The Church's Dilemma

Although I am an atheist, albeit one with a Jewish heritage, I have always had a soft spot for the Church of England; for its' eccentricities and its' pick and mix attitudes. I remember the Red Dean Hewlett Johnson, and David Jenkins the Bishop of Durham, who didn't believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection.

This latest controversy over gay marriage is typical of the knots the church ties itself up in, due in my opinion to a lack of intellectual clarity and woolly thinking.

Apparently the Archbishop of Canterbury has said the church needs a twenty-first century understanding  of being human, and being sexual.

This of course is what those who want the church to accept gay marriage believe. The traditionalists base their objection on the scriptures, the word of God. Presumably they still believe that all anal intercourse is an abomination, although hopefully not agreeing to the punishments that in the past were meted out to transgressors.

The modernisers use semantics and words like reinterpretation, or continuous revelation, or even 'that passage is not so important and is negated by other more compassionate passages.' And therein lies the problem, who decides what is important? If one part can be discounted or updated, why not others, the virgin birth and the resurrection for example?

Personally I am not against same sex couples getting married, if that is what they want to do, but I am at a loss to understand why they would want a Christian ceremony considering the historical attitude of the church to homosexuality from ancient times to the twentieth century.

I think you either have to accept that the bible was written by fallible human beings who reflected the prejudices, culture, science, mores and world view existing at the time, or that these scribes had a direct line to God. In which case everything is true, although why the Creator should have such a poor knowledge of his own creation is beyond my understanding.