Of late, there has been a battle in the Episcopal Church over the matter of sexuality. But more than sex is involved. In this essay, using the example of Virginia Seminary, I shall show that it's not just sex, it's everything. I begin with Virginia Seminary's guidelines for sexual behavior.
In 1997, Virginia Theological Seminary published their new guidelines for sexual behavior under the title, "A Call to a Holy Life." Similar guidelines are published in their 2002-2003 catalogue. (pp. 91-2) These guidelines allow certain forms of sexual behavior never before permitted at Virginia Seminary. Among other things, this would include certain forms of homosexual relations. For this to happen, the guidelines avoid the idea that God can specify who should or should not have sexual relations with whom. Rather than giving specific moral content, the guidelines give the form of right and wrong sexual behavior. Let me amplify.
According to the guidelines, these are the "inappropriate" sexual behaviors: 1. "Persistent, unwanted sexual attention." 2. "Unwanted verbal propositions, innuendoes, letters, phone calls, written or printed materials of a sexual nature." 3. "Requests, expectations, or agreements, spoken or unspoken, regarding sexual favors in return for employment or educational decisions." 4. Physical contact of a sexual nature between adults in unequal power relationships, such as faculty- student, CPE and Field Ed supervisor-student, and relationships between faculty or administrators and staff members who work directly under their supervision. 5. "Inappropriate touching, embraces, or assault."
The above is what sex should not be. On the positive side, human beings are "created to love and glorify God." Their sexual life should then be "a life of mutual love and respect embracing the totality of their bodily existence," a "living together in love, and "an opportunity for relationships of mutual fidelity and delight."
These guidelines revolve around a simple idea: sex should be mutual and wanted by all involved. For example, restrictions one and two prohibit unwanted sex. Restrictions three, four, and five entail power relations that are not mutual and sexual acts that are normally unwanted. Positively, the terms "mutual love," "respect," and "mutual fidelity and delight," all express the idea that sex is a mutual activity among willing persons. Seen somewhat abstractly, the guidelines specify the form of sexual behaviors--mutual and wanted--rather than specifying specific content. Norms with specific content would define certain behaviors as right or wrong, regardless of whether the behaviors were wanted or unwanted, delightful or unpleasant. For example, such norms could limit sex to male and female or to no more than two persons at a time, or such norms could outlaw polygamy and sex outside of marriage.
Since the norms specify form and not content, all sexual behaviors are permissible as long as they maintain the right form. For example, three or more persons of varied gender could commit themselves to "mutual [sexual] fidelity and delight" if all parties mutually desired such a relationship and no one was forcing themselves on anyone due to "unequal power relationships." Or, married couples could trade partners if this arrangement was preceded by open discussions in which the participants mutually decided what was wanted and unwanted, what did or did not bring "delight." This would not necessarily entail a violation of marriage vows since the guidelines do not insist that vows must be maintained as originally conceived. As is well known, conceptions of what we want and do not want, what constitutes "mutual fidelity and delight," change with age and circumstances. In short, the norms do not deny or approve specific behaviors, such as adultery, homosexuality, or polygamy, but only behaviors determined by subjective criteria such as "appropriate," "unequal power relationships," "mutual love ," "unwanted," and so forth.
These conclusions were so obvious, and were for me so contrary to Christian faith, that I wrote the dean at Virginia Seminary in 1997 asking if I was amiss to think that these guidelines would permit "short and long term affairs among any and all persons at the same power level." I received no reply to this question. Once the seminary hired a lesbian with a partner in 2002, I wrote again, asking the same question. Again there was no response. What response could there by? It is obvious--the norms allow a variety of possibilities as long as the participants are allowed to define the meanings of "fidelity and mutual delight."
Now it might seem that this ethic of form without content would be the end of the matter. But it is not. Human beings think. They adjust their behavior to conceptions of ultimate truth, and therefore, it is simply not enough to publish the guidelines. One must justify the guidelines theologically, and of course, that is the case.
