LGBT+? Deus pro nobis – God is for us

Brenda Hopkins tells us about what led her to write her new book, Toxic Shame in the Church: LGBT+ Christians at the Edges of Belonging.

-

This book is the product of a lifetime’s engagement with the Church of England and a reflection on that sense of not quite belonging, of having to occupy a space at the edges of a shaming Church.

For me, central to the question of toxic shame for an LGBT+ Christian is the Church’s understanding of us, or the interpretation and othering of our actions. But that understanding and interpretation is the result of particular shaming doctrines and practices in the Church. For example, if the understanding of the human person starts from the doctrine of original sin, Christian doctrine is already in shaming territory, and it goes downhill from there if you are an LGBT+ Christian. This is because our sexual intimacy, even within monogamous, loving relationships, is interpreted as a sign of our wilful rebellion against God, and as a refusal of God’s grace. It’s a double-bind hermeneutical trap and a game that LGBT+ Christians cannot hope to win, because those who interpret Scripture literally have the whole weight of that ‘evidence’ to back them up. Those who point to tradition have the whole history of tradition to back them up. LGBT+ Christians are left with nowhere to go. It is an impasse that is extremely damaging to any understanding of ourselves as moral beings.  

Rather than starting from the negative theological anthropology implicit and explicit in the doctrine of original sin, my book sets out to offer a different starting point, that of Deus pro nobis – God is for us. The idea of God delighting in creation has to be the starting point and the lens through which we interpret God’s orientation towards the whole created order. Our ‘evidence’ is the much bigger story of God’s loving action in creation, incarnation and redemption. As LGBT+ Christians, we have to be able to locate ourselves within that bigger story. My book presents one way in which LGBT+ Christians might begin to do this.

There is another particularly thorny doctrinal trap for LGBT+ Christians, and that is the traditional understanding of sin. It is a word that is thrown around with quite careless abandon, with no genuine attempt to articulate what it means. There are several different words for ‘sin’ in Scripture; one of them is the Greek word hamartia (to miss the mark). We have to ask the questions: ‘What are we aiming at, and what is the mark that we are missing?’ Adam and Eve’s relationship with God is presented in the early part of Genesis as one of innocence, close union and naivety – they happily walk naked in the presence of God. That naive trusting is shattered the moment that shame and painful self-awareness enter the story. It is the primal story, theologically speaking, of the origins of shame. A bond is severed, and we no longer trust our own desirability before God.

The couple’s first impulse is to hide from God’s presence. It is this that ruptures the human-divine relationship. It is not ‘sin’ that causes the disunion, because the word ‘sin’ (hamartia) is not used in the Eden narrative. It is shame, the great Accuser (Hebrew: ha Satan), that causes us to doubt our acceptability before God. So, when we talk about Jesus as the one who restores that which was lost in Adam, it is more than just death that is vanquished. Shame is vanquished. The primal union between God and humanity is restored. We no longer need to stand shame-faced in the presence of God, because God delights in us and desires union with us. This is good news for LGBT+ Christians.

If Practical Theology wants to take seriously the question of toxic shame, it has to look afresh at the understanding of human nature that is espoused in the Western Christian tradition. My book is a call to the Church to grapple with the question of whether or not original sin is the best place to start when trying to understand human nature. In my book I propose that we look afresh at some of the earliest church teachings about human nature, those that preceded Augustine’s notion of original sin: in particular, Irenaeus’ theory of recapitulation. In this theory, atonement is achieved through Christ’s fully entering into our humanity – through birth, life and death, and overcoming all of that. Our human nature is restored, it is lifted up. What I am presenting in my book is the idea of the person as in process of becoming. In doing so, I draw together notions of theosis from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and concepts from the person-centred tradition, which underpin my work as a psychotherapist and informed my pastoral approach as a priest and teacher. My book offers a working model of what the theory of recapitulation might look like in modern, psychological and theological terms, and how this might support LGBT+ Christians to understand ourselves as moral beings.

Irenaeus would not interpret the events depicted in Genesis 3 as a falling of our humanity, but as a sign of our immaturity as human beings. Recapitulation is about maturing and growing into the image and likeness of God. It is a gradual process of faltering and failing, of being lifted up from the dust when our accusers have been admonished. There is an eschatological dimension to human nature; it is fulfilled in Christ and in the fullness of time. I argue in my book that this is a better starting point for LGBT+ Christians when trying to understand ourselves as moral beings. We are not wilful sinners, born bad, who are guilty of disobedient, wilful rebellion. We are fellow pilgrims, inching towards Christ-likeness, trying to stay closely tuned to the loving heart of God. In such a paradigm of human nature, there is no place for shame.

-

Brenda Hopkins is a person-centred psychotherapist and former Church of England priest.

Toxic Shame in the Church is published this month and can be ordered here (with 20% off all pre-orders in June 2025).