Thoughts on patriarchy.

I felt I could not let the diatribe1 posing as a scientific article by Professor Malcolm Potts and his wife, Dr Martha Campbell, go without comment. When one reads an article that contains gross inaccuracy, even in part, the credibility of the rest and of the journal running it is thrown into question. The couple has an understandable modern problem with St Augustine but that is no excuse for their absurdly inaccurate summary of over a hundred theological works,2 that he “saw God as an arbitrary judge who could be placated by bribes”. Nor does it justify ridiculing him from a 21st century perspective with no attempt to understand his historical or personal context, or indeed any of their other (highly selected) examples. To then link patron saints in a non sequitur to bribery and the etymology of ‘grace’ (wrongly)3 to the same is as ridiculous as it is irrelevant. (I note they are only able to quote Potts’ own authority for this.) To limit the development of Christian sexual ethics only to the context of sexual exploitation tolerated in the Roman Empire is profoundly misleading. They show no awareness of the contributing influences of Judaism, Hellenism, Stoicism or Gnosticism.4 Just how blinkered the authors’ historical viewpoint is can be seen from the fact that the discussion is limited to one theologian among many, to only the Western tradition, ignoring Eastern and Celtic perspectives completely, and subsequently narrowing within that to Roman Catholicism. Islam fares worse, seeming only to be represented by the Taliban in the authors’ minds. If the two faiths both have “liberal and conservative interpretations”, why is discussion limited to the negative ones? The most one can learn from this article is something of the prejudices of its authors. This is not the first time Malcolm Potts has been accused of a lack of objectivity.5 Space precludes a more detailed response but I wonder how this got through the Journal’s peer review process. It would have been sensible to mention Martha Campbell’s membership of the Editorial Advisory Board as a competing interest. In a journal aspiring to international scientific respectability, authors should be obliged to give balanced and informed discussion. If polemic is to be part of the offering, it should be flagged as such. I am certainly no friend of patriarchy, but a scientific article is not the place to abandon balance in favour of rhetoric.