Bishop's take on sexuality ignites debate
'Sex is not a sport,' one critic argues
MICHAEL VALPY
From Friday's Globe and Mail
An Anglican bishop's call for a new theology of human sexuality would require a shift rivalling the Reformation in size to move Christianity away from the shadow of patriarchy and the too-narrow view of the human person, several theologians said yesterday.
Bishop Michael Ingham of B.C.'s New Westminster diocese told a church conference in Ottawa this week that the church's opposition to birth control, abortion, masturbation and homosexuality is morally groundless because its traditional teaching that sex is reserved for procreation is wrong.
"If we believe that we are created in the image of God, that we carry in our very selves the icon of God's own self in our earthly existence, then we must be able to say that our sexuality is not an accident, not a mistake and not simply a tool for the making of babies -- presumably God, in his infinite wisdom, could have devised a much less potent and complicated way of regenerating the species if the purpose of sex was simply that," he said.
Charles McVety, president of Toronto's evangelical Canada Christian College, talked about a huge and growing chasm between Christians who see the Bible as allegorical and those who see it as the teaching of God. He called the bishop's remarks whimsical, a passing fancy and a distortion of the Bible.
"Scripture is crystal clear," he said. "Sex is not a sport."
And while the Anglican primate of Canada, Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, said The Globe and Mail had overblown Bishop Ingham's remarks, academic theologians talked about the enormity of the redefinition of the church that the bishop was trying to get at.
Christopher Lind, former director of the Toronto School of Theology, explained that what the bishop is saying is that "sexuality is a lot bigger than genital activity, and that's hard for people to hear because people hear the word sex and they think intercourse.
"The whole culture has a hard time hearing that sex is something spiritual, that it's something bigger than just intercourse. And when we talk about the [church] blessing of same-sex unions, he makes the case that relationships should be judged on the basis of fidelity, trust, values other than the regulation of genital activity.
"He's starting to go into what's the meaning of patriarchy. Patriarchy is a distortion of the gospel [the central Christian teaching], a social sin which the church has to confess. But to correct it is enormously hard to do. We've been living in patriarchy for thousands of years."
It requires a cultural change, Prof. Lind said, comparable in size to the Reformation, the 16th-century movement to reform the church in Western Europe.
He added: "I have said for some years now that the church should actually shut up about sex because the church doesn't know what it's talking about.
"We really have not thought this through."
Richard Leggett, professor of liturgical studies at Vancouver School of Theology, agreed that "to come to grips with the cultural context of [biblical] scriptures will take a Reformation. I think it's been in the works for probably the last hundred years or more as we engage in so-called higher criticisms of the Bible."
And Bishop Victoria Matthews of Edmonton said Bishop Ingham was talking about more than patriarchy, which she called "only one chapter" in the need for a fuller theological understanding of the human person.
"The question is are the other major churches ready to do this or are they going to hide from something that's really a need?
"That is at the heart of the challenge in Michael Ingham's comments.
"
Link to original article
Linear Mode
