How To Be An Agnostic
preserved? It came to be thought of as embodying a different
sort of reason by the Reformers – a divine reason that contains
certainties of which secular science knows nothing. No longer
was Jesus the Word (as, paradoxically, the Bible itself testifi es);
the Bible was. ‘This is the Word of the Lord,’ Christians now say
after the Bible is read out in services – in mainstream practice,
not just fundamentalist churches. In other words, the scientifi c
revolution forced Christians to turn to the Bible, and it forced
them to say that the Bible was above the critique of the scien-
tifi c worldview.
This, in turn, sheds light on crises churches face today.
Consider the issue that appears to be tearing the Anglican
Church apart – that of homosexuality. It is often a puzzle
to people why gay relationships should be so divisive. Jesus
himself said nothing about same-sex activity. It should not be a
‘fi rst-order’ issue, like say the Trinity or the Incarnation. Surely,
it would be thought, an essentially liberal Church ought to be
able to fi nd an accommodation within which homosexuality
is treated as a matter of private conscience. However, homo-
sexuality has become a schismatic issue today because it has
become a test case of this need for biblical reliability. Liberal
voices contest this, arguing that the Bible condemns the con-
sumption of shellfi sh and the practice of usury, or that the word
homosexuality is a modern one and has little to do with the
same-sex activity objected to in the New Testament. But, to the
conservative, that misses the point. Homosexuality, they say, is
against the order of creation described in the Bible, expressed
no more succinctly than in the book of Genesis. The argument
that the Pope, Archbishops, Chief Pastors and Moderators make
in mainstream churches is that God created humans as man and
woman in a complementary relationship, and that this narrow
ordering of human relationships represents a line beyond which
a Christian cannot go. To condone homosexual relationships,
as if they were a similarly ordained part of creation, is therefore
read as a rejection of the Bible in toto. This is what religion as a
transcendental science puts the liberal Christian up against.