"Le Christ de Gala" by Salvador Dali 1978
Society does not set standard for God's law. God does not obligate nor encourage us to fulfill all our desires. Those desires that violate his laws must be controlled; and yet, where does that leave the question of homosexuality, which is considered an acceptable practice by many in our world today.
"Will gay debate tear the Church apart?" was the screaming headline on CNN's Larry King Live, featuring the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop in U.S. history, The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Bishop of New Hampshire, The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church, who appointed him, the clergy that oppose him, and....our own journalist/blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic and gay.
The ensuing debate was interesting as it centered around the premise that the truth is still unfolding:
"In the Gospels, Jesus says, 'I have many more things to say to you but you cannot bear them now,' which suggests to me that God's truth is always unfolding," Bishop Griswold said. "If we can accept that there are new truths that science brings us, or new discoveries in medicine, why is it when it comes to sexuality, there is no new truth?"
Bishop Griswold added: "A number of those most upset about our seemingly ignoring Scripture, though they are solidly heterosexual, have enjoyed the mercy of the church in the case of their own divorce and remarriage, which is something Jesus commented on."
We have 'discovered', although it took us almost 2,000 years to do so, that slavery was wrong. For 2,000 years women had no place in the leadership of the Church, which has finally been rectified.
One of the lesbian Priests on the show advocated that the term "homosexuality" is actually not part of the original Scripture but gradually found its way in the current context over several centuries by way of varying interpretative translations. The Scripture in the original Greek version, now fervently quoted homosexuality as 'abomination and sin', apparently related to the to sexual abuse of young children.
I will let my theologian readers tell me otherwise no doubt, but the reference in Leviticus 20 Verse 13 leaves no ambiguity as to God's law: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death their blood will be on their own heads."
Corinthians Chapter 6 Verse 9-11: “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor the drunkards nor the slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the Kingdom of God".
Romans I Verse 24-27: ”Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lust. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion".
Romans I Verse 32: "Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things, but also approve of those who practice them".
One of the absolute foundations of Evangelical faith is the dogmatic stand that Scripture is the literal word of God. But the Catholic Church has acknowledged that the scripture is God inspired and that analogies provide interpretational understanding which over the centuries have and should evolve with advancing knowledge, scientific and otherwise. We also know that our Lord Jesus Christ violated the scripture daily by reinterpreting the Old Testament through the lens of God's love, and showed us how the scripture can be unforgiving to those less fortunate or for that matter different from the rest.
None of us are truly able to conform to the word of the Scripture; we have not exactly given up our worldly possessions, have we? And yet the Episcopalian Church met this week to debate banning gay Bishops because homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. They have however in conclusion declined to stop the practice and rejected an immediate moratorium on gay marriages.
Obviously the ten Commandments are unambiguous and remain
non-negotiable, but why, the question goes, has the Church taken away
the "God Welcomes You" sign, or, as they say, added the asterisk about
who is to be excluded. God is willing to receive anyone who comes to
him in faith they say; aren't we
Christians commanded to love and accept others no matter what their
background or individual orientations, so long as they do not cause
harm or oppression of any kind. As Michael Liccione reminded us in his
long and thoughtful post "we can hate the sin and love the sinner" ("Pontifications" is inaccessible for periods of time during the day)
A rare occurrence these days when I concur with Andrew Sullivan's opinion, who, as a devout Catholic, is refusing to let the condemning voices drive a wedge between himself and his deep faith. A marvelous trait to have in my book; certainly topping any adverse sentiment I might harbor against him due to our otherwise plentiful political differences. It simply does not feel right when society takes it upon itself to make anyone feel ostracized in the house of the Lord, especially when done so selectively.
In a permissive society it is far too easy for Christians to overlook or tolerate some shall we say more convenient immoral behaviors such as greed and drunkenness, while remaining outraged at others such as homosexuality and thievery. God expected his followers in any age to adhere to uncompromising standards and yet we seem to be more and more selective about which standards we choose to adopt and which to reject.
To reach consensus, I believe we first need to find an answer to the question which appears to be at the heart of this debate: Do we have the appropriate grasp of the term 'literal' when interpreting Scripture?
James I. Packer's "The Interpretation of Scripture" is a good starting point:
This ‘literalism’ is founded on respect for the biblical forms of speech; it is essentially a protest against the arbitrary imposition of inapplicable literary categories on scriptural statements. It is this ‘literalism’ that present-day Evangelicals profess. But to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the poetic and imaginative form in which they are sometimes couched, would be no less a violation of the canons of evangelical ‘literalism’ than the allegorizing of the Scholastics was; and this sort of ‘literalism’ Evangelicals repudiate. It would be better to call such exegesis ‘literalistic’ rather than ‘literal’, so as to avoid confusing two very different things. [...]
God, then, does not profess to answer in Scripture all the questions that we, in our boundless curiosity, would like to ask about Scripture. He tells us merely as much as He sees we need to know as a basis for our life of faith. And He leaves unsolved some of the problems raised by what He tells us, in order to teach us a humble trust in His veracity. The question, therefore, that we must ask ourselves when faced with these puzzles is not, is it reasonable to imagine that this is so? but, is it reasonable to accept God’s assurance that this is so? Is it reasonable to take God’s word and believe that He has spoken the truth, even though I cannot fully comprehend what He has said?
UPDATE: It seems that the split is worsening over the issue of gays in the clergy:
"The differences are irreconcilable," the director of communications for the American Anglican Council, Cynthia Brust, said. "The truth of Christ is the ultimate truth, which is not accepted by the Episcopal Church any longer."
Kenny, whether you are Catholic or not- you are a fantastic teacher and Christian. We Catholics may wish you were ~~more~~- i have no doubt that God is well pleased w/who you are, just as you are.
Miracles DO happen and maybe someday the hand of the cherished Church you really seem to love will grasp hold of yours and you won't want or be able to let go :0).
Posted by: karen | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 10:34 AM
No need to apologize Kenny... idiosyncrasies can be fun...I have my own collection!!! All discussions, when conducted in the right spirit, bear fruit.
Posted by: Stefan | Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 04:12 PM
Stefan,
I have, actually, already read Scott's book; but I appreciate the recommendation.
I agree that Americans in general have the intrinsic objection to submission to authority that you're describing, though my own issues with Papal/Roman authority are idiosyncratic.
I regret very much, actually, having commented at all about my difficulties with the Church's authority. I have lived most of my life without feeling at home, either metaphorically or literally; only very rarely have I ever felt that I fit in, and the sensation, while thoroughly delightful, has always been painfully temporary. I don't think there's anything special about that; it's the natural human condition for a lot of us, after all, and I don't expect any unusual pity or anything. But between me and the Roman Church there is a relationship rather like that between Dante and Beatrice, in this very limited respect: that I love the Church and have benefitted greatly from God's ministry to me through the Church; yet Dante knew he would never be able to marry the girl, and I have come to face that I'll never be able to join the Church. To at least echo the point of this thread, I look at people whose intellect and emotions have found rest and reconciliation in the Church rather as devoutly chaste gay friends of mine look at the happily married: it's something I don't ever expect to have, but I rejoice in my friends' joy and the last thing I would want to do is to screw it up for them. So I keep my issues private -- or at least usually I do, this thread being an obvious and highly regrettable exception -- since long experience teaches me that they're not going to convince me, and the last thing I want to do is infect them with my own doubts.
