Speculation
Sir, “What would Jesus do?”. Alan Minchin cautions against ‘unwise speculations’, yet we cannot avoid the question of orthopraxis in a fast-changing world. The Bible witnesses to Jesus – it is not essentially a rule book – and he once wrong-footed the selfassessed ‘godly’ people of his day, who had dragged a woman taken in adultery before him, to test his orthodoxy. He set a trajectory in his lifetime and then left his Spirit to help us to work out the implications of inclusive, agape Love in very different times and differing contexts.
Pope Francis declared that he prefers a Church that is prepared to take risks to one that is safe but sterile. He said: “God is always creative, never closed and that is why he is never rigid... to be faithful, one must be creative, one must be able to change.” To duck this responsibility is the equivalent of burying one’s talent, for fear of incurring the Master’s wrath. Of course, the pace of any change may need to be controlled by brakes or accelerator in different contexts and change is always likely to be patchy in a global Church.
The primary problem in the current homosexual debate, I would suggest, is not “... people’s refusal to accept Scripture’s authority for life and practice”, as the Archbishop of Nigeria contends, but rather their failure to grasp what the Bible says overall. Slavery would still be in place if Wilberforce and others had not taken their lead from the whole Bible: It now appears so obvious to us that slavery is totally incompatible with loving one’s neighbour as oneself.
It took time for the former slave states of America to mature their understanding and to reject their Jim Crow thinking, but now the United States is in the forefront of gay inclusion. Hopefully, in their own time and of their own accord, the African nations, which now regard gay people as vermin, will come to recognise them as fellow human beings, also made in the image of God, and so treat them as neighbours. By all means let the Churches write in the sand, for they have an ideal to uphold, but, then, let them show forth the compassion of Christ for all men.
Serena Lancaster,
Moreton-in-Marsh, Glos.