Published Saturday, March 31, 2007
Episcopal leader fears split may be unavoidable.
By Cary McMullen
Ledger Religion Editor
Uncertainty seems to be Bishop John Howe's companion these days.
Just returned from last week's meeting of the Episcopal House of Bishops at a retreat center in Texas, Howe reflected this week on the continuing crisis within the American denomination and with its Anglican cousins overseas. Asked if a break within the Episcopal Church is now inevitable, the leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida sighed deeply.
"I don't know," he said after a moment. "Anglicans have been famous for finding some sort of middle ground. It's possible we may squeak through. But the long-predicted realignment is probably inevitable. What that means (for conservatives), I don't think anyone knows."
Howe has been a leader among conservatives opposed to the Episcopal Church's progressive policies toward homosexuals. The dispute has had international repercussions, with some American Episcopalians allying themselves with conservative archbishops from Africa and Latin America.
The bishops were faced with an ultimatum issued at a recent meeting of international Anglican archbishops, known as primates: promise to stop consecrating gays as bishops and stop blessing same-sex unions or face exclusion from the councils of the Anglican Communion. The bishops were given until Sept. 30 to respond, and the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, deferred discussion of those issues until the bishops' September meeting.
The primates also proposed a "pastoral" plan that conservatives, a minority in the Episcopal Church, be allowed to report to a "primatial vicar" appointed jointly by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Jefferts Schori. In a resolution and letters to the primates and the Episcopal Church, the bishops rejected the proposal, declaring it would violate the church's autonomy and its constitution and policies, or "canons." Anticipating an eventual rejection of the ultimatum as well, the bishops' letter to the church stated, "If that means that others reject us and communion with us, as some have already done, we must with great regret and sorrow accept their decision."
In a telephone interview from his office in Orlando, Howe said the atmosphere at the meeting was respectful between those who disagreed, although some conservative bishops no longer attend the House of Bishops' meetings.
"There's sadness that we have such deep disagreements," he said.
Howe said he disagreed with the bishops' decision about the proposed pastoral plan.
"There's nothing in the constitution and canons that (prohibits) that. Katharine Schori has said that in terms of oversight, there is very little that is delegated to her. She said if we were willing to accept (the pastoral plan), she would, too," Howe said.
Howe said it was unclear what the consequences of the bishops' decision would be. Jefferts Schori could appoint her own primatial vicar to oversee parishes and dioceses unwilling to accept her authority, he said, but such a vicar would report to her rather than to an independent council, as the primates recommended.
However, Jefferts Schori is distrusted by many conservatives, and Howe said they "probably" would not agree to such an arrangement.
Howe has been more circumspect about Jefferts Schori. In an e-mail written to the diocese's clergy during the meeting and later posted on the Web site VirtueOnline, Howe wrote that Jefferts Schori had done a "stunning" job of leading. "When asked questions she is clear, and she allows this House to do its business in a totally straight-forward manner," Howe wrote.
As a result of the bishops' vote, at least one large Episcopal parish has voted to leave the denomination. According to the New York Times, Grace Church and St. Stephen's Parish in Colorado Springs voted last weekend to join the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, an arm of the Anglican church in Nigeria. Colorado Bishop Robert O'Neill has dissolved the parish's vestry, and a legal fight is expected over control of its property.
Howe has counseled disgruntled parishes in his diocese to have patience, arguing that there could be a way to remain within the Episcopal Church while allied with the larger Anglican Communion. He seemed more pessimistic about that possibility this week and said he feared a rejection of the primates' ultimatum would lead to a split within the Anglican Communion.
"It's clear to me the House (of Bishops) as a whole is not going to agree to what's been asked of us. ... In my opinion, there will be a realignment which will include many parts of the Anglican Communion and exclude others," he said.
Howe is scheduled to meet with the clergy of the Diocese of Central Florida on Wednesday.
Asked whether there will be a number of parishes in the Diocese of Central Florida that want to leave the Episcopal Church to align themselves with overseas Anglican churches, Howe replied, "Anything could happen. We'll take it step by step."
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Friday, March 30, 2007
Faithfulness Vindicated
TEXAS: Christ Church Midland to inhabit new church two years after break with Episcopal church
by Jennifer Edwards
Midland Reporter-Telegram
http://tinyurl.com/3xwxp8
3/24/2007
An Episcopalian congregation kicked out of its home church because of its protests against openly gay bishops and the blessing of gay marriages will soon have a brand-new home with a kneeling touch.
The congregation of Christ Church Midland, formerly of St. Nicholas' Episcopal Church, is hoping to soon celebrate its first service at a brand-new church on the corner of Midkiff Road and Mockingbird Lane. The final touch -- custom-designed needlepoint kneelers -- won't be in place yet, but the church will be ready for the bishop's blessing the day before services.
"The plan is that the church will be ready by late summer," said Nancy Shaw, a congregation member.
The Rev. Jon Stasney, church rector, agreed, setting June 17 as the date for the first service.
"We're a little bit later than we anticipated," he said. However, "the property is twice what we had before -- (it is) 16.8 acres." The property also will feature more classrooms, which Stasney said was the church's "greatest need."
Construction on the new church cost about the same as construction of St. Nicholas', which was just four years old when Bishop Wallis Ohl ordered dissenting members to leave by June 1, 2005. At that time, the congregation was almost finished paying off the construction and was already planning an addition, Stasney said.
Though some of the congregation stayed behind at St. Nicholas', Stasney said Christ Church Midland has recouped and slightly increased its membership since cutting ties with the Northwest Texas Diocese and then joining up with the Diocese of Mityana in Uganda.
"We grew first by just replacing the (number) we lost -- about 11 percent that didn't move with us," he said. "We have grown other ways in terms of operating budget as well, from a little over $500,000 to $800,000 (annually)."
The budget had been a sticking point before the move, as donations to the church declined after the Episcopal Church U.S.A. ordained an openly gay bishop and blessed same-sex marriages, according to Reporter-Telegram reports.
Since leaving, donations recovered then increased, Stasney said.
"So far, we haven't had to draw on our loan to pay on our building cost because the pledges are coming in ahead of time," he said. "It's pretty phenomenal. It is a wonderful congregation, and you can tell the level of commitment is pretty high."
While members are giving of their money, others are giving of their time. For instance, one group has already committed to the numerous hours it will take to hand-stitch the kneelers Atlanta artist Nancy Keating is custom-designing. Keating, who has designed kneelers for several churches in Georgia and one in Corpus Christi, said the theme will be the life of Christ. Specifically, they'll focus on Jesus' role as a healer.
"These should last a lot longer than us," she said during a recent visit to Midland. "We should use the best of everything."
The stitching will be of Persian wool, which Keating assured is "very, very durable."
They will be placed around the altar, said Shaw, who co-chairs the needlepoint committee.
"They will be completed by people at Christ Church. We have a number of ladies who have been working to learn needlepoint since last summer," she said. "We have been amazed at the interest."
Because the artist has visited the church and will stay in contact, the designs she creates will be "one-of-a-kind" and personal, Shaw said.
It could take as long as a year to finish the kneelers, but the new church won't lack for decoration.
The congregation also will place a big bronze of St. Nicholas, designed by Stan Jacobs, in the center of the columbium (where the ashes of church members are interred.
Though the kneelers won't be in place for move-in time, members likely will breathe a sigh of relief that they now have a permanent church. Since they left St. Nicholas', the congregation has endured a lot of moving, lifting and shifting, Stasney said.
"They set up the church every Saturday and take it down every Sunday" at Midland Classical Academy, he said. Member Steve Clarke even built a portable altar, while St. Stephen's Catholic Church lent a big wooden cross and some chairs. Other churches, including True-Lite Christian Fellowship and Mid-Cities Community Church, also have helped by offering Ash Wednesday and holy week services, office space and room to perform weddings and funerals.
"We have had wonderful support from the larger church of Midland," Stasney said. "It is great."
However, "... the work is not over," he said. "It's not a resting place along the way, so much as one more base to do ministry from. And it continues to grow from there."
END
------------------------------
by Jennifer Edwards
Midland Reporter-Telegram
http://tinyurl.com/3xwxp8
3/24/2007
An Episcopalian congregation kicked out of its home church because of its protests against openly gay bishops and the blessing of gay marriages will soon have a brand-new home with a kneeling touch.
The congregation of Christ Church Midland, formerly of St. Nicholas' Episcopal Church, is hoping to soon celebrate its first service at a brand-new church on the corner of Midkiff Road and Mockingbird Lane. The final touch -- custom-designed needlepoint kneelers -- won't be in place yet, but the church will be ready for the bishop's blessing the day before services.
"The plan is that the church will be ready by late summer," said Nancy Shaw, a congregation member.
The Rev. Jon Stasney, church rector, agreed, setting June 17 as the date for the first service.
"We're a little bit later than we anticipated," he said. However, "the property is twice what we had before -- (it is) 16.8 acres." The property also will feature more classrooms, which Stasney said was the church's "greatest need."
Construction on the new church cost about the same as construction of St. Nicholas', which was just four years old when Bishop Wallis Ohl ordered dissenting members to leave by June 1, 2005. At that time, the congregation was almost finished paying off the construction and was already planning an addition, Stasney said.
Though some of the congregation stayed behind at St. Nicholas', Stasney said Christ Church Midland has recouped and slightly increased its membership since cutting ties with the Northwest Texas Diocese and then joining up with the Diocese of Mityana in Uganda.
"We grew first by just replacing the (number) we lost -- about 11 percent that didn't move with us," he said. "We have grown other ways in terms of operating budget as well, from a little over $500,000 to $800,000 (annually)."
The budget had been a sticking point before the move, as donations to the church declined after the Episcopal Church U.S.A. ordained an openly gay bishop and blessed same-sex marriages, according to Reporter-Telegram reports.
Since leaving, donations recovered then increased, Stasney said.
"So far, we haven't had to draw on our loan to pay on our building cost because the pledges are coming in ahead of time," he said. "It's pretty phenomenal. It is a wonderful congregation, and you can tell the level of commitment is pretty high."
While members are giving of their money, others are giving of their time. For instance, one group has already committed to the numerous hours it will take to hand-stitch the kneelers Atlanta artist Nancy Keating is custom-designing. Keating, who has designed kneelers for several churches in Georgia and one in Corpus Christi, said the theme will be the life of Christ. Specifically, they'll focus on Jesus' role as a healer.
"These should last a lot longer than us," she said during a recent visit to Midland. "We should use the best of everything."
The stitching will be of Persian wool, which Keating assured is "very, very durable."
They will be placed around the altar, said Shaw, who co-chairs the needlepoint committee.
"They will be completed by people at Christ Church. We have a number of ladies who have been working to learn needlepoint since last summer," she said. "We have been amazed at the interest."
Because the artist has visited the church and will stay in contact, the designs she creates will be "one-of-a-kind" and personal, Shaw said.
It could take as long as a year to finish the kneelers, but the new church won't lack for decoration.
The congregation also will place a big bronze of St. Nicholas, designed by Stan Jacobs, in the center of the columbium (where the ashes of church members are interred.
Though the kneelers won't be in place for move-in time, members likely will breathe a sigh of relief that they now have a permanent church. Since they left St. Nicholas', the congregation has endured a lot of moving, lifting and shifting, Stasney said.
"They set up the church every Saturday and take it down every Sunday" at Midland Classical Academy, he said. Member Steve Clarke even built a portable altar, while St. Stephen's Catholic Church lent a big wooden cross and some chairs. Other churches, including True-Lite Christian Fellowship and Mid-Cities Community Church, also have helped by offering Ash Wednesday and holy week services, office space and room to perform weddings and funerals.
"We have had wonderful support from the larger church of Midland," Stasney said. "It is great."
However, "... the work is not over," he said. "It's not a resting place along the way, so much as one more base to do ministry from. And it continues to grow from there."
END
------------------------------
The Great Liberal Death Wish
Malcolm Muggeridge
Commentary: Muggeridge was one of the few western journalists to recognize the evil of Soviet Communism when most western thinkers were still taken in by the utopian promises of Marxism. For his honest reporting on the Stalinist show trials he lost his job and was blacklisted for a time. He never lost his critical touch.
The Great Liberal Death Wish" is a subject that I've given a lot of thought to and have written about, and it would be easy for me to read to you a long piece that I've written on the subject. But somehow in the atmosphere of this delightful college, I want to have a shot at just talking about this notion of the great liberal death wish as it has arisen in my life, as I've seen it, and the deductions I've made from it. I should also plead guilty to being responsible for the general heading of these lectures, namely, "The Humane Holocaust: The Auschwitz Formula. "
Later on I want to say something about all this, showing how this humane holocaust, this dreadful slaughter that began with 50 million babies last year, will undoubtedly be extend-ed to the senile old and the mentally afflicted and mongoloid children, and so on, because of the large amount of money that maintaining them costs. It is all the more ironical when one thinks about the holocaust western audiences, and the German population in particular, have been shuddering over, as it has been presented on their TV and cinema screens. Note this compassionate or humane holocaust, if, as I fear, it gains momentum, will quite put that other in the shade. And, as I shall try to explain, what is even more ironical, the actual considerations that led to the German holocaust were not, as is commonly suggested, due to Nazi terrorism, but were based upon the sort of legislation that advocates of euthanasia, or "mercy killing," in this country and in western Europe, are trying to get enacted. It's not true that the German holocaust was simply a war crime, as it was judged to be at Nuremberg. In point of fact, it was based upon a perfectly coherent, legally enacted decree approved and operated by the German medical profession before the Nazis took over power. In other words, from the point of view of the Guinness Book of Records you can say that in our mad world it takes about thirty years to transform a war crime into a compassionate act.
But I'm going to deal with that later. I want first of all to look at this question of the great liberal death wish. And I was very delighted that you should have got here for this CCA program the film on Dostoevsky for which I did the commentary, because his novel The Devils[1] is the most extraordinary piece of prophecy about this great liberal death wish. All the characters in it, the circumstances of it, irresistibly recall what we mean by the great liberal death wish. You cannot imagine what a strange experience it was doing that filming in the USSR. I quoted extensively from the speech that Dostoevsky delivered when the Pushkin Memorial was unveiled in Moscow, and his words were considered to be, in terms of then current ideologies, about the most reactionary words ever spoken. They amounted to a tremendous onslaught on this very thing that we're talking about, this great liberal death wish, as it existed in Russia in the latter part of the last century. The characters in the book match very well the cast of the liberal death wish in our society and in our time. You even have the interesting fact that the old liberal, Stephan Trofimovich Verkovensky, who is a sort of male impersonator of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, with all the sentimental notions that go therewith, is the father of Peter Verkovensky, a Baader Meinhof character, based on a Russian nihilist of Dostoevsky's time, Sergey Nechayef. To me, it's one of the most extraordinary pieces of modern prophecy that has ever been. Especially when Peter Verkovensky says, as he does, that what we need are a few generations of debauchery - debauchery at its most vicious and most horrible - followed by a little sweet bloodletting, and then the turmoil will begin. I put it to you that this bears a rather uneasy resemblance to the sort of thing that is happening at this moment in the western world.
Now I want to throw my mind back to my childhood, to the sitting room in the little suburban house in south London where I grew up. On Saturday evenings my father and his cronies would assemble there, and they would plan together the downfall of the capitalist system and the replacement of it by one which was just and humane and egalitarian and peaceable, etc. These were my first memories of a serious conversation about our circumstances in the world. I used to hide in a big chair and hope not to be noticed, because I was so interested. And I accepted completely the views of these good men, that once they were able to shape the world as they wanted it to be, they would create a perfect state of affairs in which peace would reign, prosperity would expand, men would be brotherly, and considerate, and there would be no exploitation of man by man, nor any ruthless oppression of individuals. And I firmly believed that, once their plans were fulfilled, we would realize an idyllic state of affairs of such a nature. They were good men, they were honest men, they were sincere men. Unlike their prototypes on the continent of Europe, they were men from the chapels. It was a sort of spillover from the practice of nonconformist Christianity, not a brutal ideology, and I was entirely convinced that such a brotherly, contented, loving society would come to pass once they were able to establish themselves in power.
My father used to speak a lot at open air meetings, and when I was very small I used to follow him around because I adored him, as I still do. He was a very wonderful and good man. He'd had a very harsh upbringing himself, and this was his dream of how you could transform human society so that human beings, instead of maltreating one another and exploiting one another, would be like brothers. I remember he used to make quite good jokes at these outdoor meetings when we had set up our little platform, and a few small children and one or two passers-by had gathered briefly to listen. One joke I particularly appreciated and used to wait for even though I had heard a hundred times ran like this: "Well ladies and gentlemen," my father would begin, "you tell me one thing. Why is it that it is his majesty's navy and his majesty's stationery office and his majesty's customs but it's the national debt? Why isn't the debt his majesty's?" It always brought the house down.
Such was my baptism into the notion of a kingdom of Heaven on earth, into what I was going to understand ultimately to be the great liberal death wish. Inevitably, my father's heroes were the great intellectuals of the time, who banded themselves together in what was called the Fabian Society, of which he was a member - a very active member. For instance, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Harold Laski, people of that sort. All the leftist elite, like Sydney - and Beatrice Webb, belonged to this Fabian Society, and in my father's eyes they were princes among men. I accepted his judgment.
Once I had a slight shock when he took me to a meeting of the Fabian Society where H. G. Wells was speaking, and I can remember vividly his high squeaky voice as he said - and it stuck in my mind long afterward -"We haven't got time to read the Bible. We haven't got time to read the history of this obscure nomadic tribe in the Middle East." Subsequently, when I learned of the things that Wells had got time for, the observation broke upon me in all its richness.
Anyway, that for me was how my impressions of life began. I was sent to Cambridge University, which of course in those days consisted very largely of boys from what we call public schools, and you call private schools. Altogether, it was for me a quite different sort of milieu, where the word socialist in those days - this was in 1920 when I went to Cambridge at 17 - was almost unknown. We who had been to a government secondary school and then to Cambridge were regarded as an extraordinary and rather distasteful phenomenon. But my views about how the world was going to be made better remained firmly entrenched in the talk of my father and his cronies. Of course, in the meantime had come the First World War, to be followed by an almost insane outburst of expectations that henceforth peace would prevail in the world, that we would have a League of Nations to ensure that there would be no more wars, and gradually everybody would get more prosperous and everything would be better and better. That rather lugubrious figure Woodrow Wilson arrived on the scene, to be treated with the utmost veneration. I can see him now, lantern-jawed, wearing his tall hat - somehow for me he didn't fill the bill of a knight in shining armor who was going to lead us to everlasting peace. Somehow the flavor of Princeton about him detracted from that picture, but still I accepted him as an awesome figure.
My time at Cambridge was a rather desolate time. I never much enjoyed being educated, and have continued to believe that education is a rather overrated experience. Perhaps this isn't the most suitable place in the world to say that, but such is my opinion. I think that it is part of the liberal dream that somehow or other - and it was certainly my father's view - people, in becoming educated, instead of on Sundays racing their dogs or studying racing forms, or anything like that, would take to singing madrigals or reading Paradise Lost aloud. This is another dream that didn't quite come true.
