John's Blog: August 2003
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On Religious Unity
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Having been an Episcopalian in a former life (and might be still if there was a church of that flavor in my current town), I've been following with interest the election of The Rev. Gene Robinson as the next Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire. Although I can appreciate the desire to settle our theology on the matter before putting it into practice, I am also firmly in the camp that a loving, committed, monogamous relationship is a good thing regardless of the gender and orientation of the individuals involved, and that orientation should not be a barrier in any area of life.I was browsing today to maybe find some discussion of this issue, and came across a nice site called the Every Voice Network: Anglican Voices United for Justice. What I ended up being most interested in turned out to be an not-directly- related essay entitled "On Christian unity as an idol...". You can follow that link to read the original article; following is my reply:
Thank you for your thoughts, Stephanie. As a teenager, I felt very strongly that the fact that the church was split into denominations reflected a failure of the church to truly live out God's will for it. If we really perceived *the truth*, why so many disagreeing factions? Twenty years and several Protestant and Evangelical denominations later, I have come to appreciate the variety of different worship styles and theological approaches. As Christians, we believe that there is some core of "truth" (although I'm not prepared to get into that discussion) but that in no way means that we all have to worship the same way, serve God and humanity the same way, or can't disagree about some of our theology, maybe strongly. I probably have conceeded some of our ability to perceive *the truth* since I was 16, but I have also come to appreciate the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual variety between the different denominations, and between individuals and groups within them. I think this variety reflects various characterstics of God, and reflects humanity's different valid perceptions of those characteristics. As with life in general, diversity is healthy and natural.
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