I read wonderful things in both parts of this series, side by side with odd or curious things, side by side with what I read as outright falsehoods.

Among the wonderful things? His grasp of: (1) conservative realignment would breach the core values of our historically mixed Anglican identity - room for evangelicals, catholics, progressives; (2) the queer communities are actively investigating and maturely reflecting on their own innate capacities for individual and communal good, truth, and care; (3) various forms of legacy authority innately contain the seeds of their own bases for self-scrutiny and self-correction. At times I read a welcome tone that seems to tell me we are all in this, together, for the long run.

Among the odd or curious things? His subtle, clever framings that peek out from time to time. These peeks at self-evident frames offer us much to carefully investigate, not least because they predict where we might possibly be expected to fall off any flat earth theories or models. So he defines: Original sin is the human world under divine judgment. This probably serves as far as I can tell, to import an exclusively penal frame of some sort into his invitation for us to discern together. Yet can we really have the conversation we need, or investigate as widely and deeply as we need, if a self-evident Penal Frame of some sort is our only available frame? Odd, curious. And, if it is really happening, a big deal. Such a conversation, limited mainly to penal frames, will automatically get us just where conservative penal frame faithful believers already are, and where the rest of us already are not.

I think I get hints of other frames operating, which may possibly involve pieces or wholes of pledging some allegiance to flat earth theories or models - but 400 words, no more.

Bearing false witness? How about: Liberal thinking is innately defined by leftish narrowness, changing secular fashions, a failure to really be friends with oppressed people, a hermeneutic of attack that lacks positive best practices, and much else. What is getting left out of this definition of being Liberal? Why, all of the sciences for one thing. Now, does best practices in practical reason include our sciences? Do our sciences ever dramatically re-position us? Do liberals read and attend to our sciences? The professor seems not to know.

I think Dan in your last paragraph you are setting up a false distinction, in that you appear to suggest that science and theology are somehow opposed. I cannot imagine you think that, and nor would the professor. But he is arguing through the medium of his background, beginning with theology.

Your final sentences, I think, are pressing a different question from that being addressed in this article. Whether he chooses to address it we shall need to wait and see for the rest of the series.

Howdy SC, let me try to clear up confusions.

It is the good professor's presumptive characterizations of liberal thinking as fatally lacking in practical reason - see Part One, I think (maybe my ailing memory fails me again?) - that raises the issues of science. In fact, most liberal thinkers that I know make a great deal of reading science as part of the reason/practical reason leg of the typical Anglican three-legged stool. (Lately I've heard that Anglicans have taken to mentioning experience as a fourth leg, but for me this is entirely redundant as reason must ever include experience, or what sort of reason are we using?)

This habit - of referencing science as a best practice domain of practical reason in modern era discernment - is so very widespread among published liberal Anglican thinkers that I find it quite odd that the professor would write as he does. By adopting a narrow, technical definition of practical reason (cleverly limited to certain key figures in philosophy) that just happens to omit the most dominant form of institutionalized practical reason we have so far known in global human civilization, I cannot help but wonder if the professor is doing us a good service?

It is the professor's frame which wittingly or unwittingly sets us all up, way ahead of time, to eventually conclude that a negative reading of scripture concerning sexuality, say, must trump empirical data. If the only way we can maintain our legacy condemnations of LGBTQ folks is to consistently leave out the real world data of their decency, normal range variation, competency, and care - what sort of theology are we doing?

drdanfee noted
"It is the professor's frame which []sets us all up []to conclude that a negative reading of scripture concerning sexuality, say, must trump empirical data. If the only way we can maintain our legacy condemnations of LGBTQ folks is to consistently leave out the real world data of their decency, normal range variation, competency, and care - what sort of theology are we doing?"

Good question. Most disturbingly, perhaps, this closed world theology is only allowed to operate in carefully selected areas. Even creationists try and get science to back them up, rather than disregard it, even if they have to mangle the science accordingly (look at talkorigins.org for exposes of bad science).

'Proper' Sola Scriptura would have no truck with geology, just like it has no truck with empirical data in the gay debate.....

