Archbishop of Canterbury Shuts the Door of the Cathedral to Orthodox Anglicans

So you believe and so you say, but the Bible itself does not claim quite what you claim for it. It simply says in toto, it is inspired by God.

It does not claim to be faultlessly inerrant. It might however claim to be the truth.
* And he said, "O man greatly beloved, fear not, peace be with you; be strong and of good courage." And when he spoke to me, I was strengthened and said, "Let my lord speak, for you have strengthened me." Then he said, "Do you know why I have come to you? But now I will return to fight against the prince of Persia; and when I am through with him, lo, the prince of Greece will come. But I will tell you what is inscribed in the book of truth: there is none who contends by my side against these except Michael, your prince. * Dan/10:19-21
Though it is unlikely that this reference is actually to The Bible per se but to some other 'book', one or more of which may get a mention in the book of Revelation.

I will concede to your assertion though that sin can abide in the heart BEFORE it becomes obvious to the outside world.
* But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption; And shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day time. Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you; Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children: Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness; * 2 Pet.2:12-15. But even here it is implied that secret sins of the heart will inevitably spring forth in the life of those who constantly 'entertain' them.

Given that fact though I am surprised at the degree of condemnation meted out to same sex civil partnership couples while more than half your nation are happy to wink the eye and overlook the well publicised and boasted sexual antics of Donald Trump, and accept his LEADERSHIP, simply it would seem because he is a 'Hard Line' populist Republican and not an Unpopular 'Liberal', Democrat and regardless of his well documented and self congratulated, sexual immorality.
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Jesus certainly seems to think it is. Whenever he prefixes one of his teachings with "It is written", he is referring to Scripture. There are many cases where he explicitly affirms Scripture as reliable and true.

Matt. 5:17-18: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished."

Jesus said Scripture cannot be broken. See John 10:34-38: "Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father."

Jesus based his entire ministry on quotations from Scripture (our Old Testament). He quotes from it constantly. He preaches it as absolute truth given by the Father to human beings. If we confess Jesus as Lord, we must adhere to Jesus' own view of Scripture as God's own Divine Word.

Psalm 12:6: "The words of the Lord are pure words,
like silver refined in a furnace on the ground,
purified seven times."

Article VI of the Anglican 39 Articles affirms this view: "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation."

 

I was talking with a friend a while back about the recent Lambeth conference, and my friend asked me whether I thought Justin Welby had been turned somehow in office to a more liberal direction than the one he was originally more inclined to follow. I answered in the negative; I think Welby is very much the same person he's always been. Give him this much -- he's never been untruthful about his own convictions, though you have to parse his public speeches rather carefully (since he is a politician as much as a Bishop of the Church). I accuse him of many things, but not subterfuge.

If the question is "When did he become this guy?" the answer is "He always was this guy."

 

I find your fixation on the foibles of the former President to be weird, frankly. I'm not aware that I or anybody else holds him up as an exemplar, so why the constant references to him? You're certainly free to dislike him; many do. But I'll be bound that his foibles are much less grievous than many other politicians in the US or UK I can name off the top of my head -- what makes Trump so especially heinous to you?

This is a rhetorical question, by the way; we all know the answer already. I just mention it because it's an example of a straw man argument. You are refuting a point that absolutely nobody is making.

When I use the word "liberal", I explicitly do not mean liberal in the political sense, but in the religious and theological sense (as those following in the tradition of Rosseau, Schleirmacher, etc.). I use "liberal" in preference to the word "heterodox", though I do in fact think that "heterodox" is a more accurate term for modern left/liberal Christian theology -- as it is properly categorized by its modernist refutation or opposition to established orthodoxy. But "liberal" is in common use in its theological sense in the literature, so that's the sense in which I use it.

 

This is tangential to the thread topic, but I'd like to post it anyway. Lest anyone doubt that homosexual behavior is contrary to God's will and to the revelation He has given us in His written word:

Eph 5:22-32 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (ESV)

A man-woman marriage touches upon a "profound mystery," because the relationship reflects that which exists between Christ (a man's man!) and the church (which is always portrayed as a feminine figure in the Bible, similar to the way Israel was spoken of by God (through His prophets) in the feminine sense (in some passages as a virgin, in others as a prostitute). A man-man or a woman-woman union may reasonably be seen by the secular world as worthy of legal recognition and privileges, but for the church it can only be seen as a perversion of truth and a violation against God's holy will.

When a man enters a binding relationship with another man, that relationship reflects the perversion of truth. That alone is reason enough why he should not be appointed to a leadership role in a church/Christian context.

 

There is some ambiguity there though (if you really WANT to see it, as many perpetual virginity proponents obviously do). If they take the statement "had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son;" to refer specifically to only the time period between the conception and birth of Mary's first son, Jesus. Their assumtion then is that Mary had no more sons or daughters but adopted children, not produced by sexual intercourse, therefore remaining a perpetual virgin.

