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

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

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

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

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

Tip to A conservative blog for peace:

Religious Tolerance and the Common Good as appeared in First Things

The Catastrophic Model of the Church

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

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

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

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

Eddie Izzard explains our problems:



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

The ex-Anglican Obsession

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

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

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?

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"

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

Think of the Starving Children in India

The latest spin in the campaign to demonize the opposition seems to be this one, courtesy of the PB-to-be:

But it seems to me that the shame in all of this is that we’re being diverted from feeding people who are starving, and treating people with AIDS, and malaria and tuberculosis, and providing basic healthcare for children who are suffering in other parts of the world, because we can’t get get away from bickering about these issues. They are certainly important, but they’re not the most important thing in the lives of the whole world.

She must really think we are stupid.

The truth seems to be that she thinks that bending the church to the will of its homosexuals is AS important as working for adequate food, shelter, healthcare, etc., because she and her allies are willing to keep the church in a froth over it. In fact, I'll take a step further: it's MORE important in her scheme to gain and retain control over church institutions in order to put them in the service of achieving homosexual objectives. If she were really serious about the priorities she (and Fr. Jake, for that matter) keep bringing up, she would give up the fight, reconvene General Convention, and preside over the division of the church. That way both sides could have their sexuality status quo, and they could get on with the charity (and political arm-twisting of course) that she claims to be their basic work.

But instead the new line is that rebellious dioceses and parishes will be subdued and put to the work of the liberal establishment. It's OK for (again I turn to the Fr. Jakites) us to rebel against our British overseers, but not for those dissident conservatives to rebel against the "heresy" of the PB-to-be. So now more money is going to be spent by the national church to crush the rebellion, instead of letting the rebels leave and giving that money to the poor. The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty stinks. When 815 is abandoned in favor of Minot, North Dakota, when Mt. St. Albans is sold to the Baptists for a tidy sum and the proceeds all sent to Africa, when St. John the Divine is converted into low-cost housing, then I'll take this seriously.

{Tip to titusonenine)

R-E-S-T-R-A-I-N-T

(With apologies to Aretha)

Jim Naughton, who seems to have signed up to be the Episcopal Diocese of Washington's Canon Spinmeister, tries his hand at Rowan Williams's "Reflection" on the Anglican communion:

As I read the archbishop, he, like many others, is suggesting that the struggle in the Anglican Communion is not about homosexuality but about how we make decisions in concert. To me that is similar to saying that the American Civil War was not about slavery but about states' rights. Both arguments allow you to ignore sins against humanity while you debate the nature of polity.

Well, perhaps Naughton ought to reflect a minute as to who the despot is in "Maryland, My Maryland". Casting John Chane as Abraham Lincoln might work within the diocese-- after all, look at how things went under Jane Dixon-- but in the communion as a whole, it isn't going to fly.

But perhaps Cantuar is supposed to stand in for the Tyrant Lincoln. Well, then perhaps the War of Northern Agression, the War Between the States, the War to Free the Slaves might then be a better analogue-- but for one fact. Cantuar is actually capable of no tyranny over PECUSA. He can expel us from the club, but he cannot do more than that.

And it is more than a little disingenious to suggest that homosexuality is the only issue presented by PECUSA. After thirty years, ordination of women is not universally accepted in the communion. What with the "Mother Jesus" sermon (which, coupled with Jefferts Schori's address to the deputies, gave us the repugnant image of Jesus giving birth to a montrous PECUSA), we have the next crisis: first sacraments, then morality, and next the language of theology itself. Williams's reflection fairly hammers on this point: that the succession of American adventures is in its essence a repudiation of conciliarity, and that therefore it's not at all unreasonable to deny the Americans a place at council.

There are in fact two struggles going on. At the moment, statements from Canterbury are but rumors of war. The bigger problem for the bishop of Washington is that his erstwhile liberal allies have (perhaps) reneged, and are choosing conciliarity over conscience. That's the real purpose of Naughton's statement: to pressure (say) the Bishop of Maryland to give consent if and when the Diocese of Newark or some other diocese elects the next homosexual bishop. If we are casting roles in the Late Unpleasantness, it's as easy to cast Chane as Leonidas Polk, especially considering the language of rebellion I hear from his corner. Over on Fr. Jake the war of choice is that of 1776, with Williams as, well, the British; I guess they prefer to cast GC as the Continental Congress. So-- has anyone seen Richard Henry Lee recently? Or would the troops of Chane's diocese rather fire on Ft. Pitt-- er, Ft. Sumner?