This particular pain is my own, and I don't usually take it public and inflict it on others, and having done so here I now very much regret having done it. I cannot explain myself without implicitly criticizing the Church and its authority, and I just hate doing that publicly -- for fear that I might actually convince somebody of something I'd very much prefer not to be convinced of myself. I'm taking down the post I put on my own blog, and I hope you and Mike will have the grace to forgive me for reneging on my promise to carry on the conversation on his blog -- though I assure you I am reading his stuff with interest. This thread was fine as long as it was about the issue, but I made it about me and my own issues and now I deeply regret having done so...and so, if I may channel Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 01:43 PM
Stef, it was perfect you just missed a gap between the a and the href
Posted by: Alexandra | Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 01:17 PM
DOH!!! It didn't work....I guess I need more practice...till I get it right you'll have to C and P the link....
http://www.catholic-pages.com/pope/hahn.asp
Posted by: Stefan | Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 12:03 PM
Kenny,
I, of course, truly have no interest to convince others of Papal authority but I do find some of the great emotion surrounding the subject to have a strange tint to it. It seems that many people see that to “submit” (your word) to the Pope is somehow enslaving yourself to a spiritual dictatorship. I am not suggesting that this is your view by any means but I find it “underneath” a lot of people’s ideas on the matter. People have confused “authority” with “Authoritarianism”. As a quick note, there has been only one strictly infallible teaching since 1870 when Vatican I officially defined the doctrine and that was on the Assumption of Mary. It is not like every statement a Pope makes is strictly infallible.
Not that you (or anyone else) are overly interested on the matter but I would highly recommend reading Scott Hahn’s defense of the Papacy. As you probably know, Scott Hahn was one of the foremost Evangelical Biblical scholars in the world and he shocked many people by studying his way to reunion with the Catholic Church. This is, again, not meant to try to “convert” folk but because he argues on a level much higher that I am capable and it should be of great interest to people on both sides of the discussion.
I shall discontinue this topic (even though it is quite interesting) because it is quite a tangent from the original thread. I do hope that you will check out the article (it is a speech transcript actually) as it is quite thought provoking. :-)
I’ll try your cool link trick here.
Posted by: Stefan | Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 12:01 PM
My dear Stefan,
I can't speak for anybody else on the quesion of Papal authority, but:
1. I don't have any intrinsic objection to the idea of Papal authority and certainly during the period in which I expected and desired to become Catholic I was more than prepared to be convinced. Indeed, I had every expectation that after a little bit of due diligence I would be so.
2. Only the due diligence, quite to my surprise, mostly showed that when it came to convincing evidence of Papal (as opposed to apostolic) authority, there was no there there.
3. Insofar as at this point I have a problem with Papal authority other than simply not thinking it is in fact a Divine institution, it is that the Papal insistence on Papal authority is, to my mind, fundamentally responsible for the Great Schism, the Filioque being simply the presenting issue for a deeper disagreement -- in, ironically, precisely the way that the importance of the issue of homosexuality lies not in itself but in the much deeper and irreconcilable fault lines that the homosexuality issue forces into the open.
4. But I realize that Catholics look at the same evidence and find it incontrovertible, and by all means I encourage them to submit, therefore, to the authority of the Pope and the Church; and wherever I can help my beloved CRHP brothers deepen their relationship with the Church I enthusiastically do so.
It would be nice to be where you are. I doubt very seriously, however, that you could present me with any evidence that I have not already seen, and have not already examined with a mind predisposed by its desires to find convincing -- but mind rendered unable by logical training and a somewhat cynical temperament to find so. You find evidence like the Rock quotation compelling. I simply do not. So I don't know what we do except tip our hats to each other on that topic and continue to appreciate the many points on which we do agree.
As for the distinction between what the Church appears to teach and what she officially teaches -- that is, the distinction between what a reasonable and well-meaning and generally attentive layman would at any point in time understand the Church to be teaching and what three hundred years later persons with specialized knowledge would decree that the Church had "officially" taught at that time -- that is an entirely different topic that I don't think I want to wade into at this point.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 09:33 AM
I put a little of my own personal opinion on my own blog.
Briefly summarized: I don't disapprove of the monogamous form of homosexuality; what I disapprove of is the degree to which monogamy is rejected as an option by the gay community. As any gay pride parade will make clear, Being In Love has less of a priority in gay society than does Having A Good Time - and until this is remedied, gays will always remain more or less marginalized.
Posted by: Michael Andreyakovich | Saturday, June 24, 2006 at 11:07 PM
Kenny and Stefan:
Since this thread's length and sophistication is already a challenge to newcomers, I shall resume the discussion at my own blog.
Thanks,
Mike
Posted by: Michael Liccione | Saturday, June 24, 2006 at 07:47 AM
Kenny,
Although Mr. Liccione is far more able to speak on such matters (his website is tremendous) I will endeavor to muddle clumsily along on some points you have raised.
I have always been taken aback by the fervent distaste for “the authority of the (Roman) Church”. Even though it could be said that most Christians hold more in common with the Magisterium than they do not, they, none-the-less, are all a twitter with fears of Papist authoritarianism. Some of this, I believe, has something to do with remnants of the Black Legend and other anti-Catholic traditions borne from England to America. Growing up in a very Lutheran state I am still amazed at some of the bizarre conspiracies and prejudices that normally straight thinking people retain. Although long before my time, things like the fears over JFK and the potential coup by Papist forces that he potentially could have facilitated are a good example. I also think there is something very American in the great mistrust of “authority” that plays into this view.
More to the point, though, if you find yourself in agreement with the Orthodox Church you must put some credence to the belief of Apostolic Succession. If that is the case (and it may not be) then the authority of the Pope and the Church is not such a hard thing to come to grips with. The Church’s authority was clearly understood by the apostles the very early church as Patrick Madrid notes:
“The earliest account we have of a bishop of Rome exercising authority in another diocese comes from St. Clement's Epistle to the Corinthians. It was written by Clement, bishop of Rome, around the year A.D. 80. In it he responds to the Corinthians' plea for his intervention. The entire letter is written in a fatherly, kind way, but it is also clear that Clement was quite aware he had a special authority. Two key phrases stand out as testimony of this: "But if any disobey the words spoken by Him [Christ] through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in sin and no small danger"; and "For you will give us joy and gladness if, obedient to what we have written through the Holy Spirit, you root out the lawless anger of your jealousy" (59, 63). Clearly, this early bishop of Rome wrote as one who expected his words to be obeyed. “
Jesus said that he would build his Church on the “Rock” that was St Peter and he vowed never to abandon it. So although human leaders can (and often have) screw things up they would never be allowed, by the firm guidance of the Holy Spirit, be allowed to screw it up too badly. This drive-by is not meant to try to “convince” anyone of the Church’s authority but rather just to remind people that it is not the great Boogedy Man that many seem to think it is and it is worth some serious and prayerful consideration. It is also a good thing to remember that the “Church” is not just and brick and stone institution but rather it is the Bride of Christ. Thus the symbolism of the Priests and Bishops (a.k.a. “the hierarchy”) living “In Persona Christi” who are, by their vows, betrothed to the Church, is an earthly reflection of Jesus’ eternal faithfulness to his bride: the Christian Church on earth and is no small matter.
