Mark Bonney, the Dean of Ely explained.

"This weekend we will be proudly flying the rainbow flag in support of the first ever 'Pride in Ely' event.

I am very pleased that Chapter agreed to my request to fly the 'Pride' flag from the Cathedral tower on 11 August when Pride in Ely holds is first festival. I am pleased first of all to lend my backing to this community event because it celebrates the breadth and diversity of the community in which we all live. I am also very conscious that Christians have not always been perceived as being as supportive and inclusive as some of us would wish, and so I am pleased to fly this flag as a sign of the kind of inclusion that I wish to promote at the Cathedral"

The Dean of Ely has adopted the secular values of a culture that has set its face against Christianity, and is waging a war against Judaeo-Christian culture.

Sexual ethics have always been at the heart of the Christian's struggle with sin, the world and the devil. But it seems the Dean of Ely is not over concerned with either sin, or the distinction between the Church and the world, or the struggle with evil.

But then more and more cathedrals see themselves as civic centres of spirituality, wanting to embrace the secular.

Jesus warned that you could no more serve God and mammon than you could submit to the temptations of the devil and still work for the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the case of Ely, the Dean is choosing the Leftist values of so-called 'breadth and diversity' (values found nowhere in the Christian Gospels) and wants to make reparation for the fact that Christians have been insufficiently supportive of non-monogamous and heterosexual sexual adventure (code word 'inclusivity'- another term found nowhere in the teaching of Jesus.)

In brief why is this an act of apostacy and worse?

The flying of a gay pride flag above a cathedral is more than a contradiction, it constitutes a blasphemy.

Distorted sexual identity and practice is diagnosed by St Paul as a symptom of idolatry (in Romans 1).

He warns that the more a society turns its back on the living God, the more people experience dis-ease and disintegration. This expresses itself partially in a confusion of sexual identity and equally by an absence of continence. By contrast the Judaeo-Christian tradition is a journey into a deeper sexual and psychological purity, set within the parameters of God's created order.

The present cultural and ideological assault on the Church takes the form of an attack on the conceptual integrity of both marriage and the family.

It particularly sets out to undermine the integrity of the given-ness of the 'binary' categories of man and woman coming together to co-create, as God's agents.

Instead of resisting this assault, parts of the church have welcomed it. By ripping a piece of St Paul out context they have made him say the opposite of what he intended.

In Galatians 3 Paul explored the basic categories of mutual antagonisms embedded in his culture. Jews against gentiles, men against women and the free against the enslaved. Once anyone defined by these categories of adversity entered the new life in Christ, this baptised life washed these antipathies away into a new identity. "In Christ there is no slave or free...". This can best be summarised by saying that no Christian can truly be a Christian if they place a defining categorising adjective in front of their identity in Christ.

So there can be no black, tall, rich, old, feeble, or any other category to define 'Christian', or it becomes a contradiction in terms.

And particularly, of all adjectives, the least desirable would be an adjective denoting perversion of God-given identity, or a disorder of behaviour whose effect was the sullying of sexual purity as enabled experienced and understood in the Holy Spirit.

But this is exactly what the gay pride movement has set out to achieve in the redefining and undermining of Christian sexual ethics and theological identity.

It would be ludicrous to describe people as 'straight' Christians. It is just as ludicrous to define people as 'gay' Christians. Our new anthropology of the Kingdom bestows an identity that is 'in Christ'. How can a Christian withdraw that identity and relocate it in a spectrum of sexual and genital attraction? What kind of Christian, what kind of church would replace the 'imago Christi' with the romanticised stimuli of genitalia? What kind of Church would replace the call to die to yourself with the psycho-sexual narcissism of a call to sexual and romantic adventure with a same sexual partner?

The matter is not made any clearer by the observation that the very term gay is too clumsy to act as a descriptor of the horizon of sexual incoherence that stretches through the spectrum of LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA etc...

In flying the flag of gay pride from a Christian Cathedral, the clergy have indicated their allegiance to an ideology of sexual identity that is at complete odds with the faith that the Cathedral was built to teach and embody.

They have instead adopted the categories, language and ethics of the enemies of Christ and his kingdom. They have betrayed Christ by raising the standard of surrender and offering their allegiance instead to an over sexualised, disordered and decaying secularism.

A church built on such a foundation, of ideological sand, is both under judgement and built upon such shifting sand, that it will inevitably soon collapse.

------------------------------------------------

The Rt. Rev'd Dr Gavin Ashenden SSC, LLB, BA, MTh, Ph.D. is a former chaplain to the Queen. He resigned from the Church of England in 2017. He is a bishop in the Christian Episcopal Church in the United States. His blog can be viewed here: www.ashenden.org