Why is the PLF Process Proving So Prolonged and Painful?

424 thoughts on “Why is the PLF Process Proving So Prolonged and Painful?”

1. Because obstinate culture-bound people refused to address the obvious point that you cannot square a circle, and would rather expend masses of money and time vainly trying to do so, and thereby to jettison the model of stable family. 2 Cor 6.14.

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2. I tried DeepSeek just now, but it didn’t come up with the image the above brought to mind. Can anyone else follow their suggestions and create it for us:
   Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your animated GIF:
   1. **Conceptualize the Scene**
   – **Ship**: A rudderless ship turning in tight circles, symbolizing disorientation or lack of direction.
   – **Rudder (Labelled “Bible”)**: Floating nearby, detached from the ship.
   – **Life Rafts**: Abandoned and labelled with “Canons,” “39 Articles,” “History,” and “Legal Advice.”
   – **Title**: Add the text “Church of England” prominently in the scene.

   2. **Create the Assets**
   – Use graphic design tools (e.g., Adobe Illustrator, Canva, or Procreate) to create:
   – The ship, rudder, and life rafts.
   – Labels for each element.
   – A background (e.g., stormy sea or calm water, depending on the tone you want).
   3. **Animate the Scene**
   – Use animation software (e.g., Adobe After Effects, Blender, or even Photoshop for simpler animations):
   – Animate the ship turning in tight circles.
   – Make the rudder float nearby, bobbing slightly in the water.
   – Add subtle movement to the life rafts to make them look abandoned and adrift.
   4. **Add Text and Labels**
   – Include the title “Church of England” in a prominent font.
   – Ensure the labels on the rudder and life rafts are clear and readable.
   5. **Export as a GIF**
   – Once the animation is complete, export it as a GIF file. Most animation software will have an option to export in GIF format.

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3. So there is holy matrimony and unholy matrimony, and what the revisionists want is to import the latter into the Church of England. Sooner or later they are going to be brought, kicking and screaming if necessary, to Keith Sinclair’s dissenting Appendix to the Pilling Report, in which he examines the relevant scriptures.

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   • Badly

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     • Where?

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4. The timing of this announcement interests me. Is it a coincidence that ++Justin is no longer in post?

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   • The timing of which announcement?

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5. As for underestimation of the breadth and depth of objections…
   How about the length of history and the breadth of the world?
   Not so much ivory tower as living under a stone.

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6. Thank you, Andrew, for a most enlightening and insightful analysis of how we have got to where we are – and for the positivity of your hopes for the future.

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7. Does Christian doctrine deal with eternal truths; is something that was true yesterday, true today and also true tomorrow? If Jesus is Divine, is He is Divine today and tomorrow? If abortion was immoral in the first century, is it immoral today? Is this the same with artificial contraception, divorce and remarriage, and sexual activity outside of a life-long union between a man and a woman?

   I found this comment from an article on ‘Modern Church’ both interesting and deceptive:

   From a historical and theological perspective, the very existence of a Protestant world view is dependent on a rejection of the view that church tradition and hierarchy has the right to define the limits of acceptable enquiry.
   https://modernchurch.org.uk/how-can-the-church-change-doctrine#:~:text=From%20its%20very%20inception%2C%20the,formalised%20in%20councils%20and%20synods.

   Interesting insofar as it is accurate in terms of most Protestant churches stances in relation to the Bishop of Rome and to early doctrinal formulations before the Reformation – when “errors” were corrected. Deceptive because it confuses the proper development and (re)presentation of Christian doctrine in different contexts, with a change in doctrine. It also artificially divorces “acceptable enquiry” from church “tradition” and “hierarchy”.

   Some lines of theological exploration do need to take place within settled doctrinal parameters that were true yesterday (2000+ years ago), remain true today, and will be true tomorrow. This debate can of course find different ways of expressing of doctrines and explore pastoral concerns suited to each age and time. However, the Biblical teachings on the immorality of sexual relations between same sex couples, and the immorality of sex outside a life long marriage between a man and a woman, are areas of settled doctrine; unless God has “changed His mind”.

   “Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi” follows – “the law of what is prayed is what is believed is the law of what is lived”.

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   • An awful lot of church traditions ‘just grow’, but it is never too late – or too early – to compare them against holy scripture.

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     • You need to define “tradition”, Anton, and what you mean by “grow”.

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       • One has to be bery highly educated indeed to find the meaning of such words obscure.

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         • Perhaps, perhaps not, Anton.

           It’s important to able to distinguish between Apostolic Tradition (from the Latin word tradere, “to hand on”), ecclesiastical tradition, and mere custom?

           As for “grow”, doctrine grows through development, not change, a living process by which the Church’s understanding of faith deepens over time. Development of doctrine is always the coming to see more clearly what the mystery is, not the full comprehension of the mystery itself. Doctrines don’t change, but the Church’s understanding of them does.

           Furthermore, Scripture must be read and interpreted from within this living Apostolic Tradition. Whatever is proposed contrary to or inconsistent with Scripture as it has perennially been understood within this living Apostolic Tradition, and as it has been consistently and authentically taught within the Church’s magisterial Tradition, is thus not a true development of doctrine.

         • So, Jack, you think the Apostles taught the immaculate conception and the assumption?

         • James, I’m a Roman Catholic!

           I believe both dogma are implicit in Scripture, yes. The Apostles were focussed primarily on teaching about Christ resurrected. Did the Apostles pass these teachings on orally? I’d be surprised if the didn’t. Certainly the early Fathers recognised that Mary received a number of distinctive blessings in order to make her a fitting mother for Christ and the prototypical Christian.

           The Greek word “kecharitōmenēis,” for example, is a perfect passive participle, pointing to Mary having been and is full of grace. Because of her unparalleled role as the mother of God, she has been prepared to become the pure sinless bearer of the Incarnation. Mary is a fulfilment of various Old Testament imagery and prophecies: the Ark of the Covenant (Luke 1:39-45), the New Eve (Luke 1:37-38; John 2:4, 19:26-27; Rev. 12), and the “daughter of Zion” (Isa. 12:1-6, Zeph. 3:14-16, Zech. 2:10).

           Granted the evidence is not exactly overwhelming. Mary’s perpetual virginity is the Marian doctrine with the best biblical evidence. The evidence for the Immaculate Conception and Assumption is far from explicit.

           What is certain is the pervasive belief in those two doctrines in the early Church. These didn’t come from thin air; nor from Gnosticism. Hippolytus and Origen in the third century; Ephraem the Syrian, Ambrose, and Athanasius in the fourth century; and Theodotus of Ancrya and Peter Chrysologus in the fifth century all affirmed the Immaculate Conception. The Patristic support for the Immaculate Conception is so powerful that many of the the early Reformers subscribed to it.

           Eiphanius and Ephraem the Syrian, writing in the late fourth century, support the early Church’s belief in Mary’s assumption. Indeed, by the end of the fourth century, the Feast of the Dormition, or “Koimesis”, honouring Mary’s death and bodily assumption into heaven, was celebrated throughout the East. The consensus among the East and West (dormition and assumption referring to the same doctrine) also points to the historical legitimacy of this doctrine. Even post-Catholic Luther believed in the Assumption.

           As Cardinal Henry Newman put it:

           The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now, as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you know, a process of development in apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.
           https://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/pusey/section2.html

           Scripture does not prove what the Catholic Church teaches about Mary. Catholics believe them because the earliest Christians did not adhere to sola scriptura. The Bible is not the only authority.

         • Mary’s perpetual virginity is the Marian doctrine with the best biblical evidence.

           In which case we can safely forget about the others. Mary’s perpetual virginity is nowhere deducible from scripture and is against the normal inference from Matthew’s words in verses 1:18 and 1:25, that Joseph “had no [carnal] knowledge of her until she bore him a son” – which although stating nothing about what happened after her pregnancy is not likely to be how Matthew would have written if the couple had remained celibate. If you are told that a woman broke her leg before her wedding, and that she and her husband had no union until the plaster cast was removed, what do you suppose they did next? Your Magisterium appears to regard it as scandalous that a married couple had sex, whereas Paul takes the view that it is mistaken for them not to (1 Corinthians 7:5). Abundant children are viewed throughout the Old Testament as a blessing, and Mary was certainly blessed (Luke 1:48). Did Mary and Joseph have separate beds or bedrooms for the rest of their lives together?

           This is one of several Catholic doctrines which assign to Mary various special characteristics of Jesus. Why, if Mary’s perpetual virginity is true, did none of the gospel writers say so explicitly?

         • Anton, if you were a faithful Jew would you dare engage in sexual relations with a woman who you believed had carried in her womb and given birth to God incarnate, the Lord Jesus Christ?

         • If I were married to her, Yes. The Most High God simply borrowed her womb for 9 months.

           You might as well say that Christians should not travel to the land that Jesus trod.

         • The Ark of the Covenant foreshadowed Mary’s womb and the Incarnation. The Angel Gabriel informed Mary the Most High will overshadow her in the same way God’s presence overshadowed the Holy of Holies in the Temple. The early Church Fathers also pointed to Ezekiel 44: 1-3 as foreshadowing Jesus’ birth and Mary’s perpetual virginity.

           One could go over all the Scriptural texts and arguments against Mary and Joseph having had children, but we’ve been here before. The early reformers all fully accepted this doctrine: including Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bullinger, Turretin, and Cranmer, and most Protestant exegetes continued to believe it for at least another 350 years. On this, John Calvin said: “No man will obstinately keep up the argument, except from an extreme fondness for disputation.”

           Why the change today? We’ve made sex an idol.

         • Jack, Ezekiel 44:1-3 reads: The man brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, the one facing east, and it was shut. The Lord said to me, “This gate is to remain shut. It must not be opened; no one may enter through it. It is to remain shut because the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered through it. The prince himself is the only one who may sit inside the gateway to eat in the presence of the Lord. He is to enter by way of the portico of the gateway and go out the same way.”

           It is desperate eisegesis to see Mary’s womb in Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple. It is you, not moderns, who crazily see something related to sex in this vision.

           As for Mary’s alleged perpetual virginity being early, in the Protoevangelium of James, there is a reason this writing did not make it into the New Testament.

         • Anton, have you considered how devout Jews were obligated to act after manifestations of God’s spirit and the strict rules concerning the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy of Holies? Mary was the consecrated sacred vessel carrying and giving birth to God incarnate.

           The Protoevangelium of James did not meet the necessary criteria for inclusion in the canon. It was written after the Apostles; is apocryphal; and is not Divinely inspired. There’s nothing heretical in it. The teaching on the perpetual virginity of Mary does not depend on it being accurate. In fact, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli all accepted this doctrine.

           The Greek terms for brother (adelphos) and sister (adelphe) have a wide sematic range and are not restricted to literal full or half natural siblings. So we don’t have to accept that these refer to children of Joseph, as per the Protoevangelium of James, a position held by some of the Fathers, or children of Mary of Clopas, the wife of Alpheus, and sister of Mary, as held by other Fathers.

           Do you really expect the authors of Scripture to delve into the absence of marital relations between Mary and Joseph? There are clues in Scripture. When Jesus was 10 years old there’s no mention of brothers and sisters being with Joseph and Mary during their trip to the Temple. Why not? Before His death, Jesus placed Mary in the care of John. According to Jewish practice, this responsibility would pass to Mary’s eldest son. Where was he?

         • Jack, you write:

           have you considered how devout Jews were obligated to act after manifestations of God’s spirit and the strict rules concerning the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy of Holies? Mary was the consecrated sacred vessel carrying and giving birth to God incarnate.

           Even accepting this analogy, those rules were while the Ark was in use in ancient Israel’s worship. After the curtain in the Temple was torn and after Pentecost its purpose was fulfilled. (I wonder why it did not reappear after the Babylonian exile, but that’s a separate question.)

           The Protoevangelium of James did not meet the necessary criteria for inclusion in the canon.

           And quite possibly this was decided after Mary’s grandchildren said Wait a minute…

           Do you really expect the authors of Scripture to delve into the absence of marital relations between Mary and Joseph? There are clues in Scripture. When Jesus was 10 years old there’s no mention of brothers and sisters being with Joseph and Mary during their trip to the Temple. Why not?

           Because Jesus was at barmitzvah age and a man; any younger brothers were not. That’s an easy question to answer!

           Before His death, Jesus placed Mary in the care of John. According to Jewish practice, this responsibility would pass to Mary’s eldest son. Where was he?

           Do you remember the statement of John (7:5) that even his brothers did not believe in him? Presumably this sad situation persisted and John preferred Mary to be in the care of believers.

         • The analogy stands, Anton. Did Joseph, a devout Jew, know the events that were to take place after Christ’s death and resurrection after Pentecost? Not even His Apostles knew this!

           Jesus was aged 10 years of age when His parents and He visited Jerusalem – below the age of reason. The barmitzvah age is 13 years. One doubts any younger siblings would have been behind left at home. Was there even an equivalent ceremony during the time of Jesus? It doesn’t exist in the Hebrew Scripture and only emerged from the 6th century onwards.

           Don’t you consider James, the first leader of the Jerusalem Church, to be Jesus’ “adelphos”? – the semantic meaning of which you’ve ignored. Surely Jesus would have entrusted Mary to him and not to John if he was Jesus’ natural sibling?

         • Jack,

           You insist that the analogy holds between the Ark holding the Mosaic Covenant and Mary’s womb holding the Messiah and the associated new covenant. Notice that Paul, the ethnic Jewish theologian who believed in Jesus par excellence, never drew it. Nor any of the other Jewish letter-writers of the New Testament. It enters from the Church Fathers, i.e. the Greek philosophers who were believers in Jesus. Allegory was an addiction of philosophy at the time; see the absurdity of Augustine’s eisegesis of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, for instance, at

           sermons dot logos dot com/sermons/47795-augustine%27s-commentary-on-the-good-samaritan

           Augustine was not denying the usual understanding, but the allegorical view was held to be deeper. It is too clever by half and is obviously not the short, sharp point that Jesus made about who your neighbour is when he told the parable. But Origen took Jericho to be the world rather than the moon, and called the manager of the inn the head of the church, not St Paul. That neither of these differing interpretations can be said to be right or wrong is a warning that this sort of thing is trash. Origen and Augustine are taking their wider understanding of scripture, which they got from its plain meaning, and using it to reimagine the parable. The result makes no point which cannot be got more clearly from other scriptures.

           Jesus was aged 10 years of age when His parents and He visited Jerusalem – below the age of reason. The barmitzvah age is 13 years. One doubts any younger siblings would have been behind left at home.

           I don’t know where you got His age from; my Bible tells me that He was 12 years old (Luke 2:42). The fact that we do not know at what age in biblical times a growing boy was to start attending the festivals cuts both ways; it would have been around the age Jesus was then.

           I’m sure Mary went – which was not usual – because she wanted to see what would happen when the Messiah, whom she knew her Son to be, went to the Temple. There would be plenty of extended family glad to take care of younger children.

           Don’t you consider James, the first leader of the Jerusalem Church, to be Jesus’ “adelphos”? – the semantic meaning of which you’ve ignored. Surely Jesus would have entrusted Mary to him and not to John if he was Jesus’ natural sibling?

           I’ve no reason to doubt that this James was a son of Mary and Joseph. But his own brothers did not believe in him (John 7:5) at the time he went to the Festival of Tabernacles, and perhaps it took the Resurrection to make James believe – in which case He was not a believer when Jesus had to give Mary to someone He trusted, from the Cross.

         • >>I’ve no reason to doubt that this James was a son of Mary and Joseph.<>But his own brothers did not believe in him (John 7:5) at the time he went to the Festival of Tabernacles, and perhaps it took the Resurrection to make James believe>>

           It’s not clear from the New Testament exactly when Jesus’ “brothers” became believers, so we cannot simply assert this as an explanation. Also, this doesn’t take into account Jesus’ plan to visit his “brother” James shortly after His resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:7). Why entrust Mary to John if His “brother” James was foreknown by Jesus to be a believer just a few days after the crucifixion? At best this would be a temporary arrangement, but John 19:27 implies it to be permanent.

           John 7:5 tells us that Jesus’ brothers didn’t believe in Him at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles, quite a bit prior to the crucifixion. There’s nothing in the New Testament that confirms they left it until after the resurrection before they became believers.

           Jesus’ high view of God’s Law requiring children to care for their aging parents would have prevented Him from entrusting Mary to John if these “brothers” were her biological children. Recall what Jesus says in Mark 7:8-13 about the Pharisee’s Corban tradition: they “leave the commandment of God [the fourth commandment]” and “make void the word of God.”

           Mary not having other children is the best explanation. It doesn’t rule out James simply being a cousin of Jesus, or any of the four “brothers” mentioned in the synoptic Gospels, rather than cousins or other relatives.

         • It’s a bit much, Jack, to be told that a suggestion consistent with the facts cannot be “assert[ed] as an explanation”. You are making conjecture after conjecture in this whole matter, above all Mary’s perpetual virginity itself.

           Recall that Jesus himself said that he came to divide, even within families: look at Luke 12:51-3 and consider that he might, tragically, have been speaking from personal experience. For all we know, Jesus appeared to James following his resurrection*in order* to convert him. Or James might indeed have been a believer but living in a family home with brothers and sister who did not believe. Mary would not wish to live in a household bickering over the greatest fact in the world and in her own experience. We don’t know why Jesus sent her to John. But you don’t know either.

   • was abortion, say in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, ‘immoral’ in the first century? In Roman, Greek or Jewish culture?

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     • No. Personhood was dated usually grom quickening. Besides which, it is clear from some Jewish scripture that a foetus was property not a person, hence causing a miscarriage wasn’t a capital offence.

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       • Was Jesus Christ present in the womb of His mother from the point of conception? Did John the Baptist leap in his mother’s womb and recognise Him when Mary visited Elizabeth?

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         • For millennia personhood was dated from quickening.

         • Not universally – and whilst there was no clear distinction made between abortion and contraception, both were forbidden. Here’s an area where science has confirmed theology that human life is present from conception.

8. The reason that the C of E has taken two years to bring in PLF is because PLF is contrary to the Apostolic teaching that the church accepted in its doctrine.

   Is the church not guilty of the same language of ‘Weaponised Kindness’ that was mentioned on this blog recently as the reasoning behind PLF. Are they really prayers of true love and true fellowship?

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   • However, the Church of England can change doctrine through a formal process involving debate and theological “development” that ultimately requires approval through a legal process, most notably by a two-thirds majority vote within the General Synod’s three houses (laity, clergy, and bishops) to alter liturgy and doctrine.

     But what are the rules for changing or developing doctrine? Scripture – whose interpretation of key disputed passages will succeed?

     I was intrigued by Richard Hays’ ‘The Moral Vision of the New Testament’, which is widely accepted within evangelical circles as an authoritative interpretation of Scripture’s plain opposition to same sex relationships. Yet, within that book Hays planted a seed that permits modernist-revisionism.

     He proposed a “guideline” that “claims about divinely inspired experience (whatever this might be) that contradicts the witness of Scripture (whoever determines what this is) should be admitted to normative status in the church only after sustained and agonizing scrutiny by a consensus of the faithful.”

     In other words, according to Hays, the Church can set actually Scripture aside when there is agreement to do so based on “experience”. Not a development of doctrine from a fuller understanding of Scripture, or a representation of doctrine to be pastorally sensitive, but an actual setting aside of Scripture that places it and Sacred Tradition secondary to this “divinely inspired experience” and a “consensus of the faithful” following a process of “sustained and agonizing scrutiny.”

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     • No protestant is obliged to agree with Hays.

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       • Years ago, Chris Seitz predicted where Hays’s ‘post-evangelical’ “trajectory” ideas would lead him. Seitz was correct.
         Now the Pope wants to go down the same rabbit hole.

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         • James, if Pope Francis did, and this is disputable, that particular “rabbit hole” is effectively blocked by Apostolic Tradition, the reading and understanding of Scripture from within this living Tradition, and by earlier Magisterium declarations.

         • Two words to you, Jack: Pope Honorius.

       • Anton, no protestant is obliged to agree with anybody!

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         • I am obliged to agree with holy scripture. Of course there is the matter of how to make sense of the difficult bits. In most cases better knowledge of the ancient world or of biblical languages does the trick. The important thing is to let yourself be exposed to a wide range of opinions and seek out debate amongst them, and keep thinking for yourself what scripture means. Some differing conclusions can be tolerated within a congregation; some cannot. But never trust anyone who says his opinion of scripture *cannot* be wrong. That is folly.

     • I am not sure the C of E *can* change its doctrine. Since 1662 it never has.

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       • cant ‘laws’ be changed?

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       • Insofar as it lacks a formalised and codified body of doctrine, this is perhaps true. The Church of England was designed from the outset to accommodate a range of beliefs within a loose framework holding these together.

         Canon A5 says:

         The doctrine of the Church of England is grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures.

         In particular such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, The Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal.

         Make of that what you will. It seems to give wriggle-room aplenty.

         Was the Church of England’s General Synod’s decision in 1992 to allow women to be ordained priests, and now bishops, not a change in doctrine? Or was it a “development” or “extension” of doctrine? Or perhaps a deeper understanding of Scripture, meaning the teachings of the “ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church” could be ditched because they are not (now) seen as “agreeable to the said Scriptures.”?

         Is this the case too with the Church of England’s Lambeth Conference vote in favour of birth control in 1930, reversing its previous (doctrinal?) position? Before 1930, the Church of England, like all other Christian denominations, condemned artificial contraception.

         Or the Church of England’s approval of divorce and remarriage in 2002? Was this not a change in doctrine? Previously the (doctrinal?) teaching was that marriage was a lifelong, exclusive covenant.

         So, on the same basis, call it what you will, why not a change in matrimony to accommodate better understandings of Scripture and permit same sex people to marry? Just follow due legal process at General Synod and alter liturgy and doctrine.

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         • Before 1930, contraception was associated with prostitution and picked up the opprobrium atached thereto. When respectable married couples started using the much less unpleasant forms of contraception available by 1930 the Church of England had the good sense to revisit scripture. Where exactly is marital contraception (barrier methods at least) prohibited in the written Laws of Moses from Sinai to Deuteronomy or the words of Jesus (or the NT letters?)

         • Anton, as you know, Christian leaders were unanimous in opposing artificial birth control for 2,000 years – and not because it was associated with prostitutes!

           All Christians were united in believing that contraception is a violation of God’s will until the 1930s when Anglicans permitted it for “hard cases”. As late as 1920, the Lambeth Conference had restated its uncompromising rejection of all forms of artificial birth control.

           The Bible does not explicitly address the morality of contraception, but there is a passage that very strongly implies that it’s wrong. The evil of contraceptive acts stems from its wilful, unnatural separation of what God intended to be together – i.e., self giving in conjugal love and procreation. Onan tried the “middle way” (the “modern way”) of having sex but wilfully separating procreation from it. This was his sin, and it’s why God killed him. We learn from Onan the general moral principle that contraception is forbidden.

