Exploring the Connections

The Seven Deadly Sins

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

AVARICE

They say Midas
died a ruined man—
you can't eat gold,
gold can't keep you warm.
But that's just
allegory, and anyway
times have
changed. Give me
that touch.
I'll take my chances.

PRIDE

I have swallowed it
and swallowed it,
but I am like the Whale,
I can feel my Jonah
down there, waiting.
When I spit him out
everyone
will take notice.

GLUTTONY

As I finish lunch
I am thinking about
what I will eat
for dinner, so
if I give you
the smaller portion
of dessert, it is only
because I am
preoccupied. Here
let's cover it
with cream.

LUST

There is a candle lit
between my thighs.
Come, blow it out,
you with the down
so new on your face
it could be a girl's,
though I saw the muscles quicken
under your shirt,
as my pulse
quickened when
you lifted the groceries
into my car.

SLOTH

The indolent sloth
had three toes
on each front foot,
a small mammal, slow moving
and from …
South America.
Since you ask,
I would tell you which country,
but I am too tired
to look it up.

ENVY

There was a green
silk scarf with gold
around the edges
that matched
my cousin's green eyes
flecked with gold.
Mother said mine
were pure merino wool.
Mother said never mind,
boys would want to marry
girls like me.

ANGER

You tell me
that it's alright
to let it out of its cage,
though it may claw someone,
even bite.
You say that letting it out
may tame it somehow.
But loose, it may
turn on me, maul
my face, draw blood.
Ah, you think you know so much,
you whose anger is a pet dog,
its canines dull with disuse.
But mine is a rabid thing,
sharpening its teeth
on my very bones,
and I will never let it go.

Linda Pastan A Fraction of Darkness
Norton, 1985

Session 3 of OVERCOMING POVERTY, Sunday morning, April 29, 2007

Session 3 of our new study series - OVERCOMING POVERTY - will convene in the Brides' Room (on the first floor of Latham) on Sunday morning, April 29, at 10:05 AM.

Notes for Session 2 - "The Common Good"  can be downloaded below:

Download the_common_good.pdf

See you there!

Another Confrontation with Ourselves

National Catholic Reporter, Editorial, April 27, 2007

Virginia Tech.

A new name on the roster of senseless slaughter. We have seen so much of this.

We are violent.

In the past half-century we have witnessed the assassinations of a president, his presidential candidate brother and a civil rights leader, and attempted assassinations of other presidential candidates and presidents. We have witnessed the murders of civil rights workers and antiwar protesters, including the killing of four on the Kent State University campus.

There was Columbine, where 13 students were gunned down in 1999 before the shooters killed themselves. In 2006, in the quiet of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, 11 youngsters were shot and 5 killed, execution style, in an elementary school.

Twelve years ago this month, a truck bomb destroyed half a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring more than 800.

We’ve puzzled over snipers from university towers and killers who haunted Maryland and Virginia, and a highway sniper in the upper Midwest, picking off the unsuspecting, one at a time, from a distance.

* * *

The concession one makes in these moments is that so much is beyond our control. We cannot, as Jesuit Fr. William Byron said, inure ourselves against or forever avoid malice, but we can rely on “faith and religion to ready the human spirit to withstand any assault.”

Relying on faith as the ultimate protection against life’s disruptions, however, should not leave us helpless. There are things we can do.

Two days after the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, President Clinton declared: “We must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.”

That same day he ordered intense bombing of Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia.

Anyone who’s raised a child knows that they don’t learn well when behavior contradicts teaching. One thing we can do is more deeply examine who we are and how accepting we are of state-sponsored violence. Does it square with who and what we say we are?

* * *

The day of the shooting massacre on the Virginia Tech campus, President Bush said in a TV interview that he expected a debate on gun control policy, but argued that now is not the time.

We can’t think of a better time.

According to a 2007 Small Arms Survey, the United States ranks first in the world in gun ownership with 90 weapons per 100 people. By contrast, the rate in France, for instance is 32 per 100 people, and 31 per 100 in Canada, Sweden and Austria.

The numbers themselves would be insignificant, save for the fact that guns account for so much carnage among our children.

These statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are posted on the Web site of the National Education Association:

The rate of firearm deaths among kids under age 15 is almost 12 times higher in the United States than in 25 other industrialized countries combined. The number of U.S. kids killed by gunfire in 2002 was 3,012.
American children are 16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a firearm accident than children in 25 other industrialized countries combined.

