Theological ethics – Page 4 – All Things Considered

12 May

Merci Boko

The Archbishop of Canterbury honed his negotiating skills by successfully inaugurating talks with terrorist predecessors to Boko Haram in Nigeria. This would have set him up nicely for his discussions with the warring factions in the Church of England over women bishops and sexuality. Justin Welby says Boko Haram are “irrational” but “many-layered” and that some layers might be a little more amenable to talks than others. I have no idea whether he is right about this, but perhaps it’s worth a try if it increases the likelihood that the captive girls might be released.

But I would not describe the terrorist group as “irrational.” They are perfectly rational according to their own lights: and these lights – the lights of experience – have told them that terrorism works. A more accurate description would be “evil.” Unfortunately, that word is not often to be found on the lips of senior churchmen these days who tend to be Enlightenment Progressives and the only sins they recognise are Islamophobia, Homophobia and In equality. All this is well-known and I won’t harp on it. But I do have a question:

The whole of the mass-media refers to this terrorist group (and other such groups) as “Islamist.” What I should like to know, please, is whether there is any connection at all between being “Islamist” and being a devotee of the Muslim ideology? The usual answer given is “Of course not: these terrorists are not representative of Islam which is a noble religion of peace and love.”

Really? Well, if that is the case, then what practical – and, as the Archbishop might say, rational – purpose is served by the neologism “Islamist”? It appears to be meaningless. Or is it being used as a way which helps us not to notice that the members of these terrorist groups are, in fact, Muslims?

19 Apr

Cor wot a cop out!

The Archbishop of Canterbury says he is powerless to provide blessings for gay marriages because to do so would split the global Anglican Church.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, the Most Rev Justin Welby says that the Church had probably caused “great harm” to homosexuals in the past — but there was not always a “huge amount” that could be done now to rectify the situation.

Although indicating that he was sympathetic to calls for the Church to publicly honour gay relationships, the Archbishop says that it is “impossible” for some followers in Africa to support homosexuality. In the interview, the leader of the Anglican Church, which has 77 million followers globally, speaks movingly of the persecution faced by Christians in parts of the world. He indicates that the Church must not take a step that would cut off these groups, most of them in the third world, however much this angers parts of society in Britain.

It’s not just Africans who oppose same-sex marriage, Archbishop. You will find plenty of opponents in the diocese of Canterbury

So once again we have equivocation from the leader of the Anglican church. Welby thus stands in a long tradition of “on the one hand…and on the other…and in a very real sense.” But it is sheer cowardice and dereliction of duty to invoke political expediency to settle a dispute which is about doctrine and morals. The Christian faith teaches that marriage is a sacrament consecrating the faithful relationship between a man and a woman.

It is the Archbishop’s job to uphold that teaching. Why doesn’t he?

30 Mar

Accommodating Archbishop Welby

Archbishop Justin Welby has told The Guardian: ‘I think the Church has reacted by fully accepting that same-sex marriage is the law, and should react on Saturday by continuing to demonstrate in word and action, the love of Christ for every human being.” He added on this morning’s Sunday programme that the government was “perfectly within its rights to make this law.”

Two things then.

First, we know that Christians should continue to demonstrate the love of Christ for everyone. Welby’s words are just cliche, cant and touchy-feeliness. Secondly, while we might agree with him that the government was within its rights to pass this law, does this entail that Christians must accept it? Whatever happened to the Scheltrede and the Drowert – the prophetic word of judgement? Marriage is a Christian Sacrament instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency for, among other things, the procreation of children and the avoidance of fornication. Neither of these two things is possible in same-sex “marriage.” A same-sex “marriage” is not a marriage. The Book of Common Prayer directs us to the second chapter of St John’s gospel which tells how Christ “ordained and beautified with his presence” the wedding at Cana. In The Book of Revelation, Christ is the Bridegroom and the Church is his Bride. Thus the Sacrament of marriage – which includes the definition of marriage – belongs to the Church. And the Church says it is between a man and a woman.

This is not to say that there are no other forms of personal and sexual relationships. But whatever they are, they are not marriage. It follows that anyone who declares marriage to be something other than what the Church celebrates and defines thereby desecrates the Sacrament

And it is the duty of the Archbishop to say so.

