CofE should bless same-sex marriages and let its gay clergy marry

Hogmanay this week saw Scotland’s first same-sex marriages. Substantially over 600 million people now live in jurisdictions that allow gay people to marry. Jesus taught his followers to be watchful for the signs of the times. The hour is coming, indeed is here, when the Church would do well to get real about gay people and marriage.

For Anglicans this involves grasping two nettles that we have been pussy-footing around since the 1980s.

One is how the Church of England can discern a coherent anthropology that does justice to the experience of people who are in same-sex marriages. Such a theology would express itself, among other ways, in liturgies that reflect the blessed realities of many gay relationships more successfully than the mess portrayed in the final series of the BBC sitcom Rev.

The other nettle involves clergy marriages. Anglican clergy may wed by virtue of Article 32 of the 39: “It is not commanded by any decree of God that bishops, presbyters or deacons take a vow of celibacy or abstain from marriage. So it is lawful for them, as for all other Christians, to marry at their own discretion when they judge that this will promote godliness.”

There is also a discussion to be had as to whether a same-sex couple can “promote godliness” more by shacking up informally, or by entering the legally covenanted and accountable state of marriage. The Church of England allows clergy to enter into same-sex civil partnerships so long as the partners remain chaste. But how can that ruling be upheld in a same-sex marriage?

The ecclesiastical rabbit is caught in the headlights. Years of steering around difficulties rather than facing them has not produced decisive or rational policy, especially when the particular difficulty has no fence to sit on — either gay people marry or they don’t.

Of course nobody had same-sex marriages in mind when they framed Article 32. But then neither would they have countenanced marriage after divorce, marriage where the wife was not an item of property, or marriage redefined to recognise the possibility of marital rape.

Now civil partnerships can be converted, more gay Christians will marry. A policy of bluster and threat, pending shared discussions on the understanding that nothing can change, is wearing very thin for those who are pressing for change.

Gut issues can lead to “good disagreement”. Anglicans have managed this in the past. Almost Paisley-ite Protestants have historically managed to share a Church with stratospheric Anglo-Catholics, whilst disagreeing about issues that, unlike homosexuality, do engage with much Scripture and the Creed. But in the end, the Church will have to remove its head from the sand and respond to the primary question of where, beyond church politics, the truth of this matter may lie, in a way that is good news to the increasing number of gay married couples we encounter around us.

Dr Alan Wilson is the Anglican Bishop of Buckingham and author of More Perfect Union? Understanding same-sex marriage (DLT, 2014)