The headline this week from the Vatican’s Synod on the Family has been the publication of a halfway document that shows the liberals making clear progress towards the acceptance of gay people and remarried couples as worthy of communion even if – and I know this is hard to imagine – they are actually having sex with each other, and even if they refuse to repent of this.
This is something like the Romans’ abandonment of Hadrian’s Wall: both a defeat and a recognition of reality. The best evidence that it’s happening is the outrage of the conservatives, such as the American George Weigel, who described it as “something more disturbing and unpleasant than a surprise”.
So how did it happen? And here the most informative document is a working note about some of the small group discussions, produced by Cardinal Vincent Nichols and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, heads of the Catholic church in England and Wales, and Ireland respectively.
It suggests that the problem be addressed from first principles, with the book of Genesis, where, they say: “This account of the creation of marriage presents also the three basic characteristics of marriage, as it was in the beginning – monogamy, permanence and equality of the sexes.”
This is so monumentally different from what the rest of the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, has to say about marriage, which is distinguished by polygamy, frequent rape, lots of divorce and the general oppression of women, that even the cardinals involved are constrained to notice it.
They hurry on to say that as a result of sin, we got the kinds of exploitative marriage that history actually reveals.
You have to give them full marks for trying. A cynic might observe that the Genesis story is astonishingly difficult to purge of patriarchy: after all, if the present misery of women is a consequence of sin, who was it who introduced sin to the Garden? Eve. She it was who tempted Adam, so he did eat.
Yet the cardinals’ style of argument actually shows the anti-fundamentalist use of the Bible. The fundamentalist wants to argue that it’s all true, however ludicrous and incoherent the results must be. The anti-fundamentalist tacitly divides the Bible into those bits that are true, or at least vaguely historical, and those that are not (such as the Garden of Eden) and then – this is the twist – goes on to privilege the bits that didn’t actually happen and to claim that these are really authoritative.
This historical or supposedly historical bits can always be reinterpreted as a consequence of the sinfulness of a fallen world – that’s how we get around the Bible’s acceptance of slavery, or the enthusiasm of the Old Testament God for genocide as a means of resettling refugees. The ahistorical or, if you’d prefer, eternal truths can then be used as God’s template for how the world ought to be, whether they are located in the past, in the Garden of Eden, or in the impossible future where the lion will lie down with the lamb.
To some extent all Christians, and perhaps all believers in a scripture, must argue like this. It’s certainly the way Muslims wrangle with the Qu’ran. The real disputes come over which bits of the scripture are to be taken as historical and which as normative.
This looks completely absurd. But when you think about it, it’s actually the model for all big plans for improving society, whether socialism, liberalism or anything else: you privilege the map over the territory in the hope that this will get you where you need to go. And it has to be, because it’s only by imagining a different world that we can affect which one we get to. The difference is that for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the imaginary world was located in the future. Now we’re seeing a return to locating it in the past. It’s the only way religions can move into the present.
