Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Bp. Robinson At Lambeth

Cartoon by Dave Walker.

Dave also notes that Bp. Robinson's new book, In the Eye of the Storm, is being published in the UK by Canterbury Press. How's that for irony? You'll want to go read Abp. Tutu's preface, found with the above link. Here's part of it:

...Gene Robinson, breathtakingly, says of those opposing him who have been vituperative and worse, that they are all, including him, destined for heaven. He has refused to demonise them. After all the calumny heaped on him he might have been forgiven for hoping that his adversaries would end up in the warmer place. Our Lord must smile to have such a splendid representative in an affair that has often been sordid.

He is so utterly eirenic and his hermeneutics – his manner of understanding the scriptures as being time bound and thus conditioned by cultural language, beliefs contemporary knowledge, etc. is so reasonable and persuasive.

For me, the question of human sexuality is really a matter of justice; of course I would be willing to show that my beliefs are not inconsistent with how we have come to understand the scriptures. It is not enough to say the "Bible says ….. ", for the Bible says many things that I find totally unacceptable and indeed abhorrent. I accept the authority of the Bible as the Word of God but I remember that the Bible has been used to justify racism, slavery and the humiliation of women, etc. Apartheid was supported by the white Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa which claimed that there was biblical sanction for that vicious system...
Bp. Robinson's book will be available in April. You can pre-order a copy here. Why not show your support for the Bishop of New Hampshire by ordering a copy for yourself, your neighbor, your rector, and maybe even a few copies for the Archbishop of Nigeria?

J.

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