Harry’s Place

I thought all British teeth looked like that.

This is all rather ad hominem.

Any chance of some engagement with the more thoughtful and good-natured conservatives (who actually have coherent arguments and true compassion, rather than ignorance and fear)?

From the close-up, I dread to think what that bloke’s been putting in his mouth.

This is the thing about homophobia though (an almost fascinating thing, despite how vile it is) - I can’t quite understand what people find repulsive about homosexuality? I see two blokes being affectionate with each other and I don’t bat an eyelid. Its as uninspiring as a woman and man being all over each other. Ditto with same-sex sex. I find the whole lesbian thing tiresome as well. Turn-on? Hah, you’re having a laugh. Is it an anal thing? Is it a top-bottom thing? Are homophobes against anything other than the missionary position?

I’m genuinely puzzled as to how anyone could be against two people (of whatever gender) loving each other and caring for each other.

I always understood the sin of Sodom to be lack of hospitality.

My father’s line on this sort of thing is “Why do Christians think that Leviticus applies to them?”. I think he has yet to grasp the concept of “replacement theology”.

As a former keen Catholic, and now pro-gay marriage agnostic, I nevertheless feel compelled to clarify what is actually being argued by the “homophobes”. Official church teach does not object to loving and caring and nurturing and deep relationships, and specifically forbids hatred and ill-treatment of gay people. It is specifically an objection to the sexual element of the relationship, because of the Christian understanding of what sex means. You may disagree with the premises of Christian arguments, but the view is coherently constructed, and the vast majority of Christians I know are not haters or bigots of any description.

The Independent says that you were beaten up.

http://tinyurl.com/3l584p

Of course, this being the Independent, you can’t necessarily believe what they say.

I always understood the sin of Sodom to be lack of hospitality.

I dread,dread to think what goes through Davids mind when he drives past a Travelodge.

I always understood the sin of Sodom to be lack of hospitality.

That’s what I was taught to believe too. It was downright rudeness and not man-love that cause the problem.

But you know what fundies are like, they get an idea into their heads and just run with it forever.

It is specifically an objection to the sexual element of the relationship, because of the Christian understanding of what sex means.

Funny how this alledged “specific” objection *always* manifests itself in outright hatred towards homosexuality in general.

and the vast majority of Christians I know are not haters or bigots of any description.

Yeah, right. That hatred and bigotry are inherent parts of Christianity conveniently seems to escape you.

With all due respect, Morgoth, I spent twenty years in Christian churches, as well as studying theology and church history.

Sounds like I missed the classes on the “inherent” hatred and bigotry. Of course there have been many haters and bigots in the church, and many who treat homosexuals badly. No-one has ever denied this. Like everyone else Christians are flawed, messed up human beings. Hell, even 21st century liberals have been known to make the odd mistake.

In any case, there is plenty of spite to go around in this debate. Some “liberal” venom against Christianity is as ignorant, irrational and vicious as anything on the other side.

If you’re gay why would you want to be an Anglican?

You think I’m “liberal”?

*chortle*

That’s quite funny.

Free radical

I am basically very positive towards Anglicanism, which I think is the second best religion (i.e. to “no religion at all”).

However, Christian doctrine - like Jewish doctrine which it is based on - is virulently homophobic. I don’t see how Christians can get round Leviticus, or St Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality.

Yeah, I know, people argue that Jesus brought us a “new covenant” and therefore nobody has to follow Leviticus (which in any case only applies to Jews). But Jesus was pretty clear about not abrogating the laws in Leviticus: he thought they continued to apply with full force.

Similarly, people do say “Paul was only talking about promiscuity, and specifically Temple prostitution in pagan sects, and not loving committed relationships and anyhow what about Jesus and the woman taken in adultery etc.”.

But frankly, this is clutching at straws. Jesus wasn’t pro gay relationships, any more than he was in favour of adultery. He was a pretty traditional 1st century AD Jewish guy. And these people weren’t pro-gay by any means.

“If you’re gay why would you want to be an Anglican?”

Precisely.

