Good News! Northeast Priests Affirm Moral Tradition on Marriage

AXOIS! AXOIS! AXOIS!

Thanks be to God that these priests are speaking out and standing firmly behind the timeless teachings of Christ, the Apostles, the Saints, and the Moral Tradition of the Orthodox Church. Every single dioceses across ALL Orthodox jurisdictions should be doing this.

Has anyone noticed the slight change put forth in Bishop Michaels original letter?–he now actually wants us to be PROACTIVE and asking us to discuss the churches position with other orthodox, family, neighbors, etc, instead of just having the OCA post synodal affirmations online and hoping people will read them. A welcome change–hopefully it sticks.

Regarding the letter above, they should make clear what the discipline will be if a priest performs a same sex union.

Finally, the new OCA.org site seems to have scrubbed its entire site on anything regarding homosexuality. Hopefully they will just say that they havent had time to add everything when they switched to a new site.

I’m just curious as to when Stokoe will publish this news item on OCANews. Should we start a pool? Something like this: today / tomorrow / the day after / never .

George,

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Thank you for your website, which in my estimation gives balance where there was none.

Just for the record, and with your permission, I would like to post here what ocanews.org edited out of a comment I made. After many months of seeing little point in commenting on ocanews because of its blatant bias and dismissive “editorial” responses to comments (those I guess to be Steve’s editorial responses are much more angry and ridiculing), I decided to comment on Fr Arida’s article. I wound up commenting several times in the same thread, and, as Mark Stokoe usually does, my comments were posted as written and in a timely manner (after all, Mark does have a day job!). I appreciate that he posted all of my several comments. But my latest comment was edited, and I would appreciate it if you, George, were to allow me to put on the record here all that I sent to ocanews. I will put what was edited out in bold (it’s three separate sentences, a link, and one paragraph, but I do think it involves a couple of important points to make):

Ken,
Your position cannot be the “end of story,” in indeed you are seeking God’s truth, and not your own. (As Jesus said, we must seek God’s Kingdom and *His* righteousness –notice He did not say we are to seek heaven, and notice He did not say we are to seek what “I” think is right, but rather God’s rule over our lives as the One Who knows best, and God’s righteousness, as revealed in the holy Scriptures.)

Stating “your primary contention is obviously wrong,” offers no Scriptural or patristic evidence to support your bias against the clear teaching of the Bible and the Church. You say that it is “utter nonsense” to contend that humankind was created heterosexual. This, I would say, ignores the obvious. But what *is* utter nonsense, is to believe, contrary to the Bible and Holy Tradition, that God intended men to inject their life-giving seed into a place of excrement, decay, and death. What *is* nonsense, is to ignore the biological and physical compatibility of a man and a woman and say that sodomy is its moral equal (in effect saying heterosexual compatibility is nothing more than chance, which is the position of the godless). What *is* nonsense, is to turn a blind eye to the widespread fruit of homosexuality: a lifestyle of promiscuity, loneliness, self-hatred and disease. What *is* nonsense is to blame a holy and loving God for our fallenness and rebellion against His own loving direction and commands for living.

But what is much worse in your position, Ken, is to enable those who are identity-confused and sexually unstable to continue harming themselves and others. You are not doing anyone any favors. *Sodomy hurts.* Homosexual activity is not just a serious personal malady, but is deeply harmful physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. If you truly cared about those with same-sex attractions, and if you truly believed the Church’s loving teaching, you would stop enabling such harmful (even deadly!) activity by saying it is normal, natural, God-given, etc.

“God created man in His own image; male and female He created them” (Gen 1:27). Human gender is not only a part of the created order; it is a reflection of God. Equality in Christ (Gal 3:28) does not mean that distinctions between women and men are to be ignored, or that men can take the place of women or vice versa. There are overt differences in Scriptural counsel to men and women, especially in how they relate to one another. As in nature, male and female are not interchangeable. Salvation does not involve the denial of our identity as women and men, but rather the acceptance of our identity. (Part of our redemption is gratitude for who we are!) The distinctions between women and men remain forever, even in the Kingdom of God, both physically and spiritually. Masculinity and femininity have been distorted and perverted in the fallen world; if gender is to be rediscovered and healed, it has to be discovered in our divine image and relationship with God.

God in His wisdom created humanity as man and woman. He has not made us unisex spirits, but chose to reflect His image as male and female. We are male and female in the deepest sense of ur being; our souls are gender-specific –not as something external put upon us, but as who we are and were made to be by God. Gender differences are not just biological, or even mostly biological; our gift of gender is far more profound. As Fr Hopko says, a woman is not maternal because her body is able to give birth: it is from her maternal spirit that the corresponding physiological and anatomical capabilities are derived. Likewise, man is more virile and physically stronger because in his spirit there is something that corresponds to the “violence” of which the Gospel speaks. The physiological and the psychic depend upon the spirit; they service it and express it. These differences are not conflicting or contradictory; they are designed as complementary. In fact, the image of the Trinity in humanity is precisely both male and female; one alone (male or female) is an incomplete reflection of God. (And, of course, two of the same gender are also an incomplete reflection of God.) Dualists say God created us male and female because of sin, and in eternity gender will pass away. Christians say the opposite: in order to be in the image of God, we must be male and female. Without Eve, Adam is not human, and vice versa.

