Information Sheet



1. This issue isn’t important.

Everybody should stop talking about it, and it will go away.

It doesn’t affect me personally.

2. We need to make changes to the Church’s beliefs and morality to make them more just and loving, and to be more up to date.

The Anglican Church of Canada has the right to make this kind of decision. Whatever is decided, we all should go along with it for the sake of unity.

Whatever the Bible or church tradition says, we can know what God wants by what’s in our hearts (a little voice, or by our consciences, or our leaders, or the majority, or our culture, or certain scholars).

3. It doesn’t really matter what we believe or do, as long as we are loving (nice, kind, tolerant….).

It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you believe something.

We should just have our own thoughts and beliefs and not bother about this. Let others deal with it.

A lot of wrong has been done by people assuming they know God’s will, so we shouldn’t presume to know or tell others what’s right.

4. God is love (1 John 4:8,16, etc),

so anything that is loving is what God wants.

All that matters is that we love everybody.

If we would just love everybody this issue will go away.

1. This issue could change the Church forever--in Canada and the world. We are forced to face this issue by those calling for the Church to change its values. If our God cares about it, we need to also.

2. The Church is not a democracy, a social institution that a majority vote can change. The Anglican Church of Canada is part of “one, holy, catholic church” for whom Jesus Christ is Lord. So it exists over time (we are part of all the saints who have gone before us and will come after us) and world wide (we are part of the Church around the world). We say our lord (ruler, head) is the Lord Jesus Christ and that we believe in the Trinity.

This is God’s Church. To be faithful to our God, to follow the true leading of the Holy Spirit, any serious change has to be shown to be required by or consistent with our authorities (what we believe God has given us through which to discover or know God’s will): first Scripture, then reason and tradition. Otherwise, we are representing or serving some other God, or just ourselves, or those around us. We could cease to be followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

3. While anyone can believe whatever they want, that doesn’t make it Christian or true to our God. Check out Info Sheet #2 on the biblical witness. Does God care about what we believe or do? There are thousands of verses that say yes. We can’t say something is okay with God unless we can show it’s what our God wants. That it doesn’t matter what we believe is the attitude of our culture; that’s not consistent with the Bible, or with Christian tradition, or even with reason! (i.e., It even matters how you define loving!) As Christians, we have to learn how to put God first while still loving everybody whether we agree with them or can support them in their choices or not. Sometimes the Church has wrongly forced its values on others; Christ’s example is to speak the truth, show compassion and be willing to suffer for what you believe.

4. God is love. Love isn’t God. It’s God who shows us and tells us what is loving (1 John 4:1-6,10, 5:2-3, 18-19, etc). If God says not to do something, it’s because He loves us and it’s not good for us, so it isn’t loving. In fact, if God says something is wrong or sinful, it would be unloving to say its okay—we’d be leading people away from God and His best. As our creator who loves us, we believe God does know what is best for us.

Sexual fulfillment is crucial for human flourishing; any loving sex is life-giving.

As long as two people are committed to each other in a loving relationship, their gender doesn’t matter.

If it feels good, do it.

Life is all about human happiness.

People being happy is what matters.

Everybody is loved and accepted by God—and that means God accepts whatever we do.

5. We can’t really know what God wants. We can’t really know anything.

It is presumptuous to make truth claims. Every viewpoint is biased or self-interested, so there is no absolute truth.

Miracles, revelation just don’t happen. Or at least, not the way the Bible records. God wouldn’t bother with those things.

The Bible is the record of the development of the human spirit in love and grace. So anything that continues that development is good and Christian.

Anything in Scripture that doesn’t seem like love or grace or the way God should be can be ignored or discarded. We know better than these earlier, less developed people what God is like and what God would want.

6. The Bible is not to be taken at

its plain sense. Science has proven it to be wrong (evolution rather than creation; earth goes around the sun, not sun around the earth; Jesus rose from the dead spiritually, not physically, etc).

The Bible is not an adequate authority to tell us what God wants. We know

The views opposite agree with parts of Scripture and Christianity: that we should love everyone, that love covers a multitude of sins, that sex is powerful and wonderful—but they ignore the whole, integrated witness of Scripture, and aren’t consistent with major themes in Scripture: sin, repentance, truth, grace, obedience, holiness, loving God first, sex only within heterosexual marriage. See Info Sheet #2.