There are just some things that are incompatible.

I do understand why people who are warm and fluffy about old churches, and cassocks, and Evensong, and incense want to join the Anglican church. But the sine qua non of joining a church is believing in god and accepting its doctrine.

Certianly, religions are broadly interpretable, and it is possible to interpret the Bible so as not to, you know, require people to kill gays. But to suggest that Christianity is positive about homosexuality really requires a striking degree of myopia about some of its central texts.

Jesus told the woman taken in adultery to “sin no more”. That I think is the best that gay men can realistically expect from Christianity.

Conservative Christians are often very concerned about “helping” gays, just as anti-Zionists have a deep concern for the Jewish people. This is called hating the sin but loving the sinner, I understand.

Torquemada - not an Anglican, I acknowledge - was also an exponent.

Only Christian fundamentalists could be so stupid to devise an organisation that will forever be known as the FOCAs (as in ‘meet the fockers’). Unfortunately most of the focas will be staying away from the Lambeth conference later this month, so there will not be a chance to protest against them in person.

There is good evidence that the repulsive Peter Akinola stirred up the Christian-Muslim riots in Nigera in 2003, and bishops in his church are well known to support the death penalty for homosexual practice.
http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/001585.html
http://akinolarepent.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/nigerian-bishop-gays-not-fit-to-live/

Akinola should surely be banned from Britain.

David T
Jesus wasn’t pro gay relationships, any more than he was in favour of adultery.

Not really tenable. Jesus had plenty to say about adultery, and the correct response to it, but nothing about homosexuality. If Jesus believed that the laws of Leviticus were to be applied with their full force, he would not have stopped the stoning of the adulterous woman, nor preached against an eye for an eye.

‘the World Health Organization’s definition of “AIDS” in Africa which differs decisively from AIDS in the West. The WHO’s clinical-case definition for AIDS in Africa (adopted in 1985) is not based on an HIV test or T-cell counts but on the combined symptoms of chronic diarrhea, prolonged fever, 10 percent body weight loss in two months and a persistent cough, none of which are new or uncommon on the African continent’ http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/aids_afr.html.

Contrast with your comment ‘The irony, of course, is that in today’s world - once again, especially in Africa - AIDS is overwhelmingly a heterosexual issue’. Perhaps you don’t understand the AIDS issue yourself?

Ah, Anita S - an HIV/AIDS denier in the Mbeki mould.

The laws about shellfish etc seem to carry equal weight as the anti-sex laws do - so why the obsession with people breaking the sex laws, even if you think they still hold? Do they ask potential bishops if they eat lobster?

Do they ask potential bishops if they eat lobster?

Oooh errr missus!

Re the sin of Sodom, the general wickedness was what did for the place. Though homosexuality - or should it be gang rape? which is after, all, fairly inhospitable - is given as an implicit example of that wickedness.

“Now this was the sin of Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.”

Haughty gays can be a bit annoying, I suppose, but it does seem a bit of an over-reaction. It’s also worth remembering that Lot offered his two daughters to the crowd instead of his male visitors. He was after all a righteous man so that’s okay. (Then again, remember what the daughters got up to with him later on).

The really interesting question, though, is what on earth did they get up to in Gomorrah?

Any jaded roué looking for new vices to explore could do worth than study the Bible. It can be very instructive for that sort of thing.

The NT records that Jesus specifically overturned all the dietary prohibitions and ritual requirements of the Old Testament, but is not recorded as having done so for sexual morality. Most orthodox scholars explain this by pointing out that sexual morality is important, fundamental if you will, in a way that most OT Jewish rituals were not.

Sexual morality is tied up with how the world is created, how we relate to each other, how we structure society, how we relate to God etc. Not eating shellfish is a kind of specific and obviously cultural prohibition for particular peoples at particular times.

It is true that Jesus never specifically condemns homosexual acts; but then he never specifically condemns racism, rape, nuclear weapons, climate change, speeding on the motorway or slavery – this does not prevent Christians from having moral qualms about all these issues. Bear in mind that when Christians try and work out moral principles, they do not always have a clear statement from Jesus to guide them. Jesus never tells Christians how to understand the Trinity, for example.

