In response to pastoral questions with which several Covenant authors are wrestling pertaining to marriage and human sexuality, Canon Dr. Graham Kings, pulled this radio interview with Rowan Williams out of the Fulcrum archives. In this excerpt, the Archbishop provides a concise teaching about a healthy Christian concern for sex.
BBC Radio 5 Live, 6 December 2005
A Fulcrum Transcript
Note: The transcript of this 2005 radio interview with Rowan Williams was conducted by the BBC’s Simon Mayo. The transcript was made by Fulcrum with BBC permission.
Civil Partnerships and Christian Marriage
Simon: It’s an issue in this country, as well of course. And, as from yesterday, Civil Partnerships are legal and legislation came into force permitting civil ceremonies. Is this a welcome development?
Rowan: I think, in so far as it gives people certain rights in the public sphere, certain economic and property rights, which wouldn’t otherwise exist, yes. I think the difficulty is, there’s a sort of muddle about this, both in some of the Government language about it and some of the media language about it. It’s instantly been dubbed ‘gay marriage’, as if that were the only thing it were about. But as several of the papers have remarked - I’ve seen things in The Guardian, The Telegraph and elsewhere about this - it’s a legal arrangement between two people. It’s about certain commitments that allow certain legal dispositions and economic dispositions to be made. It doesn’t presuppose there’s a sexual relationship, it doesn’t presuppose that there is anything like - well, anything like? there is exactly like - what we would call, as Christians, a marriage. But it’s very hard to keep those two things apart in the public eye.
Simon: So this is a limited welcome.
Rowan: A limited welcome. Welcome in so far as it rectifies injustices or inequities that there may have been before.
Simon: And if one of your priests wanted to become involved in a civil partnership?
Rowan: Well, the guidelines issued by the House of Bishops are quite clear. If a priest wants to enter into a civil partnership, then he or she has to give an undertaking that this is not an active sexual relationship, because I don’t think it’s proper that the Church should have its doctrine and discipline changed by the decision of the State. That’s the bottom line there.
Simon: Do you think these couples who are going to have a civil partnership shortly and have some kind of ceremony - do you think that they should be able to have it blessed in church, or there should be some kind of ceremony which would give blessing?
Rowan: Well, again, the Bishops of the Church of England have said, no, they don’t think that is appropriate. It’s partly because, I don’t think any of us would know quite what we were blessing in any particular instance. The danger of making…
Simon: ...presumably you’d be blessing two people who are saying publicly that they want to commit themselves to each other for the foreseeable future - same as in a wedding.
Rowan: A wedding includes rather more than that. A wedding is between a man and woman. It has the possibility, normally, of family. It’s a social fact. It’s got two thousand years, or more, of theology behind it. And I think what the Archbishops of the Anglican Church said, a couple of years ago when they met, was: ‘You need to be clearer about having a theology before you have a service - or something like that.’ So, I think it’s right to hold back on that. We don’t want this confused with marriage, at the moment. We don’t want orders of service which, if you like, run up to the frontiers of marriage and then just pull back a little bit. It’s a very complicated issue, and I think how people deal with it pastorally, in individual cases, is going to be difficult.
Simon: But in the fullness of time, maybe once people have thought about it, and the theology has caught up, might it be something that…?
Rowan: We’d need to have changed quite a lot before - well, I won’t speculate about that.
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