I think that if one is alone in their judgment interpretation of the Bible (without regard to long-standing Christian traditions) then one is at great risk of “Biblical Relativism”, to coin a phrase, and that must surely account for the 30,000 or so Christian denominations that have taken form in the modern world. It is also why Christians like Bishop Spong always say things like: “I believe that Jesus meant……” or “the God that I worship wouldn’t….” They are clearly acting as the sole judge of biblical meaning. They have their own truth.
As rambling as this is already I will “quickly” (yea right…) address the Church’s view on sexual matters. Or, more correctly, I will let George Weigel do it since he is a theological rock-star. He notes that
“The Catholic Church never officially taught that sexual love within the bond of marriage was inherently and intrinsically darkened by sin. To the contrary, the old marriage ritual included an instruction to newlyweds in which they were told that “no greater blessing can come to you married life than pure, conjugal love, loyal and true to the end.”
He does note that most people in the past came away with a very muddled view from the Church’s teaching and that is why John Paul II’s Theology of the Body was so vital. Weigel adds:
“The Catholic sexual ethic, the Pope (JPII) proposes, redeems sexual love form the trap of lust. Catholicism doesn’t prohibit the erotic. Catholicism liberates the erotic for what John Paul calls a “full and mature spontaneity,” in which the age-old attraction between the sexes is fulfilled in the mutual gift of self and the mutual affirmation of the dignity of each partner.”
He goes on to say:
“Christians, as one moral theologian nicely puts it, make love only with people to whom they have made promises and serious promise making, of the sort involved in the complete gift of self that sexual love represents, is not transitory or serial.”
From this point we can easily reason about the problems involved in premarital relationships, “sexual solipsism” (and homosex), pornography, and rape.
As for contraception the point of view of the Church (put briefly) is that if sexual love within the bonds of marriage is to be an icon of the inner-life of the Trinity then God can never be “shut-out”. That being said Weigel points out that “Catholicism rejects an ideology of fertility at all costs.” Regarding this he quotes the testimony of a newly wed woman:
“Natural family planning (NFP) is not the justly ridiculed rhythm method, which involves vaguely guessing when the woman expects to ovulate and abstaining for a few days around day fourteen of her cycle. The full method involves charting the woman’s waking temperatures, changes in the cervical fluid, and the position of the cervix……(NPF is 98% effective when followed correctly)”
She Continues:
“But the turning point came for me as I watched, month after month, as my temperature rose and fell and my hormones marched in perfect harmony. I had no idea I was so beautiful. I found myself near tears one day looking at my chart and thinking, “Truly, I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” My fertility is not a disease to be treated. It is a wonderful gift. I am a wonderful gift.”
That is pretty cool way to look at things, in my humble opinion.
Finally Weigel notes that “In the Catholic view of things, couples grow into their love through a process that involves sexual expression and sexual abstinence, sexual ecstasy and sexual asceticism.”
Sorry so dreadfully long and scattered and sorry to those really not interested. I hope that Mr. Liccione can respond to some of your points more professionally!!!
Posted by: Stefan | Friday, June 23, 2006 at 10:41 PM
Okay, I got that post up.
Very special-interest kind of thing, plus not really suited for the blog format; so for most of you it's not worth the time and trouble to go wade through it.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Friday, June 23, 2006 at 07:26 PM
I think perhaps I'll post onto my blog a piece I wrote in order to help myself think through the issue of the Church's reliability on human sexuality. It is hardly complete -- it does not, for example, raise the issue of the apparent incoherence of the Roman Church's position in allowing birth control by the rhythm method but not by the use of condoms -- but it at least should make clear the basic reasons I think it very difficult to put any confidence in a proposition about sexuality morality for no reason other than an appeal to the Church's authority. It's an appendix to my private commentary on I Corinthians (I posted an excerpt from that earlier somewhere in Alexandra's comment section, I think), addressing the thorny problem of I Corinthians 7, and it addresses at some length the nature of early Church teachings on human sexuality and the reasons I see those teachings as evidence that a first-millenium Christian who relied on what the Church was teaching him, would have been trusting in false teaching.
It'll take a bit to get it converted to HTML and posted, though. I'll come back and post a link when it's up. In the meantime I won't pursue that topic any further on this thread, which is (a) getting further and further from Alexandra's original point and (b) as Mike observes, is finally starting to wind down.
A heckuva thread while it lasted, though, wasn't it? Alexandra, I don't think anybody else in the blogosphere generates comment threads like yours. As a cyber-salon hostess you are without peer. (And I know that's because you work bloody hard at it.)
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Friday, June 23, 2006 at 04:25 PM
Mike, Stefan
[grinning] I'm sure my comment was indeed largely incoherent. I don't very often post comments here that have to do with my emotions rather than the issues, and indeed as my wife would tell you I'm not very good at understanding my own emotions anyway, being pretty uncomfortable with the whole emotional thing from the get-go. So, emotions being the irrational things they are, the comment was bound to be somewhat incoherent under the best of circumstances, and my own cluelessness about emotions in general could only ratchet the noise-to-signal ratio up.
I absolutely agree that sola Scriptura is an illusion and that nobody truly takes Scripture (in practice) as his highest authority. Every Christian's highest authority is, in practice, the person whom he trusts to tell him what Scripture means, which for most Protestants winds up being oneself. When I returned to Christianity from agnosticism, the main reason I didn't return to the Baptist / Disciples of Christ milieu in which I was raised, was the absence of any knowledge of or interest in the two thousand years of Christian experience in between the closing of the canon and the birth of Billy Graham. (That's a rhetorical exaggeration not meant to be offensive to Baptists listening in, and I hasten to say that growing up Baptist had some very significant advantages indeed.)
But if I may say so without offense, when I returned to Christianity I was in love with Rome (still am, actually) and badly wanted to become Catholic...only in the end the Orthodox won every debate, as it were. The fundamental difference between myself and a devout Catholic is precisely the question of the authority of the Church -- that is, I look forward to reading Benedict's stuff, and I am generally going to be inclined to think that where he and I disagree he is more likely, ceteris paribus, to be correct than I am. But I'm just not going to be able to trust him as much as I trust St. Paul.
I absolutely agree that questions such as the morality of masturbation -- or for that matter the question of whether rock'n'roll music is inherently Satanic even if the words are Christian -- cannot be deduced from Scripture alone. My difficulty is simply that I don't have any faith in the Church on this particular topic. But anybody who has been persuaded by the Roman claims to spiritual authority naturally has, as it were, more tools at his disposal for settling the question in his own mind. Those tools are, in my case, simply not at my disposal because I have been unable to convince myself that the Church is reliable on this particular point.
What I was trying to express is my discomfort with the whole process of reasoning from what is "natural." The reference to the Fathers wasn't because Catholics consider the Fathers authoritative (the Orthodox respect the Fathers more than the Romans do, if it comes to that), but because the dynamic by which "natural" means "in conformity to my own idiosyncratic expectations" is clearer in the Fathers than anywhere else. As I hope the subsequent comment made reasonably clear, in point of fact I agree that to think about sexual morality clearly one has to start from an understanding of God's purpose in making us sexual beings -- that is, from our sexual "nature" -- so that my issue is not so much that I object to the approach per se, as it is that I have little confidence in the reliability of conclusions yielded thereby. But that it's the only approach that can hope to give you conclusions of any validity on the aspects of sexuality not explicitly addressed by Scripture, is something on which I think we utterly agree.
