The latest evidence regarding the Church of England came out on January 18th. Its bishops concluded a six-year process known as Living in Love and Faith, which sought to assess the church’s doctrine and practice regarding matters of human sexuality. They announced their refusal even to consider formally recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages next month. That’s the good news. However, they signaled two additional actions they will take. They said they would and have since issued an apology to persons in the LGBTQ community for when the church has “rejected and excluded them.” Moreover, they “will offer the fullest possible pastoral provision without changing the Church’s doctrine of Holy Matrimony for same-sex couples.” The plan to do so involves publishing “a range of draft prayers, known as Prayers of Love and Faith, which could be used voluntarily in churches for couples who have marked a significant stage of their relationship such as a civil marriage or civil partnership.”
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” So God declares in the opening verse of Jeremiah 23. In the 2019 Book of Common Prayer, the daily office gives this text as the Old Testament lesson for the evening of January 24. The chapter goes on to give a thorough rebuke of that day’s prophets and priests—those tasked with the spiritual care of God’s people. Though directly aimed at the Israelites, this passage of Scripture encapsulates well the contemporary state of the Church of England (as well the Scottish and American episcopal churches, among others).
The latest evidence regarding the Church of England came out on January 18th. Its bishops concluded a six-year process known as Living in Love and Faith, which sought to assess the church’s doctrine and practice regarding matters of human sexuality. They announced their refusal even to consider formally recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages next month. That’s the good news. However, they signaled two additional actions they will take. They said they would and have since issued an apology to persons in the LGBTQ community for when the church has “rejected and excluded them.” Moreover, they “will offer the fullest possible pastoral provision without changing the Church’s doctrine of Holy Matrimony for same-sex couples.” The plan to do so involves publishing “a range of draft prayers, known as Prayers of Love and Faith, which could be used voluntarily in churches for couples who have marked a significant stage of their relationship such as a civil marriage or civil partnership.”
In other words, the bishops announced the surrender of Biblical orthodoxy on matters of human sexuality. Their words amount to a near-total capitulation on every principle and practice in the debate except the technical definition of marriage and the accompanying church liturgy for it. But make no mistake, those exceptions will fall, too. For any principled, doctrinal ground on which these hold-outs stand has been torn from under them (Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York, assured Progressives that “This is not the end of that journey but we have reached a milestone and I hope that these prayers of love and faith can provide a way for us all to celebrate and affirm same-sex relationships.”)
The fact that this betrayal of orthodoxy comes from the bishops, the shepherds of Christ’s church in England, establishes their parallel with the men who failed God’s flock in ancient Israel. But the links do not end there, abounding throughout the rest of the text as well.
First, the book of Jeremiah diagnoses the central problem for Israel’s shepherds back then as a rejection of God’s Word. Speaking of the prophets, God asks, “For who among them has stood in the council of the Lord to see and to hear his word, or who has paid attention to his word and listened?” (23:18). The issue today, as then, is not merely one of knowledge but of obedience. Listening in this verse means more than hearing, which the preceding term “paying attention” would cover. To listen means to do in reaction to, to submit to Scriptural authority. Foley Beach, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America and Chair of the GAFCON Primates Council, rightly declared of the English bishops that, “Their actions…reject the authority of Scripture.” In that rejection, these actions clearly, brazenly violate the Church of England’s own foundation principles, encapsulated in the Thirty-Nine Articles’ declaration (Article 20) that, “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written.” Nor may the church confuse and confound by trying to “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” Yet both routes we see taken by the Church of England on this issue. In fact, they do the second in service of the first, giving unfaithful interpretations of the Bible in order to go against its requirements.
In so doing, these bishops continue to replace Scriptural authority (and church historical practice as well) with the new orthodoxy of the sexual revolution and other pieties of the contemporary Left. Yet this approach gets the relationship between society and the Bible backwards. The Word of God does not conform to the trends of any society, whether its cultural mores, political agendas, or social fashions. Instead, in Jeremiah we read, “Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?” (23:29). Fire cleanses and a hammer, in its breaking, also re-forms. Through the illumination of the Spirit, God’s Word cleanses our hearts of sinful dispositions and helps to mold us into the image of Christ.