“Husband” only means something akin to “permanent boyfriend” in the lexicon of the American youth. Similarly so for “wife.” When we (mistakenly) define marriage by employing only fragments of its true and Holy meaning, we end up with situations like this mess in New York. It would be like attempting to build a full scale replica of the USS Nimitz based on “enormous, floats, carries airplanes…” and so on. When the full plan and detailed blueprint is shredded, folks are left to fill in the blanks. In a relativist, post-industrial and post-Christian society, it follows that the new recreation is more relativist, post-industrial and post-Christian than Christian at all.

I think we are actually in agreement on the issue of needing to stand up and fight for marriage. Tacky signs on court house laws won’t work. We need to be educated in what the Church teaches on marriage, in order that we might give an “apologia.”

“We are not to give it up. We are not to let it’s words be misappropriated or stolen, ripped from it proper textual context in order to confuse culture without a fight. Words mean things. When they are misappropriated or stolen we respond courageously, with intelligence and resolve.” – This is essentially the same sentiment that drove me to write that post. I was hoping to spark discussion. I’m glad I found my way here.

Non-Christian societies still regard homosexuality as a Western import.
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/India-health-minister-calls-homosexuality-disease-1452284.php

India’s health minister derided homosexuality as an unnatural “disease” from the West at an HIV/AIDS conference, drawing outrage Tuesday from a U.N. official and activists who said the comments set back campaigns for gay rights and against HIV.

In a hastily called news conference Tuesday evening, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said he was misquoted, though video of Monday’s speech has aired repeatedly on Indian television.

I read it and concluded he gives up the fight too early just like James does below. The Church is not an alternate universe. It’s the place where what began in Eden is recovered and continues until the revelation of the New Jerusalem. Put another way, the salvation of Christ is not only the salvation of the individual, but the entire world including culture. (Pat. Kyrill and Pope Benedict are quite clear on this.)

Further, language is critical to the enterprise. Language — words — are the initial interface between God and man. To see how this works in concrete, real-life terms read my essay: When God Speaks and We Obey, Good Things Happen. Note the implicit lesson: God seeks to save not only the Orthodox (or Catholics, or Protestants, or Muslims) but the entire world. What was my point of initial contact with the young man recovering from the drug overdose? The words I spoke. What was his initial point of contact with God in his present circumstance? The words I spoke.

To see how this works in culture see my essay: One Word of Truth Outweighs the Whole World (and note the ontological inferences, especially how God speaking the world into existence is complementary to speaking the words of the Gospel). I drew those important lessons from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s masterful Nobel Lecture of 1970.

The language of the moral tradition draws from the well of scripture, the foundational text Christianity and Judaism. We are not to give it up. We are not to let it’s words be misappropriated or stolen, ripped from it proper textual context in order to confuse culture without a fight. Words mean things. When they are misappropriated or stolen we respond courageously, with intelligence and resolve. We do not capitulate just because a bear has growled.

You give up the fight too early, James. Marriage is within the order of creation. God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, or even Adam and Eve and Betty.

Look, baptism is both a death and restoration, a putting off the death of this world and a path towards the Kingdom of God that is also a restoration of primordial Eden. And a marriage, while restored to its proper teleological trajectory in the Church, still exists outside the Church because it exists within the order of creation. That’s why even non-Christian societies reveal monogamous opposite-sex relationships as a cultural norm for the most part and why the traditional relationship went unchallenged in Christian culture for the last 2000 years and even longer in Judaism before it.

You have inculcated the logic of the redefining marriage crowd and are bringing it into the Church. The Church sanctifies what God created, and He created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. But this truth is written into the fabric of creation. It is not true because you or I believe it, it is true because God created it that way and is thus evident to all who are open to truth to some measure, even those not within the Church.

Where do we see this? Whenever homosexual marriage is put to a public vote (removed from the courts and legislatures), it is defeated. Thirty states have now passed bans on same-sex marriage.

One way out would be to legally define all marriages (whether serial, hetero or homosexual) as domestic partnerships, which are constituted as contracts between the parties and which convey certain rights and obligations guaranteed by the state. Divorce would be handled in much the same way it is now, as a dissolusion of those same rights and obligations, and consequences relating to property and children.

The Church, on the other hand, would be free to provide sacramental marriage for its members.

I frankly (I lived in Hollyweird for almost 30 years!) don’t see a plethora of same sex couples banging on our doors demanding to be crowned in the Mystery of Holy Matrimony.

Rdr. James Morgan

http://holyprotection.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/changing-definitions/

The political, and moral, point that Weigel argues here is an important one. Try as I might, I cannot re-make myself according to my own desires without at the same time crippling myself and those around me. It this what Adam and Eve attempted in the Garden and it is precisely from this, my own willfulness and desire to be god in place of God, that Christ comes to redeem me. And all this is an anthropological insight central to the biblical tradition.

In the first centuries, the Church combated heresies about God. Today we are called to combat not simply heresy about God but about what it means to be human. For better and worse, ours is an anthropological age. Culturally we are struggling to understand ourselves and what it means to be human. Is my identity grounded in a shared and immutable human nature? Or am I rather free to create, and re-create, myself according to my own will? The latter is the anthropological model that informs recent changes to marriage laws while the former is at the heart of orthodox (and Orthodox) Christianity.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory