Episcopal church without gay marriage

There are two kinds of authority here, and they should not be conflated:

One is the legislative authority; what was passed is now binding.

Another is divine authority, as revealed in the the Holy Scriptures. (Which incorporates consulting the church fathers, archeology, the anglican divines, etc.)

By legislative authority, you are in the right. But law may itself be false, and thus actually no law at all. Law does not authenticate itself, and indeed submits to divine authority. That’s exactly what the Reformation was: when the Roman church broke divine authority, its legislative authority had to be broken. By your logic, you would still be defending indulgences.

Mere law is not enough, you need the divine authority on your side. And that’s why we’re citing the apostolic witness, and especially the Anglican tradition which should be extra authoritative among Anglicans.

 

This is close to the mark. I do not think I would be defending indulgences, but I would have been defending the Church’s right to dispense them. I think the colonists were wrong to revolt against the British, and would like to think I would have been a Loyalist during the War of Independence, as Samuel Seabury was. I would absolutely have sided with the Union during the Civil War, for every imaginable reason, despite being a Southerner. So, yes, your analysis of my position is basically correct. I am a Protestant who defends the Papacy. I’m a descendant of colonists, who thinks King George was right. I’m a Southerner, who reveres Lincoln and his legacy. I am temperamentally a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, yet sympathetic to liberals and progressives. Yet I was born when and where I was, not having to make those choices. All I had to do was to decide: where will I grow best as an orthodox Christian? Where I landed was the Episcopal Church. That is where I am supposed to be. That is where God wants me to be. It may seem paradoxical to some, but to me, it makes a certain kind of sense.

 

But is there any teaching involved in these 'blessing' cermonies? I don't know that there is.

The issue seems to me to hinge about what is meant by the word 'marriage'. 'Marriage' now implies a monogamous relationship regarding affection. (An ideal that is frequently violated also by heterosexual Christian couples incidentally, even after making vows before God they they 'will keep themselves only unto each other'. So 'marriage blessings' don't always seem to 'work', even for heterosexuals). 'Marriages' according to scripture, have not always been monogamous though.

If the church refused to adopt the modern definition of the word, would that satisfy the gainsayers? I think not, because their objections are based upon what they assume will go on in the bedchamber, (both for heterosexual and homosexual relationships), not actually on the use of the word 'marriage'.

I can't see any reason the church should be vilified for refusing to use the word 'marriage' though. If the relationship were to be called an 'affiliation', an 'association', a 'partnership', that would put clear blue water between it and 'marriage' which by definition has always been between a man and a woman or a man and women, (also but rarely, between a woman and men, but that was only because of social convention and imposed male supremacy).

But you see there are even different forms of 'relationship' in 'marriages' by definition. It is within Christian marriage that it is defined as a union between one man and one woman. In some other cultures, even Biblical ones, different numbers of women and even different numbers of men might be involved. So this is a more complicated issue than it at first appears. Solomon had 700 wives, who were princesses, and 300 concubines. Rehoboam had eighteen wives and sixty concubines, and fathered twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters. Were those marriages 'Biblical' marriages or not? They must have fitted the Biblical definition of 'marriage' at the time, otherwise Solomon and Rehoboam wouldn't have been 'married', and that would never have done, would it.

'Marriages', 'affiliations', 'associations', 'partnerships', whether single or dual sex always have all fallen short of God's ideal standards for relationship. Sin has always seen to that. So I don't see the deficiencies of single sex 'relationships' being much different in extent, than the deficiencies in every heterosexual 'relationship'. Those deficiencies from God's standards are the reasons Christ died to expiate for all, regardless of our sexual proclivities.
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As an ideal this works OK but in my 75 years on earth I've lost count of the number of marriages that by no means truly reflect this ideal.

Just as God being the image of a heavenly 'Father' is besmirched for many unfortunate believers by having grown up with an actual Father who was a totally illegitimate, unloving anus of a man. I thank God that my own father was a really good guy, who gave me a truer image of what God might be really like.

Some 'marriages', we must admit, were more likely made in hell than in heaven, and those are certainly no patern for teaching us anything whatever about "the communion between Christ, the heavenly bridegroom, and the Church, his holy bride".
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Sure I do. I also know many adulterers, gluttons, fornicators, and drunkards. All of them are sinners (as am I, and so are we all), and their behavior -- if they do not repent -- will exclude these people from God's kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9-10). Further, sanctioning sin in others is sin in itself (Rom 1:18-32). The Bible could not possibly be more clear on this point. One who has died to sin cannot continue to live in sin (Rom. 6:2).

