Episcopal church without gay marriage

Goodness, King was a liberal theologian if ever there was one. His citation of Aquinas does not mean that he was committed to a Thomistic view of natural law. He cited Buber and Tillich in the same letter. King was making a rhetorical and literary argument, not a strictly philosophical one. We've covered Nuremburg before. Nothing like it had ever been done before, it was widely criticized by legal theorists at the time, and it is highly unlikely that we will have anything quite like it again. I find your reliance on these two examples - both of which are from the mid-20th century - quite puzzling.

Yes, I read and study philosophy for myself, avidly. I have read all the works of Plato, Philo, much of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, some of Spinoza, most of Kant, individual German Idealist works, Mill, Berlin, Keynes, and Rawls, for starters. My three main focuses are English empiricism, German Idealism, and modern constitutional theory, but I have also spent a substantial amount of time studying both Aquinas and Islamic philosophy as well. I have a deep and abiding love of the study of the great thinkers.

Before any further responses descend into even greater hysterics, it needs to be pointed out that the only 2 propositions I have been defending here are:
1. That the Church's policy regarding who may participate in its marriage rites, is a matter of discipline rather than doctrine, and,
2. That as a matter of discipline, the Church has the authority to make policies it determines are pastorally necessary to achieve its evangelistic mission and goals.
These are hardly radical notions. By temperament and conviction, I am and strive to be about as "middle of the road" as I can be. I think I've achieved that here.

 

I think Greek-style philosophy unanchored to Christian truth is corrosive rather than enlightening. Hegel and Marx did more damage to Christianity in Europe than any invading army. Paul had the sense of it: "See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ." (Col. 2:8).

 

I'm not sure what this even means. Truth is truth no matter who utters it. The discipline of philosophy is one of critical thinking, i.e., being deliberately exposed to various arguments for and against various propositions, and learning how to evaluate them on their merits. People who study philosophy don't relinquish their free will in the process. One isn't going to turn against Christianity just by reading Hegel and Marx. And the Church's tradition of theology did not follow St. Paul's advice quite so rigidly or literally: it's hard to imagine what the writings of, say Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine, Peter Lombard, Aquinas, Scotus, or many other eminent theologians of the Church might have looked like without the early and heavy dependence on concepts and arguments elucidated by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Philo, and some of the Middle Platonists.

 

Surely it assumes that in effect his soul would be saved, because he had already received punishment for his sin.
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Absolutely, I concur. That's exactly what he's saying. It just doesn't line up with historic sacramental practice. That's the part I find interesting.

This is why some commentators have pointed out that one cannot simply take the 'vice lists' in Paul at face value and assume that they indicate how he would handle those situations pastorally. In this very example, in v. 5:5 he says the soul of a person excommunicated will nonetheless "be saved in the day of the Lord", yet a few verses later (6:10), he says the same category of persons "will [not] inherit the kingdom of God".

 

Read Paul's speech on the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-34). We assume that you know what the truth is when we hear it, but we are quite often wrong. We are easily beguiled by pretty lies; this is why Satan rarely needs to exert himself. We willingly pour lies into our brains. Somehow we manage to convince ourselves that two men can be "married"; that a woman can really be a man or vice versa, simply by declaring it to be so; that the murder of infants in the womb is "health care".

When we read the Bible, it comes from God so we know it's true. We presuppose it is true, because otherwise we would not be Christians.

The Gnostics fell down the relativist hole by imbibing too deeply of Platonism, to the point that they came to denounce materiality itself as evil. Yet Jesus was bodily raised, and so will we be. Flesh and spirit glorified and eternal, just as in our Lord Jesus. Gnosticism should stand as a warning to Christians of the dangers of letting "philosophy" guide Christian belief rather than the other way around.

When we read human philosophy unanchored in the word of God, "truth" becomes something fluid, internal, temporal, relative. In other words, philosophical "truth" without God is nothing -- it's wind, a rattling of dead leaves. "Truth" that is purely internal is a paradoxical concept, which is why the phrase "my truth" is ridiculous.

 

I agree. I don't use that phrase, either.

But the question "what is truth" is a philosophical one; one is engaging in philosophy even when one is arguing against it. It's unavoidable. The discipline is itself merely the application of laws of thought that are inherent in human nature. I've never paid any attention to fundamentalist attitudes about it, and have derived much satisfaction from learning the great thinkers. It's exercise for the mind. Those who eschew it are depriving themselves of one of life's greatest joys. It's analogous to refusing to listen to Beethoven or Mozart because the bulk of their music wasn't sacred.

 

Take it from someone who has read philosophy for more than 30 years: a man with no book but the Bible is better off than a man with a million books and no Bible. If I read only the Bible, and proclaim Christ as my savior, I gain eternal life in Christ; if I read all the famous Greek and Roman philosophers, and their more modern German counterparts, but do not read the Bible, I gain nothing at all because my spirit remains dead and I will not enter the Kingdom of God.

I'm not saying that one shouldn't read the great thinkers (though I do wish people would do so with the same skepticism they often bring to the Bible). I'm saying that for Christians the Bible should be at the center of all of it, the hub of the wheel. The Bible should be the lens through which you read every other book, just as the New Testament is the lens through which you read the Old. The Bible is the very Word of God himself. It is the voice of our Creator, our Redeemer, our Savior, our Judge. The Bible is the foundation upon which the entire Christian house is built.

 

I agree with this part. And I wouldn't suspect many modern philosophers approach the works of any one thinker expecting to find in his or her writings the answers to all possible questions one could ask about the nature of knowledge or morality. But the idea of humanity being bereft of those works, just like the idea of being forever deprived of the music of Bach or Tchaikovsky, or the art of Michelangelo or Rembrandt, is a deeply sad one. I've never been sympathetic to those - and I'm not saying you're one of them - who would frame the matter as an either/or proposition.

 

When one considers that Church discipline is an outflow from Christian doctrine, it is clear that a change in discipline is generally reflective of a change/perversion of doctrine. That's why those who oppose the innovation of women's ordination (a church discipline) also see WO as representative of a change in doctrine (created order, scriptural distinctions between males and females, Christ as the head of man and man as the head of women, etc).

The same could be said about homosexual mirage.

 

Well, that depends on what one means by the word "outflow". There is a real distinction doctrine and discipline, corresponding to the difference between belief and practice (the former is in the mind, and the latter objectively takes place in the world). If the intent of the word "outflow" is to collapse that distinction anyway, then the statement is simply incorrect. Otherwise, empirically, matters of discipline, like fasting rules, have changed many times throughout history without this being taken to mean that a repudiation of defined doctrine had taken place. It's not at all clear that the link between the two is as tight as some suppose. Be that as it may, the distinction remains, and to alter a matter of discipline is not of itself tantamount to 'heresy', and even if it were, that's not a determination for laymen to make.

 

I'm afraid you won't get a reply from Tiffy he has been banned for 6 months for reasons that are unclear to me.

 

The Devil tries to persecute the humble servants of the Lord anywhere they go, including on their church. Count with my prays, brother.

 

We haven’t rewritten our Prayer Book, just FYI. It’s the same one we’ve been using for the last four decades, and further revision at this point is unlikely.