Writing as one of literally scores of theologians who sought to inform his/her Anglican national church as to the issues laying behind much of the ‘debate’ on the same-sex and gay ordination issues, both formally and informally in my own work, I read Oliver O’Donovan’s Church in Crisis with some regret. Most of the regret comes from the simple fact that the type of useful, reasoned and hopefully dialogical work that would come from paying attention to the issues Prof. O’Donovan raises, has been circumvented by political will, quasi-legal reductionism and a general incompetency of Episcopal leadership. In my own context of Canada, as is well-known, our own Primate’s Theological Commission’s recommendation in its St Michael’s Report, which while imperfect was at least (partly) theological, was neatly set aside by the National Synod, even to the dismay of its own legal counselors! What O’Donovan’s work does is clearly to articulate five points of theological reflection necessary to engage in two points of theological application, and does so in such a way that both ‘sides’ may actually dialogue with the hope of persistent unity. Some regret, however, it must be said, also lay in the simple fact, as with much of his academic work, that O’Donovan’s immense ability is occluded at times by his very learnedness.

At the heart of O’Donovan’s work is a deeply theological question, both to the gay and non-gay Christian community. This question is most neatly summed as being the difference in considering whether gay is adjectival to being a Christian or whether it is a proper noun by itself. In other words, whether gay Christians follow suit to a wider cultural milieu of confounding identity with some opaque culturally conditioned (see Foucault on this matterFootnote 1) anthropology or whether, as Christians, they too must operate on some foundational theological assumptions, and if so, what might those assumptions be? It is those assumptions, really a pastoral sensitivity and confidence for the work of God and presence of God, which O’Donovan opens for reflection and in doing so, he opens the question of what the church might then truly and sincerely begin to consider as it seeks to cut the Gordian knot of the present crises. However, despite being clearly ‘conservative’, O’Donovan’s work is not an apologia for a static or reactionary movement against a progressive [sic] spirit, but may, in truth, provide a truly Christian theological foundation for the said Spirit.

The text is ‘seven sermons’, of which five are reflections preparatory to two chapters of application. The five reflections are on the nature of liberalism, the role of communion as a mode of discourse for disagreement, a critique of ethical disagreement as skewed by a misunderstood pluralism, the role of the Scripture and a criticism on hermeneutics left to merely atheological considerations. Each is connected by a general worry, namely that the tail that wags the dog of the church is some form of modernity left un-thematized by any Christian content, and that the gay crises are, in fact, part of that failure of attention. The final two chapters or sermons are applied reflections — asking if there is indeed a distinctly Christian theologizing, however imperfect and also (and appropriately) hopeful, what might that mean for the gay and non-gay Christian.

O’Donovan’s first reflection on liberalism comes out of his work as a moral theologian. In this reflection, he raises the point that liberalism’s rush to evacuate tradition imposed a new straw man with its appeal to an imagined and pristine location/act of ‘moral consciousness’. Or as O’Donovan neatly sums, it is Kant’s first Critique of Pure Reason without his second on practical judgment. The moral certainties of this age, in such a mode, are the only moral certainties and only as a general expression of something primary or emancipatory. This has two problems. The first is that, as in any ‘ism’ of the modern age, the experience of the few has now been nakedly revealed not as a general truth but rather a special manifestation. In this instance, even ‘gay experience’ being considered univocal as a mode of emancipation, which it is not, is not useful to the general project of liberalism and its quest for a pristine humanity and O’Donovan, like many, wonders when it will be thrust aside as a mode of discourse. The second is related, raising the specter of a tradition, however confused with humanity, which is also a history of the people of God. This, O’Donovan argues, the church, semper reformanda, asks a more basic hermeneutical question on existence than merely the reductionism to emancipation raised by liberalism. The church, caught in the mystery of God as the church, asks a truly basic human question of what does it mean to give an account of human life and identity as something owed and lived to God? Implicit here is a solution to modernity’s bricolage, in that God provides some kind of human constant on the nature of identity.

The second reflection extends this logic that the theological work to be done is also churchly work — namely, to be done within the confines of Christian reasoning rather than liberalism’s domain. In part, this domain is to be decided ‘within the care of the Churches’ as a Christian praxis with Christian structures of dispute, reasoning and dialogue in play. While some may suspect the whiff of magisterium or papal-style interference, what O’Donovan argues is much more Protestant in a conciliar-front in which the crises are to field. Nonetheless, the field on which the debate is to be conducted must, he notes, be within the churches as a place of Christian dialogue.

