Benjamin Wyatt Earth & Altar What is Fornication?
Kelvin Holdsworth What’s in Kelvin’s Head 12 Things I’ve Learned About Preaching
Colin Coward Unadulterated Love Being realistic about God
Jayne Ozanne ViaMedia.News ‘Hermetically Sealed Hermeneutics’ & an Inability to Own Up to Harm
Stephen Cottrell Archbishop of York Opening the Scriptures
The 25th, and final, Archbishop Blanch Memorial Lecture
For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. Matt. 15:19 It’s like one of those IQ test questions Murder = dead person Adultery= cuckolded spouse Theft = victim of theft False Witness/slander = victim of … Fornication = ? Put in a list like that, it’s clear that fornication has a victim: that’s the common thread of the list. If there is no victim, then it is not fornication. Our IQ test answer is then that fornication is any sexual (or sexualised) act which has a victim. I would suggest that includes… Read more »
Wyatt’s piece is interesting , although I wonder what he makes of 1 Corinthians 7, especially verse 9 ‘But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.’
To me, the need for the Christian disciple to chose between marriage and sexual abstinence indicates fairly clearly that the apostle Paul believed that sexual activity was only legitimate within marriage- implying also that sex outside marriage was included within his understanding of fornication.
Decades ago, I confounded a religious school teacher when I stated that God created human beings so that human beings could create God. She changed the discussion. I was being somewhat cheeky, but as I’ve grown older I still ascribe to that. Colin Coward’s column is excellent. And partway through, he condemns anthropomorphic thinking about God. Absolutely spot on! God is not an entity with a definable body. God is not a super man (and the way some clergy speak of God, I use “man” deliberately) who condemns our enemies and showers us with goodies. I used to suffer from… Read more »
Colin Coward is always worth reading, particularly when he sets into an evolutionary context the place the human animal has within the vast universe. I’m sure that for many people, God has an obsessive and prurient interest in the sex life of homo sapiens. Christian revelation is surely a human construct based upon how our scientific knowledge reveals more about how things are. It has been revealed, for instance, that in Sydney Diocese, women are inferior in evolutionary development to their male husbands. This is not a universal truth, even in Australia. Similarly, it has been revealed to certain CofE… Read more »
You tell we must acknowledge that God is ‘usually a projection of our own divisive opinions which we call ‘theology’ – which presumably must include your and Colin’s opinions posted here.
Yes. Exactly.
Smile ….
‘People known as “evangelicals” know all God’s views about everything since He wrote them down.’ I’m sorry, FrDavid, that’s just a ridiculous statement. No evangelical claims to know all God’s views about everything, and no Anglican evangelical theological statement that I am aware of claims that God wrote down all God’s views on absolutely everything in the Bible. (Also, most evangelical theologians don’t believe that God wrote the Bible; they believe God inspired the process by which humans wrote it, and there is considerable diversity of understanding on how that happened). I really wonder how caricatures like these advance the… Read more »
The evangelical bloggers that I see here in the US, always say that God “told” Paul, or Matthew, or Mark, “what to write.”
Are they Anglicans? I’m writing on a website called ‘Thinking Anglicans’, so I assumed that was who we were talking about.
Anglicans, yes: ACNA.
ACNA is not Anglican
You know what, I don’t especially care for the ACNA either, but I think those of us who belong to a church that calls itself ‘catholic’—even though we aren’t part of the church that calls itself ‘THE Catholic Church’—might want to be careful about denying the name ‘Anglican’ to those who feel they’re preserving all that’s best in Anglicanism. It smacks a bit too much of “Lord, we saw someone casting oiut demons in your name, and we told him to stop, because he wasn’t part of our group.”
Methodists left the Anglican church. They don’t call themselves Anglicans. Anglicans left the RC Church. They don’t claim to be Roman Catholics. Anyone not in Communion with the Anglican Church can call themselves what they like. But they’re not Anglicans.