This is what I mean by the modern habit of subordinating the authority of Scripture to the authority of men. We do not have the authority to overturn Scripture -- not us individually, not the church, not a conclave or council or synod. Absolutely no one, anywhere, at any time may overturn Scripture as the bedrock of Christian authority. It is God's very word written. We have no other source of God's teaching now that Christ has come and ascended back to Heaven -- the Apostles have passed away and the prophets have fallen silent. Scripture is God's final message to us until Christ returns.

And before you begin to complain that understanding Scripture is a matter of interpretation, I'm saying that the Bible speaks plainly about sin of this kind. It's not as if homosexuality did not exist in Biblical times, or gluttony, or drunkenness, or other forms of carnal sin. Human nature is eternal. This insistence that modern homosexual behavior is somehow categorically different from ancient practice is ridiculous. The Bible bans homosexual behavior in plenary fashion. There is no allowance made for how a person feels about it, or how much or how little the surrounding culture advocates for it. The only acceptable expression of human sexuality in the Christian faith is between a married male and female. That's it.

EDIT: This is also why I say that condoning homosexual behavior is by no means an act of Christian love and charity. It is cruelty, for it deludes the offender into thinking their behavior is just before God, and puts them in danger of everlasting damnation. A Christian act of love is to convince them to repent of their sin, to reform themselves in the Christian mold, so that they may live eternally as an adopted child of God (1 Cor. 6:11).

 

Matt. 19:9 is the only possible response to this. Christ himself forbids divorce except in the case of sexual immorality. I don't recall that Jesus added any codicils or exceptions to that commandment. The modern Christian church's embrace of easy divorce is a tragedy. Eph. 5:32 is certainly an idealized portrait of a Christian marriage, but that's the point: it is something that married Christians should aspire to.

 

It's important to note that the Bible, even in the Old Testament, does not condone polygamous marriage. In fact, given what happened to the Jews during the Pentateuch and the historical books, it's clear that it was one of the things that displeased God mightily. One of the marks of King Solomon's fall from grace was his habit of "marrying" pagan women to cement alliances (1 Kings 11:1-6). Scripture makes it abundantly clear that polygamous marriages are contrary to God's design for his people.

In the New Testament, Paul even uses Abraham's sinful union with Hagar in contrast with his Godly union with Sarah as a metaphor for life under Jewish law vs life in Christ (Gal. 4:21-31).

 

According to the Anglican theologian Edmund Bunnius, the modern impression of the Jews being blessed to practice polygamy is a misrepresentation. None of the OT prooftexts which claim to endorse polygamy actually do so, it was a widespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Deuteronomy 41:1 and other similar verses:
https://www.anglican.net/works/edmu...there-is-no-sufficient-warrant-so-to-do-1595/

So yes, according to Bunnius, the OT teaches monogamous marriage, just the same as the NT. The doctrine does not change (and cannot change).

Even that, according to Bunnius, is not exactly true. Christ permits separation, but not divorce (such that the parties can marry again). Even in adultery, the marital bond remains, because (according to him) it is so strong that just about nothing in existence can break it.

In Anglican legislature, there are two terms:
-divortium a mensa et thoro ('separation from room and board')
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_mensa_et_thoro

-divortium a vinculo ('separation from the bond of matrimony')
https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/divorce-a-vinculo-matrimonii/

The first is what we today call separation, whereas the second is what we call divorce. Unfortunately both words had the latin word 'divortium' which led to confusion in modern times that there was a 'divorce' in our legal code, whereas in fact we never did.

 

I suppose you can interpret the clause "and marries another" in that way, but as you said, the marriage bond itself remains. Neither partner is free to remarry or engage in sexual relations with others; that would be adultery. But even separation would seem to violate Christ's dictum that married people form "one flesh" (Matt 19:6). That admonition does not simply refer to the act of sexual intercourse. Marriage is a union of man and woman in a relational as well as a sexual sense. Separation without divorce would still damage that union.

 

To me all that is incredibly admirable. You are a classic inheritor of the thought of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and the long line of the conservative tradition. I get where you're coming from, absolutely.

I just don't want you to elevate conservatism to a status of the gospel, or some absolute principle. It is a helpful hermeneutic, but that's all it is: a helpful hermeneutic. The issue that prevents conservatism from being elevated into an absolute principle is that there are just too many counter-examples which vitiate it. If you were a Christian in the 370s AD, you would have known that,

The Council of Seleucia met in 358 AD, to declare, "Since the terms homoousion and homoiousion have in time past troubled the minds of many [...], we reject the first two, as expressions which are not found in the Scriptures"
The Council of Arminium met in 359 AD, to declare that the Son was 'similar' to the Father rather than consubstantial.
The Council of Constantinople met in 360 AD, to declare: "since the term ousia[...] has been a cause of offense, we have thought proper to reject it"

As a good proper Burkean conservative, you would have gone along with them. You would not have been SAINT Athanasius. And we should all strive to be saints, contending for the truth.

