The Rt. Rev. Paul V. Marshall, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem:
I hope I would have made the radical choice we now take for granted, two centuries later, that government is of, by and for the people.
I have my doubts, however, about myself and about you who read this because it was not a lesson we learned once and were done with.Christians opposed the abolition of slavery, remarriage of divorced persons, votes for (or the ordination of) women, earning interest on money lent, life insurance, and even Social Security — all because of fairly clear passages or groups of passages in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that would need to be reinterpreted or quietly discarded.
These resistant people were not stupid or benighted, but they did base their thinking on the idea that things do not change, the idea that the scriptures themselves do not show a variety of images of God and the evolution (let’s at last embrace that word) of religious understanding. They also assumed that religion cannot and ought not learn from ”the culture,” much less from the spirit of the times.
But we do learn, all the time.
Read it all.