COMPANY MEN
I don’t know how closely any of you have been following the Virginia controversy involving Tory Baucum, the allegedly “conservative” rector of Truro Anglican Church (ACNA) and Shannon Johnston, Episcopal Bishop of Virginia. Stand Firm has been all over this story so if you want details, go there and start searching. I’ll sum things up as briefly as I can. It basically began when Truro reached an agreement with the Diocese that Greg Griffith summed up as follows:
Truro could have walked away from the property the moment the congregation realized that the game was over. They could have walked away, and found themselves a new campus. They could have made a fresh start.
Instead, they will stay in the building for another year, paying hard-earned money for the upkeep of the buildings, and during which visitations by ACNA Bishop John Guernsey are made purely at the pleasure of TEC Bishop Shannon Johnston.
Then they will leave, with nothing, and with a year’s worth of maintenance expenses down the drain, unavailable to them to support any expenses at their new facility.
Not long after that, Baucum decided to try to reach out to Shannon Johnston.
We met two years ago in 2011. I had been wanting to meet Shannon. We had been in a lawsuit at war. I had asked a predecessor of mine at Truro, Bishop John Howe to reach out to Shannon. I went to Richmond to meet him.
The lawsuit was the occasion not the reason. I had been the rector for three years. I had seen a reluctance in the church to reach out to different communities in our area. There was fear. I could not just tell people to reach out to people and places they were afraid of without setting an example. I wanted to reach out to an adversary. We read that perfect love casts out fear, but equally perfect fear casts out love.
For his part, Shannie was intrigued.
My interest was in the relationships – I love to listen. I was intrigued by the call that came out of the blue. I was delighted Tory could come to sit down in the office so we could sit down to talk. I was not sure what we would be talk about. I felt there was a leading of the Spirit in this. This caught me off guard. My sense would be to be defensive. I was surrounded by something that felt godly from the beginning.
Eventually, Tory and Shannie hit it off.
TB The meetings were private. We considered that space to be safe. Truro Vestry knew that I was meeting. We kept it closed to protect it.
Truro Church has not been afraid to take a stand if it is a real matter of truth and justice. Deep in the soul of the parish is the desire for peacemaking.
To give an example: the Chapel of Virginia Theological Seminary burnt down. The Vestry decided to give significant sum of money to rebuild the chapel in our former diocese.
After the second ruling came which we lost, we called a special prayer meeting. 500 members gathered to pray. A reporter who came said “I do not believe this. There is no anger but a sweet spirit.”
SJ My chief of staff, a practicing attorney was nervous about what the bishop might say. There were misgivings about a meeting behind closed doors and with no reports. There was a fear of the unknown. As the meetings went on they began to give it more space. He began to see some change in me in relation to my ministry as a bishop from the time I began to meet with Tory. I had more of a sense of confidence.
BM Did this enhance you?
SJ. I grew through this friendship.
TB This path changes you.
TB. God was with us. There were always three present in our meetings. Trust had been destroyed in this process. The pathway to trust is transparency. We would not paper over our differences nor would we exaggerate them.
SJ Our prayers grew in scope and depth. I began to think something was opening up. Our conversations were going to places we did not think they would go. We talked about ordinary and personal things, theology and personal things. Things opened up more and that set the stage for the next step. It has always been we take a step into the unknown – we do not know why. Trust has been the great virtue. Trusting God’s presence among us. What do we see new? That new thing we see calls us to take another step. We do not have much knowledge about where this is leading.
Shannie’s a Christian then?
A lot of people who write about this have been wounded and betrayed. They ask “Please do not let Tory betray us”. I have had those experiences myself. I did not become the Rector of Truro to fight the Episcopal Church. I do not preach against TEC. I still love TEC. I consider Shannon a friend and a brother who has taken a wrong turn. This is not the same thing as not being a Christian.
For reasons known only to him, Baucum seemed rather defensive about this whole business. After citing a number of “orthodox” Anglicans, including the current Archbishop of Canterbury, who supported what he was doing, Tory had this to say.
These quotes represent not only our most orthodox leaders in Anglicanism but those who are evangelistically effective leaders, the ultimate test of orthodoxy. (Those on the right and left who remain coiled for action and are riven in spiritual sterility are seldom as orthodox as they claim.) But these leaders walk the talk of obedience to Jesus.
