Another church endorses gay marriage

Now the Presbyterian Church (USA) has approved males marrying males, females marrying females. Obviously this is a bar to unity with churches that find such unions heterodox at best. Here is a news article about PCUSA's move: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/19/presbyterian-church-gay-marriage_n_5512756.html

Here is a background piece that gives more details: http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2014/06/12_questions_presbyterian_chur.html

In Christianity's first twenty centuries the matter was scarcely controversial, but now in the twenty-first we have people whose new and clearer thinking, as they believe, supersedes the bad old homophobic ideas of former ages.

The apostle Paul, some of whose writings touched on the topic of homosexuality, has been given a hard time in debates. Some gay marriage proponents say that anything he had to say was culturally conditional and only relevant for his times. Others go so far as to say he was actually a repressed and self-loathing gay. Still others say he lacked the advantage of modern-day understanding of what gayness really is. In any case, what he said is, for practical purposes, excised from their canon as irrelevant today.

We saw similar sidelining of Paul in the question of whether it was dignified and proper for women to wear hats to church, and later on, in the question of whether women should serve as pastors and bishops. Thus was the pattern established. Paul's letters can be looked at as a lot of old fashioned ideas not relevant today. That is how the progressively liberal wing of the church sees them, and has for a long time.

Which shall be the next of Paul's lessons to be dismissed by the champions of modernity? You can be sure it will not end with gay marriage. Without Paul's letters there is little in the New Testament about day to day church order and discipline, a point that cannot have escaped his modern detractors. Get rid of pestilent Paul and there are few limits on what the church may be turned into.

The traditionalist case against gay marriage does not rest on Paul alone. But it is by now clear that all counter-arguments taken together make no difference to the churches that are intent on having same-sex marriages. Those churches have heard the counter-arguments and decided the other way. The believers outside that pale, who feel that gay marriage is a dreadful mistake, can now only watch and see what happens. Their time to speak has passed, for those they would inform are not listening now.