Three thoughts on Gay Churches

So I said that I was going to be meeting last week with a local Anglican clergymen who supported gay ordination and see what I could learn from him, and said that I was going to include the results in my review of O'Donovan chapter 7. It turned out that wasn't practical, so I'll lay out some of my resulting thoughts here. The three issues I'll explore are 1) the attempt to reconcile homosexual practice with Scripture, 2) the ramifications that the celibacy (permanent or temporary) of a gay clergyman may have on how we regard his ministry, 3) the teaching of the Church on the proper response to severely compromised churches and ministers.


First, here was his approach to the question of how homosexuality can be reconciled with Scripture. First, the Church has always been revising and expanding its interpretation of Scripture to address new situations; the tradition is not static, but always growing and developing. Now, of course this is indisputable, and though some of these revised interpretations prove later to have been foolish and hasty indeed, they have often proved valuable (e.g. the Reformation and justification). Of course, where the rubber meets the road is whether these new insights are in fact "reinterpretations" of Scripture, or just revisions. It's legitimate to interpret the text in a new way, or at least to try out a new interpretation (though it would be rash to try to implement it immediately in the Church), when it is really a matter of reading what's there in a new way that is consistent with what's on the page. But revising the text, "interpreting" it in a way that flatly contradicts it, is a different matter. Is there a way to defend homosexuality in a way that does not flatly contradict the text? Well, there's at least an attempt in certain circles--the argument runs that what is being condemned in these passages are culturally-specific forms of homosexuality that are reprehensible; e.g., promiscuous homosexuality, or the Greek pedophilic homosexuality. This would be similar to arguments (pretty standard among conservatives) that, e.g., the teachings regarding head-coverings were addressing a culturally-specific problem (not the best example, I know...supply your own). Stable conjugal homosexuality, on the other hand, is not what these condemnations have in mind.
Now, I find this argument highly doubtful, but I do at least appreciate the attempt to base the position on an interpretation of Scripture, instead of just tossing Scripture out the window and saying it's wrong and should be ignored. It seems to me that we should be able to treat Christians who mount such a defense differently than the latter, and, however much we disagree, still be in fellowship with them. As for Christians who think the Bible can just be chucked...well, two cannot walk together unless they are agreed on a point of such importance.

Second, what difference, if any, does it make if a gay minister is not actively homosexual? Well, there are three forms of this, of course. Type one would be a committed permanent celibate. In this case, the fact that he is "gay" is not particularly important; it is certainly not sinful as such. It may, perhaps, depending on how serious is the individual's struggle, be a reason why he should steer clear of the ministry, but it need not be. The homosexual inclination in itself is not any disqualification for a solid and holy ministry. Type two is that of someone who is merely between partners. They are not actively homosexual at the moment because they are not currently in a relationship, but they have no qualms about being so. In this case, the fact that they are "not actively homosexual" is of no moral relevance. But type 3 is more complex. It is that of a committed temporary celibate, that is, someone who does not see a problem with being in a conjugal, "marriage-like" homosexual relationship, but who is determined to remain celibate until such time as they are in such a relationship, just as a heterosexual should stay celibate until he or she is married.

Now, what is the nature of our objection to this person? We're not objecting to their homosexual inclination; that in itself is not culpable. We're not blaming them for their homosexual activity, because they are not, and have not been, active. We're blaming them for their views about the issue, their views which approve the possibility of their being active as something that is legitimate for them to do as a Christian, their views which clearly misunderstand the moral requirements of Christianity and especially of their office. Now, this is certainly a serious problem, but is it any different than the error of a heterosexual minister who held the same views--namely, that it was fine for a homosexual minister to pursue a conjugal partnership? We would have serious objections to a minister who taught such things, but it would an objection to wrong teaching and thinking, not sinful practice, still morally culpable perhaps, but not in the same degree. So, is the committed temporary celibate homosexual in a compromised sinful condition, over and above the intellectual error of his false understanding of the moral requirements for homosexuals? It would seem that there is still an additional objection we could raise, which is that in his case, unlike the case of the heterosexual sharing the same views, there is a sin of will, an openness to giving in to a temptation to sin. His is certainly a seriously compromised position.

However, this discussion raises the important question of whether the church whose minister is "Type 3" celibate homosexual is really more in the wrong, more compromised, than a church whose minister merely approves of such practice in principle. In what way do we relate to churches of these descriptions, and how do we fellowship with them? These are still questions I am struggling to answer, but the principles and distinctions discussed here provide, I think, some helpful direction.

Finally, then, an important part of this answer is provided by the twenty-sixth article from the Thirty-Nine Articles, which the priest read aloud and I found rather convicting:

"Although in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ's, and do minister by his commission and authority, we may use their Ministry, both in hearing the Word of God, and in receiving the Sacraments. Neither is the effect of Christ's ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God's gifts diminished from such as by faith, and rightly, do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ's institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men."

I think we conservatives tend to forget this crucial and ancient doctrine of the Church. I posted before about how we need to be more concerned with admitting the corporate guilt that we share simply by being fellow-members in Christ with those who have perverted the Church, instead of being afraid of being tainted with guilt by associating too closely, or worshipping with such. But this pushes it even further. We do not incur new guilt simply by sitting under the ministry of an evildoer. Before, I had thought to myself, "Well, as long as you don't know he's an evildoer. Once you know he is, you must flee." But that's not what the 26th article says, nor what the teaching of the Church has historically said. "Neither is the effect of Christ's ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God's gifts diminished from such as by faith, and rightly, do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ's institution and promise." Wow. That means that even if you have an actively homosexual priest in the pulpit and at the altar, you do not sin by worshipping in the service he officiates, nor does he prevent you from truly worshipping God and receiving His grace, as long as you participate in faith.

Now, there may well still be strong prudential reasons for staying away, especially if your faith is not so strong as not to be distracted by your knowledge of the sins of the leader. But this article removes forever a strictly moral consideration from the question of "with whom or under whom may we legitimate worship" (as long as it is a Christian Church following genuinely Christian worship." I don't think we conservatives usually think that way. Instead, we tend to think that there are a whole list of abuses and sins, doctrinal and moral, on the part of clergy and churches, that are serious enough to basically bar these churches from consideration as places where you may lawfully worship. Where do we get that from? Article 26 tells us that the sins and errors of the ministers, while they should not be taken lightly, should be treated simply as one among a number of factors in determining the prudence of worshipping with a certain congregation. I think this principle is extremely important to keep in mind, both for individuals seeking to discern how to interact with and participate in severely compromised churches, and for whole denominations or groups of churches that are tempted to fall prey to a "this is the last straw; we gotta get outta here" attitude.

Of course, none of this is said to deny the latter part of article 26, which says, "Nevertheless, it appertaineth to the discipline of the Church, that inquiry be made of evil Ministers, and that they be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences; and finally, being found guilty, by just judgment be deposed." Yes, church discipline needs to happen, but church discipline is not the same thing as--indeed, it is the opposite of--an uprising by individuals or particular churches to take matters into their own hands and decide who is and who isn't the Church.
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The Legend of Death

So yesterday, while searching the New College library catalogue in search of a couple of books by John Milbank, I saw a title that jumped out at me: The Legend of Death: Two Poetic Sequences, published just last year. And yes, it was by John Milbank. The same Milbank who writes the labyrinthine, brain-dissolving prose of Theology and Social Theory, is, apparently, a poet. But I suppose that if poetry is, as Dr. Leithart says, "concentrated excess," then it makes sense, since Milbank's writing certainly fits that description. And if Milbank were to write poetry, it makes sense that he'd pick a melodramatic title like The Legend of Death.

Here's a sample, "Via Moderna":

The day vanishes
in its very dawning

We might have soared through it
like birds rushing upon the waters.

But all was lost at the outset:
with crumbling nuggets of darkness
like charcoal we signed the warrants
of our own fatal autonomy.

They were derived from
the buried remains of the wood
that must haunt us long after
the final axe-blow will have fallen.

For in reality it is the absolute trees
that are but shadowed
by the gusts of 'little things'
of our own nominal sad contriving.
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Vindiciae Contra Detractos (Church in Crisis Review #7 and Last)

Chapter 7, “Good News for the Gay Christian”
Now at last I embark on a review of the last chapter in this book, the most important, and the reason why I began these reviews in the first place. You may perhaps remember that I decided to embark on this lengthy defense and analysis of O’Donovan’s book in response to Douglas Wilson’s very harsh dismissal of it, which you can read here (beware the comments at the bottom). Oh, and by the way, here’s the link to the online version of O’Donovan’s book, which I failed to supply earlier in this series) I shall address the specific quotes that Wilson criticizes as they come up in the course of the chapter, but suffice to note here that Wilson seems to completely misunderstand what O’Donovan is doing in this chapter.

This time around, I shall work very carefully through the text, even more so than previous chapters, to guard against the kinds of misunderstandings that Wilson falls into. But, since that will make this post extremely long, I shall provide a shorter summary first, and you can just read that if you don’t feel the need for the extended analysis and vindication.


In this chapter, O’Donovan takes the hypothetical (but a hypothetical that certainly has real-life examples) of a gay Christian who genuinely desires to live in obedience to Christ, but who has difficulty seeing how the condemnations of homosexuality in the Bible could really apply to his case. How does the Church address the good news of the gospel to this person? O’Donovan makes a couple of important points about this question. The first is that inasmuch as the gay Christian is to be addressed as a believer and a disciple, he should be addressed also as a potential evangelist, as someone who has a calling to not only be witnessed to about Christ, but to be a witness of Christ to the world. The second is that the good news is always a demanding good news, a gift that requires obedience. So the gay Christian cannot expect to hear a word of simple affirmation.

Then O’Donovan points out that, on the one hand, the good news as proclaimed to the gay will simply be the same as that proclaimed to anyone else--the promise and summons in Christ is, an important sense, the same for all men; on the other hand, the promise and summons of the gospel will take on a unique form in addressing gays with their unique struggles and challenges.
O’Donovan then fleshes out the nature of this unique address to gays, which he proposes will address the situation of the gay Christian as one of a vocation. This is perhaps the point at which most conservatives will balk, as we are used to using the word vocation to denote an entirely positive calling to be advanced, and are used to thinking of homosexuality as an entirely negative problem to be overcome. But if we listen patiently here, I think O’Donovan’s point is decisive and convincing; I will take extra time to go over the details at this point in the argument. If the gay Christian has a particular vocation, then our task in preaching the gospel to them is to help them see where in that vocation are strengths to be encouraged, and where are the temptations to be overcome, to help them see where their calling to follow Christ is one of burdens to be borne, and where it is one of opportunities to be pursued.

To make sense of the desires that homosexuals find themselves facing, O’Donovan reminds us that, in our state of fallenness, we must remember that not all desires can be taken at face value; they are always pointing vaguely towards some good that should be pursued, but usually in a disordered way that, if followed literally, will lead to evil. The Church must work together with gays to understand what homosexual desire really points to, so that it can sort out where is the good, and where is the evil. Moreover, it must work to understand what contemporary homosexuality means; instead of simply hastily saying, “Well, it’s just sin, so stop doing it,” we must, without necessarily denying that it is sin, understand the roots of it, the meaning of it, and in what ways a gay Christian might live out his or her hard vocation in a way that blesses the Church and the world. This will necessarily be a more patient and difficult process than either the liberal or the evangelical response to homosexuality.

------
Now, for those who want more detail, I will work through the text carefully, summarizing and questioning it, and responding to Wilson’s particular charges as they come up (note that I address every one of Wilson's charges in here--they are all in response to quotes from the chapter, and I take up each one as it arises. The only exception is the mockery Wilson indulges in about "fairies" and "probing" at the end, which I have omitted to address [though I think I might have mentioned it in an earlier post] since it is not a substantive objection and is in rather bad taste.)

O’Donovan begins by considering a hypothetical homosexual who “declares: (i) that he desires to live in obedience to Christ; (ii) he is unable to see himself reflected in the description of homosexuals in Romans 1, since he is not ‘rejecting something I know in the depths of my being’; (iii) that he conducts a life of moral struggle like other Christians; and (iv) that it is ‘hard to hear good news’ from a church which insists his condition is spiritually compromised.” Like it or not, we must accept that such struggling, well-intentioned gay Christians do exist, Christians who want to follow Christ, but who do not understand that this necessarily requires an abandonment of their homosexuality. As O’Donovan says “If there are homosexual Christians who see themselves in this way, then, precisely because they intend to take the disciplines of the Christian life with perfect seriousness, we may and must listen and speak to them with perfect seriousness about the good news in Jesus Christ.” So far, so good, right? Well, no, actually. Oddly, Wilson interjects an objection after just this quote, saying, “But of course, this is only the case if the true center of authority is to be found in the disciple's sentiments and self-justifications and not in the master's commands. We must take the homosexuals' self-assessments as authoritative only to the extent that any such self-justifications are authoritative, which of course they aren't.” I’m not really sure what to make of this objection, since O’Donovan said nothing about the homosexual’s self-assessment being “authoritative” but only as being something that we must address “with perfect seriousness.” Of course his self-assessment isn’t authoritative--O’Donovan has established that quite clearly earlier in the book.

In any case, O’Donovan goes on to say that we must ask not only how the gospel is to be proclaimed to this homosexual Christian, but “How does the homosexually inclined person show Christ to the world?” We may do a double-take here, but O’Donovan’s point is quite simple--every Christian believer, sinner or saint, has the task of both receiving the gospel and proclaiming the gospel; of receiving the witness of Christ and being a witness for Christ. If we are to address the homosexual Christian as truly a Christian, we must keep both of these in mind; moreover, note that he refers here to the “homosexually inclined” person, not the homosexually active. Throughout this chapter, O’Donovan is not calling upon us to cheerfully endorse homosexual practice, but to seriously engage the Christian who has homosexual desires, who wants to understand how he is called upon to live his Christian faith.

