A Presidential address from the bishop of Liverpool to his synod has a gentle treatment of ethical disagreements within the Anglican church. It is an important way to start to think about such things!
Read it at: http://www.liverpool.anglican.org/index.php?p=1126
My experience of disagreement is usually that I or the other person (both) retreat back into our attitudes and don't examine them. But Lifeline counselling taught me to look for ambiguity. If you can expose an ambiguous statement and examine it then a deeper level of truth might be exposed. In a recent episode of Compass on ABC TV (http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s2820702.htm) Howard Jacobsen examined "Jesus the Jew". He taught me a lot about how young Jews are affected by my own religion.
But the big statement he made for me was that each religion has a truth about God that they hide behind and don't look to see the truth in the other. We all have some knowledge of god, but we don't acknowledge what others find of god.
If I disagree with another person, then finding out where they are coming from and why they think as they do is an important learning for me. But that also needs to be accompanied with me finding out why I think as I do. Then we might start to be able to hear one another. Then we might be able to go to another level of truth, or at least live with our differences.
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