A conversation with you on this topic would, I'm sure, be a conversation that consisted almost entirely of your explaining things to me. That is, it would probably be very fruitful for me but not terribly fruitful for you. Also, as Alexandra and young Mr. Galien can tell you, a conversation with me tends to be inordinately frustrating because I go dark, as it were, for days at a time, with no warning. I have eight children and anything I post happens in whatever spare time I can steal. Since tonight we begin a move to a new house, spare time is going to be hard to come by for a while, and you would have to endure long tedious pauses where nothing happened in the conversation.
But if you're still interested in a conversation on those terms I'd be very interested as well.
P.S. I suppose I should be a bit more specific about the Fathers thing. I'm assuming everybody here is familiar with the Bible on sex, in which I myself can find no hint that God objects in the slightest to enthusiastic sex between husband and wife; so I won't post Biblical evidence here. Most people have, however, far less access to the Fathers and the Stoics. So:
Let's start with a passage of Seneca that St. Jerome quotes with so far as I can tell complete approbation:
Now a string of quotations from Clement of Alexandria:
St. Ambrose:
Mike, can you point me to any Christian theologian before 1500 A.D. other than Lactantius who renders the opinion that there's nothing wrong with a husband and wife's having sex when the wife is already known to be pregnant? (And even Lactantius doesn't exactly give it his full endorsement.) My impression is that it was pretty much universally taken for granted amongst Christian moral authorities from Clement throughout the medieval period that the best sort of Christian didn't have sex during pregnancy. I could certainly be wrong about that, though.
At any rate, perhaps those specific quotations will help illustrate the reason I get uncomfortable when people start appealing to what is "natural" as determinative of sexual morality.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Friday, June 23, 2006 at 09:40 AM
I don't wanna get into the protestant/catholic thing since we all love Christ, but I do want to add this about the natural law mentioned since this was an actual topic recently with me and someone that is gay...
I am told that I don't know what natural is because if I was paying attention that I would realise that homosexual activity is 'natural' and that if I look at nature that I will notice that many species are into homosexual activity. In other words, "How can I miss it in nature since it's a common thing?" I won't argue that. because yes, I am aware of "animals" doing such and am quite aware of the Evolution's Rainbow book and all that, but I agree with Kenny on this, that what was "natural" before the great fall of mankind has gotten just as corrupted as everything else since the great fall, so that what might seem natural within our world's nature today is really just a corrupted version of what it was planned to be.
I guess what I am trying to say is that when it comes to the word "natural" then we can't really honestly look at what has taken over out there in this world in nature today amongst the animals. It's all been moved into shape with sin's influence. It's all warped!
Since I became a Christan I don't feel I belong to this world anymore, you know that feeling that we are in between worlds anyway and I am sure that the sexual perversion within nature and outside of marriages today is part of that which I should try to avoid if I want to please God. I feel this topic is like everything else in our lives...that if we want to get as close as we can to what God wants for us then we have to include God in all things and understand what His law is all about and put that first because we are suppose to delight in the law of the LORD not be slaves to the nature we see of this world and IMHO pleasing God would be sex within marriage because isn't all sex outside of marriage the real first step down where all these debatable issues are just the results? Isn't all sex outside of marriage the place where we continue to fall?
Posted by: liquid | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 10:49 PM
Mr Liccione’s responses are fantastic. I fully agree that the “Theology of the Body” is one of the most important, exciting, and yet, painfully challenging, texts in modern Christianity.
I would like to echo of Mike’s comment on Sola Scriptura:
If we as Christians (of any stripe) were to ignore the value of, as Mr. Liccione puts it, the “dual hermeneutic of Tradition and the teaching authority of the Church” and rely on the Bible alone we would be unthinkingly disregarding the hundreds of years or the early Church during which there was no “bible” as we understand it today. The Gospels were transmitted to the faithful (and in turn to us) through the mass and from the faith traditions handed down directly from Peter, Paul, the rest of the apostles, and through all the Church Fathers who constituted and transmitted the teaching authority of the Church. That same authority and tradition is what determined which books were true, authentic Christian teaching and which were Gnostic or Aryan heresy. It seems quite odd to me (speaking as a Catholic) to suddenly see the written Bible as the one and only source of wisdom and jettison any regard to the value of tradition forevermore suddenly after the Bible canon was fixed.
Posted by: Stefan | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 09:45 PM
Kenny:
I appreciate your humility. I wish I encountered more of it elsewhere in the blogosphere.
In one respect, it's difficult for me to have this discussion with you because I don't believe that the entire content of faith or morals can be read off or even deduced from Scripture. Although I do believe that what God wants to reveal for the sake of our salvation is materially present in the record of Scripture, it seems quite evident to me that Scripture alone, interpreted without the dual hermeneutic of Tradition and the teaching authority of the Church, does not suffice to enable believers to understand it correctly. Otherwise the Jews would have had little difficulty seeing the New Testament as the fulfillment of the Old, and Protesant denominations would have little difficulty agreeing with each other about interpreting this or that aspect of Scripture. Sola scriptura is only a slogan; it's not a reality even in Protestantism; nor could it be. After all, the very writing of the New Testament and the selection of some writings over others for inclusion in it was conducted by representatives of the Church on the basis of the paradosis Paul cites and on the apostolic authority that he and the Twelve invoked. Those bases do not evaporate with Scripture; they always have formed and always will form the necessary context for understanding Scripture.
Thus when I read Romans 1, it's evident to me that Paul is appealing, at least to a certain extent, to natural revelation (e.g, verse 20) and to natural morality (e.g., verse 32). Properly interpreted, Scripture itself presupposes what I'm talking about when I talk about 'natural law'. In The Aboliton of Man, CS Lewis argues persuasively along the same lines. There is such a thing as natural law; the only question is its extent.
I must say that I find your doctrinal history of Catholic teaching on sexuality to be almost incoherent. Catholics have never been obliged to accept every patristic opinion about sex, but the Church has constantly taught, for as long as we have records on the subjects, that such things as contraception and masturbation are immoral. That is why I'm puzzled when you criticize Catholic doctrine while upholding, in rather eloquent language, the "sacramentality" of sexuality. The ideas you're upholding in that comment are pretty much the same ones that John Paul II upholds in his "theology of the body" and that Paul VI upheld in his anti-contraception encyclical Humanae Vitae. And those popes take the doctrinally established teaching of the Church about sexual morality to be part of that vision.
This discussion seems potentially quite profitable to me. But since this thread seems to be petering out, perhaps we could continue in another setting. If you care to, please e-mail me and tell me whether you're willing to have me blog the ensuing discussion. You can get my address by clicking the corresponding link at my blog.
Best,
Mike
PS and BTW, I was once director of adult education at St. Michael Catholic Church near the Galleria.
Posted by: Michael Liccione | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 08:34 PM
What I find problematic with the homosexual movement is not the fact of the sin, but the complete denial that sin is what it is.
Deacon Bishop, I agree completely.
