Monday, March 31, 2008

Uganda: Gays Might Split the Church

http://allafrica.com/stories/200803310914.html

[allAfrica.com] 31 Mar 2008--The future of the Anglican Communion seems to be descending into an irreconcilable route, that very soon some Provinces might succeed from the Communion altogether because of the homosexuality ridge. It is a ridge indeed because I can't remember a time when the Christian church was as divided as it is today. I have just returned from a conference where, as a Christian, I was rather embarrassed seeing fellow Christians at each other's throats as we debated homosexuality. Either side claimed the biblical witness to justify their arguments.

We may use the bible to justify our actions but since I became a committed Christian at the age of 21 in 1982, I have never found any vagueness in the bible. What is at stake in the Anglican Communion is whether the African church should accept homosexuality as have some Christians and churches in other parts of the Communion. And since it is accepted in some of the dioceses elsewhere, it was assumed that the African church would automatically agree because that was been the trend before.

The African Church is opposed to homosexuality on Scriptural argument. The scriptural argument begins with the book of Genesis as a prime example of the predominant biblical affirmation of heterosexual relationship. In Genesis 1:27-28, humanity in the form of both male and female is created in the image of God. Just as Genesis 1 ends with a declaration that the order of creation involving the creation of man and woman is very good, Genesis 2 ends with the climatic statement that the woman is the reason why a man leaves his father and mother, to become one flesh with his wife in Genesis 2:24.

If this powerful affirmation of heterosexual relations as the carefully planned order of creation in these two introductory chapters of the bible is not striking to modern thinking, it certainly was to the writers of the Holiness Code in Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 and to St Paul in Romans 1:26-27.

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