From this morning’s perusal of Anglican Mainstream, we find this.
“Marriage is to do with the church’s relationship to her redeemer. What could be more core doctrine than that?” Nazir Ali
At the fourth Chavasse Lecture at Wycliffe Hall on July 4, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester responded to a question about the recent motion at the Canadian General Synod.
Q. Can you comment on the motion that the Canadian General Synod has passed asserting that blessing of same-sex relationships is not a matter of core doctrine?
A. First, the Book of Genesis affirms that humanity is made in God’s image, male and female together, and is given a common mission which they fulfil in distinctive ways. As Karl Barth said, this makes marriage and the family the most visible sign of that image.
Secondly this is clarified further in the teaching of Jesus. Mark 10 1-9 (“The two will become one flesh”) is set as the gospel for the wedding service, and when I preached at wedding services in Pakistan many Muslim women used to come to enquire further about it as they had never heard about this way in which the relationship between men and women is ordered.
Thirdly, Ephesians 5.32 (“This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church”) is the only place where the word ”˜sacrament’ which is the translation of the Greek word ”˜mysterion’, is used in the New Testament. It affirms that marriage is a sacrament of Christ and the church. Fundamentally this is to do with the Church’s relationship to her redeemer. What could be more core doctrine than that?
Not having studied Greek, is +Nazir-Ali’s gloss on Eph 5:32 standard?
If so, his conclusion is strengthened immensely by it.
I don’t quite see how it does strengthen his conclusion. One could think that Paul was indeed making a very profound statement about how marriage signifies the relationship between Christ and the Church, without concluding that therefore it was illegitimate to bless same sex unions. That would only be logical if such blessings undermined the idea of marriage, which is a point in need of further justification. What this text really and obviously makes difficult is divorce – because can we imagine Christ ‘divorcing’ the church? And yet, most of us have managed to swallow that change in sexual ethics …
Core doctrine of Anglicanism is that the two sacraments of the Gospel are baptism and the eucharist. These are the only sacraments in accordance with the definition of Martin Luther which is traditionally accepted as the Anglican definition. The Thirty Nine Articles state in terms (Article 25) that these are the sacraments, and that the other five commonly so-called “are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel”.
Nazir Ali here speaks from his Roman Catholic roots, since marriage is one of seven sacraments recognised by Roman Catholics.
Peter W, “most of us”….? Who’s “us”? Not sure. There’s been an interesting move from the merciful recognition that divorce, even of “sacramental” Christian marriage properly undertaken, is not perhaps the unforgiveable sin — to the current merry endorsements and indeed blessings of serial heterogamy, apparently by “most of us” (though that’s another area in which my sympathies may be with Rome more than Canterbury).
On Nazir-Ali, he’s quite right that “sacramentum” is the Vulgate’s translation of “mysterion” here – as indeed often in the Fathers. I don’t know what he can possibly mean by saying this is the only time the word sacrament is used – both sacramentum and mysterion occur elsewhere, both together and separately. Not something to rest a major point on, I wouldn’t have thought.
FWIW ARCIC II, ‘Life in Christ: Morals, Communion and the Church’ agreed the following:
[blockquote]59 Neither of our two traditions regards marriage as a human invention. On the contrary, both see it as grounded by God in human nature and as a source of community, social order and stability….
61 The mutual pact, or covenant, made between the spouses (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 47-52, and Final Report on the Theology of Marriage and its Application to Mixed Marriages, 1975, 21) bears the mark of God’s own abundant love (cf. Hos 2:19-21). Covenanted human love points beyond itself to the covenantal love and fidelity of God and to God’s will that marriage should be a means of universal blessing and grace. Marriage, in the order of creation, is both sign and reality of God’s faithful love, and thus it has a naturally sacramental dimension. Since it also points to the saving love of God, embodied in Christ’s love for the Church (cf. Eph 5:25), it is open to a still deeper sacramentality within the life and communion of Christ’s own Body.
62. So far, we believe, our traditions agree. Further discussion, however, is needed on the ways in which they interpret this sacramentality of marriage. The Roman Catholic tradition, following the common tradition of the West, which was officially promulgated by the Council of Florence in 1439, affirms that Christian marriage is a sacrament in the order of redemption, the natural sign of the human covenant having been raised by Christ to become a sign of the irrevocable covenant between himself and his Church. What was sacramental in the order of creation becomes a sacrament of the Church in the order of redemption. When solemnized between two baptized persons, marriage is an effective sign of redeeming grace. Anglicans, while affirming the special significance of marriage within the Body of Christ, emphasize a sacramentality of marriage that transcends the boundaries of the Church. For many years in England after the Reformation, marriages could be solemnized only in church. When civil marriage became possible, Anglicans recognized such marriages, too, as sacramental and graced by God, since the state of matrimony had itself been sanctified by Christ by his presence at the marriage at Cana of Galilee (cf. BCP Introduction to the Solemnization of Holy Matrimony, 1662). From these considerations it would appear that, in this context, Anglicans tend to emphasize the breadth of God’s grace in creation, while Roman Catholics tend to emphasize the depth of God’s grace in Christ. These emphases should be seen as complementary. Ideally, they belong together. They have, however, given rise to differing understandings of the conditions under which the sacramentality of a marriage is fulfilled.
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Very apt and interesting ARCIC quote, driver8, thank you.
