First, …[marriage] was ordained for the procreation of children
Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication
Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.How do these three concerns relate to the prospect of gay marriage? The third priority insists that marriage is designed to bring human beings into loving and supportive relationships. Surely no one can deny that homosexual men and women are in as much need of loving and supportive relationships as anybody else. And equally deserving of them too. This one seems pretty clear. The second priority relates to the encouragement of monogamy. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself has rightly recognised that celibacy is a vocation to which many gay people are simply not called. Which is why, it strikes me, the church ought to be offering gay people a basis for monogamous relationships that are permanent, faithful and stable. So that leaves the whole question of procreation. And clearly a gay couple cannot make babies biologically. But then neither can those who marry much later in life. Many couples, for a whole range of reasons, find they cannot conceive children – or, simply, don’t choose to. Is marriage to be denied them? Of course not. For these reasons – and also after contraception became fully accepted in the Church of England – the modern marriage service shifted the emphasis away from procreation. The weight in today’s wedding liturgy is on the creation of loving and stable relationships. For me, this is something in which gay Christians have a perfect right to participate.
But asks Peter Ould: Who wants to point out to him the fact that he missed out the most crucial bit of the theology? Read the whole Fraser piece and the whole Ould response. Also, recall I have made this same point repeatedly in recent years, as for example at General Convention 2003:
Not only the Bible is at stake, but the church’s whole theology of marriage. Traditionally, marriage was understood to have four purposes, communion (joy shared is doubled, sorrow is halved), union (the two shall become one flesh), procreation (be fruitful and multiply), and prevention (marriage was actually understood to prevent sin-when was the last sermon you heard on THAT one?). A same sex union cannot be unitive, because physically the bodies do not fit together in their design, and it is unable to be procreative.
So whatever else is being called for by Resolution C-005, it is not marriage. You see this in the rhetoric of the resolution itself. It is only clear what these couplings are not-marriage-but what they are is never carefully defined.
Yet the church has always understood that the only proper context for the expression of sexual intimacy is between a man and a woman who are married to each other. So what, it must be asked, are those claiming the necessity for change asking for? Among themselves there are actually three positions. Some say marriage needs to be shifted, some say we need a new category which is like marriage in some ways but unlike it in others, and others say we need to encourage friendships which may develop a physical side and see what God’s spirit will do.
In the course of much of the press coverage of the recent California Supreme Court decision, many people have missed the profound importance of the response by the California Catholic Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops thereto in which they said, among other things:
[these same-sex] partnerships are not marriage””and can never be marriage””as it has been understood since the founding of the United States. Today’s decision of California’s high court opens the door for policymakers to deconstruct traditional marriage and create another institution.
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The argument above is mere agenda-driving. That homosexuals too need love does not, logically, lead to marriage as the proper venue.
If this were the case, Oedipus is permitted his mother, homosexual RC priests are permitted their young acolytes and little old ladies could marry their precious cats. This is liberal baffle-gabbing, making general statements and deriving specific conclusions from them as if the general statement were in fact very specific in its application, a logical premise who conclusion follows deductively as a necessity.
As to avoiding fornication and therefore sin, homosexual sex will always be a sin regardless of the context in which it occurs. This is properly called semantic smoke and mirrors. It is as carelessness as it is laughable – well, I wish it were for so much of America. It would be better to say that it SHOULD be laughable.
All the above waffling is petty cash compared to his argument in the matter of procreation. That some couples avoid having children or cannot have them does not violate evolution’s crucial dictum nor the Bible’s declarations. The concept remains; the exceptions prove the rule. But homosexuals sex is, by any standard, sterile, and all life, sentient and otherwise, balks at this vision of life. Indeed, for homosexual sex, there IS no vision of life, only of a-life.
Stable relationships? Precisely what children need, and t is means a mother and a father who have committed themselves to each other and their children. The evidence here is simply too clear. The argument above is mere liberal agenda and rests therefore on wishes and careless language. Larry
Oh dear, please read “semantic,” not semitic. Larry
I suppose the fact that Jesus Christ is recorded in the Gospels as teaching against porneia and affirming marriage between a man and a woman simply does not carry much weight for Giles Fraser.
To adapt a question posed to Barbara Harris to the present innovation: “Is there anything God could do that would convice Giles Fraser that SS behavior is categorically a sin?”
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I am uncertain about calling procreation a purpose or end of marriage. Isn’t it more accurate to say that procreation is a fruit(result or outcome) of the one-flesh union of husband and wife and that the one-flesh union is an end in itself? If procreation is an end of marriage don’t we have a problem in justifying the marriage of post menopausal women?
#4, As a matter of fact in most centuries unmarried women were styled “widows”, having outlived a husband (and I gather uncommonly remarried since the original marriage is still seen as a living thing in the Orthodox Church), or professed monastics. As a great Russian priest, Fr. Elchaninov wrote long ago, there is marriage and the monastic life. The alternative of virginity in the world is just too dangerous. Of course one would have to point out to him now that it just about doesn’t exist. A widowed person who remarries in Orthodoxy is married in a special service that is not like the first wedding; it is more subdued and has the character of a gesture of economia.
#4, in answer to your question, Phillipians 4:13.
Phil you are both right and wrong (in a way). You are surely right in the matter of the “one-flesh union,” but this does not preclude fertility as a fit goal of marriage. In the matter of fertility, evolution and Christianity are very much in agreement. The central question is one of survival: What must we do for the race to survive? For rabbits, the question is simple to answer. For mankind, it is a matter of utmost complexity. We must make children; those who bear children must be protected because of their role; the children must be protected because they bear the means of survival.
But mankind adds this for survival: values must be instilled and ideas must be integrated so that life means something, for if it does not, humankind will not survive. We may in justice conclude this because our distant ancestors buried their dead with care and with life-symbols; clearly death MEANT something to them. So that mere physical survival, however primary, is not sufficient for mankind. The imagination must be engaged and we must believe something. And we note that the burial “rituals” were in all probability pre-verbal, or largely so. For mankind – and mankind alone, it would appear – ideas are more important than individual life, and marriage as we understand it is an idea. This point has not been made with sufficient clarity. The specifics are as circumstances dictate: Some may not want children, and some may require incest for continuation (vide Naoh), but the IDEA is takes precedence for it alone is generative.
We have an animal nature; simple lust will keep men having sex with women, but this doesn’t guarantee our survival, because without ideas we are not human. Marriage is an idea, and whether we believe it or not, at one with evolution, for it contains the complex seeds for
our continuation. L
Ah dear old Giles Fraser- he very often tells only half the story. emphasising the gushy bit and omitting the challenge. It drives me crazy…..
But of course to give him credit ..that imgae of Christ and his bride the church is also echoed at the Eucharist and we have already rendered that a barren union by replacing the man in persona Christi with women. So what is a little more barren fruitlessness within marriage?