Oliver O'Donovan has caused some huffiness amongst conservatives because of this paragraph:
The old-style liberalism that used to preside over the church’s dilemmas in a confident spirit of practical compromise began from the assumption that everyone was divided from everyone else by recalcitrant disagreements. The Lord, the liberals prophets announced, had sent a perpetual famine of his word. We should stop asking questions of one another and hoping for answers, and eat the dry bread of commonsense compromises. Those who remember Pentecost may reasonably doubt that this was ever the wisest counsel for the church. But at the very least we cannot know whether and how much of a famine of the word there is in any disagreement until we submit it to the disciplines of patient common enquiry. No disagreement refuses to be analysed, and its constituent elements sorted out according to size and shape. No disagreement does not lure us on with the hope, however distant, of a genuine resolution. Can we promise ourselves, then, that if the churches would only discuss homosexuality long and fully and widely enough, they would end up agreeing? Well, we are not entitled to rule out that possibility. But suppose it were not true; suppose that after careful exploration and a search for common ground, there was an agreement-resistant core at the centre of the issue – a problem about how modernity is viewed, for example, or about the ontological status of self-consciousness - it might still be possible to set the residual disagreement in what the ecumenists like to call “a new context”, and (who knows?) learn how to live with it. We have a parallel in the difference between indissolubilist and non-indissolubilist views of marriage, a traditional point of tension between Catholic and Protestant. That disagreement has not gone away; but if today it bulks less threateningly than it once did, that is because we are so much more clear about the extent of the agreed ground all around it – God’s intentions for marriage, the pastoral desiderata in dealing with broken marriage etc etc. It no longer evokes threatening resonances. It is a problem reduced to its true shape and size.
Is it possible to imagine this? I don't think that O'Donovan is himself making the gay issue a second-order issue as is claimed by the Anglican Mainstream commentator. O'Donovan is rather standing against the liberal belief in the famine of God's word, which means that true reconcilation is impossible...
5 comments:
Michael that was also my understanding of O'Donovan's point. Surely it's also worth stressing that a problem reduced to its true shape and size might still prove to be a large problem: this paragraph certainly allows that possibility and I'd argue that the rest of the web sermon does too.
The writer of the "AM editorial comment" seems to have identified his enemy, namely The gay person, by which he means a rather specific sort of gay person, whose "wants" can be fully identified with certain rhetoric --- is this likely to be true of anyone, even people who themselves compose such rhetoric? In any case, he appears to be cross with O'Donovan for not being sufficiently on side against such a "gay person". This might explain the travesty of O'Donovan's argument presented there.
I have a different type of question-of-interpretation: do we know who is responsible for the overall post on the AM site? The O'Donovan paragraph is followed by an extract from (and link to) a piece by John Richardson on first- and second-order issues, which does not explicitly address O'Donovan's sermon and doesn't even display obvious knowledge of it. Yet it is introduced with the heading Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream comments: ... unless the poster (and/or editorial writer) is Richardson wearing another hat, this seems imprecise at the very least ...
Yes, it was weird. weird in spades...
O'D has repeatedly challenged the 'we must listen to gay experience' rhetoric in this series.
The AM website indicates that all material on it is (C) Chris Sugden unless otherwise stated so it is presumably by him. Certainly it possesses his usualy somewhat hysterical tone!
Thanks guys for the background. By juxtaposing those items the posting begged all sorts of questions ... this AM site/guy/etc. does not seem patient with distinctions, fine or otherwise.
Michael while it's true to say, in defence of O'D against the AM screed, that he has repeatedly challenged the 'we must listen to gay experience' rhetoric in this series, I think it's much more interesting to note how he has done this, namely by identifying a sense in which the statement is true and necessary. Of course this does not look much like the polemical sense in which this sort of statement is normally used, but neither does it look like a simple denial.
Yes, he has picked up the condescension of liberalism and exposed it, and said: gay Christian, they are not your friend.
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