           In Leviticus 20:13 and Leviticus 20:15-16, God prescribes death as the penalty for homosexual activity and bestiality. These two acts are non-procreative forms of sexual activity. Sex with an animal or with someone of the same sex is intrinsically incapable of producing a child. Contraception artificially removes the procreative potential of the act between a man and a woman. God killed Onan because he spilled his seed on the ground, removing the procreative potential of his sex with his sister-in-law and making it similar in this key respect to homosexuality and bestiality; two sins that merited death in the Old Testament.

           Perhaps Christians have been wrong all these years about abortion too (for “hard cases”) … and about divorce and remarriage (for “hard cases”) … and how about same sex acts (for “hard cases”) … and, why not transsexuality?

         • Onan suffered his penalty for cruelly deceiving his sister-in-law, denying her the child that custom demanded (later codified in Deuteronomy 25) and avoiding the resulting responsibilities while using her body for his own gratification. Do you think he’d have been killed if he had simply refused to go near her?

           The Bible does not explicitly address the morality of contraception

           Thank you, Jack. No further questions.

         • Anton, you skipped the main argument. Would God have condemned Onan to death for not having sex with his sister in law? It was because he had sex and performed a wilful, unnatural separation of what God intended to be together – i.e., self giving in conjugal love and procreation.

           There are many truths Scripture does not explicitly teach – they have to be authoritatively discerned – that’s why it took centuries to understand and formalise teachings on the Trinity and the Incarnation.

         • Why then did God arrange the human female to be sexually receptive when infertile – for part of the monthly cycle, when pregnant, when lactating and beyond menopause – unlike all mammals who have similar reproductive physiology?

         • Yes. The claim the Anglican doctrine doesn’t change doesn’t bear scrutiny.

         • Women being sexually receptive when infertile? I thought these arguments from experience and urges and passions in a fallen world were to have no bearing on how we read Scripture. My mistake…

         • That is not your mistake, AJB. You make a different one.

         • I have explained it!

           When Peter came to Antioch, Paul opposed him (Galatians 2:11), because Peter had stopped engaging with Gentiles out of fear of the Jewish leaders (Galatians 2:12). He had been eating with the Gentile believers, but when a contingency of Jews arrived from Jerusalem, Peter withdrew from the Gentile crowd. Many of the Jews in the region, along with Barnabas, fell into that error too, following Peter’s example. Paul branded that as hypocrisy (Galatians 2:13). Paul rebuked Peter openly, saying, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?” (Galatians 2:14).

           It’s clear the use of “force” here is used in the sense of setting a poor example and giving into social pressure from the Jews from Jerusalem (for whatever reason), rather that a teaching; i.e., “forcing” them by the sheer power of his own poor example.

         • Think it through, Jack. Peter stopped eating with the gentile believers. They would not have said to each other “OK, let the Jewish believers eat in one house and we shall eat in the other, and then join together for worship.” They would have asked Peter why, obviously. And he would have had to give a reason. That counts as teaching.

       • Careful now, you’re getting close to arguing that only Parliament can change CofE doctrine. I’m not sure you want to throw this question to the MPs…

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     • Ah, poor old Honorius; the favourite pope of everyone who disparages the primacy and infallibility of the papacy. Indeed, he’s the only one against whom such claims can be made! His attempts to resolve a controversy resulted in one brief sentence that many see as the destruction of the idea of papal infallibility and even of papal supremacy. It wasn’t and isn’t.

       In a letter, he wrote: “We confess one will of our Lord Jesus Christ, since our (human) nature was plainly assumed by the Godhead, and this being faultless, as it was before the Fall.” Monothelites seized upon Honorius’s confession of “one will of our Lord Jesus Christ” as confirmation that the Pope believed with them that Christ had no human will. Henry Newman and other commentators have correctly noted that Honorius’s letters to Sergius are not doctrinal, ex cathedra definitions; thus they are outside the scope of infallibility as defined by the First Vatican Council. Plus, if you look at Honorius’s exact words, he did use a formula–“one will”– that was later correctly declared heretical – but he used it in a sense that implied the orthodox belief.

       Indeed, this was picked up in 640 by Pope John IV, Honorius’s successor, who pointed out that Sergius had asked only about the presence of two opposing wills. Honorius had answered accordingly, speaking, says Pope John, “only of the human and not also of the divine nature.” Pope John was right. Honorius assumed the existence of a human will in Christ by saying that his nature is like humanity’s before the Fall. Thus Honorius’s speaking of Christ’s assumption of a “faultless” human nature shows that he really did believe in the orthodox formula of two wills in Christ: one divine, one human, in perfect agreement.

       The Third Council of Constantinople was in error when it condemned Honorius for heresy. A Council has no authority except insofar as its decrees are confirmed by the pope. The reigning Pontiff, Leo II, did not agree to the condemnation of his predecessor for heresy; he said Honorius should be condemned because “he permitted the immaculate faith to be subverted.” Honorius was clumsy and ill-informed; he was no heretic.

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       • Edward Feser thinks differently.

         Reply

         • I’m not so sure. Feser agrees Pope Honorius was not exercising extraordinary magisterium and thus was not teaching infallibly. He does argue he taught a Christological error that facilitated the spread of the Monothelite heresy. His main point is that any pope could, in principle, teach heresy when expressing personal theological opinions.

           He writes:

           Pope Honorius was definitely not a heretic in that sense (the modern sense), both because there is no evidence of obstinacy on his part, and because a charitable reading of his problematic statements supports the judgment that he did not intend to undermine traditional teaching (even if his words inadvertently had that effect).

           He also confirms that while two later Councils condemned Honorius as a “heretic,” future popes limited their accusation against him to negligence in suppressing heresy and did not apply the formal label “heretic.” The consensus seems to be he was negligent in repressing error.

           Bear in mind too, Feser has a broader agenda. He does present Catholic dogma on papal infallibility succinctly:

           It is well-known that the Catholic Church teaches that popes are infallible when they speak ex cathedra or exercise their extraordinary magisterium. What that means is that if a pope formally presents some teaching in a manner intended to be definitive and absolutely binding, he is prevented by divine assistance from falling into error. The ordinary magisterium of the Church, and the pope when exercising it, are also infallible when they simply reiterate some doctrine that has been consistently taught for centuries.

           And, referring to recent concerns about Pope Francis:

           In fact, popes are in principle capable of a fairly wide range of errors of governance and even of teaching, when not speaking in a manner that meets the strict criteria for an ex cathedra declaration. And in practice some popes have been guilty of very grave errors – witness the condemnation of Pope Honorius I by his successors for his failure to uphold orthodoxy, the notorious and bizarre Cadaver Synod of Pope Stephen VI, the sacrilege and Caligula-like lifestyle of Pope John XII, the doctrinal error for which Pope John XXII was criticized by the theologians of his day, and so on. All of this is consistent with the doctrine of papal infallibility, because the fathers of Vatican I who defined the doctrine formulated the conditions under which a pope speaks infallibly very precisely, and in a way that took account of this history.

           The various articles are all here:
           https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/search?q=Pope+Honorius

         • Peter, held by Catholics to have been the first Pope, was wrong on a matter of doctrine (long after Christ had spoken the words to Peter which arguably gave him primacy after Christ had ascended). He had to be corrected by Paul (Galatians 2:11), and the binding decision was made by James, not Peter (Acts 15:19: “I decide…”).

         • Anton, this is a well worn discussion between Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Who “presided”; who had “authority”; was Jerusalem a local Synod or a universal Council?

           Here’s the Catholic perspective:

           From Acts 15, we learn that “after there was much debate, Peter rose” to address the assembly (15:7). The Bible records his speech, which goes on for five verses and is a summary of the Gospel of faith and grace – as opposed to one of Mosaic law. It reports that “all the assembly kept silence” (15:12). Paul and Barnabas speak next, not making authoritative pronouncements, but confirming Peter’s exposition, speaking about “signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles” (15:12). Then when James speaks, he refers right back to what “Simeon [Peter] has related” (15:14). Peter’s talk was central, authoritative, and definitive. James speaks last to confirm his agreement with Peter and is explained by the fact that he was the local bishop of Jerusalem.

           Remember James was the leader of the Church’s “Jewish wing” who were instructing the brothers they needed to be circumcised according to Mosaic practice. They were coming from James. Therefore, he renders judgment on the matter for his Jewish party. Who was “troubling” the Gentiles? Not Paul and Barnabas. Not Peter and his disciples, who baptised the first Gentiles without circumcision. It was the Jewish Christians under James.

           Yes, Paul rebuked Peter – not on a matter of doctrine, but on his personal practice. Dietary law was the secondary decision of the Jerusalem Council, and Peter referred to his experiences with the Gentiles at the council (Acts 15:7-11). The council then decided – with regard to food – to prohibit only that which “has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled” (15:29). Peter was acting hypocritically by withdrawing from eating with Gentile Christians in Antioch out of fear of Jewish criticism, even though he had previously preached that salvation is by faith and grace, not by following Jewish law. Peter’s behaviour implied that Jews should not sit at table with Gentiles and that Mosaic Law remained binding.

           Like our friend Honorius, in seeking to keep the peace between factions he failed in his primary duty.

         • I’m afraid this response contains diversionary practices, Jack. Thanks to Paul, Peter had seen the error of his ways by the time of the Jerusalem council recorded in Acts 15. James changed his mind too, during the debate. But he, James, then made the ruling using words that unambiguously imply the decision was his to make; he was not merely rubber-stamping Peter.

           Here is Galatians 2:14: When I [Paul] saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?

           For Peter to *force* gentile believers to follow Jewish customs he must have been teaching them wrongly. This is more than Peter’s ‘personal practice’. And at a time when he knew that he was the apostle to the gentiles, and according to Catholics the first Pope.

           Other Catholic comments about this matter are little better than suggesting that, because the Magisterium and a series of committees in Rome had not yet been founded for Peter to run this past, his error doesn’t count. That is empty legalism.

         • “For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray” (Galatians 2: 11-13).

           As HJ said, Paul rebuked Peter not on a matter of doctrine, but on his personal behaviour and hypocrisy. Indeed, as recounted in Acts 10:9-16, before the Council of Jerusalem, Peter had received a vision from God revealing that the dietary restrictions given in the Law of Moses had been lifted.

           Does it matter if it was Paul who was “instrumental” in helping Peter “change his mind” about circumcision? That’s what Councils are for – debate, discussion, and agreement as one body. And it was Peter’s speech that was central and definitive. Paul and Barnabas speak after Peter, and do not make authoritative pronouncements, but confirm Peter’s exposition. As does James, the local leader.

         • Jack, Paul’s words in Galatians 2:14 show that Peter had been “forc[ing] Gentiles to follow Jewish customs”. That is not a summary of what Peter was doing wrong in the preceding verses, which is a little different. So those verses are not relevant to what we are discussing. If Peter had been forcing gentiles to follow Jewish customs then he, the chosen apostle to the gentiles in all the authority Christ had given him, must have been telling them that. This is a matter of doctrine, and Peter was wrong.

           He was corrected, by Paul (although it indeed does not matter by whom) in Antioch, according to Galatians 2:11. This was clearly before the Jerusalem council, for Peter got it right there.

         • James changed his mind too, during the debate.
           If only contributors to the lengthy, often off-topic debates on this blogsite could sometimes themselves be seen to change their minds. It would be a good sign.

           Regarding Peter – as I have said before – he was the leader of the apostles (John 21, Acts 2), all of whom were charged with taking the gospel to their fellow Jews. He was not a natural evangelist to the Gentiles, hence the rebuke in Gal 2:14. Paul says explicitly (Gal 2:7), that Peter and the other leading apostles had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised (= Jews). Paul in contradistinction had been entrusted with taking the gospel to the Gentiles (Gal 2:9, Acts 26:17). That was the purpose for which he was uniquely and dramatically singled out.

           Obviously, it is not consistent to argue that Peter when he was in Rome supplanted Paul in his God-given role, nor that Peter then became the leader of the churches, and his episcopal successors – when the apostles had all departed this life – likewise leaders of the churches.

         • Anton, you’re overstating this. Peter wasn’t pushing or forcing anything. This was coming from Jerusalem and Peter was withdrawing from eating with Gentiles to pacify the Judaizers. His attempt to accommodate Jewish sensibilities sent the wrong signal, and he was criticised on that ground. Peter was not proclaiming a teaching! The dispute wasn’t over doctrine, but over behaviour. The text is clear on this.

         • Paul says in Galatians 2:14 that Peter was “forc[ing] Gentiles to follow Jewish customs.” What else could Peter have said to them than “you gentiles must follow Jewish customs”? That is a teaching, is it not? And if it is true for those gentiles in Antioch then it would be true everywhere, would it not? And it would have been spoken by Peter long after he had been chosen by Christ, even if the Magisterium did not then exist in its present form.

           In any reply, please include an explanation of exactly where this reasoning is wrong.

         • Anton, I have explained it!

           When Peter came to Antioch, Paul opposed him (Galatians 2:11), because Peter had stopped engaging with Gentiles out of fear of the Jewish leaders (Galatians 2:12). He had been eating with the Gentile believers, but when a contingency of Jews arrived from Jerusalem, Peter withdrew from the Gentile crowd. Many of the Jews in the region, along with Barnabas, fell into that error too, following Peter’s example. Paul branded that as hypocrisy (Galatians 2:13). Paul rebuked Peter openly, saying, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?” (Galatians 2:14).

           It’s clear the use of “force” here is used in the sense of setting a poor example and giving into social pressure from the Jews from Jerusalem (for whatever reason), rather that a teaching; i.e., he was “forcing” them by the sheer power of his poor example.

       • Anton, I have explained it!

         I posted my reply above ….

         Essentially, it’s clear that “force” here is being used in the sense of setting a poor example and giving into social pressure from the Jews from Jerusalem (for whatever reason), rather that a teaching; i.e., he was “forcing” them by the sheer power of his poor example.

         Reply

9. Ex-evangelical Welby gone because of failed leadership. Ex-evangelical Perumbalath gone because of poor conduct. Cottrell – who promoted David Tudor and knew about Perumbalath – will now be in Cathy Newman’s sights.
   Is God telling the Church of England something?

   Reply

   • He’s been telling the Church of England something on this subject via His scriptures and via the decline of congregations that ignore them for three decades. Time to turn up the volume?

     Reply

   • Ex-evangelicals are they? Is this a new version of “no true Scotsman”?

     Reply

     • No, it’s the old version of apostasy.
       But you knew that already.

       Reply

       • Now they’re not even Christians?

         Reply

         • Or heresy, if you prefer. I meant apostasy from true teaching. In both cases of Welby and Perumbalath have renounced what they once taught and have caused harm and confusion to the Church. By teaching error. Welby also failed to act as a true shepherd. If Perumbalath had been a head teacher or middle manager, he would have been sacked for gross misconduct.
           Cottrell turned a blind eye to miscond3, as well as teaching error.

         • Unless and until he had been convicted in a court of law or by a disciplinary tribunal he wouldn’t

   • James

     Maybe it’s that you can’t go around minimizing sexual assault and then expect to be taken as a serious moral authority?

     Reply

10. Cant laws ought to be changed! Don’t you mean can’t laws?

    Reply

11. What a breathtakingly one-sided account. To read this you’d think the House of Bishops were the only people making any moves at all, and the likes of CEEC and the Alliance completely absent and passive.

    A couple of observations:

    I don’t think any telling of the story of LLF/PLF makes sense without talking about the faction who believe they’ve found their wedge issue to split the church and start picking their own bishops. Hence, even now when PLF is on pause for the rest of the year we’re told that nonetheless put questions of episcopacy must “front and centre”. The schismastic project must press ahead!

    There was a concerted effort to sabotage LLF. So the Bishops were persuaded that they couldn’t make any public statements about it whilst the conversations were going on. The idea was to stand back and allow the Church to have an open conversation with itself without drawing battle lines. But CEEC felt able to launch their “Beautiful Story” campaign and video. A neat ambush. One of the more curious episodes is what happened to the covenanted friendships prayers. This was a curious element (more on that later) but very clearly for sexless relationships, and a place where those on the ‘conservative’ side might have been expected to show interest. Instead what happened was some bizarre modifications to un-covenent the friendships, and in the re-draft they were suddenly no longer exclusive, open to married people etc., and no one’s ever explained why such a potential compromise should be torn up like that.

    Where the Bishops and Church leadership went awry was keeping very attached to Pilling. It seems that they thought Pilling was basically right, and what was needed was to find a way to get the Pilling recommendations accepted. Hence, they were able to move to PLF very rapidly (it’s implementing Pilling) including elements – the covenanted friendships – that seemed to come out of the blue if you followed LLF, but were familiar to anyone looking at Pilling. But this has led them to stop thinking this was about deciding any particular teaching about or for gay people. Rather, it is (in their apparent view) about working out how to hold the different but fixed views together. So, when the Bishops are asked to provide some theological backing to what they’re doing, we get a paper on how to manage Church unity, not sexual ethics and adult relationships.

    Finally, in thinking about what to do, we should probably think about where we can build agreement and unity in the Church. I suggest that starts with systematically revising Issues in Human Sexuality. The different factions of Synod all agree it needs replacing. What is untested is how Synod wants to replace it. Although Goddard argues that those resisting changes are united in their views, and those pressing for change think lots of different things, I don’t see it as anywhere near that clear-cut. There are really important questions for the Church to be clear about – is sexual orientation a real or imagined/constructed thing? Is it malleable or fixed, and should we be trying to change it or accept our sexualities? Should gay people be encouraged or discouraged from pursuing straight marriages? Is celibacy a calling or an instruction? Are faithful and exclusive but sexless relationships ok, and if so, how do we acknowledge that? And so on. Eventually with those questions we’d get toward the questions of sex and same-sex marriage, but we’d be doing so with a firmer grasp of what we do (largely) agree on, and where the disagreements on this issue begin.

    Reply

    • you’d think the House of Bishops were the only people making any moves at all, and the likes of CEEC and the Alliance completely absent and passive.

      But who has, all the time – decades now – been reacting to whom? Who is it who wants to change church doctrine and practice away from a scriptural position that CEEC//Alliance were happy with?

      There was a concerted effort to sabotage LLF.

      I hope so. LLF itself was disingenuous, granting no more authority to scripture than to any other source of church doctrine and practice. I took the LLF course on Zoom in the Covid era.

      Eventually with those questions we’d get toward the questions of sex and same-sex marriage

      Which is the wrong order. You need to consult scripture about those fundamental things first, and then address the questions you raise.

      As for unity within the church (of England), there are differences tolerable and differences intolerable, and this issue is one of the latter. We desire unity but we will stand firm on scripture and if necessary fight for it for as long as is necessary.

      Reply

      • A majority of Synod voted for LLF as did a majority of all 3 houses, of laity and clergy and bishops. Parishes which disagree with LLF do not have to perform the prayers for same sex couples in their churches.

        If even that is intolerable to some then there is the door and they are quite welcome to leave the Church of England and join their nearest Baptist or Pentecostal church. Where they can refuse prayers for same sex couples to their hearts content without having to worry anyone else in their denomination is doing them either

        Reply

        • You are evidently unaware that this nonsense is affecting the Baptist Union too.

          But I’ll go to the congregation that *I* choose, T1, not the congregation that you choose for me.

          Reply

          • It’s very interesting that the Baptist Union is also struggling with these questions; (the same is also true now for some black Pentecostal churches.) Baptists split over very different issues at the time of the Downgrade Controversy in the 1880s and 1890s. Then as now, some believed that the issues at stake were so fundamental and the Bible’s teaching so clear that there could be no fellowship with those they disagreed with. Only time will tell if our current conflicts are truly fundamental or, like the issues at stake at the time of Spurgeon, will come to be seen as ones over which differences can be accommodated. I suspect that none of us has a crystal ball about this.

          • No Baptist churches perform same sex marriages and the Southern US Baptists, the largest global Baptist group, refuses prayers for same sex couples either

          • Simon/T1 obviously doesn’t know about Bloomsbury Baptist Church.

          • There are actually fully available statistics of what the the churches in the Baptist Union of Great Britain believe, because a) the union actually asked us and b) the union Published the results fairly comprehensively on their website.

            Here’s a link to the executiuve summary for you. https://www.baptist.org.uk/Groups/415545/Executive_Summary.aspx

            And here’s an extract from the results:

            From the churches who responded:

            56% of churches said that an accredited minister could not be in a same-sex marriage.
            8% said that accredited ministers could be in a same-sex marriage.
            36% of churches stated that they could not continue in covenant relationship with those who hold a different view.
            20% stated they could.
            From those who responded to the ministers’ survey:

            57% said that an accredited minister could not be in a same-sex marriage.
            25% believed accredited ministers could be in a same-sex marriage.
            44% of respondents believed they could stay in covenant relationship with accredited ministers who had a different view.
            27% said they could not.

    • A generous response. Mind would be that CEEC and the Alliance are threatening a craven House of Bishops with schism, withdrawal of funds, anything they think will frighten them. Which doesn’t take much.
      Despite Synod’s proper votes the Bishops are being bullied into delay and prevarication.
      Meanwhile, as ever, queer folks are sacrificed and their holiness is trampled on.

      Reply

      • Who exactly are these “queer folks” that you’re on about, Penelope? Undesirable, possibly suspicious characters? People who aren’t quite right in the head? And what is a “queer relationship”, when it’s at home? An ill-advised and toxic one?

        Reply

12. And as I predicted (wasn’t hard), Cathy Newman starts laying out (further) the case against Cottrell and his manipulation of appointments – with further damning information on the Bishop of Oxford (another ex-evangelical, AJB).
    Why on earth was Perumlabath made a bishop in the first place?
    Why did Cottrell promote his cause – as he did for David Tudor?
    Cottrell should resign.
    Now the Church of England has a first – Bishop sexually harasses Bishop.
    Now we know why the Bishop of Warrington hasn’t been doing her job for nearly a year.

    Reply

    • It’s all caused by the heteronormative-patriarchy, James.

      Prepare for a female Archbishop of Canterbury.

      Reply

      • Which will complete the tail spin of the C of E into apostasy and division. The whole move to ordain women as bishops in the C of E has been a failure, as it has in Lutheranism and in other Anglican provinces. The decline has been relentless. This was precipitated by the failure of men to uphold biblical teaching on sex and marriage. Reading Ezekiel 20 has reminded me that sometimes it takes destruction and exile to bring people back to God.

        Reply

        • I don’t think anybody’s mind is going to be changed. But the Church of England is not Methodism, which has let the apostates change its doctrine and is consequently going gently into that good night. The Church of England is the Established church, and cannot simply wind itself up quietly if the apostates complete their takeover. What can be said is that it will survive as a church of Jesus Christ only if it vomits out the apostates. If not, Christ’s faithful within it will simply move to or found nonconformist congregations.

