religiocity

… Prayer … is the chief context in which the irreducible threeness of God becomes humanly apparent to the Christian. It does so because—as one ceases to set the agenda and allows room for God to be God—the sense of the human impossibility of prayer becomes more intense (Rom 8:26), and drives one to comprehend the necessity for God’s own prior activity in it. Strictly speaking, it is not I who autonomously prays, but God (the HS) who prays in me, and so answers the eternal call of the “Father,” drawing me by various painful degrees into the newly expanded life of “Sonship.” There is, then, an inherent reflexivity in the divine, a ceaseless outgoing and return of the desiring God; and insofar as I welcome and receive this reflexivity, I find that it is the HS who “interrupts” my human monologue to a (supposedly) monadic God; it is the HS who finally thereby causes me to see God no longer as patriarchal threat but as infinite tenderness; but it is also the HS who first painfully darkens my prior certainties, enflames and checks my own desires, and so invites me ever more deeply into the life of redemption in Christ. In short, it is this “reflexivity in God” this Holy Spirit, that makes incarnate life possible.–Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 42.

If same-sex marriages are indeed to be equal in every way to heterosexual marriages, then all reference to the creation of humanity as male and female will have to be excised from the teaching and liturgy of the Episcopal Church. It is entirely in keeping with this logic that the traditional preface to the marriage rite has been dropped in the alternative marriage rite adopted at the General Convention. The church cannot be called the bride of Christ without causing offense, and the maleness of Jesus is inherently problematic for the new teaching.

Before coming to the 2018 convention, I had not heard the news that when Jesus returns we do not know how gender will be expressed, if at all, in the glorified humanity that will appear. Apparently, in the new creation cisgender identity will, along with every tear, be wiped away.

The theology and doctrine of the church are like pick-up sticks or, as our Roman Catholic brethren sometimes put it, “a seamless garment.” If you change one doctrine, there are a host of other doctrines that must be changed as well in order to be consistent and coherent. — Leander Harding, “Being Disarmed.”