Posted on 07/08/2011 12:31:34 PM PDT by wagglebee
NEW YORK, July 8, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - American Christians may one day find themselves facing legal penalties simply for believing marriage can only exist between a man and a woman, a fate already suffered by believers in other countries, said the leader of America’s most influential Catholic pulpit this week.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York reflected on his blog Thursday on the recent legalization of gay “marriage” in New York, and what repercussions true marriage supporters can expect in the future.
He called it “haunting” that the marriage bill became law on the day Catholics celebrate the feast of the Birth of John the Baptist, “whom King Herod would behead because the saint dared to defend the God-given truth about marriage.”
“If the experience of those few other states and countries where this is already law is any indication, the churches, and believers, will soon be harassed, threatened, and hauled into court for their conviction that marriage is between one man, one woman, forever, bringing children into the world,” wrote the archbishop.
Christians in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere have lost their jobs, been dragged through lengthy “human rights” proceedings, and faced steep fines for questioning the dangerous homosexual lifestyle, declining to facilitate gay “marriages,” or even failing to acknowledge “gay pride” events.
Dolan pointed out that editorials nationwide have been calling for an end to the Catholic Church’s religious liberties as a growing percentage of Americans consider defending true marriage a form of discrimination against homosexuals. The archbishop insisted the Church’s position was “never anti-gay.”
“As I replied recently to a reporter who asked if I had any message to the gay community, ‘Yes: I love you. Each morning I pray with and for you and your true happiness and well-being,’” he recalled.
Meanwhile, he says, the true aggressors have proven to be the gay “marriage” lobby.
“As one respected columnist has observed, the problem is not homophobia but theophobia — a hatred by some of God, faith, religion, and the Church,” he said.
Although Dolan said his brother bishops in New York were “particularly prophetic” in acknowledging an uphill battle on the marriage issue, Dolan said Christians would not back down on the truth.
“Like St. Thomas More, we’re willing to take the heat and even lose our head from following a conscience properly formed by God’s revelation and the teaching of His Church, even if it is politically incorrect, and clashes with the King’s demands to re-define marriage,” he said.
Read Archbishop Dolan’s full post here.
Excellent point .. but, there are plenty of quotes, not necessarily from Scripture. They come from the Extra-Canonical books, like the Didache and the Early Church Fathers. The Didache is one of the earliest written documents of the Church other than Scripture itself. It was written sometime between 90 and 110 AD. It may not have had a single author but may have been compiled from the Apostolic Teaching as a kind of early catechism and a summary of the essential moral tenets of the Faith. It’s existence demonstrates that many current teachings of the faith, often under attack by modernity, are in fact very ancient, going right back to the beginning. Let’s take a look at some excerpts from the Didache that are especially pertinent for today’s controversies. Here are some examples from both:
"You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill one that has been born"
(Didache 2:2 [A.D. 70])."[W]e have been taught that to expose newly-born children is the part of wicked men; and this we have been taught lest we should do anyone harm and lest we should sin against God, first, because we see that almost all so exposed (not only the girls, but also the males) are brought up to prostitution. And for this pollution a multitude of females and hermaphrodites, and those who commit unmentionable iniquities, are found in every nation. And you receive the hire of these, and duty and taxes from them, whom you ought to exterminate from your realm. And anyone who uses such persons, besides the godless and infamous and impure intercourse, may possibly be having intercourse with his own child, or relative, or brother. And there are some who prostitute even their own children and wives, and some are openly mutilated for the purpose of sodomy; and they refer these mysteries to the mother of the gods"
Justin Martyr - (First Apology 27 [A.D. 151])."[A]ll other frenzies of the lusts which exceed the laws of nature, and are impious toward both [human] bodies and the sexes, we banish, not only from the threshold but also from all shelter of the Church, for they are not sins so much as monstrosities"
Tertullian (Modesty 4 [A.D. 220]).
Noah and his family didn't leave and go somewhere else where the destruction wasn't happening; God did not remove them from where it was all going on. Noah and his family were right there in the midst of it all, riding out the full force and fury of the destruction in the safety of the ark. They could see it, they could hear it, they could feel the fury of the waves and wind; only being inside the ark saved them.
There is no real sense in which they were removed from it all.
Consider also this situation: the land of Goshen in Egypt during the outpouring of the Ten Plagues.
There is explicit reference that some of the plagues that struck Egypt did not impact Goshen, at all. The plague of Darkness, for one; the text expressly states that it remained light in Goshen where the Hebrews lived.
