Thought for the Month November 2025

I tend to think that the Epistle shouldn’t be read in church. It’s usually knotty in argument and not easy to take in fully at one go. It doesn’t work well when read in a “churchy” voice – it demands someone like Paul, truculent, opinionated, uncompromising. Jeremy Clarkson would be ideal. And then, when you get home and read it over again (as it needs) you find it doesn’t say quite what you thought it did.

Firstly, something surprising.  Paul says in Colossians, “Do not let anyone take you captive with philosophy”. Given all of the actual enemies Paul and fellow Christians faced then it seems an odd windmill at which to tilt. But you only have to look at the current debate about trans “rights” to know that Paul is absolutely wise to make this warning. The first stage of this began with love and compassion for those unhappy in their own bodies. Any encounters you have had with anorexia and bulimia will similarly surely evoke the same response. The second stage moves on to saying that those affected have rights – rights to medical treatment to transition, rights to be respected if they choose to live as their chosen gender. This is where many of us will start to differ. All rights within our society are a compromise to enable different people to live together in some sort of peace and harmony. So while it might be ideal for everyone to have medical treatment for every problem, in reality with limited funds and resources, doctors have on a daily basis to make decisions on which patients and which treatments to prioritise. Likewise in our society women have what might be considered a natural right to protection from sexual harassment in environments such as changing rooms and toilets. So sympathy for trans people cannot lead to an assumption that their rights automatically as of right trump the claims of others. The third stage is where the demand for rights develops into a philosophy: taking the analogy drawn from critical theory of language and sexuality, that gender is not a matter of biology but one of choice.  Most of us would say at this point that this is a question of opinion, not of fact, and that it is not one that is supported by science or logic. The fourth stage is when those who adopt this philosophy turn upon those who do not and use it as a weapon to demonise and castigate them. And the final stage is that the real concerns for and of trans people have been forgotten as just one sub-issue in political warfare. So “philosophy” can turn love into hatred. Game, set and match (in men’s tennis, naturally) to St. Paul.

Secondly, the verse that has given Paul such a bad reputation over the centuries: Wives, submit to your husbands (as is fitting in the Lord). Read in context however, it can mean almost the opposite of what it appears to say. Paul goes on to tell masters to treat their slaves fairly, justly, as human beings, since masters are themselves servants of God. So without necessarily preaching a social revolution, Paul overturns the whole meaning of power and obedience – that our relationships within the family, the community, the workplace have to be based upon “compassion, kindness, patience, forgiveness and…, above all, on love”. Thus the question of wifely submission could and should never arise because no loving husband would or should ever expect his wife to do something that runs counter to the love that ought to be at the heart of their relationship – and vice versa. This is something you could pass on to your boss.

Finally, circumcision. I have to admit that as a choirboy, knowing nothing of what the word meant, I was shocked to find out that our then churchwarden, a lady of notorious virtue, was discussing men’s willies in church. It’s not anything I have ever experienced since being raised in a sermon. Clearly Paul was arguing that Christians no longer had to abide by the laws of Judaism – fairly important if the new religion was to spread – but there is surely more to it than that. It points back to the Abrahamic covenant – the covenant that was a sign of God’s love towards a people that worshipped him alone – not idols, not a school of philosophy, not the ragbag polytheism of Greece, Egypt and Rome. The promised land for Jews was defined in terms of the other people who lived there – it was not an invitation to throw them all out. And it was a sign that the Jewish nation should be a blessing to all the other nations of the earth. Circumcision was to be a sign of adherence to this bond; it is also of course a sign borne today by followers of Islam, the other great monotheistic religion of the area. As a way of defining identity it has thus lost its meaning; but as Paul wrote, if your behaviour, individual or corporate or national, is marked by anger, malice and deceit, then the message of your religion too is a dead letter.

I was going to write more about circumcision but the editor cut me off short.

David.