Welby: Despising the Day of Small Men

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has dismayed faithful members of the Church of England by publicly abandoning his Church’s historic teaching on sexual ethics. While the Church of England officially maintains that sexual activity should only take place within marriage, and that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, Justin Welby has now said that sexual activity is permissible within any ‘committed relationships’, and that the ‘majority’ of bishops are in agreement. Alistair Campbell asked Welby in his podcast The Rest is Politics: Leading: “Is gay sex sinful?”

Welby said: “What the Archbishop of York and I and the Bishops, by a majority, by no means unanimous, and the Church is deeply split over this — where we’ve come to is to say that all sexual activity should be within a committed relationship, and whether it’s straight or gay.”

He then waffled an explanation:

“In other words, we are not giving up on the idea that sex is within marriage or civil partnership, or whether marriage is civil or religious, and that, therefore, we have put forward a proposal that, where people have been through a civil partnership or a same-sex marriage, equal marriage, under the 2014 Act, they should be able to come along to a church and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together.”

As though this were a parody, his own office at Lambeth Palace said the 'Archbishop’s views are his own':

“He has been honest that his thinking has evolved over the years through much prayer and theological reflection – particularly through the Living in Love and Faith process – and he now holds this view sincerely.

Although we have known for some time that Welby is a man of jelly, now he is officially at odds with his own Church’s teaching. Why has he not done the honourable thing and resigned, enjoying a long period of obscure retirement, perhaps in some securely built Home for the Clerically Inane?

The Church in the West is weak and declining, and the Church of England in particular is shrinking and dying. It needed a Luther, or even a Cranmer, to hold the fort and retain an unpopular faithfulness to God’s word against the aggressive encroachments of secularism. Instead, it got a Welby, a weak, silly little man, whose pronouncements are as clear as the opaque glass in a municipal toilet block, whose ethics of marriage are as helpful as King Solomon’s after he decided to abandon wisdom. Truly, we must despise this day of small men.