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| Marriage! Source:church Times |
Great Britain's fourth largest Christian denomination, the
Methodist Church, has voted to change the definition of marriage, thus permitting same sex 'marriage' along with the Scottish Episcopal Church, United Reformed Church and Quakers.
The Church of England continues its convulsions as trendy Lefties push to follow fashion rather than faith.
The bench of bishops of what is becoming the
LGBT Church in Wales have made no secret of the fact that they support same sex marriage but they rarely make the headlines unless plugging the latest
LGBT news or having to apologise for offences caused as
here and
here.
A
report to be presented to the General Synod of the Church in England says that, by July, approximately 5500 people will have participated in a Living in Life and Faith (LLF) event. Each diocese has at least one LLF Advocate and 9000 people have registered on the LLF learning hub.
Foremost among those losing
the plot on this occasion is the bishop of Liverpool, the
Rt Rev Paul Bayes, who says that "the Church of England should recognise marriage between people of the same sex and allow such ceremonies in church." A move that would break with centuries of Christian teaching.
Bishop Bayes told a conference of the
neo-Marxist organisation ‘
Mosaic Anglicans‘ that he wanted a gender-neutral marriage canon such as they have in the Episcopal Church or in the Scottish Episcopal Church.
As Archbishop Cranmer puts it in his
Blog: "It is not only all gendered language which must be expunged – all mention of male and female, man and woman, husband and wife – but also every mention of children, for in a gender-neutral marriage canon there can be no presumption of or preference for procreation. The nuclear family becomes a partnership of two for mutual society; a contract to keep each other company (though why limit it it just two?): marriage ceases to be about a union to be blessed with babies for the future flourishing of society, because unions in a gender-neutral marriage canon must have a presumption of barrenness in the present. To talk of children is to presume fertility and so to discriminate against the naturally sterile union of man and man and woman and woman."
If that sounds far fetched, the
LGBT charity Stonewall has told organisations to stop using gendered terms like mother and father and to close down single-sex toilets while teachers have been told to drop the terms
'boy' and 'girl' in favour of 'learners'.
Bishop Bayes is not alone in his view of Christian marriage. Commenting on Matt Hancock's resignation as Health Secretary after he breached his own Covid regulations, the bishop of Manchester, the
Rt Rev Dr David Walker dismissed Hancock's 'lies, deception and unfaithfulness' and as 'a bit of a fling', not something to be 'unduly concerned about'.
Bishops Bayes and Walker are just two Anglican bishops who have lost the plot who happen to be in the news.
Why is the Church so woke? asked Giles Fraser following a Savanta ComRes survey which revealed that only 6% of Church of England clergy admitted to voting Tory in the December 2019 General Election, whereas 40% voted Labour.
Writing in Christian Today, former Church of England vicar Julian Mann posed the question Why the left-wing bias of so many Anglican clergy?
"The short answer would seem to be because that is the way of the world. Or at least the world of this country's institutions, from the BBC to the police, to the educational establishment, to the National Trust, since the 1960s.
"Britain's institutions, including the CofE, are now run by men and women who absorbed the left-wing doctrines that were becoming predominant in the universities they went to in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the belief that the State is the most effective agent of human betterment."
"The watering down of the CofE's historic biblical teaching since the 1960s is arguably the reason why it has become so woke.
"Because historic Christianity stresses "the resurrection of the body, And the life everlasting" - as the Apostles' Creed concludes - the kingdom of woke, in which humanity can achieve a rainbow utopia in this world, is fundamentally opposed to the kingdom of God and of his Christ."
Exactly. They have lost the plot.
Postscript [06.07.2021]
Apology from the Bishop of Liverpool.
Today's liberal left-leaning woke Church, in which sin can no longer be referred to as sin and feelings override all else.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion and that of many others who have walked away, both the Church of England and the Church in Wales lost the plot, abandoning sound Theology and Godly Order at least two decades ago, maybe more.
ReplyDeleteThe swamp of filth continues to spread.
Speaking personally, during the first half of the '90s I recognized that Anglicanism no longer had anything to offer for me. I just couldn't take seriously a communion which had effectively reversed so much of its theology and ecclesiology within less than two generations.
DeleteAnglicanism has had nothing to offer anyone for decades. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
Delete'Bishop Bayes told a conference of the neo-Marxist organisation ‘Mosaic Anglicans‘ that he wanted a gender-neutral marriage canon such as they have in the Episcopal Church or in the Scottish Episcopal Church.'
ReplyDeleteI know nothing about 'Mosaic Anglicans' - indeed I'd never heard of the organization before reading about it here just now - but I do know a fair amount about the Soviet bloc, at least in the post-war era, which continued - until the whole ramshackle edifice started to crumble at the end of the '80s - to proclaim its allegiance to Marxist-Leninist principles.