* * *
Lax enforcement of existing gun control laws and consistent erosion of those laws have allowed the deadly gun culture to flourish. Even the 1994 ban on assault weapons, essentially battlefield grade weapons that have no use other than killing humans quickly, efficiently and in great numbers, was allowed to expire three years ago.

The gun lobby -- rich, unconscionable and unscrupulous in manipulating public fear -- has most politicians in a stranglehold. The stranglehold is maintained even as survey after survey, including gun owners and members of households where guns are available, show that a majority of Americans approve of reasonable controls.

We may not be able to hold off malice in the world, or predict the actions of the deranged among us. But we all can do something to foster a culture less accommodating of violence and less friendly toward those who make the violence possible.

Who are we, really, and what kind of culture do we want? How much state-sponsored violence are we willing to tolerate and pay for? How much will we allow the purveyors of arms to dictate our politics? What actions are we willing to place behind the instructions on nonviolence that we attempt to pass on to our children?

National Catholic Reporter, April 27, 2007

Interview with the Rev'd Blake Rider

[I came across this piece, quite by accident, on THE ROUNDTABLE - a "Religion and Social Welfare" site maintained by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, State University of New York - MT]

The Roundtable:

Your background seems a little unusual for a minister. Can you tell us about it?

Rev. Rider:

I grew up in Oklahoma and after graduation from college there, I went to work for Phillips Petroleum, an energy company. And I moved with them to Houston in ‘82, and eventually moved from company to company and ended up at a company called Union Texas Petroleum in the mid-‘80s and was with them then for the rest of my career in the oil business, which lasted about 20 years.

I wandered through a variety of departments. Most people think that you're either an engineer or a geologist or a geophysicist. But oil companies are big companies, so there's people who do all kinds of things. I worked in the land department with oil and gas leases, I worked in the natural gas marketing department with gas contracts. And eventually I ended up working overseas managing an operation in Tunis, in the country of Tunisia, on the coast of North Africa, where we were drilling for oil and gas, both in the Mediterranean and down in the Sahara. And I was there for three years managing that operation. And it was there when the company went out of business that I had a chance to take a deep breath and see a call to ordained ministry in my life.

Before I left for Tunis was when I was involved with a couple of nonprofits in the Houston area, in the social services arena. The first of those was a reading program where we opened a variety of clinics to help children suffering from mild dyslexia. In the mid-‘80s, the state legislature in Texas mandated that all the schools test and provide services for children with dyslexia. It was an unfunded mandate. So it was a bad situation - it's not like that anymore in Texas, but it was at the time. So the local Masonic lodges, which I'm a member of, in Houston, we organized dyslexia centers. And I think there's 11 or 13 of them now around the Southeast Texas area, where we provide some free training for first and second graders who have been identified for being at risk for dyslexia. And that was a gratifying and a very meaningful operation. We had clinics in private schools, in public schools, not associated with schools, in a variety of locales throughout the state, both in big cities and in very small underserved communities. So that was a good thing to be involved in, and it showed me a lot about what private organizations could do in the social service arena, and also organizations that maybe hadn't done things like that in the past.

Then in the early ‘90s, the church I was attending - St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Houston - began to provide what was called at the time AIDS respite care, where we would go into the homes of people suffering with AIDS and give the primary caregiver a break - where we would come in and clean or cook or whatever - or in many cases it was working with people with HIV/AIDS who had no one at all.

By the mid-‘90s, there were still no housing services for people suffering with AIDS - both on the income end of their situation and on the social stigma and rejection end of their situation. So three of us got together and it was like a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movie: We said, “Let's open house!” as if we knew what we were doing. And who knew what it would all turn into. But we did find a big old abandoned house in Houston, in a kind of derelict neighborhood. And we had to pry the plywood off the windows to crawl in to see if it was okay. And we kept going. We found the owner, signed a rent lease-to-own contract with no money, and began to have bake sales and garage sales, thinking we could do it on that level. That would never have worked. But about that time was when the government came out with the Housing for People Living with AIDS Act. So we applied for an early grant in that program, and got the almost-a-million dollars we needed to buy and renovate the facility. So we opened within about two years.

The Roundtable:

How long have you been in Poughkeepsie?

Rev. Rider:

I arrived in June of ‘06, so six months now.

The Roundtable:

Share with us your impressions of the city, and its religious life and community service, compared to other places that you've been.

