What do you all think about this article?
In the midst of the current maelstrom over same-sex marriage raging at every level of American political and religious life, the Orthodox Church has hunkered down with an improbable cast of bedfellows, including the Vatican, James Dobson and his Focus on the Family, and Bible Belt fundamentalists. A growing catalogue of naysaying articles at www.orthodoxytoday.org lists contributions from the Greek Orthodox Archdioceses Metropolitan Maximos of Pittsburgh, Fathers Thomas Hopko and John Breck, former professors at St. Vladimirs Orthodox Theological Seminary outside New York City, and a number of other familiar and less familiar names. The informal coalition of most Orthodox bishops in the U.S. and Canada known as SCOBA (Standing Conference of the Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas) issued a joint denunciation of same-sex unions in their August 27 Statement on Moral Crisis in Our Nation, also available at Orthodoxy Todays website. The award for insensitivity, however, must surely go to Father Ted Stylianopoulos, who expects that his gay communicants remain not only perpetually abstinent but alsocloseted in lifelong shame.
What is most remarkable about the combined testimony of these and other Orthodox spokesmen is its failure to add a single new or creative thought concerning the problem of diversity in human sexuality to what has already been parroted ad nauseum by their Western cousins in the faith.
This is a shame. Although numerically small in the U.S. and elsewhere outside the borders of traditionally Orthodox countries (e.g., Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, et al.), the Orthodox Church has come to exercise over the past several decades a disproportionately influential role in the theological deliberations of ecumenical initiatives at the local, national, and global levels. Addressing its Western cousins in a voice that rings mysteriously ancient and new, familiar and strange, timeless and relevant at one and the same time, Eastern Orthodoxy attracts the attention and interest of its partners in interfaith dialogue precisely because it has something different to say.
The Orthodox Church is especially well positioned to tackle the challenge of homosexuality creatively and honorably while not violating its essential fidelity to the continuity of holy tradition. For one thing, the Orthodox East as a whole has never countenanced the extreme aversion to human sexuality that has plagued the Roman Church at least from the time of Augustine of Hippo. Married men have been ordained to the diaconate and priesthood in the Orthodox Church since the apostolic era. Canonical legislation dating as far back as the fourth century censures anyone refusing to take communion from the hands of a married cleric, or becoming a monk because he abhors the conjugal state, or leaving his wife under pretext of piety. Finally, the early fifth-century archbishop of Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom, insisted in his preaching on the innate holiness of the conjugal act, in and of itself, whether or not conception resulted or was even possible. Also noteworthy is the fact that, unlike the Roman Church, the contemporary Orthodox Church does not deny the use of artificial contraceptives to its faithful.
And herein lies the key to unlocking the mystery of same-sex marriage, affirming its inherent goodness, and securing for it a rightful place in Orthodox ecclesial life: for Chrysostom as well as for Orthodoxy as a whole, the conjugal act possesses a primarily unitive function, its procreative aspect being only secondary.
Chrysostom also enlarged on the scriptural metaphor of the spousal relationship uniting Christ to the Church and to the individual believer, going as far as asserting that what transpires between spouses in the marriage bed resembles the act of eucharistic communion, and vice versa. This is pretty heady stuff, coming from a late fourth- and early fifth-century celibate churchman.
In words that ring a little odd in modern ears, Chrysostom characterized marriage as an antidote to fornication. Not unlike the Apostle Pauls statement that it is better to marry than to burn, this is properly understood only within the wider context of Chrysostoms take on the passions: these he viewed as inherently good, God-given, but errant impulses needing redirection towards their proper outlets. Marriage serves to prevent the misuse of the essentially good erotic dimension of the human person precisely by constituting its proper locusnamely, fidelity, monogamy, and, in principle if not always in practice, lifelong durability. Finally, marriage creates a little church for the couple, that gathering of two or three where prayer and the day-to-day ascesis of salvation become a collaborative, reciprocally supportive effort.
The traditional Orthodox conception of the inner content of conjugal life and loveincluding its erotic expressiondiffers in no respect whatever from what the Churchs gay sons and daughters have come to know experientially in their own committed, monogamous, durable unions. The hierarchys intransigent, doctrinaire insistence on the indispensable requisite of gender complementarity for conjugal love to be genuine is nothing short of arrogant, and an insult to the integrity of those of us who know otherwise, and who have endured together through trials that would have rent most couples apart.
Metropolitan Maximos is widely reputed for his holiness; Fathers Hopko and Breck are good men. No one expects the Orthodox Church to start blessing same-sex unions overnight. However, is open dialogue too much to ask? Likewise, is the long overdue admission that the attempted gang rape in Sodom, the Levitical prescriptions for ritual purity and the death penalty for non-compliance, the Jewish focus on procreation as a supreme end, the Pauline censure of ritualized promiscuity in the pagan world, and finally the irrational sputterings of certain church fathersidentical in tone to their anti-Semitic rants, incidentallyhave no relevance for a loving couple wishing to establish a life and a home together, too much to ask?
So long as these kinds of things continue to be sidelined in the mainstream Orthodox Church, its gay sons and daughters will remain vulnerable to the allure of such uncanonical entities as the Rainbow Orthodox Church or even worse, to the oblivion of suicide. If the hierarchy thinks this is an exaggeration for dramatic effect, they have homework to do.
