Diocese of Central NY Continues Slide Into Oblivion

In 2002, the Diocese of Central New York had 100 parishes and an average Sunday attendance of 6,734.  In 2017, the DCNY had 81 parishes with an average Sunday attendance of 3,609.  I believe that I can explain why this has happened.

When I was rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Vestal, one of our local rectors was called to become the dean of the Cathedral in Syracuse.  After roughly a year, he requested to enter the search process for his former parish and was called a second time to be rector there.

He came back to our local clergy group and reported that there were only 19 full-time priest positions in the diocese at that time.  Today, I wonder how many there are.  A number of churches have been yoked with other churches to provide one priest with a livable stipend.  As you can see from the numbers above, 19 churches have closed their doors.

Meanwhile, three churches that left the DCNY after an openly gay and divorced man was consecrated Bishop of New Hampshire continue to offer orthodox Anglican worship and ministry.  A fourth Anglican church was planted in Syracuse and it is doing splendidly.

We give thanks for St. Andrew's Church, my parish in Endicott, Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton,  St. Andrew's Church in Syracuse, and Church of the Holy Trinity in Syracuse.  These four churches did not bow the knee to the neo-paganism that has swept across the Episcopal Church.  These four churches continue to offer authentic orthodox Anglican worship and ministry to our needy world.  Thanks be to God for their faithfulness!

Meanwhile, the DCNY continues its slide into oblivion, embracing, teaching and practicing a false gospel.  Along with other liberal mainline denominations, the numbers continue downward for the Episcopal Church.

The only way upward is to repent of past and present sins and return to obedience to Jesus Christ as His ways have been revealed in His Holy Word.  This is something that I would never expect the Episcopal Church to do.  But it is their only hope.

Leading Episcopal Trad Goes To Rome

This surprised me.  I haven't kept up with the Stand Firm in Faith website, nor have I been a fan of Stand Firm for many years after some dust-ups with Greg and Sarah from the website.  I was banned from commenting on SFIF after I said on the website that Greg would never permit the things Greg said about David Virtue to be said about him.  Now, David Virtue in still standing and SFIF is pretty much gone, if not totally gone.  My browser won't let me go to Stand Firm, saying its not safe to do so.

I've found SFIF to be a place all too often run a muck with emotions.  All  too often SFIF was heavy into speculation and short on facts.

By ROD DREHER • May 29, 2014, 12:36 AM

It’s hardly news when conservative Episcopalians become Roman Catholics. But prominent conservative Episcopal lay leader Greg Griffith’s embrace of Catholicismis notable. Here’s a passage from an essay Griffith wrote announcing his conversion:

So for me, a move to Rome is not about a revolution in my theology, and certainly not about a rejection of Anglicanism. It is about a very painful choice between two dilemmas:

On the one hand there is Anglicanism, an expression of faith that in the abstract – its doctrines and theology – is as nearly perfect as I believe man has ever succeeded in achieving, but which in practice has unraveled into a chaotic mess. There is of course the heresy and false teaching that infects all but a handful of Episcopal parishes in this diocese – including its bishop, its cathedral, its dean, almost all of its clergy, and a distressing number of the few laypeople who have made the effort to pay attention and learn what’s happening – but the promise of the orthodox Anglican movement outside of The Episcopal Church never materialized either. Populated as that movement is by many good people, it has the institutional feeling of something held together by duct tape and baling wire. It is beset by infighting and consecration fever, and in several of its highest leadership positions are people of atrocious judgement and character.

On the other hand there is Roman Catholicism, some of whose doctrines give me serious pause, but which in practice has shown itself to be steadfast in its opposition to the caprices of the world. Even the horrific pedophile priest scandal forces one to concede that Pope Benedict’s purging of the ranks, while not complete, was at the very least spirited, and based on a firm rejection of the “everything is good” sexual sickness that’s all but killed the Episcopal Church.

I hope he finds what he’s looking for in the Catholic Church, but I would caution him not to think he has escaped all of the problems that drove him out of TEC. Friends and acquaintances in the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, for example, could open Griffith’s eyes about a lot of things in American Catholicism. It sounds like he’s found a great Catholic parish with strong pastoral leadership, but I assure him this is not universal among Romans.

I would say to him if he were coming into Orthodoxy that he had better not believe that he’s escaped problems; Orthodoxy’s problems tend to be different from the problems faced by Western Christian churches, but we sure have problems too. Don’t misread me: overall, I believe that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox are in vastly better shape than mainline Protestant churches in terms of small-o orthodox Christianity. I just feel the need to express caution in these matters. All churches are made up of people.

From reading the essay, it doesn’t seem that Greg Griffith has decided that Catholicism is true, exactly, but that it’s a safe place in which to practice Christianity and to raise kids in the faith. There was a time in my life when I would have said no, you had better accept that it’s true, or stay out. Now, I understand exactly where he’s coming from — my embrace of Orthodoxy was kind of on the same basis at first — and I wouldn’t say he’s wrong to have made the jump.

Still, it was strange to read about Griffith and his wife looking at youth programs for their daughter as they were figuring out which church to leave TEC for. On second thought, though, I understood this a lot better now than I would have 10, 15 years ago, as a Catholic whose experience of the faith was primarily intellectual. Griffith, who has been a prominent activist and writer on Episcopal issues for a decade or so, said in his essay that his 12-year-old daughter has only ever known a relationship to her church in which her father has been battling it in a high-profile way. Maybe Griffith and his wife thought something along the lines I did in 2005, when I was so burned out from fighting over the abuse scandal and all the rest in the Catholic Church, and sick and tired of having to teach my oldest child (one was still a baby, and the other was not yet born) to mistrust his church before he had even learned to trust it. I remember well driving home from mass one Sunday morning, with my son in the backseat asking about Father’s sermon, and me having to tell him that that’s not what the Church teaches, and in fact a lot of times what you’ll hear from the pulpit is not what the Church teaches. I was exhausted by anger over the whole mess — an anger that was massively exacerbated by being on the front lines reading, talking to folks in the trenches, and writing critically. I bet Greg Griffith knows what I’m talking about.