Therefore it is the Church's duty to, while accepting homosexuals in their midst, inform them that the homosexual lifestyle is a sin.
Kenny: that is completely true. And Lord, may I add to that list.
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 02:24 PM
Iknow that what I am about to say is more or less an ad hominum addition to the discussion but about fifteen years ago I was friends with a fellow pastor back on the east coast. He was Episcopal and evangelical. In a moment of honesty he said to me with great saddness and weariness of heart, "You have no idea of the corruption of our priesthood. Homosexuality, AIDS, alcoholism are all being swept under the carpet."
I suggest that what we are seeing today is the tip of an iceberg. The theological discussions are simply to justify a largely immoral priesthood and its profligate life-style.
BTW, here in the suburbs of Kansas City the highest profile and evangelical Episcopal Church withdrew from the Diocise after the Robinson affair and has become an Anglican church. It came after a settlement with the Diocise of a million dollars.
Posted by: Ken Lightcap | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 01:19 PM
Deacon,
I can't remember Dorothy Sayers's exact (and inimitable phrasing), but she somewhere says that she doubts that any notoriously greedy and dishonest banker has ever been denied the Sacrament on the grounds that he was, in the words of the Prayer Book, "an open and notorious sinner." It is clear from her tone that she does not consider this to be a complimentary observation.
The incident of the woman caught in adultery is a very interesting one, but one that I think is not very often properly understood by modern readers. (Though your use of it is perfectly valid.) I may have to do a post on it...maybe this evening.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 11:33 AM
Mike,
I should say that I probably do use purpose-driven, "God's design" reasoning in my thinking about human sexuality. I just largely refuse to draw premises about what God's design is from "nature" rather than from explicit Scriptural statements. The Genesis "for this reason" statement appears to me to be the clearest Biblical expression of what God's purpose in human sexuality is, especially since that passage is appealed to both by Jesus and by Paul. I don't know how to understand simultaneously the Genesis passage, Jesus' explication of it, and Paul's corollary to it, other than to say that:
(1) Human sexuality is essentially sacramental -- human sexuality is to animal sexuality roughly as the Mass is to one's everyday dinner, in that God takes a natural biological necessity and invests it with radically new and transformation spiritual significance. It is, however, a sacramental act in which the spiritual consequences engage entirely without intervention by clergy and even without reference to whether the participants are aware of any spiritual dimension: a man who sleeps with a prostitute is spiritually joined to her as surely as a bridegroom's wedding night spiritually joins him to his bride.
2. One can no more conclude, from inspection of the "natural order," that God's principal interest in human sexuality is procreation, than one could conclude that God's interest in the Mass is to provide physical nutrition to our bodies, or that God's interest in baptism is physical cleanliness. The relationship between the natural significance of the physical aspect of a sacramental act, and the spiritual significance of the act as transformed, is very real and very deep but not necessarily very straightforward.
3. Human sexuality is sufficiently damaged by the Fall that special ameliorative measures quite outside the original design (preeminently divorce) have (at the very least under the Old Testament dispensation) been instituted by God.
I would add one further point. I grew up thinking of God as my Father. But it sank in on me some years ago that the Bible spends at least as much, if not more, time talking about God as our Lover and Husband than it spends talking of him as our Father. I have come to opine (which is not as strong as "to believe") that sex is to marriage what worship is to our relationship with God -- that worship is, essentially, making love to God -- and that the reason that you almost never have a false prophet who does not attempt to undermine the Biblical sexual ethic is that Satan knows that his most effective way to rob us of the joy of our relationship with God is to damage and pervert our sexuality. But that is only an opinion.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 11:28 AM
Alexandra,
You wrote, “In a permissive society it is far too easy for Christians to overlook or tolerate some shall we say more convenient immoral behaviors such as greed and drunkenness, while remaining outraged at others such as homosexuality and thievery.”
You are quite right that the people of God's Church seem to have a hierarchy of sins. I believe the Roman Catholic Church has long differentiated between venal and mortal sins, a theological distinction few Protestants make, at least in theory.
I think there is a distinction to be made between embracing a repentant sinner into the fellowship of Christ and merely overlooking sin as if it does not matter. Jesus had compassion for the woman caught in adultery. But he also told her, “Go and sin no more.”
I don't think it is so much a question of "which standards we choose to adopt and which to reject." The question is, do we want to promote as normal and acceptable behaviors which scripture condemns?
What I find problematic with the homosexual movement is not the fact of the sin, but the complete denial that sin is what it is. While I am quite willing to embrace someone who has failed in marriage, is stingy with money, or is an alcoholic, and struggles with those issues, I don't think the Church can (or generally does) accept serial marriage, constant inebriation, or the celebration of greed as acceptable, to be flagrantly and unrepentantly practiced and proclaimed as merely an alternative lifestyle, fully acceptable to God.
As Paul said, "Should we sin more so that grace may increase? May it never be!"
Posted by: Deacon Bishop | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 11:16 AM
Mike,
>
I find two important points curiously absent from his discussion: the status of "natural law" in traditional moral teaching, especially on sexuality, and how that relates to the spiritual purpose of sexuality.
>
What follows is not an argument. It is, shall we say, a bit of self-revelation. Persons who are interested in the topic rather than in understanding Kenny's personal idiosyncracies, would do well to skip this comment entirely.
The primary reason I tend to avoid "natural" terminology in discussions of human sexuality, is that...hmm, difficult to express...let's put it this way. (1) "Natural" is, to a very great degree, in the eye of the beholder, and beholders have a tendency to confuse their own tastes with God's. (2) The Church historically has gotten itself into major trouble over human sexuality -- and by "major trouble" I mean "put itself into conflict with Scripture" -- precisely by promoting theologians' prejudice of what is "natural" ahead of what the Bible appears actually to say about God's purposes for human sexuality.
This is not such a big deal for people who are only interested in what the Church's teaching is currently (it's quite different now than it was from the second through fourth centuries, and is markedly different from what the overwhelming majority of people in the pews would have understood it to be from the fourth through the seventeenth); but in every Roman appeal to "natural law" I personally can't help but hear echoes of Clement of Alexandria and the long train of theologians who followed him, promoting a sexual ethic that is taken pretty much straight from Seneca -- that is, from the Stoics' ideas of what is "natural" (and that's precisely their language and their principle technique of moral and ethical analysis) -- a sexual ethic that flies in the face of Paul's explicit instructions and that, as far as I can tell, puts the Church on the side of the Corinthian proto-gnostics and in opposition to Paul. When the Church came completely off the rails vis-a-vis human sexuality in the second and third centuries, it do so entirely because its theologians' thought was dominated by the concept of what was "natural." And while I think modern Catholic teaching on human sexuality comes very much closer indeed to consonance with the Biblical ethic than did the Augustinian synthesis -- and Augustine's ethic itself was a dramatic return back to Scripture away from the undiluted Stoic ethic of the earlier Fathers -- still I find myself suspicious and uncomfortable with people who try to define sexual boundaries based on what they consider to be "natural."
