Dissecting ‘Together in Love and Faith’

‘Together in Love and Faith’ is a pro-gay booklet by Rt Rev Steven Croft, Anglican Bishop of Oxford. The Oxford Diocese sees it as supporting the pro-gay ‘Living in Love and Faith’ project which is currently tearing the Church of England apart, as David Virtue reports here.

Here, I dissect ‘Together in Love and Faith’  and discover it is as intellectually lightweight as every other bit of ‘gay theology’.

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But firstly, I’ll just remind you the House of Commons debated a proposal from the Church of England bishops for ‘gay blessings’ in a debate on 24th January 2023.

House of Commons berates bishops

The homosexual MP Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab) asked ‘the Second Church Estates Commissioner if he will make a statement on the outcome of the meeting of Church of England bishops on equal marriage in the Church of England.’ HANSARD is HERE. And here is this message in VIDEO:

Firstly, Mr Bradshaw used the expression ‘equal marriage’. ‘Gay-marriage’ will never be ‘equal’ to God’s divine institution. It isn’t even ‘equal’ in civil law, because homosexuals have no way to consummate their ‘gay-marriage’. To file for divorce, they can only commit adultery with a member of the opposite sex. ‘Equal marriage’ is not just a fiction, it is laughable.

All the same, the ‘Second Church Estates Commissioner’, Andrew Selous MP, responded thus:

‘Last Friday, the bishops of the Church of England published a pastoral letter and draft resources that will enable same-sex couples to come to a Church of England church to give thanks for their civil marriage or civil partnership, and to have a service in which there would be prayers of dedication, thanksgiving and blessing for the couple. The bishops also apologised for the rejection, exclusion and hostility that LGBTQI+ people have faced in some of our churches. The bishops are united in condemning homophobia, and urged churches to welcome same-sex couples “unreservedly and joyfully”. I am pleased to speak for a Church that has the humility to apologise and admit when it has behaved badly.’

Our Lord endorsed creation account

However, if the Church of England has ‘behaved badly’ it is by not meeting homosexuals at their actual point of need and offering healing and deliverance. Rather, for Mr Selous, objecting to ‘gay blessings’ is a failure ‘to go forward’.

During the debate, if we can call one-way traffic a ‘debate’, Sir Chris Bryant MP asked ‘Did Jesus say a single word about same-sex relationships or marriage?’ This writer was not aware the Rt Hon Member for Rhondda had a theological bent, but we should observe that the answer, not that any MP ventured it, is ‘Yes, our Lord did speak about human sexuality and marriage.’ He endorsed creation and God’s holy institution both in Mark chapter 10 and here in the Gospel of Matthew:

Matt 19:4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, 5 And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

Furthermore, as an MP might have said, but didn’t, becoming ‘one flesh’, in the full spiritual and emotional sense, of which sexual intercourse is the physical expression, is something a pair of gays or two lesbians can never do. It’s because they lack between them the essential God-given complementary bodily equipment. That, by the way, is why they can never consummate a ‘gay-marriage’.  It is also why ‘adultery’ must involve two people of opposite sexes.

Bishop’s offering has no science

A Christian Voice member very kindly and without any prompting (thank you, sir) sent this writer a copy of Together in Love and Faith. It was written in late 2022 by the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev Steven Croft. It argues for full gay marriage in church. There are 49 pages of it, with some reference to scripture in pages 25 – 34.

The Bishop concedes in his offering that some New Testament texts ’lie at the foundation of the Church’s prohibitions against same-sex activity’.  Nevertheless, the Bishop says their number ’is not large’. Furthermore,  ’none of them is an extensive, intentional treatment of the subject’.  He completely ignores Matthew 19 and Mark 10 as if they do not exist. Of course he does. Our Lord’s words embarrass him.

In his epistle to the church in Rome, the Apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote:

Rom 1:26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

The bishop dismisses Roman 1:26-27 by saying ‘our science and knowledge of sexual identity and orientation has moved on’.  He actually means fashions and his personal prejudices, because there is not one single reference in his ‘Endnotes’ to the scientific literature on homosexuality. Steven Croft has not studied it at all, let alone in the length this writer did in his book The Sexual Dead-End.

Bishop Croft believes the Biblical witness against homosexuality is really only contained in these two verses of Leviticus:

Lev 18:22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
Lev 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

So is God happy with bestiality, Bishop?

However, after quoting them, or at least the first, he sneers: ‘How many other commandments and regulations in Leviticus does the church keep and teach today?’

Well, we note the tables of affinity from Lev 18 and 20, forbidding marriage between close relatives, are still observed in the church. We also hope it would both keep and teach these commandments against adultery, child sacrifice and bestiality, which, coincidentally, we find either side of the injunction against sodomy in Lev 18:22:

Lev 18:20  Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour’s wife, to defile thyself with her.
Lev 18:21 And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.
Lev 18:23 Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.

