Tune: Kings Lynn

Conceding the Field to Fundamentalism

2012-01-30T10:37:00.004-05:00

One of Facebook's least endearing behavioral features is how it kicks up "Bullhorns for Everyone!" to a new level. There are numerous "friends" whom I've eventually silenced in my Facebook feed because of their constant stream of political cheap shots and other announcements of their fealty to True Causes. One would think that politics and religion are, to the Anglican upper class, not seen as fit subjects for the internet parlor.

And yet we have this making the Facebook rounds: another entry in the annals of "worshipping the Lord with a slight air of superiority," and not an especially innocent one at that. Whatever truth there is to Mark Noll's notorious opening observation in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, namely that "there is not much of an evangelical mind", for Episcopalians the scandal is our infatuation with our own supposedly superior theological sophistication. The sad truth, unfortunately, is that for some decades now the church has been dominated by two parties, each of which has largely taken its cues from secular sources. So on the establishment side, we have the continued drive to make the church safe for upper middle class liberals, and most especially their sexual appetites; the church rebels, on the other hand, seem as responsive to the words of the economic prophet von Mises as they are to the gospel. In the meantime, a somewhat beleaguered band of Anglicans resists, often futilely, with the sophomoric attempts at theology which appear to drive changes to the liturgy, not to mention yet another semi-official rebellion against the idea of even having a standard liturgy.

Perhaps the only church more prone to theological snobbery than us is the Church of Rome, or at least its more traditionalist partisans. We are bad enough: "fundamentalist" might as well mean "theological redneck", the way it appears in so much rhetoric, such as in this one-liner. Real fundamentalism, as Tony Clavier reminds us and as any student of theological history should be aware, came out of the Presbyterians, as a response to the, well, theological snobbery of the textual criticism faction. It has little to do with us, even if one of our episcopal heretics felt moved to try to rescue us from it. Instead, as everyone knows, "fundamentalist" means "narrow-minded, stupid, backward, mean-spirited literalist", or "someone who tells me I shouldn't have an abortion", or even "someone who takes their religion seriously enough to blow up themselves up for it." As Bryan Owen points out, it signifies the social class distinction between us and the Southern Baptists, whom we are prone to treat as nasty and brutish if not short. On top of all this is the presumption that we are in imitatio Christi through our resistance, as though there isn't something pharisaic in the fastidiousness with which we emasculate the liturgy and vote meaninglessly at church conventions to affirm this or that other secular cause over which the church has no influence, having spent it all decades ago. Indeed, if there is any favorable linkage to be made between us and the Pharisees, it is that we perhaps most resemble that exalted pair, Nicodemus and Joseph, who saw to the burial of Our Lord.

It is inevitable that we serve as a refuge for those fleeing what they perceive as the theological tyrannies and idiocies of other churches. If it is our only virtue, however, then we are lacking in virtue at all. Half a century ago we could point to a distinctly Anglican tradition of doing theology, in the academy, the sanctuary, and in the world; but of late we are increasingly reduced to that wretched "inclusion" and an increasingly limp and pale costume drama of a liturgy. And obviously we cannot include any fundamentalists; indeed, the campaign to drive them away is perhaps only beginning to fade a bit due to its manifest success.

The thing we need to resist isn't fundamentalism. It's the unbelief, the irreligion, the "spirituality" that is becoming the default religion of the social classes we so disproportionately represent. For all their faults, the fundamentalists now do a better job of calling the apostasy of Christendom to account. We can hardly be bothered; indeed, we seem more inclined to cater to the irreligious, for challenging them to real membership in the body would be, well, a failure of inclusion. And that's reflected in our own theological congress, where the only criterion that seems to matter is whether it would offend someone of vague or no spirituality who is committed to staying in that state. Can anything be more fatal to evangelism? We seemingly cannot call to the unchurched, but only to those who are on their way out the church door.

It is time for us to repent. We need to cease this stupid war against our fellow Christians and return to doing what we ought to be able to do best: harvesting those outside the church whom these other churches fail to collect. We need to appeal to the unchurched and apostate, and give them a reason to join us, not just to be comfortable visitors. And we need to look inward at our snobbery, and root it out mercilessly. Then we can consider again whether what we do is the work Christ set us to do.

Negotiating the Book

2012-01-12T09:29:00.005-05:00

As I remarked last time, the pressure on the 1979 BCP is growing in the land of liturgical revisionism. And generally, the pressure is bad. Here's an example from some prayers used recently:

That we may discover God's Word in every sound of our world, God's touch in every embrace, and God's redeeming love in the love of others, let us pray to the Lord.
People: Lord, have mercy

One can belabor the faults of this: that it is precious, vacuous, wordy, and proud of its political correctness, and that it fails to satisfy the rubrics for the prayer of the people as they are set forth in the BCP. More to the point, however, is that so very much of what I'm seeing here is not prayerbook revision at all. One can of course criticize the 1979 book on that same basis: Rite II is not, for the most part, a revision of the 1928 and earlier books so much as it is a wholly new rite which uses some of the same material as the old. However I would say that this project was, for the most part, more successful than the Prayer Book Society let on.

But this time around it seems to me that the accusations of theological innovation, dubious in 1979, are not dubious at all this time around. There is, for instance, the continuing insistence on inserting a phrase in the confession of sin, having us confess our sins against ourselves. Can we really do so? Well, isn't a lot of discussion required on that before we stick in such a change? The same thing goes for the emasculation of the God-language which is a signature feature of every attempt going forward; it is quite controversial.

But even beyond that, here it is, thirty years after the most radical rewrite of the liturgy effort, and it seems to me that so much of the material being proffered owes nothing at all to older liturgies except that the structure of the 1979 rite, for whatever reason, seems to be almost immutable. When the rewrites do address the actual current BCP text, the changes almost never have to do with fixing infelicitous phrasing or the like; they are almost always introductions of theological novelties. And on top of that, in practice, doing what the book actually says has in some districts become increasingly uncommon. There are places where one can expect a straight up Rite II with hymns from the 1982 hymnal and nothing either omitted or added; one can even find places where they still kneel at the prayers, and perhaps where they even still stand for the psalm (though I haven't seen the last in a couple of decades). But increasingly the Anglican traveller is well-advised to become a connoisseur of parish websites, looking for the tell-tale signs that the BCP liturgy will be tampered with to some lesser or greater degree, for expediency or because the rector does not want to say what the book says to say. And increasingly one finds on church websites doubts about anything and everything that we might do, all to be set aside in the name of Inclusion.

That someone who is an Anglican might find this excluding is entirely the point. And the signs are disturbing. Derek Olsen throws down the gauntlet, saying that commitment to the 1979 BCP is non-negotiable, and on the one hand the various concurrences (from, among others, Bryan Owen and Tony Hunt, as well as the many comments on the article itself, and a separate opinion from Tony Clavier) are gratifying, giving hope that preservation and true revision of our book may prevail, I also have to fear that, in spite of the vigorous opposition, the church establishment will see to it that this opposition is dismissed as regressive and that problem liturgies will be pushed through because they are objected to. And I would assume that, should this not come to pass, the current pattern of widespread disobedience as to the rubrics and liturgical canons will see even more tolerance (and implicit promotion) in this or that diocese and parish. Obedience, after all, is only for traditionalist and conservative dissidents; progressives are authorized by their sense of righteous progress to break any rule that stands between them and Inclusion. It indeed hardly seems necessary to develop liturgies for same-sex marriages, for instance, given that they are already being performed without benefit of canon.

The Idol of Inclusion, it appears, demands as a sacrifice any kind of institutional character; and our liturgies, it seems to me, are about all that is left beyond mere organizational bonds which hold us in a common religious consciousness. It is time to topple this false god. Christianity is not about inclusion, but about incorporation; and in our church, incorporation is through being bound in common worship. And in that worship is bound, not just across place, but through time. I cannot say it enough: anamnesis is the core of Christian worship, and constant change and constant deviation work against memory. When our church cannot remember what to pray from one town to the next and from one week to the next, we forget who we are. We are not here merely to make people feel good about coming in the door; we are here to change those who enter into Christians. And for us Anglican Christians, part of that change is being bound into the cycle of liturgy that dates back to our founding as a separate church, and which has roots as deep as liturgy goes back in time, all the way back to that upper room and through every sanctuary since.

Ordinariately, Part 1

2012-01-02T21:42:00.008-05:00

As the ordinariate continues to take form and the new year rolls over, we have the usual annual outbursts of triumphalism from the various sides.

Things are more muted from the ECUSA establishment side, possibly because the likelihood of triumph in the courts is set against the relentless decline in numbers. And then there are these issues:

The obsession with homosexuality: In the Diocese of Delaware they started off the new year with a civil union in church, notwithstanding that I don't see where the canons or the prayer book actually authorize any such service. But hey, Delaware wasn't the first to jump the gun. Of course, it's a very safe bet that the next General Convention will push that authorization through, now that ~~three~~four dioceses have been chased off. Which takes us to:

Inclusion and the march of heresy: A big topic in the past year has been the push for Communion WithOut Baptism, or more accurately described, the offering of communion to non-Christians. Now, the restriction of communion to those within the church can be traced straight back to St. Paul, and really the arguments seem to boil down to the rather thin belief that we might offend someone if we say that communion is reserved for members of the church. So as usual, inclusion means not standing for anything besides, well, inclusion, which really means only including other people who don't have standards either. This is ultimately the route to driving off anyone who has an any connection to the tradition of the church, so I don't see this reversing the decline. And it puts even more people in the position of struggling with the hierarchy. And looking further afield:

The covenant and the communion: In spite of its rejection by most liberal churches and dioceses in the communion, the liberal organs continue to obsess about the Anglican Covenant. They hammer away at the autonomy of the national church while at the same time it is quite clear that the national polity will be used to direct the church away from traditional, orthodox positions. The response from abroad is becoming increasingly negative, as witness the recent disinvitation of our presiding bishop by the Episcopal Church of Sudan. It's hard to see how the communion can hold together. But that's OK for an ECUSA loyalist, because:

It's General Convention time again, and that means that no Episcopalian's liturgy is safe. Or for that matter, pretty much any church teaching. It's been long acknowledged that GC is highly dysfunctional, and in spite of the many complaints about, for example, Holy Women, Holy Men, it's hard to see how the many questionable commemorations it proposes will fail ratification. The principle proposals for reforming it seem to me designed to make this sort of process failure even more the norm, by expediting the innovations coming out of the bishops and removing the brakes that the deputies had hitherto applied to them. And beyond that, the materials I've seen towards prayer book revision have been wretched: vapid and polemic at the same time. The best thing that GC could do about most issues this year would be nothing at all, except to repudiate 815's policy of refusing to deal with departing congregations. But that's unlikely to happen, because of:

The contempt: the continuing rock-headed hatred of both extremes for each other has meant entrenchment in their respective sins. It doesn't help at all how they are in thrall to their politics. The notion that we could act like Anglicans and try to live together is out the window, at least in the places of power. And power seems very much at the core of the matter. And never mind:

The declining numbers. Even after losing the ~~three~~four dioceses, we are seeing a decline of some 3% a year in membership and attendance.

There is an obvious message here: what we are doing now is not working. And fixing that is not a priority of our leadership. The temptation to do something alienating at GC is strong, to the end of making at least some people in the church feel good about how right-thinking they are. Actually making the church a place of worship according to the principles our own documents set forth is not only not on the agenda; the current rule seems to that principles themselves are a bad thing, because they are not inclusive. Instead there is a sort of suppressed institutional panic. The one thing that cannot happen is that the church establishment admit that they must make some concessions to the rest of the church, lest they keep driving their existing membership away as they did the three dissenting dioceses; but they realize they must do something to arrest the fall. Thus any kind of alienating change is acceptable, but conceding that they need to respect the orthodoxy said every Sunday: that is not acceptable.

The Queen of Great Britain's Christmas Message

2011-12-26T19:44:00.002-05:00

Verbum Caro Factus Est

2011-12-25T01:31:00.002-05:00

Meanwhile, in Atheist Land

2011-12-20T15:49:00.002-05:00

Now that Christopher Hitchens has died and people have ceased to care much about Richard Dawkins's strident atheism, apparently others have decided they need to take up the slack. Thus we are presented, in the NYT, with a fairly tame and tired defense of atheistic morality, courtesy of one Louise M. Antony, who "teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst." She does not give me a lot of confidence in the quality of instruction there, as she skips over the whole 19th-20th century demolition of natural law with nary a mention of so crucial a figure as our old buddy Friedrich Nietzsche. On the strength of this recommendation I've taken up reading Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II by Michael Burleigh, and while I would agree that, thus far, he goes a little easy on the allies (an early section on Churchill leans to the hagiographic) the relentless listing of the atrocity-based methods of Nazi and Communist rule laves me with little doubt about their moral systems. Yes, atheists can be moral, and that's mostly because most atheists in the USA at least take their moral compass from the hands of those Enlightenment moralists who fused Christian and old pagan virtue; one doubts, however, that Marx was enamored of the Stoics. The years passed, and we all saw that, in the end, almost anything could be justified, or indeed justification set aside entirely. Natural law worked only as long as all more or less agreed on its basic principles, and in time, that agreement failed.

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post we have yet another tired atheist trope, this time in the declaration that "Celebration, despite their protests, does not belong solely to the pious." Here the question is why the irreligious should celebrate Christmas, to which this particular pious person must reply, "Madame, you may celebrate, but you do not observe Christmas." We of course must be trotted through all the tired old saws about how it's really a co-opted pagan holiday anyway (which may or may not be true) and how it's about family and stuff, and one longs for Linus to set Charlie Brown straight again for another year. As with nearly everything about Christian holidays, it's all about anamnesis, the annual recollection of the miracle of the incarnation, how God hallowed human flesh to the utmost and set us on the road to Calvary and redemption. All that family stuff is nice if your family is pleasant and hell if they aren't, and giving presents can likewise cut either way depending upon how you feel about shopping. But it's all supplementary to the real observance of the feast. Our atheist is sentimental; we are faithful. There is a great and unbridgeable gulf between the two.

Pantheist Broadcasting Service

2011-12-19T09:18:00.004-05:00

So here I am in the living room, having made my squash and shrimp bisque (recipe to follow), and I've turned on WETA, the local PBS station. And they're showing Journey of the Universe, which at first seems to be some sort of Grand Science Survey a la Carl Sagan's old Cosmos series. However, the film's thesis, it appears, is founded in an expression of religion: Brian Swimme, the scientist you see on screen, is frequently identified as a pantheist, and the theologian you don't see, at least in the first episode, is Mary Evelyn Tucker, who is strongly connected to evolutionary and environmental theology.

Swimme's earlier book, The Universe Is a Green Dragon, expresses the view that there is a teleology to cosmic history. You can read this excerpt to get a flavor of the thing. What is striking isn't so much the religious spin he puts on the facts of cosmology, but that PBS is so willing to present this stuff in this way. It's hard to imagine John Polkinghorne stood up in front of the camera to present his very Anglican and very Christian view of the same topics, and not just because he isn't as handsome as Swimme, or for that matter as Deepak Chopra, whose Hindu-esque/new-age take on Christianity also saw PBS airtime. It's rather obvious that the public television people are uncomfortable with letting Christianity express itself on their airwaves, except as a historical relic (any number of "historical Jesus" programs) or as the source of aesthetic outpourings (Sister Wendy and various musical presentations). But they aren't uncomfortable with religion when it makes nothing more than impersonal demands which happen to already line up with their subculture's mores.

In the case of the program at hand, those demands are environmentalist, and never mind the irony that Tucker herself admits elsewhere that pantheist religion has a poor environmental record. Environmentalism traces rather plainly into Christianity: it is from thence that the obligation to manage Creation rightly springs, even though the expression comes at a certain distance. It's rather ironic that Swimme's theses can be taken in a decidedly anti-environmentalist direction, considering the emphasis he puts on the inexorability of evolutionary development. It is surely the case that we can screw up the earth enough so that we cannot live on it, but not enough so that nothing can live on it, in which case one assumes that Life will try again and replace us with something which it hopes will be less destructive. Personally I find Pokinghorne's anthropic analysis to make far more religious sense: if the universe "wants" sentient beings, there's no particular reason for it to want them. And there's no strong cosmological argument against the possibility that, absent the Apocalypse, humanity will live and die alone on this planet, with nothing to show the rest of the universe except a tiny handful of space probes which may well travel on into the void unnoticed, and an electronic whisper into the ether that goes unheard before it is silenced. Is that what the universe really wants?

Two Days, One Not Infamous

2011-12-11T05:51:00.002-05:00

There's a limit to how much an Anglican should spend on the new Roman mass translation that English-speaking Catholics switched to on Lent 1 of this year. It's not as bad as the old, pedestrian version, with its occasional egregious misrepresentation of scripture, but it isn't good either: nobody noticed that one needs to use English syntax as well as English vocabulary (and never mind "consubstantial"), and the problems with the Latin text are faithfully reproduced. It perhaps represents a break from the ecclesioclasm of a generation back, but to suggest that it is going to break Catholics of rushing through mass as quickly as possible so they can get to their Sunday shopping, or that they are going to start having kids in sufficiency to supply the altar with priests and the schools with nuns: I don't see that happening. An Anglican converting, I suspect, is going to be stuck with most of the same RC theological and practical issues.

My traddie acquaintances are all for it, of course, topped with some degree of longing for Tridentine Latin. Not that they are SSPX/V sedevacantists; they aren't that rebellious. But it is striking the degree to which an anti-establishment contrarianism colors them, and I have to suspect that the fact of them having all been betrayed by the Episcopal Church enters into this. Of course our grip on the establishment was broken back in the sixties, much as we continue to delude ourselves otherwise; we are really incapable of putting pressure on the political establishment anymore, and we have become increasing divided in our subservience to social liberal interests on the one side and neocons on the other. But the liberal capture of church polity continues to make the faithful life difficult, and it is understandable that people give up and go elsewhere.

Once elsewhere, though, the craziness bursts forth. One of the things that I find striking is how often this sort of conversion is accompanied by an attachment to political revisionism as well, and aside from the occasional Marxist, there seems to be a strong attraction to American right wingery: paleoconservatism, or its cousin libertarianism. And that leads to a striking susceptibility to crank theories. So every December 7th rolls around, and one of these guys puts up his inevitable post advocating the old theory that FDR deliberately provoked the Pearl Harbor attack in order to pull the USA into the war. The centerpiece of this conspiracy theory is Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit, which any genuine historian finds faulty to the core. It's easy to find fault with Stennitt's claims: the McCollum memo does not support his interpretation, and his claims about allied code reading simply are not true. A set of fringe theorists making questionable claims is not good enough reason to abandon the orthodox theory: that while we did put pressure on the Japanese, their military considered us a threat anyway and might just as well have attacked without the pressuring; that the surprise at Pearl Harbor was paradoxically made possible by the fact that the chain of command did not ensure readiness because the expectation of attack was so high, they presumed that obvious preparation would be made; that FDR did want to go to war against Germany, but was surprised that Germany would make this possible by (for once) honoring treaties and declaring war on the US on Japan's behalf.

Not surprisingly, these people don't like JFK and are willing believe in assassination conspiracies about him. The fact, unfortunately, is that JFK was the model of a modern American Catholic, and these traddies are not. Maybe they're conservative, maybe they aren't, but they take the more classically Catholic position that the pope is a point of loyalty, not someone to be obeyed. One also imagines that the average American Catholic is of a more pragmatic view on politics, and is not wedded to the hyper-Enlightenment rationality of libertarianism, which really doesn't take sin seriously enough. It is entirely germane that that the doctrines of American conservatism are more powerful than the teaching of the church, so that when the Vatican insists on the obligations of societies, through their governments, fulfill their obligation to take care of the poor, the traddies go through contortions to push this away from the teaching authority which they would otherwise ascribe to the church.

I've not been able to turn off my Protestantism anyway. But it seems to me that there is something fundamentally wrong with a viewpoint which is controlled by a doctrine of fringiness.

A Glance at the Door

2011-11-29T23:17:00.000-05:00

Advent 1 came, and the Roman Catholics switched to their more accurate but excessively Latinate new rite, and we quite predictably started off with Helmsley (warning: way over-the-top arrangement), and for whatever reason did two verses of Veni Immanuel instead of the Kyrie, and truncated the sequence hymn, and finally we got to the prayers. And here I was put on the spot: I was called upon the previous week to chant them, but what I was given was none of the forms from the BCP. It was some text from who knows where, gassy and trite, constructed of theological cliches. It failed to satisfy the rubrics, which specify a list of subjects about which prayers are to be made, and it indulged in the presently fashionable practice of refusing to use pronouns for the Godhead. This at least I dealt with by singing in English instead of Theocant, for which sin I was taken to task at coffee hour by a lay adherent of this practice. There was nothing to be done, however, for the failure to observe the rubrics; I toyed with the idea of inserting some scraps of Form I but decided it would be too conspicuous a demonstration.

I had wanted to avoid participating in this at all, but what with Thanksgiving and the general chaos of my life I never got around to demurring until too late. I did find myself telling my remonstrator that I would not be chanting the text again, not because of the emasculation, but because of the rubrical violation. But an attempt to briefly touch upon why I do not accept the neuterist theory of god-language ended up with the other person gleefully proclaiming herself to be a heretic, and then justifying this with "broad church", as if the label were accurate rather than ironic. For of course, broad churchmanship is that most strongly associated with theological adventurism and an inability to live within the canons.

The priest said nothing to me, but then he and I never talk about anything substantial. It is the first time I have had a priest who made me wary of theological discourse. The search for a new rector fills me with deep unease, as I sense that there is a will to steer the parish further from the Zion of Al Kimel's day, and into the surrounding hills where we can be made safe for Inclusivity. I am also beginning to wonder how much longer I will be able to say the words of the liturgy. I stopped attempting to follow the BCP revision materials because they have been uniformly terrible: simultaneously pedestrian and overwritten, and full of every manner of theological innovation. But we cannot talk about these things in any orderly fashion, for fear of offending someone other than a creedal Christian. Inclusivity means never being able to do theology, because theology is exclusive. It really bugs me that nobody seems to be able to simply do what is before them on the page; if the variety of official rites already weakens the unitive significance of a common liturgy, how much more so when, increasingly, priests present the laity with words which are not ours.

I had started on the road to a resignation that, though there was little hope of reversing the trend towards a fraudulent latitudinarianism, I at least could hope to stay with my church to the end of my days. Now it seems this is not to be. And on top of this, my parish is failing quickly. Attendance is off 40% from a decade ago, and is less than half of our peak in 2007; we have run a deficit for at least half the year. The surrounding parishes are not encouraging, and nearly every problem I've mentioned here is emphasized in The Other Diocese. To no small degree it is bloody-minded loyalty which keeps me in an Episcopal pew, but I have no loyalty to liturgies which are not ours; and I cannot have any loyalty to a bishop who cannot say the creed without crossed fingers and who willy-nilly ignores the canons and rubrics.

And thus, I look over at the door, and contemplate the possibility of passing through that gateway, out of this church.

Time to Quash This

2011-11-03T22:32:00.003-04:00

Diocesan conventions are the warm-up for General Convention, at least when it comes to the resolutions. Of late a couple of interesting cases have come up, neither of which bodes all that well.

Down in Atlanta they haven't had their convention yet, so this list of proposed resolutions at least theoretically could go down to uniform defeat. That won't happen: boilerplate in support of suicide prevention, immigrants (legal or not), parental leave, health insurance, and against bad immigration law, human trafficking, and the death penalty are likely to be ineffectual; but if one were to publicly come out against passing them, for whatever reason, it would look bad. It's the second to last proposal, however, that has caught a lot of eyes: the Rev. Benno D. Pattison, rector of Epiphany, Atlanta, proposes to "appoint a committee of discernment overseen by our Bishop, to consider these matters as a means to honor the contributions of Pelagius and reclaim his voice in our tradition." Now Pelagianism doesn't have a good rep, even as the various historical revisionists argue whether he actually held the views assembled under that heading. One has to wonder whether this is as much about rehabilitating the heresy as it is pardoning the man. It's easy to ridicule, and the usual places wasted no time in doing so. Update: Over at Catholicity and Covenant it is pointed out that the Pelagians are denounced by name in Article 9.

All of this is a sideshow, for the real menace comes from Connecticut. Its convention seems to have spent less time on fluff self-affirmations and more on administrative housework. But they managed to push through a couple of resolutions that will cause some trouble. You will not be surprised to learn that they now allow clergy in the diocese to act as agents of the state in performing same-sex marriages. It can be assumed that all liberal dioceses will eventually take such action, so it's not surprising that Conn. is taking steps now, though the Usual loud types will go on about it. Far more troublesome is a resolution declaring "a year for theological and catechetical reflection, dialogue, discussion, conversation and listening among parishes of this diocese on “Communion of the Unbaptized” [welcoming all, baptized or not, to Holy Communion]". Readers may remember that the reaction to Derek Olsen's series against this was not all that well-received in some parts. That was simple discussion, but as Rev. Dr. Mom says in Derek's post on the resolution, "dialogue" is a word that should raise a red flag to anyone committed to orthodox positions:

And I’m afraid that you are correct about conversation meaning “we’re going to talk until you see that you’re wrong.” In the forum held the evening before resolutions came to the floor, there were lots of comments that implied that CWOB was a foregone conclusion and we should all get with the program.

It's pretty obvious what the pattern will be, unless the laity step in to quash it: there will be a great deal of talking in which the innovators will use the word "inclusion" in every sentence and utterly ignore the orthodox position; it will be implied that defenders of the orthodox doctrine are hateful snobs; the innovators will declare that the Holy Spirit has moved everyone to a consensus for CWOB; and eventually heavy pressure will be placed upon those upholding the traditional and scriptural teaching on the matter. Even if the laity manage to quash this (because this is the sort of thing that comes out of the clerisy), it's likely to be the case that priests will get away with CWOB invitations, and attempts to discipline them will likely bring us to a Tennis-like declaration that it's not part of our core doctrine.

Somewhere along the line here, the liberals who say they are orthodox are going to have to stand up and be counted. CWOB is so fundamentally opposed to orthodox Christian thinking about salvation, the church, and the sacraments that it has to be stopped. They are going to have to summon up the nerve to tell the radicals that we already have a means to inclusion that we've been given from the beginning. It's called baptism, and for those who never crack a prayer book, it starts on page 299.

Trumps

2011-10-30T23:37:00.002-04:00

Fleming Rutledge, one might expect if you've ever read any of her preaching, is no fan of Marcus Borg. And especially she is not a fan of a catchphrase he has taken up: "Jesus trumps the Bible." Now it may occur to you that she is criticizing this out of context, but, well, let's have it in his own words:

And because Christians find the primary revelation of God in a person and not in a book, Jesus is more central than the Bible. Jesus trumps the bible; when they disagree, Jesus wins. Yet, of course, we know about him primarily through the Bible, and in particular through the New Testament. (The Heart of Christianity, p. 81)

He then appeals to the central modernist paradigm, for the next section of the book begins with an exposition of images of God, taking for granted that a traditionalist image is unacceptable:

The first reason that a historical-metaphorical approach matters is that an earlier image of Jesus and the image of the Christian life that goes with it have become unpersuasive to millions of people in the last century. (p. 81)

And that leads right to the issue I invariably have at this point: why and how should we care about their disbelief?

Here I and Rutledge take a slight divergence, though I think it is one of emphasis rather than a difference of opinion. Her reaction to hearing Borg speak focuses on the problem of actually constructing this alternate image, particularly on the distinction Borg makes between a pre- and post-Easter Jesus. She is absolutely right in denying this distinction, and her grounds for that denial is spot on-- and really, right up the alley that Borg is trying to argue. We don't have any pre-Easter documents about Jesus, not unless you want to work with the Old Testament, which I'm pretty sure contains a lot of the material that Jesus is supposed to trump (and I'll bet that Paul's exposition of sexual morality is another). The gospels, though, are emphatically post-Easter documents, and it is they that we go to for word of the pre-Easter Jesus. Thus we see that Jesus through post-Easter eyes; the texts themselves work against such a separation.

