It is surprisingly hard to find in the Bible a consistent endorsement of heterosexual marriage as we now understand it. The Old Testament is replete with stories of men like King Solomon who had 700 wives and 300 concubines. And the New Testament is generally populated by single men and women whose domestic arrangements have little in common with the model of Christian marriage that is now being aggressively defended by Cardinal Keith O’Brien and others. Indeed, the best that many wedding service liturgies can do to insist that Jesus himself supported the institution of marriage is to say that he once turned up at one.
None of which is to attack the institution of marriage, which provides many with a permanent, faithful and stable context for loving relationships. Cardinal O’Brien is, however, getting completely carried away when he speaks of gay marriage as an attempt to “redefine reality”. Traditionally, the church has explained the purpose of marriage in terms of three features: that it’s the proper context for raising children, that it promotes monogamy and that it exists for the mutual comfort and society of one person for another. How can the application of these three features to gay marriage justify the cardinal’s blustering hyperbole?
“The Old Testament is replete with stories of men like King Solomon who had 700 wives and 300 concubines.”
That’s true and it’s also true that it was expressly forbidden by God and it caused no end of trouble. The Guardian should never attempt exegesis of scripture.
They’re eminently unqualified to attempt it.
That has never stopped the Guardian and their ilk before. I’m sure it’s about time to pull out the shellfish and the cloth of two kinds.
Isn’t it funny how people will quote scripture out of context to stop Christians from quoting Scripture IN context?
Even funnier how they are Scripture experts, but do a little probing, and you invariably find they have never actually opened a Bible, they are just mouthing off the stuff they read.
How weird – a deeply secularist newspaper trying to make Scriptural arguments.
Of course it is worth reminding oneself that, whatever the Guardian now says, when Civil Partnerships were introduced reassurances were given that they were not in any way intended to alter existing marriage law. It was, for example, only on this basis that COE clergy were permitted to enter (celibate) Civil Partnerships.
This deeply secularist paper – and that’s what it is, as well as reflexively leftwing and liberal – is beloved of liberal churchmen over in England like Giles Frazer and Nicholas Baines, the Bishop of Bradford, who is always quoting it with approval.
I imagine one of these guys wrote this leader.
This excerpt from the leader:
“The Archbishop of York recently described David Cameron’s expressed desire to extend marriage to homosexuals as something done by “dictators”. It is good, therefore, that a younger generation of church leaders, like the recently appointed Bishop of Salisbury and the new Dean of St Paul’s are taking a different line.”
suggests it was probably written by Frazer or Bishop Baines in support of their own actions, to change church law on marriage.
Neither Holtam or Ison, in their late 50s, is particularly “young”.