Rev. Rider:

I'm just beginning to get my feet on the ground with both of those, of course. But what I have found in Poughkeepsie, of course, coming from Houston, would be a much smaller town atmosphere, that personally I like. So that I have breakfast every week with one of the Jewish rabbis and the Presbyterian minister and the Congregational Church minister, and the Reformed Church minister, and the American Orthodox Church minister or priest.

The Roundtable:

And this isn't something that would necessarily happen in a city the size of Houston - the interfaith collaboration?

Read Blake's answer to this, and other questions, here

Session 2 of OVERCOMING POVERTY, Sunday morning, April 22, 2007

Session 2 of our new study series - OVERCOMING POVERTY - will convene in the Brides' Room (on the first floor of Latham) on Sunday morning at 10:05 AM.

Notes for Session 2 - "A Covenant for a New America"  can be downloaded below.

Download a_covenant_for_a_new_america.pdf

See you there!

Rowan Williams’ Wrong Reading of Romans (… and John 14:6)

by Rober A.J. Gagnon, Assoc. Prof. of New Testament, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
http://robgagnon.net/RowanWilliams'WrongReading.htm

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and titular head of the Anglican Communion, delivered a lecture on Apr. 16, 2007 in which he suggested that the “conservative” case against homosexual practice, based significantly on Romans 1:24-27, has failed to give due weight to the fact that Paul in context is primarily critical of the judgmental attitude of those in the covenant community. Reuters has picked up Williams’ remarks—which constitute only 424 words out of a 6358-word text entitled “The Bible Today: Reading and Hearing”—and has formulated a screaming headline out of it entitled, “Anglican head Williams says anti-gays misread Bible”

This imbalance is already a distortion of sorts, especially since Williams also once notes that the “‘liberal’ or revisionist case” is not helped by the fact that “everyone in [Paul’s] imagined readership agrees in thinking the same-sex relations of the culture around them to be as obviously immoral as idol-worship or disobedience to parents.” And yet the reporting is not a complete distortion of Williams’ remarks. The dominant point that Williams makes rests with “conservative” misinterpretation of the text’s “movement,” not with the “liberal” reading. Moreover, even when he states that his own reading is “not helpful for a ‘liberal’ or revisionist case,” he carefully couches his language. He does not say that Paul himself fully accepted the view of homosexual practice per se as “immoral” (perhaps, but only perhaps, this can be assumed) but refers instead to what Paul’s readers think and that only with regard to “the same-sex relations of the culture around them,” leaving open the possibility that their opposition to homosexual practice was limited only to common exploitative forms. Then, too, he states that same-sex relations were “as obviously immoral as . . . disobedience to parents,” which is a distortion of Paul’s point in Romans 1:18-32. To indicate, as Paul does, that any form of sin could get one excluded from the kingdom of God if personal merit is the criterion of evaluation is not the same as saying that all forms of sin are equally abhorrent to God (the latter point Paul and Scripture generally deny categorically). 

[Read the rest of Gagnon's critique here]

Response to Bill Carroll's Response to Archbishop Williams

by Dan Orfield

[Dan Orfield is a communicant of Christ Church Cathedral, Houston, and a member of the Exploring the Connections community]

I think Carroll misses a central point of Archbishop Williams' argument, which is that we must listen to Scripture not just from our vantage point now, in which violence in Joshua and subjugation of women are clearly no longer our call as individuals or community, but from the point of view of the historical audience that was listening to Joshua. We then must think hard about the unity between the various movements of the message then and the message now. (Some of which, even in the text itself, are clearly "disruptive" and critical.) By contrast, this critic seems to want to eliminate distasteful stories from Scripture, or criticize them as not "really" part of God's word, without any foundational Biblical or theological reasons. And I think that unless one wants to discard much of the Hebrew Bible, and also point to the more peaceful New Testament as superceding violent Judaism (which has its own problems of anti-semitism) one must try in faithful response to God and community to make sense of the entire Biblical story, to the audience then and now, rather than excise the points we now dislike.

Of course, an important part of that story is how we Christians after the cross and resurrection now view the power of God as self emptying, rather than warring, conquering or hierarchical. But, to come to that realization we need to address those earlier stories as also the word of God. Feminists and liberation theologians have a place in that project, certainly, but if they are Christian or Jewish, less I think to highlight how the intention of the original stories may have been to subjugate women, and more, as Williams does, to say either that those were not the primary movements of the stories, (whether that movement was consciously affected by the original writers or not) or to show how the Bible story itself has since identified the very notions of power and hierarchy in earlier stories as no longer a faithful response to God even though they were at the time. Indeed, that is what Jesus himself often did.

