A few facts, questions and speculations:
1. One of the first acts of the current bishop was to hire a media consultant to advise him on how to handle television and radio interviews and inquiries from print journalists. Who paid for this?
2. One of the first acts of the current bishop after inhibiting Fr. David Bollinger was to hire a high-priced public relations firm. A leaked memo on a meeting with Peter Kapcio from this firm is on the DCNY blog; the title of this memo is the McDaniel memo. The strategy from this memo is clear and chilling. One has to wonder whether any part of the strategy could be called Christian in its plan or execution. When you look at the whole failed presentment proceedings, was it good stewardship to spend diocesan funds for public relations consulting?
3. The bishop admitted to the clergy last Wednesday that the diocese paid $185,000 in its failed prosecution of Fr. Bollinger. Does the diocese really know that this is the real number? Given that the bishop made at least two false statements to his clergy at that same meeting, how do we know whether even the high figure of $185,000 is correct? It has been suggested to me that the number could actually be over $300,000. Whether its $185,000, $300,000, or somewhere in between, was this good stewardship?
4. At the clergy conference, one of the false statements that the bishop made was that the diocese had won their case against St. Andrew's, Syracuse. The case was not won; it was settled out of court. Even given this, the diocese hired top-priced lawyers for this case that dragged on for a long time. How much did these lawyers cost the diocese? Was this good stewardship? You might have read an earlier entry where I posted the thoughts of others in Central NY who said that the diocese is likely to have spent over $300,000 in pursuit of holding onto property that is valued at $220,000. I also mentioned that in our area church buildings are being bought at ten cents on the dollar. Again, where these legal expenses good stewardship?
I may add to these thoughts in the coming days. There is plenty here already to wonder what kind of leadership the Diocese of Central NY is getting these days. Maybe those who have resigned from key positions in the diocese over the last few years know something that we don't know. How's your tolerance level for the expenditures given above? And to think that the diocese couldn't afford Thornfield Conference Center but has hundreds of thousands of dollars for legal action. Kinda makes one wonder about what's important to the diocesan leadership.
And, as a last thought, what is in the Shaffer Report that makes the bishop so intent on hiding it from the diocese?
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
From a new Woman’s Magazine called More
Feb 2007
I have been an Episcopal priest since 1984. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the
new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church [“Against the Tide,” Novenver
2006] tells the American public what they want to hear without respecting
tradition. I hope she has kept up her scientific credentials current,
because at the rate revisionist Episcopal Church is losing members, she may
be hustling her salary sooner than she planned.
Reverend Ally Perry – Pottsboro, Texas
I have been an Episcopal priest since 1984. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the
new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church [“Against the Tide,” Novenver
2006] tells the American public what they want to hear without respecting
tradition. I hope she has kept up her scientific credentials current,
because at the rate revisionist Episcopal Church is losing members, she may
be hustling her salary sooner than she planned.
Reverend Ally Perry – Pottsboro, Texas
Saturday, August 25, 2007
$185,000
Did that number catch your eye? It has been reported to me that at a clergy meeting on Wednesday, Bishop Skip Adams disclosed that the diocese spent that amount in the bishop's failed attempt to remove Fr. David Bollinger from the priesthood. The bishop gave some lame excuse for why the presentment failed, but the real reason is the diocese refused to release a key piece of evidence to Fr. Bollinger's defense team. That piece of evidence is the Shaffer Report. Questioning minds must continue to ask why the bishop would be willing to endure the public humiliation of a failed presentment so that he could continue to conceal the contents of the Shaffer Report.
It has also been reported to me that the bishop made at least two false statements at the clergy meeting. One, he said that the State Police are still investigating Fr. Bollinger. A reliable source says this is untrue. Second, the bishop said that the courts have ruled in favor of the diocese in the case against St. Andrew's, Syracuse. This is also untrue. A second source tells me that the parish was willing to settle out of court; no court decision was made.
Some in central NY wonder how much the bishop has spent on his legal assault against St. Andrew's, Syracuse. The legal action against St. Andrew's has been longer and more costly than the Bollinger fiasco. Given the $185,000 he admits spending on the Bollinger presentment, the speculation is that the amount spent on legal work against St. Andrew's, Syracuse exceeds the assessed value of the property. In a recent assessment the church was valued at $220,000. We have been told that in the Binghamton area churches are selling at ten cents on the dollar. What reasonable person would spend more on legal costs than they can get in return should they win a lawsuit? The drama in DCNY continues.
I also learned this weekend that the bishop was pressed by other clergy at the clergy gathering to release the Shaffer Report. The bishop continues to stonewall the report. We can only speculate what's in that report, but again, it can't be favorable to the diocese if the bishop is going to these lengths to keep it from the priests and laity of the diocese. One speculation is that the report comments on the comptroller's breaking into Fr. Bollinger's retirement accounts. If so, we can understand what kind of questions that action would raise. Stay tuned.
It has also been reported to me that the bishop made at least two false statements at the clergy meeting. One, he said that the State Police are still investigating Fr. Bollinger. A reliable source says this is untrue. Second, the bishop said that the courts have ruled in favor of the diocese in the case against St. Andrew's, Syracuse. This is also untrue. A second source tells me that the parish was willing to settle out of court; no court decision was made.
Some in central NY wonder how much the bishop has spent on his legal assault against St. Andrew's, Syracuse. The legal action against St. Andrew's has been longer and more costly than the Bollinger fiasco. Given the $185,000 he admits spending on the Bollinger presentment, the speculation is that the amount spent on legal work against St. Andrew's, Syracuse exceeds the assessed value of the property. In a recent assessment the church was valued at $220,000. We have been told that in the Binghamton area churches are selling at ten cents on the dollar. What reasonable person would spend more on legal costs than they can get in return should they win a lawsuit? The drama in DCNY continues.
I also learned this weekend that the bishop was pressed by other clergy at the clergy gathering to release the Shaffer Report. The bishop continues to stonewall the report. We can only speculate what's in that report, but again, it can't be favorable to the diocese if the bishop is going to these lengths to keep it from the priests and laity of the diocese. One speculation is that the report comments on the comptroller's breaking into Fr. Bollinger's retirement accounts. If so, we can understand what kind of questions that action would raise. Stay tuned.
Reading the Signs of the Times
by Bishop David Bena
(via email)
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Today as I was driving through the countryside near my home in upper New York State, I noticed the first trees beginning to change color. Some golds and yellows appeared where green used to be. It was a message loud and clear that although the temperature is high as a giraffe today, in just a few months, the temperature will be low as a snake. Although we are in for a beautiful and spectacular autumn, with fall foliage and delicious apples, the inevitable result will be dead leaves and crippling snow storms. So I have decided to enjoy the soon coming autumn and not think about the future numbing winter. Reading the earth and the sky?
Jesus said to the crowds, "...Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and sky. How is it that you don't know how to interpret this present time?" (Luke 12:56). Much will be happening in the Anglican Communion over the next few months. Will we be able to "interpret this present time?"
Here is what I am getting at: The Episcopal Church House of Bishops will meet in late September. All the world will be watching. Will the HOB agree to repent and turn back from condoning a very loose systematic theology and an even looser sexual behavior policy? The Primates of the Anglican Communion have given the Episcopal Church HOB until September 30 to turn back. Will they? Recent statements and actions say that they will not. Their statements and actions say that the majority of Episcopal Church bishops are firmly committed to a "multi-truth theology" when studying God and salvation history, and are firmly committed to celebrating gay relationships on a par with marriage and the ordination of those practicing sex outside heterosexual marriage. Unless a miracle happens, the HOB is not going to back down from these positions. What they will do is attempt to give the Anglican world and leadership some assurance that they "are doing the best they can" to both staying in the Anglican Communion and "telling their truth" through a listening process, explaining that their polity does not allow them to comply with the Dar Es Salaam Communiqué. We sometimes call this way of handling the Communiqué as "fudge." Fudging the truth and the facts. In fact, the HOB CAN comply with the Communiqué if it votes that it will. And in fact, the HOB CAN indeed make decisions regarding whom they will ordain and what parameters will be placed on the blessing of relationships. But they will not do this.
While the House of Bishops is meeting in New Orleans, Archbishop Williams and a number of other primates will attend and dialogue with the American bishops. The plan, I'm sure, is to put such pressure on the Archbishop that he will have to accept the "fudge" by stating that the HOB and the Episcopal Church have complied in "most" of the demands of the Primates and so they should be given a pass. He will be pressured to say that the Americans and all other bishops (with a few exceptions, let the reader understand) should be able to sit at the Lambeth Conference in 2008 for a time of listening and understanding one another. This approach has been tried many times and found wanting by those who wish to clearly speak the Scriptures and the historic teachings of Anglicanism. I somehow think the Archbishop knows this in his heart. So let us pray for the Archbishop, that he sees the fudge and its vacuousness, that he refuses to accept it, and that he speaks the Truth on behalf of the Primates of the Anglican Communion, that the HOB has NOT complied with Dar Es Salaam.
Whatever happens at New Orleans, and whatever the Archbishop may or may not say about the HOB meeting, the Primates of the Anglican Communion will probably meet soon after and thoughtfully analyze the HOB statement - Comply? Not comply? and since the Archbishop of Canterbury is but one of the thirty-something Primates, he must join them as they form an opinion. It will be interesting to see how this all goes.
Interpreting this present time? We are at a New Reformation, brothers and sisters. This age can be compared with the times of the sixteenth century. Those of us in CANA are attempting, with a spirit of humility, to stand firm in our biblical faith, the faith of Anglicanism. We are saying, "this corruption of theology and behavior has been tolerated long enough in our Communion. We can no longer abide it. We need to reform our Communion by returning to Anglican biblical formation, and by moving with the Holy Spirit into world evangelization based on the Word of Jesus and the Works of Jesus.
But Reformations are messy, aren't they? And we are in a mess. The Episcopal Church, with its huge endowments (dead people contributing to what, if they were alive, would probably not!) is using millions of dollars to sue for the properties of disaffected Episcopalians. They have set a "NO NEGOTIATIONS" policy and advised all bishops to follow that policy. The attempt is apparent - destroy those who oppose the current trends of the Episcopal Church, and intimidate any others who wish to oppose them. To this, we can only say, "Here we stand; we can do no other." Let the New Reformation proceed!
By the time we meet at the First CANA Convocation Council November 1-3 at Epiphany, Herndon, Virginia, much of this will have played out. Let's be in fervent prayer as we prepare. While you pray, select your delegates and make your airline reservations to join us in Virginia. It will be autumn. We'll know that because we can interpret the earth and sky. But will we be able to interpret this present age?
Your Brother in Christ,
Bishop David Bena
Suffragan for CANA
(via email)
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Today as I was driving through the countryside near my home in upper New York State, I noticed the first trees beginning to change color. Some golds and yellows appeared where green used to be. It was a message loud and clear that although the temperature is high as a giraffe today, in just a few months, the temperature will be low as a snake. Although we are in for a beautiful and spectacular autumn, with fall foliage and delicious apples, the inevitable result will be dead leaves and crippling snow storms. So I have decided to enjoy the soon coming autumn and not think about the future numbing winter. Reading the earth and the sky?
Jesus said to the crowds, "...Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and sky. How is it that you don't know how to interpret this present time?" (Luke 12:56). Much will be happening in the Anglican Communion over the next few months. Will we be able to "interpret this present time?"
Here is what I am getting at: The Episcopal Church House of Bishops will meet in late September. All the world will be watching. Will the HOB agree to repent and turn back from condoning a very loose systematic theology and an even looser sexual behavior policy? The Primates of the Anglican Communion have given the Episcopal Church HOB until September 30 to turn back. Will they? Recent statements and actions say that they will not. Their statements and actions say that the majority of Episcopal Church bishops are firmly committed to a "multi-truth theology" when studying God and salvation history, and are firmly committed to celebrating gay relationships on a par with marriage and the ordination of those practicing sex outside heterosexual marriage. Unless a miracle happens, the HOB is not going to back down from these positions. What they will do is attempt to give the Anglican world and leadership some assurance that they "are doing the best they can" to both staying in the Anglican Communion and "telling their truth" through a listening process, explaining that their polity does not allow them to comply with the Dar Es Salaam Communiqué. We sometimes call this way of handling the Communiqué as "fudge." Fudging the truth and the facts. In fact, the HOB CAN comply with the Communiqué if it votes that it will. And in fact, the HOB CAN indeed make decisions regarding whom they will ordain and what parameters will be placed on the blessing of relationships. But they will not do this.
While the House of Bishops is meeting in New Orleans, Archbishop Williams and a number of other primates will attend and dialogue with the American bishops. The plan, I'm sure, is to put such pressure on the Archbishop that he will have to accept the "fudge" by stating that the HOB and the Episcopal Church have complied in "most" of the demands of the Primates and so they should be given a pass. He will be pressured to say that the Americans and all other bishops (with a few exceptions, let the reader understand) should be able to sit at the Lambeth Conference in 2008 for a time of listening and understanding one another. This approach has been tried many times and found wanting by those who wish to clearly speak the Scriptures and the historic teachings of Anglicanism. I somehow think the Archbishop knows this in his heart. So let us pray for the Archbishop, that he sees the fudge and its vacuousness, that he refuses to accept it, and that he speaks the Truth on behalf of the Primates of the Anglican Communion, that the HOB has NOT complied with Dar Es Salaam.
Whatever happens at New Orleans, and whatever the Archbishop may or may not say about the HOB meeting, the Primates of the Anglican Communion will probably meet soon after and thoughtfully analyze the HOB statement - Comply? Not comply? and since the Archbishop of Canterbury is but one of the thirty-something Primates, he must join them as they form an opinion. It will be interesting to see how this all goes.
Interpreting this present time? We are at a New Reformation, brothers and sisters. This age can be compared with the times of the sixteenth century. Those of us in CANA are attempting, with a spirit of humility, to stand firm in our biblical faith, the faith of Anglicanism. We are saying, "this corruption of theology and behavior has been tolerated long enough in our Communion. We can no longer abide it. We need to reform our Communion by returning to Anglican biblical formation, and by moving with the Holy Spirit into world evangelization based on the Word of Jesus and the Works of Jesus.
But Reformations are messy, aren't they? And we are in a mess. The Episcopal Church, with its huge endowments (dead people contributing to what, if they were alive, would probably not!) is using millions of dollars to sue for the properties of disaffected Episcopalians. They have set a "NO NEGOTIATIONS" policy and advised all bishops to follow that policy. The attempt is apparent - destroy those who oppose the current trends of the Episcopal Church, and intimidate any others who wish to oppose them. To this, we can only say, "Here we stand; we can do no other." Let the New Reformation proceed!
By the time we meet at the First CANA Convocation Council November 1-3 at Epiphany, Herndon, Virginia, much of this will have played out. Let's be in fervent prayer as we prepare. While you pray, select your delegates and make your airline reservations to join us in Virginia. It will be autumn. We'll know that because we can interpret the earth and sky. But will we be able to interpret this present age?
Your Brother in Christ,
Bishop David Bena
Suffragan for CANA
Primates 'are the logical centre of authority'
From the Friday, August 24, 2007 issue of the Church of England Newspaper
THE PRIMATES are not an Anglican Curia but are the logical centre of
authority for the Communion in difficult times, South American Presiding
Bishop Gregory Venables (pictured) has said.
"Common sense and biblical concepts would say the Primates are at that
highest level of authority, under the presidency of the Archbishop of
Canterbury by tradition" within the Anglican Communion, Bishop Venables said
at a press conference on July 31 at St Vincent's Cathedral in Bedford,
Texas, at the close of the Anglican Communion Network council meeting.
"We are an episcopal church," he noted. "Bishops have authority within their
dioceses, the House of Bishops is very significant within a Province, a
Presiding Bishop or Archbishop has authority within a Province," but, he
added, the difficulty is "that nobody has ever said what happens after
that."
"We've got authority, we've got structure, we've got canons, we've got
rules, up until that level," Bishop Venables said.
"Because we don't have written rules, you can say what you like about the
Primates authority without fear of contradiction. That is the problem and "I
don't see the Anglican Communion finding a place to solve that problem" at
the present time.
However, the majority of Anglicans believe "we are an Episcopal Church and
expect our church to be overseen by the episcopacy in the Anglican way,
expecting the church to be led by those so set apart."
Fort Worth Bishop Jack Iker told the gathering the Primates' enhanced
authority arose from the actions of the 1998 Lambeth Conference. Resolution
III.6 he noted gave the Primates Meeting the authority to intervene in cases
of exceptional emergency which are incapable of internal resolution within
provinces.
Bishop Venables observed that what lay behind this problem was that the
"primates are very clear about what they think."
"There is some confusion when the rubber hits the road on this issue," that
appeared to be fuelled by objections to what the Primates were saying.
"People are still living in a 1960s post-modern dream," he noted. "In my
youth, I really thought that
songs like Strawberry Fields meant a great deal, but as I grew older I
realised it had a number of interesting concepts but really didn't work," he
said.
The Communion must "keep the Biblical concept that truth means reality" and
structure its mission and ministry accordingly, he said
THE PRIMATES are not an Anglican Curia but are the logical centre of
authority for the Communion in difficult times, South American Presiding
Bishop Gregory Venables (pictured) has said.
"Common sense and biblical concepts would say the Primates are at that
highest level of authority, under the presidency of the Archbishop of
Canterbury by tradition" within the Anglican Communion, Bishop Venables said
at a press conference on July 31 at St Vincent's Cathedral in Bedford,
Texas, at the close of the Anglican Communion Network council meeting.
"We are an episcopal church," he noted. "Bishops have authority within their
dioceses, the House of Bishops is very significant within a Province, a
Presiding Bishop or Archbishop has authority within a Province," but, he
added, the difficulty is "that nobody has ever said what happens after
that."
"We've got authority, we've got structure, we've got canons, we've got
rules, up until that level," Bishop Venables said.
"Because we don't have written rules, you can say what you like about the
Primates authority without fear of contradiction. That is the problem and "I
don't see the Anglican Communion finding a place to solve that problem" at
the present time.
However, the majority of Anglicans believe "we are an Episcopal Church and
expect our church to be overseen by the episcopacy in the Anglican way,
expecting the church to be led by those so set apart."
Fort Worth Bishop Jack Iker told the gathering the Primates' enhanced
authority arose from the actions of the 1998 Lambeth Conference. Resolution
III.6 he noted gave the Primates Meeting the authority to intervene in cases
of exceptional emergency which are incapable of internal resolution within
provinces.
Bishop Venables observed that what lay behind this problem was that the
"primates are very clear about what they think."
"There is some confusion when the rubber hits the road on this issue," that
appeared to be fuelled by objections to what the Primates were saying.
"People are still living in a 1960s post-modern dream," he noted. "In my
youth, I really thought that
songs like Strawberry Fields meant a great deal, but as I grew older I
realised it had a number of interesting concepts but really didn't work," he
said.
The Communion must "keep the Biblical concept that truth means reality" and
structure its mission and ministry accordingly, he said
Sunday, August 19, 2007
A Most Agonizing Journey towards Lambeth 2008
Archbishop Peter Akinola writes to Nigerian Synods on the Journey towards Lambeth 2008
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Eph. 4:1,3)
We have been on this journey for ten long years. It has been costly and debilitating for all concerned as most recently demonstrated by the tepid response to the invitations to the proposed Lambeth Conference 2008. At a time when we should be able to gather together and celebrate remarkable stories of growth and the many wonderful ways in which our God has been at work in our beloved Communion as lives are transformed new churches built and new dioceses established there is little enthusiasm to even meet.
There are continual cries for patience, listening and understanding. And yet the record shows that those who hold to the “faith once and for all delivered to the saints” have shown remarkable forbearance while their pleas have been ignored, their leaders have been demonized, and their advocates marginalized. We made a deliberate, prayerful decision in 1998 with regard to matters of Human Sexuality. It was supported by an overwhelming majority of the bishops of the Communion. It reflected traditional teaching interpreted with pastoral sensitivity. And yet it has been ignored and those who uphold it derided for their stubbornness. However, we have continued to meet and pray and struggle to find ways to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
The journey started in February 1997 in Kuala Lumpur. It was here, during the 2nd Encounter of the Global South Anglican Communion that a statement was issued in which concern was expressed about the apparent setting aside of biblical teaching by some provinces and dioceses. The statement pleaded for dialogue in ‘a spirit of true unity’ before any part of the Communion embarks on radical changes to Church discipline and moral teaching. [i]
With about seven weeks to go, hope for a unified Communion is not any brighter than it was seven months or ten years ago. Rather, the intransigence of those who reject Biblical authority continues to obstruct our mission and it now seems that the Communion is being forced to choose between following their innovations or continuing on the path that the church has followed since the time of the Apostles.
We have made enormous efforts since 1997 in seeking to avoid this crisis, but without success. Now we confront a moment of decision. If we fail to act we risk leading millions of people away from the faith revealed in the Holy Scriptures and also, even more seriously, we face the real possibility of denying our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.
The leadership of The Episcopal Church USA (TECUSA) and the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) seem to have concluded that the Bible is no longer authoritative in many areas of human experience especially in salvation and sexuality. They claim to have ‘progressed’ beyond the clear teaching of the Scriptures and they have not hidden their intention to lead others to these same conclusions. They have even boasted that they are years ahead of others in fully understanding the truth of the Holy Scriptures and the nature of God’s love.
Both TECUSA and ACoC have been given several opportunities to consult, discuss and prayerfully respond through their recognized structures. While they produced carefully nuanced, deliberately ambiguous statements, their actions have betrayed them. Their intention is clear; they have chosen to walk away from the Biblically based path we once all walked together. The unrelenting persecution of the remaining faithful among them shows how they have used these past few years to isolate and destroy any and all opposition.
We now confront the seriousness of their actions as the year for the Lambeth Conference draws near.
Scorned Opportunities
In 2001, the Primates’ meeting in Kanuga, North Carolina issued a pastoral letter acknowledging estrangement in the Church due to changes in theology and practice regarding human sexuality, and calling on all provinces of the Communion to avoid actions that might damage the “credibility of mission in the world” [vi] In April, 2002 meeting at Canterbury the Primates further issued a pastoral letter recognizing responsibility of all bishops to articulate the fundamentals of faith and maintain the Church truth. [vii]
In what appeared to be deliberate defiance the Diocese of New Westminster in Canada voted in June 2002 to approve the blessings of same-sex unions with the enthusiastic support of their Bishop Michael Ingham. [viii] Later that year ACC-12 meeting in Hong Kong in October 2002 approved a resolution [34] urging dioceses and bishops to refrain from unilateral actions and policies that would strain communion. [ix]
The following year ECUSA met in General Convention in Minneapolis in July/August 2003. Among their many actions they chose to reject a Resolution [B001] affirming the authority of Scripture and other basic elements of Christian faith [x] while approving the election as bishop [C045] someone living in an unashamedly sexual relationship outside marriage. [xi]
The Primates’ meeting at Lambeth Palace in October 2003 issued a pastoral statement condemning ECUSA’s decisions at General Convention describing them as actions that “threaten the unity of our own Communion as well as our relationships with other parts of Christ’s Church, our mission and witness, and our relations with other faiths, in a world already confused in areas of sexuality, morality and theology and polarized Christian opinion.” They also declared that if the consecration proceeds “the future of the Communion itself will be put in jeopardy” and that the action will “tear the fabric of our communion at its deepest level, and may lead to further division on this and further issues as provinces have to decide in consequence whether they can remain in communion with provinces that choose not to break communion with the Episcopal Church (USA).” They also called on “the provinces concerned to make adequate provision for Episcopal oversight of dissenting minorities within their own area of pastoral care in consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of the Primates.” [xii] ECUSA responded the following month by proceeding with the consecration of Gene Robinson thereby tearing the fabric of our Communion and forcing Nigeria along with many other provinces to sever communion with ECUSA.
Earlier, in June 2003, we in the Church of Nigeria had cut our links with the diocese of New Westminster and sent a clear warning of reconsidering our relationship with ECUSA should Gene Robinson be consecrated. [xiii] As always, we were ignored.
During 2004 there was a growing number of so-called ‘blessings’ of same-sex unions by American and Canadian priests even though the Windsor Report released in September 2004 reaffirmed [xiv]
One consequence of this continuing intransigence by ECUSA was the alienation of thousands of faithful Anglicans who make their home in the USA. The attempts by the Primates to provide for their protection through the Panel of Reference proved fruitless. So the desire of these faithful Anglicans
During the African [sic] [xv]
Although the Primates in February 2005 at their meeting in Dromantine, Northern Ireland, advised the withdrawal of both ECUSA and the ACoC from the ACC [xvi] the continued influence of these churches on the Communion and their renewed efforts to make others adopt their intransigent line frustrated any genuine reconciliation attempts. The agonizing journey towards unity and faith seemed unending.
The failure of resolve by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the unwillingness of the other Instruments of Unity to effect discipline on those who had rejected the mind of the Communion prompted the Church of Nigeria to effect a change in her constitution during a General Synod held in Onitsha in September 2005. [xvii]
The Third Anglican South-to-South Encounter in Egypt October 2005 issued a very strong indictment of ECUSA and the ACoC and called for a common “Anglican Covenant” among churches remaining true to Biblical Christianity and historic Anglicanism. [xviii]
Ignoring all the calls for repentance, homosexual unions and nominations for episcopacy continued in the USA with the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing “deep unease” with such nominations in California in February 2006. [xix]
A much-awaited ECUSA General Convention in 2006 proved to be a disappointment as resolutions expressing regret for the harm done to the communion were rejected as well as one that tried to emphasize the necessity of Christ for salvation. Approved were resolutions promoting homosexual relationships as well one apologizing to homosexuals for the Anglican Communion following Biblical principles. [xx] The agony of a frustrated communion was visible worldwide except among those already prepared to embrace this dangerous path departing from the faith.
Nigeria needed no further prodding to proceed with the election in June 2006 and the August 2006 consecration of the Rt. Rev. Martyn Minns to give Episcopal oversight to CANA. The Nigerian House of Bishops also declared a reluctance to participate in the 2008 Lambeth Conference with an unrepentant ECUSA and Canada. [xxi]
The Global South Anglican Primates meeting in Kigali, September 2006 recognizing that ECUSA appears to have no intention of changing direction and once again embracing the ‘faith once delivered’ said in their communiqué: [xxii]
The Anglican Communion Primates meeting in Dar es Salaam in February 2007 reaffirmed the 1998 Lambeth resolution and called on ECUSA (now TEC) to consider definite actions, which could heal the communion as well as reassure those who have been alienated of adequate pastoral care.
All journeys must end someday
We want unity but not at the cost of relegating Christ to the position of another ‘wise teacher’ who can be obeyed or disobeyed.
We earnestly desire the healing of our beloved Communion but not at the cost of re-writing the Bible to accommodate the latest cultural trend.
As stated in “The Road to Lambeth” [xxiii]
“We Anglicans stand at a crossroads. One road, the road of compromise of biblical truth, leads to destruction and disunity. The other road has its own obstacles [faithfulness is never an easy way] because it requires changes in the way the Communion has been governed and it challenges [all] our churches to live up to and into their full maturity in Christ.”
