Murray Rae and Graham Redding (Editors): More Than A Single Issue

More Than A Single Issue: Theological Considerations Concerning the Ordination of Practising Homosexuals

Hindmarsh $36.95

Review: Philip Culbertson*

I have been an Anglican minister for 30 years, and all that time the Church has been arguing over the status of its homosexual members. The issues have remained the same: should the Church welcome only celibate homosexuals, or sexually active homosexuals; should the Church ordain homosexuals, whether celibate or not; and should the Church bless, or perhaps marry, same-sex couples?

New Zealand scholars and churchmen have addressed these topics (a bibliography of such works has been produced by Tony Millett, of Waikato).

This collection of essays purports to address the topic of the ordination of practising homosexuals by substituting theological convictions implicit in the Trinity in place of the usual biblical and historical grounds for argument.

Of the 13 essays, six are by New Zealand theologians: Susana Carryer, Bruce Hamill, George Knight, Stephen May, Alister Rae and Graham Redding. The other seven are from Australia, Scotland, England and America.

Despite the cover claims, not all of these essays deal with the ordination of practising homosexuals, a term which is itself dismissed by most recent writers on the subject, who would ask: "Practising for what?" Nor do half of these essays make any reference to Trinitarian theology.

Like most collections of essays, these vary in quality, sophistication and readability. It is difficult to see what holds the collection together, other than that each essay is about some aspect of the Church's debate about homosexuals, celibate or practising.

I had hoped that the essayists in a book on this topic, published in the South Pacific, would have the courage to contextualise their arguments by citing local examples or local authors. Unfortunately, of the 13 writers, only two New Zealanders (Susana Carryer and Stephen May) and one Australian (Gordon Watson) give us any hint of context.

Overall, the tone is convinced, but not hysterical, though only a handful of writers offer arguments which have not already been hashed and rehashed in the overseas literature. The four that do (Carryer, May, Darrell Guder and Murray Rae) offer the most interesting essays in the collection.

Despite the claim that these authors will not descend to sloganeering, several get caught up in arguments about whether homosexuality is natural. Genesis becomes their nemesis. According to Gen. 1:26-27, when God created human beings, male and female He created them. Some of the essayists argue that the Genesis statement expresses the intention of God, and thus the proper (and hence the only desirable) ordering of nature. None of the essayists seems familiar with the trend in biblical scholarship to interpret that Genesis passage as a permission, but not a mandate, for humanity to be heterosexually active.

In a recent essay, Methodist biblical scholar Richard Hays argues that the Bible never constructs classes of persons based on sexual preference, but only discusses the sexual practices of individuals. Therefore, says Hays, the Church is immediately unfaithful to Scripture when it lumps people into opposing camps of heterosexuals and homosexuals. Hays and others now call for the Church to drop the polarising rhetoric, and instead focus on what individual acts separate Christians from God and community.

Such an argument would have been more useful for us in Aotearoa New Zealand, where senses of communal identity are still strong. After all, the Trinity is itself a communal concept, where identity is drawn only from relationship with others in that small community, and certainly not from the sexual performance of its members. Sadly, the loudest voices in this collection of essays have missed that point altogether.

* Philip Culbertson is the director of pastoral studies at St John's Theological College, Auckland.