Furthermore, upon this verse in Leviticus stands Christian redemptive theology:

Lev 17:11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

Ceremonial Law abrogated

A more considered look at the book of Leviticus sees that apart from that verse and chapters 18 and 20, which are of universal application, the clue to the purpose of the rest of the book of Leviticus lies in the name. It carries instructions for the ceremonial temple duties of the tribe of Levi.

Bishop Croft does not seem to know that the ministry of the Lord Jesus abrogated the ceremonial laws of Leviticus. He even quotes in full a moment in a drama called The West Wing, where one of the characters quotes a version of the ‘Dr Laura’ questions doing the rounds at the time. For example:

‘I know from Leviticus 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?’

It goes on (it really does go on) asking what penalties should apply today for sowing a field with different crops and wearing garments made with ‘different threads’ (it was wool and linen in Lev 19:19 – and Deut 22:11).

The idea of the questions is that the requirements of God’s law through Moses look silly and therefore that looking to the Bible for any questions of morality is silly. The questions fall down by making no distinction whatever between the judicial and moral laws of God, which in their general equity are still in force, and ceremonial matters of ritual holiness and the priesthood, which all passed with the sacrifice of Jesus.

The Genesis account

However, God’s design for human sexuality actually begins, not with Sodom, nor with Leviticus, but in the two Genesis passages brought together, as we saw above, by the Lord Jesus:

Gen 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Gen 2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Right there is God’s creation of mankind as ‘male and female’ and his institution of marriage. The Bishop has to talk about marriage, but he finesses these scriptures to be more about fellowship than about God’s division of the sexes. He dismisses the Genesis 18 and 19 account of Sodom as concerning rape rather than homosexuality. He accepts scripture informs scripture but ignores, or does not know, what the Prophet Ezekiel wrote about Sodom:

Ezek 16:50 And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.

He accepts that Jude 1:7 accepts that the sin of Sodom is, well, sodomy:

Jude 1:7 Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

Less than scholarly

But that, for Bishop Croft, merely reflects ‘the tradition by this time’. The holy Apostle did not, you see, have the benefit of Mr Croft’s woke personal opinion that the sin of Sodom was rape and rape alone. Because, for Mr Croft, there is ‘an overall trajectory’ ‘within Scripture’. Moreover, he thinks people like him have authority to continue the ‘trajectory’ after the closing of the Canon. He gives what he hopes is a good example.  Scripture also endorsed slavery, he says, but we now know that slavery is wrong.

This is another example of his less than scholarly approach. What he calls ‘slavery’ in the Bible was bond servitude, which formed part of an ancient social security system. However, capturing and selling another human being, the core of what we understand as actual slavery, carries the death penalty in God’s law:

Exod 21:16 And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.

Mr Croft also cites Deuteronomy 23:17-18 and correctly identifies it as referring to ritual cult practice:

Deut 23:17 There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel. 18 Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog, into the house of the LORD thy God for any vow: for even both these are abomination unto the LORD thy God.

However, it would logically follow that if the Lord is cool with sodomy except when it forms part of pagan ritual, then surely he is also now happy with whoredom. Naturally, that is a clarification too far for the Bishop’s purpose.

Intellectually lightweight theology

All in all, Together in Love and Faith is an intellectually lightweight offering. Bishop Croft never engages with the mass of scientific literature on homosexual promiscuity despite speaking blithely of ‘faithful, stable, long-term same-sex relationships’ as if they are the norm rather than the exception in the homosexual sub-culture.

In fact, under that very heading (‘faithful … relationships’) he recalls a priest coming to him wanting to ‘marry’ his same-sex civil partner. We expect a declaration that this man and his civil partner had not been having ‘flings’ outside, which the homosexual literature reveals is common in male homosexual relationships. But there is nothing.  Does the bishop even know this happens in the gay world?

Finally, despite his degree in classics and theology, the Bishop dodges any examination of the Greek words malekoi and arsenekoitai. The Apostle Paul uses these to describe homosexual men in 1Cor 6:9:

1Cor 6:9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, 10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.

What Bishop Croft doesn’t want to tell you is that ‘malakoi’ means ‘soft to the touch’. It’s ancient Greek slang equivalent to the 1960’s word ‘pansy’ or the KJV ‘effeminate’. ‘Arsenekoitai’, translated as the second underlining above, is literally ‘man in bed’ and matches the Greek word in the Septuagint’s translation of Leviticus 20:13. The Apostle is plainly referring us back to Leviticus. Put them together and the highly-educated and well-travelled Paul means passive and active homosexuals.

Bishop Croft must know this but he fears to go into that kind of depth. Then again, what do you expect? Homosexual theology relies on a lack of intellectual rigour. We mustn’t look at the Bible, or homosexual lifestyles, too closely. As long as a ‘theologian’ can come out with something, anything, the gays will be happy.

PRAY: Pray the Lord will raise up those who will speak truth to the church. Pray for true Christians in the Anglican Church worldwide to stand firm on Scripture and sound doctrine.

READ: The Sexual Dead-End (by this writer).

ACT: Pastors and parents alike need to have sound doctrine before their churches and families come under attack.  Invite Stephen to minister on this subject or any of the matters raised by Christian Voice at your church.

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