The Archbishop Speaks

+++Rowan spoke today.

And I wasn’t unhappy, for the first time in a long time after reading his comments.

You can read them here and here.

The key is this:

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.’

I’m too tired to comment much tonight, but it is at least a move in the right direction.  I don’t particularly like his characterization of “liberal,” as I consider myself liberal in many senses but not in the way he characterizes liberal theology.  I certainly don’t consider myself a revisionist.

j