This is not to say that natural-law reasoning on human sexuality can't be responsible and enlightening; and it is particularly important to say that I have no familiarity with Benedict's writings on ethics (a deficiency the rectification of which is very high indeed on my to-do list), and therefore probably am not speaking at all intelligently at the moment. I say again that this post is not really about the topic, but rather is about my own emotional and theological limitations. But my fundamental point here is that even if appeal-to-nature reasoning is valuable, I'm not likely ever to appeal to it myself, because I have no confidence that I can apply to the term "natural" (in the context of sexuality) any sense that does not in the end reduce to "consonant with my own personal sense of fitness," which sense of fitness I know perfectly well has been heavily shaped by my own culture and experience, just as it was Clement's culture and experience that led him to proclaim (working from memory here) that "we Christians engage in sex only in order to procreate children, and otherwise we are chaste even in marriage" -- because every good convert from Stoicism knew that the "natural" purpose of sex was procreation, and the use of sex for any other purpose was "against nature."
When the Bible says that homosex and adultery and incest and bestiality are right out, then I feel comfortable saying, "Okay, those are outside of the Great Plan" -- because I'm not deducing that from what I think is "natural," but responding to a direct and explicit teaching of Scripture. But when somebody goes on to say, "And masturbation and nonvaginal sex and any forms of birth control other than the rhythm method are also out because they are not consonant with 'natural law,'" I don't find myself able to join that chorus with any confidence at all. Mostly this is because, being familiar with a millenia and a half of early and medieval Catholic teaching on human sexuality, and finding myself in great difficulty in trying to reconcile what the Church spent most of its time teaching with what the Bible seems to me to say, I have no confidence in the Church's reliability on the subject. And also, of course, it's probably obvious from this comment that I don't have a good grasp of what a modern theologian would mean by "natural law" in the context of human sexuality (I'm sure Benedict would be able to draw a clear and convincing distinction between "natural law" as it is properly understood, and the Clementine appeal to "nature"). Emotionally, however, when I hear theologians start talking about what sexual activities are "natural" I instantly remember the equal-and-opposite errors of Clement on the one hand and hey-it's-genetically-determined-so-it's-natural-and-can't-be-sinful Jack Spong on the other hand, and the alarms start going off. I can't help it; that's how I respond.
But of course I'm not Catholic; and I don't have any problems with one Catholic's trying to prove his point to another Catholic by appealing to the authority of the Church. You're just not likely ever to find me appealing to "natural law" on the topic of human sexuality because I am unlikely ever to have confidence that where I've filled in the gaps left by Scripture with conclusions drawn from what is "natural," I haven't really just drawn those conclusions from my own cultural programming, which more than anything else determines what seems "natural" to each of us.
Mike, if I understand you correctly (probably I don't), you think that "natural law" is even more important in discussions of human sexuality than it is in most ethical discussions. My own reaction to that -- and I emphasize that this is more of an emotional reaction than a rational one -- is basically twofold. (1) The reason natural law looms unusually important in Catholic teaching on sexuality is that an unusually high percentage of Catholic teaching on sexuality can't be drawn convincingly from Scripture. (2) The track record of Christian appeals to "nature" on the topic of human sexuality is unusually clearly flawed, making human sexuality a topic on which one ought to be especially suspicious of appeals to "nature."
And that's why I don't appeal to it. [grinning ruefully]
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 11:07 AM
Mike,
your point is highly interesting and actually is exactly what Dr. H. Berkhof, a Dutch theologian wrote about this matter as far as I can tell.
The essence of being a 'human' according to this Dutch theologian is that our nature is that of love. Mind you, not as in physical nature, but as in what God intended for us.
Our 'nature' is what God intended for us: so when Paul describes that homosexuality is unnatural he does not mean as in 'nature' as we commonly use it, but as in what God intended for us, how God wants us to live.
Our 'nature' is / was to live on a higher plane, in unity with God, to sin is not going to that higher plane / level not living according to that nature created by God.
He created us to walk in companionship with Him, on that higher level - He created us to answer His love, His wisdom, His 'ways'. That is our nature in Christ.
What do you think?
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 06:46 AM
I thank Alexandra and Ann for their praise and citations of me. Sorry for coming late to this discussion. As I plan another post at my own blog on this subject, I shall be brief here.
Deborah Gyapong and Kenny Pierce strike me as the commenters most on target. But I find two important points curiously absent from his discussion: the status of "natural law" in traditional moral teaching, especially on sexuality, and how that relates to the spiritual purpose of sexuality.
1. The Catholic Church teaches that "the natural law" is just that aspect of the divine law which is "written into the human heart" and thus binds universally, irrespective of historial divine revelation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, it was to just such a law that St. Paul referred when he spoke of idolatrous people exchanging "natural" for "unnatural" sexual relations (Romans 1:25 ff). But 'natural' here does not mean merely 'physical', as in genetics; as a result of original sin, there are genetic predisposiitons to all sorts of evils, such as violence and depression as well as, probably, homosexuality. 'Natural' in this context rather means 'in accord with God's built-in designs for us'. Those designs define our nature; they are not superadded to it or opposed to it. Sin is what warped our nature without destroying it. So, most sin is 'against the natural law'. Talk of what's natural and unnatural used to come so readily to people's lips on the topic of sexuality only because that's where the true meaning of the 'natural' in natural law is especially evident. These things are well accounted for in Catholic theology, but I see very little of them in Protestant theology. A look at Pope John Paul the Great's theology of the body would be most enlightening to many here, as it was to me.
2. What JP2 showed is how natural-law thinking, which many dismiss as mere Aristotelianism, actually jibes well with biblical personalism, both OT and NT. It explains why sex is so spiritually significant, why marriage is indissoluble, why contraception is a perversion of both, and why chastity regardless of state of life is such an important virtue. I'll have a bit more to say about that when I post at my blog tomorrow.
Best to all,
Mike
Posted by: Michael Liccione | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 10:15 PM
Mikkel,
As far as the KJV goes, the major problems with it are the ones already mentioned: (a) We have much better manuscript evidence than they had four centuries ago and therefore have a much more accurate Greek text than the Textus Receptus. (b) Since English words change their meaning over time, what was in the 17th century a perfectly accurate translation could now be disastrously misleading. A person who uses the KJV has to translate from Shakespearean English into modern English as he goes, but since the KJV is "already in English" he may not realize that, and thus is likely to misunderstand passages that three hundred years ago would have been impossible to misunderstand.
On St. Paul: the reason the letters of St. Paul is taken as authoritative is the same reason that the letters of St. Peter and St. James and St. John are taken as authoritative. Paul dominates the New Testament because (a) he was vastly more prolific both in letters and in evangelism than the other apostles, and (b) he was, unlike the other apostles, a genius (this doesn't mean that he was correct, of course, since a person can be a genius and still be a fool; it just means that he was brilliantly creative in wrestling with problems that people badly needed answers for). But the reason he is considered authoritative is that Jesus was considered to have gone to immense trouble to recruit him and to endorse him as the Apostle to the Gentiles. He was miraculously converted to Christianity in spectacular fashion and by direction action of the risen and glorified Jesus; he was subsequently examined by the established apostles, who concluded that his calling was genuine; he and Barnabas were set apart by the Church in direct response to instructions from the Holy Spirit; he was a noted mystic who claimed (and was believed) to have been taken bodily into heaven temporarily; he had a long series of what the Church considers to be well-documented miraculous cures and similar miracles. On the basis of that body of evidence, the Church believes that Jesus specially selected St. Paul to be the Church's first and greatest theologian (in the modern sense), and that the more or less systematic soteriology of St. Paul was provided by God as a deliberate supplement and complement to the example of Christ.
