Receive our inheritance with gratitude and be radical in our interpretation of it. That suggestion sorted me out in regard to the creeds and I’ve since found it to be helpful in a variety of arenas. This weekend we’ve been applying it to the topic of gay marriage. We’ve been specifically focused on Proposition 8 ”“ an attempt to deny gay and lesbian couples their constitutional right to marry. Many of us oppose that proposition and we do so in the spirit of Dr. Carpenter. We have no intention of altering the traditional understanding of marriage ”“ two people, mutual love expressed in and through fidelity, life-long commitment lived out under the gracious purview of God and with the strong support of society ”“ but we insist on extending that blessing to the whole human family.
We are rigid conservatives when defining the core content of holy marriage and wild radicals in our belief that God intends this beautiful covenant for all. And because both sides of that statement are equally true, we join with the Episcopal bishops of California, unanimously aligned, in vigorously defending the right of gay couples to wed, the right the high court of our state granted earlier this year. We also pledge to work to encourage the Episcopal Church, as a national body, to recognize the wisdom and compassion of that decision and follow suit.
Read it all. This is what passes for wisdom in the Orwellian world of the leadership of The Episcopal Church these days. What is by any reasonable definition a complete overhaul of the nature of marriage–which is by definition a life long union of a man and a woman–is claimed to be instead a conservative clinging to the content of holy marriage.
Recall carefully and well the genuinely prophetic Statement by the California Catholic Conference Of Bishops’ Regarding The Supreme Court Decision:
Every person involved in the family of domestic partners is a child of God and deserves respect in the eyes of the law and their community. However, those 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 under the guise of equal protection.
Yes, exactly, these relationships can never be marriage by its very definition. That is the core content of marriage which some are attempting to change completely. But this is a church that does not tell the truth, and then does not tell itself the truth about not telling the truth, so this complete alteration is claimed to be the opposite of what is–KSH.
“It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God. This is the Lord for whom we have waited;”
Umm, no, Father, the most that supporters of ecclesiastical sanction of homosexual relationship can say is that “this is the Lord that we have created”, because nothing contained in the traditional ecclesiology of Anglicanism (Pre-eminently Scripture; in the absence of clear Scriptural guidance, tradition; and in the absence of guidance based on tradition, then reason) supports the analysis contained in this address.
In reading this message, I am not so much reminded of today’s Gospel reading as of the Old Testament lesson–creating an idol of the people’s own making.
Well, of course civil marriage cannot be Christian marriage (or Muslim marriage, or Hindu marriage, either) in California, for example, since civil marriage is simply a contract between two people the rights and responsibilities of which are spelled out by the law of the State of California. That bundle of rights and responsibilities which is called civil marriage under the law varies slightly from state to state, and country to country. Christian marriage is an ecclesiastical sacrament, instituted by God, of which the blessing of the Church is a key part. For anyone to imagine that civil and ecclesiastical marriage are the same doesn’t understand the difference between ekklesia and the ‘world’.
The problem we’re experiencing here is that both are called ‘marriage’ even though they’re not the same thing. I, myself, have basically destroyed my own career by my opposition to GVR and KJS and all their works, but I still will not conflate civil and Christian marriage. As far as I’m personally concerned, any two reasonable adult people can freely contract a civil union without threatening Christian marriage. That the 5 bishops in California incorrectly applied theological language to a civil institution (not understanding the separation of Church and State) does not change the plain fact that a civil marriage without the blessing of the Church is not a Christian one.
Our bishops clearly do not understand theology and just as clearly do not have one. They have a tag on which to hang their long ropes, of course, justice. When that is delivered, what will they say? My bet is that the “Lord, you got it wrong” line will not be efficacious.
Marriage is not a constitutional right. The proposition should be nonsense; t hat it is not shows us just how powerful the grip the liberals have over our cultural and spiritual life. Where is the constitutional right to marry? Oh, let us hope that Obama never gets a chance to choose justice for the Supremes! The case must come there sooner and later, and a realistic reading of the constitution will send this proposition packing. Larry
#2 is of course, correct. We now need a clear distinction drawn between the civil benefits of a union and the spiritual benefits of marriage. They are presently run together and no one is willing to make the distinction, especially the courts, because it will damage their pursuit of the liberal agenda. As I have said so often before, marriage properly so called is a spiritual affair and therefore protected by the First from gov. interference. Larry
[blockquote] Receive our inheritance with gratitude and be radical in our interpretation of it. That suggestion sorted me out in [i]regard to the creeds[/i] and I’ve since found it to be helpful in a variety of arenas. [/blockquote]
That’s the money quote for me, folks.
Perhaps Senior Priest needs to dust off a volume on sacramental theology. A civil marriage contracted between a man and a woman, neither of whom is baptized, is nonetheless a [i]true marriage[/i]. Marriage between a man and a woman, at least one of whom is baptized, is [i]also[/i] a sacrament. But the marriage [i]per se[/i] is in both cases the same.