But it seems to me that beyond this, the key phrase is towards the end of the first section I quoted: "we know about him primarily through the Bible." Phrased that way, it carries the implication that there is some other source. But what is that source? Well, there is the church, but given his devaluation of tradition I would say that her teachings aren't what he had in mind. Borg, at least in this book, takes a while to tip his hand, but several pages later, having stumbled over the Chalcedonian problem of the natures of Christ with giving it a mention, he finally get to his new authority, in analyzing the messianic titles and language of Jesus:

First, this language is post-Easter. A strong majority of mainline scholars think it unlikely that Jesus said these things about himself; he probably did not speak of himself as the Messiah, the Son of God, the Light of the World, and so forth. Rather, this is the voice of the community in the years and decades after Easter. (pp. 86-87)

A quick check in an online bible search discloses that Jesus does say exactly that he is the Son of God and the Light of the World, so clearly we must conclude from this that the wisdom of the scholars, some of the scholars at least, is greater than the text of the Bible. I don't think much of this, and neither does Rutledge: "It has been shown over and over again that attempts to construct a “historical Jesus” or “real Jesus” apart from the faith-based witness of Scripture end in failure because such attempts are grounded, not in the text, but in the bias of those who undertake them." Indeed, that qualifier "mainline" is necessary because a survey shows a distinct lack of consensus on the matter: one could indeed assume that Borg identifies the mainline precisely in its agreement with this thesis.

If an unexamined life isn't worth living (an exaggeration, I would say), then unexamined scholarship is worse than worthless. It's impossible for me to read the "mainline" material and not come away with the conclusion that it's largely worthless because it begs the question. It already knows that Jesus cannot be a miracle worker, cannot be aware (somehow) of his divinity, cannot indeed be divinely born of a virgin. OK, so where's the proof of all these "cannots"? Well, Borg, at least in close proximity to the passages I've quoted, doesn't say, but one gets the sense that the scriptural God is distasteful. But like all good modernists, he fails to put his own predilections on the spot. If the problem with traditional Christianity is that it doesn't "work" for everybody (and within it's own schema, that's not a problem ), the problem with the modernists is that they won't admit that their scheme doesn't work for everyone either, and that the traditionalist scheme does work for probably the majority of Christendom. The relativism that they try to paper over this with doesn't wash: they really believe that the traditional teachings are wrong for everyone. So the big issue in this is really the whole problem of doubt, the unexamined and taken-for-granted doubt that is at the root of the modernist program. It is that doubt which is the true teaching of the moderns, and it is a teaching that does not move me, for I do not doubt, not on their terms.

Not That We Work for the Guy

2011-10-27T11:42:00.006-04:00

When I go to the church website, I almost never look at what's on the front page, because 99% of the time my next act is to click on "A-Z Directory" on the way to the "Research and Statistics" subsection. So it failed to catch my eye that this was prominently displayed:

The cadence is that familiar prayer book style, but if you will turn in your 1979 BCP to page 821, you will see that the standard "you/who/do/through" form as shown on the website is missing the last part, for the prayer continues: "through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." Not surprisingly, though, the Forces of Ridicule at StandFirm noticed it. And while I think the "He Who Must Not Be Named" dig is overmuch, one does have to wonder what possessed someone to leave that bit behind when they laid the text on the front page of the website.

Meanwhile, various people can, I suppose, sleep a little more easily, knowing that the Executive Council has rejected the Anglican Covenant and is putting it before General Convention next year, expecting the same rejection. I suppose someone felt that they had to go through the motions, but everyone knew several years back that the the church establishment was never going to submit to any sort of outside discipline, especially since the cause and nature of said discipline has been known since 2003. I don't need to spell out the hypocrisy of it all over again, but it seems to me that there's another wrinkle to it that may not have caught everyone's notice.

At the moment the anti-Lawrence effort is still in some early stage of bureaucratic digestion. I think it would be a very bad thing for Lawrence to be deposed through this process, but if the expulsion were to succeed, and GC specifically denounces the covenant, then the way would be open for deposing every bishop and seizing control of every diocese which signed on to it.

I really do not recall the part where Jesus said to act like this, and I do remember the part where he said not to.

UPDATE: Word came late yesterday that the prayer has been fixed. I still wonder how it was put up wrong, but there is only so much malice one is entitled to presume.

Finding Lawrence a Griddle

2011-10-08T10:13:00.002-04:00

Nobody should be surprised that the conservative Anglican blogosphere is ringing with the news that charges have been brought against Bishop Lawrence of South Carolina. The list of charges and evidence runs to sixty-three pages, and much of it is either obviously rubbish or represents a very curious perspective on the accusers. For instance, charges 9 through 11 are basically accusing him of associating with undesirables and holding views not in line with the progressive agenda; there's nothing wrong with this, not considering how the progressives came to power.

The most serious charges are the first five, which step directly up to the polity issues in the church today. These are what manifestly stand behind how many of the liberals understand the issue: they think that Lawrence intends to follow Fort Worth, San Joaquin, and Pittsburgh in leaving the denomination. That seems to me to explain half the reason for the timing of this, the other half being the Title IV changes which took effect in the summer and which set up the process for prosecuting Lawrence. The other half the reason, I am guessing, is that the course of legal decisions in the state is presenting the risk that the hierarchy up north might not prevail in a lawsuit over possession of properties; the strategy for preventing those losses, therefore, would be to place a bishop acceptable to the progressives on the throne preemptively.

The question of strategy inevitably leads to the question of who is pressing the charges, and while this is not being disclosed, all sign point back to the Episcopal Forum of South Carolina, an AAC-style parachurch group which has strong connections to St. Mark's Chapel, a extra-diocesan church plant which Lawrence has refused to acknowledge as a mission (that's Charge 8). The congregation was started by a retired priest not resident in the diocese (thus protecting him from Lawrence's discipline), and it's not to hard to figure out that part of rationale is to devil the bishop in some manner, perhaps in the manner of making one of the present charges possible. At any rate there is a great lack of transparency, particularly as to the PB's participation. One of the complaints about the new canon is the poor process it presents, and indeed, if you believe various analyses, KJS is already supposed to have become involved by this point.

But one gathers, based on the history of these things, that process isn't going to matter much. After all, the deposition of Duncan proceeded in the face of lacking the requisite approval of the consulted bishops. Unless there is a major revolt by the moderates, Lawrence will be subjected to something of a kangaroo court and be removed, and the diocese is highly likely to leave anyway at that point. And as a lot of people have said, the church really cannot afford to lose the only domestic diocese that is showing substantial gains in membership and attendance.

Summer Ends, But Not the Doldrums

2011-08-31T11:59:00.005-04:00

Things have gotten slack in the Anglican blogging world, so that the best I can observe about actual events is that the Diocese of New York coadjutor slate is made up of what seems to be the standard set of candidates for a liberal diocese these days:

one white guy shaved bald (bonus points for the goatee)
one white woman with an upper-crusty big hairdo
one black guy (also covering the foreign-born slot)
one lesbian
one guy who actually looks like a traditional bishop candidate and happens to be a bishop now

It's hard to get excited about it: everyone except the last makes the ritual obeisance to the Spirit of Inclusion, so I would guess that the bishop will remain bishop of where he is now instead of being enthroned in Harlem. I assume if they elect the lesbian that the Stand Firm people will be briefly distracted from the string of neo-con/Libertarian political posts and will make their ritual denunciations, and that the diocese will move on to uncanonically marrying homosexuals out in the open instead of behind church doors (if indeed they are bothering to be so circumspect now). I cannot imagine in any case that much will change, no matter who is elected: numbers in the diocese will continue to decline as before, in a smog of upper-middle self-congratulation.

Meanwhile the ordinariate is receiving a second ECUSA parish. It is simply pitiful to hear the goings-on about this from the traddy Roman side, as though the influx of a small number of Continuing parishes is going to have any effect in the great sea of American liturgical indifference. It is at least encouraging to see new churches and renovations which pay any attention to artistic merit, but the level of churchmanship still seems stuck at "wham/bam/thank you--" well, not "ma'am" but you get the idea. About the only thing I can hope for is that the infection of RC liturgical notions can be halted.

Speaking of which: so here it is Sunday morning, and guitar and hymnal services have been combined for the summer, and the organist can't be there this week. So we sing one of the listed hymns and the doxology, unaccompanied, and then nerve is lost on the final hymn and it gets replaced with a Cursillo thing which most people don't know. And you know what? The congregation sings far more enthusiastically on the unaccompanied hymns than it does on the guitar songs. Now this was trending to an older crowd, but I'm going to guess that if the kids aren't singing the hymns, they aren't singing the guitar songs either.

And thus ends a rather rambling blog post.

On the Other Hand

2011-08-22T09:32:00.003-04:00

If I came upon a service in which the "creed" which Bryan Owen quotes here was recited, I'd get up and walk out. Conspicuously.

How Can Anyone Say "Credo"?

2011-07-22T13:41:00.004-04:00

One should not be surprised to find over at the Episcopal Cafe this sort of routine liberal paean to unorthodoxy, I suppose. Personally I think that someone who is expressing these sentiments ought not to be a candidate for ordination.

Meanwhile (courtesy of Bryan Owen) we have a superb essay from Matt Gunter on the centrality of the creeds and their importance as a focus for Christian belief. I would like to elaborate on two points he raises, and then address one of my own.

First, in answer to the question, But, isn't one's faith about one's relationship with the living God and with God's children. Can’t we just say Love God and love your neighbor and leave it at that? , he writes in part:

It is inadequate to appeal to a simplistic pietism, whether in its more conservative or more liberal versions, that says "Don't bother me with doctrine, just give me Jesus". We have no access to Jesus other than the Gospels which are soaked in interpretation (doctrine) of who Jesus is and why it matters. And the creeds are the Christian guide to understanding God in light of Jesus.

To this I would add two things. The word "relationship" is (as this mathematician constantly finds himself pointing out) only the context of the issue; the need is of course to put oneself into right relationship with God. And if you take John 3:16 seriously, an important, perhaps crucial component of that relationship is beliecing the right thing about Jesus. A Christian needs to be able to answer the challenge "who do you say that I am?" correctly.

And where do we get the answers to that question? Well, the church remembers them. I seemingly cannot emphasize the centrality of anamnesis enough in this: the church is our conduit back the the historical truth of Jesus. The creed, besides its own content, stands as a synecdoche for the recollected truth of the Church. The all-too-obvious problem with a lot of the doubting is that it reflects listening to what the World says about Jesus. And not just the World, but a world which has turned away from Jesus and rejects Him, that is, the world of modernist, Enlightenment-driven skepticism. It doesn't seem reasonable to me to prefer a voice which has rejected Jesus over that which is specifically commissioned to recollect Him.

Second, he raises the question, "But isn’t the language of the Creed poetic, rich in metaphors?" I would like to rephrase his answer more forcefully. Some of it is metaphorical, but some of it is not. He says:

To say that all language about God acting in history, e.g., the virginal conception, the incarnation, and the bodily resurrection as historical, physical events, is metaphorical and only true in some spiritual sense is to try to be more spiritual than the God we know though Jesus has deigned to be.

I would put this more strongly. Those who first said the creed did not mean anything in the least bit metaphorical when they said that "Jesus[...] was crucified, died, and was buried." If a person says otherwise, they are not telling the truth. So if we say those same words, but mean them "poetically", we deny that Jesus was so executed; we essentially falsify them. So we move to the surrounding words. Nobody at Nicea held that the statements in Matthew and Luke concerning the Virgin Birth to be metaphorical in the sense that they accepted the assertion that Jesus was born through the normal biological processes in which some actual human male fathered him. Nobody then understood the phrase "rose from the dead" as implying that the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in the gospels didn't relate an encounter that was physical in the only sense that matters. (Indeed, the passages in John seem specifically intended to argue against any such interpretation.)

Metaphor is not a "get out of meaning free" card in any case. The utility of figures of speech presupposes that some figure conveys the meaning adequately, and that others do not. But the intent, after all, belongs to the speaker. Gnosticism may have been fading by the 400s, but there is not any doubt that the bishops were intent on excluding gnostic readings of scripture. No bishop at Nicea, not even Arius, wanted to leave open the possibility that Jesus remained dead or that he had an ordinary, earthly, biological father. Saying the creed "metaphorically" so as to assert those things is an act of intellectual dishonesty: it proclaims a unity of belief which the creed's formulators absolutely rejected. Not only that, but the need for metaphor is entirely lacking. One does not need figures of speech to relate the heterodox theories about Jesus, so one might as well speak what one believes in a manner which does not invite the false interpretation that one accepts the orthodox interpretation.

Finally, my own point: there isn't anything unreasonable about the expectation that people who cannot say the words ought either to find another job (if they are clerics) or another church (if they are not), or they should allow themselves to be instructed by the church and fix the defects in their theology. All of this is very much about the church as an institution, and it seems inevitably to trace back to power, and thence to politics. In my own church the creeds are connected directly to sacramental participation (as the Apostle's Creed is prerequisite to baptism) and to sacramental order (as the Nicene Creed appears in the order for consecration of a bishop). They are what we, individually and corporately, believe. Liberals within the church have long looked to the institution as a source of moral authority to push moral causes; but regardless of the other reasons why that authority has been eroded, the fundamental hypocrisy of clerics standing up and saying, "we believe, but I do not believe," also weakens the church's authority. A reasonable person, a not especially sophisticated reasonable person can see that the emperor lacks clothing: such a cleric does not teach with the church's authority, but only with his own. One can readily progress to the inferred teaching that the church has no real authority in the first place.

Blue Pencilling the Creed

2011-07-02T23:35:00.003-04:00

From a comment in the Lead:

Today, in a class that explores our faith and our ministries, I gave the class a copy of the Nicene Creed and a pencil. The directions for the exercise: draw a line through any part of this creed you do not believe. Not a single person failed to strike out about a third to half. One left only, I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. The composition of the group: a retired professor of theology and church history, 2 clergy, 4 Episcopalians, 2 ELCA Lutherans, 1 Presbyterian. The simple fact is, that on any given Sunday, if you asked a congregation how many present believe the entire Nicene Creed as it is written, my best estimate is fewer than 25% would say so.

I really think that a deacon should not be encouraging people to strike out portions of the creed; or at least, if he do so, then he ought to be challenging them as to why they think they feel entitled to reject them. Well, since he's in another diocese and a deacon to boot, I don't suppose I have to worry about refusing communion with him.

Third Time the Charm

2011-06-12T21:07:00.003-04:00

Word has reached me that Al Kimel has been ordained again, this time in a complicated three-way arrangement between the OCA, ROCOR, and the Antiochians, the latter being where he is going to function as a western rite priest.

His second ordination hurt, and though he had cut off communication between us, word did get back to him and he eventually published an apologia if not an apology. Now, I have little use for the argument he made, and if I have not formally forgiven him, time has put the hurt in the past. But it is all vacated, so that when he said

I have never, of course, denied the presence of God within Anglicanism nor have I denied God’s use of my priestly ministry during my twenty-five years as a priest in the Episcopal Church. I rejoice that many of those whom I have been privileged to serve testify that I have been a vessel of God’s love and holy presence in their lives. It is unfortunate that Charlie has interpreted my conversion to Catholicism as a denial of such grace. Perhaps even more unfortunate is his apparent misunderstanding of the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church on the reality of God’s grace within the Churches of the Reformation.

... my unwillingness to rely on his exposition of that "authentic teaching" is now made all the more easier by his abandonment of that authority for yet a third church. I've said it so many times, but it bears saying again: there is something fundamentally Protestant, and deeply unfaithful, about wandering from church to church based on one's own theological discernment. I regard this as one of the most spiritually dangerous practices out there, and I've seen so many people who have been deeply hurt by it, some to the point of apostasy. ECUSA may be the Whore of Babylon, but she's my whore, and I was called to her; I may eventually be driven elsewhere, but it won't because I went church shopping, nor because I divorced her in favor of another.

Your Anglican Covenant at Work

2011-06-02T22:40:00.003-04:00

The Moral Perils of the Consumer Church

2011-05-27T14:30:00.003-04:00

The stuff appearing in The Lead on the Episcopal Cafe is often mostly useful in tracking clericalist interest in (a) homosexuality and (b) making sure that the rest of the communion can't tell them what to do, but other little tidbits do manage to squeeze their way in. So in a collection of various links they come up with the following story from the Financial Post: Fair-trade coffee producers often end up poorer.

What's going on here? Well, here we have upper-middles, SWPLs if you like, who want to make sure that they aren't exploiting anyone in the addiction to caffeine, nor contributing to world pesticide and fertilizer usage. So we have all this certification corporate bureaucracy to assure them that their choice of Organic Gumutindo from Uganda is more virtuous than (say) Maxwell House or Safeway store brand grown who knows where. Well. Really poor farmers can't afford pesticides or fertilizer, so what they grow is organic by default. They also can't afford the certification fees required so that they can get that all-reassuring claim to be organic. Meanwhile the fair trade label typically involves membership in a cooperative or some other corporation whose administrative mouths need to be fed too, thus siphoning off profit which otherwise could go to the farmer. And you should not be surprised to learn that the certification and cooperative organizations are not free of corruption. The upshot of this is that on the average small farmers who stay away from the whole fair-trade/organic market are actually seeing better income than those who participate.

So in the end, what we have here is a little industry whose whole purpose is the assuage the guilty consciences of the exploitative classes--by exploiting the very people that are supposed to be helped by the program! It's like a Marxist parody made real. It's also a testimony to the upper-middle worship of credentials, but that's a whole 'nother class of sinning.

And so here we are, expected to "seek and serve Christ in all persons", to "strive for justice and peace among all people," and to "respect the dignity of every human being," in short, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and instead we get a program which isn't about that. It's about reassuring us that we are good people, or at least superior to the Baptists. Our church doesn't really have a place for the poor and troubled but it's oh so easy to find room for fair trade programs and other "think locally, act globally" ineffectualities. Lawrence Solomon writes above of trying to explain to the representative of some church group how the fair trade certification doesn't really help the farmers, to no avail:

After a long pause, the church official replied something like: “I still think the parishioners would feel better knowing that they were drinking fair-trade coffee.”

Yep, feeling better about yourself: that's what loving your neighbor is all about.

Redde Mihi Stolam Immortalitatis

2011-05-03T12:33:00.004-04:00

For the most part the Bad Vestments blog is a testament to I don't know what, some hideous convergence of bad taste and slovenliness and maybe color-blindness. This one, however, defies easy categorization.

Easter Sunday, in the Episcopal cathedral in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the canons was vested thusly:

And lest you think this is a stunt picture having nothing to do with the liturgy, you may see her again at the left edge of this picture taken during Easter Sunday's baptismal rite:

Honestly, I cannot fathom this. Does anyone have any good explanation?

1979 and All That

2011-04-28T22:55:00.003-04:00

Between the approach of Easter and the general slouch of the national church towards diminution and "inclusion" (which is to say latitudinarianism) there has not been the juxtaposition of motivation and time which leads to new posts. Moreover we are in mid-rector-search, and no man's parish is safe while that is underway.

At this point the various Anglican divisions in the USA seem set, modulo the tiny trickle in the Ordinariate (and all evidence is that it will indeed be tiny, and certainly not the revitalizing force which various RC traditionalists wish for). And for the most part, the liturgical dividing line will be between 1928 and 1979, with the various missals around the fringes.

Those of us who have been around long enough and have paid attention long enough will remember Peter Toon's various denunciads on behalf of the Prayer Book Society, and while in some respects he moderated his views, he nevertheless represents the party rejecting the books many innovations.

And innovations, if that is the word one wants to use for changes, are there in abundance. It is ironic, however, that the chief of all the changes, the restructuring of the Eucharist liturgy, has proven to be the most enduring feature, and that subsequent revisions, when they do not simply dismiss the book entirely, hew to the 1979 structure with almost no deviation. What happens instead is that people pick at the words. And here I see a parallel between Toon's program and the revisionists: there's an awful lot of claiming about what the 1979 words say that simply isn't there in the text.

Toon was certainly right to call attention to the various heretics wandering around in the ECUSA hierarchy. But he consistently missed the most obvious sign: that there were and are increasingly many clerics who will not say the words of their own prayer book. Five years ago the Office of Women's Heres-- er, Ministry put out a liturgy for discussion, and as I noted then, there was a lot of theological change hidden in the very many changes, little of which had to do with gender neutrality. It's hard to say that it has gotten better, or worse, or even different, but the inability to say "it is right to give him thanks and praise" persists.

Toon's argument was always that the differences between 1928 and 1979 wording lent themselves to various heretical interpretations. In my opinion, he was wrong about that. Certainly someone like Pike had no trouble interpreting 1928 in an unorthodox manner, and following him, Spong held to beliefs that could not be reconciled to the texts he mouthed on Sunday. Conversely, as I said above, the pressure to rewrite the words indicates that, if heresy is the intent, the current texts do not express it sufficiently.

But beyond that, there was another paradigm operating. Toon, it always seemed to me, operated from the assumption that the 1928 book represented a standard of orthodoxy. And therefore, it also always seemed to me that he assumed that the intent of pretty much any difference between the two books represented an intent to deviate from orthodoxy on the part of the 1979. Now I never used the 1928; I went directly from the services of the Green Book to the 1976 Proposed rites (which differed only in small ways). For me, therefore, taking the catholic stance of accepting the church's book, the standard of orthodoxy is 1979, not 1928. And since I do not participate in all these various heresies (and indeed see many beyond-1979 changes that explicitly encode some of these heresies), it is "obvious" to me that the texts do not imply what Toon would have them saying. And I think it is my view that is most prevalent, and that at least a few decades back that is how most people looked at 1979: they gave it an orthodox reading.

And furthermore, some of what he objects to could, I think, be defended. The most conspicuous case, also mentioned by Fr. Jonathan, is the "baptismal covenant".Here is where, in fact, I think we see the 1979 text in its most conservative and Anglican. It is inaccurate to say that its text turns away from a catholic and orthodox doctrine of the atonement: as Fr. Jonathan says, Prayer C, the most modern of the Eucharistic texts, hammers on it the hardest. What is novel is not this at all, but rather the acknowledgment that there is more to the Christian life than personal rectitude. And that realization is nothing more than say 150 years of hard-learned lessons about what the second great commandment entails. Respecting the dignity of every human being, striving for peace and justice: these are no more or less than what "loving your neighbor" demands. there is no reason for this to be controversial; nor am I constrained to interpret them to mean specifically the socialist program beloved of many church liberals.

and again, the tell-tale issue is that the pressure for change is on 1979's quite orthodox understanding of the need for atonement, redemption, and repentance. In that respect Toon was to some degree right in seeing 1979 as a step on the way towards corruption; but actual corruption has in practice brought forth an increasing mutilation of the 1979 text, so that now 1979 stands as the monument of orthodoxy against which the revisionists rail. Likewise, using the 1928 now doesn't mean for us what it did in 1928. It's a specifically reactionary and rebellious act.

Finally, Toon's line of argument reflects what I see as the most common error of liturgists: the notion that they can somehow control the faith of the church through these words. Fr. Jonathan assesses Toon's readings as "strained", which I would agree with; but insofar as such readings can be adopted, most laymen don't adopt them, and if it has gotten worse, I think it was not so long ago that the vast majority of ECUSA clerics also adopted straightforward, orthodox readings. The problem is not in the text, but in the readers. the best that one can hope for in a liturgy is that it encourages an orthodox and catholic reading; but one cannot write a liturgy that forces such a reading.

Not That Kind of Relationship

2011-03-08T10:15:00.001-05:00

The Underground Pewster nails everything that is wrong with "dialogue" about sexuality: a hypothetical conversation between Bishop Waldo and a simple pewsitter.

I particularly loathe the phrase "living in relationship", which sits between "dialogue" and "living in community" on my Shelf of Theological Vacuity. Every two people live in some sort of relationship; the important thing is pinning down what that relationship needs to be like, and you know, God/people (your choice) invented these things called "rules" and "laws" to help us through this. "That kind of relationship" is discussed at length in scripture, and besides it doesn't take a lot of observation to realize that (a) long-term monogamy is what works best, and (b) "relationship" is a word which means "letting your sexual appetites and the drudgery of everyday life dictate your behavior."

At any rate, it took about thirty seconds for "not that kind of relationship" to become the new catchphrase in the Wingate household.

HarperCollins and the Velvet Elvis

2011-03-04T11:35:00.006-05:00

The Christian and especially Anglican blogosphere is echoing now from the responses to the promotional campaign for Rob Bell's latest book. OK, so if you are a typical church-going Episcopalian, and you through some horrific accident stumbled upon this, you are wondering, "who in the heck is Rob Bell, and why should I care?" Well, you should care because Bell is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Church, one of those gratingly hipster "emerging" churches, located in this case in Grand Rapids, which also happens to be the home of Zondervan and Eerdmans, the biggest evangelical publishers (Eerdmans also publishes a lot of Anglicana).

I suppose I shouldn't let my personal prejudices get in the way of all this, but I see Bell and think, "isn't time he grew up?" The guy is in his forties and he is trying to look as if he's twenty-five; yes, he has young kids, but he had them almost as late as I did. If his first kid had been born when he was 25 instead of almost 30 he would have a teenager now, and everyone knows that parents of teenagers cannot be hip. And probably wearing vestments isn't hip either, though one sees a lot of failed attempts to the contrary in the Episcopal Church. Vestments demand dignity, and what looks merely casual in hipster shirt-and-jeans (the shirt, of course, isn't tucked in) looks hopelessly undignified in vestments. (Vestments that are trying to look hip are grist for the Bad Vestments mill, which ranks lower on the scale than merely "undignified".) Yet there's a lot of wanabee Anglicanism (which is to say, Protestant Catholicism) on Mar's Hill's website, such as their recco of doing the Office, for which they link directly to an Episcopal Church site.

What I don't see is much Anglican influence in Bell's ideas. It's not clear how much the church's website reflects his personal views, but what he has written thus far reflects either an immersion in modernist theology, or at least a rediscovery of the same principles on his own. The example which everyone points to first is a passage from one of his early books, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith:

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archaeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of Mithra and the Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? But what if you discover that in the first century the word virgin in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at the time, the word virgin could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first century being "born of a virgin" also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse? (p. 26)

I remember discussing all of these things (except the last, which is a new one on me and of course he doesn't cite anything) back in high school sacred studies and then again in college religion courses, thirty years ago. We are right in the middle of modernist country here, and it might occur to you that a leeettle bit of theological discussion may have happened since then, and not only that, but for decades and decades prior to that. And you would be right, except that somehow the modernists never seem to be able to hear the criticisms of traditionalists and even mainstream theologians. But to continue, Bell back in 2006 was still in the mode of actually answering his own rhetorical questions. He frames this whole thing in a metaphor in which his new system is likened to a trampoline, which he characterizes creedal faith in this manner:

It hit me while I was watch that for him [a creationist] faith isn't a trampoline; it's a wall of bricks. Each of the core doctrines for him is like an individual brick that stacks on top of the others. If you pull one out, the whole wall starts to crumble. It appears quite strong and rigid, but if you begin to rethink or discuss even one brick, the whole thing is in danger.

Now, as usual, the deck is rigged by picking someone whom even most traditionalists outside of a subsection of radically conservative Protestantism think is quite wrong. And nothing is more bricklike than Roman Thomist or hardline Calvinist theology. But even ignoring that the history of theology shows that this claim isn't true, and that plenty of people are able to rebuild their theological edifices when parts of them are damaged in one manner or another, the real message here is based on the hipster values that trampolines are Cool and that brick walls are utterly UnCool. I suppose that means they never sing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God", but really this is a pathetically lame basis for a theology. But never fear, he goes on to realize the similes and give a reason for preferring one to the other:

I affirm the historic Christian faith, which includes the virgin birth and the Trinity and the inspiration of the Bible and much more. [....] But if the whole faith falls apart when we examine and rethink one spring, then it wasn't very strong in the first place, was it?

Well, obviously it's going to depend on the spring, and Paul of course gives an absolutely contradictory answer. But like most modernists, Bell seems to have a problem with Paul. And in any case, as a thought experiment this runs up against the reality that one of my college classmates raised: nobody is ever going to come up with a strong disproof of the Virgin Birth, and we are always going to be forced to rely on believing the sources (scripture and the church) or not believing them. In the meantime, this has been discussed endlessly, but apparently not to Bell's satisfaction, so he has a new book coming out, and the emphasis is on raising questions again. Well, not really: at the moment, based on his promotional YouTube video, it's all about universalism. Not surprisingly, this set off a huge fight. Traditionalist altar-call Protestants simply aren't going to accept his answers, nor are traditional catholics. Equally unsurprisingly, the Episcopal "cool kids" love him. I suppose the fight is good publicity, just as "a Bishop rethinks" probably sold a lot of Spong's books, and I see that Bell has advanced from the unhip Zondervan to the with-it HarperCollins, the preferred publisher of the fashionably controversialist.

