Ordinary Authority, the Apostolic Priesthood, Orthodox Anglicanism and Women’s Ordination

 

The incident of a couple of weeks ago in which Fr. Calvin Robinson, having been invited to address the Mere Anglicanism conference hosted by an ACNA parish in the United States on the subject of how critical theory is contrary to the Gospel and was disinvited from the final panel because in his talk he highlighted feminism’s role in the development of Cultural Marxism and criticized women’s ordination, is still generating much discussion.   Fr. Robinson, if you are unfamiliar with him, is an outspoken conservative Christian commentator from the United Kingdom.   He was denied ordination in the Church of England a few years ago, for his conservative views, but was ordained a deacon in the Free Church of England (the British counterpart to the American Reformed Episcopal Church, it separated from the Church of England in the nineteenth century in protest over the Oxford Movement) then later a priest in the Nordic Catholic Church (a group that left the Lutheran Church of Norway to join the Old Catholics, i.e., the formerly Roman Catholic Churches that rejected Vatican I).   He also had a show on GB News until they dropped him last year in a spasm of political correctness.   The ACNA is the Anglican Church in North America which was founded about fifteen years ago by parishes that separated from the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada (up here the parishes associated with the ACNA go by the name Anglican Network in Canada, ANiC) over the increasing influence of the alphabet soup lobby in the mainline bodies (as seen in same-sex blessings/marriages).   It is recognized by and in full communion with the orthodox provinces of the Anglican Communion (the Global South provinces) although not with the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada or the Episcopal Church, the three most apostate Churches within the Anglican Communion.   Parts of the ACNA practice women’s ordination, other parts do not.   The aforementioned Reformed Episcopal Church, for example, which joined the ACNA when it was formed although it had already been separated from the Episcopal Church for over a century, does not.   This the REC has in common with other Anglican jurisdictions that left the Episcopal Church over its apostasy prior to the alphabet soup crisis, such as those which left when James Parker Dees declared the Episcopal Church apostate in 1963 over liberalism as manifested in her refusal to discipline Bishop Pike when he abandoned the faith entirely (the low church Anglican Orthodox Church and the high church Orthodox Anglican Church, originally a single communion) and, rather obviously, those who signed the St. Louis Affirmation of 1977 which declared the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada to have apostatized from Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church by introducing women’s ordination (called the Continuing Anglican Churches or the Anglican Continuum in the stricter sense, the broader sense of these terms also includes the REC, AOC, OAC, and other smaller groups that left prior to St. Louis, these were intended to be a single body by the Concerned Churchman of St. Louis who, interestingly enough, called the body they so envisioned the Anglican Church in North America).  (1)  The ACNA calls its policy of allowing different dioceses and parishes to have different viewpoints and practices on the matter of women’s ordination by the expression “dual integrities”.      

 

I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the incident itself.   I rather wish to answer an argument that Dr. Bruce Atkinson has posted in several places.   One of those places is the comments section on Dr. David W. Virtue’s article on the Robinson/Mere Anglicanism affair and it is this version, should there be any differences between this and the versions he has posted elsewhere, to which I shall be responding.    Dr. Atkinson is a psychologist and a founding member of the ACNA.

 

His first section under the heading “On WO” reads:

 

1) The New Testament does not discuss the issue of the sacramental ordination of clergy at all, neither male nor female. What became the tradition of clericalism (a ruling and elite priesthood order) only developed after the Apostles had passed. The closest the NT gets to supporting this is where Paul mentions roles of overseer, elder, and deacon (servant) and a few times he or elders prayed and laid hands on disciples for specific tasks. Hardly the same as what later became the sacrament of ordination. And Jesus was against such a ruling privileged priesthood as evidenced in Mark 10:42-44 and Matthew 23:5-12, and as also evidenced by Peter’s view of the priesthood as being of ALL believers (1 Peter 2:4-5, 9).

 

As I have pointed out many times in the past a case against a distinct priesthood within the Church cannot be made from St. Peter’s remarks about the universal priesthood of all believers.   This is because there was a universal priesthood under both Covenants.   In the book of Exodus, the Israelites, having been led by Moses out of Egypt, arrived at the wilderness of Sinai in the nineteenth chapter.   At the beginning of this chapter, the LORD, speaking to Moses out of the mountain, tells him to tell the Israelites “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” (v 6).   This clearly did not preclude the establishment of a more specific priesthood, the Levitical priesthood, within national Israel.   St. Peter, by joining the expressions “royal priesthood” and “holy nation” in 1 Peter 2:9 alludes back to this Old Testament passage.   Since the original did not preclude a more specific priesthood, neither can the New Testament allusion.   Especially since St. Paul speaks of his ministerial work in terms of just such a priesthood.   In Romans 15:16 he writes:

 

That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.

 

The word “ministering” that is placed in bold in the above quotation is in St. Paul’s Greek “ἱερουργοῦντα” (hierourgounta).  This is the present, active, participle of ἱερουργέω (hierourgeo) which means “to officiate as a priest”, “to perform sacred rites”, “to sacrifice”.   It is formed by combining the basic Greek word for “priest” (St. Peter’s word for “priesthood” in 1 Pet. 2:9 is ἱεράτευμα, hierateuma) with the basic Greek word for “work”.   Indeed, the word λειτουργὸν (leitourgon) that is behind the noun “minister” earlier in the verse has connotations of this as well since the primary meaning of the word, “public servant” in the civic sense, clearly does not apply here.

 

That this sort of language is not more widely used of the Apostolic ministry in the New Testament is easily explainable.   The Old Testament priesthood was still functioning at the time.   The Book of Acts brings the history of the Church down to a few years prior to the destruction of the Temple.   SS Peter and Paul were both martyred prior to that event.   Most of the New Testament was written prior to that event.   To more promiscuously refer to the ministry of the Church as a priesthood would have invited confusion at that time.   That this did not prevent St. Paul from referring to it as such in this verse is explainable by a) the fact that his ministry was to the Gentiles as stated in this very verse and so unlikely to be confused with the priesthood of national Israel, and by b) the fact that this verse comes towards the end of an epistle in which it is preceded by an extended discussion of the differences between the two Covenants.