I realized one day that I was a terrible icon of Christ to my children, in this state. I was showing them that being a faithful Christian was a matter of living in a state of anger, anxiety, and fear for their souls, growing up in this church in which orthodoxy didn’t seem to mean a lot. I thought about what kind of relationship with Christ they would have if we stayed in place. Yes, I mean in terms of the teaching they would receive, but I mean just as much the example they would get from their father, who had long since lost his joy in the faith, and had passed the point of being able to get it back.

We started attending an Orthodox parish, not intending to become Orthodox, but simply so we could worship at a parish that had the Real Presence, without being so sad and mad and tied up into a thousand knots. Eventually, we knew we weren’t going back. The liturgy was reverent and beautiful, everybody appeared to believe what the Church taught, and it seemed that this was a good place in which to raise children. By then, I really had lost my Catholic faith. The point I wish to make here is that the practical matter of where to raise your children so that they hold on to Christianity in any small-o orthodox form played a much bigger role in my own story than I would have figured.

Pay attention: I don’t say that to start a theological fight in the comboxes. If you want to fight about this, don’t bother posting, because I’m not going to approve it. I’d like to discuss it, though, and don’t hesitate to be critical, as long as you’re respectful. Mostly I’d like to hear from you readers, of whatever wing of whatever church, about how your thoughts about your children’s spiritual and religious lives and futures affects the way you think about your church, and the prospect of leaving it, or why you stay put. I’ve known a fair number of people over the course of my life who have said, one way or another, “I hate what they’re doing in my church, but by God, they’re not going to drive me out!” That can be noble and brave, but at some point, if you cannot connect with God there, and are losing Him, shouldn’t you consider your options?

I think Griffiths will find that he no longer has authority to speak in a leadership role to conservative Anglicans. He says he’s going to keep blogging at the Episcopal blog Stand Firm, though as a Catholic. But how can you blog for something called Stand Firm, the title of which encourages Episcopalians to stiffen their spines, when you did not stand firm, but rather jumped ship? When I confided to a fellow conservative Catholic friend that I was thinking of leaving the Catholic Church for Orthodoxy, he cautioned that I would lose all influence in the battle to clean up the Church’s Augean stables. I knew he was right, but at the rate I was burning out, I didn’t care about cleaning out the stables; I needed to save my soul.

I still write about Catholicism, of course, as I write about most forms of Christianity. Religion is what I’m most interested in, and besides, this is a news and opinion blog, not an advocacy blog. I don’t know him, but if I were Greg Griffith, I would leave Stand Firm, and focus instead on resting and repairing the damage of a decade of intense ecclesial combat. Continuing to fight the Anglican wars after one has left for Rome not only makes Griffith a less potent combatant, it also keeps him from fully re-orienting himself in his new church. Continuing to fight battles after the real battle — the one for your own soul, and your own future — has been concluded is a waste of time and energy that ought to be focused on learning how to the the best member of your new church that you can be. You don’t want to be the guy who has just married his second wife, but who spends a lot of time thinking and talking about the awful first wife he divorced.

Posted in Christianity. Tagged Catholic, Episcopalian, Greg Griffith, Stand Firm.

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Can Evangelicalism Survive Donald Trump and Roy Moore?

This was originally published in the New Yorker. ed.

By Timothy Keller

December 19, 2017

“Evangelical” used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with “hypocrite.”

Photograph by Brynn Anderson / AP

For centuries, renewal movements have emerged within Christianity and taken on different forms and names. Often, they have invoked the word “evangelical.” Followers of Martin Luther, who emphasized the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, described themselves in this way. The Cambridge clergyman Charles Simeon, who led the Low Church renewal movement within the Church of England, adopted the label. The trans-Atlantic eighteenth-century awakenings and revivals led by the Wesleys were also often called “evangelical.” In the nineteen-forties and fifties, Billy Graham and others promoted the word to describe themselves and the religious space they were seeking to create between the cultural withdrawal espoused by the fundamentalist movement, on the one hand, and mainline Protestantism’s departures from historic Christian doctrine, on the other. In each of these phases, the term has had a somewhat different meaning, and yet it keeps surfacing because it has described a set of basic historic beliefs and impulses.

When I became a Christian in college, in the early nineteen-seventies, the word “evangelical” still meant an alternative to the fortress mentality of fundamentalism. Shortly thereafter, I went to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry. It was one of the many institutions that Graham, Harold Ockenga, and J. Howard Pew, and other neo-evangelicals, as they were sometimes called, established. In those years, there was such great energy in the movement that, by the mid-nineteen-nineties, it had eclipsed mainline Protestantism as the dominant branch of the Christian church in the U.S. When I moved to Manhattan to start a new church, in 1989, most people I met found the church and its ministry to be a curiosity in secular New York but not a threat. And, if they heard the word “evangelical” around the congregation, a name we seldom used, they usually asked what it meant.

Today, while the name is no longer unfamiliar in my city, its meaning has changed drastically. The conservative leaders who have come to be most identified with the movement have largely driven this redefinition. But political pollsters have also helped, as they have sought to highlight a crucial voting bloc. When they survey people, there is no discussion of any theological beliefs, or other criteria. The great majority of them simply ask people, “Would you describe yourself as a born-again or evangelical Christian?” And those who answer ‘yes’ are counted. More than eighty per cent of such people voted for Donald Trump, and, last week, a similar percentage cast their ballots for Roy Moore, in the Alabama Senate race. So, in common parlance, evangelicals have become people with two qualities: they are both self-professed Christians and doggedly conservative politically.

The fury and incredulity of many in the larger population at this constituency has mounted. People who once called themselves the “Moral Majority” are now seemingly willing to vote for anyone, however immoral, who supports their political positions. The disgust has come to include people within the movement itself. Earlier this month, Peter Wehner, an Op-Ed writer for the Times who served in the last three Republican Administrations, wrote a widely circulated piece entitled “Why I Can No Longer Call Myself an Evangelical Republican.” Many younger believers and Christians of color, who had previously identified with evangelicalism, have also declared their abandonment of the label. “Evangelical” used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with “hypocrite.” When I used the word to describe myself in the nineteen-seventies, it meant I was not a fundamentalist. If I use the name today, however, it means to hearers that I am.

Understanding the religious landscape, however, requires discerning differences between the smaller, let’s call it “big-E Evangelicalism,” which gets much media attention, and a much larger, little-e evangelicalism, which does not. The larger, lower-case evangelicalism is defined not by a political party, whether conservative, liberal, or populist, but by theological beliefs. This non-political definition of evangelicalism has been presented in many places. The most well known is by the historian David Bebbington, whose “Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s” has become standard. He distinguishes evangelicals from other religions and Christians by a core set of beliefs. Evangelicals have generally believed in the authority of the whole Bible, in contrast to mainline Protestants, who regard many parts as obsolete, according to Bebbington. They also see it as the ultimate authority, unlike Catholics, who make church tradition equal to it. In addition, the ancient creedal formulations of the church, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, as well as others, are taken at face value, without reservation. And, again, unlike many in mainline Protestantism, evangelicals believe that Jesus truly did exist as the divine Son before he was born, that he actually was born of a virgin, and that he really was raised bodily from the dead.

Under Bebbington’s formulation, another defining evangelical quality is the belief in the necessity of conversion, the conviction that everyone needs a profound, life-changing encounter with God. This conversion, however, comes not merely through church attendance or general morality, but only through faith in Christ’s sacrificial death for sin. A lyric from Charles Wesley’s famous hymn captures the evangelical experience of conversion through saving faith in Christ alone: “My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed thee.” Finally, contemporary evangelicals feel bound by both desire and duty to share their faith with others in both word and deeds of service. In this, they seek to resemble, as well as to obey, their Lord, Jesus, who is described as mighty in word and deed.

Do the self-identified white “big-E Evangelicals” of the pollsters hold to these beliefs? Recent studies indicate that many do not. In many parts of the country, Evangelicalism serves as the civil or folk religion accepted by default as part of one’s social and political identity. So, in many cases, it means that the political is more defining than theological beliefs, which has not been the case historically. And, because of the enormous amount of attention the media pays to the Evangelical vote, the term now has a decisively political meaning in popular usage.

Yet there exists a far larger evangelicalism, both here and around the world, which is not politically aligned. In the U.S., there are millions of evangelicals spread throughout mainline Protestant congregations, as well as in more theologically conservative denominations like the Assemblies of God, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. But, most significantly, the vast majority of the fast-growing Protestant churches in Asia, Latin America, and Africa all share these same beliefs. And in the U.S., while white Evangelicalism is aging and declining, evangelicalism over all is not.

The enormous energy of the churches in the global South and East has begun to spill over into the cities of North America, where a new, multiethnic evangelicalism is growing steadily. Non-Western missionaries have started thousands of new urban churches there since the nineteen-seventies. Here in New York City, even within Manhattan, I have seen scores of churches begun over the last fifteen years that are fully evangelical by our definition, only a minority of which are white, and which are not aligned with any political party.

In my view, these churches tend to be much more committed to racial justice and care for the poor than is commonly seen in white Evangelicalism. In this way, they might be called liberal. On the other hand, these multicultural churches remain avowedly conservative on issues like sex outside of marriage. They look, to most eyes, like a strange mixture of liberal and conservative viewpoints, although they themselves see a strong inner consistency between these views. They resist the contemporary ethical package deals that today’s progressivism and conservatism seek to impose on adherents, insisting that true believers must toe the line on every one of a host of issues. But these younger evangelical churches simply won’t play by those rules.

In a book published earlier this year, “In Search of Ancient Roots: The Christian Past and the Evangelical Identity Crisis,” the historian Kenneth J. Stewart makes the case that the evangelical impulse in Christianity has been with us for centuries, taking on many different forms and bearing many different names, while maintaining substantially similar core beliefs. Many have analyzed the weaknesses of the current iteration of this movement. The desire by mid-twentieth-century leaders to foster more widespread coöperation between evangelicals and downplay denominational differences cut believers off from the past, some religion scholars have found. The result was an emphasis on personal experience rather than life in a church with historical memory. This has made present-day evangelicals more vulnerable to political movements that appeal to their self-interest, even in contradiction to Biblical teachings, for example, about welcoming the immigrant and lifting up the poor. However, evangelicalism is much more resilient than any one form of itself. The newer forms that are emerging are more concerned with theological and historic roots, and are more resistant to modern individualism than older, white Evangelicalism.

Does the word, then, have an ongoing usefulness? For now, the answer may be no. These new urban churches are certainly not mainline Protestant, yet they don’t look at all like what the average person thinks of by the term “Evangelical.” Will these younger churches abandon the name or try to redefine it? I don’t know, but, as a professional minister, I don’t think it is the most important point to make. What is crucial to know is that, even if the name “evangelical” is replaced with something else, it does not mean that the churches will lose their beliefs. Some time ago, the word “liberal” was largely abandoned by Democrats in favor of the word “progressive.” In some ways, the Democratic Party is more liberal now than when the older label was set aside, evidence that it is quite possible to change the name but keep the substance.