The first road, the one that follows the current path of The Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada, is one that we simply cannot take because the cost is too high. We dare not sacrifice eternal truth for mere appeasement; we cannot turn away from the source of life and love for a temporary truce.
The other road is the only one that we can embrace. It is not an easy road because it demands obedience and faithfulness from each one of us. It requires a renewed commitment to the Historic Biblical Faith. For those who have walked away from this commitment, especially The Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada, it requires repentance, a reversal of current unscriptural policies and credible assurances concerning such basic matters as:
The Authority and Supremacy of Scripture.
The Doctrine of the Trinity
The person, work and resurrection of Jesus the Christ
The acknowledgement of Jesus as Divine and the One and only means of salvation
The doctrines of sin, forgiveness, reconciliation, and transformation by the Holy Spirit through Christ.
The sanctity of marriage and teaching about morality that is rooted in the Bible.
These are not onerous burdens or tiresome restrictions but rather they are God’s gift, designed to set us free from the bondage of sin and give us the assurance of life eternal.
John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress, describes the Christian life as a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. On his journey, Pilgrim is confronted by numerous decisions and many crossroads. The easy road was never the right road. This is our moment of truth.
+ Peter Abuja
[i] The Kuala Lumpur statement on Human Sexuality available on http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/the_kuala_lumpur_statement_on_human_sexuality_2nd_encounter_in_the_south_10/
[ii] Communiqué of the Primates meeting in Dar es Salaam in February 2007 available on http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/42/50/acns4253.cfm
[iii] Lambeth 1998 resolution 1.10 text is available http://www.anglicancommunion.org/windsor2004/appendix/p3.6.cfm
[iv] Communiqué of the Primates meeting in Porto in March, 2000 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/acnsarchive/acns2075/acns2094.html
[v] Text of Resolution D039 from General Convention 2000 can be found http://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts_new/acts_resolution.pl?resolution=2000-D039
[vi] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Kanuga , North Carolina in March 2001 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/acnsarchive/acns2400/acns2410.html
[vii] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Canterbury in April 2002 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/29/50/acns2959.html
[viii] Diocese of New Westminster policies on Same Sex Blessings can be found here http://www.samesexblessing.info/cnurse/DotNetNuke/Default.aspx?tabid=75
[ix] Resolutions from ACC-12 meeting in Hong Kong in October 2002 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acc/meetings/acc12/resolutions.cfm
[x] Test of Resolution B001 rejected by General Convention 2003 http://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts/acts_resolution-complete.pl?resolution=2003-B001
[xi] Text of Resolution endorsing the election of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire http://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts/acts_resolution-complete.pl?resolution=2003-C045
[xii] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Lambeth Palace in October 2003
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/36/25/acns3633.html
[xiii] Statement from Church of Nigeria breaking Communion with the Diocese of New Westminster http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/34/50/acns3455.html
[xiv] The full text of the Windsor Report is available here www.anglican.org.nz/Resources/windsor2004full.pdf
[xv] Statement from the Primates gathered at the first African Anglican Bishops’ Conference is available here http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/39/00/acns3906.cfm
[xvi] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Dromantine in February 2005 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/39/00/acns3948.cfm
[xvii] Statement issued on 15th September 2005 describing actions of the General Synod is available here: www.anglican-nig.org/Onitsha2005_pressls2.htm
[xviii] Communiqué from 3rd South to South Encounter held in October 2005 text available here: http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/third_trumpet_communique_from_3rd_south_to_south_encounter/
[xix] Article describing reaction by Archbishop Rowan to California election is found in Church of England Newspaper, February 24th, 2006
[xx] Episcopal News Service describing the election is here http://www.episcopalchurch.org/75383_76174_ENG_HTM.htm
[xxi] Minutes of the Church of Nigeria House of Bishops meeting June 2006
[xxii] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Kigali , Rwanda , in September, 2006 http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/kigali_communique/
[xxiii]Complete text of the Report “The Road to Lambeth” is available here: http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/the_road_to_lambeth_presented_at_capa/
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Eph. 4:1,3)
We have been on this journey for ten long years. It has been costly and debilitating for all concerned as most recently demonstrated by the tepid response to the invitations to the proposed Lambeth Conference 2008. At a time when we should be able to gather together and celebrate remarkable stories of growth and the many wonderful ways in which our God has been at work in our beloved Communion as lives are transformed new churches built and new dioceses established there is little enthusiasm to even meet.
There are continual cries for patience, listening and understanding. And yet the record shows that those who hold to the “faith once and for all delivered to the saints” have shown remarkable forbearance while their pleas have been ignored, their leaders have been demonized, and their advocates marginalized. We made a deliberate, prayerful decision in 1998 with regard to matters of Human Sexuality. It was supported by an overwhelming majority of the bishops of the Communion. It reflected traditional teaching interpreted with pastoral sensitivity. And yet it has been ignored and those who uphold it derided for their stubbornness. However, we have continued to meet and pray and struggle to find ways to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
The journey started in February 1997 in Kuala Lumpur. It was here, during the 2nd Encounter of the Global South Anglican Communion that a statement was issued in which concern was expressed about the apparent setting aside of biblical teaching by some provinces and dioceses. The statement pleaded for dialogue in ‘a spirit of true unity’ before any part of the Communion embarks on radical changes to Church discipline and moral teaching. [i]
With about seven weeks to go, hope for a unified Communion is not any brighter than it was seven months or ten years ago. Rather, the intransigence of those who reject Biblical authority continues to obstruct our mission and it now seems that the Communion is being forced to choose between following their innovations or continuing on the path that the church has followed since the time of the Apostles.
We have made enormous efforts since 1997 in seeking to avoid this crisis, but without success. Now we confront a moment of decision. If we fail to act we risk leading millions of people away from the faith revealed in the Holy Scriptures and also, even more seriously, we face the real possibility of denying our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.
The leadership of The Episcopal Church USA (TECUSA) and the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) seem to have concluded that the Bible is no longer authoritative in many areas of human experience especially in salvation and sexuality. They claim to have ‘progressed’ beyond the clear teaching of the Scriptures and they have not hidden their intention to lead others to these same conclusions. They have even boasted that they are years ahead of others in fully understanding the truth of the Holy Scriptures and the nature of God’s love.
Both TECUSA and ACoC have been given several opportunities to consult, discuss and prayerfully respond through their recognized structures. While they produced carefully nuanced, deliberately ambiguous statements, their actions have betrayed them. Their intention is clear; they have chosen to walk away from the Biblically based path we once all walked together. The unrelenting persecution of the remaining faithful among them shows how they have used these past few years to isolate and destroy any and all opposition.
We now confront the seriousness of their actions as the year for the Lambeth Conference draws near.
Scorned Opportunities
In 2001, the Primates’ meeting in Kanuga, North Carolina issued a pastoral letter acknowledging estrangement in the Church due to changes in theology and practice regarding human sexuality, and calling on all provinces of the Communion to avoid actions that might damage the “credibility of mission in the world” [vi] In April, 2002 meeting at Canterbury the Primates further issued a pastoral letter recognizing responsibility of all bishops to articulate the fundamentals of faith and maintain the Church truth. [vii]
In what appeared to be deliberate defiance the Diocese of New Westminster in Canada voted in June 2002 to approve the blessings of same-sex unions with the enthusiastic support of their Bishop Michael Ingham. [viii] Later that year ACC-12 meeting in Hong Kong in October 2002 approved a resolution [34] urging dioceses and bishops to refrain from unilateral actions and policies that would strain communion. [ix]
The following year ECUSA met in General Convention in Minneapolis in July/August 2003. Among their many actions they chose to reject a Resolution [B001] affirming the authority of Scripture and other basic elements of Christian faith [x] while approving the election as bishop [C045] someone living in an unashamedly sexual relationship outside marriage. [xi]
The Primates’ meeting at Lambeth Palace in October 2003 issued a pastoral statement condemning ECUSA’s decisions at General Convention describing them as actions that “threaten the unity of our own Communion as well as our relationships with other parts of Christ’s Church, our mission and witness, and our relations with other faiths, in a world already confused in areas of sexuality, morality and theology and polarized Christian opinion.” They also declared that if the consecration proceeds “the future of the Communion itself will be put in jeopardy” and that the action will “tear the fabric of our communion at its deepest level, and may lead to further division on this and further issues as provinces have to decide in consequence whether they can remain in communion with provinces that choose not to break communion with the Episcopal Church (USA).” They also called on “the provinces concerned to make adequate provision for Episcopal oversight of dissenting minorities within their own area of pastoral care in consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of the Primates.” [xii] ECUSA responded the following month by proceeding with the consecration of Gene Robinson thereby tearing the fabric of our Communion and forcing Nigeria along with many other provinces to sever communion with ECUSA.
Earlier, in June 2003, we in the Church of Nigeria had cut our links with the diocese of New Westminster and sent a clear warning of reconsidering our relationship with ECUSA should Gene Robinson be consecrated. [xiii] As always, we were ignored.
During 2004 there was a growing number of so-called ‘blessings’ of same-sex unions by American and Canadian priests even though the Windsor Report released in September 2004 reaffirmed [xiv]
One consequence of this continuing intransigence by ECUSA was the alienation of thousands of faithful Anglicans who make their home in the USA. The attempts by the Primates to provide for their protection through the Panel of Reference proved fruitless. So the desire of these faithful Anglicans
During the African [sic] [xv]
Although the Primates in February 2005 at their meeting in Dromantine, Northern Ireland, advised the withdrawal of both ECUSA and the ACoC from the ACC [xvi] the continued influence of these churches on the Communion and their renewed efforts to make others adopt their intransigent line frustrated any genuine reconciliation attempts. The agonizing journey towards unity and faith seemed unending.
The failure of resolve by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the unwillingness of the other Instruments of Unity to effect discipline on those who had rejected the mind of the Communion prompted the Church of Nigeria to effect a change in her constitution during a General Synod held in Onitsha in September 2005. [xvii]
The Third Anglican South-to-South Encounter in Egypt October 2005 issued a very strong indictment of ECUSA and the ACoC and called for a common “Anglican Covenant” among churches remaining true to Biblical Christianity and historic Anglicanism. [xviii]
Ignoring all the calls for repentance, homosexual unions and nominations for episcopacy continued in the USA with the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing “deep unease” with such nominations in California in February 2006. [xix]
A much-awaited ECUSA General Convention in 2006 proved to be a disappointment as resolutions expressing regret for the harm done to the communion were rejected as well as one that tried to emphasize the necessity of Christ for salvation. Approved were resolutions promoting homosexual relationships as well one apologizing to homosexuals for the Anglican Communion following Biblical principles. [xx] The agony of a frustrated communion was visible worldwide except among those already prepared to embrace this dangerous path departing from the faith.
Nigeria needed no further prodding to proceed with the election in June 2006 and the August 2006 consecration of the Rt. Rev. Martyn Minns to give Episcopal oversight to CANA. The Nigerian House of Bishops also declared a reluctance to participate in the 2008 Lambeth Conference with an unrepentant ECUSA and Canada. [xxi]
The Global South Anglican Primates meeting in Kigali, September 2006 recognizing that ECUSA appears to have no intention of changing direction and once again embracing the ‘faith once delivered’ said in their communiqué: [xxii]
The Anglican Communion Primates meeting in Dar es Salaam in February 2007 reaffirmed the 1998 Lambeth resolution and called on ECUSA (now TEC) to consider definite actions, which could heal the communion as well as reassure those who have been alienated of adequate pastoral care.
All journeys must end someday
We want unity but not at the cost of relegating Christ to the position of another ‘wise teacher’ who can be obeyed or disobeyed.
We earnestly desire the healing of our beloved Communion but not at the cost of re-writing the Bible to accommodate the latest cultural trend.
As stated in “The Road to Lambeth” [xxiii]
“We Anglicans stand at a crossroads. One road, the road of compromise of biblical truth, leads to destruction and disunity. The other road has its own obstacles [faithfulness is never an easy way] because it requires changes in the way the Communion has been governed and it challenges [all] our churches to live up to and into their full maturity in Christ.”
The first road, the one that follows the current path of The Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada, is one that we simply cannot take because the cost is too high. We dare not sacrifice eternal truth for mere appeasement; we cannot turn away from the source of life and love for a temporary truce.
The other road is the only one that we can embrace. It is not an easy road because it demands obedience and faithfulness from each one of us. It requires a renewed commitment to the Historic Biblical Faith. For those who have walked away from this commitment, especially The Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada, it requires repentance, a reversal of current unscriptural policies and credible assurances concerning such basic matters as:
The Authority and Supremacy of Scripture.
The Doctrine of the Trinity
The person, work and resurrection of Jesus the Christ
The acknowledgement of Jesus as Divine and the One and only means of salvation
The doctrines of sin, forgiveness, reconciliation, and transformation by the Holy Spirit through Christ.
The sanctity of marriage and teaching about morality that is rooted in the Bible.
These are not onerous burdens or tiresome restrictions but rather they are God’s gift, designed to set us free from the bondage of sin and give us the assurance of life eternal.
John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress, describes the Christian life as a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. On his journey, Pilgrim is confronted by numerous decisions and many crossroads. The easy road was never the right road. This is our moment of truth.
+ Peter Abuja
[i] The Kuala Lumpur statement on Human Sexuality available on http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/the_kuala_lumpur_statement_on_human_sexuality_2nd_encounter_in_the_south_10/
[ii] Communiqué of the Primates meeting in Dar es Salaam in February 2007 available on http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/42/50/acns4253.cfm
[iii] Lambeth 1998 resolution 1.10 text is available http://www.anglicancommunion.org/windsor2004/appendix/p3.6.cfm
[iv] Communiqué of the Primates meeting in Porto in March, 2000 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/acnsarchive/acns2075/acns2094.html
[v] Text of Resolution D039 from General Convention 2000 can be found http://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts_new/acts_resolution.pl?resolution=2000-D039
[vi] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Kanuga , North Carolina in March 2001 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/acnsarchive/acns2400/acns2410.html
[vii] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Canterbury in April 2002 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/29/50/acns2959.html
[viii] Diocese of New Westminster policies on Same Sex Blessings can be found here http://www.samesexblessing.info/cnurse/DotNetNuke/Default.aspx?tabid=75
[ix] Resolutions from ACC-12 meeting in Hong Kong in October 2002 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acc/meetings/acc12/resolutions.cfm
[x] Test of Resolution B001 rejected by General Convention 2003 http://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts/acts_resolution-complete.pl?resolution=2003-B001
[xi] Text of Resolution endorsing the election of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire http://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts/acts_resolution-complete.pl?resolution=2003-C045
[xii] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Lambeth Palace in October 2003
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/36/25/acns3633.html
[xiii] Statement from Church of Nigeria breaking Communion with the Diocese of New Westminster http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/34/50/acns3455.html
[xiv] The full text of the Windsor Report is available here www.anglican.org.nz/Resources/windsor2004full.pdf
[xv] Statement from the Primates gathered at the first African Anglican Bishops’ Conference is available here http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/39/00/acns3906.cfm
[xvi] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Dromantine in February 2005 http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/39/00/acns3948.cfm
[xvii] Statement issued on 15th September 2005 describing actions of the General Synod is available here: www.anglican-nig.org/Onitsha2005_pressls2.htm
[xviii] Communiqué from 3rd South to South Encounter held in October 2005 text available here: http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/third_trumpet_communique_from_3rd_south_to_south_encounter/
[xix] Article describing reaction by Archbishop Rowan to California election is found in Church of England Newspaper, February 24th, 2006
[xx] Episcopal News Service describing the election is here http://www.episcopalchurch.org/75383_76174_ENG_HTM.htm
[xxi] Minutes of the Church of Nigeria House of Bishops meeting June 2006
[xxii] Communiqué from the Primates meeting in Kigali , Rwanda , in September, 2006 http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/kigali_communique/
[xxiii]Complete text of the Report “The Road to Lambeth” is available here: http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/the_road_to_lambeth_presented_at_capa/
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Anglicanism: Protestant or Catholic
by James I. Packer
August 15, 2007
Anglicanism is the most debated form of Christianity. It is judged in a
variety of ways not only by outsiders and spectators, but also by Anglicans themselves. Even for a person who has spent a great part of his life in the world of Anglicanism, it is not easy to disentangle the knot of misunderstanding about Anglicanism.
A first point of discussion is whether Anglicanism should be considered part of Protestantism. In many of its expressions, particularly among those who are called Anglo-Catholics, Anglicanism shows striking resemblance to Roman Catholicism. Today we can even find Anglican churches in which the interior differs in no way from that of a Roman Catholic church. Anglican churches in which The Lord's Supper is again considered the sacrifice of the Mass; in which the priest wears Catholic vestments;
and in which nearly all the Roman Catholic devotions such as benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, recitation of the rosary, and veneration of Mary and the saints have been introduced.
However, by far the majority of Anglicans find this all as strange as does a Dutch Protestant. In any case, whatever judgment may be formed of Anglo-Catholicism from the viewpoint of the Roman Catholic Church, the official conduct of Anglican churches should not be measured by Anglo-Catholic criteria: this would, a priori, render a proper understanding of the activities of these churches impossible. As opposed to Anglo-Catholic Anglicans there are many other Anglicans whose vision of the nature of the Christian religion, the Church, the sacraments, and the gospel is typically Protestant. As a result of their insular formation many Anglicans scarcely know how much of the Reformation heritage they share in their faith, thought, and actions.
It may be true that Anglicans generally do not like to be called Protestant, and that Anglicanism as it presents itself today should not simply be considered part of Protestantism. On the Catholic as well as on the Protestant side there is a fairly recent widespread opinion that Anglicanism is closer to the Roman Catholic Church than to the Reformation. This notion had its origin in the nineteenth century Oxford
Movement, which was a Catholicizing revival. It has left permanent traces in the total picture of Anglicanism today, but in the form it has assumed in later Anglo-Catholicism, it has remained a foreign and isolated element in the world of Anglican churches.
As a result of the lively activity and propaganda displayed by Anglo-Catholicism for over a century, many people have come into contact with Anglicanism by way of Anglo-Catholicism. Consequently, many of these people have the impression that Anglicanism belongs in principle to the Catholic type of Christianity and that it has been influenced by the sixteenth century Reformation and Protestantism only accidentally and superficially.
Such a neo-Anglican vision is untenable. It is contrary to the historical facts, if all the facts, documents and data are taken into consideration. This neo-Anglican vision is based on a one-sided, arbitrary interpretation of the ecclesiastic and religious events which took place during the troubled and confused reign of Henry VIII. It also disregards the distinct Reformation characteristics of Anglican preaching and writing in the sixteenth century, to the present day. Moreover, it is based on serious misconceptions of the deepest essence of the Reformation, and of the real content, purport, and intention of the teaching and theology of the Roman Catholic Church.
On the other hand, in reaction to liberalism and lawlessness on the part of Anglo-Catholics within the Protestant Episcopal Church, many abandoned the denomination, and established independent jurisdictions which were staunchly Anglo-Catholic in theology and practice, but of a conservative nature in other respects. None of these independent Churches, however, are recognized by Canterbury or any other of the national Churches of the Anglican Communion.
Finally freed from the restrictions of Canon Law and church custom, these Anglo-Catholics were able to establish Tractarian parishes along ultra-
Montagne ritualist lines, furnishing their own Romish clergy as well, most of whom had not been ordained in the P.E.C.U.S.A. or trained in her seminaries. Ostensibly, they claimed to have broken with the mother church over the use of the 1928 BCP and the introduction of the 1979 BCP, which they regarded as heretical.
But instead of retaining the 1928 BCP, these Anglo-Catholic groups wasted no time in introducing a novelty of their own and insinuating it upon an often unwitting laity. The Anglican Missal, and Anglo-Catholic version of the Roman Mass in English, quickly supplanted the Book of Common Prayer in the majority of parishes of the splinter Churches, and in many instances its use was made mandatory.
Paradoxically, those who claimed it necessary to split from the P.E.C.U.S.A. because of the introduction of a new Prayer Book became the promoters of a liturgy completely foreign to orthodox Anglican usage. The Anglican Missal is not really a substitute for the Prayer Book, as it contains only the liturgy for the Mass and rites incidental to the celebration of the Mass, such as making "holy" water and prayers for the dead. Along with the introduction of the Missal, the Anglo-Catholic clergy
convinced their lay constituencies that the Missal was really the 1928 Book of Common Prayer with "proper" rubrics added to restore "catholic"orthodoxy to the liturgy destroyed by the Protestant Reformation and to correct "errors and flaws in the 1928 BCP." Of course, since Anglo-Catholicism insists upon having the Holy Communion (Mass or Holy Eucharist, as they call it) every Lord's Day, gullible congregations were
tricked into accepting this substitute for the Prayer Book without complaint. They were not even aware they had been robbed, given paste for the gem of our Protestant Anglican heritage.
When first introduced by Anglo-Catholic clergy (illegally) to American congregations, the Anglican Missal was publicly condemned by over thirty bishops of the Church and forbidden in their Dioceses. High Church bishops, such as Dr. Manning of New York and Dr. Parsons of California were very outspoken in their rejection of the Missal as a "perversion and misrepresentation" of the Prayer Book. The General Convention of the
Episcopal Church soundly rejected the Missal and condemned its use as a threat to Anglicanism in the country.
The origins of the Anglican Missal, in its British and American versions,
cannot be dealt with herein. It is sufficient to say that it has never been an approved service book of the Anglican Communion, and itself bears little relation to the Book of Common Prayer. Yet, because of the ignorance of Episcopalian believers, regarding their own precious Book of Common Prayer, even conservative churchmen have been duped into accepting a lie. In their desire to protect their orthodox Christian heritage, they have unwittingly sacrificed a priceless portion of that heritage.
Yes, the 1928 BCP may still be found in the pews of these Anglo-Romanist churches: this is the unkindest cut of all, as it is a bold sham. One poor lady was even told that the Missal was really the Sarum Use of Salisbury Cathedral, which her monsignor regarded as the "purist" liturgy of Christendom!
The notion of many Reformed Protestants that Anglicanism was never really "reform-minded" and thoroughly Protestant is, like the neo-Anglican vision, based on a one sided judgment which sees the situation only from a Puritan viewpoint. But, as is evident from classical sixteenth century Anglican theology, it is impossible to explain the struggle between Anglicanism and Puritanism under Elizabeth I as a secret nostalgia for the Roman Church, or as an attempt to arrive at a compromise without
principle.
If the Anglican Reformation ran a different course from that of the Lutheran and the other Reformed churches, this must be attributed not to after effects of Roman Catholic influences, but rather to certain typically English circumstances, to certain traits in the English national Character, and to the practical, humanistic character of English religiousness.
The bishops who laid the foundations of Anglicanism during the time of Elizabeth I were not striving for an unprincipled compromise betweenRomanism and Protestantism. In their writings there is not a trace of Romish sympathies. When they battled Puritanism, they were concerned about protecting the Church against premature and shortsighted abolition and against disorder and liturgical dissoluteness. As far as the episcopal government of the Church, the liturgy, and the sacraments were concerned, it is out of the question that the Anglican bishops of the time included
anything of a Romish origin. Elizabeth I had no other aim than to give the Reformation movement its own austere form and style. But the Anglican Reformation never reached a static position where nothing could be changed or revoked. More than did Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism, Anglicanism succeeded in realizing the universal Christian ideals of the reformers.
Yet, it also preserved a certain openness to the Catholic and the Reformed
interpretations of the the faith. It has taken seriously the principle "ecclesia catholica semper reformanda" - the church catholic, always reforming. By nature Anglicanism has a wide vision. Moreover, it has a great reverence for what has grown slowly, what has been tried, what has been generally accepted - in short, for tradition (not to be confused with the Catholic concept of tradition).
It cannot be denied that in the course of time the vision of the true nature of the Reformation and of Protestantism has for many Anglicans been clouded. The rise of a pietistic subjectivism and liberal individualism has influenced many Anglicans to view Protestantism as a negative, destructive force which lacks respect due to age-old Christian tradition and community values. To a great degree, Anglo-Catholicism has succeeded in wiping out the last traces of Anglicanism being related to the Reformation. This has in turn produced a kind of ecclesiastical and
theological schizophrenia within worldwide Anglicanism, leaving the Communion deeply divided and to a great degree incapable of dealing with the many divisive issues of twentieth-century Christianity.
Anglo-Catholicism, once embraced as a remedy against rationalism and humanism, has proved inadequate to the job. Historically foreign to the true tradition of English and American churchmanship, it has become exactly what it initially sought to combat: it is liberal, lawless, and radical in the extreme.
Anglicanism must be called back to its Reformation foundations and historic theology: without such a reclamation of its Protestant heritage, it is in danger of disappearing altogether. The ultimate decision for Anglican believers will not lie in choosing a Protestant or Catholic identity, but in choosing between Papal and biblical Christianity.
---The Rev. Dr. James I. Packer is professor of Theology at Regent College, in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is also a senior editor, Visiting Scholar, and Institute Fellow for Christianity Today. This article is drawn from The Protestant Alliance.
August 15, 2007
Anglicanism is the most debated form of Christianity. It is judged in a
variety of ways not only by outsiders and spectators, but also by Anglicans themselves. Even for a person who has spent a great part of his life in the world of Anglicanism, it is not easy to disentangle the knot of misunderstanding about Anglicanism.
A first point of discussion is whether Anglicanism should be considered part of Protestantism. In many of its expressions, particularly among those who are called Anglo-Catholics, Anglicanism shows striking resemblance to Roman Catholicism. Today we can even find Anglican churches in which the interior differs in no way from that of a Roman Catholic church. Anglican churches in which The Lord's Supper is again considered the sacrifice of the Mass; in which the priest wears Catholic vestments;
and in which nearly all the Roman Catholic devotions such as benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, recitation of the rosary, and veneration of Mary and the saints have been introduced.
However, by far the majority of Anglicans find this all as strange as does a Dutch Protestant. In any case, whatever judgment may be formed of Anglo-Catholicism from the viewpoint of the Roman Catholic Church, the official conduct of Anglican churches should not be measured by Anglo-Catholic criteria: this would, a priori, render a proper understanding of the activities of these churches impossible. As opposed to Anglo-Catholic Anglicans there are many other Anglicans whose vision of the nature of the Christian religion, the Church, the sacraments, and the gospel is typically Protestant. As a result of their insular formation many Anglicans scarcely know how much of the Reformation heritage they share in their faith, thought, and actions.
It may be true that Anglicans generally do not like to be called Protestant, and that Anglicanism as it presents itself today should not simply be considered part of Protestantism. On the Catholic as well as on the Protestant side there is a fairly recent widespread opinion that Anglicanism is closer to the Roman Catholic Church than to the Reformation. This notion had its origin in the nineteenth century Oxford
Movement, which was a Catholicizing revival. It has left permanent traces in the total picture of Anglicanism today, but in the form it has assumed in later Anglo-Catholicism, it has remained a foreign and isolated element in the world of Anglican churches.
As a result of the lively activity and propaganda displayed by Anglo-Catholicism for over a century, many people have come into contact with Anglicanism by way of Anglo-Catholicism. Consequently, many of these people have the impression that Anglicanism belongs in principle to the Catholic type of Christianity and that it has been influenced by the sixteenth century Reformation and Protestantism only accidentally and superficially.
