The Bishop of Oxford’s surprising case for same-sex marriage is flawed

Nov 17, 2022 by Jill

By Ian Paul, Premier Christianity:

[…] He starts the main part of his argument with another very surprising claim: “We now have a profound dislocation between the Church of England…and the society we are called to serve…We are seem to inhabit a different moral universe.” (p.20)

Most Christians would think that “inhabiting a different moral universe” from surrounding culture was core to being a disciple of Jesus, not a problem that inhibits our witness. Croft’s comment appears to completely ignore the profound discontinuity we often find in scripture between “the world” and the people of God, the radical difference that the kingdom of God brings, and the contrast between the “works of the flesh” and the “fruit of the Spirit” in Paul.

There was a wonderful irony in the timing of Croft’s report. It came out on the day when the Church of England was reading about the faithfulness of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Daniel 3, and the lukewarmness of the people of God in Laodicea in Revelation 3 – and the collect for the week entreated that God would enable us to “reject the world’s deceits”! As one Anglican minister observed wryly: “I look with interest to seeing the Bishop’s defence of extreme patriarchy in the Middle East, the defence of the caste system in India, and of polygamy in Africa for ensuring that Anglicanism remains consistently and universally against radical cultural dislocation…”

Croft then says some very surprising things about sexuality. First, he claims that sexual orientation is ‘genetic’, which is an extraordinary claim, completely at odds with all the research literature in this area. How could something as complex as our sexual interests, desires and relationships be genetically determined? The evidence shows that parenting, experience, and environment all contribute to our psycho-sexual development, and that, at various stages of life, particularly for women, same-sex attraction is quite unstable.

Related to that is another astonishing claim: that if a desire in us is experienced as ‘innate’ rather than being a ‘choice’, then it could not be wrong to follow that desire into action. You don’t have to think about the range of human desires and passions for more than a minute to realise what an extraordinary claim this is.

Read here (£)