On not blaming God
by Martin Davie:
The argument of the Bishop of London.
If you read carefully the transcript of the Bishop of London’s presentation to the General Synod yesterday on the House of Bishops’ response to Living in Love and Faith you will find that that the heart of her argument for what the House of Bishops is proposing lies in the following passage in her speech:
‘Our call is and always will be to seek the face of Christ – yes, in each other, but above all in searching the Scriptures, examining the Church’s tradition, and exercising our reason as we strive to make sense of how truth is to be lived out with grace in our 21st century context.
The reality is that as we have done all these things – even among ourselves as bishops – our conclusions about the ‘clear teaching of Scripture’ and the trajectory of the Church’s tradition diverge. We see God at work in each other’s ministries and are forced to acknowledge that somehow, mysteriously, the people of God who seek God’s face and who want to see the Church flourish, disagree.
For some unfathomable reason, God, it seems, has allowed us to continue to disagree – disappointingly refusing to engineer a Damascus road experience for one side or the other, either in the Church of England or across the Anglican Communion.
How can this be?
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