Gender was from the beginning; it is not a result of the Fall. The Son of God assumed everything about humanity except sin; His taking on the male gender proves that gender is not a result of sin. The eternal Word took on our human nature, not as a genderless being or a unisex creature, but as a man, because there is and can be no other way to be human but to be male or female. “If sexuality is sinful, then God is the sinner.” Lust and selfishness seem bound up with the sexual act, and yet they are not proper to it. Orthodox say that gender, marriage, and exclusive marital sex is good, ordained by God, and intended to be a witness of His unifying love.

Not only is our gender a part of our inner self, our personality and psychology, but it instinctively affects our relationships with others individually, in family, and in society. How we interrelate is gender-specific. The “role” of men, in the Christian view, differs from the “role” of women, in much the same way that the “role” of God the Son differs from the “role” of God the Father or God the Holy Spirit. (Being in the image of God is a metaphysical reality and not merely a matter of moral imitation.) As we have said, the divine Persons are fully equal, yet each has a unique “role” in their relationship to one another and to creation. In the same way, we are made equal human beings with unique and complementary gender “roles” that unite us as one, as the Trinity is one. Unity is not uniformity; real unity starts with accepting one another’s differences, including our own gender. To deny this is to deny our psychological makeup, our different bodies, and our human nature; to deny this is to deny ourselves.

As God created us male and female, He gave us a father and a mother, who are created to be committed in love, divinely joined (“What God has joined together, let not man separate”), and to raise us together, each in their own gender-specific and unique ways. The “role” of father is naturally different from the “role” of mother, and vice versa; it was created to be. A child relates differently to his/her mother than his/her father, and needs to receive both of their gender-specific loves. Likewise, in our relationship with God our Father, we are to enter into a paternal relationship with Him, not a maternal and not a sibling relationship. This is as important as it is to be human; made in God’s image.

The two forms of human existence must be in communion to have proper humanity. They belong together, and to each other. Complementarity and mutual fulfillment are essential to our humanness. God made Eve from the substance of Adam to show that she is what Adam is, and is equal to him. Too often overlooked, however, is the biblical teaching about the relationship between male and female. Holy Scripture is very clear that there is in the relationship a loving headship of the husband (I Cor 11:3). Woman is equal, and man cannot be human without her, but in their relationship, there is an order. Eve is created as Adam’s “helpmate”; she makes him fully human by completing the image of God in him. Man is “head” the same way that the Father is the head of Christ, and in the same way that Christ is the head of the Church: by the self-sacrificing means of love, self-giving, compassion, and communion. (This, by design, should also be the characteristic of Church leadership and authority.) All this is derived from the Holy Trinity.

For further discussion, check out this Orthodox catechism:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/a-seekers-manual/3386768

(Incidentally, a wonderful saint for those struggling with homosexuality is St Symeon the New Theologian, who confesses such struggle himself, along with sins of sodomy in Constantinople, and who ultimately found purity and inner peace in the Holy Spirit.)

Father Mark
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Up until his shameless campaign to oust Metropolitan JONAH, and with the glaring exception during the Kondratick scandal of his intentionally not dealing with the homosexual issue (as I posted at the time, this was/is our “family secret”), I think Mark did an amazing job with ocanews. Our church sent him a thank you letter for his service to the Church. Regarding my edited comment, I believe that Mark and/or Steve and/or whoever felt that what they edited out was distasteful, and, giving them the benefit of the doubt, they may have thought it did not help my argument. I don’t hold their editing against them (in one reflection I posted on ocanews years ago, Mark’s editing was very helpful), and I don’t consider this editing conspiratorial. (I do think that such realities are a little too close to home for those who live in denial, and so they consider some facts “off limits” in “gentlemanly” discussion.) But I think the realities of sodomy and homosexual perversion are relevant and important facts to point out, as is the fact that we are not helping those with same-sex attractions by defending their activities.

Thank you, George, for letting me post the whole thing.

Fr Mark Hodges
http://stores.lulu.com/elijahpublications
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Mat 13:33 NKJV – Another parable He spoke to them: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened.”

The Church is to leaven the culture, not the other way around.

Well, how do you know that the US will decline. Rome-the western part probably a combination of things- the best current theory is civil during the 5th century, Constantinople became weak because of a weaker military-hence vulnerable first to the crusaders and then the Ottomans. If you did the Second Punic War as the beginning of the Roman Empire, then the Western lasted for 500 years. And the Eastern for about a 1000 years but the last 200 years it wasn’t much of an empire. Granted, modern Empires or Countries that dominated last less as things changed rapidly. I agree with historian Adrian Goldworthy that one doesn’t want the US to go yet, in fact, those that wanted the old Roman Empire as mention above missed the aqueducts, and so forth that the Germanic tribes couldn’t recreate though in the middle ages some advances occurred because of agriculural development with the horse collar and so forth. The main hostility here is that the US is a Protestant Country and Protestant Countries have dominated since about 1600 A.D. or so. Roman Catholic countries probably lost a great deal of their dominance by 1600 and the Orthodox outside of Russia and other Eastern European countries stopped dominating about 200 years or so in both Western and Eastern Europe before Constantinople felled. Facts are or facts, Orthodoxy will probably with the exception of Russia not be in a dominated Country in the future, it rose in the Roman Empire and that formed of culture and government peak in the ancient world or the middle ages, this is also true with Islam which peak in the middle ages. Granted, Protestant Countries may one day be replaced with foreign eastern ones who knows