Churches today run into trouble on gender and sexuality. Public discussion reveals passionately held differences within churches and between churches, and culture. A Uniting Church Synod decision to license the ordination of candidates living in homosexual relationships, the Anglican debates about ordaining practising homosexual bishops in England and the United States, and a Vatican statement in response to legislative recognition of homosexual marriages are recent cases in point. Each was followed by controversy.
The starting point for the discussion within churches is their claim to form the body of Christ. The image suggests that Christ welcomes people into the church, and that they commit themselves to honour and aspire to his way of life. Christians therefore do not enter a church on their own terms. They are chosen by Christ through the church.
The image of the body naturally raises questions of boundaries. At what point do disparities between people’s lives and Christ’s way of life exclude them from church membership or from ministry? Even to ask this question is culturally unfashionable. Most Australians, including reporters, would assume that people have a right to church membership and to ministry, and therefore that those who exclude others must be narrow and intolerant. So for churches the question of boundaries is a question of identity, fraught but unavoidable. It is the more fraught because churches accept the authority of Jesus who criticised many forms of exclusion.
When it comes to excluding people on the grounds of sexual behaviour, however, churches have a problem. Historically, they have often drawn on a purity code to justify such exclusions. Purity codes reflect the natural analogy between the physical and the social body. In forming personal identity, it is common to be concerned about the boundaries that distinguish our body from what lies outside it. What is ambiguous becomes the object of fascination and revulsion. Bodily excretions, for example, can be seen not merely as different but as disgusting. Activities in which the boundaries of the individual body are blurred, such as eating, excretion, sexuality or pregnancy, can be seen as impure or dirty. In many religions, they mark a distance and rupture with the pure God. So, sexual abstinence was once required of married priests before celebrating the Eucharist. The influence of the purity code on the debate about homosexuality is evident when some critics describe it not simply as wrong, but as filthy or disgusting. It