MARRIAGE RATES AT RECORD LOW IN UK

Marriage rates are at their lowest in England and Wales since records began over 150 years ago:

Marriage rates in England and Wales have plunged to their lowest rate since records began almost 150 years ago, according to the latest official figures.

Only a fraction more than two per cent of woman and 2.28 per cent of men over the age of 16 chose to get married in 2006.

The number of marriages for the whole year was just 236,980, a fall of four per cent on the previous year and lowest proportion of marriages since they were first recorded in 1862.

It is also the lowest number of marriages since 1895, when 228,204 tied the knot.

This is simply an outgrowth of the decline of Christianity in England and Western Europe. The cultural consequences will be devastating in the long term, and ultimately will result in the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it. Currently we are living off the built up cultural capital of the past centuries, but we ourselves are running a vast cultural deficit.

INTERMITTENT THEOSEBES

You may (or may not!) have noticed that things have been a little slim on the posting side around here. It's not just March Madness, but I am also in the process of moving Theosebes HQ from Alabama to Kansas City. Beginning in May I will begin working with the Hickman Mills congregation. We're excited about the move although leaving here is hard. The process necessarily means packing up all of one's earthly possessions and can be pretty distracting. I'll try to give Theosebes attention as I can, but for the next few weeks I'm not sure how often that will be.

IS THE BOOK OF ROMANS OBSCURE?

Long considered to be the most thorough theological treatise in the Bible, Paul's epistle to the Romans has now been relegated to obscurity by Barack Obama. Speaking on the issue of homosexual marriage, the Democrat Presidential candidate said,

I will tell you that I don't believe in gay marriage, but I do think that people who are gay and lesbian should be treated with dignity and respect and that the state should not discriminate against them. So, I believe in civil unions that allow a same-sex couple to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other. I don't think it should be called marriage, but I think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized by the state. If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans.

Well, if we do push aside Paul's more obscure writings like Romans I wonder if Jesus had anything to say about marriage (er, 'unions', nudge, nudge, wink, wink). In the very same gospel as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus quotes Genesis in Matthew 19:4-5 and said,

"Have you not read that He who created them from 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'?" (emphasis added, nac)

In that passage Jesus affirms the intent of marriage and of sexual relations. They are to be within marriage and between a man and a wife. And since Jesus also said in the gospel of Matthew (15:19-20) that

"For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man..."

it seems that Mr. Obama will find that the thing he condones is condemned even in non-obscure books like Matthew.