Monthly Archives: December 2007

Gene Robinson to be a "June bride"

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Bishop Gene Robinson, the infamous gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, is reported as saying:

I always wanted to be a June bride.

And so he is planning to “march down the aisle” with his partner Mark, in a same sex legal union, in June 2008 (not July 4th as reported by Ruth Gledhill). Well, as I wrote in comments here and here, and see also this post, I consider this to be a small step in the right direction: if he will not give up his gay union, it is best that he formally acknowledges it and pledges himself to being faithful to his partner.

But hold on, isn’t there something wrong here? A man who has always wanted to a bride? Continue reading →

Christianophobia and non-Christianophobia

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A Facebook friend asked for comments on this BBC article Christianophobia warning from MP. (UPDATE 5th December: See this report on the debate; the Evangelical Alliance has sent out this Press Release about it.) Meanwhile Ruth Gledhill reports, both in The Times and on her blog, on an interesting case in which a Christian is taking his Christian employers to an Employment Tribunal to complain that he was forced to discriminate against non-Christians.

I will look at the second issue first, partly because it is perhaps simpler. Continue reading →

Australian Archbishop: equal in Christ but not in church

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John Richardson, the Ugley Vicar, reports these words of Archbishop Peter Jensen, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, who is a leading conservative in the worldwide Anglican Communion – the subject is women bishops:

You know that I am opposed to this innovation on scriptural grounds, believing as I do in the equality of men and women in Christ, but our complementarity in church and home.

Let’s look at the last part of this sentence. We have “equality … in Christ, but … complementarity in church and home” Hold on, does this mean that there is a contrast between “in Christ” and “in church”? When we are “in church”, or for that matter at home, are we no longer “in Christ”? Are churches in Australia so non-Christian that they are not even to be considered “in Christ”?

I’m sure that the Archbishop does not really want to teach this. But without this his argument falls apart. If men and women are equal in Christ, logically that equality must apply to everything they do in Christ, which should certainly include everything that happens in church, and in a Christian home. But if they are denied equality in church, then logically either the church is not in Christ or they are being denied the equality in Christ which is being preached.

The Archbishop continues:

I believe that the way that God has ordered our relationships is demonstrably for the best.

But the way he seems to think that God has ordered our relationships cannot be the real way if it is self-contradictory as I have argued.

US arms manufacturer to run UK census?

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Apparently the 2011 UK census will be run by a private company, and one of the two leading bidders for the contract is the US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. There are various reasons why I find this objectionable:

  • Perhaps the least of them: the company manufactures arms. I am not a lover of arms manufacturers, but perhaps they should be encouraged to branch out into peaceful activities like running censuses.
  • This is a foreign company and should not be given access to sensitive information about British citizens.
  • “They also focus on intelligence and surveillance work and boast of their ability to provide ‘integrated threat information’ that combines information from many different sources. … This [census] information would be very useful to Lockheed Martin’s intelligence work”.
  • The choice of Lockheed Martin could compromise the usefulness of the census, because “fears that the data might not be safe could lead to many people not filling in their Census forms.”

The last two points are taken from this post, which also explains what action you can take if, like me, you wish to express your objection to this.

But then I would not want to suggest that the UK government itself runs the census, given its continuing appalling track record on protection of confidential personal data.

Thanks to Pam for drawing this to my attention.

Provinces, dioceses and parishes: relics of mediaeval Christendom which must go

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Diocletian (reigned 284-305) was the last major non-Christian Roman emperor and the last great persecutor of the church in ancient times. Ironically, it was also him who divided up the Roman Empire into new administrative units called “dioceses“. As the Empire became Christianised, and then its administrative structures crumbled under the pressure of barbarian invasions, the bishops of the Catholic church became the only effective local authorities, and gradually dioceses became the areas within which a bishop had authority over all the churches. These dioceses became subdivided into parishes, which were generally the geographical areas associated with an individual church building and priest. Although under late Roman administration a province was a subdivision of a diocese, in the mediaeval western church the term “province” came into use for a higher level unit than a diocese, led by a metropolitan or archbishop.

This geographical division of the church into a hierarchy of different territorial units, although originating in late antiquity, fitted well with the feudal system of mediaeval Europe. Continue reading →