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| Susan Musgrove, centre, with, left, Rev Cecilia Eggleston, Paster of the Metropolitan Community Church in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Rev David Hewlett, Vicar of Corbridge, before the start of the Affirmation service for Susan at St Andrew’s Church, Corbridge, Northumberland. Source: Guardian |
"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." - Galatians 3:28
For years Galatians has been (ab)used by liberals in the Anglican church to justify just about every departure from Scripture starting with the ordination of women. Now that sameness has been exhausted, difference is back on the agenda.
After he was approached by a young transgender person seeking to be “re-baptised” in his new identity, the vicar of Lancaster Priory has proposed a motion to the General Synod to debate plans to introduce a ceremony "akin to a baptism" to mark the new identities of Christians who undergo gender transition.
These are the preparatory words used in the Church of England's Baptism service:
Our Lord Jesus Christ has told us
that to enter the kingdom of heaven
we must be born again of water and the Spirit,
and has given us baptism as the sign and seal of this new birth.
Here we are washed by the Holy Spirit and made clean.
Here we are clothed with Christ,
dying to sin that we may live his risen life.
As children of God, we have a new dignity
and God calls us to fullness of life.
The vicar could have replied that the Sacrament of Holy Baptism cannot be repeated. What does he hope to achieve by embroiling Synod in yet more turmoil?
Oh, what confusion! Many of the concerns posted here stem from deeply held conviction, that's true. Often the sense of emotion overwhelms our call to be reasonable: giving a scriptural and rational answer for our faith. I think this is why so many are guided by some sort of 'inner voice', and by the 'zeitgeist'; and they invoke these as if they should be both satiated and promoted within the Church. So, 'let us reason together' with a bit more light and less heat.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I heartily recommend readers to read: West, C. Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution Paperback – 1 Sep 2009. This is a short, but very important exposition of the beautiful purpose of being embodied as a man or woman. It throws out a great deal of light, rather than darkness. This book should be 'compulsory', and, I do pray that it will help readers to trust that God did know what He was doing when He created male and female, and He still does - if only people would not try to reinvent new species.
In the Scottish Church this was released yesterday (and it seems completely appropriate to this item even though the Scottish Church Synod was the original reason for the statement):
ReplyDelete“[…] Canon 31 at present defends His teaching, His word, His Lordship. The proposed changes make a mockery of all three. It effectively teaches that we can abrogate His authority, change the meaning of His teaching, disregard His word, and so take away His Lordship, because we know better.
This is the catastrophic message that this change would send to the world. It sends the message that, deep down, we see the Jesus of the Gospels as being just a man of his own time who didn’t understand and couldn’t know what we know now. It implicitly denies that our Lord is the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord who speaks to all time. It sends the message that this fallible Jesus is not the unique Son of God, fully God and fully human, but just one of history’s many holy teachers whose words we can pick and choose from as it suits us. This change denies that Christ is Lord, that He means what He says and knows what He means.
The proposed change is uniquely divisive because it crystallizes the moment for a parting of the ways with a stark choice, and a question we must all come to answer. Is He Lord, or is He not?”
As Jesus said: "“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female...."? (Matthew 19 verse 4) which says that He created them and He made them male and female, so mankind didn't create them at all.
St Peter replied to Jesus' question of "Who do you say I am?" by responding that Jesus is the Christ the Lord.
Again I have used editorial license to publish this anonymous comment to illustrate what can be lost by a simple omission. Would commentators please observe the rule that anonymous comments are not published. Many have ended in the bin. The simple addition of a pseudonym is all that is required if the 'Anonymous' option is used in the drop down menu.
DeleteDoes it therefore mean being re ordained within the anglican faith for the second time?
DeleteTerfel Sant
It is really ever so simple : if you chop bits off your body or add something on by vicious hormone therapy,your chromosomes are unchanged and you remain as God made you.
ReplyDeleteThe majority of these operations are for alleged change from a man to a woman. The concerning fact is that requests are increasing in number,and this madness is costing the tax payer millions of NHS funds! Yes, you are paying for this nonsense!
There was a blog discussion recently about 'social care' for the older generation, and the present Government is telling us, this cannot be afforded. There needs to be some sanity built in, not only to the Anglican Church but also importantly into the NHS ,so that we can provide need for those who are only asking for basic nursing and medical care, which,at the end of the day, is this new disease labelled as 'social care'.
Old age, of itself, is not an illness and those people who are deemed to need 'social care' have underlying (maybe chronic) illness.
And,by the way, this is another thing to consider when you vote! It is now a 'right' to choose to change your sex. What about 'the rights' of the aged population needing care of whatever category?
To your (rhetorical) question there is one simple answer: Yes.
ReplyDeleteI think we should be sympathetic to a point, but this is utter and total madness. Margaret Court the tennis player who is an ordanined minister in the Pentecostal Church now is being hounded just because she has a traditional and biblical view of family life. They want to whitewash her out the game's history now. Where are her rights to believe and express her view? We truly are becoming a a 'totalitolerant' dictatorship in the west. If you don't believe the 'orthodoxy' of political correctness you are a pariah. Where is freedom of religion and speech now under the veto of this pseudo-equality agenda? And what for - less than 3% of the population?
ReplyDeleteCome on, enough is enough. No wonder Putin laughs at us and the Islamic world despises us.