But without those earlier "distasteful" stories as themselves part of God's word the whole notion of God at least partly involved in our historical response toward God disappears. The Bible itself then no longer is a living word demanding our continual although admittedly partial response, but a tool solely for human control and criticism that freezes us in the particular moment the criticism is made. And I simply do not want creation to be frozen in Carroll's word of this-moment criticism, despite, I can gather, having equally left leaning notions of power, equity and justice. (I am a labor union lawyer precisely because I think the best current way for workers to equalize power with managements is through collective action.) I am faithful enough to believe that centuries hence, folks will read the Bible as a whole, with those distasteful stories, as more liberating than without, and such that Carroll's and feminists current view of liberation (and mine too) will seem quaint, parochial, even insular. And then we all will be much more liberated yet interpersonally and historically connected with each other and with God through Williams' interpretive strategy than through Carroll's.

Williams on Listening to Scripture: A Brief Response

By Bill Carroll*
Anglican Resistance, April 17, 2007

[*The Rev'd Bill Carroll is an Episcopal Priest in the Diocese of Upper South Carolina]

The full text of Rowan Williams April 16, 2007 Larkin Stuart Lecture in Toronto is found here.

I find much to agree with, especially when it comes to the need to listen to the full canon of Scripture, publicly read and heard in its proper context, the Eucharist. We may read the Scriptures at other times, but it is in the context of the Church (as Eucharistic assembly) and its liturgy that the Word of God is paradigmatically spoken and heard.

I am interested, however, by this portion of what Williams has to say:

It is not that we are given only a method of interpretation by the form of Scripture -- a method that, by pointing us to the conflict and tension between texts simply leaves us with theologically unresolvable debate as a universal norm for Christian discourse (I make the point partly in order to correct what some have -- pardonably -- understood as the implication of what I have written elsewhere on this matter). There is a substantive and discernible form. The canon is presented to us as a whole, whose unity is real and coherent, even if not superficially smooth. To quote from Kevin Vanhoozer's recent and magisterial work on The Drama of Doctrine. A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, p.137, 'The canon both recounts the history of God's covenantal dealings with humanity and regulates God's ongoing covenantal relationship with his people...[I]t is the text that "documents" our covenantal privileges and responsibilities.' We must acknowledge the tensions and internal debates in Scripture; we must also acknowledge the clear sense that the text is presented as a narrative of 'fulfilment' -- as one that contains a vision claiming comprehensiveness of meaning. We are to locate ourselves within this set of connections and engagements, the history of Israel, called, exiled, restored, and of Jesus crucified and risen and alive in the Spirit within the community, not to regard Scripture as one element in a merely modern landscape of conflicts.

I myself have cited some of Williams' earlier remarks on the tensions and contradictions of Scripture in "Restoring the Bonds of Affection," Anglican Theological Review 87 (2005), 621-622 and used these remarks in support of a position with which subsequent developments have made his disagreement quite clear. I don't flatter myself that Williams is responding to my article, and in any event, I think it is quite evident that my position does not reduce Scripture to "one element in a merely modern landscape of conflicts." Nevertheless, I find Williams own position to be woefully inadequate in addressing some of the very real concerns that I raised about Windsor's biblical hermeneutics. Here is what I wrote in ATR:

Nevertheless, the Report pays little heed to tensions within the Bible. As Rowan Williams observes, "€œThe meaning of one portion of scriptural text is constructed in opposition to another.€"4 Scripture contains falsehoods and ideological distortions, and decent theories of interpretation allow for more historical and ideological criticism of the text.5 For example, much that Scripture asserts or implies about the relationships between women and men must be challenged.6 The Report, by contrast, insists that "questions of interpretation are rightly raised, not as an attempt to avoid or relativise scripture and its authority, but as a way of ensuring that it is really scripture that is being heard"€ (para. 59). It also asserts: "The message of scripture, as a whole and in its several parts, must be preached and taught in all possible and appropriate ways" (para. 58). Does this include the subordination of women and other forms of oppression? Denying that this is part of the essential "€œmessage"€ does not help.7 Portions of Scripture were written and canonized to marginalize women,8 and they are still so used, with deadly results. Another problem concerns the notion that God'€™s authority is "€œvested in scripture" (para. 58). This runs counter to the more cautious formulations in paragraphs 54-55, and it does not seem to permit the kind of "€œtalking back"€ that good interpretation requires.9 It is idolatrous, moreover, to assert that God'€™s authority can be "€œvested"€ in any text or creature, except in highly provisional ways. A more accurate theory of interpretation would stress the critical "conversation"€ between readers and the text.10