Anyway, from Cambridge I went off to India, to teach at a Christian college there, and I must say it was an extremely agreeable experience. The college was in a remote part of what was then Travancore, but is now Kerala. It was not one of the missionary colleges, but associated with the indigenous Syrian Church, which you may know is a very ancient church, dating back to the fourth century, and now there are a million or more Syrian Christians. In its way it was quite an idyllic existence, but of course one came up against naked power for the first time. I had never thought of power before as something separate from the rest of life. But in India, under the British raj, with a relatively few white men ruling over three or four hundred million Indians, I came face to face with power unrelated to elections or any other representative device in the great liberal dream that became the great liberal death wish. However, it was a pleasant time, and of course the Indian nationalist movement was beginning, and Ghandi came to the college where I was teaching. This extraordinary little gargoyle of a man appeared, and held forth, and everybody got tremendously excited, and shouted against Imperialism, and the Empire in which at that time the great majority of the British people firmly believed, and which they thought would continue forever. If you ventured to say, as I did on the boat going to India, that it might come to an end before long, they laughed you to scorn, being firmly convinced that God had decided that the British should rule over a quarter of the world, and that nothing could ever change this state of affairs. Which again opened up a new vista about what this business of power signified, and how it worked, not as a theory, but in practice. We used to boast in those days that we had an Empire on which the sun never set, and now we have a commonwealth on which it never rises, and I can't quite say which concept strikes me as being the more derisory.
That was India, and then I came back to England and for a time taught in an elementary school in Birmingham, and married my wife Kitty. (I wish she were here today because she's very nice. We've been married now for 51 years, so I am entitled to speak well of her.) She was the niece of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, so it was like marrying into a sort of aristocracy of the Left. After our wedding, we went off to Egypt, where I taught at the University of Cairo, and it was there that the dreadful infection of journalism got into my system. Turning aside from the honorable occupation of teaching, I started writing articles about the wrongs of the Egyptian people, how they were clamoring, and rightly so, for a democratic setup, and how they would never be satisfied with less than one man one vote and all that went therewith. I never heard any Egyptian say that this was his position, but I used to watch those old pashas in Groppi's cafe' smoking their hubble-bubble pipes, and imagined that under their tabooshes was a strong feeling that they would never for an instant countenance anything less than full representative government. That at least was what I wrote in my articles, and they went flying over to England, and, like homing pigeons, in through the windows of the Guardian office in Manchester, at that time a high citadel of liberalism. That was where the truth was being expounded, that was where enlightenment reigned. In due course I was asked to join the editorial staff of the Guardian, which to me was a most marvelous thing. I may say that the work of teaching at Cairo University was not an arduous job, essentially for three reasons. One was that the students didn't understand English; the second that they were nearly always on strike or otherwise engaged in political demonstrations, and thirdly they were often stupified with hashish. So I had a lot of leisure on my hands.
Incidentally, to be serious for a moment, it seems to me a most extraordinary thing that at that time you wouldn't have found anybody, Egyptian or English or anybody else, who wasn't absolutely clear in his mind that hashish was a most appalling and disastrous addiction. So you can imagine how strange it was forty years later for me to hear life peeresses and people like that insisting that hashish didn't do any harm to anybody, and was even beneficial. I see that in Canada it is going to be legalized, which will mean one more sad, unnecessary hazard comes into our world.
Anyway, these were the golden days of liberalism when the Manchester Guardian was widely read, and even believed. Despite all its misprints, you could make out roughly speaking what it was saying, and what we typed out was quite likely, to our great satisfaction, to be quoted in some paper in - Baghdad or Smyrna as being the opinion of our very influential organ of enlightened liberalism. I remember my first day I was there, and somehow it symbolizes the whole experience. I was asked to write a leader - a short leader of about 120 words - on corporal punishment. At some head-masters' conference, it seemed, words had been spoken about corporal punishment and I was to produce appropriate comment. So I put my head into the room next to mine, and asked the man who was working there: "What's our line on corporal punishment?" Without looking up from his type-writer, he replied: "The same as capital, only more so." So I knew exactly what to tap out, you see. That was how I got into the shocking habit of pontificating about what was going on in the world; observing that the Greeks did not seem to want an orderly government, or that one despaired sometimes of the Irish having any concern for law and order; weighty pronouncement tapped out on a typewriter, deriving from nowhere, and for all one knew, concerning no one.
We were required to end anything we wrote on a hopeful note, because liberalism is a hopeful creed. And so, however appalling and black the situation that we described, we would always conclude with some sentence like: "It is greatly to be hoped that moderate men of all shades of opinion will draw together, and that wiser councils may yet prevail." How many times I gave expression to such jejune hopes! Well, I soon grew weary of this, because it seemed to me that immoderate men were rather strongly in evidence, and I couldn't see that wiser councils were prevailing anywhere. The depression was on by that time, I'm talking now of 1932--33. It was on especially in Lancashire, and it seemed as though our whole way of life was cracking up, and, of course, I looked across at the USSR with a sort of longing, thinking that there was an alternative, some other way in which people could live, and I managed to maneuver matters so that I was sent to Moscow as the Guardian correspondent, arriving there fully prepared to see in the Soviet regime the answer to all our troubles, only to discover in a very short time that though it might be an answer, it was a very unattractive one.
It's difficult to convey to you what a shock this was, realizing that what I had supposed to be the new brotherly way of life my father and his cronies had imagined long before, was simply on examination an appalling tyranny, in which the only thing that mattered, the only reality, was power. So again, like the British raj, in the USSR I was confronted with power as the absolute and ultimate arbiter. However, that was a thing that one could take in one's stride. How I first came to conceive the notion of the great liberal death wish was not at all in consequence of what was happening in the USSR, which, as I came to reflect after-ward, was simply the famous lines in the Magnificat working out, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek," whereupon, of course, the humble and meek become mighty in their turn and have to be put down. That was just history, something that happens in the world; people achieve power, exercise power, abuse power, are booted out of power, and then it all begins again. The thing that impressed me, and the thing that touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that western man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident journalists knew were completely nonsensical. It's impossible to exaggerate to you the impression that this made on me. Mrs. Webb had said to Kitty and me: "You'll find that in the USSR Sydney and I are icons. " As a matter of fact they were, Marxist icons.
How could this be? How could this extraordinary credulity exist in the minds of people who were adulated by one and all as maestros of discernment and judgment? It was from that moment that I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I'd supposed it to be - a creative movement which would shape the future - but rather a sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutal-ly and oppressively and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy? I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded. I tell you, if ever you are looking for a good subject for a thesis, you could get a very fine one out of a study of the books that were written by people like the Dean of Canterbury, Julian Huxley, Harold Laski, Bernard Shaw, or the Webbs about the Soviet regime. In the process you would come upon a compendium of fatuity such as has seldom, if ever, existed on earth. And I would really recommend it; after all, the people who wrote these books were, and continue to be regarded as, pundits, whose words must be very, very seriously heeded and considered.
I recall in their yellow jackets a famous collection in England called the Left Book Club. You would be amazed at the gullibility that's expressed. We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most out-rageous fantasy. We would tell them, for instance, that the shortage of milk in Moscow was entirely due to the fact that all milk was given nursing mothers - things like that. If they put it in the articles they subsequently wrote, then you'd score a point. One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant. I never got over that; it always remained in my mind as something that could never be erased. I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still. That's when I began to think seriously about the great liberal death wish.
In due course, I came back to England to await the Second World War, in the course of which I found myself engaged in Intelligence duties. And let me tell you that if there is one thing more fantastical than news, it is Intelligence. News itself is a sort of fantasy; and when you actually go collecting news, you realize that this is so. In a certain sense, you create news; you dream news up yourself and then send it. But that's nothing to the fantasy of Intelligence. Of the two, I would say that news seems really quite a sober and considered commodity compared with your offerings when you're an Intelligence agent.
Anyway, when in 1945 I found myself a civilian again, I tried to sort out my thoughts about the great wave of optimism that followed the Second World War - for me, a repeat performance. It was then that I came to realize how, in the name of progress and compassion, the most terrible things were going to be done, preparing the way for the great humane holocaust, about which I have spoken. There was, it seemed to me, a built in propensity in this liberal world-view whereby the opposite of what was intended came to pass. Take the case of education. Education was the great mumbo--jumbo of progress, the assumption being that educating people would make them grow better and better, more and more objective and intelligent. Actually, as more and more money is spent on education, illiteracy is increasing. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if it didn't end up with virtually the whole revenue of the western countries being spent on education, and a condition of almost total illiteracy resulting therefrom. It's quite on the cards.
Now I want to try to get to grips with this strange state of affairs. Let's look again at the humane holocaust. What happened in Germany was that long before the Nazis got into power, a great propaganda was undertaken to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called "mercy killing." This happened long before the Nazis set up their extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the highest humanitarian considerations. You see what I'm getting at? On a basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation. It's to me quite clear that that is so, the evidence is on every hand. The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we've seen so many manifestations in our time - in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. I see this process going on irresistably, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory--farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well--being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. That's where you land yourself. And it is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself.
This might seem to be a despairing conclusion, but it isn't, you know, actually. First of all, the fact that we can't work out the liberal dream in practical terms is not bad news, but good news. Because if you could work it out, life would be too banal, too tenth-rate to be worth bothering about. Apart from that, we have been given the most extraordinary sign of the truth of things, which I continually find myself thinking about. This is that the most perfect and beautiful expressions of man's spiritual aspirations come, not from the liberal dream in any of its manifestations, but from people in the forced labor camps of the USSR. And this is the most extraordinary phenomenon, and one that of course receives absolutely no attention in the media. From the media point of view it's not news, and in any case the media do not want to know about it. But this is the fact for which there is a growing amount of evidence. I was reading about it in a long essay by a Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Mihajlov,[2] who spent some years in a prison in Yugoslavia. He cites case after case of people who, like Solzhenitsyn, say that enlightenment came to them in the forced labor camps. They understood what freedom was when they had lost their freedom, they understood what the purpose of life was when they seemed to have no future. They say, moreover, that when it's a question of choosing whether to save your soul or your body, the man who chooses to save his soul gathers strength thereby to go on living, whereas the man who chooses to save his body at the expense of his soul loses both body and soul. In other words, fulfilling exactly what our Lord said, that he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life for all eternity, as those who love their lives in this world will assuredly lose them. Now, that's where I see the light in our darkness. There's an image I love - if the whole world were to be covered with concrete, there still would be some cracks in it, and through these cracks green shoots would come. The testimonies from the labor camps are the green shoots we can see in the world, breaking out from the monolithic power now dominating ever greater areas of it. In contradistinction, this is the liberal death wish, holding out the fallacious and ultimately destructive hope that we can construct a happy, fulfilled life in terms of our physical and material needs, and in the moral and intellectual dimensions of our mortality.
I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God's purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand. We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse - and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse - and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistably growing power of materialism and materialist societies. But, it will not happen that that is the end of the story. As St. Augustine said - and I love to think of it when he received the news in Carthage that Rome had been sacked: Well, if that's happened, it's a great catas-trophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men build they destroy, but there is also the City of God which men didn't build and can't destroy. And he devoted the next seventeen years of his life to working out the relationship between the earthly city and the City of God - the earthly city where we live for a short time, and the City of God whose citizens we are for all eternity.
You know, it's a funny thing, but when you're old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won't go into that now. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God's creation, you are a participant in God's purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.
Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God's love. We ourselves are part of that love, we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene does our existence here have any reality or any worth. All the rest is fantasy - -whether the fantasy of power which we see in the authoritarian states around us, or the fantasy of the great liberal death wish in terms of affluence and self-indulgence. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second--class hotel.
1. Sometimes translated as The Possessed.
2. "Mystical Experience of the Labor Camps," included in his excellent book Underground Notes.
At the time of the original publication, Malcolm Muggeridge was quite simply one of the most delightful, articulate, brilliant thinkers in the world. His career has included journalist and Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian; agent for British Intelligence in Africa during World War II; Liaison - Officer with the Free French; Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph; Editor of Punch; and Book Reviewer for Esquire. In addition to several anthologies of his own writings, he is a published novelist and playwright. His television career began when television began, and has continued in the United States, the United Kingdom and throughout the English-speaking world. In England he had worked extensively with the B.B.C.
Imprimis, the monthly journal of Hillsdale College. May 1979, Vol 8, No. 5.
Copyright © 2002 Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu).
Commentary: Muggeridge was one of the few western journalists to recognize the evil of Soviet Communism when most western thinkers were still taken in by the utopian promises of Marxism. For his honest reporting on the Stalinist show trials he lost his job and was blacklisted for a time. He never lost his critical touch.
The Great Liberal Death Wish" is a subject that I've given a lot of thought to and have written about, and it would be easy for me to read to you a long piece that I've written on the subject. But somehow in the atmosphere of this delightful college, I want to have a shot at just talking about this notion of the great liberal death wish as it has arisen in my life, as I've seen it, and the deductions I've made from it. I should also plead guilty to being responsible for the general heading of these lectures, namely, "The Humane Holocaust: The Auschwitz Formula. "
Later on I want to say something about all this, showing how this humane holocaust, this dreadful slaughter that began with 50 million babies last year, will undoubtedly be extend-ed to the senile old and the mentally afflicted and mongoloid children, and so on, because of the large amount of money that maintaining them costs. It is all the more ironical when one thinks about the holocaust western audiences, and the German population in particular, have been shuddering over, as it has been presented on their TV and cinema screens. Note this compassionate or humane holocaust, if, as I fear, it gains momentum, will quite put that other in the shade. And, as I shall try to explain, what is even more ironical, the actual considerations that led to the German holocaust were not, as is commonly suggested, due to Nazi terrorism, but were based upon the sort of legislation that advocates of euthanasia, or "mercy killing," in this country and in western Europe, are trying to get enacted. It's not true that the German holocaust was simply a war crime, as it was judged to be at Nuremberg. In point of fact, it was based upon a perfectly coherent, legally enacted decree approved and operated by the German medical profession before the Nazis took over power. In other words, from the point of view of the Guinness Book of Records you can say that in our mad world it takes about thirty years to transform a war crime into a compassionate act.
But I'm going to deal with that later. I want first of all to look at this question of the great liberal death wish. And I was very delighted that you should have got here for this CCA program the film on Dostoevsky for which I did the commentary, because his novel The Devils[1] is the most extraordinary piece of prophecy about this great liberal death wish. All the characters in it, the circumstances of it, irresistibly recall what we mean by the great liberal death wish. You cannot imagine what a strange experience it was doing that filming in the USSR. I quoted extensively from the speech that Dostoevsky delivered when the Pushkin Memorial was unveiled in Moscow, and his words were considered to be, in terms of then current ideologies, about the most reactionary words ever spoken. They amounted to a tremendous onslaught on this very thing that we're talking about, this great liberal death wish, as it existed in Russia in the latter part of the last century. The characters in the book match very well the cast of the liberal death wish in our society and in our time. You even have the interesting fact that the old liberal, Stephan Trofimovich Verkovensky, who is a sort of male impersonator of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, with all the sentimental notions that go therewith, is the father of Peter Verkovensky, a Baader Meinhof character, based on a Russian nihilist of Dostoevsky's time, Sergey Nechayef. To me, it's one of the most extraordinary pieces of modern prophecy that has ever been. Especially when Peter Verkovensky says, as he does, that what we need are a few generations of debauchery - debauchery at its most vicious and most horrible - followed by a little sweet bloodletting, and then the turmoil will begin. I put it to you that this bears a rather uneasy resemblance to the sort of thing that is happening at this moment in the western world.
Now I want to throw my mind back to my childhood, to the sitting room in the little suburban house in south London where I grew up. On Saturday evenings my father and his cronies would assemble there, and they would plan together the downfall of the capitalist system and the replacement of it by one which was just and humane and egalitarian and peaceable, etc. These were my first memories of a serious conversation about our circumstances in the world. I used to hide in a big chair and hope not to be noticed, because I was so interested. And I accepted completely the views of these good men, that once they were able to shape the world as they wanted it to be, they would create a perfect state of affairs in which peace would reign, prosperity would expand, men would be brotherly, and considerate, and there would be no exploitation of man by man, nor any ruthless oppression of individuals. And I firmly believed that, once their plans were fulfilled, we would realize an idyllic state of affairs of such a nature. They were good men, they were honest men, they were sincere men. Unlike their prototypes on the continent of Europe, they were men from the chapels. It was a sort of spillover from the practice of nonconformist Christianity, not a brutal ideology, and I was entirely convinced that such a brotherly, contented, loving society would come to pass once they were able to establish themselves in power.
My father used to speak a lot at open air meetings, and when I was very small I used to follow him around because I adored him, as I still do. He was a very wonderful and good man. He'd had a very harsh upbringing himself, and this was his dream of how you could transform human society so that human beings, instead of maltreating one another and exploiting one another, would be like brothers. I remember he used to make quite good jokes at these outdoor meetings when we had set up our little platform, and a few small children and one or two passers-by had gathered briefly to listen. One joke I particularly appreciated and used to wait for even though I had heard a hundred times ran like this: "Well ladies and gentlemen," my father would begin, "you tell me one thing. Why is it that it is his majesty's navy and his majesty's stationery office and his majesty's customs but it's the national debt? Why isn't the debt his majesty's?" It always brought the house down.
Such was my baptism into the notion of a kingdom of Heaven on earth, into what I was going to understand ultimately to be the great liberal death wish. Inevitably, my father's heroes were the great intellectuals of the time, who banded themselves together in what was called the Fabian Society, of which he was a member - a very active member. For instance, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Harold Laski, people of that sort. All the leftist elite, like Sydney - and Beatrice Webb, belonged to this Fabian Society, and in my father's eyes they were princes among men. I accepted his judgment.
Once I had a slight shock when he took me to a meeting of the Fabian Society where H. G. Wells was speaking, and I can remember vividly his high squeaky voice as he said - and it stuck in my mind long afterward -"We haven't got time to read the Bible. We haven't got time to read the history of this obscure nomadic tribe in the Middle East." Subsequently, when I learned of the things that Wells had got time for, the observation broke upon me in all its richness.
Anyway, that for me was how my impressions of life began. I was sent to Cambridge University, which of course in those days consisted very largely of boys from what we call public schools, and you call private schools. Altogether, it was for me a quite different sort of milieu, where the word socialist in those days - this was in 1920 when I went to Cambridge at 17 - was almost unknown. We who had been to a government secondary school and then to Cambridge were regarded as an extraordinary and rather distasteful phenomenon. But my views about how the world was going to be made better remained firmly entrenched in the talk of my father and his cronies. Of course, in the meantime had come the First World War, to be followed by an almost insane outburst of expectations that henceforth peace would prevail in the world, that we would have a League of Nations to ensure that there would be no more wars, and gradually everybody would get more prosperous and everything would be better and better. That rather lugubrious figure Woodrow Wilson arrived on the scene, to be treated with the utmost veneration. I can see him now, lantern-jawed, wearing his tall hat - somehow for me he didn't fill the bill of a knight in shining armor who was going to lead us to everlasting peace. Somehow the flavor of Princeton about him detracted from that picture, but still I accepted him as an awesome figure.