But I, personally, prefer to remain an agnostic on this at least to a point. Jesus and scripture spend too much time on the subject of damnation for me to dismiss the possibility that some people, maybe most people, end up there. Hell may be empty, but I'm not counting on it and I'm certainly not going teach that. On the other hand it's patently obvious from scripture that altar-call salvation is inadequate; behavior is important to salvation. There are people out there (for instance, Eugene Peterson) who are trying to find a better route between these Scylla and Charybdis of heresies, but this, I do not think, is going that route. Instead, what I see is that this fits into the Emergent path already trod by the likes of Brian McLaren of reinventing if not adopting the classic modernist errors of rhetoric and reasoning. There is a LOT of theology out there, and the reaction against (a) the Catholic Church or (b) fundamentalism or literalist evangelicalism is the erection of a strawman. There are and have always been other possibilities; if you look at a classical Anglican such as Lewis, for instance, you will find someone who not only does not adopt but actively avoids either position. Nobody who is going to make this kind of pronouncement should be doing so without at least surveying the literature, and Bell's writings seem to be those of someone who has taken a survey of the modernists and nobody else. I notice that his church commends Chesterton's Orthodoxy but I really don't see anything in his theses consonant with that book.

And also one again we see the essentially oppositional character of the Emergent movement, even if they don't see it themselves. One of the big issues that continues to plague the modernists is that they are stuck in eternal combat with the fundamentalists and Thomists and Calvinists and other hardline systematic traditionalists, but this century-old fight is completely irrelevant to my theology, and I say, a curse on all their houses. Too many Emergents are obviously in rebellion against American evangelicalism, and they show all the same traits of exaggeration and grandstanding and oversimplifying the field. Likewise, the whole hipster ethos is a rebellion against an earlier generation that should have ended a long time ago in an anamnetic religion. If there's one thing that should be learned from the history of 20th century theology, it's that reinventing theology is the fastest route to heresy and to that religion so memorably damned by H. Richard Niebuhr: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

Addendum: I commend to the reader this extended review of Velvet Elvis by an Orthodox Presbyterian minister.

How Odd I May Be

2011-02-09T16:21:00.002-05:00

It occurs to me that my wife and I may be the first couple to be married in our parish and raise a child to adulthood in decades. I'm not entirely sure but we may be the only family at present who were married in the parish and have children of our own.

Does This Mean Anything?

2011-01-25T11:09:00.004-05:00

Courtesy of Stand Firm we have an address by Walter Brueggemann as reported by ENS:

Walter Brueggemann told the opening session of the 41st Trinity Institute Jan. 20 that 21st century Christians need to stop being mired in old quarrels over scriptural interpretation and instead approach the Bible as "an intricate set of symbols and signs and signals that are arranged in a certain imaginative, artistic configuration that yield a new kind of reality."

Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar and professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, said that such an approach can help Christians engage with the Bible in a way that avoids pre-packaged interpretation. Instead, he said, Christians and the churches to which they belong need to engage with the Bible in a way that gives them a place to stand in their lives and their faith in the midst of "the power of nation states, the reductionisms of scientism and in the capricious power of the marketplace."

One is foolishly tempted to ask what much of this means. But the point of course is that it not only means nothing in particular, but it is a sort of word smoke screen that is supposed to make something profound out of the reactive antipathy to established theological tradition.

And it's easy to guess which tradition is the target:

"There is an enormous appetite for an authoritarian approach to the Bible," said [Mary] Gordon, adding that "a sense of certainty in God" can be lost in the sort of interpretation Brueggemann suggested.

"There's a reason why fundamentalists are doing better than the likes of us," she said.

Well, part of the answer may be in their use of simple, declarative sentences. Look, as an Anglican I don't read scripture with the kind of point-to-point reading that characterizes a lot of the most authoritarian theologies. But this kind of burbling obscurity seems intended, for the most part, to escape from the wrong problem of scripture: not that it is difficult, but that a lot of it isn't difficult. Or to be more precise, the problem of the bible for today, for intellectuals, is that they come to it with a lot of manufactured difficulties arising from their unearned alienation from the text.

Is Communion Worth a Bath?

2011-01-24T13:15:00.002-05:00

Derek Olsen is out tipping over modernist sacred cows again, this time in a three part attack on the latest ECUSA liturgical innovation, Communion Without Baptism (or CWOB, if you like). (Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.) You can read the postgame show here.

I would say the most succinct response came from Benjamin Guyer:

If I may propose that your problem – your frustration – is the same as those which many of the rest of us have: trying to hold theologically serious conversation within the Episcopal Church (USA) is simply impossible. “Radical openness” is not a theology, but a flight from intellectual rigor, just as it is a flight from genuine political engagement and genuine moral commitment. It is, in other words, an “anything goes” system.

But I am also beginning to consider that there is another, more malign element here. I suspect that one reason why CWOB is being pushed is precisely because it is offensive to people who have theological standards, and especially traditionalists. Set beside the theological laxity has been a program of increasing political rigor: we are not allowed to hold anyone to any traditional theological standard, but we can't leave either, at least not without abandoning everything. I have to suspect that the time will come when clerics can be disciplined for refusing communion to unbelievers. But then, after all, only Pharisaic right wingers would ever do that.

All Over?

2011-01-04T22:30:00.005-05:00

Word has come that the bishop of Massachusetts celebrated the Feast of the Holy Name by marrying two of his female clergy. It's hard to imagine a much more definitive statement that any moratorium on same-sex unions is over.

Update: Peter Ould has a discussion of the changes made in the 1979 liturgy in order to accommodate this rite. Besides the, um, curious second reading (well, at least it wasn't from the Koran, but then, I suppose it wouldn't be) I note a comment made by one Michael Harnois: "Here in the Diocese of Massachusetts I haven't heard about anyone who plans on rewriting the BCP marriage rite for straight couples, although I could have missed something, I suppose." Well, consider the Office of Women's Ministry rewriting Rite II in the interest, of course, of avoiding what male-favoring language there is in the 1979 language. I noted at the time that many of the changes could not be explained on the basis of their program, and that therefore there had to be larger theological pressures in play. I have to expect that the pressure on the marriage rite will be to make one unified form regardless of the sex of the participants, opening up the current rite to other modifications. And those modifications, I would expect, will go beyond neutering the references to brides and grooms. I expect the SCLM to promulgate some liberal (that is, unorthodox) theory of marriage, because historically they have preferred questionable rites. And it will be difficult to suppress whatever heresies they set forth because Justice will preempt the application of any kind of theological standard.

It is easier for moderates to tolerate same sex rites when they are merely an aberration which they can ignore because it happens in another parish, or at least at services which they do not attend. Changing the marriage rite as a whole is a far more significant issue, but I think it is a very safe bet that changes are in the works. The biggest threat that social liberals pose to the church is their poor record in keeping the Unitarians and other heretics out of power. The danger is very real, in this case, that they will allow the emasculation of the marital rite because they need the heretics to maintain the political weight keep the conservative troglodytes at bay.

2009: The Numbers

2010-11-19T09:04:00.002-05:00

The 2009 statistics came out late this year, perhaps because of the need to get correct numbers for Ft. Worth and Quincy. At any rate, the diocesan totals can be found here.

Perhaps more interesting are the five year "fast facts", which contains a mixture of depressingly constant trends and curious statistical surprises. For instance, one can see that the rate of decline in membership and ASA has been fairly constant, but the five and especially ten year rates of decline have been growing. The median parish numbers have slid too, with a five year decline of 10% in membership and 12% in ASA. These numbers are each two percentage points smaller than the composite rates, indicating that not only are parishes shrinking, but that parishes are disappearing too. And looking at the top of the report, we see steady losses: a 4.2% decline over five years, with the rate increasing in the last two years.

Of course, at that point we are seeing the results from the departure of dioceses. The biggest decline in ASA, 65.5%, comes from Pittsburgh; second place is Ft. Worth, with 18.7%. Quincy, curiously, is among the gainers, at 3.4%. Twelve other domestic dioceses showed gains, but before we get all excited at this turn-around, it should be noted that only three dioceses had increases of over a hundred attendees, and only three domestic dioceses showed a increase greater than the domestic decrease decrease, all of them small: Utah, San Joaquin, and Quincy.

If one takes out Ft. Worth and Pittsburgh, then the declines are not so bad: a 2.4% decline in ASA instead of 3.2% for all domestic dioceses. Foreign dioceses, as usual, blunted the overall numbers. Haiti, however, did not report numbers this year, and as it accounts for a third of foreign membership and ASA, those numbers have to be considered very dubiously. Meanwhile, the drop in P&P continues, accelerating to 2.8%.

Epic Statistical Fail

2010-09-28T20:07:00.003-04:00

The Studying Your Congregation and Community tables have been updated for 2009, and the next phase of departures can now be assessed (at least for the patient and dogged) for the effect on church numbers.

Except that they can't.

If you pull up the chart for the Diocese of San Joaquin, yes, it is still almost entirely gone. Pittsburgh also has dropped precipitously. The charts for Fort Worth and Quincy, however, don't look that different: Ft. Worth ASA shows a maybe 30% ASA decline, while Quincy shows a tiny increase. OK, what's going on here?

Well, the answer is that there is apparently a large scale pattern of misrepresentation if not outright fraud. Let's work with Ft. Worth, which in 2008 had 55 parishes. Well, looking through the charts, only 17 parishes show changes in reported numbers between 2008 and 2009, and there are only a couple more which show changes in reporting between 2007 and 2009. They are simply repeating the old values rather than acknowledging that the other parishes no longer count themselves as ECUSA congregations.

Of the seventeen that do show changes, only one does not show a loss from 2008 to 2009, and all show losses from 2007. Only three do not appear in ACNA Ft. Worth's list of parishes, and these three have relatively small losses (13%, 25%, and a gain of 11%). There are three other apparently contested parishes with relatively small losses (9%, 20%, and 35%). Every other parish lost at least 60% of its attendance, with the worst case going from 94 to 2 ASA, a loss of 98%.

Taken together these parishes have a combined ASA of 970, down from 2218 in 2008 for a loss of 56%. If one assumes that all the other parishes haven't reported numbers because they are no longer part of the ECUSA diocese, then given a reported 2008 ASA of 6945 (and this number isn't really accurate, because few parishes reported a change in ASA between 2007 and 2008) the drop in ASA was not around 30%, but in excess of 85%. It's a good thing that Ft. Worth is a relatively small diocese, because the loss I compute is 0.8% of total domestic ASA.

One hopes that there is a good (read, canonical and longstanding) reason for this kind of reportage. I'm told that the three phantom parishes in LA are still on the books, and one is led to suspect that there are others that haven't been checked. And of course, there's also Quincy, which at an ASA of 935 in 2008 isn't going to be sending statistical shockwaves out when its reporting is rectified, but still, it all adds up.

UPDATE
The diocesan numbers have now been released, and at least one of the peculiarities has been remedied: numbers for Ft. Worth now show departures. The Quincy numbers have also been updated, but they show little change from the previous year. I will have more analysis in a separate post.

On the Aging of Clergy

2010-09-28T09:12:00.003-04:00

Over at The Lead in the Episcopal Cafe, we are pointed to an interesting table from the 2009 Clergy Compensation Report. Now there are some other curious numbers, such as why men are paid better than women except in curate positions, or my associates in Province VI are paid so poorly compared to those in other dioceses.

Table 5, however, offers the opportunity to recover some other demographics, if one is willing to indulge in a few suppositions, because it reports how many clergy are in each of four age brackets, and it breaks this down by gender. Now as Laura Toepfer points out in the comments, the clergy in each age range includes both those ordained at an earlier age and those newly ordained; therefore by making a few assumptions we can work out the ages at which clergy are ordained. The assumptions are actually pretty dubious on one level, but I believe that the likely errors tend to reduce the effects I am about to describe, so I'm not too unhappy about making then.

The central assumption is that the flow of people into each of the groups is constant, so that I can assume that the number of people ordained at a given age in the past is the same as it is now. This assumption, over the very long haul, isn't true, but when I say "long haul" we're talking before my lifetime: the pattern that is going to appear fits what I knew about ordination patterns back when I was in college. The second assumption is that people don't die or quit young. Again, this is a bad assumption, but the degree to which it is false will blunt the pattern, so it won't hurt to make it. The third assumption is that deaths and retirements in the last group are balanced by ordinations and aging into it. This is also dubious, but the likely error is in the direction of blunting the pattern, so again I'm not too concerned about this.

Using these assumptions, I can get the number of people ordained in each age range by subtracting out the number of people in the previous range from the number of people in the current range. Normalizing this over the these new quantities, we get the following:

Age group	Men	Women	Total
under 35	15%	15%	15%
35-45	13%	9%	12%
45-55	33%	38%	35%
over 55	39%	38%	39%

One result of this is very striking: only about a quarter of all ECUSA clergy are ordained before age 45, and over a third are ordained after age 55. I have a hard time imagining that this pattern obtains for any but mainline churches, and probably not even for most of them. It's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Episcopal priesthood is, for most, a second career or even a post-retirement hobby.

And that conclusion is reinforced by the second pattern: the decided drop in women ordained in the 35-45 age bracket. Either a lot more women are reluctant to abandon careers in that age group, or child-rearing interferes with starting the ordination path. (I would note, BTW, that discernment processes, seminary and transitional diaconates apply about a five year bias to these numbers in terms of when people actually make their decisions to start.)

Of course one has to allow for the possibility that the Holy Spirit likes it this way. But there are plenty of reasons to suspect that economic realities and diocesan policies are likely contributors. Having to largely go without pay for several years surely accounts for much of the dip in the 35-45 bracket: unless a spouse can support the family themselves, people with families to support are unlikely to be able to afford to drop everything, especially with the risk of being dropped from the process and having to pick up the pieces of their lives. Kids fresh out of college lack the obligations, but there has been a historic pattern of discouraging them as being insufficiently mature. So instead we see people waiting until the kids are old enough or indeed out on their own. In any case this presents a very different picture of the priesthood and how it is to be lived, when it is not a primary profession, but a second stage in life. And it creates a very strong bias towards a priesthood whose peers are older. One has to wonder how much this affects the causes espoused by those clergy, who are so much older than the population as a whole.

The Campaign

2010-09-21T09:24:00.004-04:00

The level of rancor directed at the pope on the occasion of the his visit to England (including the beatification of John Newman) should, I suppose, be unsurprising. But then again, it should be surprising, because it is reprehensible. Perhaps he and Rowan Williams should feel a kinship as being, at heart, theologians who are cast into political struggles to which they are not naturally drawn.

The picture of Benedict as a tyrant is obviously false. It's clear that he wants to right a lot of what he sees are wrongs and abuses that have developed over the years; his vigor in pursuing this, however, is less than dictatorial. But for some reason it is important that the pope be this malevolent, cruel, heartless, fundamentalist tyrant, so that this what he is, at least when he is written about in the secular media. The level of dislike for him is wildly disproportionate.

So here we have Garry Wills misrepresenting a nine year old address by the then-cardinal, and here we have Jim Naughton commending the attack. I defy anyone, in a few minutes, to read what Ratzinger actually said in a few minutes and come up with a coherent and succinct summary of his views re Newman. The passage is subtle, complex, and highly nuanced; it is the address of a deep-thinking theologian meditating on one of his equals if not superiors. Wills's reduction of Newman to a dissident is absolutely wrong, and Naughton's commendation of this reduction is equally wrong.

But it is worse than just wrong, because Naugtton is, after all, an agent of the ecclesiastical establishment, not a dissident. So just two posts earlier in Episcopalian Cafe, he mounts an attack on the character of Dan Martins, bishop-elect in the Diocese of Springfield, which it is hard to characterize as anything other than a deliberate misrepresentation of what Martins said. And you can hear exactly what he said, or go from there to a copy of the remarks as he intended to say them, and you can see and hear for yourself that Naughton's claim of what Martins found shameful simply isn't true.

The posturing in the remarks on Naughton's post is, as usual, quite routine and tiresome, with plenty of powerful people bemoaning the rebuke to their acts. What is more striking to me is how this fits into a long pattern of Naughton serving as an agent of agitation for the liberal establishment. Naughton is, you may recall, the person behind publicizing the Chapman memo and trying to raise the alarms about IRD and Howard Ahramson. It all fits into a consistent campaign-- and everything shows that the present presiding bishop is a participant in it-- to deny dissenting traditionalists any access to power. I think Martins has a pretty good chance at this point to survive these attacks, because I think there are probably enough bishops in the middle who will stick to their guns in allowing him to be a dissident, especially since he isn't making any noises about taking his diocese out of the church. But the pattern of hypocrisy continues: people of power commending "dissidents" like Newman, and then moving to quash any dissidence within their own ranks, even if it means saying things about the opposition that really aren't true, and beyond that, attacking others for practicing politics when everything about their acts is political in the extreme. If prophecy is speaking to power, then these are the people to whom prophecy must speak, not a man whose words at GC were not heeded and whose ascent to power is in the hands of these so-called dissidents.

It's Not Just Me

2010-08-09T16:46:00.002-04:00

For years I have complained about the liberal strategy in the church of breaking the rules against progress first and then getting their violations authorized ex post facto. Well, finally it seems someone else has noticed.

Philip Turner, writing on the Anglican Communion Institute website, is warning everyone not to trust ECUSA when it comes to "dialogue":

Dialogue, for TEC, is not a process of disciplined argument designed to clarify issues, expose false reasoning, and arrive at a truth both parties can hold. It is not even a process of critical examination that occurs before taking a disputed action. Rather it is an aggressive form of self-promotion built around “talking points” rather than disciplined argument—talking points that are meant to beat down opposition to a disputed action already taken. In short, the decision made by the Standing Committee is in reality a decision to allow TEC more time to gain acceptance for its actions. It is not, in TEC’s mind, a time to subject those actions to “consequences” or to critical examination.

Turner then goes right back to the point I also identify as the start of this strategy:

TEC’s recent history makes the truth of these charges abundantly plain. Let us begin with the first of the more recent challenges to the Communion’s common life–the ordination of women to the priesthood. Before I begin this tale, I wish to make it clear that I am a strong supporter of the ordination of women both to the Presbyterate and to the Episcopate. What I do not support is the way in which TEC made this change. The way in which it was done opened Pandora’s box, and now TEC seeks to spread the bad habits it learned though this event to the rest of the Communion.

He then outlines exactly the same steps I see: the "prophetic" step beyond the bounds, the "justice" supposedly denied by not working in process, and the failure of any discipline from church organs, presumably because to dare to insist on church order was to risk being tagged an oppressor.

It's pretty clear at this point that the larger agenda is for the liberal establishment to gain control of the first world Anglican churches, and the communion can go to hell after that because that establishment doesn't really care that much about Africa, Asia, or South America since they are too backward to be persuaded, especially since the American troglodytes have taught them some politics. That takes us right back to the deeper social purpose of the Episcopal Church, which is to make the world safe for the upper middle class. The possibility that they would listen to any truly prophetic voice is pretty much gone now, once they have converted the Church of England (a project now in progress in the form of the campaign to drive the Anglo-Catholics out by making sure they have no place in the hierarchy), they will be finished. Holding their members' feet to the fire over their sexual sinning-- not homosexuality, but their lack of interest in marriage-- is not going to be on the list. There will never again be a serious confrontation over abortion, because the freedom to copulate without consequences is going to always trump responsibility towards the children thus engendered. The persistent lie that they are in conflict with the establishment, when in fact they are the establishment, isn't going away either.

The only possible opening I can see in this is that the establishment is also so patently heretical. There is some hope that the next generation-- mine is too tainted-- will tire of all the clerics telling them to give up on any conventional faith, and will restore the church to some foundation of integrity, actually living out the charity and tolerance to which, at present, they only pay lip service.

Sacred Cow Tipping

2010-08-03T20:59:00.003-04:00

Derek Olsen continues his campaign against modernist sacred cows with a pair of articles on the Virgin Birth and the Perpetual Virginity of Mary (part 1/ part 2). He and I come to different conclusions, as I (perhaps too modernist-tainted myself) have taken the interpretation that the PV is the result of excessive Marian piety. What is far more telling is that the remarks, from the beginning, have been dominated by controversy over the Virgin Birth itself.

It is a commonplace among various Catholic partisans to assert that the Protestants are all doomed to go to theological pieces because they don't have infallibility. This thread illustrates the more complicated reality and the weird power struggle behind the theology.

For example, consider this discussion of the proposal to put WEB DuBois on the ECUSA kalendar. DuBois did not, to put it mildly, have a positive opinion of the church, and his admiration for Stalin was at best delusional, at worst a defense of a mass murderer. As far as his advocacy of racial causes is concerned, I think it is a very safe bet that when November 14 rolls around we are not going to see a commemoration of Booker T., nor of the more overt religious GW Carver when his day comes up. I do not want to get too caught up in racial politics here, but the preference for the upper middle Yankee DuBois over the southern ex-slave Washington is quite telling. In any case I'm not the only one wondering why we are putting yet another non-Christian on the calendar.

Which brings me to the comments to Olsen's posts, in which I find myself engaged in a lopsided conflict with someone who is apparently some sort of Heidegger aficionado and who, along with another, prefers to refer to scripture as a "faith text", though apparently "faith text" means specifically "something we don't believe in". The resurrection is not an event, but a doctrine (which is apparently some modernist code phrase for "something the apostles just made up"). These are only more extreme examples of sentiments expressed by others; doubt apparently comes easily, but for whatever reason its proponents seem to have some trouble following through on the rejection of the gospel story.

At the same time we find another person chastising John Robison for "nitpicking" at the addition of DuBois to the kalendar. We should be feeding the hungry instead of wasting our time on such theological concerns, we are told. Of course, that one can use that juxtaposition against anything is sufficient reason not to take it seriously. But more telling is the implication in this that the nature of Christian life is essentially moral, and that matters of theology or worship can be set aside as unimportant. This perhaps also explains why at St.Gregory of Nyssa's dancing saints can include Malcolm X with his famous denunciation of Christianity as the "white man's religion", beyond the sheer radical chic of the thing. Moralistic therapeutic deism, crossed with liberal social activism, has become the theology of the those who like to see themselves as the church's ruling class.

Actually, they don't really believe that matters of theology are so unimportant as to justify simple acceptance of the tradition. They really believe that it's important for theology to express and realize their doubts. If they didn't believe that, they wouldn't keep making an issue of it, and the 1979 BCP would remain undisturbed. But instead-- and again, the form of this is quite telling-- the theology of the BCP must be altered specifically to make moral points about the place of women. But this is all OK because of this modernist doctrine that the scriptures really do not tell us anything definite and immutable. In any theological conflict, it is the (liberal) theologians who dictate what scripture says, even when a naive reading would say the opposite. Even Jesus is not immune: if he says "Father", well, we know better than the Son of God, and oh, that doesn't mean that he embodies God in any way, so his words can be set aside whenever they do not support our more enlightened principles.

This is what is going to destroy the Episcopal Church, not the fight over sexuality (though more on that anon). The persistent and increasing attempt by effective nonbelievers to control and direct the church is against the faith of the average believer in the church, who may or may not have a committed opinion on homosexuality but who more likely than not can say "born of the Virgin Mary" every Sunday without apology, and who, on low Sunday, hears the gospel account and has no trouble believing that Thomas's fingers were laid upon physical, living flesh. Having driven the evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics away, the ruling unitarians are going to run out of bogeymen; the cachet of opposing fundamentalism will pall when it turns out that fundamentalism includes, for instance, insistence on baptism. And even in sexuality the fight isn't ever really going to go away; people are going to keep their qualms in the closet, but I think it is quite safe to assume that reluctance about homosexuality is going to be with us in the church, because the spiritual authority of its clergy is so eroded by their faithlessness.

Meanwhile there is a new generation, whose members do not remember the glory days of civil rights and antiwar activism, and who do not make obeisance to mandarins of skepticism. At age fifty, I do not remember the glory days, and even in college I was impatient with the sophistry of "things no modern man can believe". Derek Olsen is a lot younger than I am-- decades younger, I would venture to guess.

The Ugly Party at Prayer

2010-07-15T17:21:00.000-04:00

I have become dismayed at the rhetoric being thrown around politically these days. I am apparently not the only one, judging from Michael Gerson's editorial in the Washington Post. He coins the phrase, "the Ugly Party", describing its rhetoric as "shar[ing] some common themes: urging the death or sexual humiliation of opponents or comparing a political enemy to vermin or diseases. It is not merely an adolescent form of political discourse; it encourages a certain political philosophy -- a belief that rivals are somehow less than human, which undermines the idea of equality and the possibility of common purposes." I personally think he is being way too kind to adolescents who are well past their "grow up by" date, and he shies away from the rampant stupidity and blockheaded certainty which are part and parcel of the ugliness. Nonetheless e has it pegged, and it's obvious that nothing good is going to come of this.

And nothing good is going to come of its analogue in the church. Bryan Owen comments on the Church of the Ugly Party-- that is, an awful lot of our church, or at least an awful lot of our church commentators. I can understand some of the anger expressed over at StandFirm, considering the course of the Kennedys' departure. After that it goes downhill rapidly, with over-the-top and unwarrantedly bitter remarks tossed off about every move from the liberal establishment. And as Owen observes, the other side is not really any better-- indeed, I would say that, as they are consistently winning, they really have little ground for the anger that spews from their pens. Yet you can read the comments in the "Thinking Anglicans" blog (a title which holds a slim lead over "Anglican Mainstream" in the contest for greatest hubris), and see if you aren't struck by the nastiness and dismissiveness therein (see, for example, this snarky article from Episcopal Cafe).

Meanwhile, I see that Fr. Jones of St. Peter's London Docks is discontinuing his blog. The reason, of course, is that he does not wish to make a spectacle out of his now untenable situation. I shall miss him; his Catholicism is not my Anglican "eth", but his dedication and faith are obvious, and he after all has something to lose: not just his parish, but even (so I am told) his pension if he leaves.I am told that his sort are a tiny minority, which I suspect is not so true in England as (after thirty years) it is in the USA.

I will reserve my views on the future for another post. Suffice it to say that I find it increasingly difficult to live with the nastiness that has come pervade my church.

New Horizons in Liturgy

2010-07-12T10:41:00.003-04:00

Given the reappearance of clown masses a few years back, my daughter suggested we needed a pirate baptism:

Celebrant: Are ye willing to walk the plank for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

Candidate: Aye!

The crew responds, ARRRRGH.

Hospitality, Inclusion, the Altar, and the Font

2010-06-17T15:48:00.000-04:00

I have been following several discussions/posts about what Derek Olsen has taken to terming "communion without baptism" (or CWOB). As he and Tobias Haller have been engaging the Anglican Scotist (especially concerning this blog post), it struck me that I would prefer at this point to step back a little bit from the fray and take a larger view of those very current words, "inclusion" and "hospitality".

Now, as nearly everyone on the traditional side of the argument is wont to point out, the theology of the BCP is quite clear: baptism is what includes us in the church. Two passages from the catechism:

Q. How is the Church described in the Bible?
A. The Church is described as the Body of which Jesus
Christ is the Head and of which all baptized persons are
members. It is called the People of God, the New Israel,
a holy nation, a royal priesthood, and the pillar and
ground of truth.

Q. What is Holy Baptism?
A. Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us
as his children and makes us members of Christ’s Body,
the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.

Also, consider Cramner's words in the postcommunion prayer:

...and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people....

This rather puts me in a position very close to that of Christopher, who writes that "If I were to make a distinction in the parlance of our day, I would prefer "incorporation" rather than "inclusion."" I think, however, I must take a more aggressive stance. Let me reiterate my chief concern of a few weeks ago: that those so "included" in communion, in this age at least, are those with a commitment to syncretism that leads them away from Christianity.

Christopher, and BSnyder in the comments here, and Derek here, and I are all agreed: communion takes place in a Mystical Body in which the chief sacraments are not only about feeding or whatever, but that the Christian life is about being bound into that Body, which is the life of Christ. But that leads me to a much stronger negative response, one that is elicited by Paul's statements about the consequences of sexual immorality. The problem with offering communion to Hindus and Wiccans and random New Agers and other people who have no Christian intentions is that we are joining Christ back to them. We thus make communion a Hindu/Wiccan/New-Age/whatever sacrament.

