ANGLICAN CHURCH 'MAY HAVE TO SPLIT'

Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen warned that homosexuality may split the Anglican church:

Dr Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney in Australia, said that the authority of the Bible was at stake in the row over gay priests and same-sex marriage....

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The idea that we break from one another is a painful one, and very, very sorrowful.

“But there do come times when the authority of the Bible is at stake – and this is one of those times – where to stay together becomes a great difficulty.

“I hope we can stay together. I am hoping there will be reconciliation and a turning back again to what the Bible says.

“But in the final analysis, as in the past, as the Baptists had to break away from the Church of England, there are times where strong views are held and where division does occur.”

A leading supporter of homosexual rights in the church blamed--well, of course--American right wingers:

A leading supporter of greater tolerance for homosexual lifestyles, the Dean of Southwark Colin Slee, suggested that the row was being stoked up by American-funded right-wingers who wanted to impose an unrealistic “purity” on the Church.

The Dean told Today: “The Christian right, particularly funded from North America, is generating very severe divisions in the Baptist and Anglican and indeed the Roman Catholic churches.

Jensen has it right, though, on the Biblical view of homosexuality:

Dr Jensen accepted that some people were born gay, but said that they should resist the sin of homosexual practice in the same way that heterosexuals had to resist the temptation of adultery.[emphasis mine, ac]

I don't concede that homosexuals are necessarily born that way. But certainly people are born with predispositions to different sins, alcoholism, for example. Do we accept that that individual has a right to stay roaring drunk and beat his family as a result? Certainly not. The answer is treatment and that he never touch the stuff. Some, also, then, may need to become eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom.