I recently have seen the link to the essays on this page and submit this comment for your consideration. While the comment is totally mine, I attend St. Marks, Saskatoon.
When addressing the issues of sexuality and same-gender blessings, we fall into at least four fallacies:
- We assume that those who wrote scripture (and those who interpreted it for the following centuries) understood our present culture, medical and scientific knowledge and wrote to speak to the situations we presently face.
- We assume that life spans were of the same length as presently, that resources and ability to self-actualize were the same as today.
- We attributing our modern ideas and concerns to writers and thinkers who were concerned about other things.
- We assume that present ideas and practice of human relationships and societies are the same as at the time the texts were written and intepreted by the early church.
Without complete elaboration, consider: In the present world, other people are not considered property, propagation of the family line is not the primary purpose of marriage and family, many of us live through 40-70 years of adulthood rather than never reaching it at all or dying by our early 20s, and we have biological and comparative psychology knowledge beyond our wildest dreams. We also acknowledge human suffering – even as we remain insensitive to much of it – including suffering related to relationships and emotions.
And we would turn to some ancient texts to govern specific human interactions in the present day?, elevating them above the loving response that is actually the core of the texts? We would not use the information and knowledge that God-given science affords so to understand how same gender sexual behaviour is ubiquitous in both human societies and in many mammalian species? We would not seek to accept everyone into God’s human family? Shame on those who debate Holy Writ while people suffer and churches grow cold, a sorry, sad version of ‘fiddling while Rome burns’.
Dr. WJ Arnold