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TechnoratiAs it was in the beginning
Why sexual issues matter enough to cause a schism in the Anglican communion.
It has become a cliché to say that the Church of England is in a mess. But a new chapter of messiness began just recently with the “marriage” of two Anglican clergymen in a festive ceremony in St Bartholomew’s church in London. One of the men is a doctor at the nearby famous St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The wedding – in grand style, with music and flowers and “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…” and vows and bouquets – received widespread publicity.
At no time among any Christians at any stage since Christ himself walked this earth – or at any stage in the long years before that, of preparation and teaching by God to his chosen people – has it ever been regarded as possible or right for two people of the same sex to go through any form of marriage ceremony, or to engage on any form of sexual relationship.
Down all the centuries of Christian life, through so many different eras with great massive changes in laws and politics and dress and food and human customs, through wars and dynasties and famines and explorations, through the building and re-building of cathedrals and hospitals and schools and universities, through debates and arguments and massive splits and heresies and mutual antagonisms and fights and persecutions…through all that, and through more, through the passage of the years and the discoveries in science and medicine and engineering and technology, through changes in transport and travel and art and writing and language and means of communication, through great writings of music and drama and literature and great mapping of the stars and planets and explorations of the human mind and its possibilities…through all of that there has never, absolutely never, at any time, been any sort of recognition by the Christian Church that it was anything other than repugnant to the law of God and contrary to His plan for the human race for two people of the same sex to attempt matrimony. Until the last five minutes, that is.
| 'Christ’s miracle at Cana is reversed – no long water into wine at a wedding, but water splashed everywhere, on any sexual relationship that humans seek to honour.' |
Now, with the Lambeth Conference imminent, the actions of the clergy involved in the St Bartholomew’s debacle (there were many senior clergy among the 300 guests) make it more likely that the church will split over homosexuality and other issues, including the consecration of women bishops. A breakaway group has already held an alternative “Lambeth” in Jerusalem, declaring, among other things: “We acknowledge God’s creation of humankind as male and female and the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family.”
This isn’t a tiny obscure niggling aspect of our Christian faith. This is connected to human begetting – to the essence of how we are made, to God’s creation ordinances. Matrimony is a sacrament instituted by God, not something of our making, and done on his terms, not ours. Just as bread and wine are the “matter” at the heart of the Eucharist, so one man and one woman, united for life, are the essential “matter” of matrimony.
Why do some in today’s Anglican Church think differently? Chiefly, it seems, because it is regarded as cruel and unjust to make anyone feel uncomfortable simply because of a desire to engage in same-sex relationships. And no one wants to be regarded as cruel or unjust. So, instead, there must be a decision that, somehow, God got things wrong from the beginning, or…no, perhaps it is simply his Church which has been wrong from the very start, and the Jewish tradition in all the epochs beforehand.
This understanding brings in the idea that a new revelation came to people in America and much of Western Europe in the late 1970s, and thus now we must rewrite things and make a claim for the Anglican Church which sets it irrevocably apart from all the Christians belief of centuries. In this understanding, God’s plan for the human race is not essentially based on man and woman, there is no uniting of the two that reflects the great reality of Christ and Church, there is no mystery of marriage which draws us ultimately to the marriage feast in heaven. Christ’s miracle at Cana is reversed – no long water into wine at a wedding, but water splashed everywhere, on any sexual relationship that humans seek to honour. And the Eucharist no longer contains within its heart a nuptial mystery, but is merely a decorative feast that we can use to honour what we will.
A mess? Of course it’s a mess. And heartbreaking. The Church of England has been for many a thing of great goodness: an introduction to God, a place where the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer and the beauty of Christ’s message could be learned and loved, an institution through which the name of Christ was held high in public places. It has been custodian of some of the world’s most glorious churches. Their walls have echoed to exquisite music, and seen enchanting displays of flowers created by loving hands for God’s glory. For many, many families – and schools, and colleges, and regiments, and institutions the Anglican Church has provided a framework for the honouring of birth and death, of life’s landmarks and memories. Soldiers have been sent to God with Anglican prayers, and battle-worn flags have been hung in peaceful parish churches to honour courage and valour. Dying patients in hospitals, the lonely and the sick at home, people in prison, the bereaved, have met with kindness from Anglican clergy who spoke to them of God and led them in prayer.
This is a terrific heritage. It is something good. It is cherished and valued by many who are not themselves members of the Church of England.
And what happens now? Ordaining women was a break with the solemn tradition of the Church and has closed the door to any possible unity with the See of Peter and the Church centred in Rome. But there remained much goodwill and a common understanding of Christ and of God’s plans for human flourishing. There remained faithfulness to God’s word, and common endeavours to spread it among people everywhere. But now this is going too.
For the immediate future, things will muddle along. Compromises will be made. A structure of sorts will remain intact. Some bishops will formally break communion, and there will be wrangles over property. Those who adhere to the traditional and orthodox teachings will be deemed the rebels. There will be factions. Meanwhile, quite apart from the debates about homosexuality, other issues will continue to cause splits. Some provision – inadequate, muddled, slightly illogical – will be made if and when women are consecrated as bishops.
Probably, various forms of Anglicanism will continue for quite a while yet. Some will be very good, and much will be compromised and pointless. Decent men and women will be confused, and the great mass of people in Britain – unchurched, untaught, in a culture dominated by a celebrity-obsessed media and much vulgarity – will drift further and further away from even the folk-memories of Christ that they have at present.
Can one same-sex wedding ceremony in a London church cause all this? Of course not. The problem is a much larger one. It wasn’t just one iceberg that caused this shipwreck. This is about church authority and whether it exists or not. It is about how true doctrine is preserved and safeguarded. It is about our understanding of God, and how much authority he has and how we can discern what is his will and what isn’t, and whether it matters.
The people within the Church of England who love the scriptures and are convinced that there are deep unchanging teachings, are on the right path. The Anglicans who simply love their church and ache for the days when things seemed simpler and issues such as same-sex marriage didn’t seem to arise, have a right to a spiritual home and good guidance. The sincerely confused, who went along with women priests and will accept women bishops too and vaguely feel that endless changes are somehow creative, need a vision which is larger and stronger and points to ultimate truth.
How will God provide for all these people? We don’t know, but he won’t let them struggle without aid in the stormy seas of the 21st century. He seeks out his own. Keep members of the Church of England in your prayers. The story isn’t over yet.
Joanna Bogle writes from London.
Brian, instead of getting worked up about an imaginary “potential subtext”, why don’t you confine your criticism to what was actually said? Few people who have a psychiatric illness are “psychotic”, and few people who live a sinful lifestyle under satanic influence are “devil-worshippers”. Nothing “automatic” about it.
Mr Page, I already said that I strongly disagree with Bp Orama re the death penalty. (My apologies to him if, as someone pointed out earlier, he was referring to eternal life.) You see, unlike those under the “dictatorship of relativism”, we mainstream Christians can disagree about such subjects without making the person we disagree with the object of vilification and hatred because he has a different opinion.
Thank you, David, for checking the true source of this quote.
But your phrase “One wonders if...” is an unnecessary slur on Bishop Akinola. I trust that a Bishop who writes in the Gafcon speech of “assuring people with different sexual orientation of God’s love and our pastoral commitment to them” does not share Bishop Orama’s very un-Christian sentiments expressed above.
And no, Brian, these people are not psychotic devil-worshippers or unfit to live. But to witness to Christ’s mercy and love is also to be truthful to Christian teaching on sexuality: “Marriage is a sacred relationship between a man and a woman” and “the only sexual expression...which honours God and upholds human dignity is that between a man and a woman” (quotes from Bishop Akinola).
I still say it is irresponsible to quote Bishop Orama without first checking whether this is truly Christian teaching or the rant of an individual. I could quote random and unpleasant remarks by gay people made against Christians but would not do so, because it would be a slur on the many people of SSA who lead quiet, Christian, dignified lives.
I concur with the view that the Church of England is a morally weak religious organisation through which any and all distortions of Christ’s message can be carried. It’s beginnings were anti-marriage, dispensing with the Vows of marriage in favour of the ego of a King. Unilateral divorce (with or without beheadings) are now the common woman’s prerogative.
Homosexuality is a ‘common’ enough condition of humanity to be considered a minor variation which does not have associated criminal drives that society need worry about or punish. However it does take to itself activities which are detrimental to health, individually and socially, and homosexual people prosletise among the vast majority of heterosexuals in an effort to undermine long standing Institutions.
What people do sexually in privacy is a private issue and no one else’s concern but Marriage is a social issue. Marriage was designed - by mankind - in various forms, as a binding relationship between a man and a woman, in order to have and provide for children. Marriage is as appropriate for homosexuals as a medical Licence to perform life saving surgery is for a lumberjack.
Ronk, you say you don’t support the death penalty. What punishment do you consider appropriate for the ‘practice’ of homosexuality? Does the insertion of the word ‘practice’ make Orama’s statement OK with you?
So are those people still automatically psychotic devil-worshippers? Are they still unfit to live? I’m afraid we can’t keep sweeping the potential subtext under the rug if we expect to witness to Christ’s mercy and love.
The operative word in Bp Orama’s statement being “PRACTISE”. Rendering it fundamentally different to the alleged statement about “homosexual persons”.
(And Mr Page please spare us the usual empty rhetoric about there being no distinction between the person and the practice, or between temptation and sin, uniquely in the case of homosexual tendencies.)