But the final plague did not spare Goshen; only the blood of a lamb would save the people in their houses; only the blood would cause the Death Angel to pass over them and spare their lives.
Here, as in the story of Noah, the people of God are not taken away to some remote location while God deals with His enemies; they remain in their homes, just up the road in Goshen from which vantage point they witness all the judgment that God poured out on Egypt, and even see the most severe of those judgments affect them where they live, as well. Only the blood of the lamb saves them.
Noah's ark. The Hebrews' passover lambs. Jesus is our Ark; and He is our Lamb. When Judgment comes, we don't need to go anywhere to be preserved in perfect peace.
Well, you made my point rather well. God kept them from the destruction didn’t He.
‘“If the experience of those few other states and countries where this is already law is any indication, the churches, and believers, will soon be harassed, threatened, and hauled into court for their conviction that marriage is between one man, one woman, forever, bringing children into the world,” wrote the archbishop.
Christians in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere have lost their jobs, been dragged through lengthy “human rights” proceedings, and faced steep fines for questioning the dangerous homosexual lifestyle, declining to facilitate gay “marriages,” or even failing to acknowledge “gay pride” events.’
If any of us has friends (I do) that don’t see how same-sex “marriage” will hurt them, show them the above excerpt, tell them to look at history.
I agree. WE must maintain unity with Christ and His Gospel, and not try to be unequally yoked with those who follow the way of the world
Where I typically run into disagreement is in regard to how God will accomplish that. Many make the claim that God will achieve the protection of His people by taking them out of the way, by which they most often mean that He will completely remove them from the world.
Of course, this idea doesn't fit the paradigm God established in His method of protecting Noah's family, nor does it jibe with how He protected the Hebrews in Goshen, nor is it the oldest view of the church.
I'm not gung ho about pressing the debate, but my conviction is that we're in it for the duration. The Church will remain in the world as a testimony throughout the outpouring of God's judgment, during which time Christ will truly be our Ark, His blood will prove sufficient to save us, and we will ride out the storm in perfect peace.
Then you had better hope you are one of the 144,000 kept safe during the Tribulation because it’s not to pretty and there are not promises to anyone else.
“Progressive” Christians (Catholics included) maintain that the early Church after the Ascension was simply men dictating their opinions, which have been handed down under the guise of faith, and which have no validity; to bring up anyone other than Christ Himself has no meaning to them. They are determined to create a “church” in which they can divorce, abort, and sodomize, and will completely ignore any inconvenient obstacle to this end.
Well, the change has to come from the top, and the sooner the better; while we wait souls are going to their final judgment.
And that’s the great thing about being a Baptist.
If the leadership strays, the pew-sitters get rid of them. Or leave and found a congrgation of their own.
“If the leadership strays, the pew-sitters get rid of them. Or leave and found a congrgation of their own.”
That’s a double-edged sword; while it is a logical response, carried to the extreme it has now given us hundreds of different Christian denominations (each claiming to represent the Church of Christ).
The Catholic Church applies scripture and holds it up with the Early Church Fathers. For example:
[Quote] (Didache 2:2 [A.D. 70])
Essentially, scripture is supported by the writings of the earliest christians. Yet sola scriptura believing christians are exonerated from taking such passages as these (and there are plenty more) into consideration. That is the point I was trying to make. My purpose in doing so is not to incite a flame war but to clarify the critical need for a unified voice, based on historical documentation, including scripture. What active homosexual could excuse away the above passages?
Has the Roman Catholic Church to-date provided an infallible interpretation of the documents from which you quoted?
If not, then what you doing here is the very same thing you condemn in others. You tout the principle of the illegitimacy of private judgment and yet here you are relying on your own fallible private judgment picking and choosing which interpretation of Scripture and Church history seems best to you.
You hypocrite! You profess to not want to start a flame war, but if you are going to use a thread about homosexual perverts criminalizing Christianity and distorting these Scriptures "as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction" (2 Peter 3:16) to argue against the sole infallible authority of God-Breathed Scripture, then why don't you for a change start applying the SAME epistemological standard that you demand of everyone else to YOURSELF and to that other "infallible authority" that you privately decided, using your own fallible private judgment, was an additional "infallible authority" besides Scripture.
Cordially,
It would be rare that you’d see someone who prefers a human interpretation over the written Word
who doesn’t have some passage of scripture that he would prefer WASN’T the Word of God, IE, Romans 1, in the case of this issue.
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