The third reflection exacts why such reasoning is to be done in the context of Christian churchliness in that O’Donovan exposes liberalism’s moral pluralism as yet another imagined space created by modernity. Modernity’s pell-mell rush to eradicate difference, O’Donovan argues, circumvents the possibility of respectable disagreement in exchange for a vapid laziness in actually considering what might found difference and what might control the parameters for difference and disagreement. Moral certainty, promised by modernity’s quest for the universal and incontestable, is actually in the realm of the contestable, so it makes sense that the parameters of such a context must be considered. North Atlantic societies, he notes, simply confuse difference/disagreement with a kind of non-thinking conjured by moral pluralism. To avoid disagreement, no solution or dialogue is conducted and solutions are political or piecemeal. O’Donovan never says it, but in the Canadian context this is all too real as the much ballyhooed solution — blessing but not marriage itself — is neither a solution nor a statement of equity for gay Christians. They are denied de facto one aspect of Christian sacramental life in the name of compromise.

The fourth and fifth reflections fill in the area from which difference and disagreement are to be reasoned or contested in the context of the church — namely, in Scripture and through a ‘hermeneutic distance’, in which there is, for the church as God’s people, the possibility of being questioned by the Spirit as one reads, lives and interacts with the Scripture and the mandate of obedience. O’Donovan does not reduce Christian life to mere tropes of morality but argues cogently and theologically that the authority of Scripture, and our subsequent hermeneutic distance, is self-given by the nature of the triune God and the possibility of open questions. Here, he suggests, is not the perfect theory of liberalism’s hermeneutical gymnastics but rather ‘honest bewilderment’ in which judgment is made in the context of Gospel faithfulness and a resolution to be obedient to the Spirit. O’Donovan’s appeal is one of wrestling with God in God’s Word, continually seeking God in confidence that while everything is not possible to know of God’s mind, it is not the same as arguing nothing is knowable.

The final two reflections are where O’Donovan offers pastoral advice in terms of application of some heady ideas. The sixth reflection opens the question on whether nature and redemption are to be confused so that what is natural is ordinary and what is redeemed is extraordinary or superfluous. At stake is a deeply pastoral issue, namely whether as redeemed a person is more than natural, or rather, more to the point, whether it even makes sense to talk of ‘natural/unnatural’ without reference to both embodied soul and ensouled body. O’Donovan argues that such conceptions, driving a wedge between creation and redemption, are deeply problematical because part of the Christian contribution to moral theology is the idea that to be natural is to indeed care about the body as more than merely physical and that creation is indeed given form by redemption. Redemption, rather than abolishing the natural, for him, focuses our attention on what exactly are the purposes of God in creation so that we can truly live the good God intended. Thus, O’Donovan argues to think on the naturalness of homosexuality is really to think on it as a condition of intelligibility in terms of human life circumscribed by God. In short, to treat homosexuality as not a special form of human life but as a general human vocation God intends for all. Gay Christians, in other words, are not special Christians with their own unique Christian moral logic, experience or standing. This introduces O’Donovan’s final reflection — ‘Good news for the Gay Christian’. This ‘good news’ is that the gay Christians, contrary to liberalism’s attempt to force another identity on the gay community as separate, is that they are indeed believers and disciples, recipients of the good news and therefore bought into the dialogue as Christian persons with all the temerity of ‘demanding comfort’ in that vocation. They too have no other foundation than Jesus Christ, and follow that Shepherd whose love and care mean that we must pay attention and work harder theologically in order to honor that vocation. The process, then, he suggests, is one of discernment and that process cannot be revisionist but must be guided by Christian theological considerations. That hope, nonetheless, has been short-circuited by all manner, on both sides, of stillborn atheological intrusions.

O’Donovan’s little book, although at times a difficult and dense read, is truly a contribution to the present crises in that it opens bare assumption and places central the theological issues which may not produce the desired resolutions or guarantees but at least promise the reasons to keep trying. Turning once more to my own Canadian context, I wonder what such reasoning might have created in the decade of turmoil and schism since Lambeth 1998 for everyone involved? But perhaps it is not too late, and O’Donovan’s book is a place from which such a conversation could be framed. Thank you Prof. O’Donovan for this work.