Owning God, Part 2: Shahbaz Bhatti– “A Martyr” Says Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury in Pakistan in the last

Assassinations of high-profile public figures in Pakistan in the last three months have prompted reflection and concern in that country and elsewhere. The proximate cause is Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy law; the underlying cause is the deformation of religion known as fundamentalism. The assassins– and those who support them– dishonor God by claiming that their “religion”– or particular interpretation thereof– contains all of who God is. They want to own God for themselves.

This fundamentalism– whether it’s in Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Argentina, Uganda, the United States, the United Kingdom, or the United Arab Emirates– is religion out of balance.

Here are some words from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoken in response to the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti– the latest Pakistani official killed because of his criticism of that country’s anti-blasphemy law.

The archbishop’s words are religion in balance.

Said Williams, “[Those who supported Mr. Bhatti's killing] inhabit a world of fantasy, shot through with paranoid anxiety.” He went on to characterize these violent fundamentalists as “wholly uninterested in justice and due process of law, [and] concerned only with promoting an inhuman pseudo-religious tyranny.”

In the end, he said that Mr. Bhatti died “for all practical purposes as a martyr. Not simply for his Christian faith, but for a vision shared between Pakistani Christians and Muslims.”

via BBC News – Pakistan Christian minister Shahbaz Bhatti ‘a martyr’.

 

Beholding and Beheld: Mutual Vulnerability in the Divine Image

In previous posts I traced the strong version of the conservative argument against gay marriage, and also pointed to where the serious, conservative, theologically grounded argument  for gay marriage needs to go. In this post, we’ll lift up one thoughtful reflection– on God, desire, humanity, and sexuality– that leads, at the very least, to the possibility that God’s nature as Creator and Source of Life can manifest in human sexuality in ways other than begetting children. The author of that reflection is Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury.

In a piece entitled “The Body’s Grace” (composed over a decade before becoming archbishop), Williams identifies God’s enlivening, life-affirming nature as present in human sexuality itself. He helps us see human sexual intimacy in terms of the grace of reciprocated desire and delight– a grace and a delight that are in the very image of the trinitarian God, whose nature is love-in-relationship. By that grace we learn to inhabit the fullness of the lives we have been given.

From this perspective, the moral goodness of a sexual relationship is not whether it is homosexual or heterosexual, but whether it is characterized by mutual nurture and care, surrender and vulnerability, and a faithfulness over time that can lead to delight, joy, and an enlarged sense of life. The essential nature of human sexuality is not procreation, but beholding and being beheld. This is not to divorce human sexuality from the divine life, but to ground it in a theology of grace wherein we receive the fullness of ourselves as a gift from another, and from an Other.

 

Where a Conservative Case for Gay Marriage Needs to Go

A January 2010 Newsweek article by Ted Olson makes what is entitled “the conservative case for gay marriage.” You can read his case here. His attempt is good, but he doesn’t go far enough. A truly conservative case for (that’s right, for) gay marriage is actually stronger than what Mr. Olson proffers.

He makes a two-pronged argument. First, since (as conservatives maintain) marriage is the foundation of a stable society, so all the more should marriage be extended to those people (homosexual couples) who want to be married. The more marriages, the better. Second, he identifies equality before the law as a bedrock American principle; marriage equality must inevitably follow.

As I pointed out in a recent post here, the deeper conservative argument on this question has to do with God’s nature as Creator, and humanity’s special relationship with that God. While nodding in that direction, Olson doesn’t go there.

What the conservative case for gay marriage needs to show, is that the union of two committed, loving, same-sexed humans has a place in the divine life: that there are ways to manifest the life of God in and through homosexual unions, and that those ways are life-producing and life-affirming, even if they don’t include begetting children. Rowan Williams, currently the Archbishop of Canterbury, reflects theologically on sexuality in a piece called “The Body’s Grace.” His reflections are directly relevant to a truly conservative case for gay marriage. We’ll look at “The Body’s Grace” next time.