A review of Mark Vasey Saunders – Defusing the Sexuality Debate.
by Martin Davie:
The Revd Dr Mark Vasey-Saunders is a Church of England priest who is the Academic Tutor at St Hild College in Yorkshire. He oversees the formation of part time and full time Anglican ordinands at St Hild Sheffield and leads modules in Doctrine, Advanced Christian Ethics and Mission Entrepreneurship. His new book, published by SCM in June this year is entitled Defusing the Sexuality Debate: The Anglican Evangelical Culture War. [1]
The argument of Defusing the Sexuality Debate.
In the introduction to his book Vasey-Saunders writes that the Church of England’s debate about sexuality:
‘….has become destructive, and exerts a profoundly negative influence on all areas of church life, leaving casualties in its wake on both sides. Some have been persecuted. Some have been excluded from communities in which they were once welcomed and accepted. Some have been driven to despair and have left the church.’ [p.4]
In the light of this fact, the purpose of his book is to try:
‘…to help defuse a debate that has become corrosive to the spiritual health of all those caught up in it, on both sides, by trying to unpick exactly what it is we are arguing about and why it has aroused such passionate intensity’ (p.5)
He then goes on to identify what he calls the conservative evangelical[2] ‘consensus position’ about sexuality, which he describes as ‘the understanding that the only permissible patterns of sexual life for gay or straight people are heterosexual marriage or abstinence’ (pp.5-6), and to explain that much of what he writes in his book:
‘…. will effectively act to undermine a key position defended by conservative evangelicals: the conviction that adherence to the consensus position represents a first order issue of faith, where disagreement represents unfaithfulness to the gospel. This is deliberate. I believe that this conviction is a major contributor to the current destructive state of debate, preventing genuine engagement with the issues ostensibly being discussed. For both sides the debate has become a nil sum game where they either win or they leave. This in itself would be a good pragmatic reason for challenging its, but I want to make the case that it is also fundamentally mistaken. None of the arguments commonly advanced as to why adherence to the consensus position should be considered a first order issue are compelling, in large part because they all represent a rush to judgement. At present I am not convinced we even know what it is we are taking a stand to protect or to prevent. Similarly, I believe that the pattern of biblical interpretation on which the consensus position is based is far newer, and far less certain, than much rhetoric would suggest, and that the passages on which it is based are considerably more complex to understand than is generally admitted.
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