My time at Cambridge was a rather desolate time. I never much enjoyed being educated, and have continued to believe that education is a rather overrated experience. Perhaps this isn't the most suitable place in the world to say that, but such is my opinion. I think that it is part of the liberal dream that somehow or other - and it was certainly my father's view - people, in becoming educated, instead of on Sundays racing their dogs or studying racing forms, or anything like that, would take to singing madrigals or reading Paradise Lost aloud. This is another dream that didn't quite come true.
Anyway, from Cambridge I went off to India, to teach at a Christian college there, and I must say it was an extremely agreeable experience. The college was in a remote part of what was then Travancore, but is now Kerala. It was not one of the missionary colleges, but associated with the indigenous Syrian Church, which you may know is a very ancient church, dating back to the fourth century, and now there are a million or more Syrian Christians. In its way it was quite an idyllic existence, but of course one came up against naked power for the first time. I had never thought of power before as something separate from the rest of life. But in India, under the British raj, with a relatively few white men ruling over three or four hundred million Indians, I came face to face with power unrelated to elections or any other representative device in the great liberal dream that became the great liberal death wish. However, it was a pleasant time, and of course the Indian nationalist movement was beginning, and Ghandi came to the college where I was teaching. This extraordinary little gargoyle of a man appeared, and held forth, and everybody got tremendously excited, and shouted against Imperialism, and the Empire in which at that time the great majority of the British people firmly believed, and which they thought would continue forever. If you ventured to say, as I did on the boat going to India, that it might come to an end before long, they laughed you to scorn, being firmly convinced that God had decided that the British should rule over a quarter of the world, and that nothing could ever change this state of affairs. Which again opened up a new vista about what this business of power signified, and how it worked, not as a theory, but in practice. We used to boast in those days that we had an Empire on which the sun never set, and now we have a commonwealth on which it never rises, and I can't quite say which concept strikes me as being the more derisory.
That was India, and then I came back to England and for a time taught in an elementary school in Birmingham, and married my wife Kitty. (I wish she were here today because she's very nice. We've been married now for 51 years, so I am entitled to speak well of her.) She was the niece of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, so it was like marrying into a sort of aristocracy of the Left. After our wedding, we went off to Egypt, where I taught at the University of Cairo, and it was there that the dreadful infection of journalism got into my system. Turning aside from the honorable occupation of teaching, I started writing articles about the wrongs of the Egyptian people, how they were clamoring, and rightly so, for a democratic setup, and how they would never be satisfied with less than one man one vote and all that went therewith. I never heard any Egyptian say that this was his position, but I used to watch those old pashas in Groppi's cafe' smoking their hubble-bubble pipes, and imagined that under their tabooshes was a strong feeling that they would never for an instant countenance anything less than full representative government. That at least was what I wrote in my articles, and they went flying over to England, and, like homing pigeons, in through the windows of the Guardian office in Manchester, at that time a high citadel of liberalism. That was where the truth was being expounded, that was where enlightenment reigned. In due course I was asked to join the editorial staff of the Guardian, which to me was a most marvelous thing. I may say that the work of teaching at Cairo University was not an arduous job, essentially for three reasons. One was that the students didn't understand English; the second that they were nearly always on strike or otherwise engaged in political demonstrations, and thirdly they were often stupified with hashish. So I had a lot of leisure on my hands.
Incidentally, to be serious for a moment, it seems to me a most extraordinary thing that at that time you wouldn't have found anybody, Egyptian or English or anybody else, who wasn't absolutely clear in his mind that hashish was a most appalling and disastrous addiction. So you can imagine how strange it was forty years later for me to hear life peeresses and people like that insisting that hashish didn't do any harm to anybody, and was even beneficial. I see that in Canada it is going to be legalized, which will mean one more sad, unnecessary hazard comes into our world.
Anyway, these were the golden days of liberalism when the Manchester Guardian was widely read, and even believed. Despite all its misprints, you could make out roughly speaking what it was saying, and what we typed out was quite likely, to our great satisfaction, to be quoted in some paper in - Baghdad or Smyrna as being the opinion of our very influential organ of enlightened liberalism. I remember my first day I was there, and somehow it symbolizes the whole experience. I was asked to write a leader - a short leader of about 120 words - on corporal punishment. At some head-masters' conference, it seemed, words had been spoken about corporal punishment and I was to produce appropriate comment. So I put my head into the room next to mine, and asked the man who was working there: "What's our line on corporal punishment?" Without looking up from his type-writer, he replied: "The same as capital, only more so." So I knew exactly what to tap out, you see. That was how I got into the shocking habit of pontificating about what was going on in the world; observing that the Greeks did not seem to want an orderly government, or that one despaired sometimes of the Irish having any concern for law and order; weighty pronouncement tapped out on a typewriter, deriving from nowhere, and for all one knew, concerning no one.
We were required to end anything we wrote on a hopeful note, because liberalism is a hopeful creed. And so, however appalling and black the situation that we described, we would always conclude with some sentence like: "It is greatly to be hoped that moderate men of all shades of opinion will draw together, and that wiser councils may yet prevail." How many times I gave expression to such jejune hopes! Well, I soon grew weary of this, because it seemed to me that immoderate men were rather strongly in evidence, and I couldn't see that wiser councils were prevailing anywhere. The depression was on by that time, I'm talking now of 1932--33. It was on especially in Lancashire, and it seemed as though our whole way of life was cracking up, and, of course, I looked across at the USSR with a sort of longing, thinking that there was an alternative, some other way in which people could live, and I managed to maneuver matters so that I was sent to Moscow as the Guardian correspondent, arriving there fully prepared to see in the Soviet regime the answer to all our troubles, only to discover in a very short time that though it might be an answer, it was a very unattractive one.
It's difficult to convey to you what a shock this was, realizing that what I had supposed to be the new brotherly way of life my father and his cronies had imagined long before, was simply on examination an appalling tyranny, in which the only thing that mattered, the only reality, was power. So again, like the British raj, in the USSR I was confronted with power as the absolute and ultimate arbiter. However, that was a thing that one could take in one's stride. How I first came to conceive the notion of the great liberal death wish was not at all in consequence of what was happening in the USSR, which, as I came to reflect after-ward, was simply the famous lines in the Magnificat working out, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek," whereupon, of course, the humble and meek become mighty in their turn and have to be put down. That was just history, something that happens in the world; people achieve power, exercise power, abuse power, are booted out of power, and then it all begins again. The thing that impressed me, and the thing that touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that western man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident journalists knew were completely nonsensical. It's impossible to exaggerate to you the impression that this made on me. Mrs. Webb had said to Kitty and me: "You'll find that in the USSR Sydney and I are icons. " As a matter of fact they were, Marxist icons.
How could this be? How could this extraordinary credulity exist in the minds of people who were adulated by one and all as maestros of discernment and judgment? It was from that moment that I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I'd supposed it to be - a creative movement which would shape the future - but rather a sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutal-ly and oppressively and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy? I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded. I tell you, if ever you are looking for a good subject for a thesis, you could get a very fine one out of a study of the books that were written by people like the Dean of Canterbury, Julian Huxley, Harold Laski, Bernard Shaw, or the Webbs about the Soviet regime. In the process you would come upon a compendium of fatuity such as has seldom, if ever, existed on earth. And I would really recommend it; after all, the people who wrote these books were, and continue to be regarded as, pundits, whose words must be very, very seriously heeded and considered.
I recall in their yellow jackets a famous collection in England called the Left Book Club. You would be amazed at the gullibility that's expressed. We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most out-rageous fantasy. We would tell them, for instance, that the shortage of milk in Moscow was entirely due to the fact that all milk was given nursing mothers - things like that. If they put it in the articles they subsequently wrote, then you'd score a point. One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant. I never got over that; it always remained in my mind as something that could never be erased. I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still. That's when I began to think seriously about the great liberal death wish.
In due course, I came back to England to await the Second World War, in the course of which I found myself engaged in Intelligence duties. And let me tell you that if there is one thing more fantastical than news, it is Intelligence. News itself is a sort of fantasy; and when you actually go collecting news, you realize that this is so. In a certain sense, you create news; you dream news up yourself and then send it. But that's nothing to the fantasy of Intelligence. Of the two, I would say that news seems really quite a sober and considered commodity compared with your offerings when you're an Intelligence agent.
Anyway, when in 1945 I found myself a civilian again, I tried to sort out my thoughts about the great wave of optimism that followed the Second World War - for me, a repeat performance. It was then that I came to realize how, in the name of progress and compassion, the most terrible things were going to be done, preparing the way for the great humane holocaust, about which I have spoken. There was, it seemed to me, a built in propensity in this liberal world-view whereby the opposite of what was intended came to pass. Take the case of education. Education was the great mumbo--jumbo of progress, the assumption being that educating people would make them grow better and better, more and more objective and intelligent. Actually, as more and more money is spent on education, illiteracy is increasing. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if it didn't end up with virtually the whole revenue of the western countries being spent on education, and a condition of almost total illiteracy resulting therefrom. It's quite on the cards.
Now I want to try to get to grips with this strange state of affairs. Let's look again at the humane holocaust. What happened in Germany was that long before the Nazis got into power, a great propaganda was undertaken to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called "mercy killing." This happened long before the Nazis set up their extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the highest humanitarian considerations. You see what I'm getting at? On a basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation. It's to me quite clear that that is so, the evidence is on every hand. The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we've seen so many manifestations in our time - in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. I see this process going on irresistably, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory--farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well--being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. That's where you land yourself. And it is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself.
This might seem to be a despairing conclusion, but it isn't, you know, actually. First of all, the fact that we can't work out the liberal dream in practical terms is not bad news, but good news. Because if you could work it out, life would be too banal, too tenth-rate to be worth bothering about. Apart from that, we have been given the most extraordinary sign of the truth of things, which I continually find myself thinking about. This is that the most perfect and beautiful expressions of man's spiritual aspirations come, not from the liberal dream in any of its manifestations, but from people in the forced labor camps of the USSR. And this is the most extraordinary phenomenon, and one that of course receives absolutely no attention in the media. From the media point of view it's not news, and in any case the media do not want to know about it. But this is the fact for which there is a growing amount of evidence. I was reading about it in a long essay by a Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Mihajlov,[2] who spent some years in a prison in Yugoslavia. He cites case after case of people who, like Solzhenitsyn, say that enlightenment came to them in the forced labor camps. They understood what freedom was when they had lost their freedom, they understood what the purpose of life was when they seemed to have no future. They say, moreover, that when it's a question of choosing whether to save your soul or your body, the man who chooses to save his soul gathers strength thereby to go on living, whereas the man who chooses to save his body at the expense of his soul loses both body and soul. In other words, fulfilling exactly what our Lord said, that he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life for all eternity, as those who love their lives in this world will assuredly lose them. Now, that's where I see the light in our darkness. There's an image I love - if the whole world were to be covered with concrete, there still would be some cracks in it, and through these cracks green shoots would come. The testimonies from the labor camps are the green shoots we can see in the world, breaking out from the monolithic power now dominating ever greater areas of it. In contradistinction, this is the liberal death wish, holding out the fallacious and ultimately destructive hope that we can construct a happy, fulfilled life in terms of our physical and material needs, and in the moral and intellectual dimensions of our mortality.
I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God's purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand. We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse - and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse - and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistably growing power of materialism and materialist societies. But, it will not happen that that is the end of the story. As St. Augustine said - and I love to think of it when he received the news in Carthage that Rome had been sacked: Well, if that's happened, it's a great catas-trophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men build they destroy, but there is also the City of God which men didn't build and can't destroy. And he devoted the next seventeen years of his life to working out the relationship between the earthly city and the City of God - the earthly city where we live for a short time, and the City of God whose citizens we are for all eternity.
You know, it's a funny thing, but when you're old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won't go into that now. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God's creation, you are a participant in God's purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.
Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God's love. We ourselves are part of that love, we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene does our existence here have any reality or any worth. All the rest is fantasy - -whether the fantasy of power which we see in the authoritarian states around us, or the fantasy of the great liberal death wish in terms of affluence and self-indulgence. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second--class hotel.
1. Sometimes translated as The Possessed.
2. "Mystical Experience of the Labor Camps," included in his excellent book Underground Notes.
At the time of the original publication, Malcolm Muggeridge was quite simply one of the most delightful, articulate, brilliant thinkers in the world. His career has included journalist and Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian; agent for British Intelligence in Africa during World War II; Liaison - Officer with the Free French; Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph; Editor of Punch; and Book Reviewer for Esquire. In addition to several anthologies of his own writings, he is a published novelist and playwright. His television career began when television began, and has continued in the United States, the United Kingdom and throughout the English-speaking world. In England he had worked extensively with the B.B.C.
Imprimis, the monthly journal of Hillsdale College. May 1979, Vol 8, No. 5.
Copyright © 2002 Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu).
What is ‘generous orthodoxy’? Bishop Christopher FitzSimons Allison
Monday March 26th 2007, 10:26
Special to Virtueonline
The Rev. Katherine Grieb, Ph. D., attempts to defend the Episcopal Church’s status in the Anglican Communion on the grounds of what she calls its “generous orthodoxy.” It is indeed generous in the sense that “street walkers” are generous. The present leadership of the Episcopal Church shows an ardent willingness to employ recently passed canons to discipline, punish threaten, depose, and seize property at enormous legal costs involving anything that is perceived to threaten Episcopal control, property or territorial boundaries.
This is in stark contrast to the utter failure to hold anyone responsible who is grievously distorting the Christian faith or blatantly denying their confirmation and consecration oaths. This irresponsibility dates from the time of James Pike (Bishop of California, 1955-66) when he denied the church’s teaching regarding the Incarnation and Trinity. He was censured by the House of Bishops, not for the substance of his denials, but for their “tone and manner.” This substitution of Episcopal “manners” for the Christian faith a half century ago has marked the precipitous slide away from the duty to be a “guardian of the church’s faith,” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 519)
The drift of this “generous orthodoxy” has only accelerated. The unrebuked atheism of Bishop John Spong’s “12 Theses,” the acceptance by the Bishop of Massachusetts of the claim by the Rev. Carter Heyward, Professor at the Episcopal Divinity School, that her “God is different from and superior to the Hebrew/Christian god,” and that the Trinity is a “homoerotic relationship between three males” are examples of this “generous orthodoxy”. The Bishop of Pennsylvania claims that the church can “rewrite the bible” (and must do so to encompass that Bishop’s teaching). The New Testament scholar and Episcopalian, Marcus Borg, who has reduced the Christian Faith to unitarianism, is a perennially well received teacher among the “generous orthodox.”
Matthew Fox, who departed the Roman Catholic Church under just condemnation of Gnostic distortion of the Christian faith, has found a generous home in the Episcopal Church. Our present Presiding Bishop has taken upon herself to share the unique redemptive role of Jesus Christ with other redeemers, a truly generous act consonant with secular and non-Christian proclivities.
Surely Professor Grieb is aware that, in 2003, the House of Bishops voted down Resolution B001 in which they repudiated by a vote of 84 to
65 the very faith they had sworn to uphold. This vote is a telling inclusive and “generous orthodoxy” to unbelievers but quite exclusive and ungenerous to believers.
Another example of exclusion by a well-meaning attempt at inclusion was the defeat by the House of Bishops in 2006 of a proposed amendment to a resolution. The amendment was to substitute the word “believers” for the word “persons” in a resolution stating that “Lesbians and homosexual believers are children of God.” The proposed amendment (to read “Lesbian and homosexual believers are children of God,”) was to enable us to be in accord with scripture (John 1:11,12) “He came unto his own but his own received him not. But as many as received him gave he the power to become the children of God.” Archbishop Temple was quoted in support of the amendment that we are creatures of God by creation but children of God by redemption. It was overwhelmingly defeated, leaving lesbians and homosexuals without the believing door to become the children of God by receiving Jesus Christ. Actually such well meant “generous orthodoxy”
can become singularly ungenerous.
I leave to the last the most outrageous and schismatic of the Episcopal Church’s “generous orthodoxy.” Declaring null and void the election of Mark Lawrence, an impeccably faithful example of the very best clergy, elected on the first ballot by the Diocese of South Carolina, that is the only one of 110 dioceses that is growing. This rejection of Lawrence is not the result of the Christian faith but the action of an apostate, self destructive, and different religion.
Surely what is becoming increasingly obvious is that we have two different religions in one church as Bishop John McNaughton warned us some twenty years ago. Professor Grieb has apparently purloined the phrase “generous orthodoxy” from the truly orthodox author, The Rev.
Fleming Rutledge. It is unlikely that the Anglican primates will fail to tell the difference.
—The Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison, D. Phil (Oxon) is Bishop of South Carolina (ret.)
Special to Virtueonline
The Rev. Katherine Grieb, Ph. D., attempts to defend the Episcopal Church’s status in the Anglican Communion on the grounds of what she calls its “generous orthodoxy.” It is indeed generous in the sense that “street walkers” are generous. The present leadership of the Episcopal Church shows an ardent willingness to employ recently passed canons to discipline, punish threaten, depose, and seize property at enormous legal costs involving anything that is perceived to threaten Episcopal control, property or territorial boundaries.
This is in stark contrast to the utter failure to hold anyone responsible who is grievously distorting the Christian faith or blatantly denying their confirmation and consecration oaths. This irresponsibility dates from the time of James Pike (Bishop of California, 1955-66) when he denied the church’s teaching regarding the Incarnation and Trinity. He was censured by the House of Bishops, not for the substance of his denials, but for their “tone and manner.” This substitution of Episcopal “manners” for the Christian faith a half century ago has marked the precipitous slide away from the duty to be a “guardian of the church’s faith,” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 519)
The drift of this “generous orthodoxy” has only accelerated. The unrebuked atheism of Bishop John Spong’s “12 Theses,” the acceptance by the Bishop of Massachusetts of the claim by the Rev. Carter Heyward, Professor at the Episcopal Divinity School, that her “God is different from and superior to the Hebrew/Christian god,” and that the Trinity is a “homoerotic relationship between three males” are examples of this “generous orthodoxy”. The Bishop of Pennsylvania claims that the church can “rewrite the bible” (and must do so to encompass that Bishop’s teaching). The New Testament scholar and Episcopalian, Marcus Borg, who has reduced the Christian Faith to unitarianism, is a perennially well received teacher among the “generous orthodox.”
Matthew Fox, who departed the Roman Catholic Church under just condemnation of Gnostic distortion of the Christian faith, has found a generous home in the Episcopal Church. Our present Presiding Bishop has taken upon herself to share the unique redemptive role of Jesus Christ with other redeemers, a truly generous act consonant with secular and non-Christian proclivities.
