Stephen Crittenden: Speaking of what Paul says and what Paul meant, the Anglican communion worldwide is split over understandings about what he meant about homosexuality at the moment. Your point I think is a very interesting one. It does seem to me that what you’re saying is that those liberal scholars who claim that when St Paul refers to homosexuality, what he really means is temple prostitutes, or whatever, aren’t really fair dinkum, that they’re trying to weasel out of a difficult problem and that really, Biblical scholarship requires more integrity than that. And if you’re gay and you’re confronted by St Paul, you’re just going to have to take it on the chin in the end, aren’t you?

Tom Wright: Yes, I think what I’ve reacted against in the area that you’re describing, and I should say that the whole question of sexual relations and identity and homosexuality, is one of these things that really needs another 700-page book which I haven’t got time to research and write. So I’m aware that there are multiple questions going off into the blue yonder on this. But the critical thing is when people say, ‘Oh well of course, when Paul refers to homosexual relations in Romans 1 or 1st Corinthians 6, or whatever, what he was talking about was the fact that when people would go off to the Pagan temples, then there would always be girls and boys hanging around outside, and that would be part of the deal, and that that has nothing to do with what we today know as committed faithful, stable relations’. There’s other questions down that line.

Now I want to say, just go back and read Plato. Read Plato’s Symposium , and you discover in Plato’s Symposium a panegyric on love, on erotic love, and specifically because women aren’t included in this, on the erotic love between probably a slightly older man and probably a slightly younger man, although sometimes the age isn’t so significant. And this includes explicit descriptions of the falling in love and the lifelong relation that some men will have with other men. Now Paul was around the Greek world, he was out on the street, he was in and out of places like Athens, Corinth and Ephesus etc. There was the full range of everything that was available, that was out there.

Stephen Crittenden: And we know, don’t we, we know about Emperors like Hadrian who had precisely those long-term committed relationships, we know that there were rites of gay marriage in ancient Rome.

Tom Wright: Yes, and if we look at a figure like Nero, who was of course Emperor through certainly the second half of Paul’s writing career if you like, Nero was notorious for doing all kinds of things, including at least one apparent homosexual marriage. And it may be, though the sources are not quite clear on this, that Nero underwent two such marriages, in one of which he was the ‘male’ or dominant partner, and the other one in which he was the more so-called effeminate one – that’s how they would have described it. So all this is known about in Paul’s world. The question then is how does what Paul says about what one does with one’s body relate to all the other aspects of his thought? Are these in other words simply abstract commands that he’s simply hurling at people’s heads? ‘I believe you shouldn’t do this, and I believe you should do that’. Or are they actually much more tightly integrated with all the other things he said? And on that, I would say very clearly they are extremely tightly integrated. The integration between the middle of Romans 1 and the end of Romans 4, and the beginning of Romans 12, if your listeners can bear to go and look up those passages, is extremely significant for the way Paul’s mind works. In other words, you can’t just take that bit of Romans 1 out, and say, Oh well, Paul had a headache at that point, we’ll just leave that.

And the other thing is, when we have found out what Paul says, what do we do with it? I respect the person who says Yes, it really does look as though Paul is saying A, B, and C, and I just think he’s wrong. I mean at least you know where you are with that. But if somebody is committed for quite other reasons, a view of Scripture, of the church’s tradition, etc., to say, When I have found out what this book says, then it is my Christian duty to struggle and live with it, within it, as best I can, then though that is always tough – and do you know, there are things in Scripture which are tough for all of us, there are things in Scripture about the use of money, which are horribly tough for Western people today, and that’s why we’re in such a mess about global debt. If we’d taken the Bible seriously we’d have solved that one long ago.

Stephen Crittenden: I must say I’ve always been puzzled by why any gay people would want to burden their relationships with theology, and in Australia there really isn’t much of a movement for gay marriage. Nonetheless, isn’t it a furphy, a red herring, to suggest that blessing a same-sex union implies that you’re conferring the same theological status as a marriage?

Tom Wright: There’s a huge amount of confusion on this at the moment, and the confusion takes different shapes in different parts of Europe, in Britain, in Canada, in the States, in different states within the States. I don’t know on this one about Australia. But for instance, there is legislation coming before Parliament in Britain in the not-too-distant future for civil partnerships, and the government has said, Oh these aren’t marriages, this isn’t gay marriage. But actually what they’ve done to construct the legislation is that they’ve gone to the marriage laws and they’ve just lifted whole paragraphs out of the marriage laws and they’ve plonked them in, including, believe it or not, the ban on consanguinity. Now what is the great deal about consanguinity for goodness’ sake, when you’re talking about two men over here and two women over there. This should not be a problem, and yet they’ve done it, because clearly, they are seeing it as a quasi marriage. And I know in my own diocese some people who work in Registry Offices, who are being told there’s no escape clause, if you’re working in this office, you’re going to have to implement this whether you like it or not.

Stephen Crittenden: We’re talking civil unions now. My question I guess was more about the difference between a marriage, and blessing a friendship.

Tom Wright: Yes, well that difference has been of course blurred in all sorts of ways over the last generation. I grew up at a time when I suppose perhaps still at least half the population, if not more, didn’t actually live together before marriage. There may have been some sexual relation here or there in the relationship, but they didn’t basically move in together until after they got married. And all of that of course has been blown away completely, and we’ve seen now a continuum, both in heterosexual relations and in homosexual relations, between casual encounters all the way through to publicly committed lifelong partnerships. And some of those are graced with the word ‘marriage’, and some of those have been graced with a service in church or a public Registry Office ceremony or whatever. And so we live at a hugely confusing time in all that, and it’s not surprising to me that however much successive governments say ‘Oh, this wouldn’t actually be gay marriage’, in fact the press know perfectly well that’s basically what it is. That is what some – not all – gay people want, and it’s what the church has agonised about. Because once it’s in the civil law, then of course there will be huge pressure on the church to say “Well, if somebody has a heterosexual civil marriage and then says I want this blessed by the church, you’ll do that, so why won’t you do that for us?” So we’re in a very, very murky world here and negotiating our way through it is going to be tough.

Stephen Crittenden: A fireside chat with one of the world’s great Bible scholars, the Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright. And by the way, his books are under the name, ‘N.T. Wright’.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s1243268.htm