We can’t even win this argument within the church…the culture is long gone that way…forget, change the subject and move onto something else…like Christian economics…
Today we heard the gospel story about the banquet and those who refused to come and then the man who came but did not have a banquet gown. The issue of marriage is just like this parable: The undressed guest wanted to participate in the banquet on his own terms, without the proper attire. Likewise, those who insist they know that marriage can be between two men or two women are wanting to participate in the sacrament on their terms, wearing their modern interpretations of marriage instead of God’s admonition that “a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Consider where they, like the undressed guest, will likely wind up!
I think I may pass on that job in this diocese that I am being offered.
RE: “all you can say is the same. . . . ”
Well, no. Unlike Scott Richardson apparently, Kevin Babb accepts that God is self-revealed through God’s Word written — Holy Scripture. The closer to Holy Scripture, the closer to God’s self-revelation.
Just another difference in the two gospels at war in the Episcopal organization.
What she said.
Archer_of_the_Forest – please consider prayerfully about that job. Granted Bishop Mathes is an institutional reappraiser who will do anything that the presiding bishop asks of him, and granted that all except for a few of the traditional, orthodox churches in the Diocese of San Diego have left, but you never know what God might have planned! (Although, I have to admit, that if I were being offered a job here, I would think long and hard – anyone traditional will be shut out of the power structure – but if you have a heart for pastoral work, the laity sure can use support!)
From the article, concerning the disputes leading up to the formation of the creeds:
That to my mind says it all.
#7, no it is NOT a true marriage, for a marriage is – is it not? _ a spiritual affair, while a civil union concerns itself with the things which are Caesar’s. Only civil unions can come under the umbrella of civil law. This is stating the obvious. If marriage is a spiritual affair in any real sense, it cannot come within the grasp of civil law. Or are you telling me that marriage is not a spiritual matter, but simply a business matter? Larry
There is no constitutional or legal bar to men or women who are homosexual (or self-identify as homosexual) getting married.
No change in the law is required for homosexual men or women to get married.
Marriage is, and has been for all of our country’s history, the union between one man and one woman. A homosexual man is at liberty to get married to any woman who is willing to marry him. Likewise a homosexual woman is free to marry any man who is willing to marry her (all of this is with the limits of state law – such as you can’t marry your sibling, etc.).
There is not one law for the homosexual man who wants to get married and a different law for the heterosexual man who wants to get married.
What we are looking at here is a radical change in the definition of marriage.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
When you charge a TEC-minded person with “redefining marriage” I suspect the response you’d get is, “yeah, so what, someone defined it , so why can’t we redefine it?” In a June 2004 essay by Msgr. Robert Sokolowski in the magazine “America”, he said,”A very important element in our modern culture is the belief that there are no ends in things; there are only purposes. One of the names for this belief is “mastery of nature.” We think we can redefine all institutions, relationships and things, because whatever seems to be “natural” to them is really only the result of earlier choices that other agents have made.” What we are reaping is a 400 year old philosophical mistake which posited that the final causes of things were unknowable. What C.S. Lewis so clearly showed in the “Abolition of Man” is that our “mastery of nature” will turn out to be nature’s mastery of man.
Larry, marriage is a procreation matter. The end of sexuality is procreation. The end of marriage is procreation. The life-long, faithful bond of husband and wife is the means by which children are conceived and nurtured and, thereby, our society is preserved. Christian theology has added immensely to the depth of our understanding of marriage, but it has not changed the end of marriage. It amounts to fideism to argue that there are two definitions of marriage- a civil defintion and a Christian definition.
#17, yes, marriage is, in a certain sense, “simply a business matter” in that in consists of the contract (promises) made between the man and the woman. Marriage exists in the order of creation, prior to the Church, prior to Israel, and certainly prior to the state. Marriage is also always a spiritual matter since all men are spiritual creatures. On top of that, the marriage of Christians is raised to the dignity of a [i]sacrament[/i].
And #20, of course, you’re right about the ends of marriage. A couple of pagans (or what have you) who get married in a civil ceremony, as long as they intend, if not explicitly, then implicitly, to fulfill the ends of marriage, i.e. procreation and life-long union, have a real marriage. On the other hand, Christians can have a church wedding and yet not have the proper intention; in that case, there is no marriage at all.
Larry (et. al.),
As an Anglican you should know that the question “Is marriage a civil or spiritual matter” is an uncompromising “yes!”
One issue that we seem to have a human beings is that we divide our lives into different realms – secular/sacred, personal/professional, etc. God does not see us that way nor does He see the world that way. God sees us as an integrated whole and we should try to see ourselves and our world in the same manner. This means that we should not differentiate between secular marriage and sacred marriage.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Larry, doesn’t Paul say that a man who lies with a prostitute becomes one flesh with her? Essentially Paul is saying that the physical union of man and woman, which is what marriage is supposed to enshrine, is itself a defining element of what makes a marriage. All civil ceremonies are nothing much else but the recognition of what the couple involved are seeking to do with their bodies.
