Today is one of those days when it is exceedingly depressing to be an Anglican. Jeffrey John's nomination as Bishop of Reading has cause a good deal of anger and vitriol. Some of this is sane, much isn't. So we have the very unedifying sight of the Bishop of Carlisle telling the nation on Newsnight that 'obviously the penis belongs to the vagina: that is something fundamental to the way God made us'. This is neither true nor helpful, it's a crass oversimplification at best. The church is very definately confused over sexuality. Bishops seem particularly unable to deal with the subject. All we get is the incessant round of 'the Bible says' as if it didn't say lots of things that we don't worry about in the same way. It makes me want to scream. What does God really think about all of this? There's a great cartoon in the Guardian today which has a Breugel-esque painting of widespread death and destruction. One of the characters being massacred is saying 'I think that bishop over there is gay' to which another replies 'We're doomed!!!'.
Theology and the Man in Black
I went to hear a paper at the University this evening entitled 'The Apocalypse according to Johnny Cash: Examining the 'Effect' of the book of Revelation on a contemporary apocalyptic writer'. As well as some fine music and lots of humour from YouTube , the paper was examining how we detect the effect of the Bible on the world, and using Cash's The Man Comes Around as a means of doing this. One of the papers themes was that because Cash doesn't name Jesus as the Man (who comes around) he has a weak Christology and leaves his work open to a range of interpretations of who 'The Man' could be - from Cash himself to George W. Bush! Lots of food for thought about how what we say is then heard and repeated in our culture, which has little understanding of the Gospel. But the thing that really stood out for me was the suggestion that it was possible to tell that Cash was really reading the Bible in this song (rather than just regurgitating what his traditio
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