Electing Schori

Let me say that I don't have any chromosomal issues with the Rt. Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori. She's not whom I would pick for the job, male or female, and if I were to pick a woman, it would probably be the Rev. Fleming Rutledge, who is probably the female cleric in PECUSA who is least acceptable to those who voted for Schori (or practically anyone else, for that matter). I mean, how many priests of either sex in the country appear in Geneva bands?

I don't doubt that Bp. Schori brings some considerable gifts to her new position. But she also brings considerable symbolism. At 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. I suppose I can sigh with the flounder and the fisherman when this turns out not be enough, and it must be that the Archbishop of Canterbury, and then the Pope, and the God in His/Her/Its/Their heaven must be a woman, but I personally think Presiding Bishop is enough of an aspiration for any Episcopalian.

The problem end is epitomized by this spin from Jim Naughton:

I don't know how the politics of this is going to shake out in the Anglican Communion yet. On the one hand, this is another "first" from the Episcopal Church, and maybe that won't be well received. On the other hand, the hand I favor, it now becomes clear that attacking the Church that deals fairly with gays and lesbians also means attacking the Church that deals fairly with women. The cause of the small, vulnerable gay population is now linked to the large and much less vulnerable female population.

That's one way to put it. But here's a better one: Schori's election is very much about rubbing it in the rest of the communion's faces that the leaders of PECUSA are going to do what they want, and to hell with everyone else. PECUSA is already the church whose female bishops represent a problem for the rest of the communion, and a problem which somehow has managed to remain dormant through the last Lambeth conference. Now, in the midst of a severe strain over the one issue, the other issue has been raised again.

Naughton has it exactly backwards. In the current context, Schori's election has linked the women to homosexuality, and not the other direction. The position of women in the communion has been weakened, not strengthened, because the coupling of the two issues has given conservative, moderates, and even some liberals a very strong reason to chuck us out of the communion. The message is that we are willful and don't care about the consequenceds for anyone else, and are in general impossible to live with. Everything that Rowan Williams and his emmissaries have said over the past few months indicates an increasing frustration with PECUSA. And on the other hand, I'm hearing increasing resentment from the liberal vanguard that Cantuar dares even to express an opinion, however veiled. Meanwhile, there are rumblings from the center, with Bp. Peter "Schism is worse than heresy" Lee of Virginia propsing a moratorium on such extreme terms that I can only read this as realization that (a) the current course is going to get us thrown out of the communion, and that (b) he values communion unity higher than PECUSA unity.

That last evaluation will destroy the denomination, or at the very least cleave it in two. Fudge is becoming increasingly difficult to make; and for that, too, perhaps we can thank Schori's electors.

My prayers for you, Bp. Schori. You are going to need all the Divine Help you can get.

Past My "Pray By" Date

I've tried not to afflict anyone who still bothers to read this with too much about the Sausage Factory-- er, the PECUSA General Convention now underway. But then I read (courtesy of T19) this ENS story about resolution D061 "Pastoral Plan to Revise the Book of Common Prayer".

The resolution itself seems almost innocuous:

Resolved, the House of _____ concurring, That the 75th General Convention direct the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music to present to the 76th General Convention a pastoral plan for the future revision of the Book of Common Prayer.

That sounds like good idea, you might say. Well, here's the real message of the resolution:

“Our prayer book is already outdated and it is hard for my generation to relate to everything in it,” said a youth, identified only as Hannah, from Northern California.

and

The Rev. Stephanie Speller, 34, of Boston, also testified at the Friday hearing that she uses alternative resources for her diverse congregation. Our diversity “is a miracle of God’s grace, but…where people enter church on Sunday morning they may see a multicultural congregation but what they hear is all European American,” said Speller, whose congregation at St. Paul’s Cathedral includes African Caribbean, African, African American, Chinese, Latino and Anglo parishioners.

Speller added, “After awhile you begin to feel like the marginal voices are only found in the marginal text; at what point do those voices come to the center?”

Really? Thirty years of folk masses and clown masses and hip-hop masses and rave masses, and it's only now we've discovered that the prayer book is getting in the way?