Sedgwick's Ethics
At about the time the new ethic was being promoted, Virginia Seminary hired Timothy Sedgwick from Seabury-Western to be the Clinton S. Quinn Professor of Christian Ethics. His ethic, and here I will concentrate on his text, Sacramental Ethics, is a ethic of form without content. I will summarize the primary characteristics of his ethic and then show that this approach has profound implications for the whole of the Christian faith. In other words, when Virginia Seminary revised their sexual standards, they initiated a way of Christian thinking and behavior that would change everything.
Sedgwick begins with four related factors--worship, language, reality, and ethics. Equivalent to the term "reality," Sedgwick also uses such terms as "life," the "world," or "existence." The four factors are related in various ways. Specifically, language does not refer to something "out there" apart from language, but rather, creates and dissolves reality through its symbolic power. As language is used in worship, life is recreated, shaped, and opened up in new and dynamic ways. In the process, worshipers discover that there is a discrepancy between life as shaped by worship and life as lived out in their daily lives. Ethics exists because of this discrepancy. It is the effort to bring all of life into harmony with reality as dissolved and recreated by worship.
Secondly, for Christians, worship has its basis in the story of Jesus as rehearsed in the eucharist. This story has a four-fold form. Briefly put, these are word, offertory, great thanksgiving, communion and dismissal. In worship, these four dynamic factors shape worshippers and their world, and according to that four-fold form, life is to be lived. For example, in worship, one may perceive that Jesus gives himself in bread and wine. This implies that one's personal relationships should reflect the same sort of self-sacrificial love encountered in the worship experience. As the liturgy unfolds, its language dissolves the discrepancy between one's selfish world of egotistical grasping and recreates a wider world of self-sacrificial love. Ethics means allowing this to happen and following the consequences in daily life.
Thirdly, for Sedgwick, all of reality is historically and socially conditioned. As a result, there are no ethical absolutes that hold for all persons everywhere. Since time and circumstance change all things, what was ethical in one historical period may be not be so in another. In other words, there are no absolute ethical norms spoken by God. The four-fold form as actualized in worship, however, gives ethics a consistent form but not a specific content. From this perspective, the only constant is the four-fold form rehearsed in liturgy, while the content of ethical behavior reflecting the four-fold form evolves over time. For this reason, I would think that Sedgwick would favor the Virginia sexual guidelines, at least in the sense that they do not give definite content, but rather, the "appropriate" form of ethical behavior. Finally, Sedgwick rejects the idea that God can speak an ethical "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not." He calls the belief that God speaks his moral will and that human beings can know his will, "voluntarism" or "intuitionism." Here is Sedgwick,
But the still, small voice of God is not so clear as the voluntarist tradition would suggest. As the voluntarists often claim, the experience of God is the experience of trust as we come to sense the graciousness, the giftedness of all that is. (p. 34)
Given such an understanding, the Christian moral life is not primarily a determination of specific rules of conduct. Nor is the Christian life a matter of intuitively responding to the will of God. (p. 34)
For reasons of space, this is not the place to detail how Sedgwick applies his theological liturgical perspective to sexual ethics. Succinctly, he envisions sexuality as a gift in which persons give themselves to each other in mutual love. Like the Virginia Guidelines, he specifies the form of sex, willing mutuality, but not the content. He claims, for example, that homosexual relations are positive and healthy as long as they are mutual, faithful, and loving. Be that as it may, my aim here is to validate the claim that "It's not just sex, it's everything." By "everything" I do not mean everything in heaven and earth, but "everything" critical to the profession of the Christian faith. For Christianity that would entail such claims as "Jesus is Lord," or the command that "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." I shall now show that these central affirmations of the Christian faith cannot fit within the boundaries of Sedgwick's theology, and how that is connected to sex as form but not content.
