by Julian Mann
The treatment of the Bible in an article in the latest Church Times by two prominent London clergy is highly revealing of the state of the Church of England.
The Revd Dr Sam Wells and the Revd Lucy Winkett wrote “an Open Letter to the Church of England, in the light of plans for a separate structure made by those who reject the validity of same-sex relationships”.
The piece entitled “Separate structures put the Church of England in danger” has the feel of an Ad Clerum, a letter a diocesan bishop periodically writes to his or her clergy. Wells is Rector of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square. Winkett is Rector of St James’s Piccadilly. Both are contributors to the Thought for the Day religious slot on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme.
Their letter begins: “We are two incumbents in central London. Some neighbouring parishes have announced their intention to form a separate structure, perhaps a new province, within the Church of England.
“This has been prompted by the modest steps that the House of Bishops has taken to enable clergy to affirm civil partnerships liturgically, as part of the Living in Love and Faith process. Headline aspects of the announcement include withholding parish contributions to dioceses and the commissioning of lay people to lead churches, in many instances following the principle of male headship.”
Their open letter includes a section on marriage which is breathtaking for the liberal arrogance with which it dismisses centuries of Christian orthodoxy:
“The Old Testament offers various portrayals of human partnership, including kings with multiple wives and concubines. This was an era in which children were a necessity, and large extended families were a blessing.
“The New Testament also has diverse notions of faithful partnership; but the central emphasis is on singleness in the face of God’s impending in-breaking realm. While there are analogies relating marriage to Christ and the Church, there is also Jesus’s insistence that following the way of the cross disrupts family life and upturns all relationships.
“The notion that monogamous heterosexual marriage is foundational as a consistent scriptural portrayal of God’s relationship with humankind, and accordingly constitutes the definitive form of relationships of humans with one another, is, therefore, not plausible.”
They make no mention of the divine creation of the institution of monogamous heterosexual marriage in Genesis emphasised so strongly by Jesus in the New Testament when he quoted Genesis 1v27 and Genesis 2v24:
“But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female,’and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mark 10v6-9 – NIV; see also Matthew 19v4-6).
And they make just a cursory mention of “the analogies relating marriage to Christ and the Church”, so prominent in the final chapters of Revelation and emphasised by the Apostle Paul in his teaching on marriage in Ephesians in which he also quoted Genesis 2v24:
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansingher by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church – for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5v25-32).
The Anglican Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service makes no such omissions, beautifully distilling the Bible’s teaching on marriage: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this Congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men…”
How do Wells and Winkett get away with such cavalier treatment of the Holy Scriptures in their prestigious London churches? One can only conclude it is because the modern Church of England has a very high level of biblical illiteracy in its pews.
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.