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A response to Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold - by Rev. Matt Kennedy

AS EYE SEE IT - A response to Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold

By Matt Kennedy

"C'mon Frank, Don't be such a literalist. Remember the reader and the text
are in conversation with one another. The text has its perspective and culture,
the reader has hers. Somewhere in the middle, beyond the written canon and
living reader a new reality is birthed that is "truth" for both the text and the
interpreter.

You see Frank, it does no good to prooftext canon. What was going on in the
canonists community at the time the canon was written? What particular social,
economic, ethnic or political struggles marked the community in which the
canonist lived? Surely you are not suggesting that we simply take the words of the
text written in one social context and apply them directly to our own?

Perhaps, Frank, God is doing a new thing? I mean you have your perspective on
canon and these retired bishops have theirs. Both are valuable. Both are
true.

Somewhere in the tension between your two truths a new community of
reconciliation is taking shape. Whatever happened, Frank, to the field
beyond rightness and wrongness? I thought we were all going to meet you
and the Sufi mystic Rumi there? This is not the time for prooftexting
and literalism. This is not time to draw lines or to marginalize those
outcasts on the fringes of ECUSA whose voices are so seldom heard.

Now, Frank, is the time to wage reconciliation."

Yours in the Diverse Center,

Matt Kennedy

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