Before going any further, O’Donovan pauses to emphasize “an elementary point about Christian ethics”: “there is no Christian ethics that is not ‘evangelical,’ i.e. good news. There can be no change of voice, no shift of mood, between God's word of forgiveness and his word of demand, no obedience-without-gift, no gift-without-obedience. The gift and the obedience are in fact one and the same.” Therefore, whether addressing gays or non-gays, the Gospel will be both a word of promise and a word of demand; we must neither forget (as conservatives sometimes do) that the gospel addresses gays with comfort, or forget (as liberals usually do) that it addresses them with demands.

“The righteousness of Jesus Christ is not comfort without demand, any more than it is demand without comfort. It is never less than that demanding comfort by which God makes more of us than we thought it possible to become. And from this there seems to follow an important implication: the Gospel must be preached to the gay Christian on precisely the same terms that it is preached to any other person.”

We cannot, says O’Donovan, treat gays as some special kind of human, as the homophobic do in a judgmental way, or as the liberal gay-rights agenda does in an wrongfully affirming way. The gospel comes to them with the same words as it does for anyone else. The homosexual Christian must see Christianity, Christ, as the ground of his identity, not his homosexuality.

“Homosexuality is not the determining factor in any human being's existence; therefore it cannot be the determining factor in the way we treat a human being, and should not be the determining factor in the way a human being treats him- or herself. Gays are children of Adam and Eve, brothers and sisters of Christ. There is no other foundation laid than that. ‘He will feed his flock like a shepherd’; from which it follows, simpliciter and without adjustment, that he will feed gays like a shepherd, too.”

But then O’Donovan questions this line of reasoning--this may be so, and yet surely people possess specific subordinate identities, to which the Gospel should be addressed in a specific way. Should we not apply the Gospel differently to the different sectors of society, as Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule does? O’Donovan counters this question by asking,

“Why would there be a Gospel for the homosexual any more than a Gospel for the teacher of literature, for the civil magistrate, or for the successful merchant (to name just three categories that the early church viewed with the same narrowing of the eyes that a homosexual may encounter today.) It is for the church to address the good news, we may say; it is for the recipient - homosexual, pedagogue, politician or captain of industry - to hear it and to say how he or she hears it in and from this or that social position.”

At this point Wilson sharply objects,

“And, of course, in response the question should immediately arise whether the early Church was correct to view these persons with suspicion. If they were, then we should still be viewing them with suspicion. If they were not, then we should not be. And if the suspicion directed at sexually-active homosexual ‘Christians’ throughout the entire history of the Church has been correct, then let it continue. If incorrect, then let us abandon it now in repentance. But how about some exegesis first? O'Donovan tries to anticipate that clever trick by creating some hermeneutical wiggle-room early on in the book, which in these pomosexual times is not hard to do. Simple right? Clear wrong? All this deep theology is making my head hurt.”

Of course, in response the answer should immediately arise that O’Donovan never said here, or anywhere else, that homosexuals should not be viewed with “suspicion,” at least, in the same sense as civil magistrates, as those prone to be engaged in types of activity that the Church must oppose. Moreover, O’Donovan is not clearly talking about “sexually-active homosexuals” per se, but about prone-to-be-sexually-active homosexuals, and in any case, I find deeply troubling Wilson’s placing of quotation marks around “Christians” in referring to homosexuals. But, the biggest problem with this objection by Wilson is that O’Donovan goes on to object to his own question in the very next paragraph.

O’Donovan, having asked whether the Gospel has nothing special to say to the homosexual, replies, “Not so; it does!” I will quote: “The Gospel does have implications for the way we conduct ourselves in the world, and the way we conduct ourselves in the world is differentiated as the forms and circumstances that constitute the world are differentiated. There are special needs because there are special contexts within which the Christian life has to be lived out.” So, on the one hand we must beware of treating homosexual Christians like some special class that receives a different Gospel than the rest of us; on the other hand, we must recognize that they have unique struggles and tasks, to which a specific application of that Gospel must be made. Such a specific application, O’Donovan says, has traditionally fallen under the heading of “vocation”; just as the teacher, politician, or banker faces particular temptations in their station in life, that the Gospel must help them overcome, so does the homosexual. Now, as I mentioned above, it is here that we are likely to object--homosexuality isn’t a vocation; it’s a sin. But we must remember here that O’Donovan is speaking of those with “homosexual sensibility”; those who find themselves, for whatever reason, characterized by an attraction to the opposite sex, and for whom such desires cannot simply be swept under the rug and replaced with new desires; these are those who find themselves called to live lives confronted by this desire. In such cases, we can rightly speak of a vocation, and not merely of a vocation to suffer, because it would be harsh indeed to suppose that God had no special use to which he could put such Christians, no special gifts with which they were endowed amidst their weaknesses, no special service which they could do for the Church. If we truly believe that all members of the body are needed and valuable, then certainly we may speak of homosexual sensibility as a vocation within the body that some are called to live out.

As O’Donovan puts it,

“Of course, this pastoral train of thought does not entitle us to demand that the gay Christian (or the teacher, politician and banker) should repent without further ado. Theirs is a position of moral peril, but also a position of moral opportunity. In preaching the Gospel to a specific vocation we must aim to assist in discernment. Discernment means tracing the lines of the spiritual battle to be fought; it means awareness of the peculiar temptations of the situation; but it also means identifying the possibilities of service in a specific vocation. The Christian facing the perils and possibilities of a special position must be equipped, as a first step, with the moral wisdom of those who have taken that path before, the rules as have been distilled from their experience. A soldier needs to learn about "just war", a financier about "just price", and so on. Again, can it be any different in the realm of sexual sensibility?”

To these last two sentences, Wilson objects, “Sure it can. It is completely different. Scripture provides multiple examples of soldiers fighting the way soldiers ought to fight. Scripture provides multiple examples of merchants conducting their pricing operations in an honorable way. It contains no examples of "just sodomy." And by "no examples," just to be clear and precise, I mean nada, zilch, zip, zero.” Again, this entirely misses O’Donovan’s point. I don’t know about “just sodomy” but there is certainly “just homosexuality,” which would be celibate homosexuality. Now one may say object that this is a silly point to make, because it means that the only just way to fulfill the calling is just not to fulfill it. But this, to anticipate something O’Donovan says further on, would wrongly assume “that a homosexual is someone essentially characterised by an inevitable homoerotic desire. That would be to close down the exploration of the gay experience with a vengeance!” (Part of the point that I take O’Donovan to be making, in insisting on homosexuality as a “vocation” and on there being more to “gay experience” than “inevitable homoerotic desire,” is that homosexual sensibility is often associated with many great strengths of sensibility and mind. Many of the great artists and writers in the Christian tradition have struggled with homosexual desire, and it seems quite clear that such desire often goes hand-in-hand with great creative abilities or unique perceptiveness. We cannot treat this as a mere coincidence, but as one of the strengths and unique opportunities of service that belong to the homosexual vocation.) And in any case, it would hardly be the only vocation in which a Christian would find the obvious paths for action closed off to him. Christians in the Roman army (and in the American army today) would find that the just way of carrying out their calling would be to refrain from doing most of what they were called upon to do. Moreover, Wilson commits a fairly obvious fallacy here, since the fact that there are no examples of something in Scripture clearly does not necessarily mean that such a thing could not rightly exist--there are no examples of “just actors” in Scripture, but it would be wrong to therefore assume, as the Puritans seemed to, that such could not exist. (I say this not to contest Wilson’s point that there is no such thing as “just sodomy,” but only to say that this point was made very poorly, and this kind of poor argument is not likely to help the evangelical cause.)

Anyway, to move on...O’Donovan immediately points out that the homosexual’s task of discerning the right and wrong in his vocation is not his task to carry out on his own, but must be done by listening to the tradition, which, although it may not have the final word, must have a very important word, without which the final word may never be found. “No one who has not learned to be traditional can dare to innovate.”

But, what of the sincere gay Christian, who, having listened to the tradition, and accepted that “discipleship cannot be without a price in self-denial” yet wonders “whether that price may not be paid, pari passu with the married, in the ‘daily discipline of a shared life.’ And then he asks how that daily discipline can fit in with its two exclusive categories of ‘marriage’ and ‘singleness’.” (He is here referring to the text of the St. Andrews Day Statement, a 1996 statement by open-minded conservatives on the matter of homosexuality.) O’Donovan points out here that the Statement did not rule as an absolute final word that these were the only two possible categories, and that homosexuals could only choose the latter, but that it did say (and O’Donovan agrees) that such is the teaching of the tradition, which must not be lightly overturned. The Statement’s main purpose was not “merely to declare what its authors supposed to be the case. Its intention was to pose open questions to gay Christians which might elicit what they supposed to be the case. It was an invitation to dialogue within the basic terms set by Christian faith.” This invitation was not answered, he says, but was greeted with suspicion, and by liberals, with disdain. This is because liberalism “reckons it knows what gay Christians need, which is ‘stable relationships.’” But this, he points out, is the testimony of liberal Christians, not necessarily of gay Christians. Do gays see the primary fulfillment of their desires as a conjugal relationship, or not? It is dangerous, thinks O’Donovan, to abandon the tradition to offer a hasty solution for gay Christians before even determining if that is the solution that gay Christians need. We need, says O’Donovan, to have a much more serious discussion with gay Christians about how they understand their experience than liberalism has ever actually engaged in.

Now, having discussed all this time the vocation of those with “homosexual sensibility,” O’Donovan turns to address the question whether, if such sensibility is not sinful in itself (as I think we should all agree), a sexual expression of it need be sinful. This is, for many, the crux upon which all turns, and it must be addressed, although O’Donovan has been right to steer our attention to the larger contours of the issue. However, following his strategy throughout the book, O’Donovan does not offer a straightforward answer (he does not conceive this as his task in the book), but rather clarifies the framework within which a right answer can be given.

And the first thing to say in establishing this framework is that to ask the question this way is to turn it on its head--we cannot start from desire as from a given, and then move outward to expression as doubtful, but must start from given social norms of expression, and approach the desire as that which is doubtful. As O’Donovan puts it, “Wrapped up in this is a certain psychological positivism, an unbiddability characteristic of romantic, pre-Wittgensteinian psychology. Within, we have a self-interpreting mental state, "desire"; outside, we devise an action to "express" it, i.e. lead the mental state uncompromised from the inner expanses of the mind to the public world. Inner certainties demand untrammelled expression. But that approach can only invite a sceptical reply. What is this inner certainty certain of? How can we know what the desire is for?” Desires, he says, cannot be taken at face-value, especially in this fallen world:

“The language of ‘expression’ is treacherous. It lets us suppose that our desires are perspicuous, when they are not. Sexual desire in particular is notoriously difficult to interpret....It is characteristically surrounded by fantasy, and fantasies are never literal indicators of what the desire is really all about, but are symbolic revealer-concealers of an otherwise inarticulate sense of need. But the point holds also for many other kinds of desire - let us say, the desire for a quiet retirement to a cottage in the countryside, or the desire to own a fast racing-car. We cannot take any of them at their face value.” In other words, just because a homosexually inclined person understands himself to have same-sex sexual desires does not mean that the only, or even the best way, for him to respond to his desires is to have a same-sex sexual relationship. “To all desire is appropriate self-questioning: what wider, broader good does this desire serve? how does it spring out of our strengths, and how does it spring out of our weaknesses? where in relation to this desire does real fulfilment lie? It is in interpreting our desires that we need the wisdom of tradition, which teaches us to beware of the illusory character of immediate emotional data, helping us to sort through our desires and clarify them. The true term of any desire, whether heavily laden or merely banal, is teasingly different from the mental imagination that first aroused it. And gays have no infallible introspective certainties in relation to their desires that would put them outside the common human lot of self-questioning.”

In other words, we must not say, with the liberals, that the proper response to homosexual desire is simply to endorse the indiscriminate literal fulfillment of this desire; but nor must we say, as many evangelicals tend to, that the proper response is just to shut it down, write it off, turn away from it in horror. Rather, we must recognize that this desire, like every other desire of fallen man, is a desire for true goods, but a disordered desire, that is likely to lead away from them if we are not careful. Our task in addressing homosexuals is to help them discern what true goods their desires are distortedly aiming at, and to help train them to pursue those goods rightly, and avoid acting on their desires in the ways that do not lead toward the good.

“It is perfectly possible to think of desires as no matter for blame, and yet be persuaded that their literal enactment can never be their true fulfilment. Think of the desires we conceive in relation to our enemies when we are angry, or of the desires we conceive in relation to money and possessions! Desire is, however, one aspect of what Christian doctrine used to speak of as ‘concupiscence,’ a brokenness of the world reflected in a confusion of desire that our human society itself instils in us.”

And this, of course, as O’Donovan hastens to remind us, puts us again in the position of having to understand that gays are, fundamentally, in no different position from the rest of us sinners; we all find ourselves facing distorted desires, which we must overcome and re-orient, and this all the more so in the fractured post-Christian world of modernity.

“The gay Christian who complains that the good news is difficult to hear because his position is treated as compromised from the outset could learn that it is not his position, but the position of the human race, that is compromised from the outset....If the distinctiveness of gay experience reflects original sin in some way, it is because it also reflects the fractured quality of society and its loveless disorder, a disorder for which we all share common responsibility and all pay the common price, the fruit of our uneven social formation.”

