A crisis of character at the top of the Anglican Communion
by Gavin Ashenden, Anglican Ink:
“A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”
Deut 22.5.
It would not take a very developed theological intellect to recognise that we are in the middle of a serious culture war.
Nor would you have to be especially well-informed to note that the culture war involved serious antagonism towards Judaeo-Christian ethics and values.
In the Bible, believers discover they have an insight into the mind of God through the voices of the prophets and the gift of the Law in the books of the first covenant.
A mystery we could not solve for ourselves unfolds. We learn about the mutuality and the interdependence of the two sexes and the invitation to share in co-creation with the Creator, who is our Father.
We learn that leitmotif of the journey on which the people of Israel were led was one of ritual, social and ethical purity. We learn through the presence and teaching of Jesus that it is His intention that this purity deepens and enters the human heart, through the New Covenant.
We learn too that all kinds of forces that are characterised by their rejection of the Holy Trinity set out to disrupt the patterns and given-ness that we encounter in revelation.
These form the normal narrative of orthodox Christianity.
One does not have to be an astute theologian to perceive in the secular movement of feminism an attempt to rekindle antagonism between men and women. One does not have to be very sophisticated to see you that the recasting of the mutuality between men and women in terms of power relations is a sign of this assault on the mind of God and his purposes for us.
Nor to see that the movement for gay marriage is an attempt to break the causal link between sex, love and heterosexual parents with their children.
One does not have to be very bright to see at the movement for transgenderism is at its root an attempt to recast the reality of our circumstances in the humanistic contours of our own narcissistic imagination. No longer even “Cogito ergo sum”. Now it is becoming “Ego sum quidquid velim esse”. (I am whatever I might wish to be). Cross dressing and gender dysphoria are not so much about gender or cross dressing as they are the attempt to make reality in the shape of our own distorted and wounded imaginations. In a sex and gender obsessed society, this takes the form of manipulating sex and gender into whatever shapes please our disordered psyche and dispositions most.
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