Anglican Mainstream

Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner, ACI
 

In May, 2007 the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada issued a Pastoral Statement on same-sex blessings. At the end of the statement, the bishops made the following request:

“Looking ahead, we ask the Primate and General Synod for a report on:

1.The theological question whether the blessing of same-sex unions is a faithful, Spirit-led development of Christian doctrine (St. Michael Report)
2.The implications of the blessing of same-sex unions and /or marriage for our church and the Communion (The Windsor Report)
3.Scripture’s witness to the integrity of every human person and the question of the sanctity of human relationships.”
The reflections that follow are a contribution to the discussion that this requested report has engendered. Rather than look broadly at the question of same-sex blessings, my remarks concentrates on the Scriptural meaning of blessing as it has been taken up by the Church, and provides some preliminary evaluations of how this meaning applies to the question of same-sex blessings.

1. Blessing in the OT
Blessing in the OT is designated pretty much exclusively by the Hebrew verb barak – as in the US President’s first name. A “blessing”, in the singular, is berakah. The Talmudic tractate devoted to blessings is called Berakoth – blessings – and provides a profound elaboration of the theology of blessing in Jewish terms. (There is nothing comparable in Christian writing.) We shall turn to this tractate a little later.

What does the verb barak actually mean? There are various theories: Break down [into pieces]; kneel; Hence “adore”. Does if associated with the bent knee, does the word derive somehow from the knee viewed as “seat of fertility” or erotic encounter (according to some older views; cf. Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee)? Etymologically, the question as a whole is shrouded in mystery.

In passing one might note that the notion of God “kneeling” to us in the world is amazingly Christological! That God should “bless” us, is odd, in a sense, and represents a profound and almost disturbing paradox of love. But the paradox itself is at the base of the Scriptural understanding of creation and, of course, of redemption. (We will return to this briefly at our conclusion.)

Before going further, though, let us just flag a linguistic issue: the Hebrew notion of blessing, barak, is bound to a very rich theological set of semantic contruals. But the NT notion of blessing seems on the surface to be much thinner. We’ll come back to this point, but now only to say that the NT Greek is almost exclusively bound to the word eulogeo, or “speaking well” of something – praise, flattery, compliments, and so on. This is the word used in the Greek OT to translate barak, however, and it is the word used in the NT everywhere, virtually, that the English word, “blessing” is found as a translation. If we want to know how the NT construes blessing – and hence the Christian faith – we must look into the Hebrew, for it fills out what is otherwise a rather hollow Greek term.

So let us begin with the OT’s central understanding of blessing.
 

Read here

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.