You know what I want to say to such people? You damn well try it. Go on. You try running an international Christian organisation that is committed to both liberalism and biblical tradition. You think it’s easy? You think it’s about being nice and progressive?
The real question, Gene, is whether we believe in the church at all. To believe in the church is to believe that God wills the Gospel to be incarnated in something that looks very like a human ideology, full of all-too-human flaws, and not unstained by human violence. Can it be that God wills this? That he allows himself to be mediated by a morally flawed society, a place in which homophobia (and much else) is rife?
This is what we must ask ourselves: do we dare to take the (considerable) risk of identifying the cause of Jesus Christ with a particular human tradition, a particular model of human wellbeing? Such a tradition will have rules – otherwise it would lack all coherence, all grammar. And these rules change slowly, if the tradition is old and large. Yes, the Catholic model of church does seem to implicate us in certain habits of cultural violence. Dare we accept that? Dare we suffer it? Is there an alternative? Yes: the alternative is to reduce Jesus Christ to a mere idea, to allow him to be eroded by secular anarchism, to be wise in our own sophistications.
For Catholic and apostolic Christians, Jesus Christ is not an idea but a living body. He calls us to defend his body, Gene. Perhaps it currently feels as if you are the waste matter excluded from the body – but is this not a crucial part of bodily health? When it comes to this very natural process, the dichotomy of inclusion/exclusion is transcended. You are part of the body that excludes you. May God grant you the wisdom to see this.
The link seems to be broken.
Phil
Well now. Sooner or later, this sort of writing will give tastelessness and mugwumpery a bad rep, won’t it? I don’t know who Theo Hobson is, but he needs a course in freshman composition. LM
Theo Hobson, in his imaginary letter from the ABC to Robinson:
He is suggesting that the ABC would view the Global South Primates as comparable to Nazi soldiers, Robinson as comparable to a Jew and resistance to the persecution of the Jews in nazi Germany is comparable to overturning the biblical understanding of marriage and standards of sexual morality.
The implication is that those who support the LGBT agenda now are taking a risk that will be rewarded by being glorified as morally honorable later.
The LGBT lobby has been successful in selling this vision of glory as the reward for advancing their agenda. It is puzzling to me. Do the people who buy into this envision they will receive the glory as earthly accolades in the history books? It seems like the people who buy into this are not after heavenly accolades from God in the afterlife because they do not seem concerned with honoring God’s laws and show contempt for those who are so concerned.
“You are part of the body that excludes you”
Funny. That’s how I’ve been feeling. Excluded. Unwanted. Second class.
I think the earthy final analogy is an echo of Lytton Strachey on Newman’s departure from the Anglican Oxford movement into Roman Catholicism, which he likened to the final expulsion of a particularly recalitrant piece of matter from a person suffering from constipation – something like that, I haven’t got the text.
#5 I was wondering about the last analogy as well. After a somewhat dithering approach to the subject by Hobson, at the last Hobson seems to be saying that Williams intends to treat Robinson (and Minns by extension) in a scatological manner? Well, perhaps that may be accurate, but to date there is no evidence of any functional flushing.