The same thing may be happening to evangelicalism. The movement may abandon, or at least demote, the prominence of the name, yet be more committed to its theology and historic impulses than ever. Some predict that younger evangelicals will not only reject the name but also become more secular. That is not what I have been seeing here in New York City. And studies by the Pew Research Center and others indicate that religious denominations that have become more friendly to secularism are shrinking precipitously, while the evangelical churches that resist dilution in their theological beliefs and practices are holding their own or growing. And if evangelicals—or whatever they will call themselves­—continue to become more multiethnic in leadership and confound the left-right political categories, they may continue to do so.

A new generation of churches, more diverse and confounding political categories, may abandon the label but remain committed to its historic beliefs.

• Timothy Keller is the founder and Pastor Emeritus of the Redeemer Presbyterian Churches of New York City.

Why I Can No Longer Call Myself an Evangelical Republican

This was originally published as an op-ed in the New York Times.  ed.

Dec 9, 2017 by Peter Wehner 

Preserving my identity as a Christian conservative means turning away from two movements that have shaped my life.

Abusing the Fathers

This essay from Touchstone magazine was referenced in an article at American Anglican, the website of the American Anglican Council.

The Windsor Report’s Misleading Appeal to Nicea

by William J. Tighe

A year ago, after the uproar over the consecration as bishop of New Hampshire of the notorious Vicki Gene Robinson—the Episcopal priest who divorced his wife and subsequently openly entered a homosexual relationship that continues to this day—the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed a committee to look into the matter. The consecration clearly contradicted the 1998 Lambeth Conference’s resolution declaring such relationships to be incompatible with the Christian faith, and the “Lambeth Commission” was to recommend ways in which the Anglican Communion could maintain the highest possible degree of communion.

The ensuing “Windsor Report,” released on October 18, 2004, called for moratoria on the ordination of all non-celibate homosexuals and on the approval of rites for blessing same-sex “partnerships,” as well as for an end to the intervention of traditionalist bishops (usually from Africa or Asia) in the dioceses of “revisionist” bishops. It called both traditionalist and revisionist groups to express regret for their actions, which were deemed to be incompatible with the tangible and intangible bonds that held the Anglican Communion together.

Wright’s Defense

N. T. (“Tom”) Wright, the bishop of Durham in the Church of England, was a member of the commission, and in various places since the issuance of the report has defended it. He has for some years deservedly enjoyed the reputation of a first-rate Scripture scholar who has been able to counteract and debunk revisionist—read, if you will, heretical or anti-Christian—views of the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord and of the authority of the Bible.

He appeals particularly to those “conservative evangelical” Christians who wish to uphold a generally high view of the authority of Scripture in doctrine and morals, but wish to leave room for some “developments,” such as the ordination of women, which Wright supports.

Wright has, in particular, defended the report’s implicit censure of the intervention of orthodox Anglican bishops in the dioceses of revisionist ones in the United States and Canada. In a report published in the liberal-leaning English Roman Catholic weekly The Tablet, he justified this censure on the basis that such interventions were “in contravention not only of Anglican custom but of the Nicene decrees on the subject.”

The theory of the inviolable integrity of diocesan boundaries has underpinned the statements of more than one or two Episcopal bishops in recent years, such as Peter Lee of Virginia and Neil Alexander of Atlanta. The result of the theory that “heresy is preferable to schism” and “schism is worse than heresy” has been the belief among influential conservative Anglicans that the faithful must put up with an unending stream of doctrinal absurdities and moral enormities.

In an interview with Christianity Today, Wright insisted that “border crossings” are not only “disruptive” but prohibited by the Council of Nicea. “And I think not a lot of people know this, but it’s important to say this was a question that the early fathers faced at the same time as they were hammering out the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ, and that they gave it their time to say people should not do this because that’s not how episcopacy works.” He insisted that “the real charge” against the offending dioceses

is that they were going ahead with innovations without giving the proper theological rationale, without paying attention to the rest of the communion, without doing all the things which as Anglicans we all thought we were signed up to doing before people make innovations. The bishops and archbishops who have intervened in other people’s provinces and dioceses are, in effect, at that level making the same error.

The interviewer then noted that one theologian believed that, in the early Church, orthodox bishops considered a heretical bishop’s see vacant and would go into his diocese. “It’s not simply as easy as that, because who says that so-and-so is a false teacher?” Wright responded. Bishop John Spong would describe the Evangelical former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, as “a false teacher. . . . So you have to have some way of getting a handle on this and not simply one bishop saying that his next-door neighbor is out of line and therefore he’s going to invade. That has never been the Anglican way.”

As Bishop Wright’s grasp of the church fathers’ theory and practice seems a bit weak in these areas—and as he was clearly the most scholarly member of the commission—it may be useful to pursue the subject a bit further. Less can be said for the church fathers’ support for the commission’s claims than Wright asserts.

A regrettable feature of the Windsor Report is its lack of documented notes and references to back up its claims and assertions. For example, it simply cites “the ancient norm of the Church” for its claims about the unity of all Christians in one place and for its rationale against the intervention of outside bishops, without offering any evidence at all. It never quotes any “Nicene decrees on the subject,” to use Bishop Wright’s phrase, though an allusion to one of Nicea’s canons, of doubtful relevance, is tucked away in the report.

Inapplicable Canons

The Council of Nicea, which met from May to August of a.d. 325 and is most famous for its formulation of the original version of the Nicene Creed, also produced twenty canons, or rules, to settle problems or fix abuses in the Church. Several of the canons concern the relations of bishops with one another and of clergy with their bishops. Significantly for the present case, none have any legal force in any contemporary Anglican church.

