Martin Henry THE REV. Gene Robinson is to be enthroned as Episcopalian Bishop of New Hampshire. The new bishop has abandoned his wife to live with a homosexual partner for the last 13 years. The 62 to 45 affirmative vote of the church's National Convention has precipitated a gut-wrenching crisis in the worldwide Anglican communion which is threatening to split over the issue.
I exchanged words with one of the church's estimated 77 million members, a colleague, and a deeply troubled lay servant of the church who is painfully contemplating the future of his membership as so many others are now forced to do. We both agreed that the stance of rejection of the Church in the Province of the West Indies does not hold much water. For while the 38 provinces of the Anglican Church around the world are autonomous in administration, the one thing that should hold them together as a 'communion' is doctrine, a common theology. The homosexual issue is profoundly doctrinal and theological. The Bible does have a great deal to say, in the most explicit manner, about homosexuality. The matter is not one of deduced doctrine but of explicit statement. The real problem is the source of authority in the church and the status of the Bible as the rule of faith.
SCRIPTURE TAKES BACK SEAT
The OT Law regulating human sexual expression declares, "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination [Lev.18: 22]." The Hebrew for abomination carries the connotation of being detestable, disgusting and worthy of indignation and abhorrence. Not just being sinful; but a shameful impurity.
Canon Robinson disagrees that gay sex violates the scripture on which his church says it is historically based. Paul blazes from the New Testament that God has abandoned those who exchanged the truth of God for a lie to vile affections and degrading passions where men have turned from natural relations with women and were set a blaze with lust for one another committing shameful acts with men and suffering in their own bodies and personalities the inevitable consequences and penalty of their wrongdoing. [Rom 1: 25 - 27]. Robinson declares that "God has once again brought an Easter out of Good Friday." But what about the death of Christ as sacrifice for sin that would have changed His legal ruling on sexual abomination?
Now all of this anti-homosexual scriptural stuff can readily be dismissed out of hand as old, nasty, irrelevant and deeply offensive in light of our new understanding of the genetics, psychology, sociology and human rights of homosexual relationships. But it can't simply be scrubbed from the scriptures of the Anglican Church with any shred of honesty whatsoever.
WORD ON SEX
A massive social experiment in sexual diversity (or perversity) has been unleashed upon society. The only thing necessary now is a clearly defined control group. And that should have been the church as the OT laws expected for Israel. But Bishop Robinson and 61 other of his fellow Episcopalian bishops think otherwise. Clearly it is time for the church to get rid of the Bishop or the Bible. Pretence at peaceful co-existence is a monumental mockery, a travesty of honesty.
The first and most significant mass act of Emancipation was the gathering of the soon-to-be ex-slaves in numerous Christian chapels for worship in their best clothes. Laura Facey-Cooper's naked statues may indeed be at worship, but it is not Christian worship. Despite the secular humanist historians, the truth of our past is that Emancipation and black freedom were deeply rooted in Christian faith both in the battles for and in the celebration of. The park whose entrance is (dis?)graced by the naked statues pretty as it is and useful for recreation as green urban space has little to justify its name. The first practical divine act in response to human sin, the now thoroughly discredited Bible says, was the Lord God making tunics of skin and clothing the man and the woman, husband and wife [Gen 3:21]. To preserve the clothed modesty and dignity of worship, God proclaims in OT law, "Neither shall you go up by steps to My altar, that your nakedness be not exposed upon it [Lev. 20:25]." And the law forbids gazing upon the nakedness of our parents, much less in worship.
The Babylonian captivity psalmist ruefully enquired, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" The Most Hon. Prime Minister, under whose portfolio the NHT and its Emancipation Park fall, should lead the nation in a rendition of our covenant National Anthem, a sublime prayer to the Judaeo-Christian God of the Bible and of Emancipation in the shadow of the generous genitals of Redemption Song. The derisory disjunction should, hopefully,
be as clear as the water of the statue's fountain.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
