St Augustine must have had a premonition of modernity when he wrote, “If you believe what you like in the Gospel and reject what you do not like, it is not the Gospel you believe in but yourself.”
Today every man isn’t just what Luther described as “his own priest” but his own God. Hence the tendency either to ignore Scripture altogether or to treat it as an à la carte menu from which one picks a few items and ignores the rest.
An article in The Times by Tim Montgomerie provides an illustration to this observation. The subject is the growing Anglican acceptance of homosexually co-habiting clergy, which Mr Montgomerie welcomes.
Alas, when Mr Montgomerie tries to justify his position, he demonstrates in one fell swoop what’s wrong with a) modernity, b) Protestantism, c) his mind.
To wit: “In America, Christian acceptance of homosexuality rose from 44 to 54 per cent in seven years. Personally, I no longer see this as an abandonment of biblical faithfulness but as a potential rediscovery of the authentic Jesus Christ who, according to the four gospels, did not once condemn same-sex relationships.”
One could write volumes debunking every fallacy these 51 words contain, starting with logical lapses and going on to Mr Montgomerie’s ignorance of the very religion he claims to espouse.
The first sentence contains two rhetorical fallacies: argumentum ad populum and non sequitur. The first underlying assumption is that the more people support an idea, the truer it is. The second is that, if Americans feel something, it must be right. Since this argumentum ad populum is false, it’s also a non sequitur, providing no logical bridge to the next statement.
Mr Montgomerie’s deficit of intellectual rigour is only matched by his ignorance of the subject, as his second sentence proves. Yes, “the authentic Jesus Christ” (as opposed to the inauthentic one?) “according to the four gospels, did not once condemn same-sex relationships.”
From this one is supposed to infer that Jesus’s omission of homosexuality implies tacit acceptance. By the same token one could infer that Jesus saw nothing wrong in necrophilia, bestiality, coprophilia and all those other perversions he somehow forgot to mention in the Sermon on the Mount or any of his parables.
Apart from being logically unsound, this misapprehension evinces obtuse biblical literalism, so characteristic of sectarian Protestantism. In Mr Montgomerie’s case, this curiously coexists with the kind of selective approach to Scripture that’s closer to atheism or deism at best.
In addition to the Gospels, the Christian canon also comprises the rest of the New Testament and most of the Old. Both include numerous condemnations of homosexuality.
Citing the Gospels as the only valid source is therefore either pernicious or ignorant, take your pick. Then again, if Mark, Matthew and John contained injunctions against homosexuality, Mr Montgomerie would probably support his view by pointing out that Luke didn’t say a word about it.
Oddly, while ignoring most of the Christian canon, he seems to reduce all of Christian doctrine to Scripture. This is another typical Protestant failing, except that in Mr Mongomerie’s case it’s tinged with cavalier dismissal of the parts of the Bible that contradict his point.
Yet Christianity isn’t only the teaching by Christ but also – one is tempted to say mainly – the teaching about Christ. This has always been conveyed by and through the Church.
If one wrote out everything Jesus is quoted as saying in the Gospels, it would amount to about two hours of normal speech. Yet his ministry lasted at least a year. Surely he spoke for longer than two hours during all that time?
It has been the task of the apostolic Church to absorb not only written but also oral accounts of Christ, compiling them, with necessary interpretations, into coherent doctrine. The original oral accounts came from eyewitnesses, of whom there were thousands besides the apostles themselves.
This mission had started decades before the first Gospel was written down, with Christianity rapidly spreading on the strength of doctrine transmitted either orally or in short epistles, such as those by Paul, in which he condemns homosexuality (Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10).
Not recognising the Church as a depository and teacher of Christianity is therefore rank ignorance – even if one disagrees with Hilaire Belloc’s staunchly Catholic view that there’s no such thing as Christianity; there’s only the teaching of the Church.
What made Mr Montgomerie step on the path he doesn’t know how to navigate is his fashionably open-minded view not just on homosexuality in general but specifically on Anglican bishops openly living in homosexual unions, including marriage.
Here his co-opting the Gospels is particularly disingenuous. For in Matthew 19:4-6 and Mark 10:6-9 Jesus explicitly states that marriage is a union of a man and a woman, not any other combination thereof or any other mammals.
Mr Mongomerie’s unsound musings wouldn’t be worth talking about if they weren’t so typical and widespread. They’re another chapter in the civilisational suicide pact called modernity. And it’s our intellectually and morally unsound opinion-formers who’ll end up pulling the trigger.