Surely Professor Grieb is aware that, in 2003, the House of Bishops voted down Resolution B001 in which they repudiated by a vote of 84 to
65 the very faith they had sworn to uphold. This vote is a telling inclusive and “generous orthodoxy” to unbelievers but quite exclusive and ungenerous to believers.
Another example of exclusion by a well-meaning attempt at inclusion was the defeat by the House of Bishops in 2006 of a proposed amendment to a resolution. The amendment was to substitute the word “believers” for the word “persons” in a resolution stating that “Lesbians and homosexual believers are children of God.” The proposed amendment (to read “Lesbian and homosexual believers are children of God,”) was to enable us to be in accord with scripture (John 1:11,12) “He came unto his own but his own received him not. But as many as received him gave he the power to become the children of God.” Archbishop Temple was quoted in support of the amendment that we are creatures of God by creation but children of God by redemption. It was overwhelmingly defeated, leaving lesbians and homosexuals without the believing door to become the children of God by receiving Jesus Christ. Actually such well meant “generous orthodoxy”
can become singularly ungenerous.
I leave to the last the most outrageous and schismatic of the Episcopal Church’s “generous orthodoxy.” Declaring null and void the election of Mark Lawrence, an impeccably faithful example of the very best clergy, elected on the first ballot by the Diocese of South Carolina, that is the only one of 110 dioceses that is growing. This rejection of Lawrence is not the result of the Christian faith but the action of an apostate, self destructive, and different religion.
Surely what is becoming increasingly obvious is that we have two different religions in one church as Bishop John McNaughton warned us some twenty years ago. Professor Grieb has apparently purloined the phrase “generous orthodoxy” from the truly orthodox author, The Rev.
Fleming Rutledge. It is unlikely that the Anglican primates will fail to tell the difference.
—The Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison, D. Phil (Oxon) is Bishop of South Carolina (ret.)
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Ephraim Radner: What Way Ahead – Part Two
It is a maddening time within American Anglicanism. Even in the last few days, there is a new restlessness born of the energies of sorrow and hope both, as they seek some resolved path ahead. A few days ago, I wrote about the need to take this time seriously indeed. I wrote in terms of conservative presence within the Episcopal Church, and its now apparent incongruity with the official structures of our leadership. “Normative Christianity” (as one friend has put it) has been demoted and even banished: the Episcopal Church has declared independence. We must take our stands.
Thus, we are no longer in a position to avoid making conscious and determined choices regarding our vocation as Anglican Christians within the Episcopal Church. From one perspective, that has always been the case. The faithful are called to know what they are about, to “count the cost” of their following of our Lord. But at least from the perspective of the larger church of which we are a part – the Anglican Communion – some of those choices have remained provisional, in large part because, although the stakes have been clear enough, the paths offered for acting responsibly and in concert with brothers and sisters within the larger church have not been practically articulated. Many individuals and congregations have therefore been in a position of choosing their way in a fashion that has, by the nature of the moment, been more or less idiosyncratic. This time of obvious provisionality is now past.
We must now choose our way with respect to the Communion, and choose it in a manner that can be evaluated rather clearly according to the Communion’s own calling. This is so because the Communion has moved through very important, articulated and clear phases of reflection and action, especially most recently at Dar es Salaam. For that we are profoundly grateful.
The key now is to work with the Communion in as focused and effective a way possible. In this case, “the Communion” has offered a way, and they have done so in as clear and unified a fashion possible. All Primates agreed to the Communiqué, both African, Western, Northern and Southern. They may in fact go home to play another tune – we know that this happens all the time with meetings. Nonetheless, the agreement stands, and it represents in fact a rather surprising unanimity on matters concrete and disciplinary within this varied gathering of churches. The agreement stands, and it is up to the Primates to hold accountable their colleagues. It is also up to people like us, simple laborers in the vineyard, to hold up to our leaders the shape of that calling they themselves have voiced, and to do what we can to further its accomplishment. It is past time to claim technical difficulties or polity constraints – after all, the communiqué was not a debating piece, but rather offered a way forward for a part of the family all had agreed had acted preemptively, if not also in clear contradiction to the faith and teaching as received in this church.
It is clear that the official structures of TEC have rejected the plea made to them, or have begun to do so in respect of what was, if we be honest, a critical effort at peace-making: the Pastoral Council and Primatial Vicar scheme. Will the Bishops by 30 September agree to other requests made of them or are we seeing the handwriting on the wall? I fear the answer to that seems virtually foregone.
To this degree, then, we now stand apart from them, and our work stands apart from theirs. If this puts us in conflict with these structures and their representatives, so be it. How one chooses to respond to this conflict represents the options I listed earlier: one can understand its reality in one’s heart, yet choose to avoid it, by retiring to a protected space within the battle; one can seek a place apart from the center of the conflict, by transferring one’s structural allegiance to a group outside TEC and (one hopes) thereby avoiding direct confrontations with the Communion-recalcitrant of the Episcopal Church; one can, on the basis of a judgment that the conflict itself is without evangelical or perhaps more personally, emotional merit, discern the life of the Church as calling one into another tradition altogether. As I wrote, each of these choices, made in the face of now open conflict with the official structures – in this case, the very “mind” of our bishops gathered – has things to recommend as well as to criticize it. But the choice, to repeat, is about what is now an open conflict with the structures of TEC as they stand apart from the communion in Christ we understand to order our ministries.
As I wrote earlier, my own sense of this moment – one I share with many colleagues – is one that remains consistent with long-standing commitments:
a. As an Anglican Christian, I continue to wish to give myself to the vocation of Anglicanism within the larger Church, one of embodying a faithful Scriptural and ministry to Christ Jesus within the difficult yet glorious discipleship of “communion”. I continue to believe that this is an imperative gift to offer the larger Church in a time of wrenching human confusion and uncertainty in the trust of the Gospel within the world. I remain an Anglican, because I believe that God continues to give us work to do.
b. Because the Primates – as those asked to respond to the threats against this Anglican vocation – have offered together a way forward, I believe it is best to follow this way as far as one can from within the position God has placed us – in this case, Americans within TEC. How do this, if TEC’s own bishops as a group have rejected this way?
i. Those bishops who do not in fact share the “mind” of the House of Bishops, must say so openly and separate themselves from that mind; they must have a different mind, a mind that is at one with the larger church’s.
ii. They must respond positively to the Primates’ request, by publicly acceding to their recommendations, both in word and deed: clarifying their own commitments on matters under dispute, and following through with the request to gather and nominate a Primatial Vicar to a Pastoral Council – now seemingly capable of being made up only of 3 persons, given TEC’s refusal to participate. What the Council does with this rests in their hands; but “communion-minded” American bishops must at least do their part.
iii. Individual congregations and clergy and laity within TEC should encourage Communion-minded bishops to this work, by urging them forward and committing themselves to the Pastoral Scheme as it unfolds under the direction of the Communion and the Communion-minded. Such a commitment could be given in a number of ways, but it should be done openly and clearly.
iv. Communion-minded bishops and their supporters may indeed face sanctions from the official structures of the TEC – other bishops, the legal offices of 815 and the Executive Council. This will represent the practical side of the conflict now upon us. But be of good cheer – He has overcome the world.
v. We must in all things act together, and not apart. Shall there perhaps be a moment on October 1st when we shall stand as one mind and one heart? But if this is to happen, the choices we make today must move in this direction and not another.
Some have wondered if I am counseling us to “leave” the Episcopal Church. There are certainly ways to do this that are unambiguous, and I am not in a position to judge those who take such an unambiguous path. However, for those like myself who are committed to the Communion path outlined above, “leaving” is not as clear as it may seem. We have not moved; last week, our bishops as a House have moved.
In such a situation, the readjusting of relationships will, as I have said, engage an inevitable conflict. This could well “feel” like leaving to some, I have no doubt. It will certainly be filled with anguish, as I feel every day. But steadfastness in this course is not flight or abandonment of anyone. We can respect the choices of our House of Bishops as choices made openly and honestly.
But our own choices can likewise be made with integrity, precisely as they remain consistent with the vows we have all taken to “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship” and the “heritage” of the Great Church God would have rise up again the sight of all the world.
–The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner is rector of Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado, and a fellow of the Anglican Communion Institute. Dr Radner wishes to thank Christopher Seitz and Philip Turner for their input on this piece.
Thus, we are no longer in a position to avoid making conscious and determined choices regarding our vocation as Anglican Christians within the Episcopal Church. From one perspective, that has always been the case. The faithful are called to know what they are about, to “count the cost” of their following of our Lord. But at least from the perspective of the larger church of which we are a part – the Anglican Communion – some of those choices have remained provisional, in large part because, although the stakes have been clear enough, the paths offered for acting responsibly and in concert with brothers and sisters within the larger church have not been practically articulated. Many individuals and congregations have therefore been in a position of choosing their way in a fashion that has, by the nature of the moment, been more or less idiosyncratic. This time of obvious provisionality is now past.
We must now choose our way with respect to the Communion, and choose it in a manner that can be evaluated rather clearly according to the Communion’s own calling. This is so because the Communion has moved through very important, articulated and clear phases of reflection and action, especially most recently at Dar es Salaam. For that we are profoundly grateful.
The key now is to work with the Communion in as focused and effective a way possible. In this case, “the Communion” has offered a way, and they have done so in as clear and unified a fashion possible. All Primates agreed to the Communiqué, both African, Western, Northern and Southern. They may in fact go home to play another tune – we know that this happens all the time with meetings. Nonetheless, the agreement stands, and it represents in fact a rather surprising unanimity on matters concrete and disciplinary within this varied gathering of churches. The agreement stands, and it is up to the Primates to hold accountable their colleagues. It is also up to people like us, simple laborers in the vineyard, to hold up to our leaders the shape of that calling they themselves have voiced, and to do what we can to further its accomplishment. It is past time to claim technical difficulties or polity constraints – after all, the communiqué was not a debating piece, but rather offered a way forward for a part of the family all had agreed had acted preemptively, if not also in clear contradiction to the faith and teaching as received in this church.
It is clear that the official structures of TEC have rejected the plea made to them, or have begun to do so in respect of what was, if we be honest, a critical effort at peace-making: the Pastoral Council and Primatial Vicar scheme. Will the Bishops by 30 September agree to other requests made of them or are we seeing the handwriting on the wall? I fear the answer to that seems virtually foregone.
To this degree, then, we now stand apart from them, and our work stands apart from theirs. If this puts us in conflict with these structures and their representatives, so be it. How one chooses to respond to this conflict represents the options I listed earlier: one can understand its reality in one’s heart, yet choose to avoid it, by retiring to a protected space within the battle; one can seek a place apart from the center of the conflict, by transferring one’s structural allegiance to a group outside TEC and (one hopes) thereby avoiding direct confrontations with the Communion-recalcitrant of the Episcopal Church; one can, on the basis of a judgment that the conflict itself is without evangelical or perhaps more personally, emotional merit, discern the life of the Church as calling one into another tradition altogether. As I wrote, each of these choices, made in the face of now open conflict with the official structures – in this case, the very “mind” of our bishops gathered – has things to recommend as well as to criticize it. But the choice, to repeat, is about what is now an open conflict with the structures of TEC as they stand apart from the communion in Christ we understand to order our ministries.
As I wrote earlier, my own sense of this moment – one I share with many colleagues – is one that remains consistent with long-standing commitments:
a. As an Anglican Christian, I continue to wish to give myself to the vocation of Anglicanism within the larger Church, one of embodying a faithful Scriptural and ministry to Christ Jesus within the difficult yet glorious discipleship of “communion”. I continue to believe that this is an imperative gift to offer the larger Church in a time of wrenching human confusion and uncertainty in the trust of the Gospel within the world. I remain an Anglican, because I believe that God continues to give us work to do.
b. Because the Primates – as those asked to respond to the threats against this Anglican vocation – have offered together a way forward, I believe it is best to follow this way as far as one can from within the position God has placed us – in this case, Americans within TEC. How do this, if TEC’s own bishops as a group have rejected this way?
i. Those bishops who do not in fact share the “mind” of the House of Bishops, must say so openly and separate themselves from that mind; they must have a different mind, a mind that is at one with the larger church’s.
ii. They must respond positively to the Primates’ request, by publicly acceding to their recommendations, both in word and deed: clarifying their own commitments on matters under dispute, and following through with the request to gather and nominate a Primatial Vicar to a Pastoral Council – now seemingly capable of being made up only of 3 persons, given TEC’s refusal to participate. What the Council does with this rests in their hands; but “communion-minded” American bishops must at least do their part.
iii. Individual congregations and clergy and laity within TEC should encourage Communion-minded bishops to this work, by urging them forward and committing themselves to the Pastoral Scheme as it unfolds under the direction of the Communion and the Communion-minded. Such a commitment could be given in a number of ways, but it should be done openly and clearly.
iv. Communion-minded bishops and their supporters may indeed face sanctions from the official structures of the TEC – other bishops, the legal offices of 815 and the Executive Council. This will represent the practical side of the conflict now upon us. But be of good cheer – He has overcome the world.
v. We must in all things act together, and not apart. Shall there perhaps be a moment on October 1st when we shall stand as one mind and one heart? But if this is to happen, the choices we make today must move in this direction and not another.
Some have wondered if I am counseling us to “leave” the Episcopal Church. There are certainly ways to do this that are unambiguous, and I am not in a position to judge those who take such an unambiguous path. However, for those like myself who are committed to the Communion path outlined above, “leaving” is not as clear as it may seem. We have not moved; last week, our bishops as a House have moved.
In such a situation, the readjusting of relationships will, as I have said, engage an inevitable conflict. This could well “feel” like leaving to some, I have no doubt. It will certainly be filled with anguish, as I feel every day. But steadfastness in this course is not flight or abandonment of anyone. We can respect the choices of our House of Bishops as choices made openly and honestly.
But our own choices can likewise be made with integrity, precisely as they remain consistent with the vows we have all taken to “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship” and the “heritage” of the Great Church God would have rise up again the sight of all the world.
–The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner is rector of Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado, and a fellow of the Anglican Communion Institute. Dr Radner wishes to thank Christopher Seitz and Philip Turner for their input on this piece.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The Episcopal Declaration of Independence
From First Things:
By Jordan Hylden
Monday, March 26, 2007, 10:00 AM
Last week, the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops met and let the world know just what they think of the rest of the Anglican Communion. The official text of their resolutions ran to several thousand words, but for the effect they are likely to have on the church’s relations with the rest of the Anglican world, the bishops could just as well have taken a page out of General McAuliffe’s playbook, saved everyone a lot of time, and issued a simple one-word response: “Nuts!”
At last month’s meeting of Anglican primates in Africa, the Episcopal bishops were asked to do three things: participate in the creation of a church-within-a-church for Episcopal conservatives, promise not to consecrate any more actively homosexual bishops, and promise not to conduct any more church blessings of same-sex unions.
If they did not, the African meeting clearly suggested, the Americans would in effect be choosing to “walk apart” from the wider Anglican Communion. It was rightly described as an ultimatum but nevertheless was quite measured—no one asked Gene Robinson (the actively gay bishop of New Hampshire) to step down, and no one required anything of the Episcopal Church’s numerous openly gay priests. Essentially, the Anglican primates told the Episcopal Church that it would be allowed to push the boundaries, but within limits.
Unfortunately, last week the Episcopal Church apparently decided that it will be bound by nothing beyond itself—not Scripture, not tradition, not worldwide Anglican councils, not anything. And it said so with a vehemence that was surprising, even to many of its supporters.
In their statement, the American bishops accused the global Anglican primates of “unprecedented” spiritual unsoundness and solemnly spoke of the Episcopal Church’s “autonomy” and “liberation from colonialism,” which they understood to be threatened by the creeping rule of “a distant and unaccountable group of prelates.” Apparently, they were serious. With no sense of irony, the bishops of an overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and liberal American church actually saw fit to accuse their fellow Anglicans—many of whom are from poor third-world countries—of “colonialism.”
It is all very sad. One cannot read the bishops’ statement without sensing their anger and impatience. And what is worse, one cannot read the statement without sensing that the bishops have decided, for now and for always, to leave the Anglican Communion and cut conservatives out of the church.
The American bishops passed three resolutions. One was relatively uncontroversial, and passed unanimously—a simple invitation to Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, and the Primates’ Standing Committee to meet with delegates from the Episcopal Church about the present crisis. As Katherine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, explained: “There is some belief in this house that other parts of the Communion do not understand us very well.” Many bishops, it seems, are under the impression that the Episcopal Church’s unique polity and theological concerns are not fully grasped by Archbishop Williams and the primates.
That is unlikely. Rowan Williams invited three Episcopal bishops to last month’s primates meeting for the express purpose of allowing the Episcopal Church to explain itself, and Archbishop Williams has indicated many times that he and the primates understand the polity and position of the Episcopal Church quite well (see here and here). One doubts that additional meetings will finally enlighten Williams as to the true wisdom of the Episcopal Church.
A second resolution was much more pointed and potentially much more consequential. In it, the bishops flatly refused to participate in the primates’ proposed “Pastoral Council,” in effect a church-within-a-church for conservatives, which they rejected as “injurious” and incompatible with the polity and canons of the Episcopal Church. The impetus behind the primates’ proposal was to provide a space for conservatives within the Episcopal Church who, for a variety of reasons, have become alienated from church leadership in recent years. It was a temporary, stopgap measure, designed to hold the church together until a more permanent solution could be found. Many had hoped that, by its adoption, the steady flow of parishes splitting off from the Episcopal Church would cease.
Sadly, the bishops’ rejection of the Pastoral Council means that the disorderly and painful fracturing of the Episcopal Church will likely continue apace, since the bishops do not seem willing to provide any sort of acceptable safe space for conservatives. It also means that tension with Rowan Williams and the primates will ratchet up another notch—their proposed Pastoral Council, by which the primates intended to work with the Episcopal Church, will almost certainly now be implemented against the Episcopal leadership’s will. Conservatives who wish to participate in it will have to do so in defiance of national church leadership, and they may be subject to discipline.
The absurdity of this situation—wherein Episcopalians could be disciplined for daring to conform to Anglican “doctrine, discipline, and worship,” just as printed in every single prayer book in every Anglican pew—apparently has not yet occurred to the Episcopal bishops.
Discouraging as all this is, it gets worse. This is the reason the bishops gave for their rejection of the Pastoral Council: “The meaning of the Preamble to the Constitution of The Episcopal Church,” they solemnly intoned, “is determined solely by the General Convention of The Episcopal Church.”
While that may seem opaque to the casual observer, it is actually a bold and sweeping statement that, if acted upon, will lead directly to a final split with Canterbury and destroy the idea of Anglican catholicity within the Episcopal Church.
To make clear the radical nature of the Episcopal bishops’ new claim, the constitution’s preamble is worth quoting: “The Episcopal Church . . . is a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces, and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.”