I wish I could say that it was astonishing to hear this stuff, but it seems that the downfall of the Episcopal Church is going lie not in sex, but in the overwhelming urge to demolish the one thing that gave us any unity: the Book of Common Prayer. Thus it was drearily unsurprising that convention liturgies read anything but "it is right to give him thanks and praise"; some sullen, hidden vein of traditionalism in me want to say that it is their own damn fault for getting rid of the certified patriarchy-free response used from 1549 to 1928.

But let's go back to that word:

PATRIARCHY

I have to join with those who question the judgement of young adults who WANT to go to church conventions. Young people who would rather inflict all that bloviation on themselves, when they could be out copulating or tipping cows or doing almost anything else, surely need to reexamine their priorities. That dreary work should be left to their tired and jaded elders, who have already put decades of office work and parenting under their belts. But they point to what seems to be a very common belief: that church must be made juvenile in order for it to survive.

That's the real message of all the clown/rave/hip-hop/folk masses. And while I am not a Rite I partisan, there are times when Rite II retreats from a clean, modern language into childishness. But the problem with this is that (duh) people grow up. I did so prematurely, I suppose. I went to an Episcopal boarding school with a very high (in the church sense) standard of ritual, so all the "relevant" mid-week services we were sentenced to produce seemed impossibly dated once I set foot in college. (Indeed, the whole "hold hands around the altar" communion schtick of the chaplaincy seemed, in 1978, to be an embarrassing hangover of the '60s. And it's still with us.)

And here it is, thirty years later, and in a year I'll have a son in high school. And I think of those young women at general convention, and I wonder whether a service for their teenage children will be keeping them in church when I'm a white-haired elder. And my thirteen year old son, sitting next to me, informs me that he does not think that the BCP is hard to understand. Of course, his throwback of a father has already corrupted him.

Rev. Speller's words fly in the face of decades of Anglican practice. The BCP liturgy, unbowdlerized and even unmodernized, has proven adaptable to services from church camp eucharists to evensong of the highest music standard.

The last thing the church needs is to even think of revising the prayer book. There are certainly changes which ought to be made, but now is not the time.

It's an Episcopal Church, Isn't It?

So here we have Questioning Christian complaining about one aspect of the Angican covenant proposal:

I see no reason to entrust the primates with that kind of gatekeeper authority. The very idea rests on the outdated notion that the church is a flock, of which bishops are shepherds. This notion apparently derives from patristic times: Before leaving for Jerusalem, Paul reportedly exhorted the elders of the church of Ephesus to keep watch over "the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers," and to "[b]e shepherds of the church of God" (Acts 20.28). Perhaps taking their cue from Paul, some early church leaders wrote in a similar vein, notably Ignatius. All this presupposes that the rest of us are sheep who must be led by their wise, benevolent human overseers. Nonsense. Bishops are not divinely-appointed monarchs; they're "hired help," with specific jobs to do.

It is to laugh. Anyone who has ever watched a mainline church in the throes of controversy knows that bishops are not the leaders one looks to for theological restraint. Controversial votes in the ECUSA General Convention are decided by the deputies; the House of Bishops is always comfortably in the vanguard.

Those who hold the croziers for the dioceses of ECUSA lack almost any accountability to anyone. Hired help? They're more like "presidents for life". When it comes to shepherding, they are as wont to drive their flocks into new fields as they are to keep them within bounds.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but the language of liberals is all too often exactly expressive of the opinion that the laity are dumb sheep who need to be led to the green fields of tolerance and every other liberal virtue, and that without this direction, they would stray into choking down the thorns of bigotry. I have yet to find time to read the material about the proposed convenant, but it's rather obvious that the biggest problem with letting the primates at it is that the liberals would be consistently outvoted.

Paleo-ArtTheory

It is a common feature of traditionalist critics that they will attempt to theorize that traditional high art is objectively good and that anything else is objectively bad. This is amusingly constricted by one's tradition, so that for instance Russian harmonized chanting can be good or bad, depending on whether you are embracing that tradition or rejecting it as an innovation.

So here we have Daniel Mitsui railing against popular culture. Well, specific media, at any rate, as proxies for it. I'm surprised he doesn't take a few swings at modern high culture, but as he hasn't I'm to be deprived of the amusement of watching him try to drag himself out of that intellectual swamp.

Popular music and popular culture, as it is, presents enough problems. One only has to look at the situation of music in the early 20th century, particularly as it involves Americans. The class meanings of different categories and even nationalities are bloody obvious. Folk music of the period doesn't exist as, well, folk music; it exists as a sort of upper class archaeology, rendered acceptable by the suave touch of Vaughan Williams or Grainger or Sharp or Child. Gottschalk was reduced to popular music by dint of being an American. Gershwin, writing for the theater and the "dance" orchestra, swasn't respected as high culture.

Is American shape-note music folk music, or not? Well, it doesn't neatly fit into any slot. On the one hand, it is an isolated subculture; but on the other, it has from the beginning relied upon the technologies of printing and travel. And while we're at it, relying on the technology of music for income can be traced right back to Byrd and Tallis getting a monopoly on music printing.

What about Tchaikovsky's church music? Is it an imitation, or the real thing? Is the distinction even meaningful? I would say that it isn't.

And so, on it goes. It's very hard to point to popular culture as anything different from low culture-- which is to say, as a class difference-- before the late 1800s. Popular culture is a function of prosperity, of the lower classes being able to purchase art as easily as the upper classes. In music, it is closely coupled with the appearance of pianos in middle class homes, and then with recordings. But a funny thing happened: middlebrows took over the old high culture, and therefore the high culture had to invent something new-- preferably something that the middle would not appropriate. That's how we ended up with 20th century "epatez les bourgeous" "High Art With Furrowed Brow" (Peter Schickele, with lots of reverb). This freed pop culture to be the anti-culture that it is today.

But then again, the notion of artists as "humble craftsmen" is laughable. Artists as a group are notoriously arrogant-- often with some reason, of course, inasmuch as they express their talents. They are also prone to theorizing, a trait particularly evident starting in the 1800s, but also conspicuous in the theory-happy middle ages. Nor is the artist-superstar a particularly modern idea. Nodern communications and prosperity simply allows the lower classes to participate in the phenomenon, and thus amplify it.

If there is an argument to be made, it is in the totality and immediacy of film. I have always sensed something akin to envy on the part of wordsmiths in particular when they talk about music, and some of the same feeling I sense in discussion of film. Music is granted a gateway into the psyche that is barred to mere talk, a channel deemed dangerous in its power and disrespectable in its "irrationality". I see that film gains the same power.

But the notion that one will put such time to better use is verging on juvenile in its laughability. Some of us are destined to be polymaths, and some of us just need a break from shovelling coal. And a lot of us who fancy that we might be polymaths are destined to be no more than dilletantes.

Over in Serge's blog, where the real action on this seems to be taking place, Mitsui said (among many other things), "I see natural traditionalism as the primary way that the faith is preserved, not catechisms or papal pronouncements (the metaphor I use is that those are part of the armor, not part of the knight). Catholic art and liturgy and music and culture are part of Catholicism - to reduce the "teaching of the Church" to the moral and doctrinal precepts is to ignore the Church as an incarnate reality and an actor in history." Natural tradition is "doing what you've always done", and that's not Catholicism. Roman Catholic art is every bit as systematized as Roman Catholic doctrine; indeed, the schoolmen didn't see a distinction between one and the other, nor did their followers in later days feel any much compunction to halt its development at any given point. Going "back" to the middle ages was the province of Anglicans, not that they ever succeeded in truly doing so. But for many years the division between Anglican and Roman art ran neatly between Abbot Suger and Palladio, with the Romans firmly on the side of innovation in this.

I'm not going to see The Da Vinci Code. partly it's because, having children of a certain age, movie going has to be carefully rationed, and by most accounts this one isn't worth the aggravation. Part of it is because I would have to resist throwing rotten tomatoes at all the misrepresentations. But I'm not going to reckon this as unto righteousness.

Is This Liturgy Heresy? Please Discuss

It's our buddies at the Office of Women's Ministries again, this time with a Eucharist Using Female Nouns and Pronouns which is "for use in discussion". They want discussion? I can give them discussion.

One point which has come out of all the liturgical revision proposals is that the 1979 structure has become the de facto ECUSA standard. All the changes have concentrated on the words; none have suggested the kind of rearrangements that 1979 made. This has important positive and negative consequences.

The positive consequence is that a fixed structure reinforces examination about how church architecture supports the liturgy. I've had some discussion of this with others, and then there are those crazy liturgists at St. Gregory of Nyssa who are clearly working from the 1979 structure as the basis for a radically different space. (In my view, it's an unsuccessful experiment, but that's another post.)

