I'll be in the corner kicking the cat. Hey, at least it's not sodomy, right?
Also the article that you posted is a distortion of the churches teaches with a fundamentalist view. Not all christians are fundamentalist.
I'll openly admit the fundamentalist aspect, but the passages presented make a clear Biblical argument. It seems to me that a very important but subtle consideration is how many legitimate variations of God's Law there are. If there is only one, we're
all screwed. While I recognize the difference between the sects, I'm still puzzled at how each of these churches can separate from each other and not seek to reconcile. They are leaving the sick to their sickness, the captive to their prisons. Whatsoever they do not do for the least of His bretheren .....
Actually priest are pretty good at this type of stuft becaues they have seen many marriages. Also the union with the church is similar to are natural marriage.
I agree that priests have the benefit of witnessing a large sample of marriages, but for those who are celibate, the intimate mysteries of human interaction are closed to them. It seems well enough to talk about "communication" and other such ideas, But I guarantee you that a Catholic priest, for instance, doesn't know what it's like to be lied to and put off for
years about very basic issues between people. I mean, if I look at what is turning out to be my domestic partner's descent into various symptoms of either absurdity in the Camusite sense or insanity in the general, I have to admit that I never imagined someone acting this severely, and I can't imagine what it would be like if I
was legally bound to her. Right now the fact that I can protect my daughter from the hostility is the only thing that keeps me from packing her off someplace safer.
I'm sorry, but a priest just
doesn't have that experience. And in some traditions, he won't.
To the other, I'm brought to mind of a reverend (I don't know the official title, now that I think of it) at a Society of Friends meeting house whose family took a turn for the worst. Apparently in a family dispute, he struck his eldest son. The preacher, on reflection, decided that the situation was beyond his immediate control and sought the professional assistance of a psychologist who was of the flock. The resulting controversy did not focus on family troubles, did not focus on the fact that he struck his son. Rather, society conservatives asked him to step aside because, in his moment of trial, he sought a psychologist and not Jesus Christ.
More than the oddity of hearing such a point from Quakers, I have to say that I would prefer his advice on domestic issues than Father Jerry's, and I respect that man as the brightest star of the clergy at my Catholic high school, perhaps the brightest star I've found in the Catholic sector of my Universe. And that's the thing. Insofar as I know, Jerry was a master of teen angst dating back to his own youth. He knew those conflicts before he was a priest and he brought that knowledge with him. He belongs at a high school. But I wouldn't take actual marital or relationship advice from him, and on one occasion that the school asked him to do just that he fudged around the point because he knew that the seventeen year-old sitting in front of him had a simple leg up on him. If my girlfriend had been
socially normal he might have dared, but nothing in his
experience gave him any other wisdom to offer than to trust in God and do the right things. But between the two of us, he knew that I was the only one with a remote clue what was at stake and how it came to be. And it's not like a seventeen year-old has much along those specific lines, but still
it was more than the priest had.
He has a divine nature and a human nature all at the same time. It's no more paradoxical than saying we are both flesh and spirit.
Ri-ight. But most of us don't assert the power to heal with touch by the power of the Holy Spirit, and those among us who do are generally regarded as fraudulent or crazy.
Nonetheless, to sum up what turns out to be a longer argument than I had thought necessary ... well,
you even point out ... well, your take on it is bizarre. Jesus cannot be "fully" something and then something else as well. If he is fully human, then he is fully human as you or I are fully human. If Jesus is also God, as opposed to being specially endowed by God, the sacrifice is still diminished. Jesus cannot know sin and suffering from the human perspective if he knows what others can only have faith in.
Consider:
You are tied up, blindfolded, abused. Your captor is a monster, and has ravaged you. You are tired, frightened, and seriously wondering if you will see daylight again ....
(sounds bad, right?)
.... And then the director yells, "Cut!" and several union men scurry out to untie you and start wiping the fake blood out of your eyes while your mind wanders to whether or not your assistant made those dinner reservations at the Met.
There is an amazing scene in Wes Craven's
Last House on the Left. Watching a young girl pray after her rape, one is taken with the intended catharsis. Watching her subsequent execution is horrifying; that's why it's a horror flick.
Did the actor go through the actual experience the character was depicted as having experienced? The actor knows it isn't real, and sublimates reality in favor of the role. But is it the same thing? Jesus knew that, unlike others, his physical body would be raised in three days. Jesus knew he would ascend. Jesus knew (clearly, according to Luke 3) that he was not quite like everybody else, and would occasionally announce it all over town (e.g. - John 8)
On the other hand, I'm amazed at the lengths you'll go to in order to avoid certain considerations. I'm trying to track this vein back to its start. The closest I'm getting is when you shied away from the arcane realization that trusting in Jesus is trusting in man.
