SAME-SEX AFFECTION booklet now ready

The 64 page booklet examining the ECUSA teaching on same-sex partnerships is now ready. Call 1-800-727-1928 to order multiple copies.

The RESPONSE to Bishop Griswold & his team concerning “Same-Sex Affection” by Peter Toon is not a repetition of commonly-made arguments against the blessing of homosexual practice made by opponents of active homosexuality and same-sex blessings, but is something different. And what it states is important, worrying & challenging for all Episcopalians and Anglicans, who care about the moral teaching of their Church.

In presenting its long essay, To Set our Hope on Christ, in book-form in June 2005 to the whole Anglican Communion in late June, Presiding Bishop Griswold and his team took a dramatic step. Not only did they publicly demonstrate their belief that covenanted same-sex unions of males or females can be examples of Gospel holiness, but they also demonstrated the theological methods by which they reached this conclusion. That is, they revealed how they approach Scripture and how they do theology, and in so doing how they embrace error and heresy.

The 64 page booklet by Dr Peter Toon – Same-Sex Affection, Holiness and Ordination – responds to the Griswold essay not by discussing homosexuality as such from within such disciplines as biology, anthropology and psychology. Rather, it faces head-on the basic theological methods used by the ECUSA team to come to its conclusions about homosexual partnerships. And, in doing so, it shows just how and why these methods will always produce results that are contrary to received orthodoxy.

So there is a major chapter on the topic of “the development of doctrine,” and the question is faced whether the claim that same-sex couples demonstrate holiness is truly a development or a corruption of doctrine.

Likewise, there is a major chapter on the interpretation of Scripture, and how the ECUSA team uses the data of Scripture as merely being the data of religious experience, to be used along with other data, to come to conclusions contrary both to the common-sense meaning of the text of Scripture and the way it has been understood for centuries.

What the booklet also makes clear is that the theological methods used by the ECUSA to justify and commend same-sex unions are methods which have been gaining ground within the liberal denominations of the USA, and especially within the Episcopal Church, since the 1960’s.

Regrettably, in fact very regrettably, even opponents of the sexual innovations have been using, or at least not opposing, the same methods, in other areas of church life where there has been major innovation in doctrine and practice, liturgy and prayer. However, the adoption by the Episcopal Church of the new doctrines of same-sex partnerships as blessed by God, and active homosexual persons ordained as Ministers, is not unexpected – at least not to those who have been watching how the Episcopal Church has increasingly innovated in doctrine and practice, liturgy and morality, canon law and discipline, over the last forty years!

Same-Sex Affection, Holiness & Ordination. A Response to Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold is published by the Preservation Press of the Prayer Book Society on August 5, 2005, and is available from The Prayer Book Society, P.O. Box 35220, Philadelphia, PA 19128-0220, for $7.50 per copy, postage included. Discounts are available for orders of five or more copies: call 1 – 800 – 727 – 1928 from August 1st.

Be sure to get a copy, or better to get several copies and share them with others.

Let there be a discussion as to how the Bible is read and used in parishes, and how theology is pursued in our colleges and seminaries -- and how this differs from the way It was read and used by earlier generations.

The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon MA., D.Phil (Oxford)