Letters from the week of May 14 - 21, 2017
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An Inconvenient Consecration
"Private conversations by self-selected individuals" says all anyone needs to know about the so called Jesmond consecration. This is yet one more attempt to sustain prejudice in the official bodies of the church all the while giving it a thin veneer of apostolicity. For shame.
Carlton Kelley
Grace Church
Traverse City, Michigan, USA
rector@gracetc.org
15 May 2017
Editorial Assertions
I cannot understand your editorial assertion "The problem was solved in November 1784 when Samuel Seabury was consecrated in Aberdeen as Bishop for America by three Scottish bishops. It was the first consecration of a bishop in Scotland in almost a century, and was the event that ultimately triggered the existence of the Anglican Communion."
The succession of Bishops in Scotland was continued by the Episcopalian party, and a cursory search throws up at least nine such consecrations in Scotland in the period 1705–1782.
Brian Stewart
C of E but formerly PECUSA
Oxford, England
17 May 2017
The place of God in current debate
I am Jewish but follow religious affairs of other and all faiths. I am perturbed by the illogicality of the debate in the church of England on homosexuality, in all its aspects.
It has often been pointed out to Jews in recent centuries that the law is that of the stern God of the Old Testament, not the love and grace that characterises the theology of the New. (Not that much love and so on is shown by those who oppose the modernising wing of the church.)
The truth is that St Peter's vision of the "tablecloth" abrogated the concept of koshser food. But we know that St Paul went a great deal further, and that both went a great deal further than Jesus himself when he said he had come not to destroy but to fulfil the law.
How much Old Testament law the church feels need of is a variable feast.
It does not observe (if we leave kosher food and rabbinical interpretations in the mishnah of any of the laws aside) the biblical provisions for jubilee,levirate marriage, sacrifice, the Nazirite, and many others.
Nonetheless, some feel able to search the depths (and it is the depths) of their minds and hearts, and are able to rely on "scriptural authority" for rules on homosexuality and so on. It is, to anyone that has a sense of what law means, a nonsense, a mere attempt at justifying what does not stand up to reason. It might be argued faith is not reason, but what basis of human do's and do not's can there be for selecting some only of the provisions of the Old Testament as still being valid, when the New says no such thing, but gives only the three strands of general guidance above noted.
Peter Goldsmith
London, ENGLAND
pgoldsmith@tinyworld.co.uk
21 May 2017
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