Sexuality and the Anglican Communion

Jan 14, 2016 by

By Andrew Goddard, Fulcrum:

I contributed a chapter on “Sexuality and Communion” to the recently published Oxford Handbook of Anglican Studies and this article offers a short summary of its argument.

The media obsession with homosexuality gives the impression of an Anglican death wish on sexuality and texts in Leviticus. This not only fails to do justice to the complexities of the contemporary debates but forgets that the English Reformation was itself bound up with debates over texts in the same two chapters of Leviticus (Leviticus 18 and 20) but concerning marriage to a deceased brother’s wife. Like the English Reformation, today’s debates involve a range of political and cultural factors but like then they also reflect deeper disagreements over authority in the church and especially the authority of Scripture. Only by addressing these as Anglicans can we hope to resolve the current crisis.

Though commonly offered as interpretations, we need to avoid simple perspectives that the problem is caused simply either by un-Anglican, narrowly Biblicist fundamentalism invading global Anglicanism or by departure from orthodox Christianity and capitulation to secular liberalism. Both analyses have some truth but are also seriously flawed. A much more complex multi-factorial analysis is needed in which at least seven factors can be identified.

It is clear that the 1998 Lambeth Resolution on sexuality (I.10) has played a decisive role but this also points to the first factor explaining tensions. This resolution was simply restating and amplifying earlier statements in 1978 and 1988 and was overwhelmingly carried but the conference as a whole clearly contained a greater variety of understandings than explicitly expressed in the final motion. The reality was already more complex and fragmented and the cracks soon began to show and spread following the conference.

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