He may not have left a detailed teaching on a certain issue, but what he does do is to give Christians pointers as to how they should be thinking about ethical and moral issues.

So, for example, when someone asks him about marriage, he does not just give them a pat answer, but instead refers back to Genesis and the creation story; that is, he refers to the original divine plan for human relationships. So for Christians, a more useful question than “what does Jesus say about homosexuality?” is “how do homosexual acts fit in to the divine vision of human sexuality as laid down by Jesus?”

Just trying to bring a little light as well as heat :-)

The photo led me to pray for good dentistry.

And why does everyone assume that ALL gays are into sodomy?

Many gay men aren’t into sodomy at all, whereas others are completely celibate.

There is good evidence that the repulsive Peter Akinola stirred up the Christian-Muslim riots in Nigera in 2003,

Akinola is certainly repulsive, but to claim he stirred up sectarian riots between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria is horsefeathers.

Nigerian Muslims don’t need ’stirring’ when it comes to attacking Christians.

They can self-stir on a dime.

“The NT records that Jesus specifically overturned all the dietary prohibitions and ritual requirements of the Old Testament,”

For someone who studied theology etc for 20 years I find this statement extraordinary. Are you sure you didn’t mean Paul?

Acts of the Apostles 10-11. The food prohibitions are clearly superseded.

Maybe I overstate it slightly by talking about ALL ritual requirements, but the whole tenor of Jesus’ actions in the NT is about the formation of the inner man and individual responsibility for actions rather than outside religious observance.

Some 300 dissident conservative Anglican led by Nigerian Archbishop Akinola held a meeting of their group called the Global Anglican Future Conference or Gafcon in Jerusalem last week where they attacked the Archbishop of Canterbury as too liberal. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7468474.shtm for details.
Alas, their conference coninceded with Jerusalem’s Annual Gay Pride Parade! (For Real!) See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7476604.stm for this LOL event! Some times you get lucky and the idiots like Gafcon end up satirizing themsevles.
Hat tip to Snoopy the Goon at http://smplyjews.blogspot.com
Click on down to his June 27th post, “The Jerusalem answer to Anglican rebels” .

whoops, that should be SimplyJews at http://simplyjews.blogspot.com . Sorry for the misspelling.

Umm, isn’t that Peter talking, not Jesus as far as I can see?

Can you actually point out something attributed to Jesus himself which supports your view on the dietary issues?

And you have definitely overstated your position concerning ALL ritual requirements.

Even Acts 15 indicates that the early Christians were prohibited from eating blood in meat…

Oniad

It’s in Mark’s Gospel - chapter 6 - Jesus says that what goes into a person doesn’t defile him (therefore declaring all foods clean (verse 19).

He goes on to say that what comes out of the heart of a person is what defiles him, including ’sexual immorality’ - a term that first Century Jews would see as a catch-all for all sex outside of marriage - including homosexual practice (sorry Brett).

Des

It’s Mark 7 actually.

And I personally don’t buy it.

The reason why is because Jesus’ followers were arguing about it after the event of his death (Acts 15) which suggests (not unreasonably) that he never actually said it.
Otherwise why the argument and certainly why did they adopt something which completely contravened Jesus’ known view?

I would suggest instead that Mark included this attribution in line with Paul’s position which won out, especially after James’ death and the destruction of the Temple (which coincedentally both occur before Mark’s Gospel is written) and the virtual wholesale shift to a non-Jewish audience.
This is also reasonably borne out by the fact that Mark’s audience are clearly not Jews because he needs to keep explaining Jewish customs to the reader and similarly by the fact that constant debates continued between Christians concerning the Law eg. circumcision etc.

*Sorry readers for arguing about this on the thread.

It’s in Mark’s Gospel - chapter 6 - Jesus says that what goes into a person doesn’t defile him (therefore declaring all foods clean (verse 19).