Such a neo-Anglican vision is untenable. It is contrary to the historical facts, if all the facts, documents and data are taken into consideration. This neo-Anglican vision is based on a one-sided, arbitrary interpretation of the ecclesiastic and religious events which took place during the troubled and confused reign of Henry VIII. It also disregards the distinct Reformation characteristics of Anglican preaching and writing in the sixteenth century, to the present day. Moreover, it is based on serious misconceptions of the deepest essence of the Reformation, and of the real content, purport, and intention of the teaching and theology of the Roman Catholic Church.
On the other hand, in reaction to liberalism and lawlessness on the part of Anglo-Catholics within the Protestant Episcopal Church, many abandoned the denomination, and established independent jurisdictions which were staunchly Anglo-Catholic in theology and practice, but of a conservative nature in other respects. None of these independent Churches, however, are recognized by Canterbury or any other of the national Churches of the Anglican Communion.
Finally freed from the restrictions of Canon Law and church custom, these Anglo-Catholics were able to establish Tractarian parishes along ultra-
Montagne ritualist lines, furnishing their own Romish clergy as well, most of whom had not been ordained in the P.E.C.U.S.A. or trained in her seminaries. Ostensibly, they claimed to have broken with the mother church over the use of the 1928 BCP and the introduction of the 1979 BCP, which they regarded as heretical.
But instead of retaining the 1928 BCP, these Anglo-Catholic groups wasted no time in introducing a novelty of their own and insinuating it upon an often unwitting laity. The Anglican Missal, and Anglo-Catholic version of the Roman Mass in English, quickly supplanted the Book of Common Prayer in the majority of parishes of the splinter Churches, and in many instances its use was made mandatory.
Paradoxically, those who claimed it necessary to split from the P.E.C.U.S.A. because of the introduction of a new Prayer Book became the promoters of a liturgy completely foreign to orthodox Anglican usage. The Anglican Missal is not really a substitute for the Prayer Book, as it contains only the liturgy for the Mass and rites incidental to the celebration of the Mass, such as making "holy" water and prayers for the dead. Along with the introduction of the Missal, the Anglo-Catholic clergy
convinced their lay constituencies that the Missal was really the 1928 Book of Common Prayer with "proper" rubrics added to restore "catholic"orthodoxy to the liturgy destroyed by the Protestant Reformation and to correct "errors and flaws in the 1928 BCP." Of course, since Anglo-Catholicism insists upon having the Holy Communion (Mass or Holy Eucharist, as they call it) every Lord's Day, gullible congregations were
tricked into accepting this substitute for the Prayer Book without complaint. They were not even aware they had been robbed, given paste for the gem of our Protestant Anglican heritage.
When first introduced by Anglo-Catholic clergy (illegally) to American congregations, the Anglican Missal was publicly condemned by over thirty bishops of the Church and forbidden in their Dioceses. High Church bishops, such as Dr. Manning of New York and Dr. Parsons of California were very outspoken in their rejection of the Missal as a "perversion and misrepresentation" of the Prayer Book. The General Convention of the
Episcopal Church soundly rejected the Missal and condemned its use as a threat to Anglicanism in the country.
The origins of the Anglican Missal, in its British and American versions,
cannot be dealt with herein. It is sufficient to say that it has never been an approved service book of the Anglican Communion, and itself bears little relation to the Book of Common Prayer. Yet, because of the ignorance of Episcopalian believers, regarding their own precious Book of Common Prayer, even conservative churchmen have been duped into accepting a lie. In their desire to protect their orthodox Christian heritage, they have unwittingly sacrificed a priceless portion of that heritage.
Yes, the 1928 BCP may still be found in the pews of these Anglo-Romanist churches: this is the unkindest cut of all, as it is a bold sham. One poor lady was even told that the Missal was really the Sarum Use of Salisbury Cathedral, which her monsignor regarded as the "purist" liturgy of Christendom!
The notion of many Reformed Protestants that Anglicanism was never really "reform-minded" and thoroughly Protestant is, like the neo-Anglican vision, based on a one sided judgment which sees the situation only from a Puritan viewpoint. But, as is evident from classical sixteenth century Anglican theology, it is impossible to explain the struggle between Anglicanism and Puritanism under Elizabeth I as a secret nostalgia for the Roman Church, or as an attempt to arrive at a compromise without
principle.
If the Anglican Reformation ran a different course from that of the Lutheran and the other Reformed churches, this must be attributed not to after effects of Roman Catholic influences, but rather to certain typically English circumstances, to certain traits in the English national Character, and to the practical, humanistic character of English religiousness.
The bishops who laid the foundations of Anglicanism during the time of Elizabeth I were not striving for an unprincipled compromise betweenRomanism and Protestantism. In their writings there is not a trace of Romish sympathies. When they battled Puritanism, they were concerned about protecting the Church against premature and shortsighted abolition and against disorder and liturgical dissoluteness. As far as the episcopal government of the Church, the liturgy, and the sacraments were concerned, it is out of the question that the Anglican bishops of the time included
anything of a Romish origin. Elizabeth I had no other aim than to give the Reformation movement its own austere form and style. But the Anglican Reformation never reached a static position where nothing could be changed or revoked. More than did Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism, Anglicanism succeeded in realizing the universal Christian ideals of the reformers.
Yet, it also preserved a certain openness to the Catholic and the Reformed
interpretations of the the faith. It has taken seriously the principle "ecclesia catholica semper reformanda" - the church catholic, always reforming. By nature Anglicanism has a wide vision. Moreover, it has a great reverence for what has grown slowly, what has been tried, what has been generally accepted - in short, for tradition (not to be confused with the Catholic concept of tradition).
It cannot be denied that in the course of time the vision of the true nature of the Reformation and of Protestantism has for many Anglicans been clouded. The rise of a pietistic subjectivism and liberal individualism has influenced many Anglicans to view Protestantism as a negative, destructive force which lacks respect due to age-old Christian tradition and community values. To a great degree, Anglo-Catholicism has succeeded in wiping out the last traces of Anglicanism being related to the Reformation. This has in turn produced a kind of ecclesiastical and
theological schizophrenia within worldwide Anglicanism, leaving the Communion deeply divided and to a great degree incapable of dealing with the many divisive issues of twentieth-century Christianity.
Anglo-Catholicism, once embraced as a remedy against rationalism and humanism, has proved inadequate to the job. Historically foreign to the true tradition of English and American churchmanship, it has become exactly what it initially sought to combat: it is liberal, lawless, and radical in the extreme.
Anglicanism must be called back to its Reformation foundations and historic theology: without such a reclamation of its Protestant heritage, it is in danger of disappearing altogether. The ultimate decision for Anglican believers will not lie in choosing a Protestant or Catholic identity, but in choosing between Papal and biblical Christianity.
---The Rev. Dr. James I. Packer is professor of Theology at Regent College, in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is also a senior editor, Visiting Scholar, and Institute Fellow for Christianity Today. This article is drawn from The Protestant Alliance.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Heresy in the Cathedral
http://www.almohler.com/blog_read.php?id=989
Posted: Thursday, August 16, 2007 at 4:40 am ET
The Rt. Rev. Peter Jensen, Australia's Archbishop of Sydney, is making
headlines for denying a heretic access to the pulpits of the churches under
his care. The heretic is the retired bishop of Newark, New Jersey, The Rt.
Rev. John Shelby Spong -- a man who has denied virtually every major
Christian doctrine.
Heretics are rarely excommunicated these days. Instead, they go on book
tours. Bishop Spong is visiting Australia at the invitation of Australia's
Anglican Primate Phillip Aspinall of Brisbane. When Archbishop Jensen denied
Bishop Spong access to the pulpits of Sydney, Archbishop Aspinall extended
an invitation for Spong to preach in Brisbane's St. John's Cathedral.
As the The Australian reports:
A row has erupted within the Anglican Church over a visit to Australia by an
American cleric who has being accused of modernising Christ to the point of
stripping him of all divinity.
Sydney Archbishop Peter Jensen has taken the extraordinary step of banning
John Shelby Spong, a fellow member of the Anglican communion who arrives in
Sydney this morning, from churches in his diocese.
By contrast, Anglican Primate Phillip Aspinall has invited Bishop Spong, a
leader of the church's liberal wing, to deliver two sermons in Brisbane's St
John's Cathedral.
John Shelby Spong has written a series of books attacking the central
doctrines of the Christian faith. As a matter of fact, he has basically run
out of doctrines to deny. He has repudiated the Christian faith as treasured
by the faithful Church for two thousand years -- the faith of biblical
Christianity. This faith is the faith for which the martyrs died.
Mark Thompson, responding to Bishop Spong in the newspaper of the Sydney
archdiocese, noted correctly that "one cannot imagine anyone willing to be
martyred for Spong's Jesus."
Even the secular press understands the depths of Bishop Spong's denial of
Christian truth. The Sydney Morning Herald noted that Spong has denied that
Jesus was born of a virgin, that Joseph ever existed, that Jesus performed
miracles, that He died for our sins, and that He was raised from the dead.
He also denies the deity of Christ and the nature of God as a personal
being, much less the only true God. In other books Spong has suggested that
the Apostle Paul was a repressed homosexual. More recently, he has joined
the chorus of those suggesting that the death of Christ was necessary for
the salvation of sinners amounts to "divine child abuse."
So how would Archbishop Aspinall defend his decision to allow a heretic to
preach two sermons in this cathedral? Here is his answer:
Dr Aspinall defended his decision to welcome the American bishop. "Bishop
Spong speaking at St John's Cathedral is not particularly extraordinary," he
said.
"That Bishop Spong holds views which some Anglicans might find challenging
is no reason to exclude him from speaking.
"Our church has thousands of members and widely diverse views on a wide
variety of subjects. I am sure Anglicans will listen respectfully to the
bishop's views and make their own minds up."
Not particularly extraordinary? Given Archbishop Aspinall's own theological
liberalism, that might be frighteningly accurate. What kind of pastor would
invite his people to hear a denial of the Christian faith from his own
pulpit and then encourage them to "make their own minds up?"
This controversy in Australia is indicative of the situation we now face in
so much of Christianity worldwide. Archbishop Jensen defends the faith and
protects his people and is treated as a divisive figure. Archbishop
Aspinall invites a heretic into his pulpit, explains that this is "not
particularly extraordinary," and is seen as a portrait of magnanimous
ecclesiastical leadership. Bishop Spong gets to sell more books, and the
public gets to see a spectacle.
How profoundly sad . . . and how utterly predictable.
--
Posted: Thursday, August 16, 2007 at 4:40 am ET
The Rt. Rev. Peter Jensen, Australia's Archbishop of Sydney, is making
headlines for denying a heretic access to the pulpits of the churches under
his care. The heretic is the retired bishop of Newark, New Jersey, The Rt.
Rev. John Shelby Spong -- a man who has denied virtually every major
Christian doctrine.
Heretics are rarely excommunicated these days. Instead, they go on book
tours. Bishop Spong is visiting Australia at the invitation of Australia's
Anglican Primate Phillip Aspinall of Brisbane. When Archbishop Jensen denied
Bishop Spong access to the pulpits of Sydney, Archbishop Aspinall extended
an invitation for Spong to preach in Brisbane's St. John's Cathedral.
As the The Australian reports:
A row has erupted within the Anglican Church over a visit to Australia by an
American cleric who has being accused of modernising Christ to the point of
stripping him of all divinity.
Sydney Archbishop Peter Jensen has taken the extraordinary step of banning
John Shelby Spong, a fellow member of the Anglican communion who arrives in
Sydney this morning, from churches in his diocese.
By contrast, Anglican Primate Phillip Aspinall has invited Bishop Spong, a
leader of the church's liberal wing, to deliver two sermons in Brisbane's St
John's Cathedral.
John Shelby Spong has written a series of books attacking the central
doctrines of the Christian faith. As a matter of fact, he has basically run
out of doctrines to deny. He has repudiated the Christian faith as treasured
by the faithful Church for two thousand years -- the faith of biblical
Christianity. This faith is the faith for which the martyrs died.
Mark Thompson, responding to Bishop Spong in the newspaper of the Sydney
archdiocese, noted correctly that "one cannot imagine anyone willing to be
martyred for Spong's Jesus."
Even the secular press understands the depths of Bishop Spong's denial of
Christian truth. The Sydney Morning Herald noted that Spong has denied that
Jesus was born of a virgin, that Joseph ever existed, that Jesus performed
miracles, that He died for our sins, and that He was raised from the dead.
He also denies the deity of Christ and the nature of God as a personal
being, much less the only true God. In other books Spong has suggested that
the Apostle Paul was a repressed homosexual. More recently, he has joined
the chorus of those suggesting that the death of Christ was necessary for
the salvation of sinners amounts to "divine child abuse."
So how would Archbishop Aspinall defend his decision to allow a heretic to
preach two sermons in this cathedral? Here is his answer:
Dr Aspinall defended his decision to welcome the American bishop. "Bishop
Spong speaking at St John's Cathedral is not particularly extraordinary," he
said.
"That Bishop Spong holds views which some Anglicans might find challenging
is no reason to exclude him from speaking.
"Our church has thousands of members and widely diverse views on a wide
variety of subjects. I am sure Anglicans will listen respectfully to the
bishop's views and make their own minds up."
Not particularly extraordinary? Given Archbishop Aspinall's own theological
liberalism, that might be frighteningly accurate. What kind of pastor would
invite his people to hear a denial of the Christian faith from his own
pulpit and then encourage them to "make their own minds up?"
This controversy in Australia is indicative of the situation we now face in
so much of Christianity worldwide. Archbishop Jensen defends the faith and
protects his people and is treated as a divisive figure. Archbishop
Aspinall invites a heretic into his pulpit, explains that this is "not
particularly extraordinary," and is seen as a portrait of magnanimous
ecclesiastical leadership. Bishop Spong gets to sell more books, and the
public gets to see a spectacle.
How profoundly sad . . . and how utterly predictable.
--
U.S. Bishops Ask Archbishop of Canterbury for Clarity
08/16/07
From The Living Church:
Bishops who have made a public commitment to support the Windsor Report have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to be clear and articulate in explaining what the consequences will be if the House of Bishops fails to give the assurances sought by the primates.
Seventeen diocesan bishops and one bishop suffragan from The Episcopal Church received an extensive briefing on the primates’ communiqué from the Rev. Canon Gregory Cameron, and shared with him their hopes for the meeting in September between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the House of Bishops during a conference held Aug. 9-10 at Camp Allen near Houston.
Canon Cameron is deputy secretary general and director of ecumenical affairs for the Anglican Consultative Council. He also has served as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s secretary at recent primates’ meetings and wrote the final draft of the primates’ communiqué. The Most Rev. Rowan Williams is scheduled to attend the first two days of the bishops’ meeting Sept. 20-25 in New Orleans.
During the Texas meeting the bishops decided not to issue a public statement and agreed not to discuss meeting details. This is the fifth time that “Windsor bishops” have met at Camp Allen to consider the Windsor Report and The Episcopal Church’s response to it. At previous meetings the bishops have issued statements and The Living Church was assured by several participants at the Aug. 9-10 gathering that the overall goals and objectives remain consistent with what has been previously published.
Steve Waring
From The Living Church:
Bishops who have made a public commitment to support the Windsor Report have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to be clear and articulate in explaining what the consequences will be if the House of Bishops fails to give the assurances sought by the primates.
Seventeen diocesan bishops and one bishop suffragan from The Episcopal Church received an extensive briefing on the primates’ communiqué from the Rev. Canon Gregory Cameron, and shared with him their hopes for the meeting in September between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the House of Bishops during a conference held Aug. 9-10 at Camp Allen near Houston.
Canon Cameron is deputy secretary general and director of ecumenical affairs for the Anglican Consultative Council. He also has served as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s secretary at recent primates’ meetings and wrote the final draft of the primates’ communiqué. The Most Rev. Rowan Williams is scheduled to attend the first two days of the bishops’ meeting Sept. 20-25 in New Orleans.
During the Texas meeting the bishops decided not to issue a public statement and agreed not to discuss meeting details. This is the fifth time that “Windsor bishops” have met at Camp Allen to consider the Windsor Report and The Episcopal Church’s response to it. At previous meetings the bishops have issued statements and The Living Church was assured by several participants at the Aug. 9-10 gathering that the overall goals and objectives remain consistent with what has been previously published.
Steve Waring
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
The Latest Case of Molestation
The latest case of sexual misconduct in the diocese is the fourth since 1992. Is this high for a diocese of less than 100 parishes? It appears so, but given the current direction of pecusa who knows how many of these cases will be investigated in the future. It is shocking and difficult to understand why someone as widely respected as Ed Putnam would be the latest priest to have been accused of and admitted to such acts. His self-published novel, as the Syracuse Post-Standard suggests, may provide a clue. In the novel, which is described as "quite autobiographical," the main character is molested as a Boy Scout by an older Scout.
The zero tolerance comment from the diocese apparently is a shift in policy since it took several years for the diocese to seriously investigate the charges made against Ralph Johnson. This latest case is sad, especially for the victims, but also for Ed Putnam and all those who have loved and respected Ed for his personable nature and by many accounts good ministry of many years.
The zero tolerance comment from the diocese apparently is a shift in policy since it took several years for the diocese to seriously investigate the charges made against Ralph Johnson. This latest case is sad, especially for the victims, but also for Ed Putnam and all those who have loved and respected Ed for his personable nature and by many accounts good ministry of many years.
Episcopal Priest Admits Abuse in Skaneateles
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
By Renée K. Gadoua
Staff writer, Syracuse Post-Standard
A former Episcopal priest who ran for state Assembly last year has admitted sexually abusing four adolescent boys while serving as rector of St. James Episcopal Church in Skaneateles from January 1986 to May 1993.
J. Edward Putnam, 66, was suspended from acting as a priest for 20 years after a diocesan investigation, said the Rev. Karen C. Lewis, assistant to Bishop Gladstone "Skip" Adams.
Putnam signed a document last month that outlines the accusations and the church discipline, Lewis said. In a written statement to the bishop, Putnam said he engaged in "inappropriate conduct with minors" while at St. James, she said.
The diocese received a complaint about Putnam from one man on May 13 and immediately began an investigation, Lewis said. Two days later, Adams prohibited Putnam from acting as a priest while the diocese investigated the allegations.
The investigation revealed three other victims. All were males and minors at the time. She would not describe the incidents but said some occurred in the church at 96 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles.
"We just don't tolerate this," Lewis said.
Putnam cannot celebrate Mass, preach, teach, or perform any other functions of a priest, Lewis said. He cannot wear a clerical collar and cannot use the title "Rev." or "Father."
The 20-year suspension, which was effective July 23, can be extended at the discretion of the bishop or his successor, Lewis said.
Putnam could not be reached for comment Monday. The telephone at his 42 Jordan St., Skaneateles, home has been disconnected, and he did not respond to an e-mail message.
His tenure at the Skaneateles church immediately preceded that of Adams, who was elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New in 2001. Putnam also served as interim dean of St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Syracuse and in parishes in Albany, Rhode Island and Michigan. He retired from active ministry in 2004.
Lewis said diocesan officials informed New York State Police and the other dioceses where Putnam ministered of the accusations. First Chief Assistant District Attorney Rick Trunfio said he doesn't know about the case, and it's unclear whether the criminal statute of limitations has run out.
Adams and others involved with the investigation met Monday night with members of St. James Church. Lewis said informing the congregation is part of diocesan policy.
"For it to remain a secret would cause damage," she said.
Diocesan clergy and lay leaders were informed in a letter from the bishop mailed Monday.
"The Episcopal Church and this Diocese maintain a zero-tolerance policy for any type of clergy misconduct, particularly in the area of sexual misconduct," Adams wrote. "We know this behavior to be an abuse of power, a betrayal of trust, and a sinful act against God's beloved creation."
The diocese has investigated three cases of clergy sexual misconduct since 1992, Lewis said. The Rev. Wallace Frey, pastor of St. David's Episcopal Church in DeWitt for 28 years, resigned from the ministry in 1992 after admitting sexual contact with several young men, including at least one teenager.
In 2006, the Rev. Ralph E. Johnson resigned from the ministry after a five-month investigation of allegations he sexually abused a boy in the 1970s while serving as rector of St. Paul's Church in Owego.
Neither was charged with a crime.
The third case involved a deceased priest. Lewis would not name the priest, but said the diocese is paying for counseling for the victim.
Putnam served as chaplain to the New York State Assembly from 1994 to 1996. In November 2006, he ran unsuccessfully against William Barclay, R-Pulaski, who won a third term representing the 124th Assembly District.
In 2004, Putnam self-published a novel, "Sandy Hill." The biography included with the book describes him as retired, but does not say he is a priest. The back cover describes the book as "quite autobiographical."
The novel is about a recently retired school administrator returning to his hometown in Upstate New York for a 45th high school reunion. In one scene, the main character, Dan, recalls an incident in which an older Boy Scout, Mitch, touched his genitals.
"Dan saw a pedestal shatter and a hero fall before his eyes," Putnam wrote. "The trust Dan had committed to Mitch had been destroyed, and it would never be the same again."
Renee K. Gadoua can be reached at rgadoua@syracuse.com or 470-2203.
By Renée K. Gadoua
Staff writer, Syracuse Post-Standard
A former Episcopal priest who ran for state Assembly last year has admitted sexually abusing four adolescent boys while serving as rector of St. James Episcopal Church in Skaneateles from January 1986 to May 1993.
J. Edward Putnam, 66, was suspended from acting as a priest for 20 years after a diocesan investigation, said the Rev. Karen C. Lewis, assistant to Bishop Gladstone "Skip" Adams.
Putnam signed a document last month that outlines the accusations and the church discipline, Lewis said. In a written statement to the bishop, Putnam said he engaged in "inappropriate conduct with minors" while at St. James, she said.
The diocese received a complaint about Putnam from one man on May 13 and immediately began an investigation, Lewis said. Two days later, Adams prohibited Putnam from acting as a priest while the diocese investigated the allegations.
The investigation revealed three other victims. All were males and minors at the time. She would not describe the incidents but said some occurred in the church at 96 E. Genesee St., Skaneateles.
"We just don't tolerate this," Lewis said.
Putnam cannot celebrate Mass, preach, teach, or perform any other functions of a priest, Lewis said. He cannot wear a clerical collar and cannot use the title "Rev." or "Father."
The 20-year suspension, which was effective July 23, can be extended at the discretion of the bishop or his successor, Lewis said.
Putnam could not be reached for comment Monday. The telephone at his 42 Jordan St., Skaneateles, home has been disconnected, and he did not respond to an e-mail message.
His tenure at the Skaneateles church immediately preceded that of Adams, who was elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New in 2001. Putnam also served as interim dean of St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Syracuse and in parishes in Albany, Rhode Island and Michigan. He retired from active ministry in 2004.
Lewis said diocesan officials informed New York State Police and the other dioceses where Putnam ministered of the accusations. First Chief Assistant District Attorney Rick Trunfio said he doesn't know about the case, and it's unclear whether the criminal statute of limitations has run out.
Adams and others involved with the investigation met Monday night with members of St. James Church. Lewis said informing the congregation is part of diocesan policy.
"For it to remain a secret would cause damage," she said.
Diocesan clergy and lay leaders were informed in a letter from the bishop mailed Monday.
"The Episcopal Church and this Diocese maintain a zero-tolerance policy for any type of clergy misconduct, particularly in the area of sexual misconduct," Adams wrote. "We know this behavior to be an abuse of power, a betrayal of trust, and a sinful act against God's beloved creation."
The diocese has investigated three cases of clergy sexual misconduct since 1992, Lewis said. The Rev. Wallace Frey, pastor of St. David's Episcopal Church in DeWitt for 28 years, resigned from the ministry in 1992 after admitting sexual contact with several young men, including at least one teenager.
In 2006, the Rev. Ralph E. Johnson resigned from the ministry after a five-month investigation of allegations he sexually abused a boy in the 1970s while serving as rector of St. Paul's Church in Owego.
Neither was charged with a crime.
The third case involved a deceased priest. Lewis would not name the priest, but said the diocese is paying for counseling for the victim.
Putnam served as chaplain to the New York State Assembly from 1994 to 1996. In November 2006, he ran unsuccessfully against William Barclay, R-Pulaski, who won a third term representing the 124th Assembly District.
In 2004, Putnam self-published a novel, "Sandy Hill." The biography included with the book describes him as retired, but does not say he is a priest. The back cover describes the book as "quite autobiographical."
The novel is about a recently retired school administrator returning to his hometown in Upstate New York for a 45th high school reunion. In one scene, the main character, Dan, recalls an incident in which an older Boy Scout, Mitch, touched his genitals.
"Dan saw a pedestal shatter and a hero fall before his eyes," Putnam wrote. "The trust Dan had committed to Mitch had been destroyed, and it would never be the same again."
Renee K. Gadoua can be reached at rgadoua@syracuse.com or 470-2203.
Former Episcopal priest in central NY admits to sexual abusing boys
From Newsday:
SKANEATELES, N.Y. - A former state Legislature chaplain who ran for the Assembly last year has admitted to sexually abusing four underage boys while serving as rector of a central New York church.
Officials with the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York say J. Edward Putnam, 66, recently admitted in a written statement to the bishop that he engaged in "inappropriate conduct with minors" while at St. James Episcopal Church in Skaneateles (skan-ee-AT'-lus).
An investigation begun in May resulted in his being suspended last month from acting as a priest for 20 years. Diocese officials say Putnam, who was ordained in 1970, admitted to sexually abusing the boys from early 1985 to mid-1993.
Putnam served as chaplain to the Assembly from 1994-96. Last year he ran unsuccessfully for the Assembly.
SKANEATELES, N.Y. - A former state Legislature chaplain who ran for the Assembly last year has admitted to sexually abusing four underage boys while serving as rector of a central New York church.
Officials with the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York say J. Edward Putnam, 66, recently admitted in a written statement to the bishop that he engaged in "inappropriate conduct with minors" while at St. James Episcopal Church in Skaneateles (skan-ee-AT'-lus).
An investigation begun in May resulted in his being suspended last month from acting as a priest for 20 years. Diocese officials say Putnam, who was ordained in 1970, admitted to sexually abusing the boys from early 1985 to mid-1993.
Putnam served as chaplain to the Assembly from 1994-96. Last year he ran unsuccessfully for the Assembly.
Friday, August 10, 2007
The Revisionist Dictionary - Part I
By Irenaeus (a frequent poster to Stand Firm in Faith, ed.)
First Edition—August 2007
PREFACE
This dictionary seeks to shed light on current debates in the U.S. Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion by exploring the foibles of Anglican Progressives (also known as reappraisers, revisionists, and theological liberals). Progressives’ Orthodox opponents (also known as reasserters and theological conservatives) have many foibles of their own. But Progressives’ foibles need attention more urgently. Progressives have long been better organized than the Orthodox, are ascendant in most rich-country Anglican churches, and now control most levers of power in the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. Progressives have largely set the terms of current debates, often in ways that mask their agenda and keep the Orthodox on the defensive.
