new church life: jan uary / february 201 4
legalizing same-sex marriage would have stood, and same-sex couples from
across Australia would have flooded into the Capital Territory to be married
legally. It could also have set a precedent for the remaining states and territory,
none of which currently allows same-sex marriage, to try or to try again to
enact a similar law.
More importantly, such efforts to legalize same-sex marriage potentially
impact the New Church. This is because a pillar doctrine of the New Church is
that of true marriage, which is stated in a number of passages in the Writings,
such as: “...true marriage is that of one man with one wife... “ (Arcana Coelestia
385), and, “...there is no marriage except between one husband and one wife...”
(Heaven and Hell 380.1)
These teachings are categorical and permit no deviation: there is true
marriage and apart from that there is no marriage. Moreover, the reciprocal
love of husband and wife and their striving for conjunction into a one, produces
conjugial love. (See Heaven and Hell 369, Conjugial Love 37) So, legalizing
same-sex marriage would increase the attack of the hells on true marriage and
on its product, conjugial love.
In the past weeks I attended a church service of one of the largest Christian
Protestant denominations. Doubtless because of the then imminent vote in
the ACT Legislature and because of public interest, the priest devoted her
entire sermon to the subject of marriage equality. She based her views on her
conviction that Jesus had come to earth to save us, but first had to learn the
ways of the world from his (definitely not His) human contacts.
According to her, under God’s providence Jesus was led first to meet,
and then to include, sinners, adulterers, wicked tax collectors, etc., in his
ministry. He even learned to control his hot temper which, she said, was
exhibited when he angrily threw people out of the temple who were only going
about their business. From being an angry man, he learned to show only love.
So she said that if Jesus had learned from contact with the people around
him to change his nature and show unqualified love, and to be inclusive of
everyone, was not this a lesson to us to be inclusive likewise and show love
and understanding toward same-sex couples and same-sex marriage? Also
to see marriage equality as part of Jesus’ instruction to love our neighbor as
ourselves?
How sad to see the Word of the Lord so distorted but, of course, all heresies
have arisen from that source. How sad, too, to see religion being used to spread
the infection of the hells.
Certainly during the lead-up to the ACT vote, there were church leaders
who argued publicly in favor of retaining the definition of marriage as the
union of a man and a woman. But there was considerable public support for
same-sex marriage and there was no general outcry against it from church10