But more importantly, none of them seem to have any real applicability to the situation of the Anglican Communion, or the Episcopal Church, today. If any one of them underlies Bishop Wright’s oblique reference, it must be Canon 16. Members of the clergy, it declares,

who have the audacity, not considering the fear of God and not knowing the Church’s rule, to abandon their churches, must not under any circumstances be received in another church but by all means must be forced to return to their proper communities, and if they refuse, they are to be properly excommunicated. In addition, if anyone dares to take someone who is under the authority of another bishop and to ordain him in his own church without the consent of the bishop in whose clergy he was enrolled, let the ordination be regarded as null.

This canon obviously deals with “clergy flight” and “clergy poaching”: It assumes a community of orthodox belief between the churches and bishops concerned, and says nothing at all about interventions in churches whose bishops have abandoned orthodoxy of belief and practice and have begun to oppress those of their flock who continue to uphold it, even if that “oppression” consists only in contradicting that orthodoxy and furthering those who teach and act against it.

But while I was puzzling over Wright’s invocation of this inapplicable canon, I found an allusion to the eighth canon early in the report. In this passage, the report deplores “ as now part of the problem we face” the breaking of communion with the Episcopal Church by other Anglican churches, attempts by dissenters in America to “distance themselves” from the Episcopal Church, and the interventions of archbishops from other Anglican churches.

Then it comments: “This goes not only against traditional and oft-repeated Anglican practice [alluding to the 1988 and 1998 Lambeth Conferences] but also against some of the longest-standing regulations of the early undivided church (Canon 8 of Nicea).”

The Pure Ones

So what does the canon say? It is one of the longer ones, and it concerns the re-entry into the Church of “the so-called ‘pure ones’.” It required them to “promise in writing to accept and to follow the rulings of the Catholic Church,” primarily to have communion with those who renounced the faith during persecutions but had since been given a period of penance and a date for their reconciliation with the Church.

In places that had only “pure ones” as clergy, they should keep their status, but if a “pure one” wanted to be admitted to the clergy in a place that had “a bishop or a priest of the Catholic Church . . . it is evident that the bishop of the Church should keep the dignity of bishop.” A bishop of the “pure ones”

is to have the rank of priest unless the bishop consents to let him have the honor of his title. But if he is not so disposed, let the bishop give him a place as a chorepiscopus [i.e., a bishop who exercised some supervision over Christian communities in the rural areas, while being himself subordinate to the bishop of a nearby city] or as a priest so that he can appear as being integrated into the clergy. Without this provision, there would be two bishops in the city.

“The pure ones” was the name given, perhaps self-given, to a schismatic group known as the Novatianists. They originated in the aftermath of the great persecution—the first empire-wide persecution—launched against the Church by the Roman Emperor Decius in 249–251. Before that persecution, a Christian who renounced Christianity under pressure and then wished to return to the Church could only be readmitted to the Eucharist when on his deathbed.

In the aftermath of the persecution, which saw apostasies on a large scale, the bishop of Rome, Cornelius, allowed the “lapsed” to be readmitted after some years of public penitence, which involved, among other things, standing in a particular place during the Church’s Liturgy and leaving before Communion. Most bishops elsewhere adopted this practice as well, but in Rome, Pope Cornelius was opposed by the priest Novatian, whose followers elected him bishop in opposition to Cornelius, and in the ensuing years the schism spread throughout the Roman Empire.

The Novatianists were moral rigorists, best known for their absolute prohibition of second marriages under any circumstances (including after the death of a spouse) and their refusal to readmit the lapsed to Communion. In every other respect, though, their beliefs were thoroughly orthodox. A Novatianist bishop turned up at the Council of Nicea, where he was as vehement in his opposition to the views of the heretic Arius as any of the other bishops there. It was only when he went on to insist on the exclusion of the lapsed from Communion that his Novatianist allegiance came to light, and he was ejected from the council.

Of all the various heretical or schismatic Christian sects, the Novatianists were viewed with the most indulgence, as this canon indicates. Although it was common at the time to regard as “heretical” all Christian sects that pertinaciously and as a matter of principle separated themselves from the “Catholic and Apostolic Church,” in practice the council treated groups of them who wished to rejoin the Church as though they were simply schismatics.

In fact, few Novatianists took advantage of this offer. Their church, or “denomination,” continued to exist as a rigorous and “pure” alternative to the established Church in parts of the Eastern Roman Empire for some three or four centuries afterwards.

Dealing with Defectors

It is hard to see how this canon has anything to do with the troubles of contemporary Anglicanism that evoked the Windsor Report. The canon does uphold the unity of the local church, but the situation it addresses is the reunion of a schismatic group with the Church, not the appropriate response of bishops to the defection of one of their brethren from their common orthodoxy. However, the latter type of situation did arise in the fourth century, in the long aftermath of the Council of Nicea, and later still.

The main purpose of the Council of Nicea was to judge the views of the Alexandrian priest and theologian Arius, who held that Jesus was a creature—a divine being created by God before the angels, the cosmos, and mankind, but a creature nevertheless. Nicea condemned Arius’s views, and its creed confessed the full co-divinity and co-eternity of “the everlasting Son of the Father.”

However, since the controversy continued unabated after Nicea, and since Emperor Constantine had wanted the council to promote ecclesiastical harmony, the fact that it signally failed to produce such harmony induced him, within a few short years, to attempt to promote various theological compromises that would reconcile the Arians and the Niceans. (Many of the most influential bishops around the emperor were sympathetic to some degree with Arius.)

Among the most vigorous and uncompromising upholders of Nicea and its creed was the young archbishop of Alexandria, Athanasius (c. 296–373), who as a priest had accompanied his predecessor to Nicea. His vigorous opposition to any compromise earned him the hostility of the bishops who had most influence with the emperor, who himself in the last decade of his life (he died in 337) increasingly regarded Athanasius as a disturber of the peace, and finally exiled him to what is today the German Rhineland.

