Heorhij said:
I am not rejecting the authority of Scripture and Tradition. What I am trying to say is that the spirit of love should (and will!) prevail over the LETTER of Scripture and Tradition. Again - and this is also what you and some others keep ignoring or down-playing! -
I am not ignoring your point, I am trying to get you to address the central point which you keep ignoring:
The *universal* witness of the Scripture and Tradition is that homosexual sexual activity is a sin.
It is in the same class as any other kind of fornication. There is not a single example of an authoritative Orthdox voice (the Scripture, our Lord, an apostle, a Council, a Father) stating that homosexual sex is *not* a sin while there are multiple examples of such authoritative voices stating that it is.
As such, you cannot analogize your position to the Arian or Iconoclast controversies where an error became widespread but then were eventually rejected in favor of the correct opinion which *already* existed (the classic statement of Orthodox theology 'On the Incarnation of Christ' was written several years before Arius preached his first Arian sermon; the Iconoclasts got their name because they were 'breaking' icons already in existence). Nor can you analogize it to debates about fasting or the Calendar or the advisability of a national church (for the U.S. or for the Ukraine) where one authority says one thing and another says another thing so there are conflicting opinions which can be harmonized or chosen between. You also can't analogize it to how the Church addresses depression or suicide--because while the Church may alter how it pastorally addresses these things, the Church still teaches that depression is a problem that needs to be addressed, treated with whatever tools are available, and healed if possible. It still teaches that suicide is wrong, even if it sees a pastoral reason to bend the letter of the law and respond to the death as it would to any other death (and if you think that is a new thing, you need to pay more attention; this seems part and parcel with a general prejudice against the past that blinds you to the reality--we could tell the Fathers something about the mechanics of *why* homosexuals feel a natural/'unwilled' attraction to the same sex, but they were well aware of the existance of such an attraction).
Now, if you want to have a discussion that starts with 'Okay, the Church teaches that homosexual sex is immoral, how can we better pastorally address that in light of expanding medical knowledge', that would be a good discussion to have--and parallel to discussions the Church has had about depression, alcoholism, general mental illness, infertility, etc, etc. But that hasn't been your starting point. Your starting point has been to simply reject the universal witness of the Church because it doesn't fit the most recent scientific understanding (which is by no means settled--we think we know homosexuality has a genetic component, but the same twin studies that show that also show it is not absolutely determinative)--and once you do that, your argumentation falls to the Protestant dilemma. If I reject one part of the Tradition, on what basis can I determine else should be rejected or accepted? If I reject the universal witness of the Church about the immorality of homosexuality, why not reject the witness about fornication? After all, modern science has identified spreading your seed as widely as possible as the effective evolutionary strategy of male primates. Why do I even accept the witness of the Church on the primacy of agape love which you appeal to? Nothing in modern science supports that position.
So, in essence, until you address that fact - that the universal witness of the Church is that homosexual activity is immoral - by either accepting it and then trying to understand it, or acknowledging that you reject it because you have some other criterion for truth against which your and Scripture's arguments must be judged, the rest of your arguments are only so much smoke and mirrors.
witega said:
Secondly, your point is obviously incorrect. If a heterosexual cannot find someone willing to marry him, the Church *imposes* celibacy. If a priest's wife dies (not so common an issue now, but a depressingly common childbirth event prior to modern medicine), then the Church *imposes* celibacy. We had a member of our parish who had been divorced 3 times and so the Church *imposed* celibacy on him. It's true that the first example can always have hope that things will change, which in some senses makes his lot lighter than that borne by the gay; but it's a difference of magnitude, not of type. And the latter 2 are in the exact same boat.
I think it is a huge difference when a human being is given a chance. Then you cannot speak of "imposition." Gays are not given any chance, and that's dehumanizing.
See, this is typical and why, I think, this will probably be my last response on this thread or at least in terms of your and my discussion: you jump on the first example, where the person has a 'chance' and ignore the latter two. What is the difference between the gay Orthodox and the widowed priest or my fellow parishoner? None of them has a 'chance'. All they have is choice, a simple one for all its difficulty in practice--they can accept the teaching of the Church and work on embracing celibacy, or they can reject it and do what they want. That's not dehumanizing. That's the same choice that every human being since Adam has faced every moment of their life.