By stating that the meaning of this sentence is determined solely by General Convention, the Episcopal bishops are doing nothing less than claiming that what it means to be Anglican, what it means to be in communion with Canterbury, what it means to be a part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church and hold to the historic Christian faith—that all of this is to be decided solely by the democratic vote of clergy and laypeople once every two years in a Marriott hotel convention room, with reference to nothing and nobody. It is breathtaking in its arrogance.
The bishops’ third resolution is a long, churlish, and supercilious explanation of their actions, nominally addressed as a statement to their own American church but really meant as a jab at the rest of the Anglican world. With an assumed innocence that by this time ought to convince no one, the bishops proclaim the “deep longing of their hearts” to remain within the Anglican Communion, while feigning surprise at the notion that their continued defiance of the rest of that communion might somehow be a problem.
Stunningly, rather than admit that the Episcopal Church’s actions may perhaps have had something to do with the crisis that has nearly driven the entire communion off a cliff, the bishops actually point the finger of blame at the primates, who, the bishops allege, in their attempt to set boundaries and work with the Episcopal Church to provide a safe space for conservatives, are in fact encouraging “one of the worst tendencies of our Western culture, which is to break relationships when we find them difficult instead of doing the hard work necessary to repair them.”
To their credit, the bishops here show themselves to be not completely out of touch. They do at least recognize that their actions may lead to the withdrawal of Canterbury’s recognition of full Anglican status, which the bishops say they contemplate with “great sorrow.” But no matter what the archbishop of Canterbury or other Anglicans may say, the bishops boldly declare that it will not affect “our own recognition of our full communion with the See of Canterbury or any of the other constituent members of the Anglican Communion.” One imagines that Lewis Carroll would be proud.
There is more to be said, and many faithful Episcopalians have eloquently and clearly expressed their sorrow at the bishops’ actions—most notably, the Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner and the bishops of Dallas and the Rio Grande. Rowan Williams, in a terse response issued by his press office, summed the whole thing up with one word: “discouraging.”
Discouraging, indeed. But for what it’s worth, the bishops actually did not go quite so far as to declare their final independence from the Anglican Communion. While they roundly rejected the Pastoral Council, the bishops did not directly rebuff the primates’ requests to refrain from blessing same-sex unions and consecrating actively homosexual bishops. Several general statements in the bishops’ third resolution seem to signal that they will do so at the next bishops’ meeting in September.
But while this outcome may be likely, it is not certain. Some bishops may feel that they have adequately pushed back at the primates by rejecting their Pastoral Council, thus freeing them up to acquiesce in their other two requests. If so, it might win the bishops a seat at the table for next year’s Lambeth Conference, which would give them a say in crafting the all-important Anglican Covenant, in which terms for communion membership will be laid down.
Of course, even with their presence, the conservative Global South’s large majority will almost certainly make for a covenant unacceptable to Episcopalians, who will likely not go along with any covenant that allows other Anglicans to restrict their much-vaunted “autonomy.” Such a covenant would likely be rejected by the Episcopal Church’s next General Convention in 2009, thus finalizing their decision to walk apart from the Anglican Communion.
So, in effect, while the Episcopal bishops may yet decide to do just enough to postpone their expulsion from Anglican councils for the time being, it is difficult to see how, should they remain on the autonomous course they have set, a schism could possibly be avoided. As most rebellious teenagers and philandering spouses eventually learn, autonomy can be fun for a time, but in the end it does not work well as a way of life together in a family. At last month’s primates’ meeting, most Anglicans decided that sacrificing a bit of their autonomy for the good of the family was what it took to live together as a church. Sadly, so far, it looks as if the Episcopal Church has chosen autonomy and individualism over community and fellowship.
Ephraim Radner sadly gave his conclusion: “There is clearly no place left for conservative Christians within the Episcopal Church’s official structures,” he wrote. Last week’s meeting, he continued, “made clear that the alienation between the Episcopal Church’s leadership and the Anglican Communion . . . has become currently unbridgeable.” “It now appears,” concurred Jeffrey Steenson, bishop of the Rio Grande, “that a divorce may be inevitable . . . the opportunity for moving forward together is getting very slim.” Paul Zahl, dean of a prominent conservative Episcopal seminary, went even further: “It is time for all of us to give up,” he said, “and give up unconditionally.”
Not all conservatives have reached the point of giving up. But there is no way to escape from the conclusion that it will not be long before they will have no other choice. The recent actions of the Episcopal bishops have made the prospect of a conservative exodus—possibly numbering in the hundreds of thousands—more likely than ever. Schism, which so many had hoped to avoid, is today closer than it has ever been. And it does not appear that anything will be done to stop it.
Jordan Hylden is a junior fellow at First Things.
By Jordan Hylden
Monday, March 26, 2007, 10:00 AM
Last week, the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops met and let the world know just what they think of the rest of the Anglican Communion. The official text of their resolutions ran to several thousand words, but for the effect they are likely to have on the church’s relations with the rest of the Anglican world, the bishops could just as well have taken a page out of General McAuliffe’s playbook, saved everyone a lot of time, and issued a simple one-word response: “Nuts!”
At last month’s meeting of Anglican primates in Africa, the Episcopal bishops were asked to do three things: participate in the creation of a church-within-a-church for Episcopal conservatives, promise not to consecrate any more actively homosexual bishops, and promise not to conduct any more church blessings of same-sex unions.
If they did not, the African meeting clearly suggested, the Americans would in effect be choosing to “walk apart” from the wider Anglican Communion. It was rightly described as an ultimatum but nevertheless was quite measured—no one asked Gene Robinson (the actively gay bishop of New Hampshire) to step down, and no one required anything of the Episcopal Church’s numerous openly gay priests. Essentially, the Anglican primates told the Episcopal Church that it would be allowed to push the boundaries, but within limits.
Unfortunately, last week the Episcopal Church apparently decided that it will be bound by nothing beyond itself—not Scripture, not tradition, not worldwide Anglican councils, not anything. And it said so with a vehemence that was surprising, even to many of its supporters.
In their statement, the American bishops accused the global Anglican primates of “unprecedented” spiritual unsoundness and solemnly spoke of the Episcopal Church’s “autonomy” and “liberation from colonialism,” which they understood to be threatened by the creeping rule of “a distant and unaccountable group of prelates.” Apparently, they were serious. With no sense of irony, the bishops of an overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and liberal American church actually saw fit to accuse their fellow Anglicans—many of whom are from poor third-world countries—of “colonialism.”
It is all very sad. One cannot read the bishops’ statement without sensing their anger and impatience. And what is worse, one cannot read the statement without sensing that the bishops have decided, for now and for always, to leave the Anglican Communion and cut conservatives out of the church.
The American bishops passed three resolutions. One was relatively uncontroversial, and passed unanimously—a simple invitation to Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, and the Primates’ Standing Committee to meet with delegates from the Episcopal Church about the present crisis. As Katherine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, explained: “There is some belief in this house that other parts of the Communion do not understand us very well.” Many bishops, it seems, are under the impression that the Episcopal Church’s unique polity and theological concerns are not fully grasped by Archbishop Williams and the primates.
That is unlikely. Rowan Williams invited three Episcopal bishops to last month’s primates meeting for the express purpose of allowing the Episcopal Church to explain itself, and Archbishop Williams has indicated many times that he and the primates understand the polity and position of the Episcopal Church quite well (see here and here). One doubts that additional meetings will finally enlighten Williams as to the true wisdom of the Episcopal Church.
A second resolution was much more pointed and potentially much more consequential. In it, the bishops flatly refused to participate in the primates’ proposed “Pastoral Council,” in effect a church-within-a-church for conservatives, which they rejected as “injurious” and incompatible with the polity and canons of the Episcopal Church. The impetus behind the primates’ proposal was to provide a space for conservatives within the Episcopal Church who, for a variety of reasons, have become alienated from church leadership in recent years. It was a temporary, stopgap measure, designed to hold the church together until a more permanent solution could be found. Many had hoped that, by its adoption, the steady flow of parishes splitting off from the Episcopal Church would cease.
Sadly, the bishops’ rejection of the Pastoral Council means that the disorderly and painful fracturing of the Episcopal Church will likely continue apace, since the bishops do not seem willing to provide any sort of acceptable safe space for conservatives. It also means that tension with Rowan Williams and the primates will ratchet up another notch—their proposed Pastoral Council, by which the primates intended to work with the Episcopal Church, will almost certainly now be implemented against the Episcopal leadership’s will. Conservatives who wish to participate in it will have to do so in defiance of national church leadership, and they may be subject to discipline.
The absurdity of this situation—wherein Episcopalians could be disciplined for daring to conform to Anglican “doctrine, discipline, and worship,” just as printed in every single prayer book in every Anglican pew—apparently has not yet occurred to the Episcopal bishops.
Discouraging as all this is, it gets worse. This is the reason the bishops gave for their rejection of the Pastoral Council: “The meaning of the Preamble to the Constitution of The Episcopal Church,” they solemnly intoned, “is determined solely by the General Convention of The Episcopal Church.”
While that may seem opaque to the casual observer, it is actually a bold and sweeping statement that, if acted upon, will lead directly to a final split with Canterbury and destroy the idea of Anglican catholicity within the Episcopal Church.
To make clear the radical nature of the Episcopal bishops’ new claim, the constitution’s preamble is worth quoting: “The Episcopal Church . . . is a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces, and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.”
By stating that the meaning of this sentence is determined solely by General Convention, the Episcopal bishops are doing nothing less than claiming that what it means to be Anglican, what it means to be in communion with Canterbury, what it means to be a part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church and hold to the historic Christian faith—that all of this is to be decided solely by the democratic vote of clergy and laypeople once every two years in a Marriott hotel convention room, with reference to nothing and nobody. It is breathtaking in its arrogance.
The bishops’ third resolution is a long, churlish, and supercilious explanation of their actions, nominally addressed as a statement to their own American church but really meant as a jab at the rest of the Anglican world. With an assumed innocence that by this time ought to convince no one, the bishops proclaim the “deep longing of their hearts” to remain within the Anglican Communion, while feigning surprise at the notion that their continued defiance of the rest of that communion might somehow be a problem.
Stunningly, rather than admit that the Episcopal Church’s actions may perhaps have had something to do with the crisis that has nearly driven the entire communion off a cliff, the bishops actually point the finger of blame at the primates, who, the bishops allege, in their attempt to set boundaries and work with the Episcopal Church to provide a safe space for conservatives, are in fact encouraging “one of the worst tendencies of our Western culture, which is to break relationships when we find them difficult instead of doing the hard work necessary to repair them.”
To their credit, the bishops here show themselves to be not completely out of touch. They do at least recognize that their actions may lead to the withdrawal of Canterbury’s recognition of full Anglican status, which the bishops say they contemplate with “great sorrow.” But no matter what the archbishop of Canterbury or other Anglicans may say, the bishops boldly declare that it will not affect “our own recognition of our full communion with the See of Canterbury or any of the other constituent members of the Anglican Communion.” One imagines that Lewis Carroll would be proud.
There is more to be said, and many faithful Episcopalians have eloquently and clearly expressed their sorrow at the bishops’ actions—most notably, the Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner and the bishops of Dallas and the Rio Grande. Rowan Williams, in a terse response issued by his press office, summed the whole thing up with one word: “discouraging.”
Discouraging, indeed. But for what it’s worth, the bishops actually did not go quite so far as to declare their final independence from the Anglican Communion. While they roundly rejected the Pastoral Council, the bishops did not directly rebuff the primates’ requests to refrain from blessing same-sex unions and consecrating actively homosexual bishops. Several general statements in the bishops’ third resolution seem to signal that they will do so at the next bishops’ meeting in September.
But while this outcome may be likely, it is not certain. Some bishops may feel that they have adequately pushed back at the primates by rejecting their Pastoral Council, thus freeing them up to acquiesce in their other two requests. If so, it might win the bishops a seat at the table for next year’s Lambeth Conference, which would give them a say in crafting the all-important Anglican Covenant, in which terms for communion membership will be laid down.
Of course, even with their presence, the conservative Global South’s large majority will almost certainly make for a covenant unacceptable to Episcopalians, who will likely not go along with any covenant that allows other Anglicans to restrict their much-vaunted “autonomy.” Such a covenant would likely be rejected by the Episcopal Church’s next General Convention in 2009, thus finalizing their decision to walk apart from the Anglican Communion.
So, in effect, while the Episcopal bishops may yet decide to do just enough to postpone their expulsion from Anglican councils for the time being, it is difficult to see how, should they remain on the autonomous course they have set, a schism could possibly be avoided. As most rebellious teenagers and philandering spouses eventually learn, autonomy can be fun for a time, but in the end it does not work well as a way of life together in a family. At last month’s primates’ meeting, most Anglicans decided that sacrificing a bit of their autonomy for the good of the family was what it took to live together as a church. Sadly, so far, it looks as if the Episcopal Church has chosen autonomy and individualism over community and fellowship.
Ephraim Radner sadly gave his conclusion: “There is clearly no place left for conservative Christians within the Episcopal Church’s official structures,” he wrote. Last week’s meeting, he continued, “made clear that the alienation between the Episcopal Church’s leadership and the Anglican Communion . . . has become currently unbridgeable.” “It now appears,” concurred Jeffrey Steenson, bishop of the Rio Grande, “that a divorce may be inevitable . . . the opportunity for moving forward together is getting very slim.” Paul Zahl, dean of a prominent conservative Episcopal seminary, went even further: “It is time for all of us to give up,” he said, “and give up unconditionally.”
Not all conservatives have reached the point of giving up. But there is no way to escape from the conclusion that it will not be long before they will have no other choice. The recent actions of the Episcopal bishops have made the prospect of a conservative exodus—possibly numbering in the hundreds of thousands—more likely than ever. Schism, which so many had hoped to avoid, is today closer than it has ever been. And it does not appear that anything will be done to stop it.
Jordan Hylden is a junior fellow at First Things.
Monday, March 26, 2007
The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion
Dr. Chris Seitz
Background
After the last General Convention two gatherings of Bishops from the Episcopal Church took place. One involved an official of the Anglican Communion Office. It was an effort to resolve major differences within The Episcopal Church (TEC) by recourse to a Primatial Vicar scheme, viz., a Bishop appointed by the new Presiding Bishop of TEC to provide oversight for Dioceses at odds, for a variety of reasons, with the PB and with recent decisions of TEC. There is a history of proposals for alternative or delegated oversight that need not detain us here. There were two meetings of this group of Bishops and advisors.
A second series of meetings took place at Camp Allen, Texas (and some Bishops attended the other gathering as well). The Bishops in attendance were assisted by NT Wright, Bishop of Durham, and Michael Scott-Joynt, Bishop of Winchester, as well as Archbishops Drexel Gomez and Donald Mtetemela (the former convener of the Covenant Design Committee and the latter the host of the primates meeting) . The distinctive of this gathering was a commitment to certain principles by which the Windsor Report was to be held in common as the way forward for common life in the Communion. Public statements were made which clarified these commitments, and the mind of the gathering was that the primates meeting would be the occasion for dealing with problems presented by TEC’s actions and the decisions and resolutions of General Convention. Communications were made with the Archbishop of Canterbury and with the primates as a body. Proposals were made that addressed the irregularity of having foreign Bishops involved in the life of TEC dioceses. Serious discussion was undertaken about a way forward for oversight for those seeking to live by the Windsor Report’s understanding of Communion, in the language of the discussion, ‘an American solution to an American problem.’
When the primates met in Dar es Salaam, matters did indeed come to a head and the major issues were engaged with diligence and thoroughness. The ‘Primatial Vicar’ notion introduced at one gathering of Bishops after General Convention was combined with the specific oversight concerns articulated at the other gathering at Camp Allen. Moreover, the shared interpretation of the Windsor Report’s implications for TEC were described by the Communique in the language ‘Camp Allen Principles’ and these were held to be an appropriate means for distinguishing Bishops in TEC desiring to live in Communion in conformity with TWR. A Pastoral Council was to be set up, comprised of up to five members, two of whom would be nominated by TEC, and three of whom would come from the primates and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Those bishops subscribing to the ‘Camp Allen Principles’ were invited to nominate three Bishops, one of whom would be chosen by the Pastoral Council to serve as Primatial Vicar in TEC. Those of us involved in the work of Camp Allen/Windsor Bishops were encouraged by the commitment of the primates to work toward an oversight scheme that would embody Windsor Report calls for submission and forbearance across provinces of the wider Anglican Communion.
Response
Immediately responses came from individual Bishops in TEC denouncing the communiqué, saying the communiqué did not understand the polity of TEC, or claiming that TEC had a special warrant for pursuing its own understanding of the Gospel in the area of human sexuality and so forth. This served to underscore the significance of the scheduled meeting of the Bishops to take place at Camp Allen in mid March. After the full tenure of the preceding Presiding Bishop, this would be the first occasion for the new PB to chair the House of Bishops (HOB). She had attended the primates meeting in Dar es Salaam and had not sought to distance herself in any specific way from the Communique when it was first issued. The Communique came as a report from all the primates, even as statements were soon to be made that defended TEC’s special role in respect of human sexuality and matters of polity.
Three things at least appear to have emerged from the HOB meeting. Nominations were to have been made by the assembled Bishops for the Pastoral Council; the Archbishop of Canterbury, before the HOB meeting of TEC, indicated a date of 16 March by which time he would wish to receive nominations from the primates, so it was clear that things were moving ahead on this front so far as the primates were concerned. In spite of this, nominations were not made by the Bishops of TEC, and the Pastoral Council and Primatial Vicar notion, as stipulated by the primates, was declined as a way forward. Certain individual Bishops have since suggested that a different scheme may be proposed, though it is hard to know at this point within what Communion logic this might be said to function.
A second resolution requests a meeting of the HOB with the ABC and the standing committee of the primates. It is hard to know what this meeting is meant to achieve, and having it might suggest that the primates Meetings are not themselves adequate for communion life; or that the Archbishop of Canterbury has a specific role independently of that Meeting, unrelated to Lambeth invitations or some other quite specific role traditionally undertaken. It is clear that the Archbishop is carefully attending to the limitations and distinctive character of his office given the stresses and strains on the Communion.
Finally, anyone reading the various statements emerging from the HOB will see a steady insistence that TEC belongs to the Communion, passionately wants to remain, will remain on certain terms nonetheless, and will interpret the otherwise plain sense of the Preamble to the Constitution and Canons through the lens of General Convention. This steady insistence, whatever its logic might be otherwise, appears to be aimed at any contrary interpretation of membership, in the light of TEC’s claims to have a special polity and its now declared unwillingness to accept certain specific requests made of it by an Instrument of Unity/Communion (the primates meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury).
Where does this leave TEC?
On the specific matter of the Pastoral Council and Primatial Vicar scheme, one element of this proposal has declined to be involved on the terms of the Communique coming out of Dar es Salaam. The HOB has provided no nominations and appears to question the scheme as somehow un-Episcopalian. It is not my intention here to pursue the logic of this, except to say that the Bishops are of course free to work with any scheme if the alternative is ongoing intervention by bishops from outside TEC or dis-invitation from the councils of Communion life. There is nothing inherently impossible about allowing such a scheme to function as the Communion devises a covenant and asks which parts of the Communion can live within its vision. The canons of the church would not prohibit the development of such a scheme, if the will was there to see the request as both reasonable and practically the only way to preserve the TEC and the Anglican Communion both.