Anyhoo, Tory and Shannie’s bromance was going along swimmingly until Shannie screwed up and not only allowed several talks given by the Jesus Seminar’s John Dominic “Jesus Who?” Crossan but attended one of them, at which point John Guernsey, Baucum’s ACNA bishop, put his foot down.
Earlier this week, John Dominic Crossan, a radical theologian famous for his denials of biblical truth and the historic Christian faith, spoke at an Episcopal church in Northern Virginia with the approval of Bishop Johnston. Crossan gave two addresses to the congregation and spoke to clergy of the Episcopal diocese on Monday morning. The parish online newsletter announced that the clergy event was hosted by Bishop Johnston and the parish rector. An account of Crossan’s visit and talks can be read here.
Bishop Johnston’s action is unconscionable. In spite of his assurances to Tory that he believes the Nicene Creed, he welcomed Crossan, who denies the bodily resurrection of Jesus and says that Jesus’ body was eaten by dogs, and he permitted him to speak unchallenged to clergy in his diocese.
I have talked with Tory Baucum about this. He is grieved over this situation and agrees with my determination that this relationship with Bishop Johnston can no longer continue. We long for the Body of Christ to reflect the unity for which our Lord Jesus prayed (John 17:20-23), but there can be no reconciliation with The Episcopal Church apart from its repentance for false teaching and practice and its return to the truth of the historic Christian faith.
Baucum meekly fell into line.
This week I learned of two events in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia that have challenged those principles of Christian peacemaking.
First was the ordination of a non-celibate lesbian in the former home of the Falls Church Anglican parish this past December. This was a problem of both menu and venue, of what and where it was done. This kind of ordination, which violates scriptural teaching, caused the Anglican schism in the first place. I believe that holding the service at the Falls Church shortly after they lost their building showed a disregard and lack of respect for the good and godly pastor and the people of the Falls Church. This was a failure to treat others in a way that honors the imago dei in each of us. It was extremely painful to learn of this action and my full sympathy is with John Yates+ and his congregation.
Even more egregious was a series of talks given by John Dominic Crossan at a church in the Diocese of Virginia. I believe that Crossan’s work is a contradiction of Nicene faith and events like this undermine Nicene Christianity. Avoiding this kind of aggravating damage is foundational to our efforts at peacemaking. Crossan has appeared in debates with Christian scholars like N.T. Wright to fully and completely debate his theories, which have largely been found in extreme want of support in fact and scholarly analysis. But he appears to have come as a Christian teacher. He is not.
Sumbitch. For his part, Johnston issued this rather peevish statement.
Some of the questions put to me about allowing Dr. Crossan to teach in the Diocese of Virginia challenged my own creedal orthodoxy – a kind of “guilt by association.” I reject such reasoning completely. Allow me to quote from my own pastoral address from January 25, 2013, delivered before the diocesan Council:
“I am as creedal a Christian as you will ever find. The core of my faith is utterly and absolutely defined by the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. I do in fact believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain all things necessary for salvation. But I also think that inevitably, people will have differing ways of understanding, interpreting, appropriating and applying these essential truths. I do not accept that my own dearly held faith is in any way compromised by agreeing to disagree over the ways in which the catholic and apostolic Church gives witness and offers ministry, any more than I feel that my Church is compromised by my doing so . . . To me, the plain fact is that I – we – need to hear and understand other views of Christian truths.”
As I’ve noted here, I quite disagree with many facets of Dr. Crossan’s theology – for example, his view of the Resurrection of Jesus, which I believe to have been bodily, personal and unique to the Lord, accomplished in a moment of historical time. This is a central tenet of the Christian faith and is without qualification the proclamation of the Episcopal Church and of this bishop. Indeed, any teaching that is contrary to the Creeds is contrary to the witness of our Church and, specifically, is at odds with my own faith and teaching.
Nonetheless, I will not be a censor of ideas, a roadblock to inquiry that is grounded in a search for “God with us.” The Holy Spirit is still at work with and within the Church and, in my view, we cannot shut down that which pushes our limits. Many times in human history, we have seen how the Spirit has pushed the Church beyond itself.
I mentioned all that in order to mention this. Guess who St. Paul’s, Richmond, is having in for Good Friday this year.