The phrase “For many years in England after the Reformation, marriages could be solemnized only in church” is rather opaque. Although “for many years” this was so (after the Restoration, not the Reformation), it was also for a number of years not so. During the Protectorate, it was actually illegal for marriages to be solemnized in Church, and, for many years before that, matrimony did not take place in church but at the gate of the church, i.e. outside the church building, although under the auspices of the church.
The theology and law of matrimony in England and the Church of England in pre modern times is a fascinating but complex and confusing subject. I’m not sure how much it has to do with gay blessings. A blessing is not the same as a marriage, and is not limited to the marriage service. Clergy in England regularly bless buildings, enterprises, ships, workplaces, pets, even in my local parish recently, teddy bears.
Consider the possibilities of where we would be today had +Michael been appointed ABC. Sadly there was a smear campaign in the liberal Brit press to sabotage his candidacy and sadder still it was sucessful.
Of course during the Protectorate the episcopal Church of England was not the established church.
I guess most clergy will not bless situations that they consider counter to the divine will (for example, in the CofE at least, there are no liturgies of blessing for heterosexual couples who live together outside the marriage bond).
“…holy matrimony, which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church……..”
BCP 1662 ‘The form of Solemnisation of Matrimony’
Cf #9 an #3. How are these two to be made congruent? Obviously they must be so made, one way or another? This problem is fundamental, one would think, for #9 would seem to speak of core doctrine as “instituted by God….” LM
#10 LM Is core doctrine necessarily a ‘sacrament’? Perhaps the point is that baptism appears in the gospels with John the Baptist baptising Jesus and the Spirit coming down in the form of a dove and the eucharist being something that Jesus instructed us to do in remembrance of him. The other ‘sacraments’ of the RC church do not have the same prominence in the gospels although the 1662 service goes on to describe the participation of Jesus in his first miracle at the marriage at Cana of Galilee.
The reason for the differences in treatment appear to lie in the reasoning in the 39 articles: VI and XXV, but also of XXVII and XXVIII. Do you not think??
http://www.acl.asn.au/
The Articles are set in the context of the Reformaton debates about what is a sacrament. Marriage is denied to be a sacrament (in that it is not instituted by the Lord) unlike the eucharist and baptism. Nevertheless marriage is affirmed to be part of God’s plan for creation (instituted in the Garden of Eden).
It would be surprising if there were a conflict between the introduction to the 1662 BCP marriage rite quoted above (largely unchanged from the 1552 version) and the 39 Articles since Cranmer was instrumental in the drafting of both.
I’m with #2 and #6. We keep hearing that gay blessings are an attack on marriage. They aren’t. The participants don’t want to get married to people of the opposite sex. The’re not disrupting marriage as between men and women. What they want is something approaching to marriage applied to their own relationship. They’re actually supporting marriage. I think one should go beyond gay blessings and have gay marriages. I realise not many people here agree with this. It will certainly come, both in the civil sphere and in the religious one.
john,
Marriage encompasses a whole array of social, biological and economic considerations that are simply absent in same-sex relationships, and this is before we even get to the theological and spiritual aspects. In other words, the duality that is present in a marriage is perforce absent in same-sex relationships, so such relationships can never be a “marriage.”
Marriage is an ancient institution that predates the State and even the Church. “Gay marriage” is just a modern contrivance with no basis in anything. To call two men or two women (or two transsexuals) “married” is to cheapen the institution. If the State wants to give such couples (or triples, or quadruples) a piece of paper granting them certain legal rights it can. But the Church simply cannot extend the marriage sacrament to the relationship because, bottom line, it’s just not a marriage.
#13. There’s no point in rehearsing the whole debate but, as your’ve raised it, the assumption behind the reference to Eden in Cranmer’s liturgy is that marriage is definitionally the union of a man and woman. We might disagree with Cranmer but better IMO be honest and just say that rather than saying ‘we’re just supporting marriage’.
!4 and 15 are looking at marriage in a commonsense sort of way, something that actually happens, not something formal and discursive as ++Nazir Ali is talking about. Evolution has gone to enormous time and trouble to fit a man and a woman correctly.When a man makes love to a woman, they fit together because that is the way they are designed. Even if they have no intention of being fertile (and they won’t, if they’re Episcopalians) they are practising, reiterating, that old commensuration. A man cannot do that with a man for the simple, rather obvious reason that they do not fit together: One stickouty puzzle piece is being put into the hollow of another puzzle piece and hammered into place to pretend that they fit. They don’t. Obviously.
Evolution allows homosexuals to come to pass, and I expect that this has something to do with the role homosexuals have for a long time played in the arts.
That is, evolution has assigned the homosexual a role that is important to the race’s survival. I suspect that homosexuals have so long been in the arts PRECISELY because their hunger for a fit cannot be met, and this incompatibility drives them creatively. For mankind, this is important, for our love of the arts – broadly defined – is central to our power to appreciate – that element that separates us from all other life. But that isn’t a reason to concoct a marriage for a union that evolution has so formed that it cannot make a match. I like what 14 and 15 have said because it is clear, simple and straightforward, therefore has the ring of the truth about it, but without the flashing tinsel that excessive ratiocination so gloriously provides.
Larry
#16
Larry,
Evolution doesn’t ‘design’ things. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything about evolution. Evolution privileges ‘what works’. That’s it.