There were two other key elements in the proposal: the Windsor Bishops who accepted the Camp Allen Principles were to make nominations for the Primatial Vicar. From reports coming out of the HOB meeting, only one or two bishops attending previous Camp Allen meetings have publicly stated their concerns about the request made at Dar es Salaam, so this aspect of the Pastoral Council is still in effect. The Windsor Bishops should meet and make nominations.
The second crucial aspect of the Dar es Salaam proposal, mentioned above, was the provision of three members from the primates for the Pastoral Council, to have been received by mid March. It would be helpful to know what has happened on that score and we hope a report is issued as soon as that is possible.
It has been noted that the original request spoke of membership of ‘up to’ five Bishops for the Pastoral Council. Two out of three elements of the scheme can complete what is requested of them, and a decision can then be made about TEC’s apparent resistance, and how to address that. Making up a different scheme would look like arrogating to itself a role in creating polity and broad polity implications for the Communion which the Communion has been careful to safeguard against.
Polity quicksilver
Anyone looking on the American Episcopal Church situation will bound to be confused about the office of Bishop – and one need not be a Presbyterian or Baptist for this to be the case. Bishops appear to have a role within their own dioceses that they reserve to themselves, independently of clergy or laity or other Bishops; Bishops then say they cannot act because General Convention inhabits a unique US polity, and they must defer to that; Bishops are concerned that their Presiding Bishop must attend the primates meeting as a full member, and when she does so, and returns to the US having agreed in some way to the plenary communiqué, she appears unable or unwilling to use the strength of an office others have defended for her in a way consistent with the claims of the same office, to prosecute what the plenary statement requests.
The danger is real that in defending a special polity and deferring to that when difficulties arise the Episcopal Church will find it inhabits a ‘polity’ that is sui generis and idiosyncratic in ways that question altogether what it means to be a Communion church with Catholic Bishops. The claim to national identity and specific polity has something of Lutheran World Federation aspects; the claim to independence, spiritual endowments and new truth has aspects of ‘always reforming’ Presbyterianism, or even American Mormonism; the claim to rule over a diocese in ways that cannot be constrained when it comes to blessing things or giving pastoral direction is congregationalism without the usual high involvement of laity and committees assuring full participation precisely because the office of Bishop is unbiblical or not commended of God.
Many Bishops in TEC, upon seeing what the Communion was asking, responded immediately that they preferred to go it alone and to inhabit an Episcopal Church ‘come of age’ and not necessarily like anything else, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, congregational, or otherwise -- a church without affiliative tissue of any kind accept in prior historical, or more notional, terms.
The Communion, through an Instrument of Unity (primates meeting), presided over by a second Instrument (the Archbishop of Canterbury), has given TEC an opportunity to remain a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, by making certain clear requests, in the context of TEC’s own involvement through an elected Presiding Bishop, of the Episcopal Church. These requests stand now in a long line of similar charitable pleas, stretching back before General Convention 2003. The opportunity extended to TEC exists precisely so as to allow TEC to remain in communion fellowship, and it was not rejected on terms of improper polity by any member of the primates meeting at the point of its publication – not least because it was an effort to provide something of a charitable solution to a dilemma created by TEC itself.
The Communion would forfeit its own integrity as a Communion if it now simply said, ‘you tell us how you want to proceed, and when you have made your mind up, we will OK that, if you so wish.’ That is a single body part telling the Body what it wants to do, on the grounds that an eye can demand it sees things the Body does not. Whatever else this means, it is not an understanding of the Anglican Communion that has ever been the case, and should it be the case, the Communion would evaporate as a meaningful, providentially overseen, catholic and evangelical reality. Many may wish this of course, but for those of us committed, in Christ, to a Communion and ‘one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth,’ we pray ardently that the Bishops committed to Communion life, on the terms the Communion has asked, humbly and joyfully submit to that, and move forward together. Those who wish to insist on a special polity may find that their wish is granted, even if the role of Bishop is made more confused thereby.
We stand at a threshold moment. It is our prayer that the Communion be allowed to maintain its own life and its own integrity, in line with what was resolved at Dar es Salaam, acting from charity and in concern for the wider Body. The alternative is an unraveling of the fabric of Communion identity and mission, as new churches are created and new polities vie for the brand name Anglican. We pray that the Windsor Bishops meet, that the Pastoral Council be set up as requested, and that the Communion move forward on the terms it has set for itself.
There was a moment in the early history of Anglicanism in America when, fearful of the power of Bishops in a civil government now rejected in England, the fledgling Episcopal Church sought to create a polity that was all its own, in which the power of Bishops was circumscribed by a second House of Deputies. The Church of England indicated that was fine, but it would not be an Episcopal Church in Communion in consequence, and so the polity was carefully redefined.
Ironically, we may now find ourselves in a similar situation but for very different reasons. Now the Bishops themselves wish to depict restrictions upon themselves, and a special US polity, in order to defer or reject requests being made by Communion members as new and vibrant as the American church herself once was. It is time for the Communion to insist that America inhabit an Episcopal Church recognizable on terms all can see and identify as such. Restrictions on autonomy are not new, and it is time they be defended as fully appropriate to both Anglican Communion and Episcopal Church polity and identity.
Christopher Seitz
Anglican Communion Institute
Background
After the last General Convention two gatherings of Bishops from the Episcopal Church took place. One involved an official of the Anglican Communion Office. It was an effort to resolve major differences within The Episcopal Church (TEC) by recourse to a Primatial Vicar scheme, viz., a Bishop appointed by the new Presiding Bishop of TEC to provide oversight for Dioceses at odds, for a variety of reasons, with the PB and with recent decisions of TEC. There is a history of proposals for alternative or delegated oversight that need not detain us here. There were two meetings of this group of Bishops and advisors.
A second series of meetings took place at Camp Allen, Texas (and some Bishops attended the other gathering as well). The Bishops in attendance were assisted by NT Wright, Bishop of Durham, and Michael Scott-Joynt, Bishop of Winchester, as well as Archbishops Drexel Gomez and Donald Mtetemela (the former convener of the Covenant Design Committee and the latter the host of the primates meeting) . The distinctive of this gathering was a commitment to certain principles by which the Windsor Report was to be held in common as the way forward for common life in the Communion. Public statements were made which clarified these commitments, and the mind of the gathering was that the primates meeting would be the occasion for dealing with problems presented by TEC’s actions and the decisions and resolutions of General Convention. Communications were made with the Archbishop of Canterbury and with the primates as a body. Proposals were made that addressed the irregularity of having foreign Bishops involved in the life of TEC dioceses. Serious discussion was undertaken about a way forward for oversight for those seeking to live by the Windsor Report’s understanding of Communion, in the language of the discussion, ‘an American solution to an American problem.’
When the primates met in Dar es Salaam, matters did indeed come to a head and the major issues were engaged with diligence and thoroughness. The ‘Primatial Vicar’ notion introduced at one gathering of Bishops after General Convention was combined with the specific oversight concerns articulated at the other gathering at Camp Allen. Moreover, the shared interpretation of the Windsor Report’s implications for TEC were described by the Communique in the language ‘Camp Allen Principles’ and these were held to be an appropriate means for distinguishing Bishops in TEC desiring to live in Communion in conformity with TWR. A Pastoral Council was to be set up, comprised of up to five members, two of whom would be nominated by TEC, and three of whom would come from the primates and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Those bishops subscribing to the ‘Camp Allen Principles’ were invited to nominate three Bishops, one of whom would be chosen by the Pastoral Council to serve as Primatial Vicar in TEC. Those of us involved in the work of Camp Allen/Windsor Bishops were encouraged by the commitment of the primates to work toward an oversight scheme that would embody Windsor Report calls for submission and forbearance across provinces of the wider Anglican Communion.
Response
Immediately responses came from individual Bishops in TEC denouncing the communiqué, saying the communiqué did not understand the polity of TEC, or claiming that TEC had a special warrant for pursuing its own understanding of the Gospel in the area of human sexuality and so forth. This served to underscore the significance of the scheduled meeting of the Bishops to take place at Camp Allen in mid March. After the full tenure of the preceding Presiding Bishop, this would be the first occasion for the new PB to chair the House of Bishops (HOB). She had attended the primates meeting in Dar es Salaam and had not sought to distance herself in any specific way from the Communique when it was first issued. The Communique came as a report from all the primates, even as statements were soon to be made that defended TEC’s special role in respect of human sexuality and matters of polity.
Three things at least appear to have emerged from the HOB meeting. Nominations were to have been made by the assembled Bishops for the Pastoral Council; the Archbishop of Canterbury, before the HOB meeting of TEC, indicated a date of 16 March by which time he would wish to receive nominations from the primates, so it was clear that things were moving ahead on this front so far as the primates were concerned. In spite of this, nominations were not made by the Bishops of TEC, and the Pastoral Council and Primatial Vicar notion, as stipulated by the primates, was declined as a way forward. Certain individual Bishops have since suggested that a different scheme may be proposed, though it is hard to know at this point within what Communion logic this might be said to function.
A second resolution requests a meeting of the HOB with the ABC and the standing committee of the primates. It is hard to know what this meeting is meant to achieve, and having it might suggest that the primates Meetings are not themselves adequate for communion life; or that the Archbishop of Canterbury has a specific role independently of that Meeting, unrelated to Lambeth invitations or some other quite specific role traditionally undertaken. It is clear that the Archbishop is carefully attending to the limitations and distinctive character of his office given the stresses and strains on the Communion.
Finally, anyone reading the various statements emerging from the HOB will see a steady insistence that TEC belongs to the Communion, passionately wants to remain, will remain on certain terms nonetheless, and will interpret the otherwise plain sense of the Preamble to the Constitution and Canons through the lens of General Convention. This steady insistence, whatever its logic might be otherwise, appears to be aimed at any contrary interpretation of membership, in the light of TEC’s claims to have a special polity and its now declared unwillingness to accept certain specific requests made of it by an Instrument of Unity/Communion (the primates meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury).
Where does this leave TEC?
On the specific matter of the Pastoral Council and Primatial Vicar scheme, one element of this proposal has declined to be involved on the terms of the Communique coming out of Dar es Salaam. The HOB has provided no nominations and appears to question the scheme as somehow un-Episcopalian. It is not my intention here to pursue the logic of this, except to say that the Bishops are of course free to work with any scheme if the alternative is ongoing intervention by bishops from outside TEC or dis-invitation from the councils of Communion life. There is nothing inherently impossible about allowing such a scheme to function as the Communion devises a covenant and asks which parts of the Communion can live within its vision. The canons of the church would not prohibit the development of such a scheme, if the will was there to see the request as both reasonable and practically the only way to preserve the TEC and the Anglican Communion both.
There were two other key elements in the proposal: the Windsor Bishops who accepted the Camp Allen Principles were to make nominations for the Primatial Vicar. From reports coming out of the HOB meeting, only one or two bishops attending previous Camp Allen meetings have publicly stated their concerns about the request made at Dar es Salaam, so this aspect of the Pastoral Council is still in effect. The Windsor Bishops should meet and make nominations.
The second crucial aspect of the Dar es Salaam proposal, mentioned above, was the provision of three members from the primates for the Pastoral Council, to have been received by mid March. It would be helpful to know what has happened on that score and we hope a report is issued as soon as that is possible.
It has been noted that the original request spoke of membership of ‘up to’ five Bishops for the Pastoral Council. Two out of three elements of the scheme can complete what is requested of them, and a decision can then be made about TEC’s apparent resistance, and how to address that. Making up a different scheme would look like arrogating to itself a role in creating polity and broad polity implications for the Communion which the Communion has been careful to safeguard against.
Polity quicksilver
Anyone looking on the American Episcopal Church situation will bound to be confused about the office of Bishop – and one need not be a Presbyterian or Baptist for this to be the case. Bishops appear to have a role within their own dioceses that they reserve to themselves, independently of clergy or laity or other Bishops; Bishops then say they cannot act because General Convention inhabits a unique US polity, and they must defer to that; Bishops are concerned that their Presiding Bishop must attend the primates meeting as a full member, and when she does so, and returns to the US having agreed in some way to the plenary communiqué, she appears unable or unwilling to use the strength of an office others have defended for her in a way consistent with the claims of the same office, to prosecute what the plenary statement requests.
The danger is real that in defending a special polity and deferring to that when difficulties arise the Episcopal Church will find it inhabits a ‘polity’ that is sui generis and idiosyncratic in ways that question altogether what it means to be a Communion church with Catholic Bishops. The claim to national identity and specific polity has something of Lutheran World Federation aspects; the claim to independence, spiritual endowments and new truth has aspects of ‘always reforming’ Presbyterianism, or even American Mormonism; the claim to rule over a diocese in ways that cannot be constrained when it comes to blessing things or giving pastoral direction is congregationalism without the usual high involvement of laity and committees assuring full participation precisely because the office of Bishop is unbiblical or not commended of God.
Many Bishops in TEC, upon seeing what the Communion was asking, responded immediately that they preferred to go it alone and to inhabit an Episcopal Church ‘come of age’ and not necessarily like anything else, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, congregational, or otherwise -- a church without affiliative tissue of any kind accept in prior historical, or more notional, terms.
The Communion, through an Instrument of Unity (primates meeting), presided over by a second Instrument (the Archbishop of Canterbury), has given TEC an opportunity to remain a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, by making certain clear requests, in the context of TEC’s own involvement through an elected Presiding Bishop, of the Episcopal Church. These requests stand now in a long line of similar charitable pleas, stretching back before General Convention 2003. The opportunity extended to TEC exists precisely so as to allow TEC to remain in communion fellowship, and it was not rejected on terms of improper polity by any member of the primates meeting at the point of its publication – not least because it was an effort to provide something of a charitable solution to a dilemma created by TEC itself.
The Communion would forfeit its own integrity as a Communion if it now simply said, ‘you tell us how you want to proceed, and when you have made your mind up, we will OK that, if you so wish.’ That is a single body part telling the Body what it wants to do, on the grounds that an eye can demand it sees things the Body does not. Whatever else this means, it is not an understanding of the Anglican Communion that has ever been the case, and should it be the case, the Communion would evaporate as a meaningful, providentially overseen, catholic and evangelical reality. Many may wish this of course, but for those of us committed, in Christ, to a Communion and ‘one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth,’ we pray ardently that the Bishops committed to Communion life, on the terms the Communion has asked, humbly and joyfully submit to that, and move forward together. Those who wish to insist on a special polity may find that their wish is granted, even if the role of Bishop is made more confused thereby.
We stand at a threshold moment. It is our prayer that the Communion be allowed to maintain its own life and its own integrity, in line with what was resolved at Dar es Salaam, acting from charity and in concern for the wider Body. The alternative is an unraveling of the fabric of Communion identity and mission, as new churches are created and new polities vie for the brand name Anglican. We pray that the Windsor Bishops meet, that the Pastoral Council be set up as requested, and that the Communion move forward on the terms it has set for itself.
There was a moment in the early history of Anglicanism in America when, fearful of the power of Bishops in a civil government now rejected in England, the fledgling Episcopal Church sought to create a polity that was all its own, in which the power of Bishops was circumscribed by a second House of Deputies. The Church of England indicated that was fine, but it would not be an Episcopal Church in Communion in consequence, and so the polity was carefully redefined.
Ironically, we may now find ourselves in a similar situation but for very different reasons. Now the Bishops themselves wish to depict restrictions upon themselves, and a special US polity, in order to defer or reject requests being made by Communion members as new and vibrant as the American church herself once was. It is time for the Communion to insist that America inhabit an Episcopal Church recognizable on terms all can see and identify as such. Restrictions on autonomy are not new, and it is time they be defended as fully appropriate to both Anglican Communion and Episcopal Church polity and identity.
Christopher Seitz
Anglican Communion Institute
Voice of America: Bishop Martyn Minns
US Episcopalians Move Away from Tanzania Communique
By Howard Lesser
Washington, DC
26 March 2007
Listen to Bishop Martyn Minns - RA audio clip
American Episcopalian bishops are resisting terms to head off a greater split with the Anglican mother church that were hammered out at a conference in Tanzania last month. Rejection by the end of September and an American reaffirmation of principles welcoming homosexual clergy and same sex marriages boost chances that the Anglican Communion will try to expel some two-point-three million American Episcopalians from the 77 million member Anglican arm of the Church of England.
Bishop Martyn Minns is the Missionary Leader of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), an initiative of the Anglican Church of Nigeria. He says that to Anglican communities in African countries, the American clash is not so much cultural, but centers more around issues of faith and a struggle over Church authority.
“I think the whole thing right now is a very understandable development because the African church is coming of age and that’s hard for folks who’ve had the power for much of the life of the Communion and now have to share it. I think this is a very understandable struggle to figure out a new set of relationships with the African churches now that are growing, and in fact are taking the lead in terms of spreading the gospel,” he said.
Bishop Minns points to the internal struggle still being waged among US Anglicans over the endorsement of homosexual practices and says that despite the prevailing view advocated by Episcopalian bishops, American divisions are still running deep.
“There are a lot of folks in this country who really don’t believe that we should change the basic understanding of the Scriptures, and there’s not unanimity at all. I think I would say that what we actually believe is that what we’ve been given in the Scriptures is timeless, and so therefore it’s not a matter of going back. But it has taken the truth that has been tested and proven for thousands of years and is applying it to our lives today. But all the Communion seems to see in the American development is actually rejecting some of that in a way that they can’t accept,” he said.
Although he says it is too soon to predict whether American Anglicans will fully reject February’s Tanzania Communique, Bishop Minns readily points out the determination of the US church to stick by its stands in the face of international Anglican opinion.
“My instinct is that those presently in control of the Episcopal Church are really pretty much determined to go their own way. Now whether or not they will take the whole church with them or how much they will separate is yet to be determined,” he surmises.
Right now, US church authorities continue to see themselves as uniting against foreign interference in the policies of their church. However, Bishop Minns remains hopeful that by the September deadline for compliance with international Anglican prescription, there will be some movement on the actual theological and sexual divisions that are contributing to the rift.
“I’m a Christian, so I live with hope,” he says. “Right now, they seem pretty intransigent, so I don’t know. That’s the big question. We’ll have to wait and see.”
By Howard Lesser
Washington, DC
26 March 2007
Listen to Bishop Martyn Minns - RA audio clip
American Episcopalian bishops are resisting terms to head off a greater split with the Anglican mother church that were hammered out at a conference in Tanzania last month. Rejection by the end of September and an American reaffirmation of principles welcoming homosexual clergy and same sex marriages boost chances that the Anglican Communion will try to expel some two-point-three million American Episcopalians from the 77 million member Anglican arm of the Church of England.