I do think drdan and DR have a point here. While it may not be entirely fair to single out O'Donovan in this regard, it does seem to me that there is a continuing reluctance among at least some theological conservatives to engage with science.

This point was starkly illustrated for me a few months ago when I saw two leading CofE evangelicals (note to SC: not members of Fulcrum :-) interviewed on a Channel 4 documentary, and one of them stated that he "did not accept the category of 'being homosexual'".

And I was reminded of this again recently when I saw the new RNT production of Brecht's play about Galileo. I would like everyone who reads TA and lives near London to see this production and then talk about the certainty of scripture...

This is close to the nub of the issue, & therefore worth pursuing. My impression was that the recent pro-homosexual movement was largely the result of social change (specifically: part and parcel of a more general loosening of sexual morals, which was never actually argued for but was just the result of people 'going with the flow' as their social/economic circumstances increasingly allowed them to do so). Not the result of scientific advances in the same period which clearly pointed a certain way. Hang it all, how many participants in the sexual revolution base their behaviour on any findings of science, as opposed to basing it on animal instinct?

Even doctors seem uniformly to speak of what is normal and/or natural (and we well know what is normal and/or natural) rather than necessarily of what is beneficial.

Surely we should accept the category of 'being homosexual' - just as we should accept the category of being prone to all sorts of other things, some of them beneficial and some of them not. 100% of people agree that such urges exist, and that some feel them more than others. (For that matter, I may feel an 'urge' to clonk my neighbour for growing his garden too high.) That has never been the question. The question is whether this is beneficial, or to be encouraged.

how many participants in the sexual revolution base their behaviour on any findings of science

umm, how about the contraceptive pill...:-)

The question is whether this is beneficial, or to be encouraged.

A serious question, Christopher — so what parameters are we to use for assessing this? And does the acknowledgement that homosexuality is not a 'perversion' but part of the normal spectrum of human diversity (for good or ill) undermine arguments based on 'unnaturalness' and 'perversion' which seem to underpin a lot of the scriptural and Christian tradition?

It's good to see the discussion move on.

Hi David

As for the pill, Im sure you are speaking jokingly. Obviously the pill made certain things *possible*. It didn't simultaneously make those things *moral*, nor was that the reason why people started taking it. It was mere opportunism.

The ways to assess what is good or beneficial is to compare statistics for (a) people who are and are not X (e.g. homosexual), and (b) pre-acceptance of X and post-acceptance of X.

What kind of statistics are relevant? Three at least: Promiscuity rates. Disease rates. Life expectancy. By each measure homosexuals (on average, of course) do not fare well - to put it no stronger than that.

The closest we can get to 'facts' is statistics. That is why one wonders why the controversy exists. The statistical trends are not controversial, but relatively clear-cut. The controversy is engendered purely by the fact that the statistics do not point the way that some would *want* them to point. That is, it is a matter of wants, not of facts.

Unfortunately this brief report of statistics depends upon a fatal flaw - ommitting the intervening discrimination/prejudice factors that mediate causes and effects. Yes, simple surveys of large human populations consistently report high statistical risks of suicide, say, among LGBTQ Youth, say about ages 12 to 22. The classic conservative argument is that this demonstrates for us that having a certain non-straight sexual orientation reliably causes suicidality - it is right there, plainly reported in the statistics, no?

Then closer and more detailed studied of these suicides help us to get a whole range of mediating domains - youth depression, say. Then we really look into what is so depressing for the LGBTQ Youths. Then we find that they are getting threatend and bullied at school or in the community, sometimes regularly. We find that many are kicked out of their homes, or threatened with loss of basic parental support, due to their being different. This shifts a large part of our research effort to investigating the mediating variables - up to and including outright social or religious discrimination/prejudice, and yes, the highly negative views of the suicidal youth's family often dramatize.

