Archbishop of Canterbury Views Homosexual Acts and Marriage as Comparable?

"Rowan Williams believes that gay sexual relationships can 'reflect the love of God' in a way that is comparable to marriage, The Times has learned."

LONDON (Catholic Online) - An explosive article appeared Wednesday in the London Times entitled "Rowan Williams: Gay relationships 'comparable to marriage'".

Ruth Gledhill, the Religion Correspondent of the Times may have blown the lid off of the perceived pause in the internal battles threatening the the Church of England after the Lambeth Conference.

Ms. Gledhill wrote:

"Rowan Williams believes that gay sexual relationships can "reflect the love of God" in a way that is comparable to marriage, The Times has learnt. Gay partnerships pose the same ethical questions as those between a man and woman and the key issue for Christians is that they are faithful and lifelong, he believes.

"Dr Williams is known to be personally liberal on the issue but the strength of his views, revealed in private correspondence shown to The Times, will astonish his critics.

The disclosure threatens to reopen bitter divisions over ordaining gay priests which pushed the Anglican Communion towards a split, as conservatives seek uphold the Biblical opposition to homosexuality.

As Archbishop of Canterbury, he recommitted the Anglican Communion to its orthodox position that homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture at the Lambeth Conference which closed on Sunday.

In an exchange of letters with an evangelical Christian, written eight years ago when he was Archbishop of Wales, Dr Williams describes his belief that Biblical passages criticizing homosexual sex are not aimed at people who are gay by nature.

Instead, he argues that scriptural prohibitions are addressed "to heterosexuals looking for sexual variety in their experience".

He says: "I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness."

Although written before he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, Dr Williams describes his view in the letters as his "definitive conclusion" reached after 20 years of study and prayer. He refers to it as his "conviction".

He draws a distinction between his own beliefs as a theologian, which are liberal, and his position as a church leader for which he must take account of the traditionalist view of the majority of Anglicans. He has stuck to this position ever since.

"If I'm asked for my views, as a theologian rather than a church leader, I have to be honest and admit that they are as I've said," he writes. The letters, written in the autumn of 2000 and 2001, were exchanged with Dr Deborah Pitt, a psychiatrist and evangelical Christian, who lives within his former archdiocese in south Wales and wrote challenging him on the issue.

In reply, Dr Williams describes how his view changed from that of opposing to gay relationships when, in 1980, his mind became "unsettled" by contact as university teacher with Christian students who believed the Bible forbade promiscuity not gay sex.

Dr Williams, who was ordained priest in 1978, became a lecturer at Cambridge two years later and was appointed Dean of Clare College in 1984.

He writes that by the end of the 1980s he had "definitely come to the conclusion" that the Bible did not denounce faithful relationships between people who happened to be gay.

He cites two academics as also pivotal in influencing his view, one of whom ironically is Dr Jeffrey John, the celibate homosexual whom he later forced to withdraw as Bishop of Reading after an outcry from conservative evangelicals.

Until now the clearest statement of Dr Williams' liberal views was an essay, "The Body's Grace", published in 1989 in which he argued that the Church's acceptance of contraception meant it acknowledge the validity of non-procreative sex. This could be taken as a green light for gay sex."

Of course for Catholic observers, and for some Anglo-Catholics within the Church of England, the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury that the acceptance of contracepted sex at an earlier Lambeth conference, after its unbroken rejection for close to two millennia in Christian history, undermined the classical Christian teaching on the unitive and procreative dimensions of the conjugal act.

However, to now go even further down the road to heresy and say that this error now opens the doors to equating sexual actions between homosexual sex partners and conjugal love between married heterosexual spouses is sure to raise serious concern throughout the entire Christian community.If the Times report is accurate, it reveals a clear divergence from orthodox Christian teaching on the ends of marriage, the dignity of human sexuality, and an errant vision of theological anthropology and Christian morality.

It is also sure to send shockwaves through the Anglican world and raise anew the specter of its further dissolution.

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