So Mark or Luke, or whomever says that Jesus said something. Why didn’t Jesus write anything himself? And if he did why wasn’t it preserved? If there was in fact a historical Jesus, seems more likely that he was illiterate.

And then the bit about whatever goes into a person doesn’t defile him seems like utter bollocks. Or is Mark’s Jesus saying that ingesting poison, say rat poison won’t defile people? And if poison won’t defile human beings, what about ingesting your neighbour’s children in a red wine marinade? That won’t “defile” people either I presume? What does it mean today and what did it mean to a 1st century Judean or Galillean, to “defile” a person anyway? Geez.

“what goes into a person doesn’t defile him”
If so then what’s the problem?

Oniad:

I’ll grant you the Mark 7 correction, but I am just responding to your question asking for something attributed to Jesus. You may not buy it or believe he said it - but his earliest followers seemed to think so (Mark is the Gospel attributed to Peter, after all, who was there at the Jerusalem council). The reasons you give for Mark would need to also apply to Matthew’s account, who wrote to a mainly Jewish audience, but says the same thing without Mark’s editorial comment. Acts 15 is primarily about circumcision, and not the food laws, and also contains an injunction against Christians practicing sexual immorality.

Geez:

“If there was a historical Jesus”. Oh dear.

Jesus is talking about food - not rat poison, or radioisotopes or sulphuric acid. Read it.

At the end of the day guys, why are you actually bothered with what the Church thinks about this stuff anyway? From what I’ve previously read from Brett on this site, he seems to have nothing but utter contempt for Christianity - why even be concerned with the LGCM? Or are they only useful because they are a ‘gay’ organisation challenging the ‘club rules’?

I’ll go away now.

Des

I’m not sure whether you don’t know or are trying to be dishonest but you have heard about Markan primacy haven’t you?
(Helps explain why Mark’s stuff turns up in Matt. and Luke)

I’m also unsure why you haven’t actually addressed any of the (IMO reasonable) objections/issues that I brought up?

I appreciate that you are probably a person of faith, a Christian even, but that doesn’t really excuse critical thought when your trying to use your own religious books to argue moral positions.

David T: “If you’re gay why would you want to be an Anglican?”
Precisely.
There are just some things that are incompatible.

I hate to defend the Church, but hang on. In terms of personal belief, there’s a fair few members of the Anglican church (up to and including Bishops, and at least one former Archbishop) who don’t actually believe in Christ’s divinity, and that’s been the case for at least a couple of centuries. There’s any number of reasons for being an Anglican, and belief in doctrine is merely one of them.

But on the level of the Anglican Church as a whole, it has been revising Christian doctrine since its inception. This is the latest in a long line of debates about where to draw the line between which bits of Christianity the Church will promote and which bits it will ignore, nothing more - debates that progressive Anglicans always win, because time is on their side. The Church was a strong voice for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, despite what St. Paul wrote. Hell, it was a strong voice for the abolition of slavery, despite what St. Paul wrote.

John P:
And why does everyone assume that ALL gays are into sodomy?Many gay men aren’t into sodomy at all, whereas others are completely celibate.

I believe sodomy refers to all non-procreational sex - anal, oral, frottage, etc. - so, only celibate homosexuals escape castigation there. I suspect you were thinking of buggery (I know I am).

David All:
Alas, their conference coninceded with Jerusalem’s Annual Gay Pride Parade! (For Real!) See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7476604.stm for this LOL event! Some times you get lucky and the idiots like Gafcon end up satirizing themsevles.

Gaffecon indeed.

I love the first video clip in the report, for three reasons:

1) The rent-a-quote conservative reverend is called Tinker.

2) The marching gays who have, to Tinker’s dismay, chosen a lifestyle “against God’s plan”… are also Jewish, so doubly “against God’s plan” (according to what I learnt at Sunday School - and given that conservative Anglicans also believe that they have a Biblical duty to evangelize and convert, that these people are Jews and therefore un-saved regardless of their sexual behaviour, should really be Tinker’s primary concern).

