(ot) Here ya go... good news -g-
Living in sin approved as Church sexes itself up
By Helen Rumbelow
Anglicans are being told to cast off prudery
timesonline.co.uk
THE Church of England tried to catch up with the 21st century yesterday with a report celebrating the joy of sex between unmarried couples and denouncing debt and the culture of spin.
The Church’s authoritative Doctrine Commission has grappled with the difficult issues of sex, money and power to offer guidance on day-to-day living to modern Christians.
It said that the Church of England should throw off its image as a prudish Victorian institution and celebrate the sexiness of Christianity.
“The secular world needs to know more clearly that the Church regards sexuality as essentially a joy and a blessing,” said the Rt Rev Stephen Sykes, chairman of the Doctrine Commission, a committee of eminent Anglican bishops and theologians who lay the groundwork for church policy.
“The Church should joyfully and openly declare that human sexuality can be a matter of grace.”
The commission, which took seven years to prepare the report, called Being Human, blamed the Church for what it sees as today’s unhealthy climate of sexual permissiveness.
If previous generations of church leaders had extolled the pleasure and spirituality of sex then maybe not so many young people would have abandoned its teachings on the matter, it said.
“The development of sexual permissiveness in our society can perhaps be seen as one of the long-term consequences of the failure of Christians to maintain a positive Christian view of sexuality as a gift of God in creation,” the report said.
The report is remarkably relaxed about the idea of non-married couples, which may lead to liberalisation. Gone are any references to “living in sin”, or stern warnings to wait for the wedding night. It encourages “sexual delight” within “covenant relationships”, but the definition of such a relationship is left deliberately vague.
When asked at the publication of the report at Church House in London whether a covenant relationship could describe an unmarried couple, Professor Sykes, the former Bishop of Ely and Principal of St John’s College at the University of Durham, said that he thought it could.
“That is a very difficult question,” he said. “If we are talking about a relationship where man and woman are committed ‘till death do us part’, I would say they are in a covenant relationship,” he said.
But he added that, from the Church’s point of view, there was still “something lacking if they hadn’t made a socially endorsed vow to each other”.
Professor Sykes said that it was difficult to change the Church’s prudish image. “The Church has a reputation for being negative about sex. We want to say it is a wonderful gift from God, but it is difficult to be heard,” he said.
The commission also spoke out against the “explosion” in credit, which encouraged people to get into spiralling debt.
Professor Sykes said that people should be careful that vast debt did not dominate or ruin their lives.
The report attacked the Government’s enthusiastic use of private finance initiatives (PFIs) to build schools and hospitals by entering into mortgage-style agreements with companies. Professor Sykes said that PFIs illustrated the problem with debt, because the need to make repayments could take precedence over the needs of pupils or patients.
He also emphasised the report’s dim view of the obsession with spin, which caused a cynical view of power that was un-Christian.
“If an announcement is made, it is assumed that spinning has gone on, or something has been concealed,” he said. “We’re very cynical in modern society, but this is sharply contrasted with the way Christians should view the issue.”
The report, the first from the commission in eight years, is endorsed by the House of Bishops and reflects the view of the Church of England, but will be extensively debated.
“We looked at these very powerful forces active in the modern world, because if people don’t take hold of these forces, these powerful forces will shape them,” Professor Sykes said.
Money
The report has dire warnings for those who take on too much debt, as is often encouraged in our consumer society. “Money will never arrive at a point where it is capable of being sated, or saying ‘enough’,” it said. “The last 20 years have seen a massive increase in the amount of credit available, credit has become central to the way we manage and live our lives.”
People should try to follow the Bible’s teachings to “avoid unnecessary borrowing” it said. “When the repayment of the interest on our debts form such a significant proportion of our income, our lives become centred in practice around the service of that debt — our future becomes mortgaged and our relationship to time is fundamentally reconfigured — though we may be quite unaware of it.”
Sex
Upheavals of the 20th century have put new strains on people’s sex lives and on the Church. Most difficult was the fact that there was a “saturation of virtually all channels of communication by sexual imagery of an increasingly explicit kind”, leading to an acute sexualisation of our culture.
Another problem was that people were marrying, if at all, a decade later than in the past, the report said. “Not all members of this generation are likely to delay sexual activity until they get married, or to confine premarital sexual relations to just one partner.”
Longer life expectancy also introduced the new strain of very long marriages. “This new environment has proved extraordinarily disturbing and challenging for the Christian Church,” it said. To ignore or repress sex, as the Church had done in the past, was also not helpful, it said. “The historical inheritance of the Church on sexuality is very ambivalent, and there are strands that now seem profoundly mistaken. Sadly the Church has sometimes appeared to endorse sexual repression.”
The report aims to “promote constructive discussion” about homosexuality in the Church of England, with a brief survey of relevant scriptures, without coming to any conclusion.
Power
Power has been corrupted by too much spin and suspicion of spin, the report says. “In Western politics power has come to have formidably negative connotations, and suspicion is now in-built in our attitude to those who exercise it in public.”
This, it says, is an un-Christian state of affairs. “In the Christian view power cannot be seen as intrinsically corrupt.” |