And I know that its ethos was extraordinarily puritanical. Extra-marital heterosexual relationships were viewed as decadent and anti-revolutionary, let alone homosexual relationships. Doubtless they happened, because human nature's very prevalent in any society and there have always been people who have been so inclined. As they doubtless still happen in the Russian Federation today.
But Russia is ruled by 'United Russia' and 'United Russia' is the political faction dominated by Vladimir Putin, whose character and attitudes were forged by his formation as an officer of the Soviet KGB. These days he may have switched his allegiance to simple old-fashioned Russian nationalism and he cultivates a cordial relationship with the Russian Orthodox church; but in the moral and ethical sphere he sticks with the old Communist party's hostility to what they unhesitatingly termed sexual deviance. A stance which the Russian Orthodox bishops tend to share.
Which is why no LGBQT campaigns are countenanced in Russia without a pretty heavy-handed response, and 'equal marriage' isn't even a remote possibility there. The currently prevailing liberal agenda in western societies - endorsed in the UK by the Conservative leadership no less than by those on the political left - has nothing to do with Marxism as a political philosophy (and one which is practically defunct these days anyway) and much more to do with the more general social philosophy summed up long ago by Roy Jenkins - certainly no Marxist - when he opined that 'a permissive society is a civilized society'.
I think that our respected host AB - and perhaps potentially other posters on this blog - tend to conflate their political conservatism with their social and theological conservatism. I'd suggest that in reality the two are fundamentally different things.
It is sexual deviance.
DeleteHomosexuality is an evolutionary dead end, it's that simple.
Without heterosexuals, homosexuals simply would not exist but rather than just getting on with their own lives quietly and discreetly, a significant vocal minority of them insist on trying to force gay "pride" propaganda on everyone else (including the gays who *do* wish to lead their lives quietly and discreetly.
The Stonewall dogma of "outing" people against their wishes is an abomination.
As with many other aspects of human society, when the pendulum is swung too far from the middle ground there will invariably be a backlash.
Empty pews and empty coffers in Churches and Cathedrals is merely one such example.
Deviance it undoubtedly is, if deviance is to be simply defined as divergence from the norm. And for evident reasons it is, as you say, an evolutionary dead end.
DeleteBut I recall, in my days as a university student back in the 1960s, having a cup of coffee with a fellow student on my course who, out of the blue, suddenly told me that he was homosexual - the slick term 'gay' not having been invented back then.
He was wholly unhappy with it, had no idea how to cope with it, and he was wholly aware that it didn't square with his Christian convictions. But - rather like Tourette's Syndrome or type one diabetes - whatever he thought about it rationally, it wouldn't go away. It was just there.
I've never forgotten that conversation, nor the guy who opened up to me - although in the passage of years we never kept touch and I've no idea how he's fared in the fifty-odd years since he and I had that conversation.
But I can't disagree with the overall drift of your post. I just think that the Christian way has to extend compassion and a stab at understanding towards people who find themselves impaled on the grim dilemma of experiencing spontaneous and unsolicited physical attractions which their belief system tells them is morally wrong. That's a pretty hideous predicament in which to find yourself.
He probably died of AIDS.
DeleteRegardless,he might have chosen to live his life quietly and discreetly.
I hope his fate was the latter option.
Love the sinner but despise the sin.
DeleteThus spake my Sunday School teacher.
@ Jeremiah:
DeleteWell, he certainly lived 'quietly and discreetly' for the rest of our time in university. No one else among our circle of friends and acquaintances ever suggested in my hearing that David might be 'one of them', as the phrase was at the time. Although we were in each other's company daily - we were in the same year and on the same course - he and I never spoke of the matter again. I thought it was for him to raise the subject if he wanted to do so, and he never did. But our single conversation left me with the feeling that he wasn't really coping with the conflict between his beliefs and his inclinations.
In our final year he had a breakdown and was briefly admitted to the local psychiatric hospital. I visited him there, but he didn't attribute the onset of his acute depression to anything other than the stress of the increased workload created by changes to our course which the external examiner had demanded when we were half way through it.
That was quite credible: another of our colleagues had had a brief admission to the same hospital for the same reason, and by then I was taking prescribed antidepressants myself. I knew well enough for myself the pressures which he described. But I still wondered whether his internal conflict around sexuality was a further factor behind his hospitalization.
And 'Wise Words Indeed' has a point. Did it not occur to you - after posting if not before - that the opening words of your post might seem to exhibit a certain callous brutality?
