Photo: Iona Books
'I have rarely been at weddings which had the same clear level of faith, moral seriousness, intentionality and community affirmation.'

Author, minister and broadcaster John L Bell has published a collection of his Thoughts for the Day, titled Thinking Out Loud, which were broadcast on Radio 4's Today programme.

This article was broadcast on 24th May, 2006

Doing the blessed civil thing … and the antagonism it breeds

Last weekend I accepted an invitation to an event about which I was personally apprehensive. It was the blessing of a civil partnership.

It involved two people of the same sex and their children. It happened in a church with over a hundred family members and friends surrounding them.

The couple pledged their loyalty to each other and to their children before God, and the children prayed for this new family.

I have rarely been at weddings which had the same clear level of faith, moral seriousness, intentionality and community affirmation.

And as the ceremony went on I felt within myself blind prejudice being replaced by deep admiration as vulnerable and previously stigmatised people celebrated their love.

Assembly

The issue of blessing civil partnerships was a lively issue yesterday in Edinburgh, at the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly. It used to be that the Church thought it could tell parliament what to do regarding family matters.

But parliament, having approved civil partnerships, has created a dilemma for the Church, especially when its ministers are asked by same-sex Christian couples to bless their union.

Inevitably, when discussing such an issue, quotations from scripture are batted about like ping-pong balls, as people of different theological positions try to convince each other of what God or St Paul really meant.

But, as I listen to such debates, I am reminded of other moments in civil and ecclesiastical history where scripture became, if not the whipping boy, then certainly the common crutch for diametrically opposed debaters.

When the place of women in the church and society was discussed in the post-war period, two different understandings of social anthropology were attributed to the Bible. One in which women were co-equal with men, one in which they were subordinate.

Justification

Go back two centuries to the anti-slavery movement and you find clerics defending that most inhuman bondage, and others attacking it, all claiming biblical justification.

Whether it be slaves or women or homosexual couples, I suspect that behind the most rabid of opinions is the desire to retain power in the hands of those who are used to it, and to forbid full engagement in the church and society to those who are vulnerable or stigmatised.

One central insight of Christian teaching is that power is never morally neutral. Those who wield it to discriminate against the vulnerable may, in God’s sight, be the most morally tarnished.

• Thinking Out Loud is available from amazon.co.uk by clicking here

• Visit the surefish Faith section