Bishop Martyn Minns is the Missionary Leader of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), an initiative of the Anglican Church of Nigeria. He says that to Anglican communities in African countries, the American clash is not so much cultural, but centers more around issues of faith and a struggle over Church authority.
“I think the whole thing right now is a very understandable development because the African church is coming of age and that’s hard for folks who’ve had the power for much of the life of the Communion and now have to share it. I think this is a very understandable struggle to figure out a new set of relationships with the African churches now that are growing, and in fact are taking the lead in terms of spreading the gospel,” he said.
Bishop Minns points to the internal struggle still being waged among US Anglicans over the endorsement of homosexual practices and says that despite the prevailing view advocated by Episcopalian bishops, American divisions are still running deep.
“There are a lot of folks in this country who really don’t believe that we should change the basic understanding of the Scriptures, and there’s not unanimity at all. I think I would say that what we actually believe is that what we’ve been given in the Scriptures is timeless, and so therefore it’s not a matter of going back. But it has taken the truth that has been tested and proven for thousands of years and is applying it to our lives today. But all the Communion seems to see in the American development is actually rejecting some of that in a way that they can’t accept,” he said.
Although he says it is too soon to predict whether American Anglicans will fully reject February’s Tanzania Communique, Bishop Minns readily points out the determination of the US church to stick by its stands in the face of international Anglican opinion.
“My instinct is that those presently in control of the Episcopal Church are really pretty much determined to go their own way. Now whether or not they will take the whole church with them or how much they will separate is yet to be determined,” he surmises.
Right now, US church authorities continue to see themselves as uniting against foreign interference in the policies of their church. However, Bishop Minns remains hopeful that by the September deadline for compliance with international Anglican prescription, there will be some movement on the actual theological and sexual divisions that are contributing to the rift.
“I’m a Christian, so I live with hope,” he says. “Right now, they seem pretty intransigent, so I don’t know. That’s the big question. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Married Gays Die 24 Years Younger
Contact: Dr. Paul Cameron
March 23, 2007
303.681.3113
Philadelphia: Marriage between a man and woman seems to result in
longer life for both. Does it work that way for gay marriage?
"No," says Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute, a
Colorado-based think tank.
Researchers Paul and Kirk Cameron reported at the Eastern
Psychological Association convention that married gays and lesbians
lived about 24 fewer years than their married heterosexual
counterparts.
In Denmark, the country with the longest history of gay marriage, for
1990-2002, married heterosexual men died at a median age of 74, while
the 561 partnered gays died at an average age of 51.
In Norway, married heterosexual men died at an average age of 77 yr.,
the 31 gays at 52. The lifespan of same-sex married lesbians was 20+
years shorter than the lifespan of married heterosexual women. In
Denmark, married heterosexual women died at an average age of 78 yr.
as compared to 56 yr. for the 91 same-sex married lesbians; in Norway,
married heterosexual women died at an average age of 81 v. 56 for the
6 same-sex married lesbians.
"These are the ages of death as reported by the census bureaus of
Norway and Denmark," said Dr. Paul Cameron. "While the internet is
filled with debate about our previous findings -- largely based on
obituaries =96 these deaths were recorded by governments. The obituaries
we assembled over the same time period in the US were similar: an
average lifespan of 52 for 710 gays who ostensibly did not die of
AIDS, 42 yr. for those 1,476 who supposedly did; and 55 yr. for 143
lesbians. So the findings from Scandinavia are not much different from
figures derived from U.S. obituaries."
Paul Cameron, Ph.D. & Kirk Cameron, Ph.D., presented "Federal
Distortion Of The Homosexual Footprint." Paul Cameron, a reviewer for
the British Medical Journal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal,
and the Postgraduate Medical Journal, has published over 40 scientific
articles on homosexuality. The EPA is the oldest regional
Psychological Association in the United States. At its Philadelphia
convention members presented the latest advances in scientific work to
colleagues.
The full report can be accessed at http://www.earnedmedia.org/frireport.htm
------------------------------
March 23, 2007
303.681.3113
Philadelphia: Marriage between a man and woman seems to result in
longer life for both. Does it work that way for gay marriage?
"No," says Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute, a
Colorado-based think tank.
Researchers Paul and Kirk Cameron reported at the Eastern
Psychological Association convention that married gays and lesbians
lived about 24 fewer years than their married heterosexual
counterparts.
In Denmark, the country with the longest history of gay marriage, for
1990-2002, married heterosexual men died at a median age of 74, while
the 561 partnered gays died at an average age of 51.
In Norway, married heterosexual men died at an average age of 77 yr.,
the 31 gays at 52. The lifespan of same-sex married lesbians was 20+
years shorter than the lifespan of married heterosexual women. In
Denmark, married heterosexual women died at an average age of 78 yr.
as compared to 56 yr. for the 91 same-sex married lesbians; in Norway,
married heterosexual women died at an average age of 81 v. 56 for the
6 same-sex married lesbians.
"These are the ages of death as reported by the census bureaus of
Norway and Denmark," said Dr. Paul Cameron. "While the internet is
filled with debate about our previous findings -- largely based on
obituaries =96 these deaths were recorded by governments. The obituaries
we assembled over the same time period in the US were similar: an
average lifespan of 52 for 710 gays who ostensibly did not die of
AIDS, 42 yr. for those 1,476 who supposedly did; and 55 yr. for 143
lesbians. So the findings from Scandinavia are not much different from
figures derived from U.S. obituaries."
Paul Cameron, Ph.D. & Kirk Cameron, Ph.D., presented "Federal
Distortion Of The Homosexual Footprint." Paul Cameron, a reviewer for
the British Medical Journal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal,
and the Postgraduate Medical Journal, has published over 40 scientific
articles on homosexuality. The EPA is the oldest regional
Psychological Association in the United States. At its Philadelphia
convention members presented the latest advances in scientific work to
colleagues.
The full report can be accessed at http://www.earnedmedia.org/frireport.htm
------------------------------
Saturday, March 24, 2007
From the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin
GUEST VIEWPOINT
Episcopal split related to core beliefs
By Warren Musselman
There are key points that need to be made, which were not included in the article that appeared in the Press & Sun-Bulletin on March 19 regarding the parishes of Good Shepherd in Binghamton and St. Andrew's in Vestal.
First, both orthodox and liberal Episcopal Churches have seen their membership dwindle since the General Convention 2003. The implicit suggestion in the article, that it is just orthodox parishes, is incorrect. Good Shepherd, in fact, has grown in attendance and membership since 2003, not shrunk as your articles suggested. Loss of members is accelerating, with orthodox parishes showing smaller losses on average and in some cases, like Good Shepherd, even showing growth.
According to the Episcopal Church's own statistics, the net loss of members was 8,200 in 2002, 35,988 members in 2003, 36,414 in 2004 and 42,443 in 2005. Though more recent official Episcopal Church numbers are not available, some estimates for 2006 are in the ball park of 70,000.
Secondly, the issue of same-sex blessings and the consecration of an openly non-celibate gay bishop, to be sure, are critical issues. However, both are symptoms of a much deeper problem, one that has been growing for a few decades.
It has not been widely reported, because of the preoccupation with the homosexuality question, but at the Episcopal Church's general conventions in 2003 and 2006, this governing body voted down resolutions that did nothing more than reaffirm the historic creeds of the church, and basic tenants of the Christian faith -- things that all bishops and priests promised to uphold and defend at their ordinations. It is not the sole issue of homosexuality, but rather it is the Episcopal Church's unwillingness to remain faithful to the Bible and historic Christian teachings that have caused the current crisis. The governing body of the Episcopal Church has chosen a path that will separate it from the Anglican Communion.
When bishops refuse to affirm the Nicene Creed and core essentials of the Christian faith, there is a crisis in the Church. When they vote to bless and call holy behaviors that the Bible defines as sin, there is a problem. When the leader of the denomination responds to Jesus' words -- "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me," (John 14:6) -- by stating that Christians should not say that Jesus is the only way to God, "If we insist we know the one way to God, we've put God in a very small box," orthodox Anglicans take issue.
Another statement was: "Christians understand that Jesus is the route to God. That is not to say that Muslims, or Sikhs, or Jains, don't come to God in a radically different way. They come to God through human experience, through human experience of the divine -- that doesn't mean that a Hindu doesn't experience God except through Jesus. It says that Hindus and people of other faith traditions approach God through their own cultural contexts; they relate to God, they experience God in human relationships, as well as ones that transcend human relationships." Orthodox Anglicans can only see such pronouncements as heresy.
These are some of the reasons why many orthodox Anglicans can no longer remain a part of the Diocese of Central New York and of The Episcopal Church. LGBT people are and will always remain welcome in our orthodox Anglican parishes. It is the radical changes in theology that are driving us out. The church is a hospital to heal sinners. We all qualify.
Warren Musselman is senior warden of St. Andrew's Church. His viewpoint was written on behalf of William Ritter, junior warden of St. Andrew's Church as well as John King Jr., senior warden, and Thomas Woolsey, junior warden, from the Church of the Good Shepherd.
Episcopal split related to core beliefs
By Warren Musselman
There are key points that need to be made, which were not included in the article that appeared in the Press & Sun-Bulletin on March 19 regarding the parishes of Good Shepherd in Binghamton and St. Andrew's in Vestal.
First, both orthodox and liberal Episcopal Churches have seen their membership dwindle since the General Convention 2003. The implicit suggestion in the article, that it is just orthodox parishes, is incorrect. Good Shepherd, in fact, has grown in attendance and membership since 2003, not shrunk as your articles suggested. Loss of members is accelerating, with orthodox parishes showing smaller losses on average and in some cases, like Good Shepherd, even showing growth.
According to the Episcopal Church's own statistics, the net loss of members was 8,200 in 2002, 35,988 members in 2003, 36,414 in 2004 and 42,443 in 2005. Though more recent official Episcopal Church numbers are not available, some estimates for 2006 are in the ball park of 70,000.
Secondly, the issue of same-sex blessings and the consecration of an openly non-celibate gay bishop, to be sure, are critical issues. However, both are symptoms of a much deeper problem, one that has been growing for a few decades.
It has not been widely reported, because of the preoccupation with the homosexuality question, but at the Episcopal Church's general conventions in 2003 and 2006, this governing body voted down resolutions that did nothing more than reaffirm the historic creeds of the church, and basic tenants of the Christian faith -- things that all bishops and priests promised to uphold and defend at their ordinations. It is not the sole issue of homosexuality, but rather it is the Episcopal Church's unwillingness to remain faithful to the Bible and historic Christian teachings that have caused the current crisis. The governing body of the Episcopal Church has chosen a path that will separate it from the Anglican Communion.
When bishops refuse to affirm the Nicene Creed and core essentials of the Christian faith, there is a crisis in the Church. When they vote to bless and call holy behaviors that the Bible defines as sin, there is a problem. When the leader of the denomination responds to Jesus' words -- "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me," (John 14:6) -- by stating that Christians should not say that Jesus is the only way to God, "If we insist we know the one way to God, we've put God in a very small box," orthodox Anglicans take issue.
Another statement was: "Christians understand that Jesus is the route to God. That is not to say that Muslims, or Sikhs, or Jains, don't come to God in a radically different way. They come to God through human experience, through human experience of the divine -- that doesn't mean that a Hindu doesn't experience God except through Jesus. It says that Hindus and people of other faith traditions approach God through their own cultural contexts; they relate to God, they experience God in human relationships, as well as ones that transcend human relationships." Orthodox Anglicans can only see such pronouncements as heresy.
These are some of the reasons why many orthodox Anglicans can no longer remain a part of the Diocese of Central New York and of The Episcopal Church. LGBT people are and will always remain welcome in our orthodox Anglican parishes. It is the radical changes in theology that are driving us out. The church is a hospital to heal sinners. We all qualify.
Warren Musselman is senior warden of St. Andrew's Church. His viewpoint was written on behalf of William Ritter, junior warden of St. Andrew's Church as well as John King Jr., senior warden, and Thomas Woolsey, junior warden, from the Church of the Good Shepherd.
Friday, March 23, 2007
A Message from Canon Anderson
Beloved in Christ,
There are several items of interest and importance this week. The first is Bishop John Howard of Florida’s absolute rejection of the Panel of Reference’s (POR) proposal for Church of the Redeemer and Fr. Neil Lebhar. The POR’s proposal actually asked a great deal of Redeemer and Lebhar, and seemed weighted heavily in favor of the Diocese of Florida and Howard. I was disappointed in their proposal knowing the cost it would exact from those faithful orthodox Anglicans who had fled a pseudo-orthodox bishop, but it was not them who revolted. Since much less was asked of Bishop Howard, one would have thought that he would have agreed with the POR and encouraged Lebhar back in, but once again under the authority of the Episcopal Church (TEC). Instead he stuck his finger in the eye of the POR and told them to stop meddling in his affairs. So much for the authority and power of the POR. It reminds me of the unarmed British Bobby who orders the armed bank robber to stop and surrender. At least in Florida, this doesn’t work. What does this say about the hopes for letting TEC stay in the worldwide Anglican Communion? Are the hopes honestly realistic, or are these hopes at this point in fact contributing to the pain and suffering and making things worse rather than better?
The Pastoral Scheme called for all of the out-of-TEC American Churches with overseas primatial connections to go under the Windsor bishops as soon as an adequate pastoral plan was in place. This would have put an end to the boundary crossings that TEC was constantly complaining about, and it would have provided some degree of spiritual and actual safety to those recently departed from TEC. The Pastoral Scheme was a way to protect the overseas-linked congregations, but the one thing that it might not have helped them with was the lawsuits that TEC has filed against them, and the new ones initiated since the Tanzania meeting.
Conventional wisdom was that it was in all the key players' best interests to rapidly move forward on the Pastoral Scheme. Dr. Williams could have prevented further erosion of the USA situation and strengthened the middle ground which he believes (erroneously) to be the stable and large platform for the future. The pastoral primates would have turned the border crossing over to Windsor bishops who could then cross boundaries with permission of TEC, and then the criticism over the boundary crossings would have stopped. Finally it was in Schori and the House of Bishops’ (HOB) best interests to cooperate because it did pull everything back under the TEC umbrella, including the Constitutions and Canons. Although it would have involved a temporary bending of TEC’s sovereignty, it would have earned TEC goodwill internationally, and when TEC fails terribly in September to meet the compliance demands, they could have said “we tried hard and aren’t there yet, but look, we are on board with you on the Pastoral Scheme,” and it would have bought them more time. Instead they defied what was in their own best interests and also stuck their finger in Dr. Williams' and the primates’ eyes. It seems to be a Lenten seasonal discipline of TEC giving up reason.
So with the acts of immediate defiance (new and increasing law suits by TEC and the “take a hike” message to the Communion) is there really any reason to wait until September 30th? In the real world, no. No business or nation that was intending to go forward would tolerate this behavior. In the church world, yes, of course we will all wait until September 30th. For one thing, the communion is not set up for rapid and decisive action, and it will still need the time to put the decision making group together and ready to function. An immediate consequence of the HOB defiance is any scheme that puts overseas-linked congregations back under TEC is dead in the water. Any concern that those parishes had based on the literal wording of the Communiqué is significantly lowered. The group of bishops and dioceses that are now at greater risk are the Anglican Communion Network bishops and dioceses, and unless the Archbishop acts now in the interim before September 30th, those dioceses are left very vulnerable to reprisal. One case in point is the upcoming trial of beloved retired bishop Cox, aged 86, whose “crime” was to do confirmations and an ordination on behalf of Archbishop Orombi and Archbishop Venables in Christ Church Anglican (Ugandan) in Kansas City, Kansas. The service occurred in a congregation under the Church of Uganda, yet Bishop Cox is to be tried by a TEC Trial Court For Bishops for his “high crimes.” On the other hand, an orthodox presentment filed over a year ago in Connecticut against Bishop Smith for his canonically unlawful actions against churches there has sat on the Presiding Bishop’s desk, uninvestigated and with no action contemplated. This is what happens when a corrupt church misuses the canons of the church to terrorize the faithful orthodox.
Even if the Archbishop of Canterbury were to proceed with the Pastoral Council and an appointed Primatial Vicar (without the permission of the US HOB or Presiding Bishop Schori), the spiritual relief this would provide would be weighed against the immediate legal attack TEC would bring against those participating dioceses and bishops. If this is not an ecclesiastical war, I don’t know what one would look like. At the very least, a declaration by the Anglican Communion that the Episcopal Church is in a “State Of Division” would help a great deal, and if that were to be coupled with a Primatial Vicar answering to the Primates, some positive protection would result. We are indeed in need of the Peace that passes all understanding, for it is not in the world that we will find it.
Blessings and Peace in Christ Jesus,
The Rev. Canon David C. Anderson
CEO & President of the AAC
There are several items of interest and importance this week. The first is Bishop John Howard of Florida’s absolute rejection of the Panel of Reference’s (POR) proposal for Church of the Redeemer and Fr. Neil Lebhar. The POR’s proposal actually asked a great deal of Redeemer and Lebhar, and seemed weighted heavily in favor of the Diocese of Florida and Howard. I was disappointed in their proposal knowing the cost it would exact from those faithful orthodox Anglicans who had fled a pseudo-orthodox bishop, but it was not them who revolted. Since much less was asked of Bishop Howard, one would have thought that he would have agreed with the POR and encouraged Lebhar back in, but once again under the authority of the Episcopal Church (TEC). Instead he stuck his finger in the eye of the POR and told them to stop meddling in his affairs. So much for the authority and power of the POR. It reminds me of the unarmed British Bobby who orders the armed bank robber to stop and surrender. At least in Florida, this doesn’t work. What does this say about the hopes for letting TEC stay in the worldwide Anglican Communion? Are the hopes honestly realistic, or are these hopes at this point in fact contributing to the pain and suffering and making things worse rather than better?
The Pastoral Scheme called for all of the out-of-TEC American Churches with overseas primatial connections to go under the Windsor bishops as soon as an adequate pastoral plan was in place. This would have put an end to the boundary crossings that TEC was constantly complaining about, and it would have provided some degree of spiritual and actual safety to those recently departed from TEC. The Pastoral Scheme was a way to protect the overseas-linked congregations, but the one thing that it might not have helped them with was the lawsuits that TEC has filed against them, and the new ones initiated since the Tanzania meeting.
Conventional wisdom was that it was in all the key players' best interests to rapidly move forward on the Pastoral Scheme. Dr. Williams could have prevented further erosion of the USA situation and strengthened the middle ground which he believes (erroneously) to be the stable and large platform for the future. The pastoral primates would have turned the border crossing over to Windsor bishops who could then cross boundaries with permission of TEC, and then the criticism over the boundary crossings would have stopped. Finally it was in Schori and the House of Bishops’ (HOB) best interests to cooperate because it did pull everything back under the TEC umbrella, including the Constitutions and Canons. Although it would have involved a temporary bending of TEC’s sovereignty, it would have earned TEC goodwill internationally, and when TEC fails terribly in September to meet the compliance demands, they could have said “we tried hard and aren’t there yet, but look, we are on board with you on the Pastoral Scheme,” and it would have bought them more time. Instead they defied what was in their own best interests and also stuck their finger in Dr. Williams' and the primates’ eyes. It seems to be a Lenten seasonal discipline of TEC giving up reason.
