from a youtube message by bishop Stephen Cottrell
"If the Bible were a range of mountains I wonder what the mountain peak would be. I guess we probably have a different answer to this question every time we open the Bible. But certainly for me, one of the climactic passages -- the one through which we then interpret many others -- is this: Galations 3.28 'There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, for you are all one person in Jesus Christ'.
Now that great text -- it has taken us in the Church a long while to work out what it means. The first bit 'in Christ there is no Jew or Greek' only took us about 20 years or so to work out what it meant, and you can read about the debates and struggles the Church had over that text in the Bible itself. In the Acts of the Apostles and in some of Paul's letters you can see the Church grappling: 'do you have to become a Jew before you can become a Christian - how does that work?' Well, we resolved it, though there were big disagreements.
The next one, 'there is no slave or free' -- it took us 1,800 years to work that one out, but we did. Eventually we came to understand that in Christ there cannot be slavery, there cannot be slaves, we are all set free.
And it falls to our generation to be those working out the full implications of 'so what does it mean to say "there is no male or female"?' We all agree it can make no difference to our baptism. We've sort of agreed and found a way of living together by saying it shouldn't make any difference to someone being a priest. And now we say, should it affect being a bishop as well?"
"If the Bible were a range of mountains I wonder what the mountain peak would be. I guess we probably have a different answer to this question every time we open the Bible. But certainly for me, one of the climactic passages -- the one through which we then interpret many others -- is this: Galations 3.28 'There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, for you are all one person in Jesus Christ'.
Now that great text -- it has taken us in the Church a long while to work out what it means. The first bit 'in Christ there is no Jew or Greek' only took us about 20 years or so to work out what it meant, and you can read about the debates and struggles the Church had over that text in the Bible itself. In the Acts of the Apostles and in some of Paul's letters you can see the Church grappling: 'do you have to become a Jew before you can become a Christian - how does that work?' Well, we resolved it, though there were big disagreements.
The next one, 'there is no slave or free' -- it took us 1,800 years to work that one out, but we did. Eventually we came to understand that in Christ there cannot be slavery, there cannot be slaves, we are all set free.
And it falls to our generation to be those working out the full implications of 'so what does it mean to say "there is no male or female"?' We all agree it can make no difference to our baptism. We've sort of agreed and found a way of living together by saying it shouldn't make any difference to someone being a priest. And now we say, should it affect being a bishop as well?"
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