          Reply

          • Methodists perform same sex marriages in their churches, the C of E still does not

          • I think James is correct. But its heresy, not apostasy. Most promoting same sex relationships and marriage still believe in Jesus Christ – just not in male and female complementarity in the ministry or in the bedroom. Reserving the priesthood to men highlights the fundamental distinction between men and women.

            As Bishop Barron writes:

            Men and women are both created in God’s image and likeness. They are both good and equal in dignity. And they complement one another. But they are not the same. A man and woman can come together in such a way to create another life. Such is not possible for a man and a man or a woman and a woman, no matter how hard they try. There is a real difference between men and women that is natural and good. Only a man can be a father and only a woman can be a mother. Only a man can be a brother and only a woman can be a sister. Only a man can be a son and only a woman can be a daughter. These distinctions are not negotiable – they are given. Nature is intelligible, and any reasonable person can come to know and understand the beautiful complementarity and difference of men and women.

            The male celibate priesthood by its nature points to the natural distinction of men and women. After all, a priest is a spiritual father, and only men can be fathers. The “father” aspect of the priesthood is a constant reminder of sexual difference and of sexual complementarity, both at the same time. For as much as it is true that only a man can be a father, it is equally true that a man cannot be a father without the complement of a woman, who is a mother. The male priesthood protects and highlights this important and natural distinction.
            https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/fellows/the-prophetic-nature-of-the-male-celibate-priesthood/

            Saint John Paul II when he definitively excluded women from the priesthood, cited Paul VI, who had said:
            “The real reason is that, in giving the Church her fundamental constitution, her theological anthropology – thereafter always followed by the Church’s Tradition—Christ established things in this way.”

            When we look at Christ and His Church, we see the marriage analogy. Christ is the bridegroom and the Church is the Bride. Women are the bearers of new life. Children spring forth from the love women receive from their husbands. So too the Church, through men acting in the person of Christ, give new life. A woman cannot consecrate the Eucharist, not because they are not equal, but because they are different.

          • Jack, I wasn’t actually disagreeing with James; and I agree with the first paragraph of your quote from Baron.

          • Anton

            By his own admission, the previous Archbishop of Canterbury was continuing to promote teaching on sexuality which he himself thought to be wrong.

            By my counting at least 4 current diocesan bishops are in hot water over their response to SA.

            Either Justin Welby and these bishops are apostate or the church of England’s teaching is apostate and either way apostatism is already dominating the CofE.

          • Have you noticed that people might change their mind yet not be honest enough to say so?

        • No. Synod voted by 2/3 majority in all 3 houses over 10 years ago for women bishops. Women priests have barely any cases of sex abuse and are trusted by families with their children and are caring and compassionate. Of course most Pentecostal churches have women priests too and they are the fastest growing denomination on earth of Christianity

          Reply

          • I largely agree with what Jack cites above from Robert Barron, because in recent years I have reflected more and more on the significance of our creation as male and female and the particular callings that God gives to men and women.
            Motherhood is a greet and wonderful mystery and a calling made to all women in principle, either biologically or, more importantly, spiritually.
            Similarly, fatherhood is the calling made to all men.
            It is for the ssme reason that I believe that women should not be in combat roles in the military. In a similar context I found myself taking as a guest taking a PSHE class this week with ordinary working class 14 year olds, on the subject of bullying. I explained that sexual harassment and bullying was nearly always a male on female phenomenon because males have twice the upper body strength of females and testosterone is an aggressive hormone.
            But Simon/T1 is very wrong if he inagines that the “answer” to the crisis in the Church of England is to replace the faults of men with the faults of women. Clergy down in Kent tell me of the terrible impact of a media hungry female bishop there, a fanatical advocate of DEI and PLF who is trying to drive evangelicals and other orthodox clergy out of every diocesan post. This same female suffragan has ttied four times to gain a diocesan post and has been rejected each time because dioceses know of the personal misery she has caused, much driven by her own insecurities.
            Thr answer to abuse is not “Appoint a woman!”
            It is: “Appoint a godly, faithful man,” And retire Stephen Cottrell, a man of terrible judgment and worse theology.

          • Synod voted by 2/3 majority in ALL 3 houses for women priests AND women bishops. So even if the Canon B2 2/3 majority threshold for stand alone services for same sex marriages has not been met it has been met for women priests and bishops. Women priests do an outstanding job on the whole, are community minded and have had no sex abuse cases unlike sadly a minority of male priests and bishops.

            Indeed I very much hope the next Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman, eg the Bishop of Chelmsford who is also Parish focused. I accept those of a Forward in Faith Anglo Catholic persuasion or ultra conservative evangelical position can still have male flying bishops and male priests only in their Parishes as a compromise for their opposition to women priests despite the overwhelming majority of Synod in favour. However anybody who refuses to accept the Synod result for women priests and bishops really has no place in the C of E now and should leave for a Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Baptist or Free evangelical church

          • Question: What do artificial contraception, divorce and remarriage, abortion, women ministers/priests, approving same sex unions/marriage, and transsexuality all have in common?

            Answer: They all deny a Christian anthropology – a logos about anthropos – a theory or philosophy drawn from Scripture and Natural Law about mankind, human nature, and our relationship with one another and with God.

          • “Of course most Pentecostal churches have women priests”

            That’ll be a shock to them! Your use of sloppy language in a debate of these things is shockingly poor. Sorry…

          • I don’t remember any mention in the Bible of contraception or transsexuality or abortion. Paul opposed women priests, Jesus never stated opposition to them. Paul and Leviticus opposed same sex relationships, Jesus never mentioned them either though he supported lifelong marriage and divorce only for spousal adultery

          • Pentecostal groups that do not support the ordination of women include;

            The Pentecostal Mission does not ordain women pastors.
            ‘Church of God in Christ (COGIC) does not ordain women as elder or bishop
            Pentecostal groups that ordain women include;

            The Federation of Pentecostal Churches (Germany)[60]
            The Assemblies of God USA, 1927[61]
            The Foursquare Church, 1975 [62]
            The Pentecostal Alliance of Independent Churches allows ordination of women.’

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordination_of_women_in_Christianity#:~:text=The%20Pentecostal%20Mission%20does%20not,women%20as%20elder%20or%20bishop

          • Silence is a great argument, Simon?

            Your Anglican church speaks of priests, but you are tying to make Paul in your own image 2000 years later if you think he spoke of priests.

          • I have just shown you most Pentecostal churches, not just Anglican churches, have women priests

          • Quite incorrect.

            I was a pentecostal elder for 13 years and they have no priests at all. Like other informed Christians they know of only 4 kinds of priest: non Christian priests e.g. pagan; High Priesthood of Christ; priesthood of all believers; Old Testament priesthood.

          • Even if not priests, Pentecostals have ministers or pastors and most Pentecostal churches have female ministers or pastors now.

            Though if you are Pentecostal quite why you feel the need to comment on Anglican affairs is beyond me!

          • But there is a massive distinction between priest and ministers, priests and pastors. Why are you saying there is not?

            And what does it mean to ‘be Pentecostal’? Such talk is nothing but tribalism. I am just a New Testament world-Christian, and have been intimately involved with all kinds of denominations within that big reality.

            To reject the pentecostal is to reject the book of Acts, so if you reject that, what is the organisation you belong to?

          • You have just said Pentecostal churches don’t have priests, only Pastors and Ministers. I have shown you they have female Pastors and Ministers in Pentecostal churches

          • Having been a pentecostal elder for 12 years, something known to you, you (pretend to) deduce that your revelatory statement is the first I have heard of that. Having served alongside women myself.
            Secondly, how is that relevant? You have not got a single more priest out of what you said. There are still zero priests.

          • To repeat, are you of the same organisation as the book of Acts. There is plenty of pentecostalism in there. Where is even a smidgin of anglicanism?

        • do you really think the decline in people attending the coe is as a direct result of appointing women to the position of bishop?

          Reply

      • The males havent exactly done a good job, so…

        Reply

    • The previous article to Andrew’s was a highly thought provoking and helpful one by Mike Starkey. One of his observations was that debates in our society quickly become deeply polarised. ‘It’s a language of us and them. There’s no nuance, no middle ground. You’re committed to the cause or you’re evil.’ And, sadly, the church copies wider society in the use of invective, judgemental accusations and binaries. When we invoke God it can become even more toxic – ‘I’m defending God’s view, you’re disobedient. I can speak/write aggressively, but that’s OK because I’m telling the truth. And I can be 100% certain of my views and that they will never change.’ Even though the evidence from the experience of the church is that both individuals and the church do change. And none of us has much idea what that means for the next 20 years let alone the next 50 or 100 years, or what may stay the same and be expressed in the same language. Let’s take Mike’s observation to heart and try to avoid the ‘us and them’ approach and be a little more nuanced

      Reply

      • Which is why I was prepared to engage with Mike Starkey’s article. There is on the other hand little point in discussing these matters with people who think that the church will not recover till it ‘vomits you out.’

        Reply

        • I agree. There is also little point discussing it with people who don’t trust the scriptures to define what God regards as right and wrong.

          Reply

        • Thanks, Lorenzo.

          Reply

    • Bp harasses Bp?
      Maybe, maybe not. We note that the spicier of the two alternatives (and moreover the one that seemed less plausible, maybe substantially less so, in the investigation[s] that has/have already taken place) morphs inevitably and unexplainedly into the default of the two alternatives.
      (1) The case was already examined. JP’s charges have in fact already come first before church and also second before police. As in other cases we have been talking about, the threshold has not been reached. High gossip threshold is not the same thing as high crime threshold, though many wish it was. This fact (charges already examined, twice) is one of those things the media hypnotises people to forget.
      It is not clear why the second examination will be considered better than the first.
      It will certainly take place, if it does, at a greater distance of time.
      (2) When it was examined it was considered misconduct and not harassment. Again, people select-out that point. I expect that any investigation that finds it to be harassment instead will be the final one, because it has come to the ‘right’ answer.
      (3) The case was referred to on Anglican Unscripted months ago.
      (4) Standing aside is recommended as a procedure – but hasn’t that so far amounted to 510 wasted days?
      (5) Church disciplinary procedures have different standards than civic/national ones – but doesn’t one main difference consist in the fact that the church holds people often to higher standards rather than to lower? The only need for non-ecclesiastical to trump ecclesiastical would be if ecclesiastical were holding people to lower standards, which is the opposite of its remit. It may be doing that sometimes. I don’t know.

      Meanwhile C Newman promises a few days ago on twitter/X that she has a BIG story breaking. The salivation is palpable. A Graystone promises there will be two big stories breaking (for our delectation, I expect?). Likewise he sent out a call for information on abuse around the Iwerne network 8 years ago; the activity, then (and/or the common denominator) is dirt-gathering. Why can so many not see what is happening? The replacement of a ‘The World for Christ’ church by an ‘ooh, he touched me’ church. The self-proclaimed and widely accepted infallibility of those who (as Tom Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, characterises the Pharisees in Mark 2) spend their time holding others to account for things they may or may not even live up to themselves. They now rule over the church, given that it is accountable to them. They also label others as victims/survivors, often correctly, often on the basis of one person’s word against another’s, always when there is much more to be said about the individuals in question, always together with treating them too as infallible (which is either fundamentalism or more probably opportunism). The source of their authority is unclear. Bp Mason’s characterisation of the media as self-appointed judge, jury and everything else, within her honest statement, was correct. Self-appointed because the sovereignty of sensationalism is self-evident.
      ?
      And (as ever) that media are not worried about details getting in the way of their stereotyped one-way narrative or of their lynch mob.

      Reply

      • There is a limit to how badly even a person set on behaving badly could behave when they are in public.

        And cultural perceptions are always going to be different. After all, they are different between different years in the UK and different parts of the UK, so what hope has a Keralan?

        He said he had to think himself into another culture (never easy) to try and imagine how differently that culture might perceive things. Cultures are always different, sometimes very much so – that is a given and a large one, but it is incredible how many forget it. The idea is that everyone everywhere ought to be like 2025 metropolitan UKers?

        Warmth and affection stem from a close family life, which is likelier in healthy Indian cultures than anywhere. It reminds me of when Priti Patel was criticised for smiling (an innocent enough activity, one would have thought – and in fact better than the sullen faces one usually gets) because the impoverished complainant could associate it only with mockery, having possibly never heard of happiness or psychological health. (Basil Fawlty – ‘Ah, yes, happiness. I remember that.’.)

        Reply

        • About healthy Indian cultures, this Indian ex-pat would beg to differ:

          https://www.amren.com/features/2024/12/india-its-worse-than-you-think/

          I’ve never been to India and this essay startled me. I don’t think tourists can begin to understand a place – any place. It takes years.

          Reply

      • Newman is an investigative journalist.
        Of course she publicises her stories.
        And many survivors are profoundly grateful that she is doing this work. Since the CoE clearly won’t.
        Andrew Graystone has advocated for victims and survivors since he discovered the extent of the cover ups. Of course he publicises Newman’s and Channel 4 News’ work. He wants justice for the victims.
        Information on Iwerne is not ‘dirt gathering’ (though your choice of words indicates that there is, indeed, dirt to be gathered); it is an investigation into historical abuse and the concomitant sleaze, misuse of power, elitism, racism, and corruption.
        I can sort of understand you being in thrall to Iwerne, but to pop up belittling other allegations of abuse and of cover up is a rather large red flag.

        Reply

        • She certainly has a tendency to think that things that do not reach the level of being crimes are the most astonishingly wicked things possible and the greatest headlines ever. Probably because she has in mind to bring low the reputation of Christianity (and of tenderness and kindness as witness her vicious attitude to the sweet natured anti abortion campaigner).

          Reply

        • Of course there will be dirt wherever there are human beings. Who thinks otherwise? Do you think that there are some human enterprises free of dirt? Some individuals who are?

          The topic is not that, but the gleeful gathering of it. And secondly the gleeful gathering of it by the unaccountable. And thirdly the selectivity. And fourthly the way that generally speaking all CofE powers now bow to Newman and Graystone, who achieve the destructive ends they want every time. While others are trying to preach and grow churches.

          Andrew Graystone advocates for victims? Have you met anyone who has ever been opposed to that? Perhaps we should oppose victims, you think? Or say they deserve nothing?

          Racism – what racism are you referring to? That is quite a charge. One of the 6 Iwerne events I attended was New Year 1987, Vijay Menon as the guest speaker. But it is not the first time I said it, not will this be the final time you fail to digest it. What good is reality when you have stereotypes?

          Why do you think that the C of E website was able to pinpoint two errors of fact in her report?

          Why do you think she constantly downplays the fact that what she wants investigated already has been? And the second fact that the police she wants consulted already have been? If she wants, thirdly, for Christian leaders to be held to a different standard than the rest of us (and indeed herself), that is two-tier, but the only story would be if they upheld a lower standard, whereas the whole point of having separate church law is that they are to uphold a higher. If they are upholding a higher, it should be those who are only upholding a lower that we should be more concerned about.

          Reply

        • Having read Bp Perumbalath’s account on Anglican Ink, it is obvious that Newman considers ‘the more salacious the better, the more it damages the church the better’ never mind considerations of accuracy or justice.

          Those who side with someone with that attitude should be ashamed.

          You saud that Andrew Graystone supports Cathy Newman. It is more that he feeds her with information.

          Reply

          • I’m glad that he does. Journalists need sources. And what has been hidden should come to light.
            You have made it quite clear that your sympathies are with the perpetrators not the victims. We see you.

          • I haven’t met you but you have shown me – and everyone here and on Twitter – that you most certainly do not advocate for victims.
            You have called them activists and said that they have got all they wanted.
            You have criticised Graystone for giving too much information.
            You have vilified Newman for exposing corruption, racism, and abuse in the CoE.
            You don’t believe in investigative journalism?
            You don’t think that the victims supporting Newman tells us something about their treatment by the CoE?
            You have defended Iwerne and it’s shabby ethos.
            You have lied about parents not wanting the police to be involved.
            You defend the hierarchy of the CoE despite its many failures in safeguarding and its record of retraumatising survivors.
            You believe that sending Smyth off to the ‘colonies’ wasn’t racist?

            And you seriously ask us to believe you advocate for the victims?

          • The perpetrators not the victims? Three obvious mistakes there.
            (1) A simplistic goodies-baddies picture.
            (2) Knowing (actually not knowing) immediately that the claimed victims are actual victims.
            (3) Claiming to know this without even being an eyewitness.
            Any one of these three errors would rule your case out of court. But in fact it is not your case at all but a parroting (i.e. with no originality or fresh independent thought) of what has become the dominant narrative through jamming/repetition alone.
            When the case is weak, a lot of repetition is required precisely because it was weak.
            The dominant narrative was largely invented by those who benefit from it – namely those who can style themselves victims (mostly they are actual victims but there is a lot more to be said and there is a lot more to them as people too) who thereby become regarded as infallible. Being regarded as infallible AND being able to take revenge on anyone you want is an irresistible cocktail.
            Look out for PCD simply proclaiming first up that X, Y , Z are victims when she has never investigated the case.
            A woman scorned will sometimes want revenge; an attempt at adultery or anything approaching that will quite properly and deliberately result in the said distancing or ‘scorning’.
            There are two churches, except that the second is not a church. The first is a ‘The World For Christ’ church. The second is an ‘oooh he touched me’ rather pathetic enterprise. But isn’t it thrilling.

          • And there you see the words of the abuse apologist. The victim blamer – I think this is perhaps the most wicked claim (style themselves victims/ who can benefit from it). These are vile accusations. The man who minimises abuse and harm. The man who thinks eyewitnesses are necessary to prove sexual and physical abuse. The man who vilifies a distinguished journalist and a sympathetic author, but who is sanguine about retraumatising victims and survivors of abuse. A man who disparages a culture of abuse and violence by claiming it’s merely about people crying “me too”. A man who deprecates ‘permissiveness’ but argues that beatings and sexual abuse are
            consensual. A disgusting victim blaming: a woman, a young man get what they deserve …

          • I was trying to see if *any* element of the attempted character assassination are accurate. So, one by one:
            (1) I have called victims activists? No way. Even in the UK, Smyth had 26-30 victims (I do not know the exact number, and there are issues of definition). Only about 5-6 of these are activist. So the majority are not. ‘Victim’ by the way is a title that masks the fact that there is much more to be said about said individuals, and that they were at the time consenting. But that is a separate issue. You are wishing them to be covered by this generic label. They are individuals different from one another. The label can attract a false sense of infallibility, which is naturally enticing but can do no-one any good.
            (2) Yes, and with extremely good reason, but what the relevance of that is I do not know. If your implication is that I am wrong in this, you must be a dishonest person since you yourself said you did not know what I was referring to, so it follows that you are *inventing* the idea that I am wrong on this point, and that actually you have no idea if I am right or wrong.
            (3) I have vilified certain things that Newman has said and done. Mainly the vulture like procedure that always prefers anything that could bring down C of E leaders or the institution, and ignores investigations that go the wrong i.e. not salacious way, and is generally biased towards salacious angles.
            I have never vilified any one of the three things in her that you listed. Your Trojan Horse modus operandi is has been seen repeatedly. I vilify something someone does, and you come out regularly and say i am vilifying the good things that they do. You knew all along that that was inaccurate.
            (4) I don’t believe in investigative journalism? You are speaking as though investigative journalism and biased sensationalist investigative journalism (which is the actual thing tat I and all honest people do not believe in, for obvious reasons) were the same thing. I know it sometimes seems like they are, but….

            (5) I’m sure it does. In addition, it is a match made in heaven because they allow her to deepen the C of E wounds she has already inflicted, which (rather sickly) delights her. And as for the C of E treating people a certain way, an institution cannot do that, though individuals can.

            (6) You know perfectly well that ‘Iwerne’ is a multifaceted reality. And have more than once ignored my unnecessary reiteration of that.The analysis of anyone who knows only one or two dimensions of that reality is not worth the paper it is written on.
            The Iwerne leader John Eddison confessed after Smyth (in Makin) that they had never come across anything parallel before. Why? Because the Iwerne movement which was then in its 50th year was so many light years away from Smyth’s behaviour. This is the analysis of an eyewitnesses and insider.

            (7) I lied, you say.
            How dare you?
            Not all UK parents were consulted by any means. In many cases, not a great deal had happened to their sons. The number of parents that wanted the police informed was two. The number that did not was two at least. There were many parents and informing the police is more to the point than wanting them informed. If anyone did not (and in fact everyone did not), that is because they did not want to (with the exception of the two aforementioned who may have understood that there was a policy in the young men’s interests).
            You spoke of lying. What is your own numerical analysis? I try to take account of all the sources I can.
            Do you think my numbers are wrong here?
            What are the right numbers, if so?

            (8) Defend the hierarchy of the C of E?
            That hierarchy is an amorphous mass which is always equally competent or incompetent?
            Is this not a case for ‘case by case’ analysis?

            (9) That is an excellent stereotype or cartoon idea, picked up second hand and repeated without thought.
            It is well possible that they had (which indeed was what David Fletcher said) 2 thoughts in their minds. First, separate him from the victims, whom he had started grooming about 6 years earlier so that it would (worst case, they thought?) take 6 more years to get to the same point. And second, stop him by putting hum under authority. Your analysis omits both central and explicitly stated points so is biased. It omits them repeatedly even when prompted, so is all the more biased.

          • How did you decide who was the victim in the most recent case? What was your secret to being able to do that? And how sure are you percentage wise? People’s livelihoods and families are at stake.

            Do you think that a claim to have been ‘abused’ (I put inverted commas because of the vagueness of the term) or simply being female are enough? Do you think some claims are false? Do you think some claims leave important data out and are selective?

          • As for ‘We see you’, that is menacing speech.

            From that comment, I think I sympathise with victims and not with those who make them so. I think we all do that. It seems logical and natural. I may be wrong. I think in the latest case the Bishop of Liverpool is likely to be broadly speaking the victim, together with his family and to a degree his culture. So yes, remarkably enough I sympathise with the victim and remarkably enough I never sympathise with those who make others into victims. Not that there is always precisely one victim, and not that things are always simplistically goodies vs baddies.

          • 1) you admit that you have called 5-6 victims ‘activists’, and furthermore claimed that they were consenting. As I have observed before you have no empathy and are ignorant of coercive control and trauma informed responses. This is victim blaming.
            2) if eyewitnesses are necessary to prove abuse and violence, no cases would ever be made or proved.
            3) you vilify a distinguished journalist and accuse her of being salacious. In what way is her reporting salacious?
            5) I’m not quite sure which point you are answering, but if Newman does want to bring down the CoE, she’s not alone in that. Quite a few survivors and their supporters would like to see the institution experience a Holy Saturday.
            6) you know that I disagree strongly with the Iwerne ethos and believe it to be harmful both to the Church and to the young men who went through it.
            7) that only one set of parents wanted to go to the police (your original claim) was a falsehood. Misinformation or disinformation I don’t know.
            8) no it’s not, the CoE is an institution. Its constructions of power and authority influence those who engage with it.
            9) I have no idea to which of my comments your response refers.