Kendall,
Thanks for adding your incisive comment on this appalling sermon when you posted it. Alas, this pathetic sermon from the cathedral dean in San Diego is all too typical of what I’ve heard many, many times from various TEC clergy who are totally captive to the relativist ideology dominant in the elite culture of our day. Sadly, they have been completely deceived.
This sermon is so typical of the “working theology” (as Dr. Philip Turner calls it) of the majority of leaders in TEC nowadays, a theology that completely turns traditional theology upside down, and then has the gall to imagine that they are somehow faithfully upholding the legacy that they have “received with gratitutde” and then utterly perverted (sometimes consciously, sometimes unwittingly). The trouble is that when you hear or tell a lie often enough, it starts seeming to be true, and that is what we are dealing with in TEC in our time. The reappraisers have fallen for their own propaganda and come to believe that the lies they tell are actually the truth.
This kind of nonsense, spouted by self-deceived preachers like Scott Richardson+, always reminds me of the fierce rebuke that Isaiah of Jerusalem used to denounce and ridicule his theological opponents many centuries ago,
“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil!
Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” (Isa. 5:20).
It is a fearsome thing to thus distort and falsify the Word of God. I wouldn’t want to be in Dean Richardson’s shoes at the Judgment Day.
David Handy+
“And, frankly, we don’t care as much [about the issues dealt with in the creeds]”
Right! We’re like, dis jst isn’t relevant 2 my lyf ryt now.
Archer – consider what Richardson has said carefully, because theology like this is rampant in San Diego. Mathes fully supports all of the revisionist changes, is actively campaigning against the proposition to outlaw single-sex marriage, and has waged a campaign of harrassment and lawsuits against conservatives – clergy and laity alike. Remaining conservatives keep their heads down and have little or no representation at Diocesan Convention.
I added the link to this sermon to the Stand Firm “Document the Heresy” thread because of what the priest said about how he was taught in seminary to radically reinterpret the Creeds. So when TEC professes to continue to proclaim and believe in the Creeds, such a statement is worthless because they may keep the outward words but give them totally new meaning. At least they admit it.
Archer, how far away are you from retirement and collecting your full 30 years pension from CPF? If three or less, go; or if you want to retire to SD for some reason (such as family already living there). (MANY clergy are in this position, don’t feel alone).
Otherwise, (barring a very strong call from God) stay AWAY, it’s not worth the spiritual and emotional strain!
As others have pointed out, this:
is a woefully inadequate definition of marriage.
My point, and this is in partial response to #2, the state has absolutely no business at all preferring certain sexual couplings over others IF
[Sorry, I accidentally hit the submit button somehow in the above post before I was done]
As others have pointed out, this:
is a woefully inadequate definition of marriage, and ignores the key part of marriage – the children. This definition given by the San Diego dean is a narcisitic, self-centered adult definition of marriage.
My point, and this is in partial response to #2, the state has absolutely no business at all preferring certain sexual couplings over others IF THAT IS ALL IT IS ABOUT. I would argue that the state has absolutely no business at all telling me that I must grant preferential treatment to parties X and Y just because they are having sex together and agreed to sign some papers. Who cares?
The state’s ONLY justification for granting preferential treatment to certain sexual couplings is IF THOSE COUPLINGS GIVE SOME WEIGHTY BENEFIT TO SOCIETY. Traditional marriage is defined as being between one man and one woman because that is the normative way to bring children into the world and raise them. That is why – and ONLY why – the government should be in the marriage business in the first place.
No, marriage is not about procreation and has never been. We have been doing the procreation thing long before the concept of marriage even appeared, not only copulating but bearing children and raising them, presumably successfully (because we are not only around but in rather large numbers.) WE are told it is better to marry than to burn with lust, and that may be, but it certainly does cheapen marriage if this is its intent. But Paul nowhere says that is the ONLY reason.
#24, I only vaguely remember the passage – very vaguely – but Paul does not say that such a union is to be regarded as a marriage.
And my recollection is that this is intended to be transitory, a mere indulgence, and therefore worthy of condemnation. There are after all, as you may or may not know, two distinct kinds of sex: one is getting laid and the other is making love properly so called. This latter is what husbands do with their wives after the hormones of the honeymoon return to normal levels. There are two radically different sexual acts, the latter having a powerful spiritual element. Every time a man truly makes love to his wife, he is renewing his marriage vows. Am I wrong about this?
#23. Of course we divide our lives. We are supposed to. Christ told us to render unto Caesar those thing which are his. Are you telling me to ignore this declaration? American just happen to call this necessary wisdom the First Amendment. A civil union is Caesar’s, like tax money, under the control of civil law. WE divide our lives as our body divides its functions, and for the same reasons.Beg pardon, but I thought this rather obvious.
Are you telling me that marriage is NOT a spiritual affair? If you tell me it is, then it is protected from manipulation by the government. In fact the meaning of marriage DOES need to be clarified, and the civil separated from the spiritual. L
God created man in His image, and took woman out of man. In marriage the two become “one flesh” in God’s Image and His creative intent. That is not just Christian.
Man with man or woman with woman…is not in God’s Image nor His creative intent. It is an abomination. They cannot ever be “one flesh”.