- By Abdu Rafiu
It all began in 1981 — the tearing down of barriers between man and woman in, of all places, Christendom. We have the Anglican Communion, the Church of Nigeria to thank for putting up vigorous resistance to the abomination. Last Sunday, 12 February, it issued a strong statement denouncing the decision of the Church of England authorizing the blessing of same sex marriage. The Church of England announced its decision last week.
The Most Reverend (Dr.) Henry C. Ndukuba said in a statement: “The recent decision by the Church of England did not come as a surprise to discerning minds because it is the logical result of the path they have been consistently and painstakingly taking for the past decade. This decision to redefine marriage different from the teachings of the scripture and the proposal to change the male gender used for God to a neutral or inclusive language is a clear departure from the truth. Human words are not sufficient to express the depth of the unfathomable truth and power of God or His person. All these bring to the fore the folly of the human mind in questioning the authority of God who created mankind male and female.”
Dr. Ndukuba went on: “Church of England by this decision can best be described as ‘quarrelling with God.” He refers to Isaiah 45:9, where the Scripture says: ‘Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker…Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’”
The distortion to the words of the Lord’s Prayer came into being in 1981 when one version of It being used in some churches in the United States begins with “Our Parent Person, who art in heaven.” A decade later, by September 1991, the Church of England General Synod decided to go the way of some churches in the United States by considering a revised version of the Lord’s Prayer to give it a feminist flavour. Some Anglican churches in Britain began to jostle to be the first to use the new version as from October of that year, 1991. A report at the time listed the churches wanting to remove what it described as sexism out of worship as those in Derby, Leeds, Nottingham, Sheffield and London. The revised version reads in an Anglican prayer book: “Beloved, our Father and Mother in whom is heaven, hallowed be your name.”
The raging feminist battle tearing down all barriers has made an inroad into lexicographical correctness as well. A new dictionary called “Random House Webster’s College Dictionary,” reflecting the changing times changes ‘chairmanship’ to ‘chairpersonship’. The dictionary, according to Time Magazine at the time would not agree that ‘history’ comes from the Greek word ‘histor’ which means ‘learned’, ‘knowing’. In it ‘history’ becomes ‘herstory’ to distinguish the study of women’s affairs. ‘Mankind’ changes to ‘humankind’, ‘waiter’ to ‘waitron’ or ‘waitperson’ and ‘women’ to ‘womyn’.
The contention of the Church of England was not that there was error in transmission of the Lord’s Prayer given to mankind more than 2,000 years ago by the Lord Christ Himself. The Church of England has proven, by accepting the revised edition that it is not convinced that Christ came from the Almighty Father as His Son. It is not also convinced that Christ was and still is the Truth because Truth cannot be wrong. If the Church were convinced that the Lord came from His Father, it must logically follow that it would realise that the Lord Jesus knew His Father and He did not refer to Him as mother. There were several instances when He referred to Father to describe the Almighty that sent Him and there was no single case where He referred to Him, the Creator, as mother. It was not as if the word mother was not in existence in His time. He said of the relationship between Him and His Father: “The Father and I are One.” He went on to say that He was going back to His Father: “Where I go, you cannot come. My Father and I are One.” “My Kingdom is not of this world.”
Christ, being the Truth can never be wrong. It is mankind that can be and has always been wrong as the Church of England has been blasphemously wrong. The Anglican Communion in Nigeria, that is, The Church of Nigeria has sensibly steered clear of the wrong path as at then and also now when it is standing up against same sex marriage.
Dr. Ndukuba, the head of the Anglican Communion in Nigeria, said: “On the 9th of February 2023, the Synod of the Church of England voted in favour of the proposals of the House of Bishops to approve the Church’s blessing of same Sex marriages while at the same time claiming that it has not changed its traditional doctrine recognizing that marriage is between a man and a woman. The disingenuous manipulation of language to conceal their true intentions and unwillingness to stand by principled positions and Biblical truth has characterized the behaviour and statements of the Church of England for a while. The leaders failed to call to order and discipline The Episcopal Church of America, Canada, etc, when they violated Resolution 1.10 of Lambeth 1998 by consecrating Gay Bishops and recognizing the blessing of same-sex marriage partnerships. They have hitherto sat on the fence as the crisis tore the Communion apart. They have failed to function as Defenders of the Faith and ‘Instrument of Unity’ in the global Anglican Communion.”
He went on: “The souls of the faithful departed members of the Church who built and promoted the Christian faith throughout the world, sponsored missionaries, built churches and cathedrals, enthroned Christian civilization and encouraged Christian families, education, and civil society, would be grieved at the recent action of the current leadership of the Church of England, especially the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bad decisions of the Church’s secular synods. Sadly, the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury have joined the widening rebellion against God and the Church of Jesus Christ, a move that must be challenged and resisted and reversed by the rest of the faithful church.
“The Church of England is one out of the 42 Provinces in the communion spread across 165 countries of the world. It cannot hold the rest of the Communion, especially the majority population located in the Global South, to ransom. The Protestant Movement arose out of the Reformation which was a response to heresies and ecclesiastical abuses by the recognized Church then, the Roman Catholic Church. History is about repeating itself. The Anglican Church is at the threshold of yet another reformation, which must sweep out the ungodly leadership currently endorsing sin, misleading the lives of faithful Anglicans worldwide and endangering their prospects for eternity.
