So as the Flintstones, sorry, I mean the Anglican Primates, meet in Northern Ireland this week, it was appropriate that I spent my drive to work this morning listening to Tony Campolo's talk on homosexual issues at the San Diego conference. As I wrote previously, I attended all but the first twenty minutes in person, so this was more of a refresher than anything else.
First, let me say how absolutely amazing I find Tony Campolo. Here's a conservative evangelical who is a million miles from the shrill right-wing political suck-ups to our beloved president. The religious right label Campolo a delusionary liberal, when by any objective standard he is what he says he is - a conservative evangelical. What the religious right hates about TC is his absolute, utter, steadfast integrity in preaching the gospel as he sees it.
That gospel finds in him a heart for the poor, the disenfranchised, the sick, the needy, anywhere in the world. In his talk he wends his way around the traditional anti-homosexual arguments and finds that, for him, only the passage in Romans 1 essentially prohibits monogamous Christian homosexual relationships as we know them today. He rejects all other oft-quoted scripture on the issue as irrelevant or inapplicable to the situation we find ourselves in today. While he ends up on the other side of the fence to me I have immense respect for the integrity of how he arrives at that position. Not just that, despite holding that position, he argues strongly that there is no excuse for homophobia in the church.
His wife disagrees with him on gay relationships (determining that Romans 1 is primarily about temple prostitution and other wacky goings on at Aphrodite's temple) and is (I presume from his comments) in much the same place I am. A loving, stable, gay relationship that exhibits the qualities of the fruit of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, etc.) to at least the same degree as heterosexual relationships, can certainly be blessed and honored.
TC also talks about speaking to an assemblage of Anglican bishops (he doesn't say when - presumably sometime in the last decade, and George Carey was Archbishop of Canterbury at the time.) At that time TC notes that the Anglican communion featured Bishop David Jenkins (widely believed to be somewhat heretical, often cited as doubting the resurrection), Bishop John Spong (pretty much a heretic any way you look at it, but specifically on the issue that the bible has no authority) and significant supporters of the Jesus Seminar (there is no such thing as a living god at work today). All of which the Anglican bishops tolerated because "we're such an inclusive bunch". Yet he berated them soundly for jumping on the anti-gay bandwagon like a bunch of drunken pirates on their first shore leave in five years because "we have to draw the line somewhere". OK, that pirate analogy was mine, not his, but believe me, he pulls no punches.
I guess the bottom line to this whole situation is that he and his wife disagree vehemently on this issue. Yet they remain happily married. Why, and how can this be a model for a church about to be rent asunder?
Because TC opines that if we're going to "draw the line", shouldn't the defining issues be:
- that Christ is risen from the dead
- that the bible has authority (although I think we can still debate what the nature of that authority is)
- that there is a living god at work in the world
...rather than homosexuality? Hmm, don't you think?
And then we get to the actual Primates meeting this week, only to find that Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola and his reactionary friends have hijacked the agenda:
"Led by the primate of Nigeria, Dr Peter Akinola and primate of Central Africa, Dr Bernard Malango, the anti-gay evangelicals used their numerical strength to force the meeting to put subjects such as Aids and world poverty on the back burner and to spend all week debating the threatened schism over homosexuality."
It's good to see that trivial issues of little concern to Africans like, oh, AIDS and world poverty are now firmly on the back burner in favor of issues 5,000 miles away in New Hampshire.
One final point from TC's talk. He suggests that the end of denominational structures is in sight. Decisions in all denominations are being made more and more at a congregational level.
As I heard this at first I thought surely not, but as I've pondered it more and more I believe it to be true. If this is the beginning of the end for a power structure like the Anglican communion, then maybe that isn't the end of the world. In fact, I'm sure it isn't. Once upon a time we needed vast superstructures to know the people we were aligned with. Now with, for instance, the blog world, we know that on a much finer grained level. I'm not sure where this is all headed, but I don't think it's necessarily bad.