You have always to remember that, despite the fashionable idea that Jesus was primarily a moral teacher, the only remotely reliable records we have of His actual teaching portray Him as seeing His mission as primarily salvific and atoning, not educational; His teaching tends to raise questions rather than provide answers, or to call into question the old answers. If you want, you can think of it this way: from the Church's perspective, Jesus came to die and be raised again and in the process to shatter a lot of categories and preconceptions; and then following along behind that the Church considers -- based on the miraculous calling and subsequent career of St. Paul -- that St. Paul was unmistakably assigned by God to work out and popularize the new categories of thought that could, as it were, take in the greatly expanded vistas that had opened up. You can't put new wine in old wineskins or it will explode the old wineskins. Well, the Church thinks of the new revelations embedded in the Incarnation as, if you will, new wine, and she thinks of Pauline theology as the wineskin that could hold the new revelation without breaking.
At least, that's one way to express it. I'm sure Benedict could come up with something better but I think he would agree that this way of putting it isn't too terribly far off the mark.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 07:01 PM
Wow!! Magic!!! Thanks for the tip Kenny!!
Posted by: Stefan | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 06:55 PM
Stefan thanks, I'll check it out.
Kenny, you're right, my mistake.
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 06:40 PM
Stefan,
If you type the following only without the spaces after the < signs:
< a href="http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html">Here's your link.< /a>
Then you get this:
Here's your link.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 06:36 PM
Michael,
The link is here somewhere....sec....ok, found it!
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html
You’ll have to paste since I can’t add the cool linky things here….anyways check it out, it is pretty cool.
Posted by: Stefan | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 06:32 PM
Alexandra,
An interesting coincidence in light of your post highlighting Christian approaches to homosexuality. I was cleaning out some boxes during linch and found a paper I had filed some ten or eleven years ago authored by Joseph (Cardinal) Ratzinger and Alberto Bovone in 1986 titled, "LETTER TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON THE PASTORAL CARE OF HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS". (The link is to a copy of the letter on the Vatican website.)
While I am not Roman Catholic, I found the paper to be theologically sound as far as its limited scope of address required. While you are probably aware of this paper, I thought that just in case you had not read it recently, it might be useful in informing the discussion you raised in the thread.
Thanks, as always, for all the food for thought you offer.
Posted by: David | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 02:08 PM
For one Orthodox Christian's perspective, see here.
Posted by: americanorthodox | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 02:02 PM
I am learning alot here!
Posted by: Liquid | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 01:23 PM
Michael,
Not my contention; I don't really have an opinion on the narcissism thing. It's Stefan and slowtrain who are exploring that aspect. It is true that I once heard a gay gentleman who was trying to live a chaste life (including no masturbation) explain that the most difficult temptations arose when he would see his own willie in the full-length mirror of his bathroom. But one anecdote does not a statistically useful sample make.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 12:50 PM
Michael, sexual attraction to oneself or an image of oneself is a disorder and it is expressed or consumated through erotic attraction to what one already is or has, as a sexual being; in other words, a desire to sexually merge and become one with a mirror image of oneself, that mirror image can only be found in another man. Here are some helpful materials:
1. Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited by Sam Vaknin, Lidija Rangelovska (Editor)
2. Sexual Narcissism
3. Narcissism and changing masculinity
Posted by: slowtrain | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 12:16 PM
Kenny,
And my question: Could homosexual desire be considered a radical form of “self-love”? To fall into yourself so deeply that you desire your own image?
I never heard that theory. As far as I know, homosexuals feel sexually attracted to someone of the same sex, because of hormons or something, not because they think they have sex with themselves.
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 11:02 AM
Michael,
Quick answers to your specific questions:
Yes. Terminology: "Episcopalian" is a subset of "Anglican," though not for very much longer. When Englishmen used to go overseas and set up colonies, they would take the Church of England with them; and when colonies became independent nations the local branch of the Church of England would become a new national church. Anglican missionaries then started going into other countries and founding Anglican missions, which eventually would turn into that country's branch of the Anglican Church. Thus Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the U.S., Nigeria, Brazil, etc. each has its own Anglican Church, though in the United States the Anglican Church has always been known (somewhat confusingly) as the Episcopal Church.
Because the current crisis has made it quite clear that there are actually two mutually incompatible religions that have tried and failed to coexist in the Episcopal Church, and because the local political battle has been won by the liberal wing but the worldwide political battle has been won by the conservatives, there is now new terminology. Conservative Episcopalians have for the last couple of years started referring to themselves as American Anglicans, in anticipation of the inevitable expulsion of the Episcopal Church from the worldwide Anglican Communion, at which point conservative Episcopalians will stick with the Anglican Communion and let the Episcopal Church go its own way.
Short answer: yes, though (a) confession is optional for Anglicans and (b) the Prayer Book's theology is probably, and Anglican ecclesiology is certainly, more similar to the Orthodox than to the Romans.
Not on your life, though we may have a great deal of personal admiration for any given Pope.
Nominally the Archbishop of Canterbury but he has never had more power than the power of deference and respect, and the current Archbishop has largely forfeited even that.
Moving rapidly toward that model.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 10:56 AM
Michael,
I'll explain the whole Episcopalian/Anglican thing if you want, being an American Anglican myself who has lived through the long slow process of the collapse of the decades-long Episcopalian pretense to unity.
Alexandra, do you want me to explain that here or would you prefer to keep this quite remarkable thread more tightly focused? (I think probably it would be better for me to just send Michael an answer by e-mail or...you know what, I'll do a blog post on it over at the Peril.)
Looking forward to Liccione's contribution, I must say.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 10:28 AM
That link to that Sun article says:
Well, I'm probably stupid, but I don't know anything about Anglicans. We don't have Anglicans in The Netherlands I believe.
We have lutherans, reformed, baptists, salvation army, catholics, that's about it I suppose.
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 10:10 AM
Alexandra: is the Episcopal Church (we have not an Episcopal Church in the Netherlands as far as I know... not a Presbetyrian either I think.. have no idea what the differences are) the Church that recently accepted that gay Bishop and now some fractions within the Episcopal, or should I say Anglican (?? con.fu.sing) Church are upset about the decision to make Gene Robinson Bishop?
And excuse my lack of knowledge on this matter, but are Anglicans the same, in many ways, as Catholics? With confessing sins, bishops, etc.? And do Anglicans accept the Pope as the most high authority of the Church on earth, do they have a 'human' leader themselves, or more like traditional Protestants: not one main leader on earth?
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 10:06 AM
I guess so 'cos it earns quite a few Hail Marys in the confessional.
Just a quick update, the inimitable Michael Liccione from Catholica Pontifications (the link to his piece is in the main text, but Pontifications is inaccessible for periods of time during the day) will be joining the discussion later today, so I hope you can all stick around for some interesting debate.
Also, it seems that the split is worsening over the issue:
Posted by: Alexandra | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 09:54 AM
Stefan: got a link?
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 09:54 AM
So is masterbation a sin? Isn't it basically having sex with yourself?
Posted by: Liquid | Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 12:23 AM
And my question: Could homosexual desire be considered a radical form of “self-love”? To fall into yourself so deeply that you desire your own image?