In satirizing Progressive language and Progressives’ putative view of Anglican concepts and institutions, this dictionary seeks to illuminate the Progressive ethos and to suggest the possible consequences of Progressive terminology, tactics, and thinking. Fortunately, real-life Progressives don’t necessarily hold the extreme views caricatured here. Many, for example, disapprove of Progressive bishops’ harsh treatment of Orthodox clergy and congregations. Yet both sides need to pay closer attention to what Progressive terminology denotes and connotes. Such is human frailty that yesterday’s parody can become tomorrow’s reality. Better to satirize it than simply let it happen.
________________________________________
This dictionary uses the capitalized words “Orthodox” and “Progressive” in a specialized sense:
--- ORTHODOX denotes theologically conservative persons and views in the context of the U.S. Episcopal Church and the broader world of Anglican Christianity; it does not refer to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Synonym: reasserter. When uncapitalized, “orthodox” denotes conforming to established Christian doctrine.
--- PROGRESSIVE denotes theologically liberal persons and views in the context of the U.S. Episcopal Church and the broader Anglican world. Synonyms: reappraiser; revisionist.
Asterisks denote words defined elsewhere in this dictionary, as do cross-references like “See” and “See also.”
________________________________________
20/20 VISION: Plan adopted in 2000 to double the Episcopal Church’s average Sunday attendance by 2020. As of 2005, attendance had fallen 8% from its 2000 level. At this rate of decline, attendance will have fallen 28% by 2020.
815: Affectionate nickname for the Episcopal Church Center, 815 Second Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017. Mainspring and heart of the church. Efficient cornucopia of resources for apologetics*, parish ministry, evangelism, and litigation. Located one block from United Nations Headquarters to facilitate sharing the Episcopal Church’s insights with world governments. Has New Age bookstore and penthouse apartment for presiding bishop. “815 has spoken; the case is closed.”
ABANDON COMMUNION: Short for “abandoning the communion of this Church.” An Orthodox priest abandons the communion of the Episcopal Church if he takes a long-planned sabbatical without notifying his Progressive bishop. A Progressive priest does not abandon communion by converting to Islam. Such deep* and sagacious distinctions illustrate why Progressive bishops are bishops and you are not.
ABRAHAM: Husband of Sarah.
ACCEPTING: Approving; welcoming. “Unless you become more accepting, we cannot accept your presence.”
ACTION PLAN: Plan already doomed to inaction.
ADOPTIONISM: More bother than reproductive rights.
AFFIRMING: Accepting*; displaying cheerful tolerance*.
AFFIRMING CATHOLICISM: Progressive theology in High Church garb; smells, bells, and birettas untainted by catholic theology.
ALPHA COURSE: Orthodox recruiting device. “Alpha lets you explore the Christian faith in a relaxed setting.”
ALTERNATIVE EPISCOPAL OVERSIGHT: Arrangement by which a congregation claiming it cannot in good conscience accept the authority of its own diocesan bishop comes under the authority of another bishop; subversive alternative to DEPO*; step towards local schism. See also Donatism (2).
ALTERNATIVE PRIMATIAL OVERSIGHT: Step towards regional schism. “The Diocese of Pittsburgh, dismayed by the theology of Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, has requested alternative primatial oversight.”
AMENDMENT OF LIFE: Forsaking “sin” (1)*; reforming your ways. “Having repented of my sin, I firmly intend amendment of life.” Superseded by baptismal covenant (2)*.
AMERICAN ANGLICAN COUNCIL: Nexus of Orthodox Conspiracy.
ANALYZE: To “think about anything for more than a few minutes” (Tony Proscio).
ANGLICAN CHURCH OF CANADA: Second most enlightened member church of the Anglican Communion.
ANGLICAN COMMUNION NETWORK: Schismatic cult allied with Orthodox Conspiracy; synod of discontent.
ANGLICAN COVENANT, PROPOSED: Hurtful* exclusion* device sought by Orthodox Conspiracy and its Global South* allies to subvert the autonomy* and polity* of the Episcopal Church; yoke of bondage. See also Curia; Inquisition.
ANGLICAN SECRETARIAT: Facilitates inter-Anglican cooperation: e.g., by providing staff support for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Anglican Consultative Council, primates’* Meeting, and Lambeth Consultation. Administered by a secretary general who reports to the Archbishop of Canterbury and always comes from among well-connected Progressive clergy in wealthy, enlightened English-speaking countries. Priceless resource for Progressive Anglicanism.
ANGLO-CATHOLIC (increasingly rare): High Church reactionary.
APOLOGETICS: Apologizing for all that is wrong with Christianity. “Bishop Grobble has taken apologetics to a new level: begging Al-Qaida’s forgiveness for the Catholic Reconquest of Spain.”
ATONEMENT:
(1) Traditionally, “the reconciliation of God and humankind through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ” (Merriam Webster).
(2) For radical progressives, a pernicious doctrine of “cosmic child abuse,” in which “God murder[s] his son for the salvation of the world” (Giles Fraser).
AUTHENTIC: In the case of women, persons of non-European ancestry, and sexual minorities, fidelity to the outlooks and ideologies prescribed for their group: respectively, militant feminism, militant separatism, and militant militancy. “In shouting ‘Coitus is punishment!’ Andrea Dworkin offers an authentic voice* of feminist rage. See also Identity.
AUTONOMY: Freedom from any non-P.C.* constraint. “To preserve its integrity, the Episcopal Church must zealously maintain its autonomy.”
BAPTISMAL COVENANT
(1) Traditionally, the covenant made at baptism by which we repent, renounce sin, accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and become members of Christ, redeemed by his atoning sacrifice. “Obdurate sin grieves the Holy Spirit and violates our baptismal covenant.”
(2) For Progressives, two related ideas: that baptism irrevocably confers good standing in the church so neither “sinful” conduct nor heterodox belief disqualifies any baptized person from holding church office; and that baptized persons need little trouble themselves about “sin”*, repentance*, or amendment of life*. “A moratorium on ordaining noncelibate homosexuals would betray our baptismal covenant.”
BARGAIN WITH GOD: To balance God’s will with our own needs.
BASH
(1) “To strike with a heavy, crushing blow” (American Heritage Dictionary); “to injure or damage by striking” (Merriam-Webster).
(2) To criticize. “Orthodox bloggers bashed the new Presiding Bishop for her ‘Mother Jesus’ sermon.” See also Demonize; Hurtful; Insensitive; Offensive; Pejorative Labeling; Safe Place, Tolerate; Verbal Violence.
(3) Expenses-paid trip to church convention.
BEYOND INCLUSION: Quotas; speech codes. “We must now go beyond inclusion to give the pyromaniac community* a truly warm welcome*.”
BIBLE: Collection of ancient patriarchal texts available for reinterpretation, contextualization, deconstruction, ridicule, and selective use. Subordinate to canons (2)*.
BIBLIOLATRY: Worship of the Bible*; believing that the Bible has greater authority than the Constitution and Canons (2)* of the Episcopal Church. “If we exalt scripture as the supreme, preemptive authority, we may well be guilty of bibliolatry” (D.C.).
BISHOP
(1) If Orthodox, kindly figurehead; pastor to diocesan clergy; first among clerical equals.
(2) If Progressive, God’s Vice-Regent; S/he Who Must Be Obeyed.
BOUNDARY CROSSING: Performing episcopal acts, such as confirmations and ordinations, in the territory of another bishop without that bishop’s permission; unpardonable sin. “According to Bishop Howard, the Ugandan bishop improperly crossed diocesan boundaries by confirming 15 persons at a new Anglican church in Jacksonville.”
BOX: Container into which the Orthodox put God. “If you stake the gospel on Christ’s bodily Resurrection*, you put God in a very small box.” Because Progressive reason is liberating*, Progressive beliefs do not similarly confine God.
BOY: Small, disruptive, potentially patriarchal human in need of domestication.
CANON
(1) Set of ancient writings traditionally referred to as the Bible*: “the canon of scripture.”
(2) Corporate bylaws of the Episcopal Church; living scripture. “The Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church are the supreme authority for our common faith and life.”
(3) In reference to Progressive clergy, priests affiliated with a cathedral and freed from the tedium of parish ministry. “The Reverend Mercedes Moonbeam-McGillicuddy is Canon Missioner for Diversity Curriculum Coordination and New Age Awareness.”
CHANCELLOR: Chief legal officer of the Episcopal Church or its dioceses. (David Booth Beers is Chancellor of the Episcopal Church, and don’t you forget it.) The Chancellor provides the legal interpretations needed by Progressive church leaders and makes examples of clergy and vestries who attempt to make off with parish property. See also Parliamentarian.
CHARITY: Money or property given to others so as to make them feel bad. “We don’t take charity.”
CHEAP GRACE: Grace* without repentance*. Derogatory term borrowed from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a well-known citizen of Nazi Germany, and now used to deride the theology and practice of the baptismal covenant (2)*. In his book, The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Bonhoeffer defined cheap grace as “the grace we bestow on ourselves,” manifested in “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance” and “baptism without church discipline.” Bonhoeffer claims that cheap grace “amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sins departs.”
CHICKEN DINNER: Cheap, reduced-fat form of bribery, alleged to work magic on poor-country clerics. “According to well-placed Progressive sources, the American Anglican Council plans to woo Global South primates* with bounteous chicken dinners.”
CLINICAL PASTORAL EDUCATION: Assigning a seminarian to an emergency room, nursing home, hospice, or other place of acute human need to provide value-neutral, answer-free spiritual counsel. “My clinical pastoral education taught me not to offer easy comfort to bereaved families but to give them space to discover for themselves the meaning of their suffering.”
COMMUNITY: “Any group of people with anything in common” (Proscio), particularly an oppressed minority group: “the pedestrian community”; “the pyromaniac community.”
CONFESSION: Superseded by baptismal covenant (2)*.
CONSULT: To ask for others’ opinions as a mark of inclusion and respect, without necessarily planning to listen.
CONTEXT: Background facts we invoke to neutralize or liberate* unhelpful* parts of the Bible. “We must take Christ’s rejection of ‘immorality’ in the context of first century cult prostitution.” See also Lectionary.
CONVERSATION: Playing the Progressives’ game by the Progressives’ rules. If you are Orthodox, you cannot have a satisfactory “conversation” with Progressives unless you discuss their agenda on their terms, using their language and working towards their conclusions. Come, let us reason together!
COUNCIL OF NICEA, FIRST: Church council held in 325 C.E. Prohibited boundary-crossing*.
CREED: What we say after the sermon.
CHURCH GROWTH CONSULTANT: Explains why your congregation does well by shrinking more slowly than others.
CURIA: Possible result of Anglican Covenant*.
First Edition—August 2007
PREFACE
This dictionary seeks to shed light on current debates in the U.S. Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion by exploring the foibles of Anglican Progressives (also known as reappraisers, revisionists, and theological liberals). Progressives’ Orthodox opponents (also known as reasserters and theological conservatives) have many foibles of their own. But Progressives’ foibles need attention more urgently. Progressives have long been better organized than the Orthodox, are ascendant in most rich-country Anglican churches, and now control most levers of power in the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. Progressives have largely set the terms of current debates, often in ways that mask their agenda and keep the Orthodox on the defensive.
In satirizing Progressive language and Progressives’ putative view of Anglican concepts and institutions, this dictionary seeks to illuminate the Progressive ethos and to suggest the possible consequences of Progressive terminology, tactics, and thinking. Fortunately, real-life Progressives don’t necessarily hold the extreme views caricatured here. Many, for example, disapprove of Progressive bishops’ harsh treatment of Orthodox clergy and congregations. Yet both sides need to pay closer attention to what Progressive terminology denotes and connotes. Such is human frailty that yesterday’s parody can become tomorrow’s reality. Better to satirize it than simply let it happen.
________________________________________
This dictionary uses the capitalized words “Orthodox” and “Progressive” in a specialized sense:
--- ORTHODOX denotes theologically conservative persons and views in the context of the U.S. Episcopal Church and the broader world of Anglican Christianity; it does not refer to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Synonym: reasserter. When uncapitalized, “orthodox” denotes conforming to established Christian doctrine.
--- PROGRESSIVE denotes theologically liberal persons and views in the context of the U.S. Episcopal Church and the broader Anglican world. Synonyms: reappraiser; revisionist.
Asterisks denote words defined elsewhere in this dictionary, as do cross-references like “See” and “See also.”
________________________________________
20/20 VISION: Plan adopted in 2000 to double the Episcopal Church’s average Sunday attendance by 2020. As of 2005, attendance had fallen 8% from its 2000 level. At this rate of decline, attendance will have fallen 28% by 2020.
815: Affectionate nickname for the Episcopal Church Center, 815 Second Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017. Mainspring and heart of the church. Efficient cornucopia of resources for apologetics*, parish ministry, evangelism, and litigation. Located one block from United Nations Headquarters to facilitate sharing the Episcopal Church’s insights with world governments. Has New Age bookstore and penthouse apartment for presiding bishop. “815 has spoken; the case is closed.”
ABANDON COMMUNION: Short for “abandoning the communion of this Church.” An Orthodox priest abandons the communion of the Episcopal Church if he takes a long-planned sabbatical without notifying his Progressive bishop. A Progressive priest does not abandon communion by converting to Islam. Such deep* and sagacious distinctions illustrate why Progressive bishops are bishops and you are not.
ABRAHAM: Husband of Sarah.
ACCEPTING: Approving; welcoming. “Unless you become more accepting, we cannot accept your presence.”
ACTION PLAN: Plan already doomed to inaction.
ADOPTIONISM: More bother than reproductive rights.
AFFIRMING: Accepting*; displaying cheerful tolerance*.
AFFIRMING CATHOLICISM: Progressive theology in High Church garb; smells, bells, and birettas untainted by catholic theology.
ALPHA COURSE: Orthodox recruiting device. “Alpha lets you explore the Christian faith in a relaxed setting.”
ALTERNATIVE EPISCOPAL OVERSIGHT: Arrangement by which a congregation claiming it cannot in good conscience accept the authority of its own diocesan bishop comes under the authority of another bishop; subversive alternative to DEPO*; step towards local schism. See also Donatism (2).
ALTERNATIVE PRIMATIAL OVERSIGHT: Step towards regional schism. “The Diocese of Pittsburgh, dismayed by the theology of Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, has requested alternative primatial oversight.”
AMENDMENT OF LIFE: Forsaking “sin” (1)*; reforming your ways. “Having repented of my sin, I firmly intend amendment of life.” Superseded by baptismal covenant (2)*.
AMERICAN ANGLICAN COUNCIL: Nexus of Orthodox Conspiracy.
ANALYZE: To “think about anything for more than a few minutes” (Tony Proscio).
ANGLICAN CHURCH OF CANADA: Second most enlightened member church of the Anglican Communion.
ANGLICAN COMMUNION NETWORK: Schismatic cult allied with Orthodox Conspiracy; synod of discontent.
ANGLICAN COVENANT, PROPOSED: Hurtful* exclusion* device sought by Orthodox Conspiracy and its Global South* allies to subvert the autonomy* and polity* of the Episcopal Church; yoke of bondage. See also Curia; Inquisition.
ANGLICAN SECRETARIAT: Facilitates inter-Anglican cooperation: e.g., by providing staff support for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Anglican Consultative Council, primates’* Meeting, and Lambeth Consultation. Administered by a secretary general who reports to the Archbishop of Canterbury and always comes from among well-connected Progressive clergy in wealthy, enlightened English-speaking countries. Priceless resource for Progressive Anglicanism.
ANGLO-CATHOLIC (increasingly rare): High Church reactionary.
APOLOGETICS: Apologizing for all that is wrong with Christianity. “Bishop Grobble has taken apologetics to a new level: begging Al-Qaida’s forgiveness for the Catholic Reconquest of Spain.”
ATONEMENT:
(1) Traditionally, “the reconciliation of God and humankind through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ” (Merriam Webster).
(2) For radical progressives, a pernicious doctrine of “cosmic child abuse,” in which “God murder[s] his son for the salvation of the world” (Giles Fraser).
AUTHENTIC: In the case of women, persons of non-European ancestry, and sexual minorities, fidelity to the outlooks and ideologies prescribed for their group: respectively, militant feminism, militant separatism, and militant militancy. “In shouting ‘Coitus is punishment!’ Andrea Dworkin offers an authentic voice* of feminist rage. See also Identity.
AUTONOMY: Freedom from any non-P.C.* constraint. “To preserve its integrity, the Episcopal Church must zealously maintain its autonomy.”
BAPTISMAL COVENANT
(1) Traditionally, the covenant made at baptism by which we repent, renounce sin, accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and become members of Christ, redeemed by his atoning sacrifice. “Obdurate sin grieves the Holy Spirit and violates our baptismal covenant.”
(2) For Progressives, two related ideas: that baptism irrevocably confers good standing in the church so neither “sinful” conduct nor heterodox belief disqualifies any baptized person from holding church office; and that baptized persons need little trouble themselves about “sin”*, repentance*, or amendment of life*. “A moratorium on ordaining noncelibate homosexuals would betray our baptismal covenant.”
BARGAIN WITH GOD: To balance God’s will with our own needs.
BASH
(1) “To strike with a heavy, crushing blow” (American Heritage Dictionary); “to injure or damage by striking” (Merriam-Webster).
(2) To criticize. “Orthodox bloggers bashed the new Presiding Bishop for her ‘Mother Jesus’ sermon.” See also Demonize; Hurtful; Insensitive; Offensive; Pejorative Labeling; Safe Place, Tolerate; Verbal Violence.
(3) Expenses-paid trip to church convention.
BEYOND INCLUSION: Quotas; speech codes. “We must now go beyond inclusion to give the pyromaniac community* a truly warm welcome*.”
BIBLE: Collection of ancient patriarchal texts available for reinterpretation, contextualization, deconstruction, ridicule, and selective use. Subordinate to canons (2)*.
BIBLIOLATRY: Worship of the Bible*; believing that the Bible has greater authority than the Constitution and Canons (2)* of the Episcopal Church. “If we exalt scripture as the supreme, preemptive authority, we may well be guilty of bibliolatry” (D.C.).
BISHOP
(1) If Orthodox, kindly figurehead; pastor to diocesan clergy; first among clerical equals.
(2) If Progressive, God’s Vice-Regent; S/he Who Must Be Obeyed.
BOUNDARY CROSSING: Performing episcopal acts, such as confirmations and ordinations, in the territory of another bishop without that bishop’s permission; unpardonable sin. “According to Bishop Howard, the Ugandan bishop improperly crossed diocesan boundaries by confirming 15 persons at a new Anglican church in Jacksonville.”
BOX: Container into which the Orthodox put God. “If you stake the gospel on Christ’s bodily Resurrection*, you put God in a very small box.” Because Progressive reason is liberating*, Progressive beliefs do not similarly confine God.
BOY: Small, disruptive, potentially patriarchal human in need of domestication.
CANON
(1) Set of ancient writings traditionally referred to as the Bible*: “the canon of scripture.”
(2) Corporate bylaws of the Episcopal Church; living scripture. “The Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church are the supreme authority for our common faith and life.”
(3) In reference to Progressive clergy, priests affiliated with a cathedral and freed from the tedium of parish ministry. “The Reverend Mercedes Moonbeam-McGillicuddy is Canon Missioner for Diversity Curriculum Coordination and New Age Awareness.”
CHANCELLOR: Chief legal officer of the Episcopal Church or its dioceses. (David Booth Beers is Chancellor of the Episcopal Church, and don’t you forget it.) The Chancellor provides the legal interpretations needed by Progressive church leaders and makes examples of clergy and vestries who attempt to make off with parish property. See also Parliamentarian.
CHARITY: Money or property given to others so as to make them feel bad. “We don’t take charity.”
CHEAP GRACE: Grace* without repentance*. Derogatory term borrowed from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a well-known citizen of Nazi Germany, and now used to deride the theology and practice of the baptismal covenant (2)*. In his book, The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Bonhoeffer defined cheap grace as “the grace we bestow on ourselves,” manifested in “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance” and “baptism without church discipline.” Bonhoeffer claims that cheap grace “amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sins departs.”
CHICKEN DINNER: Cheap, reduced-fat form of bribery, alleged to work magic on poor-country clerics. “According to well-placed Progressive sources, the American Anglican Council plans to woo Global South primates* with bounteous chicken dinners.”
CLINICAL PASTORAL EDUCATION: Assigning a seminarian to an emergency room, nursing home, hospice, or other place of acute human need to provide value-neutral, answer-free spiritual counsel. “My clinical pastoral education taught me not to offer easy comfort to bereaved families but to give them space to discover for themselves the meaning of their suffering.”
COMMUNITY: “Any group of people with anything in common” (Proscio), particularly an oppressed minority group: “the pedestrian community”; “the pyromaniac community.”
CONFESSION: Superseded by baptismal covenant (2)*.
CONSULT: To ask for others’ opinions as a mark of inclusion and respect, without necessarily planning to listen.
CONTEXT: Background facts we invoke to neutralize or liberate* unhelpful* parts of the Bible. “We must take Christ’s rejection of ‘immorality’ in the context of first century cult prostitution.” See also Lectionary.
CONVERSATION: Playing the Progressives’ game by the Progressives’ rules. If you are Orthodox, you cannot have a satisfactory “conversation” with Progressives unless you discuss their agenda on their terms, using their language and working towards their conclusions. Come, let us reason together!
COUNCIL OF NICEA, FIRST: Church council held in 325 C.E. Prohibited boundary-crossing*.
CREED: What we say after the sermon.
CHURCH GROWTH CONSULTANT: Explains why your congregation does well by shrinking more slowly than others.
CURIA: Possible result of Anglican Covenant*.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Why Theology Should Precede Change
Written by Dr. Jacqueline Jenkins Keenan
Tuesday, 07 August 2007
Most people realize that change within the church is difficult. In fact, change within any organization is hard, and systems theory has long studied the reality that any change, whether good or bad, will be greeted with resistance. That is because all change causes loss, which creates accompanying reactions of confusion, anger, and grief. The best way to make a change is for the people involved to become convinced that, although they are still doing things the old way, they should be doing them the new way. In religious institutions it is important to undergird changes with a clear and articulated theological reasoning to justify the change. This stated reasoning should always precede the change and allow for a theological discussion about whether the change should be made. In this process either the change will be owned by those involved in the change, or the change in the form proposed may be revealed to be inappropriate before any injury is done to the church. The recent turmoil within the Episcopal Church demonstrates what can go wrong when the articulated theological reasoning follows rather than precedes and founds the change.
In the ongoing debate about sexuality The Episcopal Church (TEC) has consistently looked to the medical and scientific community in order to understand human sexuality. This tradition was continued when TEC presented a theological statement in 2005 to the worldwide Anglican Communion in order to explain its consecration of a homosexual bishop in 2003. This theological document, To Set Our Hope on Christ, stated that "Altogether, contemporary studies indicate that same-sex affection has a genetic- biological basis which is shaped in interaction with psycho-social and cultural-historical factors. Sexual orientation remains relatively fixed and generally not subject to change. Continuing studies have confirmed the 1973 decision of the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from their diagnostic manual of mental illness."
Unfortunately, the bibliography that was cited in this document consisted of scientific articles that were written between 1970 and 1995. In fact none of the TEC documents on homosexuality include any studies after 1995. But research on homosexuality has continued, and later studies have produced new data in the areas of genetics, prevalence rates, and mutability of homosexual attraction. These studies also show that data regarding homosexuality in men does not apply to women.
Two months after TEC presented its document to the Anglican Communion, I sent evidence of most of the updated information that appears in this article to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Presiding Bishop of TEC. The information included abstracts of all but the two newest articles, but I had included an article from The Washington Post quoting the researchers regarding those studies. I received a reply from Lambeth Palace that was general, but that thanked me for my "constructive and thoughtful contribution to the debate". The letter from the Office of the Presiding Bishop said, "I hope you will appreciate that the Presiding Bishop himself was not the author of To Set Our Hope on Christ, which your letter seems to suggest in its first sentence." Even though he was not the author, he chose the authors and left out anyone with a background in science. In an earlier letter from his office I was told "I would like to convey the Presiding Bishop's appreciation to you for drawing his attention to the importance that science plays in issues facing the life of the church." He should have included a person with a science background.
Before any further discussion of the issues with TEC's theological document take place, it is important to present the research that TEC missed. Since many churches are struggling with the issue of homosexuality, the information is beneficial to most denominations. It seems quite probable that many churches are not up to date, because they use theological journals to present rigorous science. Although the Anglican Theological Review was interested in the information in this article, for instance, it would not have printed it before the summer of 2009, because of the lag time to publication at theological journals. By then the information would be out of date, and TEC's error of using old science illustrates the tendency to canonize bibliographies that take a long time to be produced.
One clear area in which recent research has challenged earlier assessments is the genetic causality of homosexual attraction. In 1991 Bailey and Pillard ("A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation," Archives of General Psychiatry 48) published results of a study in men that suggested a genetic cause of same-sex attraction. It was largely on the basis of that report that To Set Our Hope on Christ concluded that homosexual attractions were based on genetic causes. But a 1994 article called "Homosexuality: The Behavioral Sciences and the Church" by Jones and Workman had already pointed out severe sample bias in that study. Further, a later study co-authored by Bailey did not support the 1991 results.
The 1991 Bailey and Pillard twin study on men looked at identical twins, fraternal twins, siblings that were not twins, and adopted siblings. Seeing traits significantly more often in pairs of identical twins than in the general population suggests heritability of the trait. The authors found that 52% of homosexual identical twins had a homosexual co- twin. Since that was much higher than the 2% rate of homosexuality in the general population at that time, such a large increase would indicate that genetic factors were highly likely. However, the subjects for this study were individuals recruited through gay publications. Besides the obvious problem of who would be likely to respond to such a solicitation, the data itself showed that even the adopted children in the study had five times the normal rate of homosexuality. A high rate in unrelated children indicates that the families of respondents were not typical of the general population. It is clear that the Bailey and Pillard study was subject to sampling bias.
In 1992 King and McDonald ("Homosexuals who are twins: A study of 46 Probands," British Journal of Psychiatry 160) did a twin study using an unbiased sample. It showed only about 25% of homosexual identical twins had a co-twin who was homosexual. This is still higher than the general population so it could indicate some heritability, but King and McDonald also did something else that any good researcher would do. They looked into the possibility that there might be environmental factors causing even this relatively low rate of concordance. They found that "genetic factors are insufficient explanation of the development of sexual orientation" because of social factors, including "a relatively high likelihood of sexual relations occurring with same sex co-twins at some time, particularly in monozygotic [identical] pairs." The identical twins were having a strong influence on each other.
In 2000 Bailey published a new study, this time co-authored by Kirk ("Measurement Models of Sexual Orientation in a Community Twin Sample," Behavioral Genetics 30.) This new study drew on a twin registry for the subject population instead of recruiting participants through gay publications. This new study also reported a much lower heritability rate for men than had the 1991 report, which Bailey had co-authored. This time heritability was only 30%. Yet a close look at the study shows that even this lower rate is subject to question. Once environmental factors have been described that interfere with results on heritability, they must be addressed in all later research. For some reason, however, the Kirk and Bailey study asked no questions about the social issues that King and McDonald found. As a result the study is fundamentally flawed in design.