After Constantine’s death, as his Arianizing son Constantius became master, first of the East and then (in 350) of the whole Roman Empire, imperial policy shifted from conciliation to coercion of the adherents of Nicea, and these shifts continued down to the final defeat of Arianism in 381.

As time went on, the whole Church became divided over the question, with bishop opposing bishop. Athanasius was willing, as the conflict intensified—in his case, as early as the mid-340s—to intervene unilaterally in dioceses whose bishops were Arians or compromisers. The historians Socrates and Sozomen, writing in the middle of the next century, record that he ordained men in dioceses whose bishops were tainted with Arianism to serve the orthodox upholders of Nicea, and that he did so without seeking or obtaining the permission of those bishops.

We do not know for sure whether Athanasius ordained bishops for these orthodox communities faced with hostile heterodox bishops, or only priests and deacons. Socrates’s account in his Ecclesiastical History is obscure, stating only that “in some of the churches also he performed ordination, which afforded another ground of accusation against him, because of his undertaking to ordain in the dioceses of others.”

In his Ecclesiastical History, Sozomen wrote of Athanasius’s ejection of Arianizing clergy when he returned to Egypt from his second exile around 346, and added, “It was said at that time that, when he was traveling through other countries, he effected the same change if he happened to visit churches which were under the Arians. He was certainly accused of having dared to perform the ceremony of ordination in cities where he had no right to do so.”

Violable Boundaries

And he was not alone. Other orthodox bishops acted similarly.

Theodoret of Cyrrhus, yet another historian (and bishop), tells us in hisEcclesiastical History that a contemporary and collaborator of Athanasius, Eusebius of Samosata, traveled around many of the eastern portions of the Roman Empire disguised as a soldier, and where he found Arian or Arianizing bishops, he ordained deacons, priests, and even bishops to care for the orthodox and oppose the official bishops and their supporters. He names five bishops Eusebius consecrated.

Another bishop, Lucifer of Cagliari, wandered throughout the Mediterranean world in support of those who upheld Nicea. Both Socrates and Theodoret record his intervention in the divided church of Antioch. In 362 he consecrated the leader of one of the orthodox groups, the leader of the other, larger group having early on in his career appeared to compromise with moderate Arians. The uncompromising orthodox group had never been willing to accept him as their bishop, and the consecration embittered the break between the two and led to a schism that was not to be healed for over fifty years.

Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, conducted ordinations in his native Palestine in defiance of compromising bishops during the Arian crisis. As Socrates relates, he did the same thing many years later in Constantinople, when he was led to believe that John Chrysostom, the patriarch there, supported the errors of Origen.

Details of the activities of such bishops are few, but in the next century, for 85 years after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, both proponents and opponents of that council among the bishops in the eastern parts of the empire were willing to intervene, or intrude, regularly in dioceses whose bishops were on the “ other side.”

All of this allows us to say that any attempt to construct a theory of the inviolability of diocesan boundaries cannot find any support in the theory and practice of the early Church. In the light of this history, Bishop Wright’s invocation of “Nicene decrees” and the Windsor Report’s allusion to “the ancient norm” and “some of the longest-standing regulations” vanishes altogether, and all that is left is “Anglican custom” (Wright) or “traditional and oft-repeated Anglican practice” (Windsor).

Deprived Christians

Those who have followed the actual practices of Anglican churches over the past three decades, in the United States, Canada, and Australia especially, will see how readily proponents of one innovation after another have been willing to abandon norms, decrees, regulations, canons, customs—you name it—to gain their ends.

In the Christianity Today interview, Wright remarked that “the real question at the heart of much of this is, which [are] the things we can agree to differ about and which [are] the things we can’t agree to differ about.” He continued, speaking of modern questions the Nicene fathers he invoked would have thought settled matters of their common faith,

Again and again I hear people on both sides of the argument simply begging that question and assuming that they know without argument that this is something that we can agree to differ about, or assuming that they know without argument this is one of the things we can’t agree to differ about. What we all have to do is to say about any issue—whether it’s lay celebration [of Communion], whether it’s episcopal intervention, whether it’s homosexual practice—

How do we know, and who says which differences make a difference and which differences don’t make a difference?

Speaking for myself as a Catholic with many Anglican friends, the clearest and most instructive (as well as the saddest) lesson of this episode is how sincere and pious Christians, like Bishop Wright, deprive themselves of any compellingly persuasive basis for rallying a forceful “Athanasian” movement to retake their churches from the heterodox innovators who dominate them—and not least because of their own inability, as the bishop’s statements show, to make clear judgments about false teaching and false teachers and to take firm and decisive measures in response. In consequence, they render their own situations hopeless, being able neither to fight nor to flee.

N. T. Wright’s article appeared in the 23 October 2004 issue of The Tablet and may be found at www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/register.cgi/tablet-00945. The Christianity Today interview can be found at www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/142/42.0.html. The sources of the quotations from Socrates are (in order): Book II, chapter 24; III.6 and 9; VI.12; those from Sozomen are III.21; and from Theodoret IV.13 and V.4; III.2.

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William J. Tighe is Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a faculty advisor to the Catholic Campus Ministry. He is a Member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.

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Dramatic Shake-Up in American Anglican Blog Rankings

This morning, I read an article at Anglican Mainstream, a British site, and clicked on a link.  That link sent me to Anglican Ink, an American site, and it got me wondering.  How are American Anglican blogs doing these days?  Here's what I found at Alexa.com:

Global Rankings

Virtue Online: 432,834
Anglican Ink: 1,451,785
Stand Firm in Faith: 7,451,785
Titus One Nine: 10,872,613

This was the first check I've done in a long time, and it suprised me on two fronts.

