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.
1 comment:
Hi Michael. Interesting topic. I was just reading in the paper yesterday that here in Aus, there’s huge controversy in the Anglican church (even among clergy) over its donation of $1M to the “No” campaign (i.e. against same-sex marriage).
We’re having a postal vote here at the moment, as you might’ve heard over there, and there’s been a lot more ads for the “No” campaign than for “Yes”. (Most of the “No” ads are about use of gender-identity books in primary schools, rather than purely being about gay marriage, so there’s an air of hysteria to the campaign.)
Here, marriage can be in a church or by a civil celebrant almost anywhere, and as a result, people often get married on beaches and the like. So there doesn’t seem to be much if any push for Christian ceremonies for gay marriage.
On the wider issue of the bible as a whole, if it was the word of a god, I’d expect it to have rather more impressive content on the nature of the universe, instead of mundane stories about fishing, separating sheep and goats, and stoning people to death.
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