 

The very nature of the rite that the Lord commissioned the Apostolic ministry to perform in the Church necessitates that it be thought of as a priesthood.   There were three types of sacrifices (in terms of what was to be offered) the Levitical priesthood was commissioned to offer in the Old Testament.   There was the offering of animals, who were killed and their blood sprinkled, which was involved in any sacrifice having to do with sin and guilt.   These were a type of the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ and were forever fulfilled in Christ’s Sacrifice.   Then there were the offerings of grain/flour/cakes (meat/meal/grain offerings) and of wine (libations).   These three elements are also featured prominently in the Passover meal.   A covenant in the Old Testament would always be sealed by a sacrifice and concluded by both parties to the covenant eating the sacrifice together as a shared meal.   Jesus Christ offered Himself as the Sacrifice that sealed and established the Covenant of redemption from sin.   In instituting the Lord’s Supper, He took the bread and wine of the Passover, the other two elements offered by the old priesthood in sacrifice, and pronounced them to be His Body and Blood, making a way for God’s people to be perpetually sustained by the food of His One Sacrifice.   Just as baptism replaces circumcision as the rite of initiation under the New Covenant, so the Sacrament by which Christ’s One Sacrifice becomes the sustenance of the believers’ spiritual life takes the place of the sacrifices that looked forward to the One Sacrifice, and so the ministry commissioned to administer the Sacrament is a priesthood within the universal priesthood of the Church, as the Levitical priesthood was a priesthood within the universal priesthood of Israel.

 

Dr. Atkinson’s use of terms like “ruling”, “privileged” and “elite” to describe a priesthood within the universal priesthood of the Church is misleading.   The import of Mk 10:42-44 is not that the Church was not to have governors but that her governors were to govern in a spirit of humility.   Pressed to the extreme of hyper-Protestant anti-clericalism, Mk 10:42-44 would condemn St. Paul in defending his Apostolic authority in the Corinthian epistles and the early chapters of Galatians.   The Lord clearly set His Apostles as governors over His Church, just as clearly the need for structure and order in the Church did not die with the Apostles nor did they let their governance end or die with them.   Already in the New Testament we see them placing others in authority under themselves over local Churches as elders/presbyters, and already in the New Testament we see them commissioning others such as SS Timothy and Titus to exercise the same level of governing authority as themselves, including the authority to ordain elders/presbyters and deacons.   The term bishop (overseer/episkopos) would later be used as the title of the Apostles’ co-governors/successors.   In the New Testament this term is used either interchangeably with elder/presbyter or more likely for the presiding elder/presbyter in each locality.  When it is first unmistakably used for the co-governors/successors of the Apostles, in the epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the description suggests that every presiding elder/presbyter was now what SS Timothy and Titus were in the New Testament.   The rapidity and earliness with which this usage became universal and the fact that it first appears in the writings of St. John’s direct disciples may indicate that St. John, the Apostle who survived the others by decades, had merged the two offices towards the end of his life and ministry.    However that may be, the thing traditionally designated by the term bishop, the person who has been given the ordinary authority (vide infra for explanation of this expression) of the Apostles to govern the Church and ordain presbyters and deacons, is clearly already established in the New Testament.   That the Lord’s instructions in Mk. 10:42-44 have not always been obeyed by those in authority in the Church is lamentable, although not, given the fallenness of human nature, very surprising, but the abuse of something does not invalidate the thing itself.  

 

Dr. Atkinson begins the second section of his argument by saying:

 

2) I will never ignore clear scriptural advice; like most members and clergy in ACNA, I am generally against women’s ordination above the level of deacon. What Paul clearly wrote to Timothy (1 Tim 2, cf. Titus 2:3-5) is that he did not allow women to have authority over men in his churches, but he did not condemn the practice nor was it ever called a ‘sin’ anywhere in the NT. He also wrote elsewhere about male headship in the family (1 Cor 11: 3-10, 1 Cor 14:33-35, Eph 5:22-23)

 

If someone in a position of authority were to say “I do not allow you to walk up to your neighbour, poke him in the eyes, tweak his nose, and pull his beard” would you interpret this as a non-condemnation of eye-poking, nose-tweaking and beard-pulling?

 

His third section, however, begins by saying:

 

3) However… the whole counsel of God provides some mitigating circumstances.

a) The fact that Jesus Himself elevated women (and their roles) above what was regarded as normative in His culture (women were virtual chattel, not even to be spoken to in the street) tells us a lot about the teleological direction we could expect to occur over time in the Kingdom of God by the revelation of scripture made evident by the Holy Spirit. Note Paul’s teaching in Galatians 3:24-29 where egalitarianism is taught as being part of our freedom in Christ versus the Jewish laws and culture. Despite Paul's admonition to Timothy about women's disqualification to have authority over men, Paul was not shy about allowing women to lead where his own welfare (and thus that of the gospel) was concerned (as seen in Romans 16:1-4).

 

This is a common argument but it is no less wrong for being common.   The fact that Jesus elevated women above what was normative in Jewish, and for that matter Roman, culture carries the exact opposite meaning to that which Dr. Atkinson attaches to it.   It makes it all that much more significant that Jesus did not include a woman among the Twelve.    Had He, by treating women as the human beings they are, intended to start the Church on a path that would lead towards women’s ordination He would not have allowed St. Paul to prohibit – his words to St. Timothy are stronger than a mere admonition – women from having authority over men in that way.

 

He continues:

 

b) The issue of Women’s Ordination (WO) is not at all the same as the homosexuality issue where there are absolutely no exceptions in either Old Testament or New Testament that this behavior is an egregious sin that will keep a person out of the Kingdom of God (e.g., 1 Cor 6:9). Rather, the role of women in God’s kingdom on earth has clearly had some exceptions in the Bible, where women have had authority without any divine judgment or criticism being revealed about it. The New Testament reveals that there were women deaconesses and women prophets in NT churches… without any criticism by Paul or other Apostles. And how far should we generalize Peter’s point that the Church consists of the “priesthood of ALL believers”? But I must emphasize that these scriptural exceptions to the rule (like Deborah the judge in the OT) were in fact exceptions.

Therefore, ACNA is not wrong to also have exceptions... but they must be kept relatively rare (to remain exceptions) and never to be turned into a general WO rule (as TEC and the Church of England have done).

 

The issue of Women’s Ordination is related to that of the homosexuality – actually the entire alphabet soup – issue.   I’ll return to that momentarily.   First, I would like to point out how Dr. Atkinson seriously misinterprets the significance of the Scriptural examples of women with authority to which he points.   These are not exceptions to the rule.   They are rather illustrations of a different rule.

