I see my ministry as one of connecting pieces, reminding people of a variety of points of view, that they don’t have a corner on God’s truth. God’s truth has many dimensions. The Anglican tradition has always … been a tradition in which widely divergent points of view have been held together not by one point of view capitulating to another but by common prayer, focusing beyond opinions on the person of Christ.
This is the kind of vaccuous claptrap that really rankles. Can anyone sympathetic with Bp. Griswold's perspective explain what he is talking about? If its true that no one person has "a corner on God's truth", is that true for Griswold? What is the pluriformity of God's truth supposed to be like? How can we assess the truth value of a statement asserting (as true, presumably) the pluriformity of "God's truth"? I just can't see how (A & ~A) is anything but absurd. Help.
"Person A is apostate" say the Connecticut 6.
"It is not the case that person A is apostate" says Bp. Smith.
Is the hierarchy really interested in "living in tension" here? Actions speak louder than words, as Fr. Mark of St. John's, Bristol, I'm sure, will tell you.
Maybe ++Griswold isn't talking about the kinds of doctrinal differences on display in Connecticut. But if not, what's the point? And what, pray, is he talking about?
Read the whole thing here.
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2 comments:
Er... two posts that say the same thing... hmm... Well, I'll just repost what I commented below then...
I think I've actually read this interview. I posted a piece of it with some comments a while back.
I don't think +Griswold and you are as far away from each other as you think. Nothing I've ever read or heard from +Griswold has lead me to believe that he doesn't think there is such a thing as "truth," or even that there are not imperatives for Christians to be able to call themselves Christian. In the same interview he strongly asserts this when he says "The ancient creeds, the doctrine of the trinity, the nature of Christ — all these things are not up for negotiation."
I don't think his point is to say that there is no objective truth, or even to say that somehow we each have pieces of the truth that can be put together like a puzzle to add up to the whole thing. Rather, his intention seems to me, both here and elsewhere, to say that a great number of the details are fuzzy, that we likely know a good deal less than we think we do and should humble ourselves before God in prayer that we may come to a more perfect understanding, and that an Anglican ideal which he wishes to uphold is a certain fluidness about theological searching in all but the essential categories. In other words, when it comes to understanding things we diverge upon, the place to begin and end that exploration is in humility in common prayer.
Oops. The internet was fuzzing in and out when I posted this. Apparently I posted it twice. I've now deleted it once.
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