If we want a feeding model, we would be better off looking to the Syro-Phoenician woman. At first, she seems to fit the bill; but note also that she who gathers up the crumbs from beneath the table specifically acknowledges Jesus' unique authority in approaching him in the first place. One should also note the cases in the Acts: conversion of gentiles leads directly to baptism. There is something of the restorationist in this movement, as though something was lost even before the Diddache, perhaps even before Pentecost itself. It's hard to take seriously a theory that is supposedly based in historical analysis and which appears to skip the entire history of the church.

My final observation is how deeply insecure this movement seems, underneath. BSynder sums it up thus: "Episcopalians have been so worried for so long about offending people that our preaching has become soft and atrophied." I would put it another way: that the radicals in the Episcopal Church are fine with the spiritual, but are scared to death of appearing to stand for anything religious. And I think this is hurting our evangelism, because in the end we increasingly cannot give anyone a reason for joining our church as a vehicle for joining with Christ. In this case, we are opening up the sacrament of our unity with Christ to people who do not want such unity and reject that inclusion. Surely that paradox is not lost on many who might convert rather than visit.

Addendum: I would commend to the reader a series of posts by Matt Gruner, beginning with Baptized into Eucharist.

Come See the Violence Inherent in the System

2010-06-11T21:00:00.004-04:00

When the presiding bishop's pastoral letter was released, I didn't read it particularly carefully. Thus, I missed this quite remarkable passage:

We also recognize that the attempts to impose a singular understanding in such matters represent the same kind of cultural excesses practiced by many of our colonial forebears in their missionizing activity. Native Hawaiians were forced to abandon their traditional dress in favor of missionaries' standards of modesty. Native Americans were forced to abandon many of their cultural practices, even though they were fully congruent with orthodox Christianity, because the missionaries did not understand or consider those practices exemplary of the Spirit. The uniformity imposed at the Synod of Whitby did similar violence to a developing, contextual Christianity in the British Isles.

Now, I cannot speak to the other issues, for I am not as conversant with the situations in question. Early English church history, on the other hand, is something of a hobby with me, so when this passage was pointed out to me, I was aghast at her grotesque misrepresentation of the council.

As Mark Clavier writes:"We have here a sort of theological variation on Avatar"-- perhaps more apt an analogy than he intended, considering all the woad, er, blue skin in the movie. Of course, as he points out, the matter was nothing of the kind; the council was called to resolve differences in practice which were becoming too disruptive to continue tolerating. It is strikingly presumptuous for the PB to deny the assembled churchmen (and women-- remember that they met under the authority of Hilda) the right and authority to make the kinds of decisions which they made. The Celtic churchmen were not victims; they were parties to a dispute, which for the most part they acknowledged losing with grace and forebearance. The greatest saint of the era, Cuthbert, acceded to the changes and eventually assumed a short bishopric under the "new" (that is, Roman) hierarchy and rites.

Clavier notes, as he should, that Celtic Christianity serves as a object of romanticism. But he neglects another point, the continuing paradox of the present struggle: that 815 2nd Avenue stands not just for Iona, but also for Rome, and the General Conventions of the Episcopal Church might as well all be held in Whitby. And yet there is not the charity which characterized the English council, but indeed, only, war, legal rather than phsyical, but combat nonetheless. Or if I may jump, not so charitably, to a parable: the ruling clerisy in ECUSA is altogether too much like the servant who is forgiven his debt, but then presses all the more on those in debt to him.

There is no mythology of dissidence and freedom within the communion which cannot come back to haunt ECUSA in the treatment of its dissident and rebellious dioceses and parishes. And of course the reality is that the Episcopal Church is safe from having its parish churches and cathedrals confiscated by Cantuar, as opposed to the relentless litigating within ECUSA. But of course, unlike the Hawaiians or Navaho, the modern reactionaries are irredeemably wrong and have to be made to change their ways,

A Confused but Inclusive Mess

2010-06-03T11:46:00.003-04:00

Judging from some discussions I'm seeing, the next assault on the church's theology is not going to be against the Father. Communion without baptism seems to have jumped to the head of the line. Now the prohibition against communing the unbaptized is so old as to be untraceable, to the point where in the New Testament baptism seems to be assumed. And while we're at it, in 2006 General Convention passed Resolution D084, confirming the restriction and asking the Theology Committee of the House of Bishops to make a presentation concerning the issue at the next GC. The paper so presented can be found here, and not too surprisingly it supports a pretty traditional yet middle-of-the-road understanding of baptism as an essential initiation into the life of the church, with communion being part of that common life together.

Nonetheless, the pressure against it continues, in the name of Inclusion. So, for instance, in the Daily Episcopalian we have a column by Linda L. Grenz, recently interim at Good Shepherd Silver Spring, presenting this line of thinking. So we get strung together the usual line of people we used to exclude: blacks, women, and homosexuals, with (for some reason) a detour to Hispanic workers for Walt Disney. We included them, the implication goes, so we should include everyone else.

This just completely ignores any kind of theology, because whatever exclusions there were varied widely, and the (good or bad) theology behind the exclusions was all over the map in the kinds of arguments made. Of course, women and blacks were always baptized. The exclusion of women from the clergy can be traced right back to specific statements in Paul's letters; whereas whatever theological justification can be wrung out of scripture for the exclusion of blacks from such positions was tortured at best. There was nothing in Paul, for instance, to hang the latter exclusion on, whereas the statement that in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek nor a long list of other, highly relevant distinctions plainly bears directly on the matter. This is surely why racial discrimination within the churches has been driven into fringey corners, while ordination of women must still fight for acceptance. Reconciling Paul's denial of distinction on the one hand and his flat prohibitions on the other requires theology, one way or the other.

Homosexuality is a quite different issue. Nobody claims it is sinful to be black or female; by contrast, the center of the homosexuality debate is over whether it is an ontological fact of sexuality which must be respected (and thus affirmed), or a manifestation of sinfulness which must be resisted. On the other hand, the rejection of Donatism implies that the only possibly insurmountable problem with Mary Glasspool's consecration is her sex, not who she chooses to have sex with. It stands as a symbol of the church's endorsement of homosexuality, but it doesn't delegitimize her office, at least if one accepts that a woman may be made a bishop.

All of this is preface to the observation that Grenz's essay doesn't come within miles of this. Indeed, considering the kind of inclusion that she discusses, I can only note Paul Goings's waspish remark at another place that he's "waiting for the movement to introduce ordination without baptism." I don't see the theology in this, only an inchoate urge towards Inclusion as the highest Christian value.

And furthermore, one should give a thought about how people who are not baptized may approach the rail (or should I say, altar, since rails are after all a realization of exclusion). People with strong religious commitments--faithful Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or atheists--are likely either to refrain out of piety or (perhaps in the case of the Hindus) reinterpret the act in the context of their own religion, in which case they may be ritual participants but not faithful participants. We cannot include these people with bread and wine.

From there we turn to that growing faith, the irreligious and the "spiritual but not religious". Here the paradox is made manifest: the problem these people have is their lack of religious commitment, so we "welcome" them by abolishing the requirement for that commitment! Or as I put it several years ago: "Open communion sends the message that you don't have standards." I have to think that these people are the ones most likely to transgress Paul's numerous warnings about approaching communion unworthily, not perceiving Christ in it. They are not being included; they are being indulged. They come to church with no commitment to Christ, and they leave the same way; in the middle they may persuade themselves that they've had some sort of deep spiritual (which, I am sad to say, is likely to mean aesthetic and emotive) experience, but the one person they do not want to meet there is John the Baptist demanding to know what they're doing there and calling them to repentance.

And naturally, as usual the clerics get to congratulate themselves on their radical hospitality. "Radical" means "rebellious", and if there isn't a bishop or the canons to rebel against, there's always the Baptists and the pope. "Hospitality" means catering to spiritual dilettantes. Meanwhile the church itself suffers, if only because of the old principle: "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"

The power of a sacrament

2010-06-02T10:44:00.002-04:00

Chasing down some remarks by Derek Olsen concerning communion without baptism, I came upon this striking statement from Fr. John-Julian, OJN:

I had a friend who was a military chaplain. He had been a Congregationalist, but the moment he left the military, he became an Episcopalian. (He wasn't allowed to "convert" while a chaplain!)

I asked him why he became an Episcopalian. He said: "I was on the battlefield in the front lines, and when one of the young soldiers was dying, I watched the Episcopal priest give him Communion and anoint him with holy oil. As a Congregationalist, all I could do was TALK to the dying -- and that was so bloody irrelevant. It was then that I literally SAW the power of a Sacrament -- and knew where I belonged."

Calming Down

2010-05-22T17:08:00.005-04:00

The presiding bishop gives interview on the state of the church:

She said fallout from the 2003 decision to consecrate Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire appears to have settled out for the most part.

“The reactivity right now is much, much less than it was seven years ago,” she said during an interview at Christ Church, where Waldo's consecration will take place.

“I think the church, and certainly the part of the church in the United States, is reasonably clear about where we're going, even though everybody doesn't agree. And those in the church, I think, are willing to live with that tension.”

Some Episcopalians who believe Scripture is clear in condemning homosexuality have left the church and formed an alternative province, while some parishes, including one in Aiken County, have left the denomination.

Others, such as Jefferts Schori, believe the gospel, taken in context, doesn't condemn monogamous homosexual relationships.

“There are certainly parts of the Anglican Communion that continue to be unhappy with the Episcopal Church and the church in Canada,” she said, “but we continue to build relationships across the communion, mission partnerships, and I think those are probably stronger than they were 10 years ago, and there are more of them."

Is that so? You wouldn't know it to read Stand Firm-- but then, it seems that perhaps most of them have left. And really, I don't see the anger dying down on the radical left. They are triumphant, but they're angry all right.

No Longer a Predominantly White Male Conservative East Coast Elite

2010-04-06T09:05:00.003-04:00

One of the longer running revisionist talking points in the current battle is to paint it as the overthrow of the old white racist homophobic patriarchy. Our title comes from this remark by the white male Rev. Michael Russell of the Diocese of Los Angeles.

Anyone with any memory at all is aware that this isn't true. I was confirmed into the Episcopal Church in May of 1977, a year after John T. Walker was consecrated as bishop coadjutor of Washington. If my recollection is correct, he wasn't even the first black bishop. Of course, he was very patrician, in his way. Three years previous a set of upper middle class white women were illegally ordained; by the time of my consecration their ordinations were regularized.

All of this was a generation ago. In this age, if race even enters into the picture, it is because the upper middle class is still largely white. Berkeley has always been in California as Cambridge has been in Massachusetts, and social tinkering has never known gender.

The elitism, if anything, has gotten stronger, not weaker. The social stratum of the liberal ECUSA establishment is if anything more constrained than ever. Black, female, poor powerless America is emphatically conservative in church; Latinos, far more so. The current struggle in ECUSA is openly about denying less privileged, less elite conservatives access to the power that church structures afford. Indeed, if you listen to Jim Naughton, it is specifically about denying power to secular conservatives who are supposedly using the church as a tool in secular struggles. But Naughton's old expose implicitly presupposes that those conservatives are right, and so I can only presume that Naughton and the episcopacy he represents have the same intentions. If they are not "rich", it is only in comparison to the resources of a man like Ahramson; for by any reasonable standard, the people who back the Diocese of Washington are wealthy enough, and (male or female) they have access to the educational and social opportunities afforded by matriculation from institutions of the greatest American prestige. The social views given power in the church represent those people, not those of Wheaton College or Notre Dame or Bob Jones University.

Given what I have heard of church life and advocacy back in my single digit years, I do not think that PECUSA has represented a conservative white male position in my lifetime, especially if what it means is a Jim Crow southern position-- for that is what Russell's remark is supposed to remind me of. I would point out to him that I knew several not so young, socially progressive priests in my salad days-- several of whom learned their profession at Sewanee. They are all dead now, as is very nearly everyone who was a bishop back in the heady days of 1964.

An Infernally Symbolic Act

2010-03-22T09:47:00.002-04:00

People who follow Stand Firm closely may have noticed a couple of times when I've tangled with Matt Kennedy. I don't know all the details of his long battle with his bishop, and I've been reluctant to endorse his "we can take this parish and attach it to some other bishop" ecclesiology. He and I have rather different views on Rowan Williams.

That said, possibly no act more perfectly epitomizes the current conflict between the presiding bishop's office and her subjects than the fate of the buildings in Binghamton, New York, formerly occupied by the Kennedys' parish. While they have been graciously accommodated by the local RC parish, the former Church of the Good Shepherd has not reopened. It has come out, instead, that it is being sold to a muslim group, one presumes for use as a mosque, at a price one third of what the departing parish offered to pay for it.

Thus we defend our faith.

Two Charts That Say A Lot

2010-03-16T14:47:00.004-04:00

Kendall Harmon has been running a series of posts in T19 on Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) for various dioceses for the 1998-2008 period. I managed to find some older data on the ECUSA website going back to 1992, so I've created a couple of charts which examine this from a slightly different perspective.

Our first chart shows ASA by diocese as a percentage of 1992 ASA:

The bold red line is domestic ASA. The legend to the right shows the dioceses in order by 2008 increase/decline (right-to-left, top-to-bottom) so that S. Carolina is at the top and San Joaquin is at the bottom.

Our second chart shows percentage change on a year-by-year basis:

In this case I have omitted Navaholand and San Joaquin, the first due to its volatility and the second due to its extreme at the end. I've also omitted selected extreme values along the way for other dioceses. The heavy red line again shows overall domestic ASA changes.

Both of these show pretty much the same pattern: up until 2001, the church was holding its own, and in many places showing increases. From 2002 on, almost all dioceses show substantial losses. Of course, it's only going to be worse next year, as three more dioceses all but disappear.

On the Feast of the Holy Name

2010-01-01T12:36:00.004-05:00

January 1 is, in the Episcopal Church, the Feast of the Holy Name. I couldn't find anyone on YouTube singing the Vaughan Williams tune, and the other tune isn't right for what I am about to write (also, I just don't like it), so I'm afraid you'll just have to sing along yourself:

At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow,
Every tongue confess him king of glory now.
'Tis the Father's pleasure we should call him Lord,
Who from the beginning was the mighty word.

The upcoming year, for those of us who loved our church for what it was, is likely to be grim. When Mary Glasspool gets her consents, the church shall be riven yet again. The anger from on high (by which I mean, the heights of 815 2nd Avenue) will discourage the orthodox and incite the heretics. Dioceses will write (or worse, allow their parishes to write) their own rites for homosexual marriages, citing GC resolutions as authorization to do so, and many of the same dioceses will allow increasingly large deviation from our common rites. A shrinking, besieged band, often beloved but seldom honored, will remember and move in the old ways; but the dominant churchmanship will continue to slide towards a high'n'wide'n'happy style in which "celebrate" because the only word for everything we do.

In between attempts to write this, I came across Tony Clavier talking about the same thing, more or less. So I will go to him for a moment, as he is more articulate about the matter than I seem to be at the moment:

Oddly enough for a person who yearns for the unity of Christendom, I have come to think that our abandonment of the distinctively Anglican “flavor” of worship and devotion, an abandonment variously justified as bringing us closer to other liturgical churches as well as making worship more accessible to moderns, has enormously harmed our witness and compromised our evangelism. A wise Bishop of Michigan, now in glory, once remarked that our contribution to unity had to come from the depth of our own tradition. That tradition was intimately anchored in our liturgical heritage and in its patient pastoral application.

[....]

So I live in a community which has nothing much to do but “affirm” people and offer them shares in real estate and a part in what goes on in those buildings, organized into an expensive structure which busies itself in good works.

And yet, I have no place else to go. It was the old PECUSA which called me forth from the dormancy of my childhood, and it was in a chaplaincy of that church that I was called into faith again. I do not trust the notion that one can choose among the churches through a theological scorecard, and the claims of those catholicisms that deny that I even go to a church presume too much, and brush off their own deep deficiencies too casually. It is a bit ironic that Fr. Clavier says, "Instead we seem to have morphed into “denominationalism”. By that I mean that the institution itself now claims our allegiance, a form of genealogical affirmation to structure as opposed to content", because increasingly I find loyalty to be holding me here-- not loyalty to the institution's representatives, for they have too often betrayed the trust put in them, but loyalty to the corpus, the bride sore oppressed. And so I pray for her, and hope, that what was lost and set aside and scorned be restored and made new.

More Howlingly Bad Liturgy

2009-12-17T16:12:00.006-05:00

It's garbage like this that keeps me posting.

Courtesy of this thread at StandFirm, we have a series of Advent liturgies for Year C. You may read them here, if you wish:

Advent 1

Advent 2

Advent 3

Advent 4 isn't up yet, but frankly, I'm not all that interested; it's probably just about as bad as the others.

Here's some points I observe:

What is at the point where we should have a eucharistic prayer isn't a prayer at all. It barely manages to brush against orthodox liturgics by including the institution narrative, but God isn't addressed directly, and there's no epyclesis.

There's no confession and hardly any prayer. The Lord's Prayer is made to substitute for the normal prayers, and it is repeated (in Maori) as the post-communion prayer. The only other prayer is the collect of the day, and even it isn't always a prayer. It's hardly worth remarking on the significance of omitting the confession during a penitential season.

The Epistle reading is omitted. In pre-Protestant days it was the OT reading that was omitted; here it is kept, but there is no reading from the epistles. Why is this significant? Well, it ties into the omission of the confession: the epistles are the section which particularly contains readings concerning the life of the community, so it has all that nasty stuff about personal (and sexual) purity. The OT readings, however, especially at this time of the year, tend to be taken from the prophets; their warnings can be heard as directed outside the church walls, without threat to the assembled parishioners.

There are lots of readings from non-Christians. Anne Frank, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lin Yutang... At least Helen Keller was baptized.

The hymns are bowdlerized. Let's go to the opening hymn of Advent 1, whose last line should read: "Thou shalt reign, and Thou alone." And I hardly know where to begin with the horrible mess they've made of the sanctus. At least, to their credit, they have resisted the push to expunge the Father.

They've dropped the creed. And thereby they've all but proclaimed their heterodoxy.

All of this is against a background of language which is vacuous, wordy, limp, and nice:

From the beginning, life has been shaped by despair, struggle, and triumph. Oppressive forces have time and again tried to destroy the hope of the marginalized and vulnerable. The forces of wealth and privilege, armies and theology, have beaten down upon the poor. Yet hope is never extinguished. When all seems lost the embers stir back into life, and the light of justice ignites again. For this we give deep and heartfelt thanks.

Well, that inspires me. It inspires me to find a church which, if it is filled with the wealthy and privileged--and what America east coast parish isn't?--at least pays lip service to some other hope besides the social justice which would put these mighty from their seats, and send these rich empty away. The notion that the people in the pews who say and hear these words might have something to repent of is kept at a vast distance. As one Joshua says, it's the perfect realization of H. Richard Niebuhr's summary of bad modernist theology:

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross."

This parish has a page explaining why they are doing this. And here's the first sentence: "St Matthew-in-the-City is attempting to step out of the box of the Book of Common Prayer into Liturgical Renewal." Well, yeah, and that's the end of common prayer. There's no "renewal" here, because it's all new-- well, it's the same old "new", but you get the idea. They can't pray with the rest of us, so in essence, they are schismatics, or revolutionaries. The obvious reason why they find the BCP a "box" is because, for all its latitude (and if I recollect correctly, the NZ version allows a lot more of that than 1979, which is saying something) it requires them to actually believe in stuff which they apparently reject, because otherwise, they would say it.

Such, apparently, is the doom of Anglicanism. No creed, no sin, no redemption; no order but hierarchy, and no faith, but in other enlightened people. We don't need renewal to bring us this; we need renewal to rid the church of this international apostasy.

Crunching the Red Book: 2007

2009-10-18T22:12:00.003-04:00

Now that the 2007 Red Book numbers are out, it's time to apply the analysis I performed for the 2006 data. This year I've decided to make a longitudinal comparison for 2004-2007, the years for which data is available on-line.

What is most striking to me is the utter consistency of the numbers. The rates of activities per member (baptisms, marriages, etc.) vary but slightly from year to year, showing a slight decline overall in every category of about 10% over the period. The average rates are as follows:

Baptisms per member: 1.92%
Child: 1.69%
Adult: 0.22%
Receptions: 0.31%
Confirmations: 1.21%
Child: 0.55%
Adult: 0.65%
Marriages: 0.70%
Burials: 1.50%

As before, the rates are in proportion to each other. Burials are a bit more than twice marriages, and the latter is slightly less than child baptisms. The disturbing number, as before, is the departure rate. Baptisms plus receptions together are 50% greater than burials, and adding adult confirmations just makes it worse. Somewhere in excess of six thousand people appear to leave the Episcopal Church every year, or about 2.6% of the total membership; this contrasts with average net losses each year of about 1.9% of the membership.

So who is leaving? The conventional wisdom is that it happens soon after teens leave home. puzzling this out of the data is difficult. It's reasonable to assume that child baptisms roughly represent births to Episcopalian parents, and these happen at over the replacement rate at about 2.4 baptisms per marriage. (Note that there is an error possibility here, because of course not all Episcopalians marry within the church. I'm assuming for the moment that marriages that take people out of the church are balanced by marriages that bring people into the church; I'll account for that assumption in a moment.) Now, according to the CDC, about 10% of the population who survives to age 15 never marries. This is surprisingly consistent with the marriage to burial rate, although accounting for successive marriages would lead to a lower expected rate of burials to marriages. Another factor here is that people who are dying now were generally married a long time ago, mostly when the church was quite a bit larger. There actually should be a substantial excess of burials to marriages. Therefore there does seem to be a large outflow of people who have had children and then left. Probably the larger outflow is those that leave before marrying, but at the moment I haven't figured a way to puzzle this out of the data. One of the contributors to this rate is people who marry out of the church (e.g., to Catholics-- we generally would lose these marriages and the subsequent child baptisms to the Catholic church).

At any rate, the evidence is clear: poor retention is what is causing the church to decline.

2008: The Numbers

2009-10-15T22:58:00.002-04:00

After a not particularly illuminating PR dance between KJS and Frank Lockwood, the 2008 stats have been released. See churchwide totals for 2004-2008 and breakdown by diocese for 2007 and 2008 if you like your numbers numeric; you can get graphs on individual parishes here, but they don't show specific numbers and the scale for ASA is too small.

Looking through the last shows a number of cases where the graph shows unchanged numbers for some years. A bit further investigation shows that, at least in some cases, the reason of these reports is that the parish no longer exists, generally because they've split off; the diocese apparently has simply repeated the parochial numbers from the last year before the split. These phantom parishes, if recorded accurately, would surely noticeably increase the reported rate of decline.

And that decline continues as before: membership is down 3% and ASA is down 3%, values which have obtained ever since Robinson's election and consecration. More noteworthy is that, after years of increases, P&P is also down. Moving on to the diocesan figures, the big story is the departure of over 75% of the Diocese of San Joaquin. The other three departing dioceses hadn't left in 2008, but next year's number will no doubt show substantial losses for those as well, not to mention the possibility the South Carolina and perhaps others may call it quits on ECUSA. ASA numbers are as usual quite depressing, with the only large increases being either foreign (see Haiti, the largest ECUSA diocese BTW) or tiny (Navaholand's 5.3% increase sounds good until you realize that the diocese's total ASA is about the same as the ASA of three median parishes), excepting a few southeastern cases.

Thus, the seemingly relentless decline continues: three percent a year, every year, since 2003, after a decade of stable numbers.

Spiked by the elves

2009-10-14T14:47:00.005-04:00

So-- Sarah1 (who I believe to be Sarah Hey of StandFirm fame, though I of course could be wrong), dumps a load on me, and the T19 elves spike my response. Well, it's 2009, and I won't be censored so easily.

Here's her comment.

My response:

Which takes me to Sarah's first false assertion. I'll start by saying that she's changed the subject, or rather, that she has cast a bunch of people into the mix who are objectionable for reasons whose variety essentially belies her own thesis. Bennison, after all, is objectionable as much for the way he hid his brother as he is for his episcopal tyranny. Having seen several flaps about things our presiding bishop has said, I personally cannot penetrate her inarticulate pronouncements so far as to establish exactly how heretical her theology is. Chane-- well, on the one hand there was his "I will chastize you with scorpions" inaugural sermon; on the other hand I have heard that he has actually backed down from the confrontational stance with his conservative parishes that characterized Dixon's interregnum. So, I ask, where is the endorsement of Spong's systematic apostasy in any of this? If you want to claim that Jane Dixon endorsed it, give me a citation! In my hearing she has never said any such thing.

And if you you aren't interested in anyone listening, then you jolly well ought to stop jamming the airwaves by talking. What the hell-- who are you trying to save, anyway? It seems to me that you are only preaching to your own little faction and don't even care to increase its numbers. Yeah, there are a lot of dogged partisans out there, and you regularly volunteer (as in this response) to be numbered among them. Let's hit the wayback machine: WRT the possibility of Forrester getting his consents, you wrote: "This is TEC, remember. I think there will be a fine crew of Standing Committees and bishops who do not vote to confirm. But the vast majority of bishops and Standing Committees will do so . . . thus further demonstrating the thing we’ve all been talking about. You then predicted that he would get consents from 3/4s of the bishops, 2/3s at the least. Acto Frank Lockwood, he didn't even get a majority. So what does that mean? I take it at face value: bishops do not think or act as if the various issues are one integral piece.

Your hyperbole about dialogue between a communist and a libertarian exemplifies exactly how your rhetoric pollutes. Communists are ideologues, and libertarians (at least all the ones I have met) are ideologues; but not every Episcopalian is an ideologue, nor every cleric in this church. And even the ideologues are not always ideologues about everything in the same way.

The thing is, I knew Jane Dixon's sermons quite well, because I heard them every Sunday morning the last year or so that I was a parishioner at St. Philips, Laurel. I didn't really like her then, though I came to dislike the direction of the parish to the point where I bailed out. When she became bishop, and especially in her days of acting bishop after Haines's retirement, I might have commented that she was one of those bishops who put the "despot" in despota (EO joke there). But in all my Sundays of hearing her preach, I heard neither the Unitarianism of some clerics nor the Tillichian apostasy that is Spong's theology. She preached middle-of-the-road broad stuff.

This is one of the reasons why the reasserter schismatics are going to lose most of the church: they won't admit that both they and Spong-ite crazies are both small factions. Probably few Episcopalians have so rock-solid a theology as to make the schismatics happy, but I suspect that a majority can say the Nicene Creed without having to cross their fingers. Misrepresenting this just makes the critics of the current regime into a bunch of, well, right-wing, loudmouth, intolerant jerks.

And you don't get points in heaven for this, either, if that's what you're looking for.

Crone-ies Are Our Future

2009-10-05T22:36:00.000-04:00

I don't recommend the StandFirm thread which called my attention to this. There is too much snark about the "simple country bishop", and the comments degenerate into argument about homosexuality which is not as snarky as the typical SF commentary, but which is not especially germane to the subject of the post.

That subject is the September newsletter of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. It's not surprising that it has a lot of material about General Convention, or that this material goes off about how inclusive the church is. One despairs of seeing a convention eucharist anywhere outside of, say, Ft. Worth where traditional vestments are worn and a solemn rite is used; apparently that's not celebratory enough, judging from the pictures. Pep rally liturgy doesn't include me, but we all know that a white college-educated married man who wants Rite II straight up and sky-high is not the guy they want to include. Some of the other features get plenty more snark from the SF folks than they deserve, particularly an article about children's bibles which begins with some snark of its own, but then goes on to suggest, well, editions from surprisingly orthodox sources-- did anyone expect someone from Mt. St. Alban to recommend a book published by Zondervan, never mind Adoremus?