Footnotes

4 Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 53.
5 On "€œideology criticism," see Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 120-121.
6 Patriarchy is intertwined with other forms of oppression. See Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 27.
7 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. 10th Anniversary ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 14-21.
8 Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 53.
9 Letty M. Russell, Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 35-45.

It is not sufficient in my view to acknowledge the tensions present in the text, which only a strict fundamentalist ignores (and does so at the price of any academic or intellectual integrity). One must also recognize that there are ideologies present in the text which actually corrupt and destroy the liberatory thrust of the Good News (as well as of Torah, prophets, and other writings) and that these ideologies are used by Christians today, including Christians in the churches of the Anglican communion, to deadly effect. The point made by the citation from Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, which I have summarized as follows "portions of Scripture were written and canonized to marginalize women," is too important to ignore.

What I see operative in Williams' thoughts here is an emphasis on the "hermeneutics of retrieval" over the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (see the writings of David Tracy and Paul Ricoeur). He seems to fear that giving the well founded suspicions of feminists, Marxists, Freudians, queer theorists, etc. their due place within a Christian theological hermeneutics will mean giving away the store, i.e. making Scripture "one element in a merely modern landscape of conflicts." Rather, can we not insist that these suspicions arise from the heart of the Eucharistic assembly itself, as this diverse community, growing under the Spirit's influence into the fullness of Christ, seeks a faithful response to the Word of God? Until we admit that portions of our sacred text serve an anti-Kingdom, anti-Gospel agenda and were written to do so, we cannot take adequate account of the contradictory collection of writings, which I too hope to listen to, as a whole, as the record of God's mighty acts in salvation history and as the contemporary means by which God addresses human beings and calls into being a People out of nothing. The need for ideological criticism of Scripture is aptly demonstrated by feminist theologian and biblical critic Sandra Schneiders, whom no one can accuse of ignoring the theological sense of the text.

I am deeply troubled by Williams remark that "The canon is presented to us as a whole, whose unity is real and coherent, even if not superficially smooth." The book of Joshua alone, with its conquest narrative, should give us pause. So should the texts of terror discussed so well by Phyllis Trible. The Bible countenances holy war, putting captives to death by the sword, rape, and other atrocities. Williams appeals to the Shoah, the Holocaust, which we just commemorated. (At Ohio University Hillel's service for Yom HaShoah, we also remembered the victims of the Holocaust who were of African descent, physically and mentally handicapped, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, and--YES--LGBT persons). Doesn't this memory, to say nothing of the anamnesis of the crucifixion, point us in a direction where more interruptive, disruptive voices must be heard? As Thomas Aquinas once wrote, "Every truth, no matter by whom it may be spoken, comes from the Holy Spirit." The unity of the canon is the person of God whose story is told there, as well as the People whom God calls into being. But the story is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions. A superficial attempt to find coherence is at least as dangerous and unfaithful to the canon as those positions which, overwhelmed by the superficial contradictions, find no meaning or truth there. The ecclesiological corollary, which Williams seems also to ignore, is that some forms of unity are sinful. Williams apparent hostility to Enlightenment liberalism needs to be countered by voices like David Tracy's, who acknowledges the ambiguities of the Enlightenment project, without rejecting its unfulfilled emancipatory possibilities. We do not have to choose between an adequate theological hermeneutics and the critical thrust of the Enlightenment. In fact, those hermeneutics which ignore the voices of suspicion may be shown to be inadequate on strictly theological grounds.

The Bible: Reading and Hearing

Thinking Anglicans 'blog, April 17, 2007

As part of his current brief trip to Canada the Archbishop of Canterbury has given a lecture The Bible: Reading and Hearing to students at Wycliffe and Trinity theological colleges in Toronto. The full press release from Lambeth Palace is below the fold but here is the first paragraph.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan WIlliams, has told an audience of theological students that both intensely liberal and ultra conservative readings of the Bible are ‘rootless’ and are limited in what they can contribute to the life of the church. In the Larkin Stuart lecture, delivered today at an event hosted jointly by Wycliffe and Trinity theological colleges in Toronto, Dr Williams said that Christians need to reconnect with scripture as something to be listened to and heard in the context of Jesus’s invitation to the Eucharist and to work for the Kingdom.

