Read on the front page of my Australian newspaper this morning that the Anglican Diocese of Perth – led by Archbishop Kay Goldsworth – now licences heterosexual fornication and homosexuality provided the consenting parties “take responsibility for their sexual conduct.” Whatever that means. Her defence, according to the article, was that other Australian dioceses do it too. Indeed they do. Heresy is not peculiar to Perth. And, in fact, across the ocean Justin Welby, before his timely (couldn’t come soon enough) resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury, was a fellow traveller on the road to perdition.
The now deleted moral injunction: “maintaining chastity in singleness and faithfulness in marriage” (between a biological man and woman, to be clear) is passé in Perth, evidently, in this current “enlightened” age. The Bible and our Lord Jesus Christ have a use-by date it would seem.
Full disclosure, I have committed fornication, i.e., sexual congress outside of marriage. Nothing that has occurred in the past two thousand years or so is exculpatory. It was a sin, it is a sin, and it will be a sin until the end of time. Now, of course, some people are free to have a different view. Atheists and assorted pagans might measure their conduct against their own concocted moral standards. Fine, but that option is really not available to Christian priests. Yet some inexplicably think that it is.
Haven’t you read, he replied, that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. (Matthew 19: 4-6)
Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-10)
There are many other confirming passages. There is no ambiguity or wriggle room. The Bible is simply inconvenient for those of a libertine turn of mind. Thankfully, many Anglicans are holding their ground. Among them are Archbishop Kanishka Raffel in Sydney, the breakaway Diocese of the Southern Cross in South East Queensland mainly, and GAFCON internationally.
Licencing licentiousness has only become part of Protestant Christianity in the past few decades, since postmodernism infected a growing number of priests. A smirking Screwtape is no doubt delighted.
I couldn’t bring myself to read this in The Australian. It is past belief and adequate comment. Screwtape is rubbing his hands indeed. What a debased society we are living in.
Ick.
They licenced sodomy with the first queer priests not defenestrated, about 1986.
Perth was also first to ordain women, based on The Vibe.
Last service I attended in St Georges Cathedral was the start of NAIDOC Week two or three years ago, a full dress bells and smells event. The arch fem preached what I leaned on my own understanding to describe as animist heresy.
CofE ha? been on the slippery slope to this since HenryVIII.
Mind you, as a Catholic, Francis is Not My Pope.
Perth was also first to ordain women, based on The Vibe.
The sad need for so many to be fashionable in their ideas has had its inevitable consequences. If these pathetic inadequates could see themselves as others see them, they’d die of shame.
The same moral relativism has infected not only the Anglican communion but also large parts of the Catholic Church since the 60s. In the Catholic case, it accompanied the invasion of schools and seminaries by feelgood Californian pop psychology in which ‘I feel’ was the sole criterion for evaluating or deciding anything. Jung, Carl Rogers and the Kinsey report were where it was at. Talk of sin was old hat or, worse still, ‘pre Vatican II’.
Needless to say, this coincided with the explosion of paedophilia. To paraphrase CS Lewis, we sniggered and sneered at chastity and professed to be horrified that there were pedophiles in our midst. It is also the background to the ACU graduation debacle in Melbourne. And the present pope has given it a new lease of life.
Why, that sounds eerily familiar to the opinion of Israel Folau.
You know, his belief that got him sacked by Rugby Australia.
Absolutely idiotic – must have at the sewer pit of a university student union.
Get this, majority of couples want to stay as couples. It teaches you to be selfless, consider other peoples opinions,strength to your partners, their family and you children.
this opens up treachery, emotional hurt, leading to the downward slide of an individual as they grapple with what’s happened.
Then the effect on the children, the effect in divorced children is deleterious and they crave for a single partner, a home and happy children.
this is the social evolution of humanity which Christianity has its foundations.
the reference to 1986, was this when pedaphilia went through the roof.
Also being taught at a Catholic school in the 70s the references to Freud were continual, not much of Nitschke.
it amazes me how the idiocy of socialism/hedonism in the western world has become the predominant philosophy.
i am wondering how much Hollywood has to do with this, good looking people around eachother with lots of money, not having to work and having sex with each other is responsible for this.
the hedonist politicians, Albo, Wong , teadeau came from broken homes. They ridicule the middle class of one partner, children, stable community. Yet this is what the yearn for when as adults they pursue this lifestyle.
Such comments only underline the reality that the crisis of faithfulness among church leaders crosses over denominational boundaries.