Dr. Ndukuba went on to add: “We are grieved that the deviant, revisionist actions of some Western Anglican Churches, including the Church of England are regularly affecting the image, moral credibility and evangelical activities of faithful Anglican Christians because of the likelihood of many other denominations perceiving or labeling the Anglican Church as a ‘homosexual church’, more so, with the capitulation of our ‘Mother Church.’ Geoffrey Chaucer’s statement in the Canterbury tales comes to mind here: ‘If gold rusts, what can iron do?’ If the Archbishop of Canterbury and his Bishops deny the faith and mislead the Church, then what would ordinary congregants do? Hence the fate of Christianity and the Church has experienced a terrible decline, loss and irrelevance in the secular and post-Christian Western World. We must take steps to redefine our relationship with those who persist in willful disobedience to God and strive to bring the gospel and Church of our Lord Jesus Christ into disrepute.”
The Most Reverend Ndukuba is rightly concerned and may have spoken well. However, until mankind gets to the root cause of the aberrant phenomenon, abhorrent as it certainly is, the problem will not go away and ecclesiastics, the weak ones in particular labouring under tremendous pressure following decline in the conduct of human beings generally, will continue to buckle under. What, for instance, drives a woman to desire a romantic relationship with a fellow woman, and a man to make love advances to a fellow man? Only yesterday, an online publication revealed a marriage secretly consummated between two ladies said to be beauty queens. It was a marriage between Mariana Varela and Fabiola Valentin. According to the report the two ladies “are giving fans a behind-the scenes glimpse of their love story in a romantic new commercial for Fenty Eau de Parfum.
“In October 2022, Varela, who was crowned Miss Argentina in 2020, and Valentin, who won the Miss Puerto Rico title the same year revealed they had tied the knot after secretly dating for two years.” The two ladies are in their 20s and they revealed their union on their Instagram pages.
We cannot easily understand marriage as a natural and, living concept unless we solve the riddle of why man and woman have always and will forever appeal to and desire each other; why every girl dreams of ending in the loving arms of a man, and a man seeking to bask in the aura of a worthy woman who will drive him out of his mind, to whom he would surrender as his teacher, guide and nurse. And companion. If two women are in a romantic relationship with each other, it means one is a man in a woman’s clothing. A distortion has taken place in their inner make-up. In other words, adopting a holistic approach to life is what will help. What I am getting at is that the state of affairs presupposes the unity of, or rather man as a fruit of Nature. That is, one uniform Law pervades and rules the entire universe. By this Law, sodium and chlorine unite as if in a wedlock, under certain circumstances, to form sodium chloride, our very familiar table salt. It is in the same vein that hydrogen and oxygen unite to form water. Something is evident here. The uniting factors are of different nature. Science designates sodium as positive ions and chlorine as negative ions; hydrogen as positive and oxygen as negative. In the end we find that what science demonstrates to us is that these are split parts of a species seeking union for fuller value of existence.
The question then predictably arises: By this thinking, can man and woman be split parts of a species seeking union for fuller value of existence? They, indeed, are. Time and space do not permit a contemplation of why and when the splitting into sexes occurred. However, we can begin to sense the origin of marriage. It is pertinent to say this was a consequence of each person’s volition at some point in the course of our journey from Home Above to the school down here in the vale of matter regarding our choice of activity in life upon unfolding from unconsciousness the condition in which we left our spiritual Home above, Paradise. In other words, a woman is a woman and a man is a man by the nature of his or her activity. Thus it is Nature that assigns roles to woman and roles to man and these are not interchangeable. With the decision on choice of activity, masculine attributes can be envisaged as withdrawing from the feminine inclined ones and vice-versa, and Nature Beings cover each gender with appropriate cloak necessary for his or her activities including reproductive organs. Thus this leaves man or woman in an incomplete species condition comparable to the split ions or radicals, and it is in union with the opposite gender that his or her activities in life become fulsome.
In modern times, women not fully aware of their roles in Creation begin to ape men in their activities and the sing-song is: “what a man can do, a woman can do also even better.” So she gets involved in masculine activities also in thoughts and volition which repress her femininity. In place of her femininity, masculinity comes to the fore. The soul has been distorted. The distortion is reflected outwardly in the body. The spirit remains unchanged. The spirit is the man, and it is its wrong volition that has brought about the distortion. That is why in their reflective mood, they wonder why they are different, hardly accepted warmly in circles of women and if men in the gathering of men. Such rejection in many cases gets troubling and suffocating and out of self-doubt and a feeling of low esteem, it results in suicide. A woman thus becomes a wrestler, a boxer and footballer for which she is not made but for which she is hailed. From the spelling of the words alone, it is indicated that man is different from woman and each has its assigned roles. With the forced changes in roles, indulging in positive activities instead of delicate ones consistent with her nature, the distortion of the inner man begins and disequilibrium sets in. With time, a woman begins to manifest the characteristics of a man outwardly in accordance with the dictate of her volition. Inwardly she is a woman but outwardly a man. Since he is a woman inside her, a man also in the process of being distorted falls in love with him and we have the gay phenomenon! It is the same process that leads to the emergence of lesbians. A fuller discourse is reserved for some other day.
Cash crunch
I hope that in view of the chaos and desperation that getting new currency notes entails, some deeper thoughts will go into an otherwise laudable policy the implementation of which, however, has been bungled and the nation made a laughing stock. If you are being beaten by the rain and you don’t like it, you change your position, so it is said. That is the sensible thing to do. You become flexible. As our elders would add, you do not set a house on fire in order to catch a rat! There are protests, and bank facilities are being vandalized in certain places already. The country cannot afford a total breakdown of law and order. Push out enough new currency notes, and frayed nerves will be calmed.
The Guardian
