(It’s a long paper, so here’s a link to the PDF.)
A good number of years ago the Episcopal Church consecrated her first openly gay bishop. It caused quite a furor in large segments of the Anglican Communion, and out of that furor came something called “The Windsor Report.” One of the things that the authors of the report asked was that the Episcopal church provide a biblical rationale for what we’d done. I cast about vainly trying to find a cohesive, coherent biblical defense and couldn’t find one.
So I wrote one. I sat down to write it and decided before I started that if I couldn’t build an argument that not only permitted what we’d done, but also advocated what we’d done, that I’d have to suggest that perhaps we had gone too far, too quickly, even if it were permitted.
In the end, I discovered that there was not only an absence of applicable biblical prohibition, but strong biblical warrant for Bishop Robinson’s consecration. (With some help from the Holy Spirit who woke me up at 3:00 a.m. one night, urging me to look up the antonym to “physikos!”)
Given the recent Lambeth discussion of human dignity (that is, the portion of it dealing with human sexuality) I thought it might be good to dig this old piece out. It doesn’t deal with marriage, which seems to be the sticking point at Lambeth these days, but many of the same thoughts apply. If it seems worthwhile, I may have a go at the marriage arguments as well.
The paper’s too long to put into a post, (and it has – arg – footnotes!) so here’s a link to the PDF. (There’s a link at the top of the post, too.)