The Roman Catholic Church does not call itself the Roman Catholic Church – it calls itself The Catholic Church. It’s others that call it ‘Roman’ Catholic, partly to dispute its exclusive claim to the title ‘Catholic’. So the parallel holds good. We Anglicans call ourselves ‘Catholic’, even though we have left the Catholic Church as defined by communion with the See of Rome. Likewise, ACNA members are not in communion with the See of Canterbury, but still hold to Anglican liturgy, tradition, and theology. I may disagree with them, but it would be the height of arrogance to judge them… Read more »
What about evangelical members of TEC?
I actually think that Paul, Mark and Matthew thought that too, though I would choose different words to express the Christian understanding of inspiration and revelation that lies behind such statements. But the gospel writers plainly did not believe their minds had been bypassed and they were robotically receiving literal dictation. And nor do any evangelicals I know, for that matter. But every tradition of the church has its narrow, dogmatic (and mad) corners. If you have stayed into one such cul de sac can I suggest you just ignore them?
I read them only for amusement. And I believe it’s helpful to know what the competition is thinking.
Richard, just to clarify, when I said ‘evangelicals’ I was thinking mainly of Anglican evangelicals. I know the US evangelical scene can be very weird a lot of the time.
I’m unclear about the difference between a God who “wrote” the Bible and the deity who “inspired” the Bible. It amounts to the same thing. Evangelicals tend to appeal to proof texts to justify their own opinions. What is the point of quoting ancient scriptural verses if not to prove the evangelical’s view that their opinions, and those of God, are identical?
FrDavid, the view that ‘the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God containing all things necessary to salvation’ is not some strange evangelical doctrine; it’s the official doctrine of my denomination, the Anglican Church of Canada, found in both our Book of Common Prayer and our contemporary Book of Alternative Services (in which every candidate for ordination has to make that declaration publicly before hands may be laid on them). I think most Canadian Anglicans (including me) would not claim that it commits us to a doctrine of inerrancy, but the idea that the… Read more »
Just one point: ‘The holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God containing all things necessary to salvation’ does not mean that “all things in holy scriptures are necessary to salvation.”
I agree.
Amen to that
An “authoritative revelation from God” is simply another way of saying “our views we project onto God claiming they are His”.
So I’m just curious to know whether you believe that God has ever revealed anything to humanity, and if so, how? Because bog-standard Anglicanism definitely believes that such revelation has taken place. Again, this isn’t fringe evangelical theology. It’s the official liturgy of TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada – two of the more liberal member churches of the Anglican Communion.
Bishop Richard Holloway likens “revelation” to space scientists receiving in-coming messages at Mission Control. All religions seek to find a meaning in the Universe and describe it according to culture and custom. Surely “revelation” is an interpretation of human existence coming, not from “outside”, but from within themselves.
So actually not revleation at all, but simply human wisdom. No guidance or word of hope from God, who could speak if God wanted to, but apparently does not?
Where does this leave Jesus, who has traditionally been regarded as ‘the Word’ of God in John 1?
The story of Jesus is a good one to inhabit and live by. It requires faith and hope to put into practice. His teaching turns the world upside down. Interpreting the myths, miracles, teachings and parables is like trying to turn poetry into prose. Talking about the concept of “revelation” in historical terms is too simplistic. One should simply live inside the poem.
I warm to that response, Fr David. And yet, i note that the teaching of Jesus does include the concept of revelation – ‘no one knows the Father except the Son, and and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’ But like you, I want to ‘inhabit and live by’ the story of Jesus.
This is a genuine question, not an invitation to further argument: how would you describe the Christian good news? What makes it good news?
IMO, every time science discovers something new–a new element, a cure for disease, a new planet, a new understanding of physics, whatever–that is, at its base, a revelation from God.
I warm to your sense of God working with us to increase our scientific knowledge, and I’m sure this is part of God’s dream for us, Pat. I’m 100% with you on that. But surely if we part company with the idea that God has spoken to us, in some sense, in Jesus and the scriptures, we part company with something that has always been central in the Christian message, don’t we? The Hebrew celebration of God’s word being a lamp to our feet and a light to our path – Jesus as “the light of the world; those who… Read more »
My thoughts on science and revelation are not meant to denigrate religious revelation at all…in fact, I think much scientific revelation has spiritual meaning as well. If the fact of evolution means that human beings are intimately related to all other living things, as an example, then we are given a revelation of the width and breadth of our family in God’s care, far beyond our own humanity. If our knowledge and understanding of human psychology makes us more understanding and forgiving of the foibles and errors of our fellow men and women, then that, too, is a spiritual revelation.… Read more »
Thank you very much!