Yet environmental effects became clear when the results of this same study were used in an article produced by Savin-Williams in 2006 ("Who's Gay? Does it Matter?" Current Directions in Psychological Science 15.) Savin-Williams produced a chart of prevalence rates of homosexuality in many countries and covering many age groups. The groups from Australia had markedly higher prevalence rates than any age groups in any other country. That seemed baffling until one noticed that the Australian population came from Kirk and Bailey's twin study. Now heredity does not increase prevalence. It only determines whether twins are concordant or discordant for the trait, but it does not cause an overall increase in the trait in the population. For example, if the prevalence is 2% and the trait is fully inherited, then 2% of the time both twins will have the trait and 98% of the time both twins will not. If it is not inherited at all, then of those twins with the trait, 98% will have twins without the trait. The greatly increased prevalence in the twins in the Kirk and Bailey study indicates a strong environmental influence, since prevalence is increased by environmental factors, not heredity.
At this point twin studies have not conclusively demonstrated the existence of genetic factors that precondition a person to homosexual attraction. On the contrary, they have pointed to the existence of social factors in determining sexual behavior. In addition, a 2002 review article on homosexuality co-authored by Bailey ("A Critical Review of Recent Biological Research on Human Sexual Orientation," Annual Review of Sexual Research 13) said that "molecular research has not yet produced compelling evidence for specific genes."
That same review article also expressed concern for "a lack of research on women." By that time, however, L. M. Diamond was well under way to remedying the situation. Diamond published a paper in 1998 ("Development of Sexual Orientation Among Adolescent and Young Adult Women," Developmental Psychology 34) in which it was noted that a majority of lesbian and bisexual women failed to report at least one of the usual childhood indicators of sexual orientation. She then began to follow a group of nonheterosexual women over time because she found that "Previous research suggests that the sexual identities, attractions, and behaviors of sexual-minority (i.e., nonheterosexual) women change over time, yet there have been few longitudinal studies addressing this question, and no longitudinal studies of sexual-minority youths." The young women she followed were 16 to 23 years old when the study started. Most of them were lesbians rather than bisexual. After two years one-third of the women had changed their identity since that first interview. At the five year interview one-fourth of the women had completely relinquished their lesbian/bisexual identities. Diamond noted that the women who gave up their lesbian/bisexual identities did not differ from those women who retained their lesbian/bisexual identities. She found no way to predict who would change.
Finally, in 2005 she published a report of the interviews that took place after eight Years ("A New View of Lesbian Subtypes: Stable Versus Fluid Identity Trajectories Over an 8-Year Period," Psychology of Women Quarterly 29.) By then almost two-thirds of the women had changed identities at some point during the eight years. Since most of the population were lesbians, I will focus on what happened to them over time. Although these women started as lesbians, only 42 % stayed lesbians for the entire eight years; therefore, 58% changed. Diamond included a typical example of a lesbian, who changed over time. At the first interview the lesbian reported a 100% attraction to women. By the two-year interview she reported a 90% attraction to women. At five years she reported a 70% attraction to women. Finally, at eight years she reported a 50% attraction to women. In her interview at that time the young woman said that "currently I'm in a long-term relationship with a man that I find very, very ,very enjoyable and, um, fulfilling so it's hard for me to identify so therefore I kind of prefer not to identify." Again, Diamond could not predict which women would change over time, but clearly a number did change spontaneously.
It is probably important to note that Diamond is not a social conservative with a bias against gay and lesbian behavior. Researchers who question claims about the permanence of same-sex attraction are often suspected of anti-gay sentiments. Diamond identified herself as a lesbian in an interview in The Washington Post on January 4, 2004 (Partway Gay? Trying Gay for the Day: The Rise of the Heteroflexible Woman.) She along with several other researchers were being interviewed to gain an understanding of a great increase in homosexual behavior in young women. The Washington Post reported many examples of the phenomenon and said that "Social scientists say that 5 percent to 7 percent of young people are gay or lesbian." After discussing the results of her research, The Washington Post quoted Diamond as saying "As gays, we have predicated our acceptance by the culture on something we can't change. We say 'Oh look at us! We can't help it! That's what the straights want to hear.'" (Italics are my emphasis.)
A 2004 study by Otis and Skinner (An Exploratory Study of Differences in Views of Factors Affecting Sexual Orientation for a Sample of Lesbians and Gay Men," Psychological Reports 94) asked what homosexuals considered to be the cause of their sexual orientation. They reported that members of "the lesbian group were more likely to view positive relationships with the same sex to have a great influence on sexual orientation." This also suggests that social interactions may play an important role in formation of sexual identity. It also supports the report in the previously mentioned Washington Post article that studies indicate that women are more open to homosexual relationships than men.
The 2006 article by Savin-Willliams confirmed high prevalence rates of homosexuality in young people. He reported that rates of homosexual self-identification differed with respect to age. The rates of homosexual self-identification for females in the USA were 1% for adults, 4% for young adults, and 8% for youth. Further homosexual behavior was 11% for female youth. The rates of homosexual self-identification in males were 2% for adults, 3% for young adults, 3% for youth, and 5% for behavior in youth. This research also verifies the high levels of homosexual behavior in the girls reported on by The Washington Post. In addition, Savin-Williams' article reported results of a study of one group of adolescent boys who participated in a CDC health study. This study found fluidity in the sexual attractions of adolescent boys. Most boys who reported exclusive same-sex attractions in one interview, reported a change in attitude by the time of a follow-up interview a year later, including 48% who reported exclusive opposite-sex attractions. This information makes the practice of "coming out" early - and encouraging such "coming out" -- quite worrisome.
Further, all of this new information should have been considered before writing a theological paper based on a scientific understanding of how homosexuality functions in our society. By making a liturgical change before stating a theology, the opportunity for reasoned dialogue was lost. It is not irrelevant to note here that another principle of systems theory is that as the anxiety in a system increases, the ability to think decreases. When anxiety is very high, people just react without thinking. TEC is a very polarized and anxious body . My hope has been that if people could see how unclear our understanding of homosexuality really is, they would not pull the church off of its historic foundations in the Anglican Communion.
But the Episcopal Church that claims to hear all voices does not want to hear a voice like mine. The conservatives will not talk to the liberals about what worries them as I have, and the liberals have made up their mind, so all new information is suspect. However, fifteen months after Presiding Bishop Griswold received this information along with copies of the Archbishop's comments and ten months after 93 bishops in the House of Bishops received the same letters and comments, they apparently had not successfully rebutted this information to the Archbishop. When I sent a copy of my Anglican Theological Review article containing this information to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he wrote me a personal note. It started "Many thanks for your letter. I hope the ATR will print your piece." Since the American bishops would have been highly motivated to rebut this information to the Archbishop, it seems unlikely that they have been able to do that. It will be interesting to see if, at the upcoming House of Bishops meeting, they will see fit to offer, in the presence of the Archbishop, any theological response that takes seriously the scientific data that, until now, they have so broadly ignored.
Because the practical change in sexual norms within TEC has preceded the hard work of theological reasoning - one that must take into account scientific study -- , it now seems that the House of Bishops has decided to keep Episcopalians in the dark about the problems with their statement. So rather than having a discussion, we are dealing with a political situation. If there had been a discussion, the House of Deputies would have been informed. But in May of 2007 I sent an email about this material to Bonnie Anderson, President of the House of Deputies. Before I checked my email for a response, she had asked me twice for copies of my articles and the material that I had sent to the bishops in Feb. 2006. Clearly, she had not been informed of the scientific problems with TEC's theological statement. Whether knowing about these issues would have affected decisions by the House of Deputies at GC 2006 is doubtful. But there is no question but that in general we are now reaping the consequences of the bishops' silence.
Also this spring I spoke to two members of the House of Bishops Theology Committee about the need to clear up the problems with the church's original theological document. I sent them the most updated science that appears in this article. Therefore, they could see how serious the problems with their original document were. Instead of telling the people of the Episcopal Church about this issue, they left To Set Our Hope on Christ as the official statement of the church on this matter, when they published their theology statement for the communique on June 1, 2007. They did that even though one of the two bishops had written to me about To Set Our Hope on Christ in May 2006 to say, "I share your belief that the job could have been done in ways that paid better attention to both science and theology." So here was the opportunity to be honest with Episcopalians, but instead they kept their secret.
Christian theology and systems theory both recognize that secrets are divisive, cause distorted perceptions, and increase pathologic processes totally unrelated to the secret. Not only does the House of Bishops have a secret, the American Psychiatric Association has a secret. Not only was the APA's vote to remove homosexuality from their list of diagnoses in 1973 based on no science, but also they did not believe their own vote. Four years after the vote, a poll of the APA showed that 69% believed that homosexuality "usually represents a pathologic adaptation." (Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis, 1981)
A final reality, noted by practical experience and systems theory both, is that the person who reveals the secret will feel the reactivity and wrath of the system. But if learning to put reasoned theology first saves even one church, it will be worth it. In 2002 my Disciples of Christ congregation exploded over the matter of homosexuality. I went to an orthodox TEC congregation to hide. There is nowhere to hide. This article is not just about TEC. It is about all denominations, and the need to approach the challenge of change in a non-destructive manner.. Establishing "facts on the ground" without the reasoned agreement of the larger church has become the fuel today for the church's dismantling. State the theology of the change first. The discussion that ensues might be surprising for everyone.
Jacqueline Jenkins Keenan (BA [Math/Chemistry -- UVA], DVM [Ohio State College of Veterninary Medecine]) is currently in an MTS program at VTS, focusing on family systems. She has been reading and studying human and animal medical literature for 27 years and studying homosexuality for six years.
Tuesday, 07 August 2007
Most people realize that change within the church is difficult. In fact, change within any organization is hard, and systems theory has long studied the reality that any change, whether good or bad, will be greeted with resistance. That is because all change causes loss, which creates accompanying reactions of confusion, anger, and grief. The best way to make a change is for the people involved to become convinced that, although they are still doing things the old way, they should be doing them the new way. In religious institutions it is important to undergird changes with a clear and articulated theological reasoning to justify the change. This stated reasoning should always precede the change and allow for a theological discussion about whether the change should be made. In this process either the change will be owned by those involved in the change, or the change in the form proposed may be revealed to be inappropriate before any injury is done to the church. The recent turmoil within the Episcopal Church demonstrates what can go wrong when the articulated theological reasoning follows rather than precedes and founds the change.
In the ongoing debate about sexuality The Episcopal Church (TEC) has consistently looked to the medical and scientific community in order to understand human sexuality. This tradition was continued when TEC presented a theological statement in 2005 to the worldwide Anglican Communion in order to explain its consecration of a homosexual bishop in 2003. This theological document, To Set Our Hope on Christ, stated that "Altogether, contemporary studies indicate that same-sex affection has a genetic- biological basis which is shaped in interaction with psycho-social and cultural-historical factors. Sexual orientation remains relatively fixed and generally not subject to change. Continuing studies have confirmed the 1973 decision of the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from their diagnostic manual of mental illness."
Unfortunately, the bibliography that was cited in this document consisted of scientific articles that were written between 1970 and 1995. In fact none of the TEC documents on homosexuality include any studies after 1995. But research on homosexuality has continued, and later studies have produced new data in the areas of genetics, prevalence rates, and mutability of homosexual attraction. These studies also show that data regarding homosexuality in men does not apply to women.
Two months after TEC presented its document to the Anglican Communion, I sent evidence of most of the updated information that appears in this article to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Presiding Bishop of TEC. The information included abstracts of all but the two newest articles, but I had included an article from The Washington Post quoting the researchers regarding those studies. I received a reply from Lambeth Palace that was general, but that thanked me for my "constructive and thoughtful contribution to the debate". The letter from the Office of the Presiding Bishop said, "I hope you will appreciate that the Presiding Bishop himself was not the author of To Set Our Hope on Christ, which your letter seems to suggest in its first sentence." Even though he was not the author, he chose the authors and left out anyone with a background in science. In an earlier letter from his office I was told "I would like to convey the Presiding Bishop's appreciation to you for drawing his attention to the importance that science plays in issues facing the life of the church." He should have included a person with a science background.
Before any further discussion of the issues with TEC's theological document take place, it is important to present the research that TEC missed. Since many churches are struggling with the issue of homosexuality, the information is beneficial to most denominations. It seems quite probable that many churches are not up to date, because they use theological journals to present rigorous science. Although the Anglican Theological Review was interested in the information in this article, for instance, it would not have printed it before the summer of 2009, because of the lag time to publication at theological journals. By then the information would be out of date, and TEC's error of using old science illustrates the tendency to canonize bibliographies that take a long time to be produced.
One clear area in which recent research has challenged earlier assessments is the genetic causality of homosexual attraction. In 1991 Bailey and Pillard ("A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation," Archives of General Psychiatry 48) published results of a study in men that suggested a genetic cause of same-sex attraction. It was largely on the basis of that report that To Set Our Hope on Christ concluded that homosexual attractions were based on genetic causes. But a 1994 article called "Homosexuality: The Behavioral Sciences and the Church" by Jones and Workman had already pointed out severe sample bias in that study. Further, a later study co-authored by Bailey did not support the 1991 results.
The 1991 Bailey and Pillard twin study on men looked at identical twins, fraternal twins, siblings that were not twins, and adopted siblings. Seeing traits significantly more often in pairs of identical twins than in the general population suggests heritability of the trait. The authors found that 52% of homosexual identical twins had a homosexual co- twin. Since that was much higher than the 2% rate of homosexuality in the general population at that time, such a large increase would indicate that genetic factors were highly likely. However, the subjects for this study were individuals recruited through gay publications. Besides the obvious problem of who would be likely to respond to such a solicitation, the data itself showed that even the adopted children in the study had five times the normal rate of homosexuality. A high rate in unrelated children indicates that the families of respondents were not typical of the general population. It is clear that the Bailey and Pillard study was subject to sampling bias.
In 1992 King and McDonald ("Homosexuals who are twins: A study of 46 Probands," British Journal of Psychiatry 160) did a twin study using an unbiased sample. It showed only about 25% of homosexual identical twins had a co-twin who was homosexual. This is still higher than the general population so it could indicate some heritability, but King and McDonald also did something else that any good researcher would do. They looked into the possibility that there might be environmental factors causing even this relatively low rate of concordance. They found that "genetic factors are insufficient explanation of the development of sexual orientation" because of social factors, including "a relatively high likelihood of sexual relations occurring with same sex co-twins at some time, particularly in monozygotic [identical] pairs." The identical twins were having a strong influence on each other.
In 2000 Bailey published a new study, this time co-authored by Kirk ("Measurement Models of Sexual Orientation in a Community Twin Sample," Behavioral Genetics 30.) This new study drew on a twin registry for the subject population instead of recruiting participants through gay publications. This new study also reported a much lower heritability rate for men than had the 1991 report, which Bailey had co-authored. This time heritability was only 30%. Yet a close look at the study shows that even this lower rate is subject to question. Once environmental factors have been described that interfere with results on heritability, they must be addressed in all later research. For some reason, however, the Kirk and Bailey study asked no questions about the social issues that King and McDonald found. As a result the study is fundamentally flawed in design.
Yet environmental effects became clear when the results of this same study were used in an article produced by Savin-Williams in 2006 ("Who's Gay? Does it Matter?" Current Directions in Psychological Science 15.) Savin-Williams produced a chart of prevalence rates of homosexuality in many countries and covering many age groups. The groups from Australia had markedly higher prevalence rates than any age groups in any other country. That seemed baffling until one noticed that the Australian population came from Kirk and Bailey's twin study. Now heredity does not increase prevalence. It only determines whether twins are concordant or discordant for the trait, but it does not cause an overall increase in the trait in the population. For example, if the prevalence is 2% and the trait is fully inherited, then 2% of the time both twins will have the trait and 98% of the time both twins will not. If it is not inherited at all, then of those twins with the trait, 98% will have twins without the trait. The greatly increased prevalence in the twins in the Kirk and Bailey study indicates a strong environmental influence, since prevalence is increased by environmental factors, not heredity.
At this point twin studies have not conclusively demonstrated the existence of genetic factors that precondition a person to homosexual attraction. On the contrary, they have pointed to the existence of social factors in determining sexual behavior. In addition, a 2002 review article on homosexuality co-authored by Bailey ("A Critical Review of Recent Biological Research on Human Sexual Orientation," Annual Review of Sexual Research 13) said that "molecular research has not yet produced compelling evidence for specific genes."
That same review article also expressed concern for "a lack of research on women." By that time, however, L. M. Diamond was well under way to remedying the situation. Diamond published a paper in 1998 ("Development of Sexual Orientation Among Adolescent and Young Adult Women," Developmental Psychology 34) in which it was noted that a majority of lesbian and bisexual women failed to report at least one of the usual childhood indicators of sexual orientation. She then began to follow a group of nonheterosexual women over time because she found that "Previous research suggests that the sexual identities, attractions, and behaviors of sexual-minority (i.e., nonheterosexual) women change over time, yet there have been few longitudinal studies addressing this question, and no longitudinal studies of sexual-minority youths." The young women she followed were 16 to 23 years old when the study started. Most of them were lesbians rather than bisexual. After two years one-third of the women had changed their identity since that first interview. At the five year interview one-fourth of the women had completely relinquished their lesbian/bisexual identities. Diamond noted that the women who gave up their lesbian/bisexual identities did not differ from those women who retained their lesbian/bisexual identities. She found no way to predict who would change.
Finally, in 2005 she published a report of the interviews that took place after eight Years ("A New View of Lesbian Subtypes: Stable Versus Fluid Identity Trajectories Over an 8-Year Period," Psychology of Women Quarterly 29.) By then almost two-thirds of the women had changed identities at some point during the eight years. Since most of the population were lesbians, I will focus on what happened to them over time. Although these women started as lesbians, only 42 % stayed lesbians for the entire eight years; therefore, 58% changed. Diamond included a typical example of a lesbian, who changed over time. At the first interview the lesbian reported a 100% attraction to women. By the two-year interview she reported a 90% attraction to women. At five years she reported a 70% attraction to women. Finally, at eight years she reported a 50% attraction to women. In her interview at that time the young woman said that "currently I'm in a long-term relationship with a man that I find very, very ,very enjoyable and, um, fulfilling so it's hard for me to identify so therefore I kind of prefer not to identify." Again, Diamond could not predict which women would change over time, but clearly a number did change spontaneously.
It is probably important to note that Diamond is not a social conservative with a bias against gay and lesbian behavior. Researchers who question claims about the permanence of same-sex attraction are often suspected of anti-gay sentiments. Diamond identified herself as a lesbian in an interview in The Washington Post on January 4, 2004 (Partway Gay? Trying Gay for the Day: The Rise of the Heteroflexible Woman.) She along with several other researchers were being interviewed to gain an understanding of a great increase in homosexual behavior in young women. The Washington Post reported many examples of the phenomenon and said that "Social scientists say that 5 percent to 7 percent of young people are gay or lesbian." After discussing the results of her research, The Washington Post quoted Diamond as saying "As gays, we have predicated our acceptance by the culture on something we can't change. We say 'Oh look at us! We can't help it! That's what the straights want to hear.'" (Italics are my emphasis.)
A 2004 study by Otis and Skinner (An Exploratory Study of Differences in Views of Factors Affecting Sexual Orientation for a Sample of Lesbians and Gay Men," Psychological Reports 94) asked what homosexuals considered to be the cause of their sexual orientation. They reported that members of "the lesbian group were more likely to view positive relationships with the same sex to have a great influence on sexual orientation." This also suggests that social interactions may play an important role in formation of sexual identity. It also supports the report in the previously mentioned Washington Post article that studies indicate that women are more open to homosexual relationships than men.
The 2006 article by Savin-Willliams confirmed high prevalence rates of homosexuality in young people. He reported that rates of homosexual self-identification differed with respect to age. The rates of homosexual self-identification for females in the USA were 1% for adults, 4% for young adults, and 8% for youth. Further homosexual behavior was 11% for female youth. The rates of homosexual self-identification in males were 2% for adults, 3% for young adults, 3% for youth, and 5% for behavior in youth. This research also verifies the high levels of homosexual behavior in the girls reported on by The Washington Post. In addition, Savin-Williams' article reported results of a study of one group of adolescent boys who participated in a CDC health study. This study found fluidity in the sexual attractions of adolescent boys. Most boys who reported exclusive same-sex attractions in one interview, reported a change in attitude by the time of a follow-up interview a year later, including 48% who reported exclusive opposite-sex attractions. This information makes the practice of "coming out" early - and encouraging such "coming out" -- quite worrisome.
Further, all of this new information should have been considered before writing a theological paper based on a scientific understanding of how homosexuality functions in our society. By making a liturgical change before stating a theology, the opportunity for reasoned dialogue was lost. It is not irrelevant to note here that another principle of systems theory is that as the anxiety in a system increases, the ability to think decreases. When anxiety is very high, people just react without thinking. TEC is a very polarized and anxious body . My hope has been that if people could see how unclear our understanding of homosexuality really is, they would not pull the church off of its historic foundations in the Anglican Communion.
But the Episcopal Church that claims to hear all voices does not want to hear a voice like mine. The conservatives will not talk to the liberals about what worries them as I have, and the liberals have made up their mind, so all new information is suspect. However, fifteen months after Presiding Bishop Griswold received this information along with copies of the Archbishop's comments and ten months after 93 bishops in the House of Bishops received the same letters and comments, they apparently had not successfully rebutted this information to the Archbishop. When I sent a copy of my Anglican Theological Review article containing this information to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he wrote me a personal note. It started "Many thanks for your letter. I hope the ATR will print your piece." Since the American bishops would have been highly motivated to rebut this information to the Archbishop, it seems unlikely that they have been able to do that. It will be interesting to see if, at the upcoming House of Bishops meeting, they will see fit to offer, in the presence of the Archbishop, any theological response that takes seriously the scientific data that, until now, they have so broadly ignored.
Because the practical change in sexual norms within TEC has preceded the hard work of theological reasoning - one that must take into account scientific study -- , it now seems that the House of Bishops has decided to keep Episcopalians in the dark about the problems with their statement. So rather than having a discussion, we are dealing with a political situation. If there had been a discussion, the House of Deputies would have been informed. But in May of 2007 I sent an email about this material to Bonnie Anderson, President of the House of Deputies. Before I checked my email for a response, she had asked me twice for copies of my articles and the material that I had sent to the bishops in Feb. 2006. Clearly, she had not been informed of the scientific problems with TEC's theological statement. Whether knowing about these issues would have affected decisions by the House of Deputies at GC 2006 is doubtful. But there is no question but that in general we are now reaping the consequences of the bishops' silence.
Also this spring I spoke to two members of the House of Bishops Theology Committee about the need to clear up the problems with the church's original theological document. I sent them the most updated science that appears in this article. Therefore, they could see how serious the problems with their original document were. Instead of telling the people of the Episcopal Church about this issue, they left To Set Our Hope on Christ as the official statement of the church on this matter, when they published their theology statement for the communique on June 1, 2007. They did that even though one of the two bishops had written to me about To Set Our Hope on Christ in May 2006 to say, "I share your belief that the job could have been done in ways that paid better attention to both science and theology." So here was the opportunity to be honest with Episcopalians, but instead they kept their secret.
Christian theology and systems theory both recognize that secrets are divisive, cause distorted perceptions, and increase pathologic processes totally unrelated to the secret. Not only does the House of Bishops have a secret, the American Psychiatric Association has a secret. Not only was the APA's vote to remove homosexuality from their list of diagnoses in 1973 based on no science, but also they did not believe their own vote. Four years after the vote, a poll of the APA showed that 69% believed that homosexuality "usually represents a pathologic adaptation." (Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis, 1981)
A final reality, noted by practical experience and systems theory both, is that the person who reveals the secret will feel the reactivity and wrath of the system. But if learning to put reasoned theology first saves even one church, it will be worth it. In 2002 my Disciples of Christ congregation exploded over the matter of homosexuality. I went to an orthodox TEC congregation to hide. There is nowhere to hide. This article is not just about TEC. It is about all denominations, and the need to approach the challenge of change in a non-destructive manner.. Establishing "facts on the ground" without the reasoned agreement of the larger church has become the fuel today for the church's dismantling. State the theology of the change first. The discussion that ensues might be surprising for everyone.
Jacqueline Jenkins Keenan (BA [Math/Chemistry -- UVA], DVM [Ohio State College of Veterninary Medecine]) is currently in an MTS program at VTS, focusing on family systems. She has been reading and studying human and animal medical literature for 27 years and studying homosexuality for six years.
Monday, August 06, 2007
into the twilight
Posted by: Diogenes - Aug. 04, 2007 3:01 PM ET USA
Whenever an organization begins to lose its grasp on the message it wants to deliver, it concentrates its efforts on improving the means of delivery. With gratifying timeliness, ECUSA has responded to its identity crisis by developing an Organizational Effectiveness Plan to streamline the ministerial services whose purpose it can't seem to find.
Strategic groupings of advocacy, evangelism, leadership development, and partnerships -- together with a configuration of regional satellite offices to support strategic mission -- are central to a new organizational effectiveness plan to reshape ministries based at the Episcopal Church Center.
A new "diocesan services" unit, offering a comprehensive approach to local mission needs, is a highlight of the new plan initiated by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and drafted after five months of consultative work by two task forces.
"The new configuration will raise our level of service to the church," Jefferts Schori said July 26 while commending the plan’s outline to the Church Center management team. "There is remarkable synchronicity in the development of this plan, and great potential for creativity and capacity building."
Give credit where credit is due: the good Doctor didn't get where she is without skill in the bestowal of elegant and semantically vacuous compliments. Note down these gems for your own future use: "remarkable synchronicity," "great potential for capacity building" (potential for capacity building?). That's about as close to pure meaninglessness as you're likely to find without a prescription. There is no project, plan, document, or resolution whatsoever -- including the minutes of the Wannsee Conference and your son's third grade report card -- to which these pretty polysyllables could not be cheerfully applied.
Yet it's hard not to pick up a sense of desperate swagger in the use of quasi-military jargon such as "task force" and "strategic mission" -- muscle-flexing, heel-clicking words that suggest an ardor and singleness of purpose that isn't there. The crisis of liberal Christianity is precisely its inability to decide whether it has anything of value to give, and the language of mission is empty in the absence of an authority to do the sending. As with decaying religious orders in their death-throes ("that we may work toward deconstructing existing systems and constructing a new paradigm ..."), the grandiosity of objectives expands in inverse proportion to the power of failing eyes, muscles, faith.
The synchronicity is, well, remarkable.
Whenever an organization begins to lose its grasp on the message it wants to deliver, it concentrates its efforts on improving the means of delivery. With gratifying timeliness, ECUSA has responded to its identity crisis by developing an Organizational Effectiveness Plan to streamline the ministerial services whose purpose it can't seem to find.
Strategic groupings of advocacy, evangelism, leadership development, and partnerships -- together with a configuration of regional satellite offices to support strategic mission -- are central to a new organizational effectiveness plan to reshape ministries based at the Episcopal Church Center.
A new "diocesan services" unit, offering a comprehensive approach to local mission needs, is a highlight of the new plan initiated by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and drafted after five months of consultative work by two task forces.
"The new configuration will raise our level of service to the church," Jefferts Schori said July 26 while commending the plan’s outline to the Church Center management team. "There is remarkable synchronicity in the development of this plan, and great potential for creativity and capacity building."