First, VOL is off a bit from previous global rankings, but Stand Firm in Faith and Titus One Nine have both fallen off a cliff.  SFIF used to be a close second to VOL, but now a newcomer, AI is a distant second.

Second, traffic to American Anglican sites is down overall from the heady days after the Episcopal Church's 2003 General Convention.  This is to be expected, but I was surprised to discover how much traffic has fallen for SFIF and TitusOneNine.  While AI is a relative newcomer, they do good reporting and their use of video sets them apart from the other sites.

Since the province of the Anglican Church in North America was founded in 2009, the dust has settled, and the issues that were so prominent after GC2003 are less so.  Orthodox Anglicans now have a place to go outside of PECUSA and the business at hand has become more and more the Gospel and not the issues plaguing PECUSA.

What is the future of American Anglican blogs?  That is hard to say, but I expect VOL will remain the dominant player for America Anglicanism.  Anglican Ink will likely continue to grow in popularity given its use of video, which will attract viewers in our visual age.  I expect that SFIF and T19 will continue to appeal to their smaller constituencies.

"Shut Up, Bigot!": Civil Rights and Same-Sex Marriage

via Virtue Online: By Ben R. Crenshaw WITHERSPOON INSTITUTE http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/04/16749/ April 14, 2016 Supporters of "same-sex marriage" claim that its opponents are bigots, like racists or misogynists, whose views should not be tolerated in the public square. In fact, marriage traditionalists are not bigoted but rather are realistic and honest about what marriage actually is. In a Public Discourse essay last year, "Shut Up, Bigot!": The Intolerance of Tolerance, I addressed how defenders of marriage are often called bigots for holding the view that marriage is, by nature, the union of one man and one woman, exclusively and for life. I objected to this censoring and bullying, explaining that those calling traditionalists "bigots" held a false postmodern conception of tolerance that confuses intolerance of ideas with intolerance of persons. Here I address the central objection that I have encountered to my argument. Denying Gay People the Civil Right to Marriage? The most common objection is that traditionalists are using "tolerance" as a cover for their discriminating and harmful views. The objection goes something like this: Discriminating against homosexuals by not allowing them to marry is as evil as racism and segregation, the banning of interracial marriage, or denying women's rights. You wouldn't be tolerant of these abhorrent things would you? America has become enlightened to LGBT rights, and you are simply using religious rhetoric to cloak your animus and bigotry. You have no right to demand tolerance just as the racist or misogynist has no right to demand tolerance, and society should call you what you are: a backward, intolerant bigot. The core of the complaint is that people in a same-sex relationship have a civil right to marry each other (i.e., a right to same-sex marriage), and that denying them this right is as scandalous and repulsive as denying blacks or women basic civil rights. In this case, traditionalists' calls for tolerance are ignored, just as calls for tolerance of racism, misogyny, and the like are ignored. The Limits and Demands of Tolerance If the analogies in this objection are correct, the critic has a valid point. Tolerance can only go so far. If members of a society systematically dehumanize any other group of people, the rest of society should not tolerate it. The practice of tolerance itself, however, is dependent upon a shared worldview that corresponds to reality. For example, because we all agree that by the laws of mathematics 2+2=4, we would not tolerate an elementary-school math teacher instructing her students that 2+2=5. We all agree that Aristotle's law of non-contradiction is necessarily true. Likewise, we wouldn't tolerate a religion that engaged in human sacrifice. We all agree that there is a moral law that unjustified killing of another human is murder and should be prohibited. We may not agree on the ontological bases for these truths, but all that is necessary is agreement that these things are true. In these and similar cases, intolerance is appropriate. Without it, society would become chaotic. Tolerance becomes relevant when truths are obscure. Is God timeless or in time? Are human beings body-soul composites or just physical matter? Is discarding leftover embryos used in in-vitro fertilization the equivalent of killing a person? These and a thousand other questions do not have clear-cut answers. This is why ongoing public discourse, academic freedom, and the joint pursuit of truth are necessary. Tolerating the views of those with whom one disagrees is an integral part of this task. For millennia, the necessity of sexual complementarity for marriage was one of the truths that cultures around the world shared (even those cultures that approved of same-sex sexual practice, e.g., ancient Greece and Rome). Yet this has now changed: the nature and definition of marriage, once indubitably and unanimously believed to be a union between man and woman, has become obscured. It has moved from the former category of a shared truth to the latter category of a debated idea. This means that, for traditional accounts of marriage, sexuality, and gender to be tolerated, they must be rationally explained and defended as reasonable, true, and moral. We can no longer rely on what everyone once knew to be true about marriage. False Analogies and Conceptions Such a defense of marriage has been made thoroughly, in part demonstrating that any comparisons to racism, misogyny, or prejudice against interracial marriage are false analogies. Refusing two people in a same-sex relationship the "right" to same-sex marriage is dissimilar in every way from denying black people human rights or women the right to vote, or banning interracial marriage. The reason the traditional view of marriage should be tolerated in public discourse and its adherents shouldn't be labeled bigots is precisely because it is a comprehensible, virtuous, and well-argued account of marriage superior in every way to revisionist accounts. Critics of the traditional view of marriage often think of opposite- and same-sex unions as two viable expressions of marriage, equally intelligible and able to coexist harmlessly. Thus one can understand why many think denying same-sex relationships marriage is a gross breach of civil rights. Yet approaching the debate over same-sex marriage from this premise is confused. In place of the fallacious analogies above, we need a valid analogy that captures the severity and consequence of what it means to redefine marriage. A Valid Analogy Consider the hypothetical case of a middle-aged couple, Dan and Susie, who own a pet Labrador dog named Max. This couple love and adore their dog so much that, for whatever reason, they come to believe he is actually their flesh-and-blood biological child. When they fill out their taxes, they claim the child tax credit for Max; when the new school year begins, they enroll Max in kindergarten; when they stop at McDonald's they order Max