One of the consequences of living in New Zealand is that I am 17 — 29 hours ahead of the USA. This means that comments arrive here when I am fast asleep, and interesting comments occur overnight. It also means that the news does not change here: we wake as the USA goes to sleep and when we watch the six o’clock news much of the USA is inhaling coffee. So I made a comment in the TC combox last night and the discussion flowed on, including this.
Is this because the State itself is centralized?
No, it’s because the state (like the church) is not a primary actor in marriage, so whenever it attempts to be one, it confuses people about what marriage actually is. People start to think marriage comes from the state or from the church, and that is simply not true, as marriage (like property) existed in Paradise.
We don’t live in Paradise anymore, though. There are now sometimes marital disputes, so there needs to be some third party to intervene and protect the public’s interest in the marriage. Same as property disputes have to be argued in front of a judge, marital disputes have to be argued in front of a judge.
I am arguing that the church makes a superior arbitrator, at least in Christian marital disputes, because they are the experts on the holy and mysterious nature of our marriages. The state is simply ill-equipped to view marriage as anything other than an arm of property law, as that is their area of expertise. That doesn’t mean that the state shouldn’t be included in decisions directly relating to property, such as testaments and inheritance.
Our ideas of rights flow out of the Scottish Enlightenment, and that flows from the Scottish Kirk and the Covenantors. You do not have to like it: but the Covenanters died for their beliefs — and to resist a King they saw as ungodly, and a Episcopal church that was imposed upon them. From that flowed certain unalienable rights.
Such as freedom of speech, security of property, and security of marriage. As Vanessa points out, Adam had a wife. We know that there will not be marriage in the kingdom to come, but in this fallen kingdom there is marriage.
So what is going on at present is a form of state over reach. We are seeing it with marriage, we are seeing it with hate speech. We see it with the change of the language, where terms are forbidden (or even entered in the dictionary on the whim of the most foolish Prime Minister Australia has ever had).
But the natural rights are unalienable. That means that a government can not truly remove them, just try to: and that government’s name is tyranny.
This has left me feeling out of sync with the cycle of the church. We are in Easter, and celebrating the triumph of Christ over all evil and all tyranny, as evil and tyranny seems to increase. However, this is not new. The church was born under the government of a tyrant (Herod), grew under a series of tyrannical emperors from Caligula through Diocletian to Julian the Apostate, and survived the Atheist night of the 20th century. For Christ prayed for us, and prays for us.
1After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, 2since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 3And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. 4I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. 5So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.
6“I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 7Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; 8for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. 9I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. 11And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
Now what is this unity? It clearly is not in our theology: we disagree within the church about the role of the table, the utlity of praying to saints, the role of Mary, and the means of salvation (the division here is within protestantism between the Reformed, who say it is completely the work of God, and the followers of Arminius, who consider that there is a general grace and the sacraments are efficacious). We argue about these things, and we will always argue about these things.
On the reformed side of Lake Geneva, We trust that the Holy Spirit will guide us into truth.
However, cross grained and stubborn as we are, with partial knowledge, and dealing with the problems in our own lives, we are one. Across the churches there is the church invisible. And in times of trouble we act as one. The Protestants — the ones who have not fallen down the sectarian rabbit hole of self righteousness — back the Bishops of the Roman Church because they know that they are the ones persecuted today… and we recall Bonhoeffer’s comments that after they came for the Catholics and Unionists, they came for him.
In times of economic difficulty, the task is too great for one branch and all churches work together to provide for the increasing flood of homeless and the poor. Consider this
We have four homeless shelters now. Four. And still hundreds of homeless people scattered all around the city. Most of them aren’t even from here, they’ve discovered. Most are from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and some arrive from Detroit or are Mexican immigrants who’ve fled Virginia. We’ve become a sort of hobo tourist destination because our charitable offerings are so generous, sort of like San Francisco.
So, these people aren’t like our own poor people, who have some sort of relationship with us. The local guys try to look well-kept and are very polite. There’s nothing frightening about them at all. But the others are scruffy and reek and catcall and glare at us, or babble at us in sloppy Spanish. The cops waste a lot of time just chasing them away from the libraries and cafes and stuff.
It’s unbelievable. This is one of the wealthiest cities in the country.
The dynamic here is one known from Elizabethan times. The indigent then tried to get to England because they had relatively enlightened laws (the Poorhouse laws) that meant you would be fed. People will travel for food. And one of the things the church needs to do is provide a safe and appropriate way to not only give charitably but to police this. Which means that the ministers, pastors and priests need to talk to each other and that all congregations need to pool their resources. (And yes, even in Dunedin, which is about as safe as you can get, we have a homeless shelter).
In tough times, we have to work together. To proclaim the word, and do good, and to ignore our states and governments, which have over-promisied and under-delivered.
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