Would you say Jesus and Mother Theresa, both sexually inactive by choice, had less rich or worthwhile lives? Would you say people are generally much happier, better adjusted and more flourishing now that there is lots of sexual freedom? Sexual satisfaction, or our own happiness by whatever means, is a pathetic life goal by Christian standards. We live to know, enjoy and glorify God! (Philippians 1:21, 27) We choose not to grieve God or lose touch with reality by affirming what-ever people want just to make them temporarily happy.

5. Historically and worldwide, Christianity has this

belief at its core, that God is and that He speaks and makes Himself known (Genesis 1:1,3; John 1:1-18; Hebrews 1:1-4,11:6, etc), supremely and definitively in Christ Jesus. The Bible is the authoritative record of God’s self-revelation.

Yes, we have a hard time knowing anything, but God reveals Himself and, recognizing our weakness and sinfulness, we humbly put ourselves under His authority and follow as best we can. We try to put God first and there is forgiveness and help to change when we get it wrong. We seek to conform to God’s revelation.

Many have come to believe more in humanity, putting human capacity to know (or not know!) first. Some believe we can’t know what God wants; that’s putting our assumption of not knowing first. Believing that God doesn’t or can’t break in to human life (either by revelation or miracles) are also assumptions that aren’t consistent with basic Christianity. That limits God, saying He can’t get through to us! We are again assuming we already know something about the Christian God that we believe more than anything He might say. These beliefs require God and Christianity to conform to us.

6. The Bible is meant to be taken at its plain sense.

When it’s straightforward history, it’s straightforward history; when it’s figures of speech (poetry, prophecy), that’s what it is. An example is the Psalms talking about the sun going around the earth. That is a figure of speech—one we still use! Ever heard of sun down? Sunrise?

A lot of the talk of science or history disproving the Scriptures is based on approaches or assumptions of unbelief. Such as, miracles can’t

that its history is slanted and written long after the occurrences. The texts just describe things in the way that people came to think of them. We can now better discern what really happened.

God wouldn’t bother with the kinds of things we find in the Bible—such as raising people from the dead or making adultery a sin. (Bishop Spong, Ted Turner)

Jesus wouldn’t say anything too original, nor anything that anyone else ever said; he wouldn’t say anything too radical or too conservative, or anything that served the purposes of the early church; they stuck those things back in (Jesus Seminar)

We realize that the human authors were groping after spiritual truth and we now know better than they did what God is like and what God wants.

7. We now know homosexual orientation is genetic and therefore created by God, so we can ignore the Bible passages against same-sex activity because those authors didn’t know.

We can say that homosexuality is one of God’s good creations, so he would want people live out this desire.

8. The Scripture writers didn’t know about homosexual orientation. Their

condemnations were out of prejudice. We now know that homosexual desire is innate and God given.

happen (i.e., it could not have been the Red Sea, so it was a much smaller stream that often dries up—but then, how did it drown the Egyptians?). Such as, prophecy never predicts the future; anything that looks like it does was always written back in after the so-called fulfillment (i.e. Matthew has Jesus predicting the fall of Jerusalem, so it has to have been written after 70 A.D). Such as, we know evolution is correct, so Scripture must be wrong. Rather, science keeps changing its theories and we keep finding new possibilities in the Hebrew words, so what’s the point of assuming Scripture is wrong? Most physicists are now conceding that belief God started the material world is as reasonable as any theory they can come up with. This is definitely not the time to give up on Scripture!

The Bible uses human languages and concepts, both usual and unusual, to convey to us what God wants us to know. It does not present itself as a science book, a book of purely doctrinal statements and philosophical answers. We find historical accounts, poetry, laws, letters, prophecy, drama, etc. Naturally, since God could want to convey to us things we don’t understand or that we don’t want to know, interpretation can get tricky at times. That doesn’t mean writing off the Bible’s authority or plain sense! It means careful attention to each part and the whole, seeing how it all fits together. It means holding to what is clear and repeated, asking God’s help with what is unclear and hard, and humility knowing we can get our interpretation wrong.

7. We don’t know homosexual orientation was

created by God. Scientists have found some genetic markings that seem to go with having same-sex desires. That doesn’t tell us that God made them at creation. The fall has happened since creation and creation is no longer in the state God created it (including our bodies, Romans 8:19-23). Science can not tell us when those genes first appeared. To know what happened at creation, we have to look at Genesis 1 & 2, and that shows one man, one woman, with sex for companion-ship and procreation within marriage (Jesus reaffirmed this). The Bible plainly and repeatedly says not to act on this desire. As well, genes are affected by experiences so they are marked throughout our lives. The genetic evidence only shows that there are markers that sometimes go with same-sex desire (perhaps like being tall sometimes goes with being a basketball player)--there are many other factors.