Following this train of thought, O’Donovan says, leads us to consider the novelty of the gay phenomenon in modern society: “The world has never seen a phenomenon like the contemporary gay consciousness. There have been various patterns of homosexuality in various cultures, but none with the constellation of features and persistent self-assertion that this one presents.” I would’ve thought that this was one of the most uncontroversial sentences in the book; indeed, when I read it, my first reaction was that it was a rather pointlessly self-evident statement, since almost by definition, no pattern in a previous society could have exactly the same “constellation of features” as it does in today’s society. But, oddly enough, Wilson jumps on this sentence with a sharp objection:

“Let us assume this assertion correct, which it almost certainly isn't. But let's grant it for the sake of discussion. Why is this unique development assumed to be an ameliorating point in favor of some kind of softened judgment? Why isn't it assumed to be the most perverse development in the history of the human race? As in, this is ‘far worse than Sodom’? ‘This thing is unique -- it must be the mother of all perversions.’ Why don't we take that line?” I am mystified by Wilson’s suggestion that this assertion “almost certainly isn’t” correct, given that, as I just said, it seems rather to be by definition correct. Wilson also seems to again mis-read between the lines, since O’Donovan never said that this was supposed to be “an ameliorating point in favor of some kind of softened judgment.”

He never makes such a point here. Rather, his point is that this fact must force us to come to careful and comprehensive grips with the nature of the contemporary homosexual issue, so that we can offer a judgment that is not necessarily “softened” but which is balanced and informed. An approach like Wilson’s, which sees nothing in the contemporary gay phenomenon except “the mother of all perversions,” risks being an approach closed to new insight, unable to learn anything from the age in which we live, or from the homosexual Christians whom we encounter in the Church.

Having drawn attention to the uniqueness of today’s homosexual movement, O’Donovan insists that we must read the problem of homosexuality in our culture not as some isolated sin, that can be condemned and dealt with on its own, but as in many ways the product of late-modernity, and the chaos which our society has fallen into. When we read it this way, we will see another way in which we may benefit from attentiveness to the experience of gay Christians--we will be able to read therein a clearer picture of the society we inhabit, the disorder it engenders, and the ways in which the Gospel might be brought to bear upon it.

“From the place of special sensibility in which the homosexual Christian may find him- or herself we may hear a testimony to the way the world confronts our mission in our time, to its fragmented identities, its disjunctions of feeling, its cruelties, its dislocations and the peculiar possibilities of redemption that God has put at its heart. The rest of us cannot do without this torchlight shone through the fog of the late modern world in which we, too, must grope our way.”

When we approach gay Christians this way, we approach them as friends, as neighbors, as companions on the hard path of faith. Such an approach, suggests O’Donovan, is what gays need far more than liberal Christianity’s “managerial juridicalisation of the gay Christian's claim, by its ‘laws and peremptory dogmas,’ designed to settle questions without exploring them, to adjust relations without justifying them, to reassure the uncomforted without comforting them, in short, to manage the situation.” In this hasty liberal attempt to manage the situation, the actual experience, needs, and particular vocation of gay Christians has been largely ignored, and if conservatives are to offer a better answer to the situation, they must fill this void, and fill it with love and friendship.

“The role of attorney's client, the perpetual petitioner before the court of pleas, is open and inviting, and there are plenty to welcome the gay into it - for the time being. But the catalogue of candidates for emancipation will be extended further, and the gay cause will lose the interest it once had - irrespective of whether it has won the concessions it fought for. The role of friend among friends, on the other hand, questioned and self-questioning, joined with those in pilgrim search for the new name that no man knows except the one to whom it is given, is an altogether different role, and perpetually available to those who seek it. The gay Christian thus faces in a particular way the choice that constitutes the human situation universally: whether to follow the route of self-justification, or to cast oneself hopefully on the creative justification that God himself will work within a community of shared belief.”

O’Donovan approaches his conclusion by summarizing the questions that the gay issue confronts us with--for gays “how this form of sensibility and feeling is shaped by its social context, how it can be clothed in an appropriate pattern of life for the service of God and discipleship of Christ?” and for non-gays, “how and to what extent this form of sensibility and feeling has emerged in specific historical conditions, and how the conditions may require, as an aspect of the pastoral accommodation that changing historical conditions require, a form of public presence and acknowledgment not hitherto known?” Now, I will confess of course that I am not wholly comfortable with a “pastoral accommodation” that involves “a form of public presence and acknowledgement not hitherto known.” I will grant of course that we cannot a priori rule out the possibility of such an accommodation, and perhaps what O’Donovan is calling for here is nothing too radical, nothing that would involve a shift in the fundamental ethical requirements of the situation that the Church has insisted upon. Indeed, based on the rest of the book, I should expect that this is the case--that O’Donovan does not anticipate or desire any such fundamental shift; but I wish he’d be a little clearer here at the end.

O’Donovan ends by reminding us that if we are patient and faithful, we can hope for a real resolution of this crisis: “No disagreement refuses to be analysed, and its constituent elements sorted out according to size and shape. No disagreement does not lure us on with the hope, however distant, of a genuine resolution. Can we promise ourselves, then, that if the churches would only discuss homosexuality long and fully and widely enough, they would end up agreeing? Well, we are not entitled to rule out that possibility.” Even if such final agreement is not forthcoming, it is also possible that the disagreement may cease to evoke such “threatening resonances” which seem today to make it a communion-breaking issue, just as, for example, the formerly tense debate over whether divorce was ever appropriate now seems a manageable disagreement for Christians. I admit that I am not as sanguine (or perhaps my imagination is just not so expansive) as is O’Donovan here. I have trouble conceiving of how this could be a matter that the churches are able to “agree to disagree” on; yet I have no right to rule out this possibility; after all, it is certainly not a dispute over credal orthodoxy, as serious as it may seem.

“There are no guarantees. There never are in the Christian life. But that is not a reason not to try. And seriously trying means being seriously patient. Anyone who thinks that resolutions can be reached in one leap without long mutual exploration, probing, challenge and clarification, has not yet understood the nature of the riddle that the ironic fairy of history has posed for us in our time.”

So, is O’Donovan’s final chapter satisfactory? Is his book satisfactory? Certainly not for most liberals, probably not for most conservatives. We conservatives are left frustratedly asking, “OK, that’s all well and good, but what’s the upshot? We shouldn’t ordain gays, right? We shouldn’t let them get married, right? We should urge them to be celibate, right?” As far as I can tell (and this impression is confirmed by others who know the man better than I do), O’Donovan would answer “right” to all of these--certainly this is clearly implied by the principles he lays out in this book. But laying out these answers is not the task he sets for himself in this book; as I mentioned to Donny, I think he sees his task as a theologian differently than most Reformed theologians would. Although ordained, he is not currently serving as a churchman, and so it is not his task to throw his “vote” on the issue onto the table. He does not want to add his voice to the cacophonous shouting match on one side or the other, despite having stronger sympathies with one side, but he wants to calmly direct the attention of the shouters to the nature of the situation, the nature of the questions to be addressed, and the ramifications of the answers that may be given. In so doing, he performs, I think, a great service to the Church, and gives us a great deal of food for thought. I would hope that other conservatives like myself, would, instead of casually dismissing this book, see in it a source of blessing and illumination, as I have.

