Thursday, January 18, 2007

Rowan Williams accused :: The Times

Ruth Gledhill reporting on Bishop Marshall's letter:
Although Bishop Marshall is an elderly bishop who is little known outside his numerically small province of The Episcopal Church, his words are being afforded weight because they reflect a growing frustration at Dr Williams, primus inter pares, or first among equals of all 39 Primates.
. . .
Dr Williams, as an academic and as Archbishop of Wales, was understood on his appointment to the top job to be liberal on the issue of gay clergymen.

In essays such as The Body’s Grace, he argued a Christian case for the acceptance of homosexuality.

But since becoming Archbishop, he has distanced himself from these views and become more sympathetic to the conservative cause, believing that Church unity must come first.
. . .
A Lambeth Palace spokesman defended the Archbishop last night. He said: "The Archbishop of Canterbury has already said there is no aspect of this debate which is pain-free. Just because the liberal voice is not all that often heard in complaint does not mean to say that they do not feel this pain just as acutely."
Here are some google search results on "The Body's Grace."

Here is a link to The Body's Grace, by Rowan Williams, 1989. Read the whole thing. Quoting an isolated paragraph does not do justice to the whole, but here is one:
In fact, of course, in a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts, or on a problematic and non-scriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures. I suspect that a fuller exploration of the sexual metaphors of the Bible will have more to teach us about a theology and ethics of sexual desire than will the flat citation of isolated texts; and I hope other theologians will find this worth following up more fully than I can do here.

No comments: