The Chicago Consultation: read it and weep
By John Richardson, The Ugley Vicar
One of the things I’ve been reading recently is the Study Guide prepared for The Episcopal Church by the Chicago Consultation, titled Christian Holiness and Human Sexuality. It is important to be aware of this in the UK, not least because one of the contributors is our own Revd Marilyn McCord Adams, canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University.
It is also important because the document must presumably be regarded as the ‘best of’ arguments for changing the Church’s traditional teaching and practice on same-sex relationships. That is certainly the point and purpose of is contents.
However, I personally find the theological content tendentious to the point of being bizarre, particularly where it deals with the biblical material.
Thus we have an opening argument that Genesis 1:28 needs to be rescued from a caricatured version of dominion theology: “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours!’” (According to the document, the text of Genesis “can certainly” be read that way.) This seems to show an almost complete unawareness of Ancient Near Eastern background and the way the text would have been read in that context. The putative modern abuse of the text is the starting, and the reference, point of the ‘exposition’ which follows.
From that shaky beginning, we go on to the suggestion that the story of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 27, “raises questions about models of blessing: is there only the possibility of the one blessing to the exclusion of the other or can the church bless both kinds of marriage [heterosexual and same-sex]?”
The inappropriateness of this can surely be seen by turning the question round. If this reading turns out to be wrong, does it add evidence to suggest that equal blessing is not available to same-sex relationships? One doubts whether this would be accepted at all. Yet this is presented, once again, as a model of exegesis. Read more
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