Give credit where credit is due: the good Doctor didn't get where she is without skill in the bestowal of elegant and semantically vacuous compliments. Note down these gems for your own future use: "remarkable synchronicity," "great potential for capacity building" (potential for capacity building?). That's about as close to pure meaninglessness as you're likely to find without a prescription. There is no project, plan, document, or resolution whatsoever -- including the minutes of the Wannsee Conference and your son's third grade report card -- to which these pretty polysyllables could not be cheerfully applied.
Yet it's hard not to pick up a sense of desperate swagger in the use of quasi-military jargon such as "task force" and "strategic mission" -- muscle-flexing, heel-clicking words that suggest an ardor and singleness of purpose that isn't there. The crisis of liberal Christianity is precisely its inability to decide whether it has anything of value to give, and the language of mission is empty in the absence of an authority to do the sending. As with decaying religious orders in their death-throes ("that we may work toward deconstructing existing systems and constructing a new paradigm ..."), the grandiosity of objectives expands in inverse proportion to the power of failing eyes, muscles, faith.
The synchronicity is, well, remarkable.
Friday, August 03, 2007
The Handwriting on the Wall
By Stephen Noll
http://www.stephenswitness.com/2007/07/handwriting-on-wall.html
Friday, July 27, 2007
Why the Sexuality Conflict in the Episcopal Church Is God's Word to the
Anglican Communion[1]
UPDATE: In September 1997, just ten years ago and one year following the
Righter Trial verdict, Anglican bishops from the Episcopal Church and
from the Global South gathered in Dallas at the "Anglican Life and
Witness Conference," sponsored by the fledgling Ekklesia Society under
the Rev. Dr. Bill Atwood, and the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. The
relationships formed at this gathering were the beginning of what has
become a strong alliance of orthodox Anglicans around the world.
In his recent comments, the Archbishop of York (23 July 07) has stated
that sexuality does not involve "core doctrines" of the faith and hence
should not be a church-dividing issue. This language of "core doctrine"
is reminiscent of the Righter verdict. The address I presented to the
bishops at this conference was aimed to show why the Episcopal Church's
position on sexuality was and is indeed a heresy and a threat to the
faith once for all delivered to the saints. SN
My dear Archbishops and Bishops and other colleagues:
I am conscious of, and deeply grateful for, the privilege of speaking to
you today, because I believe this week may prove a crisis point that
will affect the future of the Anglican Communion as a unified worldwide
movement. God is, I believe, issuing a challenge to the leaders of
Anglicanism that they must respond to or risk his judgment as the Lord
of history and the Church (Revelation 2:18-29).
I realize this opening statement may seem very Eurocentric and
"parochial," as though the health of the small American Church were the
sine qua non of the health of the worldwide Church. The fact is,
problems in the Episcopal Church tend to become symptomatic. As one
African bishop put it: when America sneezes, the whole world catches a
cold. In the case of the sexuality virus, it has already spread to most
Western churches of the Communion, and Southern hemisphere churches will
be exposed more and more because of the financial, educational, and
media influence of the West.
The Decade of Sexuality in the Episcopal Church
We Anglicans like to think in decades, it seems, as symbolized by the
intervals between Lambeth Conferences which have met every ten years
since 1888. It shall be my argument that this past decade in the
Episcopal Church USA has posed so great a challenge to the Communion
that it is genuinely possible that by the year 2008 the Anglican
Communion will be a name without substance. Absurd? Reflect on what it
once meant to be a member of the British Commonwealth before Britain
pledged its troth to the European Community and how little it means now
when one is subjected to visa checks just passing through a London
airport!
In 1988, the issue of homosexuality seemed but a little cloud on the
horizon of Anglicanism. Prior to the 20th century, the Anglican judgment
against sexual license of any sort had been so unequivocal that when in
1920 the Lambeth Conference addressed the new world of Sigmund Freud, it
did so with seeming assurance:
Recognizing that to live a pure and chaste life before and after
marriage is, for both sexes, the unchangeable Christian standard,
attainable and attained through the help of the Holy Spirit by men and
women of every age, the Conference desires to proclaim the universal
obligation of this standard, and its vital importance as an essential
condition of human happiness. (Resolution 66)
As recently as 1987, this "unchangeable standard" was reaffirmed with
only slight nuancing by the bishops of the Church of England, who
stated:
1. that sexual intercourse is an act of total commitment which belongs
properly within a permanent marriage relation ship;
2. that fornication and adultery are sins against this ideal, and are to
be met by a call to repentance and the exercise of compassion;
3. that homosexual acts also fall short of this ideal, and are likewise
to be met by a call to repentance and the exercise of compassion;
4. that all Christians are called to be exemplary in all spheres of
morality, including sexual morality, and that holiness of life is
especially required for Christian leaders.
At its 1988 Convention, the Episcopal Church USA joined in this
consensus by reaffirming once again "the Biblical and traditional
teaching on chastity and fidelity." Twenty-nine bishops, however,
dissented from this Resolution, and the next year Bishop John Spong of
Newark ordained Robert Williams, an avowed, non-celibate, homosexual man
to the priesthood.[2]
The decade since has been a time of unraveling in the Episcopal
Church.[3] When the Episcopal House of Bishops disassociated itself from
Bishop Spong's act in 1990, he encouraged his assistant bishop Walter
Righter to ordain Barry Stopfel, another practicing homosexual, within
two weeks of the bishops' meeting.[4] It was this act that became the
focal point of the so-called Righter Trial in 1996. Responding to what
we in America call the "in your face" acts of Bishops Spong and Righter,
Bishop William Frey proposed a canon at the 1991 General Convention
stating that "all clergy of this Church shall abstain from genital
relationships outside of holy matrimony." A majority of bishops voted
against this attempt to uphold the Church's teaching through a binding
canon, signaling the unwillingness of Church leaders to stop the sexual
radicals' overt tactic of occupying territory and then calling for
negotiations.
This political stalemate has resulted in a paradox that many outside the
Church find confusing. The Episcopal Church has simultaneously paid lip
service to classic Christian sexual moral norms while allowing rampant
violation of those very norms. In 1996, ten bishops attempted to rein in
this hypocrisy by presenting Bishop Righter for trial under the
disciplinary canon for "holding and teaching publicly or privately, and
advisedly any doctrine contrary to that held by this Church." They lost
the case and were stigmatized as "ten men with an agenda," who were
fomenting division in the Church.
The Righter verdict permitted homosexual activists to advance their
agenda to a new level: the advocacy of same-sex marriage.[5] The victory
of the early 1990's had been the condoning of gay ordination, but it
followed logically that if Barry Stopfel and others were now "wholesome
examples" for the flock of Christ, as the ordination rite declared them
to be, the Church should provide some formal recognition of their
partnerships. Thus although the 1994 General Convention forbade the
publication of any same-sex marriage rites, radical priests and bishops
have been performing informal ceremonies with increasing boldness.
Bishop Douglas Theuner of New Hampshire, for instance, wrote the clergy
of his diocese that he would support their officiating at such acts and
had done so himself. The homosexual lobby claims that similar rites are
being used in a substantial number of dioceses of the Episcopal Church.
This brings us to the General Convention of 1997, which many people saw
as decisive for gauging the future direction of the Episcopal Church.
The news from the General Convention is ominous but not yet disastrous.
On the positive side, with careful planning and much hard work,
supporters of the American Anglican Council prevented the Convention
from passing any formal and explicit endorsement of the homosexual
agenda.[6] It is therefore technically correct to say that the Episcopal
Church still affirms the biblical and traditional norms of sexuality and
marriage.
But this affirmation on paper does not extend to practice, where "local
option" is the accepted order of the day.[7] Openly practicing
homosexual laypersons and clergy spoke without reproach at the
Convention. A number of bishops made clear that they now permit blessing
of same-sex unions in their diocese. As the House of Bishops proposed
further study of whether such rites were possible, Bishop Joe Morris
Doss of New Jersey was asked whether this further discussion meant that
there would be a moratorium on ordaining homosexuals and performing
same-sex "b lessings." "No, it does not," was his blunt answer. As I
shall argue later, this refusal to wait follows necessarily from the
revisionists' claim that homosexuality is a "justice" issue.
The "Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality" was brought to the floor
of the House of Bishops for endorsement. By a 2 to 1 vote, the bishops
declined to affirm it, "deep-sixing" it by sending it to a committee for
further study. The votes at General Convention reveal that the Episcopal
bishops are divided 50/50 between those who support the gay agenda and
those who do not. It is equally clear that those who support it
absolutely refuse to conform to traditional standards and their fellow
bishops do not have the power or the will to stop them.
The two main decisions of the July Convention with regard to sexuality
were the revision of the canons to remove from power all who oppose the
ordination of women and the election of a new Presiding Bishop. The
canon revision was significant in that it makes clear that the basis for
the new sexual ethic is not diversity, or tolerance during a process of
dialogue, but justice, as defined by contemporary North American
liberationism.[8]
Let me explain the moral logic of their position. Revisionists read the
Bible and the baptismal vow "to strive for justice and peace among all
people" (American Book of Common Prayer, page 305) in such a way as to
make acceptance of their position morally binding on all. I need to
emphasize that they already employ this same logic against those who
maintain the exclusive biblical standard of "two sexes, one flesh."[9] I
can confidently predict that if the present trend continues, opponents
of homosexual practice will find themselves in the same situation
tomorrow as opponents of women's ordination today. The exclusion of
traditionalists follows necessarily from the liberationist conviction
that homosexuality is a non-negotiable human rights issue and that
opponents of sexual liberation, whether they know it or not, are bigots
(i.e., "homophobes" and "heterosexists").
The election of Frank Griswold as the new Presiding Bishop was a major
source of discouragement to many Episcopalians. During the past 12
years, traditional Episcopalians have come to expect that the national
Episcopal Church will always support and even promote the program of the
homosexual lobby. For instance, the General Convention committee
appointed by national church leaders to consider authorizing same-sex
"blessing" liturgies voted in favor of such rites 37 to 7 (deputies) and
7 to 0 (bishops); but when the House of Deputies received this committee
recommendation, it voted against such authorization. Now that is what I
call stacking the deck.
In 1984, when the current Presiding Bishop was elected, his support of
the gay-rights agenda was not perceived as a crucial issue.[10] That was
not the case this time. Everyone knew in 1997 where the two principal
candidates stood on this issue. Bishop Griswold has consistently voted
with the sexual revisionists in Church councils and has admitted to
ordaining avowed non-celibate homosexuals.[11] In 1994, he signed Bishop
Spong's "Koinonia Statement," along with 80 other bishops, declaring
that he would ordain homosexual persons living in committed
partnerships.
You must therefore understand that when biblically-minded Episcopalians
talk about withholding money from the national headquarters, it is based
on the assumption that the national leadership will continue to promote
practices fundamentally contrary to the Gospel. We are open to creative
proposals from the new Presiding Bishop, but in the absence of such
proposals, we will assume that it is "business as usual" in New York.
Three Reasons Why the Current Sexual Agenda of the Episcopal Church is a
Church Dividing Issue
In a recent lecture entitled "A Challenge to Episcopalians," John Stott
gave sage advice as to how we should live in the present crisis. He
called evangelicals to "stay in while refusing to give in."[12] Bishop
FitzSimons Allison has put this advice aphoristically as Stay. Don't
Obey. Don't Pay. Pray. John Stott went on to say that "we must choose
the really vital issues on which to protest and fight."
There are three compelling reasons why the sexuality issue in our Church
is decidedly one of those issues over which we must fight.
Rejecting Biblical Authority The first reason we must fight for
traditional sexual norms is that they are clearly taught in Scripture,
and the Church that turns away from God's Word in the Bible undermines
the basis of its own authority.
The Lambeth Quadrilateral speaks of the Holy Scripture "as being the
rule and ultimate standard of faith." In affirming this, the
Quadrilateral expresses the classic Anglican commitment to the primary
authority of Scripture in matters of faith and morals (see the
Thirty-Nine Articles, especially articles VI and XX). Everything the
Church teaches and practices must conform to the revealed Word of God in
the Bible. To be sure, some matters are clearer than others in
Scripture, and the question of how to harmonize one passage with another
can be very complex.
In the case of sexuality, however, the Bible in both Old and New
Testaments holds up lifelong, monogamous union of a man and a woman as
God's exclusive norm; it offers no positive examples of non-marital sex;
and it specifically condemns fornication and homosexuality as sin. The
Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality is thus correct in saying:
5. The whole body of the Scripture bears witness to God's will regarding
human sexuality which is to be expressed only within the lifelong union
of a man and a woman in (holy) matrimony.
6. The Holy Scriptures are clear in teaching that all sexual promiscuity
is sin. We are convinced that this includes homosexual practices,
between men or women, between men and women outside marriage as well as
heterosexual relationships.
7. We believe that the clear and unambiguous teaching of the Holy
Scriptures about human sexuality is of great help to Christians as it
provides clear boundaries.
The approval of homosexual practice and same-sex marriage poses one of
the clearest challenges to the authority of Scripture in the life of the
Church. Only the most strained reasoning can lead one to conclude that
the biblical authors would permit, much less endorse, these
practices.[13] If the bishops and other leaders of the Church cannot say
No to this clear contradiction of biblical norms, it is hard to believe
they will ever be able to use the Bible credibly in moral
decision-making.[14]
I have been involved for five years in the debate over the use of
Scripture in the Episcopal Church.[15] During these years, I have
encountered appalling apathy, even antipathy, to the idea that one must
search the Scriptures and, when all is said and done, obey the Word of
God written.[16] In the Righter trial, the judges, with one exception,
simply passed over the body of evidence collected by the presenter
bishops that Bishop Righter had knowingly disobeyed his ordination vows
to obey the Bible.[17]
In a debate several years ago, I asked a well-known lesbian advocate:
"Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it could be shown beyond a
shadow of a doubt that the Bible does specifically forbid contemporary
homosexual practices. Would it make any difference to you?" "Well, yes,"
she replied, "but I would not give up my relationship with my partner
because of it." It is crucial to understand this fact: revisionists
enter into "dialogue" with a prior commitment to do what they are going
to do regardless of what Scripture says.
Dishonoring Christian Marriage The second reason why the homosexual
agenda is a matter that we must stand against is that it leads to a
redefinition of marriage that is in fact a denial of our Lord's own high
doctrine. In his teaching on divorce and his presence at the wedding of
Cana, Jesus marked faithful, lifelong monogamous marriage as a sign of
his new covenant relationship to the Church. The "mystery of Christ and
the Church" to which St. Paul alludes (Ephesians 5:32) is in fact
founded on Jesus' own understanding of his role of bridegroom and savior
of his people. Alternatively, Jesus set celibacy, being a "eunuch for
the kingdom of God," as a sign of exclusive love for him. Like Jesus,
Paul also calls some Christians to remain unmarried for the sake of the
Gospel (1 Corinthians 7:32-35).[18]
In their recent "St. Andrew's Day" statement, several of England's
leading theologians affirm this understanding of the apostolic faith,
stating that the Church
assists all its members to a life of faithful witness in chastity and
holiness, recognising two forms or vocations in which that life can be
lived: marriage and singleness (Gen. 2.24; Matt. 19. 4-6; 1 Cor. 7
passim). There is no place for the church to confer legitimacy upon
alternatives to these.[19]
Thus Church leaders have no authority to devise a third sexual
configuration for same-sex couples.[20] The impossibility of this
novelty is suggested by the moral innovators' unclarity about whether to
model homosexual relations on marriage or over against marriage. Some
gay-rights advocates take a "both/and" approach, affirming the sanctity
of marriage and the blessing of alternative sexual unions. Others call
for a "new paradigm" for all sexual relationships, homosexual and
heterosexual.[21]
The truth is, any new paradigm is utterly at odds with the holy estate
of matrimony. Fundamental moral principles and institutions simply do
not allow for compromise or third options. The Prayer Book wedding
service alludes to a Scripture passage that says: "Let marriage be held
in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled; for God will
judge the immoral [literally 'fornicators'] and adulterous" (Hebrews
13:4). The moral logic of this passage is clear: marriage is honored
when it is set apart from other illegitimate forms of sexual activity.
Therefore talk of blessing the cohabitation of same-sex or opposite-sex
partners dishonors marriage.[22]
Advocates of a new paradigm for marriage have decried sexual
exploitation and abuse but have been vague as to what kinds of
relationships are acceptable. I have asked them several pointed
questions to clarify their position:
Will they uphold homosexual unions as lifelong? =B7 Will they uphold
premarital chastity as a rule for all Christians? =B7 Will they condemn
sexual relations other than those sanctioned by the Church? =B7 Will they
insist that all persons remain in that state to which they have
committed themselves?[23]
No reply. In other words, the Episcopal Church is presently condoning
and promoting practices that are in continual flux. As in the case of so
many other utopian visions of this waning century, we are being told:
"Trust us. We'll tell you where we're going once we've got there."
When the Church gives up the norm of exclusive, lifelong marriage of a
man and a woman, it undermines the institution in society as well. Many
of us in the West know deep down that the abandonment of marital
fidelity over the past thirty years as a public expectation is greatly
responsible for the confusion and personal pain of so many in our
society. We are aware that "no-fault divorce" laws have not only
mirrored the breakdown of the family but have contributed to it.[24]
We in the Episcopal Church know that the revision of the divorce and
remarriage canons in 1973 has led to rampant divorce among clergy and
demoralization of the congregations under their care. We know this, but
we shrug our shoulders fatalistically, saying: "What can we do? My
mother, my best friend, even my priest and bishop, are on their second
or third marriage."[25]
I believe that the Church must regain the lead in this social crisis
that is so close to the heart of our Lord's own teaching and at the root
of so much personal pain and loss. We must repent of our past neglect by
restoring and revitalizing the doctrine and discipline of marriage.[26]
Reforming our practices in the midst of the permissive culture of the
West will be no easy task. It is made even more difficult when the
national Episcopal Church is intent on undermining the effort. It would
be most helpful if the Anglican Communion would provide a counterpoise
by offering positive teaching from the biblical and traditional
viewpoint.
Embracing a False Spirituality The third reason that the gay-rights
movement in the Episcopal Church presents Anglicanism with a historic
test is that it is not just about sexuality but about spirituality. It
has been just over 30 years since my conversion to Christ and baptism in
the Episcopal Church. During that time, I have been reading continually
and widely in works of theology from all sides. What I can tell you with
full conviction is that the issue presented to us in the sexuality
debate is not just about sex but about the meaning and truth of the
Christian faith altogether.[27]
True, there are some folks who hold otherwise orthodox opinions yet
differ on matters of sexuality, but most people who stand there are in
transition either toward a more traditional or a more revisionist
position.[28] If you get in bed with a new periphery one evening,
chances are you will wake up next morning in the embrace of a new
center. (Or, frightened by the strange bedfellow, you may rush back to
your first love.)
The words "sexuality" and "sexual identity" and the so-called "ethic of
intimacy" that defines personal identity in terms of sexual satisfaction
are part of the revolution in the thinking of late modernity.[29]
This revolution begins with the conviction that the Sea of Faith has
withdrawn, leaving the world and the human soul empty and infinitely
plastic. In the grip of this void, men and women grasp for something
that looks like their former spirituality. Falling in love - "Ah, love,
let us be true to one another" - and falling into bed are the common
substitutes for love of God and love of neighbor.
Sexuality is a surrogate religion. What late modernity takes away with
one hand - the divine covenant and purposes of marriage - it offers back
with the idea of sex as a sacrament.[30] Anthony Giddens, a secularist
and a sociologist, puts it this way:
Sexuality, it could be suggested, gains its compelling quality, together
with its aura of excitement and danger, from the fact that it puts us in
contact with these lost fields of experience. Its ecstasy, or the
promise of it, has echoes of the "ethical passion" which transcendental
symbolism used to inspire - and of course cultivated eroticism, as
distinct from sexuality in the service of reproduction, has long been
associated with religiosity.[31]
It is understandable that those without God will seek to replace him and
his institutions with a surrogate. What is deeply troubling is when the
same ideas are taught by Christian bishops and theologians. The clearest
articulations of the worldview chasm between classic and late-modernist
Christianity can be found in the advocates of North American liberation
theology, people like Bishop John Spong and Professor Carter Heyward who
claim that one's essence is "to explore the character of the erotic as
sacred power" and "to live, to love, to be."[32]
I must tell you frankly, Bishop Spong and Professor Heyward are not
"fringe" figures in the Episcopal Church. This past July at the
"Integrity Mass" sponsored by the gay lobby and attended by the
Presiding Bishop and many other church officials at the General
Convention, the preacher uttered the following profundity:
Our special task, our specific charism, is to help ourselves and the
church reclaim the erotic as a central part of our lives ... We know in
the deepest places of our knowing that the pathways to our spiritual
selves are through our erotic selves. We must chart those paths and make
those maps available to the larger church. We must begin with awkward
strokes to touch the strength of our erotic power.
Whatever this means, it is not Christianity, but it was greeted by many
with equanimity and even congratulation. Twenty years ago, who would
have imagined the Episcopal Church would be voting on homosexual
marriage? Watch out! Unless someone calls paganism by its name, you may
be singing "Eros divine, all loves excelling!" at Lambeth 2008.
Venus is a soft goddess, but she has a demonic alter ego, which emerges
in the "exotic" excesses of modern sexuality. Camille Paglia, in her
flamboyant yet insightful way, argues that the Marquis de Sade is the
true prophet of late modern thinking about sexuality.
Humanity has no special status in the universe. Sade asks: "What is man?
and what difference is there between him and other plants, between him
and all other animals of the world? None obviously." This is a
classically Dionysian view of man's immersion in organic nature. Judeo-
Christianity elevates man above nature, but Sade, like Darwin, assigns
him to the animal kingdom, subject to natural force... Since man has no
privileges in Sade's universe, human acts are "neither good nor bad
intrinsically." From nature's point of view, marital sex is no different
from rape.[33]
It is worth noting that several revisionist Episcopalian theologians
have left open a place in their moral evaluation of sexuality for such
exotic practices as sadomasochism and pornography. [34]
Official proponents of the gay agenda in the Episcopal Church have
rightly denounced pedophilia as exploitative. But they also insist that
sexual identity, and homosexual "orientation" in particular, is inborn.
(Actually, only some of them think this. Others believe sexuality is
"socially constructed" and can be chosen.) In any case, it follows that
the Church should help young people, even children, identify their
particular sexuality, with all options open. Once again, the moral logic
of the innovators is impeccable, but their moral conclusions are
intolerable. The explosion point for many traditional Episcopalians has
come when they have faced the reality that they have to protect their
own children from their own Church![35]
The culture of sexual liberation is a new name for an old religion:
libertinism. Unlike ancient libertinism, the modern version,
"liberationism," is a highly politicized movement.[36] One may marvel at
the adeptness by which the "Integrity" lobby in the Episcopal Church
achieved most of its goals in a mere 20 years. But this is not
accidental. Liberationism is based on the assumption that all of life is
a quest for power and that all articulations of truth clothe a hidden
desire by one group to dominate another. Words are, in their view, as
malleable as sex. Thus they use slippery rhetoric about "same-sex
blessings" and "committed relationships" when they mean "marriage," and
they intimidate traditional Christians by calling them "homophobic" or
"heterosexist." It is for this reason that we who have observed close-up
the operation of this ideology warn you who have not: it is foolish to
play by the normal rules of deliberation and persuasion when your
opponents are playing by a different set of rules.
God has given us several little testimonies in the New Testament about
the dangers we now face: I refer to the letters of Jude and John. These
books make clear that moral behavior is part and parcel of the
Gospel.[37] Jude plainly identifies his opponents, who obviously claimed
a high spirituality, as "godless men, who change the grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ into a license for immorality" (verse 3). This verse
reminds one of Dostoevsky's observation in The Brothers Karamazov that
"if God does not exist, everything is permissible."
Libertinism is thus a sign of practical atheism. Jude's strategy for
dealing with such folk is militant: "contend for the faith once
delivered to the saints" by denouncing false teachers, even as you build
yourselves up in the holy faith. Similarly, John urges the church to
test the spirits, knowing that some spiritualities are in fact the
spirit of antichrist (1 John 4:1). While we must be careful not to
demonize our opponents as persons, the New Testament does encourage us
to see ourselves in the midst of a world of contending spirits, some of
whom have clothed themselves as an angel of light.[38]
"Come Over and Help Us"
If my analysis of the crisis facing the Episcopal Church is anywhere
near accurate, it is crucial for the rest of the Anglican Communion to
take notice and "come over and help us." It has frequently been said in
recent years that Third World Anglicans are in a much stronger place
spiritually than Westerners and that re-evangelization of the original
colonizing nations is called for.[39]
What I am asking for is a special form of this: help us defend the
Gospel of Jesus Christ from an attack by a foreign, essentially pagan
worldview. Many Third World Christians know from their own recent
history the striking difference between worship of nature gods and the
one true God. We in the West have forgotten the nature and power of
paganism, and so we find it harder to believe that it is cropping up in
our midst, especially when it is packaged in terms of liberation of
victimized groups and new light breaking forth from God's word.
In particular, I believe the Lambeth Conference in 1998 offers a
decisive opportunity for the wider body of Anglicans to speak clearly on
the question of Christian sexual norms. The Kuala Lumpur Statement on
Human Sexuality has already been widely circulated and gratefully
received by biblically-minded Episcopalians, even though our House of
Bishops chose to sidestep it. I would hope that the Lambeth Conference
would declare that the Kuala Lumpur statement represents the historic
teaching and the exclusive moral norm of the Church. I highlight the
word exclusive because many revisionist leaders use the word "norm"
statistically. Yes, of course, they say, marriage is the norm for the
heterosexual majority, but there can be another discontinuous norm for
the homosexual minority. That is not what the word norm means morally,
where it serves as both an ideal and a boundary marker of true faith and
order, of following Jesus or turning away from him.
If the Lambeth Conference joins the Third World Anglicans in affirming
the Kuala Lumpur Statement, it will give many of us Episcopalians great
encouragement. It will help us rebuff the frequent accusations that we
are not true Anglicans but fundamentalists and literalists in Anglican
garb and that we are the "troublers of Israel" (1 Kings 19:7-18).[40]
Let me refer you to this encounter between Elijah and King Ahab in the
Old Testament. Who is the true prophet and who the true troubler? God
knows. Lambeth can assist by defining the essentials and the limits of
what is truly Anglican.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for a larger dialogue on
sexuality. Frankly, I am of two minds about such a proposal. On the one
hand, I think the biblical and historic norms, as summarized in the
Kuala Lumpur statement, are sufficiently clear and relevant, and the
Communion might best "just say No" to the agenda being brought to it
from the West and get on with the mission of spreading the Gospel. On
the other hand, I have no objection in principle to the leaders of the
Church reviewing Christian doctrine within the classic formularies and
its application to contemporary experience.
But our experience of dialogue in the Episcopal Church should serve as a
warning. When the questions are posed and the committees chosen by
revisionists in the bureaucracy, the dialogue is skewed and artificial
from the beginning.[41] I would urge that any dialogue include a
genuinely fair representation of the entire Anglican Communion at all
levels.
Even more importantly, I would ask that the Lambeth Conference demand
genuine accountability from participants by specifying that no dialogue
should take place until all the participants agree to obey the current
norms.
