Francis wrote the following as a Facebook response to my previous posting; I thought it was so good I sought/got permission to repost it here.

It’s a response to Mel Rimmer’s feed line that:

[…] But with this particular issue, I honestly don’t even understand their own attempts to explain their reasons.

…that Francis writes:

No. It is a mystery. I think its a failure of historical understanding and a mixing up of cause and effect. The Christian view traditionally was that “marriage” was a pre-existing state of affairs. Marriage ceremonies simply recognised and regularised that situation. Eg in Roman Catholic thought it is the couple (not the priest) that celebrates the sacrament of marriage. Certainly the overwhelming view of the Mediaeval schoolmen was that marriage just was something people did.

Now, enter the state with a strong desire to know when people are or are not married because lots of legal consequences flowed from that status. The state began to take over the arrangement of “marriages” – in 1753 in England and Wales famously. From then on you could only be “married” *legally* if you ticked the right boxes. Unsurprisingly the official Church was happy with that arrangement – in England and Wales because they enjoyed a near-monopoly on celebration of marriages (Jews and Friends being excepted).

So, now we have a situation in which the Church is worried that what it thinks of as marriage will change because the state changes what it labels “marriage”. If you understand the historical development, that’s odd. Theologically the government can’t change what is and is not possible for God. It may choose to label people “married” but if they aren’t (from God’s perspective) nothing will change. I.e. marriage cannot on this analysis be affected by what the state does.

Indeed the Friends in England already take the view that God appears to be marrying Gay people (i.e. taking the Mediaeval approach to the concept) and they would like to (or do) celebrate that in their meetings. It is almost impossible to see why not.

So, I think the Church of England has itself very confused by a confusion of cause and effect and a failure to have confidence in its roots. Alas I don’t blog at the moment, otherwise I’d blog a better researched version of this.