Singleness in our culture and the Christian church. Could there just possibly be a connection?
Captain Sensible writes: Every paper I seem to pick up these days features articles about how singleness is on the increase, how people are delaying marriage indefinitely, and how women are leaving it too late to have children.
This is the exactly the pattern we are seeing in the church.
But there is a difference.
In the church, we are told singleness is a good "gift" from God, and that if we are single then it is God's will that we are, and that we should just wait and trust, and then when the time is right, He will reward our singleness contentment with a spouse.
I have one question:
Have Christians done away with circumcision, only to replace it with lobotomies?
This is the exactly the pattern we are seeing in the church.
But there is a difference.
In the church, we are told singleness is a good "gift" from God, and that if we are single then it is God's will that we are, and that we should just wait and trust, and then when the time is right, He will reward our singleness contentment with a spouse.
I have one question:
Have Christians done away with circumcision, only to replace it with lobotomies?
posted by Captain Sensible at 3:42 PM
1 Comments:
Spot on about the connection.
Actually pushing 'the gift of singleness' is veering FAR too closely to prohibiting marriage for some, i.e. women. Paul tells Timothy that some heretics (probably early Gnostics) are wrong to forbid marriage. Incidentally, 'Do not be yoked to unbelievers' in II Corinthians NOWHERE refers to marriage, but to FELLOWSHIP. Funny how so-called Biblical literalists constantly quote the II Cor. verse to justify not allowing women to marry non-Christian men. In reality both Paul and Peter are more pragmatic about marriage;they acknowledge in I Corinthians and I Peter, that some people (mostly women) are married to unbelievers.
'The gift of singleness' is the conservative, straight-laced version of church support for the Lesbian and Gay lobby: giving into a worldly tendency and spiritualising it by selective reading of the Bible. Both have only succeeded in driving people away from the Christian faith. The proponents of both pretend that their beliefs will attract people to the faith, when this is actually just a rationalisation of their own sexual and emotional problems.
Post a Comment
<< Home