 

As orthodox Christians, we believe that God is working in everything that goes on in the world.   We are not Deists who think that God started the world going, like someone winding up a clock, then left it to wind down on its own accord.    God brought Creation into existence ex nihilo and apart from His sustaining its existence it would slip back into nothingness.   The tree in your front lawn, God put there, through multiple different steps including the falling of the seed from which it originally grew, the natural process of growth that He put into the seed, the rain that He caused to fall, etc.   Everything that happens in nature, does so because God is working in and through it in this way.   God is not limited to working in this way.   If He had reason to do so, He could cause a tree to appear out of nowhere in your front lawn without going through all that preliminary motion.   If He did so, this is what we would call a miracle.   God does not work in this direct way unless He has special reason to do so.   His ordinary method of producing a tree in your front laws, is through the means of the seed, the growth, the rain, etc.   A miracle, in which He directly acts without means, is extraordinary.

 

The distinction just made can also be seen in those to whom God delegates authority.   In the Old Testament, God established the Levitical priesthood and the Davidic monarchy.   These were positions of authority that were passed on through the generations in an ordinary manner (David passed his throne to Solomon who passed it to Rehoboam, for example).   This type of authority corresponds to God’s working ordinarily through the means of nature.   There are other examples, however, of God raising up individuals to positions of leadership and authority that correspond to His working extraordinarily through miracles.   The judges are examples of these.   So are the prophets.   Each one was called by God as an individual and given special authority and power.   Since order is one of the more important purposes of structure and ordinary authority there are rules as to how that authority is transmitted.   God is not bound by such rules in raising people up to special authority any more than He is bound by the laws of nature when He performs miracles.   In the New Testament, Jesus gave to the Apostles both ordinary and extraordinary authority when He set them in governance over His Church.   The extraordinary power, such as infallibility when teaching the faith and writing Scripture, could not be passed on to others.   The ordinary authority that they exercised in settling controversies, ordaining presbyters and deacons, and basically governing the Church they passed on to those such as SS Timothy and Titus who succeeded them in governance.   St. Paul’s instructions to St. Timothy in regards to women belong to the rules governing ordinary authority and its transmission.   They do not bind God when it comes to raising up people with special or extraordinary authority like prophets.  

This distinction accounts for Deborah the judge and the prophetesses of both Testaments.    Remember that if someone claims to have received extraordinary authority directly from God, they are to be tested and tried by all the tests of the prophet in both Testaments.

 

This brings us back to the connection between the women’s ordination issue and the alphabet soup issue.   If God raises up a woman as a prophetess or otherwise gives her extraordinary authority that is one thing.   If the rules governing the transmission of ordinary authority in the Church are altered to allow for women’s ordination that is something entirely different.   When that happens it leads to further apostasy.   This is what has happened in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada and the Church of England.   That this further apostasy has taken the form of the affirmation of alphabet people, then same-sex blessings, then outright same-sex marriage, and most recently all the garbage that is preceded by the prefix trans is only to be expected.   When you set aside the rules laid down in Scripture for the transmission of the Apostolic ministry of the Church so as to ordain women you do so for a reason.    In this case you do so because you think the rules of Scripture (and tradition for that matter) are incompatible with some higher standard or ideal you are seeking to achieve.    To regard an ideal or standard as higher than the Word of God is itself a serious apostasy.   When the rule set aside is the prohibition against women in positions of ordinary authority, the ideal that is set above the Word of God, and thus made an idol, is the equality of the sexes.   The equality of the sexes, when treated with this exaggerated importance, becomes the interchangeability of the sexes.   If the sexes are treated as interchangeable when it comes to the priesthood/ministry the next step will be for them to be treated as interchangeable in other areas – such as in who one looks for as a mate and ultimately with which sex one identifies.

 

Of course we could also back the story up and point out that just as women’s ordination has led to the alphabet soup problems of today, so the path to women’s ordination was one the Church set upon when it took that first false step of breaking with the Catholic (in the Vincentian sense) consensus against artificial contraception in Resolution 15 of the 1930 Lambeth Conference which passed because supposedly conservative evangelicals failed to support the conservative Anglo-Catholics in their opposition to the Resolution (for the Biblical case against birth control, see Charles D. Provan’s The Bible and Birth Control, Zimmer Printing, 1989, for an interesting discussion, albeit from a Darwinian perspective, of why affordable, effective, contraception for females led, counter-intuitively, to the ramping up of the feminist demand for abortion and the skyrocketing of single-motherhood, see Dr. Lionel Tiger’s The Decline of Males, St. Martin’s Press, 1999).   That is, however, a topic for another time.

 

(1)    Lest you get the impression that the mainline Anglican Churches in England, Canada, and the United States are entirely apostate, I assure you there are orthodox parishes left in each.  On both sides of the pond, there are parishes within the mainline Anglican Communion that indicate their adherence to the full orthodoxy affirmed at St. Louis by affiliating with Forward in Faith or Forward in Faith North America.   In the Anglican Church of Canada there are parishes that indicate their ACNA type orthodoxy by affiliating with the Anglican Communion Alliance.   My own parish is one affiliated with the Anglican Communion Alliance and personally, while I disagree with separatism as a solution to apostasy, I could sign my full agreement with the Principles of Doctrine and Principles of Morality sections of the St. Louis Affirmation.  

A Cause Neither Lost nor Gained

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph” – T. S. Eliot

Has that strange sound from beneath the high altar of St. James’ Anglican Cathedral in Toronto finally ceased?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The forty-second General Synod of the Canadian branch of the Ecclesia Anglicana convened in Vancouver, British Columbia on the tenth of July. Prominent on the agenda was a motion to alter the canon governing holy matrimony to allow for the performance of same-sex marriages. Canon law requires that such a motion pass two consecutive General Synods. At each of these Synods it must receive a two-thirds supermajority from the lay delegates, from the clergy, and from the episcopal college. It received this, albeit through some questionable shenanigans, at the last General Synod in Richmond Hill, Upper Canada, three years ago. This year, however, while it received 80.9 percent of the lay vote, and 73.2 percent of the clerical vote, it was defeated in the House of Bishops who gave it only 62.2 percent, with fourteen bishops voting against the motion, and two abstaining.

It was this motion to which I alluded when I suggested in the concluding paragraph of my Dominion Day essay that John Strachan, first Bishop of Toronto, was probably spinning in his grave. While it is good that the motion was defeated it is important that we recognize that although this was a defeat, of sorts, for liberalism it was not a triumph for orthodoxy. Had orthodoxy triumphed we would be talking about a liberal motion that never made it past its first round through Synod because it was voted down by lay, clerical, and episcopal supermajorities larger than those required to pass it. The reason it is important to recognize this is because the temptation for the orthodox faithful in the Anglican Church of Canada will be to look upon this as the end of a decades long battle of which they are already weary. This is not the end, but rather the beginning. The liberals may not have had the numbers to overcome the constitutional roadblocks that were wisely placed in the way of quick and easy changes to canon law but they clearly outnumber the orthodox and they are not giving up. Indeed, it is quite apparent that they came to Synod with their Plan B already in place in the event they lost the vote. Their Plan B is basically to treat canon law in the same way in which they have long treated the Holy Scriptures, the Creeds, and the traditions of the Church – as texts that can mean anything, which is another way of saying they mean nothing, and therefore mean whatever they want them to mean. It is this sort of thinking, rather than the mere symptom which is their desire to redefine marriage to suit the alphabet soup crowd, that is the essence of the cancer of liberalism that has been eating away at the Church.