Another backlash in Georgia today.
Deletehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-57727887
DeleteThe situation is not helped by the politically correct BBC LGBTQIA+ agenda of always describing the protestors as "far right".
There's every chance they're middle of the road Orthodox Christians who have just had enough.
Bayes is condemned by his own church's Book of Homilies; he's not being modern just evil
ReplyDeleteThis vice is so abundantly common and has grown to such a height that among many it is counted no sin at all, but rather a pastime, a dalliance, and but a touch of youth — not rebuked but winked at, not punished but laughed at.
The permissive woke cancel-culture luvvies selectively quote "love thy neighbour as thyself" and "your sins are forgiven" whilst very conveniently ignoring "go and sin no more".
ReplyDeletePP. Such a difficult debate when the subject has so many tangled threads! However, what is puzzling is that unless I am missing something in the Gospel, we do not know what Jesus said on the subject, do we?
ReplyDeleteTaking the death of Jesus as the atonement for our sins, using the premise that He came to fulfil the law, not abolish the law (Matt 5). In Romans 10 Paul tells us "Christ is the end of the law". But, in Hebrews we are taught two key points: His sacrifice ended the blood sacrifices for atonement that redemption was through His blood "at-one-ment" with Him. The priesthood between God and man ceased at this point as Christ became "the way" to redemption. The physical need for a geographical place, temple or centre to be "the tent" or "temple" as all became centred in Christ ( John 4).
So the bottom line, is surely faith grounded in the love of God through the redemptive work of Christ.
The conscious of every LGBT+ person as each heterosexual, is not under law but under grace.
Too often we put judgement before love, acceptance, turning a blind eye, condoning or derision becomes our mode operandi.
When we consider the scholarly work of biblical theologians who are now more abled to give us a clearly picture of the Hebrew and Greek language, the acceptance of poorly translated, contextualised and biased interpretation of Levitical law and other key scripture in the sexuality debate, we become richer in our understanding.
The final point, what I personally see as a conundrum for many who are both for and against LGBT+ Church engagement, is the clear fact the God does wondrous work, through ordained and lay gay people.
The key to all the whole debate has to surely be to seek first the Kingdom through the love of Christ (John 3:16, Romans 8. 28-39)
Reads like Scriptural, moral and theological revisionism.
DeleteRob
Quoting Romans 8 , but ignoring Romans 1:26-27. Also 1 Corinthians 6 is quite clear in who will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Delete"God does wondrous work, through ordained and lay gay people" - ok give me an example please
Thanks
Postie
PP, you assert that we do not know what Jesus thought on the issue. The answer is "Yes, we do know." In the issue of marriage, Jesus responded to the Pharisees, "Have you never read that Creator from the beginning made them male and female? For this reason, a man leaves his father and his mother and is joined to his wife (The Greek word Gunaika means both "woman" and "wife"), and the two shall become one flesh. It follows that they are no longer two individuals, they are one flesh. Those whom God has joined together, humanity must not separate." Jesus therefore, asserts the direct will of God in creation. The bishops and their doctrinal commissions can revise the Law of God as much as they want, Jesus teaching is clear. It is Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.
DeleteSeymour
PP. Several notable and leading Anglicans from all sphere of the Church, are represented in the LGBT+ community. In other denominations acceptance is more advanced or, beyond comprehension in others.
DeleteThe African Church's views are often cited as a difficulty pill to swallow, but, a recent Stonewall LGBT study reveals a changing dynamic, small as it is, but it's growing.(See: Christian Role Models Stonewall).
To name any individual as suggested would be absolutely wrong, as permission to cite them has not been given, to do so would infringe privacy.
However if we are dealing with historical fact of acceptance and notable citation, and examples. I can recommend the scholarly work John Boswell: "Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality" and "Same Sex Union in Pre-modern Europe". Who is certainly not short in his evidence! There are also biographies of clergy of all denominations widely available, citing experience of both the vitriolic castigation by some churches and the fully embracing love and pastoral care in others. Like: "A Life of Unlearning" Anthony Venn- Brown. "Not a Sin or, a Sickness" Troy Perry. On the thorny subject of the female gender in Holy Orders whatever the sexuality or choice of pronoun, the revised edition of Canterbury Press' "Apostolic Women, Apostolic Authority" is worth a read.
I do not seek to offend simply to add a little to this engaging blog.
