Abandoning the texts

Sir, The Rev Simon Tillotson’s philosophic musing on reception of gay-marriage by Steve Chalke (letters, 27 January) seems to have drawn him away from New Testament Christianity with its insistence upon the sexual purity first revealed in the Old Testament.

Of course we can use our freedom to depart from the morality of Christ and his apostles but should we do so, it becomes ours and not Christ’s. The reason we know that Old Testament standards were carried forward is that in I Corinthians 5 Paul insists on excommunicating the man who took his father’s wife, something that is hard to fault upon the known teaching of Christ alone. That those living in rebellion to the traditional scriptural sexual morality are excluded from Church fellowship should settle our Church practice.

A second problem of his letter is his inaccurate confusing of chaste with celibate. The latter means unmarried not chaste, and even chaste only means sexually abstinent when speaking about someone who is celibate, otherwise it includes sexual relations within traditional marriage.

The confusion will only increase should Mr Tillotson receive gay marriage for then he could hardly call celibate those he deems married, and further he would have to say they were chaste even when sexually active, so some phrase such as sexually abstinent would have to be used for those respecting the Church’s traditional teaching in this area.

What of adultery? In traditional Christian morality this involves sexual relations between a man and a woman where at least one is married or betrothed, all else is called fornication. In the new marriage paradigm adultery must be generalised to the sexual involvement of any third party that adulterates this revisionist marriage. Oh what a tangled web we weave! “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees” (Isaiah 10:1). Alan Bartley, Greenford, Middlesex