We believe this consultation is too narrowly focused and too predetermined to animate the sort of public debate about the nature of marriage which our society needs. The incidence of cohabitation and the frequency of divorce suggests that our society is an unlikely one in which a new and universal understanding of marriage has been discovered. It is noticeable that most of the countries which have already introduced same sex marriage have a similar pattern of marital instability. There seems a good deal of confusion surrounding marriage itself.
The New Testament shows that the first Christians quickly developed a fresh understanding of marriage but one which did not create a new institution. They reinterpreted what they had already experienced. In Ephesians 5. Over time different traditions in the Christian Church have expressed this in different ways.
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In the Catholic tradition marriage is a sacrament. For Reformed Christians it is a covenant binding the couple together but also uniting them with God. Anglican thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed an understanding of marriage as a little commonwealth, a source of divine grace, a social unit and a binding and solemn covenant between the spouses. The most recent teaching document on marriage from the House of Bishops of the Church of England was published in September It can be found on line at www.
What this teaching document also illustrates is that our present understanding of marriage is grounded in the mutual love of the couple themselves and their commitment to each other, which Christians believe to be one means of experiencing the love of God and the power of his grace. Such teaching contains little which is gender specific. It seems clear there is further work to be done to articulate an understanding of marriage grounded in scripture and tradition and which engages clearly with the questions being raised by significant changes in our society.
It does not discuss same sex marriage, an indication of how recently this debate has emerged. It is surely to the benefit of the whole of our society if gay people live in faithful, stable and publicly recognised relationships. Indeed, some gay relationships are a model of faithfulness compared with the serial monogamy so prevalent among heterosexual people. Civil partnerships were introduced less than six years ago and seem to have won rapid acceptance in wider society. The Government proposes retaining civil partnerships but not extending them beyond same sex relationships as well as introducing same sex marriage.
The rapidity of these developments makes us wonder how well considered they are. We are sympathetic to the full inclusion of gay people in our society and the provision of appropriate means to enable them to maintain stable and lasting relationships. We believe, however, that the redefinition of marriage itself in the law of the land raises other important issues about the nature of marriage itself.
The way in which the Government is going about it appears to create a new and ill-defined phenomenon called religious marriage, a novelty liable to generate more problems than the present legislation will solve. If you value what this story gives you, please consider supporting the Eastern Daily Press. Click the link in the orange box above for details. Slim 0. Toned 1.
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