the child's Happy Meal and then let him romp in the play place. In short, they do everything for Max that normal parents would do for their children. Things don't go smoothly, however. When the IRS denies them the child tax credit, their local elementary school refuses to enroll Max, and the McDonald's manager kicks them out of the play place, they are incensed. How dare these people deny their child Max the rights and benefits of full integration into society! They decide to take their case to Washington, lobbying the government for help. Despite their passionate pleas, they are refused. The US government kindly but firmly explains that Dan and Susie are mistaken about the nature of reality: dogs are a different kind of species than human children. Their conviction that Max is their biological child is false, despite what they feel, insist upon, or do. Dan and Susie were not denied the civil right to have and raise children just because they had confusedly adopted their pet dog as their child. Instead, we would say that they failed to actually participate in the institution of parenthood (i.e., mothering and fathering), something that requires producing human offspring through sexual intercourse (or via adoption, etc.). Despite their insistence and self-righteous indignation, they were neither denied a civil right nor socially marginalized. They do not have the right to treat their dog as if it were a child, christen such behavior "parenting," and then insist that everyone else in society--including state and national governments--recognize their behavior as legitimate. Instead, their belief that Max is their child is correctly identified as false and thus detrimental not only to themselves and to their pet but also to society as a whole. But what would happen if Dan and Susie succeeded in convincing their culture that Max was indeed their biological child? What if thousands of other pet owners across the nation came to believe the same? What would happen if the Supreme Court, in a contested and controversial 5-4 decision, sided with Dan and Susie and redefined "children" to include pets? One could only imagine the social chaos that would ensue. Such a society would rightly be deemed to be living in a fantasy--a delusional world that would inevitably end in disaster. This is the proper analogy to the redefinition of marriage. Of course, this analogy is not asserting that gay people are somehow less human or a different species, but rather that revisionist definitions of marriage are as confused as Dan and Susie's revisionist definition of children. The traditionalist claim is not primarily that same-sex marriage is a bad idea, but that it is a nonsensical idea--an impossibility--just as a "pet (i.e., animal) child" is an impossibility. Since marriage necessarily requires sexual complementarity, to speak of "homosexual marriage," "gay marriage," or "same-sex marriage," is a contradiction in terms. It is akin to talking about square triangles, married bachelors, or monogamous throuples. It is unintelligible. Any society that believes it is possible to have "married bachelor" as a relational status with legal protection and congruent civil rights would rightly be declared delusional; so it is with "same-sex marriage." Natural Rights and Civil Rights How does this relate to the civil rights debate? Civil rights come in two forms. The first are pre-political, natural rights that governments recognize and codify as law, such as the inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. These rights are naturally occurring, God-given, and innumerable. They are known as negative rights because they place obligations of non-interference upon everyone else. In this case the civil right is a moral imperative that flows from the natural right. The second kind of civil rights come from civil law. In America, this includes the rights to vote, to trial by jury, to the standard of reasonable doubt, etc. These rights are not naturally occurring, innumerable, or provided by God, as they only obtain through social contracts and government legislation. They are not universal, but can vary from country to country and over time. It also means that changing these rights is not immoral (although usually imprudent). These kinds of civil rights are known as positive rights because they place obligations of provision upon certain parties. In this case the civil right is created when the positive right comes into existence via human effort. Civil Rights and Same-Sex Marriage Although debated, marriage is the former kind: a natural, pre-political right that is part of the created order. Therefore, the civil right to marriage depends on marriage as a naturally occurring, negative right. Since marriage did not come into existence through social contract or legislation (i.e., positive rights), governments and courts cannot redefine either marriage or the civil right to it. "Same-sex marriage" is a contradiction in terms, and one cannot have a civil right to a contradiction. Just as there is no civil right to being a "married bachelor," so there is no civil right to a "same-sex marriage" because such a thing does not and cannot exist--despite beliefs to the contrary. One can be granted the freedom to believe in illusory relationships, but in no case does one have the moral right to impose these false beliefs on the rest of society and use the strong arm of governments or courts to reshape the culture accordingly. In fact, just the opposite is true. Every government has the duty to correctly discern truth and then to craft laws, customs, and values according to those truths. While pluralistic societies should allow for differing beliefs and lifestyles, under no circumstance does this excuse the government from its duty to adhere to reality within its legitimate domains of authority--one of which is marriage. The irony is that same-sex attracted people have always had the civil right to marry. What they have not had is the civil right to "same-sex marriage," since such a thing is not possible. Just as Dan and Susie were never denied the right to have children or become parents simply because they were mistaken about what a child was, so same-sex attracted people have never been denied marriage just because they are mistaken about what marriage is. Marriage traditionalists are not bigots because their view of marriage is rational, well-argued, and virtuous, thus falling within the realm of debated ideas that are tolerated in the common pursuit of truth. Marriage traditionalists are not bigots because the analogies to racism, interracial marriage, and the like are false. Marriage traditionalists are not bigots because their understanding of marriage necessarily excludes "same-sex marriage" as a possible concept. Finally, marriage traditionalists are not bigots for denying same-sex attracted people the civil right to same-sex marriage, because this civil right does not exist. Everyone is welcome to get married, but we must conform to the reality of what marriage is, not attempt to shape it according to our desires. Facts are stubborn things, and the facts about marriage are stubborn indeed. Ben R. Crenshaw is a graduate student at Denver Seminary and a teaching fellow at the Gordon Lewis Center for Christian Thought and Culture ------------------------------