A Dave Walker Cartoon is worth a thousand words:
My favorite quote from the Associated Press article on +Gene & Lambeth:
A spokesman for the Anglican Communion did not respond to a request for comment.
And then there's this great quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu's preface to +Gene's soon-to-be-published book, In the Eye of the Storm
... Gene Robinson, breathtakingly, says of those opposing him who have been vituperative and worse, that they are all, including him, destined for heaven. He has refused to demonise them. After all the calumny heaped on him he might have been forgiven for hoping that his adversaries would end up in the warmer place. Our Lord must smile to have such a splendid representative in an affair that has often been sordid.
He is so utterly eirenic and his hermeneutics – his manner of understanding the scriptures as being time bound and thus conditioned by cultural language, beliefs contemporary knowledge, etc. is so reasonable and persuasive.
For me, the question of human sexuality is really a matter of justice; of course I would be willing to show that my beliefs are not inconsistent with how we have come to understand the scriptures. It is not enough to say the "Bible says ….. ", for the Bible says many things that I find totally unacceptable and indeed abhorrent.
I accept the authority of the Bible as the Word of God but I remember that the Bible has been used to justify racism, slavery and the humiliation of women, etc. Apartheid was supported by the white Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa which claimed that there was biblical sanction for that vicious system ...
Gene Robinson is a wonderful human being and I am proud to belong to the same Church as he.
Desmond Tutu
Capetown, South Africa
More tomorrow.
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