The most fully human and complete person who ever lived was Jesus Christ. He never married, he was never in a romantic relationship, and never had sex. If we say these things are intrinsic to human fulfillment, we are calling our Savior subhuman. That is the voice of Sam Albury speaking before the Church of England's General Synod in London on February 15th, 2017.

There he talked about separating self-identity from sexual fulfillment. It was a profound moment captured on video. Sam joins us today on the podcast from his office in Oxford. This video clip of your brief address went viral, as they say, Sam. Take us into the clip I just played. What's the setting and what was unfolding at the moment?

Yes, so the General Synod is the governing body of the Church of England, which is the kind of main Anglican denomination in England. And so it kind of acts as the Parliament of the Church, and so it gathers twice a year. I'm one of the elected members on that Synod.

It has a mixture of bishops, clergy, and laity. And that particular session of Synod, we were having a debate about whether the Church of England should allow and accept and bless same-sex partnerships and/or whether it should redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. So that was the context of the particular meeting.

I've always known that the debates and the meetings at Synod are live-streamed. There are peculiar people out there in the world who like to watch Church Synod debates for some reason. But I hadn't literally no idea that the words I was going to say in that room would be kind of extracted and put online and shared with other people.

And to be honest, I'm really glad I didn't know that because it was hard enough trying to work out what to say to that room of people without having to think through who else might be listening in as well. So I was very deliberate with every sentence I spoke to kind of be speaking into a particular context and speaking in the light of other things that have been said during that Synod meeting and during that particular debate.

So there were a bunch of bishops and clergy and kind of lay representatives there in that particular room. And by this stage I think we'd had about 90 minutes of debate. We were given a, I think, a two-minute limit on what we could say. So yes, it was an interesting afternoon.

I had a lot of people praying for me, so I felt very conscious of that as I stood up to speak. Excellent. So what was the end result of this particular debate? Well, the vote was specifically about whether—it all sounds very kind of mundane and bureaucratic—the House of Bishops in the Church of England had produced a report.

The actual debate was on whether the Synod should recognize that report. Got it. So we weren't actually—the conclusion of the debate wasn't going to be, "Shall we vote to allow same-sex marriage?" Although that was the topic, the vote was, "Should we recognize—not even endorse, just recognize a report that the bishops have produced?" We didn't, in the end, recognize the report that the bishops had produced.

That wasn't going to change too much of the world. But the significant thing was it was the first time this Synod had had an open debate about that issue. That makes sense. Well, that brings me to the big thing I want you to address today in this episode. There you were limited to two minutes.

Here you can elaborate on this incredible point about sexual expression and human dignity, and the fact that I want you to unfold that point for us here today. Yeah, so there are a few things that are assumed, and the arguments for allowing same-sex partnerships in the church or redefining marriage, there are a few things that keep being said in support of that that I very strongly disagree with.

One is, you alluded to in your introduction, that actually sexual expression is essential to self-identity. As believers, we should have a problem just with the concept of self-identity. Jesus doesn't put the word "self" in front of identity. Jesus puts the word "self" in front of denial, and there's a reason for that.

It's not our job to come up with our own identity. It's our job to learn who we are in the light of who God says we are. So just that whole concept of self-identity, I think, is entirely wrong-headed from the start. I love the testimony of the Samaritan woman in John 4 after she's met Jesus.

She goes back to her town, and she says to them, "Come meet a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?" And I just love that. That's the testimony of all of us. Jesus is the one who shows us who we really are. So that's one thing just to say.

The other thing is that the more significant part of this, which is the idea that you have to be sexually fulfilled in order to be complete as who you are. And we kept hearing in these discussions, and you still hear it in discussions today, that if you are not sexually fulfilled, you're somehow diminishing who you are.

You're less complete. You can only be a shriveled version of who you are meant to be. And that is assuming a very particular anthropology, one that I think is massively unbiblical, because it implies that the center of our humanity, the center of our personhood, is our sexual feelings. That they are the core of who we are, and therefore they have to be expressed and fulfilled in order for us to be authentically us.