PP, you are obviously well read on the subject. The simple fact however, is that those of us who have accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour could not give a fig what any scholar thinks. It is not their Church. You are merely looking for a teacher who will tickle your itching ears. St Paul predicted it many years ago. Fundamental to New Testament thinking is the teaching that the Church is the body of Christ. He redeemed it with his own blood, and it is called to be holy - a word which means "being different" to the way in which the world behaves. What Stonewall wants, and the Methodist Church and the Welsh bishops are acquiescing to, is that the Church should become like any other secular organization. Can I suggest that if you want a secular organization, then you and the bishops can go and join the Humanist Society. I am sure that your secular opinions will be greeted only too happily. As far as I am concerned, the Humanist Society is only too welcome to the rag-bag of bishops here in Wales.
DeleteWhat I can assure you is this: the Welsh bishops will not give up their £47,000 a year jobs and all the perks that go with it. Rather they are hell bent on building their own secular organization whilst removing Christ and his teaching completely from the Church in Wales.
GB is being brought to a decisive moment in September. If its members go where the bishops want them to go, then my family will walk away from the Church in Wales, and I know that we are not alone. I suspect that this will be repeated across Wales, which will bring the Church to a funding crisis. Just think of it. Clergy numbers will have to be cut. Bigger misery areas as a result. The dioceses will still not be able to pay their way. Parish shares will have to be increased and the Parishes will constantly be in default - all because the Church in Wales could not be loyal to the Lord. I wonder whether Stonewall and all your scholarly authors will step in to make up the shortfall. No doubt, when that day comes, the six mitre-wearing idiots will be on sick leave because none of them would want to admit that they have sinned against the Lord. After all, they have removed the concept of sin and repentance from Wales.
I will only advise you, PP, to take care for your soul.
Seymour
Please remind me PP.
DeleteWhich of your notable and leading Anglicans was called Joshua and was crucified for us?
So those who think differently to yourself have not accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour? As someone, brought up in the Church of England, who made a conscious decision to commit my life to Christ at the age of 12, who has served God in West Africa for 5 years and as a Baptist minister for well over 30 years, seeking to teach people "the whole counsel of God", I find that statement simply staggering.
DeleteHow lucky you are, Baptist Trainfan, to know the whole counsel of God - that privilege wasn't even granted to Job, whom God considered righteous! Seymour
DeleteDon't be silly: of course I don't know the whole counsel of God. In fact none of us does - not me, not you, not the Pope, not the Church Fathers, nor even St. Paul who I was quoting.
DeleteBut, hopefully with the help of the Holy Spirit, I do seek to discern as much of it as I can and teach it responsibly - just as any Minister of the Gospel would do.
Baptist Trainfan, if you don't know the whole counsel of God, how could you have spent the last 30+ years trying to teach it to people? That was demonstrably a lie. Seymour
DeleteCompetent scholars with no axe to grind have considerable reservations about Boswell's work. The Syriac and Patristic scholar Robin Darling Young of the Catholic University of America (who happens herself to have engaged in the rite of adelphopoiia in the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem) and Claudia Rapp of the University of Vienna (writing in English) have both indicated that adelphopoiia and marriage are different things.
DeleteOld Nick
You do make me laugh boys.
DeleteIt's almost as if the more obscure the author and their teaching, the better it is.
Your goals are to appear to be profound and well read.
When will the Church realise we are commanded to love one another, not promote LGBT which serves only to set apart and make different? Instead of the Rainbow flag, how about the flags of Yemen, Somalia, etc where children are dying like flies. Why is the Church on fire for spurious Gay rights while neglecting these tragedies?
ReplyDeleteLW
Woke anarchy now on the rampage in Canada.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57693683
"Statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II torn down in Canada"
Disgraceful. Where were the RCMP?
DeleteDid they attend the same politically correct Police college as Avon & Somerset Police?
A query on the main topic. Does the C in W now allow its priests to enter same sex marriages? One of our bishopettes has licensed a priest who writes and talks openly about his husband!
ReplyDeletePuzzled
The Bishop of St Davids views, and the anti-Tory propaganda, have now been aired in a question raised in Parliament.
ReplyDeleteRob
PP. I'm a little perplexed! I cannot see how the name Joshua, is used to displace Jesus. I would never by so disrespectful.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with Baptists comments. We can try our best to preach and teach according to the leading of the Spirit. Through His decernment we do our best as fallible people of God. Some of us ministers, communicants; but, we are all part of the One Body of Christ.
The fact that the Anglican Church in Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England, now ordain to the three Holy Orders, those persons across the spectrum of LGBT+ who are in same-sex civil partnerships. Which does not detract the importance of the formation process.
Some will alway not accept it, others embrace it. But, at least we are not engaged in promoting Levitical law, or are we? If so, why are we not following it to the letter?
Indeed their are those who disagree with Boswell and they are notable. But, their are also those who have accept and add to his work.
