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Pace Peter Hitchens - The 1662 Prayer Book is as clear as a bell against Same-Sex Marriage
By Julian Mann
Special to VIRTUEONLINE
www.virtueonline.org
January 3, 2016
A gentleman in our South Yorkshire parish once complained about the ringing of the Church of the Ascension's bell. It apparently frightened his dog and made it hide under the table. The relevance of that anecdote will hopefully become clear in due course.
Peter Hitchens, Anglican Christian columnist on the right-leaning UK national newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, has long held that the culture war over same-sex marriage is a 'Stalingrad' for social conservatives. But his latest, biblically-alluding intervention on his blog - 'Swallowing a dozen camels, and straining on a gnat. The same sex marriage debate drags on' - advances an argument from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer that calls for an answer.
Mr. Hitchens asserted: 'The argument that a same-sex marriage cannot produce children (except by surrogacy or IVF or other indirect methods) is (a) perfectly true and (b) fundamentally weak. Even the 1662 Prayer Book (which specifies that marriage is firstly ordained for the procreation of children) allows for a variation in wording, for couples past childbearing.'
It is certainly true that the Solemnization of Matrimony in the 1662 Prayer Book directs the minister to omit the prayer for godly offspring 'where the Woman is past child-bearing'. But there is no rubric allowing the minister to omit the first cause for which God ordained heterosexual marriage in the preface to the Prayer Book's matrimonial order - 'for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name' - even when the bride is past child-bearing.
That biblically true statement about one of the God-ordained purposes of marriage stands because it is generally applicable to Christian men and women getting married. Christian men and women around the world usually have children after they get married and they usually teach their children the faith of the Lord Jesus.
Clearly, it is the second cause for marriage advanced by the Prayer Book that torpedoes same-sex marriage. Having already made clear that marriage is between one man and one woman, the Prayer Book asserts that matrimony 'was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication: that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body'. The Prayer Book thus faithfully reflects the Bible's teaching that because God has created humanity male and female all sexual activity outside the God-created institution of heterosexual marriage is against God's good and loving purposes.
The biblically-faithful, historic liturgy of the Anglican Church, therefore, is no infantry man bogged down in any culture-war equivalent of Stalingrad. The 1662 Prayer Book is a heavily-armed, mobile and effective spiritual and moral weapon against politically correct pressure on the Anglican Church to truck with same-sex marriage.
If Anglicans, particularly in the West, choose not to deploy their Church's historic biblical teaching in the culture war, then that is their fault. Thank the good Lord, the 1662 Prayer Book is as clear as a bell on the exclusively heterosexual nature of marriage.
Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire, UK - www.oughtibridgechurch.org.uk
