Men and women in marriage by Church of England's Faith and Order Commission

Many have stated that this document should receive the fate common to the vast majority of General Synod Miscellaneous paper, to be ignored and to sink without trace impacting neither the life of the Church and much less the life of wider society. 

However such is my disgust with its content that I feel at least some comment must be offered.

We begin with paragraph 13 (I am highlighting only the most extreme of the documents errors, please do not interpret my silence on other paragraphs as assent to them!).  There is a wilful misinterpretation of the quotation “The first blessing God gave to man was society” – it seems to me that in the context of the quote “society” is being used as a pseudonym for companionship and not as society as in for example “Big Society”.  Neither does it seem clear from the fact that the first expression of that blessing was marriage between Adam and Eve (a union with only limited coexistence with our current legalistic expression of marriage) which of the characteristics of Adam and Eve are  about any resulting patterning of “society” – perhaps we should only be allowed to marry people who have been cloned from one of our ribs?

On to paragraph 21 – which tells in the context of marriage sex between those for whom there is “no prospect of actually having children” is still somehow open to procreation.  This is bizarre, it is characteristic of the deployment of arguments to justify a predetermined conclusion without any critical evaluation of them.

In paragraph 23 we come to one of, in my view, the most offensive and pastorally damaging statements in the document.  It is a direct attack on single parents, which even the patronising language about their “heroic struggles” can not hide.  For many being an adoptive or single parent is not ultimately characterised by “struggle”.

In paragraph 41 the document seems to shoot itself in the foot, by stating that neither state nor Church are the arbiters of marriage, it is a matter of God’s providence at work in the couples themselves.  It is therefore left to a question of whether you believe God’s providence to be constrained and limited or bountiful and boundless.  Then in 42 it seeks to pretend that civil marriage within the UK has been defined within the bounds of the Church’s understanding, completely ignoring that the state took an approach to divorce at variance to the Church and only latterly has the Church come to realign its understanding of divorce towards that of the state.

My final complaint is about paragraph 45 which talks of “giving pastoral help to those who seek to engage with the challenges of life responsibly.” It is clear that the vast majority of those who would wish to have a same-sex marriage are doing exactly that, it is an act of responsibility.  However setting that aside even the most ill-informed Gospel reader must see that Jesus was often far more interested in those who, for what ever reason, were engaging with life irresponsibly – are we not now to give pastoral help to the prodigal?