            Did I comment on who was the victim on this latest ‘case’?
            I have no idea what you mean by ‘ being simply female’. I suspect that you are insinuating that women are untrustworthy. Furthermore, as I have said often, false accusations of abuse are not unknown, but they are extremely rare.

            Finally, you most certainly do not sympathise with victims. As you have shown us. Which is what ‘we see you’ means. How can it possibly be menacing?

          • My main question is: How do you know who IS a victim right from the off?
            You are claiming virtual infallibility.
            AND no grey areas.
            AND no scenarii where there are 2 or 0 victims.
            AND none where there are semi victims.
            If for example teenagers above ‘age of consent’ throw themselves at rock stars and tell a different story 30 years later, who is the victim? Does there need to be one? Are they all victims of the sexual revolution?
            The answer is, no, you don’t know who (if anyone) is a victim from the off, nor whether or not any victimhood is unadulterated. But you speak as though you do. (And then insult those who have truthful Socratic agnosticism.) This invalidates much of what you say.

            1. Why would I ‘admit’ I called 5-6 victims activists? Would doing so be a felony. I certainly do so, but why would anyone be shy about saying so? ‘Admit’ is an odd word.
            In any case, truthful people never ‘admit’ or ‘concede’ anything – they just *say* things without the slightest reluctance and without being pushed by a lying spirit to do otherwise.

            I also called them consenting. I wonder why? To repeat (the amount of repetition is large, but it amounts to the amount undigested or omitted by you): I think I gave four separate reasons last time:
            -they themselves in Ruston report never gave their consent a second thought, it was so clear to them;
            -Ruston’s sermon later repeats that point (which comes from their own mouths, not from him);
            -one or two of them decided to desist and were allowed to do so (how could they not be allowed to?);
            -consent was critical to the way the police received the report;
            -those 3-4 who remained with Smyth after the early 1982 revelations manifestly consented and continued to do so, thinking him unfairly treated.
            Omitting all four/five of these points over and over shows the full extent of your bias.

            Coercive control? Those who read PCD will know that this point too was treated last time, in fact on the original occasion (so I am now saying it for the 3rd time, which is typical of her); but what she writes is similar to what one would write if they are hoping that others have forgotten this:
            The point about ‘grooming’ mitigating the consent was already in my original assessment. That point, as I said, I have now made 3 times.

            2. If eyewitnesses are necessary to prove anything – and indeed they are:
            -The main players are themselves eyewitnesses and can be questioned cleverly for inconsistency.
            -This is the kind of scenario which the sexual revolution, to which you so much hold, proliferates automatically, because of all the grey areas it introduces (which are further exacerbated beyond hope by the way people’s moods change).
            -That means that your bottom point about the low level of false accusations has been contradicted by you. In one place you say that the level of evidence does not allow proof, but in another place you claim to know the level of false accusations. Which neither you nor anyone else can begin to know. Your two points are at odds with one another.

            3. Salacious is the right word? Certainly typically preferring the outlook/conclusion that causes most damage to those institutions she might want to wound, like Rita Skeeter in Harry Potter. Her long interview with Justin Welby homed in on points where he was not to blame in the slightest, even when there were others where he was.

            6. ‘Iwerne ethos’
            It must be a pretty good ethos if nothing remotely close to the Smyth debacle had happened in the first 50 years, as the documents say and show.
            However, readers must be holding their sides at how often this point has had to be answered by me, and at PCD pretending she has heard zero of the many times it has already been answered. Ethoses (ethe) are multifaceted. It is only those who know little about their topic who can only think of one aspect of an ethos. But why would we be listening to them if they know little?

            7. We are not in all cases talking sets of parents. In at least one case we are talking about one parent. Of the parents whose view was sought there are certainly two divorced couples, meaning that both parents may not have been consulted; however, they may still have been.

            I am certainly puzzled again and again firstly by your failure to show that those who wanted to go to the police in any way exceeded those who did not, and secondly by your lack of explanation for the next 30 years when no-one at all did. That last is a huge datum. It is ignored because it is inconvenient. The longer it gets ignored, the more convinced people will be that it is awkward to your case. Not that you are apprised of many aspects of the case.

            8 This treats an institution as a living agent with intentions rather than the sum of its parts.

            9. This refers to the idea that colonialism was in mind. It is a given that 2020s will have colonialism in mind. It is a given that any liberal will. But these conservatives in the early 1980s?? Why are not the two explicitly affirmed and central motives already given sufficient?
            The way you conceptualise this motive is, moreover: ‘Let’s download this trouble on the natives.’. So likely.

            ‘Simply being female’ refers to some kind of female untrustworthiness? Read the train of thought. It refers to your (and your ilk’s, if you have one) general preference for female testimony over male, rather than any equality.

            False accusations being rare? – see 2 above.
            They are not rare when women are scorned, because when they are scorned they want revenge for that.
            They are also not rare when there is monetary reward at the end of the line.

            Sympathy with victims?!
            I am like everyone else (aren’t you?):
            Namely my sympathy is firmly with everyone who IS a victim, and INSOFAR as they are a victim. And in this thread we have touched on many of those.

            All clear?

          • No, Christopher, none of it is clear. You make accusations, such as that I prefer female over male testimony, which are baseless. And irrelevant, since we are talking about mainly male victims.
            And yes, I do have to reiterate all my points about your victim blaming, and not understanding coercive control, and trauma informed responses because it is quite clear that you do not. Quite clear that you have not reflected for one moment on what damage your words could do to survivors and vulnerable people who need healing and support.
            Quite clear that you find investigative journalism ‘salacious’ because it uncovers details you would prefer remained obscure. Quite clear that Newman shouldn’t interrogate authority and risk bringing down the whole rotten house of cards. Quite clear that you believe that since Smyth only happened once (ignoring other abuse) that Iwerne’s ethos must be otherwise blameless. Quite clear that because Iwerne invited a POC to speak at an event, their packing Smyth off to Africa couldn’t possibly be racist.

            And, as ever, you make wild generalisations. Some of which are insulting. I don’t decide who are victims from the off. I read Andrew Graystone and Janet Fife and testimony from people like Mark Stibbe, and reports such as Jay and Makin. Unlike you, I don’t rush to judgement.
            Nor did I claim to know how many accusations of abuse are false. I observed that research shows that they are rare. It does. Your misogyny about scorned women is sadly predictable, and once again irrelevant, since we are mainly discussing male victims. I am always amused by your veering from the extremes of copious citations to wild, unevidenced generalisations. And to avoiding occasions when you have – to be generous – misrepresented the truth.

            Now, I expect that, as usual, you will want the last word. Such a male prediliction. (See what I did there?).
            But it’s not a sixth-form debating society. We have tried Ian’s patience long enough. You have written quite enough to demonstrate what you are. And I am weary and find this conversation distasteful. I have persevered. But no further.

          • Your inability to address specifics and detail says it all. In future I will ask one specific question at a time.

    • noooooooo, your opposition to my heretical subversions on doctrine are holding up the process!!!!!!!!!!!!!

      Reply

13. The church of England is supposedly a Christian church and so has to take its teaching from the Bible, especially the NT which clearly states that same sex relationships are against God’s will. This view is also clearly expressed in the OT.

    God created mankind male and female and marriage is only valid in God’s sight as between man and woman.

    These are the views that the C of E has in its own doctrine. The logical and correct way to progress is to apply this doctrine. As it stands at the moment, PLF encourages people to think that it is OK to live contrary to God’s will.

    Jesus taught us to live a counter cultural lifestyle. The Bishops are teaching a pro-cultural lifestyle.

    The early church followed the Apostolic doctrine and grew because it was counter cultural and evangelical. The C of E is declining because it doesn’t teach the Apostolic doctrine, and doesn’t apply its own doctrine, but rather, has been adopting the views of the world.

    Reply

    • Where does the Bible clearly state that same sex relationships are against God’s will? I can’t find any mention of them in my Bible.

      Reply

      • What do you mean by relationship?

        Reply

        • Anton

          An agreed partnership based on mutual romantic love for one another? I don’t know what definition Andy would use.

          Reply

          • Well, “mutual romantic love” is understood by Christians as a deep, committed physical, emotional and spiritual attraction between a man and a woman that is expressed within the context of life long marriage, reflecting God’s own love by being selfless, faithful, and open to life. Within this marital covenant, spouses freely and fully give themselves to one another. Marriage elevates romantic love to a spiritual level with the dual purpose of the unitive aspect (deep personal union) and the procreative aspect (openness to having children).

      • Peter. who will listen to your line and a half when many massive and well thought out books have been written? Start engaging with specific points therein?

        Reply

        • Christopher

          You can write as many books as you like, it won’t turn coal white or give a giraffe legs. It doesn’t help anyone to climb the Bible says things that it does not actually say.

          Reply

          • I meant those who practise homosexuality. As regards references see 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10.

            By using same sex relationships in the context of PLF, I thought what I meant was obvious.

          • So the BBiblical writings do not disapprove strongly of two men sleeping together?

            Which Bible is that?

        • Massive maybe.
          Well thought out. No.

          Reply

          • Thus in 6 words you dismiss many authors’ decades long careful work.
            Does anyone agree that PCD’s 6 words rate higher than multiple decades of work? Answers….
            Why should we waste our time engaging with such arrogance?

          • Quality matters more than quantity Christopher.

          • One word more than those you used to conjure a …
            Well what?
            Well researched tomes?
            Unanswerable arguments?
            Irrefutable evidence?

            No just some big books which are ‘well thought out’. Solid scholarship there.

          • Quality matters more than quantity? Yes, exactly.

            So for quality you need close analysis and you need evidence / documentation.

            As opposed to unsupported assertions and lack of evidence/documentation.

          • Massive and well thought out books.
            Solid documentation, references and citations there Christopher.

          • Said solid documentation already given in What Are They Teaching The Children?

        • Debate on a lower level than the analysis of the main publications is a waste of time. I will certainly join in if we are analysing as they analyse.

          Reply

          • Oh yes. WATTTC. Massive books. Much research.

            I think it has been pointed out before how much of the ‘well thought out’ research you cite doesn’t prove what you claim.
            Or is already very out of date.

            We can all play that game.
            But some of us choose not to.

          • Correct. Many long and important studies quoted.

          • On many different topics, and I will have to stop engaging with you if you generalise and are not specific. You can speak of a particular question and we can all see what the evidence is.
            Sayin: ALL the 100+ papers you cited are wrong and in the same way but I can’t actually name any of them or what they said and of course they were on many different topics – is self-condemning.

14. What it reminds me of is the ‘conversion therapy’ proposals.

    No progress could be made because the inherent incoherence prevented it each time there was a bold sally.

    Reply

    • It was all too coherent. A society that seeks to criminalise realigning mind with body but allows bodily mutation in order to align body with mind is a society that has lost its grip on reality. Which of mind and body can lie?

      Reply

      • I couldn’t think of anything less coherent if I tried.

        Reply

15. Perhaps, for those seeking “a more excellent way” in this maze of turmoil and conflict; may want to consider Jesus-
    the True Nazirite.
    Samson was of this order, in the struggle with the Palestinians who constantly harassed and disrupted the people of God; which by the way was St. Paul’s and the early Churches dilemma and Paul followed Christ on the way of the spirit of the Nazirite.
    The Nazirite was set forth by God as the Deliverer or Overcomer.
    I recommend a very insightful paper by: John Thomas Mawson
    “How To Overcome: Talks on Judges”@Bible Truth.com.
    Especially note his remarks on the ministries of Jesus and St. Paul
    and the role of women. Shalom.

    Reply

16. Why so prolonged and painful ….

    It seems to me because… “growing recognition that the questions are ultimately doctrinal”

    Surely it beggers belief that the ship ever set sail with such a big hole in the hull. It wasn’t damage from the journey but built in at the shipyard. It was never a good look that the House of Bishops seemed to take the inherent problem so lightly…. it’ll be alright on the night.

    Add this to the current episcopal storms and if reform isn’t seen to be needed now will they ever recover… will we recover as the CofE? It isn’t the breakup of the organisation that worries me but the clergy and congregations caught in the shrapnel.

    Reply

    • The House of Clergy and House of Laity also approved PLF by majority vote in Synod

      Reply

      • “Also”…is no response. Try reading the article again and responding to its content…

        I’m unconvinced that you actually understand what happened, what’s going on or care about anything but seeing what you want to see.

        Everyone who disagrees with you gets told to leave… some would name it “hypocrisy “

        Reply

        • I have, certain evangelicals are ideologically opposed to same sex couples and any recognition of that in church services and will never accept them. Legal semantics is just their means of refusing to give any concession whatsoever to same sex couples in the Church of England. Neither same sex marriage or stand alone services were approved anyway as they required a 2/3 majority not yet reached, what was approved was prayers of love and faith by majority

          Reply

          • They are ideologically opposed, you say.
            1. Are any of them rationally opposed for reasons that they can state?
            2. Are any of them opposed because of natural law?
            3. Are any of them opposed because their trusted and proven mentors are opposed?
            And where is the evidence for the said ideology? Is this something you have seen or can show me?

17. There are some comments that exaggerate to make a point but in doing so emphasise the gulf with inflammatory flame throwing.
    Is it not ultimately and simply question membership of the body of Christ, rules. From the “mouth of God”. Who judges?
    Joining and remaining.
    Salvation and sanctification.
    Why and how?
    R+R-R=R+R
    (Gospel) Rules+ Responsibility- Relationship= Rebellion+Rejection

    Reply

18. I worked in the house building sector for many years. At times architects’ planning details were unclear, impractical or at odds with Regulations. When our managers called a halt to work, the architects came site. The mangers would be pressed to offer solutions to keep the development moving. “Just get on and do that, and I’ll send you drawings later”, the architects would announce. But experience proved otherwise; the ruse wasn’t trusted. The managers got stung for breaches of Regulations, unrecoverable extra costs and overall delays to projects until snags were resolved. I’ve watched LLF proceed along this exact route: crash on and get it done, and we’ll tidy up the paperwork later. Utter folly.

    Reply

    • That isn’t really the case. LLF was put to the vote in all 3 houses of Synod by the Bishops before final approval and only the majority for the prayers for same sex couples in services in all 3 houses enabled them to proceed

      Reply

      • Is God a democrat too?

        Reply

        • How the C of E interprets the Bible is up to its Bishops and Synod alone. They define what the word of God for the Church of England

          Reply

          • Except in this instance you mean redefine … what was true yesterday is rendered untrue today and who knows what tomorrow!

          • They are not interpreting it, they are ignoring it.

          • By prayers for same sex couples in services which are not even stand alone services let alone marriage? Don’t be ridiculous, Christ was a leader of compassion not hate

          • No, it’s not up to the Church of England to reimagine revelation and spin Scripture to make it more acceptable to modern sensibilities. The job of its bishops is to teach and hold fast to the Truth. That is neither loving nor compassionate.

            If these prayers for same sex couples to receive the necessary graces to live in accordance with revealed Truth and to live faithful, chaste, Christian lives, not a problem.

          • T1, are you seriously using the concept ‘hate’ in an absolute sense?

            Everyone who loves the good ipso facto hates the bad. Unless they have no morals at all. Which of those categories do you think Christ fits in?

            KYou think it is moral to hate nothing at all?
            Explain.

          • Yes. They are far more important than Christ, the Holy Spirit and 2000 years of scholarship, especially since many of them were chosen for management skills.

          • So you honestly think Christ would hate same sex couples? If you think that not only should you not be in the Church of England but if you vocalise such hate of same sex couples in public you are at risk of being arrested for a hate crime

          • Is it that you are a dishonest twister of words (and so without conscience) or is it that you are not able to understand (and so without the requisite level of analytic power)?

            You know very well that I said that anyone who loves (and all healthy people do) hates the opposite of what they love.

            That means hating strongly whatever works against that which you love strongly.

            So if you love your child you hate anhything that would harm your child.

            And so on.

            You have reached your age in life without realising this point?

            The wrath of God and the wrath of the Lamb would certainly be turned away by you from admission to any Christian gathering.

            Not very Anglican!

            In your eyes, therefore, when the world was created, the most important principle of that world was that it should be Anglican?

          • Christopher, please, please read a book on semantics. And maybe then stop making silly statements about language.

          • Whereas all other contributors are well versed in the only partly relevant science of semantics? It is just me.

          • Well, Christopher, it was you that introduced ‘semantics’. You were the one who talked about ‘twisting words’. You were the one who said: ‘Everyone who loves the good ipso facto hates the bad’ and ‘anyone who loves (and all healthy people do) hates the opposite of what they love’.
            Ipso facto? Too strong. And your statement ‘anyone who loves…’ is simply wrong.
            If I love toast does that mean that I hate bread?

19. From the ‘Mouth of God’?

    Reply

20. Call me cynical, but at every stage on issues of orientation and abuse the powers that be have kicked the can rather than doing anything meaningful. While there are investigations, reviews and committees there’s something to tell the media to make it look like they care.

    Reply

    • Either way. it is outside the rules for joining or remaining as a member of the body of Christ.

      Reply

      • Hankering for a new creed?

        Reply

        • The Mouth of God.
          Not less than, but more than the Creeds on which they cohere.

          Reply

          • And even the Creeds do not safeguard against revisionist heterodoxy for joining or remaining.
            Nor do they directly address the why or how of salvation nor sanctification.
            Nor the question of
            safeguarding in general, sexual safeguarding in particular.
            The whole Counsel of Godgei is needed from the Mouth of God.

      • Geoff

        What is? Covering up abuse? Beating children for a sexual thrill? Lying to get out of a difficult spot with the media? Tolerating violence and the desire for violence?

        Reply

21. The PLF business is intractable because the two sides have different views of the nature of homosexuality, held in good faith. At the same time the two sides are ‘talking past each other’ because the evangelicals, who are basically right, have not properly come to terms with the fault in the pro-gay argument and therefore are not answering it as they could.

    The liberal side basically have fallen for the pro-gay presentation that “being gay is like being black”. That is, something which people have no choice about in the same way they have no choice about their ethnicity. And it needs to be faced that IF that is right, then to oppose ‘gayness’ is wrong, an evil comparable to racism, and of which therefore Christians must not be guilty. The liberals therefore believe that to continue believing Christianity it will be necessary to reinterpret the Bible so that homosexuality and its implications like same-sex marriage will be acceptable. And from that viewpoint simply to keep banging on showing the Bible teaches against homosexuality is both unacceptable and suicidal for the faith.

    Furthermore, if that gay presentation is true (IF!!) then like racism opposition to homosexuality should be unlawful and those guilty of it positively deserve to face legal penalties, both civil and criminal.

    But here’s the rub – that gay presentation is essentially false. ‘Gay’ is NOT like ‘being black’ or any similar comparison. Why not? Because the problem about homosexuality is not in something people ‘just are’ – the problem is in things people DO and unless they are claiming insanity, CHOOSE to do, ie the sexual acts. Things people DO are a whole different moral ball game from stuff like skin colour. The nearest thing to ‘being’ in such cases is that people have urges and desires about what they do – and it shouldn’t take much thought to realise that urges and desires, unlike skin colour, are not automatically OK just because you have the urges and desires.

    Men loving men or women loving women – basically not a problem. But for Christians God has made it plain that sexual congress is something designed for men with women (and ideally in marriage) and is inappropriate as an expression of same-sex love. Christians will trust God about that.

    On the other hand, Christians will recognise that their faith is voluntary and they are not meant to impose the Christian standards about this on those of other beliefs. It is a major part of the current problem that we live in the backlash from homosexuality having been criminalised in so-called “Christian countries”.

    Reply

    • Stephen

      Yes, being gay is something you just are. If it was something you did then there wouldn’t be celibate gay people or gay people married to the opposite sex.

      In some ways it’s similar to being Black (passers by will yell out slurs at you, it is seen as a less prestigious characteristic than heterosexual/whiteness, gays and Blacks gave historically been excluded from powerful jobs and public jobs). In other ways it’s different (most Black people grow up with Black parents, Black people cannot often pass for white, racism is more widespread than homophobia).

      Reply

      • No, Peter, it is something you become.
        If it were a matter of essence, then babies would have ‘sexual orientation’. I cannot imagine what name would be appropriate for those who think that.
        It has not the slightest connection to endemic traits like pigmentation and sex. But when gay activism began, people began to strategise about what strategy would allow them to indulge their sexual instincts and still be accepted. The best plan was to hijack the civil rights narrative (thus: born gay). Regarding which there are multiple separate and different factors that largely disprove it: correlations with broken homes, early molestation, congenial societies, congenial families / lesbian parenting, and so on.

        But the main question is that you know you have heard this before, so how are we to regard you as honest in the future if you just ignore it all, and repeat the propaganda and simultaneously ignore the science?

        Reply

        • Your argument is (not for the first time) deeply flawed Christopher.

          Just because a characteristic is something you become it doesn’t mean it’s not something you are. If you are 60, you are 60. The fact that the previous year you were 59, doesn’t mean being 60 isn’t real or is a choice. We aren’t born men and women, we’re born boys and girls, and become men and women. Your inference that because babies don’t have sexual orientation, no one has sexual orientation and it isn’t real, has no logical foundation.

          Reply

          • 60 is not something you are endemically. The idea is that being ‘gay’ is.

            It is just differentiating between different sorts of things. Not that that needs to be done, because there few points that are so often made. The fact that the points made are still ignored after being made so many times shows what sort of people we are dealing with.

            Being male/female or darker/lighter skinned by birth cannot be the result of circumstance. Things that happen later on can be. So that is obviously a main difference. Despite which dishonest people still repeat ‘sex, race, sexuality’.

            As for ‘choice’, this is yet another instance of not listening. The idea is that the situation is polar and binary (so likely) – choice or no choice being the only options, with nothing in the middle. In normal distribution far higher levels are in the middle than at the poles.

            I already listed some circumstances that seem to decrease levels of choice: who brings you up, which society preaches at you what formative experiences you have which then become inescapably part of ‘you’, whether your family and development are smooth or spoiled.

          • and being 60 is temporary lol.

        • So, Christopher, I ask yet again what societal and cultural pressures and influences made you straight? Were you aware of it as a child or did you succumb to influences in your impressionable teens? Was it a choice, or were you corrupted by your mentors and peers?

          Reply

          • Do you remember what answer you have already been given last time?
            And the time before that?
            THere’s no point repeating to anyone who does not digest, because they will not digest this time either.

          • No Christopher, I don’t remember you telling us how you became straight; what influences and mentors encouraged your emerging sexuality in a particular direction.

          • Failed to note the answer given? More than once? Now there’s a surprise. But it would be an even bigger surprise if you remembered any further repetition of the same answer.

          • Christopher

            You are being very coy. Surely you are not ashamed of your sexual orientation?

          • Surely you do not gravitate inexorably to the tabloidesque and the maximising of manufactured gossip?

          • Sorry Christopher, could you reframe your reply in intelligible English?

          • Which of the words don’t you understand?

          • Christopher

            They are all intelligible singly.

          • Which constituent of their coalescence flummoxes you?

