THE ANGLICAN DEBATE: Rev. Kendall Harmon

Katherine Kersten passes along this link to a speech by Rev. Kendall Harmon objecting to same-sex marriage and to sex outside of marriage. He is now at the Anglican convention. At MarriageDebate.com we are debating, I think, primarily civil marriage, although who knows? No aspect of subject is barred. But the Episcopalians are making headlines so I thought this report from the floor on Christian theology of sex and marriage might be of interest.

Excerpts from Rev. Harmon:

Primarily this is a controversy about the Bible. During their once a decade meeting in 1998 at Lambeth, the vast majority of Anglican bishops worldwide rejected "homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture." At issue are not just a few individual passages, as is often alleged, but the broad structure of the biblical narrative which flows from the primordial couple in the Garden of Eden through the Song of Solomon to the celebration of an undefiled marriage bed in the New Testament. The Bible's positive teaching on marriage is that it is intended by God to be a "one flesh" union which embraces the complementarity of the two sexes.

Based on this positive teaching, the Scriptures are also very clear that homosexual behavior is a violation of God's purpose for sex. As Robert Gagnon explains: "Same-sex intercourse" represents "a structurally incongruous attempt at merging sexually with a sexual same, with someone who" is "not a gender complement, and therefore not a person that could bring completion in the sphere of sexual relations to the sexual self. " This is the teaching of the Old and New Testaments: there is no tension, no qualification, no development, and no equivocation. Even Walter Wink of Auburn Theological Seminary, who favors altering the church's teaching in the area of sexual morality, admits this: "Efforts to twist the text to mean what it clearly does not say are deplorable. Simply put, the Bible is negative toward same-sex behavior, and there is no getting around it."

Not only the Bible is at stake, but the church's whole theology of marriage. Traditionally, marriage was understood to have four purposes, communion (joy shared is doubled, sorrow is halved), union (the two shall become one flesh), procreation (be fruitful and multiply), and prevention (marriage was actually understood to prevent sin-when was the last sermon you heard on THAT one?). A same sex union cannot be unitive, because physically the bodies do not fit together in their design, and it is unable to be procreative.

So whatever else is being called for by Resolution C-005, it is not marriage. You see this in the rhetoric of the resolution itself. It is only clear what these couplings are not-marriage-but what they are is never carefully defined.

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posted by maggie at 11:56 AM | Link |

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