... or I suppose you might say it's like the removal of Nazi party-members from public office in West Germany in the late 40s/50s. I had the impression that truth and reconciliation in S. Africa was about what people had done rather than the ideology that supposedly justified it. And the purging of so-called communist regimes seems to have more to do with practices rather than a definable policy. Either way, these seem rather unhelpful comparisons if they are aimed at other christians who don't believe that lgbt people or (as it might be in some quarters) women are excluded from the full ministry of the church. Or am I missing something -- which is more than likley?

Was your response not just a slap on the wrist? I thought I'd made the nature of my disappointment clear: you suggested, no doubt under all kinds of other pressures, that I had lumped things together that don't belong together.  I've generally been very careful to try to think out the way you and other conservative/'open' Evangelicals use texts from Genesis to establish that any fulfillment of gay desire in relationship is unthinkable -- as I understand it the position is that gay people are too marked by the Fall, in your book, for their natural desire to be perfected by God's grace through relationship.   I didn't refer to anyone who regarded themselves as ex-gay at all. I think I was surprised that you didn't take any serious account of those of us who don't identify as ex-gay, and who wouldn't, for good theological reasons, ever want to. (Time was, in the days of Radical Evangelical, we had rather more fruitful conversations: Ridley obviously hardens people up.) 

That is unworthy of you, Jody. I very carefully didn't  'lump' anything together (and haven't ever). You wrote of 'men and women standing alongside each other, engaged in the business of declaring each other’s full humanity.  In doing so,' you added, 'we will learn again what it is to be the imago Dei: to be those bringing about the flourishing, rather than the diminishing, of the other.' Your usuasl cavill about gay identity is equally unworthy: how many gay people do you have to meet who tell you that they perceive themselves to be and have always been attracted to their own sex to accept their account? If women are diminished by exclusion form the episcopate because somehow unworthy or unable to represent Christ, by a different logic the same is true of homosexuals -- and it would be true by a different logic where racial distinction still operates (and it very nearkly does in some of our dioceses). 

Thanks, Phil. I think I remember some of that. My question was to Jody, really, as her argument about the consecration of women bishops seemed to me to be quite close to what I have said here often enough about gay or lesbian candidates for either ministry. That point is rather different from yours about policing the interpretation of scripture.

Jody?

Jody, thanks for your article. I quite a agree that some men imagine all kinds of ambitious women ready to fight their way to the top.

Along the lines of iconoclast's point, and your response, Jody: at least part of the argument against either the ordination of women or their consecration as bishops has been that their priestly or episcopal modelling or representation of Christ is vitiated by their sex. It's the old joke that women are medically disqualified. Christ's sacrifice for and as humanity cannot it seems be represented by a woman, who might therefore be thought to be less fully human  than a male counterpart. I think that is part of your point, Jody. What is peculiar, to my mind, is that the Fulcrum official position set out in its various documents has got into exactly the same problem in relation to the full humanity of gay people, or have I got that wrong. Assuming we can break with historic tradition about the ordination of women (as with divorce and remarriage), what was it again that makes it impossible to ordain a gay man priest or consecrate him bishop? Isn't it because certain creation ordinances or some such (my words not Dr Goddard's) are contravened by a man or presumably a woman in a physical realtionship with a same-sex partner -- they're too fallen-short.  (I'm recalling +Colin Buchanan writing to me that he could no more ordain a gay man than he could a bankrupt...)

Nersen, I don't often bother to write to the fulcrum lot. I wanted to reassure the earlier poster that there was no danger that the pro-arguments put up here would not be heard. What I further reported is that the present positions were not properly represented at our deanery synod, When that point was made, the area dean did not demur. Whatever ++Rowan may or may not have said, I believe that the phrase' relational consequences 'was drawn from a document written by Dr Goddard and promulgated on this site. If I am wrong about that , it is merely my faulty memory. I have conjectured about what the phrase might mean in spite of the relatievly irenic interpretation put on it by my diocesan spokesperson among others. That's all. I know that your own posture leans  more to the pugnacious. We all know that. Nothing in the tone of my post merits your complaint. Happy New Year!

Tony

I don't think you need to worry about the pro-Covenant position being presented, John. I have no doubt that our diocesan synod will vote it through. I am not a member, but at the deanery synod discussion the official presentation was both pro-Covenant and, many of us felt, a distortion of the balance of arguments. ++Rowan and Fulcrum will get their way and, I expect, TEC and anyone who is in sympathy with them will be relegated to the outer group. It's what Dr Goddard always said about relational consequences.