To call for dialogue while acting as if a conclusion (and a totally
unprecedented one at that!) has already been reached is not real
dialogue. What we traditional Episcopalians have experienced in recent
years is a kind of double-talk about "continuing the dialogue."
Revisionists call for dialogue even as they violate existing rules,
claiming "justice" as their guide. Forgive the analogy, but it is like a
terrorist taking over an airplane and then calling for negotiations. So
the Lambeth bishops must say to the American Church: "Sure, we'll talk,
but first lay down your weapons!" Sadly, I predict, they will not do
that. But that reveals something: they are not really interested in
dialogue, they are interested in victory for their cause. Dialogue is a
ploy to pacify and distract their opponents while they continue
advancing their agenda in the Church.
I am not demeaning these opponents (yes, they are opponents). I am
taking them dead seriously, based on their words and deeds over the past
25 years in the American Chu rch. They are contending for the faith as
they understand it; it just happens to be a different faith from that
delivered to the saints of the New Testament and classic Anglicanism.
Perhaps you think I am too pessimistic. Try it! Challenge them to uphold
current Anglican standards in word and deed. If they do, I will gladly
repent of my pessimism and be part of a true dialogue. That simply has
not been our experience here.
Conclusion
After a certain vote in the General Convention that went the way of the
moral innovators, someone turned to Bishop William Frey and said: "Well,
Bill, I guess the handwriting is on the wall!" "Yes," Bishop Frey
replied, "and it says the same thing it said the first time." The
original handwriting was addressed to a complacent ruling class which
had duped its people with idolatry.[42] It read, Mene, Mene, Tekel
Parsin: "God has numbered your days and brought it to an end" (Daniel
5:26-28). Is it possible that these are God's words to the Episcopal
Church today? John Stott himself acknowledged that the time might come
when a Church so renounced the truth that it would cease to be the
Church. Then the Christian's obligation is to leave. I am sorry to
report that many conscientious Episcopalians have reached the conclusion
that that time has already come and gone.
But I, along with John Stott, believe that that time has not yet come.
Grim as I have made things sound in the Episcopal Church USA, I am
actually hopeful for our future. I am hopeful because we have a God for
whom all things are possible. I am hopeful because the majority of
American Episcopal church people do not support the gay-rights agenda.
They are confused and divided in their loyalties. They respect their
tradition and their Prayer Book. They also respect and defer to their
priests and bishops, many of whom have not been candid with them. I am
hopeful because a sizable remnant of leaders are finding their voice to
speak out in the name of historic Anglicanism. Finally, I am hopeful
because you are here and God has linked us together in this great
fellowship of the Gospel in the Anglican tradition.
I subtitled this talk "Why the Sexuality Conflict in the Episcopal
Church Is God's Word to the Anglican Communion," and I conclude with a
warning that failure to deal with the crisis in the Episcopal Church
will endanger the unity of the Anglican Communion. Representatives from
your provinces, meeting at Kuala Lumpur, have already raised the alarm
in your statement on "Anglican Reconstruction." This is a question that
cannot be delayed. What will become of Anglican unity if the American
church breaks into two bodies out of communion with each other, with one
body officially linked to Canterbury and the other officially committed
to Kuala Lumpur? If Anglican leaders look the other way in 1998, such a
situation is distinctly possible.
I believe that if the worldwide Communion would speak clearly and
forcefully to the American Church, there might be a turning back in our
Church to the faith once delivered to the saints. It would hardly be
painless and without distasteful conflict, and even division. But if you
will send a message to the Church in America, like the Risen Lord's
message to the churches in Revelation, who knows but that what has been
so far a Decade of Sexuality might conclude, as it should have been all
along, as a Decade of Evangelism? Such a message would encourage the
faithful and call those who are lukewarm to rediscover their first love
in Christ and his Word.
The handwriting is on the wall. Please spell it out for us, by the grace
of God that is given you and the help of the Holy Spirit. Thank you.
Notes [1] This essay is a revised version of a paper read at the
"Anglican Life and Witness" conference in Dallas, Texas, on September
23, 1997. It also appears in Transformation (Winter issue, 1998).
[2] Williams proved an embarrassment to Bishop Spong. Shortly after his
ordination, he claimed that "monogamy" was a straitjacket and that
everyone, including Mother Teresa, needs sex in order to experience
life. These views are not uncommon in the underground gay movement, but
they got Williams defrocked when he stated them in public. See Robert
Williams, Just As I Am: A Practical Guide to Being Out, Proud, and
Christian (New York: Crown, 1992) esp. xi-xxiii.
[3] See Philip Turner, "Episcopal Oversight and Ecclesiastical
Discipline," in Ephraim Radner and R. R. Reno, eds., Inhabiting Unity:
Theological Perspectives on the Proposed Lutheran-Episcopal Concordat
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 111-133.
[4] Bishop Righter claimed during his trial that Presiding Bishop Edmond
Browning had been consulted about this action and had suggested that
Bishop Righter, rather than Spong, officiate.
[5] In my recent book, Two Sexes, One Flesh: Why the Chu rch Cannot
Bless Same-Sex Marriage (Solon, OH: Latimer Press, 1997) 13-26, I argue
that the terminology of same-sex "blessings" and "unions" camouflages
the real intent to introduce a unisex understanding of marriage.
[6] The Convention did authorize dioceses to include "domestic
partners," which includes unmarried lovers of either sex, under church
health insurance policies.
[7] On "local option" as a transitional stage toward full mandating of
homosexuality, see Two Sexes, One Flesh, 92-93.
[8] In Two Sexes, One Flesh, 53-66, I argue that the liberationist
definition of justice is not rooted in any other major traditions of
Western justice but is in fact antithetical to them.
[9] In a recent parish newsletter, the Rev. Edgar Wells, Rector of the
Church of Saint Mary the Virgin (!), New York City, stated that "a
self-accepting homosexual person who aspires not to celibacy but to
sharing their life with another person is as acceptable for ordination
in this diocese as any celibate or married person." He goes on to say
that "our policy is clear, and I could not be on the Commission on
Ministry if I did not agree with it."
[10] Bishop Browning was one of the twenty bishops in 1979 who signed a
"Statement of Conscience" announcing that they would not obey or enforce
the Church's official and traditional teaching on sexuality.
[11] In his diocesan newspaper, Anglican Advance (Nov./Dec. 1993),
Bishop Griswold is reported to have said: "I believe that it is quite
possible for a homosexual person not committed to celibacy to live a
wholesome and profoundly Christian life." In the June/July issue, he
stated: "Can the values of the Gospel and the taking up of one's cross
and following Jesus be found in sexual expressions outside marriage and
celibacy? ... I have to answer 'yes' based on my own experience of grace
in the lives of persons whose sexuality has been expressed outside these
classical and normative categories." In an interview for Christianity
Today (Jan. 10, 1994) 44, he said that he had ordained homosexual
priests: "The question with respect to sexuality is, How is this
person's sexuality part of their living of the gospel."
[12] This lecture, given in Falls Church, Virginia, in February 1997,
has been circulated by EFAC-USA (P.O. Box 110, Hague, VA 22469;
1-800-472-2593) and published in The Episcopal Evangelical Journal 1/8
(Jan. 1998) 7-9.
[13] In his recent William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995) 239, David Daniell expresses Tyndale's and
Anglicanism's "plain sense" critique of scholastic hermeneutics, which
"can become a licence to what is little more than wilder forms of free
association, whereby words can mean anything, according to whim." The
attempts to root homosexual practice in Paul's hymn to love (1
Corinthians 13) while ignoring his teaching on the shape of Christian
relationships (1 Corinthians 6:9-20) is an example of contemporary
scholasticism at its worst.
[14] Cf. Two Sexes, One Flesh, 40.
[15] See, e.g., my "Reading the Bible as the Word of God," in Frederick
H. Borsch, ed., The Bible's Authority in Today's Church (Valley Forge,
Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993) 133-167.
[16] In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer (Dec. 28, 1997),
Bishop Frank Griswold employs the following rationalization for the
Church to contradict the Bible: "Broadly speaking, the Episcopal Church
is in conflict with Scripture... The only way to justify it is to say,
well, Jesus talks about the Spirit guiding the church and guiding
believers and bringing to their awareness things they cannot deal with
yet [John 16:13]. So one would have to say that the mind of Christ
operative in the church over time ... has led the church to in effect
contradict the words of the Gospel." Bishop Spong in his Nov. 12, 1997
letter to the Anglican Archbishops, uses the same argument and
proof-text.
[17] See Two Sexes, One Flesh, 34-35, n. 20.
[18] This interchange was with Virginia Mollenkott at the 50th annual
Witness conference held at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in
Ambridge, Pa., in October 1992. For other examples of open rejection of
the plain teaching of Scripture, see Two Sexes, One Flesh, 38-39.
[19] The St. Andrew's Day Statement: An Examination of the Theological
Principles Affecting the Homosexuality Debate (Church of England
Evangelical Council, 1995) was written by a theological working group
including Michael Banner, F.D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social
Theology at King's College, London; Markus Bockmuehl, University
Lecturer in Divinity at Cambridge University; Oliver O'Donovan, Regius
Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University; and David
Wright, Senior Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History, University of
Edinburgh.
[20] According to the Thirty-Nine Articles, "The Church hath power to
decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith; and
yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary
to God's Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture
that it be repugnant to another" (Article XX, Book of Common Prayer,
871).
[21] See Charles E. Bennison [Bishop Coadjutor of Pennsylvania]
"Rethinking Marriage - Again," Anglican Theological Review 79 (1997)
506-525. This article was originally presented at the Second
Consultation of Episcopalians for Same-Sex Unions (July 1996).
[22] On October 12, 1997, an article appeared in The Sunday Times
(London) stating that a majority of bishops of the Church of England are
willing to approve of and even bless unmarried "cohabiting" heterosexual
partners.
[23] "What about the bi's?" The notion of bisexuality appears to be a
slippery category that can include people who move back and forth
between heterosexual and homosexual partners.
[24] See Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy
Lasting Love (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1996); and Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead, The Divorce Culture (New York: Knopf, 1997).
[25] A lesser known fact about the now famous Bishop Righter is that he
was divorced and remarried twice while he continued to function as a
bishop in good standing. Apparently Bishop Righter's practice is now
perfectly acceptable to his colleagues. In the Philadelphia Inquirer
(supra note 16), Bishop Frank Griswold argued that the acceptance of
remarried priests and bishops shows that the Church can revise biblical
norms.
[26] I have made a number of specific suggestions for reform in Two
Sexes, One Flesh, 99-100. Some of these ideas have been taken up in the
"Covenant with the Family" recently proposed by the Institute on
Religion and Democracy (for copies, write Diane Knippers, IRD, 1521 16th
Street, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20036).
[27] A almost sixty years ago, Dorothy Sayers [Creed or Chaos? (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949) 27] identified the Nazi threat in terms of
spiritual warfare: Something is happening to us today which has not
happened for a very long time. We are waging a war of religion. Not a
civil war between adherents of the same religion, but a life-and-death
struggle between Christian and pagan." I am contending that today's
revisionists are analogous to the "German Christians" who co-opted the
church to serve a hostile worldview.
[28] Cf. my colleague David Mills's critique of "centrism" in "The End
of Liberalism" in The Evangelical Catholic (May/June 1997) 2-16.
[29] I have taken the term "ethic of intimacy" from Tim Stafford, The
Sexual Christian (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1989) 15-19.
[30] A national Episcopal Church manual titled Sexuality: A Divine Gift
(1988) made the claim that sex in itself is a sacrament. Cf. also Morton
T. and Barbara Kelsey, The Sacrament of Sexuality: The Spirituality and
Psychology of Sex (Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1991).
[31] Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love
and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1992) 181.
[32] Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of
God (San Francisco: Harper, 1989), 91; John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the
Bible from Fundamentalism (San Francisco: Harper, 1991) 243. For an
analysis of the anti-Christian basis of their worldviews, see Stephen M.
Smith, "Worldview, Language, and Radical Feminism," in Alvin F. Kimel,
ed., Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of
Feminism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992) 258-275.
[33] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti
to Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 1990) 236-237.
[34] See Carter Heyward on sadomasochism, in Touching Our Strength, 109;
and L. William Countryman on pornography and prostitution, in Dirt,
Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their
Implications for Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988) 245,
264-265.
[35] Just as the Anglican bishops at Dallas were discussing this paper,
it was reported that at an Anglican youth conference in Wales the
previous weekend the main speaker was an avowed lesbian and the
literature available promoted the gay lifestyle. "This is war," the
moderator at Dallas said. "We cannot tolerate this." "You have to
understand." an American bishop replied. "This is what they call
sensitizing you."
[36] It is the virtue of Jeffrey Satinover's book. Homosexuality and the
Politics of Truth (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996) 229-247, that he
links the drive for homosexuality with "the pagan revolution" in late
modern society.
[37] Cf. Richard Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (Waco: Word Books, 1983) 34:
"Antinomianism is a perversion of the gospel itself."
[38] Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the
Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996) 271-284, traces the intellectual characteristics of the antichrist
of late modernity.
[39] The disparity between the fruits of the Decade of Evangelism in the
West and in the Third World was strikingly apparent at the G-Code
Conference in 1995. Cf. Cyril C. Okorocha, ed., The Cutting Edge of
Mission: A Report of the Mid-Point review of the Decade of Evangelism
(London: Anglican Communion Publications, 1996).
[40] This was the clear implication of Bishop Browning's tirade against
traditionalists at the General Convention, as when he said: "Biblical
literalism may be someone's tradition, but it's not our tradition and
it's time we came home to our Anglican roots."
[41] This was true of the "sexuality dialogue" conducted by the national
Episcopal Church from 1992-1994, and the same-sex marriage study in
1995-1996, conducted by the House of Bishops' Theology Committee and the
Standing Liturgical Commission. For the latter case, see Two Sexes, One
Flesh, 113-117. [42] In "Good Restaurants in Gomorrah," First Things
(Feb. 1998) 14-16, Prof. Russell Reno argues that the key to
understanding the Episcopal Church is that it is dominated by
upper-middle-class concerns, among which sexuality ranks high.
This address was the title essay in my The Handwriting on the Wall: A
Plea to the Anglican Communion (Solon, Oh: Latimer Press, 1998).
Reproduced with permission.
END
------------------------------
http://www.stephenswitness.com/2007/07/handwriting-on-wall.html
Friday, July 27, 2007
Why the Sexuality Conflict in the Episcopal Church Is God's Word to the
Anglican Communion[1]
UPDATE: In September 1997, just ten years ago and one year following the
Righter Trial verdict, Anglican bishops from the Episcopal Church and
from the Global South gathered in Dallas at the "Anglican Life and
Witness Conference," sponsored by the fledgling Ekklesia Society under
the Rev. Dr. Bill Atwood, and the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. The
relationships formed at this gathering were the beginning of what has
become a strong alliance of orthodox Anglicans around the world.
In his recent comments, the Archbishop of York (23 July 07) has stated
that sexuality does not involve "core doctrines" of the faith and hence
should not be a church-dividing issue. This language of "core doctrine"
is reminiscent of the Righter verdict. The address I presented to the
bishops at this conference was aimed to show why the Episcopal Church's
position on sexuality was and is indeed a heresy and a threat to the
faith once for all delivered to the saints. SN
My dear Archbishops and Bishops and other colleagues:
I am conscious of, and deeply grateful for, the privilege of speaking to
you today, because I believe this week may prove a crisis point that
will affect the future of the Anglican Communion as a unified worldwide
movement. God is, I believe, issuing a challenge to the leaders of
Anglicanism that they must respond to or risk his judgment as the Lord
of history and the Church (Revelation 2:18-29).
I realize this opening statement may seem very Eurocentric and
"parochial," as though the health of the small American Church were the
sine qua non of the health of the worldwide Church. The fact is,
problems in the Episcopal Church tend to become symptomatic. As one
African bishop put it: when America sneezes, the whole world catches a
cold. In the case of the sexuality virus, it has already spread to most
Western churches of the Communion, and Southern hemisphere churches will
be exposed more and more because of the financial, educational, and
media influence of the West.
The Decade of Sexuality in the Episcopal Church
We Anglicans like to think in decades, it seems, as symbolized by the
intervals between Lambeth Conferences which have met every ten years
since 1888. It shall be my argument that this past decade in the
Episcopal Church USA has posed so great a challenge to the Communion
that it is genuinely possible that by the year 2008 the Anglican
Communion will be a name without substance. Absurd? Reflect on what it
once meant to be a member of the British Commonwealth before Britain
pledged its troth to the European Community and how little it means now
when one is subjected to visa checks just passing through a London
airport!
In 1988, the issue of homosexuality seemed but a little cloud on the
horizon of Anglicanism. Prior to the 20th century, the Anglican judgment
against sexual license of any sort had been so unequivocal that when in
1920 the Lambeth Conference addressed the new world of Sigmund Freud, it
did so with seeming assurance:
Recognizing that to live a pure and chaste life before and after
marriage is, for both sexes, the unchangeable Christian standard,
attainable and attained through the help of the Holy Spirit by men and
women of every age, the Conference desires to proclaim the universal
obligation of this standard, and its vital importance as an essential
condition of human happiness. (Resolution 66)
As recently as 1987, this "unchangeable standard" was reaffirmed with
only slight nuancing by the bishops of the Church of England, who
stated:
1. that sexual intercourse is an act of total commitment which belongs
properly within a permanent marriage relation ship;
2. that fornication and adultery are sins against this ideal, and are to
be met by a call to repentance and the exercise of compassion;
3. that homosexual acts also fall short of this ideal, and are likewise
to be met by a call to repentance and the exercise of compassion;
4. that all Christians are called to be exemplary in all spheres of
morality, including sexual morality, and that holiness of life is
especially required for Christian leaders.
At its 1988 Convention, the Episcopal Church USA joined in this
consensus by reaffirming once again "the Biblical and traditional
teaching on chastity and fidelity." Twenty-nine bishops, however,
dissented from this Resolution, and the next year Bishop John Spong of
Newark ordained Robert Williams, an avowed, non-celibate, homosexual man
to the priesthood.[2]
The decade since has been a time of unraveling in the Episcopal
Church.[3] When the Episcopal House of Bishops disassociated itself from
Bishop Spong's act in 1990, he encouraged his assistant bishop Walter
Righter to ordain Barry Stopfel, another practicing homosexual, within
two weeks of the bishops' meeting.[4] It was this act that became the
focal point of the so-called Righter Trial in 1996. Responding to what
we in America call the "in your face" acts of Bishops Spong and Righter,
Bishop William Frey proposed a canon at the 1991 General Convention
stating that "all clergy of this Church shall abstain from genital
relationships outside of holy matrimony." A majority of bishops voted
against this attempt to uphold the Church's teaching through a binding
canon, signaling the unwillingness of Church leaders to stop the sexual
radicals' overt tactic of occupying territory and then calling for
negotiations.
This political stalemate has resulted in a paradox that many outside the
Church find confusing. The Episcopal Church has simultaneously paid lip
service to classic Christian sexual moral norms while allowing rampant
violation of those very norms. In 1996, ten bishops attempted to rein in
this hypocrisy by presenting Bishop Righter for trial under the
disciplinary canon for "holding and teaching publicly or privately, and
advisedly any doctrine contrary to that held by this Church." They lost
the case and were stigmatized as "ten men with an agenda," who were
fomenting division in the Church.
The Righter verdict permitted homosexual activists to advance their
agenda to a new level: the advocacy of same-sex marriage.[5] The victory
of the early 1990's had been the condoning of gay ordination, but it
followed logically that if Barry Stopfel and others were now "wholesome
examples" for the flock of Christ, as the ordination rite declared them
to be, the Church should provide some formal recognition of their
partnerships. Thus although the 1994 General Convention forbade the
publication of any same-sex marriage rites, radical priests and bishops
have been performing informal ceremonies with increasing boldness.
Bishop Douglas Theuner of New Hampshire, for instance, wrote the clergy
of his diocese that he would support their officiating at such acts and
had done so himself. The homosexual lobby claims that similar rites are
being used in a substantial number of dioceses of the Episcopal Church.
This brings us to the General Convention of 1997, which many people saw
as decisive for gauging the future direction of the Episcopal Church.
The news from the General Convention is ominous but not yet disastrous.
On the positive side, with careful planning and much hard work,
supporters of the American Anglican Council prevented the Convention
from passing any formal and explicit endorsement of the homosexual
agenda.[6] It is therefore technically correct to say that the Episcopal
Church still affirms the biblical and traditional norms of sexuality and
marriage.
But this affirmation on paper does not extend to practice, where "local
option" is the accepted order of the day.[7] Openly practicing
homosexual laypersons and clergy spoke without reproach at the
Convention. A number of bishops made clear that they now permit blessing
of same-sex unions in their diocese. As the House of Bishops proposed
further study of whether such rites were possible, Bishop Joe Morris
Doss of New Jersey was asked whether this further discussion meant that
there would be a moratorium on ordaining homosexuals and performing
same-sex "b lessings." "No, it does not," was his blunt answer. As I
shall argue later, this refusal to wait follows necessarily from the
revisionists' claim that homosexuality is a "justice" issue.
The "Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality" was brought to the floor
of the House of Bishops for endorsement. By a 2 to 1 vote, the bishops
declined to affirm it, "deep-sixing" it by sending it to a committee for
further study. The votes at General Convention reveal that the Episcopal
bishops are divided 50/50 between those who support the gay agenda and
those who do not. It is equally clear that those who support it
absolutely refuse to conform to traditional standards and their fellow
bishops do not have the power or the will to stop them.
The two main decisions of the July Convention with regard to sexuality
were the revision of the canons to remove from power all who oppose the
ordination of women and the election of a new Presiding Bishop. The
canon revision was significant in that it makes clear that the basis for
the new sexual ethic is not diversity, or tolerance during a process of
dialogue, but justice, as defined by contemporary North American
liberationism.[8]
Let me explain the moral logic of their position. Revisionists read the
Bible and the baptismal vow "to strive for justice and peace among all
people" (American Book of Common Prayer, page 305) in such a way as to
make acceptance of their position morally binding on all. I need to
emphasize that they already employ this same logic against those who
maintain the exclusive biblical standard of "two sexes, one flesh."[9] I
can confidently predict that if the present trend continues, opponents
of homosexual practice will find themselves in the same situation
tomorrow as opponents of women's ordination today. The exclusion of
traditionalists follows necessarily from the liberationist conviction
that homosexuality is a non-negotiable human rights issue and that
opponents of sexual liberation, whether they know it or not, are bigots
(i.e., "homophobes" and "heterosexists").
The election of Frank Griswold as the new Presiding Bishop was a major
source of discouragement to many Episcopalians. During the past 12
years, traditional Episcopalians have come to expect that the national
Episcopal Church will always support and even promote the program of the
homosexual lobby. For instance, the General Convention committee
appointed by national church leaders to consider authorizing same-sex
"blessing" liturgies voted in favor of such rites 37 to 7 (deputies) and
7 to 0 (bishops); but when the House of Deputies received this committee
recommendation, it voted against such authorization. Now that is what I
call stacking the deck.
In 1984, when the current Presiding Bishop was elected, his support of
the gay-rights agenda was not perceived as a crucial issue.[10] That was
not the case this time. Everyone knew in 1997 where the two principal
candidates stood on this issue. Bishop Griswold has consistently voted
with the sexual revisionists in Church councils and has admitted to
ordaining avowed non-celibate homosexuals.[11] In 1994, he signed Bishop
Spong's "Koinonia Statement," along with 80 other bishops, declaring
that he would ordain homosexual persons living in committed
partnerships.
You must therefore understand that when biblically-minded Episcopalians
talk about withholding money from the national headquarters, it is based
on the assumption that the national leadership will continue to promote
practices fundamentally contrary to the Gospel. We are open to creative
proposals from the new Presiding Bishop, but in the absence of such
proposals, we will assume that it is "business as usual" in New York.
Three Reasons Why the Current Sexual Agenda of the Episcopal Church is a
Church Dividing Issue
In a recent lecture entitled "A Challenge to Episcopalians," John Stott
gave sage advice as to how we should live in the present crisis. He
called evangelicals to "stay in while refusing to give in."[12] Bishop
FitzSimons Allison has put this advice aphoristically as Stay. Don't
Obey. Don't Pay. Pray. John Stott went on to say that "we must choose
the really vital issues on which to protest and fight."
There are three compelling reasons why the sexuality issue in our Church
is decidedly one of those issues over which we must fight.
Rejecting Biblical Authority The first reason we must fight for
traditional sexual norms is that they are clearly taught in Scripture,
and the Church that turns away from God's Word in the Bible undermines
the basis of its own authority.
The Lambeth Quadrilateral speaks of the Holy Scripture "as being the
rule and ultimate standard of faith." In affirming this, the
Quadrilateral expresses the classic Anglican commitment to the primary
authority of Scripture in matters of faith and morals (see the
Thirty-Nine Articles, especially articles VI and XX). Everything the
Church teaches and practices must conform to the revealed Word of God in
the Bible. To be sure, some matters are clearer than others in
Scripture, and the question of how to harmonize one passage with another
can be very complex.
In the case of sexuality, however, the Bible in both Old and New
Testaments holds up lifelong, monogamous union of a man and a woman as
God's exclusive norm; it offers no positive examples of non-marital sex;
and it specifically condemns fornication and homosexuality as sin. The
Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality is thus correct in saying:
5. The whole body of the Scripture bears witness to God's will regarding
human sexuality which is to be expressed only within the lifelong union
of a man and a woman in (holy) matrimony.
6. The Holy Scriptures are clear in teaching that all sexual promiscuity
is sin. We are convinced that this includes homosexual practices,
between men or women, between men and women outside marriage as well as
heterosexual relationships.
7. We believe that the clear and unambiguous teaching of the Holy
Scriptures about human sexuality is of great help to Christians as it
provides clear boundaries.
The approval of homosexual practice and same-sex marriage poses one of
the clearest challenges to the authority of Scripture in the life of the
Church. Only the most strained reasoning can lead one to conclude that
the biblical authors would permit, much less endorse, these
practices.[13] If the bishops and other leaders of the Church cannot say
No to this clear contradiction of biblical norms, it is hard to believe
they will ever be able to use the Bible credibly in moral
decision-making.[14]
I have been involved for five years in the debate over the use of
Scripture in the Episcopal Church.[15] During these years, I have
encountered appalling apathy, even antipathy, to the idea that one must
search the Scriptures and, when all is said and done, obey the Word of
God written.[16] In the Righter trial, the judges, with one exception,
simply passed over the body of evidence collected by the presenter
bishops that Bishop Righter had knowingly disobeyed his ordination vows
to obey the Bible.[17]
In a debate several years ago, I asked a well-known lesbian advocate:
"Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it could be shown beyond a
shadow of a doubt that the Bible does specifically forbid contemporary
homosexual practices. Would it make any difference to you?" "Well, yes,"
she replied, "but I would not give up my relationship with my partner
because of it." It is crucial to understand this fact: revisionists
enter into "dialogue" with a prior commitment to do what they are going
to do regardless of what Scripture says.