Peter J. SanFilippo is a former priest and current communicant of the Orthodox Church, an alumnus cum laude of St. Vladimirs Orthodox Theological Seminary, and the divorced father of five children. He attends school in San Diego, where he resides with his partner of one and a half years.
Thoughts?
EDIT: Not only thoughts, but are his facts correct, even?
A Voice of Dissent in the OrthodoxChurch
by
Peter J. SanFilippo
What is most remarkable about the combined testimony of these and other Orthodox spokesmen is its failure to add a single new or creative thought concerning the problem of diversity in human sexuality to what has already been parroted ad nauseum by their Western cousins in the faith.
This is a shame. Although numerically small in the U.S. and elsewhere outside the borders of traditionally Orthodox countries (e.g., Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, et al.), the Orthodox Church has come to exercise over the past several decades a disproportionately influential role in the theological deliberations of ecumenical initiatives at the local, national, and global levels. Addressing its Western cousins in a voice that rings mysteriously ancient and new, familiar and strange, timeless and relevant at one and the same time, Eastern Orthodoxy attracts the attention and interest of its partners in interfaith dialogue precisely because it has something different to say.
The Orthodox Church is especially well positioned to tackle the challenge of homosexuality creatively and honorably while not violating its essential fidelity to the continuity of holy tradition. For one thing, the Orthodox East as a whole has never countenanced the extreme aversion to human sexuality that has plagued the Roman Church at least from the time of Augustine of Hippo. Married men have been ordained to the diaconate and priesthood in the Orthodox Church since the apostolic era. Canonical legislation dating as far back as the fourth century censures anyone refusing to take communion from the hands of a married cleric, or becoming a monk because he abhors the conjugal state, or leaving his wife under pretext of piety. Finally, the early fifth-century archbishop of Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom, insisted in his preaching on the innate holiness of the conjugal act, in and of itself, whether or not conception resulted or was even possible. Also noteworthy is the fact that, unlike the Roman Church, the contemporary Orthodox Church does not deny the use of artificial contraceptives to its faithful.
And herein lies the key to unlocking the mystery of same-sex marriage, affirming its inherent goodness, and securing for it a rightful place in Orthodox ecclesial life: for Chrysostom as well as for Orthodoxy as a whole, the conjugal act possesses a primarily unitive function, its procreative aspect being only secondary.
Chrysostom also enlarged on the scriptural metaphor of the spousal relationship uniting Christ to the Church and to the individual believer, going as far as asserting that what transpires between spouses in the marriage bed resembles the act of eucharistic communion, and vice versa. This is pretty heady stuff, coming from a late fourth- and early fifth-century celibate churchman.
In words that ring a little odd in modern ears, Chrysostom characterized marriage as an antidote to fornication. Not unlike the Apostle Pauls statement that it is better to marry than to burn, this is properly understood only within the wider context of Chrysostoms take on the passions: these he viewed as inherently good, God-given, but errant impulses needing redirection towards their proper outlets. Marriage serves to prevent the misuse of the essentially good erotic dimension of the human person precisely by constituting its proper locusnamely, fidelity, monogamy, and, in principle if not always in practice, lifelong durability. Finally, marriage creates a little church for the couple, that gathering of two or three where prayer and the day-to-day ascesis of salvation become a collaborative, reciprocally supportive effort.
The traditional Orthodox conception of the inner content of conjugal life and loveincluding its erotic expressiondiffers in no respect whatever from what the Churchs gay sons and daughters have come to know experientially in their own committed, monogamous, durable unions. The hierarchys intransigent, doctrinaire insistence on the indispensable requisite of gender complementarity for conjugal love to be genuine is nothing short of arrogant, and an insult to the integrity of those of us who know otherwise, and who have endured together through trials that would have rent most couples apart.
Metropolitan Maximos is widely reputed for his holiness; Fathers Hopko and Breck are good men. No one expects the Orthodox Church to start blessing same-sex unions overnight. However, is open dialogue too much to ask? Likewise, is the long overdue admission that the attempted gang rape in Sodom, the Levitical prescriptions for ritual purity and the death penalty for non-compliance, the Jewish focus on procreation as a supreme end, the Pauline censure of ritualized promiscuity in the pagan world, and finally the irrational sputterings of certain church fathersidentical in tone to their anti-Semitic rants, incidentallyhave no relevance for a loving couple wishing to establish a life and a home together, too much to ask?
So long as these kinds of things continue to be sidelined in the mainstream Orthodox Church, its gay sons and daughters will remain vulnerable to the allure of such uncanonical entities as the Rainbow Orthodox Church or even worse, to the oblivion of suicide. If the hierarchy thinks this is an exaggeration for dramatic effect, they have homework to do.
Peter J. SanFilippo is a former priest and current communicant of the Orthodox Church, an alumnus cum laude of St. Vladimirs Orthodox Theological Seminary, and the divorced father of five children. He attends school in San Diego, where he resides with his partner of one and a half years.
Thoughts?
EDIT: Not only thoughts, but are his facts correct, even?
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