In the previous post, I suggested that the church today, as in first-century Rome, is divided by different perspectives on purity. The focus, however, has shifted from food to sexuality. To some readers, these two issues will seem incommensurate. In their world, food purity is mainly a technical, hygienic issue, not one of religious purity, whereas sexual purity has long been treated as an important religious requirement. Some would probably argue that issues like the ordination of women, the marriage of same-sex couples, or the acceptance of transgendered persons are not purity issues at all, but matters of theology and ethics.

I agree that there are important ethical issues in regard to sex, but I don’t think those are what make our current divisions so tense and angry. The purity element is what drives anger, hatred, and schism. Purity, after all, is always, by its very definition, under threat. It is easy to lose and difficult—sometimes impossible—to restore. It occasions not only differences of opinion, but anxieties about contamination.

Fear of contamination has played a clear role in Anglican conflicts about the ordination of women. I was, early on, an opponent of this change myself, but eventually moved away from that position for several reasons, one being a deeper study of early Christian history where I learned that the life of the church has always involved risking new departures to meet the needs of changing situations. This meant, for me, that the Episcopal Church was free to make this departure from the existing tradition in the expectation that it would be confirmed by the fruits of the Spirit. Coming to know ordained women who were excellent priests sealed my growing conviction that this was indeed a movement of the Holy Spirit among us.

Even before that, however, something had given me pause and encouraged reconsideration of the topic. It was the element of anger, outrage, and even hatred that I saw among ardent opponents of women’s ordination. They already had multiple theological disagreements with other people in the Anglican Communion, but none of these evoked such hostile emotion or such a willingness to separate oneself from the offenders. Then I began to notice that opponents of women’s ordination not only refused to recognize their priesthood, but actually began to treat the male bishops who had ordained them as tainted by that action. It was not enough for them to keep their distance from women clergy; they had to avoid any sacramental contact with the hands of one who had participated in such ordinations.

This is actually contrary to the standards of doctrinal orthodoxy. The church long ago, in the face of the Donatist schism, rejected the notion that the sacraments are dependent on the worthiness of the priest. Ordinations are not dependent on the perfect orthodoxy of the bishop who performs them. They depend rather on the action of the Spirit in the church through that bishop. Opponents of women’s ordination, however, now insist on maintaining lines of ordination free of all contact with women, which makes sense only as a purity device. Women ordinands are seen as tainted, themselves, and also as tainting those who ordain them—a taint that those hands would then pass on to subsequent male ordinands. As always, impurity has to be feared as contagious and purity must be closely guarded.

The same kind of reaction is at work in our conflicts about gay, lesbian, and transexual persons. The objections, to be sure, are not presented in purity terms, but as an issue of scripture and/or tradition. But such arguments are not, in fact, compelling. The argument from scripture is cobbled together quite loosely and does not hold up on closer investigation as I showed in Dirt, Greed, and Sex (see especially chapter 12 of the second edition), The argument from tradition is no better. John Boswell’s two impressive scholarly studies, Christianity, Homosexuality, and Social Tolerance and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, have been criticized for over-stating their case. But even if that proves so (and his scholarship was formidable), he successfully shattered the assumption that the whole of Christian history was pervaded by the extreme hostility toward homosexual persons that characterized Western culture in the mid-twentieth century.

The anger and hatred that have characterized some conservative Anglicans and allowed them to justify subverting the unity of the church over these issues is not mere odium theologicum (vicious and destructive as that can be), but an effort to maintain a fragile purity in the face of something felt as defiling. Paul, I believe, would say to them as to the weak in faith of his own day, “Your purity is no longer of decisive importance. Our relationship to God and to one another is determined by God’s grace, not by our avoidance of physical impurity. Our trust is in God, not in our own purity.”

The church is still in the process of finding a new norm for the future. We should not be surprised if the process is sometimes painful. We in the West are still emerging from an era of extreme repression of gay and lesbian people during the twentieth century. (Regions formerly colonized by the West seem to have absorbed that message as well.) The depth of that repression set the stage for the crisis of Stonewall and, in many places, for a reversal of public sentiment that has been astonishing in its rapidity but is still far from complete. In the meantime, we must ask anew whether Paul’s advice to “weak” and “strong” might give us help in maintaining the unity of the church in our present situation. More in the next post.