My role in this service will be to deliver six meditations, one in each of the six thirty minute services. As we live through these three hours, I will seek to invite people into the meaning of the Passion story as it was told by the author of the Fourth Gospel that we call John. Specifically, I will try to move the Christian Church away from that threadbare Good Friday format of the past that focused on what was called “The Seven Last Words from the Cross.” Those “Words” were never anything more than an attempt to force the gospels into a blended narrative, which makes a mockery out of current biblical scholarship. The overwhelming probability is that the dying Jesus never uttered any one of these “seven last words.” The absolute certainty is that he never uttered all of them. Mark, the first gospel to be written (70-72), has Jesus speak only one “word” from the cross, that is: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew, the second gospel (82-85), followed Mark’s lead and recorded only that same “word” from the cross, nothing more. We know that this “word” is the first verse of Psalm 22, a psalm which the early Christians used to narrate the story of the cross. Even the earliest story of the crucifixion we now know was not an eye witness account, but was rather an interpretive piecing together of a series of Old Testament texts of which Psalm 22 was a major contributor. By the time Luke wrote the third gospel (88-93), the idea that Jesus felt forsaken by God was offensive and so Luke replaced it with a much more positive and confident final saying: “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” That is a far cry from “My God, why have you forsaken me.” Luke also added two other sayings, one supposedly spoken to the soldiers: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” and one supposedly addressed to the penitent thief: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
When John, the final gospel, was written (95-100), he dismissed all of the previous “words” recorded in the earlier gospels and added three new ones never heard of before: “Woman, behold your son; son, behold your mother;” “I thirst,” and “It is finished.”
“The Seven Last Words” thus represent a forced unity that the gospels never had and they are, we now know, quite inauthentic. My hope will be that in future Good Friday services the Passion story will be developed according to Mark one year, Matthew the next year, Luke the third year, John the fourth year and then continue the rotation. The authenticity of the individual gospel accounts will thus be restored to Good Friday.
The megalogmaniacal old fraud will be ably assisted by…
Third, the Bishop of Virginia, the Rt. Rev. Shannon Johnston, will preside over the entire service, assisted by the Rev. Wallace Adams-Riley, the current rector of St. Paul’s. The presence of the Bishop gives the service a larger appeal beyond the boundaries of St. Paul’s congregation.
Second thoughts, Tory? No?
Truro could have walked away from the property the moment the congregation realized that the game was over. They could have walked away, and found themselves a new campus. They could have made a fresh start.
Instead, they will stay in the building for another year, paying hard-earned money for the upkeep of the buildings, and during which visitations by ACNA Bishop John Guernsey are made purely at the pleasure of TEC Bishop Shannon Johnston.
Then they will leave, with nothing, and with a year’s worth of maintenance expenses down the drain, unavailable to them to support any expenses at their new facility.
Not long after that, Baucum decided to try to reach out to Shannon Johnston.
We met two years ago in 2011. I had been wanting to meet Shannon. We had been in a lawsuit at war. I had asked a predecessor of mine at Truro, Bishop John Howe to reach out to Shannon. I went to Richmond to meet him.
The lawsuit was the occasion not the reason. I had been the rector for three years. I had seen a reluctance in the church to reach out to different communities in our area. There was fear. I could not just tell people to reach out to people and places they were afraid of without setting an example. I wanted to reach out to an adversary. We read that perfect love casts out fear, but equally perfect fear casts out love.
For his part, Shannie was intrigued.
My interest was in the relationships – I love to listen. I was intrigued by the call that came out of the blue. I was delighted Tory could come to sit down in the office so we could sit down to talk. I was not sure what we would be talk about. I felt there was a leading of the Spirit in this. This caught me off guard. My sense would be to be defensive. I was surrounded by something that felt godly from the beginning.
Eventually, Tory and Shannie hit it off.
TB The meetings were private. We considered that space to be safe. Truro Vestry knew that I was meeting. We kept it closed to protect it.
Truro Church has not been afraid to take a stand if it is a real matter of truth and justice. Deep in the soul of the parish is the desire for peacemaking.
To give an example: the Chapel of Virginia Theological Seminary burnt down. The Vestry decided to give significant sum of money to rebuild the chapel in our former diocese.
