Associate Professor Geoff Thompson, Lecturer in Systematic Theology Pilgrim Theological College, this week published an opinion piece on the ABC Religion and Ethics website.
The piece, entitled “What’s ordered about the natural order? Considering the works of God with Job and Ecclesiastes”, looks at the wisdom theology of Job and Ecclesiastes through the lens of ideas about natural order. Geoff writes;
“Consider the work of God; who can make straight what he has made crooked?” So writes the author of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew scriptures. Of course, the straightness referred to here has nothing to do with the contemporary use of that word to describe a particular sexual orientation. This loose pairing of “straight” and “crooked” is a rhetorical tool used to illuminate how the realities of the human condition resist any easy or conventional categorisation. Understood in this way, this biblical invitation reaches across the centuries to interrogate contemporary Christianity’s own discussions of sexuality and gender.
The full article can be accessed here.
Pilgrim Theological College is an ecumenical college of the University of Divinity, operated by the Uniting Church Synod of Victoria and Tasmania. Pilgrim’s courses offer a community of learning, formation and discipleship, inspired by the richness and strength of theological education across the traditions of the Uniting Church and the commitment to ecumenical theology and formation from the United Faculty of Theology.
Graham Joseph Hill
Kevin McGovern
Fergus King
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