          • The way in which they are strung together to give an image of a coherent sentence. But isn’t.

          • If people are described as gravitating inexorably to the tabloidesque, that means that (give them time) they will start getting all gossipy and sensationalist.
            And that they will constantly be putting this sensationalist spin on things which could actually be more mundane. Just as the tabloids do.
            Now, of course, the tabloid writers may realise they are not being honest. They may be so jaded even as to have got beyond the point of knowing or caring. But their editorial remit forces them to behave in this way, so it becomes second nature. And tabloids and gossip magazines are a good guide to unfettered human nature.
            But a poor guide to truth, since they do not ‘allow’ any truth to be mundane, only sensational.

          • Christopher

            Ah, i see. Well, since you are so fond of unevidenced generalisations as we have seen, I would suggest that perhaps it is you who are veering to the sensationalist and diffuse.

          • Whenever you want evidence, I give it.

          • Just ask.

        • Christopher

          But we *were* born this way and there’s a fair amount of biological research that confirms it.

          Reply

          • Lol. The reverse of the truth. There are hormonal correlations with finger length and hair whorls. There are also
            extremely strong correlations with molestation
            and with lesbian parenting
            and with broken homes
            and with confused gender roles
            and with milieux where a lot of other people have already said they are ‘gay’
            and with societies where such a message is being pushed
            and with university campuses
            and with towns as opposed to the country
            and with milieux where people pretend adolescence is not a confused time and try to label someone’s ever changing adolescent confusion their innate self.

            Even you cannot ignore all of these simultaneously.
            Yet I have listed them so often, it is clear that you can and do. And more than once.
            But how then can we view you as honest?

      • Do stop playing the victim!

        No, same sex sexual activity is a choice; living a “gay lifestyle” is a choice. being black or being female, is not.

        Framing homosexual lifestyles as a civil rights issue and portraying homosexuals as victims in search of fairness and equality, similar to the civil rights movements for black people and women, is a category error. It allows homosexualists to depict opponents of gay marriage as prejudiced “homophobes;” the contemporary equivalent of KKK bigots and misogamists.

        What the church teaches about human sexuality is given to us by God through natural revelation, what we can know by reason, by looking at our bodies and our powers and what they’re for. It’s has also been given through supernatural revelation what is meant for us as human beings, what’s good and perfective for us as human being and constitutes our human happiness.

        Society cannot redefine marriage as if it is a social construct by using the rhetoric of fairness and equal access. Just as being male or female is a reality; both flow from human nature itself. It is obvious to all that sex is fundamentally about reproduction. That’s what it’s for in animals, and that’s what it’s for in us. We find it enjoyable, sure; it brings us closer to our partner, sure; but from a biological perspective, this is motivation to get us to engage in it and reproduce and raise our species.

        Sex is about babies; babies are helpless and require care and attention. Children need parents to take care of them and provide for them; they take a long time to mature. When more children come along, this prolongs the period of investment parents have to make in raising their offspring. It is a multi-decade effort that needs the involvement of both parents. The fact that human offspring require so much care and take so long to mature, means that their parents need to be joined in a stable union. This union extends beyond the childrearing years, because by the time the offspring are grown the parents are in their declining years and need to start taking care of one another (as well as receiving help from their offspring).

        It’s not rocket-science!

        As the (Catholic) Code of Canon Law points out, “marriage is a permanent partnership between a man and a woman ordered to the procreation of offspring by means of sexual cooperation” (CIC 1096 §1). A somewhat cold statement, but this is the reality of what marriage is and what it has been understood to be in all human societies in history, even those that have been otherwise tolerant of homosexuality.

        Human nature leads to sex, which leads to offspring, which leads to the reality of childrearing, which leads to marriage – an institution found in every human culture and understood in the way just described.

        Marriage is a reality of human nature; we cannot change it as we don’t have the ability to alter human nature. Homosexual marriage is a legal fiction. We can create laws requiring those in society to treat those in homosexual unions as if they were married, to refer homosexual unions as “marriages,” to refer to people in such unions as “spouses,” to alter forms so that people in such unions can present themselves as such, and to give them the status of married people regarding adoption, housing, taxes, insurance, divorce, and inheritance. However, these laws do not change the nature of their union to correspond to what marriage actually is. All it is is a word game, stretching the term marriage so that it no longer depicts a particular human reality that has existed and will continue to exist – unaltered – no matter what names are assigned to it. It would not give people in those unions the reality of marriage.

        For the Church to countenance supporting the formal, ritualistic blessing of such unions in church services (as “unions” involving sexual activity and as “good”), or to even contemplate conferring on them the status of holy matrimony, is literally spiritual insanity.

        Reply

        • A good statement of what natural law reveals about human beings and families, which agrees with Scripture.

          Reply

          • All you have to do is ignore Genesis 2, Ecclesiastes 4, Matthew 19, 1 Corinthians 7, and the rest.

        • At last, it all starts to come out.

          If you really thought that sexual orientation is irrelevant, and it’s all about male and female bodies then you’d be advocating for gay people to enter straight marriages. Oddly you don’t. Maybe you realise that when this has been tried, it’s turned out disastrously, so don’t want to get caught with the implications of your bad argument. Maybe you just don’t care what gay people do, because the point of the argument is to win the game in debate club. Who knows?

          I’m not convinced that childless marriages lack the “reality of marriage”. Nor do I find any basis for thinking that in Scripture.

          Reply

          • @ A J Bell

            Why on earth would one wish to advocate for those with an exclusive same sex orientation to enter a marriage with a person of the opposite sex? This must be a decision for an individual and one made honestly and openly with their spouse.

            There are some people with SSA who desire to marry a person of the opposite sex. They can be attracted to someone for reasons other than sexual desire. They may want children and are not adverse to having sex for unitive and reproductive purposes, even though they lack the same physical sexual drive as others.

            Marriage is more than sexual attraction. Same sex attraction isn’t “special” or unique. People might have inclinations for all types of unacceptable, immoral sexual activity. And sometimes married people lose attraction for each other, sometimes completely, and have to resist the temptation of being sexually active outside their marriage. One is morally obligated to remain chaste within marriages.

            That said, there are pitfalls. One would have to approach this honestly and openly. Keeping one’s real sexual attractions a secret or minimising them and marrying can result in affairs and/or abandoning the marriage later. If a person is just incapable of committing to giving themselves sexually, wholly, and exclusively to their spouse, for as long as they live, then this marriage would not be a valid marriage at all. In these circumstances, a person with a homosexual orientation ought to remain chaste and celibate

            And whose arguing that childless marriages, in and of themselves, lack the reality of marriage? Infertility (the inability to procreate children) is not an impediment to marriage. There are many men and women who are unable to have children, yet their marriages are valid.

            Unfair? No.

            Procreation and the rearing of children is the primary purpose of sex; the unitive aspect being a secondary end inasmuch as it presupposes the procreative. But this doesn’t mean that the couple must always be able to meet the primary end, as long as they do nothing to frustrate nature’s purposes. The sexual act itself must always have its intrinsic ordering toward the generation of children.

            And same sex acts, by definition, just don’t have a generative purpose.

          • No Jack, it mustn’t. Lots of couples engage in sex which may be generative, but certainly isn’t reproductive.
            You may believe in ‘natural revelation’. But your belief isn’t necessarily consonant with the truth, scripture and/or Anglican teaching.

          • Natural and Divine revelation do not contradict one another – read St Paul on this. Natural revelation is God revealing Himself through the created world; Divine revelation is when God reveals Himself through special means.

            Whilst I don’t agree with Anglican teaching on artificial contraception, (precisely because it allows for a separation of sex and the generative aspects of conjugal relations), or divorce and remarriage (because this contradicts the life long relationship intended by the unitive aspects and child rearing purposes of a life long marriage), I do agree with its (current) teachings that matrimony is exclusively between a man and and a woman.

        • Society has always defined marriage. And that definition jas changed as societies and cultures change.

          Reply

          • Penelope
            You wrote “Society has always defined marriage. And that definition jas changed as societies and cultures change”.

            True up to a point – but of course Christianity is not ‘society’. By which I mean we do not do, and are not meant to do, so-called Christian states. Rather we are an international counterculture which on marriage does its own thing following scripture. ‘Society’ does not dictate the Christian view.

          • But there always has to be a concept called marriage, right?
            Why do you think that? FIrst of all, every society has some concepts and not others, so there is no requirement to have that one. Secondly, if it constantly changes, it has no identity anyway: you are not talking about a single concept at all. Making the argument circular.

            It is realities that are eternal, not concepts.

            Other than that, we have again the inability to treat the point ‘Anything that has ever changed in one way can legitimately change in any way at all (out of the millions of possible ways) that I dictate, and still remain the same thing. The extent to which something changes is the extent to which it does not remain the same thing. It is only the word for it that remains the same, which does not get us very far and is also confusing.

          • Close inverted commas after
            same thing.’

          • Stephen

            Christian societies have also defined marriage and that definition has changed as Christian ideas about humanity, sexuality and society have changed.

          • The phrase “Christian societies” is ambiguous. Sometimes it means indeed churches as distinct from the surrounding society/culture – but often it means supposed ‘Christian states’ which can be a horrendous mix of church and world, in other areas of life causing wars and persecutions in the name of Jesus. Changes about issues like marriage in such an environment may be far from biblically Christian. That is why it is important to have a Church separate from the state and seeking to be simply biblical.

            Biblically – as opposed to later Catholic/Orthodox and Anglican and some other Protestant practices – Christians are not supposed to rule society and coerce conformity, but to operate alongside society offering a countercultural ‘better way’

          • What is meant by saying that they have ‘changed’?
            First, they have never been uniform in the first place.
            Second, one main reason they would change would be that people meekly accept their surrounding culture. As opposed to evidence.
            So, again, we go with the best thinkers not with socially prevalent ideas. But that is obvious.

        • HJ

          Gay people have all kinds of lifestyle. I know single, celibate, married gay people and I know that lots of gay people are married to the opposite sex. You dont become gay when you have same sex sex and nor do you stop being gay if you marry someone of the opposite sex

          You are confusing people with a sex act.

          Reply

      • Peter
        You have missed/ignored thr point I also made
        “The nearest thing to ‘being’ in such cases is that people have urges and desires about what they do – and it shouldn’t take much thought to realise that urges and desires, unlike skin colour, are not automatically OK just because you have the urges and desires”.

        Whatever it is – and the category ranges all the way from the seriously saintly to the definitely satanic – anything, not just sexual things, that people DO because they ‘are’ possessed of urges and desires is a completely different category to things like ‘being black’. It is different because it involves BEHAVIOUR, things that people CHOOSE to do. In a world where “ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God” people have all kinds of ‘urges and desires’ and they are not all good and appropriate urges and desires. “Being black” is absolutely NOT behaviour – doing sex absolutely IS behaviour; it is an important difference morally, legally and in many other practical ways.

        And precisely for that reason, things people DO are properly open to challenge and question and cannot be just automatically declared acceptable because people ‘are’ those urges and desires. Wrongful urges need to be repented of, not justified. Gay people clearly recognise that themselves when discussing non-sexual urges and the problems they bring. Indeed they also seem to recognise many sexual urges as undesirable….

        Urges and desires sometimes seem irresistible to those who have them; in the world as Christians understand it, a world ‘out of joint’ because of Sin, this is a matter of being ‘captive to’ one’s sins, but with a significant possibility of repairing the situarion. In other beliefs/philosophies it leads to even bleaker conclusions – have you read that Dawkins guy’s comments in his book “River out of Eden” with its conclusion that there is no right and wrong, no good and evil, that humans dance to the tune of their DNA and their DNA simply doesn’t care, indeed can’t care?

        Reply

        • Gay sexual orientation is a wrongful and needs to be repented of?

          Reply

          • Desire is not sinful …. encouraging, feeding, and acting on misdirected, immoral desire is sinful.

          • No, sexual orientation itself needs not to be fundamentalistically swallowed as a concept (a concept that most cultures have not used) but critiqued. Quite different.

            Of course people have characteristic desires at different points in time. We are supposed to think there is something moral or endemic in that? As Billy Graham often said, the desires you now have, you often have because those are the desires that you have previously fed.

          • ‘a concept that most cultures have not used’. Evidence, Christopher??

          • Well, there have been a lot of cultures, and still are. How many have such a concept?

            In our own the born this way idea is both recent and historically rare. Yet our culture is one of those at the forefront of the gay message.

          • Bruce, do you know of similar concepts to ‘sexual orientation’ [i.e., envisaged as fixed and endemic – neither of which it actually is, lifelong, even in our own day and culture] in more than a small minority of cultures?

          • No, Christopher, I don’t know of any culture that *has* ‘such a concept’. But I think I have more chance of *finding one* than you have of providing evidence for your claim. Even if I were using *concept* in the odd mistaken way that you do.

          • Not any at all? Why would that be?

            I expect you know what I mean by my usage.

          • ‘Why would that be?’

            Because, Christopher, (a) I haven’t had occasion to look; (b) I am unable to look inside the minds of 7billion+ people currently; (c) I think that the *evidence* *remaining* from many more people is *probably* lost; and (d) because you have set up the test in such a way that it completely ignores how language works anyway.

        • Christopher

          So, yet again, were you born straight, or did some circumstance influence your choice?

          Reply

          • So, yet again, why are you giving equal weight to biological function (and at a miraculous level at that) as to the lack of it? Is that like equating trillions with zero?

          • Define biological function

          • What was the entire progress of life from amoeba to the present day all about?

          • Evolution.
            Is reproducing our genes our only telos? Have you been reading too much Dawkins?

          • It is not about evolution. The entire progress from the amoeba to the present day IS evolution. But what is evolution all about?

          • Christopher

            You appear to think it’s all about reproducing our genes.

      • Should we define a person by their sexual drives? Is this their “identity”?

        Reply

        • I don’t think people are being identified by their sexual ‘drives’. Or, perhaps, only by people who are obsessed with sex.

          Reply

          • To quote you below: “Thus, being gay is a matter of identity and not of behaviour.” One can have predominantly same sex drives and identity as “gay” without giving expression to this desire.

            Between desire and action there is always space for choice.

    • Just to remind you, you can be gay without engaging in any sexual activity. Just ask some gay celibates. They’d be a bit insulted by your presumption that identity equals behaviour. Look at Living Out, for example.

      Reply

      • Penelope
        As far as I can tell I’m pretty much in agreement with the Living Out group; just my emphases are slightly different because in my life I’ve been dealing a bit more with some of the legal and civil rights aspects. I have the distinct impression that you don’t agree much with them or myself, and you appear also to significantly disagree with the Bible on these matters, which would put you somewhat outside any credible Christianity. I’m not BTW presuming that ‘identity equals behaviour’; but decidedly saying that behaviour can equal sin.

        Reply

        • I don’t disagree with what the Bible ‘says’ about gay relationships because it doesn’t ‘say’ anything about faithful covenantal gay relationships (with the possible exception of David and Jonathan).
          I do disagree with much of Living Out’s ethos, but I cited them as conservative Christians, some of whom describe themselves as gay, despite being celibate or married to other sex partners. Thus, being gay is a matter of identity and not of behaviour. You can be as gay as a daisy and completely sexually continent.

          Reply

          • Men can and do love one another as “brothers;” and women can and do love another as “sisters.”

            There’s no suggestion anywhere in Scripture of homoerotic same sex relationships, let alone these these ever having been expressed sexually! That this subject is given very little coverage in the Bible is evidence of the absence of the visibility of this phenomenon, and this is logically a consequence of the prohibition of this behaviour.

            The apt term for the relationships you suggest is philia: the affectionate love found in deep friendships. There’s nothing in the texts that allow for seeing any homosexuality between David and Jonathan, not even implicitly. If at times an expression is ambiguous to our sex-obsessed ears and spirit that equates “love” with “sex,” a reading it in context removes that possibility.

            In addition to “eros:” passionate, romantic, and often physical love, there’s agape: a selfless, universal love, characterised by compassion and unconditional giving. We also haver storge: the affection felt within a family, such as the love between parents and children.

          • Penelope
            Why would the Bible ‘say’ anything at all about “faithful covenantal gay relationships” when by saying that a man lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination it has precluded ALL relationships involving such conduct, whether ‘faithful/covenantal’ or not?

          • Jack should perhaps read the story of David and Jonathan again.

          • Stephen

            One prohibition of anal sex under particular circumstances is not a condemnation of loving queer relationships of which scripture knew nothing.
            You might as well argue that offering your virgin daughters to prevent male on male rape is a virtuous thing.

          • How is it that every such post degenerates to this precise point?
            There is certainly a reason.

22. Prolonged and painful?
    Sidetracking.
    It doesn’t get any better for the established church of England as she gets publically, nationally, politically embroiled in the accusations and denials in the wake of the appointments process and resignation of the BoLiverpool.
    For anyone who has followed Andrew Goddard’s many articles charting and commenting on LLF and the processes, can any patterns be identified, reverberating echoes heard? Systemic malfunction? Or dysfunctional establishment system?

    Reply

23. AJB
    Yes, a desire to do the parody involved in gay sex is wrongful and needs to be repented of. God has not forbidden same-sex love, nor indeed has he forbidden a great deal of physical expression of such love short of the disrespectful and arrogant parody – we are after all physical as well as spiritual beings. God has made it clear that he forbids certain acts as inappropriate/going too far.

    There is no ‘gay sexual orientation’ in the kind of sense you imply – just that in sex as in other matters, sinful humans have disordered urges and desires.

    Reply

    • Gay sex (whatever that is) is a parody?
      That’ll be news to lots of straight couples 🙂

      Reply

      • ‘Natural revelation is God revealing Himself through the created world;’ good: we have evolved from single-cell organisms. We were not created male and female. The Christian anthropology you outline is a laughing stock to the modern world. https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-first-animals

        Reply

        • Ah yes, Modern World of what? Atheistic Philosophical scientism? Idolatry. Man worshipping his maker, man in a closed material world system. Not ‘In the beginning God’. Not ex nihilo.
          No incarnation.
          Let’s all smirk in our secular sophistry.

          Reply

          • And if Jesus was not raised from the dead, our lives are indeed a terminal parody, self mockery, a vain glory, waste. As is the CoE.

        • Evolution from single-cell organisms is almost certainly false. The evidence against it is overwhelming.
          Jesus said we were created male and female (Matthew 19). I’ll take his word to yours (or mine) any day.
          As for laughing stock’: the wisdom of God is foolishness to the Greeks.

          Reply

          • Of course, it is very, very difficult for people who have invested their lives and careers in Neo-Darwinism to admit that it is fundamentally flawed. But the evidence of the sheer astronomical complexity of even the ‘simplest’ cell throws into confusion all theories about how life began.

          • And. Not or.

          • James, you ought to read the books by Nick Lane, UCL prof of evolutionary biology at the molecular level, before making strong scientific statements like that. “Life Ascending” is the one that will best give you food for thought – and explicitly addresses the issue you raise (and others), although ‘Transformer’ and ‘The vital question’ take it further. These are all written for the intelligent layman.

            Incidentally I do accept the Genesis account as material truth. But we have been fooled by translations made before modern science and by both secular humanists and fundamentalists who revel in disagreeing with each other. I prefer to live in the tension of the findings of good science and the truth of holy scripture, and see what emerges. Plenty has – but this is not the place for it.

          • Ultimately “good” scientific findings truth and Divine revelation cannot contradict one another.

          • Jack: with the exception of miracles, I agree. (Science will never explain Peter walking on water and starting to sink as his faith wavered in Matthew 14.)

          • Good to hear, James, that at least one ostensibly orthodox contributor to these debates really is orthodox, as well as scientifically informed. Jesus was not the first after Genesis 1-2 to state with divine authority that Genesis 1-2 really are true. A certain god named Yahweh said this to Moses: “In six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.” Anton says he would rather believe the atheist Nick Lane. He would rather believe that life is just chemistry – there is no such thing as ‘the breath of life’ in evolutionary biology. He would rather believe that Nature has within it the power to create itself. He would rather believe that what the OT scriptures repeat again and again – in 15 of its 36 books – and what the NT re-affirms again and again – in 13 of its 27 books – viz., that God, not Nature, created the heaven and the earth and everything in them, can be put aside, albeit with some ‘tension’, because it’s all just a matter of translation.

            In reality we are witnessing the collapse of the institutional Church precisely because for the past 160 years it has believed a lie. Creation is the foundational truth on which everything else rests. When that founders, the whole building collapses. When creation is no longer regarded as true, the doctrine that man is made in the image of God becomes a mere slogan, divorced from objective (historical/scientific) truth, marriage is no longer part of the divinely intended ab initio created order, male and female are open to human re-engineering, women are appointed priests and bishops (explicitly a creation issue in I Tim 2:12f). When creation is no longer regarded as true, God himself is abolished, since he is not necessary to explain the world. The things made do not reveal his eternal power and deity (Rom 1).

            So, indeed, the world no longer does believe in him. Since the Church itself says that believing in God in his own proper person as Creator is a subjective and optional matter, since the Church itself does not believe in him, neither does the world.

            This myopic, obsessive focus on the issue of SSM fails to recognise that the issue is completely secondary to the primary issue: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. ‘His works were finished from the foundation of the world.’ Those who deny this, do so knowing that it is contrary to what is manifest to them and to everyone, but suppress the truth because of their unrighteousness. It’s not an intellectual question fundamentally. The heart tells the mind what to think (Rom 1:18-19).

            The dishonouring of the human body with shameful acts (Rom 1:27) is not itself the thing that the Church should be focusing on; it is the fact that men, claiming to be wise, became fools, and persuaded Christian leaders to think likewise, to exchange the glory of the immortal God for false gods (Rom 1:22f).

          • Steven Robinson,

            I have explained my position and some of the modern science in my reply to James elsewhere on this thread. As you will see, my position is a long way from that which you assume. Much of the rest of your post comprises personal insult; in short, your post says more about you than about me. Anybody who enters the discussion about science and scripture really ought to have a good understanding of both first. Otherwise, it might be best to leave that to committed Christians who also understand the science and are up-to-date on it.

            The attack on Christianity has actually been led by the humanities rather than the sciences, as you might expect in our post-Enlightenment era. Are you aware that a higher proportion of scientists than of secular persons believe in God? (See the scientific journal Nature, 3rd April 1997, vol.386, p.435.) Are you also aware that the Big Bang theory affirms that there was a beginning, just as Genesis says and many eastern pagan systems deny? Science and scripture in accord!

          • Anton, you’re an obfuscator. Everyone knows that if in isolation a word can have more than one meaning, then it is the context that determines its meaning. The primary meaning of yom is day, which is why it is usually so translated. I have referred to God’s own summary of Genesis 1:1-2:3, as if the passage itself was not perfectly clear: “In six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.” There are two contexts to consider: the context of the word itself and the context in which the whole declaration is given. Regarding the first, when yom is preceded by a number, it always refers to a 24-hr period, just as in English. Regarding the second, God is explaining why Israel should keep the Sabbath day holy. The Israelites were to work for six 24-hr periods and rest for one 24-hr period, because that is what he himself had done.

