Review: Oliver O'Donovan's 'A Conversation Waiting to Begin'

Amidst Anglicanism’s ongoing confrontations on the issue of same-sex relationships, it is rare to hear voices urging a patient and authentic wrestling with Scripture. Thanfully, Oliver O'Donovan's excellent and challenging A Conversation Waiting to Begin is such a voice. At heart, O'Donovan offers an apologia for Lambeth 1.10 – and, importantly, 1.10 in its entirety. He summarises 1.10 as “generally conservative in posture ... overwhelmingly supported ... [and] open to further exploration”. A Conversation Waiting to Begin is a deep reflection on the relationship between the affirmation of the conservative posture and the call to further exploration.

The critique of the revisionist position is robust. Liberals' protestations, that the grounds of Christian communion are in the creeds alone, fail to recognise that the Christian creedal affirmations have a “specific moral shape”. The hermeneutic with which liberalism approaches Scripture prevents any meaningful sense in which “an answer [is] not already contained in the question”. Perhaps most damningly, of all, however, is O'Donovan's assessment that the failure of the revisionist position to give a proper account of the relationship between creation and redemption “is the doctrinal proposal that is likely to shake the foundations”. Readers of O'Donovan's classic Resurrection and Moral Order will recognise the outlines of his affirmation in A Conversation Waiting to Begin:

“New creation is creation renewed, a restoration and an enhancement, not an abolition”.

Reading the book as a supporter of 1.10, however, I found myself challenged. The challenges were 3-fold.

Firstly, O'Donovan reminds us that any view on the part of those of us who are traditionalists/conservatives/anti-revisionists that we instinctively ‘know’ that Scripture condemns same-sex activity – what O'Donovan terms “a confidence in the immediacy of moral judgments” - actually undermines the practice of the Church faithfully attending to Scripture as the Word of God. As O'Donovan puts it:

“The immediacy of the insight tends to make the interpretation of Scripture seem superfluous”.

To authentically wrestle with Scripture and be challenged by Scripture, requires us not to become merely a right-wing image of the revisionist case. In other words, we should not approach Scripture with questions already containing the answer.

Secondly, we are reminded that the Church has previously wrestled with 'categories' of persons whose manner of life produced pastoral challenges and dilemmas. O'Donovan points to three in particular, asking what the good news was understood to mean for them:

“For the teacher of literature, for the civil magistrate, or for the successful merchant (to name three categories that the early church viewed with the same narrowing of the eyes that a homosexual may encounter today)”.

Profound pastoral issues and challenges presented themselves to the patristic churches as they shared the good news with the teacher of pagan literature, the magistrate who upheld the authority of the Empire, the merchant who bought, sold and made a profit. O’Donovan couches this discussion in terms of ‘vocation’. The good news had implications for the teacher of literature, the civil magistrate and the merchant in their specific vocations. Mindful of these patristic parallels, our contemporary challenge is to discern the implications of the gospel for the 21st century gay person beyond the false notion that ideas, power, money or sexuality are mere “neutral technicalities” not addressed by the gospel.

Finally, O'Donovan refers to the “interesting, if teasing analogy” of “the rather careful hermeneutic of scriptural teaching on divorce and remarriage”. A Conversation Waiting to Begin closes with a reference to the diversity of teaching and practice on this issue:

“That disagreement has not gone away; but if today it bulks less threateningly than it once did, that is because we are so much more clear about the extent of the agreed ground all around it – God's intentions for marriage, the pastoral desiderata in dealing with broken marriage and the like. It no longer evokes threatening resonances. It is a problem reduced to its true shape and size”.

O'Donovan is self-evidently not urging a cheap grace, cheap unity option of 'live and let live'. Such unreflective, pragmatic pluralism is an all too-obvious attempt to bypass the hard work of patiently searching the Scriptures and patiently listening to one another in that process. But it is a significant reminder that Christians have found pastoral accommodations when confronted with the reality of differing understandings of the meaning of marriage in the context of God's purposes in creation and redemption.

The implications of this “teasing analogy” for Anglicanism's present discontents are, quite rightly, not made explicit by O'Donovan. We have much more work to do on establishing “the agreed ground” before reaching such a point.