Indeed, the breakdown of the vote reveals that the path that lies ahead for the orthodox faithful will not be an easy one. The duty of the orthodox, when a portion of the Church has fallen into grievous error, is to win those who have strayed back to the truth. This is never easy, but it is much more difficult when those who have fallen away have the larger numbers, and especially when they are a majority even among the bishops, those to whom the specific duty of safeguarding the faith had been passed on by the Apostles. It is interesting that the motion received a larger percentage of the lay vote than the clerical vote. Twenty-one years ago Rev. George R. Eves in a book which addressed the growing divide between liberalism and orthodoxy in the Anglican Church of Canada at a time when the battle over same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage was in its early stages (1) observed that the clergy were a lot more liberal, both theologically and politically, than the laity. If the vote at General Synod accurately reflects the thinking of clergy and laity today – and this is a big if, since it may simply suggest that liberals had control of the lay delegate selection process – then this would appear no longer to be the case. The laity are the largest segment of the Church and if they are also now the most liberal it will be that much harder to reclaim the Church for orthodoxy.

In light of this, the orthodox faithful would do well to remember the words of our Lord and Saviour as recorded in Luke 18:27 “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”

The fight for orthodox Christian truth has being going on since the very founding of the Church – the Apostles first encounter with Simon Magus, to whom the Fathers of the second and third centuries traced the origin of the heresy of Gnosticism, (2) is recorded in the eighth chapter of the Book of Acts – and will continue, according to prophesies made by both Jesus Christ and His Apostles, until the Second Coming. Explicit warnings against false doctrines and/or exhortations to remain true to the Apostolic faith are found in almost every book of the New Testament. With regards to the outcome of this ongoing war and the battles within it the faithful have both the assurance of the Lord Jesus Christ that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church built upon the Apostolic faith (Matt. 16:15-19) and the warnings given to particular Churches about the judgment that will come if they fall away from the faith. The letters to the angels – which in this somewhat singular use of the term means bishops – of the seven Churches of Asia Minor in the second and third chapters of Revelation are a particularly good example of this. Note the warning to the bishop of Ephesus: (3)

Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent (Rev. 2:5)

The falling away that is addressed here was less than the abandonment of the faith for which the term apostasy is usually reserved. Had the Ephesians been guilty of apostasy the warning would hardly have been lesser.

The assurance of Matthew 16 and the warnings of Revelation 2-3 do not contradict each other. The former is made to the catholic Church, the latter to particular Churches. The gates of hell, of which heresy and apostasy are weapons, shall never prevail against the catholic Church, that is to say, the entire or whole Church, but particular Churches within the catholic Church - and, sadly, Church history demonstrates that this is as true of entire dioceses and provinces as it is of individual parishes – can fall to heresy or apostasy. Fortunately, the same history also provides examples of particular Churches that have been recovered from heresy. (4) The orthodox must be ever vigilant for the “faith once delivered unto the saints” but must not succumb to despair when error appears to be in the ascendancy. The present situation in the worldwide Anglican Communion is a particular smaller-scale illustration of this point. However much the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Episcopal Church in the United States have been permeated by the leaven of liberalism, orthodoxy prevails in most of the other provinces of the wider Anglican Communion.

There are those who would object to depicting the marriage debate as one between orthodoxy and heresy. The grounds for this objection, when it is based on something more than mere squeamishness over the use of strong language, have only the most superficial sort of validity. That same-sex marriage has never been formally condemned as a heresy by an ecumenical Council is due entirely to the fact that up until the last twenty to thirty years or so nobody would have ever dreamed that the need for such an anathema might arise. That the Creeds do not contain a line to the effect of “and I believe in one holy, sacred, matrimony between man and woman” is not because this is something about which there has been no “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus” consensus among the faithful, but because like many other truths about which the Scriptures are clear this one would be out of place there. Creeds, as the formal affirmations of the Church’s faith, are not intended to be comprehensive lists of all the truths she adheres to but of those upon which she rests her confidence in God’s grace. (5)

There is, however, a sense in which the objectors are right, but to the opposite effect of what they intend. The ancient heresies were affirmations of the Christian faith that deviated from orthodoxy on some essential point because of an overemphasis upon another. Sabellianism emphasized the unity of God to the point of denying the Trinity, whereas Tritheism was the reverse of this. Arianism denied the full deity of Jesus Christ, whereas Docetism and Apollinarism denied His full humanity. If this is what heresy is, liberalism is something much worse. Keep in mind the point made earlier about the push for same-sex marriage being merely a symptom. (6) The disease to which it points is a way of thinking in which individual wish-fulfilment is the highest good, truth can be discovered or created by majority vote, and every affirmation of the Creed, every tradition of the Church, and every statement of Scripture is open to an infinite number of re-interpretations to bring it in accordance with these ideas. Heresy affirms the Christian faith while distorting its truths, liberalism denies the Christian faith under the guise of an affirmation. It is far more dangerous than any mere heresy.

This does not make our duty to contend for the orthodox faith against liberalism any less than against heresy. If anything, the duty is greater. The same Scriptural warnings apply – but mercifully, so do the Scriptural promises.


(1) The book entitled Two Religions – One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada was self-published by Rev. Eves in 1998 and has just been revised and updated for this year’s General Synod. The updated version is available here: https://georgereves.com/books/two-religions-one-church/

(2) St. Justin Martyr, Apologia Prima, 26, St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I.23. St. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, IV.51 and VI.2, 4-15.

(3) At the time the Book of Revelation was written, this would have been St. Timothy, the same St. Timothy whom St. Paul recruited to join his evangelistic mission from the Church in Lystra in Acts 16 and to whom he later wrote two canonical epistles. Since St. Timothy was bishop of Ephesus until his death in 97 AD, he would have been the one addressed regardless of whether St. John’s exile to Patmos took place under Nero or Domitian.

(4) Take the history of the orthodox Church’s struggle with Arianism in the third and fourth centuries, for example. Several provinces which accepted or leaned towards the heresy condemned by the first ecumenical Council in 325 AD were later brought back into communion with the orthodox Church. There was a period, however, not long after the Nicene Council, when the Arians very much appeared to have the upper hand.

