What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Can you backdate a marriage?

    Marriage Register

    How interesting to learn about the new rules that will govern couples in England and Wales who have been in a Civil Partnership who wish to change (upgrade?) their relationship status to a marriage.

    It seems that they are going to be able to do so easily and will receive a “backdated” marriage certificate which will state that their marriage began when they entered into their Civil Partnership.

    I’ve some reservations about this but I know it will be warmly welcomed by many and it would be churlish to oppose it.

    It is interesting though and there will be pressure now in Scotland for the Scottish Government to do the same.

    Here are some obvious issues.

    • It is quite odd to think that some might find themselves to have been married without their, at the time they entered into their marriage, believing that they wanted to be married.
    • People who have been blessing Civil Partnerships are going to find that they’ve been blessing marriages all along.
    • People will be able, I think, to find themselves married who never went through any ceremony at all – they may simply have signed the papers. (This is a new thing).
    • There’s no doubt going to be some grumpiness from those who trusted the politicians who said that Civil Partnerships were definately not marriages and that it had been invented in order to do something different to marriage.
    • In a sense, it is rewriting history. People are going to have marriage certificates that date from a time when they were not in fact married at all.
    • The Bishops of the Church of England in the House of Lords might feel that the Government has pulled the rug out from under them.
    • I think, that people can end up married whose proposal to marry has never been published either by banns on in a registrar’s office. I’ll be interested to see whether the registrars publish the names of those converting their status. My guess is that they won’t and thus people will end up married in law who have never had their intent to enter marriage advertised to anyone.
    • It is quite odd to think that a status like marriage can be backdated. Is there any comparable status that can be changed like that?

    Personally, I would have preferred the solution to be that people would get new full marriage certificates when they requested to change their relationship status into a marriage. I think this because I think that marriage ought to require a clear statement of consent at the time it is entered into. (Indeed, many of the rules surrounding marriage are about getting unambiguous consent from both parties, freely given).

    Interesting times. Uncomfortable times for the churches, particularly the Church of England.

    Photo Credit – Dale Gillard Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

     

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72 responses to “Baptism and the Churches”

  1. Erika Baker Avatar
    Erika Baker

    Thanks Kelvin and all for the interesting discussion. As a member of the Episcopal Church in the US, I only ever used the Baptismal Covenant in an argument against the necessity of the proposed Anglican Covenant. For me, the Baptismal Covenant is an assent to the New Covenant of Jesus Christ, so I saw absolutely no need of another covenant. In fact, I don’t see the Baptismal Covenant as something different from the New Covenant.

    With respect to whether Baptism or the Eucharist is a/the sacrament of initiation, wouldn’t the answer be both? In the early church, the person was baptized and received the Eucharist during the same service.

    Also, I wonder if people from other Anglican churches are aware of the great diversity of views held by Episcopalians in the US. That all the orders of ministry should be open to all the baptized seems to me simply a matter of the justice and equality that all Christians should strive for as members of the Body of Christ.

    Reply
  2. Erika Baker Avatar
    Erika Baker

    Sorry, I’m posting on Erika’s computer, but the comment above is by me, June Butler (aka Grandmère Mimi).

    Reply
  3. Alan McManus Avatar
    Alan McManus

    It’s so refreshing to read a discussion where everyone’s listening and learning through that dialectical process. Here’s my tuppennyworth: the disparaging mention of magic by churchpeople always makes my hackles go up – mostly as our Christian legacy of persecution of wise healers as witches is still largely unacknowledged and certainly unatoned – but also because the RC in me hears this as a facile Protestant jibe against metaphysics (if you want my views on that buzzword look here: http://robertpirsig.org/Alchemy.htm ) and though Vat 2 officially u-turned on slavery (yay! who says the RC church can’t change, eventually) it didn’t move away from an essentially sacramental view of Christian ministry.
    I feel that underlying this discussion may be a difference in sacramental theology. I hold the traditional view that through the creation, the incarnation and ongoing sanctification, the Spirit of God is at work metaphysically in the world and that means neither solely spiritually nor physically but betwixt and between. The RC church is just as guilty of virulent hatred of non-clerical women healers as others but the convivial nature of the relationship which sometimes occurs between Roman Catholic and ‘curandero’ (wise traditional healer) in Latin America is for me an affirmation of the ecological connections inherent in both cosmologies – though often forgotten in the RC church it must be said.
    The part of the SEC liturgy I find most alienating is ‘Lord unite us in this sign’. This speaks to me of cognition not communion. In these words I feel the lack of belief in a metaphysical reality. I feel that this discussion may have brought up a similar divide in concept about baptism: is it or is it not efficacious?

    Reply

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