But then we get to the "monthly meditation", and we find ourselves reading about "crones". Now, as Ms. Lanyi doesn't quite get around to admitting, "crone" as she uses it comes straight from the whole Wiccan-Gravesian "triple goddess" fantasy. One gets some sense of how things have fallen from the days when Florence King's south (of Southern Ladies and Gentlemen Fame) was terrorized by Dear Old Things, Rocks, and Dowagers (in her taxonomy), so that it can be suggested in this day that an older woman needs some sort of masonic ritual or some such thing to justify her exercise of whatever womanly power she has. And it's ironic that Ms. Lanyi, having just said that crones need a ritual that doesn't look like something pagan, then proceeds to set forth exactly that sort of ritual. For an Episcopalian, it isn't as though we don't have ample material of our own for such a thing. One can mine the Book of Occasional Services for rites for just about anything, and besides that, one can see between that and the BCP the basic Anglican skeleton for constructing such a rite. A versicle and response, a reading from apposite scripture (and it isn't as though there aren't scriptural models for older women), a psalm, invocation of the Holy Spirit...

Instead, what we get is a neo-pagan ritual addressed, more or less, to a different god. Inside of that is exactly what they world recommends in this age: a ritual of mutual self-affirmation. It seems to me that a genuinely powerful woman would dispense with this and do it the old-fashioned way: through sheer force of personality. On another level, I don't want to ridicule the Red Hat Society for what it really is, but it really ought to be admitted that "When I am old, I shall go out to lunch with a club of other women, all wearing red hats" really cuts the heart out of the poem. The sentiment is much the same, and it is once again the antithesis of taking up one's cross.

I would be more likely to dismiss this as an aberration if I had never seen the trial liturgies of the ongoing round of liturgical revision. They are dominated by the same borrowing from pagan sources, except that the borrowing is concealed by using scriptural texts which, in their liturgical context, are assigned the same readings that the neo-pagans and their new age fellow travellers assign to our scriptures. It's at this point that I turn into a 1979 traditionalist. I see no reason to accept liturgy which is constructed at the dictate of non- and often anti-Christian authorities. But there seems to be no stopping it. Once we get gay marriages dogmatized, it seems as though it will be impossible to subject this stuff to any kind of reasonable theological test.

She Who Must Be Ignored

2009-08-05T10:34:00.002-04:00

Putting a title to this one was tough; at StandFirm they called it the Stupidest Anglican Idea Ever, but the competition for that is so intense that I'd hate to choose a winner.

Anyway, this is Katie Sherrod's idea:

Before giving up totally on the Anglican Communion, let's have all the men -- Rowan Williams, all the male Primates, all the male bishops, all the male priests, all the male laymen -- take a vow of silence on this issue for a year and let the women of the Anglican Communion work on reconciling us to one another.

Let's let the people -- women -- who really DO make up the largest numbers of Anglicans in the world work on finding a way we can all live together in love despite our differences.

Let's make IAWN the instrument of Communion.

Well, let's NOT.

First, not to put to fine a point on it, but as Greg Griffith at SF says, the folks at the International Anglican Women's Network seem to be the same kind of nutcases-- when they aren't the same nutcases-- who infest the Episcopal Church Office of Women's Ministries. That is, they are stuck pushing the same 1970s woo-woo womanist claptrap that suggested adding pagan/wiccan material to the liturgy. They are wildly unrepresentative of women in the communion as a whole; they don't even represent well the women in liberal churches like ECUSA.

Second, the notion that women can, by nature, run things better than men is an amusing conceit that is easily belied by middle school. Yes, perhaps the girls are better organized, but the back-biting and viciousness is if anything worse than that among the boys. The notion that a woman can do a man's job, but not vice versa, is old enough to appear in fairy tales, but it is, after all, sexist through and through. And when I look at the presiding bishop, her female role model seems to be Elizabeth I on a good day, or her sister Mary on a bad one. Meanwhile IAWN and OWM represent the gender-neutral conceit of liberal academics that the world would be perfect if ordered according to their flights of fancy.

If we're going to have women run things, though, I have some suggestions. Let Geralyn Wolf run ECUSA, and let's seat Fleming Rutledge in Cantuar's throne. And let's have the remaining All Saints sisters run the Office of Women's Ministries. That way we could have some real change.

ECUSA: The Not Thinking Church

2009-07-30T12:38:00.003-04:00

One of the things that General Convention actually did (as opposed to the controversial resolutions, which didn't so much do anything as permit people to talk about whether they did or didn't do anything) was to pass the wretched kalendar changes put forth in "Holy Women, Holy Men". And if you want to understand ECUSA these days, you need to know that though this is taken from a hymn lyric, the source is in fact the emasculations of The Hymnal 1982. I imagine that one of the reasons it was picked was that "women" appears before "men".

I say this because reading the list of people they added to the kalendar reveals some profoundly questionable choices, and in particular leads to questions about the theology of even having commemorations. A fair number of those listed aren't Anglicans; several weren't even Christian. Three of them are Anglicans who crossed the Tiber. And then there's the collects, whose peculiarities wash over into the other set of supplemental liturgies brought before GC. As Dan Martins points out, the collects are highly adverse to the word "Lord". And a number of them ascribe lordship not to the Son, but to the Father. (They are also terribly written, but that's par for the course.)

Objection to this can be found all over the place. A friend of mine, John Robison, offers much the same critique. Yet this thing seems to have sailed through GC almost without consideration. Robison says at one point, "This [commemorating the atheist John Muir] is just one example of the "cool kids" making a decision and rolling with it." His next post discusses the "cool kids" further, in light of GC starting up eucharistic relations with the United Methodist Church and the failure of Forrester to gain consents. The latter is, I think, one of the most notable developments of late, because it indicates that, however weak, there is a core of orthodox belief about baptism and trinitarian theology. It is especially germane to the present point that objection to Forrester focused particularly on his tampering with the baptismal rite, as nearly every bishop and standing committee who gave a reason for withholding consent made that objection. Yet you would hardly know that from watching the output of GC; about the only orthodoxy-endorsing act was the bishops' reaffirmation of the virginity of the Theotokos. The UMC communion-sharing action simply ignores the differences in eucharistic theology between the two bodies, and while there are probably Episcopal priests out there who hold Zwinglian views (because there isn't any heresy you can't find in the church somewhere), by and large it seems to me that Episcopalians in this day and age hold to the high theory of substantial change embodied in the 1979 rites. Methodists, I gather, mostly do not. But it's what the "cool kids" want, so now we have it.

And that leads to Robison's central point: "Most matters of theological distinction are really rather unimportant to many in power in our Church. [....] Trivialities and feel good affirmations as well as sociology and political aphorisms have replaced the hard work of theology." I'd put it another way: the church does theology like a mob of Harvard undergraduates-- Harvard sophomores. Superficially well-informed, convinced of their own superiority to the point of considering criticism to be something akin to lèse majesté, insular, lazy, fond of a certain radicalism, and given to excusing all manner of coarse behavior among their own kind. So the Office of Women's Ministries puts forth a liturgy containing Old-Testament-condemned pagan practices, and their response upon being challenged about this is to go off on a completely (and ironically) irrelevant tangent about copyrights, when everyone else is wondering how a priest can defend being a druid on the side. And then the next liturgy they put out, once again, has verbiage that is conspicuously from pagan sources. Meanwhile the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music continues their decades-long campaign against God the Father, while dropping all sorts of theological novelties into the texts they want us to adopt. All of this is stuff to gladden the heart of an Ivy League academic (or even more so, one from the Seven Sisters), but it bespeaks a milieu that was passing from the University of Maryland College Park even in the days of my attendance there, thirty years ago. Yeah, we had our supply of radical feminists, but already they had a dated quality to them.

So this stuff comes onto the floor of GC, and rather than being picked over and sent back with a scathing rebuke, the, well, Harvard freshmen among the deputies and Harvard faculty among the bishops wave it on through. I mean, celebrating (and God, I am beginning to hate that word) Kepler and Copernicus in church is so cool! Well, perhaps the fight over homosexuality had them distracted. The next time around, when the homophobes have been more thoroughly routed, will they have that excuse? The next battle is plainly going to be over liturgical revision, and at present I don't think they're going to able to stand up to the "cool kids" who still think that clown masses are groovy and that the bible is so sexist and patriarchal and that having standards of faith is so oppressive. And thus, unless someone else rebels, we'll end up with a liturgy that is so "relevant" that the only thing it in't relevant to is religion.

VGR and the Numbers

2009-07-20T09:55:00.004-04:00

Courtesy of GetReligion we have a NYT interview with V. Gene Robinson (breathlessly described as "Episcopalians’ First Openly Gay Bishop", as if he has never before given an interview) in which Robinson, well, not to put to fine a point on it, essentially lies through his teeth about the statistics of his diocese. Now, mostly he doesn't say anything that can't be absolutely pinned down as a lie, but when you look at the official statistics, they paint a completely different picture from the one he presents.

Let's start with the statement that "Our diocese grew by 3 percent last year." I don't know where he got that number, but it didn't come from Kirk Hadaway. Official church numbers for 2008 aren't out yet; 2007, according to the church, showed a 1.3% decline. Lest you think that is an abberation, let's review the numbers:

2002: 16,698 members
2003: 15,621 members
2004: 15,531 members
2005: 14,725 members
2006: 14,347 members
2007: 14,160 members

or if you prefer it in percentages:

2003: 6.4% decline
2004: 0.6% decline
2005: 5.2% decline
2006: 2.6% decline
2007: 1.3% decline

Even if you believe VGR's 2008 numbers, there is a cumulative loss of 2100 members since 2002, or about 12.7% of membership; using the 2007 numbers gives a loss of 2500 members, or about 15% decline. Oh and when VGR said, "There are 15,000 people in the diocese of New Hampshire," he was not telling the truth either. Membership in the diocese hasn't been that high since 2004.

But on to the spin:

Q: Who are you pulling in?

A: We have received so many Roman Catholics and young families, particularly families who are saying, “We don’t want to raise our daughters in a church that doesn’t value young people in our church.”

Again, not to put to fine a point on it, but this isn't what the numbers say. Robinson's earlier statement in the interview that there was only one parish he had to close down may be true, but it's also misleading: 49 parishes and missions amounts to a loss of 280 members per parish from 2002 to 2007, or about nine whole parishes. He may not have rebellious priests and vestries, but he has plenty of departing laymen, far more than enough to offset the supposed RC influx. The fantasy that disaffected Catholics are going to pour into our more inclusive church is simple wishful thinking; four decades past Humanae Vitae, and it still hasn't materialized. Looking at that, and John Kerry, and Catholic Europe, I'm inclined to postulate that at this late date, Catholics have become adept at combining papal allegiance with routine disobedience. Perhaps having to sing all four verses of a hymn is a big turnoff. But the fact is that nobody really knows, that I can tell. Statistics on these conversions simply do not seem to exist.

What is real, by contrast, is the steady decline, year after year; the last year in which the church grew was in 2000, and since then the domestic dioceses have lost 213,000 members, or 9.2% of the 2000 total. And the 2007 membership of the four seceding dioceses amounts to about 2% of the domestic total, so it seems likely that 2008's numbers, when they are released, will show continuing losses.

Addendum: I don't mean to imply here that Robinson, with malice aforethought, stated what he knew to be false. There is nothing here that could not be attributed sloppy math on the one hand or unreasonably rosy thinking on the other. The important point in the end is that the bishop's demographic statements cannot be trusted, whether he is lying to us, lying to himself, or he just can't do math.

POSTSCRIPT

Well, the real numbers are out, and diocesan numbers can be found here. There is some fudge/smudge between Robinson's numbers and the official tallies. Membership grew by 2.4%, not 3%; there's a little lily-gilding in that, though at least the basic fact of growth panned out. The five year loss is 7.2%. A bit more disquieting is that ASA continued to decline, with a loss of 1.1% from 2007. Calling 14,501 members "15 thousand" is really pushing the limits of rounding up, but not technically inaccurate.

So my doubt on Robinson's expression of vigor must be tempered. He does have more members, though not quite so many (either by percentage or in toto) as his round numbers would lead one to believe. On the other hand, the drop in attendance is as discouraging as ever.

I'll have reactions to the 2008 numbers in a later post.

Forrester Disappointment

2009-06-23T15:02:00.002-04:00

If Frank Lockwood's tallies are to be believed, Thew Forrester is going to fail to get the necessary consents, and will not be the next bishop of Upper Michigan. Anyone who has followed this is probably aware of how he was first presented as a Buddhist, and how his "election" consisted of him being presented as the sole candidate. These oddities bothered some people, but what really brought him down was his liturgical innovations, which were found out by the blogosphere and broadcast widely as a result. Standing committees and bishops alike referred to his alterations to the baptismal liturgy in refusing to consent. Even dioceses generally considered to be pretty liberal and theologically adventurous (e.g., California) went against him.

It's not over until the clock runs out, apparently, but at this point it appears that without some considerable vote-switching, he will be turned down. And thus the complaining has gotten underway in earnest, as represented by a letter Lockwood received from a pro-Forrester standing committee member. Consider the following excerpt:

As you might imagine, the episode concerning Northern Michigan has sent a chill up the spines of a few folks in the Episcopal Church. What if, at the conclusion of our grueling, intensive & expensive process, a majority of bishops and standing committees decide they don’t like our bishop-elect? How do you think that realistic fear will affect search committees around the nation?? As someone recently said… “Only the bland need apply.”

Well, I don't think it's going to work out quite that way. What's going to happen, more likely, is that nominees are going to take care not to leave a paper/webpage trail, so as to avoid being borked. Forrester's big problem wasn't so much that he was vetted for theology, but that he could be so vetted on the basis of what people could find on the net. In the future, I expect that more nominees are going to look, at least electronically, like David Souter than Bork; but they won't have to be "bland". They just can't leave anything lying around that testifies to their heresies.

And that's the other point. We've finally reached a point where we can identify some of what is in Tennis's "core theology". Yes, it may put a chill up a few spines, but for most of those so affected, it's an overreaction. It does not necessarily signal rejection of the largely Lord-free language of the proposed additions to the Kalendar, for example. It certainly doesn't signal a change of direction on homosexuality, for the ACNA schismatics have surely put paid to that. Really, all that is being demanded is that a bishop-elect believes what he or she says in church on Sunday. That may be beyond the high church Unitarians, but really, it shouldn't be that tough to find candidates who can meet that standard. And it's only reasonable to expect that representatives of an organization actually hold to its tenets.

Atheists Considered Tedious

2009-05-19T12:50:00.002-04:00

In the Los Angeles Times, Charlotte Allen writes of atheists:

I can't stand atheists -- but it's not because they don't believe in God. It's because they're crashing bores.

How very, very true.

Second Search Committee

2009-05-18T16:10:00.002-04:00

In acomment to this post from Mad Priest, Terry Martin says:

The idea that the entire Church...or for that matter the entire Communion...will function as a second search committee is absurd, imo. If the diocese elected him, and the process was canonically correct, then consents should be given.

Well, nonsense. Why even have a consent process anyway? And if the process to elect Mark Lawrence the first was correct, why object to his consecration? Ah, but the difference in the reasoning is entirely revealing, and never mind on which side of That Issue the two candidates were thought to stand. The stated reason for objecting Lawrence, one may recall, was that he was not sufficiently convincing in stating that he would not try to take his diocese out of the denomination. The objections to Forrester are mostly theological, though the process under which he was elected (and I am not the first to observer that it looks more like a self-appointment than anything else) has also come under criticism. A lot of bishops apparently don't believe that Forrester believes what the BCP rites teach about baptism, among other issues.

The canons do not in fact give any grounds at all for consenting or not. Historically, the last time someone really failed (skipping over Lawrence, whose first pass was denied on a procedural pretext) was DeKoven, and the objections to him were decidedly theological. So as far as precedent is concerned, there is ample, and never mind whether DeKoven should have been elevated.

And since there is a consent process, it seems self-evident that the other dioceses are expected to review what the electing diocese has done. Such checks-and-balances structures are all over Episcopal Church polity; else the House of Bishops would have led us into the Unitarian wasteland long ago. And the nasty issue at the moment, of course, is that there is in fact a great deal of well-deserved distrust about the work of search committees. The liberal institutionalists are afraid of more attempts to take dioceses out of the church; the theological conservatives, well, don't want any more heretics. The not-entirely-a-surprise here is that, on some important core issues, there are a lot more "conservatives" than anyone banked on, and that a lot of the social liberals aren't going to go along with someone whose baptismal theology goes against the prayer book, not to mention 1700 years of doctrine on the matter.

This awakening of resistance is troubling all around. It's bad for the GAFCONites, because it puts paid to the lie that the choice is between them and the Spong-ite Unitarians. It's bad for the radicals because they've counted on being allowed to have their way as a sort of theological courtesy. But maybe, just maybe, it's good for the church.

(Hat tip to Lisa Fox for calling attention to this.)

Bad Theology Breeds Bad Verse

2009-05-04T12:33:00.003-04:00

From Peter Ould we have this timeless new hymn sung at the ACC opener:

Lord of our diversity,
unite us all, we pray;
welcome us to fellowship
in your inclusive way.

It goes on like that for four more verses, but in the interests of fair use and reader sanity, I think we can stop at one.

What's particularly awful is that they decided to sing this to the tune of the Ode to Joy. As numerous people have pointed out, the meters aren't the same: this thing is 7.6.7.6, and the Ode is 8.7.8.7D. A check through the online metrical indices shows that 7.6.7.6 tunes are almost entirely iambic, whereas this one starts off trochaic; but then it's iambic on the second line. The only tune I found that fit it at all was the first part of Royal Oak (used for the refrain of "All Things Bright and Beautiful"), and even that is a little forced. Also, dancing around in a circle, holding hands, perhaps does not set the proper tone.

But then again, perhaps it does. Now, even Horatius Bonar didn't hit one out of the park every time; still, this is doggerel at best. And when you think about it, the sentiment is pathetic. Honestly, it sounds like something one would sing of and for kindergarten. Meanwhile both sides are praying, "Lord, let's get this fight over with." Lucky for them, they're C of E.

It's Miraculously Delicious!

2009-03-17T06:34:00.001-04:00

BigIdea's daft hagiography of St. Patrick:

Bishop Epting on "'Open' Communion"

2009-02-23T13:17:00.003-05:00

From here:

The point being, we have ecumenical covenants and commitments that we have made over the last forty or fifty years which are predicated on our commitment to certain basic sacramental practices. When these practices involve the most basic sacrament which unites all Christians together, regardless of our other differences, surely we run the risk of being considered unreliable ecumenical partners when we make these changes with virtually no theological conversation among ourselves and certainly none with our ecumenical partners.

And, of course, any priest who formally and publicly invites the un-baptized to Holy Communion is in direct violation of canon law and subject to discipline for that.

But, hey, who cares about that, right?

Well, yeah-- who cares? I mean, canons are only for the bad guys, like the renegade dioceses and parishes. The "radical" in Radical Inclusion means not having to bother with rules, right?

I share Bishop Eppings's skepticism over how genuinely radical this inclusion is. This isn't about hospitality to the genuinely religiously hungry, for they as a rule can understand that there are some things which are reserved to the initiated. What it does instead is open the door to those who profane the sacrament by not caring about it at all, or those who profane it by reworking it in their own minds into whatever fits their private spirituality. On the other side, those who can read scripture or who are aware of the ancient tradition of the church may well be put off by being told to communion with unbelievers.

What particularly bothers me about the latter is that the tinge of being deliberately offensive has increasingly colored the liberal side, to the point of an increasingly conspicuous hypocrisy. How can you tell that you're being radical? Because someone complains. Therefore, you aren't truly radical unless you're offending someone. On that level, "radical inclusion" is an impossibility, because offending people isn't inclusion. Well, okay, I suppose one can try to wash over this this by saying one can't include people who don't want to be included. But still, there's that nagging need to have people to offend. In practice, the radicals of ECUSA will always have those nasty "fundamentalists", which increasingly means no more than "anyone with a real theology", to set themselves against. But the problem then becomes that doing any real theology becomes impossible, because having theological commitments leads to exclusions. And it's very obvious that the "inclusionists" have such commitments, and that they extend beyond a general inclusion into some very specific inclusions. And it's also very obvious that they are basically having not only to stop reading scripture before they get to the Letter of Paul to the Romans, but also to skip over some things that Jesus is quoted as saying in the gospels. So now the exclusions extend very much into making sure the power structures of the church don't express these contrary-but-scriptural expressions of exclusivity. And that leads us back into the old paradox of rigid latitude that has been a marker of the powerful liberals for a very long time.

And pretty soon, in the interest of not offending, the creed has to be put on the shelf, and indeed, practically anything except that specific set of inclusion causes has to be jettisoned. And then, why bother calling us Christian?

Two Tales of a City

2009-02-17T17:41:00.000-05:00

Dan Martins writes about the division of Stockton, California between the two competing Anglican dioceses in Two Tales of a City.

I would particularly call attention to his response to Sarah. One of the conceits of the puritan faction is that ECUSA is (except for a few faithful parishes and dioceses) composed of licentious Unitarians. There are parishes like that, of course, and dioceses where the bishop and his staff are like that. But most of the sexually-obsessed liberals aren't Unitarians, and in amongst the liberal command posts and conservative outposts in those dioceses, there are a lots of parishes where the rector doesn't constantly make coded sermons on inclusiveness, and where those who have any notion about the Unitarians make jokes about how the UUs pray "to who it may concern."

One of the not-too-well-concealed issues in the current program of departures is how it's being a bit of an evangelical triumph. While I'm still wondering how the Anglo-Catholics fit into this, it seems increasingly the case that the GAFCONites etc. don't particularly care that they keep approaching the issue of separation in a manner which is repugnant to the middle-of-the-road, if not bordering on slander. The result of the hyperbole about the character of the church is that the people in the middle don't believe the GFACONite/ACMA/etc. crowd, and they do believe the liberal hierarchy's accusations about the schismatic intent of their opponents because the accusations, well, appear to be true. The one group that the "evangelicals" don't really want to evangelize effectively are their own fellow churchmen.

Today's Featured Article

2009-02-16T14:12:00.002-05:00

From Wikipedia:

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI.

Slogan Busing

2009-02-11T10:31:00.007-05:00

Our friends at GetReligion have alerted us to the contest the Guardian ran in response to the atheist bus slogan campaign. So here I have a few:

One for my daughter:

And finally, with apologies to Eddie Izzard:

And Another Thing Which Never Changes

2009-01-06T15:28:00.002-05:00

William Reed Huntington writing in 1891 on Popular Misconceptions of the Episcopal Church

Another Reason not to Take Libertarians Seriously

2008-08-12T00:15:00.003-04:00

Lew Rockwell on Anglicans:

There have been many arguments made against [Rowan Williams], but now his critics in Africa especially are making a libertarian one: that while the Pope is chosen by his private peers, the Anglican leader is chosen by the State.

Yes-- and what a disappointment that has turned out to be. Williams was plainly picked to be the man to safely lead the church into the pleasantly liberal future. Instead, he has forsworn liberal advocacy entirely, angering everyone who wants Canterbury to be a bully pulpit. Politicians do not always get the people they want in these appointments, as one saw in the Warren and Burger courts, to take American examples.

And as far as Anglican origins are concerned, it comes back to the same issue: the papacy of the time did not see itself as in any way distinct from politics. I shied from saying "state", as the development of such an entity was a feature of the era. But in any case the separation of the English church was not simply an act of Henrican willfulness, nor of theological innovation, but also a reaction to the manifest political and secular corruption of the papacy. Its current relative purity is a direct result of the forced powerlessness which its excesses brought upon itself.

Augustine's throne confers even less power than Peter's; but the African notion that Parliament stands in power above it is an argument of convenience. The GAFCONites are angry at Williams because he refuses to simply hand over governance of the church to their junta; but not only is the communion at stake, but his own church as well. The recent developments at General Synod had an ugly, American color to them. The Church of England has to be saved from the same forces that are destroying ECUSA. Williams is plainly not Parliament's agent; he represents a genuinely Anglican position that the GAFCONites assail in their rush to purity.

And Rockwell's remarks are a classic example of the failure of libertarians to understand how pervasive power is. It is anyone's guess who would have been chosen had the question been given to the English bishops rather than to Tony Blair; but Cantuar's meager authority in the communion was given to him by the communion, not by Parliament. Rockwell is apparently willing to take the GAFCONite complaints at face value, because they fit into his political theories; that is all.

The Buddha Which Can Be Eaten Is Not the True Buddha

2008-06-21T11:16:00.004-04:00

If you meet the Buddha on your plate,

EAT HIM!

(yes, these are cupcakes)

A Trinity Sermon

2008-05-19T14:00:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I gave my first "sermon" at church, more or less as follows:

How many of you have heard a Trinity Sunday sermon that began, “This is a Sunday about a doctrine”? Well, you can relax a little, for I'm not going to attempt to explain the doctrine of the trinity to you. That's rather the point, after all: the trinity is a mystery, and in the end, beyond our understanding. So I will leave aside the visual aids and analogies: no shamrocks, no diagrams, no icons. This Sunday, the mystery will remain a mystery.

The other Sundays of the year, we largely look at Jesus. In Advent, we look to his coming; at Christmas, his birth; during Epiphany, his manifestation of God in his life, and so on up to Ascension Day. The Holy Spirit gets a Sunday at Pentecost, and then starting the Sunday after this, we spend the rest of the church year considering Jesus' teachings. But today, we look at God Himself, and not in time, but for all time.

Now of late, denunciads against religion have been running off the presses again. I personally was cured of reading these things back when I had to read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian for a philosophy of religion course. I found it unbearably sophomoric, and the latest examples seem more of the same. A lot of them seem to get really no further than the observation that people do evil in the name of religion, and I think that for a Christian, this is not a remarkable observation. But to stay on the subject, the picture of God that appears in these books is hardly better than a caricature of the image of an angry old tyrant on a throne. Their “god” is too small.

In today's lesson from Genesis, by contrast, we see God as he is very, very large: the creator of the universe. This morning I read that there are thought to be 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and 100 billion galaxies in the universe. That's big-- unimaginably big. And yet the old medieval image of God holding the universe in one hand and measuring it with the other is closer to the truth. “The heavens declare the glory of God”, it says in Psalm 19, and considering how big we believe the heavens to be, that's a lot of glory. We do not fully appreciate the scope of the divine architecture. And yet, the image of the great tyrant architect troubles some. The theologian Paul Tillich preferred the image of God as the “ground of being”, an image I have never found adequate, being too close to the pantheistic belief that God is simply the sum of all existence. For all that, it is better than the deistic image of the divine watchmaker, who simply starts things going and then steps away from creation; but it neglects the divine transcendence, reducing God to the foundation of the building, not the builder himself.

And it solves a problem which I think we no longer find very pressing. Yes, we believe that God is immanent in this place. He made himself manifest in the person of Jesus, and he manifests himself in the church and in the sacraments Her ministers perform. After two thousand years, we are comfortable with talking to God wherever we are and believing that he is there, and we accept that He may take up a seat in our hearts and minds and souls. The notion that God underlies all existence is comfortable to modern minds, but a transcendent God who is not only down here, but out there-- that has become difficult. The Anglican theologian Robert Farrar Capon, whom I first came upon talking about the revelation of God in cooking, also wrote that the Old Testament images of God reacting in wrath and raining down special effects on the world at least have the advantage of showing God as something active and involved in the universe. But often, it seems, men prefer their special effects in the movies. God parts the Red Sea, but it is only trick photography. God sends down fire upon the Nazis who have defiled his ark, but it is only model work. God raises Jesus from the dead, but of course the actor never died. The world looks at the screen, and knows that such things only happen in the movies.

And is it not so? These days, we do not see the special effects God, the God who, it is said in the Revelation, will pour out the seven bowls of wrath upon the earth. If God is acting in our lives, for the most part it is subtle, secret, and often in silence. Often we can only tell after the fact that He has touched us. Remember some weeks back how the disciples in Emmaus did not recognize Jesus until after he had broken bread with them? That is how, most of the time, it is with us. Vague spirituality and frank unbelief come easily to modern people; but belief in a God of power and divine will do not. Saying that a hurricane or earthquake is like the wrath of God has become an archaicism. The god of the world has become small to the point of vanishing in mist; there are very many who believe that god is present, but that he doesn't doing anything more than make people feel good.

And who should worship such a triviality? It would be like worshipping the comforter on one's bed, or a teddy bear. We are moved to worship the awesome, the God whose full presence is terrifyingly unbearable. In Isaiah, the angels hide their faces from His presence; in Exodus, God will show only his back to Moses, but not His face. When the temple in Jerusalem is consecrated, the glory of the Lord settles on it, and the priests cannot enter it to minister; and on the mountain, when Jesus is transfigured, the three disciples are confounded. We, gathered here, have not seen these things; but if we remember them, if we listen to scripture and commit these things to our hearts, we can keep the taste of the God in our mouths and the fear of God in our hearts.