The negative observation is, unfortunately, the one that matters more. Changing the words tends to imply a certain rejection of the old words. OK-- the whole experiment here seems to be to do without the male language for God. If that is so, then there are a lot of changes which go beyond this. For instance, the conventional change V&R at the end of the readings is changed from

Reader The Word of the Lord.
People Thanks be to God.

to this:

Reader The Holy Word.
People Blessed be.

The first change is obviously explicable by the desire to avoid the word "Lord". The second change is not; the original response ought to be utterly innocuous. What's more striking, as a number of the respondents on titusonenine have pointed out, is that "blessed be" is a conventional response among wiccans, and has no particular Christian precedent. This change is objectionable; we ought not to be replacing our own language with that of an anti-Christian group.

The puzzling changes continue in the prayers of the people. They have chosen to adapt Form III, which is a rather good use of the V&R form. But again, the changes seem to step far outside their program, because the only "problem" word is the first one: "Father". I wonder why there is a problem with saying "Grant that every member of the church may truly and humbly serve you; that your Name may be glorified by all people." (I've italicized the words that were changed, as in the following passages.) I also don't understand why we cannot say "We pray for all bishops, priests and deacons; that they may be faithful ministers of your Word and Sacraments."

WHen we get to the confession, the changes multiply, and some of the changes have a history of contrary objections. The invitation has many changes (which I've bolded): "Let us confess the ways we have separated ourselves from our Divine Mother, from our own best selves and our neighbors." "Sin" has been excised; "against" has been excised; and "our best selves" has been inserted. Getting rid of sin is a weenie revision, to begin with. But there's also the question of whether we can sin against ourselves. The confession itself seems to think so, and boldly inserts a third commandment after the two Great Commandments.

All of this is before I step up to the central change: calling God "Mother" and using a lot of non-biblical language to emphasize the feminine. There's a long record of objection to this which I mostly endorse, so I'll confine myself to two observations pertinent to this text. Right at the beginning, the celebrant says, "Blessed be the Lady who births, redeems and sanctifies us." Right off the bat, I'd object to the word "births". God made us. I also have to complain about the modalism that creeps in every time they have to work around the Triune Name, and following the greeting there is a seemingly needless rewrite of the COllect for Purity. But the choice of "births" is striking. All along there seems to be some implication that we-- well, that women need to feel some connection to the Persons of the trinity that is strong than the mere human image. Well, this gets tripped up by the sensible yet perverse judgement that Jesus' masculinity must be scrupulously preserved in the texts. They also do not dare to change the Lord's Prayer, though they do dare to resist calling Jesus "Lord". And in the one explicit reference to the second person of the Trinity, he is called "son". Well, isn't Jesus supposed to humanize the godhead? And so, isn't the scandal still there, that Jesus is and must be a particular sex? And therefore, doesn't this make the whole argument rather moot, because we must be able to relate to Jesus regardless of our own sex?

My reaction, in the end, is that if the words of 1979 need revision, for the most part at this point we can only justify some tinkering. It amazes me that, only thirty years after the most extensive changes ever made in the liturgy, we are already talking about wholesale change again.

Please, Thor, Make It Stop!

What is it with the pagans, anyway?!?!?

I come home, bring up titusonenine, and here's the first entry: Love Potion Number 815

I follow the link (the only content) to this article at Stand Firm, wherein it is revealed that the Episcopal Book/Resource Center (at good ol' 815 2nd Ave.) is selling a book of love spells and potions, written by a woman who is apparently reasonably well-known in wiccan circles.

Folks, I'd love to be able to say that "you can't make stuff like this up." Unfortunately, it seems as though we can expect this sort of thing at regular intervals from our friends in high places.

But fortunately, the bookstore has just the thing: The Book of Occaisional Services. "Restoring of Things Profaned" begins on Page 202 and "Concerning Exorcism" is on Page 155 of my 1979 edition. If they've taken them out in the 2003 edition, I'm sure I can make my copy available.

UPDATE:After numerous complaints, the book is no longer being offered. See also this very perceptive comment by Fr. Dean A. Einerson:

The problem is not paganism, but a dull, stupid secularism. The people that order books like that do not believe in witchcraft. They do not believe in anything except themselves. For them “Spirituality” is a hobby, a leisure time activity, a way to spend time and money that is no different than any other diversion. It certainly has nothing to do with heaven or hell. CS Lewis wrote the following in “Is Theism Important,” *God in the Dock,* p. 172. (Eerdmans, 1970): “When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, ‘Would that she were.’ For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. “If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin.” What, I am sure, Lewis never imagined was how close we are to opening the General Convention that way. Fortunately for the bull, we are not there quite yet.