LGBT+ will always cause some controversy, but so will, heterosexual divorce, infidelity and other divisiveness.
This is why the richness of the human condition, gender and sexuality will always fuel debate.
There was no-one called Jesus.
DeleteThat name is a corruption of Yeshua or Yehoshua, i.e., Joshua in modern English.
IHS is the shorthand for the same thing.
If you're so ignorant of the facts then I sincerely hope you aren't teaching anyone anything.
You have it back to front PP.
DeleteThe name Jesus replaced Yeshua.
A common misunderstanding.
It's not too complicated: Ἰησοῦς is simply an effort to render into Greek the Aramaic name יֵשׁוּעַ - Y'shua
DeleteWhich is a shortened form of יְהוֹשֻׁעַ
The corruption of the name arose because the Jews wrote only consonants and no vowels.
DeleteFor example, in English, Levi would be written as Lv.
Context and local knowledge are everything and a poor translator might well refer to me as Love, Lover, Live or Liver rather than Levi.
The surprise is that like PP, so many appear to be so ignorant of even the basics concerning the man they claim to revere as their Saviour.
@ Levi Strauss:
DeleteWhich explains why the Masoretic scholars put little code symbols under the consonants, to show what the actual correct proninciation was for those who no longer knew, after ancient Hebrew had fallen out of common use.
After ancient Hebrew (or Aramaic, the language spoken by Yeshua) fell out of common use, who knows what the correct pronunciation really was?
DeleteMy Hebrew is rusty, but checking my lexicon and grammar, Levi is actually לוי, (lamedh-waw-yodh) where yodh though a consonant pronounced y can also have the vowel sound i. The Massoretic scholars added a sere under the lamedh to indicate it was followed by an e sound and a hireq under the waw to stress that the yodh which followed it made an i sound rather than a y. Entertaining though Levi Strauss’ permutations are, I’m afraid the only lamedh-waw-yodh combination in Hebrew is Levi (which means ‘joined’), with no other words formed by those three letters.
DeleteMarvellous.
DeleteSo please now explain to PP and me how Yeshua was corrupted to Jesus.
Well explained, Hebrew revisited, and spot on. Seymour
Delete@ Levi Strauss:
DeleteLike professorial scholarly types in every age, I imagine they saw it as their business to know and to opine.
And I can't imagine that it was a wholly fruitless task, since I read recently that Aramaic is still the daily spoken language in certain rural parts of Syria - as you might not find entirely surprising in what was once ancient Aram!
While modern Aramaic might well be as different from ancient Aramaic as the English dialects of Mercia and Wessex are from modern English.there are and always have been specialists in the study of such things. And doubtless the Aramaic of the 7th - 10th centuries CE - the era of the Masoretic scholars - was probably closer to the spoken 1st century language than is the case today.
And my own university offered the study of Aramaic as a special topic option on the theology degree course, which indicates that there must be something solid to study!
So we're all agreed that there never existed any biblical figure called Jesus but his realname in fact was Joshua, Yeshua or Yehoshua?
DeleteExcellent.
Progress indeed!
CE?
DeleteHow politically correct.
What happened to Anno Domini?
@ 1662:
DeleteIf that's directed at me,I can't work out the point that you want to make. Care to elucidate?
@ Gabriel:
Personally I'm quite happy with 'AD'. But as that seems to have gone out of fashion I just went with the flow. There are some battles which simply aren't worth the trouble, and I reckon that's one of them.
One would think all Christians would consider the replacement of "Anno Domini" with "Common Era" a battle worth fighting.
DeleteYou won't see the Jews or Muslims abandoning their respective year numbering conventions in such a supine manner.
One also understands the ancient Hebrew meaning of Yeshua/Joshua to be "God is our saviour".
Out of curiosity does anyone know the ancient Hebrew meaning of "Jesus"?
PP. Dear me, how unexpected and unfounded.
ReplyDeleteMost certainly I know the context of the textual interpretation of scripture. But for the average understanding to many Christians is a simple one - to know Jesus as a personal Saviour.
I am certainly not in your words "ignorant" of the Christological debate. I would never assume such an opinion towards a fellow Christian. Is their any need to be so caustic?
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
DeletePP. "Dolt" As if, the level of your insults know no bounds.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Delete'Look how these Christians love one another!' - The level of vitriol has risen to new heights of acrimony recently ... I'm appalled and ashamed at how low some of my supposed fellow-Christians can sink (NotGoneYet)
ReplyDeletePP. @ AB & Co. I appreciate the comments and concerns noted. If in anyway I offended anyone, please accept my sincerity in saying apologies. The angst did get heavy on a subject but that was no reason to engage division.
ReplyDelete