Speaking out on Marriage

Jesus4Madrid

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"As long as the State doesn't force me to celebrate gay marriage, we shouldn't force people not to.

The Church should thus not "live and let live". It should help those caught in a lifestyle of sin, including homosexuality. But the State: yes, live and let live."


According to some people on this board Jesus4Madrid, you are now a supporter of homosexual marriage and you have a poor social/linguistic/legal understanding of these issues!

I hope not to enter into such polemics. We Orthodox Christians are against homosexual marriage. How do we prevent it? The sword? The law? The pulpit? Our personal witness?

I am a soldier in the fight for traditional Christian sexual morality. I just don't want to employ the State in this fight. I hope saying that dispels any notion that I am somehow on the other side of this argument.
 
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rusmeister

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I hope not to enter into such polemics. We Orthodox Christians are against homosexual marriage. How do we prevent it? The sword? The law? The pulpit? Our personal witness?

I am a soldier in the fight for traditional Christian sexual morality. I just don't want to employ the State in this fight. I hope saying that dispels any notion that I am somehow on the other side of this argument.

We can only prevent it when we have power in the state, and I'd say that we mostly don't - that we have very little left, what little is granted us by the powers-that-be that can withdraw even that at any time, and that both our power and our time are fading fast.

I'm reading "The Chronicles of Prydain", the last book "The High King", and there is a wonderful analogy. The heroes are trying to slow down the advance of deathless warriors, as a pebble can turn an avalanche or a twig can stem a flood. And at this point, that is all I think we can hope to do, regarding immorality in society. As long as we have any power or authority, we have a responsibility to try to order society for good. When we don't, then we don't. This is about our responsibility to love our neighbor, not only our personal efforts to live the Christian life. We believe salvation to be a collective affair; we are not saved only alone and individually. Our neighbor's fate should matter, to us, too, and law and public life affect him as well as us. Loving someone means not only praying for them, but doing what we can in the material world, as well.
 
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dzheremi

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I hope this is not taken the wrong way, but as an outsider in this discussion (since I am not in communion with any of you, or the person whose statement apparently started this whole ruckus), it does sort of read like "let's get the people who are insufficiently against the thing that we're all against". I suppose it depends on whether or not you think it beneficial to see nuance in something that (I agree) should be black and white, or whether it is more useful in your estimation to call a spade a spade or however you'd put it.

I would hope, at least, that in all our personal dealings with people who may be homosexual or otherwise living lifestyles that we know are against the gospel of Christ and His Church that we can allow for nuance, so as to not reduce people to their sins in the way that the modern narrative on this topic seems to (where, I suppose following Aristotle, you are what you repeatedly do), and hence do violence to traditional Christian anthropology. If we mostly do not have power in today's western societies, I would venture to guess that this is because of the triumph of a wholly secular and ultimately evil view of mankind's origins, purpose, and perfectability absent God, which is the view that pervades the modern media, academia, etc. Now, I'm just some yokel, but it would seem to me that to get that unthinkingly accepted view to change would require a deeper connection with the individuals we know than simply reiterating what the Church and the faith say they should/n't do in their bedrooms. Most post/ex-Christians either know or think they know all about that, but if they don't know that this is a very surface-level way of looking at things, I'm not sure we can say that we aren't at least somewhat to blame for that.
 
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SeventhValley

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I hope this is not taken the wrong way, but as an outsider in this discussion (since I am not in communion with any of you, or the person whose statement apparently started this whole ruckus), it does sort of read like "let's get the people who are insufficiently against the thing that we're all against". I suppose it depends on whether or not you think it beneficial to see nuance in something that (I agree) should be black and white, or whether it is more useful in your estimation to call a spade a spade or however you'd put it.

I would hope, at least, that in all our personal dealings with people who may be homosexual or otherwise living lifestyles that we know are against the gospel of Christ and His Church that we can allow for nuance, so as to not reduce people to their sins in the way that the modern narrative on this topic seems to (where, I suppose following Aristotle, you are what you repeatedly do), and hence do violence to traditional Christian anthropology. If we mostly do not have power in today's western societies, I would venture to guess that this is because of the triumph of a wholly secular and ultimately evil view of mankind's origins, purpose, and perfectability absent God, which is the view that pervades the modern media, academia, etc. Now, I'm just some yokel, but it would seem to me that to get that unthinkingly accepted view to change would require a deeper connection with the individuals we know than simply reiterating what the Church and the faith say they should/n't do in their bedrooms. Most post/ex-Christians either know or think they know all about that, but if they don't know that this is a very surface-level way of looking at things, I'm not sure we can say that we aren't at least somewhat to blame for that.

Great post :)
 
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