(5) Peter Toon made this point with regards to other truths. “Neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene Creeds mention hell or Satan. To add to either of these the words, “and in one devil, tempter and enemy of souls; and in damnation to hell everlasting,” would sound odd; belief in Satan and hell is of a different nature than belief in God and heaven. The contents of the creeds point to realities which are to lay hold upon us and grip us in faith and love: Satan and hell are to be avoided, not greeted.” Austin Farrer said something that was very similar in Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.

(6) An even more serious symptom is evident in the apology retiring primate Fred Hiltz made on behalf of the Church to Canadian aboriginals at General Synod and in some of the articles regarding dialogue with the Jewish community that have appeared in recent issues of the Anglican Journal. While dialogue and better relations between these communities can hardly be viewed as a bad thing per se, liberalism is willing to sacrifice the truths of the Christian faith to achieve these goals. One such truth is that there is only one true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The idols of pagans – whether we are talking about the gods such as Zeus and Odin that European peoples worshipped prior to converting to Christianity, the gods that North American aboriginals worshipped before being evangelized, or other pagan deities of other peoples – are demons. Another such truth is that the saving grace of the one true God is only available through the Redeemer He has provided for the fallen race of mankind, His Son Jesus Christ. Liberals appear to be willing to sacrifice both of these truths to achieve “reconciliation” with the aboriginals, and the second of these truths to achieve dialogue with the Jews. Stephen Roney, who is a member of the Roman Church, has pointed out how a denial of these truths is latent in Hiltz’s apology. For why the second truth should not sacrificed to the goal of better dialogue with the Jews see the chapter on evangelizing the Jews in Suicide - The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada?, written by the “Anglican Billy Graham” Dr. Marney Patterson and published by Cambridge Publishing House in Cambridge, Ontario in 1999.

Why the Church Should Not Perform Same-Sex Blessings

An Exercise in Stating the Obvious


But unto the ungodly saith God, ‘Why dost thou preach my laws, and takest my covenant in thy mouth; Whereas thou hatest to be reformed, and hast cast my words behind thee? When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst unto him, and hast been partaker with the adulterers. Thou does let thy mouth speak wickedness, and with thy tongue dost set forth deceit. Thou sittest and speakest against thy brother, and dost slander thine own mother’s son. These things hast thou done, and I held my tongue, and thou thoughtest that I am even such a one as thyself; but I will reprove thee, and set before thee the things that thou hast done. Psalm 50:16-21. (1)

Early in the sixteenth century, the Parliament of England under King Henry VIII passed a number of Acts which took the Church of England out from under the authority of the Bishop of Rome, i.e., the Pope. While this was done for base reasons – to allow the king to divorce a wife, whom he had no Scriptural grounds to divorce, and whom he had needed special ecclesiastical permission to marry in the first place – it had the effect of correcting, at least in England, the great wrong that had been done to the Western Church when the Bishop of Rome had, against the doctrines and traditions of the undivided early Church, asserted his supremacy over the entire Church.

This act of government contained much that is worthy of condemnation, as well as much that is worthy of praise, but it created for the English Church a unique opportunity, the opportunity to carry out the reforms that Luther and Calvin were calling for in continental Europe within a Church that had full organizational and organic continuity with that established by Christ and His Apostles in the first Century. She was not a sect or denomination started up from scratch, by reformers excommunicated by corrupt ecclesiastical authorities, like several of her counterparts on the Continent. She consisted of the same parishes, in the same dioceses, under the same bishops in Apostolic succession, after the Act of Supremacy that she had consisted of before. She administered the same sacraments, and recognized the same creeds – Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian.

Once she was removed from Roman control she gradually introduced some important and much needed reforms. The liturgy was translated into the beautiful English of the Book of Common Prayer, a series of official vernacular translations of the Bible culminated in the majestic King James Version of 1611, and, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, in which the supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures was asserted, as was the Scriptural truth that we are saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, without any help from our own efforts, was produced as the Church’s confession of faith. She became a Church that was both reformed and catholic, which asserted the great truths of the Reformation, while being part of the “One, Holy, Apostolic, and Catholic Church” in every sense, being in organic continuity with the undivided Church that had produced the Creed from which those words were taken, back in the fourth century AD.

The unique situation of the Church of England, made it possible for her to possess the strengths and enjoy the blessings of both Catholicism and Protestantism. It also made her vulnerable to the weaknesses and failings of both. Both the strengths and weaknesses of both the Catholic tradition and the reformed faith have manifested themselves repeatedly throughout Anglican history. She has experienced vast periods of spiritual death and dryness and often been plagued with Erastianism and simony but has also been frequently blessed with revival, including both the evangelical revival led by the Wesleys in the eighteenth century and the Catholic revival led by the Oxford Tractarians (2) in the nineteenth century.

Today there is a trend in the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, that violates both components of the Anglican tradition. I refer to the movement to reverse traditional and Scriptural teachings about homosexuality.

This movement is several decades old. The organization that, with an irony it does not recognize, calls itself Integrity Canada, (3) and which exists for the express purpose of promoting acceptance of homosexuality within the Anglican Church of Canada, was first organized in 1975 according to its website. Its American parent organization had been founded the year previously. My paternal grandmother received The Mustard Seed, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon, and I would read it whenever I visited her. I don’t recall exactly when I started reading these, just that it was in the eighties some time, but I do remember that the largest part of the letters to editor section always seemed to consist of arguments about homosexuality. More recently, a number of dioceses have passed resolutions at their synods asking their bishops to authorize the use of rites blessing same-sex relationships, despite a moratorium on the subject that is supposed to be in place, having been agreed upon at the national synod. Beginning in 2002 with Michael Ingham in the Diocese of New Westminster in British Columbia, several bishops have granted their concurrence to these resolutions. On November 1st of this year, our own Bishop Donald Phillips issued his concurrence to such a resolution, (4) which had passed by majority of over two-thirds a couple of weeks earlier at the 111th synod of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land. (5)

This problem is not limited to the Anglican Church, of course. It is present in many other denominations as well. The United Church of Canada, the denomination in which I grew up, began ordaining openly homosexual clergy back in the late 1980s and performs same-sex marriages. Same-sex blessings are available in many other mainstream Protestant denominations as well. The reasons that we will be looking at as to why this sort of thing should not be done apply to all Christian Churches.

One major reason for this is the influence of the surrounding culture upon the Church. In previous ages limitations and restrictions upon human desires were regarded as necessary for basic human survival as well as for any sort of higher civilization. The modern way of thinking is very different to this. In the modern age, human happiness came to be conceived of in terms of the fulfillment of the individual’s every desire and limitations upon those desires, even if those limitations were natural, came to be regarded as obstacles to be overcome. Modern science and technology were bent towards this goal of the elimination of limitations upon human desire. (6) In the period just before and after World War II, the intellectual foundations were laid for a revolution against traditional restraints upon human sexuality. (7) It did not take long for that revolution to materialize. In 1953 Hugh Hefner founded Playboy Magazine which would proclaim the message of sexual liberation to heterosexual males. Ten years later, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique launched the second wave of feminism, the so-called “Women’s Liberation Movement” which had as one of its objectives the promotion among women of the same liberation from traditional restraints upon sexuality for women that the “Playboy philosophy” was promoting among men. Meanwhile, during the 40’s and 50’s, Marxist intellectuals had been at work in the universities, undermining their students’ respect for parental and other traditional authority by teaching that the traditional culture was hopelessly corrupt, hypocritical, based upon greed, and the source of injustice, oppression, and war, and planting in their students’ minds the seeds of rebellion. When these seeds produced fruit in the “counter-cultural” student rebellion movement of the 1960’s, one of the expressions of this “counter-culture” was the “free love” that the philosophical enemies of Christianity had been calling for centuries. The sexual revolution was underway, empowered by the technological development of effective and inexpensive birth control. (8)

The sexual revolution wrought a change in the prevailing attitude towards homosexuality in the secular culture. At first this new attitude was a liberal attitude of tolerance. Then it became a politically correct attitude. So-called political correctness refers to the late twentieth century phenomenon, in which the force of social and cultural pressure is used to the maximum degree to enforce the replacement of traditional ideas with modern, egalitarian, ideas. In this case the liberal attitude of tolerance towards homosexuality as an “alternative lifestyle” to the norm of heterosexual marriage developed into the politically correct attitude that full social and cultural acceptance of homosexuality is a basic human right of homosexuals, that to deny them that full acceptance is to perpetuate an historical injustice, and that the traditional idea that homosexuality is sinful must be driven from polite society and rejected as “homophobia”.

It is in this cultural context that the movement within the Church to reverse traditional and Scriptural teachings on homosexuality and have the Church bless same-sex relationships came into existence. It is regrettable that the decaying, surrounding culture would have such influence in the Church as to cause its leaders to seek to alter Church teaching and practice to conform to the decay in explicit disobedience to St. Paul’s injunction to the Church in Rome:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service, And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may truly prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1-2)

In fairness to those pushing for this change, many of them feel that they are following Jesus’ example and simply practicing the love Jesus so frequently commanded His disciples to practice. Jesus, they point out, was harshly criticized by the religious people of His day, for “eating with sinners”. That is true, but they fail to acknowledge the difference between what they are doing and what Jesus did, a difference far larger than any similarity. Jesus did not shun the company of sinners, but He did not condone sin either, much less bless it. He called the sinner to repentance and forgiveness.

The leaders of the movement to have the Church institute a rite of blessing for same-sex relationships also see themselves as continuing the Anglican tradition of accommodation for theological differences. In the Anglican tradition, so long as one conformed to the Elizabethan Settlement and did not rock the boat, there was a great deal of leeway to interpret the tradition in either a more Catholic (High Church) or a more Protestant (Low Church) way.

The movement towards same-sex blessings, however, violates both sides of classical Anglicanism.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, Richard Hooker, the Master of the Temple Church in London and later the rector of St. Mary the Virgin in Bishopbourne, Kent, wrote a multi-volume treatise defending the organization, practices, and teachings of the Church of England against the attacks of the Puritans. The Puritans were radical Protestants, and in many cases republicans who used their religious zeal to cloak their seditious activities, who wished to see the abolition of the office of bishop, the reorganization of the Church of England along the model of the Church John Calvin had established in Geneva, and every ritual and practice that resembled those of the Roman Church abolished unless a clear text commanding them could be found somewhere in Scriptures. In Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker answered the Puritans by arguing that just because the Scriptures do not command something, does not mean that they forbid it and that in fact, it is the reverse of this that was the case. In making this argument, Hooker upheld the final authority of Scripture, but also gave weight to tradition and reason. Since then, the idea of an appeal to the three-fold authority of Scripture, tradition, and reason has been a basic element of Anglican theology.

The Catholic side of Anglicanism emphasizes tradition, the Protestant side emphasizes the Scriptures. These are complementary rather than contradictory emphases. Tradition is that which is handed down or passed on. In the Scriptures, St. Paul commanded the Church in Thessalonica to “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” and described the Gospel as a tradition to the Corinthian Church when he introduced it with the words “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received.” The Holy Scriptures themselves are a tradition – we have them because the Church has faithfully passed them down to us through the centuries. The traditions of any organic community have, within that community, what we call prescriptive authority, that is authority backed by the weight of ancient use. This is true of the traditions of the Church which, as the Body of Christ, is the most organic of communities. The Holy Scriptures have a greater authority than that, however, for they are the written Word of God and therefore speak with God’s own authority.

Same-sex blessings, violate both tradition and Scripture. The movement to affirm and bless same-sex relationships is only a few decades old and the weight of two thousand years of Church tradition, from the Apostles to the present, is against it. It is not a matter of updating the tradition or bringing it into the twenty-first century. Some change is necessary, in any tradition, in order to keep the tradition alive, but that does not mean that a tradition can survive any and every kind of change.

The difference between a change that preserves a tradition and a change that destroys a tradition can be illustrated with the analogy of translation. In the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer translated “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem Omnipoténtem, Factórem cæli et terræ, Visibílium ómnium et invisibílium”, the first section of the Nicene Creed, as “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” This translation accurately and faithfully expresses the essence of the Latin text in English. If however, we were to render it as “I feel in touch with a higher power or powers, that you can call God if you like, who is Father/Mother over our process of becoming” we would destroy its essential meaning altogether.

The introduction of same-sex blessings is the latter kind of change. It does not just introduce a new practice that had not previously been a part of the tradition, nor is it merely an updating of style, form, and appearance that leaves the essence of the tradition intact. If the Church blesses erotic relationships between people of the same sex it is blessing what the tradition up until now has condemned as sinful. Since this change also goes against the teachings of Scripture it should not be considered at all, but even were it not the case that it went against Scripture a change of this magnitude should only ever be considered when a case can be made that the change is absolutely necessary, should never be made with haste, and should only ever be undertaken after every factor has been reflected upon at length and with the utmost caution. (9) In this case, however, the cause of same-sex blessings has been aggressively pursued by activists determined to see the change happen regardless of what Scripture, tradition, and the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada have to say.

Of course many of these activists maintain that same-sex blessings are not really contrary to the teachings of Scripture after all. Let us now briefly examine the validity of the arguments they use to support this counter-intuitive idea.

In the Torah, God says rather plainly “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” (Leviticus 18:22)

Now those who wish to affirm and bless same-sex relationships will point out that this commandment is part of the Mosaic Code which contains plenty of things Christians don’t follow today, such as animal sacrifices, dietary restrictions that prohibit the eating such things as pork and shellfish, and the Jewish calendar of feasts, and argue that since we are not bound by these parts of the Mosaic Code we should not be found by this verse either.

There are several major flaws in that argument.

First, the Christian Church has New Testament Scriptural authority for not following these other parts of the Mosaic Code. The Book of Hebrews explains that the Old Testament sacrificial system was given as an illustration of the one, ultimate, sacrifice, which would effectively take away the sins of the world, the death of Jesus Christ on the cross (Hebrews. 9:12-10:18). The tenth chapter of the Book of Acts records how St. Peter was given a vision in which he was commanded to eat animals that were unclean under the Mosaic Code but which he was told were now clean.

Second, the New Testament does not lift the commandment in Leviticus 18:22 but rather reinforces it. In his first epistle to Timothy, St. Paul identifies “them that defile themselves with mankind” as being among the “lawless and disobedient” who are the reason we need laws, in his first epistle to the Corinthian Church he says that “the effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” shall not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, and in his epistle to the Church in Rome he describes same-sex erotic relationships among both sexes as “vile affections” that God gives people up to once they turn from worshipping Him to worshipping idols (1 Timothy 1:9-10,1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Romans 1:26-27).

Third, when God gave the ceremonial aspects of the Mosaic Law, His given reason for doing so was to make the Israelites a holy people, i.e., to set them apart from other peoples and mark them as belonging to Him. In the eleventh chapter of Leviticus, for example, where He says which animals are clean and which are unclean, He follows up the instructions by saying “For I am the LORD your God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves and ye shall be holy; for I am holy.” (v. 44) While we often think of holiness in terms of purity, the primary meaning of the word is “separateness.” He does not say that the other nations are doing wrong in eating the animals that He describes as “unclean” for the Israelites, and in fact in the ninth chapter of Genesis He told the human race after the Flood that He was giving them all birds, fish, and beasts to eat, and made no distinction there between clean and unclean.

This is not the case with the commandments in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus. This chapter opens with God speaking to Moses and instructing him to tell the Israelites that they are not to do the things that were done in Egypt and Canaan but are to follow the judgements and ordinances of the Lord; then He lists several specific things they are not to do, after which He declares:

Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;) That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you. For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people. Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God. (vv. 24-30)

This sort of language is never used of the ceremonial aspects of the Mosaic Code that are set aside as requirements for Christians in the New Testament. The Sabbath, the dietary laws, the holy days, etc. were enjoined upon Israel to set her apart and mark her as belonging to God. There is not a trace of condemnation for anyone outside of Israel for not following these commandments. When the Gospel is to be preached to the Gentiles, and the Gentiles integrated into the Church alongside Jewish believers, these commandments are set aside.

The practices forbidden in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus, however, have defiled the Canaanites and their land, have brought God’s judgement upon these people, and will bring a similar judgement upon the Israelites if they practice them. Compare this chapter with the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy. In this chapter God gives Israel His instructions as to how they are to conduct themselves in war. The Israelites are commanded, when they go against a city, to make overtures of peace and only to fight if the offer of peace is rejected. This rule, however, did not apply to cities belonging to the nations then living in the land God had promised to Israel. These were to be utterly destroyed to the last living soul in order “That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods.” The practices forbidden in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus are these abominations, which are so abhorrent that God ordered Israel to annihilate the nations that practiced them lest they be tainted with them. (10)

Clearly, therefore, the acts prohibited in that chapter are not described in the Scriptures as being merely mala prohibita for the Israelites, i.e., wrong only because the law forbids them and subject to change in the law, but as mala in se, wicked in and of themselves. The only thing left to those who believe the Church should be blessing same-sex relationships and who don’t want to be perceived as casting Biblical authority aside, is to argue that the particular kind of same-sex relationships they wish to see affirmed and blessed are somehow different from those condemned in Scripture.

Those who make that argument, claim that the passages condemning homosexual acts in the Bible, are only talking about homosexual promiscuity, prostitution, rape, and ritual homosexuality in connection with idolatrous worship. They claim that committed, loving, monogamous same-sex relationships are not mentioned in Scripture and are therefore not condemned. This is a very dubious argument. Even if we accepted the questionable claim that the Greek words used in verses like 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 have a narrow meaning that covers only specific types of homosexuality, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind” is rather clear and lacking in exceptions and qualifications. A much stronger Scriptural case than this should be required if the Church is going to make a decision to alter two thousand years of Christian doctrine and practice. (11)

The decision to bless same-sex relationships is a wrong decision. It goes against both Scripture and tradition, and indeed, indicates that for many in the Church the authority of Scripture, tradition, and reason has been replaced with that of emotion, popular sentiment, and what is socially in vogue. It is a major alteration of an ancient tradition, made without a compelling necessity or the prudence, caution, and restraint appropriate to changes of this magnitude. It is an assault upon the unity, holiness, Catholicity, and Apostolicity of the Church, since it is a divisive decision which conforms the Church to a rapidly decaying and corrupt culture, in rejection of the doctrine of the Apostles which has been taught and believed everywhere, in all times, and by everyone throughout the Church. (12)

After the Diocese of New Westminster became the first diocese in the Anglican Church of Canada to approve these same-sex blessings, Ted and Virginia Byfield, commenting on the event, noted that the Anglican Church has long consisted of what they call the "Establishment Church", which "represents anything conventional opinion happens to approve at the time", and the "Dissident Church", including both High and Low wings, which "represents Jesus Christ".  "All of Anglicanism's great achievements--and there have been many--were the work of the Dissidents", the Byfields declared, and noted that whenever the Establishment party was in control, the Anglican Church declined, but when it was led by the Dissidents,"it invariably prosperes". (13)

For much of the last century, since the 1930 Lambeth Confrence where the Anglican Communion had the dubious distinction of being the first Church to break with the two thousand year Christian consensus against artificial contraception, the Establishment Wing has led the Church into making one stupid decision after another to conform with an increasingly anti-Christian, corrupt and progressive culture.   It is time for the Dissidents to lead the Church again, before the Establishment Wing eliminates every last vestige of recognizable Christianity from her.

(1) From the Psalter in the 1962, Canadian revision of the Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer takes its Psalter from the Great Bible of 1539, which was a revision of the Tyndale Bible intended for official use in the Church of England. As the official, authorized, Bible of the Church of England, it was replaced by first the Bishop’s Bible and then the King James Bible, long before the standard 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer was published, but the Psalter in the prayer book remained that of the Great Bible.

(2) John Henry Newman, John Keble, Edward Pusey, etc..

(3) The name comes from the way this organization translates Psalm 84:11. This verse states that God will withhold no good thing from “them that walk uprightly”. They replace the “walk uprightly” that appears in the Authorized Bible and most other translations with “walk with integrity”.

(4) http://www.rupertsland.ca/wp-content/uploads/Synod-res-B-3-Final-Concurrence-21.pdf

(5) http://www.rupertsland.ca/wp-content/uploads/Minutes-of-Synod-2012-authorized-version.pdf

(6) Canadian philosophical conservative George Grant was a noted critic of modernity and technology. Influenced by the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Leo Strauss, and Jacques Ellul, he argued that technology, the blending of science and art, was the means whereby modern man accomplished two questionable goals – casting off traditional restraints upon the passions and asserting imperial domination over nature, himself, and his fellow man. This pops up constantly throughout his writings and, in a CBC interview with David Cayley, later published in George Grant in Conversation (Concord: Anansi Press, 1995), Grant said, regarding Pope John Paul II, “I have some sympathy for him in what he is trying to oppose, something which is absolutely central to modernity: the emancipation of the passions”

(7) Beginning with Margaret Mead’s The Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, the school of Cultural Anthropology founded by Franz Boaz began producing “studies” of tribal societies in which restraints upon sexuality were absent, resulting supposedly, in a peaceful, harmonious, idyllic, existence. In 1948 and 1953, Alfred Kinsey’s reports on human sexuality were published, the findings of which suggested that deviation from heterosexual monogamy was more widespread that previously thought. In 1955, Herbert Marcuse, a Frankfurt School neo-Marxist teaching at Columbia University, published his Eros and Civilization, a response of sorts to Sigmund Freud’s 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents, challenging Freud’s conclusion that restrictions on sexuality are essential to civilization, answering Freud’s unanswered question of whether civilization is worth the price with a no, and calling for the elimination of restraints upon sexuality. In recent decades, the methodology and the conclusions of both the Boaz school of Anthropology and the Kinsey Reports have been shown to be deeply flawed. See Dr. Derek Freedman’s Margaret Mead in Samoa: the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, (Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, (Basic Books, 1999) and regarding the Kinsey Reports, Dr. Judith G. Reisman’s Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People, (Lafayette: Huntington House, 1990) and Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America (WND Books, 2010).

(8) This development empowered the sexual revolution, because it allowed the revolutionaries to argue that since technology had now made it possible to have sexual intercourse without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy, the old rules governing sexual conduct were obsolete and could be eliminated. The obvious flaw in this argument is that prevented inconvenient pregnancies was not the only reason for the old rules. Another flaw can be inferred from the fact that the demand for the lifting of restrictions upon abortion increased after the invention of the birth control pill.

(9) Richard Hooker wrote “For the world will not endure to hear that we are wiser than any have been which went before. In which consideration there is cause why we should be slow and unwilling to change, without very urgent necessity, the ancient ordinances, rites, and long approved customs, of our venerable predecessors. The love of things ancient doth argue stayedness, but levity and want of experience maketh apt unto innovations.” Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, chapter vii, 3. This can be found on page 90 of Volume 2, of The Works of Richard Hooker, the 2010 print-on-demand edition, arranged by Michael Russell from John Keble’s 1836 edition. If this is the case with regards to the customs and ceremonies of the Church, how much more so is it the case of her ethical teachings.

(10)The account of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis, is not sufficient in itself to establish that same-sex erotic relationships are intrinsically sinful, because it was rape the men of Sodom were intent upon, and someone could always argue that it was only the intended rape and not the fact that it was same-sex that was deemed wicked. Although the counterargument could be made that if that were the case, Lot’s offer of his daughters as a substitute makes little sense, God did tell the prophet Ezekiel to say that the sin of Sodom consisted of pride, arrogance, greed, idleness, and neglect and indifference to the needy, as well as sexual perversion (Ezekiel 16:49-50). Nevertheless, when the account of Sodom is compared to the very similar account, at the end of the Book of Judges, of the Benjamites of Gibeah, a point can be made that reinforces what we have seen about the seriousness of the prohibitions in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus. Sodom and Gomorrah, were cities in Canaan, judged for their wickedness in the days of Abraham. The Book of Judges, begins by telling how the Israelities failed to carry out God’s commandment regarding the nations of Canaan but had instead made peace treaties with many of them, and how as a result they were led astray into committing the abominations of these nations. This began a cyclical pattern of their falling into these abominations, being judged by God, repenting and being restored, and then falling again, which is well established in the Book of Judges and which continues throughout the Old Testament history. In the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Judges, there is an account in which a Levite, travelling with his servant and his concubine, enters the Benjamite city of Gibeah and accepts the hospitality of an Ephraimite who lives there. The men of Gibeah, recreate the sin of Sodom by besieging the house, and demanding that the Levite be turned over to them that they “may know him.” The Levite’s concubine is turned over to them and the incident results in a civil war in which the tribe of Benjamin is reduced to six hundred men. The point of this narrative, placed at the end of the Book of Judges, is that the Israelites, having been ensnared by the sinful ways of the nations they had failed to destroy, had become the new Sodom.

(11) I have said nothing about the third traditional Anglican authority, reason. This is not because I think the decision to bless same-sex relationships is reasonable. The decision was made to conform to a culture, in which “male” and “female” are regarded as malleable categories, to be defined by each individual for him/her/itself, in which a person’s sex is regarded as something that can be changed through surgery but his “sexual orientation” is an unchangeable destiny, fixed in stone from birth, in which those who express their belief that homosexual acts are sinful in an irenic fashion are accused of “hate” in words full of anger, vulgarity, and contempt by those who claim to believe in tolerance and love. That is hardly a rational choice.

(12) “Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” is the canon of fifth century St. Vincent of Lerins, a traditional brief way of explaining how to identify the small-o orthodox or small-c catholic faith.

(13) Ted and Virginia Byfield, "As goes the Royal Bank, so goes  Canada's Anglican Church, the slave of social conformity", Report Newsmagazine, National Edition, July 8, 2002, p. 51