That research deepening continues, mainly so far using social psychology paradigms (especially attitudinal and interpersonal/interaction studies), and of course in psychiatry, where a lot of the PTSD model is being discussed - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Further info at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803953852/104-1651032-2959129?v=glance&n=283155

At: http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/sexual_prejudice.html

http://www.lgcsc.org/sexualprejudice.html

So far as the WNL designation goes, all the best data we so far have from both animal and human studies suggests that sexual orientation variance is within the normal ranges for human variety. Not one of the alleged personality defects, or other human incompetencies, which received negative theories or models allege are caused by having a non-straight sexual orientation holds us, once you suitably control for Subject and Experimenter biases in your study method. Every double-blind study provides data to loosen and dissolve those supposed empirical links. A social historian in USA at least could reasonably argue that without this huge and still growing research, the gay liberation movement would have been impossible over the long run.

Just go to the online PsycInfo databases (plus related) and run searches for sexual orientation or homosexuality and psychological adjustment. You will find a very large range of different studies. Again the better studies make some careful efforts to control for Subject and Experimenter biases.

All of which help shift the burdens of assumption and proof to the conservative camps, because the prior solid legacy hold little or not empirical water. Faced with this data, it is going to be quite an empirical task to show that sexual orientation variance is not within normal limits for human nature/development.

"The ways to assess what is good or beneficial is to compare statistics for (a) people who are and are not X (e.g. homosexual), and (b) pre-acceptance of X and post-acceptance of X."

The flaw in this logic is clear if 'X' = 'Jew' and the context is 1940's Occupied Europe, or 'Tutsi' in 1990's Rwanda or..... It's not a sophisticated point, I know....

David - good point. Better make that 'avoidable premature death rate'.

drdanfee- thanks for your commitment to truth. Points arising:

(1) To speak of 'sexuality' and/or 'sexual orientation' prejudges the issue. To use these rather modern terms at all (which most societies at most times have not felt the need for) is a short step from adjudging all sexualities / orientations equal. All? Polyamory? Bestiality? Paedophilia? - the last of which is unfortunately very 'normal' (a 'normal' orientation as opposed to a 'normal' practice) as shown by internet search engine figures.

(2) Following on from which - I am not sure the point has been grasped about 'normal' and 'natural' not being the issue. All sorts of things are both normal and natural and are simultaneously also wrong and justly illegal, e.g. increased violent crime in the adolescent years. The issue is, rather, what is good and beneficial - and the problem is created by the wrong step taken by some of taking the words 'good' and 'bad' (meaning beneficial and harmful: and these things are to some degree measurable) out of our vocabulary. One can guess at their motivation: to justify their own behaviour.

(3) What are the relative importances of genetics and environment? And even granted that genetics is the source of a given thing, there are plenty of genetic tendencies that one might theoretically recognise as harmful and aim to eradicate as far as possible: ie the human maturing process.

(4) What studies known to you do not give significantly higher STD / preamature death / promiscuity rates for homosexuals? - much as other studies might show higher disease and death rates for smokers, from which we draw the obvious conclusions about unhealthy lifestyle.

It would be nice if the comments here could be related to what Oliver O'Donovan actually said.

Yessir:-)) Rather lost the thread a bit.

But when O'Donovan says 'For one church to wish it of another "that you may have communion with us" is framed by a daring and demanding conviction: "our communion is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ"' and then spends much of the rest of the article explaining how that daring ACTUALLY involves defining boundaries to that communion, something just doesn't join up for me, I fear. It's still the model of someone setting themselves up (be it a tradition or an ecclesial structure) to define whether another is in communion with the Father, etc. Just what we have come to expect of the catharised wing of the Church.

A small point: Very often (maybe even more than 50% of the time) faults in argumentation lie at the level not of the argumentation itself (which may be internally coherent) but of the presuppositions. Everybody will agree with this point.

In order to address the presuppositions, one has to go slightly 'off topic' or off at a tangent. Everyone will also agree with that.

People who are interested in finding the truth will want to do so by all means. This will sometimes involve addressing presuppositions and at other times involve already-stated arguments. Anyone whose focus is on the truth will not care which of these two is being addressed, so long as we get closer to the truth.

To clarify: not being computer-minded, I am not sure whether it is permissible or not to comment on other people's comments, as opposed to directly on the postings. Whether it is permissible or not, it certainly happens all the time, & I hope this is a positive thing.
Addressing commenters' presuppositions takes one off at an even graater tangent than addressing the presuppositions of posters or posted; but hopefully it is all in the cause of truth.