Daily Archives: July 24, 2008

In ‘The Body’s Grace’, I have said, Rowan Williams asks what sex has to do with the Christian gospel. What does sex have to do, that is, with the God of Jesus Christ, and with how this God relates to God’s world?

After the long discussion of incidents from Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet (to which we will be returning, never fear), there are two paragraphs in which Williams begins to show us how his answer to this question is going to work:

The whole story of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this; so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.

The life of the Christian community has as its rationale – if not invariably its practical reality – the task of teaching us this: so ordering our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy.

Later on he speaks about

learning about being the object of the causeless loving delight of God, being the object of God’s love for God through incorporation into the community of God’s Spirit and the taking-on of the identify of God’s child

I will have more to say about the content of this in due course, but for now I simply want to draw your attention to two aspects of it.

1. This is, for Williams, a fairly straightforward retelling of the Christian gospel – the Christian good news. Anyone who knows his work even moderately well will recognise the familiar outlines of his account of the difficult gospel, costly grace, the free gift that demands everything. You could think of this as a rehearsal of the ‘rule of faith’: a sketch of the basic plot or framework that, as Williams sees it, holds the whole Christian story together. Trinity, creation, incarnation, incorporation into the body of Christ, the work of the Spirit, God’s unearned love, our growth into love – this, according to Williams, is the basic palette of colours from which the Christian picture is painted. Now, rhetorically, Williams assumes that this account of the Gospel is one that his audience will reocgnise – a bedrock on which he and his audience stand, and on which he can safely build his argument, rather than a platform to which he must hoist them by argument.
2. This brief sketch of the gospel is not, however, simply an identical repetition of Williams’ standard presentation of the Gospel. It is a variation on a theme, or a riff played on a familiar melody. Williams chooses his words, his metaphors, so as to highlight the connections he is about to make to sexuality. Nevertheless, he does not present himself as importing those connections, but as drawing them out: the first quote I’ve given above, for instance, continues, ‘It is not surprising that sexual imagery is freely used, in and out of the Bible, for this newness of perception’. The connection to sexuality is already there in the scriptural and traditional material on which this sketch is based.

These two aspects suggest two further reflections:

1. I suspect that, whatever might have been true of the lecture’s original audience, for many readers of this essay the sketch that Williams gives of the Christian message here will not be very familiar. Used to other frameworks for the telling of the Christian story – other plot summaries, in different idioms – those readers will perhaps suspect that this way of expressing the gospel is driven by the material on sexual relationships elsewhere in the article. That is, some readers might not recognise that William is anchoring his argument in an account of the gospel that precedes any of his reflections on sexual ethics – and that his description of sexual ethics is driven by his theology, rather than the other way around.
2. It’s important to clear that first point up before moving on to the second, which qualifies it. I’m going to be coming back to this rather more at a later point (if all goes according to plan), but it seems to me that whilst Williams’ retelling of the gospel in this context follows the familiar lines of his theology without demur, the precise colour and tone given to that retelling by his wider discussion of sexual ethics does show us (and perhaps Williams) that familiar gospel in a new light. In other words, whilst the major movement of the article is to examine sexual relations in the light of the already known gospel, there is a minor reverse movement as well: an exploration of the gospel in the light of this investigation of sexual ethics. That’s going to prove to be important later on.

One last caveat before I close this post. I don’t mean to say that Williams is right. I’m not yet asking that question, and when I do I will have some questions to put to him. But – particularly in the current situation – it seems to me that the prior task is to strive for a charitable understanding of what Williams is saying, how his argument goes together, what the assumptions are, and so on. So you can expect quite a few more posts simply of exposition before we get to the questioning – but please don’t assume that this is intended as hagiography.

This is the first part of a planned series on homosexuality and the church. I’m planning to start with a sequence of posts on Rowan Williams’ famous essay, ‘The Body’s Grace’, and then walk slowly towards more ecclesiological matters.

Over on Faith and Theology, when Ben Myers suggested that Rowan Williams’ ‘The Body’s Grace’, was an example of a life-changing essay, one of the blog’s regular visitors, Shane, commented, ‘What was so great about “The Body’s Grace”? … I was disappointed by this essay – there is one central question in the debate about homosexuality (whatever one’s anwer to it): What does God command me to do? Williams spends the entire essay attempting not to raise that question.’ In a comment to another post, he put the same point again, ‘As far as I’m concerned it’s a straightforward example of why the Anglican church is in the crisis it is in today – Williams is just dodging the central question over and over again. The central question is this: Is homosexuality good, bad or indifferent from God’s perspective?’

Those comments are not the main reason for starting this series of posts, but they do provide a useful starting point – by being exactly wrong.

Williams opens ‘The Body’s Grace’ with the questions, Why does sex matter? and, What does it have to do with God? As he goes on, it becomes clear that he is asking, What on earth do sexual relationships have to do with the Christian gospel?

Albeit in a different theological idiom, Williams is precisely asking, What does God command? He is asking, What difference does it make to see sexual relationships in the light of God’s word to the world in Christ? How does seeing sexuality in that light allow us to understand both what can be right about sex, and what can be wrong? How does the gospel enable us to get a truly Christian clarity about sexual ethics?

This strategy is, it seems to me, based on several related assumptions.

1. The gospel – the good news spoken by God to the world in Jesus Christ – is God’s command. To put it the other way around, the command of God is not extraneous to the gospel – as if God, while saving us in Christ by the Spirit, said, ‘Oh, and there’s another, unrelated thing I wanted to talk to you about…’
2. The connection between gospel and command is intelligible. That is, it is possible for us by attending to the Gospel to understand how and why we are commanded – and such understanding is the fundamental task of Christian ethics.
3. The gospel so understood provides the criterion by which we discover what truly is a binding command upon us. Faced, for instance, with a range of biblical commands about slavery, women, usury, polygamy, and sexual relationships, the fundamental theological question is not, ‘Which of these is culturally conditioned?’ but ‘How, if at all, do these matters relate to the gospel?’ Theological ethics is a matter, we might say, of taking every thought captive to Christ.
4. Because this attention to the gospel is the fundamental task of Christian ethics, any approach that simply stops with the apparent demands we find in Scripture, without asking whether and how they connect to the gospel, fails to take the command of God seriously.
5. If there is some intelligible connection between the gospel and sexual relationships, there would be a binding Christian sexual ethic (a command of God regarding sexual behaviour) even if there were no passages in Scripture that explicitly treated sexual matters.

I realise that I have as yet left the term ‘gospel’ vague. But we’re only just getting started…