fulfilled in Jesus Christ and are, consequently, not in contradiction to the proclamation that the God of Genesis and the Torah is the Father of Jesus Christ. Irenaus has infinite respect for the authority and value of the Old Testament text. His fundamental argument is that the Gnostics are wrong precisely because they have invented a new religion in their attempt to be relevant to the eclectic religious and philosophical values of their time, which has led them to reject the authority of the Hebrew scriptures (and, indeed, rewrite the Gospels and the Pauline corpus to their liking). The Gnostics are to be corrected by the apostolic tradition as found in the books of what we now call the New Testament and in the apostolic teaching of the bishops of the orthodox Churches in sucession to the apostles. We do not find in Irenaeus, then, the kind of relativism that reinvents the teaching of the Church to fit the age in which we live. Rather the age is to be judged by the apostolic tradition, particularly as found in Holy Scripture. If we are to claim that God the Word is revealing some utterly new ethic to us in our time which he did not reveal to his apostles, indeed just the opposite of what the apostolic tradition has been heretofore, how does our claim to superior revelation differ from that of the Gnostics, or Montanus (who claimed that the promised Paraclete was giving him a new and higher revelation of the divine will than that possessed heretofore by the Church) or Joseph Smith and the Mormons for that matter? |
We do not find in Irenaeus the kind of relativism that reinvents the teaching of the Church to fit the age in which we live. Rather the age is to be judged by the apostolic tradition, particularly as found in Holy Scripture. |
|||
|
||||
Appendix III: A Catena Patrum on Homosexuality Tertullian Cyprian of Carthage Eusebius of Caesarea
“[The men] have done an insult to nature itself. And a yet more disgraceful thing than these is it, when even the women seek after these intercourses, who ought to have more shame than men” (ibid.).
|
||||
|
||||
Appendix IV: The Anglican Reformers on the Sufficiency of Scripture LRU is supposed to “outline as clearly as possible the means by which [theologians] in the Anglican Tradition, understand, interpret, and apply the Holy Scriptures.” That scripture’s condemnation of homosexual activity is the central concern for biblical interpretation in LRU is made clear in the final paragraph which states that “the morality of homosexual acts, and the . . . issues of the ordination of homosexual Christians or the blessing of their relationships, are not readily ‘settled’ through the simple application of a handful of texts.” |
||||
The Anglican Reformers John Jewel and Richard Hooker formulated the Anglican understanding of the sufficiency of scripture in two works that stand as the classic articulations of Anglican self-understanding at the defining period of the English Reformation: Jewel’s Apology of the Church of England and Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. John Jewel |
John Jewel, An Apology of the Church of England (Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae), trans. Arthur T. Russell (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1839); Richard Hooker, Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1907), 2 vols. |
|||
According to Jewel, ministers of the gospel—priests and bishops—have the “power of binding and loosing,” the keys to the kingdom of heaven. They have the power to ease human consciences or persuade of sin. But the keys by which they are able to shut or open the kingdom of heaven is not the simple authority of their office, but rather the knowledge of the scriptures: “[T]he key by which an entrance is opened unto us into the kingdom of God, is the Word of the gospel, and the interpretation of the law and of the scriptures; where the Word is not, there we affirm that the key is not.” (36) Richard Hooker |
Jewel stated that to put aside the plain teaching of scripture and to appeal directly to “God himself, speaking in the Church and in Councils” is to follow one’s own opinions. It is a way of “uncertainty” and “hazard,” the path of “fanaticism.” |
|||
The hermeneutical key that Hooker uses to unlock the interpretation and application of scripture is law, thus the title of his book, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker’s discussion of law parallels the Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas’s own discussion fairly closely. Like Aquinas, Hooker distinguishes between eternal law, natural law, and positive law. Eternal law is the being of God himself, “which is a kind of law to his working.” God’s law and will are identified with the Good, and the end of God’s works is the exercise of his own virtue (1.2.3-4). This “eternal law” is the law of God’s wisdom (1.2.5). |
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, “Treatise On Law,” 2.2..90-114. |
|||
According to Hooker, all human law is founded on the two great commandments to love God and neighbor (1.8..7-8). In discussing human law, Hooker distinguishes between natural law (based on God’s intentions for humanity in creation, and which binds universally) and positive law (intended for the good of human society, but not necessarily universally binding). Positive laws are either laws we have bound ourselves to, or laws of civil institutions, including the judicial law given by God to Israel (1.15.1). Hooker also distinguishes between laws grounded in unfallen human nature—laws that promote the inherent good of humanity, and would obtain even if human beings had never sinned—and laws following from the fall, laws that restrain evil in a fallen world (1.10.7). Hooker also speaks of supernatural law—law oriented toward salvation, and demanding grace for its fulfillment (1.15.2). |
Hooker speaks disparagingly of those who claim a special spiritual illumination that enables them to find meaning in scripture that is not in the plain text. If we do not claim the special revelation belonging to inspired prophecy, then we have the moral obligation to justify our interpretation of scripture by sound reasoning in a manner that is open and evident. |
|||
Acording to Hooker, it is this connection between marriage and the begetting of children that calls for the permanence and stability of marriage, and distinguishes marriage from a sexual contract that would not necessarily be permanent, for example, concubinage or fornication, or, we would add, same-sex relations. Thus, according to Hooker, the words of the marriage ceremony—“With my body I thee worship”—affirm that the husband and wife honor and worship one another with their bodies and deny any impediments, such as unlawful copulation. Married parties no longer have power over themselves, but each has an “interest” in the other’s person. To “worship” with the body is to convey unto another an interest in one’s body which no one else had before except one’s very self. If the purpose of a sexual relationship were only companionship (as in concubinage), there would be no need for this mutual worship. By declaring exclusive worship, the husband declares his partner to have the exclusive dignity of a wife, and her children as legitimate and free. Accordingly, the wife is given an interest in his person as well. Thus it is only fitting that something so holy should be solemnified with the eucharist (5.73.7). |
It is clear that, for Hooker, life-long exclusive heterosexual marriage is rooted in natural law—God’s intentions for human nature in creation—and cannot be abrogated or altered without violating its essential structure. |
|||