Chris Johnson is worth repeating in full…
The Church Times is not down with the Church of England’s official opposition to homosexual “marriage,” which it calls “tendentious and poorly-argued.” At this point, I don’t particularly care one way or the other what the C of E or the Church Times thinks about anything at all but among the Times ”arguments,” this one jumped out at me:
Besides these points, however, the paper makes a number of unsupported claims. In just one example, it states that the view of marriage as “a lifelong union of one man with one woman” is “derived from the teaching of Christ himself”, first without citing which teaching, and second without any apparent embarrassment over the use of the word “lifelong”.
I don’t know what’s more remarkable, the fact that the Church of England assumed that Britons were Biblically-literate enough to know Christ’s teaching on the subject without the Church having to point it out or the fact that the Church Times proved that it isn’t Biblically-literate at all. Because if after reading the above passage, the following (orthis) didn’t immediately pop into your mind without you having to open your Bible:
Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these sayings, that He departed from Galilee and came to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. And great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them there.
The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?”
And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Then you have serious problems from which I cannot extricate you. Almost as serious as those of the Church Times editorial staff.