A guest post from Dr. Priscilla Turner:
Our Church is at odds with the Communion as a whole because decades ago she parted company in sex-ethics with the whole Church Catholic spread out in time and space. She hasn’t enjoyed the godly leadership of learned bishops who had eyes in their heads and brains between their ears about human biology, or submitted their minds to the scriptural witness about the Creator’s ordering of the world. She has tried to reopen an absolutely and completely closed question. She has become an enabler, by making her parishes institutionalised happy hunting grounds for sexual predators. Homosex has never been either in accord with natural law or pleasing to the Author of our human sexuality. And the Church Catholic has always known this.
There has been no reading of my esteemed friend and colleague Robert A.J. Gagnon’s big book The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics ISBN-13 978-0687022793
Or of mine with J.I. Packer, shorter, newer, Anglican, more theological:
Holy Homosex?: This and That (CreateSpace) A set of theological papers, including one by James I. Packer, presented in original chronological order, a thorough technical discussion:
SC 5.5×8.5: ISBN 9781482347869
HC 6×9: ISBN 9798872407768
Ebook: ASIN B07HXV8DFK
Text may be downloaded and read for nothing at: https://www.anglicansamizdat.net/wordpress/dr-priscilla-turner/
When all that is said, we really do not need any texts from any sacred book to know what to think of homosexuality. Hence as a whole no human society or culture in recorded history has ever favoured it.
How to destroy an Anglican diocese, or a whole national Church, in one easy lesson.
In 1998 we at Holy Trinity Vancouver warned our then-bishop that, with same-sex ‘blessings’ as the policy, we had no hope of holding our people, still less growing. And so it has proved to be in the long run. People would not accept a situation where in church it was open season on their growing children for predators. The predator-priest, the predator-minister were unacceptable. They left in droves, crippling parishes, so that there are now only two-thirds as many as in the 1990s. Both the Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada are in drastic decline, near dissolution; but the penny still doesn’t seem to have dropped at the top in either case.
God will not privilege the male orgasm, as both pre- and post-Christian societies do. But tragically women as a class haven’t yet tumbled to it, and now church negligence has given us in Canada the absurdity of institutionalised same-sex marriage.
“[T]he United Church of Canada are in drastic decline…”
A small United Church out in the country not far from me is now a mosque (so that’s the end of any “Pride” celebrations there I’d say). Another urban United Church near me is about to have some sort of “Pride” Christmas market later in November.
As a Roman Catholic, I find myself watching all this as a slightly bemused spectator, while routinely shaking my head.
Thank you most warmly.