After the second ruling came which we lost, we called a special prayer meeting. 500 members gathered to pray. A reporter who came said “I do not believe this. There is no anger but a sweet spirit.”
SJ My chief of staff, a practicing attorney was nervous about what the bishop might say. There were misgivings about a meeting behind closed doors and with no reports. There was a fear of the unknown. As the meetings went on they began to give it more space. He began to see some change in me in relation to my ministry as a bishop from the time I began to meet with Tory. I had more of a sense of confidence.
BM Did this enhance you?
SJ. I grew through this friendship.
TB This path changes you.
TB. God was with us. There were always three present in our meetings. Trust had been destroyed in this process. The pathway to trust is transparency. We would not paper over our differences nor would we exaggerate them.
SJ Our prayers grew in scope and depth. I began to think something was opening up. Our conversations were going to places we did not think they would go. We talked about ordinary and personal things, theology and personal things. Things opened up more and that set the stage for the next step. It has always been we take a step into the unknown – we do not know why. Trust has been the great virtue. Trusting God’s presence among us. What do we see new? That new thing we see calls us to take another step. We do not have much knowledge about where this is leading.
Shannie’s a Christian then?
A lot of people who write about this have been wounded and betrayed. They ask “Please do not let Tory betray us”. I have had those experiences myself. I did not become the Rector of Truro to fight the Episcopal Church. I do not preach against TEC. I still love TEC. I consider Shannon a friend and a brother who has taken a wrong turn. This is not the same thing as not being a Christian.
For reasons known only to him, Baucum seemed rather defensive about this whole business. After citing a number of “orthodox” Anglicans, including the current Archbishop of Canterbury, who supported what he was doing, Tory had this to say.
These quotes represent not only our most orthodox leaders in Anglicanism but those who are evangelistically effective leaders, the ultimate test of orthodoxy. (Those on the right and left who remain coiled for action and are riven in spiritual sterility are seldom as orthodox as they claim.) But these leaders walk the talk of obedience to Jesus.
Anyhoo, Tory and Shannie’s bromance was going along swimmingly until Shannie screwed up and not only allowed several talks given by the Jesus Seminar’s John Dominic “Jesus Who?” Crossan but attended one of them, at which point John Guernsey, Baucum’s ACNA bishop, put his foot down.
Earlier this week, John Dominic Crossan, a radical theologian famous for his denials of biblical truth and the historic Christian faith, spoke at an Episcopal church in Northern Virginia with the approval of Bishop Johnston. Crossan gave two addresses to the congregation and spoke to clergy of the Episcopal diocese on Monday morning. The parish online newsletter announced that the clergy event was hosted by Bishop Johnston and the parish rector. An account of Crossan’s visit and talks can be read here.
Bishop Johnston’s action is unconscionable. In spite of his assurances to Tory that he believes the Nicene Creed, he welcomed Crossan, who denies the bodily resurrection of Jesus and says that Jesus’ body was eaten by dogs, and he permitted him to speak unchallenged to clergy in his diocese.
I have talked with Tory Baucum about this. He is grieved over this situation and agrees with my determination that this relationship with Bishop Johnston can no longer continue. We long for the Body of Christ to reflect the unity for which our Lord Jesus prayed (John 17:20-23), but there can be no reconciliation with The Episcopal Church apart from its repentance for false teaching and practice and its return to the truth of the historic Christian faith.
Baucum meekly fell into line.
This week I learned of two events in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia that have challenged those principles of Christian peacemaking.
First was the ordination of a non-celibate lesbian in the former home of the Falls Church Anglican parish this past December. This was a problem of both menu and venue, of what and where it was done. This kind of ordination, which violates scriptural teaching, caused the Anglican schism in the first place. I believe that holding the service at the Falls Church shortly after they lost their building showed a disregard and lack of respect for the good and godly pastor and the people of the Falls Church. This was a failure to treat others in a way that honors the imago dei in each of us. It was extremely painful to learn of this action and my full sympathy is with John Yates+ and his congregation.
Even more egregious was a series of talks given by John Dominic Crossan at a church in the Diocese of Virginia. I believe that Crossan’s work is a contradiction of Nicene faith and events like this undermine Nicene Christianity. Avoiding this kind of aggravating damage is foundational to our efforts at peacemaking. Crossan has appeared in debates with Christian scholars like N.T. Wright to fully and completely debate his theories, which have largely been found in extreme want of support in fact and scholarly analysis. But he appears to have come as a Christian teacher. He is not.