And the point I was really trying to make is that Jesus challenges that. Just in the way he lived his own life, he challenges that. As you quoted me, Jesus is the most fully human and complete person who ever lived, and yet he was celibate. And so the moment we say that you have to be sexually fulfilled or romantically fulfilled or married in order to be a full human being, we are saying Jesus wasn't a full human being.

And that insight came to me because of two things that have happened in previous months. The first was I was having a conversation with an evangelical megachurch pastor who was telling me that he was having problems with the traditional understanding of Christian sexual ethics because he said you can't make someone live without romantic hope.

That's just not a plausible way for someone to live. And I just remember reflecting on that and thinking, again, that assumes a very particular anthropology. One that actually doesn't apply to Jesus. And the second thing that happened was I was preaching through 1 John. We got to the part, I think it's in chapter 4, where John teaches us that if you deny that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, that is the spirit of the Antichrist.

And I remember thinking, who does that these days? That was a kind of a first and second century type issue. Does anyone actually deny that now? And I suddenly realized, yes, this man who says you can't live without romantic hope is denying the full humanity of Jesus. And I suddenly realized that's part of what is undergirding this debate, is a very misleading and problematic anthropology that locates the center of our humanity in our sexual fulfillment.

And it's actually very, very destructive. Actually, whether you're feeling sexually fulfilled or not, it's very destructive. If you are feeling sexually fulfilled, it's destructive because it's saying to you, this is as good as life gets. This is it. This is life to the full. And most people who have any sense of awareness will recognize that being sexually fulfilled doesn't make all of life suddenly feel complete.

But it's particularly destructive to those who are not feeling sexually fulfilled, because it says to them that the best in life is passing you by. And my fear is that it's only a few short, tragic steps from someone being told that you need to be sexually fulfilled to be complete, for them to then hear that a life without sexual fulfillment isn't worth living.

And it's an anthropology that has a body count. So I just think it's very destructive. There are a lot of people who are, for one reason or another, unable to marry. There are a lot of people, for one reason or another, who are not able to be sexually fulfilled in the way that they may feel they ought to be.

And the message of our culture to them is, you're not really living. And my fear is people are going to believe that. So Jesus, just in his very life, challenges that. And then in his teaching, he shows us what is the center of our humanity. And that's the fact that we've been created for a relationship with our Creator.

And so he tells us that he is the bread of life. He is what our hungry souls need to be fed by. Not romantic fulfillment. That's not going to feed our souls. Maybe a great gift if enjoyed in the right kind of ways that we're told about in the Bible.

But actually, if we think sexual or romantic fulfillment is going to make life complete, actually we're putting a burden on those two things they cannot possibly bear. And so, which is why we need to keep hearing the words of Jesus, that actually he's the bread of life. That we are created for a relationship with the God who made us.

So that's kind of where I've been trying to go with that. Interestingly, one of the biggest bits of feedback after that speech was shared online was just a lot of single people, not necessarily same-sex attracted, the majority wouldn't have been, but just saying they felt encouraged in their singleness by those words.

Which makes me think that actually we need to encourage our single friends more to realize that that's not a deficient way to live. And my impression is that a lot of Christians in the church who are single are made to feel for one reason or another as though it is a deficient way to live.

So I think it's a big issue. I think it's a huge issue. Yeah, it's absolutely a huge issue, relevant to every one of us and relevant even for married couples too. Well, one of the things I say to some of the younger folks around is that if you marry someone thinking they're going to fulfill you, you're going to be a bit of a nightmare to be married to.

Because again, you're putting up an expectation and weight on the human institution of marriage that it cannot bear. Marriage is not meant to fulfill us, it's meant to point to the thing which does fulfill us, which is the real marriage with Christ. Amen. Thank you, Sam. You know, one of the things I most appreciate about you is your frankness, which is obvious here in this episode, but also your ability to speak with convictional kindness.

I think this was on full display in your Church of England Synod video, a video which can be found on YouTube. And you know, it's true of your ministry outreach work on secular college campuses too, and when we return next time on Wednesday, I want to go there next.

I want you to speak to Christian leaders on the front lines of the sexual identity conversations and culture, because I think you have a lot to teach us from your personal experiences, and we'll cover that next time. I'm your host, Tony Reike. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest Sam Albury.

We'll see you next time. you you