            What is unclear to you about that? Why do you seek to wriggle out of what Scripture says? If you think that God was telling Israel a lie, or that Moses was misrepresenting what God said, why not come out with it and say so, as honesty requires? Nick Lane would say just that, because Genesis 1 is manifestly incompatible with his view. You cite Lane to undermine Scripture’s testimony, and Jesus’s express testimony to boot. The words of the one you acknowledge to be the Truth, the Word of God made flesh. You dare say to him and to us, his word is false when he says – referencing Genesis explicitly – “He who created them from the beginning made them male and female.” Note (James too) the words from the beginning here and in the beginning in Genesis 1:1. Creation, by definition, is not a continuous process going on through history, even now. And it is not, by definition, doing what Nature itself can do by itself. After six days the heaven and the earth were finished (Gen 2:1). As Hebrews says, ‘his works were finished from the foundation of the world’.

            I see we can add the RCC’s doctrine on creation to all the other falsehoods that that Church teaches – worship of Mary (adding to the three co-eternal gods of the Roman creed), indulgences, the idea that you can earn your salvation, sacerdotalism, the idea of the priestly re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice on an altar, transubstantiation, infant baptism, canonisation of miracle-working ‘saints’, the idea that Peter was head of the Gentile Church and every Pope stands in his shoes and holds the keys of heaven. In contradicting what Scripture says you’re in good company.

            Anybody who enters the discussion about science and scripture really ought to have a good understanding of both first. Otherwise, it might be best to leave that to committed Christians who also understand the science and are up-to-date on it. I see what you are implying. However, I understand the science. The most relevant question here is not whether God could have made his amazing creation by a process of natural selection of beneficial mutations, ultimately from the slime in a ‘warm little pond’, but whether God did do it that way. Scripture aside, that’s a historical question, and answered by geology/palaeontology, not evolutionary biology. About the geological record Lane knows very little, certainly less than I. He was around when I was doing a PhD (in geology) at UCL, and I met him.

            But as above, one does not need at PhD or even a BSc in a relevant science to know what the OT says and the NT says on the subject. That’s the beauty of Scripture, especially as regards its core teaching: it does not require a super-sophisticated, super-intelligent, super-educated brain to understand it.

            Let God be true and every man false, as it is written, “That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged.”

          • Steven Robinson,

            You are actually no different from the papacy – “my interpretation of scripture is right because I say so.”

            I do not intend to cast pearls before you in this debate. Lete me reiterate simply that am not contradicting scripture and I do not believe that Genesis is a mythological account.

            Why do you seek to wriggle out of what Scripture says?

            Oh right, and have I stopped beating my wife yet?

            when yom is preceded by a number, it always refers to a 24-hr period, just as in English

            We can agree that, setting aside Genesis 1, wherever the word YOM appears in the Old Testament with a number, YOM means 24-hour day. But this fact does not elevate it into a principle of Hebrew usage, does it? Otherwise the following sentence could not be translated into Hebrew: “the first era of the industrial revolution was the mass production of iron using coked coal in place of charcoal, the second era was the deployment of the fixed steam engine, and the third era was the steam engine’s power applied to wheels that moved it along a track”. Of course this sentence can be translated into perfectly good Hebrew, in which ‘era’ is rendered as YOM and preceded by a number. So your claim is incorrect. Where did you get it from?

          • Steven Robinson,

            Do you believe that the earth is flat in view of Isaiah 11:12 referring to the four corners of the earth?

          • ‘Anton’

            As your last reply continues to demonstrate, you are an obfuscator. You cannot accept Jesus’s testimony that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth because you believe that the wisdom of this world trumps the wisdom of God. So you listen to what Nick Lane says and try to re-interpret Scripture accordingly.

            That is just what is going on in the Church of England with regard to SSM. Persuaded by the wisdom of the world concerning ‘love’ and ‘gender fluidity’ and ‘marriage’, it is doing what it can to re-interpret Scripture, although, like you, it prefers to do this by ignoring the relevant scriptures rather than facing them squarely and honestly.

            I don’t see, consequently, that you have any business opposing Peter Jermey (who at least gives his full name), Penelope Cowell Doe and others who also believe that Scripture needs to be interpreted in the light of contemporary perceptions of what is right and true. You have the same approach to Scripture as they, only they are rather more consistent, and candid, than you.

          • Steven Robinson,

            You seem to be unaware that words – including those in scripture – get their meaning from human usage in relation to the world as humans perceive it. That is why I asked you whether you believe that the earth is flat in view of Isaiah 11:12. It is why you would presumably have burnt those who advocated heliocentricity becaue of statements like “the sun came up” (Genesis 32:31). By ducking that question which is problematic for you, you tarred yourself with the same brush with which you seek to tar me.

          • Steven

            Thank you. But not so much contemporary perceptions as attention to the original intention(s) of the text(s). And their subsequent reception in Christian tradition.

          • ‘Anton’

            When it comes to ducking questions, you take the prize. As for your trying to make something of Isaiah 11:12, it was so silly, I didn’t think it merited a reply, and now you add to the silliness with Gen 32:31. If you want to understand Isa 11:12, read p. 138 and p. 160 of When the Towers Fall: A Prophecy of What Must Happen Soon, where the meaning is discussed. Don’t you know when to stop? With your having agreed that ‘wherever the word YOM appears in the Old Testament with a number, YOM means 24-hour day,’ I thought you were going to go away and humbly, before God, reconsider your anti-biblical cosmology. We were talking about Ex 20:11 after all.

            “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Which part of the statement do you not understand?

            In the beginning – i.e. time zero.

            God – i.e. not the Canaanite God El, and not Darwin’s Evolution or LeMaitre’s cosmic egg. The false gods that with your intellect you bow down to.

            Created – i.e. not simply formed, but brought into existence from new.

            The heaven – i.e. as defined later in the chapter, the space containing the sun and planets and enclosed by a shell of water.

            The earth – i.e. our own planet, in existence from day one, three days before the sun.

          • Steven Robinson

            You are not taking any trouble to try to understand my position, the better to try to knock it over. You are merely shouting your own view louder ande engagging in insult. That suits me in terms of our present discussion as viewed in a public forum, but it is poor rhetorical technique and will not stand you in good stead in apologetics discussions.

          • Steven

            Actually, Genesis 1 doesn’t say ‘In the beginning…’
            And creation ex nihilo is a post biblical philosophical idea.

          • You are correct Penelope, although I’d like to know *why* you don’t go with ex nihilo. Some persons believe that God merely ordered a pre-existing chaotic universe. (Are you one such?) I believe he created the lot and then put order in it, and that the reason for no ‘ex nihilo’ statement is to avoid futile philosophical discussion about the meaning of ‘nothing’. Askl most people what nothing is and they will tell you a cacuum. But (1) they mean a vacuum in 3 dimensions, whereas authentic nothing would have no dimensions; and (2) even the vacuum is seething with virtual particles according to quantum field theory. God was not interested in that sort of discussion 3000 years ago, so he left out ‘ex nihilo’.

          • Penelope

            I don’t know how to meet your bare assertion except to assert contrariwise that Genesis 1 does say ‘In the beginning’, both in the Hebrew and the Greek.

            As for ex nihilo, not a term I actually used, the concept of bringing into existence from new is implicit in the text (notably the verb bara*, and confirmed by Heb 11:3. ‘The phenomenal world came into being from what was invisible.’

            *From biblehub: ‘It is a term that signifies the initiation of something new, often implying a creation ex nihilo (out of nothing), which is a unique attribute of God’s creative power. Unlike other Hebrew words for making or forming, bara is exclusively used in reference to God’s creative acts.

            I have been engaged in this area (the interface between Genesis, history and science) for 30 years. Discussion consisting of dissenting one-liners is not a lot of use in my opinion.

          • Steven

            Except the first word of Genesis 1 absolutely does not mean ‘in the beginning’.
            It should be translated as ‘when God began to create’ or similar.

            Ask any competent Greek scholar.

            Additionally, of course, in the earlier creation account God creates the first man from something already in existence.

          • Anton

            Basically because I am attentive to what scripture ‘says’, and neither account has God creating out of nothing.

        • Depending on how one understand Genesis – it’s not a scientific account of creation but a theological one using figurative language – there’s nothing necessarily contradictory between evolution and God creating the universe from nothing. Why couldn’t man’s body have developed from previous biological forms – even single cells – under God’s guidance? The early Fathers left the options open; so should we.

          Belief in the special creation of a unique soul infused to our first parents, Adam and Eve, who were tested and fell, is another matter. And it’s this that separates us from other life forms and gives us our dignity as having been fashioned in the image of God and raised above other creature. Whether the human body was specially created or developed from matter previously created by God from nothing, is one thing. However, Scripture informs us the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents as our bodies are. Science will never be able to prove or disprove this. It’s a matter of Divine revelation.

          One cannot shut down human science and its interaction with sacred theology, and associated research and discussions. The precise origin of human life and whether evolved, and by what mechanism, remains a mystery. This is a debate that will never be settled between Christians and evolutionary atheists.

          As the Catholic catechism teaches:

          “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.

          “Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things the of the faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.”
          (CCC #159).

          Reply

          • Jack, that’s the view I held some years ago and I am still open to it – but in recent years I have come to doubt that evolution by natural selection (ENS) was the method God used, or that all life evolved out of a single cell. I should add that I am not a Young Earth Creationist, nor have I ever believed that Gen 1-2 gives us a literal depiction of creation. My doubts about unguided, chance-driven ENS are principally over three matters:
            – the impasse in Origin of Life studies (James Tour is very strong on this)’;
            – the astronomical complexity of even the ‘simplest’ cell, which seems to defeat any chance explanation of occurring, including a hypothetical step-upon-step development;
            – the existence of highly complex information in the genome (as well as nano-machines in the cells) that points to a powerful intelligent agent.
            If I had to choose, I would opt for multiple creative acts over millions of years.
            Anton has referenced before the books by Nick Lane, and I may get round to reading these.

          • James, I don’t believe human life was due to “unguided, chance-driven ENS”. If life evolved from material miraculously created by God from nothing, then this was under His providential guidance and direction – not random, undirected chance. It didn’t require His active, ongoing intervention. Who can know what original building blocks and forces were put in place by God with what potential? Your alternative suggestion – multiple creative miracles – is also possible. But would this be necessary for an omniscient Creator?

            The strongest objection to all versions of Christian evolution – there are a few – is that a process of death and competition is used by the Creator of life. They all entail a bloody, competitive, process as the driver of new life forms. Why would an all-powerful God use a cruel, bloody process to bring about the variety of life on earth? Even the idea that God advances evolutionary development by isolated episodes of rapid speciation between periods of little or no change, suggests wasteful, inefficiencies at play to create the world into which Adam was placed/emerged.

            Genesis teaches that God created everything “very good,” and it was human sin that initiated death, suffering, and bloodshed. Could God look upon all His Creation and call it “very good” if animals were tearing each other apart millions of years before Adam and the Fall?

            Well, yes, He could. God’s perspective and time is not ours, and Genesis is not a literal, scientific treatise – “I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’” Being omniscient, when God created the universe one can believe He foreknew all the myriad complexities and forces in play in the universe, and He also foreknew the Fall of Adam and Eve.

            Circle squared?

          • Three observations on your last comment, Jack.
            1. Unguided, purposeless, chance-driven evolution by natural selection (errors/mutations in genetic copying + accidentally favourable environment and genetic drift) IS what Evolution by Natural Selection means. This is why Dawkins said (ignorantly), ‘Natural Selection made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’.
            2. The idea that God ‘gives evolution a nudge’ is NOT evolution by natural selection, which is random and purposeless.
            3. Are you affirming a historical pair called Adam and Eve? (I’m sure Lorenzo doesn’t believe such a pair, ‘our first parents’, actually existed.)

          • James,

            I think that you are critiquing the state of evolutionary theory at molecular level as it was some 50 years ago. Diehard evolutionists at that time who were not hubristic simply said “I don’t know.” Fundamentalists said “Come back when you have better arguments.” Those now exist, which is why I recommend Lane’s books. One point is that the chances of complex molecules (and living cells) arising in the environments which scientists of the former generation took to be found in the ancient earth was truly tiny – so tiny that it would never have happened even in a timescale as old as the earth (and back to that in a moment). But scientists now know more about the reaction sequence and have realised that certain environments expected to be present in *some* parts of the ancient earth actually bump up those probabilities from shatteringly unlikely to very likely. See Lane for details.

            Anybody who enters the discussion about science and scripture really ought to have a good understanding of both first. Otherwise, it might be best to leave that to committed Christians who also understand the science and are up-to-date on it. I mean no discourtesy.

            I believe that evolution is how our bodies were formed from “the particles of the earth” (i.e. atoms) – a phrase rendered in King James as ‘the dust of the ground.’ I believe God did something to one such a duly hominid that caused him to be in the image of God – blew into him the neshamah of life, as Genesis puts it. Neshamah is conscience. This was a miracle. Sociobiology will never explain it. As for Eve, I share the fundamentalists’ view that she was created materially from Adam just as Genesis describes. This establishes the form of the relationship between man and woman.

            The verses about animals breeding true (‘after their own kind’) simply mean that a male giraffe mates with a female giraffe (not a lioness) and produce little giraffes, not leopards, etc. This verse says nothing about whether after a thousand generations the offspring look like their distant ancestors.

            And I’ll add that YOM, as in the six days of creation, has the double meaning of 24 hours or era, as in ‘the era of steam power’. It can *only* mean era in Job 15:23 & 18:20, for instance, so the question arises of which meaning it has in Genesis 1. (Feel free to ask whether the evening/morning words in this passage settle it.)

            Ignore Dawkins, by the way. He has an envious literary style but he is at heart a controversialist. He was a controversialist *within* evolutionary biology long before he began talking ill-informed nonsense about theology.

          • PS James: If you are interested in my 20,000-word essay on science and scripture then I’ll gladly send it to you via Ian.

          • Anton,
            I appreciate your reponse. I have yet to read Lane, so must defer any comment here, other than to say I have been reflecting what Stephen Meyer has written in ‘Signature in the Cell’ and what James Tour has written about Origin of Life studies, and not what people thought 50 years ago.
            I don’t know if Meyer has interacted with Lane,

          • James

            I’m suggesting that God, being both omnipotent and omniscient, and beyond our comprehension, sees in advance all possible outcomes before Him and from an infinity of possibilities selects the one that meets His purposes. From our perspective, random and purposeless perhaps; from His, designed, ordered and intended.

            And certainly I’m affirming the reality of our historical parents, Adam and Eve, ensouled by God, given freedom to obey or disobey Him, and from whom we all are descended. The creation of the human species, with male and female members, was certainly preordained.

          • “miraculously ensouled by God.”

24. ‘Natural law’ is derivative.
    Yet that is based on a priori presumptions.
    BTW. in our church’ s preaching through Ephesians today we reached Ephesians 5: 21-33.

    Reply

    • ‘Natural Law’ is not restricted to the study of science. There is a ‘Natural Law’ School of Jurisprudence.
      Ultimately, it is God’s law, above human construct, and based on the doctrine of God’s revelation.
      As an atheist law student, at the time, it is one school of Jurisprudence I gave scant attention and even less credibility to.

      Reply

25. On a related matter, what exactly is going on in the Diocese of Liverpool?
    Can anyone tell me what is the actual status of the Bishop of Warrington?
    Has she been suspended? Or is she on sick leave? Or has she been placed on administrative leave?
    Is she being paid to do nothing or does she have a CDM complaint to make?
    Is there a diocesan cover up?

    Reply

    • It is off topic but people often get suspended while a safeguarding investigation takes place. (Such can take place from true or from false reports; from weighty or from trivial reports.) The current atmosphere is such that people are terrified of not being thorough in safeguarding. So some public greeting with many others present that seems not to have occasioned comment at the time has now become a national headline. Soon people will be terrified of breathing in the wrong way or of putting one foot in front of another in the wrong way, particularly if there are cultural differences involved.

      Reply

      • So, do you think the Bishop of Warrington has been suspended? Why is she off work?

        Reply

        • This is very puzzling, not that it happens (though it is the most massive and fussy and symptomatic waste) but that there are about four possible scenarii, so who knows which is the real one.

          Reply

26. “Why would the Bible ‘say’ anything at all about “faithful covenantal gay relationships” when by saying that a man lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination it has precluded ALL relationships involving such conduct, whether ‘faithful/covenantal’ or not?”

    Obviously not. Many things are called toevoth in the Torah. The verses you refer to only ban one act between males not homosexuality in general. They do not care for sexual orientation, feelings, desire for companionship, family… They are utterly silent on lesbian relationships, the Talmud noticed this very early on. And if ‘ALL relationships involving such conduct,’ (emphasis yours) were proscribed, there would have been no need to add verses banning incestuous same-sex relationships alongside opposite-sex incestuous relationships. Yet these commandments are there.

    by fathers and uncles.

    Reply

    • Lorenzo,
      Why should Christians care about the Talmud? Are you a rabbi? If so, I can understand why you would consider it authoritative. But what relevance does it have to Christians?

      Reply

      • If the Talmud’s observation is correct, it is correct regardless of its provenance. And the Jews have paid close attention to their Torah, you know. The scope of the Torah prohibition is quite narrow, so much so that they felt the need to ‘build a fence’ around and prohibit other forms of sex that could lead to breaking the Law d’oraita (i.e. biblical) but all these later prohibitions are rabbinical. Christians should care about this because they base their disapproval of gay sex on these two verses from Lv and Dt and Paul’s reiteration of them. But they go way beyond the letter of the law.

        Reply

        • ‘If’. That’s a very big word. The Talmud comes after Christ and apart from him, deliberately ignoring his revelation and dominical authority, so it cannot be correct or at least the final word for Christians. Your suggestion is like trying to do advanced physics without calculus. It can’t be done.

          Reply

        • Lorenzo, you’re wrong in claiming the Talmud does not prohibit homoerotic relationships – male/male and woman/woman. Talmudic law extended the prohibition to women on women, limiting the penalty to flagellation.

          You’re seeking a reinterpretation of Jewish law and values and attempting to reframe the Biblical and Talmudic teachings as “primitive.” It’s true that neither the Torah or Talmud explicitly recognise people as “homosexual” or “heterosexual” (modern invented terms), but both teach clearly about misdirected desires and improper actions.

          Jewish law holds that no hedonistic ethic, even if called “love,” can justify the morality of homosexuality any more than it can legitimize adultery or incest, however genuinely such acts may be performed out of love and by mutual consent.

          Was God wrong when He gave Israelite society these laws 3500 years ago? Did He not understand human sexuality and its purpose?

          Reply

          • I am well aware that the Talmud goes on to outlaw homoerotic relationships, but that is precisely because they are not condemned d’oraita, in Scripture.

27. So Jack, if I understand you correctly, G-d’s providence guided evolution towards sexual dimorphism among hominids and such dimorphism is now evidence of a natural law which is prescriptive when it comes to sexual relationships, but same providential hand used a ‘cruel, bloody process to bring about the variety of life on earth.’ Sorry, I don’t buy it. These kinds of theological lucubrations stray so far from Tradition and Scripture that I’m not prepared to preach that gay people have to go through life alone for their sake.

    Reply

    • Lorenzo,
      You seem to be conflating, without definition and a bare assumption that ‘natural law’ is now based on human constructs of late modern – post-modern categories.
      Which God do you believe, as opposed to which God do you believe ‘in’?

      Reply

      • Geoff, natural law, classically being defined as the rational creature’s participation in eternal law, has little to do with ‘belief.’ It does not pass our understanding, by definition, and what I read in this thread makes no sense to me.

        Reply

        • Maybe that’s because your lucubrations have been in the Talmud instead of historical theology. Natural law tells us the telos of our sex organs (how males and females unite for reproduction) and the unitive purpose of sex (since father and mother need to stay together for the proper care of their offspring).
          But didn’t you know all this when you were a Roman Catholic?

          Reply

          • You missed my point, but I won’t engage any further, you’re abusive.

          • I love this one!
            So, what is the telos of the clitoris?

          • Yes, you do.
            And yet again the long thread has reached the same pre-ordained destination. Does it ever not?

          • Penelope Cowell Doe asks: “So, what is the telos of the clitoris?”

            Did your mother never explain this? Sex between a man a woman, without the right context, is to be enjoyed. That’s why our organs are designed the way they are – to fit together and maximise mutual pleasure.

          • Jack

            Sex without the right context?
            Shurely shome mishtake.

            Also, the clitoris doesn’t ‘fit’ with any other organ. It’s telos is pleasure (or joy as Rowan Williams observed). It is not necessary for sexual reproduction. It is a gift from a prodigal God.

          • Penelope, yes I meant “within the right context” – i.e., between a married man and woman.

            Now, surely you know how the female clitoris and male penis ‘connect’ during penetrative sex! The clitoris is a sensitive organ that’s involved in sexual pleasure and orgasm.

            Jewish writers place great emphasis on the need for a man to take his time to satisfy his female partner. This encourages male self control, awareness of one’s partners needs, and the selfless giving of oneself in love which, in turn, promotes closer bonding.

          • Penelope, the more that reproduction is pleasurable, the more people will reproduce.
            Their biology will evolve accordingly.
            This precisely serves the goal of evolution.
            But I have said that before.

          • Jack and Christopher

            I’m impressed. Not all women are able to achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration with their male partner.

            And, as we now know, the female orgasm is not necessary for reproduction. Which leaves us with Rowan Williams conclusion: the telos of the clitoris is joy.

          • Not necessary for reproduction but greatly aids and increases reproduction because of the pleasure principle. It amounts to the same thing. Evolutionarily beneficial.

            Which is the same point I made last time, but you ignored it.

          • This is like Mornington Crescent on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. All roads almost without fail lead to the same 2 extraordinary and recondite topics where PCD is concerned.

        • Lorenzo, are you seriously claiming there is no true morality other than that revealed by Divine command?

          There is a longstanding Jewish tradition that recognises that the authority of natural law comes from the Creator God whose rational commandments are evident to all reasonable human persons.

          Indeed, the idea of natural law is present in the “Noahide law” which predate the Mosaic law and is universally binding on the basis of reason. The prohibitions against homicide, theft, sexual licentiousness, etc, involve acts that are universally condemned. Since, at that time, the “nations of the world” were denied access to direct Divine revelation, these commandments must be rooted in reason.

          Many Jewish thinkers tend not to look behind the 613 commandments or to distinguish between them. Some Jewish thinkers, Maimonides being one, hold that the justifications for many commandments can be ascertained through reason, apart from revelation. Other Jewish thinkers maintain here is no objective moral right or wrong in the world and the only valid source of truth is Divine revelation.

          It’s an ongoing debate within Judaism.