Tony Phelan

I suppose  I asked for this! Dave, I don't think recognizing the Genesis creation stories as 'myth' means they have to be understood as fairy-tales -- though you may: it's not what I said. The great truth of the creation stories is that God affirms the material world. 

I can't see that integrity can be achieved by being merely consistent (=plugging the same old line) 'within Evangelical walls', either, Waterangel. Nor will it do to regard evolutionary principles as only a moment within the history of ideas. That would be like the old, pre-Reformation church approving the use of Copernican science when it was useful to mercantile development, but nevertheless insisting that the Ptolemaic system was The Truth with man on earth at the centre of a concentric crystal spheres. 

I absolutely agree with what User 2448 has to say about how damaging the literal (or propositional) reading of the creation stories is in terms of environmental vision. The emphasis on subduing the earth (ie exploiting resources as we see fit) was exactly the line I got well over 40 years ago! And as I've said before, the current use of the Genesis stories to generate a an anti-gay (and I think very shakey) anthropology is very damaging to individuals and to the church. Waterangel makes the same point (for which thanks) when she asks about teaching about gender roles in an evo context.

Thank you so much for publishing Luke Bretherton's article. It gives a gentle and nuanced account of these events, and I am so grateful that he points out the scapegoating mechanism that is being used to justify the typically vindictive response on the part of the government and (some of) the courts. In old money, it looks to me a lot like the predictable malice and hostility of a rattled ruling class!

I'm surprised nobody has weighed in on this yet. It's a problem Evangelicals have had for a long time -- I can remember heated arguments at our YPF ca 1960.

Is it a position of integrity? No. What is the credible Evangelical line on the creation accounts? Is there one? A lot seems to depend on the creationist view of gender to maintain the anti-gay stance of Fulcrum, for instance.

How should we present the creation story? Honestly, as a myth of origin working in a context of worship and liturgy: see Brueggemann's excellent discussion in An Introduction to the Old Testament: the Canon and Christian Imagination, pp. 27-36

Is it ironic that we are celebrating the gifts of 'Evangelical scholarship' at a time when these questions still need to be asked?. 

I wonder whether London vicars and even LondonVicar him (I kinda feel its is a him)self have any contact with clergy colleagues who don't share his opinions. Does he treat them as part of this liberal slide of which the Archbishop of Kenya is, as he reports, so fearful? Or is a principle of touch-not-the-unclean-thing and come-ye-out-from among-them in operation? It's these sweeping assertions that terrify me. I was adrift from church after enduring the indifference of a moribund but Evangelical church. It was only discovering what he would regard as a church in 'liberal slide' that I rediscovered a serious connection to scripture, and thanks to a commitment to Spiritual Direction a whole renewal of Christian faith. The 'liberal' church where I worship now has everything from people with pentecostal backgrounds and evangelicals, through ex- and recovering evangelicals to catholic ritualists, and even the Sea of Faith! You won't hear PSA preached, but you will hear the Commemoration of the Incarnation; and people come (and go) in a pretty unstable population in a part of town not much likely to suit a typically 'successful' Evangelical anglican congregation. We work and worship together and receive Christ in Word and Sacrament. Now it may be that our London Vicar and the Archbishop of Kenya would reply 'Oh no you don't!',  and that all this represents the liberal slide in the Church of England they want to put a stop to. I find LV's  bullet point responses, if he and what he seems to advocate gain the upper hand, really frightening.

Tony Phelan

I wasn't sure I'd understood the point of the Goddards' article when it appeared, but it looks as though it was prescient -- or maybe just well informed.

I hope that the two new reports (on gay and partnered people and episcopacy; and on sexuality) won't just repeat the hypocrisies and coercions that seem to have be characteristic of their deliberations and actions in the past -- by all accounts. And if it's true, as was claimed, that the bishops had hardly considered these matters over the last years, then I think I agree with Richard Ashby elsewhere: "The statement that the House of Bishops has hardly discussed the issue of homosexuality and gay priests/bishops in the past five years is a statement of a dereliction of duty coupled with cowardice."

Given the consensus here around "Issues in Human Sexuality" and of course (as nersenp. will remind us) Lambeth 1.10, I wonder what those of us in the conservative - Fulcrum axis think the positive purpose of these initiatives is meant to be? (Not a question about likely outcomes: from my own point of view, I remain deeply pessimistic and cynical about that.)

Tony