The most recent Fulcrum newsletter is entitled Listening to learn, Learning to listen and is written by Andrew Goddard.
The position taken here on this particular issue differs from that taken by Anglican Mainstream. Let’s see what TA readers think of it.
I think, though, that the basic problem remains that we have utterly different views and no matter how much listening, there really isn’t a way of combining them. The choice, thus, is to accept diversity or expect one side or another to alter their perspective, in terms of ‘the bottom line’ To be frank, and I have been involved in many of these processes – I know my view, why I hold it, and why I think it is right, and it isn’t going to alter. I know that others on the opposite side of the fence feel the same… Read more »
We did not know what listening was until we had a child who had no words.
I welcome AG’s cautious efforts to wrestle with the legacy views, without hoping that this wrestling will do much more than confirm the silliness of antigay violence, along with all its multiple variations. The longer you wrestle in deep detail with both the legacy stuff and the modern empirical research data, the clearer it becomes that scripture offers us a poorly conditioned place to start considering what we really know from data about (queer) personality, embodiment, and relationships. That is to say, at best, that scripture is quite ignorant of the modern depth and details of queer people who are… Read more »
‘The best that comes from this wrestling is to slowly but surely discern the covert presumptions of straight privilege to mistreat non-straight people, not least by believing and promulgating terrible things about them. And then acting badly towards them.’
Thanks for these words and indeed, for this entire piece (0f 8th Nov).
The Election news coming here, is very encouraging, to me.
There are many who see Lambeth 1.10 as having no legitimacy or authority because it called for others to do precisely what the Lambeth Fathers were unwilling to do.
It seems to me that Andrew Goddard is offering a timely reflection, which we in the Anglican Communion would do well to reflect carefully upon. One may not agree with everything he wrote, but the attitude of mind behind his article is very different – and to my mind far more Christian – than that of some self-proclaimed defenders of “orthodoxy,” who seem not to recognise any ethical constraints on their actions. Lambeth 1.10 has in many eyes been discredited, not least due to the behaviour of those who treat it as an infallible text. There are also, sadly, many… Read more »
I enjoyed reading this piece by Andrew Goddard. It came across to me as a gracious (in every sense of the word) contribution to the on-going process in which we are engaged as a communion. It was good to have an opportunity to really listen to someone who comes from a different tradition within the church wrestle with Lambeth 1.10 and the various reports and communiques and find in them potential paths forward. In that respect it reminded me of the St Michael Report, which I think has the same potential to open up a process that will allow us… Read more »
It strikes me that there is much hope in Andrew Goddard’s comment: “The simple fact is that in a genuine commitment to listen we are unable – if it is true listening – to control the outcome of the process.”
Exactly…
When did Lambeth Conference resolutions become ‘the official teaching of the Communion’? We do not have a Magisterium; I do not accept that a Lambeth Conference resolution is binding. As a priest of the Church of England, I am bound by the Canons of the C of E, which is quite enogh, thank you!