Christians in New Testament times suffered persecution rather than conform to pagan laws. Christians have been ready to die for the faith throughout the 2000 years of the Church’s history. The Archbishop seems to depart from this model when he announces an accommodation with this new example of sacrilege.

In The Book of Daniel and in the gospels there are the prophecies concerning the Abomination of Desolation – the desolating sacrilege – being set up in the holy place. The new law is just that and nothing else.

The Archbishop’s accommodation merits a little verse:

After lunch at The Athenaeum

He may convene an ecumenical commission

For the late repudiation of Original Sin.

Even at three in the afternoon

Among the members of that yawning Babel

He is much respected for his subtle mind:

An eminent man of tolerant religion,

Of flexible principle and estimable pragmatism,

Unrestricted by the petty syllogism and

As easy in agreement as St Janus himself.

22 Mar

Prophets To Tickle Our Ears

Christians with traditional beliefs about issues such as homosexuality should be given “reasonable accommodation” in law, Britain’s most senior woman judge has said. Lady Hale, deputy president of the Supreme Court, said the UK is “less respectful” towards people with religious views than other countries, despite its long Christian traditions. She questioned whether the current “hard line” approach to discrimination claims, based on EU law, could be sustained in the long term. Her comments, in a lecture at Yale law School in the US, follow a series of cases in which British Christians claimed to be suffering religious discrimination but lost their cases. They include Shirley Chaplin, a nurse from Exeter, who was banned from wearing a cross at work as well as Gary McFarlane, a former Relate counsellor, and Lillian Ladele, a marriage registrar, who both lost their jobs after resisted performing tasks they said went against their religious beliefs.

Well said, Baroness Hale!

We should compare and contrast her words with those of Archbishop Justin Welby, the man who ought to be in the forefront of the promoting of Christian values – and indeed the truth of the Christian gospel. But given friends like Welby, Christians have no need of enemies. He says, “It is absurd and impossible to ignore overwhelming changes in social attitudes.” This echoes Rowan Williams’ remarks last year to the effect that Christians “…have a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.” Thus we might phrase the Welby-Williams revised gospel as “Repent not, but be ye indeed conformed to this world.”

So here we see those who were appointed to defend the Christian faith and its moral teachings instead undermining both faith and teachings. It’s as if they should have declared, “And the Lord said unto his disciples, ‘Go ye into all the land and set up focus groups that ye might understand and know what it is that is desired of the people: that give unto them.”

Can you imagine Isaiah the prophet or Jeremiah the seer preaching to King Ahab or to the apostate Jeroboam, son of Nebat, “Keep not the Law of the Lord but what seemeth pleasurable unto the crowd, that do. And behold, I give unto thee a new commandment: Thou shalt do as thou bloody well likest”?

There are words to describe the Welby-Williams axis: “Beware of false prophets which come to thee in sheep’s clothing but underneath they are ravening wolves…white sepulchres which indeed appear beautiful outward but within are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

17 Feb

The plague of immoderate rain and waters

Prayers published by the Church of England for deliverance from the floods are, well…wet. Here’s one:

“God of all goodness and love,

in whom we can trust in every time of need:

be close to all who live in fear and distress

at this time of flooding in our land.

We pray for wisdom and strength for all who seek to help,

and that through this emergency,

people and communities may be drawn more closely together

in service to one another;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

This is yet another example of the church’s recently-acquired fondness for doggerel words in corny rhythms. I say recently, but it dates back at least as far as that simpering excrescence The Alternative Service Book (1980) – a book, incidentally, trumpeted by the General Synod as “the greatest publishing event in 400 years”; only to ban it its use a mere twenty years later. Does the so liberal Church of England really – like the Nazis – go in for banning books? Yes indeed it does. But why? Because, they wanted to make as much money as possible out of the even worse book which they launched in 2000 – a thing called Common Worship. But back to that doggerel and those rhythms…

The rhythm of that first line echoes a sort of Noddy speech first encountered in the vain-glorious Gloria from that ASB:

“Glory to God in the highest.” The next line clumps along in the same metre, “and peace to his people on earth”

