An Episcopal and an Anglican pastor have just launched a new boycott against civil "marriages" recognized by the state as it continues to play with redefining marriage to include sodomites.
Christopher Seitz and Ephraim Radner have formed The Marriage Pledge as a response to America's leaning toward Sodom.
"In many jurisdictions, including many of the United States, civil authorities have adopted a definition of marriage that explicitly rejects the age-old requirement of male-female pairing," the document begins. "In a few short years or even months, it is very likely that this new definition will become the law of the land, and in all jurisdictions the rights, privileges, and duties of marriage will be granted to men in partnership with men, and women with women."
Seitz and Radner wrote, "As Christian ministers we must bear clear witness. This is a perilous time. Divorce and co-habitation have weakened marriage. We have been too complacent in our responses to these trends. Now marriage is being fundamentally redefined, and we are being tested yet again. If we fail to take clear action, we risk falsifying God's Word."
"The new definition of marriage no longer coincides with the Christian understanding of marriage between a man and woman," they add. "Our biblical faith is committed to upholding, celebrating, and furthering this understanding, which is stated many times within the Scriptures and has been repeatedly restated in our wedding ceremonies, church laws, and doctrinal standards for centuries. To continue with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the Church in a false definition of marriage."
In deed it will. We are already seeing many churches and self-professed "Christians" who are already bowing to the sodomites and lawless government officials. However, Radner and Seitz are committing themselves "to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties."
"We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage," they wrote. "We will no longer sign government-provided marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings. We will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles articulated and lived out from the beginning of the Church's life."
Several signatories have put their name to the document.
Radner has previously written, "The Christian Church should continue to oversee civil marriages, but only so long as she is free to choose which couples she will do this for, on the basis of her own understandings of marriage and of her witness. This, of course, has always been the case."
He then went on to state that marriage "is a universal human estate, bound to God's creative and redemptive will" and is a "lifelong union between a man and woman for the sake of mutual support and, God permitting, the bearing and raising of children."
In speaking of the origins of the pledge, Tristyn Bloom reports:
Schmitz told The Daily Caller that the idea for the pledge came at a meeting of scholars and theologians after a speech made by Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput in October, during which he expressed sympathy for the desire to divorce church and state over liberalizing marriage definitions.
"A friend recently suggested that the Church should get out of the civil marriage business altogether," Chaput said. "In a way, it makes sense. It's hard to see how a priest or bishop could, in good conscience, sign a marriage certificate that merely identifies spouse A and spouse B. … Refusing to conduct civil marriages now, as a matter of principled resistance, has vastly more witness value than being kicked out of the marriage business later by the government, which is a likely bet. Or so the reasoning goes. I don't necessarily agree with this approach. But in the spirit of candor encouraged by Pope Francis, I hope our nation's bishops will see the need to discuss and consider it as a real course of action."
Unlike the diversity of opinion sparked at the previous year's meeting, Schmitz explained, "This time, the disagreement had mostly disappeared."
Praise God! There are more and more men of God standing up to the statist ideology that believes people can just take law and produce unlawful laws and they must be obey as such. Houston has seen its pastors take a stand against pretended legislation involving an unlawful bathroom bill and lawless actions of the mayor and city council. Now pastors are taking a stand against the civil government's attempt to redefine marriage into a perversion to include sodomites. May God grant them grace and may other men of God take the same stand, shunning the laws of men for the law of God.
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