So with the acts of immediate defiance (new and increasing law suits by TEC and the “take a hike” message to the Communion) is there really any reason to wait until September 30th? In the real world, no. No business or nation that was intending to go forward would tolerate this behavior. In the church world, yes, of course we will all wait until September 30th. For one thing, the communion is not set up for rapid and decisive action, and it will still need the time to put the decision making group together and ready to function. An immediate consequence of the HOB defiance is any scheme that puts overseas-linked congregations back under TEC is dead in the water. Any concern that those parishes had based on the literal wording of the Communiqué is significantly lowered. The group of bishops and dioceses that are now at greater risk are the Anglican Communion Network bishops and dioceses, and unless the Archbishop acts now in the interim before September 30th, those dioceses are left very vulnerable to reprisal. One case in point is the upcoming trial of beloved retired bishop Cox, aged 86, whose “crime” was to do confirmations and an ordination on behalf of Archbishop Orombi and Archbishop Venables in Christ Church Anglican (Ugandan) in Kansas City, Kansas. The service occurred in a congregation under the Church of Uganda, yet Bishop Cox is to be tried by a TEC Trial Court For Bishops for his “high crimes.” On the other hand, an orthodox presentment filed over a year ago in Connecticut against Bishop Smith for his canonically unlawful actions against churches there has sat on the Presiding Bishop’s desk, uninvestigated and with no action contemplated. This is what happens when a corrupt church misuses the canons of the church to terrorize the faithful orthodox.
Even if the Archbishop of Canterbury were to proceed with the Pastoral Council and an appointed Primatial Vicar (without the permission of the US HOB or Presiding Bishop Schori), the spiritual relief this would provide would be weighed against the immediate legal attack TEC would bring against those participating dioceses and bishops. If this is not an ecclesiastical war, I don’t know what one would look like. At the very least, a declaration by the Anglican Communion that the Episcopal Church is in a “State Of Division” would help a great deal, and if that were to be coupled with a Primatial Vicar answering to the Primates, some positive protection would result. We are indeed in need of the Peace that passes all understanding, for it is not in the world that we will find it.
Blessings and Peace in Christ Jesus,
The Rev. Canon David C. Anderson
CEO & President of the AAC
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Ephraim Radner: What Way Ahead?
To a certain kind of faithful Episcopalian, things may indeed look bleak. The recent House of Bishops meeting in Texas seems to put a seal of finality to the fraying hopes many of us had for the renewal of our common life. To be realistic, however, is not to lose hope; rather, it is see more clearly where our true hope must lie.
As for reality: There is clearly no real place left for conservative Christians within TEC’s official structures. It is obvious to me that, not only are the vast majority of the denomination’s leaders personally hostile to conservative commitments, but they have reached a point where they are quite open and brazen in their exclusion of conservative presence and influence within the councils of TEC. It is increasingly less likely that appointments of conservatives are made to diocesan, provincial, and national committees (the only way, for a long time now, that such a presence has even been possible); and it is certainly no longer likely that conservatives will be voted, by diocesan or national conventions, onto decision-making councils. Most of our seminaries apply, openly or surreptitiously, the gay-test (and probably do so in both directions, depending on the school). God forbid one should actually have a paper trail that marks one’s views. When conservatives are appointed to Communion committees and councils, they are subjected from within TEC to howls of protest and to negative campaigns, engaged in not simply by concerned individuals, but by bishops and diocesan representatives.
The recent House of Bishops meeting made clear that the alienation between TEC’s leadership and the Anglican Communion as a whole, at least as represented by its Instruments of Communion, has become currently unbridgeable. The bishops of TEC are convinced that their policies of gay inclusion are non-negotiable, and even the Presiding Bishop has made clear that there is “no going back” on actions and commitments made on this score. The clarity of the bishops’ and Executive Council’s and General Convention’s statements around this subject give the lie to any claim that TEC’s leadership is interested in “listening”, let alone learning from the rest of the Communion, or that they perceive their commitments even to be a part of some “reception” process of testing. They have made their decision regarding the absolute imperative of the Gospel on this score (as they see it), and no amount of conferences and dialogues on biblical “hermeneutics” and “cultural perspectives” will budge them from their perceived duty. Those within the church who disagree may be granted some measure of space to live out their ministries (although who knows?); but it has now been made very clear that they have no standing to oppose, for their views have been judged illegitimate. There is no place to go, in their view, but either towards an embrace of their now settled convictions, or away to the fading margins of their domain.
How should the Communion’s councils deal with this now defined reality? Here we may see where hope is leading us. In general, the Communion should simply allow TEC to go its own way for the present, and withdraw indefinitely its invitations to participate in general councils, such as Lambeth, the ACC, and the Primates’ Meeting. This was Katherine Grieb’s suggestion recently made to the House of Bishops, though her proposed limited time-frame should be left open-ended. Perhaps in 5 or 10 or 25 years, there will be movements that will change this drifting and now deliberate walking apart; but certainly they will not come about through a process of engaged dialogue. I think that the participation of any American in these councils and structures – whether bishop, clergyperson, or layperson – should be left undetermined at present. If individual invitations or petitions are tendered with respect to the Communion, let them be dealt with on an individual and ad hoc basis. TEC and its membership, as represented by its House of Bishops, Executive Council, and General Convention, have made it clear that they are committed to their own life, teaching, and discipline and on their own terms. This can and should be respected. The Communion should move on.
What then will happen to conservative Christians in TEC? There are several potential paths:
a. they can continue to gather, worship, and witness as they have, and with all the integrity they can muster, although with the clear sense that they have no directional place and probably future in this church. It is possible that, as leaders and congregations, they will simply “die out” in the coming years. For clergy who are near retirement, this may prove a peaceable option. For dioceses as a whole, there is a possible future of stability and fruitful ministry, perhaps even growth. There are real doubts about the ability to maintain appropriate episcopal leadership in such dioceses, however, in the light of the embarrassing fiasco of South Carolina’s failed consents, and simply the reality of larger social and ecclesial pressures working against maintaining coherent theological focus over the long haul.
b. they can organize, unilaterally as it were, a version of some “pastoral scheme” with a group of TEC bishops willing to step forward as a group. In effect, this would end up being a kind of alternative or parallel Anglican Church, although without yet a desired formal schism or separation. Bishops would still be members of TEC’s House of Bishops, for instance, assuming they were not brought up on presentment charges. Such an alternative church could, in theory, continue for a long time. Just as Grieb suggested that TEC should carry on in a “parallel” way with the Communion, so too this group could constitute a parallel to the TEC. This might or might not involve a Pastoral Council precisely organized as recommended in the Dar es Salaam Communiqué, although minus the input from TEC. But:
i. this would have to involve negotiation with the main representatives of TEC. Are there people of such good will still among us?
ii. and if such negotiation failed, it would involve either civil disobedience or litigation, or both. Are there people willing to face such things?
c. they can leave TEC and their properties (or negotiate buying them from their dioceses), and join some existing group that is not generally engaged in litigation, e.g. the AMiA (who has admirably, if not wholly consistently, avoided such things by simply leaving property behind and acquiring new buildings and planting new churches), or those individual congregations who have left property and gone under foreign jurisdictions.
i. These groups may or may not seek to join with one another into a common alternative Anglican church, which may or may not be recognized by the larger Communion as a whole. The challenges to this are enormous, especially beyond the short-term, as existing theological and disciplinary differences among conservatives emerge. The ecclesiological outlooks among several of the existing separated groups are vastly different, and to this point the differences have been obscured by the sense of struggling with a common adversary.
ii. the Communion as a whole will have a hard time recognizing such an alternative Anglican group “in the place of” TEC, unless the Communion leadership itself coheres more readily around a common vision, such as the Covenant. Hence, any recognition of a completely new Anglican church in America will probably have to wait several years.
d. they can leave Anglicanism altogether, and enter other Christian denominations and communions. There is anecdotal evidence that this has been a predominant response by conservatives to the present, although hard evidence is lacking.
Alternatives in themselves are useful only as they mark out parameters for discernment. What then is the best way among these alternatives? There are arguments to be made for and against each option. But let the Gospel guide our hopes!
In general, I would counsel complete avoidance of litigation – in concert with the explicit teaching of the Gospel – and instead encourage civil disobedience in cases where Christians choose to oppose the depredations of TEC leadership. But is this even a witness we are called to make? Anglicanism has its own sorry history of intolerance and injustice within its midst – we remember the whole-scale driving out of clergy in and after the English Civil War by both sides – and these kinds of conflicts among self-styled followers of Christ have long-lasting and scandalizing results. Simply leaving, however, is something that grates, though perhaps primarily against our pride. I recall only several months ago, at the diocesan convention of Colorado, that a diocesan leader (now appointed by the bishop to a Taskforce on our “common life”) publicly confronted me and demanded that I “and my kind” “leave the church and let [them] get on with ministry”; we were nothing but “dying embers” bringing division and sowing anger within the church. Part of me would like to prove these kinds of affronts simply wrong. Such a motive, however, would be base. There is no point dying with the church, unless one is ready to struggle for the truth. But there is no point struggling for the truth if the struggle leaves one bitter and hostile, aimed against adversaries instead of praying for them in love. If one is not called to the radiancy of joyful sacrifice, it is better to leave. And hope is radiant and ready.
In the end, however, I would urge our continued hope that the larger Communion – and not simply this or that individual leader or group, whose own discernment is often rather limited – will offer the kind of encouraging and supportive direction we seek, indeed that they shall in fact come forward with a Pastoral Council capable of meeting the needs of Anglican witness within the United States such as the Communiqué recommended. This would require the kind of corporate vision and courage (not Don Quixote individualism) on the part of “Camp Allen Principled” bishops that is necessary for them to step forward, offer their own readiness to work with such a Council, and suffer the consequences of their witness and leadership. We are now in the fullness of time for such a demonstration of hope! And we shall all need to hold steady in seeking this direction and support, and come together with a common sense of its need and usefulness.
I was struck, at the recent House of Bishops’ meeting, with the open abuse, often personally directed, thrown at the Primates by many of our bishops. Turning to them, it appears, means turning away from the majority of the TEC’s leadership. Some will ask, of course, “is this not a form of giving up?”. But if we do not do this, if we do not continue to hope in the larger Church, we are all being thrown back on individual conscience – a noble, but weak reed indeed that, on its own, can never save us. And it is far too easy to confuse our conscience with the Lord Jesus Christ.
It is the following of Him and Him alone – not by ourselves alone, but as the full Body of Christ! — that we seek to accomplish. May this Savior – who is “our hope” (1 Tim. 1:1) — come to our aid!
–The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner is rector of Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado, and a fellow of the Anglican Communion Institute
As for reality: There is clearly no real place left for conservative Christians within TEC’s official structures. It is obvious to me that, not only are the vast majority of the denomination’s leaders personally hostile to conservative commitments, but they have reached a point where they are quite open and brazen in their exclusion of conservative presence and influence within the councils of TEC. It is increasingly less likely that appointments of conservatives are made to diocesan, provincial, and national committees (the only way, for a long time now, that such a presence has even been possible); and it is certainly no longer likely that conservatives will be voted, by diocesan or national conventions, onto decision-making councils. Most of our seminaries apply, openly or surreptitiously, the gay-test (and probably do so in both directions, depending on the school). God forbid one should actually have a paper trail that marks one’s views. When conservatives are appointed to Communion committees and councils, they are subjected from within TEC to howls of protest and to negative campaigns, engaged in not simply by concerned individuals, but by bishops and diocesan representatives.
The recent House of Bishops meeting made clear that the alienation between TEC’s leadership and the Anglican Communion as a whole, at least as represented by its Instruments of Communion, has become currently unbridgeable. The bishops of TEC are convinced that their policies of gay inclusion are non-negotiable, and even the Presiding Bishop has made clear that there is “no going back” on actions and commitments made on this score. The clarity of the bishops’ and Executive Council’s and General Convention’s statements around this subject give the lie to any claim that TEC’s leadership is interested in “listening”, let alone learning from the rest of the Communion, or that they perceive their commitments even to be a part of some “reception” process of testing. They have made their decision regarding the absolute imperative of the Gospel on this score (as they see it), and no amount of conferences and dialogues on biblical “hermeneutics” and “cultural perspectives” will budge them from their perceived duty. Those within the church who disagree may be granted some measure of space to live out their ministries (although who knows?); but it has now been made very clear that they have no standing to oppose, for their views have been judged illegitimate. There is no place to go, in their view, but either towards an embrace of their now settled convictions, or away to the fading margins of their domain.
How should the Communion’s councils deal with this now defined reality? Here we may see where hope is leading us. In general, the Communion should simply allow TEC to go its own way for the present, and withdraw indefinitely its invitations to participate in general councils, such as Lambeth, the ACC, and the Primates’ Meeting. This was Katherine Grieb’s suggestion recently made to the House of Bishops, though her proposed limited time-frame should be left open-ended. Perhaps in 5 or 10 or 25 years, there will be movements that will change this drifting and now deliberate walking apart; but certainly they will not come about through a process of engaged dialogue. I think that the participation of any American in these councils and structures – whether bishop, clergyperson, or layperson – should be left undetermined at present. If individual invitations or petitions are tendered with respect to the Communion, let them be dealt with on an individual and ad hoc basis. TEC and its membership, as represented by its House of Bishops, Executive Council, and General Convention, have made it clear that they are committed to their own life, teaching, and discipline and on their own terms. This can and should be respected. The Communion should move on.
What then will happen to conservative Christians in TEC? There are several potential paths:
a. they can continue to gather, worship, and witness as they have, and with all the integrity they can muster, although with the clear sense that they have no directional place and probably future in this church. It is possible that, as leaders and congregations, they will simply “die out” in the coming years. For clergy who are near retirement, this may prove a peaceable option. For dioceses as a whole, there is a possible future of stability and fruitful ministry, perhaps even growth. There are real doubts about the ability to maintain appropriate episcopal leadership in such dioceses, however, in the light of the embarrassing fiasco of South Carolina’s failed consents, and simply the reality of larger social and ecclesial pressures working against maintaining coherent theological focus over the long haul.
b. they can organize, unilaterally as it were, a version of some “pastoral scheme” with a group of TEC bishops willing to step forward as a group. In effect, this would end up being a kind of alternative or parallel Anglican Church, although without yet a desired formal schism or separation. Bishops would still be members of TEC’s House of Bishops, for instance, assuming they were not brought up on presentment charges. Such an alternative church could, in theory, continue for a long time. Just as Grieb suggested that TEC should carry on in a “parallel” way with the Communion, so too this group could constitute a parallel to the TEC. This might or might not involve a Pastoral Council precisely organized as recommended in the Dar es Salaam Communiqué, although minus the input from TEC. But:
i. this would have to involve negotiation with the main representatives of TEC. Are there people of such good will still among us?
ii. and if such negotiation failed, it would involve either civil disobedience or litigation, or both. Are there people willing to face such things?
c. they can leave TEC and their properties (or negotiate buying them from their dioceses), and join some existing group that is not generally engaged in litigation, e.g. the AMiA (who has admirably, if not wholly consistently, avoided such things by simply leaving property behind and acquiring new buildings and planting new churches), or those individual congregations who have left property and gone under foreign jurisdictions.
i. These groups may or may not seek to join with one another into a common alternative Anglican church, which may or may not be recognized by the larger Communion as a whole. The challenges to this are enormous, especially beyond the short-term, as existing theological and disciplinary differences among conservatives emerge. The ecclesiological outlooks among several of the existing separated groups are vastly different, and to this point the differences have been obscured by the sense of struggling with a common adversary.
ii. the Communion as a whole will have a hard time recognizing such an alternative Anglican group “in the place of” TEC, unless the Communion leadership itself coheres more readily around a common vision, such as the Covenant. Hence, any recognition of a completely new Anglican church in America will probably have to wait several years.
d. they can leave Anglicanism altogether, and enter other Christian denominations and communions. There is anecdotal evidence that this has been a predominant response by conservatives to the present, although hard evidence is lacking.
Alternatives in themselves are useful only as they mark out parameters for discernment. What then is the best way among these alternatives? There are arguments to be made for and against each option. But let the Gospel guide our hopes!
In general, I would counsel complete avoidance of litigation – in concert with the explicit teaching of the Gospel – and instead encourage civil disobedience in cases where Christians choose to oppose the depredations of TEC leadership. But is this even a witness we are called to make? Anglicanism has its own sorry history of intolerance and injustice within its midst – we remember the whole-scale driving out of clergy in and after the English Civil War by both sides – and these kinds of conflicts among self-styled followers of Christ have long-lasting and scandalizing results. Simply leaving, however, is something that grates, though perhaps primarily against our pride. I recall only several months ago, at the diocesan convention of Colorado, that a diocesan leader (now appointed by the bishop to a Taskforce on our “common life”) publicly confronted me and demanded that I “and my kind” “leave the church and let [them] get on with ministry”; we were nothing but “dying embers” bringing division and sowing anger within the church. Part of me would like to prove these kinds of affronts simply wrong. Such a motive, however, would be base. There is no point dying with the church, unless one is ready to struggle for the truth. But there is no point struggling for the truth if the struggle leaves one bitter and hostile, aimed against adversaries instead of praying for them in love. If one is not called to the radiancy of joyful sacrifice, it is better to leave. And hope is radiant and ready.
In the end, however, I would urge our continued hope that the larger Communion – and not simply this or that individual leader or group, whose own discernment is often rather limited – will offer the kind of encouraging and supportive direction we seek, indeed that they shall in fact come forward with a Pastoral Council capable of meeting the needs of Anglican witness within the United States such as the Communiqué recommended. This would require the kind of corporate vision and courage (not Don Quixote individualism) on the part of “Camp Allen Principled” bishops that is necessary for them to step forward, offer their own readiness to work with such a Council, and suffer the consequences of their witness and leadership. We are now in the fullness of time for such a demonstration of hope! And we shall all need to hold steady in seeking this direction and support, and come together with a common sense of its need and usefulness.
I was struck, at the recent House of Bishops’ meeting, with the open abuse, often personally directed, thrown at the Primates by many of our bishops. Turning to them, it appears, means turning away from the majority of the TEC’s leadership. Some will ask, of course, “is this not a form of giving up?”. But if we do not do this, if we do not continue to hope in the larger Church, we are all being thrown back on individual conscience – a noble, but weak reed indeed that, on its own, can never save us. And it is far too easy to confuse our conscience with the Lord Jesus Christ.
It is the following of Him and Him alone – not by ourselves alone, but as the full Body of Christ! — that we seek to accomplish. May this Savior – who is “our hope” (1 Tim. 1:1) — come to our aid!
–The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner is rector of Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado, and a fellow of the Anglican Communion Institute
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)