Pro Christi Ecclesia Testamentoque
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The Yawning Gap (Capitalism and the Global Poor)

A strange silence seems to have descended over blogdom, or at least my little corner of it, of late. I myself, who was blogging madly for most of the month, have put up nothing in over five days. My friend Davey, who used to be a little blogging machine, has put up nothing at theopolitical in more than ten days. Little of interest has reached me from any other corner. Moreover, there has been virtually zero comment activity on my more recent posts. All very odd. Could this be the calm before some great blogospheric storm? I definitely have a few big-time thunderbolt posts rumbling in the background of my mind right now, waiting to be unleashed. But for now, I thought I'd do something rather unlike myself, and post all about statistics.

See, a friend of mine was telling me all about this book, and these statistics, which proved that globalization was, in fact, the global poor's best friend, and that it narrowed the gap between the richest and the poorest, instead of widening it. I was quite skeptical, as everything in my Theology and the Global Economy class seems to take for granted that the opposite is true, and that globalized capitalism is helping the rich increase their comparative advantage over the poor. But, I followed the link to the super-cool statistics site, gapminder.org, to which I was urged by my friend, and found that, in fact, the statistics demonstrated the exact opposite: the gap between the richest and the poorest countries has widened vastly over the last 200 years.

My methodology was quite simple--take the GDP per capita of the poorest country in 1800, in 1850, in 1900, in 1950, and in 2007, and compare that with the GDP per capita of the richest major country (excluding, e.g., Qatar) at those times. Now, of course, these countries were not the same in each time frame--this is not to say that there was no upward mobility among some countries that were originally quite poor, it is not to say that globalization cannot facilitate improvement. The question is whether it works to bring the countries of the world into greater equality of income, or into greater inequality. Apparently, the latter.

Here are the stats: In 1800, Guinea-Bissau had a per capita GDP of 289; the Netherlands was 2659. Ratio: 9.2/1
In 1850, Guinea-Bissau was at 285; Netherlands at 3417. Ratio: 12.0/1
In 1900, Guinea-Bissau was at 276; UK led at 6284. Ratio: 22.8/1
In 1950, Guinea-Bissau was 284; US led with 12,922. Ratio: 45.5/1
In 2007, Congo was lowest at 358, and the US had 42,952. Ratio: 120.0/1

Now, lest you say that Guinea-Bissau and Congo are just odd outliers, and are to blame for their own backwardness, how 'bout we use the bottom quintile of nations, compared to the richest? Here I can just give approximations right now, but here they are:
The ratio is 5:1 in 1800, 7:1 in 1850, 10:1 in 1900: 16:1 in 1950, and 40:1 in 2009.

Now, one can argue that this is not morally significant, for various reasons, or one may appeal to Mark Twain's excellent remark about statistics (of which I am generally quite a fan). But if you appeal to statistics, then to statistics you must go.
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The Root of the Problem

The other day, I picked up a fascinating collection of essays by V.A. Demant, a renowned Anglo-Catholic moral theologian from the Second World War Era, entitled Christian Polity, and the fruits of this little excursion are already proving rich and varied. This little comment, in particular (in the context of a discussion of the important off a Christian realist understanding of the objective good), helped a crucial set of problems in theological economics click suddenly into place:

"The configuration of a social situation is right or wrong, better or worse, in the sight of God, in a way which is to some extent independent of the virtue of its members. Honour is no less honour for its being practiced by thieves; and social evils are no less evils because there appears no one immediately to blame for them."

In other words, good and evil in social structures can be determined by reference to the objective realities of goodness--does this situation conform to the good, avail towards life, etc., or is it a perversion of the good, tending toward death? Despite the potential pitfalls in speaking of "structural sin," as liberation theologians and others have done with reference to forms of capitalism, this is nevertheless an important and true concept--an unjust social structure can be diagnosed as objectively sinful, before we inquire into the individual actions that might have helped bring it about.

This explains, of course, why the Christian nominalist/voluntarist tradition, almost entirely dominant in the sectors of Christianity that endorse capitalism (including my own background), is so resistant to the notion of structural sin. Sin and evil are simply matters of the will, and a social situation is therefore evil only to the extent that we can diagnose the individual sinful acts of the will in that situation. Individual capitalists may sin, but capitalist structures cannot be criticized as sinful in themselves. Read more!

And God Saw that it was Good (O'Don Review, Part 6)

Chapter 6: “Creation, Redemption, and Nature”
In the sixth essay, O’Donovan again turns his focus squarely upon the errors of liberal moral reasoning about the homosexual issue, showing that it leads to theological, and indeed logical, dead ends. This review should be quite straightforward (I know I’ve said that before and still written 2,000-3,000 words, but I really mean it this time). There’s not really anything that even Donny could argue with in this chapter, but I’ll resist the urge to just breeze right through it because parts of it lay some groundwork for what O’Donovan wants to do in chapter 7, which does require close attention.

O’Donovan’s central task in this chapter is to defend a traditional Christian realism which insists that there is a unity between the good and the real, between how God created the world and how he calls upon us to live in it. Liberal defenses of homosexuality, in attempting to deny the charges that it is unnatural and contrary to creation, have basically tossed out any relevance or meaningfulness of the concepts of “nature” and “creation.”

Among the most vapid forms of this theological suicide was the report of the General Synod of the Church of Sweden in favor of the sacramental celebration of homosexual marriage, which O’Donovan quotes as saying, “Here the distinction between what belongs to creation and what belongs to salvation loses its significance.” (86) O’Donovan responds, of course, that if this distinction has lost its significance, so has any traditional articulation of Christian theology, which depends upon a narrative of creation and redemption as the basic background for any claims about God’s work with man.

Much of the current quest for revisionism on the homosexual question, it seems, is inseparable from a dangerous, full-scale doctrinal revisionism, and if there is to be any chance of making genuine progress in our understanding of homosexuality, it must be separated from this milieu: “Is doctrinal revisionism a frontier reached by gay Christians in pursuit of their moral challenge to the church? Or is the gay movement a frontier reached by a liberal church leadership in its pursuit of a doctrinal-revisionist agenda? Nobody can speak for gay Christians about doctrine except gay Christians, and until an intellectual gay voice is as widely heard in the Christian community as it has long been outside it, there is little point in anyone asserting what gays do or do not believe in.” (87-88) In other words, do gay Christians really want to rebuild Christian theology from the ground up, or is theirs a more modest goal? This is a central question of O’Donovan throughout the book.

The central problem of this doctrinal revisionism, O’Donovan moves on to say, is “historicism”--”confusing the good with the future,” rather than rooting it in creation. (88) To unpack this problem, he turns to consider a particularly well-respected example of this problem in the work of moral philosopher R.M. Adams. A critique of Adams occupies the rest of this chapter.