(tip to Common Reader)

Not a Prophet

Apparently I'm not the only person bothered by the frequent appearance of the word "prophetic" in revisionist statements. And frequent it is. As of this writing, there are fifteen articles on the front page of Fr. Jake's blog. None of them contains the word "prophetic", but there are seventeen occurances of the word in the comments, spread out over comments on eight of the articles. Perhaps its just my mistaken impression, but it seems to me that the word hardly appears in Catholic or Evil Right Wing blogs.

Matt Kennedy is not impressed. Neither is newbie Anglican. I can't say that I am all that impressed either. Nobody would ever mistake me for a prophet, nor would I ever dare to claim that my words here are any but my own. And if the councils of the Episcopal Church speak as the Spirit, where does that put the councils of all those other churches?

To me, this is the other great distasteful character of the revisionists. The unconcealed contempt (if not hatred) for their opposition is bad enough; that their repetition of secualr liberal shibboleths is prophecy is more than I can take. Yes, the opposition is often quite arrogant; but this is beyond the pale. I don't hear prophecy; I hear the Spirit of the Age.

Round the Table

Over at Fr. Jake we had a discussion that centers on the image of an extended family meal. A lot of interesting stuff happened in the course of this discussion, but all along I felt a certain discomfort at the image.

Five of the seven sacraments specifically refer to real aspects of our humanity. We are born (baptism); we cannot take care of ourselves or take full responsibility for ourselves until we grow old enough (confirmation); we eat and drink (the eucharist); we form families and have children (marriage); and we sicken and die (unction). I can't quite fit confession and ordination into this, but I don't think that's essential to the point.

When one talks about meals in this wise, the image calls up communion. But I don't think that the eucharist, for better or worse, is much like a family meal, especially the omnium gatherum thanksgiving day feast. Perhaps it ought to be, but that's not the point. No, I think the actuality of the eucharist is more like a restaurant, with the Father setting the menu, the Holy Spirit doing the cooking, and the Son picking up the tab. The clergy are like the hostess/maitre d', the waiters, and the busboys; and the laity are the customers. Now, this is not an ideal image either, but it's quite a bit more like the real image from scripture:

Then he said to his slaves, 'The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.' Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

Inasmuch as the weekly eucharist realizes on earth the wedding feast of the lamb, it is not a family meal. Great and small, known and unknown are all gathered together, not for conversation, but to enter into the joy of the master.

But sitting to table together, if we do not converse, is not so hard. The hard sacrament here is not communion, but marriage. Eating is a simple thing; forming a nousehold and living in fidelity and bearing and raising children: those are impossible things, by comparison. The subject is so complex as to support most of the fiction in the world, when it comes to that.

The Campaign Continues

The attack upon the ani-liberal forces continues, with Chane taking up where his communications office left off. This time it's in the pages of Episcopal Life:

Gifts from such wealthy donors as Howard Ahmanson Jr. and the Bradley, Coors and Scaife families, or their foundations, allow the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy to sponsor so-called "renewal" movements that fight the inclusion of gays and lesbians within the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran churches and in the United Church of Christ. Should the institute succeed in "renewing" these churches, what we see in Nigeria today may well be on the agenda of the Christian right tomorrow.

I don't know about Bradley, Coors, or Scaife; it has already been established that Ahmanson is Episcopalian. However, there's that weaselly "may" in the last sentence, the sure mark of alarmist claptrap. The diocese's revelation of Ahmanson's intent is weak and unconvincing, but in any case the image of ECUSA as a vehicle for some sort of sexual fascism is just silly. ECUSA's inevitable risk is turning into a club for right-thinking snobs who want a little religious ritual in their lives. Dog-collared Black Shirts? Preposterous.

WHen it comes to denunciations, I'm waiting for Chane to denounce, oh, Spong and the Office of Women's Ministries and any number of other heretical persons/organizations in ECUSA. Fair's fair, after all. If he doesn't denounce them because he agrees with them, then I'm happy to add him to my list of excommunicate bishops. Or maybe he doesn't denounce them because they are allies in the battle against the conservatives. But that would make his demands here, of course, hypocritical.