This is the second post reflecting on agreeing to disagree within
the Church of England by exploring a contribution by Canon Dr Angus Ritchie. (The
first
responds to a published in 2015.) His recent
piece commends itself not least because Ritchie recognises flaws in Martyn
Percy’s reasoning which to those on the other side of the argument are patently
obvious which is why it is all the more remarkable that so few of those who
like Percy’s conclusions show embarrassment about the way he got there.
Ritchie’s own piece, however, seems to suffer from a conflation
of two different questions. One question is how one goes about deciding about
remarriage after divorce, the ordination of women, or the blessing of same-sex relationships.
The other is how one goes about deciding on which of these controversies one is
able to agree to disagree and which are fellowship-breaking.
Unless I have
misread it, the structure of Ritchie’s argument appears to assume two parallel
lines, a “traditionalist” one (refusing to contemplate remarriage after divorce,
the ordination of women to the priesthood, or the blessing of same-sex
relationships) and a “progressive” one (affirming all three). To the latter,
the argument suggests “you progressed on the first two, there is no reason not
to do so on the third”. To the former, it suggests “you tolerate disagreement
on the first two, there is no reason not to do so on the third (because the hermeneutics
involved are the same).” The other, probably more fundamental and fatal,
mistake is the assumption that the hermeneutics which lead Ritchie (and others)
to affirm or tolerate, e.g., remarriage after divorce are the same across the
board within the Church of England. But just as Ritchie can come to roughly the
same conclusion as Martyn Percy but through a different route, so many who
would agree with Ritchie on one or the other of these questions do so for
fundamentally different reasons from his.
The problem is crystallized in the claim that “the ethical
perspective, and the hermeneutic of Scripture, which the Anglican Communion has
accepted in the case of remarrying divorcees and of ordaining women to the
priesthood and episcopate would itself seem to lead towards the acceptability
of the blessing of LGBT Christians’ relationships.” The use of the direct
article and the singular, as if there was only one ethical perspective and one
hermeneutic of Scripture even among Anglicans who accept the remarriage of
divorcees and the ordination of women to the priesthood, marks the critical
error which deconstructs pretty much all that follows.
Ritchie contrasts two approaches to “how the Scriptures are
to be read,” the concordance approach (bad) and the contextualized
approach (good, and allegedly what most Anglicans have adopted).
Over the years I have come to know a diverse range of
readers of the Scriptures, given a good amount of thought to hermeneutics, and
encountered a number of hermeneutical approaches, including the two Angus
Ritchie outlines.
I see two problems: (1) The opponents to remarriage after
divorce and to the ordination of women that I know by and large do not follow
“the concordance approach,” even allowing that Ritchie’s characterisation is an
over-simplification. To be fair, Ritchie does not necessarily assume that
because “the concordance approach” (in his view) invariably leads to a traditionalist
position, therefore whoever holds a
traditionalist position must follow “the concordance approach” but given that
he argues that his “contextualized” approach should lead to a progressive take
on these issues, it remains unclear whether he knows that there are (a great
many) people who with a more sophisticated hermeneutical approach nevertheless
fail to come to his preferred conclusions.
(2) While it is likely true that what Ritchie describes as
“the contextualized approach” is widespread among Anglicans, it is not the
approach of many of the Anglicans I know who come to the same conclusions as
Ritchie on one or two (or even three) of these questions, including Ian Paul
(mentioned in the essay) and myself.
Ritchie apparently believes that, short of making it up as
you go along and setting aside Scripture as and when desired, there is only one
conceivable way to get from “there” (past prohibitions on remarriage after
divorce, restriction of the priesthood to me) to “here” (accepting or at least
tolerating remarriage after divorce and the ordination of women to the
priesthood), namely “a deeper understanding of the practice being condemned”
and “a prayerful exploration of the contemporary issue” (with experience,
reason and tradition as sources [!] of authority).
I do not know of a single, evangelical defence of remarriage
after divorce which works from the assumption that while Jesus condemned
remarriage we should lift this condemnation because the practice of divorce is
different today. No, not one. See http://www.divorce-remarriage.com/.
Actually, the key issue here is not different practices of
divorce (first century versus today) but different understandings of marriage.
While the church in East and West has agreed for two millennia that marriage is
“between a man and a woman in faithful, lifelong union,” the belief developed
within the West (only) that the marriage bond cannot be broken other
than through death. It is this latter belief which is not warranted from the
Scriptures and indeed faces serious obstacles within Scripture (e.g., 1
Corinthians 7:15). Anglicans who affirm that marriage is lifelong but allow for
remarriage after divorce in exceptional circumstances may do so for the reasons
outlined by Angus Ritchie but alternatively they may simply have come to accept
that the Eastern understanding of marriage is correct.
Similarly, it may be obvious to Ritchie that to ordain women
“goes directly against a New Testament injunction,” as it is probably obvious to
many who belong to Reform,
but I rather doubt that it is to any of the GAFCON Primates who allow for the
ordination of women, which is to say that I would be surprised if many of the
GAFCON Primates in favour of the ordination of women to the priesthood got to
this conclusion via the same route on which Ritchie travels. Why is this
important? Because it allows us to see that the agreeing to disagree among
members of GAFCON has a different basis
from the one Ritchie alleges. It is the failure to see these distinctions which
leaves Ritchie unable to see why Anglicans may be able to agree to disagree on
this issue without being logically committed to agree to disagree about
accepting the blessing of same-sex partnerships.
In short, there are those who affirm the normative role of
Scripture and that Scripture needs to be read reasonably (with attention to
language and context among other things) and with the help of tradition. Their
hermeneutic demands that any text of Scripture is read in the light of the
whole of Scripture and that no part is read in a way which would contradict
another part. Disagreements in this group are exegetical more than
hermeneutical and this is why they are often able to agree to disagree, at
least as long as they have confidence that the disagreement really is about the
exegesis of specific texts rather than more fundamental. They would find it
hard to agree to disagree with people who claim that a practice “goes directly
against a New Testament injunction” but may be accepted or even promoted anyway in the light
of other sources of authority.