Sumbitch. For his part, Johnston issued this rather peevish statement.
Some of the questions put to me about allowing Dr. Crossan to teach in the Diocese of Virginia challenged my own creedal orthodoxy – a kind of “guilt by association.” I reject such reasoning completely. Allow me to quote from my own pastoral address from January 25, 2013, delivered before the diocesan Council:
“I am as creedal a Christian as you will ever find. The core of my faith is utterly and absolutely defined by the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. I do in fact believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain all things necessary for salvation. But I also think that inevitably, people will have differing ways of understanding, interpreting, appropriating and applying these essential truths. I do not accept that my own dearly held faith is in any way compromised by agreeing to disagree over the ways in which the catholic and apostolic Church gives witness and offers ministry, any more than I feel that my Church is compromised by my doing so . . . To me, the plain fact is that I – we – need to hear and understand other views of Christian truths.”
As I’ve noted here, I quite disagree with many facets of Dr. Crossan’s theology – for example, his view of the Resurrection of Jesus, which I believe to have been bodily, personal and unique to the Lord, accomplished in a moment of historical time. This is a central tenet of the Christian faith and is without qualification the proclamation of the Episcopal Church and of this bishop. Indeed, any teaching that is contrary to the Creeds is contrary to the witness of our Church and, specifically, is at odds with my own faith and teaching.
Nonetheless, I will not be a censor of ideas, a roadblock to inquiry that is grounded in a search for “God with us.” The Holy Spirit is still at work with and within the Church and, in my view, we cannot shut down that which pushes our limits. Many times in human history, we have seen how the Spirit has pushed the Church beyond itself.
I mentioned all that in order to mention this. Guess who St. Paul’s, Richmond, is having in for Good Friday this year.
My role in this service will be to deliver six meditations, one in each of the six thirty minute services. As we live through these three hours, I will seek to invite people into the meaning of the Passion story as it was told by the author of the Fourth Gospel that we call John. Specifically, I will try to move the Christian Church away from that threadbare Good Friday format of the past that focused on what was called “The Seven Last Words from the Cross.” Those “Words” were never anything more than an attempt to force the gospels into a blended narrative, which makes a mockery out of current biblical scholarship. The overwhelming probability is that the dying Jesus never uttered any one of these “seven last words.” The absolute certainty is that he never uttered all of them. Mark, the first gospel to be written (70-72), has Jesus speak only one “word” from the cross, that is: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew, the second gospel (82-85), followed Mark’s lead and recorded only that same “word” from the cross, nothing more. We know that this “word” is the first verse of Psalm 22, a psalm which the early Christians used to narrate the story of the cross. Even the earliest story of the crucifixion we now know was not an eye witness account, but was rather an interpretive piecing together of a series of Old Testament texts of which Psalm 22 was a major contributor. By the time Luke wrote the third gospel (88-93), the idea that Jesus felt forsaken by God was offensive and so Luke replaced it with a much more positive and confident final saying: “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” That is a far cry from “My God, why have you forsaken me.” Luke also added two other sayings, one supposedly spoken to the soldiers: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” and one supposedly addressed to the penitent thief: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
When John, the final gospel, was written (95-100), he dismissed all of the previous “words” recorded in the earlier gospels and added three new ones never heard of before: “Woman, behold your son; son, behold your mother;” “I thirst,” and “It is finished.”
“The Seven Last Words” thus represent a forced unity that the gospels never had and they are, we now know, quite inauthentic. My hope will be that in future Good Friday services the Passion story will be developed according to Mark one year, Matthew the next year, Luke the third year, John the fourth year and then continue the rotation. The authenticity of the individual gospel accounts will thus be restored to Good Friday.
The megalogmaniacal old fraud will be ably assisted by…
Third, the Bishop of Virginia, the Rt. Rev. Shannon Johnston, will preside over the entire service, assisted by the Rev. Wallace Adams-Riley, the current rector of St. Paul’s. The presence of the Bishop gives the service a larger appeal beyond the boundaries of St. Paul’s congregation.
Second thoughts, Tory? No?
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