          There are two Talmudic passages in which the Sages consider the theoretical question of what would have been had God not revealed His will in the Torah. The Talmud states:

          R. Yochanan said: Even if the Torah had not been given, we would have learned modesty from the cat [which covers its excrement], and that stealing is objectionable from the ant [which does not take grain from another ant], and forbidden relations from the dove [which is faithful to its partner]. (Eruvin 100b)

          We use our natural moral intuition to observe the behaviours of the various animal species and intuitively realise which of those features are worthy of emulation and which should be condemned. R. Yochanan states that even if God had never revealed His will to us, we would be responsible to learn morality on our own.

          Another Talmudic passage:

          The Sages taught: “You shall do My ordinances [and you shall keep My statutes to follow them, I am the Lord your God”] (Leviticus 18:4) – [“My ordinances” is a reference to] matters that, even had they not been written, it would have been logical that they be written. They are the prohibitions against idol worship, prohibited sexual relations, bloodshed, theft, and blessing God [a euphemism for cursing the Name of God].
          (Yoma 67b)

          The Talmud states that commandments of the Torah should have been legislated even if they were not written in the Torah. We are expected to intuit and follow certain rules of morality even in the absence of revelation.

          This is the position of Maimonides in his commentary to the story of the deluge. He asks why, according to the Midrashic tradition, the fate of the generation of the flood was sealed because of the sin of theft, as opposed to their many sexual perversions. He answers that the prohibition of theft is intuitive and is therefore binding even in the absence of prophetic revelation. The generation of Noah was punished for violating the natural moral law, even in the absence of revelation. Natural law is binding in all times and places, even without an act of human or Divine legislation.

          Maimonides held that the unaided human mind can deduce the existence of various moral precepts. He contends that the seven Noahide laws can be known by our moral intuition even in the absence of revelation, and that a gentile who obeys the seven Noahide commandments merely because of the inclination of human reason is considered wise, even though he is not pious, because he follows the path of wisdom even though he does not heed revelation.

          Reply

          • I know my Guide to the Perplexed, Jack, but you’re not addressing my point at all: we were not created male and female, it is therefore not obvious that moral conclusions can be drawn from observing sexual dimorphism. It’s an adaptation, like raptors’ talons or kangaroo pouches.

            Besides, most orthodox rabbis I know, and that’s quite a few, would classify those commandments as hukim, not mishpatim. Maimonides is a lone voice when it comes to seeing a rationale behind (almost) every commandment.

          • And no, I am not claiming there is no true morality other than that revealed by Divine command? Where on earth did you read this? I’m merely claiming that what you present as a rational, natural law, argument is not so.

          • Lorenzo opines: ” …. we were not created male and female, it is therefore not obvious that moral conclusions can be drawn from observing sexual dimorphism.”
            Well, there Lorenzo disagrees with Jesus. He obviously hasn’t read Executive Order Matt19.4 affirming there are two genders in the Kingdom of God.
            No amount of repeating a falsehood makes it true.

          • Jesus did not know anything about modern biology, astrophysics or quantum mechs. And the fact that we were not created ‘male and female’ is not even remotely contentious, we truly have evolved from enomorphic organisms. You’re so desperate for your (bigoted, I’ll say it) interpretation of Scripture to be true that you are prepared to put up a fight with scientifically, demonstrably provable reality. You are the death knell of Christianity.

          • Lorenzo: actually it is evolutionists who claim their belief is “the death knell of Christianity” and indeed all theism. After all, it was Richard Dawkins who claimed, “Evolution made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
            FWIW, my belief is that evolution by natural selection (unguided chance etc) is a theory in crisis, it’s just that it’s very difficult for biology to admit this. Like Democritus’s atomic theory, phlogiston, ether and the spontaneous generation of life, some ideas persist in scientific circles until they collapse and a new paradigm takes over. It’s obvious to me that organisms mutate but the vast majority of mutations don’t confer any survival value, nor do they add new genetic information to a system, which the theory requires. The problem of combinations looks insuperable.
            But in any case, even if human beings did evolve from a supposed primal first cell, that cell would not be “we”. Theistic evolutionists think that God intervened at certain points to “ensoul” some hominids. By this thinking, male and female human beings were created in the image of God, as rational embodied souls. If modern biology cannot make sense of that idea, that is because it is working with a reductionist frame – just as Galileo tried to explain all reality as mathematical propositions and had to exclude consciousness, qualia and the like as “not really there”. The philosophy of materialism will always take us up dead ends, as Ian McGilchrist and others have noted. (Not that I agree with panpsychism either.)
            I do not know if you are a materialist, i.e. whether you think human beings are nothing other than the sum of the chemicals in their bodies in their multifarious combinations, but that is where a lot of modern theology is at. If that was true, that would be the death knell of Christianity. But this isn’t what Jesus believed. He also believed we have ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’ that survive death. Was he mistaken about this as well?

        • >>Jesus did not know anything about modern biology, astrophysics or quantum mechs.<<

          Did God not know all this when He created male and female? Perhaps He had to wait on man to reveal such hidden scientific insights to Him! What did He know some 3500 years ago?! Because male and female may have arisen as the result of a mysterious process of evolution, doesn't mean this was not the deliberate and the willed intention of our Creator. He initiated the process and established the laws of the universe – physical and moral.

          Just to remind you: “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27) That really couldn’t be any clearer. The “how” is given in figurative and poetic terms. And the first commandment in the Torah: “Be fruitful and multiply.” (Genesis 1:28). Very clear too. Do you suppose Adam and Eve were unaware of what their sexual organs were designed for?

          >>[M[ost orthodox rabbis I know, and that’s quite a few, would classify those commandments as hukim, not mishpatim.<<

          The Jewish rabbis you know certainly wouldn't be regraded as "orthodox" by my father if they approve of same sex homoerotic relationships – he being the eldest son of a Sephardic rabbi and well versed in both the Torah and Talmud.

          Lacking a central teaching authority, different schools of rabbis simply disagree on how to understand and apply them. So one can "shop around" and find a rabbi supporting one's own ideas. No rabbi or those who follow him, are going to call themselves "unorthodox."

          For an orthodox Jew, the distinction between “mishpatim” and “hukim” matters not when it comes to observing the Torah.

          As I outlined, the Talmud cites the prohibitions against idolatry, sexual immorality, murder, stealing, and blasphemy as examples of rules which can be logically deduced, and these exist without the Torah commanding them (i.e., “mishpatim”). These are contained in the Noahide Laws and Ten Commandments. In any event, “hukim” are laws that are considered to be Divine decrees, to be observed with faith by all Jews, whether understood or not.

          Leviticus details classes of forbidden sexual activity: familial relationships, adultery, bestiality, rape, and male homosexual “sex” – later extended to women in the Talmud.

          Reply

          • “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
            (Robert Jastrow)

28. Penelope
    “One prohibition of anal sex under particular circumstances is not a condemnation of loving queer relationships of which scripture knew nothing.
    You might as well argue that offering your virgin daughters to prevent male on male rape is a virtuous thing.”

    The Levitical text says nothing about ‘particular circumstances’ – it is a blanket prohibition. The ‘particular circumstances’ are an invention of people who want to limit the application and justify their breach of a very plain instruction. There is a rather obvious reason scripture ‘knows nothing’ of your idea of ‘loving queer relationships’ – as far as God is concerned such relationships are not meant to happen. Loving relations between people of the same sex, definitely yes, I have several such relationships myself. Expressing such love by inappropriate use of sexuality, definitely no. Do you not realise the grotesque improbability of no mention of these ‘loving queer relationships’ over the centuries of scriptural history IF as you pretend God totally approves of them???

    Reply

    • And BTW – Lot faced an essentially intractable situation under massive threat to the lives of himself, his family and his guests, with no easy answers; he was fortunate that his guests were angels with power to resolve the situation another way.

      There is no real comparison with the simple situation where God has commanded certain conduct and you have the choice to trust Him to know best, or to arrogantly decide that you know best and can disobey Him and teach and encourage others to do likewise. If you don’t trust God, you have the choice to opt out of Christianity…..

      Reply

      • Yeah, you lost me at Lot.

        Reply

        • ‘of which scripture knew nothing’. The question is – were the Old and New Testaments written in cultures and times when such relationships were known of? I would suggest the answer to that question is yes. I dont believe the Biblical writers were ignorant of what was going on around them.

          Reply

        • Penelope
          Actually I think you lost it in my previous post as you clearly have no answer to my point about
          “Do you not realise the grotesque improbability of no mention of these ‘loving queer relationships’ over the centuries of scriptural history IF as you pretend God totally approves of them???”

          Reply

          • Loving queer relationships weren’t much of a thing in ancient Western Asia. With the exception of David and Jonathan of course.

          • How can healthy fruition of manhood be called queer? Queer is abnormal by definition, healthy is the norm that societies strive for. And also overlaps more than average (insofar as one can generalise) with less physical fruition, being below average at games. The exact opposite. Physical achievement is to be prized; ‘queer’, by contrast, sounds like, and means something like, ‘weird’ – so who would want to strive for such an end as that?

    • Of course it’s not a blanket prohibition: it says nothing of sex between women. It restricts itself to outlawing penetrative sex between males. It makes no mention of anything like proclivities, companionship, covenant, anything else really. It has always been read as such in Jewish tradition so much so that the Mishnah saw fit to ban other same-sex erotic activities, all the while acknowledging that these additional prohibition were rabbinical. Besides, if the levitical verse that you mention were a blanket ban, there would be no need for any additional ban incestuous same-sex activities. Christian tradition has paid next to no attention to this.

      Reply

      • You are saying that biblical laws would not overlap. I suspect that they overlap all the time.

        Reply

        • Show me the redundancies (not the repetitions, mind)

          Reply

      • The Torah gives no reasons for its prohibition of homoerotic behaviour between men – extended to women in the Talmud – they are simply commands. It’s not difficult to use our God given reason e to work these out and to see them in the full sweep of Scripture – in both Testaments!

        Reply

        • It’s very easy to work them out if you view them through a particular hermeneutic lens.

          Reply

          • Anton, not only is it helpful in discussions with non-believers, but it enables Christians to meditate on Divine revelation and it’s consistency with natural revelation – the latter being informed by the former. The Divine commands in the Old Testament and Jesus’ revelation of their meaning, enables our clouded minds, with the aid of grace, to understand God’s creation, our place and purpose within His design, and in what human happiness, temporal and spiritual, consists.

        • I thought you argued it was entirely rational and could be inferred from nature without the help of revelation?

          Reply

          • Sexual morality certainly can be discerned through reason ….

            As I said earlier, natural and Divine revelation do not contradict one another – read St Paul on this. Natural revelation is God revealing Himself through the created world; Divine revelation is when God reveals Himself through special means.

          • Jack, I agree. It’s one of my life projects to get Protestants to rediscover Natural Law (reasoned reflection on the world) as part of our theological patrimony. I suspect it was the errors in Karl Barth’s neo-orthodoxy (his polemic against natural theology) that made Protestants reject or neglect Natural Law. All things have their telos, but atheist materialism has blinded minds from seeing this.

          • James, I have a very high opinion of Natural Law. It’s wshat you need when reasoning with secular people today who won’t accept “because God says so”. But it only goes so far, because Nature, i.e. the whole of Creation, is fallen too.

      • Lorenzo
        Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. The point I was making is that the Levitical prohibition is an UNQUALIFIED forbidding of male-on-male sex, with no hint of the various particular circumstances or other exceptions which people sometimes put forward to try to evade the obvious meaning. As far as I can tell you (and Jewish tradition) would agree with me there…?

        Reply

        • No, I would not. Neither would Jewish tradition. But don’t take it from me, have a look at the conservative rabbinical assembly’s yeshiva on the matter: https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/public/halakhah/teshuvot/20052010/dorff_nevins_reisner_dignity.pdf

          Reply

          • teshuva not yeshiva, autocorrect be damned

          • Lorenzo. having read the paper you attached one has to say how far Judaism has fallen if the thinking there is representative of how modern Jews understand the Torah.

            It’s major premise: “For gay and lesbian Jews, it is impossible to ensure an internal state of dignity as long as their social status is one of utter humiliation.”

            The argument basically boils down to: 1} it is impossible for homosexuals to refrain from sexual intimate acts; 2) their human dignity is damaged by the internal shame they experience because of the way they are treated by the community; 3) the humiliation of the homosexual person brings humiliation on the whole community; 4} the prohibition on homosexual acts (apart from male anal intercourse) is rabbinical, not biblical and can be set aside to preserve human dignity; and 5) homosexuals taking their rightful places in the community will safeguarded both their dignity as individuals, and the dignity of the community.

    • Stephen

      Leviticus contains a lot of restrictions that do not specifically state special circumstances.

      This particular law says you can’t lie with men as you would women.

      Do you accept that the law is written assuming only men would read it? That it’s not a ban on women having sex with men, but only men having sex with men? If so, then it’s not so much of a stretch to say it was written assuming heterosexual men would read it?

      Reply

      • Peter
        Before I reply to that, is there a typo in the last para – was it meant to read “…women having sex with *women*…”?

        Reply

        • No

          Leviticus bans the reader from having sex with men. If the law is actually universal without context or qualification then it would ban women from having sex with men.

          Clearly the reader is intended to be male. I don’t therefore think it’s a huge leap to suggest the reader is intended to be a heterosexual male

          Reply

          • This should be framed as a classic of pure desperation and sophistry.

            How can a writer think in terms of a ‘heterosexual male’ if he has no concept of a male possibly being anything other than that?

          • Peter
            Yes the law is addressed to MEN. As is the case in most of the chapter concerned. And it tells ALL men that they must not lie with a man as with a woman. (Or at least as near to that as the anatomical differences permit – essentially it is saying don’t have what purports to be sex with another man).

            Guessing a bit here but are you trying to make a case that somehow that forbidding only applies to heterosexual males but there may be as a separate class ‘homosexual males’ for whom it would be OK to have sex with other men??

            Taken as a whole the biblical presentation of the situation would preclude such an interpretation. Biblically it is if you like God’s creative intention that all men be heterosexual and that none should ever do male-on-male sex. The existence of homosexual men is not part of God’s created order, but part of the disorder that has resulted from human rebellion against God, and like the non-sexual aspects of that disorder is to be discouraged/rejected/resisted. That is Paul’s actual argument in Romans 1, as distinct from distorted arguments which pro-gay interpreters sometime suggest.

          • Stephen

            My case is simply that this passage is not to be taken as an unqualified prohibition. It’s very clear from the text itself that it doesn’t apply to all humans in all circumstances.

            However, I think its pretty safe to assume that the reader was assumed to be attracted to women.

            I agree that the Bible is written in a heteronormative style, i.e. assuming every human is heterosexual, as almost all human literature in all of history does. Gay people are a small proportion of the population, easily forgotten or not acknowledged at all.

            I don’t agree that gay people are God’s mistake or a result of the fall. I think the failure to see the image of the divine in people we find uncomfortable is a result of the fall.

          • Christopher

            For once we agree entirely.

29. I am very impressed with the scholarship and intelligence of the contributors on this subject. Lots of thought provoking issues. I know what I believe. I believe that God helps us with that little voice within making us so uncomfortable and distressed if we are trying to lie to ourselves.I can only speak for myself I cannot speak for others Perhaps having a strong religious foundation reaching back generations maybe a contributing factor. I don’t know. I am a Catholic . Not a Roman Catholic as I don’t recognise or understand this term. I think we must listen to God and make time in our hectic lives for this mystical part. God is good and he will never allow us to try and work through this quagmire alone. I am fortunate in finding Catholic doctrine fairly straight forward and easy to understand. I also know that my comment will be unacceptable because of it non academic and intellectual deficiencies. So why did I bother? because that little voice told me to. God bless all of you and bring you peace of mind.

    Reply

    • Very well stated Cressida.

      Reply

    • Is this Cressida, formerly of Archbishop Cranmer’s parish?
      If so, greetings. If not, greetings as well. Keep commenting!

      Reply

    • Good comment, Cressie.

      Reply

30. Natural Law: Natural revelation. A difference.
    As an opener, there may be some interest in this article.
    https://credomag.com/2023/09/what-is-natural-law/

    Reply

    • A helpful heads up on natural law and theology and their place in Calvin and the Reformed tradition. I may seek out Van Drunen’s works, thank you.

      Reply

      • Try this too:

        Natural Theology & Natural Law: Twin Pillars of the Reformed Classicalist Distinctive
        https://www.reformedclassicalist.com/home/natural-theology-amp-natural-law-twin-pillars-of-the-reformed-classicalist-distinctive

        Reply

31. “Theistic evolutionists think that God intervened at certain points to “ensoul” some hominids.” really? What happened to those not-ensouled hominids? Did they also stop breeding? It’s sounds to me like a desperate argument trying to shore up a prescriptive reading of Genesis.

    Reply

    • There’s the rub, succinctly put, Lorenenzo. Yours is entirely subjective. Natural law is objective, far from prescriptive in reading,, but prescriptive in as much as it is from and of God. And is universal, across generations.

      Reply

    • Lorenzo asks: “What happened to those not-ensouled hominids? Did they also stop breeding?”
      Well, at some stage they must have because they are extinct today. That’s why you don’t get Australopithecus today or Homo Neanderthalis or Denisovans. What does Lorenzo think happened to Australopithecines?

      Reply

      • That is not what I asked: if only two of these hominids (presumably sapiens), Adam and Eve, were ensouled (and fell) as was claimed, what happened to all the other non-ensouled sapiens? they died out? It’s a mad theory. Besides, our genome clearly shows that we are not descended from a primordial pair.

        Reply

        • An alternative view (does C. S. Lewis suggest this somewhere?) is that a collective of homines sapientes were ensouled (that is, given minds capable of reason, concepts and language) with a leader, ‘Adam’. Language, tool making and art are the ‘signature of man’ (G. K. Chesterton). I think I am right in saying that all human beings have been traced to a later single female ancestor (‘mitochondrial Eve’).

          Reply

          • The question stands: where are the descendants of the non-ensouled humans? It’s at best a bizarre theological hypothesis and it really ought not to be an article of belief when it comes to same sex relationships. We have evolved from non sexually dimorphic organisms. If peeps want to say that sexual dimorphism is theologically or ethically significant, let them come with better arguments because this is so highly speculative it’s trapeze.

          • If I subscribed to the CS Lewis ‘collective Adam theory’ (for want of a better term) – and I’m not sure that I do – the short answer, I think, is that the non-ensouled homines sapientes (‘NEHS’) did not possess reason and died off, as did many other species of that time. The NEHS would not count as human, I suppose. But maybe a confident proponent of this theory should speak for it.
            As I’ve already stated, I am fairly dubious about Evolution by Natural Selection. If the theory was true, should we not see thousands of differing fossils showing minimal but incremental mutations all the way from Australopithecus to homo sapiens? I know there are intrinsic problems with any fossil records, but how many postulated ‘links’ do we have from Australopithecus? Six? Seven?

          • Lorenzo asks: “Where are the descendants of the non-ensouled humans?”

            Answer: Extinct – just like the Dodo. They couldn’t keep-up with their competitors.

        • I think Im right in saying genetics cannot actually rule that out, it is silent on that possibility. Biologos had to change one of its articles due to that change of view.

          Reply

          • Peter: what does ‘that’ refer to?

          • Nope: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/10/1/2/1030040

        • actually there is some research showing that we might well have been

          Reply

    • There are two alternatives, Lorenzo, both of which I regard as even more desperate: reject evolution (cue cheers from the fundies) or have Adam and Eve’s children committing incest to produce the next generation (which the fundies try to excuse).

      Take your pick.

      Reply

      • 1.There are answers to what your deride and dismiss as ‘fundies’, Anton.
        2. But further along in scripture, how about the de-creation by God. Is it a ‘fundamental’ in Biblical history of redemption?

        Reply

        • Geoff, what do you mean by the ‘de-creation by God’?

          Reply

        • Which passage of scripture do you mean by ‘de-creation’, please?

          Reply

          • The flood is known as that by some theologians.

      • Interesting speculation from James and Anton and a topic most teenagers ask at some point during religious sex education.

        Did we as humans descend one couple, Adam and Eve, or from many progenitors? A Christian framework establishes certain limits for exploring answers: the Fall is a real event involving our first two parents; Adam’s original sin is passed on to all humans by propagation; and we have all of descended from Adam and Eve. This rules out multiple ‘parental pools’ for human beings.

        The following article summarises several proposals for reconciling science and Scripture. It affirms the three different views of Kenneth Kemp, William Lane Craig, and Dennis Bonnette, as being “within the bounds of Catholic teaching and fully compatible with mainstream science,” and considers three others as falling short in some respects.

        Adam & Eve: A Survey of Models for Catholics
        https://peacefulscience.org/articles/survey-adam-eve-catholic/

        I didn’t know there was such a variety opinions!

        This next article offers yet another – the “incest option”. It argues that close biological relatives would not have been excluded on moral grounds by the later Mosaic laws covering incest and consanguinity. Genetic mutations causing physical and mental disabilities would not have been possible – Adam and Eve being genetically identical and without any mutation caused by cell division – and only developing in later generations.
        Who was Cain’s wife?
        https://instituteofcatholicculture.org/articles/who-was-cains-wife/

        Personally, I favour William Lane Craig’s proposal, but wouldn’t rule out Cain’s wife being his sister or a very close cousin, though this will be morally repugnant to us today.

        Reply

32. So, after all the huffing and puffing, this discussion has established that no one believes Jesus’s testimony that men were on the earth from time zero, from the beginning of creation:

    Luke 11:50, ‘… the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world’.

    Matt 19:4, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?”

    Mark 10:6 “From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.”

    And the Holy Spirit speaking through Heb 9:24-26, ‘For Christ[’s atonement was effective for all time, so that he did not need] to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world.’

    They all deny their Lord, and the Father who through him created all things.

    Ps 53. God looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all fallen away. … Have those who work evil no knowledge, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon God?

    Isa 29. And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men, therefore … the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.”

    That day is coming.

    Reply

    • Steven Robinson,

      Revelation 13:8 states that Jesus was “the Lamb slain from the Foundation of the world”. Yet he was crucified long after the foundation of the world.

      You took no trouble to understand my position above, the better to try to knock it over. You are merely shouting your own view louder and, having engaged in insult, now warn me of the fire to come. Be assured that I do fear God, but I don’t fear you.

      Reply

      • How do you know I took no trouble to understand your position? I probed it repeatedly. You were evasive and obfuscating, and could not articulate anything in a coherent manner. You insulted me repeatedly, yet your means of defending your arguments and your super-sensitive ego – with your gladiatorial approach to debate, you are clearly not used to being stood up to – is to claim that I insult you. You think the debate is all about you, and if I make a summarising statement charging ‘that no one believes Jesus’s testimony’ you think I am really just speaking about you, and how the key thing for everyone is to understand your position. So you feel you have to write in reply. And as if to reinforce everything I have been saying, once again you throw in an irrelevant scripture (on top of Gen 32:31 and Isa 11:12) without explanation, and expect me (or other readers) to think “Ah, yes of course”.

