In a recent issue of The Church Times, Julian Henderson, Bishop of Blackburn, offered a defense of “the traditional view” among Evangelicals on homosexuality. His essay does indeed give what I have come to recognize as a standard Evangelical response. For better or worse, it also makes clear the profound problems in that stance.

He is apparently responding to some Anglican Evangelicals who have begun to rethink their position on this issue. It is an in-house conversation, then, but of concern to all Anglicans. Although I am not an Evangelical, I am an Anglican who shares with them a great devotion to the study of scripture as the Word of God and I have devoted much research and reflection to the present topic. (See my Dirt, Greed, and Sex, 2nd edition, Fortress Press, 2007.) The present post, then, seeks to broaden the conversation into an Anglican rather than a narrowly Evangelical one.

Henderson’s principal claim is that the arguments for change all come “from outside scripture” and therefore carry no weight in comparison to the “traditional view” which, he assumes, depends on scripture alone. I would suggest, however, that his own argument comes “from outside scripture.” He has, in effect, conflated scripture with a particular modern Evangelical interpretation of it. I have nothing against traditions of interpretation. They are necessary and inevitable. A problem arises, however, when any given tradition is made absolute and thus substituted for scripture itself. How does one know when this is happening? When its proponents become so adamant about their own interpretation that they can no longer read scripture in dialogue with other traditions or entertain the notion that their tradition could be questioned, even from within their community.

What are the extra-biblical bases that Henderson believes his opponents rely on? First he feels that the appeal to the Christian “responsibility to show love, welcome, and compassion to all” has led to the voice of experience “becoming a more important driver and authority than scripture itself.”

I find two problems with this. The first is that all interpretation of texts starts from experience and cannot avoid doing so. For Evangelicals, their tradition of interpretation is in fact a formative part of their experience. People reading scripture outside that tradition may and do come up with different readings. Either way, one always winds up reading as a self shaped by experience, both cultural and individual. I do not suggest that all reading is therefore arbitrary. Good reading is critical and open to learning how the text may be different from one’s first impressions. I simply mean that you can only start where you are. If you have committed yourself absolutely to a particular tradition, you can expect to be enlightened by it—but also blinded. Human depravity is such that we will always tend to some extent to substitute the more manageable and definitive tradition of interpretation for the sacred text itself, which is often obscure, occasionally (as Origen noted long ago) offensive, sometimes even unintelligible, and also inclined to challenge the presuppositions we bring to it.

My second problem is with Henderson’s bracketing of “love, welcome, and compassion” as things that might led to misinterpretation of scripture. Yes, any tool of interpretation can also be a means of manipulation. But the dismissal of love, which Jesus clearly underlined as the highest commandment—indeed the one from which all others derive—and its tacit replacement with another commandment to which a higher value is attributed is a maneuver of dubious scriptural validity. Whatever else the commandment to love one’s neighbor—indeed, to love one another (for remember that this is a conversation primarily among Christians, not with the outside world)—it at least requires taking one another seriously enough to listen respectfully to others’ account of their life with God. Experience is itself open to interpretation and one’s self-understanding is never perfect. But love does not permit us to dismiss the testimony of others without careful attention.

Henderson’s second objection confounds two separate issues, one being the denial of marriage to a whole class of people and the other the vocation of celibacy. Paul quite clearly distinguished them, regarding celibacy as a higher calling and strongly encouraging it for all, but emphatically not imposing it on any who had not received the gift of it (1 Cor. 7:1-10, 25-28). The vocation to celibacy is indeed one to be taken seriously, and those called to it have made and continue to make a great contribution to the whole congregation of the faithful. Recent ecclesiastical scandals, however, should remind us that treating celibacy as a requirement rather than a spiritual gift and vocation can produce deleterious results both for those who lack the graces to meet the demand and for the community at large. The effort to require celibacy of a whole population is unlikely to prove any more spiritually productive in the future than it has in the past and also effectively denies spiritual support for those whose vocation is to marry.

Henderson’s third argument is not really Biblical, even though he quotes Jesus. It is an argument about whether the church should accommodate to the environing culture or not. The only possible answer to that question and the only one with historic grounding is “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” There is no simple formula that can easily distinguish the one from the other. Certainly, one cannot distinguish good message from bad by measuring their popularity. Jesus’ instructions to the disciples indicated that we should expect both acceptance and rejection of the same gospel message (Luke 10:1-11). The present growing unpopularity of the Evangelical opinion in the Western World does not prove it is wrong. But its previous popularity did not prove anything, either.

Still, accommodations with our environing cultures have been vital to Christianity all along.The Christian theological orthodoxy that I share with Bishop Henderson would never have been formulated without the contributions of Greek philosophy, whether direct or filtered through Wisdom of Solomon and Philo. The Reformation would never have happened had it not appealed to a changing perspective among the townsfolk of northern Europe. Slavery would not have come to an end in the Western World had not the very unpopular message of the Abolitionists eventually become broadly popular.

Ironically, American Evangelicals were using the bishop’s argument decades ago, posing as a “counter-cultural” force when they were, in fact, he voice of the dominant culture, representing the consensus of the American public on issues of sexuality. Their opponents were a minority probably much smaller, proportionately, than the early Abolitionists. Evangelicals can better claim a counter-cultural status today, but it would still be misleading. Their US audience is increasingly limited to demographic elements that already agree with them and indeed demand their continuing allegiance. Their new challenge is that their own young people are increasingly unpersuaded.

There is no possible a priori judgment as to whether accommodation to the culture represents a positive or a negative development. Each challenge must be judged by the one absolute value that Christians acknowledge, love. It continues to be a matter of great astonishment to me that, for Evangelicals, the absolute rejection of gay and lesbian sexuality that they find in the Bible (mistakenly, I am convinced) has acquired the same absolute value as the command to love God and neighbor. Indeed, in many places (though not, I trust, in Blackburn) this has encouraged Evangelicals to make the lives of gay and lesbian people hell. I am not blaming the bishop for the behavior of such of his co-religionists—behavior which he rejects. But I wonder what it is about Evangelical Christianity in our time that makes it so easy to replace the command to love with some lesser commandment and to ignore the harm done thereby. I fear that, in their eagerness to be faithful to scripture as the word of God, they have actually wound up making an idol of their own particular tradition of interpreting it. They will not allow scripture itself to say anything not already embraced within that tradition.