Which Marriage? Whose Tradition?

The current Lambeth conference – a meeting of bishops from across the global Anglican communion - has reignited controversy about same sex marriage. One of the draft ‘Lambeth Calls’ statements, on which bishops are supposed to vote, claimed that opposition to same sex marriage was the position of the Anglican communion as a whole (this has now been revised after being called out). Some bishops of the ‘global south’ are refusing to attend the conference because of the pro-LGBTQ+ stance of other churches. Other bishops are refusing to take part in the Eucharist alongside partnered LGBTQ+ bishops and their allies.

The Global South Fellowship of Anglicans presents the issue as one of holding to the unchanging truth of scripture. GFSA and similar bodies present themselves as representing ‘orthodox’ churches within Anglicanism. For these groups, opposition to same sex marriage seems to have effectively become a litmus test of Christian orthodoxy (a decidedly innovative position).

But can such positions stand scrutiny? An immediate question is whether there is such a thing as a single, unchanging idea of marriage in the Bible and Christian tradition. I am going to suggest there is not; and that this fact raises unavoidable issues of interpretative strategy when it comes to reading scripture.

So read the Bible. At various points, scripture presents and endorses a number of models of marriage. These include polygamy and concubinage. Female servants are pressed into marriage, a practice which itself carries with it the acceptance that a woman’s consent is not necessary for a marriage to be consummated. Some significant marriages in scripture are between first cousins. Faced with these evident facts, one has to ask: are ‘orthodox’ Anglicans willing to submit to scripture and actively call for these forms of marriage to be reinstated? If not, on what grounds are they being selective in deciding which parts of scripture apply to our current debates?

Of course, we could evade these points by appealing the the New Testament, but that would hardly amount to submission to scripture as a whole. Nor would it resolve problematic aspects of NT teaching, including the tension between the affirmation of radical equality between men and women, when set against affirmations of male headship. One wonders how ‘orthodox’ Christians who appeal to unchanging scripture are able to square any acceptance of women’s preaching and authority in the church with 1 Corinthians’ clear stance that no woman should even speak in church let alone hold authority over a man.

No doubt, informed answers can be given to these questions, which highlight why certain scriptural practices no longer hold, at least not in any apparently straightforward sense; or why some readings hold more weight than others. The point is that these are matters of interpretative choice and strategy. The idea that it is heterodox or faithless to make judgements about the meaning and application of scripture is belied by what the ‘orthodox’ themselves do.

The issue is hardly clarified if we turn to Christian tradition. Marriage was not even officially recognised as a sacrament by the Catholic Church until the 16th century. Protestants, by and large, still do not. For most of the Christian era, the nature of marriage was much more related to extended families, clan and tribal loyalties than any modern conception of a nuclear family, let alone romantic love. Marriages, if performed at all, varied between classes, and for higher classes were means of forging alliances. It was only in the 12th century that the idea that a woman’s consent was necessary for marriage became mainstream. And Gratian, the canon lawyer who first codified this, fixed the age of consent at 14 for men and 12 for women.

Again, if we are upholding an unchanging tradition, which version do we mean? Is it marriage without women’s consent or property rights? Is it marriage of girls aged 12? Is it an economic or political transaction? Is procreation essential to it, given that there are many reasons of choice or necessity for married people not to have children?

All of these questions require careful study and judgement. I am certainly not trying to advocate a simplistic historical or cultural relativism, in which all judgements are equal and choices reflect nothing but arbitrary contextual differences. However, the idea that there could be – let alone should be – a context-free judgement is absurd. Marriage itself takes on meaning in relation to societal ideas, norms and structures of political, gendered power. The varied scriptural models and teaching on marriage speak into this complexity. To speak about marriage with no regard for any of this is self-defeating. A frame of reference will impose itself, whether it is admitted to or not.

Increasingly, it seems that the frame of reference being imposed in Anglican debates is a modernist one of truth as independent of context, and available to an ahistorical ‘view from nowhere’. In such a frame, all truth is assimilated to a supposed scientific objectivity, while the judgements made are then available as instruments of power over the desires and bodies of others (note how much of the history of marriage concerns the rights of men over women). In other words, the claim that scriptural truth is homogenous, unchanging and simply read off the page is itself dependent upon a partial, historical and contingent context.

Alasdair Macintyre made this point in books such as Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. There simply is no self-certifying ground of judgement in terms of which issues of justice and truth can be decided. What marriage is and what it is worth can only be judged in reference to a horizon of ideals and purposes, whose fullness we are still discerning. That is not the same as relativism. Rather, the establishment of what is true and conducive to human flourishing demands work and risk. Not least, it requires the cultivation of virtues of attentiveness, empathy and humility often lacking from pronouncements about same sex marriage.

A worry is that, by admitting this, we are subjecting scripture to human cultural standards, picking and choosing our scriptures to suit our prejudice. My point is that this is just as much a failing of the ‘orthodox’ in the modern sense as anyone else – more insidious for being invisible. Of course, we cannot just appeal to human love and ignore human sin (albeit Jesus, Paul and the first epistle of John are happy to risk identifying love with the essence of fulfilling of the law and with God’s own nature). What love is, what it means, what it costs all have to be worked out. However, it is better to work this out in relation to what is historically the core of orthodoxy: the revelation of the Word made flesh in the victim, the servant, the dying and rising one, who out of gratuitous love assumes our whole humanity in order to raise it to God; and not to subscribe to the fantasy of a view from nowhere, which projects stasis on to what is in fact dynamic, embodied and relational.

Given all of this, I long for a more risky conversation among Anglicans, in which our orthodoxy is an invitation into a mystery we never possess, not an ideological weapon. In the meantime, I will not apologise for my unconditional solidarity with LGBTQ+ people, so often battered and hated by the church. And I will not cease to uphold same sex marriage as the costly outworking of a wholly orthodox commitment to the Word made flesh. I’m willing to make the case that same sex marriage today is a path towards the holiness, love and faithfulness that reflect God’s own nature. I can’t do that if I am prejudged as a heretic.