        I didn’t warn you of fire to come – you’re imagining things – but it would not have been inappropriate if I had. ‘For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. … and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.’ Your teaching goes contrary to that which Jesus Christ has said throughout Scripture on the subject of creation, not least in his own words, as I have pointed out.

        Have you ever taken any trouble to understand my position? Not at all. But I have let that be. I am not here to advance ‘my position’ as regards how to reconcile Gen 1 with the facts of geology and palaeontology, to which there is repeatedly a link under my name. I have understood that, with your gladiatorial approach to debate, you are not interested in any solution which leaves Scripture intact but Nick Lane wanting.

        But what matters ultimately, as I have said more than once, is neither your position nor mine. Most Christians are not scientifically literate and cannot assess such things. What matters is that, whether scientifically literate or not, they should be faithful to the biblical position – that they be biblically literate, if you will. That they should get to grips with what Scripture says and believe it.

        There is a spiritual battle going on for the minds and hearts of everyone, inside the Church and outside. It’s a battle between Yahweh and Baal, and unfortunately nearly all Christians are unwilling to say, “Yahweh, he is Lord.” When it comes to ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” they are ashamed of his words. They refuse to say outright that the Bible is wrong, and Jesus is wrong, but they won’t believe either. They limp along on contradictory opinions, as Elijah says. Consequently, with creation issues now coming to a head like never before, the Church is incapable of resisting the Satanic onslaught, and is withering on the vine. Detached from the vine.

        The gospel includes, as foundational, the truth that God is Creator (Rom 1, Acts 17, Rev 14:6f). Belief in Christianity is a form of obedience. We are called to obey the Son (John 3:36), and obey God rather than man (Acts 5:29). Later in Romans Paul says, ‘They have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” ‘

        It is apparent that these words apply to you.

        Reply

        • If you understood my position you would not have said some of the things you did. And you ducked the questions I asked you, which remain above. I’ve tried with Proverbs 26:4; should I now employ verse 5?

          Reply

    • Even if you understand Genesis 1 & 2 literalistically, mankind was not created at or from time zero (whenever that was). In fact per the story man was the last to be created!

      Reply

      • Except in Genesis 2 where man was created first+ before the animals – and woman last?

        Reply

    • Steven

      Gay people *are* male and female and *are* made every bit in the image of God as you are. There’s no special achievement in being attracted to the opposite sex.

      Reply

      • Peter
        “ALL” are made every bit in the image of God. However it is also true that “ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. And that means that despite the image of God ALL both have and live out in various ways undesirable urges and desires which lead them to disobey the God in whose image they are made, an image which their disobedience mars and compromises. God in the Bible has rather clearly defined the doing of ‘gay sex’ as sinful and therefore part of that disorder, and therefore the relevant urges and desires are very much defined as undesirable and to be resisted and repented of. And note that if gay sex is defined as sinful, it cannot be part of the divine image, only of the sinful disorder.

        Reply

        • Stephen Langton

          Even if we assume that the Bible condemns all same sex sex regardless of circumstance, it’s sloppy logic to say *therefore* homosexual orientation is a failure of creation. This argument reduces homosexual orientation merely to having sex and refuses to recognize any other aspect of it. You can’t just unpick things from people’s beings like that and denounce them.

          Would Alan Turing have cracked the enigma code had he been straight? Probably not. Is it speculative to suggest his brain worked differently to straight brains? Maybe. But it’s not such a speculation to suggest that his homosexuality led him to devote most of his time to researching mathematics.

          Reply

          • Peter
            The key thing in Turing’s ability with codes – and with maths in general – will have been his autism, a different issue. ‘Hypercalculia’ is a common accompaniment of autism – I got ‘Hyperlexia’ instead, which means I’m not too comfortable with maths but read like Lewis Hamilton drives (actually Lewis is slow!!) Speaking very much from personal experience autism tends to make a mess of relationships in general and can make heterosexual romantic relations very hard to form. This is because of the way autism affects an ability sometimes referred to as ‘mind-reading’ but neither magic nor sci-fi.

            My impression is that with same-sex relationships (but not necessarily sexual) way easier to form many autistic people effectively ‘give up’ on straight relationships and are tempted to identify as ‘gay’ or perhaps more often as ‘bi’. I struggled with this myself for many years until I was able to diagnose the autism.

          • Peter J – “neuro-diversity” is present in many mystics, scientists, engineers, poets, musicians, mathematicians, and artists. It not a question of “straight” v “gay” brains.

          • Peter
            The situation is almost the reverse of what you imply. Christianity is strongly in favour of same-sex love. The ‘failure’ is on the human side – sin puts us ‘out of joint’ with God and ipso facto we are ‘out of joint’ in various ways with the creation too. That people have urges and desires to do same-sex acts which are not truly sex anyway is part of the disjointedness. There is no ‘homosexual orientation’ if by that you mean something designed by God for a sin-free world; God has never intended that people should do such inappropriate acts. Simply as in other non-sexual areas of life sinful humans have all manner of questionable urges and desires. Not to mention that in the sexual area people can have urges and desires that gays themselves recognise as improper.

            Having said that, it was never part of Christianity as founded that Christians should be running ‘Christian states’ in which non-Christians should be legally coerced to conform to Christian standards. Our faith is voluntary and was never intended to operate as an ‘established’ religion. CofE interactions with homosexuality are skewed by a past in which the CofE supported the criminalisation of homosexuality, and will continue to be skewed so long as the CofE holds on to what’s left of its former position as a totalitarian and coercive establishment.

          • Peter,

            That is nonsense. I am a theoretical physicist and, due to the overlap, have delivered an examinable lecture course in the mathematics department at Cambridge University. The correlation, as Stephen Langton correctly states, is with autism.

33. A general plea on long threads: would participants please specify who they are responding to and/or to what point?
    Some contributions are telegraphic to the point of obscurity.
    Further, some viewpoints or beliefs will strike each one of us foolish, wrongheaded, unfaithful etc. That is to be expected. But sometimes it might be helpful to explain why, in terms of our core convictions about Scripture, theology, science etc. Otherwise, we will be talking past each other and a chance to understand better will be lost.

    Reply

34. William Lane Craig weighs in on the question of Adam and Eve:
    https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/does-science-reveal-adam-and-eve
    Parishioners’ comments are welcome.
    Two questions for those who understand evolutionary theory better than I do:
    The genus homo has only one species, homo sapiens.
    1. If homo sapiens emerged by genetic mutation (imperfect genetic copying) from homo ergaster (or some similar species), would not multiple individuals, male and female, have to be born with the same mutation in order for a new species to exist and continue?
    2. How can *new genetic information be produced by imperfect copying of a gene? I understand how switching off a gene allows another characteristic to express itself (e.g. colour, body size; the descent of all dogs from a common ancestor), but where do new powers and capacities come from? This is the information problem.

    Reply

    • James

      Re (2), much of the human genome dos not comprise genes but rather DNA that does not code for any amino acid (the building blocks of proteins). It used to be called junk DNA and some of it undoubtedly is (we know how it comes about accidentally), but we now know that some of it does have functions, albeit not protein creation. A mutation in some non-coding DNA – especially if it is adjacent to coding DNA – can cause it to be the right sequence of bases to code for an amino acid in a chain of amino acids (i.e. a protein or a peptide – that’s a shorter chain of amino acids). So you can get increased complexity by this means. There are other ways in which irregularities in DNA replication may do this.

      Re (1), a mutation occurs in one individual, and after many generations this individual’s offspring comprise part of the population. If a deadly disease to which this mutation confers immunity then passes though, that subpopulation is all that is left.

      Reply

      • Anton: do you mean a piece of non-coding (regulatory) DNA can accidentally mutate into a piece of coding DNA through a copying error? What are the odds of this?
        Has this been witnessed to happen?

        Reply

        • It has been inferred to happen by looking at DNA sequences, yes. A copying error is not the only way that DNA may change irregularly. Radioactivity causes it too, and various chemicals which are found in higher concentrations in the body of persons with unhealthy diet and lifestyles eg smoking. If you want details of what goes on at DNA level, explained for the intelligent layman, please see Graeme Finlay’s contribution in Chapter 6 of the book “Debating Darwin” by four Christians of differing viewpoints (Finlay., S. Lloyd, S, Pattemore and D. Swift, 2009). I actually find Finlay too liberal in his arguments for relating genetics to scripture – please don’t assume that I agree 100% witgh any author – but this chapter is excellent at explaining how DN A can and does change iregularly and how we may know this.

          Reply

          • Thanks, Anton – another in the lengthening list of books I may never get round to reading! But I appreciate you responding.

    • Anton/James, my earlier post contained two links and so has been dispatched to ‘Limbo’ for an indeterminant time!

      Here’s the first:
      Adam & Eve: A Survey of Models for Catholics
      It reviews several Christian models attempting to harmonise Genesis and science. Willian Lane Craig’s proposal is one it affirms. There are a couple of others too. It’s worth a read:
      https://peacefulscience.org/articles/survey-adam-eve-catholic/

      Link two to follow

      Reply

      • The other explores the “incest theory” and why it shouldn’t simply be dismissed as immoral.

        Who was Cain’s wife?
        https://instituteofcatholicculture.org/articles/who-was-cains-wife/

        Reply

        • Thanks Jack. I took pains to read many points of view including those I do not necessarily agree with, and after several years and travelling in what felt like a wilderness – the issue means a lot to me as an evangelical and a scientist – I have found a resting point where I am happy for now, so I will not necessarily read it – but I appreciate the option.

          I did not become an adult convert for intellectual reasons, and when it happened I was instantly aware of the challenge of my new beliefs to my scientific viewpoint – miracles above all – but also realised it was far too big an issue to wrestle with while I was learning my new faith. It took a decade before I felt I was ready.

          Reply

          • Anton, the answers to these questions will not be revealed in our lifetime – probably never. Whatever the answers, as I’m sure you know, the important thing is that creation, evolution, and science do not contradict Divine revealed truths. In many ways we’re privileged to live in an age when the truths of Scripture are being confirmed by unbiased science and pushing us to a greater appreciation of the majesty and beauty of creation. In some respects, I faced similar challenges in the field of work I was called to.

          • Thank you Jack. I now take the view that science done correctly and scripture understood correctly are in active accord with the exception of miracles (e.g. Peter walking on water and sinking as his faith wavered in Matthew 14). Over miracles they clash, and I changed sides when I converted.

          • Anton writes: ‘with the exception of miracles’. Aye, there’s the rub. For what if 3 or 4 critical questions in science cannot be answered from within science, viz.
            1. Why does anything exist at all?
            2. Is abiogenesis actually possible?
            3. What is the origin (and nature) of consciousness?
            4. Can macroevolution and speciation actually be proved?
            Even in Christian circles we have got used to thinking of God as being ‘outside the world’ and its processes, so that we try to treat questions 2-4 as purely immanent. But the danger is we become methodological atheists. One result is that we lose any sense of teleology in things, not just living things. But nature seems to throw teleology in our faces at every turn.

          • James,

            I think you may be conflating one or two things unintentionally. Re (1), why anything exists at all is not a question answerable within science. Only vain philosophers wedded to scientism would make that claim. Science is limited to studying cause and effect in the material world. Ther are plenty of truths outside the purview of science.

            Re (2), there is no reason to suppose that abiogenesis is impossible. Vitalism was discredited a couple of centuries ago, and that is the same issue.

            Question (3) is enduringly fascinating. But we have to define consciousness first, and that isn’t easy. I’d say that neuroscience may well shed light on these matters but ought not to be expected to provide full answers, even in principle.

            Re (4), please look at the evidence in Nick Lane’s books and in that piece of writing by Graeme Finlay.

            We understand physics better than biology, which is why I am prepared to say that science will never explain Peter walking on water and sinking as his faith wavered (Matt 14). I’d say the evidence for intelligent design is far clearer in physics (my own subject), for the same reason. Speak to a mathematician about beauty and they will know what you are talking about. The mathematics needed to describe the material world is incredibly beautiful mathematics. It needn’t have been: it might have been hack mathematics, ugly but effective. Why is this? I take the laws of physics to have been orrdained by One with an acute aesthetic sense of beauty. Why the laws of physics are beautiful is the question I like to ask atheist colleagues.

            But God sometimes suspends the laws he ordained in order to make a point to man via a miracle. It is like a playwright walking on to the stage, for the good of the audience.

          • Anton,
            I knew Q. 1 was different in character from Q. 2-4, which is why I differentiated it – even though Hawking and Krauss thought they had answered it (they hadn’t).
            As a Christian theist, I answer Q. 1 as the decision of Almighty God (personal, omnipotent, atemporal, non-material): the creation of spacetime and matter/energy.
            So why should the creation of life (including consciousness) be considered a purely naturalistic process? A materialist prejudice, perhaps?
            I am currently working my way through Feser’s ‘Immortal Souls’, which deals at length with the nature of consciousness and the human powers of reason. (There’s an interesting section on the failure to teach real language to apes.)
            Of course I agree with you on mathematics – and note that even many agnostic mathematicians are Platonists (as was G. H. Hardy, I believe).
            I am full of admiration at what science reveals about how the world works, especially because these can be experimentally demonstrated and replicated. I am less certain about its (changing) judgments about origins.

          • James,

            It seems to me that you are reading mainly philosophy of science without expanding your knowledge of the actual science. I think it is essential to look at both (as best anyone can, given their background learning). I simply repeat: please have a look at Lane and Finlay, and then come back to the wider picture.

        • HJ,
          Aligned to that is the longevity of Adam, and the number of children who may not have been chronologically close. (Centuries apart?) Childbearing age of Eve may have been been greatly increased. How long she lived is not known.
          Additionally,
          the full effects of A+E sin was not seen for generations.
          Woman was not named Eve, (mother of all living) until after God’s Promised Seed.
          She attributed childbirth only to the help of God.
          Just as then, so thereafter in the filling, of the world being fruitful, teleologically.
          It happened as God ensured it.

          Reply

      • Thanks for the link, Jack. Interesting to see a Catholic publication give WLC thumbs up!

        Reply

        • James, I don’t think Catholics and Protestants are as far apart on natural law and natural theology as is often presented. What we know through Divine revelation from Scripture by faith is of a different order to what we can know through reason, but, nevertheless, it is still knowledge of the Truth – and the same goes for science.

          Reply

          • Jack: Quite so – William Lane Craig is probably the best known exponent of natural theology in Protestantism, and I would put Alvin Plantinga in a similar category. I have known for many years that evangelical philosophers like Ron Nash and Norman Geisler took a high view of Aquinas.

    • James, I’ve posted a couple of links below reviewing Christian attempts at reconciling God’s unique creation of Adam and Eve.

      It’s worth reminding ourselves of some orthodox parameters for our speculative theology:

      It seems to this “parishioner” that the essential Scripture truths about Adam and Eve are that human beings were created by God (by whatever ‘mechanism’ and time-scale). What was created before this couple was not as special; we were made directly in his image and likeness (rationality, consciousness, awareness of God, did not randomly emerge from evolution). There was just one Adam and one Eve from whom we all descend. The same type of soul that God gave them, and no earlier creatures, is what made them in his image and likeness, and is in each of us. All men and women today can trace themselves back to Adam to Eve. They sinned, and this fallen nature is passed onto each of us through propagation.

      I believe these are the truths conveyed in Scripture. We may or may not understand the completeness of this truth, because our minds are limited by the brains in our bodies and our reason and relationship with God clouded by the Fall. Genesis is neither an historical or scientific treatise.

      Most importantly,=we now know now, by Divine revelation, that God had a plan to reverse that sin, bring Adam and Eve back to paradise with Him, and He has that very same plan for us.

      Reply

35. To my mind there is an issue here of ‘genre’ within the scripture. The early chapters of Genesis are not necessarily a literal/scientific account off events but may be giving a different kind of account which is still valid and useful.

    Bear in mind that one of the most useful accounts off the Russian Revolution, useful not least because its allegory ‘universalises’ the issues involved, is George Orwell’s book “Animal Farm”, which is of course far from ‘literal/scientific’.

    Reply

36. Returning to the subject, I recommend this excellent 30-page booklet by Nick Needham, author of my favourite church history – nonconformist but generous regarding the presence of committed Christians in Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox congregations, and 5 volumes long and counting. (He’s reached the Englightenment.) This booklet gives details of the original gnosticism which the church had to fight against when it entered the Greek milieu, and explains how radical feminism, male and female homosexuality and the trans movement all originate in a resurfacing of this gnosticism. It’s all very well saying that gnostics believed in salvation via esoteric knowledge not in the Bible, but what exactly was this knowledge? I had thought it was Eastern monism, but it is nothing of the sort. Needham gives us the answer with brevity and clarity and shows its utter incompatibility with the Bible. Yet the gnostics claimed that they were the true Christians! Hats off to Irenaeus for leading the charge against it 1850 years ago.

    https://www.christian.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Gnosticismbooklet.pdf

    Reply

    • Are you reconsidering your views about the Gnostic, dualist Cathars. Anton?

      Reply

      • My view has not changed: they were heretics but peaceable. Count Raymond of Toulouse said that they were good citizens, and Dominic Guzman wandered their lands disputing theology with them at no risk to his person. Nevertheless the charming Pope Innocent III raised a genocidal crusade against them.

        Reply

        • Yeah, the hippies, drugs, and the sexual revolution was harmless and peaceful too. W=Thankfully, we’re better able to limit the damage of modern Gnosticism but still it effects are pernicious, widespread, and, literally, soul destroying.

          If you understand the true nature of their beliefs, you’ll know they were dangerous heretics whose ideas threatened the social, economic and moral fabric of Western Europe and the institutions upon which it was based. It had to be defeated by the means available at the time. The Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in the 13th century was a brutal and savage campaign, hard to justify by modern Catholic teachings.

          However, this article by Edward Feser, not unlike the one you linked to, draws parallels with Gnosticism and modern “wokeness” – in greater depth and spells out its dangers in detail.
          He concludes:

          It would also be fatally naïve to treat wokeness as simply one political tendency alongside others, to be afforded the same respect and given the same voice. It should instead be treated the way we treat Nazism, segregationism, and other ideas that are inherently destructive of basic social cohesion – as something to be purged altogether from school curricula, government, and other institutions, as well as from respectable discourse. The state, therefore, not only should not favor it, but should not even be neutral about it. Rather, governments ought actively to work to extirpate wokeness from any and all institutions over which they have any power or influence. Since such a purge is precisely what the woke intend for the non-woke, this policy yields just deserts as well as society’s self-preservation.
          Wokism is the New Face of An Old Heresy, And It Can Be Defeated Again
          https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/wokism-is-the-new-face-of-an-old

          Reply

          • This was genocide against a peaceable group of people. Do you believe that Jesus Christ approved of it? Please include a clear Yes or No in any answer.

          • Since Jesus set up a kingdom not of/from this world he would not approve of the kind of state church that made the Albigensian and other Crusades possible. Whether the Albigensians or the modern ‘woke’, for Christians our warfare is NOT with physical weapons but by the power of the Holy Spirit, with the Word of God as our ‘sword’.

            And yes, this does imply that CofE establishment is unChristian and needs to be disavowed and scrapped ….

          • Anton, Romans 13:1-7 answers that question.

            My answer: Yes and No.

            The Cathars were not peaceful. They rejected the entire structure of Western European society at a time when the State’s authority was supported by the Church.. In the political structure of the times, their heretical beliefs were treasonous and dangerous to the common good. Yes, they had to be supressed.

            The Church attempted for years to root out the heresy. It was particularly popular among the nobility. Wonder why? Remember too the crusade was triggered the murder of a papal legate sent to investigate the situation with Raymond VI of Toulouse, the wealthiest and most influential baron of the area, implicated. The crusade was against Raymond and the heretics of Languedoc.

            Should they have been suppressed so cruelly? Was there another way? The crusade was against local princes and nobles who rebelled against their King and shielded behind support for the Cathars. The crusaders surpassed their initial mandate in their use of savagery and cruelty.

          • I understand that Cathar support from local nationalists in the south of France (the ‘Languedoc’?), made them not simple pacifists. However, the Catholic state church was also dangerous because it disobeyed the NT teaching on church/state relations and distorted the pacifist Church that Jesus intended.

            Romans 13 is not a prescription for a Christian state because such states are not supposed to exist; rather it describes how Christians are supposed to behave towards non-Christian ‘powers that be’. It tells Christians to ‘be subject’ to those powers, but note that ‘subjection’ is not the same as obedience. And it tells Chridstians not to rebel against even governments like Nero’s, because as Paul said Christian warfare is ‘not with physical weapons’. Any ‘Crusade’ against any dissenters in the name of Jesus would be wrong and be disapproved by Jesus.

          • You condone and even advocate genocide. You condemn yourself in the eyes of the world and of Jesus Christ.

          • Anton, do get off the “horse of self-righteousness.” I neither condoned nor condemned the actions of those responsible for the killings of the Cathars. I’ll let God judge them.

            As I pointed out, the Church never mandated such brutality by those waging the war. You do know the Catholic church in 2016, represented by the Bishop of Pamiers, recognised and asked pardon for the massacre of the Cathars at Montsegur in 1244?

          • I think you did, Jack.

          • No, I just reject simplistic anti-Catholic propaganda: evil Catholic Church in pursuit of worldly power commitments genocide against peace loving Cathars.

          • Gospel Christianity is about being changed for the better in a way that one cannot do for oneself so as to keep divinely ordained laws of morality. It is a personal process not a political one. What has that to do with mass murder?

          • Jack
            The Church went over 300 years before being effectively hijacked by the Roman Empire; and arguably the hijacking only worked because it took place over about 80 years from Constantine’s toleration-with-perhaps-too-much-worldly-support to Theodosius’ eventual decree that Romans should be Christian or else. This hijacking was accepted by the whole of the still undivided Catholic/Orthodox church in the Empire and is so contrary to the NT teaching in that area that I personally can’t consider either Roman or Eastern-Orthodox to have any valid claim to special authority. If there is any ‘apostolic succession’ it is not in artificial lines of human passing-on but simply in believing the original apostolic biblical view as Anabaptists like myself do.

            Even before Theodosius Constantine had fought wars in Jesus’ name (but ipso facto in opposition to Jesus’ and the apostles’ actual teaching) including a war in North Africa against the Donatist dissenters who eventually unlike the Emperors realised that state churches are wrong (“Quis est imperator cum ecclesiae?”).

            Interestingly the current Pope seems to have at least a similar realisation – I’ve heard him described as ‘the Mennonite Pope’. I repeat – there can only be one legitimate Christian war against dissent and that would be a spiritual war ‘without physical weapons’ by an international pacifist Church independent of any and all earthly states. Fighting ‘wokeism’ in a physical war way would be to play into the ‘woke’ agenda by being the intolerant opposition they want to portray us.

            And relevant to the PLF issue, a non-coercive Church is much more likely to win that battle than a church still entangled in worldly power in England…..