So I'm almost to the end, and I've hardly mentioned the Trinity. And yet it too is a scandal, because the complexity it hints at in God is also offensive to many. The picture of the perfect, all-sufficient God affords to many no room for three persons unified in one God. Judaism could not accept it; Islam rejects it. In our history the Unitarians turned away from the doctrine. And yet, for today, I point to it as the sign of God's transcendence. It is not something we could work out for ourselves, save that scripture testifies to it. Monotheism: that we can grasp; a pagan pantheon of gods and spirits for this and that principle: that we can see devised in myriad places and manners. But a god who is both unified and divided: that we had to be taught, and that we have to remember-- just as we remember the titanic acts of God, and his creation of this universe whose wonders we never seem to reach the end of. So today we are taught by Jesus himself, that we baptize not just in the name of God, or of Christ, but in the Threefold Name.

The mighty God of history is a God whose story must be retold to each generation. Indeed, remembrance is the central act of our worship. In a short time, the priest will take up the bread and wine, and will recall Jesus' words at the Last Supper: “Do this in remembrance of me.” The church is assembled in recollection not only of the divine promises, but of the divine's mighty acts. So let us remember our faith, and remember to worship the immanent and transcendent, triune God— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit— forever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

The Privileged Oppressed Are Heard From Again

2008-04-18T13:14:00.002-04:00

Back in December, it was the gay black Harvard theologian. This time (courtesy of TitusOneNine) it's the female Maori dean of a college in New Zealand. Back when KJS was elevated to presiding bishop, I wrote that "[a]t least one of those symbols is positive by anyone's standards: no longer need I suffer self-indulgent hand-wringing about the need for further empowerment of women in the church." And here we have a powerful female officially-certified member of the establishment wringing her hands about female empowerment. When are these people going to catch on to the irony (not to say self-parody) of their situations?

Which leads immediately to the other irony: that the communion-level flap and the resistance to covenanting is manifestly about making sure that those third world bishops in Africa, South America, and East Asia do not get any power over the rich, self-satisfied, enlightened first world. In an earlier decade, this would have been called "racist". Whether it is truly thus is for others to debate, but the elitism is unmistakable and blatant.

In saying this, I would not belittle the real suffering of any particular woman-- or man, for that matter. Real oppression, real privation, real suffering are all easy to find, in past or present. But university professors and college deans are not oppressed, and do not suffer desperate want, and do not risk bodily harm simply by showing up for work. It is unseemly that they summon up those grim prospects in defense of their own license and power.

Is the Creed Sectarian?

2008-04-07T12:21:00.002-04:00

Over at Sarx Huw has edited together Richard Fabian's rationale for omitting the Nicene Creed from the liturgy used at St. Gregory of Nyssa. My reaction to this explanation is turning out to be not especially positive, I'm afraid.

The central word in Fabian's explanation is "sectarian". It's a word which is pejorative to the point of prompting the obvious question: What exactly are the sects? Well, this rather over the top remark gives a hint:

I advise ordinands that if they must use the “Nicene” Creed in their parishes, they might march about waving American and Episcopal Church flags, while their church wardens tear up photographs of the Mormon Tabernacle: these gestures would express the custom’s fundamental spirit, and employ beloved Episcopalian paraphernalia lately fallen into disuse.

When I was in high school, we used to process the flags in and out, but I think that was mostly to soak up three more acolytes, not necessarily to make some sort of statement. It's the Mormon Tabernacle, though, that's the phrase to note. The Mormons are certainly among the excluded when put to the test of the Creed, and so are the JWs, and the Unitarians. Officially, though, that's about it. Oh, and the Orthodox, because of the filioque. But if we were to take that clause out, one suspects that the Catholics would object, so it's rather a "can't win" situation.

Meanwhile, in the irony department, the Episcopal Church is about to be converted into a sect of Anglicanism. There's more than one way to be sectarian, after all, and one of those ways is to break faith with the whole. And one of the American church's persistent problems is that there are clerics and even bishops who dissent from the Creed. We cannot, of course, reduce the sectarian walls between us and either the Mormons or the JWs, so there's no point really in trying. And there's no real reason to, unless you want to believe that it doesn't make any difference that the dogmas of those sects are in blatant contradiction to the Creed-- and to each other.

I'm not a believer in the theory that one can root around in the history of a practice and apply that history directly to the present. In particular, I do not agree that one can apply the meaning of the remote past as if it were intended in the present; that meaning must be found in the present, independently of the past. And it seems to me that the main power of the Creed in the present is unitive, not sectarian. The vast bulk of Christianity holds that it does matter what one believes about Jesus; repeating the Creed each week can be taken as an act of solidarity.

I'm not going to say that omitting the creed is in some way invalidating, and I'm not going to step up to the question of how well it fits in liturgically. And I'm not going to condemn the Gregorians outright for omitting it. But I wouldn't do it, and I would be uncomfortable at a parish were it was always omitted.

Crunching the Red Book: 2006

2008-01-30T12:28:00.000-05:00

So today the 2006 red book numbers are out, and everyone has to do the appropriate posturing.

Looking at 2005, and considering domestic dioceses only, we see immediately a decline of 50,000 in active baptized members, and a decline of 22,000 in Average Sunday Attendance (ASA). That works out to a 2% decline in the former, and a 3% decline in the latter. Not good, but I suppose it could be worse. ASA/parish went from 110 to 108, a 2% decline.

When we look at the other numbers, however, things start to look really bleak. Paradoxically, it's because the other numbers are good. Baptisms outnumbered funerals by about 8,000; adding baptisms to receptions gives a net gain of about 15,000 over burials. And when one includes adult confirmations (many of which are for converts from other denominations), the gain may be as much as 29,000. (I'm ignoring child confirmations, but surely many of these can also be counted as gains in membership.)

So why is this bad? Well, because of that 50,000 member decline. That decline is caused by people leaving the church; so putting it all together, it seems that somewhere between 66,000 and 80,000 members left. That's 3% to 3.5% of the membership. Forget all the mythology about ECUSA dying off; the problem isn't that people are getting old, but that they don't want to be Episcopalians any more. And that suggests that we need to take a stronger look at retention. Classically, the churches saw growth in terms of evangelizing, and took child baptism for granted. As far as the latter is concerned, child baptisms outnumbered burials by a significant margin. But departures outnumbered burials by at least two to one, and outnumbered conversions by at least two to one-- maybe as badly as six to one.

The ratio of child baptisms to deaths isn't wildly out of line with national demographics; either young adults tend to stick around long enough to have their 2.1 kids, or the ones who stay are having big families. What it does suggest, however, is that the crucial source of departures lies in people who have had kids. There are other numbers that suggest this is a problem. Child confirmations are a third of child baptisms, when they should be close to equal; even total confirmations does not come close to equaling child baptisms. Now this suggests that a lot of people simply never get confirmed, but it also suggests that a lot of departures are coming from people who have kids and then leave. If one assumes that everyone who stays gets their kids confirmed, then it's not inconceivable that as many as half of the families who have kids baptized leave before their kids start high school.

I will note in passing that marriages are a little under half of child baptisms, and about half burials. This again implies a certain stability: people do get married and do have children at about the right rate. If there is a big drop in the high school to marriage group, it isn't registering in the statistics yet.

That leaves the big unknown group: the middle-aged. These people don't appear in the statistics in a way that can be directly identified, because they do not personally participate in the rites that get recorded. Thus we are left to deduce how they figure in the numbers. Now, one possible source of discrepancy could come from people who are struck from the rolls because they move to retirement communities; it's conceivable that a lot of these people are nonetheless buried out of their former parishes. We've explored the case of those who have kids but leave before the kids are grown. That leaves the late middle-aged, and the various factors examined so far suggest that they are substantial contributors to the exodus-- perhaps as much as half.

As for why people are leaving: well, it is hard not to look at the trend starting in 2003 and draw at least one conclusion. But the numbers suggest that the problem is not as simple as getting young people to come (back) to church. Keeping older people there is a large part of the problem, and needs further study.

That Didn't Take Long

2007-12-31T10:07:00.000-05:00

In a remarkably clumsy move, the (maybe) Bishop of San Joaquin has relieved the vicar of St. Nicholas, Atwater of his position. This has been seized upon as something for the revisionists/legalists to complain about (and there's a LOT more at Fr. Jake's besides that article); conversely, there is decided silence at Stand Firm, apparently because mention of the incident is being censored there.

Well.

If we're talking legalism, then it is hardly remarkable that John David Schofield might exercise a power which, under ordinary circumstances, there is no question about him exercising. Well, besides the usual allegations of firing people for holding the wrong opinions; but if we started handing out tickets for that, we could paper every revisionist diocese in the country with the accusations. To the degree that this is an issue, the conflict is already lost, and we as an institution are damned from decades on.

And if it be an issue, we move on to the next point. The obvious analogue to the Atwater dismissal is the Connecticut Six, but it is a false analogy, because the issue in Connecticut is the unprecedented nature of the acts. What happened in Atwater is therefore no more than fallout from the real issue: whether San Joaquin's unprecedented move leaves its bishop without powers. It is unremarkable that he should consider that he believes that he may exercise them, so on that level the incident is merely cause for "ain't it awful" hand-wringing.

The truly sticky point is that the only precedents we have were set by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and their bishops. It's not a good precedent if you think that canons are our only recourse; it would direct the parishes and dioceses to turn in their keys to the nearest Roman authority.

But the conflict, at this stage, is baldly a war over territory. If charity were given its due, GC would reconvene, concede irreconcilable differences, and set forth a negotiation to carry the division through with as little pain as possible. This is not going to happen because each of the driving factions is intent on getting as much territory for itself and denying the opposition as can be denied. In the middle are a lot of people-- perhaps the majority-- who cannot be claimed as adherents of either extreme, and whose bishops, saying that "schism is worse than heresy", refuse to deal with a situation in which they will have both schism and heresy.

In the battle, Atwater is a rather small prize (ASA of 20 at last count). San Joaquin is a smallish diocese. The real contest is over the dispersion of dioceses like Virginia and Washington and Maryland. The revisionists cannot afford to let moderates have a choice or conservative properties escape. That's where the law comes in.

For as in Adam All Fall

2007-12-30T21:20:00.000-05:00

I gave up on Christopher Johnson and the Midwest Conservative Journal a long time ago. As with David Virtue's site, there's just too much cant. So when the following passage appeared there, I missed it (and for some reason, I can't find it now either):

If you are Protestant — if you don’t believe in an infallible/one true church, and as a separate church you were founded by a schism from your lawful ecclesiastical head, you have no right to invoke Nicæa. Ever.

Well, bullshit. My lawful head, the only Head the church has, is Jesus. And I never swore fealty to either Rome or Constantinople; if indeed I owe such an utter debt of loyalty to any earthly church, it would be to 815 2nd Avenue, for it was a Episcopal bishop who confirmed me.

Looking at Nicea as a simply a matter of legal authority is not the only possibility, and it is not the possibility that has any relationship to truth. Nicea's most tenacious authority doesn't come from its political relationship to any bishop, but from its repeated, persistent ratification by generations of theologians coming from a variety of theological approaches.

Come All Ye That Are Somewhat Vexed

2007-12-28T12:51:00.000-05:00

Tony Clavier comes at a problem I'd mentioned earlier from a more direct angle:

I only wish the problem with TEC was something to do with liberalism. I caught a bit of a radio talk by the Archbishop of York over Christmas. He said that if the Church of England closed inner city parishes, even if they are sparsely attended, it would cease to be the Church of England and become merely a church for the well-off in suburban areas.

He need only look at the Episcopal Church. More and more as we have retreated from the inner cities and the rural areas we have become a church for wealthy people; people with the money to attend meetings, espouse liberal causes, write checks and love at a distance.

Meanwhile, from TitusOneNine, we have this interview of Peter Gomes, a Harvard theologian:

But I would think that, if Jesus came today, the people he would be most interested in dealing with would be homosexuals, racial minorities, people who would be thought to be less than the most upright and righteous people in the contemporary community. If the New Testament is any model, that's where he would hang out.
[....]
My job is, to coin a phrase used in the 19th century and adopted much by my old friend, Bill Coffin, "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." So, in some sense, if the one thing the sermon does is wake you up so that you discover that you don't agree, it's done a good thing, in that respect.

Frankly, it's hard for me to think of anyone more comfortable than a Harvard theologian, or for that matter, the forces at 815 2nd Avenue. And for all the talk of Jesus traveling with minorities, it seems to me that Rev. Gomes' window into the downtrodden is really quite narrow, and that it looks out upon many who are hardly downtrodden at all. Let us start with Peter Gomes himself, who (if Wikipedia is to be believed) is black and gay. A biography from his church's website reveals that he is firmly placed within the firmament of the establishment.

Let us turn instead to the single mother, with children from several men; or the father who finds himself increasingly in the hole; or the retiree faced with the care of her increasingly senile husband. Or for that matter, the family trying to keep their daughters from becoming teen pregnancy statistics, or the sons from make someone else's daughter a statistic. Or a young man started on the road to alcoholism. Or better still (since that should be our churches' core competency, should it not?) those whose hearts do not hear the message of Jesus; or having heard it, heed it not; or having once heeded it, turn away and depart into the thickets of secularism.

I look at my parish, and I do not see a place where the passing middle or lower class traveler is comfortable. We are the very model of a middle of the road upper middle suburban parish. I look at my old parish, and if anything, it seems worse. Of course, I came into the church at that most patrician of institutions: the private boarding school. We knew there who was quite rich, but we didn't necessarily know who was poor. I was on one score not among the latter, for my parents paid the full cost; but on another, we were terribly strapped by the cost, and it killed the possibility of attending one of those elite colleges such as those boarding schools are wont send their graduates to. Even at the University of Maryland I was reduced one winter to making do with a windbreaker. But I was never really poor.

I remember some of the kids at that school who were very blessed to be there, because we were their family. Sons of diplomats in difficult stations, and children of custodial fathers who didn't know what to do with them. And some of us were simply blessed to peek inside the doors of the establishment. Now and again the true patrician families would appear at the school, and they fairly glowed with privilege. Us pretenders knew we would never join their ranks, at least not by dint of effort. And yet some of them condescended to know us. It would perhaps embarrass him greatly, but I have always been grateful that the father of one of my classmates, a man of some importance, knows me by name and speaks to me as though I were the colleague which I am not.

I wish the doors of our parishes functioned as well. Instead I see the same church that Fr. Clavier sees, a church which is greatly uninterested in the suffering of the great bulk of people. The desperate poor are so very convenient: build them a house (but not on one's street), or offer shelter for the night (but not in one's house) or a meal (but not in one's kitchen). Their needs can be kept at a safe distance, and the venturesome can go among them and make the rest of us comfortable and satisfied that they are so attended to. They will be with us always, that we can never fail to be satisfied in our giving. The rest of the country can go hang; after all, for God's sake, they probably vote Republican.

I would remind Rev. Gomes and his fellows that Jesus' first miracle, as recorded by John, was accomplished not in dire need, but at that monument to middle class vainglory, the wedding. Indeed, from the description it could very well be that the host is trying to live beyond his means. And yet Jesus gives abundantly, as though the host's cheap New York State jug wine and meager champagne gave way to grand cru Bordeaux and Veuve Cliquot. Jesus, in the gospels, is friend not only to fishermen, but to Lazarus; he speaks not only to the Samaritan and Syro-Phoenician, but to members of the Sanhedrin.

Christ came not only to save the Bronx, but also Levittown.

Faith on the Ground

2007-12-21T15:31:00.000-05:00

Given the current climate of Anglican crisis (with the latest ramp-up being this accursed Common Cause thing, bidding fair to leave me with no place to go to church) my friend Serge comes through with a timely observation:

Religion on the ground level is often a question of choosing the conscience problems you can live with over the ones you can't.

This came up in the context of a post linking to this discussion of reasons why some people don't become Orthodox. I've gotten that question from some Orthodox, as I continue to engage them in discussion. I mostly haven't gotten that question from Catholics, as they tend to operate from the viewpoint that any reasonable and faithful person would convert on the basis of the arguments they present. They tend to not be really interested in my faith, except to knock it down enough to get me to convert. To be fair there are a lot of Orthodox who take the same tack; they just are not so ubiquitous.

Those who have stuck with me and followed what I've written here over time may have noticed that I'm a bit suspicious of theology. It's not that I think it is worthless, but I think it's exceedingly easy to rationalize. Theology in the large hasn't proven to be a science in which light can be shone with assurance into every corner of every question; if it were, there would be a lot less division. And around Anglicanism, at the moment, there is a lot of division. If there is a single right response to the ECUSA crisis (for a layman), we are presented instead with the unedifying spectacle of people bolting in all directions, or staying put for not especially consistent reasons. A visit to the comments of almost any post on TitusOneNine will show all sorts of "why aren't you gone yet?" slams against the church; but the departing cannot agree on a destination.

And when it comes down to it, all of these destinations have faults, especially when the limitations of geography are admitted. The continuing churches can be roundly chastised for their fissipariousness and the tenuous legitimacy of their episcopacies. ECUSA-- well, yeah; though at least in my diocese (Maryland) for the moment more or less orthodox parishes are being allowed to remain more or less orthodox. A trip to one of the local RC parishes (eliminating the non-English-speaking ones) is impeded by some of my theological objections, but more thoroughly by the ghastly state of the liturgy. Orthodoxy presents the same issues in different forms.

The real problem for me is not I've been increasingly faced with problems in my faith, but rather, that increasingly I'm having trouble finding a place to practice it. In the end, though, I have to have a place to go to church. Surely some will come along and trivialize this problem, saying, "Well, you're putting yourself above Mother Church. You must put aside your distaste/qualms and go any way to [brand name here]." Never mind that I must exercise judgement to decide among the competing claims. Never mind that the speaker may well be a priest who can mold his parish to his tastes. Never mind that I'm being sold a fantasy church. The basic problem, here in this house, in a church that I can actually drive to and worship in, is that I don't see a place where I can be an Anglican refugee-- for that is what I would be, were I to go elsewhere. After thirty years, I am Anglican through and through, from my rising to my going to bed-- and my going to church. I can only attend these other churches as aliens, and at the moment, being a theological alien in ECUSA beats being a theological AND liturgical alien elsewhere.

Also, I am not buying the argument that the crappiness of the church experience is irrelevant. The "magic communion theory" of "you must be in communion with Patriarch X" (where X is in {Rome, Constantinople, Buena Vista}) fails on me anyway, because after thirty years of not having such a connection I'm not amenable to the thesis that absolutely nothing has been happening. But beyond that, it seems to escape most internet arguers that most people aren't theological. Indeed, fundamentally I'm not really theological either. If most people's experience of Christianity as religion is church, then it bloody well does matter how well it is done; indeed, it is important above almost everything else how well it is done. And by that I don't mean that it has high production values, though in my experience where those are belittled, church is done badly. I remember a dozen Friday eucharists at the UMCP West Chapel, an afterthought on the back of the main chapel meanly fitted out for the paltry remnants of protestant chaplaincies (and the Jews twice a year, which accounted for the rather ugly curtained thing behind the communion table). Wofford Smith and I would assemble and wait for the third person to show up so that he could serve a simple said Rite II service, with him standing on one side of the table and the two of us standing on the other. Production values were next to nonexistent, and yet I would place those among the most gracious services I have been privileged to be a part of. No, the problem in most places I've been that have been bad is that they are bad on purpose. It is a sin I can't live with, so I won't go there.

The ArchBarometer of Canterbury

2007-12-19T09:04:00.001-05:00

Over in the Covenant discussion of the discouraging news about about the Common Cause meeting, John Thorpe said, "For all his personal theological liberalism, Williams does seem to be a great barometer for what is authentically Anglican in this crisis."

Well, yes. And that's why he is attracting so much ire.

Our Druidic Past

2007-12-18T14:11:00.000-05:00

We have another pass at the Melnyk saga, the web-ish details of which I've discussed elsewhere. Here I wish to talk about its relevance to The Current Crisis.

I'm not sure why a book by William Melnyk that came out a couple of years back is suddenly relevant now, but nonetheless one Susanne Evans felt the need to bring it up and connect it to the homosexuality controversy:

Melnyk’s problems within the Episcopal Church began when he was ‘exposed’ by a conservative Christian website seeking more ammunition for attacking the Episcopal Church’s consecration of a gay priest as Bishop. They accused Melnyk of taking part in rituals celebrating the Divine Feminine.

It's an inaccurate depiction, but what is most interesting is the supposed strategy. The problem is that this is precisely how the incident did NOT play out. Melnyk and Melnyk were (and I assume are) husband and wife; the problem wasn't that they "celebrating the Divine Feminine", but that (a) the rite that started it all off aped pagan middle eastern rites as described in scripture; and more importantly (b) it became quickly apparent that Bill Melnyk was living a second life as Druidic priest, on top of his day job as a priest in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. Beyond that, the protestations of innocence on the part of the OWM were implausible.

There is a continuing problem within ECUSA of the presence of a core of clerics whose theology goes beyond unitarian and into an adventurism which I for one find irreconcilable with the Creed, much less the ten commandments or anything in the bible. A lot of this is closely connected to feminist theology (though there are other offenders with other agendas), and the Office of Women's Ministry has consistently served as a conduit if not exponent of the problem theology. That's what happened in the Melnyk case, but they got caught.

But as for homosexuality, the connection is loose. One could of course drape both with the banner of sexuality, though one issue is about being a sex and the other is about having sex. But the more truoblesome connection is that the theological adventurers are all on the pro-homosexuality side of that argument; many of their fellow travellers, however, are otherwise quite orthodox (modulo women's ordination, which crosses into the anti-homosexual side). Whether by coincidence or common precept, the orthodox and the heretical are allies on the issue which promises to divide the church.

So we are then back to the question I've raised over and over. Can the Episcopal Church, divested of the "conservatives", remain orthodox? I think it cannot, and the reason is the common thread of rights. Once homosexuality is out of the way, feminist theology is going to come back to the fore. And it is going to be very difficult for the remaining orthodox to effectively criticize it, because any criticism is going to be tagged as bigotry. The prayer book will be revised to enforce womanist positions, and it will be very easy to prosecute (or persecute) the creedally orthodox clerics who remain. Anyone who has seen the first phases of BCP revision has already seen some of this in action.

And Evans's post stands as testimony to the likelihood that the battle is indeed already lost. Such a flagrantly false account cannot be expected to convince the neutral; it is only workable as a self-justification for her faction. The subtext, therefore, is that the opponents of a radicalized theology need not be refuted, much less heeded.

(For some reason, this originally appeared on my other blog. My apologies for the confusion.)

Last Liturgical Dinosaur

2007-10-15T10:16:00.000-04:00

The Last Protestant Dinosaur lists 20 Basics of Welcoming Liturgy. Anyone who has heard me talk about liturgy can guess that I disagree with a lot of those twenty points. So let's take it point by point:

1. Stop fighting the BCP. Sure, people in other churches do quite different things in church; but you can't compete with them by borrowing their praxis, so stop trying. BCP worship is the unifying center of Episcopal worship, and insofar as you abandon it, you've abandoned the brand. It is very hard to win converts by alienating the regulars, remembering also that a lot of the "converts" are Anglicans moving in from elsewhere.

2. Make worship the central spiritual priority and the sniff test of everything you do. Hospitality is important; worship is all-important. Everyone is there to connect with God; but the 25% or so of the population who are introverts are going to be put off by too much "hospitality".

3. I don't have too much to argue about point 3. Grubbing for money is off-putting for visitors. On the other hand, calling to much attention to your flexibility makes people suspicious, and can be alienating to the regulars.

4. Open communion sends the message that you don't have standards. Most people can deal with the idea that some elements of the service are for full members only. They will be more willing to make a commitment to Christ if they thing that it makes a difference to do so. (And never mind the strong scriptural justification of closed communion.) A better idea for welcoming the unbaptized is to make them aware that they can come up for a blessing.

5. Don't make a fetish out of holding people's hands. No doubt about it: a completely book-based Episcopal service can be baffling to the first-time visitor. OK: well, this is your big chance to be welcoming! Nothing could be more inviting than to slide into the pew, be faced with this daunting book, and have the person next to you come over to help you get through it.

6. Don't assume that people hate church music. Episcopalians have one of the broadest and deepest repertoires of church music out there in the 1982 hymnal. From what I can tell, a lot of clerics are afraid of it. I get the sense that its immense power threatens them because (unlike the words of liturgy) it isn't entirely within their control. So they try to whittle down as much as possible or dilute it by choosing less powerful styles and hymns.

And don't let anyone fool you: style is very important. It is a stronger conveyor of meaning than the words themselves, as evidenced for instance by the fad some years back for plainsong by those who hadn't the slightest idea what was being sung. If the only music you use is trivial, then you are saying that relationship with God is trivial.

The parish can develop an affection and even a desire for some pretty difficult music, if you let them. If they are treated like musical dunces, they will be so, so don't assume that they can't hack Anglican chanting. (There are simplified versions in the hymnal which nearly anyone can sing.)The thing is that the musical competence of any group of people depends on a dedicated core. If you always go for the lowest common denominator, you will alienate these people, and you will not even acheive that low level unless those people have pretty low tastes.

7. Don't obsess about service length. In my experience, Rite II with music and a congregation of any size is going to go over an hour unless some serious cuts are made. If the service is working, most people aren't going to notice the length; but they will notice if they are being rushed through. The clock-watchers? They can never be satisfied; if the service seems to be taking to long, there is no length which is short enough to ameliorate this. So if the service seems too long, the first question should be "what are we doing wrong?" rather than "what can we cut out?" There should of course be room in the Sunday schedule for a low-fuss/speedy service; but remember that this service is not a sellable option for everyone.

8. There's warmth, and then there is too much warmth. Please remember that about a quarter of your congregation does not want to be hugged by strangers or for that matter be subjected to less intrusive forms of familiarity. Making them feel welcome is a delicate balancing act, because they are more sensitive than most to phony cameraderie and other such performances by the priest.

9. The biggest fat isn't in the BCP. Actual liturgy is almost never "fat"; more typically the problem is in the stuff that isn't in the BCP. Item: the interminal parish announcements. Item: the "peace" in which people leave their pews and go searching the nave for the right person to hug. Item: long explanations of why we are doing things. Item: Instructions that don't need to be announcements. Keeping the extraneous out goes a long way towards "streamlining" the service; and doing so helps keep people more engaged, so they don't think about how it's taking a long time.

10. The readings are what they are for a reason. Just do them and live with them.

11. The prayers work for you, if used properly. Except for Form II, which was broken in the name of political correctness, there's nothing really wrong with the Ps of the P that doing them intentionally wouldn't fix. What I see happening to much of the time, however, is that the overemphasis on immanence renders us incapable of praying TO God in a public setting; we are wont to converse with ourselves rather than bring our petitions before the Divine Throne.

One thing I have seen done which if quite effective is to have the leader stand in teh nave or sone convenient such place and face the altar. Leading from the lectern is deadly and should be avoided if at all possible.

12. Routine is not bad in itself; constant change is destructive. The big temptation with having everything in the bulletin is that it allows clerics to indulge themselves in liturgical dilletancy. An occaisional change can wake people up; but frequent change dulls people. They stop paying attention, because it's easier than trying to keep up.

Also, having people stick their noses in the book opens up the possibility that they will stray from the day's liturgy and look at the rest of it. Missalettes send the message that the book's contents are obsolete and can be ignored.

13. Don't make a fetish out of participation. Anglican churches are clerical, and there's only so much one can take the "curse" off it. And besides, a lot of people will want to minimize their speaking role, and will resent being put onstage when they know it isn't properly their part.

14. No disagreement on that: announcements are always a dead weight in liturgy and should be minimized.

15. Don't sell the entrance rite short. There's a rhythm to the liturgy, and when you start cutting, you alter that rhythm. A lot of the entrance rite is about shifting gears; shorten it, the the shift comes too fast for some people.

16. Communion music is tricky. Anything about communion music is going to be hampered both by those people who absolutely do not want to do anything but commune and pray, and by those people whose response to communing is to sing. Communion hymns can work for both groups as long as the first group doesn't feel pushed to participate.