3) One of the gay Jews has a Che t-shirt on, so is also a godless communist - thus, triply “against God’s plan” (again, according to what I learnt at Sunday School). Ha, suck it Reverend Tinker.

Bishop voice

Reforming Christology: He Did not Die for My Sins
“The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbaric idea based on a primitive concept of God that must be dismissed.”–Thesis Number 6 from The Twelve Theses: A Call for a New Reformation

In May of 1998 when I posted on the Internet Twelve Theses for debate, drawn from my book Why Christianity Must Change or Die, I could not have imagined the intensity of the response. The debate has been welcomed and condemned, entered and avoided by countless numbers of people. The Theses have been preached on positively and negatively in this diocese, at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, in Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. The most emotional response has come to Thesis Number 6 that has to do with the interpretation of the cross and the role of Jesus in the drama of salvation, where I have challenged the adequacy of the phrase: “Jesus died for my sins.”
That phrase has been used so often in Christian history that it has achieved the status of a mantra. That is, it is repeated over and over without explanation as if its meaning is self-evident. It does not lend itself to questions or to debate. It is simply advanced again and again. The Eucharist assumes it, many of our hymns reflect it. Yet to the modern mind this phrase, when analyzed, is all but nonsensical.
Sometimes this sacred phrase is expanded to include what surely can only be described as a fetish about the blood that Jesus shed on the cross. To that “sacred” blood incredible power has been attributed. Christians have gone so far as to talk about the cleansing effect of being washed in this blood. One hymn that I endured twice during Holy Week proclaims that “God on Thee Has Bled.” The death of Jesus is said to have been something God required: a ransom, a sacrifice offered to God, a payment demanded by God for the sins of the world, the price required to achieve atonement, which is the experience of being at one with God.
In my studies I have come to the conclusion that this language, “Jesus died for my sins,” is a violent distortion of the meaning of Jesus. It offers me a God who is sadistic and bloodthirsty. A God whose will is served by a human sacrifice is not a God I would ever be drawn to worship. It is rather a grotesque idea. Yet this concept has become so normative in the way that our faith story is told that many people seem to feel that if this understanding of the saving work of Jesus is not accepted, then there is nothing of substance left to Christianity.
I am convinced, however, that exactly the opposite is true. To me it is obvious that unless we expose the barbaric quality of this ancient interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ death and of the God who was said to have required it and remove this spiritual monstrosity from the Christian enterprise then Christianity has no future. I do not believe that modern men and women will ever find appealing a God whose will is served by the human sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
If Christianity requires this view of the meaning of Jesus’ death, I, for one would no longer choose this household of faith. But because of its entrenched nature, passive opposition will never be effective. Indeed, this idea must be agressively dislodged or nothing new and more appealing will ever emerge. That is why the Christian Church today requires, I believe, a new and mighty reformation that must not stop until it has examined and reformulated the most basic core doctrines of the Christian faith. The Reformation of the 16th Century stopped short of this task and made, we see in retrospect, only cosmetic changes. This new reformation must shake the very foundations of traditional Christian thinking. It will inevitably create enormous fear and anxiety in conservative religious circles and it will elicit the kind of anger that always arises when an ultimate threat is posed to a dying belief system. But we must nonetheless welcome it, for it offers the only chance that the faith of our fathers and mothers will live to be the faith of our children and grandchildren.
The view of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, in my opinion, represents bad theology designed to accommodate the bad anthropology on which it is based.
Human life was not created good only to fall into sin, necessitating a divine rescue that culminated on the cross of Calvary, as the traditional Christian myth asserts. Human life rather has evolved through millions of years of evolutionary history leaving us not just incomplete, but distorted by that struggle to survive. We are not fallen angels, but emerging beings. We are a work in progress, constantly victimized by the unfinished nature of our humanity. We cannot, therefore, be rescued by a sacrificial death of one who was making the perfect offering to an offended Deity designed to restore us to what we have never been. We must rather be called by the gift of love to journey into a higher consciousness, a new and more complete humanity. The savior figure cannot be for us one who pays the price for the sins of our life. A savior for our understanding of humanity must instead be one who is capable of empowering us to grow beyond our limits, to escape our distorting fears, our blinding prejudices and our killing stereotypes and to bring us to a place where we discover the freedom to give our lives away in love to others. The ultimate theological question driving the new reformation is whether or not we can strip away from Jesus this traditional interpretive explanation without destroying the experience that people had with this Jesus that caused them to exclaim that in him the holiness of God had been encountered.
