Washington Blade Online: "Anglicans divided over Bible's position on gays

Four approaches taken
Associated Press | Jul 8, 10:59 AM

In their tense debate about homosexuality, the world's 77 million Anglicans (called Episcopalians in the United States) take four approaches to biblical teaching: dismissal, perplexity, renovation and traditionalism.
????Bishop Shelby Spong finds the Old Testament's homosexual prohibitions ignorant and 'morally incompetent' expressions of 'popular prejudices.'Dismissal is the left-fringe attitude personified by Bishop John Shelby Spong, former head of the Newark, N.J., diocese. In 'The Sins of Scripture' (HarperSanFrancisco), he says calling the Bible 'the Word of God' (a belief he himself affirmed at ordination) is 'perhaps the strangest claim ever made' for a document.Spong finds the Old Testament's homosexual prohibitions ignorant and 'morally incompetent' expressions of 'popular prejudices.' With the New Testament, he disdains Paul's condemnations as 'ill-informed' ravings from a zealot who, he hypothesizes, was a 'deeply repressed, self-loathing' homosexual."