First, Sedgwick cannot accept the fact that the biblical God speaks concrete, objective, ethical norms. If he accepts the biblical commands at face value, he must at once recognize that such commands prohibit and affirm specific sexual behaviors such as who has sex with whom. Since Sedgwick does not accept an ethic that determines content, he must interpret Scripture's commands from another perspective. He does so by denying what he calls "voluntarism" or "intuitionism." By that he means that God does not speak to reveal ethical norms, or anything else for that matter. Since God is silent, the language of Scripture is not about God speaking or acting. Rather, it supplies the symbolic language that can be used in worship to reconstitute reality for the believing and worshipping Christian.
Further, since God is not "out there," God must be here and now. In fact, a close reading of Sedgwick makes it clear that "God" for Sedgwick is simply reality as constituted by worship. Simply put, he does not really distinguish between God and the world, between God and life, reality, or existence. For him, God is reality, life, and experience as shaped by worship. This is fundamental to his theological perspective. Here are a few quotations out of a number to that effect.
Worship confirms and deepens previous insights while challenging the status quo. In this sense worship and daily life mirror each other, although the reflections never fully coincide. The end of such worship, however, is not intellectual insight. Worship mediates reality, both mythically and parabolically, and thereby brings the participant into relationship with reality, what Christians call God. (p. 32)
Worship is mythic as it mediates between the worshiper and reality; it is also parabolic as it dissolves the taken for granted attitudes and perceptions that distance the self from reality. In other words worship mediates reality and relates us to God as it expresses and challenges our relation to reality and, in turn, celebrates and effects that relation. (p. 34)
The paschal mystery is that precisely in our suffering the particulars of life and inevitably death, the ultimate mystery of life is encountered, whether it is called God or being or some other name. (p. 89)
These statements, along with the entire development of his thought, lead to the conclusion that God, for Sedgwick, is not something distinct and different from the world, but is reality as shaped by worship. In other words, he has denied God's speech and his transcendence, where transcendence means that God is distinct from the world. Were he to affirm God's transcendence, and further affirm that God can speak, he would need to develop the doctrines of the Trinity and Christology. These doctrines play no role in the development of his sacramental ethics, nor are they needed. He needs only reality, language as dissolving and recreating reality, worship, and ethical actions stemming from worship. God in the classical, orthodox sense is irrelevant to his thought.
Once God's transcendence and speech has been eliminated, God becomes life as constituted by worship since God apart from life has been denied. Then, since language does not refer to God "out there," but to reality as shaped by worship, it cannot be said that "Thou canst have no other gods before me" since this would imply that one of the gods, namely the Father of Jesus Christ, the Yahweh of the first commandment, is a reality distinct from all and above all other powers, forces, and deities. Such a God would be transcendent, different from "reality," above all things, the one who created reality by his effortless Word. But the claim that God is distinct from reality as shaped by worship is a possibility that Sedgwick denies. From his point of view, the first commandment is simply the statement that an ancient group of people, the Hebrews, felt that they should use only certain types of language for worship and no other. In fact, given Sedgwick's assumptions, it is only logical to conclude that "God" for other religions traditions would also be reality shaped by their liturgical forms. And once that is accepted, it cannot be said that Christian worship does a better job of shaping reality than Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or pagan worship, since realities can only be compared from a perspective that transcends reality, and such a perspective is missing in Sedgwick. This is the logical result of denying that God is transcendent and can speak.
The same conclusions hold for the claim that "Jesus is Lord." "Jesus is Lord" refers to the belief that Jesus has bodily ascended into heaven and that "all authority in heaven and earth has been given unto me." (Matt. 28:18) This means that Jesus is distinct from our earthly reality. He is in heaven, yet reigning in heaven and on earth. But if there is no transcendent realm where Christ rules at the right hand of God, if God is only reality as shaped by worship, then the exclusive claim that Jesus is Lord evaporates. It evaporates because the term "Lord" means that he is distinct from our reality, yet ruling over all things in love. Or, from Sedgwick's perspective, the name "Jesus" is simply a name that Christians use in worship, a name that constitutes reality along with all the other names used by the world's various religions. None of these names can be compared with each other, none can be Lord, because nothing transcends all of them, not even the risen Christ.
