N T Wright on Gay Marriage

and what do you think are the major challenges to the church and the Christian message in the light of the current legislation on the redefinition of marriage yeah I mean obviously huge issues there and there's no way we can lay them all out tonight I do want to say a word about a word when anybody pressure groups governments civilizations suddenly change the meaning of key words you really should watch out if you go to a German dictionary and just open it a random you may well see several German words which have a little square bracket saying NS meaning National Socialists will not see that the Nazis gave those words a certain meaning in a post 1917 Russia and there were whole categories of people who were called former persons because by the communists dictate diktat they had ceased to be relevant for the state and once you call them former persons it was extremely easy to ship them off somewhere and have them killed in the same way there was a letter in The Times lets up just a few weeks ago saying that when we're talking about assisted suicide or something like that we shouldn't actually use words like suicide and killing and those sort of words because those imply that you shouldn't do it whereas now our civilization is saying that maybe there are reasons for that and I find that sort of stuff chilling the attempt to change a bit of an idea an ideology within a culture by changing the language now the word marriage for thousands of years and cross-culturally has meant man and woman sometimes it's been one man and more than one woman sometimes occasionally it's been one woman or more than one knows certain polyamory as well as polygamy in some societies in some parts of history but it's always been male plus female simply to say that you can have a woman plus woman marriage or a man plus man marriage is radically to change that because of the this of maleness and femaleness and i would say that without any particular christian presuppositions at all just across culturally that so with Christian or Jewish presuppositions or indeed Muslim then if you believe in what it says in Genesis 1 about the coming about God making heaven and earth and that the binaries in Genesis 1 is so important that that heaven and earth and then the sea and dry land and so on and so on and you end up with male and female and these it's all about God making complimentary pairs which are meant to work together and the last scene in the Bible is the new heaven and new earth and the symbol for that is the marriage of Christ and His Church so this time it's not just one or two verses here and there which say this or that it's an entire narrative which works with this complementarity so that a male plus female marriage is a signpost or a signal about the goodness of the original creation and God's intention for the eventual new heavens and new earth if you say that marriage now means something which would allow other such configurations what you're saying is actually that when we marry a man and a woman we're not actually doing any of that stuff this is just a convenient social arrangement a social and a sexual arrangement and there it is get on with it and it seems to me that that it's something it isn't that I think that is the downgrading of marriage it's something that has gone on clearly for some time which is now poking its head above the parapet that if that's what you thought marriage meant then clearly we haven't done a very good job in society as a whole in the church in particular in teaching about just what a wonderful mystery marriage is supposed to be so I mean simply at that level I think I think it's a nonsense it's like a government voting the black black to be white you know sorry you could vote that if you like in pass it by a total majority but it isn't actually change the reality the other thing I find worrying is that I was struck this week simply this is a memory and you may not agree with the judgment that precedes it but 11 years ago no actually 10 years ago almost run right now we were about to go to war against Iraq I sat in my kitchen and I listened to Tony Blair making the great speech on how we should go and bomb Iraq it was the day before the ashes started and I thought at the time and I still think that speech was absolutely full of holes it was begging questions it was missing points it was slipping cogs in the logic and yet all the papers were on board almost everyone in Parliament was on board with only a few grouchy people and I remember thinking at the time this is apps

Channel: MATTHEW ROBINSON

Views: 596,747

Rating: 4.5181994 out of 5

Keywords: Marriage (Religious Practice), The Bible (Religious Text), Homosexuality (Sexual Orientation), Jesus Christ (Deity), N T Wright, Theology (Field Of Study), transgender, government, linguistics

Id: xKxvOMOmHeI

Length: 5min 0sec (300 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 25 2014