Stefan, I believe it is. Correct me if an wrong, but isn’t it called sexual narcissism, which by definition is “to be erotically attracted to what one already is, or has, as a sexual being; a desire to sexually merge and become one with a mirror image of oneself.”
Sexual narcissism is believed to be an essential aspect of the erotic element of homosexuality. It is an egocentric pattern of sexual behavior, which according to David Farley Hurlbert et al, is the “inability to experience intimacy combined with a fixation on the sexual act, using high sexual esteem to compensate for low self esteem”. This is believed to be more common in men than in women and is suggested to be the basis of sex addiction. Perhaps this explains why the average homosexual could have as many as 250 sexual partners in his lifetime, according to some studies. A study done in 1978 by two homosexual doctors found that of 685 homosexual men, 589 (83%) had over 50 partners in their lifetime, 497 (73%) had over 100, 394 (58%) had over 250, 284 (41%) had over 500, 182 exceeded 1000 partners, an astounding 26%. The study also showed that 79% of those surveyed noted that over half their sexual contacts were total strangers. (Source: Bell, A.P. and Wienberg, M.S. " Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women " (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.)
Posted by: slowtrain | Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 11:58 PM
Michael, although you are not Catholic I think you may enjoy perusing Benedict XVI’s first encyclical “Deus Caritas Est”…..very engaging. Not to swoop off into theology but it begins by asking a very important question about love:
“Let us first of all bring to mind the vast semantic range of the word “love”: we speak of love of country, love of one's profession, love between friends, love of work, love between parents and children, love between family members, love of neighbour and love of God. Amid this multiplicity of meanings, however, one in particular stands out: love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness. This would seem to be the very epitome of love; all other kinds of love immediately seem to fade in comparison. So we need to ask: are all these forms of love basically one, so that love, in its many and varied manifestations, is ultimately a single reality, or are we merely using the same word to designate totally different realities?”
And my question: Could homosexual desire be considered a radical form of “self-love”? To fall into yourself so deeply that you desire your own image? Just thinking…..
Posted by: Stefan | Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 09:57 PM
Kenny Pierce, great comments and I agree with your analysis, with one exception however; nothing major, just something I believe is only superficial – a transposition of terminology.
Since we now live in a postmodern world, it is perhaps more appropriate to make your argument postmodern definition of love and postmodern view on homosexuality Vs God’s or Biblical definition of love and God’s or Biblical view on homosexuality.
The era of modernity was inspired largely by Judeo-Christian principles and morality - the belief in the natural and logical order of human engagement—essence, purpose and means. In modernity true love (not erotic love), marriage, family, fidelity and truth were emphasize and reinforced. But in postmodernity — the natural and logical order of human engagement—essence, purpose, and means is rejected. In the modern world essence and purpose were primary, the means those were secondary. The postmodernist is only concerned about the means and has discarded essence and purpose. As we know in the golden age of modernity, Aristotle’s three reasons for knowledge, in order of precedent, are truth (essence), morality (purpose), and technique (technology). In modernity, truth is primary; morality and technique derive from truth. But, in postmodernity, technology or means is supreme, morality is mocked, and truth is discarded.
Christian apologist and philosopher Ravi Zacharias, wrote, “The modern world had emphasized purpose and design. The postmodern world emphasizes randomness and chance. The modern world sought stability in values. The postmodern world sees values as transient and relative. The modern world saw reason as the means and meaning as the end. The postmodern world glories in unreason and celebrates meaninglessness. The modern world pursued a synthesis of all disciplines in its search to find the unity of truth. The postmodern world focuses on deconstruction and extols the marvel of contradiction.”
The central principle of postmodernism is the rejection of logic itself or truism or “meta narratives”; ways of thinking that unite knowledge and experience to present or support a definitive universal truth – the truth of God, whether it is with regards to the meaning of love (another attribute of God) or the purpose of human existence. What we see happening today and as you clearly articulated in your in depth comment, in the homosexual fold and the larger domain of secular thought, with the redefinition of love, right and wrong, and the very idea of truth itself, is fully postmodern not modern. This redefinition is rooted in the notion that truth is unknowable, which was what the Episcopal Bishop Griswold was essentially implying, a clear indication of the reach of postmodernism, even into the Church. Postmodernism is primed on the premise that modernity was characterized by monolithic attitudes, largely of Christian origin, that are impossible to maintain in the present-day culturally diverse and fragmented world, hence the push for religious ecumenism amongst some Christians, such as those in the interfaith alliance.
Posted by: slowtrain | Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 05:53 PM
Michael,
I would speculate that there is a small population of Catholics that may believe that any sin will be forgiven through confession. But a "license to sin", I'm not so sure.
Regards,
JCC
Posted by: RunningRoach | Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 04:42 PM
Fascinating in this thread in that a few people have used the words "pride" and "idolatry".
At this point in time, many seem to see pride as a (gulp) VIRTUE, not the deadliest of sins as someone noted above.
And as for idols, idolatry is so deadly (and pride is pretty much idolatry of the self - raising myself to the "level" of God, over God) that the first four "vertical" commandments of the 10 specifically warn against it. However, in our fallen bodies we're idolators by nature, and we're steeped in a society which condones idolatry* without seeing it as such.
*Anything can become an idol. Our spouse. Our kids. Our fancy new car. A well-endowed young male body. A well-endowed young female body. Our sexuality. Etc.
Posted by: Kurt Wayne | Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 04:20 PM
Also; one could say that God 'punishes' to make us aware of His kind of love. To make us aware of real love.
That theoligian I mentioned earlier also wrote that one could almost say that he 'punished' for instance the Jews because He loved them: one could almost say, so He wrote, I don't know whether I agree with this, that God is / was hurt that man turned away from Him / from His love.
So, in essence one could say, following this kind of reasoning, that God punished 'them' because God wanted / wants the best thing for His children: walk in love with Him. When they / we stray off course, He wants to bring us back on the right path again, not out of selfisness, but out of love: He knows that it is in our interest to walk in companianship with Him.
I am still reading this, thinking about it, studying it, etc. so if my comments seem to be a little bit as if I am brainstorming that is because... well... I am. ;-)
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 03:15 PM
Kenny,
about love: I am reading this book I got from my parents this weekend, written by a very important Dutch theologian (is that English?).
Anyway: when talking about God is love, he wrote something highly interesting and it is very similar, if not the same, as you wrote about this.
The essence of it is that God is love. But not 'just' love, but perfect love. But not just 'perfect love' as we can, possibly, understand it, but even more perfect than that. He gives us insight into Himself, thus into His love for us, through revelations. But still, even through revelations, we never fully comprehend what the God's love truly is. How big it is, how deep it runs.
The thing we humans describe as 'love' has wandered from the God kind of love: due to sin 'our' understanding / kind of love is different from Gods love.
However: God's kind of love, is love as it was meant.
Come to think of it, I have no real idea why I wrote this...
anyway...
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 03:07 PM
JCC
I always find the Catholic custom of 'confession' to be highly interesting. On the one hand it is important to confess to ones sins: both for oneself and for the relationship with the Lord.
But sometimes it also gives me the feeling that it has caused certain individuals to believe they have a 'licence to sin freely'.
What do you think?
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 02:56 PM