I could, at this point, continue to describe the devastating effects of denying God's transcendence and his speech. In the end, it means the ruin of the Christian faith. Perhaps a short list without explanations can point the way. 1. Ultimately, there is no evangelism because evangelism assumes that Jesus is Lord. 2. Without a doctrine of Trinity and Christology, without God' speech, it is impossible to rightly interpret Scripture. 3. Unless Jesus Christ is distinct from reality, he can not save us when reality and our sin go against us. 4. We cannot have a personal relationship with God unless God is distinct from ourselves and from reality in general. This holds for Christ as well. 5. The orthodoxy of the Creed means nothing if God is not distinct from the world he created. 6. The two-fold commandment, love God and neighbor, becomes the idolatrous love of the world if God cannot be distinguished from the world. 7. In the end, the church will simply become the world if her god is the world as shaped by liturgy.
Far more could be said, but this indicates the general direction. Sex as form without content leads to a God that does not speak, and a God without his eternal Word is the destruction of everything Christian. It's not just sex, it's everything.
A Final Absurdity
Finally, there is one further conclusion. If you do not believe that God can speak, that he will not determine who should or who should not have sexual relations with whom, then by what logic can one even claim that sex should be governed by formal norms such as mutuality and desire? Did God say that sex should be loving and mutual? Why should it be? Why can't we have some exploitative sex from time to time? Did God say we couldn't? If you say that we cannot, quote me a passage of Scripture to that effect, and if you do, then it is clear that there are many, many passages of Scripture referring to who can have sex with whom. How can we arbitrarily decide that passages in regard to form must be obeyed and those in relation to content should ignored? Such a claim is absurd. Even more, it is absurd to assume that formal norms have no content. All formal norms have content. The contents of the Virginia Guidelines are mutuality and desire. Mutuality and desire are different from manipulation and aversion. These norms have content. There is no such thing as form without content. To deny the latter is to deny the former, and Scripture affirms both.
Or again, in regard to Sedgwick, if he believes that all ethical norms are historical and conditioned, that what is ethical in one historical period may not be in another, then why should worship correspond to the four-fold pattern of word, offertory, great thanksgiving, communion and dismissal? Where did that four-fold pattern come from? Sedgwick would reply that they came from the Bible, Jesus' eucharistic words. But why those words? Are they not historically and socially conditioned? Shouldn't they be augmented, reformulated, reinterpreted or curtailed according to our present circumstance? And if so, by what norm can we do that if everything is historically and socially conditioned? In the final analysis, Sedgwick's ethics and the Virginia Guidelines are absurd, for they implicitly contain the idea that there is no final, definitive, objective revelation valid for all time. If that be true, if all is relative, then we have nothing, neither form nor content, but "springs without water and mists driven by a storm." 2 Pet 2:17
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
January, 2003
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Barth - Economic Life and a History Chapter 5
Barth - Political Responsibility for Economic Life Chapter Four
Building Up the Ancient Ruins - A Response to the Present Crisis
Cranmer on Salvation - Introduction
How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?
Infant Baptism and Confirmation
Introduction to Anglican Theology
Introduction to Anglican Theology - Anglicanism and Scripture
Introduction to Anglican Theology - Articles One Through Five
Introduction to Anglican Theology - Articles Six Through Twenty
Introduction to Anglican Theology - Articles Twenty-One Through Thirty-Nine
It's Not Just Sex, It's Everything - The Virginia Guidelines
Judgment Begins at the Household of God
Jung, the Faith, and the New World Order
Justification, The Reformers, and Rome
Nicea and the Invasion of Bishops in Other Dioceses
Preface to the 1549 Prayer Book
Prefaces and Offertory Sentences
Reason and Revelation in Hooker
Richard Hooker and Homosexuality - Introduction
Richard Hooker and the Archbishop's Address
Richard Hooker and the Puritans
Richard Hooker and Universal Salvation
The Anglican Formularies are not Enough
The Creeds and Biblical Interpretation
The Creeds and Biblical Interpretation Continued
The House of Bishop's Pastoral Study on Human Sexuality - Theological and Scientific Consideration
