I find the following interesting and a little curious considering the post below it which would appear to be about the same meeting.
Church of England Evangelicals meeting on Saturday refused to vote to establish their position on homosexuality -- an issue that has caused deep splits within the worldwide Anglican communion.
The Church of England Evangelical Council met in central London but the 300 attendees declined an opportunity to vote. "The opinions expressed were a wide range of opinions," said The Reverend Doctor Richard Turnbull, chairman of the Church of England Evangelical Council. "People decided that they didn't actually want to vote on a resolution.
The disadvantage of that is you then don't exactly know what people think." The council meets again on December 4.
The Lambeth Conference in April, a once-a-decade gathering of bishops from the world's 77-million-strong Anglican Communion, was boycotted by around 200 bishops over the consecration five years ago of the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, the bishop of New Hampshire in the United States. The issue of homosexuality remains a turbulent matter for the Anglican communion.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gdwVkEfG7xkCeO6GBaF6scC1_JeQ
2 comments:
Turnball is confused. He simplistically seems to presume that people in general - or perhaps only believers, or perhaps only Anglican believers, or perhaps only English Evangelicals? - are only thinking if they uniformly agree in some lock-step fashion.
One doubts that this is often the real case, in fact. Typically, Turnball urges a sign upon us, allegedly a trustworthy sign of what thinking is, using a marker that is innately unintelligent, even in a comment sense way to a common sense extent. Turnball inhabits that special conservative religious world where ideologies always trump facts, and serve well to meanness aimed at real people (especially those who do not conform to Turnball who often speaks as if he uniquely knows the mind of God, the heart of God less so perhaps?).
Even when something gets so settled that it seems a truth we can take completely for granted, people may still differ in details of understanding and application.
How much wider those differences when we are dealing with something about which, like homosexuality or sexuality or embodiment, all the emerging modern foundational empirical facts are hardly yet published, let alone read widely enough to form an updated stable new consensus about what we can simply take for granted in sexuality or embodiment.
Makes me suspect that while Turnball does not have to bother with reading modern empirical research, a lot of other English evangelical believers may be doing so, even if only under the covers at night with a flashlight.
Lots of interesting discussion about this on Fulcrum. Evangelicals in the UK divide themselves into at least two groups, "open" and "conservative" (OEs and CEs). They agree in the importance of scripture (and they aren't questioning whether the canon should be re-done, or whether a lot of verses in the Gospel narratives were added by church authorities who distorted the original sayings to prove a point, and they aren't questioning the creeds) but they disagree in how the parts of scripture relate to the whole. They especially disagree on how to deal with people the CEs call "false teachers"; the CEs favor disassociation, want to take the whole evangelical group into GAFCON, etc.
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