In the beginning...there was no "Bible."

In the beginning...there was no "Bible."

What Christians tend to forget in defending scripture is that for the first few years that the Church existed, there were no scriptures. The first writing in the New Testament was probably the first letter to the Thessalonians, written sometime between 42 and 47C.E. That's a good ten years of "The Church" without "The Bible."

My argument is that if they did it then, we can do it now.

I'm not saying to pitch the whole Bible out the window and into the trash heap. What I am saying is that we need to start listening to what the Spirit is saying to each of us as individuals and to all of us as a community without going all whacky about trying to defend "biblical morality."

What the hell does that mean anyway? Does biblical morality mean that I can have four wives like Jacob or kill my daughter like Jephtha? Or does it only apply when you don't like what I'm doing and decide to prostitute the Bible in order to use it as a club to beat me into submission?

Oooh, this one is going to have two points.

Recently, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been running at the mouth about the current "crisis" in the American Episcopal Church concerning the consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop (Gene is openly gay and partnered--conservative Anglicans would like him to be more closeted).

The major concern is that Robinson's life is not consistent with Biblical ethics.

That argument holds no water.

Christians do not read the Bible to find out what to do. Christians experience life, and then find that life reflected in the words of scripture. Plain and simple, the Bible should not be read as a moral cod with rules to be followed or broken. That simplistic way of looking at a series of documents as complicated as the collection of documents we have labeled "the Bible" is plain ridiculous.

Williams is a first-class theologian. For him to ignore the best of biblical scholarship in order to pander to the bigotry of conservatives shows him to be feckless and spineless. It's unworthy of someone claiming to follow Jesus, much less the Archbishop of Canterbury. Shame on him.
The second argument that WIlliams makes is that the American Church should have allowed the rest of the Anglican Communion come to more of a consensus on homosexuality before consecrating an openly gay bishop.

More garbage.

The Church has never come to a "consensus" on something before actually doing it. The law of all progress is that you do it first and then make up (sometimes crappy) reasons for doing so afterward. A professor of mine in graduate school once said, sarcastically, that how many footnotes you have shows how smart you are because it shows you can back-track and find other people to support your own arguments.

As an example, Williams points to the example of women's ordination in the Anglican Communion, claiming that it was authorized before it happened.

He is a liar.

Nine women were ordained in 1976 well before it was allowed, and that action finally pushed the Church to accept the priestly ministry of women. The same thing is happening now: Gene Robinson is openly gay, in a relationship and a bishop.
That's it, the argument is over.

Now get back to doing what Jesus said to do: feed the poor, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless.