Communing the Unbaptized Tries Again

So once again we have another run at GC towards normalization of communing the unbaptized, this time in the form of a study resolution. So the meat of the explanation begins with the observation that "many parishes in the Episcopal Church are currently practicing open communion," by which they mean opening it not just to the baptized who are not members of this denomination, but to anyone, baptized or not. Well, yes, that statement is true, but it is also utterly against the discipline of the church and against statements made each time this has come up and the voices of orthodoxy have prevailed in the end.

But let's keep going:

They believe that welcoming all people to the table allows us to be instruments of that grace. Many of those who come to our churches have no previous experience in a faith community but are responding to our promise that “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” They come hungry for that sense of welcome and belonging. Denying them a place at the Lord’s Table denies the very desire that drew them through our doors, denies the “radical welcome” that Jesus extended to everyone. If they feel welcomed into our worshiping congregations, newcomers to the faith will be more likely to seek Holy Baptism.

It's the usual romantic picture, which flies in the face of the reality that outsiders are probably more likely to run into communion at a wedding or a funeral, not necessarily seeking anything. And it infantilizes such as do come, for surely it is possible still to recognize that participation in religious acts is for religious believers. We've been through this all before, six years ago, and yet we go around again.

As far as such a study is concerned, nothing has changed there either. Last time, I said,

[W]e have a resolution from North Carolina which, having been amended, is now proposing a committee to study the issue and make a report. If such a committee is formed, what's most likely to happen is one of two outcomes: either those in control will make sure there are enough heretics on the committee to guarantee a less than orthodox report; or when a less adequately packed committee delivers an insufficiently licentious report, it will be thanked and ignored, and the heretics on the issue will simply press the issue again and again until they've driven off enough orthodox to prevail.

I have to think the same dynamics would apply this time, but why bother? The only point to a change would be, once again, to put before the church yet another heterodoxy to drive people away. People who are breaking the rules now aren't going to stop simply because a report, or even GC as a whole, repudiates the innovation; and their bishops won't so much look the other way as they will all but cheer them on. Indeed, they get points among their own for the transgression.

This shouldn't be a point of discussion. No study should be approved.

Late word has come that this proposal has died in committee, as it should.

General Convention Postmortem

It's all over but the application of the Secret Episcopal Procedural Decoder Ring to figure out exactly what didn't pass. And the results aren't pretty.

Hardly anything bad was actually entirely rejected. Holy Women, Holy Men got sent back for another round, but there's no reason to believe that the standing committee is going to straighten out and get rid of the questionable entries. Communion of the unbaptized at least was not authorized: Eastern Oregon's resolution did get tabled at the start, but North Carolina's study resolution was gradually mutated into a completely different statement that baptism before communion was "normative". At that, it took until the last possible moment for the bishops to get rid of a sentence essentially authorizing communion of the unbaptized through the trapdoor of "pastoral sensitivity"; it's not clear whether or not the deputies were able to readdress the final version. So the best that was perhaps achieved on this front was the status quo: that places where it is being permitted will continue to invite unbaptized people to the altar.

The big news-making issues, of course, were the transgender protections and the approval of same-sex blessings. The latter was pushed through by terming the rites "provisional" rather than "trial", in order to get around a supermajority provision in the church constitution. I see no reason to take the difference seriously: the words are, in context, essentially synonyms, and nobody can surely believe that the next GC will be able to say, "no, that was a bad idea; we'll stop doing these." Furthermore, the authorization to reword the rite according to local laws surely will be taken in some dioceses as grounds to use the rite to do same-sex marriages.

The transgender resolutions are something of an empty gesture in light of the two such clerics who spoke on the measure. One can do the math and consider the possibility that every transgendered person who has considered ordination is already in a collar; the impediments which supposedly already stood were surely naught beyond the need to move to a different diocese.

I lost track of the other liturgical junk. I think we still are stuck with pet funerals (though without assurances of our dogs joining use in heaven) and some of the other rubbish from SCLM, but mostly they stand as symbols of unorthodoxy rather than as present threats to what goes on in church.

The usual round of political posturings was enacted, an enormous time-waster considering that nobody cares what a church of less than 1% of the population thinks.

And finally, restructuring. The WSJ article that has attracted a lot of attention is nearly as wrong-headed as people accuse it of being, but there is a kernel of truth at the bottom of it all. It is hard to imagine that restructuring these days will not encompass means to continue to drive the traditionally orthodox out of power. What should have happened to the liturgical resolutions is that everything except same-sex blessings should have gone down in flames, and the blessing rite should have been brutally overhauled to remove all the anti-dominical heresies embedded within it. That none of this happened indicates that orthodox believers don't have much of a future in this church.

It Isn't STRUCTURAL Reform We Need

It's striking to look at the list of resolutions up at General Convention and see how many of them are ostensibly about "structural reform", and to contemplate what that reform seems to point toward. Now, I think there is a need for reform, but it's hardly the central problem besetting the Episcopal Church. No, as one can see from the rest of the resolutions, the two central agendae of the church are once again (a) making upper middle class liberals feel good about themselves, and (b) indulging in a taste for theological adventurism. And therefore the direction that "reform" is trying to take is to centralize power in an administration to tell the conservative dissenters to shut up and get with the program.

Consider all the fuss about transgenderism. In reality, this is vanishingly rare, especially among women: even the highest "I get to make up a number by assuming this is wildly underreported" values are only a couple of tenths of a percent, and more reality-based numbers give a few hundredths of a percent for men and and another order of magnitude less for women. Yet this is a big cause at GC, with special bathrooms which have been the cause of a few amusingly embarrassing mistakes on the part of the unwary. It's an ideal cause for us because it's nominally transgressive, pseudo-clinical, and cheap. Meanwhile my quite liberal daughter has gotten thoroughly annoyed at all the people in the cosplay forums she frequents who go on and on about how remarkably out-of-the-ordinary their sexuality is. One would think that people who pick a single person of the opposite gender, make a legal commitment to them, and get down to breeding are, well, a vanishing breed. And certainly the agenda of GC takes them for granted, ignoring the much more disruptive issues of divorce and unchastity. But to deal with those issues, they would have to take a very large part of their liberal membership to task, which isn't going to happen.

And consider the current path of the proposal to commune the unbaptized. This is really another "getting points for being ineffectually transgressive" project, at the cost of one of the most fundamental understandings of the church. And thank heaven, the original Eastern Oregon resolution has been set aside; yet in its place we have a resolution from North Carolina which, having been amended, is now proposing a committee to study the issue and make a report. If such a committee is formed, what's most likely to happen is one of two outcomes: either those in control will make sure there are enough heretics on the committee to guarantee a less than orthodox report; or when a less adequately packed committee delivers an insufficiently licentious report, it will be thanked and ignored, and the heretics on the issue will simply press the issue again and again until they've driven off enough orthodox to prevail.

And that's where structural reform is hitting the rocks. The obvious reform that is needed is to get the heretics out of control, and arrange church structures so they can be kept out of control. But where we are actually headed, it appears, is arranging things to entrench the heretics and increase their powers to suppress orthodox dissent. So right before GC we get a presentment against a group of bishops who had the audacity to file an amicus curae brief in some Ft. Worth case, objecting to 815's claims about church polity; and it turns out that this comes from the bishops of two of the rump dioceses. This kind of loyalty oath crap is the worst sort of hypocrisy in a church where every sort of praxis violation is routinely ignored (see under "communing the unbaptized" above: does anyone really think that is going away?). And of course the truth behind the truth is that these bishops were picked outside the normal process and seated by the central administration, so they are very much the agents of the centralization faction.

If these people get their structural reform, we are headed towards a tightly centralized church which enforces a paradoxical theology of deviance; which is to say, the one thing that won't be tolerated is any notion of orthodoxy. I won't be a part of such a church, but then, I don't think very many other people will want to be a part of it either.

Communing the Unbaptized from the Outside In

Derek Olsen notes another run of posts in "The Daily Episcopalian" in support of communing the unbaptized, which he describes as coming "from our self-proclaimed liturgically-conservative non-theist, one from the site’s village atheist, then one that I can only kindly characterize as theologically confused." Well, yeah, and that's why I dropped "go start your own church" responses on the first two and threw up my hands on the third. What I wanted to note, however, was this response:

Besides that: this is itself, in fact, a completely “in-group” issue and only of interest to people already involved in the church. That, to me, is what’s fascinating about the thesis in that piece, in fact – that it seem to see this in exactly the reverse way.

People who aren’t Christian aren’t really interested in participating in Christian religious rituals; I personally had no interest in even stepping foot in a church for most of my life. And I think that most people believe – quite reasonably – that religious rituals are about faith, and that taking part in them has some meaning. Particularly when priests say things, and people respond; that’s serious stuff.

And this, to me, is exactly what’s wrong with CWOB; people probably think that we’re in our right minds and won’t involve them in something that might compromise what they may or may not believe. But of course, we’re not; we’re using the “full-initiates’” version of the rite on people who don’t know anything about what’s going – the version that assumes understanding and assent.

And to this, I can only say, Yes, exactly so! The supposed appeal of communion to outsiders seems to me to only work on the utterly clueless but easily informed "I'll just follow what everyone else is doing" crowd, who can be educated with a sentence, or on those syncretes who are so muzzy-headed as to be immune to our persuasion and whose participation is necessarily a profanation. The message I'm taking away from all of this is that a lot of the push for this is coming from people who are also effectively outsiders on the inside, who are nominal members but who have abandoned the historic faith. And that's why I want them to go found their own churches, rather than wrecking mine.

Well, I Thought I Was Done

There seems to be no end of things to comment about in the CWOB/communing the unbaptized exchanges. For instance, over on the Episcopal Cafe we have Jeffrey Shy asking rhetorically, Is it Communion Without or Communion Before Baptism?. Well, since the focus really is on us, that's why I prefer to refer to "communing the unbaptized". Nobody should be taking communion before they are baptized, and people who are preparing to be baptized surely can understand, if they are taught, the need to wait. The movement is surely more about countenancing "communion for people who have no intention of being baptized", and at that point the matter becomes less their lack of receptiveness and more the proponents' lack of respect for the sacrament. But then, here we have a policy suggestion from an admitted "non-theist", so really the question ought to be, "what is it with the institutions of the church that we hand them over to people who cannot even get to the end of the first line of any of the creeds without crossing their fingers?"

This is how incoherent liberal theology can get. It was one thing twenty years ago when one was likely to be buried in a lot of supposedly post-theological Tillichian or whatever jargon; it didn't mean anything substantive when pressed, but at least the semblance of intellectual persuasion was maintained. Now, the best they can come up with is the largely aesthetic standard of "radical hospitality", and while I have expressed my opinion on that before, and before that, I'm not the only one who sees the vacuity of the phrase. Over at Sublunary Sublime the author asks, "what exactly about this message is supposed to be radical?" and goes on to say:

It’s not difficult to see that the CWOB movement is straining toward relevancy, and is increasingly taking its cues from the advertising industry. So, by breaking with the status quo, in this case, 2,000 years of ecclesial tradition or the “canonically-driven,” they think they are doing something progressive; and in so doing, they are only giving the people what they want. But what if the message of the status quo is to break away from the status quo? What if the message of the status quo is collapsing difference, mixing all forms of life into one homologous consumer package? If they really wanted to be radical, wouldn’t the message be: you can’t purchase spirituality on the cheap?

But, no, "radical" isn't speaking to the culture, except to say, "see how we aren't like those other (stodgy, mean-spirited, parental) Christians". Well, yeah, except that to the spiritual-but-not-religious upper-middle hipster/sub/urban inquirer which seems to be our preferred clientele, this translates to assurance that we don't expect anything from them. It's not a challenging message; it's certainly anything but a call for them to rise out of their religious indifference or dilettancy. "You can believe in therapeutic moral deism, be a pagan or a satanist or an atheist, or not believe in anything at all, and still commune with us": that's our stirring rejoinder to the call of the world.

An actually radical message these days would sound more like, "abandon your false gods and philosophies, repent of your sins, believe and be baptized, and then join with us in communion with your savior." That is theology of the prayer book, and the theology of the church from the days of the apostles. Gritting our teeth and sticking with the tradition of the church as we received it: that is what is now radical. Instead we have what Bryan Owen accurately describes as "an assault on the church":

The current assaults on the orthodox understanding of Baptism take direct aim at what it means to be united with Christ in his death and resurrection, to be reborn into God's family the Church, to receive forgiveness of our sins and new life in the Holy Spirit. And by extension, an assault on the Church's understanding of the inward and spiritual grace received in Baptism is an assault on the Church itself. Such assaults entail a revision of the biblical narrative of Creation-Fall-Redemption that excises the Fall from the story. They jettison the understanding of sacraments as sure and certain means by which we receive the grace needed to heal our profound brokenness. And in the process, the very meaning of the term "Church" gets redefined. No longer is the Church "the mystical body" of Christ and a "wonderful and sacred mystery" that elicits our awe-filled, humble obedience and transcends our capacity to comprehend and control (BCP, pp. 339, 515). Instead, the Church becomes just another merely human institution that can be manipulated and tinkered with as we see fit. Lacking any transcendent dimension, the Church is just about us: our preferences, our agendas, and the wills to power that have the majority votes to satisfy those preferences and enact those agendas.

And such a church is not worth belonging to, except perhaps to gratify one's taste for choral singing and empty ceremonial in a spiritual space, though I note that as theological traditions lose their grip, so to do those of the liturgy, and one may be subjected to clown masses or liturgical pep rallies or Giant Liturgical Puppets of Doom.

Once, we held a very high view of the church and her sacraments. It is time to take back the church from those who have forsaken this. Otherwise, we will be left with naught but Gothic revival tombs of faith, sold off one by one to real estate developers or Muslims or indeed anyone except for those refugee Anglicans who bailed out in time. And if it takes a purge of the clerisy to get rid of the apostates and theological slackers: well, it's a radical idea in this church, but something must be done.

So It Comes to This

Alerted by Robert Hendrickson, I have put myself through reading Eastern Oregon's justification for communing the unbaptized (which ca be reached from this page). And, well, it's hard to respond to it, starting right from its abject failure to address the traditional defense of reserving communion to the baptized. Let us start with the first few sentences invoking the spirit of the 1979 BCP, which are of a kind with all those American Catholics appealing to the spirit of Vatican II to defend their various liturgical outrages. The truth, as Hendrickson points out, is that the 1979 book does not in any way contemplate Eastern Oregon's proposal, but instead goes the opposite direction. The 1979 theory is the traditional view with the sacramentality turned all the way up: we are a people made sacramentally through baptism, and fed sacramentally through the Eucharist. The celebrant says, "the gifts of God for the People of God", and it is plain in the baptismal rite that the water of baptism is how we are incorporated into that people.

And after that, it is a foregone conclusion that they are not going to step up to explaining away what Paul says on the subject. Instead, all I can make out of their rather vague and theologically buzz-phrased statement is that, while it's not just "a simple statement about hospitality", what makes it not "simple" is that somehow the isolation of Eastern Oregon means we do not need to go to the bother of baptizing people.

And about that, I may make two observations. A hundred or so years ago, the situation was hardly better. My wife is from Great Falls, and if Oregon presents transport and population density problems, Montana is in every way worse. And I have seen the tiny font that Bishop Tuttle used as he organized the church in the state and others in the west. It is a tiny cup, barely suitable for the immersion of baby mice, but I dare say multitudes were baptized from it. Surely it is no harder for a priest to get around the diocese today.

But more to the point, baptism is not in any way limited by the supply of priests! If it be so important to get visitors up to the table, then perhaps the altar guild could provide the ushers with a cup of water and cards with the baptismal formula on them, so that the unwashed (as it were) could come to the table, made new in Christ and ready to feast. But in any case a parish or mission need not wait for the priest to make his circuit for baptisms that cannot wait.

At least, I think this addresses their argument. The whole thing is only two pages long, and at that is padded with the filler of modern theological jargon, so that they say they are "intentional" and "empowering" and so forth, when it is not clear that they could articulate their intention or where power is to be had, much less what constitutes hospitality. Tony Clavier sets forth a succinct statement on baptism, and I can understand it and defend it, and I read Eastern Oregon's statement, and it is incoherent. The message I get from it is that if one sprinkles in the right theological magic words, then one's practices are justified, even if those words in what is not so much a thread of argument as a ball of word fluff.

So this is what passes for the theology that would overturn one of the Church's oldest rules. I think the resolution will be defeated, because while we are perhaps woefully ill-educated, there are probably enough priests left who remember at least this small part of their seminary educations. But the vote will be far closer than it ought be, because, it appears, this sorry excuse for a rationale has pwoer over far too many in this church.

The Rebellious Generation in Charge

Over at Driving Like Jehu we have the suggestion that the urge towards communing the unbaptized arises out of an instant gratification culture. I don't think this is the case. Discussion shows a lack of people who aren't baptized banging at the door; in general they take the requirement of membership before participation as reasonable. No, the impetus here comes especially from the clerisy, who object to the notion of even the barest semblance of turning anyone away.

It's pitifully easy to unpack this, especially when I hear the magic phrase "prophetic voice". Our boomer-dominated hierarchy is still living in the late 1960s and still protesting against the Establishment, refusing to accept that, within the church, they are the establishment now. And, well, they tend to have maturity issues, one might say, about authority. So they are willing to use it against people who rebel against them, but they are reluctant to act like parents.

This reluctance means that discipline ends up being for enemies, not friends; it is reduced to a political tactic. As a church we find it very hard these days to teach personal purity; we indulge ourselves, and we indulge the rest of the world too. You are unlikely to hear a sermon against fornication in an Episcopal parish, and the notion that one ought to observe particular rules goes equally unstated. Every case is exceptional, and we grant ourselves limitless leeway. Meanwhile there will be a list of political resolutions at General Convention whose form and content will be drearily familiar to anyone who ever rubbed up against the college protest subculture.

Thus it is hard for our clerics to tell anyone No. That people should be baptized, that they should be in love and charity with their neighbors, that they should be confessed of their sins (witness the growing practice of omitting the confession of sin for large portions of the year) ceases to be requisite for participation in communion, because that wouldn't be inclusive, which is another way of saying, We Can't Say No. And we go on from there to edit out "the Jesus of Revelation" in favor of a mythical nonjudgemental "Jesus of the gospels" as though there were not plenty of parables in which Jesus preaches the peril of being judged.

And the solution is simple: it's time to grow up, time to admit that our desires are not to be catered to and that are sins are a problem, time to step up to defending the church as our predecessors expected us to.

Communing the Unbaptized: One Last Observation

Jared Cramer joins the army of those objecting to communing the unbaptized, and in large part I endorse what he says about the bad arguments in favor of the heretical practice. But there's one thing to be added. We're talking here about one of the oldest canons of the church--not our church, THE church-- which they wish to overturn. It isn't as though there is no great weight of theology behind this, because, of course, there is. Any of us who have rebuked the innovation can explain what is wrong with it in a couple of sentences. But somehow, all of this is utterly irrelevant, and the proponents of the error can make an end run around fifteen hundred years of Christian theology. Or to put it more technically, this is the worst kind of progressivist restorationism, the liberal equivalent to the Jehovah's Witnesses. And there is no way of doing theology that is more in conflict with Anglican principles.

No to Communion Without Baptism

My parents did not do bumper stickers. Ever. Except for one case: Around 1970, Marriott wanted to build a theme park a few miles from our house, a prospect which was widely loathed among our neighbors. Therefore they affixed a bumper sticker to the our station wagon reading "No to Marriott Proposal".

And I must similarly and relentlessly object to a proposal from Eastern Oregon to eliminate baptism as a requirement for communion. Atlanta, you may recall, tested the waters with a local proposal for "a year for theological and catechetical reflection, dialogue, discussion, conversation and listening among parishes of this diocese on 'Communion of the Unbaptized'", which was defeated there. Now it's going straight to GC, and intends to change of the C&C right away.

I've been over the intellectual climate of this before. As to the theology, it's hard to top Tobias Haller's succinct rejoinder:

The church is radically inclusive and baptism is the means by which people are included. Communion is the celebration of that inclusion, not its means.

It is supremely ironic that a church that spends so much energy (rightly) celebrating the baptismal covenant could then turn its back on its significance in what seems a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of these two sacraments, and their interrelationship.

To this I can only add that abandoning baptism as the standard of membership represents a failure of our religious nerve so profound as to tip the balance against our institutional continuance. What's the point of a church that by implication admits that being a part of it is of no real consequence?

Communion Without Baptism is anathema; this is not negotiable.