tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6574048134782604093.post6358265734982585778..comments2023-04-11T09:40:17.154-07:00Comments on Bishop David's Afterwords: Positive about Scripture: Positive about Equal MarriageDavid Gilletthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08993743504212380971noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6574048134782604093.post-17105962009680460242016-08-06T10:57:21.539-07:002016-08-06T10:57:21.539-07:00Thanks for your thoughtful response, Susannah. Bea...Thanks for your thoughtful response, Susannah. Beautifully expressed and very much in line with my own approach.David Gilletthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08993743504212380971noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6574048134782604093.post-29830030866451329942016-08-06T05:01:54.243-07:002016-08-06T05:01:54.243-07:00I very much appreciate reading your post, because ...I very much appreciate reading your post, because it feels like the outcome of life, and prayer, and a spiritual journey (still continuing!) - and because perhaps, as you say, two understandings of truth may *both* hold true, in their own ways, for different people's journeys.<br /><br />Perhaps more important than 'Who is right?' is 'Can we open our hearts to love?' Perhaps that is the real test. As a Church, can we respect one another's right to conscientious belief, even where we differ? Can we share together in service? Can we pray for one another's flourishing?<br /><br />Then, I believe, we start to open ourselves to true unity - the unity that we can only, ever, find in Jesus Christ, in the living God.<br /><br />Demands for uniformity to create 'unity'... Pastoral Letters that threaten sanctions for non-conformity... Primates' Meetings that threaten 'consequences' and relational distancing for different conscientious beliefs... seem to me to be more abut control, than about that letting go, and letting God.<br /><br />We need to afford one another more space for grace. We need to love one another, and treasure the reality that each one of us is different and unique, yet loved deeply by God. How we deal with difference is possibly more important than the perennial question of 'Who is right?'<br /><br />How we exercise love, how we open up to the Love that God longs to share with us, may be to trust a bit more, to control a bit less.<br /><br />In contemplation we wait and gaze, until sometimes by grace, our controlling minds recede, and God's love and presence - in vastness - breaks through.<br /><br />That experience in chapel or on the mountainside needs to become a way we live our lives: because love fulfils the law. Love liberates us to be who we, uniquely and variously, are called to be and become. Love sometimes starts where words trail off... beyond the limits of what we now see but darkly.<br /><br />Where Christians respond in different ways to parts of the Bible, that should not be a reason for schism, but rather, a reason for falling back on love. We are diverse, we may have diverse ways of coming at things, but like the cat in the physics exercise, in the eyes of God it may not be a matter of dead or alive.<br /><br />Opening our hearts to God, to God's grace and God's love, is where we begin... just begin... to be 'right'.<br /><br />SusannahAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6574048134782604093.post-72600042835519440142016-08-06T04:59:43.623-07:002016-08-06T04:59:43.623-07:00David,
I found this post of yours incredibly help...David,<br /><br />I found this post of yours incredibly helpful and it resonates with my own intuitions and life experience. So I thank you very much.<br /><br />In my early years of Christian engagement, I looked for certainty and exactitude, which I thought the Bible could provide.<br /><br />However, as I have tried to journey with God (or more importantly perhaps, God has journeyed with me) I have found in contemplative experience, the value of letting go of the controls and that human desire to define and dictate... and instead, have found that sometimes God comes to us, through what the medieval writer called a 'cloud of unknowing'.<br /><br />So the way you suggest that there may not always be just one right way to respond to the Bible, but that two different responses may *both* be right, rings true to me.<br /><br />As Christians, I think it is a shame if we try to 'dominate' one another, and insist on just one way of responding to the Bible and responding to God.<br /><br />The language that remains universal, it seems to me, is the primary imperative: to love. We see that in the life (and enigma) of Jesus. Jesus who never wrote a word himself that we have record of (except perhaps some lines in the sand when people wanted to stone the adultress). The Bible is people's responses to encounter with God, just as we too try to respond and make sense of the God who we encounter.<br /><br />My hope for the Church is that we can accept more open-endedness, and afford grace and space for other Christians to hold views that are diverse and different from our own. I believe in 'unity in diversity'... in the unity we have, not from uniformity, but from the eternal unity and communion that eternally operates between the Holy Trinity, and into which we seem to be invited and called. Our unity is found in Christ, I believe.<br /><br />We live in an age that sometimes seems very driven with tense mental control. And sometimes, when our own values feel threatened, we make those controls even tenser. Stories which were probably intended as campfire myths, even at the time they were written down, to be received with wonder and imagination, get recruited as precise and literal narratives. If anything, I feel that that can diminish the authority and impact of scripture.<br /><br />God, in all eternity, lives in relationship, community, and love - a mystery of the Holy Trinity. And we are invited into mystery as well. Even our human relationships can be, in their own ways, mysterious and wonderful. I think we lose something if we lose that child-like wonder, and try to tie everything down to precision and facts... as if we can 'capture' that Spirit who blows where he/she wills.<br /><br />But if we can open our hearts to the love of God... and let that love inform our relationships and actions, our reading and understanding, our exercise of conscience... then the flow of God's love begins and God's nature breaks through. Not in doctrinal control or uniformity, but in the call to love: to love God, to love our neighbour, to love one another.<br /><br />(contd)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6574048134782604093.post-18716617464472126882016-08-02T22:40:28.988-07:002016-08-02T22:40:28.988-07:00Thanks Pete. I am sure you're right that our o...Thanks Pete. I am sure you're right that our own personal experience colours how we read scripture. It's also interesting that the emphasis on gender difference rather than suitability and sameness has emerged strongly in more conservative circles as they confront the increasing acceptance of gay relationships among Christians. I think that the use of the text as a campaigning tool leads to missing one of the main emphases of the story!David Gilletthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08993743504212380971noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6574048134782604093.post-88522852977115025102016-08-02T15:01:42.434-07:002016-08-02T15:01:42.434-07:00Thank you for this!
It has always troubled me tha...Thank you for this!<br /><br />It has always troubled me that conservative interpretations of gen 2 place such a heavy emphasis on gender difference but completely ignore the suitability aspect. The passage does not to me to say that gender difference is more important than suitability!<br /><br />Something that straight people may miss when reading Gen2 is the heteronormativity aspect. Gay people are accustomed to literature, fact and fiction being written from a straight perspective because the vast majority of people are straight. <br /><br />I think gay people are less likely to see emphasis on gender difference in this passage because it is everywhere.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17376621142901792337noreply@blogger.com