Documents and Human Hearts: formal and experiential sexual morality

Abstract

For the true Christian it is axiomatic that the fundamental form of interpretation of the Scriptures is not search for meaning or valid patterns of thought for today, but discipleship: in other words, the enactment of Christian life, the establishment and building up of the Christian community, the singular and corporate worship of God, the completion of Christ’s Church by sharing in his afflictions (cf Col 1.24). The Christian interpretation of the Word of God occurs not in any private ‘religious’ place, but out where the human race speaks and suffers, endeavours and achieves. What Christian theology executes reflectively, Christian discipleship executes practically—mediating that memory and hope which we call the handing-on of the Gospel.Where an opposite view prevails, responsibility for present interpretative mediation of the Gospel experience no longer devolves upon the community of Christian disciples, but far too much upon Church leaders and their theologians (commissioned as if only to explain the utterances of Authority). Christian living, which should always be responsively and responsibly interpretative—my affirmation of Christ’s call—in daily life, consequently tends merely to become the obedient practising of the explained ideas of others. Those ideas are received not in the context of our own mundane experience, cultural and psychological but before it, as the utterance of an ideology from an exterior citadei. Such utterances may appear standard to all societies, tunelessly valid, unaffected by particularity of place or people—in a word, universal and unchangeable (and so undebatable); they may satisfy the minds of those who construct pervasive patterns of thought. But above all what they can do is stifle the spirit of creative participation and joyful assent. The letter is made to prevail and the document rule; but the spirit then becomes joyless.