Monday, July 07, 2008

The Faulty Orientation Argument

http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=325

[Fulcrum] 7 Jul 2008--Archbishop Alan Harper, Anglican Primate of Ireland, has produced a paper that misreads the rejection of homosexual practice in Romans 1:24-27 in an effort to promote a "revisionist" interpretation favorable to committed homosexual unions. The paper is entitled, "Holy Scripture and the Law of God in Contemporary Anglicanism in the Light of Richard Hooker’s ‘Lawes’". The first 14 pages deal with interpreting Hooker, which I will leave others to evaluate. On pages 15-18 Harper offers an interpretation of Rom 1:24-27 that determines whether his discussion of Hooker is of any relevance for establishing his case. Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent for the London Times, has written glowingly in her online blog:

Archbishop Alan Harper, Archbishop of Armagh and primate of All-Ireland, has perhaps not received the attention he has deserved since taking over from the high-profile Robin Eames, lead author of the Windsor Report. My mission today is to change that. He has this morning delivered a powerful and, I have to say, rather convincing address making the intellectual case for a new look at St Paul’s texts on homosexuality. What is clever is that he has done this, not in the usual irritatingly woolly way we have come to expect from Anglican liberal bishops, but in a rigorous, faithful fashion, drawing directly on Richard Hooker’s Lawes on Ecclesiastical Polity. This was of course the exact same text cited with such power by Uganda’s primate Archbishop Henry Orombi at Gafcon. (4 July 2008 http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/)

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