And no before you ask I don’t support the death penalty, which is a totally separate issue, and as far as I know rejection of the death penalty is not a required belief in the anglican church.
Charles Nixon, your Anglican primate seems to be saying “let’s just put our heads in the sand and ignore sexual issues and hope they go away”. It’s exactly this sort of cowardly cop-out which has been the main cause of the Anglican church in N America going from the majority religion to a tiny minority.
The churches didn’t CREATE the argument about sexual issues. It was caused by those who created the “sexual revolution” in Western secular society and are now trying to force the churches to ditch their own teachings and conform with secular society’s. When the churches say “no thanks we’ll keep the teachings we’ve always had”, the revolutionaries accuse the churches of being “obsessed with sex”.
Just like when every other group in history has broken off from the Church because they denied a particular teaching (the Trinity, purgatory etc) and the Church naturally defends the teaching, they then accused the Church of being “obsessed” with the teaching in dispute.
In the 1920s GK Chesterton’s prediction “The next great heresy will be about sex” was widely derided; after all, the one subject all denominations and sects agreed upon was that sexual intercourse is moral only between a married man and woman open to the conception and education of children. Yet how right he was. Just a few years later in 1930, the Anglican church became the first to allow contraception in some very limited circumstances. In later decades to be widened to just about all circumstances and most denominations, and you know the rest of the story of which the supposed same-sex “marriage” is the latest sorry chapter.
Francis, I have done some checking and the quote is actually from Bishop Orama, also from Nigeria. Here it is. “Homosexuality and lesbianism are inhuman. Those who practice them are insane, satanic and are not fit to live because they are rebels to God’s purpose for man,”. One wonders if Bishop Akinola has condemned the statement.
I’m afraid that the alleged quote has floated around for much longer, since well before that conference in Jerusalem.
Having now read the full opening address by Bishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria at the Gafcon Conference in Jerusalem this year, I find it hard if not impossible to think he could ever have used the inflammable phrase that Brian quotes above. The address is sober, clear, measured,charitable and very Christian. It is in no way an ‘anti-gay’ rant such as the alleged remark presupposes. To introduce ‘alleged’ remarks of such an insulting kind is irresponsible without first checking their veracity and source. When such remarks get bandied round, the mud sticks and emotions rise, making any proper debate about homosexuality and Christianity very difficult.
Excellent article except for falling into the mainstream media’s depiction of those Anglicans who remain committed to marriage as “a breakaway group”. The bishops who met in Jerusalem represent THREE-QUARTERS of the world’s Anglicans. It is the pro-sodomy group which is breaking away both in doctrine and in numbers, although they do have the lion’s share of the church’s wealth and media access.
JFK,
I can see that point, and it is one that people struggling with habits of grave sin of any kind (not just sexual sin), would take, if they understand the Christian message. However, anyone in a position of leadership or authority needs to be aware that many do not understand the Christian message, and that their words and actions are interpreted by others to indicate that Christians wish sinners dead, not repentant. Thus it is incumbent on Christians, especially those who presume to teach, to choose their words carefully, even knowing that they may be manipulated by forces at least unconsciously hostile. There is a limit to this - and I do not know the particular circumstances in this Anglican bishop made the comment he did.
I believe an open and courageous preaching of the true Gospel - if you are weighed down by a sense of sin, come and be forgiven, and invite God to give you the grace to sin no more - is the way forward. In other words, the true context should be given for condemnation of homosexual acts.
Surely all informed people (I’m not talking about those non-Christians who get all their information from the “Liberal” press, BBC etc.) realise that the homosexuality thing is just a symptom or side-effect or product of a much more crucial, and larger, error - the total abandonment of real Christianity in much (but not all) of Western society (apparently in America’s TEC sin, the incarnation and resurrection, the uniqueness of Christ and his saving acts, are all renounced - by the leadership - and reciting the creed itself is soon to cease being part of regular worship). This zeitgeist-led product of secular materialism is simply post-Christian, and not to be confused with Christianity at all - one thing to remember about it is that the very last thing it is, in reality, is liberal, or liberating (only adherence to God’s word and wishes does that). Those who remain real Christians must never fear (though they will surely encounter) attempts to put the blame (for the break-up) on them.
If someone mentioned “unfit to live”, in regards to a homosexual relationship, perhaps he was referring to eternal life. That they would be unfit for eternal life and would be dead to God.
Can you see the point?
Cincinnati, Ohio
“God created man and then woman blah blah...” “go forth multiply and subdue the earth..etc.” If something went haywired with one’s sexual orientation then it is just it...haywired. It needs to be understood first before it can be repaired. However 2 clergymen getting married? They can still admit their mistakes.
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