The full text of the lecture is online here and here.

Archbishop - church needs to listen properly to the Bible

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan WIlliams, has told an audience of theological students that both intensely liberal and ultra conservative readings of the Bible are ‘rootless’ and are limited in what they can contribute to the life of the church. In the Larkin Stuart lecture, delivered today at an event hosted jointly by Wycliffe and Trinity theological colleges in Toronto, Dr Williams said that Christians need to reconnect with scripture as something to be listened to and heard in the context of Jesus’s invitation to the Eucharist and to work for the Kingdom.

“… The Church’s public use of the Bible represents the Church as defined in some important way by listening: the community when it comes together doesn’t only break bread and reflect together and intercede, it silences itself to hear something. It represents itself in that moment as a community existing in response to a word of summons or invitation, to an act of communication that requires to be heard and answered.”

This, he argues, is crucial in the way in which the communities of Christians are informed by what the Scriptures say:

“Take Scripture out of this context of the invitation to sit at table with Jesus and to be incorporated into his labour and suffering for the Kingdom, and you will be treating Scripture as either simply an inspired supernatural guide for individual conduct or a piece of detached historical record - the typical exaggerations of Biblicist and liberal approaches respectively.

“For the former, the work of the Spirit is more or less restricted to the transformation of the particular believer; for the latter, the life of the community is where the Spirit is primarily to be heard and discerned, with Scripture an illuninating adjunct at certain points."

Dr Williams says that neither isolating texts from their contexts nor dismissing them as limited by prevalent cultural understanding were helpful approaches. Quoting from St John’s Gospel, Dr Williams said that Jesus’s teaching that ‘no-one can come to the Father except by me’ (John 14 v 6 ) could not be used simply as a trump card in discussions with other faiths: the verse needed to be heard in its full biblical context as the development of the question posed by his earlier saying, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ (John 13 v 33).

” … This certainly does not suggest in an direct way a more inclusive approach to other faiths. But the point is that the actual question being asked is not about the fate of non-Christians; it is about how the disciples are to understand the death of Jesus as the necessary clearing of the way which they are to walk.”

Similarly, St Paul’s denunciation of homosexuality in Romans 1 v 27 also needed to be properly heard as an ancilliary point in an argument about another matter entirely. That did not diminish its force but made it harder either to discard it or to use it as a definite proof text.

“It is not helpful for a ‘liberal’ or revisionist case, since the whole point of Paul’s rhetorical gambit is that everyone in his imagined readership agrees in thinking the same sex relations of the culture around them to be as obviously immoral as idol-worship or disobedience to parents. It is not very helpful to the conervative either, though, because Paul insists on shifting the focus away from the objects of moral disapprobation in chapter 1 to the reading / hearing subject who has at this point been happily identifying with Paul’s castigation of someone else … Paul is making a primary point not about homosexuality but about the delusions of the supposedly law-abiding.“

Christians cannot pick and choose amongst the texts of scripture, he concluded; the whole of the Bible needed ot be understood both as inspired and inspiring - the work of the Holy Spirit:

“It is the spirit that connects the periods of God’s communicative action towards humanity and thus connects the diverse texts that make up the one manifold text that we call Holy Scripture. The Spirit’s work as ‘breathing’ God’s wisdom into the text of Scripture is not a magical process that removes bilblical writing from the realm of actual human writing; it is the work of creating one ‘movement’ out of the diverse historical narratives and textual deposits that represent Israel’s and the Church’s efforts to find words to communicate God’s communication of summons and invitation.

“The Spirit through the events of God’s initiative stirs up the words and makes sense of them for the reader/hearer in the Spirit-sustained community. As Karl Barth insisted, this leaves no ground for breaking up Scripture into the parts we can ‘approve’ as God-inspired and the parts that are merely human; the whole is human and the whole is offered by God in and through the life of the body; always shaping and determining the form of that life.“

Chez Vous

CHEZ VOUS

I don't
know

where you're
coming

from but
it's

no place
I

care to
visit

A.R. Ammons, Bosh and Flapdoodle,
(Norton, 2005)