17. Take sermons seriously and play to your strengths. By that I don't mean that they are all deathless monuments of prose; I'm sure even Chrysostom preached a few duds. But you have to look at how you do them, and not fight against your nature.

Of course, hardly anyone can make a long, rambling sermon work. And hardly any cleric can make an exceptionally informal sermon work either, because it's phony. I personally would have a hard time making a really short sermon, because it just isn't the way I talk. If you've made it this far you've probably noticed that I use a lot of subordinate clauses and compound sentences, because my thinking is centered around gluing things together. The question to ask is: What are people getting out of it? The obvious peril is to fall in love with your own voice, so that you can't stop talking; but the more immediate peril these days is to be so afraid of overstaying your welcome that you never say anything substantial. Which leads to

17.1. Preach to everyone, not just the new converts or the old hands. Again, the traditional fault of preachers was to preach to each other, thus producing sermons that laymen didn't understand. Given the frequency of warnings about this, it seems to me that the other fault is now more common: preaching only to the absolute beginners. The thing about beginners is that nobody is one forever; eventually the old hands will decide that there is nothing to learn from your sermons, and they will check out as soon as they sit down after the gospel.

18. Keep the sermon stunts to a minimum. An unusual presentation has a lot more impact when it is rare. If you indulge yourelf in constant performances, that's how people will see you: as a performer (or worse, a clown) rather than as a preacher.

19. Don't pretend you aren't the presiding minister. You can do some liturgies (e.g. compline) without a specific leading minister. You cannot do the eucharist that way; the most you can do is delegate parts to others. If you are really committed to being anti-clerical, then go join an anti-clerical church. But if you are the rector of an Episcopal parish, everyone can see that your anti-clericism is fundamentally fake. When push comes to shove, you will step in to rule things, because that is how your position is constructed.

And the other side of the coin is that probably most people are quite comfortable with taking a "passive" role, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Mainline churches have become uncomfortable with the notion that this kind of participation in the service is also service, even though there is a very, very long tradition respecting that. In a way, the emphasis to the contrary is also a kind of clericalism, because it says that the roles traditionally assigned to clerics are those which are important.

20. Don't mess with the words. And especially not with the creed. If you change the creed, you are saying that you are unwilling to make the same statement of faith as the rest of the church. That is THE most disunifying thing you can do, and it is hugely distracting. The natural reaction is to stop intending the words and try to figure out what the author (that is, the rector) is trying to put over you.

If you can't say the words in the BCP, then it's your job to go find some other church where you can, or to lobby General Convention to change them (knowing full well that you are excluding all the people who cannot bring themselves to say your changed version). But don't inflict your doubts on everyone else.

What is particularly striking to me about this is not so much that I found 18 of 20 points to disagree with, but that some of the attitudes implicit here are so pervasive. Never mind the lack of faith in the church's ancient words, which is completely beyond the pale. The subtext of this and so many other posts and papers talking about Anglican liturgy very much operate from the seeming position that the traditional Anglican liturgy is unsellable. Given that liturgy is about all we have left, one has to wonder whether we will soon be left with nothing beyond a vague sense of superiority. It's not working for the unitarians, and I don't think it can be made to work for us.

Amazingly Vindictive

2007-10-01T18:13:00.000-04:00

The Living Church reported that our presiding bishop is insisting that Episcopal church properties not be sold to any competing Anglican group:

”If a building is sold to a congregation, The Episcopal Church as a whole is not so concerned if it’s going to be a community church,” she said, although there must be assurances that stewardship was addressed and that the building was sold at fair market value. “But if a congregation purports to set up as another part of the Anglican Communion, we are concerned about that.”

Heaven forbid we do anything to help our enemies after all. I'm sure the Most Rev'd sees this as simple prudence. After all, a church converted to a nightclub is not nearly the threat that another Anglican church poses. And I suppose nobody took those retrograde Antiochians seriously in the 1920s or anticipated that they would start absorbing Episcopalians decades later. Or perhaps she is confident that aspiring mega-evangelicals or emerging churches (whatever they are) don't present much competition.

Or maybe it's just spite. But whatever it is, it looks exceptionally petty, if not strikingly sactimonious.

(Hat tip to T19 for the link.)

Fried Chicken Tonight?

2007-08-27T11:46:00.000-04:00

Last week a rather lame accusation was bouncing around one side of the Current Conflict, involving a letter from Akinola about which the Church Times says that Software suggests Minns rewrote Akinola’s letter. (BTW, that's an impressively unflattering photo heading the article. I have to wonder whether they went with it only because they couldn't find one that made him look more doofy/addled.) So what does the revelation that Minns may have ghost-written the missive mean? Let's go to Fr. Jake:
What this reveals is what many have suspected for some time; that it is Western conservatives who are behind the extreme positions that are being presented as the position of the Global South.

So let me ask this question: how many of you remember the chicken dinners? For those who don't: after the Lambeth conference of 1998, when the homosexuality vote went against the liberals, there were apparently claims from two bishops present that the Africans were essentially bribed into voting for the resolution through chicken dinners. At this late date, it is hard to say how accurate those claims are; one can be traced to Ruth Gledhill's summary of remarks by David Holloway, and the other (claimed of Barbara Harris) appears to have only been reported by David Virtue-- not my idea of an ironclad solitary source. Those remarks, and the large context in which they arose, have had little effect other than to reinforce a lot of ill will. And that basically what's going to happen here.

It doesn't shock me to learn that Minns had, at some point, served as Akinola's speechwriter, and never mind that the evidence isn't conclusive. Internet communications, even in Africa, facilitates this kind of shared work. The revelation hardly proves what is being claimed for it, however. It is perhaps true that the Africans wouldn't have made such an issue of the matter in 1998 without conservative American facilitation, if only because those Americans supplied organization which helped the "global south" to put up a united front. (That this was effective was illustrated by a late vote in which confusion about what was being voted on helped bring about a liberal success.) It seems more questionable to me that the Africans wouldn't have cared about the issue without American prodding. It seems absolutely certain that, when asked, the Africans would express condemnation of ECUSA positions without further prompting.

As to whether it is improper for the American conservatives to raise the level of African anxiety about this issue, I'm inclined to say that it isn't (ignoring my personal feelings about sexuality). Surely the relationships between African and American clerics are more complex than the nearly one dimensional pictures that both sides paint, but it's hard to miss the consequences of the fact that American institutional power does not extend across the Atlantic, and especially in light of a few conspicuous cases in which American parishes resorted to outright blackmail in pressuring Africans to back down from their opposition.

Beyond that, I have gotten reports from several directions indicating a lot of liberal willingness to drive conservatives from ECUSA as a consequence of their tactics. And if the American church has to choose between staying in the communion and continuing their present course (and I suspect that this time they will not be able to count on the British resolution writers to relieve them of this choice), I'm betting on schism. I am uncharitably (but I suspect accurately) inclined to suspect a great deal of liberal resentment that their power only extends as far as their diocesan borders; but it is quite clear that they aren't going to give up any of their power within those borders.

At any rate, the incident is only going to confirm liberals in their prejudices, and confirm conservatives in their (self-)righteousnesses. Naive moderates will continue not to notice, and informed moderates are likely not to be swayed. In other words, other than maintaining the current polarization, it's all going to amount to nothing.

Too Much Standing, Not Enough Sitting

2007-08-23T10:39:00.000-04:00

Tobias Haller and Leslie Fairfield have a virtual exchange of statements on why the two positions remain intractable. But the medium itself vitiates the "discussion", because it is all too easy to talk past each other and to avoid difficult confrontation.

These statements inevitably need to present the opposite side in order to address it, and inevitably those characterizations are vulnerable to criticism. In the present conflict the matter is blurred by the two "sides" being in actuality broad coalitions united in common cause but quite divergent in theological grounding. It is easy to pick extremes on the other side or dissociate oneself from them on own's own side. Cheap shots are thus easy, and because of sin, common.

So let's take a strawman that appears in the present exchange: Jack Spong. I would guess that the vast majority of Episcopalians-- even clerics-- think Spong's current denials are too far out there to profess for themselves. Using Spong as a type of one side is surely incorrect and unfair. But the question as to how much he is UNlike other modernists is much more interesting, and potentially illuminating.

My personal reading of Tillich (on whom Spong bases his program) never gets very far, because I cannot agree to Tillich's presuppositions. Yet it seems hard to escape those presuppositions; they practically define modernist theology.

It is popular in Catholic and Orthodox circles to posit that Protestantism in gnereal always begets the kind of excesses one sees in Spong. In an uninteresting way, it is true; yet protestantism is inevitable because intellectual criticism of tradition's reasons is innately possible. The only way one can avoid criticisms of one's arguments is not to argue at all; and this tradition does not do. On the other hand, it is equally obligatory to defend one's doubts; and this the modernists do not generally do. Modernists routinely misrepresent the variety of viewpoints arrayed against them, reducing everyone to Southern Baptists in dog collars. Catholic and Orthodox polemicists routinely overstate the degree to which modernism is found in the Episcopal Church (though it is certainly pervasive enough). The thing is that in the past, these theological commitments were never what Anglicanism was about.

The modernist version of Anglicanism cannot be long tolerated. Its dogmatism on sexuality and gender is impossible to defend in an Anglican framework, and its manifest use of clerical power to establish its views as church doctrine make theological discussion pointless, besides being off-putting in its uncharitibility. On the other hand, the dream of having a church where one doesn't have to argue is a recipe for fragmentation, and for the loss of the bulk of the denomination. A lot of people are Anglicans because they are comfortable with argument and difference, and do not want these taken away from them. This seems to me to be a major reason why the continuing churches are not able to gather up the bulk of the Episcopal Church.

But then there's the "heresy is worse than schism" moderates. This too is a position that nobody can live with. The truth is, this is only a position for clerics, who can control what goes on in their own churches. Us lay people all have limits; none of us can tolerate any heresy. Right now, we're coming up against issues-- homosexual "marriage", neuter language for God, universalism-- where larger and larger chunks of the laity have hit the limits of their tolerance. The steady decline since 2003 speaks for itself, after a decade of stable numbers. And I expect that a lot of these people are going to go fishing in the non-denom world, or simply become unchurched, because the churches around them cannot step up to admitting that theology is netiher wide open nor a totally solved problem. Catholic churches and Orthodox churches may pick up some, but a lot of those people will be silent dissenters making the most of a bad situation. They will remain Anglican refugees, not true converts.

The only hope for a continued Anglican church is for its bishops and clerics to back down from the "here I stand" arrogance that is driving the current battle, and to engage in genuine theological discourse: not a dialogue where canned responses are traded back and forth, but a real effort to mark out lines on the theological map. There is no hope whatsoever for this, because within PECUSA the modernists have enough power to destroy their opponents if they just keep at it. The real Anglicans will gradually give up hope, or have their parishes taken away from them, or grow old and die; the Episcopal Church will be left with a lot of expensive real estate in the Northeast which will lapse into disrepair without the rest of the church to pay for maintenance. They will be reduced, like the Unitarians, to an upper middle class dalliance in spirituality.

It doesn't have to happen. But these days, it is going to happen.

It's From Them That I Expect to Hear the F-Word

2007-08-21T13:19:00.000-04:00

In Christianity, of course, the "F-word" is fundamentalism. It's the cheap slur of "enlightened" and "civilized" religion, used against anyone who insists on any hard limits to theological statements.

The real Fundamentalism is a particular Protestant theological system, and many American preachers commonly associated with it are not in fact fundamentalists, by this strict standard. Jerry Falwell was a true fundamentalist; Pat Robertson is not. It takes a fair bit of digging to find this out, because the mainstream media are tone-deaf about this (and really don't care anyway). And so, for that matter, are a lot of mainline clerics and theologians, not to mention laymen.

It's popular to point at Akinola and other African bishops as fundamentalists, implying that they are ignorant, bigotted rubes. Well, I don't know about bigotry, but as far as education is concerned, their papers at least some them to be the equals of their American counterparts, if not superiors. There seems to be enough bigotry to go all around.

Anyway, courtesy of the young fogey we have a nice little bit from Eunomia about the use of the word these days, this time with respect to Islam.

No offense to Mr. Krikorian, but does he really think that Muslims are going to conceive of their religion as an “ideology” and “way of life” that have failed? If they believe, as I assume they do, that their religion is the final revelation of God to humanity, it will take a lot more than its “inadequacy” to adapt to modernity to persuade them to abandon it.

Well, sort of. He goes on to say that

The lesson of mainline Protestantism, to follow his comparison, is that religion without substance and conviction is dead and uninspiring and doomed to stagnation and irrelevance. People flee it as they would from the plague. Those inclined to belong to religious communities are going to seek out communities where there is a sense that the religion they practice is true and edifying.

The thing is that American religious communities don't work exactly this way. The religious community is the parish or congregation; larger units like dioceses or presbyteries or synods or conferences or denominations don't function as communities in the sense that immediately comes to mind. They tend to function (for laymen, anyway) as distant potentates who make occaisional intrusive appearances, but have little to do with the week-to-week life of the parish. And particularly with mainline protestants, it is often possible to live as a deviant refuge within a hostile church.

And fundamentalism-- the real thing-- is precisely such a posture. One of the problems with modernism (and not coincidentally part of what gave rise to postmodernism) is that life in self-examination is emphatically subjective. It invites external criticism, and among sinful men, that is often hard to swallow. Modernist theology has been conspicuously arrogant in this from the start, especially following WW I and the European-based "nobody knows the trouble I've seen" rejection of any other standing to criticize it. Fundamentalism exists precisely as such a criticism, and is thus, in its way, modern.

In considering the claims of disiilusionment proffered by the modernists, one would do well to remember that those two great conservators of the past, Tolkien and Lewis, were quite literally in the trenches in the Great War. Both had close friends killed; Tolkien caught trench foot, and Lewis was wounded. Lewis in particular expressed impatience with the notion that the horrors of the twentieth century were crucially alienating, a position I have to agree with. For me one of the biggest issues with theology in the century just past is that hardly anyone is willing to step up to the task of trying to pull of of these disparate strands together; the loudest sound in the theological synod is that of not listening to others. Here I think Anglicanism had the possibility of being post-modern early, for the via media was based in the restraint of one's ego to the point of being able to agree to disagree. But like other mainline churches, Anglican theology has in practice been captured by modernists, and the position of Anglican revisionists-- those in the driving seat of the Episcopal Church-- is conspicuously modernist, arrogant and political. What "fundamentalist" means is really anyone who is willing to admit that they do not feel the "disillusionment" that the moderns claim is universal, because those people then appeal to the texts and to older tradition in criticizing the modernist program.

There is clearly a problem because the whole claim of disillusionment goes unresolved. The moderns can't defend it, and the others cannot get past it. But "fundamentalism" per se has little to do with it. It's simply a way of dodging the obligation to defend modernist precepts.

Can't Tell Your Churchmanship Without a Scorecard

2007-08-20T13:40:00.000-04:00

One of the things that happens all the time in the Anglican Wars is people trying to position their group over the "right" churchmanship labels. The result has been that with maybe one exception these labels have become pretty unclear.

It hasn't helped that the average liturgical practice in the church has shifted considerably over the decades-- mostly upward and in some cases more "catholic"-ward. Twenty years ago I had to go to the cathedral in Wilmington, DE to get a communion service on a fourth Sunday; now communion every week is the rule almost everywhere. Anglocatholic-identified practices such as use of incense have spread.

I came into the church in the center of the old "high and wide" churchmanship, the sort that characterized many of the big east coast cathedrals thirty or more years ago. Or perhaps forty-five years would be more apropos. Back in those days the Broad issue was racism, a cause that allowed it to be easily allied with the A-Cs. When the Broad issues turned to the middle class (sexism and homosexuality), Anglo-Catholics became the enemy, because they were bound to teaching what they had always taught.

Women's ordination did not help the church hold together, but it did not wound it as grievously as the current battles are wounding it. But women's ordination took the church away from advocacy for the downtrodden, though it is impolitic to say so. Those women who were ordained were middle and upper-middle and perhaps even upper class, drawn from the same pool which produced male priests. Homosexuality has the same pattern. They are closely coupled to academic theorists who are more of the same. Thus the church turned away from advocating for others, and towards advocating for its own.

In the end, the old churchmanship distinctions have been overcome by the theological differentiation which is driving the current crisis. And it's been exacerbated by a loss of nerve about the liturgy. In one way, the 1979 liturgy has emerged triumphant: all discussion of further revision takes its considerable structural innovations for granted. But the revisors increasingly cannot say its words, and from the other direction the attacks upon its changes are so virulent as to force a division among those who resist the current wave of revisionism. From what I see, a considerable part of the Episcopal Church falls in a rather small range of churchmanship, fairly high but basically conservative within its own context (that is, that of 1979); but when the Anglo-Catholics are set aside, the other two other parties are on the one hand a Roman/evangelical-looking group which tends to use the 1979 framework for a liturgy well outside old Episcopal style, and on the other hand a high-looking party which is theologically adventurous. The old labels just don't work for these groups.

Those who know too much history are also condemned to repeat it, because they are unable to see any other course. Churchmanship has largely become a distraction; the real differences, the ones that matter in PECUSA today, arise out of theology, both in the answers and in the way these answers are brought forth. Increasingly the old tolerant modes are failing, and with them, the continuance of the church is increasingly in jeopardy.

Faith and Belief are Brothers

2007-08-14T12:43:00.000-04:00

While I appreciate some of what Fr. Jake says in his recent post on faith and belief, I'm afraid he's guilty of eliding over some of the difficult spots. Well, and one major misstatement that throws the whole thing crucially awry.

At one point he says, "Christianity is not built on intellectual ideas. It is about having a relationship with the living God." Well, I don't know about intellectual ideas, for as a mental holist I doubt the existence of non- intellectual ideas. But one would think it obvious that Christianity is about relationship with the living Christ. And this opens up all of the problems that talking about God allows one to sweep under the rug.

When we are talking about Christ, we aren't just talking about a theological abstraction, but also talking about Jesus. And about Jesus, one cannot hide behind the unknowability and indefinability of the divine. Jesus was (and is) a man, a human being, and thus can be talked about just like any other man. Faith in Jesus and belief about Jesus are quite inseparable, particularly when talking to the unbaptized.

And speaking of faith, I must also disagree that "faith has an absolute quality that belief does not." Actually, I'd say that it's the other way around. Beliefs themselves, being propositions, tend to be cast as absolutely true/false statements. In fact, that's part of the problem with them: they tend to cast matters into categories more rigidly than is often reasonable. Faith, on the other hand, beig like unto trust, is present in degrees.

Let me illustrate this by turning to that very modern divinity: Science. Natural science is something that modern educated people, as a rule, have some degree of faith in, often a very high degree. And a great deal of school science curriculum is devoted to instilling this faith, by presenting the mechanisms of scientific inquiry and building confidence that these methods do indeed work. The thing is that the degree of this trust varies, and ought to. On the level of ordinary, low-energy physics, Newtonian mechanics has earned an extremely high level of trust. Certainly on big enough or small enough scales relativistic and quantum effects intrude, but they do not invalidate the Newtonian framework that is indeed part of those other theories. Other scientific conclusions inspire similar high trust, but others are more dubious. A knowledgable and sophisticated observer understands, for instance, that cosmology is at present highly speculative, that the underlying forces of evolutions are poorly understood, that biology has a very long way to go, and that economics is close to voodoo. This is not to say that any of these fields is groundless nonsense, but simply reflects a judgement that not all pronouncements should be taken with the same seriousness.

Part of the reason I used science here is that there is a tendency of late to pit faith in science against faith in the traditions of the church. Here we come into some curious contradictions. Anyone can, for example, deduce scientifically that people are "fallen"-- that is to say, that they are wont to violate their own moral codes, much less some absolute morality. What is curious is that the other side of the human nature coin-- that people are intrinsically good-- is not so observable. Indeed, the very statement borders on the metaphysical. Yet it is this statement that most people will ratify, and the other that many will essentially deny. More commonly, statements about human nature have to be couched statistically, bringing in that dangerous word "normal". To a statistician, "normal" has a definite, objective meaning; but "normal" in that sense does not imply a meaningful distinction. It's simply a kind of 80-20 rule, with no implication that for non-statistical reasons 80 and 20 are the right numbers. Outside of statistics, of course, "normal" carries a ton of value judgments, easily prompting fallacious conclusions.

Theology being a kind of science, it is subject to the same reservations on confidence-- whatever the pope or the church fathers would say. But the traditional formula is that faith in Jesus leads to faith in the Church. If faith must be absolute in general, then this faith also must be absolute-- at least, so says an Orthodox Catholic. It is a sure thing that Fr. Jake has no such absolute faith, but it is equally sure that, to some degree, he has some faith in the church. And that is indeed the Protestant problem: that one must rely on the church to some degree for one's faith, but that the church as we see it does not merit the kind of total faith that can be placed in God (and therefore, in Jesus). And that leasds to the same issues about faith in the church's other teachings. Part of the problematic nature of Christianity is that we simply are not provided with the kind of absolute roadmap to Christian living that would obviate thought, and therefore the holding of beliefs. Theology is unavoidably necessary, at least for us adults; at the very least, we have to work out how to act morally, because we are not given rules that do not need interpretation.

That's why I think making this particular faith vs. belief distinction is a mistake: it is precisely at this level that they aren't separable.

Funny, I Don't Feel Welcomed

2007-08-06T21:55:00.000-04:00

South Carolina has cast down the gauntlet again, and Lambeth inches closer, and the ACN meeting sends Ephraim Radner off to stew in his tent (not that I don't blame him, but that's a different post). It's not a good time to be a centrist Anglican, but then, these days seem to be bad for anything reasonable in PECUSA.

So Father Jake drops a "Welcome Home" plan for "those who may become disillusioned with the apparent splintering that has begun among the secessionists." Well, I dunno. I'm not a party to the "secessionists", but it's been obvious for some time that a division of some sort is necessary. The three "catholic" bishops (as one of my friends refers to them) will not be accommodated in the present Episcopal Church. If South Carolina is having trouble electing a bishop, San Joaquin, Ft. Worth, and Quincy have no hope at all of getting consents. Too many righteous liberals will demand that they toe the line. At this point, it still seems to come down to making sure that the "other side" ends up with as few dioceses and parishes as possible.

As for disillusionment? Well, I at least haven't held out much hope throughout this. I'll talk about the "splitters" in the next post, but there is a lot about them that doesn't appeal to me. But the problem remains that PECUSA increasingly offers the prospect of a church that is tending towards making it impossible for me to worship in its liturgies. I do not think the less radical liberals are going to be able to hold the theological revisionists in check. It's hard to become more disillusioned than I already am, because I feel increasingly faced with having no place to go to church.

But let's get back to Fr. Jake's plan. Let's tart with Point One: "Seek ways to remove clergy from their posts who need to be removed without humiliating them[.]" Right away we have a big problem, because most of the really problematic clerics in need of removal have been on the liberal side. Let's just start with the adulterous: when we look at the bishops, only Jones of Montana was forced out of office. Grein and Bennison's appalling antics haven't brought significant censure. And then there's Spong: if we couldn't get rid of him on theological grounds, we cannot get rid of any liberal. So it's easy to see how this goes: easier removal translates into easier consolidation of power.

Offering DEPO: I suspect why this has been a non-starter is that trust has dropped so far that simple delegation of oversight isn't considered enough. But it's worth a try.

Implement a non-biased way to identify conservative congregations so that they can be more easily found by those seeking them. I honestly don't see the point of this. The problem isn't that the conservatives are hard to find; it's that they seem to be besieged by bishops and dioceses who are determined to end their conservatism if possible.

Make a commitment to not hinder a congregation that seeks only male clergy. Well, this a point that isn't going to be conceded. The big fights in the Diocese of Washington were precisely over forcing Jane Dixon on parishes. I simply cannot believe that the liberal powers would say, "OK, fine, we aren't going to do anything to push you into hiring a female priest or even accepting a woman as a bishop." Indeed, what I see is that the liberal side sees a moral imperative in making all parishes friendly to their causes.

And indeed, Fr. Stockton's reply pretty much says this. It is, again, very much about power, and putting the (waning) authority of the church behind liberal social causes. I tolerated this when I was a younger man, though I knew even then that the coupling diminished the church. The thing is that Protestants are going to pass judgement on the church for doing this, and they are not going to stand for being instructed by it under such circumstances. The Episcopal Church will increasingly sink into being the self-righteous indulgence of upper middle class intellectual snobs who appreciate high production values in their liturgy, thanking God that they are not like those benighted fundamentalists (who are an increasingly irrelevant group, but never mind that) or those benighted Roman Catholics.

Not that the alternatives are looking that good....

Archbishop Chaput on the Intolerant Mess We're In

2007-05-25T13:32:00.000-04:00

Tip to A conservative blog for peace:

Religious Tolerance and the Common Good as appeared in First Things

The Catastrophic Model of the Church

2007-05-15T13:59:00.000-04:00

There has been some blog action bouncing around about Vocation Deferred: The Necessary Challenge of Communion (an essay by Ephraim Radner) and a related address by Stepehn Noll: The Anglican Communion in Crisis. One line of response has centered on this remark by "I'd Rather Not Say":

The contrast between “confessional” and “conciliar” models takes us right back to the original horns of the Anglican dilemma: in what sense is the Anglican Communion “protestant” and in what sense “catholic”? The more “confessional” we are---i.e., a church apart from others with documents written in stone, the betrayal of which means a sacrifice of identity (as with Lutherans and the Lutheran confessions) or with unique institutions and doctrines unknown to the catholic consensus (as with WO)---the more sectarian we are. The more “catholic” we are---i.e., a church which bases its authority to decide doctrine on claims to be part of a wider, visible catholic church in continuity with the church of the apostles (see Articles XIX and XX)---the less it is up to the Anglican Communion to determine anything doctrinal except on a provisional basis, and the more we must defer to the common consent of antiquity and the wider catholic community (i.e., Rome and Orthodoxy).

The tell-tale word in this only pops up in the second section: authority. It shows that, on one level, the contrast between the two models is specious. The conciliar model, as an authoritarian model, is in part about enforcing allegiance to the confession that the authorities have set before the members. On the other hand, the confessional model is about the insistence that the confession's authority is not really derivative of the councils which set it before us. On that level, it is the correct model. At best, the church is only a conduit of truth; for instance, the Creed's authority must in the end trace back to it being the correct explanation of the Godhead, not merely the church's explanation.

Of course, the other side to the conciliarity model's problem is that for half of Christian history, there have been councils. Al Kimel seems prone to eliding over the issue, but the fact remains that Orthodoxy and Catholicism have maintained separate councils for a millenium. Councils themselves have therefore been a locus of sectarianism.

Let's go on further in IRNS's remarks:

WO is only one feature of this problem. I do not intend to send this thread off in the direction of discussing this specific topic, but it does serve to illustrate the problem. People such as Radner continue to evoke a conciliar model, but refuse to accept the implications of that model, i.e., that we (Anglicans) can have all the Communion-wide councils we want, and that may be better than having everything doctrinal decided at a provincial level, but such councils do not amount to a hill of beans unless we recognize that either they are local councils that must be submitted to the wisdom of antiquity and the wider church (bye bye WO), or we don’t give a fig for antiquity and the wider church (hello sectarianism).

Well, I think in fact that women's ordination is a better vehicle for examining this, but I that neither IRNS nor Al is going like my response (nor for that matter will William Tighe). Here the problem is going to be in that phrase, "submitted to the wisdom of antiquity and the wider church". Submitted, yes; but if one by this means real intellectual interaction and not mere obedience, such submissions come with the proviso that the responses to such submissions are subject to criticism. Recourse to infallibility is a bad response, as I find myself repeating over and over.

Now, I am in general loathe to invoke Post-Modernism, that Spirit of the Age. But as far as nature of men and women are concerned, it's bloody obvious that answers phrased as universals are not working right now. Women and men are universally different, all right, but when it comes to an individual man and an individual woman, it all seems to collapse into platitudes on the one hand, and the mechanics of specific human relationships on the other. The conventional, religion-justified statements about the rightful positions of men and women in society have simply crumbled to dust in a world of two-income professionals and working single mothers and women as CEOs. When the feminists rail at the hypocrisy of traditionalist men on this, they have them dead to rights. On the other hand, it is also quite clear that the feminists don't have a good grip on the complementarity of the sexes. But in any case, we live in a world where the kind of traditional arguments made about the subsidiarity of women only work in religion, and only where they can't be criticized. The same arguments simply do not work anymore in the real world-- or rather, they only "work" when those who make them are in no danger of having to realize them in practice.