"Both God and man" so that Jesus could be "fully human" is actually the produce of a severe logical failure that would never have come up if it wasn't for the bizarre race to ideological consolidation that resulted in centuries of violence and division. (An interesting episode is when Athanasius won out against Arius at Nicaea; the winning argument may have been docetic at heart, but in modern terms we could say that the marketing was exponentially easier, and that's why the heretical position won influence over the Nicene Creed.)
The issue of how Jesus as a human being relates to Jesus the Divine is a sticky issue that Christians have failed to resolve for almost 1,700 years now.
For Jesus to be both "fully human" and "fully Divine" is a fundamental contradiction in terms, something intrinsically impossible and therefore beyond God. (
see "
Omnipotence", with attention given to "mutually exclusive elements", such as a
square circle.
This was not his Will. Why do you keep assuming that everything is the Will of God?
I'm going to answer you with a question: What part of the Universe exceeds God's authority?
Remember that even
Satan is directly subordinate to God. Answers quite directly, according to the Bible.
I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with the story of the Fall of Man at Eden? You know, where God says, "Don't eat the fruit or you shall die." And then the Serpent says, "You won't die." So they eat the fruit and they don't die. And then God says, "If they eat of the Tree of Life, they will be like us and live forever."
Did you ever wonder about that "us"? It's a good thing you're not SDA; the latest I'm getting about Genesis from that camp is that God knew in advance (a common assertion) that Adam and Eve would fall and that the Son would be required to make a sacrifice on humankind's behalf, and, furthermore, that it was part of the Plan. Now, I realize this is controversial, and I have severe reservations about the Seventh Day Adventists, but in this case they're right on the mark. If God has the knowledge that God is asserted to have, and the power that God is asserted to have, then God knew damn well what would happen at Eden, and He chose to go forward with it. The Fall of Man is God's
direct will.
Would we assert that Satan succeeded in defying God's authority? Does the Devil operate independently in the Universe? Or does Satan respond to God's bidding, according to the Book of Job?
Likewise, what authority put such an important decision, such that it could split in two a fraternity of God's endeavors (e.g. a church congregation) before the House of Bishops?
Wait a minute. Why do you seem to think that I'm some sort of homophobe? I have ate easter dinner with two homosexuals. It's no big deal, but a position of bishop where one must be irreproachable and not create scandal, this is where we draw the line.
Ohhh - kay. Um ... let's try it this way:
(1) Homophobia is not a necessary component. You might just be the kind of chap who likes throwing stones. Homophobia is only a component insofar as the Churches themselves are homophobic in general.
(2) Free advice, and this time not to be condescending but because you really need to understand this:
I'm not ____ ... I have friends who are _____ .... (fill in the blanks) These statements actually have a bit of a damaging effect to one's presentation. Typically this announcement is followed by statements which are inherently _____ (whatever goes in that blank).
(3) And you do exactly that. It's not truly sinister or anything, so I'll get to that in a moment. But why is
this where you draw the line? One sin too many? Why
this line? With everything else wrong with church politics, teachings, and scandals,
why this?
Now we have to remember that certain words bear certain weight that we assign them. Words like
bigot,
prejudice, and
homophobe are excellent examples. In fact, they're the reason such things occur to me.
A bigot is merely one who insists on any particular opinion beyond the point of reason and propriety. The word has evolved to its negative context, I admit.
Prejudice merely implies judgment before facts are known. When I was a kid, I didn't like white chocolate because commerce teaches me that chocolate is dark brown. That was a
prejudice. In fact, I prefer white chocolate. This is a preference based on equal consideration. Technically, if one prefers to have sex with the opposite gender but has never tried the same, well, it's kind of a prejudice. But this is not one that most homosexuals or bisexuals would hold against you
unless you let that prejudice affect other functions. We can consider it by looking at homophobia.
All
homophobia means is that one is frightened of homosexuality. Some find this an unfair characterization, since the roots of the word simply mean a fear of things that are the same. But in the end, it comes down to fear of same-sex partners. That fear arises from a certain lack of understanding, whether of the homosexual, homosexuality, or of the otherwise-ignored questions that one brings to their conscience in the presence of a homosexual. I can understand the idea that anal penetration scares a man; it scares a lot of women, too. But transferring that fear to people and discriminating against them on the basis of that fear is, by social convention, unacceptable. Whether it's homophobia, White Supremacy, Promise Keepers and other manly-man organizations, &c., the transference of an irrational fear based on a lack of knowledge to another person such that it interferes with human interaction is generally looked down upon as unproductive, selfish, and harmful.
The only reason the sins of other Bishops don't raise a scandal is because there's a lot of people who have similar scandals. Like the McKinley article noted of the fundamentalist Christians--if they went after something like divorce and remarriage, it would make too many of the flock uncomfortable.
The only scandal is that chosen by those who see a convenient opportunity to declare a scandal in order to demonize what they fear.
Oh, yes ....
(4) No Bishop is irreproachable.
:m:,
Tiassa