 

"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)

This is why I try very hard to never use "conservative" in a political sense when I am writing about Christian theology or church practice. Political and cultural conservatism, like liberalism, is a human construct, and maps only imperfectly onto notions of Christian orthodoxy. It is a capital mistake to use the political terminology when discussing theology. This is also why I reject the "culture war" canard -- I ground my arguments not in political conservatism but in Scripture. We do not conform Scripture to the culture; this is blasphemous and heretical. We strive constantly to conform ourselves to God's Word, and to bring the Word to others so that they may do the same.

Political movements come and go. Empires rise and fall. God's word endures. The only conservatism I really care about is conserving God's holy word so that it can be passed down to our posterity.

 

What if I were to say that I know several adulterers, and that my adulterous brothers and sisters are some of the finest human beings? Or my klepto brothers and sisters, etc? We are all 'real human beings...capable of tremendous love and sacrifice,' yet we are all sinners who can be saved only by God's grace through genuine faith.

My question is, why would a sinner advertise his or her sin, or seemingly take pride in it, or verbally take ownership of it? Who would wish to tell his friends, "I identify as a gluttonous Christian," or, "I'm proud of my gluttony"? Perhaps such a person has a physical tendency toward gluttony, and perhaps he even tries to control the gluttonous tendencies; but in what universe would he advertise his condition, let alone wear it as a badge of honor, or claim it's "normal" to be a glutton, or fight for "gluttons' rights"? Yet that is what the LGBTQ people do.

 

There is a very important difference there: who is the victim?

 

so when Jesus said you can divorce for sexual immorality, remarriage was not permitted?

 

That's the point we need to focus on: the issue currently hinges on what 'Marriage' now implies according to the modern redefinition of the word. If we stick with the definition used within both the church and the non-Christian world for the past several thousand years (instead of a new and novel definition), marriage must be between a man and a woman.

Yes, and every one of us falls short of God's standard of perfection. And Christ died so that all may choose whether to believe, and thereby receive the blessings of Christ's redemptive sacrifice. Any and all sins except the 'unforgivable sin' may be forgiven, if the person accepts God's gift of grace through faith.

The questions are these: if the person purposefully persists in sin, using God's grace as a virtual 'license' to keep sinning (like a 'get out of hell free' Monopoly card), isn't that person risking his salvation? Is his faith genuine? And is it okay for the church to comfort him in his sin and reassure him that it's all right to continue in that vein, or is it the duty of the church to stand firm upon the word of God in its teaching that habitual sin is always wrong, always to be resisted, and always to be spoken against? We must recall that homosexual behavior (homosexual relations) was, is, and always will be sinful; therefore, any formalization of a "partnership" or "union" by the church is inherently wrong because it reassures the participants (as well as all witnesses in the world!) that homosexual relations are acceptable in God's eyes.

If two people of the same sex wish to live together in chastity and to share property rights, no problem. But let's be realistic: that is not what 98% of the people want when they seek such a 'civil union' or (alleged) 'marriage'.

 

I could have substituted "thefts," "adulteries," or other sins for gluttony. Victimization is a non-issue. Besides, do you think that gluttony hurts only the glutton? That is false. Family members suffer, too. And if the particular gluttony is for alcohol, all sorts of innocent bystanders may be injured (such as in car crashes due to drunk driving).

edit: It occurs to me that you may be implying that homosexual relations are a 'victimless' sin within the confines of a monogamous relationship. (I was a bit slow catching onto that.) But why should it matter? Sin is sin, and the church's response to habitual sin must always be the same whether that sin harms one or many. And besides, when one person entices or persuades another person to participate in sin with him (or her), how is that 'victimless' just because the other person eventually agrees and consents? That is what takes place when one partner 'puts the moves' on the other and works to get him (or her) 'turned on'; no matter that it's easy to convince the second party to sin, if the second party would not have otherwise initiated the sinful activity then the first party has made the second party a victim of the first party's sinful lust.

 

There are no "victims" in a consensual homosexual relationship. There are two sinners who must repent of their sin if they are to be saved. To cast a sinner as a "victim" removes their agency and moral responsibility -- which is the point, I suppose, of using the postmodernist "oppressor/victim" language in a religious context. Those who sanction the sin are also participants in it.

 

See here:

 

Yes but how do I know in Matthew that’s the distinction Christ made, between separation and divorce?

 

Actually I should be precise: divortium a vinculo is not divorce in the modern sense, because Anglicans didn't have divorce in the modern sense. The best equivalent is 'annulment'. For example if you married your first cousin, you would get the divortium a vinculo, because the ecclesiastical court would rule that the marriage was invalid in the first place. No marriage that is actually conducted and consummated, can then ever be fully broken. The most people can do is to separate and then live in chastity.

Because he taught, what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The NT has the most explicit teachings on the indissolubility of marriage.