It’s amazing how often God’s revelation matches the speaker’s worldview.
But also amazing how the revelation in Jesus challenged and changed the worldviews of its first century hearers, both Jewish and Gentile.
Another Christian author, Bishop John Shelby Spong, may his memory be a blessing, wrote in a similar fashion on the Bible and Christianity’s most basic concepts in a scientific age of current evolutionary thought and current cosmology of the Universe. Although I think Fr. Coward aims for understanding and accommodation, while Bishop Spong often (deliberately?) wrote in a more provocative fashion. One example that will remain forever in my memory is in a book Bishop Spong wrote, I think Rescuing the Bible from the Fundamentalists. Bishop Spong tried to show how impossible it is for many of the passages of… Read more »
Spong’s comments on the Ascension are less provocative than they are inane. Belief in a literal Ascension requires a miracle. It does not require a flat earth, or even that heaven be in a physical location within this universe. Requiring “up” to be a physical direction perpendicular to the ground makes about as much sense as claiming that Jesus could only have “risen” if he were constantly at a higher level above the ground than when he was in the tomb. Much of what I’ve seen of Spong seems to be like that – he’s decided he doesn’t believe something… Read more »
Spong’s belief about the Ascension is no more inane than David Jenkins’ view that the Resurrection is “more than a conjuring trick with bones”. Today’s inane CofE propagates a literalist view of the Christian religion, as if bishops like Spong and Jenkins had never existed. When Jenkins was in Durham he provoked a widespread, secular discussion of the Faith not seen since. The rubbish spouted by today’s happy-clappy denomination is sensibly ignored by most right-thinking people.
Thank you. The title of the book I was referencing Spong is titled “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism” (emphasis mine). Rescuing. Spong was using a very literalist interpretation of the Ascension, in conjunction with today’s understanding of a round Earth and a heliocentric Solar System, to show that a literal understanding of the Ascension is as inane as God flooding the entire planet Earth with water to a height (depth?) of 30,000 ft/9000 meters in a literalist interpretation of the Noah story (which I have heard some fundamentalists insist is what happened). I threw in a little extra water so… Read more »
Thank you Jo. Spong’s approach illustrates that wooden literalism is not just the language of fundamentalists. Poetry anyone? Mystery? Not here to there. Rather, everywhere. ‘He has ascended that He might fill all things.’ (Eph 4.10).
Agreed, David. It’s a standard tactic of extremists like Spong to set up a fundamentalist straw man and then take great delight in demolishing it. Meanwhile, many of us are standing on the sidelines, shaking our heads, wondering why he’s tilting at windmills.
“And partway through, he condemns anthropomorphic thinking about God. Absolutely spot on! God is not an entity with a definable body.” Do we know that God doesn’t have an identifiable body (or possibly several He swaps between as we swap outfits)? Jesus will be seated at the right hand of God which suggests God does have an identifiable physical presence (or can take one). We also know we were made in His image and don’t have evidence that doesn’t include physical form. If we speak with someone on the telephone we could conclude they are a disembodied voice. It’s only… Read more »
“therefore would caution against thinking which rejects anthropomorphism.” My comments on Fr. Coward’s excellent column and below are strictly my opinion But, Regardless of Christianity’s claim that Jesus of Nazareth is God’s only-begotten son, which has to be seen as some form of spiritual metaphor, in my opinion, … All monotheistic faiths declare God to have no beginning and no end, God is eternal. God exists. Period. Therefore God has no need to procreate for the purpose of continuing God’s existence. All monotheistic faiths proclaim God to occupy all space and time, to permeate God’s creation, the Universe. I believe… Read more »
I would reject anthropomorphism in favour of deomorphism – identifying the qualities of God that dwell in humanity.
Interesting comment. I am going to meditate and pray on that one but my instinctive reaction is that you are right. Thank you.