Dishonoring Christian Marriage The second reason why the homosexual
agenda is a matter that we must stand against is that it leads to a
redefinition of marriage that is in fact a denial of our Lord's own high
doctrine. In his teaching on divorce and his presence at the wedding of
Cana, Jesus marked faithful, lifelong monogamous marriage as a sign of
his new covenant relationship to the Church. The "mystery of Christ and
the Church" to which St. Paul alludes (Ephesians 5:32) is in fact
founded on Jesus' own understanding of his role of bridegroom and savior
of his people. Alternatively, Jesus set celibacy, being a "eunuch for
the kingdom of God," as a sign of exclusive love for him. Like Jesus,
Paul also calls some Christians to remain unmarried for the sake of the
Gospel (1 Corinthians 7:32-35).[18]
In their recent "St. Andrew's Day" statement, several of England's
leading theologians affirm this understanding of the apostolic faith,
stating that the Church
assists all its members to a life of faithful witness in chastity and
holiness, recognising two forms or vocations in which that life can be
lived: marriage and singleness (Gen. 2.24; Matt. 19. 4-6; 1 Cor. 7
passim). There is no place for the church to confer legitimacy upon
alternatives to these.[19]
Thus Church leaders have no authority to devise a third sexual
configuration for same-sex couples.[20] The impossibility of this
novelty is suggested by the moral innovators' unclarity about whether to
model homosexual relations on marriage or over against marriage. Some
gay-rights advocates take a "both/and" approach, affirming the sanctity
of marriage and the blessing of alternative sexual unions. Others call
for a "new paradigm" for all sexual relationships, homosexual and
heterosexual.[21]
The truth is, any new paradigm is utterly at odds with the holy estate
of matrimony. Fundamental moral principles and institutions simply do
not allow for compromise or third options. The Prayer Book wedding
service alludes to a Scripture passage that says: "Let marriage be held
in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled; for God will
judge the immoral [literally 'fornicators'] and adulterous" (Hebrews
13:4). The moral logic of this passage is clear: marriage is honored
when it is set apart from other illegitimate forms of sexual activity.
Therefore talk of blessing the cohabitation of same-sex or opposite-sex
partners dishonors marriage.[22]
Advocates of a new paradigm for marriage have decried sexual
exploitation and abuse but have been vague as to what kinds of
relationships are acceptable. I have asked them several pointed
questions to clarify their position:
Will they uphold homosexual unions as lifelong? =B7 Will they uphold
premarital chastity as a rule for all Christians? =B7 Will they condemn
sexual relations other than those sanctioned by the Church? =B7 Will they
insist that all persons remain in that state to which they have
committed themselves?[23]
No reply. In other words, the Episcopal Church is presently condoning
and promoting practices that are in continual flux. As in the case of so
many other utopian visions of this waning century, we are being told:
"Trust us. We'll tell you where we're going once we've got there."
When the Church gives up the norm of exclusive, lifelong marriage of a
man and a woman, it undermines the institution in society as well. Many
of us in the West know deep down that the abandonment of marital
fidelity over the past thirty years as a public expectation is greatly
responsible for the confusion and personal pain of so many in our
society. We are aware that "no-fault divorce" laws have not only
mirrored the breakdown of the family but have contributed to it.[24]
We in the Episcopal Church know that the revision of the divorce and
remarriage canons in 1973 has led to rampant divorce among clergy and
demoralization of the congregations under their care. We know this, but
we shrug our shoulders fatalistically, saying: "What can we do? My
mother, my best friend, even my priest and bishop, are on their second
or third marriage."[25]
I believe that the Church must regain the lead in this social crisis
that is so close to the heart of our Lord's own teaching and at the root
of so much personal pain and loss. We must repent of our past neglect by
restoring and revitalizing the doctrine and discipline of marriage.[26]
Reforming our practices in the midst of the permissive culture of the
West will be no easy task. It is made even more difficult when the
national Episcopal Church is intent on undermining the effort. It would
be most helpful if the Anglican Communion would provide a counterpoise
by offering positive teaching from the biblical and traditional
viewpoint.
Embracing a False Spirituality The third reason that the gay-rights
movement in the Episcopal Church presents Anglicanism with a historic
test is that it is not just about sexuality but about spirituality. It
has been just over 30 years since my conversion to Christ and baptism in
the Episcopal Church. During that time, I have been reading continually
and widely in works of theology from all sides. What I can tell you with
full conviction is that the issue presented to us in the sexuality
debate is not just about sex but about the meaning and truth of the
Christian faith altogether.[27]
True, there are some folks who hold otherwise orthodox opinions yet
differ on matters of sexuality, but most people who stand there are in
transition either toward a more traditional or a more revisionist
position.[28] If you get in bed with a new periphery one evening,
chances are you will wake up next morning in the embrace of a new
center. (Or, frightened by the strange bedfellow, you may rush back to
your first love.)
The words "sexuality" and "sexual identity" and the so-called "ethic of
intimacy" that defines personal identity in terms of sexual satisfaction
are part of the revolution in the thinking of late modernity.[29]
This revolution begins with the conviction that the Sea of Faith has
withdrawn, leaving the world and the human soul empty and infinitely
plastic. In the grip of this void, men and women grasp for something
that looks like their former spirituality. Falling in love - "Ah, love,
let us be true to one another" - and falling into bed are the common
substitutes for love of God and love of neighbor.
Sexuality is a surrogate religion. What late modernity takes away with
one hand - the divine covenant and purposes of marriage - it offers back
with the idea of sex as a sacrament.[30] Anthony Giddens, a secularist
and a sociologist, puts it this way:
Sexuality, it could be suggested, gains its compelling quality, together
with its aura of excitement and danger, from the fact that it puts us in
contact with these lost fields of experience. Its ecstasy, or the
promise of it, has echoes of the "ethical passion" which transcendental
symbolism used to inspire - and of course cultivated eroticism, as
distinct from sexuality in the service of reproduction, has long been
associated with religiosity.[31]
It is understandable that those without God will seek to replace him and
his institutions with a surrogate. What is deeply troubling is when the
same ideas are taught by Christian bishops and theologians. The clearest
articulations of the worldview chasm between classic and late-modernist
Christianity can be found in the advocates of North American liberation
theology, people like Bishop John Spong and Professor Carter Heyward who
claim that one's essence is "to explore the character of the erotic as
sacred power" and "to live, to love, to be."[32]
I must tell you frankly, Bishop Spong and Professor Heyward are not
"fringe" figures in the Episcopal Church. This past July at the
"Integrity Mass" sponsored by the gay lobby and attended by the
Presiding Bishop and many other church officials at the General
Convention, the preacher uttered the following profundity:
Our special task, our specific charism, is to help ourselves and the
church reclaim the erotic as a central part of our lives ... We know in
the deepest places of our knowing that the pathways to our spiritual
selves are through our erotic selves. We must chart those paths and make
those maps available to the larger church. We must begin with awkward
strokes to touch the strength of our erotic power.
Whatever this means, it is not Christianity, but it was greeted by many
with equanimity and even congratulation. Twenty years ago, who would
have imagined the Episcopal Church would be voting on homosexual
marriage? Watch out! Unless someone calls paganism by its name, you may
be singing "Eros divine, all loves excelling!" at Lambeth 2008.
Venus is a soft goddess, but she has a demonic alter ego, which emerges
in the "exotic" excesses of modern sexuality. Camille Paglia, in her
flamboyant yet insightful way, argues that the Marquis de Sade is the
true prophet of late modern thinking about sexuality.
Humanity has no special status in the universe. Sade asks: "What is man?
and what difference is there between him and other plants, between him
and all other animals of the world? None obviously." This is a
classically Dionysian view of man's immersion in organic nature. Judeo-
Christianity elevates man above nature, but Sade, like Darwin, assigns
him to the animal kingdom, subject to natural force... Since man has no
privileges in Sade's universe, human acts are "neither good nor bad
intrinsically." From nature's point of view, marital sex is no different
from rape.[33]
It is worth noting that several revisionist Episcopalian theologians
have left open a place in their moral evaluation of sexuality for such
exotic practices as sadomasochism and pornography. [34]
Official proponents of the gay agenda in the Episcopal Church have
rightly denounced pedophilia as exploitative. But they also insist that
sexual identity, and homosexual "orientation" in particular, is inborn.
(Actually, only some of them think this. Others believe sexuality is
"socially constructed" and can be chosen.) In any case, it follows that
the Church should help young people, even children, identify their
particular sexuality, with all options open. Once again, the moral logic
of the innovators is impeccable, but their moral conclusions are
intolerable. The explosion point for many traditional Episcopalians has
come when they have faced the reality that they have to protect their
own children from their own Church![35]
The culture of sexual liberation is a new name for an old religion:
libertinism. Unlike ancient libertinism, the modern version,
"liberationism," is a highly politicized movement.[36] One may marvel at
the adeptness by which the "Integrity" lobby in the Episcopal Church
achieved most of its goals in a mere 20 years. But this is not
accidental. Liberationism is based on the assumption that all of life is
a quest for power and that all articulations of truth clothe a hidden
desire by one group to dominate another. Words are, in their view, as
malleable as sex. Thus they use slippery rhetoric about "same-sex
blessings" and "committed relationships" when they mean "marriage," and
they intimidate traditional Christians by calling them "homophobic" or
"heterosexist." It is for this reason that we who have observed close-up
the operation of this ideology warn you who have not: it is foolish to
play by the normal rules of deliberation and persuasion when your
opponents are playing by a different set of rules.
God has given us several little testimonies in the New Testament about
the dangers we now face: I refer to the letters of Jude and John. These
books make clear that moral behavior is part and parcel of the
Gospel.[37] Jude plainly identifies his opponents, who obviously claimed
a high spirituality, as "godless men, who change the grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ into a license for immorality" (verse 3). This verse
reminds one of Dostoevsky's observation in The Brothers Karamazov that
"if God does not exist, everything is permissible."
Libertinism is thus a sign of practical atheism. Jude's strategy for
dealing with such folk is militant: "contend for the faith once
delivered to the saints" by denouncing false teachers, even as you build
yourselves up in the holy faith. Similarly, John urges the church to
test the spirits, knowing that some spiritualities are in fact the
spirit of antichrist (1 John 4:1). While we must be careful not to
demonize our opponents as persons, the New Testament does encourage us
to see ourselves in the midst of a world of contending spirits, some of
whom have clothed themselves as an angel of light.[38]
"Come Over and Help Us"
If my analysis of the crisis facing the Episcopal Church is anywhere
near accurate, it is crucial for the rest of the Anglican Communion to
take notice and "come over and help us." It has frequently been said in
recent years that Third World Anglicans are in a much stronger place
spiritually than Westerners and that re-evangelization of the original
colonizing nations is called for.[39]
What I am asking for is a special form of this: help us defend the
Gospel of Jesus Christ from an attack by a foreign, essentially pagan
worldview. Many Third World Christians know from their own recent
history the striking difference between worship of nature gods and the
one true God. We in the West have forgotten the nature and power of
paganism, and so we find it harder to believe that it is cropping up in
our midst, especially when it is packaged in terms of liberation of
victimized groups and new light breaking forth from God's word.
In particular, I believe the Lambeth Conference in 1998 offers a
decisive opportunity for the wider body of Anglicans to speak clearly on
the question of Christian sexual norms. The Kuala Lumpur Statement on
Human Sexuality has already been widely circulated and gratefully
received by biblically-minded Episcopalians, even though our House of
Bishops chose to sidestep it. I would hope that the Lambeth Conference
would declare that the Kuala Lumpur statement represents the historic
teaching and the exclusive moral norm of the Church. I highlight the
word exclusive because many revisionist leaders use the word "norm"
statistically. Yes, of course, they say, marriage is the norm for the
heterosexual majority, but there can be another discontinuous norm for
the homosexual minority. That is not what the word norm means morally,
where it serves as both an ideal and a boundary marker of true faith and
order, of following Jesus or turning away from him.
If the Lambeth Conference joins the Third World Anglicans in affirming
the Kuala Lumpur Statement, it will give many of us Episcopalians great
encouragement. It will help us rebuff the frequent accusations that we
are not true Anglicans but fundamentalists and literalists in Anglican
garb and that we are the "troublers of Israel" (1 Kings 19:7-18).[40]
Let me refer you to this encounter between Elijah and King Ahab in the
Old Testament. Who is the true prophet and who the true troubler? God
knows. Lambeth can assist by defining the essentials and the limits of
what is truly Anglican.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for a larger dialogue on
sexuality. Frankly, I am of two minds about such a proposal. On the one
hand, I think the biblical and historic norms, as summarized in the
Kuala Lumpur statement, are sufficiently clear and relevant, and the
Communion might best "just say No" to the agenda being brought to it
from the West and get on with the mission of spreading the Gospel. On
the other hand, I have no objection in principle to the leaders of the
Church reviewing Christian doctrine within the classic formularies and
its application to contemporary experience.
But our experience of dialogue in the Episcopal Church should serve as a
warning. When the questions are posed and the committees chosen by
revisionists in the bureaucracy, the dialogue is skewed and artificial
from the beginning.[41] I would urge that any dialogue include a
genuinely fair representation of the entire Anglican Communion at all
levels.
Even more importantly, I would ask that the Lambeth Conference demand
genuine accountability from participants by specifying that no dialogue
should take place until all the participants agree to obey the current
norms.
To call for dialogue while acting as if a conclusion (and a totally
unprecedented one at that!) has already been reached is not real
dialogue. What we traditional Episcopalians have experienced in recent
years is a kind of double-talk about "continuing the dialogue."
Revisionists call for dialogue even as they violate existing rules,
claiming "justice" as their guide. Forgive the analogy, but it is like a
terrorist taking over an airplane and then calling for negotiations. So
the Lambeth bishops must say to the American Church: "Sure, we'll talk,
but first lay down your weapons!" Sadly, I predict, they will not do
that. But that reveals something: they are not really interested in
dialogue, they are interested in victory for their cause. Dialogue is a
ploy to pacify and distract their opponents while they continue
advancing their agenda in the Church.
I am not demeaning these opponents (yes, they are opponents). I am
taking them dead seriously, based on their words and deeds over the past
25 years in the American Chu rch. They are contending for the faith as
they understand it; it just happens to be a different faith from that
delivered to the saints of the New Testament and classic Anglicanism.
Perhaps you think I am too pessimistic. Try it! Challenge them to uphold
current Anglican standards in word and deed. If they do, I will gladly
repent of my pessimism and be part of a true dialogue. That simply has
not been our experience here.
Conclusion
After a certain vote in the General Convention that went the way of the
moral innovators, someone turned to Bishop William Frey and said: "Well,
Bill, I guess the handwriting is on the wall!" "Yes," Bishop Frey
replied, "and it says the same thing it said the first time." The
original handwriting was addressed to a complacent ruling class which
had duped its people with idolatry.[42] It read, Mene, Mene, Tekel
Parsin: "God has numbered your days and brought it to an end" (Daniel
5:26-28). Is it possible that these are God's words to the Episcopal
Church today? John Stott himself acknowledged that the time might come
when a Church so renounced the truth that it would cease to be the
Church. Then the Christian's obligation is to leave. I am sorry to
report that many conscientious Episcopalians have reached the conclusion
that that time has already come and gone.
But I, along with John Stott, believe that that time has not yet come.
Grim as I have made things sound in the Episcopal Church USA, I am
actually hopeful for our future. I am hopeful because we have a God for
whom all things are possible. I am hopeful because the majority of
American Episcopal church people do not support the gay-rights agenda.
They are confused and divided in their loyalties. They respect their
tradition and their Prayer Book. They also respect and defer to their
priests and bishops, many of whom have not been candid with them. I am
hopeful because a sizable remnant of leaders are finding their voice to
speak out in the name of historic Anglicanism. Finally, I am hopeful
because you are here and God has linked us together in this great
fellowship of the Gospel in the Anglican tradition.
I subtitled this talk "Why the Sexuality Conflict in the Episcopal
Church Is God's Word to the Anglican Communion," and I conclude with a
warning that failure to deal with the crisis in the Episcopal Church
will endanger the unity of the Anglican Communion. Representatives from
your provinces, meeting at Kuala Lumpur, have already raised the alarm
in your statement on "Anglican Reconstruction." This is a question that
cannot be delayed. What will become of Anglican unity if the American
church breaks into two bodies out of communion with each other, with one
body officially linked to Canterbury and the other officially committed
to Kuala Lumpur? If Anglican leaders look the other way in 1998, such a
situation is distinctly possible.
I believe that if the worldwide Communion would speak clearly and
forcefully to the American Church, there might be a turning back in our
Church to the faith once delivered to the saints. It would hardly be
painless and without distasteful conflict, and even division. But if you
will send a message to the Church in America, like the Risen Lord's
message to the churches in Revelation, who knows but that what has been
so far a Decade of Sexuality might conclude, as it should have been all
along, as a Decade of Evangelism? Such a message would encourage the
faithful and call those who are lukewarm to rediscover their first love
in Christ and his Word.
The handwriting is on the wall. Please spell it out for us, by the grace
of God that is given you and the help of the Holy Spirit. Thank you.
Notes [1] This essay is a revised version of a paper read at the
"Anglican Life and Witness" conference in Dallas, Texas, on September
23, 1997. It also appears in Transformation (Winter issue, 1998).
[2] Williams proved an embarrassment to Bishop Spong. Shortly after his
ordination, he claimed that "monogamy" was a straitjacket and that
everyone, including Mother Teresa, needs sex in order to experience
life. These views are not uncommon in the underground gay movement, but
they got Williams defrocked when he stated them in public. See Robert
Williams, Just As I Am: A Practical Guide to Being Out, Proud, and
Christian (New York: Crown, 1992) esp. xi-xxiii.
[3] See Philip Turner, "Episcopal Oversight and Ecclesiastical
Discipline," in Ephraim Radner and R. R. Reno, eds., Inhabiting Unity:
Theological Perspectives on the Proposed Lutheran-Episcopal Concordat
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 111-133.
[4] Bishop Righter claimed during his trial that Presiding Bishop Edmond
Browning had been consulted about this action and had suggested that
Bishop Righter, rather than Spong, officiate.
[5] In my recent book, Two Sexes, One Flesh: Why the Chu rch Cannot
Bless Same-Sex Marriage (Solon, OH: Latimer Press, 1997) 13-26, I argue
that the terminology of same-sex "blessings" and "unions" camouflages
the real intent to introduce a unisex understanding of marriage.
[6] The Convention did authorize dioceses to include "domestic
partners," which includes unmarried lovers of either sex, under church
health insurance policies.
[7] On "local option" as a transitional stage toward full mandating of
homosexuality, see Two Sexes, One Flesh, 92-93.
[8] In Two Sexes, One Flesh, 53-66, I argue that the liberationist
definition of justice is not rooted in any other major traditions of
Western justice but is in fact antithetical to them.
[9] In a recent parish newsletter, the Rev. Edgar Wells, Rector of the
Church of Saint Mary the Virgin (!), New York City, stated that "a
self-accepting homosexual person who aspires not to celibacy but to
sharing their life with another person is as acceptable for ordination
in this diocese as any celibate or married person." He goes on to say
that "our policy is clear, and I could not be on the Commission on
Ministry if I did not agree with it."
[10] Bishop Browning was one of the twenty bishops in 1979 who signed a
"Statement of Conscience" announcing that they would not obey or enforce
the Church's official and traditional teaching on sexuality.
[11] In his diocesan newspaper, Anglican Advance (Nov./Dec. 1993),
Bishop Griswold is reported to have said: "I believe that it is quite
possible for a homosexual person not committed to celibacy to live a
wholesome and profoundly Christian life." In the June/July issue, he
stated: "Can the values of the Gospel and the taking up of one's cross
and following Jesus be found in sexual expressions outside marriage and
celibacy? ... I have to answer 'yes' based on my own experience of grace
in the lives of persons whose sexuality has been expressed outside these
classical and normative categories." In an interview for Christianity
Today (Jan. 10, 1994) 44, he said that he had ordained homosexual
priests: "The question with respect to sexuality is, How is this
person's sexuality part of their living of the gospel."
[12] This lecture, given in Falls Church, Virginia, in February 1997,
has been circulated by EFAC-USA (P.O. Box 110, Hague, VA 22469;
1-800-472-2593) and published in The Episcopal Evangelical Journal 1/8
(Jan. 1998) 7-9.
[13] In his recent William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995) 239, David Daniell expresses Tyndale's and
Anglicanism's "plain sense" critique of scholastic hermeneutics, which
"can become a licence to what is little more than wilder forms of free
association, whereby words can mean anything, according to whim." The
attempts to root homosexual practice in Paul's hymn to love (1
Corinthians 13) while ignoring his teaching on the shape of Christian
relationships (1 Corinthians 6:9-20) is an example of contemporary
scholasticism at its worst.
[14] Cf. Two Sexes, One Flesh, 40.
[15] See, e.g., my "Reading the Bible as the Word of God," in Frederick
H. Borsch, ed., The Bible's Authority in Today's Church (Valley Forge,
Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993) 133-167.
[16] In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer (Dec. 28, 1997),
Bishop Frank Griswold employs the following rationalization for the
Church to contradict the Bible: "Broadly speaking, the Episcopal Church
is in conflict with Scripture... The only way to justify it is to say,
well, Jesus talks about the Spirit guiding the church and guiding
believers and bringing to their awareness things they cannot deal with
yet [John 16:13]. So one would have to say that the mind of Christ
operative in the church over time ... has led the church to in effect
contradict the words of the Gospel." Bishop Spong in his Nov. 12, 1997
letter to the Anglican Archbishops, uses the same argument and
proof-text.
[17] See Two Sexes, One Flesh, 34-35, n. 20.
[18] This interchange was with Virginia Mollenkott at the 50th annual
Witness conference held at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in
Ambridge, Pa., in October 1992. For other examples of open rejection of
the plain teaching of Scripture, see Two Sexes, One Flesh, 38-39.
[19] The St. Andrew's Day Statement: An Examination of the Theological
Principles Affecting the Homosexuality Debate (Church of England
Evangelical Council, 1995) was written by a theological working group
including Michael Banner, F.D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social
Theology at King's College, London; Markus Bockmuehl, University
Lecturer in Divinity at Cambridge University; Oliver O'Donovan, Regius
Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University; and David
Wright, Senior Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History, University of
Edinburgh.
[20] According to the Thirty-Nine Articles, "The Church hath power to
decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith; and
yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary
to God's Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture
that it be repugnant to another" (Article XX, Book of Common Prayer,
871).
[21] See Charles E. Bennison [Bishop Coadjutor of Pennsylvania]
"Rethinking Marriage - Again," Anglican Theological Review 79 (1997)
506-525. This article was originally presented at the Second
Consultation of Episcopalians for Same-Sex Unions (July 1996).
[22] On October 12, 1997, an article appeared in The Sunday Times
(London) stating that a majority of bishops of the Church of England are
willing to approve of and even bless unmarried "cohabiting" heterosexual
partners.
[23] "What about the bi's?" The notion of bisexuality appears to be a
slippery category that can include people who move back and forth
between heterosexual and homosexual partners.
[24] See Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy
Lasting Love (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1996); and Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead, The Divorce Culture (New York: Knopf, 1997).
[25] A lesser known fact about the now famous Bishop Righter is that he
was divorced and remarried twice while he continued to function as a
bishop in good standing. Apparently Bishop Righter's practice is now
perfectly acceptable to his colleagues. In the Philadelphia Inquirer
(supra note 16), Bishop Frank Griswold argued that the acceptance of
remarried priests and bishops shows that the Church can revise biblical
norms.
[26] I have made a number of specific suggestions for reform in Two
Sexes, One Flesh, 99-100. Some of these ideas have been taken up in the
"Covenant with the Family" recently proposed by the Institute on
Religion and Democracy (for copies, write Diane Knippers, IRD, 1521 16th
Street, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20036).
[27] A almost sixty years ago, Dorothy Sayers [Creed or Chaos? (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949) 27] identified the Nazi threat in terms of
spiritual warfare: Something is happening to us today which has not
happened for a very long time. We are waging a war of religion. Not a
civil war between adherents of the same religion, but a life-and-death
struggle between Christian and pagan." I am contending that today's
revisionists are analogous to the "German Christians" who co-opted the
church to serve a hostile worldview.
[28] Cf. my colleague David Mills's critique of "centrism" in "The End
of Liberalism" in The Evangelical Catholic (May/June 1997) 2-16.
[29] I have taken the term "ethic of intimacy" from Tim Stafford, The
Sexual Christian (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1989) 15-19.
[30] A national Episcopal Church manual titled Sexuality: A Divine Gift
(1988) made the claim that sex in itself is a sacrament. Cf. also Morton
T. and Barbara Kelsey, The Sacrament of Sexuality: The Spirituality and
Psychology of Sex (Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1991).
[31] Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love
and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1992) 181.
[32] Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of
God (San Francisco: Harper, 1989), 91; John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the
Bible from Fundamentalism (San Francisco: Harper, 1991) 243. For an
analysis of the anti-Christian basis of their worldviews, see Stephen M.
Smith, "Worldview, Language, and Radical Feminism," in Alvin F. Kimel,
ed., Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of
Feminism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992) 258-275.
[33] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti
to Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 1990) 236-237.
[34] See Carter Heyward on sadomasochism, in Touching Our Strength, 109;
and L. William Countryman on pornography and prostitution, in Dirt,
Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their
Implications for Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988) 245,
264-265.
[35] Just as the Anglican bishops at Dallas were discussing this paper,
it was reported that at an Anglican youth conference in Wales the
previous weekend the main speaker was an avowed lesbian and the
literature available promoted the gay lifestyle. "This is war," the
moderator at Dallas said. "We cannot tolerate this." "You have to
understand." an American bishop replied. "This is what they call
sensitizing you."
[36] It is the virtue of Jeffrey Satinover's book. Homosexuality and the
Politics of Truth (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996) 229-247, that he
links the drive for homosexuality with "the pagan revolution" in late
modern society.
[37] Cf. Richard Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (Waco: Word Books, 1983) 34:
"Antinomianism is a perversion of the gospel itself."
[38] Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the
Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996) 271-284, traces the intellectual characteristics of the antichrist
of late modernity.
[39] The disparity between the fruits of the Decade of Evangelism in the
West and in the Third World was strikingly apparent at the G-Code
Conference in 1995. Cf. Cyril C. Okorocha, ed., The Cutting Edge of
Mission: A Report of the Mid-Point review of the Decade of Evangelism
(London: Anglican Communion Publications, 1996).
[40] This was the clear implication of Bishop Browning's tirade against
traditionalists at the General Convention, as when he said: "Biblical
literalism may be someone's tradition, but it's not our tradition and
it's time we came home to our Anglican roots."
[41] This was true of the "sexuality dialogue" conducted by the national
Episcopal Church from 1992-1994, and the same-sex marriage study in
1995-1996, conducted by the House of Bishops' Theology Committee and the
Standing Liturgical Commission. For the latter case, see Two Sexes, One
Flesh, 113-117. [42] In "Good Restaurants in Gomorrah," First Things
(Feb. 1998) 14-16, Prof. Russell Reno argues that the key to
understanding the Episcopal Church is that it is dominated by
upper-middle-class concerns, among which sexuality ranks high.
This address was the title essay in my The Handwriting on the Wall: A
Plea to the Anglican Communion (Solon, Oh: Latimer Press, 1998).
Reproduced with permission.
END
------------------------------
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