To do this we have to set aside the mythological framework that has captured Jesus. Virgin births and cosmic ascensions must be seen as nothing more than pre-modern interpretive language. Walking on water and feeding the 5000 with five loaves cannot be literal stories. Resurrection understood as physical resuscitation will have to be seen as the late developing tradition that it was. But once this mythological framework is removed, Jesus does not disappear or simply become a good teacher, as many seem to fear. Instead a Jesus emerges as a channel for transcendence, a person at one with the source of life, the revealer of the source of love, a new being who makes plain the Ground of all Being. He is a God presence, not a mythological god-man; a complete human being who becomes the life through which the full power of God’s divine reality can emerge in human history.
Instead of looking at literalized interpretive miracles, we must begin to look rather at the one whose wholeness called his followers beyond the limits of their tribal identity. The Jews, who thought Gentiles were unfit for human relationships, felt compelled by who Jesus was to go into that Gentile world to proclaim the Gospel, and they did. The religious purists who were convinced that the Samaritans, the primary object of their prejudice, were rejected by God and were therefore rejectable, were transformed by this Jesus. He taught them that when Samaritans obey the call of the Torah to be compassionate and caring, they are more fully children of Abraham than are a priest and a Levite who were willing to pass the victims of life by the other side of the road.
The strict keepers of the rules about who was clean and unclean were confronted by a Jesus who embraced the leper, allowed the touch of the woman with the chronic menstrual flow, and refused to judge the person taken of adultery.
God was in this Christ. That was the experience which cried out for explanation. Yet the explanations of history were couched in assumptions we can no longer make. These assumptions were shaped by a world view that we no longer share. They reflected an understanding of reality that is not ours and a worship tradition that is foreign to our own.
First century Jewish-Christians understood Jesus’ death after the analogy of the Passover lamb, slaughtered to break open the power of death. Next they viewed him as the new lamb of Yom Kippur, sacrificed to take away the sins of the world. They were weaving around Jesus their liturgical symbols of antiquity, but none of these symbols will work for us. Indeed, they are repellant. So we must be prepared to lay them aside, to treat them as the limited and ultimately falsifying explanations that they are. Jesus did not die for our sins! Jesus was not a sacrifice offered to God to overcome the fall that never happened. We are emerging creatures, not fallen creatures. Jesus was not the embodiment of the theistic deity who visited this planet in human disguise for a brief thirty years. Jesus was the one, in whom the God who is present in the depths of life, emerged in human history in a dramatic and complete new way. The task of the new reformation is to separate Jesus from this distorting material and to recast him in new images.
But we must never lose the experience. God was in Christ. The transcendent power of life, the eternal fountain of love, the ineffable Ground of All Being erupted in his whole and free humanity to call us into a new consciousness. The call of this Christ is a call to move beyond the evolutionary limits set by our quest for survival. The Holy Spirit of God who was so present in Jesus, that people said that the Spirit actually conceived him, is still his gift to give to each of us. We who are in Christ can, like Christ, become God bearers in our world, new incarnations of the eternal divine presence. We can reveal the source of life and love, which calls us and others into the fullness of our being.
That is an avenue through which we can speak of Christ in our time, and that is where the coming reformation might lead us. For the Christian Church to cling to the literalized formulas of yesterday is nothing less than to pursue the pathway of death. Abandoning those formulas to enter the Christ experience anew is the hope of the future.
I pray for the arrival of this reformation, even though I recognize that it will appear to many to be destroying what they think the Christian faith is. We must not fear that, for it will also lead us to revival and resurrection and give us the ability to sing the Lord’s song in the third millennium.