Though this reasoning and interpretation is pretty silly, the church has historically, and still does, nevertheless believe pretty silly things in fairly large numbers and has justified and dogmatised them by imaginative interpretations of scripture or even statements of pontifical wishful thinking.
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I think that's a fair point. The "until" is present for a reason. Many translations have the same implication: the period up until the birth of Jesus seems to be highlighted, which implies a different situation after the birth of Jesus. If the writer believed that the forbearance persisted throughout the marriage, it would have been appropriate to end with, "he knew here not" (period).

I also wonder whether tradition at the time called for a consummation to take place, else the marriage was not really completed; this has been a feature of marital tradition in some societies through history.

 

I grant that is what the text appears to be saying, but that is not the way the Church Fathers and subsequent theologians - whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox - prior to the 17th century, interpreted it.

 

There were some early churchmen whose writings suggested that Mary did not remain a virgin after Jesus' birth. Victorinus and Tertullian were two such. It is believed that Helvidius (a contemporary of Jerome) relied on their writings for his own letter on the subject, to which Jerome vigorously objected.

That word "till" (heos in Greek) is the same one used in passages like the following:
Act 13:20 And after that he gave unto them judges about the space of four hundred and fifty years, until Samuel the prophet.
John 13:38 Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied me thrice.
1Cor 16:8 But I will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost.

I like what Clarke wrote in his commentary about this issue:

"The virginity of Mary, previously to the birth of Christ, is an article of the utmost consequence to the Christian system; and therefore it is an article of faith: her perpetual virginity is of no consequence; and the learned labor spent to prove it has produced a mere castle in the air. The thing is possible; but it never has been, and never can be proved."​

Or at least Mary's alleged 'perpetual virginity' should be of no consequence, because our faith and our redemption are in Jesus Christ (not Mary).

 

Below is what Aquinas had to say on the subject. I don’t think any of his arguments here are terribly convincing, but Aquinas’ view was anything but idiosyncratic or novel at the time. Eastern Christians made the exact same arguments.

It is written (Ezekiel 44:2): "This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall pass through it; because the Lord the Godof Israel hath entered in by it." Expounding these words, Augustine says in a sermon (De Annunt. Dom. iii): "What means this closed gate in the House of the Lord, except that Mary is to be ever inviolate? What does it mean that 'no man shall pass through it,' save that Joseph shall not know her? And what is this—'The Lord alone enters in and goeth out by it'—except that the Holy Ghost shall impregnate her, and that the Lord of angels shall be born of her? And what means this—'it shall be shut for evermore'—but that Mary is a virgin before His Birth, a virgin in His Birth, and a virgin after His Birth?"

I answer that, Without any hesitation we must abhor the error of Helvidius, who dared to assert that Christ's Mother, after His Birth, was carnally knownby Joseph, and bore other children. For, in the first place, this is derogatory to Christ's perfection: for as He is in His Godhead the Only-Begotten of the Father, being thus His Son in every respect perfect, so it was becoming that He should be the Only-begotten son of His Mother, as being her perfect offspring.

Secondly, this error is an insult to the Holy Ghost, whose "shrine" was the virginal womb ["Sacrarium Spiritus Sancti" (Office of B. M. V., Ant. ad Benedictus, T. P.), wherein He had formed the flesh of Christ: wherefore it was unbecoming that it should be desecrated by intercourse with man.

Thirdly, this is derogatory to the dignity and holinessof God's Mother: for thus she would seem to be most ungrateful, were she not content with such a Son; and were she, of her own accord, by carnal intercourse to forfeit that virginity which had been miraculously preserved in her.

Fourthly, it would be tantamount to an imputation of extreme presumption in Joseph, to assume that he attempted to violate her whom by the angel'srevelation he knew to have conceived by the Holy Ghost.

We must therefore simply assert that the Mother of God, as she was a virgin in conceiving Him and a virgin in giving Him birth, did she remain a virginever afterwards.
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What a masterful application of understatement.
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Sometimes I wonder why my rector has such a high opinion of Augustine's writings. They seem rather "hit or miss" in my view.

 

No human being knows everything, and we all make mistakes.

 

For those who have asked, the queen, now the King, does not appoint C of E bishops and cathedral deans. I believe a committee called the Crown Nominations Commission draws up a short list of two. These recommendations are given to the prime minister who selects one. A former prime minister, Gordon Brown, determined that whenever the Crown Nominations Commission made recommendations he would always chose the one listed first. I believe all subsequent prime ministers have followed this example. The prime minister then recommends the appointment of this individual to the sovereign who follows the prime minister's advice. Whether the sovereign likes or dislikes the individual chosen she (now he) will follow what their prime minister advises. To do otherwise would go against the very principles of a constitutional monarchy.

 

Interesting way to phrase it. Almost sounds like a sex change operation!