By William Murchison
(Encounter Books, pp. 215 lmiklos@encounterbooks.com 212.871.5741)
Reviewed by David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
5/19/2009
When the final chapters of The Episcopal Church are written, this book, "Mortal Follies" by noted syndicated columnist and lifelong Episcopalian William Murchison, will be a significant volume in understanding why and how a church lost its way selling its birthright to follow the world and ignore "the way".
In 200 compact pages, Murchison tells us how there has been an almost complete disappearance of The Episcopal Church into the cultural woodwork - a disappearance brought on by its being taken captive by the culture. "Let non-Episcopalians learn from us. We have been conducting an ecclesiastical estate sale: our godly heritage, our gift for worship and spirituality, priced for quick disposal on the market-place."
Murchison takes us through the rough and tumble years of the Fifties and on to the 21st century. He writes of the Episcopal Church's "vaunted specialness-its reputation for gentility; the richness and roll of the language that Episcopalians used to worship God; masonry churches smelling of history and ritual; social and economic prestige outsized for a membership easily smaller than that of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans."
He writes with obvious pride that the Episcopal Church was the Church of England grafted into the American colonies, pruned and trimmed after the Revolution to suit changed circumstances, but rooted still in the English reformation of the sixteenth century. It was Protestant or Catholic-sometimes Protestant and Catholic---just as a parish or a diocese desired.
Murchison recounts the early and glorious history of Anglicanism on American soil, its missionaries, and the church in colonial times. "Whether by accident, intention, or an odd conjunction of both factors, the Episcopal Church oozed specialness."
Episcopalians he noted are a beguiling blend of all that was best in Christianity-orthodox doctrine; sacramental devotion balanced by devotion to Scripture; intellectual attainment; scholarship; architectural richness; liturgical know-how; good manners; good taste-and, with it all, intellectual spaciousness; and the willingness to not necessarily believe a new story, or a new account, but at least to hear it, as a judge from his bench might hear an arresting new theory of contract law.
The Episcopal Church flirted with the Civil Rights movement, a new Prayer Book, irregularly ordained women priests, changes in language about God, and "the feminists pressed their audiences for supposedly clarifying language about God. Some took to identifying Him as "Father/Mother God," or, still more radically, "she." Or just plain "God," the better to avoid pronouns," now defined the emerging, updated, radicalized Episcopal Church.
And so Christianity was re-invented, re-tooled, re-worked and re-amplified by the Episcopal Church, imparting new understandings the church must ever be at pains to grasp.
Was women's ordination the Episcopal Pandora's Box? Not really, writes Murchison. The Episcopal style, theologically speaking, was, by the early 1970s, already loose and accommodating. "The calling of Bishop Pike, and of the mini-Pikes who steered their boat in his large wake, was to exalt liberation.
It was downhill from thence forward.
"We see the church postulating in its worship and ministry new norms of "inclusion" and "equality" that overshadow older norms. We find Episcopalians concluding that the new-old cause of women's rights demonstrates the need for leaping over all objections to the ordination of women as priests, and for seeing even the traditional understandings of the marital relationship as deserving significant expansion."
And expand it did. From the "traditionalist" standpoint, the Robinson consecration was the ecclesiastical version of Ft. Sumter. The long-looked-for day of reckoning had dawned.
Murchison writes that the modern love affair with tolerance and diversity and contrasting views of truth has had very specific effects on the church's ability to function as a church. It has become an institution, it sometimes seems, more loosely wedded to the passing earthly show than to the Kingdom of Heaven.
In brilliant prose, Murchison exposes the soft underbelly of the Episcopal Church's reductionism in faith and morals. Murchison is a stylist of the first order. His book is a small masterpiece, an eye into the mordant and spiritually corrosive world of The Episcopal Church. It is a sad but must reading for anyone wanting a window into the soul not only of The Episcopal Church, but of a culture in decline and the church that is following it.
END
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