First, he tackles Adams’s attempt to deny that the distinction of “natural” and “unnatural” can be morally normative. What we normally call “natural,” contends Adams, is merely that which happens to be more prevalent in a given time and place, so “in discriminating between good and evil behaviour, as we must, we should not confuse genuine moral intuitions with subjective likes and dislikes.” (89)

O’Donovan’s reply is basically, “Ok, so what?” Just because a thorough account of what is unnatural and what is natural is not empirically self-evident does not mean that such an account cannot be given. O’Donovan gives examples of many things that most people would consider “unnatural”--for a human to be brought up by chimpanzees, for deaf parents to want their child to be deaf too, a diet that clogs your arteries with trans-fats, etc. These are all “subject to the same line of criticism as calling homosexuality unnatural--and that does not make all, or any, of these moral intuitions wrong; it merely means that they require further explication and justification.” (90)

Moreover, argues O’Donovan, the notion of “nature” in traditional moral philosophy “can be seen to do a fairly precise job, and to do it tolerably well. That job was to focus attention on the dual constitution of the human being as body and soul....The virtue of ‘living according to nature’ was precisely that of harmonizing the demands of these two aspects of one’s being.” (91) This, he says, has always been the substance of Christianity’s concern with the body, which has not been a matter of dissing the body, as commonly charged, but of insisting that the requirements and instincts of body and soul be properly harmonized. In reflecting on this harmony, O’Donovan says, “the erotic body, in fact, stands out as the exceptional moment in the repertoire. Here the body conveys a hint of eternity that calls us from beyond it; here it reaches out to point beyond itself.” (93) If we fail to take note of this point, a point that the Western moral tradition has consistently insisted upon, then we treat the erotic body as an end in itself, and run into all kinds of trouble. “If we fail to inquire what the erotic body is a medium for, then we end up investing our perfectly ordinary experiences of sexual attraction with an ontological weight that is, in fact, a borrowed transference, and in our confusion we fail to understand either ourselves or our bodies. We cannot and should not take that moment of rapture in the presence of the beautiful body quite at its face value--though we cannot and should not ignore it, either. We must interrogate it for its meaning.” (94) This little section is something of a digression from O’Donovan’s argument at this point, but it lays important groundwork for the seventh essay.

Returning to his critique of Adams, he addresses Adams’s reticence to use the category of creation to ground the “natural” and provide moral norms. Adams feels that since we must talk of a creation that is fallen, it’s impossible to tell what of the world around us is a natural created good and what is an unnatural fallen evil. “We can only pretend to do this, he fears, on the basis of ‘presuppositions’ about the purposes or commands of God, which look as though they are smuggled in to make sense of a creation that, on its own, is unable to tell the difference between good and evil.” (95) “But this,” O’Donovan counters, “is altogether too skeptical. There are some value distinctions we may make quite clearly simply by reflecting upon the way the world works.” (95) If we are not to discard our basic intuition that life is better than death, something that only the most radical nihilist is prepared to do, then we may make considerable progress in discerning the differences between created goods and fallen evils by determining what things lead toward death and what things avail towards life. The ruddy cheek after a healthy jog and the flushed cheek of a high fever are not indiscriminable, to use O’Donovan’s example.

This being the case (and we might add, with the addition of Scripture to clarify our intuitions--something O’Donovan fails to mention here, but which he would certainly insist upon, given his statements about Scripture earlier in the book), we may look to creation to discern God’s purposes for the world. That which coheres with the structure of God’s good creation is morally good; that which appears to contradict it, such as homosexuality, would seem to be unnatural and therefore morally bad, unless we can discern some purpose of God in it which reconciles the apparent contradiction.

Refusing to root the good in creation, Adams thinks that the three basic purposes of sex--procreation, union, and cooperation, can be separated, so that each of these goods can be pursued in isolation from the others, ungrounded in observed created reality. This “construes God’s purposes in a purely voluntarist and arbitrary sense, detaching them from the philosophical task of understanding the goods of human existence as we find it....Once we separate God’s purposes in creation from the inherent goods of creaturely existence, there is little reason to hold on to the view that God meant anything at all by making the world.” (98)

Since the good cannot be found in created “beginnings,” Adams seeks to locate the good in “the future,” in the revelation of God’s eschatological purrposes, but paradoxically these are “then assumed to be immediately accessible to moral judgment!” as O’Donovan incredulously exclaims. How are we to discern the future revelation of the good but through a narrative of an eschatology that begins in and fulfills created goodness? “For without the love of what is, the ‘new creation’ is an empty symbol--or is it a clanging cymbal? New creation is creation renewed, a restoration and enchancement, not an abolition. Not everything that can be thought of as future can be thought of as the kingdom of God. A brave new world of cyborgs is not a kingdom of God. God has announced his kingdom in a Second Adam, and ‘Adam’ means ‘Human.’” (99)

This final triumphant broadside leaves Adams’s arguments in ruins, but O’Donovan, always the gentlemen, moves in at the end to pick up his opponent, dust him off, and see if he still has anything valuable to contribute. O’Donovan finds something valuable to glean from Adams’s defense of homosexuality--Adams attempts to articulate the gay identity in terms of vocation. This, thinks O’Donovan, may prove to be fruitful. However, it must be subject to the strictures articulated in this chapter--a Christian vocation must be a truly and properly human vocation; it may well be a unique fulfillment of the created goodness that belongs to us all, but it cannot be a contradiction of it. “A ‘vocation’ is a special calling to a distinct good, different from that to which others are called” but it must be “a true way of realizing goods that are for all humankind.” Goya, he says, may have had a legitimate vocation to depict the horrific in his art; Hitler and Attila did not have a legitimate vocation to realize the horrific in their actions.

If we are to find a place for homosexuality within a Church bound to respect the goods of creation and to pursue their fulfillment in new creation, then we will need to discover a way in which gays may contribute distinct goods to the community of faith without abandoning the general good which all are called to respect. This is O’Donovan’s task in the seventh essay.

There is, I think, nothing that is controversial for us in this defense of creation and nature, so I am tempted to hasten on and deal with much more interesting and potentially controversial seventh essay. However, I am going to wait until the end of next week, until after I meet to discuss the homosexuality issue with a well-respected Anglican priest here who is a defender of homosexual ordination. In this meeting, I am trying to follow the model of dialogue that O’Donovan sets forth in chapter 2:

The only thing I concede in committing myself to such a process is that if I could discuss the matter through with an opponent sincerely committed to the church’s authorities, Scripture chief among them, the Holy Spirit would open up perspectives that are not immediately apparent, and that patient and scrupulous pursuit of these could lead at least to giving the problem a different shape—a shape I presume will be compatible with, though not precisely identical to, the views I now hold, but which may also be compatible with some of the views my opponent now holds, even if I cannot yet see how. I do not have to think I may be mistaken about the cardinal points of which I am convinced.

The only thing I have to think—and this, surely, is not difficult on such a subject!—is that there are things still to be learned by one who is determined to be taught by Scripture how to read the age in which we live.

I look forward to sharing any insights that I may clean from this dialogue, and I will do so when I put up the review of O’Donovan’s chapter 7, next week. Read more!

The Privation of the Private

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt fascinatingly points out the derivation of our word "private," which of course is linked to "privation" and thus originally meant something like "deprived":

In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man's capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.

