Responding to the Gafcon communique
by Gavin Ashenden:
“Gretna Green and the dog that didn’t bark”-opportunities and omissions.
Marriage as source of contention has history between England and Scotland. In 1754 Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act came into force in England. It was designed to stop young people marrying without parental consent under the age of 21. It didn’t apply in Scotland, where boys could marry at 14 and girls at 12. So generations of ‘minors’ fled to Gretna Green to be married by the village blacksmith. Scotland didn’t even require the celebrant to be a priest or civil servant.
Once again, at least in Christian terms, the Anglican Church in Scotland is going to have a different attitude to marriage from the Anglican Church in and of England.
When the Gafcon Primates recently met in Lagos, they did so knowing that in a matter of weeks the Scottish Episcopal Church “was likely to formalise their rejection of Jesus’ teaching on marriage.” This prospect provokes a crisis of belief and authority amongst Anglicans in the British Isles. It also ramps up the pressure for the recognition of gay marriage south of the border. People will argue with the force of nothing more than common sense, that it makes no sense being able to have an Anglican ‘gay wedding’ in Gretna Green, but not in Carlisle 10 miles down the road, in England.
Homosexual marriage is the Rubicon that biblical Christians may not cross under any circumstances. That being the case there will be a number of clergy and congregations whose relations with their bishops in Scotland are severed by the vote in their Synod.
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