Thank God for diversity?
We have the honour in Oxfordshire this year of hosting the
Westminster Faith Debates on “The Future of the Church of England”. On Thursday
at the University Church in Oxford the 4th of 5 debates took place
on the theme of Diversity. Much was said
by a fairly diverse panel and some brave and thoughtful contributions emerged
from the floor. One such was the hope
expressed that newly-empowered women priests (and bishops) should find it hard
not to be sympathetic to the demands by gay people for equality within the
church. Another came a good two-thirds
of the way through the debate when someone stood up and implied that we might
have been skirting the real issue, which is that “we have a problem with the
Bible”.
Of course some people don’t have a problem with the Bible –
in fact it serves them rather well: just look at the size of their
congregations, pointed out the representative of Anglican Mainstream, alluding
to the throngs of students at St Aldate’s and St Ebbe’s in Oxford. But a more striking comment came from someone from US (formerly USPG, a missionary society) who said that if we take the
Bible seriously then we must realise that it contains so many theologies that
the Church cannot but be diverse. (He might have added that, with the Bible self-evidently a library of 60
or even 90 books of all shapes and sizes and voices and styles, it’s tempting to say that, if this is 'the word
of God', one might wish he would make up his mind…)
Symon Hill, associate director of the Ekklesia think tank,
wrote in a commentary on a gospel passage about Pharisees and teachers of the
law who were asking for a sign:
“God wants us to think for ourselves. This is scary. I have been to plenty of churches that are not comfortable with it, and do their best to ensure that their congregations are all taught the ‘right’ interpretation of the Bible. In contrast, Jesus told parables but rarely explained them. It seems that he wanted his listeners to think through the meanings, whether individually or in discussion with others.”
We shall be doing exactly that on December 7th at
Wychwood Library as we respond in our different ways to “The Meaning of Jesus –Two Visions” by Marcus Borg (a leading liberal) and Tom Wright (a leading
conservative), both important and respected scholars, well versed in the ‘Historical
Jesus’ debate. As the publishers take
care to point out on the cover, both have written books which show their commitment
to explaining their faith: Borg wrote The Heart of Christianity and Wright Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes
Sense. As usual at Wychwood Circle we
will do our best to make sense of what we believe – and indeed of what others
believe.
We meet at 7pm on Sunday
December 7th at Wychwood Library in the High Street, Milton under
Wychwood, OX7 6LD, ending not later than 9pm.
We will focus on Parts 1 (How do we know about Jesus?) and 5 (Was Jesus
God?). The book is available in
different editions, including second-hand.
Originally published in 1999, it came out as HarperCollins paperback in
2007.
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