{"id":25226,"date":"2017-08-23T13:50:11","date_gmt":"2017-08-23T17:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/?p=25226"},"modified":"2017-08-23T13:52:25","modified_gmt":"2017-08-23T17:52:25","slug":"fred-hiltz-aims-for-good-disagreement-on-same-sex-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/fred-hiltz-aims-for-good-disagreement-on-same-sex-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"Fred Hiltz aims for \u201cgood disagreement\u201d on same-sex marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does anyone remember Rowan Williams\u2019 attempt to solve the same-sex marriage mess in the Anglican Communion using The Covenant<\/a>? It was still alive and kicking \u2013 well, twitching at least \u2013 as little as five years ago, yet now it\u2019s deader than the dandruff falling from Rowan\u2019s eyebrows.<\/p>\n

Justin Welby ignored The Covenant and, instead, imposed \u201cconsequences\u201d on provinces that defied the ban on same-sex marriages. No one, least of all Welby, took them seriously.<\/p>\n

Having now jettisoned both The Covenant and Consequences, Welby has settled on the idea of \u201cgood disagreement\u201d, an ecclesiastical version of the cold war with ersatz pieties injected into it for appearances\u2019 sake.<\/p>\n

Fred Hiltz has jumped on the good disagreement bandwagon and is applying it to the Anglican Church of Canada. Sorry, he is embracing<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

The question is, if same-sex marriage were to remain forbidden in the ACoC, would anyone be proposing good disagreement<\/em> as the solution for calming bruised liberals? Of course not: the battle would continue and all we would hear about would be\u00a0prophetic voices, inclusion, justice<\/em> and\u00a0equality<\/em>, laced with frequent references to a rubber stamping holy spirit.<\/em> \u00a0 Good disagreement is just another smoke screen designed to cloud the judgement of conservatives in order to keep them in the fold, so as to continue to collect their offerings.<\/p>\n

\"\"From here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

My own read is that many in our church are coming to accept and declare that we will never agree on this matter. There will always be those who favour same-sex marriage and those who oppose it, each from the ground of their own wrestling with the Scriptures and the long-held teaching of\u2028the church on the nature of marriage. The challenge is, how do we live with such deep-seated differences of conviction?<\/p>\n

At the heart of this challenge are two things\u2014the acknowledging of our fears and the embracing of good disagreement.<\/p>\n

Of the fear, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby addressed his own church at a General Synod in 2014, saying, \u201cThere is great fear among some, here and round the world, that that will lead to the betrayal of our traditions, to the denial of the authority of Scripture, to apostasy, not to use too strong a word. And there is also a great fear that our decisions will lead us to the rejection of LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender] people, to irrelevance in a changing society, to behaviour that may seem akin to racism. Both those fears are alive and well in this room today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the nature of good disagreement, \u2028the dean of St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral in London, David Ison, wrote in 2015: \u201cThere is no expectation of achieving any consensus\u2014in either direction\u2014in the foreseeable future. But there is a task to be done of encouraging those within the church who are at odds on this issue to express their concerns in a safe environment, listen carefully to those with whom they disagree profoundly, find something of Christ in each other and consider together what the practical consequence of disagreement might be. From New Testament times the church of Christ has had to face disagreement. Fashioning our life as a church includes finding ways to \u2018disagree Christianly\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

I believe that in our church there is both a commitment and a capacity to do just that\u2014to disagree in a manner that does not demean one another, but honours our calling in Christ. In good disagreement, no one is made to feel their position is of no value. No one feels belittled, walked over or pushed out. In good disagreement, there is, in truth, a continuing place for everyone in our church.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does anyone remember Rowan Williams\u2019 attempt to solve the same-sex marriage mess in the Anglican Communion using The Covenant? It was still alive and kicking \u2013 well, twitching at least \u2013 as little as five years ago, yet now it\u2019s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[150],"tags":[2241,1390],"class_list":["post-25226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fred-hiltz","tag-rowan-williams","tag-same-sex-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}