It is of course dangerous to invoke the World as a critic of the Church. But it is self-serving to utterly deny such criticism. The truth, once the posturing dies down, is extremely simple, and extremely difficult. The truth is that the working out of church teachings happens in the world, and that it is subject to all the pressures of sin, the devil, and human frailty as any other kind of discourse. It's a simple truth; but it means that working out answers is supremely hard. And it means that we have to live with the certainty that some of the answers won't hold up in the long run.

Anglicanism has always been about working out theology in this way. And sometimes, like now for instance, it simply doesn't work. But I for one cannot subscribe to the error of the magical, infallible church. And eventually even the magically infallible churches are going to succumb, I believe, to the dissonance between teaching and reality.

It's Not the Theological Agreement That Matters

2007-05-14T18:00:00.000-04:00

Over in Dylan's Grace Notes (via Fr. Jake) we have an invitation to discuss "a list of points on which I think I and many 'progressives' agree with the vast majority of 'reasserters.'" I don't see any significant problems with the original list of points, though I would certainly throw in adherence to the Nicene Creed as a point of agreement.

But there is another point about which there is agreement, and this point is what is creating the battle: Moral teaching is a central purpose of the church. Certainly both, um, factions believe this. On The Issue That Is Driving This, they are committed to teaching some moral position. If there is much of a difference, it's that the progressives are more sanguine about their ability to pass judgement on the world and to effect change.

And that leads to still another point of agreement, and the one that really enables the conflict: It's all about power and politics-- especially church power and therefore church politics. The current conflict is very much about using the church as a locus of power in an attempt to change the moral climate of the nation, if not the world.

BUT there are, for instance, feminist theologians who want to play with the God language to support the moral imperative of women's rights. Here we run into the most serious problem: the separation between systematic and moral theology cannot be maintained. So it's questionable whether points of agreement are going to persist, or (for instance) whether the social liberals are going to be able to resist the demands to abandon Nicene orthodoxy as being, well, immoral. It seems to me that they are going to find it difficult to do so.

The Frustrating Wait

2007-05-01T13:41:00.000-04:00

I was going to post something over Easter weekend, when so many were piously abstaining. Really, I was. But singing at four out of six services put paid to that. And since then, I've found a level of detatchment that should make my rector happy, because I've almost stopped caring what happens to the Episcopal Church.

Or rather, I've given up hope that it will come to anything other than a bad end. Perhaps away from the centers of power it will survive, but right now it seems destined to become the perfected apotheosis of upper middle class selfrighteousness. In the meantime, we await the next crisis, helpless to make any difference.

A Prayer Not Worth Praying

2007-04-04T09:09:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the two good things I can see about the "non-theistic prayer" supplied by the Rev. Dr. Charles Bidwell are that (a) he isn't one of ours (acto his website, he is in the Metropolitan Community Church), and that (b) this schlock is two years old. In fact, I'm wondering where Chris Johnson dug this stuff up from, because on one level it would seem to be pretty unimportant stuff. Liturgical crud is bad enough in our own church without having to borrow trouble from someone else. And while I'm not sure that a poll of Episcopal Divinity School faculty would result in retention of the Nicene Creed, the situation elsewhere is hardly so dire.

That said, I have to agree with Brad Drell that this is awful, self-ratifying, arrogant crap. Faced with "petitions" such as this:

We work for these changes in our lives and in the lives of others in the spirit of Jesus who cared for all those who were unjustly treated or oppressed.

... all I can says is, "you will, will you?" This drivel (for the writing is dreadful) is not for the poor, the ill, or the powerless; it is a credo for those who have health, wealth, status and power at their disposal. Or at least, those who feel they merit all of these, by virtue of their virtuous position. In short, it's for the overly-educated upper middle class, especially academicians and clerics. It's not something I can see a barber or sales clerk or ditch digger "praying".

I also wonder, reading this sort of stuff, where the rest of 20th century theology went to. Back in the '70s the Euro-American postwar (Great Patriotic or Vietnam, take your pick) angst was still strong. Now twenty-plus years later, the whole sense of sin that motivated those earlier atheisms has faded away, and we are left with people like this who can't kick the religion habit.

I suppose there's some reason to worry that the rank intellectual snobbery of this kind of talk will appeal to seminary professors. But I'm not too worried. The whole thought of having to stand up in church and say this thing is enough to dissuade all but the very silly.

Nobody Expects the Anglican Inquisition

2007-03-22T21:59:00.000-04:00

Eddie Izzard explains our problems:

(and dressed like a bit part from an old Dr. Who episode at that)

The ex-Anglican Obsession

2007-03-22T08:55:00.000-04:00

It seems almost inevitable that Anglican priests who depart for Rome or Constantinople start to harp on ecclesiology. This time it is Fr. Stephen Freeman, whose post The Problem of Church was brought to my attention in All Too Common, where the following passage is quoted:

Of course, all of that latter sentiment is delusion. It is only my imaginary relationship with Christ (if the Church is invisible it is little more than imaginary). It is the visible character of the Church, and the possibility of boundary (everything visible has some boundary) that creates the “problem.”

For if there is a boundary, then someone is not within the Church. If there is a boundary then you can be inside it or you can be outside of it. And there is the problem. Who says where the boundaries are to be set?

As far as any man is concerned, the important thing is to be inside it. And for any man who does not doubt his current affiliation, the answer seems inevitably to be, "Where I am, there is the church." But the not-at-all subtle subtext of the ex-Anglicans seems to be to definitively put the Episcopal Church in particular outside the church; the principle of the moment would appear to be, "where I came from, there is not the church."

Now, I am certainly among the unhappy to whom these appeals are directed. Anyone with even vaguely orthodox views has to feel some discomfort with the theological winds that blow through Anglicanism these days. But the claims of definite boundaries are self-evidently problematic. It is the catholic faith that the church is, in some senses, invisible, so that it isn't utterly without reason that its visible component might not be utterly identifiably; and the reality is that it is not immediately identifiable, or else there wouldn't be so much controversy surrounding its identification. In another sense, the church is manifestly visible, even if only in the steeples and towers I pass as I drive by. And while I know that India exists, as testified to by maps and some of my officemates, I don't think its existence is made imaginary by the ongoing dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir.

The fact of ecclesiological dispute is not as easily brushed off as this. A thousand years of East/West schism and five hundred years of Protestantism are ample evidence that the question cannot be reasonably resolved. It is obvious both that reason is necessary, and that reason is insufficient. And it's also just as obvious that personal judgement is all over this issue, contrary to frequent assertion. The driving force for all of this is personal dissonance with the teachings of (in this case) authorities within the Episcopal Church. There are several reasons why I don't come up with the same answer, but one of them is that I have plenty of theological dissonance with the Roman Catholic Church. There seems to be no recourse to getting past that other than more argument (especially since I have for the most part found the RC church to be sacramentally repugnant), so somewhere along the line, the arguments have to work as arguments. And since they aren't working, I would have to conclude that Catholicism's insistence on an absence of theological defect is in fact itself a defect-- which leaves me an Anglican.

The problem with Orthodoxy is more subtle, but runs far deeper. Let me return to where I started: that we are particularly hearing from ex-Anglican priests about this. I cannot but understand this as Orthodox and Catholic bishops taking advantage of priests which Anglicanism has formed, however much either church denies the legitimacy of Anglican orders. It's particularly contradictory in the Roman case, seeing how may of these priests could not have become so had they not already been Anglican "phony" priests. But at any rate, the appeal here is from one churchman to another. And that's a problem, because it is in essence saying that what I'm missing isn't anything as objective as obedience to Christian moral teaching. No, what I'm missing is the magic pixie dust of sacramental validity. And that's a huge problem, because the only way to maintain that position is to deny the relevance of personal experience. Fr. Freeman starts to slide into this, when he comments,

One’s personal history is important, but in the larger scheme it’s very little for us to go on, except for the fact that you cannot live someone else’s history.

But crucially this statement is untrue, because we are all, in essence, trying to live out the personal history of the original apostles as literal witnesses to the ressurection. Accepting it all uncritically is one thing, but to suggest that it can all be rejected equally uncritically is to invite rejection of the Christian witness. All of these appeals to ecclesiology, as they are directed to me, rely on my status as a faithful Anglican. And if my Anglicanism is so invalid, then such appeals strike me as illegitimate. It's the flip side of Al Kimel's "parasite" remark: Orthodoxy and Catholicism become parasites on Anglicanism's apparent power to produce half- or three-quarters-formed Christians.

I can contemplate the day when I may have to abandon the Episcopal Church, and it will be a day of loss indeed for me if or when it comes. But should it come, honesty will prevent me denying the reality of my former Anglican faith. I will never in good conscience be able to say, "I was never a Christian before".

Another Look at Catholicity and Reason

2007-03-05T14:03:00.000-05:00

In tracing back a bit further from the posts which prompted my just-previous entry, I found a post by Fr. WB in his blog in response to a passage from Alexei Khomiakov discussing Anglican legitimacy. I find myself largely in agreement, but I think there is one point which calls for further elaboration.

A point which is constantly misunderstood about the Anglican scripture/tradition/reason triad is that it is intended as a prescription. Well, it is, I suppose, in the sense that one ought to be aware of it: but it is more fundamentally descriptive. It is simply the way that everyone does theology, whether or not they claim otherwise. It is inarguably true of the Roman theological process, whose reference to the three components is evident to anyone. It's also true of low "bible-only" Protestants who can be seen to appeal to their own traditions and their own reasoning.

There is no getting the reasoning out of theology. And while I'm at it, Eastern snipes at the West for using "Hellenistic" reasoning is complete bullhockey. Yeah, Aristotle was dead wrong about natural science and how to go about it, but the basic notion that there are rules of proper thinking and that arguments can be tested against procedure is simply inassailable. Eastern theologians use that Hellenistic reasoning too-- indeed, as is the rule where the Anglican triad is denounced, they are all the more bound by it because they refuse to see that it is in every sentence they utter. (The Palamite "energies/essence" distinction is an object example of such bondage.) And if reasoning is everywhere in theology, then personal judgement is also everywhere-- not in the degenerate sense of someone sitting in their room and trying to work everything out without consultation, but in the much more pervasive sense of propositions requiring assent. For Roman loyalists, perhaps such assent is easy-- though as someone pointed out elsewhere, Roman Catholics as a rule have found difficulty in assenting to Humane Vitae. For someone who is not yet a Roman (or Eastern) loyalist, there's no substitute for presentation of a sound argument to which the potential convert can assent through his own judgement-- or perhaps reaching his reason through some route which does not involve theological propositions, but that's not the route of choice here.

In all of this, the Vincentian canon helps, but in the wrong way. The typical sectarian usage by Roman or Eastern correspondents is so painfully tendentious as to not bear rehashing. And obviously the expansion to include everyone who ever called themselves a Christian is hopeless: there's simply not enough commonality, especially if you include people like Spong in the mix. But what the canon does tell a person is that there's more to theology than just convincing onesself. It has to fit into the bigger theological picture, and especially into the greater community, and especially into the historical picture. And not just historically, but into the future. "At all times and places" means that one has to keep convincing people that a proposition is true, and if that conviction fails, the proposition is called into question. I don't think that the Southern Baptists get to trump Catholic positions, but to state that the Catholic Church doesn't even have to answer SBC objections satisfactorily (which is to say, reasonably) is state an absurdity.

In the long haul, theology objectively looks like many other sciences which have run aground on the shoals too much "reasoning" and not enough knowledge. If it were otherwise, the divisions wouldn't be as extreme; as it is, I can't justify the kind of absolute commitments demanded by Rome or the East on the basis of theological proposition alone.

Serial Catholicity

2007-03-01T09:08:00.000-05:00

Over in All Too Common we have a little essay by Andrew Bartus: Why Should Anglicans Accept Roman Ecclesiology?, addressing a post by Al Kimel on Parasitic Catholicism. "Catholicism" is really not the right word here anyway, because the problem point is catholicity; as Bartus points out, the "parasite" problem plagues Catholicism with respect to Orthodoxy in the same way that Anglicans are "parasites" to Catholicism. "Parasite" is also a problem word when Rome is skimming off the priests which Canterbury (or, to stretch the point, Mt. St. Albans) has made.

I'm not an Anglo-Catholic, so my analysis of the situation is going to go a bit further afield than Bartus's. I not only tolerate but must assert more difference from Rome than he would accept on his own. But at any rate my views are based more on the empirical psychology of the matter, and how this interacts with human nature as the church teaches.

I've been wont to say that human sinfulness is the one empirically verifiable doctrine of the church. Anyone, Christian or not, can see that people are prone to sinning. When it comes to theology, sin leads people to bad arguments, and to defend bad arguments. Now, those who do not consider a theological question are like Adam and Eve in the garden; but we here have tasted the forbidden fruit of theology, and for better or worse have to live with the descernment that is now required of us. And this is particularly obvious in ecclesiology. A child is raised in a church, and unless he is unusually rebellious (or perhaps, if the church is unusually vile) he simply accepts the legitimacy of that church. And if he is educated far enough, he may simply accept the official ecclesiology of that church on authority. This discussion isn't for those people, except to cast doubt upon them and force them to take up the problems of theology. Personally, I think it is cruel to rattle these people in their faith, but again, that is beside the point.

What is not beside the point, however, is that all this takes place in the context of theological strife in Anglicanism. For those of us who are theologically inclined, it is natural to resolve the question of where to go to church through a theological judgement. And as it must in the end be made as one's own judgement, there is no way to get "private judgement" out of the picture-- at least not as Anglicans have historically understood it (and in fact, as it is).

Way down in the comments on All Too Common, Al makes the claim that Roman ecclesiology is more "pneumatic" and "sacramental" than "juridical". I find this utterly unconvincing-- even counter-productive-- as far as inducing me to swim the Tiber. I would understand the first two terms to mean that I go to church where I find the Spirit and the sacraments-- and since I found Him and them in an Anglican chapel, that puts paid on that, even if that very place be something of "a bare ruined choir" in this latter day. The problem, all too obviously, is that objectively we fail to see, in the large, where the Spirit and the sacraments are. If we could, then the dispute would disappear. As it is the Spirit is too hidden, or too infrequently revealed; or sin clouds our vision too far. But in all cases it behooves me to take that seriously and start from the assumption that Roman vision is just as obscured as any other, until evidence proves otherwise. Likewise, theological reasoning is subject to all the demands of ordinary reasoning; invocation of infallibility is tantamount to an admission of inadequate arguments.

It doesn't bother me that Anglicanism is in some sense derivative of Catholicism; but the problem remains that I cannot go to church in an RC church. If nothing else, the frailties of my nature hamper my worship in the vast sea of liturgical badness and crappy preaching that is the church around here. (And what really irks me is that people keep trying to reproduce this badness in my chuurch.) And there's too much bad theology, which at least, as a Protestant, I haven't yet been made to swear fealty to in my own church. And only an idiot or a radical progressive would say that PECUSA is without its worse problems in the theology department. I will not, however, assign consent to loyalty. Of any person I will hold that they believe what they themselves believe, and not what membership in any organization would hold them believe. In any case, all those ex-Anglicans know perfectly well that I cannot be held to believe what Jack Spong (heaven forbid!) writes in his tendentious tomes.

And as a layman, likely doomed to remain so forever, I have an actual issue which none of the clerics and proto-clerics have: I can't do anything about the badness of church. The clerical re-ordinands, frankly, have a lot more leeway to talk about ecclesiology than I do, because whether they take their ordination, they have power to make church happen as they feel is right. I don't, and when I'm stuck with a dog of a priest, my only recourse is to shop for a better parish.

And that's really what this is all about: church shopping. The only dispute is about the terms, and again we are right back at the problem that there isn't consensus about what the right approach is. No agreement suggests, if not implies, that nobody really knows. But if a layman does this on the basis of theological correctness, he can always find someone who will tell him that wherevent he is now isn't "really" Catholic, and that he needs to move to a genuinely correct group. And thus the Orthodox forums are littered with serial Cyprianists who move from one true church to another, until they are completely cracked.

The reverse of church shopping is skimming. After the things I've said, I don't know if any of the online Catholics would want me in their parish. Plenty of others would, if only for my voice. I have to wonder what would happen to around here if the Anglican crack-up were to drive large numbers of ordinary central churchmen into RC parishes. I expect they would be out in short order, if they even made it that far, because they would find that ecclessiological correctness wouldn't be enough.

Am I Conventional?

2007-02-22T22:03:00.000-05:00

Do I go to a conventional church? When we I started, I didn't think so.

I can hardly remember those ancient days when men wore suits and women their best clothes of a Sunday morning. So much nonsense has been written about the '60s, as though the old world passed away with the first Mercury launch; but the truth was that in almost any place as much of the '40s survived and lived on for decades more. But by my day the men's hat was gone, and the woman's hat was disappearing fast in white culture. But I suppose in most respects my parents' Presbyterian congregation was everything the stereotype of "conventional" church promises-- except for the Sicilian pastor.

But then I went off to boarding school. Perhaps in its way it was conventional for an Episcopalian school; today, it is perhaps much more so, though the convention has changed greatly over the years. But to me it was anything but, and not just because it wasn't a lot like my old church. Indeed, it took some two years for me to become comfortable with it.

When I came home from high school, I choose my parish "conventionally": I looked up the phone number in the yellow pages and called to see what time servics were. Such a commitment is perhaps now unconventional, and now, twenty-five years, two parishes, three interims, and five rectors after high school, it is perhaps only some misbegotten loyalty that keeps me where I am. We seem to follow the local convention of a guitar service around 9 and a "traditional" service at 11, and frankly, guitars in church are not my thing; I'm not a pep rally kind of person. But the convention now is that young people and young kids are supposed to go to the "contemporary" service, and the gray hairs go to the "traditional" service., and never mind that "contemporary" really means "20 years ago" or more.

So I'm having a big problem with the word "conventional", because as far as I can see pretty much any kind of church service, at this point, follows some sort of convention. I don't think we can get at the badness of bad church on these terms.

Don't "Challenge the Culture"

2007-01-10T21:20:00.000-05:00

By way of The Living Church we have this bit of advice from a missive by John Martiner, the just-retired rector of Christ Church, Christiana Hundred, Del.:

Finally, a rector must challenge the culture. OK, this is a hard one to understand. Everyone wants a rector who “understands us.” On the other hand, a rector who just fits in and blesses the status quo, in my opinion, is not doing the job.

On my worst days, I think, "Only a priest could write such nonsense." Every new rector comes in, and thinks, "boy, is there a lot about this parish I need to whip into shape." In spite of the supposed power of altar guilds, it seems to me that any reasonably determined priest can overcome it; and the rest of the congregation is pretty much powerless, except that the priest is willing to listen. It is not a situation that is conducive to clerical humility, and a rector who believes that shaking things up is of itself a good thing is predestined to be largely a destructive force.

Tradition is anamnesis, and anamnesis is central to Christian worship. While tradition cannot be above criticism, where tradition is held to be an impediment, connection with the past is eroded. Continual agitation is, in the end, essentially destructive; what is torn out and tossed away is not so easily recreated when the next rector finds it wanted. I despise and detest the dishonest language of opposing "traditional" with "contemporary" when talking about liturgy, and when I hear a "change" sermon, I wonder what the rector is planning to break this time. A change is good, or it is bad, and only in its own right; an attitude that values Change is an attitude that opposes stability. It is often said that growth requires change, but even a tree that sends up shoots each time it is cut down will eventually succumb out of exhaustion. In truth, it is not growth that requires change, but change which arises out of growth; change that is not growth is often enough change which growth must overcome.

One of the things I have found relaxing about having supply priests is that they, as a rule, accept that they don't have to be disruptive. I remember back in the days when I was acolyte master speaking with one of them before the service and having him tell me to direct him as to how things were done. It would be a better church if more rectors had the same attitude.

The Advent Puritans

2006-12-05T09:18:00.000-05:00

For some reason, it has become the thing to do this year to harangue one's fellow Christians for paying attention to Christmas before, well, Christmas. We are not taking Advent seriously, we are told. This has gotten folded into the standard lecture about the overcommercialization of Christmas, to the point of practically accusing us of being traitors to our faith if we do any shopping. And heaven forbid we should sing a carol out of season.

I have a picture of a parade of assorted clerics carrying signs through the mall saying "NO CHRISTMAS YET". The puritanism of this has gotten out of hand, more so than the commercialism. It is not meet that we should prepare for the Nativity by being so crabby about it.

A Proper Concern for Doctrine II

2006-11-16T09:06:00.000-05:00

One of the things that bugs me about Brian McLaren is that, like a lot of people coming out of the evangelical wing, he seems awfully oblivious to mainline Christianity and its travails. So here we have an exchange bouncing around the blogosphere, as quoted in Leaving Munster:

I remember hearing Brian Mclaren talk a few years ago about an interview he' d given at a conference. I believe it was with Dallas Willard and they were discussing why a trip to your average bookshop would reveal a great upsurge of interest in Buddhism and New Age, but a sharp disinterest with Christianity.
Willard's response was simple and - it seems to me - spot on: "Christianity is a set of doctrines, whilst Buddhism offers a way of life."

Now, this is a platitudinous misrepresentation of Buddhism in its native lands. Anyone who has read much about modern Japanese culture has run across the aphorism that "the Japanese are born Shinto and die Buddhist." Beneath that is a deeper truth: that a buddhist "way of life" is the fartherest thing from their minds. The Japanese are the only modern true pagans left, and religion as westerners tend to see it is just not part of their lives. There is nothing systematic about it; their way of life is Japanese first, and Shinto and Buddhist observances are simply subsidiary parts of that life, put on and off like (and for that matter as) ceremonial clothing.

And it's not at all irrelevant that, in the USA, Buddhism tends to get lumped with "spirituality" while Christianity gets lumped with "religion". The latter word suggests something ritualistic, to be sure; but it also suggests something systematic and even life-encompassing. "Spirituality" suggests dabbling and a lifestyle-accessory attitude.

The thing is that mainline Christianity has already had it out with the "doctrine" matter, mostly to a bad end. It's not really the doctrines of Christianity that are the problem. The papers like to claim that it is, but that's because they need to controversy to have something to cover, and because it makes them look smart when they really don't get religion. The big problem is that Christianity IS all-encompassing and sets out a way of life-- which people don't want to follow! The "solution" in the West was to make all sorts of distinction between Church and State and what-have-you, leading in Europe to the collapse of moral values that was WW II, and in the US to a corrupt bargain between Church and Business which Business gradually reneged on anyway. Throughout this there was always a mainline stream of objection; but since the western wolrd these days seems to be largely made up of rebellious children, the last thing anyone wanted was a church that told them what to do. So this fiction was made up of a "doctrine-only" Christianity, something that never ever existed and doesn't exist now.

Except....

It did exist to a degree in American fundagelical Christianity, because there the Church-Business bargain held. And because it held, it led to corruption, personal in the case of various now more-or-less fallen church leaders, but also more systematic. The US is the locus of the "sex is the only form of immorality" Christian ethics, even though mainline liberals had been criticizing business (lack of) ethics for decades.

Now, bookstores are stocked along strange reasons, as might be seen in my previous articles on bible buying. Christian bookstores and book services eat a lot of the Christian book market. But I suspect that, at the local Borders anyway, a lot of the wierdness can be traced to bookstores being heavily staffed by the kind of people who do buy into the spirituality as lifestyle accessory ethos.

Whch theologian are you?

2006-09-17T22:38:00.000-04:00

On of them-there quiz thingies....

You scored as Anselm. Anselm is the outstanding theologian of the medieval period.He sees man's primary problem as having failed to render unto God what we owe him, so God becomes man in Christ and gives God what he is due. You should read 'Cur Deus Homo?'

Anselm

87%

John Calvin

60%

Karl Barth

60%

Martin Luther

60%

Charles Finney

53%

Augustine

53%

J�rgen Moltmann

47%

Jonathan Edwards

33%

Friedrich Schleiermacher

33%

Paul Tillich

27%

Which theologian are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Bible Oddity II

2006-09-16T10:56:00.000-04:00

OK, here's is where it gets wierd.

I checked out a Barnes & Noble, for completeness' sake. They hardly had a bible section, though the store was at least as big as the Books-a-Million I visited. (To be fair, a large section was taken up by a coffee shop.) The only Catholic bible they had was an RSV Catholic Edition (how ironic), and they had a spread of NIV and NLT and KJV and NKJV. That was about it. Clearly their heart was not in their religion section.

Before that, however, I visited the Potomac Adventist Book & Health Food Store. This is a "big box" store for SDAs, complete with a bronze statue of Jesus washing Peter's feet on the sidewalk out front. As you might guess, they have a HUGE bible section. They have LOTS of KJV editions, and NKJV, and all the other big commercial versions (though they don't push the NIV as much). But they also have all the traditional modern "liberal" translations (except maybe the NAB, now that I think about it). JB, NJB, Goodspeed, Moffatt, NRSV, REB (disguised as the Oxford Annotated Bible). They had the KJV apocrypha; they had the NASB; they had Lamsa's Peshitta; they had the JPS Tanakh; and they had a slew of parallel and bog-literal versions I'd never heard of.

So here we are at a conservative Christian bookstore, and it's the only place (other than a trip downtown to the shrine or the National Cathedral) to get the translations favored by liberals. THe irony is thundering.

Bible Buying Oddity

2006-09-05T13:53:00.000-04:00

So here I am at Borders, and out of curiosity I drift over to the bible section. And what I find is really quite surprising.

If you wanted to buy a copy of the RSV, you would have been out of luck; they didn't have it. And they had a single edition/copy of the NRSV. Jerusalem Bible? They didn't have it, nor the newer edition either. New English/Revised English? Ditto. NASB? Nope. Today's English? I don't think so.

So what did they they have? Well, they had a few oddities, such as a copy of the Lamsa translation of the Peshitta. They had a fair number of New American Bible editions. But mostly what they had were King James, New King James, New International, and New Living Bible. Oh, and the English Standard Version, which, if you haven't run across it before, is a recent "conservative" redaction of the RSV.

Travelling over to Books-a-Million, I found a somewhat more restricted selection, plus the Holman Christian Standard Bible in various versions. It is apparently an attempt to produce an inerrantist formal equivalence translation (in other words, to replace the NIV, whose dynamic equivalence model ended up being criticized by almost everyone).

For an Episcopalian, the situation is passing strange. We have a canonically designated list of translations we can use, and hardly any of the bibles available at these general interest bookstores are on it. Of the current list, only the KJV, NAB, and NIV are (apparently) readily available, which is particularly an issue since the RSV is the reference version of scripture readings. So what we have is a very archaic Anglican bible, a heavily criticized RC bible (which is particular a problem because of the many textual reorderings), and a heavily criticized fundamentalist bible.

But even more interesting is what this says about what they think the bible market looks like. Now, some of this is surely distorted by publisher marketing issues. The Holman and the ESV are new translations; the NLT and NKJV and Holman are owned by specific publishers. But even so, what we see is a mass market which, with the exception of the Catholic NAB, is completely occupied by theologically conservative translations. From a strictly textual or translational perspective, they are not all conservative; the Holman, for instance, uses a modern textual basis, and the NLT is paraphrastic. But they are all connected to radically conservative Protestant groups.

What this would appear to say is that mainline Protestants are not an important bible market anymore-- or if they are, that they can be satified by strictly ceremonial copies of the KJV. You can't buy the preferred mainline versions in a regular bookstore. (I'm tempted to venture down to the Adventist bookstore, just to see.) Now, I haven't been to a Barnes & Noble, nor have I been to a variety of Borders shops. And who knows, maybe in a different city or state I might see something less odd. The two stores I did visit, however, are in two quite different communities.

And I also am not sure how long things have been this way. I haven't bought a bible in years, not because I don't own plenty (I have something like twelve different translations), but because I've come to rely on on-line bibles, except for liturgical use. For that I use my trusty RSV Common Bible, which I've had for a long time.

Sowing the seeds of change

2006-07-10T16:54:00.000-04:00

The Deconstruction of Liberal Christianity by Theo Hobson from The Guardian: comment is free