Sir, Before the assumptions in Ruth Gledhill’s article (July 2) become the new norm (that a review by the House of Bishops on civil partnerships and human sexuality is the first step to a liberalising of the Church’s teaching) it is just possible God may have other ideas. What if as a result of this review the Church was able sensitively and clearly to commend again into our changing culture the wisdom that inspired the scriptures to speak of marriage between a man and a woman as the place for sexual union and the gift and nurture of children; to understand why the commandments speak as clearly as they do about the need to honour and protect that primary relationship, and why at no point in Jesus’s teaching or the experience of the New Testament Church (in a culture easily our equal in its hedonism and idolatry) did the Church imagine she was called to anything other than this kind of holiness in her life and witness.
Civil partnerships give legal expression to a relationship not known in the scriptures. To the extent that they commend sexual union between those of the same gender they promote a wisdom contrary to her teaching. Could not this review imagine ways in which those who wish to express God’s love for another do so in ways that God longs to bless, and not in ways he warns us against?
When the Church endorsed the principle of “irretrievable breakdown” as the ground for divorce in preparation for the reform of the divorce laws in the 1960s, she did so paying more attention to reason and experience, than revelation. Once she had conceded that principle, the safeguards she then urged were swept away and divorce rose.
Frank Field in his report on child poverty places the disintegration of the family over the past four decades as its chief cause. If those reviewing the Church’s teaching back then had imagined such an outcome, it is possible that in the “reasoned interpretation of scripture”, more weight might have been given to revelation than reason, and the country and her children spared much misery. Those newspaper articles in the 1960s which assumed that every right-thinking person must be in favour of reform read differently now.
The Church’s call is to hear what the Spirit is saying through scripture renewing our reason and experience, enabling us to be faithful and fruitful in all the ways God desires.
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The Right Rev Keith Sinclair
Bishop of Birkenhead