Diddly-diddly-dee-dee. Dee diddle-de-diddle-dee-dee. Here come the floods and the response of church poets is to go back to the playgroup. Par for the course, for all the modern services are infantilised, sentimentalised and euphemised. They are also disrespectful to God and peremptory. Notice how the one I’ve just quoted begins baldly, “God…” Not “Almighty God…” Certainly nothing so Prayer-Bookish and majestic as “God of all power and might…” They don’t like language like that: too elitist, imperialistic, hierarchical and not democratic at all. How reactionary to suggest that God is so much higher up the scale than us! Why, it smacks of feudalism…

It goes without saying that the theology of this prayer is weak to the point of being non-existent. In fact it is not theology at all, but naturalism. The foods just happen and God has no part in what is going on. There is no “plague of immoderate rain and waters” as The Book of Common Prayer majestically puts it. No plague at all: merely an “emergency.” – like running out of cigarettes at two o’clock in the morning. The prayer does not have the courage and faith to ask God to deliver us from the floods but only to form in us a queasy combination of the stoical and the touchy-feely. We shudder at that “may be drawn more closely together.”

Compare what the BCP has to say on the subject:

“O Almighty Lord God…” (That’s more like it!) “…who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight persons, and afterward of thy great mercy didst promise never to destroy it so again: we humbly beseech thee, that although we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters, yet upon our true repentance thou wilt send us such weather as that we may receive the fruits of the earth in due season; and learn both by thy punishment to amend our lives and for thy clemency to give thee praise and glory…”

The new prayer is not written for a world where God is in charge: judging, punishing and delivering. Instead we are merely the pagan victims of a natural order, trying our best to work up in ourselves as much sentimental togetherness as we can muster. It is therefore a faithless prayer. But what should we expect from a faithless church?

06 Feb

Rites and Rights

Moaner Cyd Eekie meant well on Thought for the Day when speaking about the treatment of women. No one should treat women disrespectfully, unfairly and certainly not with cruelty or violence. Moaner was, however, supposed to be speaking from a religious perspective as this is the requirement of TFTD. Of course we all know that it is possible to contrive ethical theories according to entirely secular criteria – with what hope of success being, as they say, a matter of some debate. But what is surely illegitimate is to conflate terminology: precisely what Moaner Cyd did in her talk.

The abstract secular vocabulary of human rights was all mixed up with religious notions about care, love and respect. The result was bound to be incoherent.

Why have religious people – Christians, Jews and now it appears even some Muslims – given up basing their morality on traditional deontological ethics – that is ethics which derive from revealed absolutes such as the will of God and God’s law – and taken up instead the relativistic, utilitarian vocabulary involving abstract rights and consequentialist theories? Historically, this always leads to undesirable consequences such as the French revolutionary terror and the atrocities and genocides of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Ethics must – and traditionally have been – based instead on habit, manners and practices rooted in a transcendental reality. And usually accompanied by rituals.

28 Jan

Catching up with the pagans

After years of discussion, the Bishops of the Church of England are to set up yet another everlasting talking shop on the ethical issues involved in human sexuality. This new talking shop will take the form of “facilitated conversations” – presumably some sort of improvement on the conversations they have been having all this time. They say:

“The College of Bishops met on 27th January, 2014 to begin a process of reflection on the issues raised by the Pilling Report. The College expressed appreciation to Sir Joseph Pilling and to all members of the working party for the work they have done on behalf of the Church. We recognise the very significant change in social attitudes to sexuality in the United Kingdom in recent years.”

We are bound to conclude from this statement that the Bishops intend to be guided in theological ethics and Christian moral doctrine by the mood on the secular street, by what the pagans believe.

Congratulations to them on their commendable open-mindedness! My only complaint is that they do not go further and undertake the wholesale re-writing of Scripture which this policy will necessarily entail. I submit the following as a first draft new gospel which they should be careful to have before them when they begin their “facilitated conversations “:

“Behold, it was said in the old time that the law of the Lord is an undefiled law converting the soul and the gospel of God is an everlasting testimony for the guidance of men. All them that would be followers of the Lord shall go out into the whole world and make all men his disciples, preaching and teaching them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. But Lo, these former things are done away and I say unto thee henceforth thou shalt go into all the world and set up focus groups that thou mayest discern what the will of the people is. And having so discerned the desire of the people thou shalt obey obey it, neither shalt thou depart from it one jot or one tittle lest thou be called the Nasty Church and get reelly, reelly out of touch, and that. Innit? Whatever”

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: Theological ethics