8. If we believe that the creator had any part in the writing of Scripture, we accept that God would have known of orientation and therefore could have put it in. As the wording of the verses shows (see Info Sheet #2) the activity itself is prohibited, regardless of inner orientation. Saying the commandments don’t apply to

Biblical prohibitions against

practising same-sex activity are for heterosexuals who are going against their nature. They don’t apply to those who are homosexual by nature.

9. Since we’ve gone ahead and abolished slavery, and ordained women despite what’s in the Bible, we should also do the same for homosexuals.

I am a homosexual; that’s the core of my identity. You have to accept my homosexuality to accept me.

10. What about other Bible laws or customs we ignore? Such as killing God’s enemies, eating pork, temple sacrifices, etc.

11. Jesus never said that same-sex

activity was wrong, therefore as His followers we need only follow His command to love everyone.

12. All the Scripture passages

against same-sex activity are against it only because of the abuse of power in relationships between men and boys, or because there was prostitution.

The Bible writers knew nothing of committed same-sex relationships; that context makes it acceptable to God.

13. Accepting these Bible texts promotes violence and hatred against gays. God would never want that.

those who genetically want to do them, means those with genetic proclivity to violence can be violent, those with genetic tendencies to depression, fear, worry, hyper-sexuality, overeating, alcoholism are all free to indulge. God calls us to resist all these activities, regardless of how hard any one is for us individually.

9. While much of the Bible accepts slavery and dis-courages the ministry of women, there are verses that both in principle and example allow, predict or show the opposite (i.e., slavery: 1 Corinthians 7:21, Philemon; women: Acts 2:17-18, quoting Joel 2:28-32; Galatians 3:28; Romans 16:7). There are no such positive statements in Scripture for same-sex activity or relationships. There is only consistent rejection of the activity. That’s why this issue is so crucial; it’s a clear rejection of the Scripture. Christ is the core of our identity, not our sexuality, as the above Scriptures show (cf 1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

10. For these we find the principle of changing them or doing differently already in the New Testament. It shows them as ceremonial, civil or historical, cultural directives that can be changed. You can even find this in the 39 articles from the beginning of the Anglican Church in the reformation! (See the Book of Common Prayer, Article 7).

11. Jesus did not revoke the Old Testament sexual morality. He reaffirmed it and made it more stringent, including lust. You will not find Him or the New Testament contradicting any Old Testament sexual prohibitions. There is no argument from silence. Jesus also didn’t directly mention witchcraft, coveting, bestiality or the incest codes—like same sex activity, the rest of the New Testament confirms these continue to be against God’s will for those who want to be His people.

12. See Info Sheet #2 on the Scriptures. There are at least 6 clear passages that use the most blunt terms possible for the actual sexual act. They do not use the terms for prostitution, nor for youths; they refer directly and simply to people of the same sex and they say this activity is not acceptable to God. Six verses are a lot.

(There are only 4 on the institution of the Lord’s Supper.)

Given the Scriptures cover a time period of over 2000 years, including towns and cultures (Sodom, Gomorrah, Greco-Roman culture) where same-sex activity was practiced and accepted, the Bible writers had ample opportunity to note any such committed unions. God still clearly prohibited the activity, and therefore God would not call holy a relationship based on it.

13. God doesn’t want that. And that is not happening in the Anglican Church. All we sinners are worshipping together. We need to repent of any hatred of homosexuals, as well as indulgence in all attitudes or activities God prohibits. We want to grow in offering God’s love and truth, and living in His ways together.

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Information Sheet on the Current Crisis in the Anglican Church #1

The Different Perspectives That Give Us Different Views 02/06

On the left side of the page you will find some of the arguments made by those wanting to change the Church’s teaching and practice on same sex activity (often called the liberal perspective) or those who just want to let them. In the right column are some of the points made by those upholding the Church’s official teaching (conservatives, orthodox). Not all points may be agreed upon by all on either side – this is a sampling. It is for those proposing the shift to blessing same sex unions to convince us of the appropriateness of such a change.

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In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

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