Arendt laments is that in modernity, we have exalted the role of privacy--private property, private life, private conscience, private faith--and forgotten just how deprived an existence lived outside the public, political realm really is. And of course, she blames a lot of this on Christianity. Obviously, she misunderstands the essence of Christianity, but perhaps, so has Christianity itself. Read more!

Why Do Conservative Christians Oppose Free Healthcare?

For class this week, we read a book by Paul Farmer called Pathologies of Power. Since this book was written before the explosion of the current healthcare debate, it doesn't figure too prominently in the text. Farmer is mainly concerned not with unjust healthcare arrangements here in the US, but those in Third World countries, like Haiti, for example, where structural violence, more often than not, supported and perpetuated by the United States (and conservative Christians especially), deprive the poor of access to the most basic health services, or even the means of subsistence. When you read Farmer's account, it is pretty obvious that these situations are the result of gross injustice and downright wickedness in the First World countries, but what is not so obvious, and so what I began to puzzle about once again, is how the healthcare debate in the US right now fits into all this.

I found myself wondering just why it is that Christian conservatives in America oppose so violently the idea of universal health care. Is it just that we don’t trust our government to oversee it wisely, that we are sure that the evil secular state will no doubt use the health care system as a cover for its own sinister purposes and will waste billions of dollars in inefficiency? Why then did such concerns not trouble us overmuch when it came to the Iraq War, for instance? No doubt the state used that as a cover for sinister purposes and no doubt it was terribly inefficient. Are we eager for the idea of universal health care, but just don’t like the current propositions for getting there? I don’t think so, having recently come from this conservative camp.

In this camp, the notion that health care might be a “human right” is greeted with consternation. Part of this, no doubt, is due to a proper suspicion of rights language--it destroys relationships of gift and gratitude, and it has a tendency to make the state the creator and guarantor of rights. But does the conservative accept the principle involved--that it should be obligatory on us to give medical aid to those in need? I don’t think so. We are told instead that receiving health care is a “privilege”--something you earn, or else that is extended to you as an extraordinary offer of grace. The conservative Christian might accept that Christians should--at least, if the need is “near and clear,” right in front of their face--always extend such extraordinary grace. But we shouldn’t expect or ask society as a whole to do that. People ought to do good things, but the government shouldn’t force them to do good things.

Of course, we might dispute whether it's true that the government shouldn't legislate that people do good things, but let’s leave that point aside for a moment. The question here is whether requiring free health care is equivalent to the government requiring that people do some good thing (perhaps like a law requiring that men give up their seats on buses for women), or more like the government forbidding that people do a bad thing (like a law forbidding men beating up women on buses). The conservative argument is that it’s the former. Farmer, I think, would argue that it’s the latter--denying a sick person access to health care unless they can pay for it is exploiting them, it is like beating them up; it’s not simply like failing to give them your seat on a bus. This is, perhaps, where the debate over whether health-care is a “right” cashes out in practical terms. Is the failure to provide it the failure to do something nice that you need not do, or is it a kind of mistreatment of the person by failing to give them that which they unequivocally ought to receive?

Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 might help us out a bit here. On the one hand, we might argue that this is a matter of “how to inherit eternal life”--it is a sort of above-and-beyond ethic. On the other hand, Jesus doesn’t seem to view it this way. This kind of care for the injured man by the Samaritan is purely and simply what God’s law requires. But we might say, the Samaritan’s actions are actions of “compassion”--they are depicted as an act of special kindness, not an act of obedience to the law. On the other hand, Christ tells this parable in response to the lawyer who “desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” In other words, the lawyer thinks to himself, “Ah yes, I am required to care for my neighbor, but, after all, this sphere of responsibility is fairly limited, right?” Jesus’s response makes clear that there can be no self-justification here, no attempt to limit the extent of our obligation to love our neighbor. And, so what if this is addressed to “Christians”--if this is God’s view of righteousness, shouldn’t we want the rest of the world to behave this way too?

I suppose, then, that I would be much more comfortable with the conservative Christian opposition to a government health-care program if we weren’t so often guilty of attempting to justify ourselves by doing the bare minimum, but were out there seeking every opportunity to give care to the sick and needy, and encouraging the rest of society to do likewise. Read more!

Our Ever-Accomodating Catholic Friends

Well, whaddya know? The Vatican has just introduced a new policy enabling Anglicans to join the Catholic Church while maintaining their Anglican traditions, and even married clergy. Not sure whether I should be excited about this or not....is this a great step toward a more ecumenical Catholicism, or is this simply opportunistic fishing from the rapidly-draining Anglican pond? Read more!

Church as/and/against/? Polis

Peter Leithart's recent tantalizing post, "Church and City" has set of a flurry of online discussion, as such a post from the author of Against Christianity might be expected to. In suggesting that there might "be a better way to say it" than that the Church is an alternative polis, Leithart seems to be retreating from at least a literalistic reading of the argument of Against Christianity. This makes sense, because, as we discussed last March, the Church as polis would seem to suggest that all (or a great many) of the features of the earthly polis simply get reincarnated within the Church--does this then mean an ecclesiastical postal service, an ecclesiastical road maintenance service, etc.? There are ways to avoid this conclusion, perhaps, but perhaps the simplest is to clarify the initial claim. The alternative, though--that the church is simply the new cultus at the center of the earthly polis--seems unsatisfactory as well. So why not say that the church is the cultus of the heavenly polis yet to come, which currently sits somewhat uncomfortably in the midst of the earthly polis? This certainly seems to reflect Biblical language pretty well.

However, I'm not sure where Leithart's clarification here leaves us. In saying, "The political order to which the church belongs is the eschatological political order of the heavenly city. The church isn’t defined over-against the earthly city, but as the sacrament and “cult” of the city that is to come," it seems that Leithart leaves unsolved the question of the relationship of the Church's social space to that of the surrounding world.

We could take a very amillenialist Augustinian route, and say that the earthly city still serves the useful function of providing a modicum of peace for the Church while she awaits the advent of the City to come. In this case, the antagonism between Church and earthly city is limited, but so, it seems, is the extent to which the Church ever achieves a social incarnation in this age. Alternatively, we could say that the Church, while itself only a cultus of the City to come, nevertheless seeks to live out, here and now, the political life of the City to come and hence achieves a kind of social incarnation as a shadow of the City to come. If this is so, however, it is hard to see how we have changed much from the "Church-as-polis" view, with its strong antagonism between Church and world (although we have re-emphasized the pilgrim character of the Church in this world). Or, thirdly, we could say that the Church's task, as the cultus of the heavenly polis, is to seek to the earthly city to transform its political forms, inasmuch as is possible in this life, into forms which mirror those of the City to come. If this is how we take it, we are back at a fairly Constantinian convergence of the aims of Church and world. So I, at least, find myself no closer to deciding amongst these three options than before Leithart's intriguing post.

If I've missed something and should be closer, please illuminate me.
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