Sydney Anglicans and the new Archbishop of Perth

The Evangelicals, who insist on a dumb reading of the bible disregard over a hundred years of historical criticism of biblical texts that gives us valuable insight into the formation of those texts. All of the writers of the New Testament were witness to the life, death and resurrection (not resuscitation) of Jesus but they did so from their own context. This context has to be taken into account if we are to understand differences in orientation. For example, it is obvious that Matthew had trouble with Paul's teaching about the law because he was writing to a Jewish/Christian congregation for whom the law loomed large.

It is the task of the exegete to sift through the texts so that we have a better understanding of what was being said and why. Evangelicals will insist that this is an easy way out and that we are ignoring the word of God as is written and label us as "liberals" who do not take the text seriously. But, on the contrary, modern exegetical methods take the text with ultimate seriousness as texts from a different time and place.

Evangelicals do us all a disfavour because the increasing number of the unchurched do not differentiate between them and what has become the mainstream in Anglicanism, so that they condemn us all as being superstitious, naïve and gullible. In supporting a fictional gap between faith and reason they condemn us all to be that increasingly strange animal, the "religious." This sabotages real evangelism at its roots.

I realise that these arguments will not change the ethos of the Sydney Anglicans since they are so wedded to what is an ideology. What I want to do is to strengthen mainstream Anglicans in their refusal of an aberrant reading of Scripture and in their support for ordained women and especially for the new Archbishop of Perth.